More likely that all sorts of white upper-middle class trustifarian college students start demanding $75,000 for everyone, to the chant of "Happiness is a human right!"
Then come the 'experts' at House and Senate hearings:
"Over 240 million Americans go to bed every night without Happiness. Americans are unhappy right here on our own shores! We must end Sadness! When I was in college, I was unhappy. After my accident, I got a $75,000 settlement from the university, and from then on I was happy. I come here to tell you that if every American had the same $75K opportunity I did, we could end Sadness forever."
Don't forget the uneducated consumers who happily took out mortgages that they could not afford. Back in 2005 I was approved for a mortgage with payments that would have added up to 98.5% of my income at the time (after the intro period). The banker told me that 'I could just refinance!' and that 'you'll be making more by then!'. I walked out of the bank and kept renting.
Yes, banks shouldn't have been able to 'pass the buck' to investors so quickly, they should be accountable for the mortgages they originate, but the House of Cards that the banks built wouldn't have toppled if the consumers were being responsible.
Banks shouldn't be making jumbo loans to folks with shrimpy incomes, and people who can't figure out a mortgage payment with a calculator and a pencil shouldn't be doing half-million dollar deals with banks. There's plenty of blame to pass around.
Or encrypt your home machine and just remote to it via RDP or VNC from work. That way the only 'data' that ever leaves your home is encrypted jumbled raw streams of RDP traffic, not sensitive files.
The control interface wouldn't have to be -that- complex... We already have plenty of operating systems that could do it, given the device drivers and hardware.
As for the guests... The beauty there is that the guests will actually be -less- complex. If the scheduling is handled by the host, guest doesn't need to cache anything, and can interact with the host VFS instead of a virtual block device, you could have a much lighter-weight OS. You wouldn't even need paging/swap, the host would just move 'cold' pages to disk after a while.
The host OS would likely see everything, RAM, storage, etc on a single 64-bit address space. Stuff that needs to be fast gets moved to the 'high' addresses (backed by RAM) and stuff that's cold migrates toward the 'low' addresses (backed by disk). As you add RAM and storage, the available addresses on the massive 64-bit space move closer to convergence. Of course, a fair portion of the storage is going to act as backup/redundancy for the RAM, and a fair portion of the RAM will act as a cache for recently-migrated or 'warm' storage.
The problem with automated sniping, and these algorithmic trades, is that there's no real evaluation going on... If ten people are bidding for my item, I expect the price to go up until people drop out. If there is a sniper, they usually win the item. Now imagine that there are only three people bidding, and they're all snipers. Whoever has the best sniping tool wins the item. That's lame.
I heard a number that may or may not be true... That historically, the entirety of capital in the stock market turned over at about 30%/year. These days, it appears that the number is 320%/year. Sure, liquidity is a generally a good thing, but I think we're well past the point of diminishing returns; we might even benefit from some 'stickiness' to the market.
Also, I just really don't like the idea that someone using a sniping tool or a 'wired-in' computer has a competitive advantage that's not available to regular traders. That's just not ethical. It's one thing to sell trading tools that make the job easier, but the idea that some database can unload tens of billions of dollars in the time it takes for my monitor to refresh is insanity, and it's setting us up for some really bad times.
I have a simple solution for problems that could be caused by these high-speed robots doing the trades, and also for eBay's 'sniping' problem (where your item sits for days untouched, and then the bids all land in the last thirty seconds).
Just add some 'fuzzy logic' to the time things happen. eBay auctions would randomly end 'between 10:05 and 10:10", forcing snipers to bid before the end of the trading. Same for the stock market, just have trades execute, by law, on a 'random' basis within a certain time period after they're filed. I'm not sure what the right balance between stability and liquidity is, but I'll guess that a two minute window would discourage most high-speed trading.
"I would even prefer an external video card for my desktop computer (if performance matched the internal version). It could have its own case, cooling, and powerbrick, instead of murdering my internal power supply, heating my computer up, screaming like a jet engine, and possible bursting into flames when my haphazard system design blocks vital airflow."
You're too much in the minority for a market to be built up for you. Haven't you realized that these days people want to buy -one box- with -as few cables as possible- and just replace it every four years? Noby except the nerdiest 5% want to go to the store to pick out a storage array, memory array, GPU, and 'interface'. People want iMacs.
That said, this technology could be indispensable for doing to CPUs and RAM what we've already done to storage in the datacenter (read: commoditize the crap out of it).
1. The Internet already does that. How much of the experience today is processed partly in a faraway datacenter? I know that even users like me use the Internet as a method to pull things away from each other so each part lives where it makes sense. I have a powerful desktop at home that I RDP into from whatever portable device I happen to be toting. I don't worry about my laptop getting stolen, the experience is pretty fast (faster than a netbook's local CPU, for sure), and I get to mix-and-match my portable hardware.
2. This is going to have much more use at a datacenter than it will in a server closet or a home. I can already fit more RAM, CPU, and Storage than I need in a typical desktop. Most small businesses run fine on one or two servers. Datacenters, on the other hand, could really take advantage to commoditizing RAM and CPU, like they have with SANs in storage. No more 'host box/VM', it's time to take the next step and pool RAM and CPUs, and provision them to VMs through some sort of software/hardware control fabric. I think Cisco already knows this, which is why they're moving to building servers.
Imagine the datacenter of the future:
Instead of discrete PC servers with multiple VM guests each and CAT-6 LAN plugs, you have a pool of RAM, a pool of storage, and a pool of CPUs controlled by some sort of control interface. Instead of plugging the NIC on the back of it into your network equipment, the control interface is -built into- the network core, wired right into the backplane of your LAN. Extra CPU power that's not actually being used will be put to work by the control fabric compressing and deduplicating stuff in storage and RAM. The control interface will 'learn' that some types of data are better served off of the faster set of drives, or in unused RAM allocated as storage. 'Cold' data would slowly migrate to cheap, redundant arrays.
Guest systems will change, too. No longer will VMs do their own disk caching. It makes sense for a regular server to put all its own RAM to use, but on a system like this, it makes sense to let the 'host fabric' handle the intelligent stuff. Guest operating systems will likely evolve to speak directly to the 'host' VFS to avoid I/O penalties, and to communicate needs for more or less resources (why should a VM that never uses more than 1GB RAM and averages two threads always be allocated 4GB and eight threads?).
Don't forget the benefit of being able to tell your employees that they get to spend 8 hours a day on top-of-the-line equipment.
I know that it's a huge 'benefit' that I get to play with all sorts of hardware and software at my job. I assume the best mechanics flock to working on NASCAR vehicles, I would assume the same thing happens with tech people and tech jobs.
Seriously, if my employer pushed hard on gigabit to my desk, that would be a benefit for both of us. I don't like waiting two hours for a file to move over the LAN, and they don't like paying for it. I've been bored to tears over long file transfers or slow jobs.
If they told me during the negotiation process that I would have gigabit, a 'workstation class' PC, access to all the toys that might touch the LAN (iPad, iPod Touch, Android stuff, netbooks, etc.), a modern Mac, and my own piece of Cisco equipment and an ESX host to play with, I would be willing to settle for less upfront pay, just because it makes my job more fun, fast, and fulfilling.
Also, something I really miss is being able to have a pick of hardware that's getting scrapped. I don't have that option at my current job, but I used to be able to snag dozens of aging pieces of hardware, refurbish them, and give them to friends who wanted to get online. That's a huge benefit, assuming you're hiring public-service oriented people.
I hate to say it, but the nature of CPUs has changed so much since the Core architecture that you might want to eBay that box and buy something like an Atom Nettop.
The G5 and P4 were both pretty much the 'end of the line' of the idea that faster=hotter and more power-hungry.
I keep a G4 dualie around for Mac work, but it's basically a space heater. I advise clients to decommission their P4-based systems ASAP. My dual-core Core 2 idles at under 60W, the G4 uses almost 200W and shows a lot less for it.
Seriously, somewhere out there is a young web designer who wants that G5. eBay it. Take the money and buy a modern machine that -is- supported by the latest distros and won't silently cost you $10/month.
I really like the Atom 330/ION combination, you get low-power, dual-core, accelerated video and 2D, and 64-bits of goodness. Sure, it's slower than a G5, but it's enough to saturate a gigabit pipe, or play 1080p h.264 via HDMI, browse, type, serve files or multimedia, etc. You could probably buy three matching ION-based nettops if you tossed the G5.
Have you tried calling your insurance company and telling this to them?
First, file a claim. You have renter's insurance, right?
Assuming you haven't...
Do an nslookup on the IP address to find out what you can glean about which ISP/node the user is at. You might be able to do some sort of geographical IP lookup, I know mine narrows it down to about three houses.
Call the local police in -that- area and tell them that you've identified your stolen property, conference a police detective in with the ISP and see if the ISP folks fold and give an address/account that's actionable. There's still no warrant, so the officer will likely stop by and 'ask politely' (especially if you offer to ride-along). Failing that (meaning that the thief knows their rights), you'll have to ask the officer to get a warrant, which he will bitch and moan about, and it likely won't happen.
By this time, that insurance deductible is looking mighty reasonable, and you should get a policy.
If you're dead-serious about justice and you know the address/account... Take the person to small claims. You won't need a lawyer if you have everything written down and articulated, and have friendly municipal workers in your area. I'm not entirely sure, but I think that those judges have an easier path (a fellow judges' number) to get a warrant issued, and then you're back to the cops.
Now... In the future... Keep a better eye on your stuff, get an insurance policy, and -always- stash enough money to pay the deductible somewhere where you won't spend it. I guarantee the $12/month and $250 in your 'unlinked' savings account would be more than worth this kind of effort. Plus, acting like a fat-cat and having a new laptop paid for is much more rewarding than rarely-served justice.
Not anymore, though. I'm a Rhode Islander, and last year they canceled school -because it was too cold-. Laughable. I remember waiting 45 minutes for the bus in 0-degree weather when I was a kid.
This is pointless. Really. All the machines will test within a few percent of each other. It's not like a Dell is significantly faster than an HP (especially if the software image is the same).
If the machines have different CPU/Chipsets/Video Cards, that's a different story, but a PC -is- really just the sum of its parts.
Tell the C-level execs that the best value would be to skip the benchmark and go right to the bidding, let the vendors undercut each other for an extra month.
Actually, if we take the number of gallons we've pumped from deep-sea drilling and divide it by the number spilled in blowouts (which there have been, this is not the first time this has happened), we have a number. It's very tiny number, but it's actionable, and you could feed it to policy makers and actuaries.
Thinking that a single blowout will collapse the crust of the earth and cause neighboring deposits to rupture is sort of like thinking that I could blow up a skyscraper by flicking a cigarette butt at it. Sorry, just ain't gonna happen.
The methane released (and absorbed) likely pales in comparison to what's generated by the sediment in a few square miles of ocean anyway.
I work next to the ocean, the water is between 2 and 8 feet deep (tidal), it sits there bubbling methane all freaking day.
Also, I did the math a few days ago, but the Mississippi dumps more petroleum distillates into the gulf on a daily basis than a 5,000 bbl oil spill does. Remember, this area of water is the watershed for a huge portion of the country. Every drop of oil that drips off the bottom of a car, every ounce of paint that gets into septic systems in the midwest works its way down to this outlet.
The big problem here likely won't be the oil in the environment as a whole, it's the -concentration- of it in some places. The gulf is huge, that will be a mitigating factor, but I'm sure some places will get 'bunches' of oil that cause localized problems.
How about leaving room on that rope for owners of hotels in front of clean beaches that are filing for damages for 'lost business'? Or the fishermen who are staying home (also filing suit) instead of going a few miles out of the way to approved fishing grounds?
Listen, this is an environmental disaster, no doubt about it. It needs to get plugged. The rules have to get changed to have more safety mechanisms and stricter BOP checkups, for sure. I'm no BP apologist. What's pissing me off is when I hear that this will 'devastate' areas that it will likely only 'affect'. This will not be the end of the Gulf, it will not be the end of the ocean (as I've heard some folks say). The volume might exceed the Valdez, but there is a totally different set of circumstances here that will likely make this -far- less of a problem than the Sierra Club crowd is predicting.
There aren't 'trillions' of barrels under this particular well. It's not like collapsing this well would cause all the other wells to collapse too. And as far as I know, the likelihood of this deposit collapsing is very, very low; unmeasurably low.
So far, oil isn't even washing up on beaches in any appreciable way. A huge portion of the area is an oxygen-depleted, polluted 'dead zone' anyway because of the Mississippi. Last I checked, only -two- birds had been collected for cleaning. Only about 4% of the gulf is blocked-off from fishing, and the larger fisheries aren't even expecting much damage, they're taking a 'wait and see' stance.
Still, (as of yet) clean beaches and untainted food seem to scare consumers away from vacations and shrimp, not because there's a risk, but because most consumers are total alarmist bozos, just like most career-environmentalists.
It looks like he opened up the mail and then closed it right away. That stuff happens, even at work. People have sent me NSFW things before without warning that I've opened up and -quickly- closed.
Also, since when is a row of girls wearing swimsuits (maybe a few are topless) 'porn'?
I say we rope-up as much oil as we can, keep it over the dead zone, and spray surfactants at it to clump it together and let it sink harmlessly to the already-polluted and useless seabed.
This is a 'big deal' in the short term, but as long as shorelines are boomed-off and this thing gets plugged, the mid-to-long term effects are negligible.
I don't have the quote handy, but higher-ups at some of the larger fisheries were saying that they don't expect this to impact their business much when it's all said and done. The guys on the news and radio saying that this will 'devastate' the industry either don't understand the scope of the impact, or are looking for some 'assistance'.
Listen, I don't want to get crucified for this, but I did the math yesterday. 5,000 barrels a day sounds like a lot, but this spill only adds about 45% to the total daily runoff coming out of the Mississippi anyway. If this gets plugged in 30 days, the total increase in annual oil going into this 'neighborhood' will be about 4%.
Again, I'm not defending the spill, it needs to get plugged, but this isn't going to dramatically change the situation in that area of the Gulf, mostly because the Gulf is such a mess already.
So I'm testing this now... It will be a few hours. Thinking that VirtualBox has the same EFI and VMM on all host platforms, I'm building an OS X VM on a Mac, exporting it, and importing it at home on my Linux host. Hopefully it will work.
...reminded me of the kind of quasi-legal nitpicking one sees in Slashdot posts almost every day. It's the same kind of thing you see when you have two children in the back seat on a long road trip, and one or both of them are determined to pick a fight, so whatever rules you lay down, they interpret them as literally and selectively as possible in order to violate the spirit of the rule while keeping tenuously to the letter. Child A pokes child B, so you tell them not to touch each other, at which point A pokes B with some object, arguing that he didn't poke B, the object did.
Slashdot Mirror
"after $1k/month on rent for a nice apt near the beach, and another $1k on food/car/entertainment, my expenses are pretty much covered."
So how's that retirement portfolio looking? Planning on spending your later years in a concrete tower?
More likely that all sorts of white upper-middle class trustifarian college students start demanding $75,000 for everyone, to the chant of "Happiness is a human right!"
Then come the 'experts' at House and Senate hearings:
"Over 240 million Americans go to bed every night without Happiness. Americans are unhappy right here on our own shores! We must end Sadness! When I was in college, I was unhappy. After my accident, I got a $75,000 settlement from the university, and from then on I was happy. I come here to tell you that if every American had the same $75K opportunity I did, we could end Sadness forever."
"The whole mortgage melt down was caused by..."
Don't forget the uneducated consumers who happily took out mortgages that they could not afford. Back in 2005 I was approved for a mortgage with payments that would have added up to 98.5% of my income at the time (after the intro period). The banker told me that 'I could just refinance!' and that 'you'll be making more by then!'. I walked out of the bank and kept renting.
Yes, banks shouldn't have been able to 'pass the buck' to investors so quickly, they should be accountable for the mortgages they originate, but the House of Cards that the banks built wouldn't have toppled if the consumers were being responsible.
Banks shouldn't be making jumbo loans to folks with shrimpy incomes, and people who can't figure out a mortgage payment with a calculator and a pencil shouldn't be doing half-million dollar deals with banks. There's plenty of blame to pass around.
Or encrypt your home machine and just remote to it via RDP or VNC from work. That way the only 'data' that ever leaves your home is encrypted jumbled raw streams of RDP traffic, not sensitive files.
The control interface wouldn't have to be -that- complex... We already have plenty of operating systems that could do it, given the device drivers and hardware.
As for the guests... The beauty there is that the guests will actually be -less- complex. If the scheduling is handled by the host, guest doesn't need to cache anything, and can interact with the host VFS instead of a virtual block device, you could have a much lighter-weight OS. You wouldn't even need paging/swap, the host would just move 'cold' pages to disk after a while.
The host OS would likely see everything, RAM, storage, etc on a single 64-bit address space. Stuff that needs to be fast gets moved to the 'high' addresses (backed by RAM) and stuff that's cold migrates toward the 'low' addresses (backed by disk). As you add RAM and storage, the available addresses on the massive 64-bit space move closer to convergence. Of course, a fair portion of the storage is going to act as backup/redundancy for the RAM, and a fair portion of the RAM will act as a cache for recently-migrated or 'warm' storage.
The problem with automated sniping, and these algorithmic trades, is that there's no real evaluation going on... If ten people are bidding for my item, I expect the price to go up until people drop out. If there is a sniper, they usually win the item. Now imagine that there are only three people bidding, and they're all snipers. Whoever has the best sniping tool wins the item. That's lame.
I heard a number that may or may not be true... That historically, the entirety of capital in the stock market turned over at about 30%/year. These days, it appears that the number is 320%/year. Sure, liquidity is a generally a good thing, but I think we're well past the point of diminishing returns; we might even benefit from some 'stickiness' to the market.
Also, I just really don't like the idea that someone using a sniping tool or a 'wired-in' computer has a competitive advantage that's not available to regular traders. That's just not ethical. It's one thing to sell trading tools that make the job easier, but the idea that some database can unload tens of billions of dollars in the time it takes for my monitor to refresh is insanity, and it's setting us up for some really bad times.
You're right. Sorry about that, I hadn't read-up on the term.
I have a simple solution for problems that could be caused by these high-speed robots doing the trades, and also for eBay's 'sniping' problem (where your item sits for days untouched, and then the bids all land in the last thirty seconds).
Just add some 'fuzzy logic' to the time things happen. eBay auctions would randomly end 'between 10:05 and 10:10", forcing snipers to bid before the end of the trading. Same for the stock market, just have trades execute, by law, on a 'random' basis within a certain time period after they're filed. I'm not sure what the right balance between stability and liquidity is, but I'll guess that a two minute window would discourage most high-speed trading.
"I would even prefer an external video card for my desktop computer (if performance matched the internal version). It could have its own case, cooling, and powerbrick, instead of murdering my internal power supply, heating my computer up, screaming like a jet engine, and possible bursting into flames when my haphazard system design blocks vital airflow."
You're too much in the minority for a market to be built up for you. Haven't you realized that these days people want to buy -one box- with -as few cables as possible- and just replace it every four years? Noby except the nerdiest 5% want to go to the store to pick out a storage array, memory array, GPU, and 'interface'. People want iMacs.
That said, this technology could be indispensable for doing to CPUs and RAM what we've already done to storage in the datacenter (read: commoditize the crap out of it).
1. The Internet already does that. How much of the experience today is processed partly in a faraway datacenter? I know that even users like me use the Internet as a method to pull things away from each other so each part lives where it makes sense. I have a powerful desktop at home that I RDP into from whatever portable device I happen to be toting. I don't worry about my laptop getting stolen, the experience is pretty fast (faster than a netbook's local CPU, for sure), and I get to mix-and-match my portable hardware.
2. This is going to have much more use at a datacenter than it will in a server closet or a home. I can already fit more RAM, CPU, and Storage than I need in a typical desktop. Most small businesses run fine on one or two servers. Datacenters, on the other hand, could really take advantage to commoditizing RAM and CPU, like they have with SANs in storage. No more 'host box/VM', it's time to take the next step and pool RAM and CPUs, and provision them to VMs through some sort of software/hardware control fabric. I think Cisco already knows this, which is why they're moving to building servers.
Imagine the datacenter of the future:
Instead of discrete PC servers with multiple VM guests each and CAT-6 LAN plugs, you have a pool of RAM, a pool of storage, and a pool of CPUs controlled by some sort of control interface. Instead of plugging the NIC on the back of it into your network equipment, the control interface is -built into- the network core, wired right into the backplane of your LAN. Extra CPU power that's not actually being used will be put to work by the control fabric compressing and deduplicating stuff in storage and RAM. The control interface will 'learn' that some types of data are better served off of the faster set of drives, or in unused RAM allocated as storage. 'Cold' data would slowly migrate to cheap, redundant arrays.
Guest systems will change, too. No longer will VMs do their own disk caching. It makes sense for a regular server to put all its own RAM to use, but on a system like this, it makes sense to let the 'host fabric' handle the intelligent stuff. Guest operating systems will likely evolve to speak directly to the 'host' VFS to avoid I/O penalties, and to communicate needs for more or less resources (why should a VM that never uses more than 1GB RAM and averages two threads always be allocated 4GB and eight threads?).
Don't forget the benefit of being able to tell your employees that they get to spend 8 hours a day on top-of-the-line equipment.
I know that it's a huge 'benefit' that I get to play with all sorts of hardware and software at my job. I assume the best mechanics flock to working on NASCAR vehicles, I would assume the same thing happens with tech people and tech jobs.
Seriously, if my employer pushed hard on gigabit to my desk, that would be a benefit for both of us. I don't like waiting two hours for a file to move over the LAN, and they don't like paying for it. I've been bored to tears over long file transfers or slow jobs.
If they told me during the negotiation process that I would have gigabit, a 'workstation class' PC, access to all the toys that might touch the LAN (iPad, iPod Touch, Android stuff, netbooks, etc.), a modern Mac, and my own piece of Cisco equipment and an ESX host to play with, I would be willing to settle for less upfront pay, just because it makes my job more fun, fast, and fulfilling.
Also, something I really miss is being able to have a pick of hardware that's getting scrapped. I don't have that option at my current job, but I used to be able to snag dozens of aging pieces of hardware, refurbish them, and give them to friends who wanted to get online. That's a huge benefit, assuming you're hiring public-service oriented people.
I hate to say it, but the nature of CPUs has changed so much since the Core architecture that you might want to eBay that box and buy something like an Atom Nettop.
The G5 and P4 were both pretty much the 'end of the line' of the idea that faster=hotter and more power-hungry.
I keep a G4 dualie around for Mac work, but it's basically a space heater. I advise clients to decommission their P4-based systems ASAP. My dual-core Core 2 idles at under 60W, the G4 uses almost 200W and shows a lot less for it.
Seriously, somewhere out there is a young web designer who wants that G5. eBay it. Take the money and buy a modern machine that -is- supported by the latest distros and won't silently cost you $10/month.
I really like the Atom 330/ION combination, you get low-power, dual-core, accelerated video and 2D, and 64-bits of goodness. Sure, it's slower than a G5, but it's enough to saturate a gigabit pipe, or play 1080p h.264 via HDMI, browse, type, serve files or multimedia, etc. You could probably buy three matching ION-based nettops if you tossed the G5.
Have you tried calling your insurance company and telling this to them?
First, file a claim. You have renter's insurance, right?
Assuming you haven't...
Do an nslookup on the IP address to find out what you can glean about which ISP/node the user is at. You might be able to do some sort of geographical IP lookup, I know mine narrows it down to about three houses.
Call the local police in -that- area and tell them that you've identified your stolen property, conference a police detective in with the ISP and see if the ISP folks fold and give an address/account that's actionable. There's still no warrant, so the officer will likely stop by and 'ask politely' (especially if you offer to ride-along). Failing that (meaning that the thief knows their rights), you'll have to ask the officer to get a warrant, which he will bitch and moan about, and it likely won't happen.
By this time, that insurance deductible is looking mighty reasonable, and you should get a policy.
If you're dead-serious about justice and you know the address/account... Take the person to small claims. You won't need a lawyer if you have everything written down and articulated, and have friendly municipal workers in your area. I'm not entirely sure, but I think that those judges have an easier path (a fellow judges' number) to get a warrant issued, and then you're back to the cops.
Now... In the future... Keep a better eye on your stuff, get an insurance policy, and -always- stash enough money to pay the deductible somewhere where you won't spend it. I guarantee the $12/month and $250 in your 'unlinked' savings account would be more than worth this kind of effort. Plus, acting like a fat-cat and having a new laptop paid for is much more rewarding than rarely-served justice.
Not anymore, though. I'm a Rhode Islander, and last year they canceled school -because it was too cold-. Laughable. I remember waiting 45 minutes for the bus in 0-degree weather when I was a kid.
Too Cold. Bah!
This is pointless. Really. All the machines will test within a few percent of each other. It's not like a Dell is significantly faster than an HP (especially if the software image is the same).
If the machines have different CPU/Chipsets/Video Cards, that's a different story, but a PC -is- really just the sum of its parts.
Tell the C-level execs that the best value would be to skip the benchmark and go right to the bidding, let the vendors undercut each other for an extra month.
Actually, if we take the number of gallons we've pumped from deep-sea drilling and divide it by the number spilled in blowouts (which there have been, this is not the first time this has happened), we have a number. It's very tiny number, but it's actionable, and you could feed it to policy makers and actuaries.
Thinking that a single blowout will collapse the crust of the earth and cause neighboring deposits to rupture is sort of like thinking that I could blow up a skyscraper by flicking a cigarette butt at it. Sorry, just ain't gonna happen.
The methane released (and absorbed) likely pales in comparison to what's generated by the sediment in a few square miles of ocean anyway.
I work next to the ocean, the water is between 2 and 8 feet deep (tidal), it sits there bubbling methane all freaking day.
Also, I did the math a few days ago, but the Mississippi dumps more petroleum distillates into the gulf on a daily basis than a 5,000 bbl oil spill does. Remember, this area of water is the watershed for a huge portion of the country. Every drop of oil that drips off the bottom of a car, every ounce of paint that gets into septic systems in the midwest works its way down to this outlet.
The big problem here likely won't be the oil in the environment as a whole, it's the -concentration- of it in some places. The gulf is huge, that will be a mitigating factor, but I'm sure some places will get 'bunches' of oil that cause localized problems.
How about leaving room on that rope for owners of hotels in front of clean beaches that are filing for damages for 'lost business'? Or the fishermen who are staying home (also filing suit) instead of going a few miles out of the way to approved fishing grounds?
Listen, this is an environmental disaster, no doubt about it. It needs to get plugged. The rules have to get changed to have more safety mechanisms and stricter BOP checkups, for sure. I'm no BP apologist. What's pissing me off is when I hear that this will 'devastate' areas that it will likely only 'affect'. This will not be the end of the Gulf, it will not be the end of the ocean (as I've heard some folks say). The volume might exceed the Valdez, but there is a totally different set of circumstances here that will likely make this -far- less of a problem than the Sierra Club crowd is predicting.
There aren't 'trillions' of barrels under this particular well. It's not like collapsing this well would cause all the other wells to collapse too. And as far as I know, the likelihood of this deposit collapsing is very, very low; unmeasurably low.
So far, oil isn't even washing up on beaches in any appreciable way. A huge portion of the area is an oxygen-depleted, polluted 'dead zone' anyway because of the Mississippi. Last I checked, only -two- birds had been collected for cleaning. Only about 4% of the gulf is blocked-off from fishing, and the larger fisheries aren't even expecting much damage, they're taking a 'wait and see' stance.
Still, (as of yet) clean beaches and untainted food seem to scare consumers away from vacations and shrimp, not because there's a risk, but because most consumers are total alarmist bozos, just like most career-environmentalists.
It looks like he opened up the mail and then closed it right away. That stuff happens, even at work. People have sent me NSFW things before without warning that I've opened up and -quickly- closed.
Also, since when is a row of girls wearing swimsuits (maybe a few are topless) 'porn'?
Give the dude a break.
It's not big leaks... More that the river is where all the oil and water-soluble pollution from the middle of the whole country ends up coming out.
http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/
I say we rope-up as much oil as we can, keep it over the dead zone, and spray surfactants at it to clump it together and let it sink harmlessly to the already-polluted and useless seabed.
Check the reference on page 241:
http://books.google.com/books?id=9bHZm_9ZtgkC&lpg=PA238&ots=2TNRXUSPu0&dq=oil%20in%20the%20sea%20III%20mississippi&pg=PA241#v=onepage&q&f=false
This is a 'big deal' in the short term, but as long as shorelines are boomed-off and this thing gets plugged, the mid-to-long term effects are negligible.
I don't have the quote handy, but higher-ups at some of the larger fisheries were saying that they don't expect this to impact their business much when it's all said and done. The guys on the news and radio saying that this will 'devastate' the industry either don't understand the scope of the impact, or are looking for some 'assistance'.
Listen, I don't want to get crucified for this, but I did the math yesterday. 5,000 barrels a day sounds like a lot, but this spill only adds about 45% to the total daily runoff coming out of the Mississippi anyway. If this gets plugged in 30 days, the total increase in annual oil going into this 'neighborhood' will be about 4%.
Again, I'm not defending the spill, it needs to get plugged, but this isn't going to dramatically change the situation in that area of the Gulf, mostly because the Gulf is such a mess already.
So I'm testing this now... It will be a few hours. Thinking that VirtualBox has the same EFI and VMM on all host platforms, I'm building an OS X VM on a Mac, exporting it, and importing it at home on my Linux host. Hopefully it will work.
...reminded me of the kind of quasi-legal nitpicking one sees in Slashdot posts almost every day. It's the same kind of thing you see when you have two children in the back seat on a long road trip, and one or both of them are determined to pick a fight, so whatever rules you lay down, they interpret them as literally and selectively as possible in order to violate the spirit of the rule while keeping tenuously to the letter. Child A pokes child B, so you tell them not to touch each other, at which point A pokes B with some object, arguing that he didn't poke B, the object did.
No worries, your children have a bright future in the Rhode Island State Legislature