Would BP really stand to lose their license to operate? Has that happened to anyone before?
ARCO (Atlantic Richfield) got thrown out of the UK for the Ocean Oddyessy (one dead, but just a couple of months after the 167 dead in the Piper Alpha). Occidental got out while the getting was good after the Piper.
No doubt there are other examples I don't have to hand.
You mean, evidence other than the exploding rig and the resulting oil spill?
Since we don't know what caused the floater to take fire and then explode, and the oil spill is an uninteresting secondary consequence of the explosion... well yes, one would like to see some better evidence. What we're hearing at the moment through the grapevine is that the liner had been cemented without back flow ; that it had been pressure tested ; and that it had been influx tested prior to the riser being displaced to seawater in preparation for unlatching and pulling the BOPs. All of which are standard operations. So, the really interesting question is - if the grapvine is correct about what had been done, then how the hell did the well start to flow, and then kill most of the people who were carrying out these operations. People who, I should point out, do these operations several times a year and who do it for a regular pay ticket, not for career advancement (because they're already at the peak of their career). People who also have routine medical examinations designed to look for (amongst other things), suicidal inclinations. (At least, in my country people in these positions would have screening ; whether America would require such examinations, I don't know. Regardless, these operations aren't the sort of thing that can be sabotaged by a lone maverick.) I should also point out that standing your ground and telling the client "don't do that" is an option at this sort of career level, and it doesn't carry any particularly difficult consequences because you're actually going to be employed by a company distinct from the client, so you've got somewhere else to go.
So - equipment failure, or did the customer (BP in this case) manage to persuade 4 or 5 senior people to do something very dangerous, which they'd have known to be dangerous to themsleves personally, in order to save relatively trivial amounts of money. Equipment failure is always a possiblity, but the well design should have intrinsically included several levels of failsafe. But the personnel questions are the more worrying ones.
But hey, what the fuck would I know about it? I only work in the business ; I only have to face down clients who try to do dangerously stupid things every few months ; it's not like I know anything about the game.
Oh, BTW, if that well was being suspended as a producer, then to be economic it would have needed a flow potential more like 50,000 bbl/day, not the 5,000 bbl/day that is being cited. That's not going to be fun. Bit different if it was a delineation well which thy thought they might want to re-use later in production as an injector. But that's not really related to the interesting questions.
It's the little pieces of useful shit that you learn on SlashDot that make it such a useful resource. I'd never have thought of doing that until now. Thank you.
If something doesn't exist, how come it has an effect, either good or bad, on the real world of goods and services?
Examine the concept of "god" and you'll see the answer. "god" does not exist in reality ; the concept exists perfectly well, but in physical reality there ain't no such puppy ; however even an convinced atheist can't deny that the non-existent entity "god" has real effects on life, the universe and 42. Richard Dawkins, amongst others, makes a steady income selling books pointing out how much damage this concept has caused. The power of the non-existent thing "god" to have effects in the real world comes from the fact that some people think that "god" exists, and this changes their behaviour. Similarly, the belief of market people, economists etc in the existence of "money" affects their behaviour and their behaviour has real-world consequences.
There was a paper on this a few months ago. (Again, I'm typing on my lap at an awkward angle, so I'll make this short) Gist of the work is that once significant water was around (brought in by the LHB??), then the deeper parts of the ocean would be significantly buffered from the scalding pummelling that the surface was getting. With major impacts coming on only every few thousands of years... something that could survive hot water in the deepest parts of the oceans would have a reasonable chance of surviving. Which is a moderate description of some of the extremophile Archaea. There are weird things about the distribution of biochemical habits in the groups around the "root" of the "tree of life", and one not-outright-implausible solution could be to have truncated the root, killing off all the descendants of LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor), except those that lived in deep ocean hydrothermal systems, or even underground.
Interesting, but hardly conclusive. Going to have to go - busy few days ahead.
BP says it will take between 55 and 90 days from now before they can attempt to plug it, even then it is only an attempt.
Hmmm, very much the timescale we'd been reaching over dinner. Sounds like BP have completed the first phase of procurement : finding rigs that are capable of doing the job. Then they have to wait until one of them is at a point in it's current well where things can be safely suspended (no point in plugging one well if another one blows out in the meantime). Then : pull anchors ; tow (from where to the Gulf... could take weeks) ; run anchors ; spud and drill a relief well (will take as long as the original well, plus about 30% because of the directional precision required) ; then finally you're in a position to begin attempts at well control.
55 to 90 days sounds like they've been lucky in the availability of hardware.
Personally I think BP should be seized by the government for being so stupid,
Several points :
Since BP is actually a British company (at least in large part), that would be an act of war against a nuclear power. Perhaps you'd like to reconsider?
You have evidence that BP have done something wrong? Please cite it. When citing your evidence, bear in mind that it will be picked over by at least one person with over 20 years of practice in drilling (i.e. me) and any errors that you've made are likely to be pointed out to you.
I am not now, and never have been an employee of BP. But while I'm fully prepared to cede to their beancounting and marketing departments their normal degree of lethal stupidity, I'm not going to call their drilling crew (the guys who died on the rig) fucking idiots without some pretty good evidence. Because that's what you're implying.
For the reader interested in what is actually happening out there, be aware that the following comments by PSandusky (740962), Bigjeff5 (1143585), and alaffin (585965) simply reveal that they don't know very much about drilling technology. I do know quite a bit about it - it's been part of my job for over 20 years now. I'm not saying anything about what's going on out there because I know that I don't know, and I also know that what little information has come out doesn't add up. Myself and several other long term professionals were chewing it over at the lunch break in the galley and while we can come up with some not-unreasonable scenarios for what has happened, we know that we don't know.
What we can be pretty sure of is that since the reported attempts to manually close the rams in the BOPs have failed, then there's nothing that's going to stop the flow of oil rapidly, so there is going to be an ongoing severe problem until they can either get a relief well drilled (which could quite reasonably have a several month lead time until it even gets started - rigs with 5000ft water depth capability are not common, and they are all likely to be in use at the moment because they're damned expensive to run). Which means that the first line of action is to try to get spill-control and clean-up equipment into theatre pretty damned quick.
Which surprisingly, is exactly what is happening.
Oh, just to remind people - 11 people died.
Amongst those 11 people are probably most of the crew who knew what the actual situation was. So if the second and third-hand rumours that are coming out from people who didn't actually understand what was happening at the time, then it's not surprising that things don't add up.
When BP went through it's major re-branding exercise a few years ago after the swallowing of (sorry, "merger with") Amoco, their lovely new logo rapidly acquired the nickname of the "septic sunflower". At least it did around here. Is that the sound of PR departments puking their guts out? Lovely sound, isn't it?
Also, "relatively recently" is pretty lame in this case. The first 10% of Earth's history was inhospitable for life. We know it quickly recovered because there's evidence for life going back between 3.8 and 4 billion years.
Actually, we have good reason to believe that the Earth's surface has been not-incompatible with life for 4.2 or possibly even 4.3 billion years ; that's around 95% of it's history so far. Or from the other end of the telescope (stopwatch), it halves the amount of time between the formation of the Earth (however you define that) and life being possible. Evidence : zircons grains from IIRC both Jack Hills in Australia and the Acasta in Canada both have been seen with cores that have fractionation of oxygen isotopes which is consistent with the oxygen having repeatedly passed through a cycle of evaporation and condensation. Which means, liquid water at Earth's surface. Which means that by 4.25 Ga ago (give or take) at least some of the planet was tepid enough to have a hydrological cycle. Which puts it in the realm of interest for abiogenesis research. I've got the papers somewhere, but I've not got time to dig the links out at the moment. But it's hardly obscure research.
(Because of the questions thrown at Schopf's putative 3.5 Ga fossils, it doesn't actually make much change to the evidence about how long it took life to develop ; the next-oldest and more widely-accepted fossils are 200 to 300 Ma younger than Schopf's claim, so the duration between "life becomes possible" and "we have evidence of life" remains about the same duration.) I'm making the common assumption that life developed on Earth in liquid-water solution ; it is a very common assumption, and since liquid water is a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for activity of all known life forms, not an unreasonable one. But people studying this topic must remember that it is an assumption.
I've have yet to find a hotel in Britain that has free wifi.
Never bothered looking, though I do see it mentioned. Means all the trouble of trying to figure out how to get wifi working on the laptop, which fails the 3-second test (if it takes longer than 3 seconds, I'll just plug the cable in, or not bother ; it's not like it's important most of the time).
Either there's no wifi at all, or it comes at a steep price (usually supplied by a 3rd party like BT). I've been in more British airports with free wifi than hotels.
Such things exist??? I spent a couple of days stuck in the airport last week, de-baggaged and so unable to make any productive use of the wasted time. And I noticed and sneered at the Costa Coffee offer of "Internet access £1 for 10 minutes". Insane, deeply insane.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
I was thinking "What to play when I finish shift?" ; thanks for the answer. Off to download now!
Regardless of whether that's why they want to view it or not, the net effect is that only robust algorithms will be exported to China.
Oh dear, the second logical fallacy of the day. That I've noticed.
The article (not that I've read it) does not imply this ; the most that the article implies is that the only firmware algorithms that will be accepted by China will be those that it's code reviewer(s) think are robust. And there is no guarantee that the reviewers will be competent for this task (this is not to impugn Chinese coders generally ; more an acceptance that the person appointed by a PHB may know nothing appropriate about the task s/he's assigned to ; the code reviewer might be a world-class celestial mechanics coder, but that ain't going to help him spotting a backdoor spread over 5 interacting code modules, planted by a spook with 20 years of canny source code obfustication behind him. (I do actually think that this is a clue-full action by the Chinese. But a clue-full start can still be hopelessly compromised by cack-handed execution. )
Let me guess - you're under 25 AND you've only recently discovered that there is technical stuff going on behind the screen of your computer?
You've got your link to the story. While I wasn't particularly bothered one way or another about mail encryption, I did see the potential and understand it both for personal use, and for encrypting client's data while moving it around (as opposed to couriering it with a trusted person, which was the norm for us, then). But could I find a copy of PGP? Could I fsck! (Obviously I couldn't get it off the web, because at the time I had neither email, an ISP, or even a telephone line.) Not until I happened to go to do some work in the Netherlands did I manage to get hold of a copy to fiddle with. And then, to bring it back into the country I decided to bury it on an un-labelled floppy in a box of others, all used, all carrying pretty random zip files.
Imagine, if you will, having to physically travel to another country before you can get software that you need, and which the author wishes to give to you.
Joke from the time : never under estimate the bandwidth of a jumbo jet full of floppy discs! (Second person's counter-punch line : but they're all AOL floppies!)
[grumble]Kids today![grumble] don't know they're born [grumble, fart] Gerrroff my lawn.
Sounds like Rimmer drinking "liver salts". A particularly unpleasant image. And quite memorable.
Which is why I remember hearing the name in the past, as an ISP recommended by several occasional contacts in the past, whose opinions I respect. (Daniel, Nikki ; you SlashDotting instead of VA-ing?)
I considered making this suggestion (as I have burdens of cow-orkers, but little control over who the Boss sends to work with me). But I suspect that it'd be dismissed by the questioner, because it's foreign. It sounds like they're American (which is a 90%-safe default assumption on SlashDot anyway).
Your English is very likely to be better than my German ; but is our combined Chinese good enough to order Special Fried Rice instead of Fetid Dingo's Kidneys?
The religion and cultural identity of these groups are virtually inseparable. To a Nationalist, a Protestant is a Unionist and a Unionist is a Protestant. To Unionists, the same is true.
You did put in a protective "virtually" in there, and just as well. One of my best friends at university was an Ulster Protestant Republican. Which may be why he was at uni outside Ulster, though I don't think so (if he'd stayed in Ulster, he'd have gone to QUB ; which would have meant that he'd have to have stayed living at home with Mummy. Not an acceptable solution.)
Actually, a good way of deflating pricks of either colour who are boring you about the subject is to point out that the Irish Republican movement was founded by, and the first rebellions were almost entirely composed of, Protestants. That's never a bad card to play when trying to get a Paisleyite's head to explode, and it's pretty effective at brain-fucking the more thuggish Fenians too.
As with so many false dichotomies, they're only really likely to get you shot when you meet idiotic thugs of one chotomy or the other ; people with enough intelligence to recognise the concept of "false dichotomy", or even of "grey" instead of "black || white", are unlikely to be particularly dangerous.
If the black/white dichotomy on the island of Ireland is painted in green/orange, would the equivalent of "shades of grey" be "shades of shitty brown"?
(I just checked : Orange (@ R255+G128) + Green (@R000+G255) comes to a rather pleasant shade of pistachio green (R170+G255), or something grimmer, like grass cuttings that have been on the compost heap for a couple of weeks (R101+G154) ; it depends on how you choose to scale colour saturations. Oh well, that was one beautiful colour magic hypothesis slain by an ugly fact.)
Where the (current) top entry starts "27/4/2010 Michael Lloyd, Production Assistant: Dear South Park Fans, Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee e eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee e eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee e eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep! Blee-b-b-b-bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep. Bleep! Hope you join us tomorrow night for the latest episode "Crippled Summer," where Jimmy suits up and prepares to shred in the annual surfing contest!" and then links on to (currently) 26 not very much more informative comments.
I assume that Comedy Central (whoever they are?) have (/are about to) broadcast an episode with some of the Mohammed-fucking swearing f*cking well f*cking ble*ped the f*cking f*ck out tae f*ck. Which might or might not make it funny enough to bother watching. If it's on at work. Personally, South Park has never particularly lit my fire. Has it really been 13 episodes now? Or even series? and I should care who killed Kennedy?
Meanwhile, SlashDot sez : "Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted! Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there. "
Because the average person in the U.S. will have any idea what would make a Euro fake?
why would they? They're hardly likely to come across one. A Canadian with US dollars, or a USian with Canadian dollars, or a Brit with Kroner or a Noggin with Euros ; these are much more reasonable tests.
Actually, I'd be quite interested to see (and examine, carefully) a kosher 500 note. Just so I know what to look for. Sterling £100s and £50s I'm already sufficiently familiar with. In fact, it won't be that long before £50s start turning up in (some) ATMs ; it's been well over a decade since they were swapped to £20s and £10s.
You only give away the information that you choose to give away. Having said that, I think I'll go and modify some more (to make it hard-to-parse for the machines) and ban a few dozen adverts as either uninteresting or irrelevant (there is no other category that advertising fits into). And when it folds... who'll care?
some Air Force One guys who told him that there was no such escape pod on the real plane.
Didn't stop having one on some more recent kill-the-POTUS movie.(Sorry, film names and plots are a bit vague - probably only saw bits of it. And I don't know if it was in the original book(s), whose author is escaping my memory.)
No great surprise if such a thing didn't exist though. It would have some pretty severe problems with the laws of physics if it was to work.
Slashdot Mirror
ARCO (Atlantic Richfield) got thrown out of the UK for the Ocean Oddyessy (one dead, but just a couple of months after the 167 dead in the Piper Alpha). Occidental got out while the getting was good after the Piper.
No doubt there are other examples I don't have to hand.
Since we don't know what caused the floater to take fire and then explode, and the oil spill is an uninteresting secondary consequence of the explosion ... well yes, one would like to see some better evidence. What we're hearing at the moment through the grapevine is that the liner had been cemented without back flow ; that it had been pressure tested ; and that it had been influx tested prior to the riser being displaced to seawater in preparation for unlatching and pulling the BOPs. All of which are standard operations.
So, the really interesting question is - if the grapvine is correct about what had been done, then how the hell did the well start to flow, and then kill most of the people who were carrying out these operations. People who, I should point out, do these operations several times a year and who do it for a regular pay ticket, not for career advancement (because they're already at the peak of their career). People who also have routine medical examinations designed to look for (amongst other things), suicidal inclinations. (At least, in my country people in these positions would have screening ; whether America would require such examinations, I don't know. Regardless, these operations aren't the sort of thing that can be sabotaged by a lone maverick.)
I should also point out that standing your ground and telling the client "don't do that" is an option at this sort of career level, and it doesn't carry any particularly difficult consequences because you're actually going to be employed by a company distinct from the client, so you've got somewhere else to go.
So - equipment failure, or did the customer (BP in this case) manage to persuade 4 or 5 senior people to do something very dangerous, which they'd have known to be dangerous to themsleves personally, in order to save relatively trivial amounts of money. Equipment failure is always a possiblity, but the well design should have intrinsically included several levels of failsafe. But the personnel questions are the more worrying ones.
But hey, what the fuck would I know about it? I only work in the business ; I only have to face down clients who try to do dangerously stupid things every few months ; it's not like I know anything about the game.
Oh, BTW, if that well was being suspended as a producer, then to be economic it would have needed a flow potential more like 50,000 bbl/day, not the 5,000 bbl/day that is being cited. That's not going to be fun. Bit different if it was a delineation well which thy thought they might want to re-use later in production as an injector. But that's not really related to the interesting questions.
It's the little pieces of useful shit that you learn on SlashDot that make it such a useful resource. I'd never have thought of doing that until now.
Thank you.
Examine the concept of "god" and you'll see the answer.
"god" does not exist in reality ; the concept exists perfectly well, but in physical reality there ain't no such puppy ; however even an convinced atheist can't deny that the non-existent entity "god" has real effects on life, the universe and 42. Richard Dawkins, amongst others, makes a steady income selling books pointing out how much damage this concept has caused.
The power of the non-existent thing "god" to have effects in the real world comes from the fact that some people think that "god" exists, and this changes their behaviour.
Similarly, the belief of market people, economists etc in the existence of "money" affects their behaviour and their behaviour has real-world consequences.
There was a paper on this a few months ago. (Again, I'm typing on my lap at an awkward angle, so I'll make this short) Gist of the work is that once significant water was around (brought in by the LHB??), then the deeper parts of the ocean would be significantly buffered from the scalding pummelling that the surface was getting. With major impacts coming on only every few thousands of years ... something that could survive hot water in the deepest parts of the oceans would have a reasonable chance of surviving. Which is a moderate description of some of the extremophile Archaea.
There are weird things about the distribution of biochemical habits in the groups around the "root" of the "tree of life", and one not-outright-implausible solution could be to have truncated the root, killing off all the descendants of LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor), except those that lived in deep ocean hydrothermal systems, or even underground.
Interesting, but hardly conclusive.
Going to have to go - busy few days ahead.
Hmmm, very much the timescale we'd been reaching over dinner. Sounds like BP have completed the first phase of procurement : finding rigs that are capable of doing the job. Then they have to wait until one of them is at a point in it's current well where things can be safely suspended (no point in plugging one well if another one blows out in the meantime). Then : pull anchors ; tow (from where to the Gulf ... could take weeks) ; run anchors ; spud and drill a relief well (will take as long as the original well, plus about 30% because of the directional precision required) ; then finally you're in a position to begin attempts at well control.
55 to 90 days sounds like they've been lucky in the availability of hardware.
Which would work fine ... until they came across shortages of their next limiting nutrient.
Several points :
I am not now, and never have been an employee of BP. But while I'm fully prepared to cede to their beancounting and marketing departments their normal degree of lethal stupidity, I'm not going to call their drilling crew (the guys who died on the rig) fucking idiots without some pretty good evidence. Because that's what you're implying.
For the reader interested in what is actually happening out there, be aware that the following comments by PSandusky (740962), Bigjeff5 (1143585), and alaffin (585965) simply reveal that they don't know very much about drilling technology.
I do know quite a bit about it - it's been part of my job for over 20 years now. I'm not saying anything about what's going on out there because I know that I don't know, and I also know that what little information has come out doesn't add up. Myself and several other long term professionals were chewing it over at the lunch break in the galley and while we can come up with some not-unreasonable scenarios for what has happened, we know that we don't know.
What we can be pretty sure of is that since the reported attempts to manually close the rams in the BOPs have failed, then there's nothing that's going to stop the flow of oil rapidly, so there is going to be an ongoing severe problem until they can either get a relief well drilled (which could quite reasonably have a several month lead time until it even gets started - rigs with 5000ft water depth capability are not common, and they are all likely to be in use at the moment because they're damned expensive to run). Which means that the first line of action is to try to get spill-control and clean-up equipment into theatre pretty damned quick.
Which surprisingly, is exactly what is happening.
Oh, just to remind people - 11 people died.
Amongst those 11 people are probably most of the crew who knew what the actual situation was. So if the second and third-hand rumours that are coming out from people who didn't actually understand what was happening at the time, then it's not surprising that things don't add up.
When BP went through it's major re-branding exercise a few years ago after the swallowing of (sorry, "merger with") Amoco, their lovely new logo rapidly acquired the nickname of the "septic sunflower".
At least it did around here.
Is that the sound of PR departments puking their guts out? Lovely sound, isn't it?
Actually, we have good reason to believe that the Earth's surface has been not-incompatible with life for 4.2 or possibly even 4.3 billion years ; that's around 95% of it's history so far. Or from the other end of the telescope (stopwatch), it halves the amount of time between the formation of the Earth (however you define that) and life being possible.
Evidence : zircons grains from IIRC both Jack Hills in Australia and the Acasta in Canada both have been seen with cores that have fractionation of oxygen isotopes which is consistent with the oxygen having repeatedly passed through a cycle of evaporation and condensation. Which means, liquid water at Earth's surface. Which means that by 4.25 Ga ago (give or take) at least some of the planet was tepid enough to have a hydrological cycle. Which puts it in the realm of interest for abiogenesis research.
I've got the papers somewhere, but I've not got time to dig the links out at the moment. But it's hardly obscure research.
(Because of the questions thrown at Schopf's putative 3.5 Ga fossils, it doesn't actually make much change to the evidence about how long it took life to develop ; the next-oldest and more widely-accepted fossils are 200 to 300 Ma younger than Schopf's claim, so the duration between "life becomes possible" and "we have evidence of life" remains about the same duration.)
I'm making the common assumption that life developed on Earth in liquid-water solution ; it is a very common assumption, and since liquid water is a necessary (if not sufficient) condition for activity of all known life forms, not an unreasonable one. But people studying this topic must remember that it is an assumption.
Never bothered looking, though I do see it mentioned. Means all the trouble of trying to figure out how to get wifi working on the laptop, which fails the 3-second test (if it takes longer than 3 seconds, I'll just plug the cable in, or not bother ; it's not like it's important most of the time).
Such things exist??? I spent a couple of days stuck in the airport last week, de-baggaged and so unable to make any productive use of the wasted time. And I noticed and sneered at the Costa Coffee offer of "Internet access £1 for 10 minutes". Insane, deeply insane.
I was thinking "What to play when I finish shift?" ; thanks for the answer. Off to download now!
Oh dear, the second logical fallacy of the day. That I've noticed.
The article (not that I've read it) does not imply this ; the most that the article implies is that the only firmware algorithms that will be accepted by China will be those that it's code reviewer(s) think are robust. And there is no guarantee that the reviewers will be competent for this task (this is not to impugn Chinese coders generally ; more an acceptance that the person appointed by a PHB may know nothing appropriate about the task s/he's assigned to ; the code reviewer might be a world-class celestial mechanics coder, but that ain't going to help him spotting a backdoor spread over 5 interacting code modules, planted by a spook with 20 years of canny source code obfustication behind him.
(I do actually think that this is a clue-full action by the Chinese. But a clue-full start can still be hopelessly compromised by cack-handed execution. )
You're correct.
Strange, isn't it.
Let me guess - you're under 25 AND you've only recently discovered that there is technical stuff going on behind the screen of your computer?
You've got your link to the story. While I wasn't particularly bothered one way or another about mail encryption, I did see the potential and understand it both for personal use, and for encrypting client's data while moving it around (as opposed to couriering it with a trusted person, which was the norm for us, then). But could I find a copy of PGP? Could I fsck! (Obviously I couldn't get it off the web, because at the time I had neither email, an ISP, or even a telephone line.) Not until I happened to go to do some work in the Netherlands did I manage to get hold of a copy to fiddle with. And then, to bring it back into the country I decided to bury it on an un-labelled floppy in a box of others, all used, all carrying pretty random zip files.
Imagine, if you will, having to physically travel to another country before you can get software that you need, and which the author wishes to give to you.
Joke from the time : never under estimate the bandwidth of a jumbo jet full of floppy discs!
(Second person's counter-punch line : but they're all AOL floppies!)
[grumble]Kids today![grumble] don't know they're born [grumble, fart] Gerrroff my lawn.
That sub-title triggered my irony detector. But not yours.
Which part of the Colonies did you grow up in?
Sounds like Rimmer drinking "liver salts". A particularly unpleasant image. And quite memorable.
Which is why I remember hearing the name in the past, as an ISP recommended by several occasional contacts in the past, whose opinions I respect. (Daniel, Nikki ; you SlashDotting instead of VA-ing?)
Have to go and talk to these people.
I considered making this suggestion (as I have burdens of cow-orkers, but little control over who the Boss sends to work with me). But I suspect that it'd be dismissed by the questioner, because it's foreign. It sounds like they're American (which is a 90%-safe default assumption on SlashDot anyway).
Your English is very likely to be better than my German ; but is our combined Chinese good enough to order Special Fried Rice instead of Fetid Dingo's Kidneys?
You did put in a protective "virtually" in there, and just as well.
One of my best friends at university was an Ulster Protestant Republican. Which may be why he was at uni outside Ulster, though I don't think so (if he'd stayed in Ulster, he'd have gone to QUB ; which would have meant that he'd have to have stayed living at home with Mummy. Not an acceptable solution.)
Actually, a good way of deflating pricks of either colour who are boring you about the subject is to point out that the Irish Republican movement was founded by, and the first rebellions were almost entirely composed of, Protestants. That's never a bad card to play when trying to get a Paisleyite's head to explode, and it's pretty effective at brain-fucking the more thuggish Fenians too.
As with so many false dichotomies, they're only really likely to get you shot when you meet idiotic thugs of one chotomy or the other ; people with enough intelligence to recognise the concept of "false dichotomy", or even of "grey" instead of "black || white", are unlikely to be particularly dangerous.
If the black/white dichotomy on the island of Ireland is painted in green/orange, would the equivalent of "shades of grey" be "shades of shitty brown"?
(I just checked : Orange (@ R255+G128) + Green (@R000+G255) comes to a rather pleasant shade of pistachio green (R170+G255), or something grimmer, like grass cuttings that have been on the compost heap for a couple of weeks (R101+G154) ; it depends on how you choose to scale colour saturations.
Oh well, that was one beautiful colour magic hypothesis slain by an ugly fact.)
http://www.southparkstudios.co.uk/fans/blog/
Where the (current) top entry starts
"27/4/2010
Michael Lloyd, Production Assistant:
Dear South Park Fans,
Bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee e
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee e
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee e
eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!
Blee-b-b-b-bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep.
Bleep!
Hope you join us tomorrow night for the latest episode "Crippled Summer," where Jimmy suits up and prepares to shred in the annual surfing contest!"
and then links on to (currently) 26 not very much more informative comments.
I assume that Comedy Central (whoever they are?) have (/are about to) broadcast an episode with some of the Mohammed-fucking swearing f*cking well f*cking ble*ped the f*cking f*ck out tae f*ck. Which might or might not make it funny enough to bother watching. If it's on at work.
Personally, South Park has never particularly lit my fire. Has it really been 13 episodes now? Or even series? and I should care who killed Kennedy?
Meanwhile, SlashDot sez :
"Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there. "
Oh, the Vogonity!
When did diabetes become a mental disease?
why would they? They're hardly likely to come across one. A Canadian with US dollars, or a USian with Canadian dollars, or a Brit with Kroner or a Noggin with Euros ; these are much more reasonable tests.
Actually, I'd be quite interested to see (and examine, carefully) a kosher 500 note. Just so I know what to look for. Sterling £100s and £50s I'm already sufficiently familiar with. In fact, it won't be that long before £50s start turning up in (some) ATMs ; it's been well over a decade since they were swapped to £20s and £10s.
You only give away the information that you choose to give away. ... who'll care?
Having said that, I think I'll go and modify some more (to make it hard-to-parse for the machines) and ban a few dozen adverts as either uninteresting or irrelevant (there is no other category that advertising fits into). And when it folds
Didn't stop having one on some more recent kill-the-POTUS movie .(Sorry, film names and plots are a bit vague - probably only saw bits of it. And I don't know if it was in the original book(s), whose author is escaping my memory.)
No great surprise if such a thing didn't exist though. It would have some pretty severe problems with the laws of physics if it was to work.
I submitted that one several days ago!
Bah! Humbug!