(Note: I think the way Apple handled this issue is a much much bigger problem than the actual antenna design, which is honestly pretty minor in the grand scope of phone problems.)
I have to disagree with the idea that the antenna of a telephone having issues is a minor problem.
It should be imperative that the antenna be absolutely as strong as possible, because it's a goddamned cell phone. The whole point of the thing is to make phone calls.
I'll grant you that the antenna issue was not as big as it appeared to be at first, but when you're spending $500+ for a phone, you expect to get the best reception possible. The antenna is not an area that should be skimped, and I do believe that it was Jobs' fault for pushing aesthetics over functionality, and leaving his engineering team stuck with having to make everything work given the aesthetics dreamt up by the art department.
The rest of your post I agree with. Not that any of this ever affected my decision to not buy an iPhone - Jobs turned me off of Apple a long, long time ago.
You secure memcached the same way you secure any cache: by restricting direct access. All you have to do is put a proxy between the memcached server/instance and the internet and the problem is solved. If you don't have command-level access to the memcached instance you can't mine it, period.
Many very large websites don't bother to do this, which is very bad security practice, as the slideshow clearly demonstrates.
The weakness isn't really with memcached. To say memcache is insecure is like saying your documents are insecure because they aren't encrypted. Yeah, you could look at it that way if you wanted to, but the real problem is the access to the documents. Restrict the access, and the problem goes away. Same with memcached. It's designed to be very fast, and to facilitate that it has no security at all. So you need to secure it externally - i.e. firewalls and proxies, among other things.
I'm sorry, but I don't see how a system with absolutely no security can somehow be intrinsically more secure than a system without security.
The same security rules apply no matter what systems you use. If you're too stupid to understand basic security practices, then even Microsoft can't save you (though they do at least try).
Actually you're both off, but you are far more wrong than the GP.
The Jury is there to determine Fact. The judge determines law, and spells out very clearly to the jury that if X, Y, and Z are true, the defendant is guilty of the given crime. The judge gives the criteria, because the judge knows the law. The judge also handles the trial, and determines what evidence is admissible and inadmissible, because the judge knows the law.
The only reason the judge doesn't also determine fact in a trial is because that is far too much power to place into the hands of one man. It is much more fair to have the facts of a case determined by a panel of one's peers (i.e. fellow average citizens, not some arbitrary critera like career or hobbies).
The Prosecutor selects which law (or laws) they believe the defendant has broken, the Judge applies them to the case, and the Jury determines whether or not the evidence proves the key points of the law (as dictated by the Judge) beyond a reasonable doubt. The Defendant's goal is to reduce the certainty of the evidence presented by the Prosecution down to at least a reasonable doubt - proving definitively that you are innocent is nice, but not necessary.
The jury's instructions really are as simple as "If X, Y, and Z are true, the defendant is guilty". All the jury has to do is decide whether they believe X, Y, and Z are true beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury doesn't apply anything, they determine fact, and based on what they determine to be fact, the judge applies the law.
You do realize there was a CCIE on the jury, right?
He explains exactly what happened, someone else posted a link up above, I'm too lazy to get it.
Frankly, in my opinion he got off easy. He did no direct damage, and it only cost about $200,000 to clean up his mess. Had something serious happened while he was being a jackass he may have gotten a lot more. It's like the asshole who runs a red light and only clips a car in the intersection. It's only by pure luck that he didn't kill someone, does he really deserve less of a sentence than someone who actually did kill someone?
He dragged the name of IT guys through the mud, for the life of me I can't understand why you're defending him.
You're a fool for getting hung up on the physical. The courts have been treating digital equivalents to physical objects exactly the same as their physical counterparts for years now.
A website is treated as property, why the hell wouldn't a password be treated as a key?
He had sole access to government property, and as such was required to give up that access to authorized persons (aka his bosses and their representatives) upon request.
That he was fired does not change the fact that he had sole access to government property and was therefore required to return access to that property.
He basically held a portion of San Francisco's IT infrastructure hostage.
That's a crime.
Re:Atmospheric engine developed, but not by J Galt
on
Gasoline From Thin Air
·
· Score: 1
First off, that's a stupid comparison. The is not a 1960's Datsun 1200. It's a modern electric car that happens to be in the frame of a datsun. So stop using that as a for of appeal to emotion.
So it's not beating Corvettes and GTRs either, considering they have all been modded with new exhaust systems, suspensions, turbos/superchargers, transmissions, etc?
You're making an incredibly ignorant argument. Most of those cars have less in common with their factory counterpart than does that Datsun 1200. In a very real sense they are all simply shells with swapped out engines, drive-trains, and suspensions. The Datsun is an old car retrofitted to be electric, and it's kicking the pants off new modded cars. It's a big deal.
Presently though, electric cars get around 150-200 miles range and require 4 hours of charge time to go another 200 miles. Even my gas hog of a pickup truck can do about 300 miles and fill up in less than 10 minutes for another 300 miles.
The problem isn't really the range, it's the charge time (though double the range, and the charge time issue is half as big). To get close to gasoline re-fuel speeds (which is necessary for making multi-charge trips) you need a 5 megawatt charging station. You could probably get away with halving that (10-20 minutes to fill up instead of 5-10 minutes, depending on battery size), but that's still a lot of power and you couldn't squeeze much more time out of it.
By your logic, Chevron should be unwilling to put gas in a car that was previously filled at a Texaco.
That's stupid. Chevron wants to sell gas. If this wacky battery pack system becomes popular, Chevron will want to sell replacement packs. In order to do that, they'll have to accept competitor's packs. In the grand scheme of things it's not really any different than what they do now. Presently all the gas producers in the US pool their gas into common lines, and take it out at the various points they need it (put in X, get to take out X). In other words, they put gas in the lines in Texas and go pull it out in New York. Obviously, there must be minimum standards, otherwise one company will put in below-standard gas and pull out good gas elsewhere. If a company tries to do that, the other companies simply don't let them use the line.
Similarly, since there is proper service and replacement of battery packs involved here, if Texaco isn't doing a good job of getting their packs replaced/refurbished when necessary, and Chevron is being stuck with the bill, Chevron, and probably everybody else, will stop accepting Texaco battery packs. Customers, in turn, will stop going to Texaco because if they want to use any other battery station they'll have to buy a new pack, instead of just paying for the energy in the pack - not cool.
Thus, in pretty short order Texaco will either be taking care of their battery packs to the satisfaction of their competitors, or they will no longer be in the battery pack business.
Cause that's what TFA is about - price fixing in New York.
See, in America, we have these things called "States". You could almost think of a State as a sub-country - they get to make a most of their own laws (in fact, they have far fewer restrictions on what laws they can make than the federal government does), and in most cases are able to bring charges in addition to any other state or federal charges, with the caveat being that the charges only apply to any elements of the crime that took place within that particular state. New Hampshire can't bring charges against Hitachi for price fixing that solely occurred in New Mexico, for example. The Federal government gets to bring charges against someone no matter where they are in the country, but they have pretty tight restrictions on what laws they can make and enforce.
Understand how things work a little better now?
In other words, it's probably the same price fixing, New York is just getting around to bringing charges for the portion of it that occurred in New York.
Have you seen the situation in Europe lately? They are all either broke as hell or stable but too small to hold a candle to America's buying power.
America may be going broke, but it's still has far more purchasing power than any other western country. It takes a whole continent pooling their resources to even approach what the US can do, and they still fall a little short. Foreign investors are going to ride this pony until it collapses, and then look for another pony. They aren't going to get off while it's still the biggest, baddest horse in the world.
You got modded flamebait because you dared question the less is more crowd that wants higher level languages that do most of the lower level work for them.
It's funny then that most of the comments are also pro-C, anti-C++, because C is simple and C++ is not.
It would seem to put a huge wrinkle in your premise.
Perhaps the reason they don't like C++ and Java is because they are ridiculously complex, not because they are lower level languages. You can't get lower level than C without hitting Assembly, and C is easy, so...
He's speaking out against C++, which is hella complicated, not C, which is pretty simple to work with (even though what you have to do being so close to hardware can be complicated).
There is a big difference between the two - mainly C++ is an ultra-extended, tricked to the nines version of C.
This means you deal with all of the low level stuff that C deals with, but you've got all sorts of other shit to remember on top of it.
I may have learned something. I always thought that Microsoft products generally were designed to wreck the human mind. Now it seems their software may have ruined the Gulf of Mexico and destroyed the economy of five states.
If that is true, the engineers who designed and installed that system should be put in jail for willful negligence or some shit like that.
But I can tell you that they won't be, because no idiot lets a Windows box (or Linux box or OSX box for that matter) - also known as a console - control valves and chokes and run meters and instruments. They use dedicated hardware with automation logic to control everything. All the Windows boxes are there for is to monitor the system from a birds-eye view and occasionally make manual adjustments when conditions require it (eg. manually open or close a valve because you are putting a well in test). You can certainly screw something up with the console, but it has to be deliberate (i.e. manually closing a valve that causes massive backpressure which causes a tank to explode - etc.). A BSOD is going to do the opposite of get you into trouble as far as the control system is concerned.
A BSOD on the console would cause you to lose visibility of the system for a few minutes, which tends to be more of an issue during these big events like cementing a well or starting up a facility or whatnot, but it isn't a "oh my god, the console isn't working, we're all going to die" situation. In fact, if the automation equipment isn't set up to deal with those eventualities, then the operator console probably doesn't even give a critical alarm for them.
The point I'm trying to make is that the Windows machines don't control anything, so it's pretty much impossible for a BSOD to cause a critical system failure. It's just not the way the systems are designed. Though, the Windows machine is there to help you catch a critical system failure that somehow made it past your safety system. If they let their operator lose visibility for more than 15 minutes or so because of a computer problem, then they very well could have been fucked by it. You can still hardly blame that on Windows directly. Machines break, you should have replacements/alternatives available to you in that time frame - especially on a rig.
Even if Windows had a BSOD it would not hurt anything. Control systems and especially safety systems don't run on Windows, they run on dedicated hardware. All the windows box is there to do is monitor what is going on with the control systems and make any configuration changes if necessary. Most of it is going to be automated, with logic running on the controllers themselves, but most of those can be overridden from the console.
The BSOD could be caused by windows, or it could be caused by the control system software running on the machine. Either way it doesn't matter, you can bring the controls software up on any machine on the network and you're back in business. Worst case scenario you lose visibility for a couple of minutes, which is about as long as it would take to recognize that conditions are changing to where a problem could be mounting.
Bypassing alerts is also common, though it usually isn't done in safety systems (which should be any controls relating to any part of the system that could potentially put the system in an unsafe condition) unless you have a very, very, very good reason. And no "the alarm is annoying and it won't shut off" is not a good reason. It sounds like they may have bypassed a critical alarm, or the part of the system that the alarm was for was not classified as safety critical when it should have been.
So it could be the operators and their supervisors fault (whoever told them to bypass the alarm) or it could be the engineering group that set up the system and didn't designate that particular part as safety-critical and make it part of the safety system.
Oh yeah, it's Capitalism that's broken, not the massively corrupt government bureaucracy that we put in place to make sure companies don't screw us over.
It's actually common practice for Congress to go to and have them draft up a law. The Congressmen sponsoring the law review it, make changes here and there, and then put it up for a vote.
That is how most of the copyright law has been written, for example.
The fact is, most of the time Congress does not know enough about the industry they are trying to regulate to come up with a law that makes any sense. So they go to the experts - the industry reps themselves. This leads to an extremely tight relationship between Congress and Industry.
The more heavily an Industry is regulated, the tighter the relationship with Congress. Oil being one of, if not the most regulated industry in America, it's no wonder the relationship is so tight.
What's the solution? I have no idea. How do you know specifically what to regulate without significant amounts of experience in the industry? You need knowledge of the technologies, the processes, the culture, and the mindset of people doing the work in order to know where things are ok and where they need improvement. You aren't going to get that without lots of time on the Industry side of the equations.
Maybe we need rules along the lines of regulators can be chosen from within the Industry, but once you become a regulator for the US government you are no longer permitted to work in that industry in any capacity ever again. That should cut out a lot of incentives for corruption if implemented right. You also need really solid leadership at the top, who can propagate good leadership down the ranks. That's really the only way to cut out the buddy-buddy behavior of regulators.
Anyway, it's a problem without an easy answer simply because of human nature. Adding new regulations on the oil industry does nothing to address the real problem - the regulations are not being properly enforced.
The regulators were tasked to check that the companies followed the procedures for checking their own operations.
And they didn't do that. There would likely not have been a spill if they had. BP's safety procedures are based on industry standards, which were so good that there had never been a spill in the 40 years prior to the BP spill. 40 years without incident, think about that.
The problem is the regulators in this case waved BP on through their own safety procedures, which would have prevented the problem had they been followed to the letter. Saying "Yeah yeah, that's fine, we know you'll do it" is not how you ensure a company is following their safety procedures.
I don't think the US Government is at fault for the spill, but they were very much in a position to prevent the spill from happening. Since that is what those regulators are paid to do, there should be serious consequences for failing. Possibly even criminal liability for dereliction of duty, but I doubt there is anything close to that sort of thing on the books.
Relative to the majority of the world, the just about all US citizens (and any European citizen, too for that matter) are very, very rich. It's just a fact of life - we've done well for ourselves over the last 200 years. We're actually slipping lately, but we're still, individually, richer than the vast majority of the people in the world.
Most people don't realize that it's their own oppressive governments that are keeping them down, because they have someone to look at and resent.
Slashdot Mirror
(Note: I think the way Apple handled this issue is a much much bigger problem than the actual antenna design, which is honestly pretty minor in the grand scope of phone problems.)
I have to disagree with the idea that the antenna of a telephone having issues is a minor problem.
It should be imperative that the antenna be absolutely as strong as possible, because it's a goddamned cell phone. The whole point of the thing is to make phone calls.
I'll grant you that the antenna issue was not as big as it appeared to be at first, but when you're spending $500+ for a phone, you expect to get the best reception possible. The antenna is not an area that should be skimped, and I do believe that it was Jobs' fault for pushing aesthetics over functionality, and leaving his engineering team stuck with having to make everything work given the aesthetics dreamt up by the art department.
The rest of your post I agree with. Not that any of this ever affected my decision to not buy an iPhone - Jobs turned me off of Apple a long, long time ago.
I don't understand, how is writing a JavaScript slideshow easier than hitting "Upload" and then "Embed" at SlideShare?
Seriously, you've got way too much time on your hands.
Just upgrade your fucking flash already, nobody else cares.
You secure memcached the same way you secure any cache: by restricting direct access. All you have to do is put a proxy between the memcached server/instance and the internet and the problem is solved. If you don't have command-level access to the memcached instance you can't mine it, period.
Many very large websites don't bother to do this, which is very bad security practice, as the slideshow clearly demonstrates.
The weakness isn't really with memcached. To say memcache is insecure is like saying your documents are insecure because they aren't encrypted. Yeah, you could look at it that way if you wanted to, but the real problem is the access to the documents. Restrict the access, and the problem goes away. Same with memcached. It's designed to be very fast, and to facilitate that it has no security at all. So you need to secure it externally - i.e. firewalls and proxies, among other things.
I'm sorry, but I don't see how a system with absolutely no security can somehow be intrinsically more secure than a system without security.
The same security rules apply no matter what systems you use. If you're too stupid to understand basic security practices, then even Microsoft can't save you (though they do at least try).
Actually you're both off, but you are far more wrong than the GP.
The Jury is there to determine Fact. The judge determines law, and spells out very clearly to the jury that if X, Y, and Z are true, the defendant is guilty of the given crime. The judge gives the criteria, because the judge knows the law. The judge also handles the trial, and determines what evidence is admissible and inadmissible, because the judge knows the law.
The only reason the judge doesn't also determine fact in a trial is because that is far too much power to place into the hands of one man. It is much more fair to have the facts of a case determined by a panel of one's peers (i.e. fellow average citizens, not some arbitrary critera like career or hobbies).
The Prosecutor selects which law (or laws) they believe the defendant has broken, the Judge applies them to the case, and the Jury determines whether or not the evidence proves the key points of the law (as dictated by the Judge) beyond a reasonable doubt. The Defendant's goal is to reduce the certainty of the evidence presented by the Prosecution down to at least a reasonable doubt - proving definitively that you are innocent is nice, but not necessary.
The jury's instructions really are as simple as "If X, Y, and Z are true, the defendant is guilty". All the jury has to do is decide whether they believe X, Y, and Z are true beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury doesn't apply anything, they determine fact, and based on what they determine to be fact, the judge applies the law.
You do realize there was a CCIE on the jury, right?
He explains exactly what happened, someone else posted a link up above, I'm too lazy to get it.
Frankly, in my opinion he got off easy. He did no direct damage, and it only cost about $200,000 to clean up his mess. Had something serious happened while he was being a jackass he may have gotten a lot more. It's like the asshole who runs a red light and only clips a car in the intersection. It's only by pure luck that he didn't kill someone, does he really deserve less of a sentence than someone who actually did kill someone?
He dragged the name of IT guys through the mud, for the life of me I can't understand why you're defending him.
So... you listed 3 types of physical things.
You're a fool for getting hung up on the physical. The courts have been treating digital equivalents to physical objects exactly the same as their physical counterparts for years now.
A website is treated as property, why the hell wouldn't a password be treated as a key?
Dumbass.
It's called denial of service.
He had sole access to government property, and as such was required to give up that access to authorized persons (aka his bosses and their representatives) upon request.
That he was fired does not change the fact that he had sole access to government property and was therefore required to return access to that property.
He basically held a portion of San Francisco's IT infrastructure hostage.
That's a crime.
Who is John Galt?
First off, that's a stupid comparison. The is not a 1960's Datsun 1200. It's a modern electric car that happens to be in the frame of a datsun. So stop using that as a for of appeal to emotion.
So it's not beating Corvettes and GTRs either, considering they have all been modded with new exhaust systems, suspensions, turbos/superchargers, transmissions, etc?
You're making an incredibly ignorant argument. Most of those cars have less in common with their factory counterpart than does that Datsun 1200. In a very real sense they are all simply shells with swapped out engines, drive-trains, and suspensions. The Datsun is an old car retrofitted to be electric, and it's kicking the pants off new modded cars. It's a big deal.
Short ranges are fine if it recharges quickly.
Presently though, electric cars get around 150-200 miles range and require 4 hours of charge time to go another 200 miles. Even my gas hog of a pickup truck can do about 300 miles and fill up in less than 10 minutes for another 300 miles.
The problem isn't really the range, it's the charge time (though double the range, and the charge time issue is half as big). To get close to gasoline re-fuel speeds (which is necessary for making multi-charge trips) you need a 5 megawatt charging station. You could probably get away with halving that (10-20 minutes to fill up instead of 5-10 minutes, depending on battery size), but that's still a lot of power and you couldn't squeeze much more time out of it.
By your logic, Chevron should be unwilling to put gas in a car that was previously filled at a Texaco.
That's stupid. Chevron wants to sell gas. If this wacky battery pack system becomes popular, Chevron will want to sell replacement packs. In order to do that, they'll have to accept competitor's packs. In the grand scheme of things it's not really any different than what they do now. Presently all the gas producers in the US pool their gas into common lines, and take it out at the various points they need it (put in X, get to take out X). In other words, they put gas in the lines in Texas and go pull it out in New York. Obviously, there must be minimum standards, otherwise one company will put in below-standard gas and pull out good gas elsewhere. If a company tries to do that, the other companies simply don't let them use the line.
Similarly, since there is proper service and replacement of battery packs involved here, if Texaco isn't doing a good job of getting their packs replaced/refurbished when necessary, and Chevron is being stuck with the bill, Chevron, and probably everybody else, will stop accepting Texaco battery packs. Customers, in turn, will stop going to Texaco because if they want to use any other battery station they'll have to buy a new pack, instead of just paying for the energy in the pack - not cool.
Thus, in pretty short order Texaco will either be taking care of their battery packs to the satisfaction of their competitors, or they will no longer be in the battery pack business.
That's how the market works.
In what world do you live in where a State government has the right to split a foreign company in two?
Whatever world it is, leave me out of it please. Thanks.
Were any of those in New York?
Cause that's what TFA is about - price fixing in New York.
See, in America, we have these things called "States". You could almost think of a State as a sub-country - they get to make a most of their own laws (in fact, they have far fewer restrictions on what laws they can make than the federal government does), and in most cases are able to bring charges in addition to any other state or federal charges, with the caveat being that the charges only apply to any elements of the crime that took place within that particular state. New Hampshire can't bring charges against Hitachi for price fixing that solely occurred in New Mexico, for example. The Federal government gets to bring charges against someone no matter where they are in the country, but they have pretty tight restrictions on what laws they can make and enforce.
Understand how things work a little better now?
In other words, it's probably the same price fixing, New York is just getting around to bringing charges for the portion of it that occurred in New York.
You're joking, right?
Have you seen the situation in Europe lately? They are all either broke as hell or stable but too small to hold a candle to America's buying power.
America may be going broke, but it's still has far more purchasing power than any other western country. It takes a whole continent pooling their resources to even approach what the US can do, and they still fall a little short. Foreign investors are going to ride this pony until it collapses, and then look for another pony. They aren't going to get off while it's still the biggest, baddest horse in the world.
You got modded flamebait because you dared question the less is more crowd that wants higher level languages that do
most of the lower level work for them.
It's funny then that most of the comments are also pro-C, anti-C++, because C is simple and C++ is not.
It would seem to put a huge wrinkle in your premise.
Perhaps the reason they don't like C++ and Java is because they are ridiculously complex, not because they are lower level languages. You can't get lower level than C without hitting Assembly, and C is easy, so...
He's speaking out against C++, which is hella complicated, not C, which is pretty simple to work with (even though what you have to do being so close to hardware can be complicated).
There is a big difference between the two - mainly C++ is an ultra-extended, tricked to the nines version of C.
This means you deal with all of the low level stuff that C deals with, but you've got all sorts of other shit to remember on top of it.
I may have learned something. I always thought that Microsoft products generally were designed to wreck the human mind. Now it seems their software may have ruined the Gulf of Mexico and destroyed the economy of five states.
If that is true, the engineers who designed and installed that system should be put in jail for willful negligence or some shit like that.
But I can tell you that they won't be, because no idiot lets a Windows box (or Linux box or OSX box for that matter) - also known as a console - control valves and chokes and run meters and instruments. They use dedicated hardware with automation logic to control everything. All the Windows boxes are there for is to monitor the system from a birds-eye view and occasionally make manual adjustments when conditions require it (eg. manually open or close a valve because you are putting a well in test). You can certainly screw something up with the console, but it has to be deliberate (i.e. manually closing a valve that causes massive backpressure which causes a tank to explode - etc.). A BSOD is going to do the opposite of get you into trouble as far as the control system is concerned.
A BSOD on the console would cause you to lose visibility of the system for a few minutes, which tends to be more of an issue during these big events like cementing a well or starting up a facility or whatnot, but it isn't a "oh my god, the console isn't working, we're all going to die" situation. In fact, if the automation equipment isn't set up to deal with those eventualities, then the operator console probably doesn't even give a critical alarm for them.
The point I'm trying to make is that the Windows machines don't control anything, so it's pretty much impossible for a BSOD to cause a critical system failure. It's just not the way the systems are designed. Though, the Windows machine is there to help you catch a critical system failure that somehow made it past your safety system. If they let their operator lose visibility for more than 15 minutes or so because of a computer problem, then they very well could have been fucked by it. You can still hardly blame that on Windows directly. Machines break, you should have replacements/alternatives available to you in that time frame - especially on a rig.
Even if Windows had a BSOD it would not hurt anything. Control systems and especially safety systems don't run on Windows, they run on dedicated hardware. All the windows box is there to do is monitor what is going on with the control systems and make any configuration changes if necessary. Most of it is going to be automated, with logic running on the controllers themselves, but most of those can be overridden from the console.
The BSOD could be caused by windows, or it could be caused by the control system software running on the machine. Either way it doesn't matter, you can bring the controls software up on any machine on the network and you're back in business. Worst case scenario you lose visibility for a couple of minutes, which is about as long as it would take to recognize that conditions are changing to where a problem could be mounting.
Bypassing alerts is also common, though it usually isn't done in safety systems (which should be any controls relating to any part of the system that could potentially put the system in an unsafe condition) unless you have a very, very, very good reason. And no "the alarm is annoying and it won't shut off" is not a good reason. It sounds like they may have bypassed a critical alarm, or the part of the system that the alarm was for was not classified as safety critical when it should have been.
So it could be the operators and their supervisors fault (whoever told them to bypass the alarm) or it could be the engineering group that set up the system and didn't designate that particular part as safety-critical and make it part of the safety system.
That's why capitalism is broken
Seen Russia lately?
Oh yeah, it's Capitalism that's broken, not the massively corrupt government bureaucracy that we put in place to make sure companies don't screw us over.
It's actually common practice for Congress to go to and have them draft up a law. The Congressmen sponsoring the law review it, make changes here and there, and then put it up for a vote.
That is how most of the copyright law has been written, for example.
The fact is, most of the time Congress does not know enough about the industry they are trying to regulate to come up with a law that makes any sense. So they go to the experts - the industry reps themselves. This leads to an extremely tight relationship between Congress and Industry.
The more heavily an Industry is regulated, the tighter the relationship with Congress. Oil being one of, if not the most regulated industry in America, it's no wonder the relationship is so tight.
What's the solution? I have no idea. How do you know specifically what to regulate without significant amounts of experience in the industry? You need knowledge of the technologies, the processes, the culture, and the mindset of people doing the work in order to know where things are ok and where they need improvement. You aren't going to get that without lots of time on the Industry side of the equations.
Maybe we need rules along the lines of regulators can be chosen from within the Industry, but once you become a regulator for the US government you are no longer permitted to work in that industry in any capacity ever again. That should cut out a lot of incentives for corruption if implemented right. You also need really solid leadership at the top, who can propagate good leadership down the ranks. That's really the only way to cut out the buddy-buddy behavior of regulators.
Anyway, it's a problem without an easy answer simply because of human nature. Adding new regulations on the oil industry does nothing to address the real problem - the regulations are not being properly enforced.
They could always come up with a "Because We Like You" license and issue it to any site they like.
Perfectly legal (as far as I know, IANAL though), and it can't be bought.
The regulators were tasked to check that the companies followed the procedures for checking their own operations.
And they didn't do that. There would likely not have been a spill if they had. BP's safety procedures are based on industry standards, which were so good that there had never been a spill in the 40 years prior to the BP spill. 40 years without incident, think about that.
The problem is the regulators in this case waved BP on through their own safety procedures, which would have prevented the problem had they been followed to the letter. Saying "Yeah yeah, that's fine, we know you'll do it" is not how you ensure a company is following their safety procedures.
I don't think the US Government is at fault for the spill, but they were very much in a position to prevent the spill from happening. Since that is what those regulators are paid to do, there should be serious consequences for failing. Possibly even criminal liability for dereliction of duty, but I doubt there is anything close to that sort of thing on the books.
Relative to the majority of the world, the just about all US citizens (and any European citizen, too for that matter) are very, very rich. It's just a fact of life - we've done well for ourselves over the last 200 years. We're actually slipping lately, but we're still, individually, richer than the vast majority of the people in the world.
Most people don't realize that it's their own oppressive governments that are keeping them down, because they have someone to look at and resent.