There are many ways. While Gandhiji made a long and effective argument through his lifelong espousal of satyaghara, I personally prefer to hit the twat with a shillelagh until they cease to use that argument. It's quicker, and I am not the venerable (and dead, and unsuccessful) Gandhiji.
While I think that BP and those other companies involved should be put on the hook for whatever it takes to prevent this catastrophe from growing any further, the simple fact is that no one at BP is going to even consider or "think up" a method of dealing with this situation in a manner that so adversely affects their bottom line.
The techniques exist, and have existed for years. The method of dealing with these situations is to not let them happen by following good drilling practices. What technical information is available in the industry discussion lists suggests that someone was trying to do two or three linked jobs at once, trying to save a few thousands of dollars (at most) on hire charges for a boat. Each job not particularly difficult or dangerous, but in the past they've been done : complete job one, then start and complete job two, then start and complete job three ; someone has the bright idea that we can start job two before finishing job one, then start job three before finishing job three as well, and suddenly no one knows what the fuck is going on. Someone, somewhere, has been trying to shave a few bucks off a big operation, and you can see the cost savings washing up on some foreigners coast. Impressive payback - give that man a pay rise!
Planned obsolescence has been around a lot longer than "current fashion".
There is a story about Henry Ford - probably apocryphal, but it has the ring of truth - and the durability of the Model 'T'. Story has it that in the 1920s, Ford sent a number of staff around the US to "beg, steal or borrow" as many scrapped Model 'T's as they could get. He then had each one stripped down and inspected to find out which components were failing and which ones weren't. The guys dismantled and micrometer-ed and recorded and collated and statistics-ed and eventually came back to Ford with a report saying, in precís, "Everything wears out apart from the flange sprocket gadgie ; we've not found one of those that's excessively worn." "Fine," says Ford, "re-design the flange sprocket gadgie and make it cheaper and weaker. It's obviously stronger than the car needs."
Which is ha-ha-but-serious : in an ideal world, something with a 2 year manufacturer's warranty would fall to pieces, every part unusable through wear, after 732 days.
If you want something that's going to last 30, 40 or 50 years, be prepared to pay for it. An occasional acquaintance of mine works in maintenance for the electricity transmission monopoly ; the mean age of his pool of equipment was approaching 40 years the last time I stood him a pint. But you can bet that that gear wasn't brought on a tight budget from a winding shop in a distant country.
Towers need power ; power needs electricity lines ; lines often get ruptured in earthquakes ; those towers that have working auto-starting generators need diesel after a few days at most. And most towers need a landline (broadband, dedicated link, whatever) to connect them to the mobile network.
(odds may vary in New Orleans, Iceland, most of Africa)
You think that Iceland is undergoing
a huge natural disaster
??
The Icelanders are undergoing a minor, quite common, local difficulty. Not quite as frequent or predictable as the geyser at, errm, Geysir (not far from the eastern side of Katla, whose western subsidiary outlet is currently erupting) ; but common enough. Other areas downwind are experiencing, almost literally, fallout from their problem, but the Icelanders are undergoing a minor, common difficulty. And that's an artificial, minor, disaster caused by an excessive degree of reliance on the alleged speed and convenience of air transport.
Hmm, "improvised munitions" sounds interesting. Looks familiar though. Yes, the electric bulb initiator... I remember reading that and thinking "I figured that out for myself two decades ago". Gelled fuels. Yep, seen this before. But reasonably worthwhile.
The Improvised Munitions Handbook is far more accurate and informative than the AC.
After reading TACB, I used to think that it would be pretty hard work to produce something that was much more dangerously uninformative than TACB.
Then I went to see what some of these Al Quaeda "manuals" are like.
The ones that aren't straight re-hashes of TACB are... almost amusing. I'm pretty sure that the authorities don't make any effort at all to prevent distribution of these because they contribute a lot to national security and, more importantly, the maintenance of the average IQ of the species. In a Darwinian sense. Who needs "survival of the fittest" when you've got things like an Al Quaeda "manual" and an idiot combining to make a rather messy room and an end to a particular blood line of idiots.
I'm sure they make life easier for the police too. No need to go around actually hunting for terr'sts when they can just go around sponging the evidence out of the craters.
Well, that's a first. I'm three days behind on my Slashdot headlines e-mails, I come across a story that rings bells, and not only are there no comments, but there doesn't even seem to be a story. I'm assuming that there is meant to be a streaming video playing in lieu of a "summary", and that the blocking on the internet connection I have is dropping the request for it.
since I have an unwelcome feeling that the "semiliterate former gold prospector" fits the description of a lunatic of my (reluctant) acquaintance, I think I really should do something to find out if it's the same lunatic, and what sort of drivel is being spouted. But with no data to go further on, I'm a bit stymied. Anybody capable of posting a little (more) information, please?
the biggest factor that craps up the imagery is the atmospheric distortion,
Not untrue.
and adaptive optics can work miracles on compensating for that.
But not particularly helpful in this situation.
How do AO systems work (in general)? By reconstructing the shape of the wavefront reaching the sensor array from a knownpoint source in the field of view, and then introducing a complementary distortion into an optical element which will render the point source back to being a point (OK, an Airy disc) on the main sensor array. Which is great for astronomy - there's usually a star (which is generally close enough to a point source to be used as one for this purpose) in any random field of view. If you don't have a suitable star in your FoV... then you shine a laser operating in the waveband that you're interested in parallel to the axis of your optical system, and enough will reflect to give you a point source.
Now look at it from the ground. Somewhere around your Beloved Leader, there are lots of shiny little ping pong balls, glittering in the sunlight. How utterly unremarkable is that? Or you see this bright light stationary in the sky. Stationary, day and night. It's monochromatic. It's collimated. How utterly unremarkable is that?
OK, perhaps the spooks have got around this. But not with conventional AO.
(If my physics is wrong... hey, tell me. I could do with learning something new today!)
if Sauerbraten is sausage, you have a much looser definition of sausage than I do.
To quote my wife on meeting the British cafe concept of "sausage" on her fist visit to the continent : "This is not 'sausage'."
But she'd have been working to a Russian definition. Which is different to a German definition I'm sure, but would have the same property of not considering British "sausage" as "sausage". There is something about the British banger. It's not the flavour ; it's not the texture ; it's sure as hell not the quality of raw materials. But there is something about the British banger... [SFX : last 5 seconds of 'Too Drunk To Fuck' by the Dead Kennedys]
But they're right - it's only "sausage" in a marketing meaning of the word - i.e. no discernible connection to reality at all.
I'm normally a laissez-faire kind of guy, but seriously... what do we need to do to get this shit shut down?
Far more than you'd think : I was only moderately interested in the article until you let your plans slip ; now (in another tab), I'm ordering a packet or two suitable for freezing, so that I can establish a breeding colony and, if necessary, re-start the business idea after you and your cronies think that you've shut it down.
OK, that's my order placed. 'F'-strain, your future is assured, even if I have to infect every brothel in my home town to do it.
BTW, does your concept of "laissez-faire" include the concept that "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"? If you're going to take on one piece of Enlightenment philosophy, then you're going to have to be aware of the rest of it (even if you don't agree with it).
an OS that requires an internet connection on your netbook.
Instant fail. By the time I get home from this job, I'll have spent 5 weeks out of 6 in places where the only wired internet connection is required for work computers (working 24x7), where the nearest mobile phone coverage is around an hours flying time away (assuming I can get onto the flight, and that it's flying ; both assumptions that you can't rely on), and where using WiFi to leech off the work-connected laptop will at best get me the sack for breaking radio silence, and at worst could kill several people (including me). Despite what the Generation-WGAF people who seem so common this decade think, you cannot rely on having connectivity. Unless you want to pay for the design, install and maintenance of your link, which is normally going to be a prohibitive cost.
You have the fair-use right to watch the TV Show at the time the station broadcasts it, on the devices they choose to enable you to view.
Do I have the right to not watch it, but to read a book, pork the wife, or do something other than sit in front of the zombie-box like a grog on a rock? Or will that get me a one way ticket to Guantanamo?
And you have to stay and watch the commercials,
"Co-mer-cials"? Now why would I want to watch a TV channel that wastes my eye space like that? I've watched 'Clockwork Orange' - I've seen what watching too much TV can do to you.
otherwise you're stealing candy from the network executive's babies!
I'm not stealing candy from them - I'm taking a proactive stance on the prevention of their future tooth decay. If I'm stealing candy from anyone's babies, it's their dentist's squalling brat's candy that I'm taking. And they certainly shouldn't be having any candy.
"This will be a good way of getting this money drain off our hands, without the fear of getting shot (or gassed, or poisoned, or electrocuted ; depends what form of judicial murder is practised in their area) for murder." ?
Wait... there are women out there that actually _want_ anal? Damn... why haven't I ever met any of them?
You don't go to the right sort of party. If you read the various serious sex science, you'll see estimates that around one in 3 or one in 4 of women enjoy being the recipient of anal sex. Which sounds around right in my experience.
Personally, I've always been confused that anal and oral are both legally referred to as "sodomy". In the interest of unambiguous communication, shouldn't their be a clear and distinct label for each and every act?
Don't blame the deficiencies of your legislature on the language. There's no shortage of precise and unambiguous terms for different sex acts, so I guess that your lawyers are just afraid of the subject.
These are not people who should be making potentially environment-altering decisions for the rest of us.
Just as a matter of interest, how many miles a day do you clock up on your push bike? Most likely it's so close to zero as to not matter.
If there wasn't a demand for the fuel, there wouldn't be much pressure to extract it. And people's desire for rapid personal transportation is one of the biggest demands for fuel. Each time you turn the key in the ignition, you press for more oil extraction from environmentally and/ or politically unstable areas.
They can't carbon date stuff from Mars, because carbon dating has to be done on things that formerly were alive.
That's not incorrect, but not because things the you are going to date with carbon dating need to have been alive. They need to have been in equilibrium with the atmospheric carbon pool before they went out of equilibrium - which a living thing does by dieing, but a non-living thing could do, for example, by being buried in sediment. The ultimate constraint on carbon dating (and any dating system) is half-life : if you're trying to date an event that occurred ten half lives ago, you're going to be pushing the limit of your techniques and you may need to go to a technique that has a longer half-life.
-- that's the one where they've lost the menus and things you need to make it work, isn't it? Came out about 3 years ago and prompted me to start to carry a memory stick with OpenOffice on it, in case I had to do office-type work at work. Call me when they've got a usable user interface.
Yeah, terrible that - Big Nasty Corporation Adobe stealing the free and open source work of some tiny little printing company, then claiming that it was all their own work and never allowing anyone else to even breath the initials of the product without paying their fist born child as a licensing fee. Someone has forgotten what happened in the 1980s.
fighting the always-connected (cloudy) movement is probably the wrong way to go if we want these things.
You're forgetting a tiny, but non-trivial fact : if your connection breaks, for what ever reason, a system that depends on the connection breaks as well. So you cannot use connection-dependent architectures for important services unless you make an absolutely reliable connection. That doesn't mean a high-availability connection ; that means an absolutely reliable connection. Your connection only goes down at pre-planned times, with you being certain (not "likely", "certain") to have enacted your plans for living without that critical system. You might have a problem envisaging this sort of world, but that is a failure of your imagination, not of reality. As an example, it is still routine for me to spend weeks or months working in remote locations where no internet connection is available at all. No Internet, not "limited to 14.4kbps modem speeds", but no internet. Our software slaves at work tried proposing that we do our software licensing using an online license server, but we've had to slap them around the face over that one, which is costing us around a £100/seat for hardware dongles. We'd love to be able to assume or require an internet connection for our software to run, but our work environment doesn't allow us to assume or require that.
Another real issue that using a "cloudy" architecture will have to be tested against will be latency. If your system requires getting an answer back from "the cloud" in (say) 1 second (which is going to provide a pretty shitty "real time" experience - try it), then you have built a system that can't be used more than approximately 150,000 km from the Earth's surface. (Actually the usable limit would be a lot lower than that - I'm allowing no time at all for "the cloud" to do it's immense calculations and lookups.)
In another thread on Slashdot, someone was asking me why the Deepwater Horizon (the oil rig that blew out in the Mexican Gulf last week, killing 11 people ; I work in the drilling industry) didn't have a remote control panel for it's BOP stack ; by remote they meant "off the rig". I've still got to get back to them, but I think the idea is just shockingly ignorant - the questioner really seriously doesn't understand the concept of losing communications. But when you're planning safety-critical systems, you dare not be anything other than screamingly paranoid. I'd be very reluctant to work on a rig where someone can close the shear rams from a passing boat. Equally, I'd be pretty unconfident of the average toolpusher remembering the 14 digit password needed to activate the blowout protectors - it's not the sort of thing that's in their skill set.
When (it is "when", not "if") a terrorist group manages to get a bomb into a major network hub then you will see an awful lot of people having the unpleasant experience of no having communications. Or maybe you'll fee it when there is another power outage (you did know that telephone and presumably internet providers spend a lot of money on their own uninterruptible power supply systems?) that lasts long enough to take out communications.
While it is indeed important to remember those people who died on the rig, considering the lost livelihoods and environmental destruction at hand is of perhaps deeper importance.
Do you drive a personal vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine? At heart, I'm damned annoyed about the wife pushing me to get a car (and even more annoyed at her not getting her driving license, so the damned thing sits there rusting more than half the time). Yes, I entirely agree that there are deeper issues, and the number of dead from the oil spill may eventually (over the decades to come) exceed the number dead on the job. The fisheries are pretty likely fucked anyway (since generally, fisheries are being fucked over by the human race far, far faster than they're being rehabilitated), so if you've got any friend in that business, then they should probably be trying to get out of it. (I say the same to the 500-year fishing familes round here - the parent's don't like it, but I'm often talking to the sons who have careers offshore.)
But yeah, lots of deep issues there. However I've got to go and find out WTF is happening with this volcanic cloud. Looks like we're going to lose flying again for a number of days, just when I'm due to go back to shore. Oh well, there's always the cranes, I suppose.
The nytimes ran an article that pretty much agreed with everything BigJeff5 said (supposedly told to them by BP). So either you're claiming BP is lying about what's happened or you should enlighten us just to why you are calling him a dumbass.
I haven't called Bigjeff5, or anyone else, a "dumbass", so you can make your own apologies to them. It's perfectly reasonble to think that all of BigJeff, the New York Times, and the PR flack from BP are all speaking from the same book titled "Noddy drills for oil and gas" and pitched at a level appropriate to, say, a total greenhorn fresh out of university with a first class degree and no knowledge. Let's have a look... how many rigs have I worked on? Oh gods, I'd have to read my CV... let's say in the order of forty in the last decade and forget the previos decade and a bit. How many have not had a remote control panel for the BOP stack, as Bigjeff (and the New York Times, according to you) says? Not one that I'm aware of. Many have had two remote panels (one in the blast-protected accommodation ; one at the lifeboat stations at the other end of the rig ; it is left as an exercise to the reader to work out why there are often two remote panels at opposite ends of the rig). Those are of course, in addition to the routine control panel in the driller's control cabin ("dog house").
loaded to the gills with failsafes.
Failsafes being...
cement which should have hardened to.GT.500psi/sq.in, followed by
steel pipe pressure tested internally to some thousands of psi, followed by
drilling mud or suspension brine weighted to reduce the local pressure differentials to something in the order of 500psi, followed by
the BOP stack that is still sitting on the sea bed, apparently open.
So, to get into this situation, four sets of failsafes need to have failed.
An bear in mind again - the people in charge of constructing the well, with those failsafes, were the people in direct line of fire in the event of a failure, which tends to concentrate the mind wonderfully, and lead you to double and triple check your own work, as well as other people's work. PSandusky (yes, I do recognise the Leather Goddess reference) obliquely cites the Challenger disaster (was it Challenger ? - one of the shuttles that killed it's crew), which is well and good ; in the same vein, I wonder how many people at Cape Caneveral get repeated safety warnings for smoking while cleaning out the rocket fuel silos?
Slashdot Mirror
There are many ways.
While Gandhiji made a long and effective argument through his lifelong espousal of satyaghara , I personally prefer to hit the twat with a shillelagh until they cease to use that argument. It's quicker, and I am not the venerable (and dead, and unsuccessful) Gandhiji.
The techniques exist, and have existed for years. The method of dealing with these situations is to not let them happen by following good drilling practices.
What technical information is available in the industry discussion lists suggests that someone was trying to do two or three linked jobs at once, trying to save a few thousands of dollars (at most) on hire charges for a boat. Each job not particularly difficult or dangerous, but in the past they've been done : complete job one, then start and complete job two, then start and complete job three ; someone has the bright idea that we can start job two before finishing job one, then start job three before finishing job three as well, and suddenly no one knows what the fuck is going on.
Someone, somewhere, has been trying to shave a few bucks off a big operation, and you can see the cost savings washing up on some foreigners coast. Impressive payback - give that man a pay rise!
Planned obsolescence has been around a lot longer than "current fashion".
There is a story about Henry Ford - probably apocryphal, but it has the ring of truth - and the durability of the Model 'T'.
Story has it that in the 1920s, Ford sent a number of staff around the US to "beg, steal or borrow" as many scrapped Model 'T's as they could get. He then had each one stripped down and inspected to find out which components were failing and which ones weren't. The guys dismantled and micrometer-ed and recorded and collated and statistics-ed and eventually came back to Ford with a report saying, in precís, "Everything wears out apart from the flange sprocket gadgie ; we've not found one of those that's excessively worn."
"Fine," says Ford, "re-design the flange sprocket gadgie and make it cheaper and weaker. It's obviously stronger than the car needs."
Which is ha-ha-but-serious : in an ideal world, something with a 2 year manufacturer's warranty would fall to pieces, every part unusable through wear, after 732 days.
If you want something that's going to last 30, 40 or 50 years, be prepared to pay for it. An occasional acquaintance of mine works in maintenance for the electricity transmission monopoly ; the mean age of his pool of equipment was approaching 40 years the last time I stood him a pint. But you can bet that that gear wasn't brought on a tight budget from a winding shop in a distant country.
FTFY
Towers need power ; power needs electricity lines ; lines often get ruptured in earthquakes ; those towers that have working auto-starting generators need diesel after a few days at most. And most towers need a landline (broadband, dedicated link, whatever) to connect them to the mobile network.
There's a lot to go wrong.
You think that Iceland is undergoing
??
The Icelanders are undergoing a minor, quite common, local difficulty. Not quite as frequent or predictable as the geyser at, errm, Geysir (not far from the eastern side of Katla, whose western subsidiary outlet is currently erupting) ; but common enough. Other areas downwind are experiencing, almost literally, fallout from their problem, but the Icelanders are undergoing a minor, common difficulty. And that's an artificial, minor, disaster caused by an excessive degree of reliance on the alleged speed and convenience of air transport.
Hmm, "improvised munitions" sounds interesting. Looks familiar though. Yes, the electric bulb initiator ... I remember reading that and thinking "I figured that out for myself two decades ago". Gelled fuels. Yep, seen this before. But reasonably worthwhile.
After reading TACB, I used to think that it would be pretty hard work to produce something that was much more dangerously uninformative than TACB.
Then I went to see what some of these Al Quaeda "manuals" are like.
The ones that aren't straight re-hashes of TACB are ... almost amusing. I'm pretty sure that the authorities don't make any effort at all to prevent distribution of these because they contribute a lot to national security and, more importantly, the maintenance of the average IQ of the species. In a Darwinian sense. Who needs "survival of the fittest" when you've got things like an Al Quaeda "manual" and an idiot combining to make a rather messy room and an end to a particular blood line of idiots.
I'm sure they make life easier for the police too. No need to go around actually hunting for terr'sts when they can just go around sponging the evidence out of the craters.
Well, that's a first. I'm three days behind on my Slashdot headlines e-mails, I come across a story that rings bells, and not only are there no comments, but there doesn't even seem to be a story.
I'm assuming that there is meant to be a streaming video playing in lieu of a "summary", and that the blocking on the internet connection I have is dropping the request for it.
since I have an unwelcome feeling that the "semiliterate former gold prospector" fits the description of a lunatic of my (reluctant) acquaintance, I think I really should do something to find out if it's the same lunatic, and what sort of drivel is being spouted. But with no data to go further on, I'm a bit stymied.
Anybody capable of posting a little (more) information, please?
Oh : Frist Ports!
[SFX : excited 1970s TV Voice-Over Man] "We can rebuild her. We have the technology ..."
[inaudible muttering] "OK ... you're paying the voice-over bills."
"We can rebuild him. We have the technology ..."
(I should have noticed at the time that "Steve" is a name that works as well for women or men. Come to think of it, so does "Lee".)
Not untrue.
But not particularly helpful in this situation.
How do AO systems work (in general)? By reconstructing the shape of the wavefront reaching the sensor array from a known point source in the field of view, and then introducing a complementary distortion into an optical element which will render the point source back to being a point (OK, an Airy disc) on the main sensor array. Which is great for astronomy - there's usually a star (which is generally close enough to a point source to be used as one for this purpose) in any random field of view. If you don't have a suitable star in your FoV ... then you shine a laser operating in the waveband that you're interested in parallel to the axis of your optical system, and enough will reflect to give you a point source.
Now look at it from the ground. Somewhere around your Beloved Leader, there are lots of shiny little ping pong balls, glittering in the sunlight. How utterly unremarkable is that? Or you see this bright light stationary in the sky. Stationary, day and night. It's monochromatic. It's collimated. How utterly unremarkable is that?
OK, perhaps the spooks have got around this. But not with conventional AO.
(If my physics is wrong ... hey, tell me. I could do with learning something new today!)
To quote my wife on meeting the British cafe concept of "sausage" on her fist visit to the continent : "This is not 'sausage'."
But she'd have been working to a Russian definition. Which is different to a German definition I'm sure, but would have the same property of not considering British "sausage" as "sausage". ... [SFX : last 5 seconds of 'Too Drunk To Fuck' by the Dead Kennedys]
There is something about the British banger. It's not the flavour ; it's not the texture ; it's sure as hell not the quality of raw materials. But there is something about the British banger
But they're right - it's only "sausage" in a marketing meaning of the word - i.e. no discernible connection to reality at all.
Far more than you'd think : I was only moderately interested in the article until you let your plans slip ; now (in another tab), I'm ordering a packet or two suitable for freezing, so that I can establish a breeding colony and, if necessary, re-start the business idea after you and your cronies think that you've shut it down.
OK, that's my order placed. 'F'-strain, your future is assured, even if I have to infect every brothel in my home town to do it.
BTW, does your concept of "laissez-faire" include the concept that "I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"? If you're going to take on one piece of Enlightenment philosophy, then you're going to have to be aware of the rest of it (even if you don't agree with it).
Tvork? Lovely stuff. Haven't tried any of their hard cheeses though - any recommendations?
Or were you being^H^H^H^H^H^H trying to be sarcastic?
Instant fail.
By the time I get home from this job, I'll have spent 5 weeks out of 6 in places where the only wired internet connection is required for work computers (working 24x7), where the nearest mobile phone coverage is around an hours flying time away (assuming I can get onto the flight, and that it's flying ; both assumptions that you can't rely on), and where using WiFi to leech off the work-connected laptop will at best get me the sack for breaking radio silence, and at worst could kill several people (including me).
Despite what the Generation-WGAF people who seem so common this decade think, you cannot rely on having connectivity. Unless you want to pay for the design, install and maintenance of your link, which is normally going to be a prohibitive cost.
Do I have the right to not watch it, but to read a book, pork the wife, or do something other than sit in front of the zombie-box like a grog on a rock? Or will that get me a one way ticket to Guantanamo?
"Co-mer-cials"? Now why would I want to watch a TV channel that wastes my eye space like that? I've watched 'Clockwork Orange' - I've seen what watching too much TV can do to you.
I'm not stealing candy from them - I'm taking a proactive stance on the prevention of their future tooth decay. If I'm stealing candy from anyone's babies, it's their dentist's squalling brat's candy that I'm taking. And they certainly shouldn't be having any candy.
"This will be a good way of getting this money drain off our hands, without the fear of getting shot (or gassed, or poisoned, or electrocuted ; depends what form of judicial murder is practised in their area) for murder." ?
You don't go to the right sort of party.
If you read the various serious sex science, you'll see estimates that around one in 3 or one in 4 of women enjoy being the recipient of anal sex. Which sounds around right in my experience.
Don't blame the deficiencies of your legislature on the language. There's no shortage of precise and unambiguous terms for different sex acts, so I guess that your lawyers are just afraid of the subject.
Just as a matter of interest, how many miles a day do you clock up on your push bike? Most likely it's so close to zero as to not matter.
If there wasn't a demand for the fuel, there wouldn't be much pressure to extract it. And people's desire for rapid personal transportation is one of the biggest demands for fuel. Each time you turn the key in the ignition, you press for more oil extraction from environmentally and/ or politically unstable areas.
That's not incorrect, but not because things the you are going to date with carbon dating need to have been alive. They need to have been in equilibrium with the atmospheric carbon pool before they went out of equilibrium - which a living thing does by dieing, but a non-living thing could do, for example, by being buried in sediment.
The ultimate constraint on carbon dating (and any dating system) is half-life : if you're trying to date an event that occurred ten half lives ago, you're going to be pushing the limit of your techniques and you may need to go to a technique that has a longer half-life.
-- that's the one where they've lost the menus and things you need to make it work, isn't it? Came out about 3 years ago and prompted me to start to carry a memory stick with OpenOffice on it, in case I had to do office-type work at work.
Call me when they've got a usable user interface.
Begs the question of WTF is a salad spinner (or as some people are describing it, a salad "shooter")?
Yeah, terrible that - Big Nasty Corporation Adobe stealing the free and open source work of some tiny little printing company, then claiming that it was all their own work and never allowing anyone else to even breath the initials of the product without paying their fist born child as a licensing fee.
Someone has forgotten what happened in the 1980s.
You're forgetting a tiny, but non-trivial fact : if your connection breaks, for what ever reason, a system that depends on the connection breaks as well. So you cannot use connection-dependent architectures for important services unless you make an absolutely reliable connection. That doesn't mean a high-availability connection ; that means an absolutely reliable connection. Your connection only goes down at pre-planned times, with you being certain (not "likely", "certain") to have enacted your plans for living without that critical system.
You might have a problem envisaging this sort of world, but that is a failure of your imagination, not of reality. As an example, it is still routine for me to spend weeks or months working in remote locations where no internet connection is available at all. No Internet, not "limited to 14.4kbps modem speeds", but no internet. Our software slaves at work tried proposing that we do our software licensing using an online license server, but we've had to slap them around the face over that one, which is costing us around a £100/seat for hardware dongles. We'd love to be able to assume or require an internet connection for our software to run, but our work environment doesn't allow us to assume or require that.
Another real issue that using a "cloudy" architecture will have to be tested against will be latency. If your system requires getting an answer back from "the cloud" in (say) 1 second (which is going to provide a pretty shitty "real time" experience - try it), then you have built a system that can't be used more than approximately 150,000 km from the Earth's surface. (Actually the usable limit would be a lot lower than that - I'm allowing no time at all for "the cloud" to do it's immense calculations and lookups.)
In another thread on Slashdot, someone was asking me why the Deepwater Horizon (the oil rig that blew out in the Mexican Gulf last week, killing 11 people ; I work in the drilling industry) didn't have a remote control panel for it's BOP stack ; by remote they meant "off the rig". I've still got to get back to them, but I think the idea is just shockingly ignorant - the questioner really seriously doesn't understand the concept of losing communications. But when you're planning safety-critical systems, you dare not be anything other than screamingly paranoid. I'd be very reluctant to work on a rig where someone can close the shear rams from a passing boat. Equally, I'd be pretty unconfident of the average toolpusher remembering the 14 digit password needed to activate the blowout protectors - it's not the sort of thing that's in their skill set.
When (it is "when", not "if") a terrorist group manages to get a bomb into a major network hub then you will see an awful lot of people having the unpleasant experience of no having communications. Or maybe you'll fee it when there is another power outage (you did know that telephone and presumably internet providers spend a lot of money on their own uninterruptible power supply systems?) that lasts long enough to take out communications.
Do you drive a personal vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine? At heart, I'm damned annoyed about the wife pushing me to get a car (and even more annoyed at her not getting her driving license, so the damned thing sits there rusting more than half the time).
Yes, I entirely agree that there are deeper issues, and the number of dead from the oil spill may eventually (over the decades to come) exceed the number dead on the job. The fisheries are pretty likely fucked anyway (since generally, fisheries are being fucked over by the human race far, far faster than they're being rehabilitated), so if you've got any friend in that business, then they should probably be trying to get out of it. (I say the same to the 500-year fishing familes round here - the parent's don't like it, but I'm often talking to the sons who have careers offshore.)
But yeah, lots of deep issues there. However I've got to go and find out WTF is happening with this volcanic cloud. Looks like we're going to lose flying again for a number of days, just when I'm due to go back to shore. Oh well, there's always the cranes, I suppose.
I haven't called Bigjeff5, or anyone else, a "dumbass", so you can make your own apologies to them. ... how many rigs have I worked on? Oh gods, I'd have to read my CV ... let's say in the order of forty in the last decade and forget the previos decade and a bit. How many have not had a remote control panel for the BOP stack, as Bigjeff (and the New York Times, according to you) says? Not one that I'm aware of. Many have had two remote panels (one in the blast-protected accommodation ; one at the lifeboat stations at the other end of the rig ; it is left as an exercise to the reader to work out why there are often two remote panels at opposite ends of the rig). Those are of course, in addition to the routine control panel in the driller's control cabin ("dog house").
It's perfectly reasonble to think that all of BigJeff, the New York Times, and the PR flack from BP are all speaking from the same book titled "Noddy drills for oil and gas" and pitched at a level appropriate to, say, a total greenhorn fresh out of university with a first class degree and no knowledge.
Let's have a look
Failsafes being ...
So, to get into this situation, four sets of failsafes need to have failed.
An bear in mind again - the people in charge of constructing the well, with those failsafes, were the people in direct line of fire in the event of a failure, which tends to concentrate the mind wonderfully, and lead you to double and triple check your own work, as well as other people's work.
PSandusky (yes, I do recognise the Leather Goddess reference) obliquely cites the Challenger disaster (was it Challenger ? - one of the shuttles that killed it's crew), which is well and good ; in the same vein, I wonder how many people at Cape Caneveral get repeated safety warnings for smoking while cleaning out the rocket fuel silos?