The intent of the Internet was to build an interconnected system of networks that
Had no single point of failure
Was self-healing
And because of these features, would survive any calamity, including a nuclear war with destruction of cities, etc
The price for this network is an unprecedented degree of anarchy in communications. This is reshaping societies on a global basis: we live in interesting times. IMHO, the tremendous benefits of this outweigh the problems it causes. But then, I don't live a lifestyle that is heavily invested in controlling other people's beliefs or their access to information.
Systems that are vulnerable to cyber attack, such as power grid management or interbank finances, should not be on the open Internet. Many of them can share the physical layers with the Internet, but they should use encryption and non-Internet protocols to logically isolate their activities from open Internet activities. And there will probably always be a strong argument that some of these vulnerable systems should have their own dedicated physical layer.
But putting any kind of kill switch on the Internet itself will create the single points of failure that the Internet was designed to avoid. It would necessarily destroy the Internet's capacity for self-healing (routing around dead areas).
There are plenty of other ways to address any of the problems that a kill switch would supposedly fix.
I too am unhappy with F-Spot. It seems to always be the most awkward place in my workflows, no matter what I am doing with the images.
But it sounds like shotwell would be moving in the wrong direction.
Anyone here familiar with F-Spot's performance wrt upgrades? Can we expect improvements in F-Spot at a steady pace, or is it a moribund project? I'm thinking that the next version of F-Spot might be closer to what would make me happy (Could we get a Linux version of IrfanView? I don't suppose IrfanView would run under wine in a way that would play well with GIMP, Inkscape, and Blender... but has anyone tried this?)
Re:Back to the original subject...
on
Time To Dump XP?
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I've never thought of it as "just a wrapper" before. That's interesting.
In practical terms, perl2exe and its ilk allow perl scripts to be easily distributed on WinXX machines without having to make the Perl language itself available on those machines. And it does so in a way that prevents causal users from altering or seeing the source code.
The script is "compiled" in the sense that its tokens are replaced by direct calls to the precompiled Perl library functions that are also bundled in the.exe file. It is not "compiled" in the same way that for instance C programs are compiled.
I don't recall any mode that returned the script itself in any error message, but there may now be one. That wouldn't be of any use to the average user, since he would have to know enough to find and install the Perl language before he could run the script from its plaintext form.
I don't see how that requires much in the way of higher level education to master.
Perl is a highly permissive language: it assumes that the programmer knows what he is doing and tries to keep out of his way. It is a lot like contemporary Internet English: in both cases most users are not fluent in the language, let alone capable of writing truly elegant stuff. But in both cases the users are generally proficient enough after a reasonably short period of study to get the language to do what they need. Just as there is a lot of really crappy English language on the Internet, so too are there a lot of really crappy perl scripts out there. But a Brazilian does not have to be able to write perfect English to ask a newsgroup for help with a problem in 3D modeling of turbulent flows. Similarly, a sys admin does not need high level programming skills to write a perl script that would read a dump of the day's network logs and extract all entries from a specific machine.
Ouch! Last thing needed when distributing printer test code is another wrapper layer that could interfere with printing.
Except maybe an additional patch to turn off the additional wrapper layer, assuming it actually does that completely, every time no matter what... maybe that is really the last thing needed.
If.bat files won't do it for you, then you could look into the Windows implementation of Perl, coupled with the Tcl/Tk module, which gives you basic GUI support so you can fancy it up with buttons and input boxes and such. After you've got the script working right, you can run it through Perl2Exe or one of the other available compilers and distribute your work as a.exe file. This has two obvious advantages:
a.exe file looks a helluvalot more impressive than a.bat file
you won't need to worry about someone messing around in your.bat and causing you needless support headaches.
A very important side effect is that you'd gain a little experience with Perl, which can work scripting wonders that.bat files could never do.
Sort of a caveat: I once made my living by writing simple perl scripts that pulled data from the text dumps of a legacy MUMPS database and returned.csv files that the QA guys could play with in Excel. So I'm biased. I've also left the Microsoft ecosystem for Linux, since I think the Microsoft ecosystem is terminally polluted on its own effluvium. So I'm really, really biased. (Perl is FOSS originating in the Unix/Linux world; Perl2Exe is shareware that I remember cost under $50)
talk to any of the young, creative designers that are moving things forward, and they will tell you about how all of their designs are being ripped off by mall stores.
Uh, no. Not exactly.
Some will tell you that, but if you press them for specifics they generally won't be able to identify any of their own designs that were ripped off, or demonstrate in any way that they themselves have actually moved anything forward in the fashion world (or any other world). Instead they'll talk about how that happened to other struggling young designers who they used to hang out with. So sad, how all of those guys copped out and took good paying jobs with companies like Calvin Klein, Nike, Columbia Sportswear, etc.
As to "Forever 21"-- what is that? Some kind of anti-wrinkle skin cream formula to keep you looking like you're still to young to know anything?
Your right to free speech does not mean that you are protected from the consequences of what you say.
There is no question that Dana The (Ex-)Dispatcher had the right to publish her jokes on Face Book. That does not absolve her of the consequences of demonstrating that she is too stupid with respect to professional off duty behavior to continue to work for that police department.
Maybe she can get a job with another police department that has lower standards.
You do realize this was not a corporation ? It was a the police department
Thanks for pointing this out. I read the article while drinking my first coffee of the day, and all synapses were not yet firing...
Because this is a police department, I have more sympathy for their point of view than I would for a private corp. They are held to a higher standard of behavior, as they should be, since we entrust their employees with guns, etc. They'd certainly be justified in disciplining an employee who was telling racist or ethnic jokes in public that could raise questions about their department's values. I can easily see a police department extending that behavior to jokes that might suggest their employees are drug users.
Dana's jokes may have demonstrated a lack of professional behavior that a police department might reasonably expect of its employees even after work hours. Hard to say whether this was actually the case, but it very well may have been. Myself, I would prefer to have a police department be too harsh on questions of appropriate professional behavior than too lax. But then I'm living in a city where there have been 3 questionable killings by police in the last 10 years and perhaps I'd be less sensitive about this if I were living in a sleepy little suburban town where the women were strong, the men were good looking, and all the children were above average.
I installed Win30 on machines on several different networks: Novell (sometimes), 3Com (mostly), and Lantastic (occasionally). Security was often an issue, even back in those days. Remember the first malware for PCs travelled from business to business by sneakernet.
Security became more of an issue as many Win3.xx machines were linked to the Internet before Win98 finally came along and most everybody upgraded. Yeah, there was WinNT before Win98, for the companies that could afford its massive support costs. And there was Win95 of course, for the pioneers. But Win95 was proof that the pioneers catch the arrows-- most prudent businessmen skipped that version and stayed with Win3.11 or earlier until Win98 provided a good reason to upgrade.
But of course security continued to be an increasing issue all along: the Microsoft approach of bolting security on as an afterthought to what the marketeer in the showroom needed to sell the goods has just never really worked out. Except of course for the leaches of the MS ecosystem with all their "firewall" and "antimalware" packages.
With the resounding success of Win3.0, Microsoft demonstrated that you don't need to provide a secure computing platform if you market your product to customers who know nothing about the technology. Things have gone downhill from there.
For all you fans of real, visceral numbers you can relate to, that volume (1.33 x 10^9 km^3) is approximately equal to the amount of water in the earth's oceans.
Nice try, but
The Tao of numbers states that the numbers that are real cannot be counted, and
visceral numbers appear to have an imaginary component since in all of known physics and chemistry, numbers do not of themselves affect the gut, therefore
the relationship being referred to is an imaginary relationship (not uncommon on slashdot, as evidenced by the occasional mention by a slashdotter that he has a gf), and
such imaginary relationships cannot be counted upon.
In short, any earthling who thinks he can relate to a volume of 1.33*10^9 km^3 is just all wet.
One of the articles describes the fuselage of the H series as a lifting body that eliminates the need for a horizontal tail. So it's a lifting body that functions as a canard. That's pretty cool.
The problem with Chernobyl was not that it was poorly designed in terms of safety. It was poorly designed, but in the event that did not matter.
The problem with Chernobyl was that it was deliberately being operated outside its procedures by persons who did not know as much about what they were doing as they thought they did. This was also a theme at Three Mile Island, when control room operators turned a developing but controllable problem into a catastrophe. They thought they could rely on the primary measuring devices to show what was going on in the pressure vessel, and they ignored other readings that were not consistent with what turned out to be faulty instrumentation. Making erroneous assumptions about how much they knew was also the root cause of the Fermi fast breeder reactor, when it turned out that convective currents in liquid sodium could in fact be strong enough to lift part of the titanium shielding off the vessel floor and carry it to a place where it could jam up the cooling flow and warp the fuel rods enough that the control rods could not descend properly even in scram....
The limitation in implementing nuclear power has to date been a problem not with the nuclear technology, but with our inability to interface it in a safe way with the severely limited capabilities of the wetware used in designing, building, and controlling it.
That said, I think some of the newer designs for nuclear power deserve being looked at. At some point we'll find a way to do it safely. We just haven't gotten there yet.
And maybe we also need to take a much closer look at how we choose and train those who manage and operate these beasts. Involving only the best wetware we have available in building and running these beasts would seem to be a very good idea.
Halliburton was responsible for cementing the deepwater drill hole that evidently failed, triggering the explosion that toppled the huge offshore rig and unleashed the gusher. from Gulf disaster spurs questions on drilling, Halliburton
also this more detailed article from the L.A. Times:
Investigators delving into the possible cause of the massive gulf oil spill are focusing on the role of Houston-based Halliburton Co., the giant energy services company, which was responsible for cementing the drill into place below the water. The company acknowledged Friday that it had completed the final cementing of the oil well and pipe just 20 hours before the blowout last week.
<here be snippage>
Cementing a deep-water drilling operation is a process fraught with danger. A 2007 study by the U.S. Minerals Management Service found that cementing was the single most important factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period -- more than equipment malfunction. Halliburton has been accused of a poor cement job in the case of a major blowout in the Timor Sea off Australia last August. An investigation is underway.
According to experts cited in Friday's Wall St. Journal, the timing of last week's cement job in relation to the explosion -- only 20 hours beforehand, and the history of cement problems in other blowouts "point to it as a possible culprit." Robert MacKenzie, managing director of energy and natural resources at FBR Capital Markets and a former cementing engineer, told the Journal, "The initial likely cause of gas coming to the surface had something to do with the cement." from Gulf oil spill: The Halliburton connection
So it does seem premature to lay this at the feet of British Petroleum. From what I've been reading, BP has done quite a bit of late to reduce their accident rates and otherwise improve their business model.
In all fairness, it needs to be pointed out that when people were screaming to the courts about MS's monopolistic abuse of the market, that was before FOSS had proven itself. What was true at that time is no longer true because the nature of the market has changed.
The market has changed, and MS's strategies for domination that worked so well in a purely capitalist market are failing in a market where the gift economy of FOSS mixes with capitalism. Now that enough contributors are working to make the whole pie bigger rather than playing a zero sum game of trying to take a larger slice than anybody else, MS needs to re-orient itself and find a business model that fits the new, improved, reality.
This is an example of why I don't worry about man-made genetically modified organisms. It you have studied biology, you realize that nature is constantly shuffling DNA from one organism to another across species, genera, phyla and here across kingdoms.
And the above statement is precisely why I have begun to worry about genetically modified organisms.
The whole concept of safety in GMO is defined in terms of species and genus, and that these abstract categories humans use to think about biology are somehow intrinsic in reality. That genes can migrate so easily across these categories shows this is not the case. Species, genus, phylum, and kingdom turn out to be convenient fictions, like centrifugal force. These fictions are an inadequate framework for working with GMO concepts in a safe manner.
We need a much better understanding of really basic biological principals to replace the rigid classification hierarchy with a way of thinking about the flows of information, materials, and energy that are an ecosystem. Until we have that more realistic framework and can use it to guide research and applications, I find the concept of using GMO in the field rather disturbing. At a very basic level, scientists and engineers involved in GMO research and applications don't know what the f*ck they are doing.
I'll point this out again: the accused has had special training (is an ex nurse) in manipulating the emotions and ideations of others and allegedly used these techniques in his communications with suicide-prone persons to push them toward suicide.
In a fist fight resulting in death from a blow to the head, a person with no training in fighting should be held to one standard, but the martial arts expert should be held to a higher standard, since he could be expected to know of less lethal ways of terminating the fight. This ex nurse should be treated like that martial arts expert since he is more likely to have recognized persons with suicidal ideation and much more likely to know what kinds of things to avoid saying because they would tend to aggravate the suicidal spiral.
On the face of it, bringing this guy up for trial seems appropriate.
Suicide of a person of a mainstream western culture is the ultimate act of selfishness.
That doesn't mean that it may not be appropriate in some instances. It means that in western cultures the decision to suicide is usually made at a time when the person is seriously under estimating his value to his circle of family, friends, and acquaintances.
Other cultures value things differently. Suicide in some eastern cultures is apparently sometimes regarded as a way of protecting the person's social circle from the burden of shame that his dishonorable actions would otherwise tar them with. Suicide in some warrior cultures is apparently sometimes a self-sacrifice for the benefit of the warrior's brethren or for those he has been fighting for. Suicide bombers appear to be a special case where brainwashing techniques have been used to artificially impose portions of the warrior ethic on the suggestible. There are definitely crimes involved with that last, but it would seem that in almost all cases the suicide bomber is another victim and not one of the perps.
Should any of these be legalized? With our current modes of handling estates and insurances policies, etc, probably not. We would end up in a hellacious mess. Can you imagine the circus lawyers would make over the insurance policy of the ex soldier who wrapped himself around a live grenade in the crowded subway? Lawyers, actuaries, and writers of insurance policies already have too much space for erecting their circus tents.
Should the crimes of suicide or attempted suicide be prosecuted? In general, no. There might be specific instances where this should be done: I think someone who straps on a dynamite vest should have all his insurance policies summarily cancelled. But these situations are rare in western societies; most of the time prosecution would just visit more hardship on the survivors with no particular benefit to anyone.
Parent post makes a telling point. The more so since the the accused had been trained as a nurse, which includes training in using communications skills and presentation of self to alter a patient's mood or self-assessment. In the nursing program I attended this training came under several titles: "therapeutic use of self", "active listening skills", etc. These can be very powerful techniques especially when working with a subject who is in a suggestible state of mind-- and there is definitely a potential for abuse.
He is no longer a nurse, so he can no longer be sanctioned by the state Board Of Nursing that licensed him. From what is known from the story, he should definitely face trial. At trial, he should be held to a higher standard than most persons because of his training, in the same way that a martial arts master who kills a stranger in a street fight should be held to a higher standard than the average bloke.
I agree with just about everything in parent post except I have one quibble:
Close the gap by engaging *multiple* commercial providers. So if one vehicle fails, or retires, NASA can keep flying on another. There will never be a gap again. Basically what they should have done back in 2003 but without the cost plus pork.
This should have been started at least 10 years earlier, in 1993, when the failures of the Space Shuttle to meet its original design goals were obvious. My guess as to the cause of the delay is that it takes decades for enough bureaucrats who pinned their careers to a single technology to either retire, or get themselves so far up the ladder that they would not be affected by criticism of their earlier actions.
We still have a lot to learn about how to develop new technology. Studying NASA's performance during the Shuttle years could teach us a lot about how important the bureaucratic side is-- in some ways more important than the science-- and some of the things that should be avoided.
Parent post is technically correct, but I think misleading in being too literal for this level of discourse.
MIRV designs do allow a single ICBM to carry decoys of various kinds, and jamming or shielding electronics can be added to any warhead, all at a relatively cheap cost in added weight since these things are suborbital. Additionally, the last fifty miles or so of an ICBM's warhead trajectory can be made very similar to the trajectory of a smart bomb with the simple addition of some small steering surfaces and target acquisition electronics. A smart warhead could be programmed to take some evasive aeronautic maneuvers and still reach its target.
Since I have no clearances and am not in any way privy to any of the relevant designs, I am of course speaking out of my ass. However it would be not only illogical, but totally irresponsible, for the USA not to have added such capabilities to the ICBMs in the 40+ years since they were first deployed. So I think it reasonable to assume that today's ICBMs do carry some countermeasures, since, as grandparent points out, the fuel cost for the added payload is well within reason.
Perhaps others who know more about the subject, and can find a way to talk about it without violating security, will speak up.
Slashdot Mirror
The intent of the Internet was to build an interconnected system of networks that
The price for this network is an unprecedented degree of anarchy in communications. This is reshaping societies on a global basis: we live in interesting times. IMHO, the tremendous benefits of this outweigh the problems it causes. But then, I don't live a lifestyle that is heavily invested in controlling other people's beliefs or their access to information.
Systems that are vulnerable to cyber attack, such as power grid management or interbank finances, should not be on the open Internet. Many of them can share the physical layers with the Internet, but they should use encryption and non-Internet protocols to logically isolate their activities from open Internet activities. And there will probably always be a strong argument that some of these vulnerable systems should have their own dedicated physical layer.
But putting any kind of kill switch on the Internet itself will create the single points of failure that the Internet was designed to avoid. It would necessarily destroy the Internet's capacity for self-healing (routing around dead areas).
There are plenty of other ways to address any of the problems that a kill switch would supposedly fix.
Looking into both xnview and irfanview on wine...
Thanks!
I too am unhappy with F-Spot. It seems to always be the most awkward place in my workflows, no matter what I am doing with the images.
But it sounds like shotwell would be moving in the wrong direction.
Anyone here familiar with F-Spot's performance wrt upgrades? Can we expect improvements in F-Spot at a steady pace, or is it a moribund project? I'm thinking that the next version of F-Spot might be closer to what would make me happy (Could we get a Linux version of IrfanView? I don't suppose IrfanView would run under wine in a way that would play well with GIMP, Inkscape, and Blender... but has anyone tried this?)
Parent post incorrectly rated "Funny".
Should be rated "Insightful".
Besides, she wasn't quite a nun. Despite rumors to the contrary, she kicked the habit before she took up with that guy and his brood.
I've never thought of it as "just a wrapper" before. That's interesting.
In practical terms, perl2exe and its ilk allow perl scripts to be easily distributed on WinXX machines without having to make the Perl language itself available on those machines. And it does so in a way that prevents causal users from altering or seeing the source code.
The script is "compiled" in the sense that its tokens are replaced by direct calls to the precompiled Perl library functions that are also bundled in the .exe file. It is not "compiled" in the same way that for instance C programs are compiled.
I don't recall any mode that returned the script itself in any error message, but there may now be one. That wouldn't be of any use to the average user, since he would have to know enough to find and install the Perl language before he could run the script from its plaintext form.
print "Hello world!\n"
I don't see how that requires much in the way of higher level education to master.
Perl is a highly permissive language: it assumes that the programmer knows what he is doing and tries to keep out of his way. It is a lot like contemporary Internet English: in both cases most users are not fluent in the language, let alone capable of writing truly elegant stuff. But in both cases the users are generally proficient enough after a reasonably short period of study to get the language to do what they need. Just as there is a lot of really crappy English language on the Internet, so too are there a lot of really crappy perl scripts out there. But a Brazilian does not have to be able to write perfect English to ask a newsgroup for help with a problem in 3D modeling of turbulent flows. Similarly, a sys admin does not need high level programming skills to write a perl script that would read a dump of the day's network logs and extract all entries from a specific machine.
Ouch! Last thing needed when distributing printer test code is another wrapper layer that could interfere with printing.
Except maybe an additional patch to turn off the additional wrapper layer, assuming it actually does that completely, every time no matter what... maybe that is really the last thing needed.
If .bat files won't do it for you, then you could look into the Windows implementation of Perl, coupled with the Tcl/Tk module, which gives you basic GUI support so you can fancy it up with buttons and input boxes and such. After you've got the script working right, you can run it through Perl2Exe or one of the other available compilers and distribute your work as a .exe file. This has two obvious advantages:
A very important side effect is that you'd gain a little experience with Perl, which can work scripting wonders that .bat files could never do.
Sort of a caveat: I once made my living by writing simple perl scripts that pulled data from the text dumps of a legacy MUMPS database and returned .csv files that the QA guys could play with in Excel. So I'm biased. I've also left the Microsoft ecosystem for Linux, since I think the Microsoft ecosystem is terminally polluted on its own effluvium. So I'm really, really biased. (Perl is FOSS originating in the Unix/Linux world; Perl2Exe is shareware that I remember cost under $50)
talk to any of the young, creative designers that are moving things forward, and they will tell you about how all of their designs are being ripped off by mall stores.
Uh, no. Not exactly.
Some will tell you that, but if you press them for specifics they generally won't be able to identify any of their own designs that were ripped off, or demonstrate in any way that they themselves have actually moved anything forward in the fashion world (or any other world). Instead they'll talk about how that happened to other struggling young designers who they used to hang out with. So sad, how all of those guys copped out and took good paying jobs with companies like Calvin Klein, Nike, Columbia Sportswear, etc.
As to "Forever 21"-- what is that? Some kind of anti-wrinkle skin cream formula to keep you looking like you're still to young to know anything?
What needs to be pointed out here is that
Your right to free speech does not mean that you are protected from the consequences of what you say.
There is no question that Dana The (Ex-)Dispatcher had the right to publish her jokes on Face Book. That does not absolve her of the consequences of demonstrating that she is too stupid with respect to professional off duty behavior to continue to work for that police department.
Maybe she can get a job with another police department that has lower standards.
You do realize this was not a corporation ? It was a the police department
Thanks for pointing this out. I read the article while drinking my first coffee of the day, and all synapses were not yet firing...
Because this is a police department, I have more sympathy for their point of view than I would for a private corp. They are held to a higher standard of behavior, as they should be, since we entrust their employees with guns, etc. They'd certainly be justified in disciplining an employee who was telling racist or ethnic jokes in public that could raise questions about their department's values. I can easily see a police department extending that behavior to jokes that might suggest their employees are drug users.
Dana's jokes may have demonstrated a lack of professional behavior that a police department might reasonably expect of its employees even after work hours. Hard to say whether this was actually the case, but it very well may have been. Myself, I would prefer to have a police department be too harsh on questions of appropriate professional behavior than too lax. But then I'm living in a city where there have been 3 questionable killings by police in the last 10 years and perhaps I'd be less sensitive about this if I were living in a sleepy little suburban town where the women were strong, the men were good looking, and all the children were above average.
I installed Win30 on machines on several different networks: Novell (sometimes), 3Com (mostly), and Lantastic (occasionally). Security was often an issue, even back in those days. Remember the first malware for PCs travelled from business to business by sneakernet.
Security became more of an issue as many Win3.xx machines were linked to the Internet before Win98 finally came along and most everybody upgraded. Yeah, there was WinNT before Win98, for the companies that could afford its massive support costs. And there was Win95 of course, for the pioneers. But Win95 was proof that the pioneers catch the arrows-- most prudent businessmen skipped that version and stayed with Win3.11 or earlier until Win98 provided a good reason to upgrade.
But of course security continued to be an increasing issue all along: the Microsoft approach of bolting security on as an afterthought to what the marketeer in the showroom needed to sell the goods has just never really worked out. Except of course for the leaches of the MS ecosystem with all their "firewall" and "antimalware" packages.
</rant>
With the resounding success of Win3.0, Microsoft demonstrated that you don't need to provide a secure computing platform if you market your product to customers who know nothing about the technology. Things have gone downhill from there.
For all you fans of real, visceral numbers you can relate to, that volume (1.33 x 10^9 km^3) is approximately equal to the amount of water in the earth's oceans.
Nice try, but
In short, any earthling who thinks he can relate to a volume of 1.33*10^9 km^3 is just all wet.
Looks like it's fuselage is also a lifting body.
On the larger one, yeah, it does.
One of the articles describes the fuselage of the H series as a lifting body that eliminates the need for a horizontal tail. So it's a lifting body that functions as a canard. That's pretty cool.
The problem with Chernobyl was not that it was poorly designed in terms of safety. It was poorly designed, but in the event that did not matter.
The problem with Chernobyl was that it was deliberately being operated outside its procedures by persons who did not know as much about what they were doing as they thought they did. This was also a theme at Three Mile Island, when control room operators turned a developing but controllable problem into a catastrophe. They thought they could rely on the primary measuring devices to show what was going on in the pressure vessel, and they ignored other readings that were not consistent with what turned out to be faulty instrumentation. Making erroneous assumptions about how much they knew was also the root cause of the Fermi fast breeder reactor, when it turned out that convective currents in liquid sodium could in fact be strong enough to lift part of the titanium shielding off the vessel floor and carry it to a place where it could jam up the cooling flow and warp the fuel rods enough that the control rods could not descend properly even in scram....
The limitation in implementing nuclear power has to date been a problem not with the nuclear technology, but with our inability to interface it in a safe way with the severely limited capabilities of the wetware used in designing, building, and controlling it.
That said, I think some of the newer designs for nuclear power deserve being looked at. At some point we'll find a way to do it safely. We just haven't gotten there yet.
And maybe we also need to take a much closer look at how we choose and train those who manage and operate these beasts. Involving only the best wetware we have available in building and running these beasts would seem to be a very good idea.
Halliburton was responsible for cementing the deepwater drill hole that evidently failed, triggering the explosion that toppled the huge offshore rig and unleashed the gusher.
from Gulf disaster spurs questions on drilling, Halliburton
also this more detailed article from the L.A. Times:
Investigators delving into the possible cause of the massive gulf oil spill are focusing on the role of Houston-based Halliburton Co., the giant energy services company, which was responsible for cementing the drill into place below the water. The company acknowledged Friday that it had completed the final cementing of the oil well and pipe just 20 hours before the blowout last week.
<here be snippage>
Cementing a deep-water drilling operation is a process fraught with danger. A 2007 study by the U.S. Minerals Management Service found that cementing was the single most important factor in 18 of 39 well blowouts in the Gulf of Mexico over a 14-year period -- more than equipment malfunction. Halliburton has been accused of a poor cement job in the case of a major blowout in the Timor Sea off Australia last August. An investigation is underway.
According to experts cited in Friday's Wall St. Journal, the timing of last week's cement job in relation to the explosion -- only 20 hours beforehand, and the history of cement problems in other blowouts "point to it as a possible culprit." Robert MacKenzie, managing director of energy and natural resources at FBR Capital Markets and a former cementing engineer, told the Journal, "The initial likely cause of gas coming to the surface had something to do with the cement."
from Gulf oil spill: The Halliburton connection
So it does seem premature to lay this at the feet of British Petroleum. From what I've been reading, BP has done quite a bit of late to reduce their accident rates and otherwise improve their business model.
In all fairness, it needs to be pointed out that when people were screaming to the courts about MS's monopolistic abuse of the market, that was before FOSS had proven itself. What was true at that time is no longer true because the nature of the market has changed.
The market has changed, and MS's strategies for domination that worked so well in a purely capitalist market are failing in a market where the gift economy of FOSS mixes with capitalism. Now that enough contributors are working to make the whole pie bigger rather than playing a zero sum game of trying to take a larger slice than anybody else, MS needs to re-orient itself and find a business model that fits the new, improved, reality.
This is an example of why I don't worry about man-made genetically modified organisms. It you have studied biology, you realize that nature is constantly shuffling DNA from one organism to another across species, genera, phyla and here across kingdoms.
And the above statement is precisely why I have begun to worry about genetically modified organisms.
The whole concept of safety in GMO is defined in terms of species and genus, and that these abstract categories humans use to think about biology are somehow intrinsic in reality. That genes can migrate so easily across these categories shows this is not the case. Species, genus, phylum, and kingdom turn out to be convenient fictions, like centrifugal force. These fictions are an inadequate framework for working with GMO concepts in a safe manner.
We need a much better understanding of really basic biological principals to replace the rigid classification hierarchy with a way of thinking about the flows of information, materials, and energy that are an ecosystem. Until we have that more realistic framework and can use it to guide research and applications, I find the concept of using GMO in the field rather disturbing. At a very basic level, scientists and engineers involved in GMO research and applications don't know what the f*ck they are doing.
That disturbs me.
Um, yeah. One of these days the San Andreas Fault is going to slip big time, and everything east of it will slide under the Atlantic Ocean.
I'll point this out again: the accused has had special training (is an ex nurse) in manipulating the emotions and ideations of others and allegedly used these techniques in his communications with suicide-prone persons to push them toward suicide.
In a fist fight resulting in death from a blow to the head, a person with no training in fighting should be held to one standard, but the martial arts expert should be held to a higher standard, since he could be expected to know of less lethal ways of terminating the fight. This ex nurse should be treated like that martial arts expert since he is more likely to have recognized persons with suicidal ideation and much more likely to know what kinds of things to avoid saying because they would tend to aggravate the suicidal spiral.
On the face of it, bringing this guy up for trial seems appropriate.
Suicide of a person of a mainstream western culture is the ultimate act of selfishness.
That doesn't mean that it may not be appropriate in some instances. It means that in western cultures the decision to suicide is usually made at a time when the person is seriously under estimating his value to his circle of family, friends, and acquaintances.
Other cultures value things differently. Suicide in some eastern cultures is apparently sometimes regarded as a way of protecting the person's social circle from the burden of shame that his dishonorable actions would otherwise tar them with. Suicide in some warrior cultures is apparently sometimes a self-sacrifice for the benefit of the warrior's brethren or for those he has been fighting for. Suicide bombers appear to be a special case where brainwashing techniques have been used to artificially impose portions of the warrior ethic on the suggestible. There are definitely crimes involved with that last, but it would seem that in almost all cases the suicide bomber is another victim and not one of the perps.
Should any of these be legalized? With our current modes of handling estates and insurances policies, etc, probably not. We would end up in a hellacious mess. Can you imagine the circus lawyers would make over the insurance policy of the ex soldier who wrapped himself around a live grenade in the crowded subway? Lawyers, actuaries, and writers of insurance policies already have too much space for erecting their circus tents. Should the crimes of suicide or attempted suicide be prosecuted? In general, no. There might be specific instances where this should be done: I think someone who straps on a dynamite vest should have all his insurance policies summarily cancelled. But these situations are rare in western societies; most of the time prosecution would just visit more hardship on the survivors with no particular benefit to anyone.
Parent post makes a telling point. The more so since the the accused had been trained as a nurse, which includes training in using communications skills and presentation of self to alter a patient's mood or self-assessment. In the nursing program I attended this training came under several titles: "therapeutic use of self", "active listening skills", etc. These can be very powerful techniques especially when working with a subject who is in a suggestible state of mind-- and there is definitely a potential for abuse.
He is no longer a nurse, so he can no longer be sanctioned by the state Board Of Nursing that licensed him. From what is known from the story, he should definitely face trial. At trial, he should be held to a higher standard than most persons because of his training, in the same way that a martial arts master who kills a stranger in a street fight should be held to a higher standard than the average bloke.
I agree with just about everything in parent post except I have one quibble:
Close the gap by engaging *multiple* commercial providers. So if one vehicle fails, or retires, NASA can keep flying on another. There will never be a gap again. Basically what they should have done back in 2003 but without the cost plus pork.
This should have been started at least 10 years earlier, in 1993, when the failures of the Space Shuttle to meet its original design goals were obvious. My guess as to the cause of the delay is that it takes decades for enough bureaucrats who pinned their careers to a single technology to either retire, or get themselves so far up the ladder that they would not be affected by criticism of their earlier actions.
We still have a lot to learn about how to develop new technology. Studying NASA's performance during the Shuttle years could teach us a lot about how important the bureaucratic side is-- in some ways more important than the science-- and some of the things that should be avoided.
Why, yes, I am a curmudgeon...
Parent post is technically correct, but I think misleading in being too literal for this level of discourse.
MIRV designs do allow a single ICBM to carry decoys of various kinds, and jamming or shielding electronics can be added to any warhead, all at a relatively cheap cost in added weight since these things are suborbital. Additionally, the last fifty miles or so of an ICBM's warhead trajectory can be made very similar to the trajectory of a smart bomb with the simple addition of some small steering surfaces and target acquisition electronics. A smart warhead could be programmed to take some evasive aeronautic maneuvers and still reach its target.
Since I have no clearances and am not in any way privy to any of the relevant designs, I am of course speaking out of my ass. However it would be not only illogical, but totally irresponsible, for the USA not to have added such capabilities to the ICBMs in the 40+ years since they were first deployed. So I think it reasonable to assume that today's ICBMs do carry some countermeasures, since, as grandparent points out, the fuel cost for the added payload is well within reason.
Perhaps others who know more about the subject, and can find a way to talk about it without violating security, will speak up.