You know you've successfully made a point on Slashdot when your post gets modded up to +5 then back down to -1 within the first 30 minutes of it being up.
Just proof that the moderation system is a popularity contest amongst a slightly more intellectual crowd. It's not news.
The web is full of landmines. They're going to download and repost something that someone who has good lawyers is going to demand they remove, and then they'll die... quietly.
And from a liability standpoint, there SHOULDN'T be a difference, but there is. You run into a car, you have to pay for it. BP blows up the gulf: they should pay for it. Except they won't.
Which has nothing to do with it, the simple fact is they are not paying the costs and you are shilling for them.
False. The CEO is on record as saying they will. And since the disaster isn't over yet, it's hard to say they aren't paying -- the final bill hasn't arrived yet.
(Note well: This assumes the survivor was telling the truth.)
Indeed it does. And when you've got this much press coverage, I think it's reasonable to conclude somebody might want to make a few bucks on the talk show circuit. They can always recant later, when the truth comes out and say they were "mistaken".
This was people cutting corners and getting caught.
Neither of us, I'm pretty sure, are qualified to say whether it was within tolerances to put two plugs instead of three down, or what pieces of rubber coming out might mean. And nobody who is qualified to make those claims has stepped forward to make the conclusion the media has made. The reason is because there aren't enough facts yet to form a professional conclusion -- and all of this is speculation. The media is great at speculation, jumping to conclusions, and reporting only half the facts, then over-analyzing and saying "what if".
This is why I have mostly ignored the media's reporting of what caused the accident: The objective and full truth will still take months, if not years, to be known. It is very likely to be like most disasters: There was no single point of failure, but a series of failures and mistakes that led to the disaster, and nobody at the time had all the facts to realize "oh shit, it's a perfect storm!"
People say this is all about BP making a profit by cutting corners and that's what caused it. In reality, it makes no sense to allow a production rig to explode and topple into the ocean and kill your employees to save a buck. They likely did a risk assessment and concluded it was safe. The assessment was probably flawed somehow and retrospectively we'll find out how.
But again, that's years from now, not today. Today, people just want a name to vent their rage at -- and people hate waiting when they're angry.
All of your links are to a single person, Mike Mason, an electrical engineer, making claims about equipment he doesn't service.
Now, where's my +5, Informative? Or will this be a -1, Troll for not immediately jumping to hysterics and saying we should burn BP to the ground as profiteering gluttons -- which is what's happened to all my other posts so far.
Because the large corporation is posting billions of dollars in profits because of their drilling?
Do you work for free?
Because some people are implying that BP engaged in several salvage operations before looking to actually lose the well?
Do you write your car off as a loss whenever it gets in a fender bender, or do you see if you can save it first?
Because a car accident puts the occupants of your vehicle and the other vehicle at risk, not entire countries, their economies and endangered animals in the surrounding environment?
A change of scale doesn't change the ethics.
Because (as the article noted) we're about to let Shell start drilling in the Arctic where the seas are rougher and the location more remote to create delays in response times?
A completely different environment and set of circumstances to what's happening now. Apples, meet oranges. That said, it's nice that we learn how to deal with engineering failures like this in a more easily accessible location than a less hospitable one.
I think at this point we could reopen the debate on the effects of a nuclear plant failing compared to an oil line failing. And how much easier and effective it is to drop a cofferdam on a nuclear core than a well miles below the surface of water.
Again, with the scale argument.
Your argument of it being a one time thing that is unprecedented does not sit well with me when we look to expand on the number of wells we have. Precedent has now been set. Either tighten regulations so that your point (a) doesn't happen and point (b) is actually true. Care to prove point (c)?
1. An oil spill of this magnitude has only happened once before: Ixtoc I, in 1979. It took 10 months before it could be capped. The BOP also failed.
After that disaster, regulations were tightened and another disaster like this didn't happen for 31 years. Currently, the US consumes 19.6 million barrels of oil per day. In 1979, it was less than half that. So we've doubled the amount of oil consumption, and we're averaging 1 accident every 31 years. I'd say regulations have worked out pretty well so far.
When bad things go wrong to corporations making lots and lots of money, then they should be held accountable, girlintraining. Why you rush to BP and the oil industry's rescue, I'll never know.
I'm not rushing to their rescue, I'm taking a larger view -- one that looks at how to fix a problem, instead of who to blame. These disasters are the inevitable result of industrialization -- the focus needs to be limiting their damage and scope, because we'll always have disasters regardless of what energy source we choose.
Accidents are rarely accidents, someone fucked up.
Human beings aren't perfect.
I sure blame the person who backed into my last car. Guess what she did not even come close to risking death zones in the gulf.
The scale of the accident doesn't change the ethics. If you say killing one person in self-defense is right, then at what point does it become wrong? Five people? Ten? Fifty? How many people have to die before it becomes unethical? Likewise -- if you spill a quart of oil down the drain, by scale you've done what BP just did -- it's just that BP employs a lot more people and pumps a lot more oil, but reduced to your personal scale of living, it's the same.
Her insurance paid the for everything and got me a rental while my car was fixed. That is all we ask here, they fix their mess.
They've promised to do more than she did: Not only will the insurance pay for it, but BP has promised to pay for all costs above and beyond that. They are fixing their mess, using the best methods available to them. But the engineering task before them is daunting, and many of these solutions have never been tested before. They don't have a laboratory to test these things out in -- it's happening now.
These assholes cut corners, you can read all about on the news sites.
These "assholes" haven't been charged with any violation of federal or state law, and right now Congress is taking notice of this and changing the laws, issuing temporary bans on drilling, etc., because of exactly that fact. They didn't cut corners -- they appear to have followed the then-current industry regulations.
That said... The investigation isn't complete. We don't know all the facts. We won't know for a long time yet, and everything the news is reporting is largely speculation. A battery was low on power, that must mean negligence! Or it could be that a battery that's several thousand feet below sea level might have sprung a leak during a massive explosion near it. We. Just. Don't. Know.
Wait. That's all we can do right now. The facts will eventually reveal themselves -- but allowing ourselves to have contempt prior to investigation is the surest way to keep our society in everlasting ignorance. And I, for one, believe we need to know the facts and find out what really did go wrong -- so it never happens again. That's a purpose independent of the political agenda currently playing out here and elsewhere, and the more important one in my opinion.
Everybody wants to blame the need for oil, or greedy corporations, or a slew of other things for this disaster. Not once do they acknowledge that (a) this is an unprecidented engineering failure, (b) there were multiple safeguards, (c) it's an economic necessity that we drill for oil, and (d) Murphy's law -- no matter how hard you try, eventually mistakes will be made.
BP is doing everything possible to fix the problem, while we sit on the sidelines and debate their ineffectiveness. I don't think that's really fair -- if we get into a car accident, we're quick to shrug it off as just that: an accident. Nobody's fault. We pick up the pieces and move on.
But when it's a large corporation, we somehow think they should be held to a higher standard? No, I don't think they should. They're holding themselves to the same standard the average person would.
Until we figure out a way to legislate in a way that applies some degree of common sense, this sort of thing just can't be allowed.
Common sense has no place in our legal system. The life of the law in this country is not knowledge, but experience. It is reactionary by nature -- and it is the one part of our country's government that is not subject to democratic review. If you want to fix the system... Start by figuring out how to make it democratic. Then cry long and hard when you find out what people really think justice is.
Wait, a device that buzzes, beeps, has whirring fans that spin at several thousand RPM, harddrives, printers, and sometimes entire home entertainment systems connected to them... could disturb sleep? I have to disagree. I've fallen asleep on my keyboard numerous times, and the newer models don't beep when the keyboard buffer gets filled. It's a disappointing feature, really -- it means about once a month, the first hour of my waking life has QWEASDFZXCV written on the side of my face.
I think the real issue here is that keyboards aren't comfortable to sleep on.
Learning to get away with stuff is vital to the developmental process
I know you meant this in jest, but there's some truth to what you're saying: Pushing the envelope, testing the rules, authority, and the environment around you is an essential part of childhood and adolescence. If they never explore and discover their own boundaries, they'll remain at risk of blundering into dangerous territory. I challenge my 13 yo sister whenever I see her to explore and open her up to new experiences. While she does it under my supervision, that doesn't negate the point I'm making:
Kids who don't explore don't grow. And testing limits is a natural part of that process... if you went through your childhood without ever getting into trouble and had only perfect grades, you're badly prepared for adult living.
Yes, don't we all just hate those attacks we're suffering all the time. Finally the LLNL is spending money where it's really needed.
It hasn't happened yet but that's never been a reason not to design safety systems to limit the damage. I do believe there's a major ecological disaster underway right now in the Gulf of Mexico teaching us this lesson right now. In a biological or chemical attack, minutes or hours matter in determining the agent(s)/pathology. Do you feel it would be money wasted if fifty thousand lives were saved because we were able to identify the agent and effect appropriate safety measures, instead of blindly groping for answers?
Eventually, a biological or chemical attack will happen -- either due to the result of human error, terrorism, or another cause: It's out there in the environment now. Sooner or later, it'll come in contact with other people, and we'll want this technology there.
21 comments, and half are along the lines of "I don't see what the problem is". It's an[deleted] [deleted] [moral indignation] [deleted]... Nice set of double standards we've got working there.
Hardly. We're just holding senators to the same standards we'd hold anyone else too -- which is that he's a human being and regardless of how important the job is, the brain needs downtime. You spend how many hours a day in a room covered in wood and architecture, listening to the echoing voices of other self-important people, and see if you don't occasionally have an urgent need to tune out. Floor debates are just like office meetings... Everybody nods their head and waits for their turn to speak, and prays the guy standing will finish before lunchtime.
There's worse ways to pass the time. *shrug* Only in America would it even make the news 'zomfg, someone's viewing porn in the senate!'... In other countries they make porn on the senate floor and it doesn't make the news.
Okay, I thought this was pretty obvious: Google realizes it's not going to remain a financial powerhouse by milking the same products over and over. Like every other tech firm, if you don't diversify you die. Google is capitalizing on the massive cash reserves it has right now by spreading itself out as much as possible. Anything even tangentially relevant to its existing business enterprises is going to be explored. And it's not like people are going to stop needing electricity anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Selective enforcement is what creates tyranny and allows those in authority undue power in determining who's looked after and who isn't.
You know you've successfully made a point on Slashdot when your post gets modded up to +5 then back down to -1 within the first 30 minutes of it being up.
Just proof that the moderation system is a popularity contest amongst a slightly more intellectual crowd. It's not news.
The web is full of landmines. They're going to download and repost something that someone who has good lawyers is going to demand they remove, and then they'll die... quietly.
And from a liability standpoint, there SHOULDN'T be a difference, but there is. You run into a car, you have to pay for it. BP blows up the gulf: they should pay for it. Except they won't.
Oh, they say they will, and if they don't, they'll be made to.
Which didn't include common safety measures taken elsewhere
Citation?
Because they lobbied heavily against them...
Sounds like a legislator, or several, need to join them on the crucifix then.
Which has nothing to do with it, the simple fact is they are not paying the costs and you are shilling for them.
False. The CEO is on record as saying they will. And since the disaster isn't over yet, it's hard to say they aren't paying -- the final bill hasn't arrived yet.
(Note well: This assumes the survivor was telling the truth.)
Indeed it does. And when you've got this much press coverage, I think it's reasonable to conclude somebody might want to make a few bucks on the talk show circuit. They can always recant later, when the truth comes out and say they were "mistaken".
This was people cutting corners and getting caught.
Neither of us, I'm pretty sure, are qualified to say whether it was within tolerances to put two plugs instead of three down, or what pieces of rubber coming out might mean. And nobody who is qualified to make those claims has stepped forward to make the conclusion the media has made. The reason is because there aren't enough facts yet to form a professional conclusion -- and all of this is speculation. The media is great at speculation, jumping to conclusions, and reporting only half the facts, then over-analyzing and saying "what if".
This is why I have mostly ignored the media's reporting of what caused the accident: The objective and full truth will still take months, if not years, to be known. It is very likely to be like most disasters: There was no single point of failure, but a series of failures and mistakes that led to the disaster, and nobody at the time had all the facts to realize "oh shit, it's a perfect storm!"
People say this is all about BP making a profit by cutting corners and that's what caused it. In reality, it makes no sense to allow a production rig to explode and topple into the ocean and kill your employees to save a buck. They likely did a risk assessment and concluded it was safe. The assessment was probably flawed somehow and retrospectively we'll find out how.
But again, that's years from now, not today. Today, people just want a name to vent their rage at -- and people hate waiting when they're angry.
All of your links are to a single person, Mike Mason, an electrical engineer, making claims about equipment he doesn't service.
Now, where's my +5, Informative? Or will this be a -1, Troll for not immediately jumping to hysterics and saying we should burn BP to the ground as profiteering gluttons -- which is what's happened to all my other posts so far.
Because the large corporation is posting billions of dollars in profits because of their drilling?
Do you work for free?
Because some people are implying that BP engaged in several salvage operations before looking to actually lose the well?
Do you write your car off as a loss whenever it gets in a fender bender, or do you see if you can save it first?
Because a car accident puts the occupants of your vehicle and the other vehicle at risk, not entire countries, their economies and endangered animals in the surrounding environment?
A change of scale doesn't change the ethics.
Because (as the article noted) we're about to let Shell start drilling in the Arctic where the seas are rougher and the location more remote to create delays in response times?
A completely different environment and set of circumstances to what's happening now. Apples, meet oranges. That said, it's nice that we learn how to deal with engineering failures like this in a more easily accessible location than a less hospitable one.
I think at this point we could reopen the debate on the effects of a nuclear plant failing compared to an oil line failing. And how much easier and effective it is to drop a cofferdam on a nuclear core than a well miles below the surface of water.
Again, with the scale argument.
Your argument of it being a one time thing that is unprecedented does not sit well with me when we look to expand on the number of wells we have. Precedent has now been set. Either tighten regulations so that your point (a) doesn't happen and point (b) is actually true. Care to prove point (c)?
1. An oil spill of this magnitude has only happened once before: Ixtoc I, in 1979. It took 10 months before it could be capped. The BOP also failed.
After that disaster, regulations were tightened and another disaster like this didn't happen for 31 years. Currently, the US consumes 19.6 million barrels of oil per day. In 1979, it was less than half that. So we've doubled the amount of oil consumption, and we're averaging 1 accident every 31 years. I'd say regulations have worked out pretty well so far.
When bad things go wrong to corporations making lots and lots of money, then they should be held accountable, girlintraining. Why you rush to BP and the oil industry's rescue, I'll never know.
I'm not rushing to their rescue, I'm taking a larger view -- one that looks at how to fix a problem, instead of who to blame. These disasters are the inevitable result of industrialization -- the focus needs to be limiting their damage and scope, because we'll always have disasters regardless of what energy source we choose.
Accidents are rarely accidents, someone fucked up.
Human beings aren't perfect.
I sure blame the person who backed into my last car. Guess what she did not even come close to risking death zones in the gulf.
The scale of the accident doesn't change the ethics. If you say killing one person in self-defense is right, then at what point does it become wrong? Five people? Ten? Fifty? How many people have to die before it becomes unethical? Likewise -- if you spill a quart of oil down the drain, by scale you've done what BP just did -- it's just that BP employs a lot more people and pumps a lot more oil, but reduced to your personal scale of living, it's the same.
Her insurance paid the for everything and got me a rental while my car was fixed. That is all we ask here, they fix their mess.
They've promised to do more than she did: Not only will the insurance pay for it, but BP has promised to pay for all costs above and beyond that. They are fixing their mess, using the best methods available to them. But the engineering task before them is daunting, and many of these solutions have never been tested before. They don't have a laboratory to test these things out in -- it's happening now.
These assholes cut corners, you can read all about on the news sites.
These "assholes" haven't been charged with any violation of federal or state law, and right now Congress is taking notice of this and changing the laws, issuing temporary bans on drilling, etc., because of exactly that fact. They didn't cut corners -- they appear to have followed the then-current industry regulations.
That said... The investigation isn't complete. We don't know all the facts. We won't know for a long time yet, and everything the news is reporting is largely speculation. A battery was low on power, that must mean negligence! Or it could be that a battery that's several thousand feet below sea level might have sprung a leak during a massive explosion near it. We. Just. Don't. Know.
Wait. That's all we can do right now. The facts will eventually reveal themselves -- but allowing ourselves to have contempt prior to investigation is the surest way to keep our society in everlasting ignorance. And I, for one, believe we need to know the facts and find out what really did go wrong -- so it never happens again. That's a purpose independent of the political agenda currently playing out here and elsewhere, and the more important one in my opinion.
Accept car accidents don't kill of entire ecosystems.
The scale changes, the ethics remain unchanged.
Everybody wants to blame the need for oil, or greedy corporations, or a slew of other things for this disaster. Not once do they acknowledge that (a) this is an unprecidented engineering failure, (b) there were multiple safeguards, (c) it's an economic necessity that we drill for oil, and (d) Murphy's law -- no matter how hard you try, eventually mistakes will be made.
BP is doing everything possible to fix the problem, while we sit on the sidelines and debate their ineffectiveness. I don't think that's really fair -- if we get into a car accident, we're quick to shrug it off as just that: an accident. Nobody's fault. We pick up the pieces and move on.
But when it's a large corporation, we somehow think they should be held to a higher standard? No, I don't think they should. They're holding themselves to the same standard the average person would.
et tu brutus?
Then the privacy groups scream like an orgasm?
I'm trying really hard to make this analogy work, but it makes my brain hurt each time I try. And other things.
"...hoping big things will come out of it"
Does Microsoft make anything that isn't slow, bloated, and fully integrated into skyne--I mean .NET?
Seriously. Where is all this pressure to bypass warrants coming from?
An apathetic citizentry kills democracy faster than any group's ambitions.
Despite all my rage, I am still just a rat in a... battery?
Until we figure out a way to legislate in a way that applies some degree of common sense, this sort of thing just can't be allowed.
Common sense has no place in our legal system. The life of the law in this country is not knowledge, but experience. It is reactionary by nature -- and it is the one part of our country's government that is not subject to democratic review. If you want to fix the system... Start by figuring out how to make it democratic. Then cry long and hard when you find out what people really think justice is.
The sooner we get these people off Limewire and onto Bittorrent, the sooner I can stop having to clean trojans off my friends PCs every few weeks.
The sooner they migrate to BT, the sooner the trojans follow.
Wait, a device that buzzes, beeps, has whirring fans that spin at several thousand RPM, harddrives, printers, and sometimes entire home entertainment systems connected to them... could disturb sleep? I have to disagree. I've fallen asleep on my keyboard numerous times, and the newer models don't beep when the keyboard buffer gets filled. It's a disappointing feature, really -- it means about once a month, the first hour of my waking life has QWEASDFZXCV written on the side of my face.
I think the real issue here is that keyboards aren't comfortable to sleep on.
Learning to get away with stuff is vital to the developmental process
I know you meant this in jest, but there's some truth to what you're saying: Pushing the envelope, testing the rules, authority, and the environment around you is an essential part of childhood and adolescence. If they never explore and discover their own boundaries, they'll remain at risk of blundering into dangerous territory. I challenge my 13 yo sister whenever I see her to explore and open her up to new experiences. While she does it under my supervision, that doesn't negate the point I'm making:
Kids who don't explore don't grow. And testing limits is a natural part of that process... if you went through your childhood without ever getting into trouble and had only perfect grades, you're badly prepared for adult living.
Yes, don't we all just hate those attacks we're suffering all the time. Finally the LLNL is spending money where it's really needed.
It hasn't happened yet but that's never been a reason not to design safety systems to limit the damage. I do believe there's a major ecological disaster underway right now in the Gulf of Mexico teaching us this lesson right now. In a biological or chemical attack, minutes or hours matter in determining the agent(s)/pathology. Do you feel it would be money wasted if fifty thousand lives were saved because we were able to identify the agent and effect appropriate safety measures, instead of blindly groping for answers?
Eventually, a biological or chemical attack will happen -- either due to the result of human error, terrorism, or another cause: It's out there in the environment now. Sooner or later, it'll come in contact with other people, and we'll want this technology there.
move in with your girlfriend, that will save you 3 keys right there
Or do what your girlfriend does, and use a purse. -_-
21 comments, and half are along the lines of "I don't see what the problem is". It's an[deleted] [deleted] [moral indignation] [deleted]... Nice set of double standards we've got working there.
Hardly. We're just holding senators to the same standards we'd hold anyone else too -- which is that he's a human being and regardless of how important the job is, the brain needs downtime. You spend how many hours a day in a room covered in wood and architecture, listening to the echoing voices of other self-important people, and see if you don't occasionally have an urgent need to tune out. Floor debates are just like office meetings... Everybody nods their head and waits for their turn to speak, and prays the guy standing will finish before lunchtime.
There's worse ways to pass the time. *shrug* Only in America would it even make the news 'zomfg, someone's viewing porn in the senate!' ... In other countries they make porn on the senate floor and it doesn't make the news.
Okay, I thought this was pretty obvious: Google realizes it's not going to remain a financial powerhouse by milking the same products over and over. Like every other tech firm, if you don't diversify you die. Google is capitalizing on the massive cash reserves it has right now by spreading itself out as much as possible. Anything even tangentially relevant to its existing business enterprises is going to be explored. And it's not like people are going to stop needing electricity anytime soon.