When I expand the time frame, the chart reveals that in the past three years, the CAD has moved within a range from about.77 to 1.07. That's a BIG (and visually chaotic) swing. To view a short time frame is unhelpfully misleading here.
Not surprisingly, there are correlations between these (and other) currencies. But to suggest that such correlations indicate some kind of control intended to keep them at steady parity is just plain wrong, and could easily mislead one into believing there is any likeness of this situation to, say, the relationship between the US Dollar and the Chines YUAN (see chart here).
The Canadian Dollar is, in fact, NOT tied to the U.S. Dollar. (And that includes not "almost" tied too.)
The President will put forth a budget and numerous other spending bills, this year like every year, and those bills will be ratified by a majority that will include Republicans and Democrats (this year, like every year).
The assertion that [Republicans] "will block anything Obama puts forward" is not a fact. It is hyperbole. That you would refer to such a broad, unsubstantive, and technically incorrect analysis as "fact" does indeed reflect your bias, and in some measure, your lack of self-awareness.
Please name any point in the last 50 years where the U.S. economy was so weak while it was accumulating debt at a pace even close to the current rate (for measurement, please use unemployment stats and government spending as a percentage of GDP).
The "blatant obstructionism" to which you refer reflects the simple assertion that government should do everything possible to avoid increasing its operating costs in the context of an extremely weak economy. In other words: NO NEW PROGRAMS RIGHT NOW. As for the move toward tax cuts, that reflects the simple assertion that a dollar of working capital put in the hands of the private sector is more likely to produce economic growth than a dollar in the hands of government.
You may disagree with those assertions but they are far from lunacy. And in the context of a rather extremely weak economy, they are not at all extreme positions. Your choice of the expression "blatant obstructionism" probably reflects your belief that government, and government spending, are our greatest opportunity to drive growth. You should not be surprise that some of us find that assertion dubious, and see government as more of a consumer of GDP than a driver.
Perhaps you are referring to third-party spending, for which statistics are scantly available, and you are therefore pulling numbers out of the same dark quarters of your anatomy from whence the rest of your rhetoric comes?
You can talk all you want about the parties that bought messages and how much they paid. You might then take some time to look at how the VOTERS voted, and WHY. But really, I suspect you have little belief in or regard for the voting public; that's a bit too close to a stark reality your rhetoric seems to avoid.
...a couple of years [...] not a single solitary honey bee [...] in the years since.
[...] When you consider that honey-bees play an absolutely vital role in the food chain on which we depend
Two years, no bees, and no visible effect on our food supply. Am I to believe my eyes, or your alarming declaration?
Perhaps the "food chain" is not quite as fragile as you suggest? Perhaps, if we just do nothing, the bees will slowly recover while we will continue to observe no significant diminishing of our food supply?
I'm inclined to add this one to the list of possible but unlikely disasters. It's a very, very long list.
Best Buy sees no problem with charging for this convenience, even though it's something Sony provides to PS3 owners completely free.
Sony provides firmware for free, not firmware installation. Your words wrongly intimate that they are the same. Even more absurdly, you intimate that Best Buy should pay for the labor of installing people's firmware.
Since "it's" "free" why don't YOU install people's firmware without receiving compensation.
Somebody [via highly suspect inference] mentions testosterone and you immediately start thinking about penises. I can trace your connection but find it even less salient and more dubious than theirs (which is very dubious and non-salient).
Anyway...that penis thing...you might do well to think a bit less with yours...it looks to be a tad bit hurt.
Well...now that we've given up on costing in dollars, and instead as a percentage of income, all I have to do is raise my income and the cost, of EVERYTHING, goes down.
And that would be about as true as it is unhelpful to know.
To anybody who feels incredulous at the notion of a single point of failure taking down a purportedly redundant system:I suspect you have limited experience with the issues and challenges of managing a very large system infrastructure. The complexity of such systems goes well beyond the knowledge of any individual, so notions of fault tolerance across the enterprise are highly theoretical. Even with extensive planning and testing, the gotcha is in what you don't know. Sometimes, one of those What-You-Don't-Knows reveals itself, and that is when it first becomes known.
The need for continued live operation of production systems typically precludes the opportunity to test them as realistically or extensively as one would wish. In fact, across large organizations and locations and departments and applications, systems managers don't even attempt to assert that they are free of single-points-of-failure, nor do they provide guarantees of non-stop operation. Real attempts at non-stop fail-safe systems are generally limited to narrower, truly mission critical applications such as aeronautical systems where lives or huge measures of capital depend upon system availability. Such criticality can rarely be ascribed to administrative systems, and they therefore rarely get the attention or funding needed to build and assure non-stop operation. And rightfully so...the cost of non-stop operation is not justified by the costs/risks of occasional failures.
So for those of you who assert that Virginia's systems should never go down, or shouldn't go down for more than 24 hours, I ask: How do you justify that assertion? Does it have a cost/benefit basis, or is it perhaps just a "soft" assertion?
I've been trying out Linux desktop distros like every two years for about 10 years. Linux is my home in server-land, and I am eager to live on an open source desktop. But whenever I try, desktop Linux runs into issues...things like power management suspend getting confused under some border condition, or a touchpad delivering less-than-optimal response to scroll gestures. I don't believe any of the machines were certified for Linux by their manufacturers, so the presence of such issues is not surprising.
One could say that a touchpad is a touchpad, power management is power management, and especially that a Dell touchpad is a Dell touchpad. But such enduring but summary labels hide the differences that come from frequent, almost continuous [evolutionary] changes in hardware...a little change here and another one there. Without appropriate mods to driver software, some percentage of those changes give you an Oops! here and a Wuh-oh! there. Even within Dell's own "manufacturing" world (much of which is broadly subcontracted to other companies), the number of power management variations being produced at any moment in time can be dauntingly high.
In the same way that computer manufacturers (e.g. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple, etc.) depend on third party hardware technologies to fill their boxes (e.g. CPUs, memory, video, audio, network, power supply, motherboard, etc.), they similarly depend on third parties to build the software drivers (e.g. hardware manufacturers, Microsoft, third party integrators) that make all those evolutionary changes work. My guess is that Dell is shy of Linux because they're having a hard time getting the kind of third-party software support that they get in the Windows environment. If a computer manufacturer were to try to move such driver development capabilities in-house, it seems likely to me that to do so would be both expensive and inefficient (if practical at all).
When we look at Apple, we might see the elegance of design (with narrowed consumer choice). With Linux, we might see the beauty of development in an free software ecosystem. And when we look at Microsoft, we might see the beauty of product choice, functional and often priced to yield a high point in VALUE to the desktop.
Among all platforms, supporters of the Windows platform have most ably made all kinds of hardware work well enough that you could pretty much take it for granted: that shit works. Too easily, almost invisibly, that is taken for granted.
The suit never goes to trial. Apple settles. The lawyers get a cash settlement (to cover their fees). The class members (read: iPhone owners) get a dollar amount applicable as a credit against future purchases from Apple.
The winners: Lawyers and Apple.
The people who neither win nor lose: iPhone owners (who always want more Apple).
The losers: Everybody else who has to continue to endure daily Apple "news" stories as if they were any better or more significant than Angelina/Brad stories.
In glancing over your reference to "other ocean contaminations" (which you misleadingly point to an article about extinction events), I don't see any support of your murky point (which seems to be that arsenic or the BP spill will lead to mass extinction?). Could you please cite where in that article you see support of your point? (Or is this, like, you know...stuff in the water and, like, mass extinction and everything...kind of...like that?)
It's interesting that you now appropriate the name "Personal Computer" to the Apple II. As I recall, it was called a "home computer" at the time, as was the TRS-80 and the Pet and the rest of the genre.
The Altair and other forerunners were tinkerer machines that were at the time referred to as "microcomputers." Unlike home computers, they weren't prepackaged with keyboard/video assumptions, but instead, left even those most basic I/O decisions for the do-it-yourselfers.
But you are undeterred by IBM having trademarked the name "PC", and having driven the widespread popularly and usefulness of the home computer outside the home and into business. This is where computing became "personal" (i.e. the CPU moved to the user's desktop) as opposed to the prior legacy of computing that had always been a centralized, shared resource.
As usual, Apple fans envision their devices as pioneering technology, when in fact, their innovations are primarily in packaging and marketing.
Some time in the nineties, it was reported that IBM ran an unusually high problem rate on a line of Thinkpads. The media attacked IBM for refusing to make any detailed remarks about the problem, or to establish a formal action plan. IBM's only comment was something to the effect, "IBM Thinkpad users have a high degree of satisfaction with their Thinkpad products. We remain committed, as always, to assuring that high degree of satisfaction."
Product failures, particularly computer failures, are a routine part of the landscape. All this hubbub about people losing data because of Dell's unreliable computers is dubious...responsible computer owners assure their own data protection. Only the irresponsible or ignorant rely on the manufacturer to do so, and always at their own peril.
A good computer company stands behind its products. When you have a problem, you call them and they promptly restore your satisfaction. The methods, economics and logistics of doing so may sometimes turn to the dark arts, but in the end, SATISFACTION best describes what a customer wants most.
Over the years, I've dealt with a lot of Dells, a lot of Dell problems, and a lot of Dell. And as ugly as this capacitor story now plays, I am still faced with the fact of my continued satisfaction with Dell as a company that has provided me with good value and satisfaction. I'm not lucky. Dell has done a good job of standing behind its products, and in my experience, continues to do so.
P.S. My only relationship to Dell is as a customer.
Firefox offers an option to use a [user-supplied] master password to encrypt/decrypt password data. If a Firefox user enables that functionality, then Firefox would not [by my guess] be vulnerable to an exploit strategy such as the one employed by this cracking product (which relies on rule-based keys instead of a user-supplied key). Firefox passwords may, however, be vulnerable to other cracking strategies.
Yes, but the News Hour's main purpose is to inform, not to opine/entertain.
So who really cares what the News Hour does (except for the few people who are looking to be better informed)?
Look at the postings here...almost all spun beyond the issue at hand to drive an outcome rooted in plain old canned partisan preference. Years ago, the masses were aghast at the audacity of the political spinsters. But now, the masses _are_ the spinsters, shamelessly twisting every potential truth to their partisan preferences, and yet laughably, bitching about the scourge of partisan politics. Ahh...to hear the cries of the contempt of the masses...their attitudes have become no less than contemptuous.
Me? I fight with all but the moderates (not many of 'em around these days).
There is nothing about the judge's decision intended to preclude the government from exercising its regulatory discretion and powers with respect to offshore drilling. The government simply needs a reasonable basis for doing so. MMS could shut down Atlantis for the reasons you describe. But imagine if there had been no Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, and an MMS inspector came upon the deficiencies you describe at Atlantis, and then decided to shut down all offshore drilling operations simply because of the deficiencies at Atlantis (without having a basis to believe the same deficiencies exist elsewhere). THAT "arbitrary and capricious" decision would have the same legal problems of the one we have today...it would cause irreparable harm without reasonable cause.
I'll allow that you've made a case to shut down Atlantis. Combined with Deepwater Horizon, there's probably even a case to shut down all BP operations. But nothing about your argument puts forth a basis for shutting down all offshore operations.
The Obama Administration's decision to have a moratorium was based on a report the Administration had produced by a bipartisan committee. The Administration's summary states that the recommendations of the report were "peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering." However, the Administration failed to point out in its summary that 5 of those 7 experts disagreed with the report's recommendations, and believed that the 6 month moratorium was not supported by the facts of Deepwater Horizon case.
Not surprising to me, this Administration ignores legitimate science in making it's so-called scientific decisions. In doing so, it is like the other administrations before it. This Administration, however, is distinguished in the lengths of its rhetoric to claim a higher regard for science than prior administrations. (I knew they were bullshiffers when they insinuated during their campaign that science clearly reveals right and wrong solutions to our complex problems; it does not.)
The judge found completely unsupported technical non sequiturs in the Administration's decision. For example, the "peer-reviewed" report expressed technical concerns about drilling challenges in waters greater than 1,000 feet, and yet, the moratorium simply cuts off at a more restrictive 500 feet without any explanation for where that number came from.
The Administration dismissed oil industry claims that the moratorium would cause irreparable harm. That position was based on the Administration's correct belief that the oil business would ultimately resume drilling operations after the moratorium is lifted. However, the Administration ignored the very clear evidence that thousands of workers and hundreds of businesses would very likely be irreparably harmed and permanently displaced by the moratorium. So though big oil will survive, many of the oil people of today won't. In this way, it appears that the Administration's definition of survival is a purely abstract perspective that is satisfied with the survival of an industry over the long run, but has no concern for the actual people in that industry who will be irreparably harmed now. (A lifetime in government can make you forget about people.)
It is clear to me that the reason the Administration called these shots was because the voting public roared, and the Administration had to do _something_, and shooting stuff down is _all_ it can do. But that's no substitute for legitimate risk mitigation. It's a grossly cynical political maneuver, performed at the very material expense of tens of thousands of people, and done as pandering to many millions more whose only connection to this thing is through newspaper headlines, and whose only damages are emotional.
Be mindful of our environment. Be mindful of each other. Learn from our mistakes. Leave politics at the door.
Smith isn't really getting paid enough to object strongly
It doesn't matter how much you pay an employee...if it's a public company or institution, the employee won't speak up. The only tangible benefit to speaking up is it saves the company legal fees. But those savings do not pass to the individual employee. What does pass to the individual employee who tries to avoid legal action (i.e. risk mitigation) is that if the risk comes to fruition, that person is humiliated for having decided to take the risk. So the employee has to weigh a potential benefit to the company against the risk of his own personal humiliation.
Unless he's an owner and the legal fees are coming out of his own pocket, he'll [almost always] avoid any possibility of personal humiliation, and instead, allow (or even favor) the company taking legal action, no matter how much he gets paid. (CEOs and other high-paid execs of public companies are often the worst offenders, being most concerned about their personal images.)
You just can't beat the economics of spending other people's money.
Slashdot Mirror
When I expand the time frame, the chart reveals that in the past three years, the CAD has moved within a range from about .77 to 1.07. That's a BIG (and visually chaotic) swing. To view a short time frame is unhelpfully misleading here.
Not surprisingly, there are correlations between these (and other) currencies. But to suggest that such correlations indicate some kind of control intended to keep them at steady parity is just plain wrong, and could easily mislead one into believing there is any likeness of this situation to, say, the relationship between the US Dollar and the Chines YUAN (see chart here).
The Canadian Dollar is, in fact, NOT tied to the U.S. Dollar. (And that includes not "almost" tied too.)
The President will put forth a budget and numerous other spending bills, this year like every year, and those bills will be ratified by a majority that will include Republicans and Democrats (this year, like every year).
The assertion that [Republicans] "will block anything Obama puts forward" is not a fact. It is hyperbole. That you would refer to such a broad, unsubstantive, and technically incorrect analysis as "fact" does indeed reflect your bias, and in some measure, your lack of self-awareness.
Please name any point in the last 50 years where the U.S. economy was so weak while it was accumulating debt at a pace even close to the current rate (for measurement, please use unemployment stats and government spending as a percentage of GDP).
The "blatant obstructionism" to which you refer reflects the simple assertion that government should do everything possible to avoid increasing its operating costs in the context of an extremely weak economy. In other words: NO NEW PROGRAMS RIGHT NOW. As for the move toward tax cuts, that reflects the simple assertion that a dollar of working capital put in the hands of the private sector is more likely to produce economic growth than a dollar in the hands of government.
You may disagree with those assertions but they are far from lunacy. And in the context of a rather extremely weak economy, they are not at all extreme positions. Your choice of the expression "blatant obstructionism" probably reflects your belief that government, and government spending, are our greatest opportunity to drive growth. You should not be surprise that some of us find that assertion dubious, and see government as more of a consumer of GDP than a driver.
R O A R !!! subtle. yeah. R O A R !!!
You know...they have laws about bullhorns, don't you?
Bold claim. Citation? According to this recent New York Times article (October 27), Democrats outspent Republicans, $119 million vs. $79 million.
Perhaps you are referring to third-party spending, for which statistics are scantly available, and you are therefore pulling numbers out of the same dark quarters of your anatomy from whence the rest of your rhetoric comes?
You can talk all you want about the parties that bought messages and how much they paid. You might then take some time to look at how the VOTERS voted, and WHY. But really, I suspect you have little belief in or regard for the voting public; that's a bit too close to a stark reality your rhetoric seems to avoid.
Two years, no bees, and no visible effect on our food supply. Am I to believe my eyes, or your alarming declaration?
Perhaps the "food chain" is not quite as fragile as you suggest? Perhaps, if we just do nothing, the bees will slowly recover while we will continue to observe no significant diminishing of our food supply?
I'm inclined to add this one to the list of possible but unlikely disasters. It's a very, very long list.
Sony provides firmware for free, not firmware installation. Your words wrongly intimate that they are the same. Even more absurdly, you intimate that Best Buy should pay for the labor of installing people's firmware.
Since "it's" "free" why don't YOU install people's firmware without receiving compensation.
Absurd. Just absurd.
Somebody [via highly suspect inference] mentions testosterone and you immediately start thinking about penises. I can trace your connection but find it even less salient and more dubious than theirs (which is very dubious and non-salient).
Anyway...that penis thing...you might do well to think a bit less with yours...it looks to be a tad bit hurt.
Well...now that we've given up on costing in dollars, and instead as a percentage of income, all I have to do is raise my income and the cost, of EVERYTHING, goes down.
And that would be about as true as it is unhelpful to know.
To anybody who feels incredulous at the notion of a single point of failure taking down a purportedly redundant system:I suspect you have limited experience with the issues and challenges of managing a very large system infrastructure. The complexity of such systems goes well beyond the knowledge of any individual, so notions of fault tolerance across the enterprise are highly theoretical. Even with extensive planning and testing, the gotcha is in what you don't know. Sometimes, one of those What-You-Don't-Knows reveals itself, and that is when it first becomes known.
The need for continued live operation of production systems typically precludes the opportunity to test them as realistically or extensively as one would wish. In fact, across large organizations and locations and departments and applications, systems managers don't even attempt to assert that they are free of single-points-of-failure, nor do they provide guarantees of non-stop operation. Real attempts at non-stop fail-safe systems are generally limited to narrower, truly mission critical applications such as aeronautical systems where lives or huge measures of capital depend upon system availability. Such criticality can rarely be ascribed to administrative systems, and they therefore rarely get the attention or funding needed to build and assure non-stop operation. And rightfully so...the cost of non-stop operation is not justified by the costs/risks of occasional failures.
So for those of you who assert that Virginia's systems should never go down, or shouldn't go down for more than 24 hours, I ask: How do you justify that assertion? Does it have a cost/benefit basis, or is it perhaps just a "soft" assertion?
Good luck escaping the web.
That would be fine as long as they don't drive the car anywhere near Ground Zero.
On what do you base this assertion (e.g. sample size)?
I've been trying out Linux desktop distros like every two years for about 10 years. Linux is my home in server-land, and I am eager to live on an open source desktop. But whenever I try, desktop Linux runs into issues...things like power management suspend getting confused under some border condition, or a touchpad delivering less-than-optimal response to scroll gestures. I don't believe any of the machines were certified for Linux by their manufacturers, so the presence of such issues is not surprising.
One could say that a touchpad is a touchpad, power management is power management, and especially that a Dell touchpad is a Dell touchpad. But such enduring but summary labels hide the differences that come from frequent, almost continuous [evolutionary] changes in hardware...a little change here and another one there. Without appropriate mods to driver software, some percentage of those changes give you an Oops! here and a Wuh-oh! there. Even within Dell's own "manufacturing" world (much of which is broadly subcontracted to other companies), the number of power management variations being produced at any moment in time can be dauntingly high.
In the same way that computer manufacturers (e.g. Dell, HP, Lenovo, Apple, etc.) depend on third party hardware technologies to fill their boxes (e.g. CPUs, memory, video, audio, network, power supply, motherboard, etc.), they similarly depend on third parties to build the software drivers (e.g. hardware manufacturers, Microsoft, third party integrators) that make all those evolutionary changes work. My guess is that Dell is shy of Linux because they're having a hard time getting the kind of third-party software support that they get in the Windows environment. If a computer manufacturer were to try to move such driver development capabilities in-house, it seems likely to me that to do so would be both expensive and inefficient (if practical at all).
When we look at Apple, we might see the elegance of design (with narrowed consumer choice). With Linux, we might see the beauty of development in an free software ecosystem. And when we look at Microsoft, we might see the beauty of product choice, functional and often priced to yield a high point in VALUE to the desktop.
Among all platforms, supporters of the Windows platform have most ably made all kinds of hardware work well enough that you could pretty much take it for granted: that shit works. Too easily, almost invisibly, that is taken for granted.
The suit never goes to trial. Apple settles. The lawyers get a cash settlement (to cover their fees). The class members (read: iPhone owners) get a dollar amount applicable as a credit against future purchases from Apple.
The winners: Lawyers and Apple.
The people who neither win nor lose: iPhone owners (who always want more Apple).
The losers: Everybody else who has to continue to endure daily Apple "news" stories as if they were any better or more significant than Angelina/Brad stories.
In glancing over your reference to "other ocean contaminations" (which you misleadingly point to an article about extinction events), I don't see any support of your murky point (which seems to be that arsenic or the BP spill will lead to mass extinction?). Could you please cite where in that article you see support of your point? (Or is this, like, you know...stuff in the water and, like, mass extinction and everything...kind of...like that?)
It's interesting that you now appropriate the name "Personal Computer" to the Apple II. As I recall, it was called a "home computer" at the time, as was the TRS-80 and the Pet and the rest of the genre.
The Altair and other forerunners were tinkerer machines that were at the time referred to as "microcomputers." Unlike home computers, they weren't prepackaged with keyboard/video assumptions, but instead, left even those most basic I/O decisions for the do-it-yourselfers.
But you are undeterred by IBM having trademarked the name "PC", and having driven the widespread popularly and usefulness of the home computer outside the home and into business. This is where computing became "personal" (i.e. the CPU moved to the user's desktop) as opposed to the prior legacy of computing that had always been a centralized, shared resource.
As usual, Apple fans envision their devices as pioneering technology, when in fact, their innovations are primarily in packaging and marketing.
Frankly, I think a bold transparent approach to something like this would be just plain stupid...like bathing in blood before visiting sharks.
I'd sooner leave it to the good people to find me by their own reasons, and then help them when they do.
Some time in the nineties, it was reported that IBM ran an unusually high problem rate on a line of Thinkpads. The media attacked IBM for refusing to make any detailed remarks about the problem, or to establish a formal action plan. IBM's only comment was something to the effect, "IBM Thinkpad users have a high degree of satisfaction with their Thinkpad products. We remain committed, as always, to assuring that high degree of satisfaction."
Product failures, particularly computer failures, are a routine part of the landscape. All this hubbub about people losing data because of Dell's unreliable computers is dubious...responsible computer owners assure their own data protection. Only the irresponsible or ignorant rely on the manufacturer to do so, and always at their own peril.
A good computer company stands behind its products. When you have a problem, you call them and they promptly restore your satisfaction. The methods, economics and logistics of doing so may sometimes turn to the dark arts, but in the end, SATISFACTION best describes what a customer wants most.
Over the years, I've dealt with a lot of Dells, a lot of Dell problems, and a lot of Dell. And as ugly as this capacitor story now plays, I am still faced with the fact of my continued satisfaction with Dell as a company that has provided me with good value and satisfaction. I'm not lucky. Dell has done a good job of standing behind its products, and in my experience, continues to do so.
P.S. My only relationship to Dell is as a customer.
Firefox offers an option to use a [user-supplied] master password to encrypt/decrypt password data. If a Firefox user enables that functionality, then Firefox would not [by my guess] be vulnerable to an exploit strategy such as the one employed by this cracking product (which relies on rule-based keys instead of a user-supplied key). Firefox passwords may, however, be vulnerable to other cracking strategies.
Here are some more details about how Firefox stores passwords.
Yes, but the News Hour's main purpose is to inform, not to opine/entertain.
So who really cares what the News Hour does (except for the few people who are looking to be better informed)?
Look at the postings here...almost all spun beyond the issue at hand to drive an outcome rooted in plain old canned partisan preference. Years ago, the masses were aghast at the audacity of the political spinsters. But now, the masses _are_ the spinsters, shamelessly twisting every potential truth to their partisan preferences, and yet laughably, bitching about the scourge of partisan politics. Ahh...to hear the cries of the contempt of the masses...their attitudes have become no less than contemptuous.
Me? I fight with all but the moderates (not many of 'em around these days).
There is nothing about the judge's decision intended to preclude the government from exercising its regulatory discretion and powers with respect to offshore drilling. The government simply needs a reasonable basis for doing so. MMS could shut down Atlantis for the reasons you describe. But imagine if there had been no Deepwater Horizon catastrophe, and an MMS inspector came upon the deficiencies you describe at Atlantis, and then decided to shut down all offshore drilling operations simply because of the deficiencies at Atlantis (without having a basis to believe the same deficiencies exist elsewhere). THAT "arbitrary and capricious" decision would have the same legal problems of the one we have today...it would cause irreparable harm without reasonable cause.
I'll allow that you've made a case to shut down Atlantis. Combined with Deepwater Horizon, there's probably even a case to shut down all BP operations. But nothing about your argument puts forth a basis for shutting down all offshore operations.
The Obama Administration's decision to have a moratorium was based on a report the Administration had produced by a bipartisan committee. The Administration's summary states that the recommendations of the report were "peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering." However, the Administration failed to point out in its summary that 5 of those 7 experts disagreed with the report's recommendations, and believed that the 6 month moratorium was not supported by the facts of Deepwater Horizon case.
Not surprising to me, this Administration ignores legitimate science in making it's so-called scientific decisions. In doing so, it is like the other administrations before it. This Administration, however, is distinguished in the lengths of its rhetoric to claim a higher regard for science than prior administrations. (I knew they were bullshiffers when they insinuated during their campaign that science clearly reveals right and wrong solutions to our complex problems; it does not.)
The judge found completely unsupported technical non sequiturs in the Administration's decision. For example, the "peer-reviewed" report expressed technical concerns about drilling challenges in waters greater than 1,000 feet, and yet, the moratorium simply cuts off at a more restrictive 500 feet without any explanation for where that number came from.
The Administration dismissed oil industry claims that the moratorium would cause irreparable harm. That position was based on the Administration's correct belief that the oil business would ultimately resume drilling operations after the moratorium is lifted. However, the Administration ignored the very clear evidence that thousands of workers and hundreds of businesses would very likely be irreparably harmed and permanently displaced by the moratorium. So though big oil will survive, many of the oil people of today won't. In this way, it appears that the Administration's definition of survival is a purely abstract perspective that is satisfied with the survival of an industry over the long run, but has no concern for the actual people in that industry who will be irreparably harmed now. (A lifetime in government can make you forget about people.)
It is clear to me that the reason the Administration called these shots was because the voting public roared, and the Administration had to do _something_, and shooting stuff down is _all_ it can do. But that's no substitute for legitimate risk mitigation. It's a grossly cynical political maneuver, performed at the very material expense of tens of thousands of people, and done as pandering to many millions more whose only connection to this thing is through newspaper headlines, and whose only damages are emotional.
Be mindful of our environment. Be mindful of each other. Learn from our mistakes. Leave politics at the door.
It doesn't matter how much you pay an employee...if it's a public company or institution, the employee won't speak up. The only tangible benefit to speaking up is it saves the company legal fees. But those savings do not pass to the individual employee. What does pass to the individual employee who tries to avoid legal action (i.e. risk mitigation) is that if the risk comes to fruition, that person is humiliated for having decided to take the risk. So the employee has to weigh a potential benefit to the company against the risk of his own personal humiliation.
Unless he's an owner and the legal fees are coming out of his own pocket, he'll [almost always] avoid any possibility of personal humiliation, and instead, allow (or even favor) the company taking legal action, no matter how much he gets paid. (CEOs and other high-paid execs of public companies are often the worst offenders, being most concerned about their personal images.)
You just can't beat the economics of spending other people's money.