Germany is am important market and it is probably causing a lot os ressource use at fb. its in the own interest of fb to either server ads there or not serve them.
However, if FB (or $internet_ad_funded_site$, because we're moving to a more general point here) find that by complying with local laws they find that more specifically German advertisers are more willing to pay them to post adverts that comply with German laws to facebook.de, than would pay them to post adverts to facebook.com, then the actual losses may be relatively small. Possibly even negative losses (i.e., amking more money.
If the alternative were that FB weren't allowed to operate in Germany, because they broke German laws, then that would almost certainly be a major loss for FB. They could of course choose to spend hundreds of millions of â (Euro symbol, in case Slashdot is still incapable of displaying normal script) trying to fight the case in the German courts with no guarantee that they'd win, huge damage to the brand globally etc etc.
On the other hand, even a pretty incompetent PR flack could spin "obeying local laws", "respecting privacy", Apfelkuchen und Mutterschaft into a defensible position, while the beansellers should still be able to turn a profit on it, even if they get less from the advertisers per eyeball because the adverts are less precisely targeted than on FB in general.
In general, profit margins differ in differing countries because of the differing costs of operating in differing countries. It's not as if the whole world is going to descend to American levels of advertising intrusion just because... well, American advertising people would like us to.
Well the discussion is moot. Facebook is ad-financed. Ads for Germany are sponsored by German businesses, [SNIP] No business would risk the fall-out from this.
Hmmm, yes, that makes sense. In fact that would be a double whammy for those that chose to proxy around any such ban, because if FB could still detect that a session originated in Germany (by whatever means ; fancy network sniffing or "this user's home country is listed as Germany, and their native tongue as German ; we'll always connect them to facebook.de, no matter where they appear to be coming from"), then it would be in FB's commercial (as well as legal) interests to comply with the local law.
So actually, if the law pushes one way and FB's commercial interests pushes the same way, then FB are going to take account of local laws and route traffic to appropriately managed subdomains. And bugger the circumvention techniques.
There is the trivial case of German people in Germany people lying to FB that they're, say, Burmese nationals visiting Germany. Complaint "but I get FB.mn, not FB.com when I should be getting FB.de and I'm trying to get FB.com" (Myanmar =.mn?) FB investigates... "so you're actually a German in Germany, not a Burmese in Germany. Account terminated : we use real identities here. RTF-ToS"
A few cases like that should be enough to establish their corporate bona fides to the German legal system and they'll just have to live with the fact the America =/= the world.
So we're in agreement here ; there shouldn't actually be a problem. Unless FaceBook corporately want to force all the world to be American.
Siemens could have learned a lot from the Stuxnet episode.
That wouldn't change the installed base though. And it is unlikely to get much of that base patched. "What do you mean, shut the factory down because you need to install some new software? You had your opportunity last October ; you'll get your next opportunity next October. You get one day. Test system? I dunno. You tell me where the test system is ; I know I haven't got room for one here. You must be new here. Just hired last week eh? The last guy quit. I don't know why, but I do know that you're not getting a shutdown until next October, or my ass is on the line."
It would be trivial to deploy a database system to store the more relevant information
Who decides what is relevant or not?
Everything would be recorded anyway, because most doctors are realistic enough to know that they don't (generally) know what is wrong with a patient, but are working to a working hypothesis. So, if that working hypothesis turns out to be wrong and they've discarded the data that didn't conform to their working hypothesis... then they've got to do it all again. Plus there's serious risk of confirmation bias.
That's the doctors having reasonable scientific caution. If the lawyers get involved ("if"? "if"?! can't you tell that I'm joking?), then everything will be recorded, in triplicate, on video. Then audited to fuck. (It was actually some of the auditing data that would have proved that Harold Shipman was a premeditated murderer. His case notes described a patient's death before he made the house call when he killed the patient, and the auditing software recorded when he made the note, and when he corrected the time-stamp on the note.)
[SNIP]in a way that's easy for doctors to access.
Which doctors get which access? There are aspects of my medical history from decades ago that I don't want a doctor at work to read when he's treating my sprained ankle. OTOH, there are aspects of my work (e.g. a month of malaria prophylaxis) that I might want my doctor at home to know about when they're treating my "influenza". I think that I will make that choice, thank you. Not some programmer knocking up a system in his mum's basement.
You tirvialize it as much as you want. I've instructed my doctor to remove my records from the system (as we have the right to do in my country, but I don't know if they have in the other countries of the UK) and to only maintain them as paper copies.
Oh, sorry, have I just added another non-trivial complication : that they're trying to generate one system to cover at least 3 different legal systems (possibly 5 if they're covering the IOM and CI too).
"Trebles and sky-rocketing specifications all round" as the Private Eye cartoon has probably said already. Repeatedly.
The Bristol Exploration Club, a UK-based caving club, have had one of their toys in orbit around Saturn for approaching 5 years now. And they probably have something in orbit around Mars too.
[XKCD is blocked from this site, so I'm not particularly sure precisely which strip you're talking about. But WGAF?]
the dude removes his required uncomfortable safety goggles for a bit because no one will notice.
Then the "dude" is a fucking retard who has never had to irrigate a colleague's eye to get the lime dust out before it scars his cornea, or to hold his own eye still while the burnt-in debris is dug out of his conjunctiva before it scars the inside of his eyelid. Without anaesthetic.
Safety specs are there for a reason. An idiot who interferes with safety equipment may look cool, but it doesn't change the fact that he's a dangerous idiot who should be fired immediately upon his arrest for breaking health and safety law.
The observed features are down to 0.5m across. That's the same as "1/2 metre resolution" as you probably meant to spell it. (Most meters I've met are only small fractions of a metre across, often less than 1/10th.)
Looking at a relatively wet desert, like the Rubh-al-Khalid on the borders of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, how much water do you see at the surface? Fuck all. Well, when I worked there, I didn't ; I had to dig at least 30cm before seeing signs of dampness in the inter-dune deflation hollows. (I cite that particular desert to move things from second-hand experience to first-hand experience.) However, when you look at the landforms, you can see evidence for the presence of sub-surface water even though the surface materials are "dry" to human senses.
These reports are looking at the same sort of features - the difference between extremely dry material and material that is merely as dry as if baked in an oven for days.
Clever people choose to work on this sort of shit when they could be looking at how to stop people from dying, and how in general to stop situations where humans lack basic resources.
Those are not interesting problems, because they've been basically solved a couple of centuries ago. The problem now is a political one of persuading people to implement the simple long-term solution. Unfortunately almost everyone who wants the simple solution to be implemented wants someone else to do the implementing and wants an exemption for themselves.
Like I said, a political problem. Find a politician who cares and back them, if you care to stoop to that level of associating with that sort of shit-eater.
"Alright, we'll see you in a few minutes when we cut your pay again."
FTFY
Remember, we are talking about a capitalist society (TINSTAS*) here, so cutting costs to lower than your competition is essential to increasing the profits of shareholders and senior management (as if they were non-overlapping groups). Everything else doesn't even make it to being counted, let alone being secondary.
(*) There Is No Such Thing As Society, in the words of extraterresstrial monstrosity, "The Maggon".
If the people of Germany want to use the features, which might no longer be supported on facebook.de (currently under Irish legislation) they will simply switch to facebook.com.
... which ISPs in Germany (be they wireless or wired, a relatively small population to gain the compliance of) would be required to redirect to facebook.de...
So, the really, really adamant user would be able to proxy round it.
BFD.
99.9% of the population at risk of having their privacy violated would be using a service which would comply with local laws. The rest... well there is no law against doing something dangerous, and I think that both the ISPs and FB could then fairly claim to have taken reasonable and proportionate steps to comply with the laws.
You can approve expenses? My deepest commiserations on your descent into Management. You can get keyboards with sharp edges, you know. Take the only honourable course open to you.
Such a collision lends itself to catastrophism, a theory of large changes that happen relatively frequently.
Speaking as a geologist... dump the "relatively frequently". If it's happening "relatively frequently", then it's a normal event, even if it's catastrophic.
"Catastrophism" is the acceptance that events do (have) happened in geological history for which we have no direct observational experience. So for a large part of human history, large volcanic eruptions were unexpected catastrophes, until people started to record them (draw a line in the sand at Vesuvius 1871 BP which gave us the term "Plinian" for an identifiable style of eruption ; or at 3710 BP for the Thera/ Santorini eruption with major archaeological effects and arguable literary echoes ; that's a fun topic for a debate). Now we have a fairly good idea what some classes of eruption can do on a regional, continental or even global scale, simply because we've observed it.
The problem is that humans have been around and keeping records for only a few thousand years. So events that happen every 10,000 or so years are mostly beyond our observational experience.
I spend a lot of time working at sea. We have a problem that structures and vessels designed for a "hundred year storm" seem to be suffering "hundred year storms" in most decades. Is this climate change? Possibly. Or is it that during most of the last 100 years, most of the vessels caught in a 10-year storm would have been lost and no records would have survived. So our (statistical terms!) sample of storm records from the population of storms has been improving, and our estimates of the population mean and variance are accordingly changing.
Nothing would be more disasterous for prelife than a 750 mile wide object impacting the surface of the moon,
... apart from perhaps, a 1000km wide impactor?
which at that point in time would be less than 30KM from the earth.
"The Moon less than 30km form the Earth ?" Not very likely - you're within the range of variation of the Earth from sphericity. In the immediate (hours) after the Giant Impact there would have been an atmosphere of vapourised rock (yes, I did type "vapourised rock" there, because I meant "vapourised rock", not something else) form ground level up to several thousand kilometres, rapidly (hours, again) settling into a more-or-less equatorial disc, cooling and condensing into dust, particles and planetesimals. Over a few hours more, these collected into smaller numbers of larger particles, many particles which had been in ballistic trajectories (not orbits) would have re-impacted on the Earth, and out of the chaos some several percent of the ejecta from the Impact collected into a small number of relatively stable planetesimals which continued to interact over the next few years until we were left with more-or-less the system we have (including the tidal evolution since). At this time, the lowest stable orbit would have been a few hundred kilometres up, not 30km.
For perhaps 100,000 years the surface of the earth would be periodically bombarded [...] That would make life constrained to even even _shorter_ time period to evolve life.
It would have reduced the time available from around 900000000 years to 899900000 years.
Wow, you could calculate the effects without having to swap your 4-figure logarithm tables for 7-figure tables.
(I'm implicitly accepting Schopf's claim of cyanobacterial microfossils in the 3.5Ga Apex Cherts as indicating a latest credible date for origin of life ; I'm unconvinced by his evidence for microfossils in the apex Chert, but I don't think he's wrong in his implication that life was well established by this point. I'm allowing a 100Ma for evolution between Schopf's claim and the actual OOL. Obviously I see this as being a decent chunk of time to do chemistry in.)
Object passing the Earth but not stopping there (colliding) will be lensed towards the Moon. But because the Moon is quite small, most of them will miss because they're lensed too much. Seen from the Moon, the annulus on the sky of close encounter trajectories (with the Earth) that will result in a collision that would not otherwise have happened is quite a narrow annulus.
Look at the full Moon in the sky ; now quadruple it's diameter and you've got a first approximation to the view of the Earth form the Moon. Compare that disc to the whole of the sky (including the half below your feet. That is your first approximation to the amount of protection the Moon gets from the Earth. It's a very small amount.
Now, if you want to refine your model look at your 4x Moon-size mark on the sky and compare it to a circle around the sky representing the "plane of the solar system" (the plane of the ecliptic) and around 10 degrees thick (both fists together, at arms length). That's a much smaller region of the sky, but the "Earth-size" patch only occupies around 1% of it. IF all meteorites travelled in this band, that would be a reasonable estimator of the protection or enhancement that the Earth and Moon give to each other.
However, we know that by no means all bodies in the solar system are confined to this belt ; if they were, there would be far fewer polar craters on any planet, and in reality, there are. Look at the number of comets in your lifetime that have appeared in the northern hemisphere of the sky on approach to the Sun and the southern hemisphere on receding form the Sun - it's the norm.
You've now got some bounds for the likely size of the shielding (or concentrating) effect : at best it's going to be in the order of 1%, but likely it's going to be considerably lower. So, to get sufficiently good statistics to clearly demonstrate such an effect, you're going to need to compare two populations of craters each populations in the 10s of thousands.
Frankly, there is little evidence for any such effect. There is strong evidence that any such effect is not a strong effect.
Oh, and by the way, early models of the Giant Impact had two proto-Moons forming form the debris cloud in somewhere between 1-in-10 and 1-in-4 of the modelled impacts. The precise proportions have varied as modelling has changed (mostly as computational modelling has increased particle counts and increased the fineness of the models), but the formation of multiple Moons remains a persistently plausible outcome of reasonable models. Some of these Moons remain stable on a long term basis ; in others there is a close encounter that ejects one proto-Moon, or leads to a merger.
I suppose I'd better go and find the paper. I'll bet it's by (or cites) Canup @ SWRI.
"You can assign on a scale of 1 to 6 points, while the reverse is true for the school grading system. 1 point means very bad (the sheep is black) and 6 points mean very good (the lamb is white). "
Well, that's as clear as mud.
But the site claims to be "open to all faiths". So... as a good Pastafarian, I feel... the need...
If the search for a shepherd not a result have provided, you can use the function "Add new herders' use and create as a new shepherd. Please note that your pastor must be a known public figure.
I think His Bobbyness qualifies.
After a quick check we will activate your pastors immediately available and known to you on request by e-mail.
I bet my account is going to be cancelled very shortly.
What to do when looking for my religion missing?
Our religion is far from complete list, but we work to ensure that it continues to grow. You can help us to improve Hirtenbarometer.de by writing us what religion you are missing. Send your proposal to info@hirtenbarometer.de. We look forward to your post.
This is going to be more fun than pulling the wings off flies. And ethically it is much, much more justifiable.
What a list of "dignities"! "Church President" seems... least wrong.
Well, that was a bit long drawn-out a process, but it's a valid contribution.
And now.. it's lunchtime. If it's spaghetti and meatballs for lunch, I shall take that as a benediction from the Noodly Appendage!.
In an open cavern, perhaps. In a much more typical non-straight tunnel with pipework, moving objects, intermittent "rooms" with "pillar and stall" workings... I suspect that you'd need to spend so much time installing and calibrating equipment that you'd be as well off sending your existing surveying team around with modern surveying equipment like theodolites, LIDAR scanners, tape measures, computerised data acquisition and GIS.
I'm sure it doesn't help, and I'm sure if that happened on a large enough scale it could certainly impact their cash flow.
Look up your history. Shell Expro UK (the operating arm of a 50:50 Shell:Exxon partnership ; essentially Shell) spent several years in the teeth of increasing public opposition trying to get to dump the Brent Spar in the North Atlantic. They fought long and hard and took some major PR hits, but were determined to carry through with it.
They finally caved, almost literally at the 11th hour, when "Shell Netherlands" (Nederlands Aardoil Maatschjipie, to approximate the spelling) and "Shell Germany" (whatever the trading name is) started reporting huge drops in sales, sustained over weeks, and across both countries. Drops in excess of 90% week-on-week. They lost... well they're not particularly free with the numbers, but in the order of £100-150 million. And it took them years to recover market share, more than doubling the losses. (There were also major losses in other European countries, but NL and DE were the the core of the resistance.)
Before then, Shell management didn't really give a shit about PR ; after losing hundreds of millions of pounds of income, they did give a shit.
(Incidentally, I was on a Shell installation at the turnaround time ; Shell had major internal resistance too. Parents were having to spend all day trying to do their day job, then phone home to be berated by their children for working for horrible companies and being begged to quit. I'm sure that helped too ; nothing like a bit of emotional blackmail to progress a PR project.)
BP tried to hide that it basically owned that platform in the Gulf by outsourcing it IIRC.
Err, they didn't own the floater ; TransOcean did. And this is absolutely standard practice.
Almost no oil companies own or operate their own drilling rigs. Almost all that own their own offshore platforms, hire drilling specialist companies to provide personnel (and often equipment) to perform drilling from those installations so that when there is no more drilling to do (70%+ of the installation's lifetime), they don't have the hassle of having to lay off staff whose jobs have become non-existent. Likewise, they don't need to locate and hire highly skilled and experienced teams of drillers toolpushers, roustabouts, roughnecks, cementers, mud engineers, derrickmen, casing installers, wireline operators etc. Just like you probably didn't learn to use an excavator, then learn how to lay bricks, then learn how to slate a roof in order to build your house, they sub-contract jobs.
You may not like it, but it is standard operating practice.
Very occasionally, various oil companies have wholly- or partly- owned drilling installations, generally for providing a training facility for their own staff. An example being the Ocean Alliance, a joint venture between BP and ODECO. After a few years BP brought themselves out of the project, having learned a number of valuable lessons. Principally, the valuable lesson that they don't want to be involved in the day-to-day shit of being a drilling company.
This isn't free markets creating competition and innovation, this is shell games and accounting tricks.
It'll probably be Lord Lucan's airship, crashed on the way to visit the ice-bears of Svalbard.
[READS TFA] Oh noes! It's in the Daily Fail! We's alls gonnas dies!
OK, got that out of the way. Reading further... 60ft (about 18m ; trust the Daily Fail to use retard-measures) in diameter ; irregular profile including a more-or-less circular outline and transverse straight lines on an incomplete orthogonal grid. Sure looks "manufactured".
Now what, in the sea between Sweden and Finland, could make an 18m diameter mark on the seabed 86m down? I'd go for a spud can.
("Wossat?" I hear you say.)
They're the structures on the feet of "jackup" style drilling rigs that reduce the penetration of the leg into the seabed. One of the world's major rig building and maintenance yards is in Finland ; there are several similarly equipped yards in Sweden ; and there is an occasional traffic in rigs being moved through the Baltic to get into the Caspian Sea. I wouldn't be surprised to find that a jackup had been stacked or load-tested here after repairs (or new construction).
That's my wild-arsed guess. But what the fuck would I know? I rarely spend more than a couple of hours a month looking at seabed sonar scans.
Can I find comparable images on the net? Nope, not in 5 minutes of searching.
Well, anyway, the probability of me buying a copy of the Daily Fail when I don't have active (and extremely urgent) diarrhoea has not increased. And the urgency of this story is almost exactly zero.
and "who is authorized vs who is liable to declare an emergency or not to" and "who gets to push what button when and why".
The on-shift toolpusher.
Question answered?
I'll rephrase that. Your question has been answered.
The problems in the Maconado case were several-fold : the problem wasn't recognised (largely because of simultaneous operations confusing the situation, which probably occurred to save a few hundreds or thousands of dollars) ; the BOPs didn't work,and hadn't worked to specification for some 5 weeks before the blowout (the toolpusher is an employee of the rig owner ; the BOP is part of the rig equipment and is the responsibility of the rig owner ; this lands very, very firmly in TransOcean's lap. And boy, do they know it!) ; and the casing/ cementing design seems to have been fucked up (a mix of responsibilities between BP, Halliburton and either Weatherford or CIW ; I forget who did the casing on that job).
But the authority to hit the "big red switch" is the toolpusher's.
Slashdot Mirror
Not doubting your assertion, but on what grounds?
Maybe, maybe not.
However, if FB (or $internet_ad_funded_site$, because we're moving to a more general point here) find that by complying with local laws they find that more specifically German advertisers are more willing to pay them to post adverts that comply with German laws to facebook.de, than would pay them to post adverts to facebook.com, then the actual losses may be relatively small. Possibly even negative losses (i.e., amking more money.
If the alternative were that FB weren't allowed to operate in Germany, because they broke German laws, then that would almost certainly be a major loss for FB. They could of course choose to spend hundreds of millions of â (Euro symbol, in case Slashdot is still incapable of displaying normal script) trying to fight the case in the German courts with no guarantee that they'd win, huge damage to the brand globally etc etc.
On the other hand, even a pretty incompetent PR flack could spin "obeying local laws", "respecting privacy", Apfelkuchen und Mutterschaft into a defensible position, while the beansellers should still be able to turn a profit on it, even if they get less from the advertisers per eyeball because the adverts are less precisely targeted than on FB in general.
In general, profit margins differ in differing countries because of the differing costs of operating in differing countries. It's not as if the whole world is going to descend to American levels of advertising intrusion just because ... well, American advertising people would like us to.
Hmmm, yes, that makes sense. In fact that would be a double whammy for those that chose to proxy around any such ban, because if FB could still detect that a session originated in Germany (by whatever means ; fancy network sniffing or "this user's home country is listed as Germany, and their native tongue as German ; we'll always connect them to facebook.de, no matter where they appear to be coming from"), then it would be in FB's commercial (as well as legal) interests to comply with the local law.
So actually, if the law pushes one way and FB's commercial interests pushes the same way, then FB are going to take account of local laws and route traffic to appropriately managed subdomains. And bugger the circumvention techniques.
There is the trivial case of German people in Germany people lying to FB that they're, say, Burmese nationals visiting Germany. .mn?) ... "so you're actually a German in Germany, not a Burmese in Germany. Account terminated : we use real identities here. RTF-ToS"
Complaint "but I get FB.mn, not FB.com when I should be getting FB.de and I'm trying to get FB.com" (Myanmar =
FB investigates
A few cases like that should be enough to establish their corporate bona fides to the German legal system and they'll just have to live with the fact the America =/= the world.
So we're in agreement here ; there shouldn't actually be a problem. Unless FaceBook corporately want to force all the world to be American.
Classic mining industry boom-bust economics. The Romans had the same problem. Fuck, the Cro Magnons in North Wales probalby had the same problem.
That wouldn't change the installed base though. And it is unlikely to get much of that base patched. "What do you mean, shut the factory down because you need to install some new software? You had your opportunity last October ; you'll get your next opportunity next October. You get one day. Test system? I dunno. You tell me where the test system is ; I know I haven't got room for one here. You must be new here. Just hired last week eh? The last guy quit. I don't know why, but I do know that you're not getting a shutdown until next October, or my ass is on the line."
Who decides what is relevant or not?
Everything would be recorded anyway, because most doctors are realistic enough to know that they don't (generally) know what is wrong with a patient, but are working to a working hypothesis. So, if that working hypothesis turns out to be wrong and they've discarded the data that didn't conform to their working hypothesis ... then they've got to do it all again. Plus there's serious risk of confirmation bias.
That's the doctors having reasonable scientific caution. If the lawyers get involved ("if"? "if"?! can't you tell that I'm joking?), then everything will be recorded, in triplicate, on video. Then audited to fuck. (It was actually some of the auditing data that would have proved that Harold Shipman was a premeditated murderer. His case notes described a patient's death before he made the house call when he killed the patient, and the auditing software recorded when he made the note, and when he corrected the time-stamp on the note.)
Which doctors get which access? There are aspects of my medical history from decades ago that I don't want a doctor at work to read when he's treating my sprained ankle. OTOH, there are aspects of my work (e.g. a month of malaria prophylaxis) that I might want my doctor at home to know about when they're treating my "influenza". I think that I will make that choice, thank you. Not some programmer knocking up a system in his mum's basement.
You tirvialize it as much as you want. I've instructed my doctor to remove my records from the system (as we have the right to do in my country, but I don't know if they have in the other countries of the UK) and to only maintain them as paper copies.
Oh, sorry, have I just added another non-trivial complication : that they're trying to generate one system to cover at least 3 different legal systems (possibly 5 if they're covering the IOM and CI too).
"Trebles and sky-rocketing specifications all round" as the Private Eye cartoon has probably said already. Repeatedly.
The BATS get everywhere!
Then the "dude" is a fucking retard who has never had to irrigate a colleague's eye to get the lime dust out before it scars his cornea, or to hold his own eye still while the burnt-in debris is dug out of his conjunctiva before it scars the inside of his eyelid. Without anaesthetic.
Safety specs are there for a reason. An idiot who interferes with safety equipment may look cool, but it doesn't change the fact that he's a dangerous idiot who should be fired immediately upon his arrest for breaking health and safety law.
The observed features are down to 0.5m across. That's the same as "1/2 metre resolution" as you probably meant to spell it. (Most meters I've met are only small fractions of a metre across, often less than 1/10th.)
Looking at a relatively wet desert, like the Rubh-al-Khalid on the borders of Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, how much water do you see at the surface? Fuck all. Well, when I worked there, I didn't ; I had to dig at least 30cm before seeing signs of dampness in the inter-dune deflation hollows. (I cite that particular desert to move things from second-hand experience to first-hand experience.) However, when you look at the landforms, you can see evidence for the presence of sub-surface water even though the surface materials are "dry" to human senses.
These reports are looking at the same sort of features - the difference between extremely dry material and material that is merely as dry as if baked in an oven for days.
Those are not interesting problems, because they've been basically solved a couple of centuries ago. The problem now is a political one of persuading people to implement the simple long-term solution. Unfortunately almost everyone who wants the simple solution to be implemented wants someone else to do the implementing and wants an exemption for themselves.
Like I said, a political problem. Find a politician who cares and back them, if you care to stoop to that level of associating with that sort of shit-eater.
Ah, you've met Priscilla too?
FTFY
Remember, we are talking about a capitalist society (TINSTAS*) here, so cutting costs to lower than your competition is essential to increasing the profits of shareholders and senior management (as if they were non-overlapping groups).
Everything else doesn't even make it to being counted, let alone being secondary.
(*) There Is No Such Thing As Society, in the words of extraterresstrial monstrosity, "The Maggon".
... which ISPs in Germany (be they wireless or wired, a relatively small population to gain the compliance of) would be required to redirect to facebook.de ...
So, the really, really adamant user would be able to proxy round it.
BFD.
99.9% of the population at risk of having their privacy violated would be using a service which would comply with local laws. The rest ... well there is no law against doing something dangerous, and I think that both the ISPs and FB could then fairly claim to have taken reasonable and proportionate steps to comply with the laws.
You can approve expenses? My deepest commiserations on your descent into Management. You can get keyboards with sharp edges, you know. Take the only honourable course open to you.
Speaking as a geologist ... dump the "relatively frequently". If it's happening "relatively frequently", then it's a normal event, even if it's catastrophic.
"Catastrophism" is the acceptance that events do (have) happened in geological history for which we have no direct observational experience. So for a large part of human history, large volcanic eruptions were unexpected catastrophes, until people started to record them (draw a line in the sand at Vesuvius 1871 BP which gave us the term "Plinian" for an identifiable style of eruption ; or at 3710 BP for the Thera/ Santorini eruption with major archaeological effects and arguable literary echoes ; that's a fun topic for a debate). Now we have a fairly good idea what some classes of eruption can do on a regional, continental or even global scale, simply because we've observed it.
The problem is that humans have been around and keeping records for only a few thousand years. So events that happen every 10,000 or so years are mostly beyond our observational experience.
I spend a lot of time working at sea. We have a problem that structures and vessels designed for a "hundred year storm" seem to be suffering "hundred year storms" in most decades. Is this climate change? Possibly. Or is it that during most of the last 100 years, most of the vessels caught in a 10-year storm would have been lost and no records would have survived. So our (statistical terms!) sample of storm records from the population of storms has been improving, and our estimates of the population mean and variance are accordingly changing.
"The Moon less than 30km form the Earth ?" Not very likely - you're within the range of variation of the Earth from sphericity. In the immediate (hours) after the Giant Impact there would have been an atmosphere of vapourised rock (yes, I did type "vapourised rock" there, because I meant "vapourised rock", not something else) form ground level up to several thousand kilometres, rapidly (hours, again) settling into a more-or-less equatorial disc, cooling and condensing into dust, particles and planetesimals. Over a few hours more, these collected into smaller numbers of larger particles, many particles which had been in ballistic trajectories (not orbits) would have re-impacted on the Earth, and out of the chaos some several percent of the ejecta from the Impact collected into a small number of relatively stable planetesimals which continued to interact over the next few years until we were left with more-or-less the system we have (including the tidal evolution since). At this time, the lowest stable orbit would have been a few hundred kilometres up, not 30km.
It would have reduced the time available from around 900000000 years to 899900000 years.
Wow, you could calculate the effects without having to swap your 4-figure logarithm tables for 7-figure tables.
(I'm implicitly accepting Schopf's claim of cyanobacterial microfossils in the 3.5Ga Apex Cherts as indicating a latest credible date for origin of life ; I'm unconvinced by his evidence for microfossils in the apex Chert, but I don't think he's wrong in his implication that life was well established by this point. I'm allowing a 100Ma for evolution between Schopf's claim and the actual OOL. Obviously I see this as being a decent chunk of time to do chemistry in.)
Look at the full Moon in the sky ; now quadruple it's diameter and you've got a first approximation to the view of the Earth form the Moon. Compare that disc to the whole of the sky (including the half below your feet. That is your first approximation to the amount of protection the Moon gets from the Earth. It's a very small amount.
Now, if you want to refine your model look at your 4x Moon-size mark on the sky and compare it to a circle around the sky representing the "plane of the solar system" (the plane of the ecliptic) and around 10 degrees thick (both fists together, at arms length). That's a much smaller region of the sky, but the "Earth-size" patch only occupies around 1% of it. IF all meteorites travelled in this band, that would be a reasonable estimator of the protection or enhancement that the Earth and Moon give to each other.
However, we know that by no means all bodies in the solar system are confined to this belt ; if they were, there would be far fewer polar craters on any planet, and in reality, there are. Look at the number of comets in your lifetime that have appeared in the northern hemisphere of the sky on approach to the Sun and the southern hemisphere on receding form the Sun - it's the norm.
You've now got some bounds for the likely size of the shielding (or concentrating) effect : at best it's going to be in the order of 1%, but likely it's going to be considerably lower. So, to get sufficiently good statistics to clearly demonstrate such an effect, you're going to need to compare two populations of craters each populations in the 10s of thousands.
Frankly, there is little evidence for any such effect. There is strong evidence that any such effect is not a strong effect.
Oh, and by the way, early models of the Giant Impact had two proto-Moons forming form the debris cloud in somewhere between 1-in-10 and 1-in-4 of the modelled impacts. The precise proportions have varied as modelling has changed (mostly as computational modelling has increased particle counts and increased the fineness of the models), but the formation of multiple Moons remains a persistently plausible outcome of reasonable models. Some of these Moons remain stable on a long term basis ; in others there is a close encounter that ejects one proto-Moon, or leads to a merger.
I suppose I'd better go and find the paper. I'll bet it's by (or cites) Canup @ SWRI.
No, seriously. This result has been known for centuries. People don't like it, but that doesn't make it news.
First Post!
Well, that's as clear as mud.
But the site claims to be "open to all faiths". So ... as a good Pastafarian, I feel ... the need ...
I think His Bobbyness qualifies.
I bet my account is going to be cancelled very shortly.
This is going to be more fun than pulling the wings off flies. And ethically it is much, much more justifiable.
What a list of "dignities"! "Church President" seems ... least wrong.
Well, that was a bit long drawn-out a process, but it's a valid contribution.
And now .. it's lunchtime. If it's spaghetti and meatballs for lunch, I shall take that as a benediction from the Noodly Appendage!.
In an open cavern, perhaps. In a much more typical non-straight tunnel with pipework, moving objects, intermittent "rooms" with "pillar and stall" workings ... I suspect that you'd need to spend so much time installing and calibrating equipment that you'd be as well off sending your existing surveying team around with modern surveying equipment like theodolites, LIDAR scanners, tape measures, computerised data acquisition and GIS.
Look up your history. Shell Expro UK (the operating arm of a 50:50 Shell:Exxon partnership ; essentially Shell) spent several years in the teeth of increasing public opposition trying to get to dump the Brent Spar in the North Atlantic. They fought long and hard and took some major PR hits, but were determined to carry through with it.
They finally caved, almost literally at the 11th hour, when "Shell Netherlands" (Nederlands Aardoil Maatschjipie, to approximate the spelling) and "Shell Germany" (whatever the trading name is) started reporting huge drops in sales, sustained over weeks, and across both countries. Drops in excess of 90% week-on-week. They lost ... well they're not particularly free with the numbers, but in the order of £100-150 million. And it took them years to recover market share, more than doubling the losses. (There were also major losses in other European countries, but NL and DE were the the core of the resistance.)
Before then, Shell management didn't really give a shit about PR ; after losing hundreds of millions of pounds of income, they did give a shit.
(Incidentally, I was on a Shell installation at the turnaround time ; Shell had major internal resistance too. Parents were having to spend all day trying to do their day job, then phone home to be berated by their children for working for horrible companies and being begged to quit. I'm sure that helped too ; nothing like a bit of emotional blackmail to progress a PR project.)
Err, they didn't own the floater ; TransOcean did. And this is absolutely standard practice.
Almost no oil companies own or operate their own drilling rigs. Almost all that own their own offshore platforms, hire drilling specialist companies to provide personnel (and often equipment) to perform drilling from those installations so that when there is no more drilling to do (70%+ of the installation's lifetime), they don't have the hassle of having to lay off staff whose jobs have become non-existent. Likewise, they don't need to locate and hire highly skilled and experienced teams of drillers toolpushers, roustabouts, roughnecks, cementers, mud engineers, derrickmen, casing installers, wireline operators etc. Just like you probably didn't learn to use an excavator, then learn how to lay bricks, then learn how to slate a roof in order to build your house, they sub-contract jobs.
You may not like it, but it is standard operating practice.
Very occasionally, various oil companies have wholly- or partly- owned drilling installations, generally for providing a training facility for their own staff. An example being the Ocean Alliance, a joint venture between BP and ODECO. After a few years BP brought themselves out of the project, having learned a number of valuable lessons. Principally, the valuable lesson that they don't want to be involved in the day-to-day shit of being a drilling company.
The difference between the two is ... ?
[READS TFA] Oh noes! It's in the Daily Fail! We's alls gonnas dies!
OK, got that out of the way. Reading further ... 60ft (about 18m ; trust the Daily Fail to use retard-measures) in diameter ; irregular profile including a more-or-less circular outline and transverse straight lines on an incomplete orthogonal grid. Sure looks "manufactured".
Now what, in the sea between Sweden and Finland, could make an 18m diameter mark on the seabed 86m down? I'd go for a spud can.
("Wossat?" I hear you say.)
They're the structures on the feet of "jackup" style drilling rigs that reduce the penetration of the leg into the seabed. One of the world's major rig building and maintenance yards is in Finland ; there are several similarly equipped yards in Sweden ; and there is an occasional traffic in rigs being moved through the Baltic to get into the Caspian Sea. I wouldn't be surprised to find that a jackup had been stacked or load-tested here after repairs (or new construction).
That's my wild-arsed guess. But what the fuck would I know? I rarely spend more than a couple of hours a month looking at seabed sonar scans.
Can I find comparable images on the net? Nope, not in 5 minutes of searching.
Well, anyway, the probability of me buying a copy of the Daily Fail when I don't have active (and extremely urgent) diarrhoea has not increased. And the urgency of this story is almost exactly zero.
The on-shift toolpusher.
Question answered?
I'll rephrase that. Your question has been answered.
The problems in the Maconado case were several-fold : the problem wasn't recognised (largely because of simultaneous operations confusing the situation, which probably occurred to save a few hundreds or thousands of dollars) ; the BOPs didn't work ,and hadn't worked to specification for some 5 weeks before the blowout (the toolpusher is an employee of the rig owner ; the BOP is part of the rig equipment and is the responsibility of the rig owner ; this lands very, very firmly in TransOcean's lap. And boy, do they know it!) ; and the casing/ cementing design seems to have been fucked up (a mix of responsibilities between BP, Halliburton and either Weatherford or CIW ; I forget who did the casing on that job).
But the authority to hit the "big red switch" is the toolpusher's.
As is Andanarko (spelling?) who had a 25% stake in the profits of the project, and a 25% risk in the liabilities.
The parents of the lawyers who finally come to settlement of this one probably haven't been born yet.