Yes, yes, and double yes! Firefox *IS* faster than most other browsers in every part of browser performance that matters *except* Javascript speed. But yeah, browser load time and overhead, as well as initial rendering and scroll-rendering speed are all critical to the browser experience for me.
I have tried Chrome 3 times now and every time I give up on it - mostly because I find scrolling performance on complex HTML pages to be distractingly bad. Firefox does not have this problem - it is zippy and smooth, at least on modern Core 2 Duo or better hardware. I gather that for lower end hardware, Webkit seems to do better.
I know that on the 10% of websites with intensive Javascript code, Chrome will blow the pants off of Firefox right now, but this is not the primary use case of the web for me.
Agreed. Chrome and Safari have the worst scroll-rendering performance of any browser. Safari is the slower of those two. Even on a lot of Javascript-heavy pages where certain functions are much faster in Chrome, the experience is often better in Firefox if any scrolling is required. Opera excels in rendering/scroll rendering speeds and even IE is refreshingly fast compared to the Webkit browsers. JS speed is okay, but I won't use a fast JS browser that isn't fit to render html.
Adobe has spent a lot of time optimizing Flash, and I'd wager it'd take some time to get HTML 5 video as awesome
So, is this why exactly the same video uses 50+% of my CPU playing in Flash, 20% playing with VLC (ffmpeg), or 20-30% with QuickTime? I hope no one with this guy's definition of optimizing goes near any code that I use. Flash video performance is absolutely terrible, flash vector image drawing is poor, flash compositing is an embarrassment. Flash ActionScript performance is reasonable, but the Tamarin engine found in Flash is also in Mozilla, and it's been a while since FireFox won any JavaScript performance competitions...
He's an analyst. His job is to know absolutely nothing but use words like "awesome."
I challenge you to name another tech company that innovates like Apple—with game-changing technologies like the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad.
GE, DuPont, Lockheed Martin, Dow Chemical, Intel, ARM Holdings...and most other large companies with big R&D budgets. All "tech" companies like Apple do is repackage technology developed and sold to them by companies like those I just listed and market them. Apple is an advertising and UI innovator. Good for them. The iPod isn't a game changing technology. It's a UI made possible by the R&D of true scientific innovators.
I've sat an exam once or twice where almost no one finished the exam in the allotted time because there was too much material.
The professors heavily curved the exam grades in that case.
It's not common, but there is a bit of an art to properly designing an exam so that it can be completed by students who have what should be an acceptable level of mastery of the material, in the given time.
I've taken a class that had 30 exams in the course of a year that weren't finished by more than 2% of the students (always 0 or 1 in a class of ~60) thanks to time constraints. The curve varied wildly from week to week, sometimes giving an A for a 60, sometimes an A for a 30. There was a huge degree of noise in those grades, enough that I'm only confident that a few students got the grades they deserved (the consistent top 10% and bottom 10% of the class).
You go to school to buy a piece of paper to impress employers. Learning plays no factor in so-called modern education.
I assume you majored in popsicle stick collection, then. In the sciences, a college education is absolutely necessary and conveys an enormous body of information. Looking at recent hires in my organization, GPA and the number of relevant courses completed correlates quite well with job performance. I'm confident that's due to a causative mechanism. Why hire people who'd need a year of background training before they can understand the job-specific training, especially when you don't know whether they'll be able to learn the subject at all? A good college record shows that the student can learn new things and usually carries with it a vast body of useful knowledge that doesn't need to be retaught.
Much more interesting (to me) is that the aircraft used (a DeHavilland DHC-3T) is a flying boat built in 1953. Looks great for fishing trips, but they were taking it through dangerous mountains - known for doing unmentionable things to aircraft - during a severe storm. Hands up all those who would want to be in the aircraft shown in the posting under those kinds of conditions.
I would prefer not to be flying any aircraft in those conditions, but if one must be chosen, a DHC-3 isn't bad. A DHC-6 would be better, thanks to the spare engine, but they have nearly identical performance and the DHC-6 is known as one of the best aircraft in the world in severe conditions. When things are too dangerous for the type of plane that you're implying would be safer (I assume you mean big fancy jets), they turn to Twin Otters. They operate in Antarctica, for instance.
is the iPhone's main feature for me. But if you like it, nice to have the choice.
Why don't you use a rock or a jellybean, then?
Not having the choice to use Flash is a very stupid motivator in choosing a phone. It's like saying that you'd rather be unable to run because running can wear you out faster than walking, or that you don't want to be allowed to freely express yourself because that can be embarrassing.
Why give up the choice just because most of the time you would stick with one option? But the real question for me is this: why take such joy in giving up that choice? Why thank Apple for disallowing a feature that wouldn't hurt you at all, though it might only rarely help?
...it adds quite a bit. The scene in 'How to Train Your Dragon' where the soot is blowing in the air and the viking appears was amazing. I also thought the massive fight against the Kraken in 'Clash of the Titans' was absolutely incredible.
And I have to wear glasses normally.
It was still worth it!
I would argue that noticing how cool the 3-D illusion of the blowing soot looked was a distraction from the film, not an enhancement. Some movies are about showcasing modern visual effects. On average, these are the high budget, low quality movies. 3-D technology can add another tool to the director's arsenal to keep you from noticing that nothing else is very interesting.
Most good movies are about telling a story. It's not like it can't be done, but no one yet has included 3-D in this sort of movie in a way that didn't detract from the experience.
As the GP said: This is a non-issue. If it happens to you, the game revealed a problem, it didn't cause it. Fix your system.
The reason people are complaining in this case more than others is that SC2 happens to create more heat than Furmark on these menu-like screens.
In principle, there's nothing to be scared about when rendering a lot of frames.
In principle, this will only reveal faulty cooling, not break the unbroken.
In practice, rendering SC2 menus is just about the most taxing activity a graphics card can perform. It wouldn't hurt for a patch to cap the framerate, since there's absolutely no benefit to all of those extra frames, and a substantial portion of users haven't cleaned the dust out of their cooling fins lately.
I read an article in the Times about elderly people who are living there now. They say the whole thing has been exaggerated by the media and it's perfectly safe. Of course there's some places where they can't go... I don't really understand how they get their food delivered.. anybody got a link to the people I'm talking about?.
Email, Skype, Pandora, MLB at Bat streaming of games, apps, it all adds up. I average around 460MB per month on my iPhone. Probably closer to 600 in the summer time since I listen to a lot of day baseball games via MLB at Bat and I stream Pandora in my car driving around.
I've put 3-7 gigs of use in each of my first 2 months with my EVO and it doesn't feel like particularly heavy use. Not enough to require a battery recharge between 7 AM and midnight, at least. I guess the free tethering apps make a difference.
Subtract 42 ( Life the universe and everything ) And you get 130 ( Hold this thought )
In 1951, Bobby Thomson hit the "Shot heard round the world" (i.e The Asteroid) Against the Brooklyn Dodgers...(i.e Earth trying to "dodge")
Take 1951 and turn it into a repeating Decimal.1951951951........ ( this is wrong but who cares )
Then take the above 130 and divide by the repeating decimal and you get....
666 !
Is anyone else struck by how similar this analysis is to Glen Beck's show? Maybe I'm just seeing Glen Beck everywhere because I just saw his performance for the first time quite recently.
It better have good multiplayer. I haven't even touched the single player campaign of MW2 but I play online daily. Play the Medal of Honor beta that's out right now and then say multiplayer doesn't matter. DICE doesn't seem to think so with the crap job they did on MoH's multiplayer.
Similarly, I wish SHODAN had been played by a random other person selected via a matchmaking service. And Doctor Breen would have been cooler if he were voiced by a kid on XBox Live. How great would Pripyat have been if the monolith were controlled by a Ukrainian connected through Gamespy?
To the readers of my comment: my point is that there's clear, reasonable evidence of the harms of piracy. But we're faced with a questioner who has an adversarial and unconvertible frame of mind.
Okay, let's look at Crysis. You say that Crysis sold fewer copies than previous games "of its scope." You cherry pick one of the most successful games of all time, Doom 3, but the most direct comparison is the one previous game produced by Crytek: Far Cry. Far Cry sold 730,000 copies in its first 4 months (http://www.wiki4games.com/Far_Cry#cite_note-1).
Crysis exceeded sales expectations according to EA, selling 1 million copies in its first 3.5 months (http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=612&Itemid=2), eliminating your argument. This came despite the fact that Crysis could barely run even on enthusiast PCs for a year after release, while Far Cry was released to a much larger audience of computers that could run it acceptably.
We know that Crysis was a very popular target of pirates, and Crytek tells us that this is proof that their sales were hurt by piracy, but there's absolutely no evidence connecting the two. Of every 100 downloads, how many would have purchased the game if they hadn't pirated it? Of every 100 downloads, how many see the game, like it, and then buy it in order to play online or out of respect for the developers? People like you assume that the first number is vastly larger than the second, but there's never been any evidence to support that position. I suggest that it's just as likely that piracy increases game sales, and I believe that the automatic assumption that piracy is the scourge claimed by some within the industry is incredibly naive.
I use a calling card which is only 5 cents per minute and will work regardless where I'm at (home, hotel, payphone along the highway). I've looked at Skype and think it's a cool idea, but don't see that it would save me money, or be as convenient.
Skype to Skype calls are free, and Skype calls to the United States cost something like $9 for unlimited minutes over 3 months. Skype calls to phones in Europe are around 1-2 cents per minute.
P.S. Gecko is still much faster at some things, i.e. image rendering and animation.
If every damned site out there wasn't overusing Javascript that might be a compelling argument.
A lot of sites with heavy image content scroll smoothly in Firefox, Opera, and even IE, but struggle along at about 5 fps when scrolling with the webkit browsers. That's my main issue with Chrome.
Anandtech just popped out a fantastic writeup on this issue in their iPhone 4 review. Check it out, its very informative for those who don't have basic antenna design knowledge from EE in college. To paraphrase, it reduces signal by up to 27 dbm, which is almost 50% of normal signal range. (50 to 113 dbm). This will not effect you or show on your bars if you get a better signal than ~75 dbm on a normal basis.
Pretty much anyone who has had an introductory course in EE should have forseen this after the keynote...including their employees. It is a case of gross engineering negligence. Yes, interference does happen with all phones, but the effect is much more pronounced with the iPhone 4 due to an exposed antenna and lack of spending to fix / spot the issue.
In short, your anecdote doesn't address the problem because you are in a good coverage area, and the signal degredation doesn't ruin your reception.
Showing again why Anand runs the best tech site on the internet. Mod the parent up and everyone go read http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2 before posting saying that the antenna problem makes the phone unusable or posting that is has no effect.
Seriously, in any given cirumstance I'd be extremely skeptical of this stuff. But in this case we don't really know whether all of "Plato's" writings were actually written by Plato, and certainly not if they're verbatim. Given that ancient Greek had five grammatical cases, it didn't have very strict word order (much like Latin). So it's even less of a coincidence if someone manages to string the words together into comprehensible sentences.
I doubt this will be the revolution Dr Kennedy thinks it will be. It'd be interesting to hear what others have to say. But of course, this is a press release, not a real article.
Dr. Kennedy wants publicity, but nowhere in his paper does he even begin to describe a code. All he does is point out that Plato, like most of his contemporaries, mixed rhythm and narrative structure. There's no hidden message, there's simply a supposed emphasis put on certain already well studied sections. No, magical-thinker Plato didn't invent science.
Think twice. Do you *really* think this will be so important to you forever?
A good test is to think about your favorite thing when you were one half your current age. If you had that tatooed on you today, would you be happy about it? Your future self may feel the same about your current fashion interests.
haul in lots and lots of huge car sized boulders, i mean hundreds of thousands of them,and pile huge boulders on the well site and after a layer of boulders is on it start piling smaller rock aggregate from basketball size to baseball & golf ball size. then start pouring on concrete or cement or maybe clay & sand, eventually they will seal it off, but it wont be a small task it will take a hell of a lot of boulders & rock and cement and/or clay & sand,
Unless your boulders are the size of ships, they'll just be pushed off the pipe by the effluent oil.
Caller pays is stupid. I'll pay my phone bill, you pay yours, thank you very much. Europeans have some interesting ideas sometimes, but this is not one of them.
The frustrating thing is that it results in a 20x increase in the cost of calling a cell phone in Europe vs. a landline via a calling card, skype, google voice, or whatever else. Cells in Europe, unless using VoIP services to get around the insane prices, essentially cannot be called from the rest of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
It makes digital connections MORE digital with LESS digital interference!
Perfectly straight ones! Unbelievably round zeros!
Yes, yes, and double yes! Firefox *IS* faster than most other browsers in every part of browser performance that matters *except* Javascript speed. But yeah, browser load time and overhead, as well as initial rendering and scroll-rendering speed are all critical to the browser experience for me.
I have tried Chrome 3 times now and every time I give up on it - mostly because I find scrolling performance on complex HTML pages to be distractingly bad. Firefox does not have this problem - it is zippy and smooth, at least on modern Core 2 Duo or better hardware. I gather that for lower end hardware, Webkit seems to do better.
I know that on the 10% of websites with intensive Javascript code, Chrome will blow the pants off of Firefox right now, but this is not the primary use case of the web for me.
Agreed. Chrome and Safari have the worst scroll-rendering performance of any browser. Safari is the slower of those two. Even on a lot of Javascript-heavy pages where certain functions are much faster in Chrome, the experience is often better in Firefox if any scrolling is required. Opera excels in rendering/scroll rendering speeds and even IE is refreshingly fast compared to the Webkit browsers. JS speed is okay, but I won't use a fast JS browser that isn't fit to render html.
Adobe has spent a lot of time optimizing Flash, and I'd wager it'd take some time to get HTML 5 video as awesome
So, is this why exactly the same video uses 50+% of my CPU playing in Flash, 20% playing with VLC (ffmpeg), or 20-30% with QuickTime? I hope no one with this guy's definition of optimizing goes near any code that I use. Flash video performance is absolutely terrible, flash vector image drawing is poor, flash compositing is an embarrassment. Flash ActionScript performance is reasonable, but the Tamarin engine found in Flash is also in Mozilla, and it's been a while since FireFox won any JavaScript performance competitions...
He's an analyst. His job is to know absolutely nothing but use words like "awesome."
I challenge you to name another tech company that innovates like Apple—with game-changing technologies like the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and iPad.
GE, DuPont, Lockheed Martin, Dow Chemical, Intel, ARM Holdings...and most other large companies with big R&D budgets. All "tech" companies like Apple do is repackage technology developed and sold to them by companies like those I just listed and market them. Apple is an advertising and UI innovator. Good for them. The iPod isn't a game changing technology. It's a UI made possible by the R&D of true scientific innovators.
I've sat an exam once or twice where almost no one finished the exam in the allotted time because there was too much material.
The professors heavily curved the exam grades in that case.
It's not common, but there is a bit of an art to properly designing an exam so that it can be completed by students who have what should be an acceptable level of mastery of the material, in the given time.
I've taken a class that had 30 exams in the course of a year that weren't finished by more than 2% of the students (always 0 or 1 in a class of ~60) thanks to time constraints. The curve varied wildly from week to week, sometimes giving an A for a 60, sometimes an A for a 30. There was a huge degree of noise in those grades, enough that I'm only confident that a few students got the grades they deserved (the consistent top 10% and bottom 10% of the class).
You go to school to buy a piece of paper to impress employers. Learning plays no factor in so-called modern education.
I assume you majored in popsicle stick collection, then. In the sciences, a college education is absolutely necessary and conveys an enormous body of information. Looking at recent hires in my organization, GPA and the number of relevant courses completed correlates quite well with job performance. I'm confident that's due to a causative mechanism. Why hire people who'd need a year of background training before they can understand the job-specific training, especially when you don't know whether they'll be able to learn the subject at all? A good college record shows that the student can learn new things and usually carries with it a vast body of useful knowledge that doesn't need to be retaught.
Much more interesting (to me) is that the aircraft used (a DeHavilland DHC-3T) is a flying boat built in 1953. Looks great for fishing trips, but they were taking it through dangerous mountains - known for doing unmentionable things to aircraft - during a severe storm. Hands up all those who would want to be in the aircraft shown in the posting under those kinds of conditions.
I would prefer not to be flying any aircraft in those conditions, but if one must be chosen, a DHC-3 isn't bad. A DHC-6 would be better, thanks to the spare engine, but they have nearly identical performance and the DHC-6 is known as one of the best aircraft in the world in severe conditions. When things are too dangerous for the type of plane that you're implying would be safer (I assume you mean big fancy jets), they turn to Twin Otters. They operate in Antarctica, for instance.
is the iPhone's main feature for me. But if you like it, nice to have the choice.
Why don't you use a rock or a jellybean, then?
Not having the choice to use Flash is a very stupid motivator in choosing a phone. It's like saying that you'd rather be unable to run because running can wear you out faster than walking, or that you don't want to be allowed to freely express yourself because that can be embarrassing.
Why give up the choice just because most of the time you would stick with one option? But the real question for me is this: why take such joy in giving up that choice? Why thank Apple for disallowing a feature that wouldn't hurt you at all, though it might only rarely help?
As long as the only pictures they take are legal ones from public places (including airspace), I don't have a problem.
It's always heartwarming to see people conflate the unrelated concepts of "legal" and "ethical."
...it adds quite a bit. The scene in 'How to Train Your Dragon' where the soot is blowing in the air and the viking appears was amazing. I also thought the massive fight against the Kraken in 'Clash of the Titans' was absolutely incredible.
And I have to wear glasses normally.
It was still worth it!
I would argue that noticing how cool the 3-D illusion of the blowing soot looked was a distraction from the film, not an enhancement. Some movies are about showcasing modern visual effects. On average, these are the high budget, low quality movies. 3-D technology can add another tool to the director's arsenal to keep you from noticing that nothing else is very interesting.
Most good movies are about telling a story. It's not like it can't be done, but no one yet has included 3-D in this sort of movie in a way that didn't detract from the experience.
As the GP said: This is a non-issue. If it happens to you, the game revealed a problem, it didn't cause it. Fix your system.
The reason people are complaining in this case more than others is that SC2 happens to create more heat than Furmark on these menu-like screens.
In principle, there's nothing to be scared about when rendering a lot of frames.
In principle, this will only reveal faulty cooling, not break the unbroken.
In practice, rendering SC2 menus is just about the most taxing activity a graphics card can perform. It wouldn't hurt for a patch to cap the framerate, since there's absolutely no benefit to all of those extra frames, and a substantial portion of users haven't cleaned the dust out of their cooling fins lately.
I read an article in the Times about elderly people who are living there now. They say the whole thing has been exaggerated by the media and it's perfectly safe. Of course there's some places where they can't go... I don't really understand how they get their food delivered.. anybody got a link to the people I'm talking about?.
Yep, here you go.
This is probably a beautiful photograph that I will never see because of the technology chosen for the presentation layer.
Why do you assume that a lot of pixels will make it beautiful?
Email, Skype, Pandora, MLB at Bat streaming of games, apps, it all adds up. I average around 460MB per month on my iPhone. Probably closer to 600 in the summer time since I listen to a lot of day baseball games via MLB at Bat and I stream Pandora in my car driving around.
I've put 3-7 gigs of use in each of my first 2 months with my EVO and it doesn't feel like particularly heavy use. Not enough to require a battery recharge between 7 AM and midnight, at least. I guess the free tethering apps make a difference.
2182 - 2010 = 172 years
Subtract 42 ( Life the universe and everything ) And you get 130 ( Hold this thought )
In 1951, Bobby Thomson hit the "Shot heard round the world" (i.e The Asteroid)
Against the Brooklyn Dodgers...(i.e Earth trying to "dodge")
Take 1951 and turn it into a repeating Decimal .1951951951........ ( this is wrong but who cares )
Then take the above 130 and divide by the repeating decimal and you get....
666 !
Is anyone else struck by how similar this analysis is to Glen Beck's show? Maybe I'm just seeing Glen Beck everywhere because I just saw his performance for the first time quite recently.
It better have good multiplayer. I haven't even touched the single player campaign of MW2 but I play online daily. Play the Medal of Honor beta that's out right now and then say multiplayer doesn't matter. DICE doesn't seem to think so with the crap job they did on MoH's multiplayer.
Similarly, I wish SHODAN had been played by a random other person selected via a matchmaking service. And Doctor Breen would have been cooler if he were voiced by a kid on XBox Live. How great would Pripyat have been if the monolith were controlled by a Ukrainian connected through Gamespy?
To the readers of my comment: my point is that there's clear, reasonable evidence of the harms of piracy. But we're faced with a questioner who has an adversarial and unconvertible frame of mind.
Okay, let's look at Crysis. You say that Crysis sold fewer copies than previous games "of its scope." You cherry pick one of the most successful games of all time, Doom 3, but the most direct comparison is the one previous game produced by Crytek: Far Cry. Far Cry sold 730,000 copies in its first 4 months (http://www.wiki4games.com/Far_Cry#cite_note-1).
Crysis exceeded sales expectations according to EA, selling 1 million copies in its first 3.5 months (http://www.incrysis.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=612&Itemid=2), eliminating your argument. This came despite the fact that Crysis could barely run even on enthusiast PCs for a year after release, while Far Cry was released to a much larger audience of computers that could run it acceptably.
We know that Crysis was a very popular target of pirates, and Crytek tells us that this is proof that their sales were hurt by piracy, but there's absolutely no evidence connecting the two. Of every 100 downloads, how many would have purchased the game if they hadn't pirated it? Of every 100 downloads, how many see the game, like it, and then buy it in order to play online or out of respect for the developers? People like you assume that the first number is vastly larger than the second, but there's never been any evidence to support that position. I suggest that it's just as likely that piracy increases game sales, and I believe that the automatic assumption that piracy is the scourge claimed by some within the industry is incredibly naive.
>>>Name a decent alternative?
I use a calling card which is only 5 cents per minute and will work regardless where I'm at (home, hotel, payphone along the highway). I've looked at Skype and think it's a cool idea, but don't see that it would save me money, or be as convenient.
Skype to Skype calls are free, and Skype calls to the United States cost something like $9 for unlimited minutes over 3 months. Skype calls to phones in Europe are around 1-2 cents per minute.
P.S. Gecko is still much faster at some things, i.e. image rendering and animation.
If every damned site out there wasn't overusing Javascript that might be a compelling argument.
A lot of sites with heavy image content scroll smoothly in Firefox, Opera, and even IE, but struggle along at about 5 fps when scrolling with the webkit browsers. That's my main issue with Chrome.
Anandtech just popped out a fantastic writeup on this issue in their iPhone 4 review. Check it out, its very informative for those who don't have basic antenna design knowledge from EE in college. To paraphrase, it reduces signal by up to 27 dbm, which is almost 50% of normal signal range. (50 to 113 dbm). This will not effect you or show on your bars if you get a better signal than ~75 dbm on a normal basis.
Pretty much anyone who has had an introductory course in EE should have forseen this after the keynote...including their employees. It is a case of gross engineering negligence. Yes, interference does happen with all phones, but the effect is much more pronounced with the iPhone 4 due to an exposed antenna and lack of spending to fix / spot the issue.
In short, your anecdote doesn't address the problem because you are in a good coverage area, and the signal degredation doesn't ruin your reception.
Showing again why Anand runs the best tech site on the internet. Mod the parent up and everyone go read http://www.anandtech.com/show/3794/the-iphone-4-review/2 before posting saying that the antenna problem makes the phone unusable or posting that is has no effect.
Fortelling assassinations! (This originally being a refutal of Drosnin's "Bible Code" nonsense)
Seriously, in any given cirumstance I'd be extremely skeptical of this stuff. But in this case we don't really know whether all of "Plato's" writings were actually written by Plato, and certainly not if they're verbatim.
Given that ancient Greek had five grammatical cases, it didn't have very strict word order (much like Latin). So it's even less of a coincidence if someone manages to string the words together into comprehensible sentences.
I doubt this will be the revolution Dr Kennedy thinks it will be. It'd be interesting to hear what others have to say. But of course, this is a press release, not a real article.
Dr. Kennedy wants publicity, but nowhere in his paper does he even begin to describe a code. All he does is point out that Plato, like most of his contemporaries, mixed rhythm and narrative structure. There's no hidden message, there's simply a supposed emphasis put on certain already well studied sections. No, magical-thinker Plato didn't invent science.
rapid startup times
.
Always a promise from Microsoft, never a reality in Windows.
25 seconds from off to a Windows 7 desktop on my netbook seems rapid to me.
Think twice. Do you *really* think this will be so important to you forever?
A good test is to think about your favorite thing when you were one half your current age. If you had that tatooed on you today, would you be happy about it? Your future self may feel the same about your current fashion interests.
haul in lots and lots of huge car sized boulders, i mean hundreds of thousands of them,and pile huge boulders on the well site and after a layer of boulders is on it start piling smaller rock aggregate from basketball size to baseball & golf ball size. then start pouring on concrete or cement or maybe clay & sand, eventually they will seal it off, but it wont be a small task it will take a hell of a lot of boulders & rock and cement and/or clay & sand,
Unless your boulders are the size of ships, they'll just be pushed off the pipe by the effluent oil.
Caller pays is stupid. I'll pay my phone bill, you pay yours, thank you very much. Europeans have some interesting ideas sometimes, but this is not one of them.
The frustrating thing is that it results in a 20x increase in the cost of calling a cell phone in Europe vs. a landline via a calling card, skype, google voice, or whatever else. Cells in Europe, unless using VoIP services to get around the insane prices, essentially cannot be called from the rest of the world.