He should of asked about the refusal of Verizon to carry the g-phone.
They didn't refuse to carry it, they had plans to carry it and HTC out-maneuvered Google at the last minute. HTC released a better phone, so why would Verizon add two phones when one is clearly better in every way? That only adds to their support costs, it doesn't add any value to their lineup. There was some incentive to go with Google in the first place, give what Google wants to turn the handset market into, but Google's plans don't preclude packaging phones with carriers (obviously, or they wouldn't be making deals).
Google just mistimed the market and missed a big opportunity to move their plans forward. It's nothing malicious on Verizon's part, they had already been planning on releasing the Nexus, Google just got out-played by a handset veteran.
You can thank apple's open source work on WebKit for a big part of that.
It's worth noting that since it was made open-source, Apple has been more of a hindrance than a help to the development of WebKit, with their constant attempts to force control of it in spite of the community's desires.
You clearly did not read the letter from jobs. He does discuss the proprietary nature of iPhone OS.
Clearly, neither did you. He touts h.264 as an open web standard, which despite what the ITU-T group likes to label it, it is not. At the same time, they are making veiled threats at Ogg Theora, which is an open web standard. That's some great promotion of "openness on the web" there.
Basically, you can exchange "Apple" and "Cocoa" or "App Store" for every single instance of "Adobe" and "Flash" in Jobs's letter. Open standards proponent my ass!
Combined with the performance issues, crashing issues
What crashing and performance issues? I haven't experienced any on my Android. I personally like flash, it would be nice if something less proprietary were better, but it does a lot of things that simply cannot be done in HTML5 (even with h.264), JavaScript, and CSS. Adobe will fix any touch issues eventually, they have a very strong incentive to make it work well, so that's really only a "for now" issue. HTML5+h.264 isn't even widely adopted yet, so how is that any different than the "touch" issue for Flash?
Saying we should be using h.264 instead of Flash because Flash isn't an open standard is like saying we should buy Lamborghini's instead of Ferrari's because Ferrari's are too expensive. Lamborghini's are just as expensive for all the same reasons as Ferrari's. It doesn't wash.
It is a rebuttal from Ars, because they requested that he be a guest writer. The article itself also frames it pretty clearly for you, so there is no need to frame it again.
While he is absolutely on the extreme end of the open source argument (he thinks just the software being open isn't good enough, but that everything supporting that software should be open as well), he nails the hypocrisy of Jobs's letter.
First, despite what the ITU-T calls it, h.264 is not an open standard, there is nothing about them that is different than any other proprietary industrial standard. It has very restrictive licensing terms that are not publicly available. They can and will sue you if they catch you implementing h.264 without paying them for the privilege.
Second, every time Jobs uses "Adobe" in his letter, you can replace it with "Apple", and every time he uses "Flash" you can replace it with "Cocoa" or "iPhone OS" or "App Store". Thy are completely interchangeable in the complaint, so Jobs very plainly is not at all interested in maintaining free and open standards on the web. Apple is no different than Adobe in this regard, they are both struggling for control over their users.
Contrast that with Google, who is saying "Yeah, you can use that if you want, we don't mind, but look here's something even better and it's free!" Obviously event he great Google isn't perfect, but they at least don't share the pot-kettle relationship of Apple and Adobe.
However, some people confuse 'open' with 'free'. The h.264 is covered by certain patents, the owners of which have joined together into a patent pool and have decided on charging for use of h.264 in certain specific circumstances.
I'm confused about what makes the ITU-T's standards open in the first place, they are absolutely no different than any other official standard in any other industry. Even de-facto standards tend to have the same aspects as these "open" standards.
It's like if the Open Source community just called themselves the Software Community, and some guy came along and had the bright idea to say "Yeah, that stuff's great, but you should use my software because it's 'open'." Everybody else's software in the community is open too, but somehow he's the only guy who gets to call it that.
Seriously, I'd like to know what makes the IETF and ITU-T's Open Standards (they are, after all, the only organizations who use the term) different from any other industrial standard. I honestly can't tell, it must be a hell of a lot more subtle than the difference between closed source and open source, because I don't see it at all.
I personally think it's just another marketing gimmick, and I'm surprised they've gotten away with it for so long.
You know.mp3 was made available under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms - at first. Once it was popular the IP owners started putting on the squeeze. At the very beginning.mp3 licenses were pretty much free. Not so any more.
According to Wikipedia, only the IETF and ITU-T refer to their standards as "open standards". Everybody else just calls them standards, even though they all require the reasonable and non-discriminatory terms of these so-called "open" standards, because that's what they are - standards. The only reason they are open is because you have to lay them out when you apply for the patents. Pretty much all definitions of the word "standard" require reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. Else they can't be a standard, by definition.
Hey guess who owns the rights to the h.264 standards? Why, it's the ITU-T! This "Open Standard" stuff is just smokescreen to trick the Open Source proponents into feeling like they aren't getting screwed over by these corporations. An "Open Standard" is absolutely no different than any other official industry standard. It's not really that much different than de-facto standards either, their openness and wide-use is what tends to make them standards in the first place.
There are a lot of things Flash does that HTML5 will never do.
What Jobs really wants is to replace Flash with Cocoa (since he knows HTML5 and JavaScript will never be good enough) so he can sell you all the dev tools and get royalties on any third party tools.
What's the motto that is so selectively applied? Follow the Money?
But can you install them on any Android phone? Which I think is what he was after.
If you can flash the device, then yes, you can install them on any phone. It's a replacement of the OS.
There are websites that tell you how to get in to the various rom-flash modes for each phone.
A lot of the stuff they are doing, though, can be done with apps (including tethering for almost all devices and carriers), so I'm not sure what the point is, really. They do have kernel tweaks, but I'm not sure they're worth it.
The only people who think BitTorrent is private are those who have no clue know how BitTorrent works.
It's like giving out your address over the web and wondering why you're suddenly getting so much mail all of the sudden. But what great offers! Seriously, people need to wise up a bit.
How the hell do you think a distributed download service is supposed to work and still remain anonymous?
And don't give me Anomos, the tracker still maintains everyone's IP and links it to the torrent they are downloading. It doesn't share the information as readily, which just makes it less efficient. It doesn't offer any substantial protection because it basically works the same way BitTorrent does.
1.Freenet style "you dont know what you are sharing" plausible deniability so when the RIAA come after you for file sharing, you can prove in court that you had no clue that you were sharing that content.
You: But I had no idea people were downloading those files, it could have been anything!
Jury: But you were sharing everything, it is in fact a stated feature on the website when you download, so you obviously intended to share those files too. Since you intended to share them, and you did actually share them, you are guilty.
You: Damn! I woulda gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!
That your defense is plausible isn't good enough. It can be plausible yet still be unreasonable to think that is the case given the circumstances. You've got to remember, with criminal law, since there is no way to prove anything beyond all doubt, the threshold is it needs to be unreasonable to think that anything else occurred. That it is technically possible for something else to have happened is not good enough for a defense. It needs to be reasonable to think that is what happened. When you've got an obscure program who's primary feature is to try to obscure exactly what you are sharing, you'd better have one hell of a good reason for it.
However, these cases rarely end up in criminal court, they end up in civil court. In civil court, the threshold is lower - the plaintiff only has to show it is more likely than not that you did it. 51% sure you did it as opposed to the 95% sure of a criminal case.
A reasonable defense would be to say that your nephew must have installed it, you had no idea it was on there and you've never used it. This works as long as you can provide the following: Testimony that your nephew does in fact like to come over and use your computer occasionally, and a download record from your ISP that correlates with your nephew's visits. I.e. an unusually high upload/download rate begins at the same time as one of your nephew's visits, the upload rate remains high after he leaves but does not spike up again until another visit from your nephew.
A jury will look at that and say "Given the pattern, what he says is probably true; he should have known better he's not guilty of distributing the music."
However if your case is any weaker than what I described, you will probably lose. If the ISP shows spikes of high bandwidth over the bittorrent protocol during periods when your nephew was not around, you're fucked.
Your piddly defense of "plausible deniability" wouldn't get you off in criminal court, let alone civil court. Say good bye to everything you own, son.
Yup, all they have to do is subpoena the tracker and everyone on that list is done. Plus, the tracker has a record of everything that was sent to everyone (it must, by nature of the protocol).
In other words, it looks a lot like anonymity, but all it really protects you from is someone in the middle of the cloud sniffing out your IP address. There are services that already find and block such hosts on the network, so you are not really gaining a lot in that respect. It will not protect you from litigation once they hit the tracker. You're only slightly better off than bittorrent, and it's probably a hell of a lot slower.
Except the reason it's a dick move to use Tor for torrents is not because people are almost certainly downloading copyright material.
It's a dick move because Tor is a free service, and downloading torrents (or any large files, for that matter) over the network costs whosever node you are punching out of (and everyone's in between, if multiple relays are involved) a lot of money in bandwidth charges.
In other words, you are abusing someone else's network connection by using large amounts of bandwidth for long periods of time. I.e, downloading torrents.
He did not say "Circulate video through bittorrent/tor simply because it's a documentary" or anything like that. It's easy to misread him, but he went out of his way to say he wasn't supporting that.
You're completely missing why it's a dick move to download torrents on TOR. The AC said exactly why in his post, and everybody has subsequently ignored it.
Downloading torrents eats away at Tor's bandwidth in large chunks. Tor is a free service, but they have to pay for bandwidth. One person downloading torrents uses the same bandwidth as 100 people or more actively browsing the web. Most people don't actively browse either, they sit on a site and dick around for a while, so it's very possible someone with a high bandwidth connection downloading torrents could use the same bandwidth as several hundred people browsing. This is the same complaint cable companies make, and it's legitimate, but we pay a lot for the service so we tell them to piss off and upgrade their network. Tor is totally different, you are abusing someone's network who is letting you use it for free.
Ergo, downloading torrents on Tor is a real dick move.
Yeah, but your cheap laptop wasn't nearly as popular as the over-priced PS3, which wasn't nearly as popular as it would have been without blue-ray to jack the price up so high.
And the North Slope of Alaska was supposed to run out of oil a decade ago, yet it still produces.
What's your point?
There is a big difference between proved reserves and the actual amount of oil in the ground. If you actually read that Wikipedia link, the amount of proved reserves is directly related to our technical ability to extract the oil. Furthermore, there are many large strategic reserves that are not proved reserves simply because they are reserved for emergencies. Due to the nature of oil exploration, the maximum is always much higher than what is known to be there.
In other words, if proved reserves are 10 billion barrels, you'll actually get more like 20-30 billion barrels out of it before all is said and done. Whether that will actually last you 20-30 years, who knows, because consumption has been increasing faster than production in the US.
Seriously, why don't the media make fun of the Tea Partiers when it's so obvious how stupid their slogans are? (Answer: large media corporations don't want to pick a fight with large petroleum corporations)
Uh, exactly which large media outlets, aside from Fox, have not been making fun of Tea Partiers? What news are you watching? All most all the news I've seen calls them vile names and ridicules them constantly. Seriously, I don't know what news you've been watching to be able to make such a statement.
What you can definitely blame BP for right now, without any new information, is not installing a remote trigger for this last-ditch fail-safe.
Actually, correcting myself here, but apparently it was Transocean that failed to install the remote trigger, since it's their rig and drilling equipment - BP just owns the well. So it's Transocean's fault for not putting in all the safety measures, and BP's fault for not verifying that said measures were all in place and working as expected.
Still, probably just another cost cutting situation, with BP not willing to spend the money to have their own guys check things out.
Actually the high pressure from the water column helps keep the oil in the reservoir. You've got to keep in mind that it's not a bubble, it's a sponge, and even if it were it can't just shoot out without something else taking its place (because it's spongy it takes longer for something else to move in). The relatively small hole and the 6,000+ feet of water exerts an enormous amount of pressure on it. Obviously not enough to stop the flow by a long shot, but if this were a surface well the oil would be shooting out 10 times as fast.
More than likely what caused this well to blow out in the first place was a high pressure natural gas pocket, which was way too much for the amount of drilling mud they were using to keep the oil in the pipe. See, if you've got oil pushing up at 10,000psi, you put enough drilling mud down the hole to equal the pressure, as you go down the pressures increase and you add more mud. Hitting an unexpected NG pocket, though, is disastrous, because these will be under 20,000-25,000psi, which literally shoots the mud and any oil above the pocket. When this happens, you clamp the emergency shutoff valves and everything should be ok, particularly if you managed before your column of mud escaped the pipe.
True, it is huge now but what about earlier when it could have been manageable?
You think that wasn't the very first thing they did after putting out the fire? There was no "earlier when it could have been manageable", the pipe broke off about 5-10 feet above the sea floor, which is well over a mile below sea level. Do you realize the kind of dispersion you get with that? It spreads out for tens of miles before it even hits the surface.
It's also an emulsion, which does not corral as well as oil sitting on top of water - an emulsion sits at the top, since there is oil in it, but not really on the top like pure oil does, since there is a lot of water in it too. They've got 30-40 miles of boom out there now to try and contain it and it isn't good enough to keep some of it from hitting the coast.
They take a microbe with the ability to generate complex enzymes, and feed them a diet of sugar and oil. They slowly add more oil than sugar until all that is left is oil, and by then the microbes are optimized to eat oil. Then they can basically dump them on a patch of oil and let them go to town.
Like the article said though, the natural bacteria in the area are better at it than the lab grown stuff.
I bet the little guys can't each much more than their own body weight in oil per day.
They can probably eat a hell of a lot more than that, given that most microbe lifespans are measured in the minutes to hours range. They'll probably go through their body weight a hundred times a day, while growing exponentially. It's still going to take a long time for them to do the job though, as you'd need one massive bio-mass to take care of all that oil in any amount of time that could be considered "quick".
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He should of asked about the refusal of Verizon to carry the g-phone.
They didn't refuse to carry it, they had plans to carry it and HTC out-maneuvered Google at the last minute. HTC released a better phone, so why would Verizon add two phones when one is clearly better in every way? That only adds to their support costs, it doesn't add any value to their lineup. There was some incentive to go with Google in the first place, give what Google wants to turn the handset market into, but Google's plans don't preclude packaging phones with carriers (obviously, or they wouldn't be making deals).
Google just mistimed the market and missed a big opportunity to move their plans forward. It's nothing malicious on Verizon's part, they had already been planning on releasing the Nexus, Google just got out-played by a handset veteran.
You can thank apple's open source work on WebKit for a big part of that.
It's worth noting that since it was made open-source, Apple has been more of a hindrance than a help to the development of WebKit, with their constant attempts to force control of it in spite of the community's desires.
You clearly did not read the letter from jobs. He does discuss the proprietary nature of iPhone OS.
Clearly, neither did you. He touts h.264 as an open web standard, which despite what the ITU-T group likes to label it, it is not. At the same time, they are making veiled threats at Ogg Theora, which is an open web standard. That's some great promotion of "openness on the web" there.
Basically, you can exchange "Apple" and "Cocoa" or "App Store" for every single instance of "Adobe" and "Flash" in Jobs's letter. Open standards proponent my ass!
Combined with the performance issues, crashing issues
What crashing and performance issues? I haven't experienced any on my Android. I personally like flash, it would be nice if something less proprietary were better, but it does a lot of things that simply cannot be done in HTML5 (even with h.264), JavaScript, and CSS. Adobe will fix any touch issues eventually, they have a very strong incentive to make it work well, so that's really only a "for now" issue. HTML5+h.264 isn't even widely adopted yet, so how is that any different than the "touch" issue for Flash?
Saying we should be using h.264 instead of Flash because Flash isn't an open standard is like saying we should buy Lamborghini's instead of Ferrari's because Ferrari's are too expensive. Lamborghini's are just as expensive for all the same reasons as Ferrari's. It doesn't wash.
It is a rebuttal from Ars, because they requested that he be a guest writer. The article itself also frames it pretty clearly for you, so there is no need to frame it again.
While he is absolutely on the extreme end of the open source argument (he thinks just the software being open isn't good enough, but that everything supporting that software should be open as well), he nails the hypocrisy of Jobs's letter.
First, despite what the ITU-T calls it, h.264 is not an open standard, there is nothing about them that is different than any other proprietary industrial standard. It has very restrictive licensing terms that are not publicly available. They can and will sue you if they catch you implementing h.264 without paying them for the privilege.
Second, every time Jobs uses "Adobe" in his letter, you can replace it with "Apple", and every time he uses "Flash" you can replace it with "Cocoa" or "iPhone OS" or "App Store". Thy are completely interchangeable in the complaint, so Jobs very plainly is not at all interested in maintaining free and open standards on the web. Apple is no different than Adobe in this regard, they are both struggling for control over their users.
Contrast that with Google, who is saying "Yeah, you can use that if you want, we don't mind, but look here's something even better and it's free!" Obviously event he great Google isn't perfect, but they at least don't share the pot-kettle relationship of Apple and Adobe.
For follow up, and because the licensing terms are not publicly available, here is the FSF's collection of information about the h.264 patent license:
http://www.fsf.org/licensing/h264-patent-license
However, some people confuse 'open' with 'free'. The h.264 is covered by certain patents, the owners of which have joined together into a patent pool and have decided on charging for use of h.264 in certain specific circumstances.
I'm confused about what makes the ITU-T's standards open in the first place, they are absolutely no different than any other official standard in any other industry. Even de-facto standards tend to have the same aspects as these "open" standards.
It's like if the Open Source community just called themselves the Software Community, and some guy came along and had the bright idea to say "Yeah, that stuff's great, but you should use my software because it's 'open'." Everybody else's software in the community is open too, but somehow he's the only guy who gets to call it that.
Seriously, I'd like to know what makes the IETF and ITU-T's Open Standards (they are, after all, the only organizations who use the term) different from any other industrial standard. I honestly can't tell, it must be a hell of a lot more subtle than the difference between closed source and open source, because I don't see it at all.
I personally think it's just another marketing gimmick, and I'm surprised they've gotten away with it for so long.
You know .mp3 was made available under reasonable and non-discriminatory terms - at first. Once it was popular the IP owners started putting on the squeeze. At the very beginning .mp3 licenses were pretty much free. Not so any more.
According to Wikipedia, only the IETF and ITU-T refer to their standards as "open standards". Everybody else just calls them standards, even though they all require the reasonable and non-discriminatory terms of these so-called "open" standards, because that's what they are - standards. The only reason they are open is because you have to lay them out when you apply for the patents. Pretty much all definitions of the word "standard" require reasonable and non-discriminatory terms. Else they can't be a standard, by definition.
Hey guess who owns the rights to the h.264 standards? Why, it's the ITU-T! This "Open Standard" stuff is just smokescreen to trick the Open Source proponents into feeling like they aren't getting screwed over by these corporations. An "Open Standard" is absolutely no different than any other official industry standard. It's not really that much different than de-facto standards either, their openness and wide-use is what tends to make them standards in the first place.
There are a lot of things Flash does that HTML5 will never do.
What Jobs really wants is to replace Flash with Cocoa (since he knows HTML5 and JavaScript will never be good enough) so he can sell you all the dev tools and get royalties on any third party tools.
What's the motto that is so selectively applied? Follow the Money?
But can you install them on any Android phone? Which I think is what he was after.
If you can flash the device, then yes, you can install them on any phone. It's a replacement of the OS.
There are websites that tell you how to get in to the various rom-flash modes for each phone.
A lot of the stuff they are doing, though, can be done with apps (including tethering for almost all devices and carriers), so I'm not sure what the point is, really. They do have kernel tweaks, but I'm not sure they're worth it.
The only people who think BitTorrent is private are those who have no clue know how BitTorrent works.
It's like giving out your address over the web and wondering why you're suddenly getting so much mail all of the sudden. But what great offers! Seriously, people need to wise up a bit.
How the hell do you think a distributed download service is supposed to work and still remain anonymous?
And don't give me Anomos, the tracker still maintains everyone's IP and links it to the torrent they are downloading. It doesn't share the information as readily, which just makes it less efficient. It doesn't offer any substantial protection because it basically works the same way BitTorrent does.
1.Freenet style "you dont know what you are sharing" plausible deniability so when the RIAA come after you for file sharing, you can prove in court that you had no clue that you were sharing that content.
Here's how well plausible deniability works:
File-Sharing Mom Fined 1.9 Million
Here's how it works:
You: But I had no idea people were downloading those files, it could have been anything!
Jury: But you were sharing everything, it is in fact a stated feature on the website when you download, so you obviously intended to share those files too. Since you intended to share them, and you did actually share them, you are guilty.
You: Damn! I woulda gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those meddling kids!
That your defense is plausible isn't good enough. It can be plausible yet still be unreasonable to think that is the case given the circumstances. You've got to remember, with criminal law, since there is no way to prove anything beyond all doubt, the threshold is it needs to be unreasonable to think that anything else occurred. That it is technically possible for something else to have happened is not good enough for a defense. It needs to be reasonable to think that is what happened. When you've got an obscure program who's primary feature is to try to obscure exactly what you are sharing, you'd better have one hell of a good reason for it.
However, these cases rarely end up in criminal court, they end up in civil court. In civil court, the threshold is lower - the plaintiff only has to show it is more likely than not that you did it. 51% sure you did it as opposed to the 95% sure of a criminal case.
A reasonable defense would be to say that your nephew must have installed it, you had no idea it was on there and you've never used it. This works as long as you can provide the following: Testimony that your nephew does in fact like to come over and use your computer occasionally, and a download record from your ISP that correlates with your nephew's visits. I.e. an unusually high upload/download rate begins at the same time as one of your nephew's visits, the upload rate remains high after he leaves but does not spike up again until another visit from your nephew.
A jury will look at that and say "Given the pattern, what he says is probably true; he should have known better he's not guilty of distributing the music."
However if your case is any weaker than what I described, you will probably lose. If the ISP shows spikes of high bandwidth over the bittorrent protocol during periods when your nephew was not around, you're fucked.
Your piddly defense of "plausible deniability" wouldn't get you off in criminal court, let alone civil court. Say good bye to everything you own, son.
Yup, all they have to do is subpoena the tracker and everyone on that list is done. Plus, the tracker has a record of everything that was sent to everyone (it must, by nature of the protocol).
In other words, it looks a lot like anonymity, but all it really protects you from is someone in the middle of the cloud sniffing out your IP address. There are services that already find and block such hosts on the network, so you are not really gaining a lot in that respect. It will not protect you from litigation once they hit the tracker. You're only slightly better off than bittorrent, and it's probably a hell of a lot slower.
God I hope that was a joke, if so you definitely deserve the +5. If not, it's a sad day on slashdot. ;)
Except the reason it's a dick move to use Tor for torrents is not because people are almost certainly downloading copyright material.
It's a dick move because Tor is a free service, and downloading torrents (or any large files, for that matter) over the network costs whosever node you are punching out of (and everyone's in between, if multiple relays are involved) a lot of money in bandwidth charges.
In other words, you are abusing someone else's network connection by using large amounts of bandwidth for long periods of time. I.e, downloading torrents.
He did not say "Circulate video through bittorrent/tor simply because it's a documentary" or anything like that. It's easy to misread him, but he went out of his way to say he wasn't supporting that.
You're completely missing why it's a dick move to download torrents on TOR. The AC said exactly why in his post, and everybody has subsequently ignored it.
Downloading torrents eats away at Tor's bandwidth in large chunks. Tor is a free service, but they have to pay for bandwidth. One person downloading torrents uses the same bandwidth as 100 people or more actively browsing the web. Most people don't actively browse either, they sit on a site and dick around for a while, so it's very possible someone with a high bandwidth connection downloading torrents could use the same bandwidth as several hundred people browsing. This is the same complaint cable companies make, and it's legitimate, but we pay a lot for the service so we tell them to piss off and upgrade their network. Tor is totally different, you are abusing someone's network who is letting you use it for free.
Ergo, downloading torrents on Tor is a real dick move.
But then how would you show negative scores?
Oh wait...
I don't think that counts, since they were only selling DIY kits back then.
Apple isn't evil!
*buries head in sand and mumbles something that sounds vaguely triumphant*
Yeah, but your cheap laptop wasn't nearly as popular as the over-priced PS3, which wasn't nearly as popular as it would have been without blue-ray to jack the price up so high.
And the North Slope of Alaska was supposed to run out of oil a decade ago, yet it still produces.
What's your point?
There is a big difference between proved reserves and the actual amount of oil in the ground. If you actually read that Wikipedia link, the amount of proved reserves is directly related to our technical ability to extract the oil. Furthermore, there are many large strategic reserves that are not proved reserves simply because they are reserved for emergencies. Due to the nature of oil exploration, the maximum is always much higher than what is known to be there.
In other words, if proved reserves are 10 billion barrels, you'll actually get more like 20-30 billion barrels out of it before all is said and done. Whether that will actually last you 20-30 years, who knows, because consumption has been increasing faster than production in the US.
Seriously, why don't the media make fun of the Tea Partiers when it's so obvious how stupid their slogans are? (Answer: large media corporations don't want to pick a fight with large petroleum corporations)
Uh, exactly which large media outlets, aside from Fox, have not been making fun of Tea Partiers? What news are you watching? All most all the news I've seen calls them vile names and ridicules them constantly. Seriously, I don't know what news you've been watching to be able to make such a statement.
What you can definitely blame BP for right now, without any new information, is not installing a remote trigger for this last-ditch fail-safe.
Actually, correcting myself here, but apparently it was Transocean that failed to install the remote trigger, since it's their rig and drilling equipment - BP just owns the well. So it's Transocean's fault for not putting in all the safety measures, and BP's fault for not verifying that said measures were all in place and working as expected.
Still, probably just another cost cutting situation, with BP not willing to spend the money to have their own guys check things out.
Actually the high pressure from the water column helps keep the oil in the reservoir. You've got to keep in mind that it's not a bubble, it's a sponge, and even if it were it can't just shoot out without something else taking its place (because it's spongy it takes longer for something else to move in). The relatively small hole and the 6,000+ feet of water exerts an enormous amount of pressure on it. Obviously not enough to stop the flow by a long shot, but if this were a surface well the oil would be shooting out 10 times as fast.
More than likely what caused this well to blow out in the first place was a high pressure natural gas pocket, which was way too much for the amount of drilling mud they were using to keep the oil in the pipe. See, if you've got oil pushing up at 10,000psi, you put enough drilling mud down the hole to equal the pressure, as you go down the pressures increase and you add more mud. Hitting an unexpected NG pocket, though, is disastrous, because these will be under 20,000-25,000psi, which literally shoots the mud and any oil above the pocket. When this happens, you clamp the emergency shutoff valves and everything should be ok, particularly if you managed before your column of mud escaped the pipe.
True, it is huge now but what about earlier when it could have been manageable?
You think that wasn't the very first thing they did after putting out the fire? There was no "earlier when it could have been manageable", the pipe broke off about 5-10 feet above the sea floor, which is well over a mile below sea level. Do you realize the kind of dispersion you get with that? It spreads out for tens of miles before it even hits the surface.
It's also an emulsion, which does not corral as well as oil sitting on top of water - an emulsion sits at the top, since there is oil in it, but not really on the top like pure oil does, since there is a lot of water in it too. They've got 30-40 miles of boom out there now to try and contain it and it isn't good enough to keep some of it from hitting the coast.
Nah, they trick it.
They take a microbe with the ability to generate complex enzymes, and feed them a diet of sugar and oil. They slowly add more oil than sugar until all that is left is oil, and by then the microbes are optimized to eat oil. Then they can basically dump them on a patch of oil and let them go to town.
Like the article said though, the natural bacteria in the area are better at it than the lab grown stuff.
I bet the little guys can't each much more than their own body weight in oil per day.
They can probably eat a hell of a lot more than that, given that most microbe lifespans are measured in the minutes to hours range. They'll probably go through their body weight a hundred times a day, while growing exponentially. It's still going to take a long time for them to do the job though, as you'd need one massive bio-mass to take care of all that oil in any amount of time that could be considered "quick".