There IS one known cure for psychopathy, at least. It generally involves a coroner, though.
Putting that aside, I can definitely agree with the poster on the mindset of oil execs, having seen firsthand the disdain and complete lack of compassion exhibited by similar folks at Atlantic Richfield during the mid '90s. I had the unique opportunity to listen in on a teleconference these execs were having with one of their HR people in Barrow; the poor lady there was positively apoplectic at the time regarding the environmental damage and the economic catastrophe the locals there were having as a result of what Arco was doing there (IIRC, her words were "we have people DYING out here! Do Something!")
These asshats were quite happy to comment amongst themselves, and were actually laughing at her dilemma. Granted, I didn't have a full hold of the circumstances, I heard this conversation while waiting in an adjacent hall on approval status for a security ID, so it's possible that I may have missed something, but even so, the pathological insensitivity of these guys was appalling at best. It wasn't long thereafter I found employment someplace else, though the wages I am earning have never been even remotely close to what I made there.
Poverty stricken as I am, though, I can at least face myself in the mirror, not so sure about these guys. Well, this is, I suspect, more the norm for this industry than not, amazing what a lack of conscience can accomplish, no?
See, psychopaths don't have any issue sleeping at night or looking in the mirror, or looking anyone in the eyes. There's no conscience there. Nothing.
Here's an idea for how to really motivate BP - and any other company with the potential to cause such massive havoc...
For every day that the oil continues to gush, the top 10% of their employees, by total compensation, should be required to work for a day on the clean-up crews. Not simply going to meetings and coming up with plans - they are to get down and dirty scraping oil off rocks and washing birds. The kind of work that gets oil under your fingernails and in your hair, with the smell soaked so deeply into your skin that it takes weeks to get it out.
After all, these guys have so much money in the bank that firing them won't hurt, and fining the company will just translate into higher oil prices. If they had some real skin in the game, I think we would have seen them take the problem a whole lot more seriously from day one.
BP top execs are corporate psychopaths - that is, psychopaths that happened to be smart enough to manipulate their way into high-paying, high-repsonsibility (without the responsibility) positions. They don't care about you, your family, or just about anyone's lives'.One buck in their pockets is worth more than a human life, for that kind of people.
Furthermore, psychopathy is NOT curable - all those fancy activities at correctional institutions, like training guide dogs for the blind, do NOT work with psychopaths (they do work with other criminals, though, and I am all for them, don't get me wrong). Having these corporate psychopaths clean up beaches and marine life will be pointless from an educational POV. But the real, greatest argument why I am against this idea is: these animals (mostly birds) have already tried cleaning themselves, by the time they are taken into cure by the various NGOs. Doing so, these birds have ingested copious amounts of crude oil, and typically die a few days, a week tops, after being cleaned. I look at this cleaning as a last mercy shown by humankind before they die. I do not want a corporate pig psychopath administering that "mercy" - it is simply revolting, and would be done utterly perfunctorily.
I don't want to get into a semantics argument. Point is, the rovers can barely dislodge themselves from a rut, or go 20 m per day. That's a problem sphere caused by highly-delayed remote control. I would be very surprised if you disagreed with this point. But hey, you just might.
I won't get into your next paragraph - I don't believe in terraforming. And for the record, I am a researcher in nanotechnology.
Your third paragraph sends your whole post straight into the trashbin.
On one hand, the claim is made that industries (of various kind) are consuming this very precious resource called water. On the other hand, China is becoming one of the most industrialized countries in the world, and is very much infatuated with it's industrial growth, and you can pry it from their cold, dead fingers.
Well, you know the saying: you can't eat a pie and have it, too. You just fucking can't. It's not politically incorrect, it's a fact, it is what it is. If China has overextended herself - can't support 1.3 billion people AND a hypertrophic industry? Well, then it won't.
The moon is close enough that round trip radio can be used to control or reprogram robots in the event of complex/unforseen situations (remember we reprogrammed the Galileo mission when it proved necessary).
That's why this endeavor is wholly useless for the operation in far-away places such as Mars, Europa (the Jovian moon), Titan, etc. By dicking around with remote controlled robots, we will learn next to nothing useful for colonizing the more hospitable planets of the solar system. The 40 minute (that would be the shortest) rount-trip of command-feedback loop to Mars, makes it necessary to basically give the commands to the martian rovers one day and wait till the next to see what happened. That slows down their effectiveness/productivity millions of times.
They're testing an EEPROM: while the underlining physics of storing data in an EEPROM and Flash RAM are the same - floating gate transistors - EEPROMs use best-of-breed implementations, single-bit addressable floating gate, while the Flash RAM found in SSDs is the cheapest, lest enduring MLC NAND. MLC NAND are the cheapest per bit, and have a write cycle endurance of two to three orders of magnitude lower than EEPROMs.
SSDs do not contain EEPROMs. They don't even contain SLC (NOR or NAND). In fact, SSDs don't even contain NOR MLCs. Only the cheapest will do, for SSDs.
While interesting, these apps aren't that useful because the other caller would have to be using the same software for it to work which limits it to just a few people using Android with these apps.
This patent troll has over-extended itself: the researchers will be able to prove their prior-art research and at the end of the day, the StemCells inc. patent will be invalidated - and they have nobody else but themselves to blame.
Williams' survival may be critical to the investigation. We took his story to Dr. Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
Last week, the White House asked Bea to help analyze the Deepwater Horizon accident. Bea investigated the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster for NASA and the Hurricane Katrina disaster for the National Science Foundation. Bea's voice never completely recovered from the weeks he spent in the flood in New Orleans. But as the White House found, he's among the nation's best, having investigated more than 20 offshore rig disasters.
"Mr. Williams comes forward with these very detailed elements from his viewpoint on a rig. That's a brave and intelligent man," Bea told Pelley.
"What he's saying is very important to this investigation, you believe?" Pelley asked.
"It is," the professor replied.
What strikes Bea is Williams' description of the blowout preventer. Williams says in a drilling accident four weeks before the explosion, the critical rubber gasket, called an "annular," was damaged and pieces of it started coming out of the well.
"According to Williams, when parts of the annular start coming up on the deck someone from Transocean says, 'Look, don't worry about it.' What does that tell you?" Pelley asked.
"Houston we have a problem," Bea replied.
Here's why that's so important: the annular is used to seal the well for pressure tests. And those tests determine whether dangerous gas is seeping in.
"So if the annular is damaged, if I understand you correctly, you can't do the pressure tests in a reliable way?" Pelley asked.
"That's correct. You may get pressure test recordings, but because you're leaking pressure, they are not reliable," Bea explained.
Williams also told us that a backup control system to the blowout preventer called a pod had lost some of its functions.
"What is the standard operating procedure if you lose one of the control pods?" Pelley asked.
"Reestablish it, fix it. It's like losing one of your legs," Bea said.
"The morning of the disaster, according to Williams, there was an argument in front of all the men on the ship between the Transocean manager and the BP manager. Do you know what that argument is about?" Pelley asked.
Bea replied, "Yes," telling Pelley the argument was about who was the boss.
In finishing the well, the plan was to have a subcontractor, Halliburton, place three concrete plugs, like corks, in the column. The Transocean manager wanted to do this with the column full of heavy drilling fluid - what drillers call "mud" - to keep the pressure down below contained. But the BP manager wanted to begin to remove the "mud" before the last plug was set. That would reduce the pressure controlling the well before the plugs were finished.
Asked why BP would do that, Bea told Pelley, "It expedites the subsequent steps."
"It's a matter of going faster," Pelley remarked.
"Faster, sure," Bea replied.
Bea said BP had won that argument.
"If the 'mud' had been left in the column, would there have been a blowout?" Pelley asked.
So. The top scientists and engineers in America and around the world are huddling their heads together in Houston, having pulled a month's worth of 20-hour days desperately trying to brainstorm every possible way to make the well stop.
And... you're modding up a guy who doesn't think they thought of DUMPING ROCKS ON IT????
Or wait... they did think of dumping rocks on it but don't want to? Even though they're looking at BILLIONS in cleanup/restoration/litigation costs? Not to mention potential penalties like, you know, no more deepwater drilling?
If blocking it with rocks would work, why would it take 500,000 TONS of rocks? The pressure coming from the wellhead is less than 5,000 POUNDS. And why would simply hauling loads of rocks and dumping them on the wellhead cost "few billions"?
I understand you are upset. The question is, why do you let your emotions turn you into a complete blathering idiot?
I see that you're nicely in the pocket of big oil (I read your other posts in this thread). A thin veil of masquerading doesn't fully disguise your affiliations.
So I do understand what turns youinto a complete blathering idiot.
Because those same psychopaths fund the election campaigns of every important member of Congress as well as the President, and they are important providers of high-paying jobs for former bureaucrats and regulators.
Well, what you provided here, was a (or one of the) reason why they won't be lined up and shot, but not why they shouldn't.
Are we to believe that a company with profits equal to a middle sized nation's GDP cannot afford to plug this hole? Sure, it may take hauling 500.000 tons of rocks from the coast, and would cost a few billions of $, but BP can very easily afford that.
Believe you me, the only reason why this crisis is lasting this long, is because BP is doing it piece-meal, so as to not affect the profits almost at all. The upper management at BP are nothing but goons of the worst kind, the most die-hard corporate psychopaths you can imagine. So what if the ecosystem is completely compromised, if it will never recover, if livelihoods of millions will be affected? They don't give a shit. They didn't give a shit when they lobbied (and continue to do so) the govt. to decrease safety regulations, when they cut costs and increased workloads for cost cutting and profit, and when they decided to overlook the reports of pieces of the blowout preventer valve breaking off - and in fact, forcing the oil rig workers to continue as if nothing happened.
Oh yeah, and these executives don't give a shit about the people who died on the platform, either.
Please someone tell me, why shouldn't these soulless suits be lined up and shot, and the event televised for the education of other similar corporate psychopaths?
Me, like many other amigans of the time, were enjoying all kinds of amiga GUI goodness, and wanted to check out this expensive IBM PC stuff that was starting to be all the rage. When I saw DOS and the MS Word that was running on it, well, I just thought I'd puke - what the FUCK is this lame ASCII graphic clusterfuck (we didn't use the term "clusterfuck" at the time, but it's very appropriate)? But as we all know, Amiga died and Microsoft and the PC became kings. And this wasn't the last time that the lesser technology won, in IT, either: NetWare vs. Windows NT, NDS vs. Active Directory, BeOS vs. all the other OSes.
Related to this: our analytical equipment, which consists of several SEMs, ellipsometers, Raman spectroscope, reflectometer, profilometers etc. are all managed via Windows XP or even Windows 98. Our microfabrication equipment (PECVD, RIE, crio RIE, sputers, E-beam lithography, iion-beam mill etc. etc. etc. are also controlled via Win XP.
You can find this kind of corporate psychopaths in every nation, trust me. And there have been many, many Jews that have unselfishly given to humankind. A lot of scientists, artists and social activists were Jews.
He was not yet a billionaire when he called the Facebook users "dumb fucks". That's right, he was 19, long before those billions would have hit his ego too hard, and already calling the users of his service dumb fucks.
Once that sinks in, I think we can conclude that he has been a douche all along.
This is why you DO WANT nuclear energy in space! OK, Voyager 1 and 2 have RTGs, but even those are considered politically incorrect these days, especially such massive ones as in the Voyagers.
More nuclear power in spacecraft, I say. To provide propulsion (ion drive, or even better, explosive drive) and energy when far from the Sun. Fuck PC.
Slashdot Mirror
There IS one known cure for psychopathy, at least. It generally involves a coroner, though.
Putting that aside, I can definitely agree with the poster on the mindset of oil execs, having seen firsthand the disdain and complete lack of compassion exhibited by similar folks at Atlantic Richfield during the mid '90s. I had the unique opportunity to listen in on a teleconference these execs were having with one of their HR people in Barrow; the poor lady there was positively apoplectic at the time regarding the environmental damage and the economic catastrophe the locals there were having as a result of what Arco was doing there (IIRC, her words were "we have people DYING out here! Do Something!")
These asshats were quite happy to comment amongst themselves, and were actually laughing at her dilemma. Granted, I didn't have a full hold of the circumstances, I heard this conversation while waiting in an adjacent hall on approval status for a security ID, so it's possible that I may have missed something, but even so, the pathological insensitivity of these guys was appalling at best. It wasn't long thereafter I found employment someplace else, though the wages I am earning have never been even remotely close to what I made there.
Poverty stricken as I am, though, I can at least face myself in the mirror, not so sure about these guys. Well, this is, I suspect, more the norm for this industry than not, amazing what a lack of conscience can accomplish, no?
See, psychopaths don't have any issue sleeping at night or looking in the mirror, or looking anyone in the eyes. There's no conscience there. Nothing.
Interesting account, by the way.
Here's an idea for how to really motivate BP - and any other company with the potential to cause such massive havoc...
For every day that the oil continues to gush, the top 10% of their employees, by total compensation, should be required to work for a day on the clean-up crews. Not simply going to meetings and coming up with plans - they are to get down and dirty scraping oil off rocks and washing birds. The kind of work that gets oil under your fingernails and in your hair, with the smell soaked so deeply into your skin that it takes weeks to get it out.
After all, these guys have so much money in the bank that firing them won't hurt, and fining the company will just translate into higher oil prices. If they had some real skin in the game, I think we would have seen them take the problem a whole lot more seriously from day one.
BP top execs are corporate psychopaths - that is, psychopaths that happened to be smart enough to manipulate their way into high-paying, high-repsonsibility (without the responsibility) positions. They don't care about you, your family, or just about anyone's lives'.One buck in their pockets is worth more than a human life, for that kind of people.
Furthermore, psychopathy is NOT curable - all those fancy activities at correctional institutions, like training guide dogs for the blind, do NOT work with psychopaths (they do work with other criminals, though, and I am all for them, don't get me wrong). Having these corporate psychopaths clean up beaches and marine life will be pointless from an educational POV. But the real, greatest argument why I am against this idea is: these animals (mostly birds) have already tried cleaning themselves, by the time they are taken into cure by the various NGOs. Doing so, these birds have ingested copious amounts of crude oil, and typically die a few days, a week tops, after being cleaned. I look at this cleaning as a last mercy shown by humankind before they die. I do not want a corporate pig psychopath administering that "mercy" - it is simply revolting, and would be done utterly perfunctorily.
I don't want to get into a semantics argument. Point is, the rovers can barely dislodge themselves from a rut, or go 20 m per day. That's a problem sphere caused by highly-delayed remote control. I would be very surprised if you disagreed with this point. But hey, you just might.
I won't get into your next paragraph - I don't believe in terraforming. And for the record, I am a researcher in nanotechnology.
Your third paragraph sends your whole post straight into the trashbin.
On one hand, the claim is made that industries (of various kind) are consuming this very precious resource called water. On the other hand, China is becoming one of the most industrialized countries in the world, and is very much infatuated with it's industrial growth, and you can pry it from their cold, dead fingers.
Well, you know the saying: you can't eat a pie and have it, too. You just fucking can't. It's not politically incorrect, it's a fact, it is what it is. If China has overextended herself - can't support 1.3 billion people AND a hypertrophic industry? Well, then it won't.
The moon is close enough that round trip radio can be used to control or reprogram robots in the event of complex/unforseen situations (remember we reprogrammed the Galileo mission when it proved necessary).
That's why this endeavor is wholly useless for the operation in far-away places such as Mars, Europa (the Jovian moon), Titan, etc. By dicking around with remote controlled robots, we will learn next to nothing useful for colonizing the more hospitable planets of the solar system. The 40 minute (that would be the shortest) rount-trip of command-feedback loop to Mars, makes it necessary to basically give the commands to the martian rovers one day and wait till the next to see what happened. That slows down their effectiveness/productivity millions of times.
Absolutely. It's like apples and hippos, as I wrote in another post :)
Which SSD contain SLC? Let's just say that I'm slightly skeptical about your claim.
Unless you mean those 4GB/8GB board-soldered memory modules that appeared in some of the ultraportables. By SSD I mean 3.5" form factor or such.
They're testing an EEPROM: it is bit addressable and it does not contain any wear leveling algorithm.
They're testing an EEPROM: while the underlining physics of storing data in an EEPROM and Flash RAM are the same - floating gate transistors - EEPROMs use best-of-breed implementations, single-bit addressable floating gate, while the Flash RAM found in SSDs is the cheapest, lest enduring MLC NAND. MLC NAND are the cheapest per bit, and have a write cycle endurance of two to three orders of magnitude lower than EEPROMs.
SSDs do not contain EEPROMs. They don't even contain SLC (NOR or NAND). In fact, SSDs don't even contain NOR MLCs. Only the cheapest will do, for SSDs.
While interesting, these apps aren't that useful because the other caller would have to be using the same software for it to work which limits it to just a few people using Android with these apps.
Are you this guy?
I very violently and devastatingly sadly agree with all you wrote.
This patent troll has over-extended itself: the researchers will be able to prove their prior-art research and at the end of the day, the StemCells inc. patent will be invalidated - and they have nobody else but themselves to blame.
For example
Williams' survival may be critical to the investigation. We took his story to Dr. Bob Bea, a professor of engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.
Last week, the White House asked Bea to help analyze the Deepwater Horizon accident. Bea investigated the Columbia Space Shuttle disaster for NASA and the Hurricane Katrina disaster for the National Science Foundation. Bea's voice never completely recovered from the weeks he spent in the flood in New Orleans. But as the White House found, he's among the nation's best, having investigated more than 20 offshore rig disasters.
"Mr. Williams comes forward with these very detailed elements from his viewpoint on a rig. That's a brave and intelligent man," Bea told Pelley.
"What he's saying is very important to this investigation, you believe?" Pelley asked.
"It is," the professor replied.
What strikes Bea is Williams' description of the blowout preventer. Williams says in a drilling accident four weeks before the explosion, the critical rubber gasket, called an "annular," was damaged and pieces of it started coming out of the well.
"According to Williams, when parts of the annular start coming up on the deck someone from Transocean says, 'Look, don't worry about it.' What does that tell you?" Pelley asked.
"Houston we have a problem," Bea replied.
Here's why that's so important: the annular is used to seal the well for pressure tests. And those tests determine whether dangerous gas is seeping in.
"So if the annular is damaged, if I understand you correctly, you can't do the pressure tests in a reliable way?" Pelley asked.
"That's correct. You may get pressure test recordings, but because you're leaking pressure, they are not reliable," Bea explained.
Williams also told us that a backup control system to the blowout preventer called a pod had lost some of its functions.
"What is the standard operating procedure if you lose one of the control pods?" Pelley asked.
"Reestablish it, fix it. It's like losing one of your legs," Bea said.
"The morning of the disaster, according to Williams, there was an argument in front of all the men on the ship between the Transocean manager and the BP manager. Do you know what that argument is about?" Pelley asked.
Bea replied, "Yes," telling Pelley the argument was about who was the boss.
In finishing the well, the plan was to have a subcontractor, Halliburton, place three concrete plugs, like corks, in the column. The Transocean manager wanted to do this with the column full of heavy drilling fluid - what drillers call "mud" - to keep the pressure down below contained. But the BP manager wanted to begin to remove the "mud" before the last plug was set. That would reduce the pressure controlling the well before the plugs were finished.
Asked why BP would do that, Bea told Pelley, "It expedites the subsequent steps."
"It's a matter of going faster," Pelley remarked.
"Faster, sure," Bea replied.
Bea said BP had won that argument.
"If the 'mud' had been left in the column, would there have been a blowout?" Pelley asked.
"It doesn't look like it," Bea replied.
So. The top scientists and engineers in America and around the world are huddling their heads together in Houston, having pulled a month's worth of 20-hour days desperately trying to brainstorm every possible way to make the well stop.
And... you're modding up a guy who doesn't think they thought of DUMPING ROCKS ON IT????
Or wait ... they did think of dumping rocks on it but don't want to? Even though they're looking at BILLIONS in cleanup/restoration/litigation costs? Not to mention potential penalties like, you know, no more deepwater drilling?
If blocking it with rocks would work, why would it take 500,000 TONS of rocks? The pressure coming from the wellhead is less than 5,000 POUNDS. And why would simply hauling loads of rocks and dumping them on the wellhead cost "few billions"?
I understand you are upset. The question is, why do you let your emotions turn you into a complete blathering idiot?
I see that you're nicely in the pocket of big oil (I read your other posts in this thread). A thin veil of masquerading doesn't fully disguise your affiliations.
So I do understand what turns youinto a complete blathering idiot.
To everyone who modded this post up...
Just FYI, nobody modded my post up at this time. The parent post is astroturfing.
Because those same psychopaths fund the election campaigns of every important member of Congress as well as the President, and they are important providers of high-paying jobs for former bureaucrats and regulators.
Well, what you provided here, was a (or one of the) reason why they won't be lined up and shot, but not why they shouldn't.
Are we to believe that a company with profits equal to a middle sized nation's GDP cannot afford to plug this hole? Sure, it may take hauling 500.000 tons of rocks from the coast, and would cost a few billions of $, but BP can very easily afford that.
Believe you me, the only reason why this crisis is lasting this long, is because BP is doing it piece-meal, so as to not affect the profits almost at all. The upper management at BP are nothing but goons of the worst kind, the most die-hard corporate psychopaths you can imagine. So what if the ecosystem is completely compromised, if it will never recover, if livelihoods of millions will be affected? They don't give a shit. They didn't give a shit when they lobbied (and continue to do so) the govt. to decrease safety regulations, when they cut costs and increased workloads for cost cutting and profit, and when they decided to overlook the reports of pieces of the blowout preventer valve breaking off - and in fact, forcing the oil rig workers to continue as if nothing happened.
Oh yeah, and these executives don't give a shit about the people who died on the platform, either.
Please someone tell me, why shouldn't these soulless suits be lined up and shot, and the event televised for the education of other similar corporate psychopaths?
Me, like many other amigans of the time, were enjoying all kinds of amiga GUI goodness, and wanted to check out this expensive IBM PC stuff that was starting to be all the rage. When I saw DOS and the MS Word that was running on it, well, I just thought I'd puke - what the FUCK is this lame ASCII graphic clusterfuck (we didn't use the term "clusterfuck" at the time, but it's very appropriate)? But as we all know, Amiga died and Microsoft and the PC became kings. And this wasn't the last time that the lesser technology won, in IT, either: NetWare vs. Windows NT, NDS vs. Active Directory, BeOS vs. all the other OSes.
Related to this: our analytical equipment, which consists of several SEMs, ellipsometers, Raman spectroscope, reflectometer, profilometers etc. are all managed via Windows XP or even Windows 98. Our microfabrication equipment (PECVD, RIE, crio RIE, sputers, E-beam lithography, iion-beam mill etc. etc. etc. are also controlled via Win XP.
Part of this initiative (IMHO) serves the purpose of fucking with Apple: it will be Flash based, hence out.of-limits to iPod, iPhone and iPad.
If Google TV becomes hugely popular, the joke's on Apple.
O
/ ^ \
* | -- Mohammad Carrying a bomb
^
_/ \_
FTFY.
And if someone is more talented than me and the OP, please add a beard ---> #
You can find this kind of corporate psychopaths in every nation, trust me. And there have been many, many Jews that have unselfishly given to humankind. A lot of scientists, artists and social activists were Jews.
Oh, the "good old times", when Zuckerberg sold the information of 4000 Harvard accounts?
Sure, back then Facebook was so much better, mindful of people's privacy and all.
He was not yet a billionaire when he called the Facebook users "dumb fucks". That's right, he was 19, long before those billions would have hit his ego too hard, and already calling the users of his service dumb fucks.
Once that sinks in, I think we can conclude that he has been a douche all along.
This is why you DO WANT nuclear energy in space! OK, Voyager 1 and 2 have RTGs, but even those are considered politically incorrect these days, especially such massive ones as in the Voyagers.
More nuclear power in spacecraft, I say. To provide propulsion (ion drive, or even better, explosive drive) and energy when far from the Sun. Fuck PC.