Seeing as I get so much spam on the subject... I thought I'd see how effective the spam is being at generating searches. This spam search returns the result:
Your terms - penis extension,breast enhancement - do not have enough volume to show graphs.
But that's exactly the problem - I don't have enough volume in my pests or breanis to satisfy my horde of lovers and wanabees.
One morning I was watching the news and they had TSA agents searching people before they got on the city busses, to "remind people busses are under the authority of the TSA". It was total bullshit, especially since they only searched people at a couple stops. In hindsight I suppose they probably had a tip and were looking for someone specific.
Nope, all they were doing was cracking the whip to make sure that the sheeple remember that the whip is there, and to keep the old "line up against the nearest wall, looking at the ground" reflex up to date in the sheeple. I bet that they're going to look all stupid when they try that with someone packing a semi-automatic and a grudge against the gummint. Blood and gore all over the place and transport freedom for all ensured!
further reducing the urgency to upgrade to one of the new formats.
Since I've not yet seen any reason to "upgrade", if indeed the various forms of HD are an upgrade, then clearly this implies that HD-BlueDVD or whatever they are called is currently running at a less-than-zero urgency to upgrade for me. (Mind you, I've only had a TV in the house for 3 of the 13 years that I've owned it. TV is also at less than zero for me. Sorry, it's 2008 now, so make that 3 of the 14 full years.)
but I find it hard to fathom that Christie's would knowingly commit fraud.
Just to put this into perspective, both Sothebys and Christies have recently been convicted of illegally colluding over the fees they charge for auctions. I forget the details of the charge, but it was something about running a cartel.
They're a business. If they think they can get away with it, and they can make a profit on it, of course they're not above committing fraud.
In blatant violation of Slashdot's normal practices, I have RTFA and indeed RTFAIR. I stopped at this wonderful snippet (from this year's Jan-Feb) issue:
J. Hardwicke, C.S. Azad and J.K.G. Laitung, Injury Extra, vol. 37, no. 1, January 2006, pp. 34-5. `A 25-year-old man was admitted under our care after referral from a local Accident and Emergency Department. Whilst intoxicated the previous night, the patient had fallen asleep at a friend's house and was victim to a "practical joke". He had fallen asleep, fully clothed wearing a pair of tight fitting denim trousers. The prankster found a can of expanding polyurethane foam gap and cavity filler and directed the nozzle into the front of his friend's trousers. This did not wake the patient and he slept through until the morning when he awoke to find the foam had adhered, expanded and cured to fill any spaces around his groin area... `
'I hope that the United States government will now see the wisdom in reaching some accommodation with Antigua over this dispute.'
Now why do I get the feeling that Antigua would make a perfect forward base for accommodating men and materials being shipped to Iraq. Invading, doing a "Diego Garcia" on the island, and then accommodating all sorts of military hardware on the island would simply be efficient use of resources. When (not if) President Bush III decides to invade Venuzuela, having a base forward of florida will be invaluable. Until the Chinese nukes start to land.
Nope, sex toys are excluded as un-patentable subject matter (immoral)
Sex toys are un-patentably immoral, while gatling guns and nuclear weapons are not?
[/self cannot understand the things people, or politicians, do]
As for patenting my drug paraphernalia... well I do the design work then come up with some other slightly plausible use for my new design of bong. Problems solved. "That's not a bong, Ossifer, that's a nebuliser for treating my cough."
We aren't talking about the Mars mission. You can always fly a helicopter out there if you had to within a few hours.
Wrong.
Sometimes you can get a helicopter out there in "a few hours". Other times... go whistle. The weather at the heliport might be too bad to take off. The weather at the rig might be too bad to land. The maintenance crew you need almost by definition are going to be highly skilled and in small numbers, so you can guarantee that the flange-sprocketing expert is currently on a different rig, working for a different client. And it is not economic to have three people trained for that job, because it doesn't go wrong that way often enough.
Then you've always got the other big unknown - can you get a crew for your helicopter? Since pay rates for flying fixed-wings are better than for flying rotary-wings, the industry is running a worsening shortfall of pilots. Train one, lose two.
I've spent part of today collating an End-of-Well report for a North Sea exploration well where 3 days were lost to misbehaviour of the automated pipe-handling system, followed by 8 days of fishing operations after an "unexpected event". The misbehaviour had the rig's specialists foxed, and the maintenance expert from the manufacturer foxed. It's been continuing on that "racking arm" for the nearly 3 months that I've been associated with that rig. So, with the best-in-the-world specialists on site, they still haven't got it fixed after 3 months of intermittent work.
Is this system going to shuttle people out to the rig every day, and back in again? (Do the sums on integrated risk from flying versus regular work - no one likes "shuttling", and most people refuse to do more than a few weeks of it per year - it's not worth the risk.) If they're shuttling by helicopter, what do you do when the weather deteriorates during the day and you can't get your crew off for a week? Oh, suddenly you have to have a refuge accommodation on board. Which throws about half of your justifications out of the window.
Maybe you're going to put the specialists onto a "floatel" ("floating hotel") and transfer them to and from the fixed rig over a hydraulic bridge. Yeah, that'd work. Except for a couple of things : the bridges are called "widow-makers" for damned good reasons ; they're even more weather sensitive than helicopters (due to the heave on the rig against the fixed platform) and get closed down or even unlatched while the paraffin budgies are still flying ; so you've still got the fixed costs of a refuge accommodation. And finally, have you seen the day rates for a floatel? They're higher than for a drilling rig.
OK, automation is good, but it is far, far short of the level of reliability required to replace drilling installations. For process and wellheads installations, it's not so far off. But you're going to have to take the hit of losing weeks of production when the robots can't handle a problem. Sure, this sort of work is going to have an effect, but it's not going to be a revolution. Not even a sea-change. Just another step towards lowering costs and (to a degree) lowering risks.
Risk calculus is important. Given that the industry's own figures for flying risk put the hazard of a crew-change (flight out, flight back in) at equivalent to approximately 2 weeks of normal working, you can do your own estimates of how many flights per month of productive maintenance work you'd be prepared to do. It's pretty unlikely that you'd want to do 20 crew changes (40 flights) for a 20-day working month.
(Caveat - before people tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about - I've been working offshore in the North Sea, and other places, for over 20 years now ; I expect a serious flight incident every 3 to 5 years ; watching that sea coming up to hit you while the pilots are desperately trying to re-start the second engine really makes you think about how much risk you're willing to tolerate for your pay packet.)
I'll uphold your right to say anything you like, but I get the right to state my opinion, too.
Oui, M.Voltaire.
At first I was shocked that anyone actually felt that way. In my circles, it would be like finding a living dinosaur or a fairy or something. Then I was disgusted, viscerally disgusted that anyone could feel that way.
Either you don't get out much, or you're very careful to NOT mix with people outside your own socio-economic group. Or you associate with people who have learned to keep their "PC radar" (in the sense of Political Correctness) on at all times and who engage their brains before they open their mouths. Racism, to some degree or another, is deeply ingrained in all Western Societies that I've lived or worked in. And I'm pretty sure that it's pretty deeply ingrained in the non-Western societies too, but I don't have the language skills to pick up on it. An absolute dead give-away phrase is "I'm not a racist but...", before the racist starts testing you out for how deep your racist opinions are. At that point, if they hear evidence of PC-awareness, they shut up or move onto a different subject.
The last couple of years have been somewhere between amusing and dispiriting, as the "flavour du jour" for racist opinion in the UK has shifted from the easily-identified (and therefore easily-victimised) "Pakis" and "niggers" to the far more insidious horrible, horrible foreigners who try the dirty trick of being white. They're spectacularly dangerous to the racist and the Little Englander (or Little Scotlander, for that matter), because they can actually pass for being a human being. It's so terribly confusing for the poor little racist fuckwits. It's even worse for the racists if you point out to them that most of these terrible people have come here because it's legal, and they want to work for a living. It's enough to make you want to cash your dole check in disgust.
But now I'm just curious as to how anyone could even arrive at that position. It runs so counter to everything I know, scientifically, about genetics, I can't imagine how anyone could find any logic to it.
You think that people arrive at this sort of position by using logic, and by using externally verifiable data? You really don't get out much, do you?
Most people don't think. Full stop. ("Period" in Americanese)
For all that I bemoan the American-centric attitudes on Slashdot, and the abysmal spelling and grammar of most participants, it has to be said that an abnormally high proportion of the Septics on Slashdot do show evidence of both being able to think , and of actually thinking. In this respect, Slashdot really does present a distorted mirror to the reality of the world. Some of you should see and hear the behaviour and attitudes of your compatriots who you send abroad as ambassadors - they'd be quite... educational. And I don't mean that in a nice sense. (Some of the Brits who go to work abroad are scumbags too, and for at least some of them I know they're abroad because they can't remain in their employment in the civilised world due to their racist behaviours, or their liking for illegal activities of various sorts, or because they know inconvenient facts and have the photographs to prove them.
I guess I should have said that we can only PROVE it (to the population) after the fact.
The population don't want to know. They're running around with their fingers plugged in their ears and shouting "La La La La LaaaaaH!" At the top of their voices. That way they don't have to listen to undesired data. Normal behaviour.
Like you said, everyone in the industry knows it's coming.
Evidently you don't consider the followers of Tom 'Abiogenic Oil' Gold to be in the industry in any meaningful sense. Which is perfectly correct - Gold's acolytes have about as much connection with doing the business as the Flat Earth Society have with maintaining the GPS, GLONASS and Galileo systems.
The fallout is not going to be pretty. Ignorance is bliss.
Indeed. Which is why I didn't tell my wife about the helicopter home which they booked for us this morning. Just as well too - after they booked the out-coming passengers onto the flight, they cancelled the helicopter. Explaining that to the wife is going to be SO much easier when shes in ignorance that there ever was a helicopter to be cancelled.
So when is the Open Source community going to invent a printer that runs off of store-bought food coloring mixed with water?
About 6 months after you can buy food colouring in stores which gives it's actual chemistry, in detail, on the carton. Do you, for an example, want to put anything containing cornstarch through micron-size holes that get hot? Didn't think so.
(I'm not defending the obscene prices of printer inks ; I'm pointing out that there is precision engineering in those cartridges, and there isn't precision chemistry in kitchens.)
We will only know when the peak is AFTER the peak.
You people out in consumer-land, and oil company people who live in spreadsheets not in cabins on rigs might not know that Peak Oil is happening until after the event. Those of us who move from oil company to oil company on a monthly to weekly basis, and can change continents with every operation, have known that the peak is looming for over a decade now. We only do the trivial, non-essential task of drilling the wells to identify the stuff, then to produce it. What would we know, apart from how many tiny fields are being attempted, how many wells are coming up dry, and how many Indian and Chinese oil companies are getting their names into the "ownership" boxes in the reports we write.
The most effective way of staving off Peak Oil would be to start a nuclear world war by dumping as much nuclear inventory as you can onto central India and the Yangtze basin ; save a few of the bigger nukes for the most populous parts of America and their gun nuts would do the rest of the population culling that's necessary. The big population control tools of famine, plague and pestilence will take out the other 3 or 4 billion necessary and the survivors might have a chance of long term survival.
So I can tell you for a fact that it is not a biological thing.
You can tell us that your opinion of yourself is that you don't think that way. But myriads of psychological tests of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people have shown that there is a wide gap between how people act and how they tell themselves (and other) that they act, or for hypothetical situations, how people think that they would personally react. Sorry to deflate your opinion of yourself, but you're probably not as nice a person as you'd like to think that you are. (Bear in mind that I'm using probabilistic argumants - you might actually be a person of Mahatma-esque self-control and dedication to nice behaviour, but the likelihood is that you're not. For what it's worth, I know there is a significant difference between the relatively nice persona that I put on in public - SlashDot included - and the person I am in my mind, when no-one is watching. Which makes me perfectly normal.)
I honestly doubt that any other country at this time is systematically violating the rights of non-citizens on the same scale as the USA. Perhaps China comes close.
As a contractor on a drilling rig owned by an American company, I'm fuming at having just been piss tested (again). Fucking stupid paranoid intrusive American bastards : my employers don't give a fuck what I do in my own time ; the client I'm working for doesn't give a fuck (they also hired the rig) ; the government authorites don't give a fuck (as long as we're not intoxicated while flying or operating machinery near other workers). It's just some paranoid twat in RigCompany corporate headquarters in Houston (Texas, not Moray) imposing their opinion about how the world should work on people in the rest of the world. The Chinese don't do that (I have friends working for CNOC). But equally, the Chinese really don't give a shit if they kill someone, as long as there's a replacement available.
There is a qualitative difference between monitoring phone numbers of international calls, and monitoring data of local calls and local internet traffic.
I sincerely don't understand why so many Americans think that right and wrong stop at the US border.
It's not just Americans - it's a general human thing. Here is a boundary of some sort (ocean, river, line in the sand, skin colour, which end of the egg you open to eat it, whether you're willing or unwilling to eat the foetuses of intelligent animals), and on each side of the boundary there are organisms which bear a superficial resemblence to humans. You and your tribe exist on one side of the line ; other organisms superficially similar to humans live on the other side of the line. As a perfectly normal human being you know in your heart of hearts that humans only live on the same side of the line as you, and that on the other side of the line live organisms that are superficially similar to humans, but are not proper humans. It's a basic human reaction - xenophobia: the fear (and therefore hatred and denegration of) foreigners. From xenophobia like that you go all the way from jeering about the undersized sexual organs of supporters of a different football team to you, through tasering the man with the different skin colour, to knifing the soccar fan with the wrong colour scarf on, to chaining the animals into the hold of the ship so you can sell them in the Carolinas, to carpet-bombing Dresden, to dropping a second nuclear bomb on an enemy city. Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and the Stanford prison experiment just get lost in the small change. It would be nice if people would learn to think better than that, but it's not a very healthy mindset to promote. Mahatma Ghandi got shot for thinking non-xenophobically (and, of course, for acting non-xenophobically) ; some would claim that Brian got nailed to a tree for the same reason. I suppose that I'll have to surrender my membership card for the "Card-Carrying Anti-American Easy-to-Dismiss Society" as well, now that I've pointed out that Americans are neither significantly better nor worse than almost everyone else in this respect.
I was sort of taking liberty with the housecleaner that lived in nests in colonist's houses. Rat based service animals. Flintstones used animals for every kind of machine, washing machines, radios etc.
OIC. Dropping the parrot's tail into the grooves of the record. Heh - try explaining that one to some spotty little kid who was born a decade after CD killed vinyl [GRIN]. Architectural Coral - now there's an idea!
Cats and Dogs were after all service animals long before they were pets and many still are.
How did Al-dibblah put it (in Small Gods IIRC) ? "Pets can be a great solace in times of stress. And in times of famine."
That kind of money is the worth the risk of my life. If I live, it means my son is guaranteed an excellent education.
Your life, your choice. If you die, then your son grows up as the orphan of someone who died for someone else's money. Pay stops on the day of your death, and you only get paid for days in-country.
I thought for quite a time about the $1000 a day offer (and again over the increased offers). I thought about my newly married wife and her daughter. I thought about the various times I've had machinery (or rocks) trying to kill me. I thought about a lot of things. And I told the Boss that I wasn't interested in the work. TTBOMK, I was the only married member of the staff the Boss offered the job to, because he knew that I have a liking for exotic workplaces and living on the edge. If I couldn't justify it to myself, then there wasn't really any reason to waste the nerve ending of the other married staff members with the prospect - they'd very likely come to the same conclusion as me, but agonise over it for longer.
Of course, there was (and is) nothing to stop any of the company's staff from resigning, going freelance, and taking up the offer. Just don't expect there to be a staff job waiting if you don't like it on the freelance side of the road. You get the full day rate, but you have to be prepared to take 6 months with zero income, and to then have two long-cultivated jobs come to the payback phase at the same time. (You can only be in one place at a time!)
I've read that some folks say that the asteroid is very purely iron, nickel, platinum, gold... when the dust all settles, the cost of getting that ore back is very high.
I've not heard anything to suggest that Eros (in particular) is anything other than fairly normal silicates ; NiFe would have a pretty distinctive reflection spectrum, but in any case neither are rare metals. The PGE (Platinum Group Elements, including gold) might be worthwhile, if they were in any significant concentration. That's a big IF : PGEs are, if I recall my geochemistry correctly, strongly partitioned into sulphide phases, so in an asteroidal setting are going to go into any differentiated "core" with the NiFe. It's only on planetary-scale objects (Mars fits ; Ceres might ; Vesta probably didn't, even before it's big bang) that you're going to get enough hydrothermal activity for long enough to have a real chance of doing significant hydrothermal concentration.
Don't confuse Sci-Fi "wouldn't it be nice if" with "is" (or even "is probably", or "is possibly"). I like my Sci-Fi too, but it isn't reality.
What you can get from asteroids in the realistic term is reaction mass and volatiles. Without going to the "bottom of a hole".
In case you hadn't guessed, I work in the industry.
I gathered that, and I apologize for the sharp comment back. It was rude of me and am I'm sorry.
I didn't even notice there was an edge to the comment.
So, really, if I had a navy of my own to defend my claims, plus, a gen 6 or 7, drilling rig, then I could hire you for a $1000 a day?
If you needed the navy to "defend your claim", then it would be pretty obvious that even you didn't believe your claim of legality. So I wouldn't touch your business with a 10 foot barge pole of someone else's.
To put that in context - I'm actively pursuing work in Iran, North Korea, and various East African countries, as well as having been at the previously-mentioned conference specifically to hob-nob with companies working in both the Falklands and Malvinas Basins. And don't forget Angola and Namibia too.
As for working in legally-dubious areas, one of my university classmates has spent some of the last couple of years on a Halliburton contract for redeveloping fields around Mosul in the relatively-safe part of Iraq ; when we hung the phone up on Halliburton telling them that we thought staying alive was more important than big pay checks, the day-rate was going over $2500. I never bothered asking my friend what he stuck out for, but the photos of catching core in a flack jacket, with a "private security guard" who looks like a refugee from a 3rd-rate remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Thinking about it, I haven't had an email from him for several months. I hope that he got out of the job before the current Turkish brohaha.
It seems that, for that kind of money - we're talking billions here, really.
But of course. A typical land well costs a million or two (USD or GBP, doesn't really matter). A typical North Sea (my main stamping ground) would be 10 to 20 million. Deep offshore, you're looking at 20 to 30 million. Per well. Add a few 10s of million for seismic surveying and detailed prospect evauation seismic. Per field, but you keep on re-doing it as seismic gets better. Don't forget to allow for building infrastructure to get to the prospect (and to get the hydrocarbons out) - that can be a good few bucks. If you're going into the Southern Ocean, you're going to need to service a marine rig from Cape Town or Punta Arenas, so look at a week of steaming time each way with equipment. Budget for around a half-million a day for renting the big boats you're going to need - one at the rig, one sailing in , one sailing out, one in or around harbour. You might as well make them all anchor handlers, and on exclusive hire (well, who you're going to share them with?)... that's no small ticket. You might have to delay your well until you can get supply boats.
Just going for a gut feeling (IANA-drilling-engineer, IANA-accountant), I'd guesstimate a Weddell Sea well at $100 to $150 million. That's per well drilled. How you're going to produce the field is a separate question, where the really big bucks get involved.
Producing a small North Sea field pushes a billion USD, in an area with abundant infrastructure and absolutely riddled with pipelines and refinery capacity. So applying a similar multiplier as for a single well, look at an investment in the region of 5 billion for a field in the Weddell Sea. ASSUMING there is something there (see previous comment). That's why the 1998/1999 drilling campaign in the Falklands "failed" : they found hydrocarbons, but not in anything vaguely like sufficient quantities to make it worth developing. (Corollary : oil prices around 6 or 7 times higher today ; conference on development prospects in the South Atlantic last month ; 2 + 2 = 4 ; drilling maybe 2010? ; producing maybe 2015?)
Now, here's the question. That kind of money could a
Urrrgh, you got me. I saw the description of the problem go by, and thought to my self "I'd better remember that name, because some one is bound to ask me." and I didn't remember it. I didn't even write it down. I didn't even make the attempt.
Excuse me, I'll just go off and commit hara kiri with the blunt edge of this keyboard.
It's your money. You have the hassle of organising it ; I'll do your wellsite geology. It'll be $1000/day if you're starting in the next 3 years, beyond that I'm not able to commit myself to a price, but it's likely to be higher.
It was a joke, because, commercial exploitation of Antarctica is presently illegal.
I know that you were joking, and why.
I wasn't joking, and this is why :
In case you hadn't guessed, I work in the industry. The industry is examining the question of "IF we got permission to look, where would we look first?" We'd be remiss not to, even though it might be 30 or 50 years before we get any opportunity to work there. The conference I attended may have cost in the order of £100,000 to stage, and represent the results of a considerable amount more of investment in regional research. But since that money wouldn't hire a 5-6 generation floater rig for 12 hours (compared to the 6 or 7th generation rigs that would be needed to handle the Belgium-sized icebergs... which are probably a decade or so from the drawing board)... well, talk is cheap.
I assume that the founding principles of the American revolution still apply, specifically the "no taxation without representation" principle.
You'd like to think that. But it doesn't apply in this case:( There are other cases too -- if you live within Washington DC's city limits you actually have no representation in Congress either. It's amazing that people aren't up in arms about this....
Does Washington DC have no democratic bodies at all, or does that line about "representation" mean specifically and solely "representation in the US Congress by a person carrying the title [quote]senator[unquote]" (or whatever your local names for upper and lower house members are)?
It must be really difficult to design the wording of a constitution to cover all future abuses. the current "taxation without representation" issue should (in theory) have your "well-regulated militia" literally up in arms to resist "oppressive government" (I can't remember the exact phrase used in the constitution's preamble.) As for the later amendments designed to stop Jim Crow laws etc, well you seem to still have a worrying amount of local variation in democratic standards.
You'd better stop talking about this - you're transgressing on HomeLand InSecurity territory. One way ticket to Egypt looming for you (now that Gitmo is being run down).
I'm also a member of the minority that thinks it's abhorrent to deny convicted felon's the right to vote -- after they have completed their sentences.
Hang on - am I understanding you correctly? I think you're saying that in America a convicted criminal loses the right to vote for the rest of their life?
I assume that the founding principles of the American revolution still apply, specifically the "no taxation without representation" principle.
So I deduce that once you've been convicted of a crime and carried out your sentence, then you never get another opportunity to vote and consequently never have to pay another dollar of tax either.
Virtually all of the sound recordings... are in the ".mp3" format for his and his wife's use...
Well that's it. He goes out and buys CDs for personal use, then he lets other people listen to them. Which part of "personal use" did he think he could get away with while letting other people listen to music which he'd only got a personal use license for?
If I went out and brought a copy of Windoze Vista (on sale at the "Scoop my eyeballs out with red-hot teaspoons Computer Emporium" in town.) and installed it on my computer - no problem. If I then stick the disc into my wifes computer and install it there - big trouble. She'd never accept the change. Oh, and MicroSloth would probably think there was something wrong about it too.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you need a new battery for your sarcasm detector. G
But that's exactly the problem - I don't have enough volume in my pests or breanis to satisfy my horde of lovers and wanabees.
We demand more and better spam!
See - the Nigerians are working!
Nope, all they were doing was cracking the whip to make sure that the sheeple remember that the whip is there, and to keep the old "line up against the nearest wall, looking at the ground" reflex up to date in the sheeple.
I bet that they're going to look all stupid when they try that with someone packing a semi-automatic and a grudge against the gummint. Blood and gore all over the place and transport freedom for all ensured!
Since I've not yet seen any reason to "upgrade", if indeed the various forms of HD are an upgrade, then clearly this implies that HD-BlueDVD or whatever they are called is currently running at a less-than-zero urgency to upgrade for me. (Mind you, I've only had a TV in the house for 3 of the 13 years that I've owned it. TV is also at less than zero for me. Sorry, it's 2008 now, so make that 3 of the 14 full years.)
No. They won't need to once the proposed ban on sex-offenders using oxygen takes full effect.
They're a business. If they think they can get away with it, and they can make a profit on it, of course they're not above committing fraud.
Actually, "Injury Extra" sounds like a fun read.
Now why do I get the feeling that Antigua would make a perfect forward base for accommodating men and materials being shipped to Iraq. Invading, doing a "Diego Garcia" on the island, and then accommodating all sorts of military hardware on the island would simply be efficient use of resources. When (not if) President Bush III decides to invade Venuzuela, having a base forward of florida will be invaluable. Until the Chinese nukes start to land.
Sex toys are un-patentably immoral, while gatling guns and nuclear weapons are not?
[/self cannot understand the things people, or politicians, do]
As for patenting my drug paraphernalia
Wrong.
Sometimes you can get a helicopter out there in "a few hours". Other times ... go whistle. The weather at the heliport might be too bad to take off. The weather at the rig might be too bad to land. The maintenance crew you need almost by definition are going to be highly skilled and in small numbers, so you can guarantee that the flange-sprocketing expert is currently on a different rig, working for a different client. And it is not economic to have three people trained for that job, because it doesn't go wrong that way often enough.
Then you've always got the other big unknown - can you get a crew for your helicopter? Since pay rates for flying fixed-wings are better than for flying rotary-wings, the industry is running a worsening shortfall of pilots. Train one, lose two.
I've spent part of today collating an End-of-Well report for a North Sea exploration well where 3 days were lost to misbehaviour of the automated pipe-handling system, followed by 8 days of fishing operations after an "unexpected event". The misbehaviour had the rig's specialists foxed, and the maintenance expert from the manufacturer foxed. It's been continuing on that "racking arm" for the nearly 3 months that I've been associated with that rig. So, with the best-in-the-world specialists on site, they still haven't got it fixed after 3 months of intermittent work.
Is this system going to shuttle people out to the rig every day, and back in again? (Do the sums on integrated risk from flying versus regular work - no one likes "shuttling", and most people refuse to do more than a few weeks of it per year - it's not worth the risk.) If they're shuttling by helicopter, what do you do when the weather deteriorates during the day and you can't get your crew off for a week? Oh, suddenly you have to have a refuge accommodation on board. Which throws about half of your justifications out of the window.
Maybe you're going to put the specialists onto a "floatel" ("floating hotel") and transfer them to and from the fixed rig over a hydraulic bridge. Yeah, that'd work. Except for a couple of things : the bridges are called "widow-makers" for damned good reasons ; they're even more weather sensitive than helicopters (due to the heave on the rig against the fixed platform) and get closed down or even unlatched while the paraffin budgies are still flying ; so you've still got the fixed costs of a refuge accommodation. And finally, have you seen the day rates for a floatel? They're higher than for a drilling rig.
OK, automation is good, but it is far, far short of the level of reliability required to replace drilling installations. For process and wellheads installations, it's not so far off. But you're going to have to take the hit of losing weeks of production when the robots can't handle a problem. Sure, this sort of work is going to have an effect, but it's not going to be a revolution. Not even a sea-change. Just another step towards lowering costs and (to a degree) lowering risks.
Risk calculus is important. Given that the industry's own figures for flying risk put the hazard of a crew-change (flight out, flight back in) at equivalent to approximately 2 weeks of normal working, you can do your own estimates of how many flights per month of productive maintenance work you'd be prepared to do. It's pretty unlikely that you'd want to do 20 crew changes (40 flights) for a 20-day working month.
(Caveat - before people tell me that I don't know what I'm talking about - I've been working offshore in the North Sea, and other places, for over 20 years now ; I expect a serious flight incident every 3 to 5 years ; watching that sea coming up to hit you while the pilots are desperately trying to re-start the second engine really makes you think about how much risk you're willing to tolerate for your pay packet.)
Oui, M.Voltaire.
Either you don't get out much, or you're very careful to NOT mix with people outside your own socio-economic group. Or you associate with people who have learned to keep their "PC radar" (in the sense of Political Correctness) on at all times and who engage their brains before they open their mouths. Racism, to some degree or another, is deeply ingrained in all Western Societies that I've lived or worked in. And I'm pretty sure that it's pretty deeply ingrained in the non-Western societies too, but I don't have the language skills to pick up on it.
An absolute dead give-away phrase is "I'm not a racist but
The last couple of years have been somewhere between amusing and dispiriting, as the "flavour du jour" for racist opinion in the UK has shifted from the easily-identified (and therefore easily-victimised) "Pakis" and "niggers" to the far more insidious horrible, horrible foreigners who try the dirty trick of being white. They're spectacularly dangerous to the racist and the Little Englander (or Little Scotlander, for that matter), because they can actually pass for being a human being. It's so terribly confusing for the poor little racist fuckwits. It's even worse for the racists if you point out to them that most of these terrible people have come here because it's legal, and they want to work for a living. It's enough to make you want to cash your dole check in disgust.
You think that people arrive at this sort of position by using logic, and by using externally verifiable data? You really don't get out much, do you?
Most people don't think. Full stop. ("Period" in Americanese)
For all that I bemoan the American-centric attitudes on Slashdot, and the abysmal spelling and grammar of most participants, it has to be said that an abnormally high proportion of the Septics on Slashdot do show evidence of both being able to think , and of actually thinking. In this respect, Slashdot really does present a distorted mirror to the reality of the world. Some of you should see and hear the behaviour and attitudes of your compatriots who you send abroad as ambassadors - they'd be quite ... educational. And I don't mean that in a nice sense. (Some of the Brits who go to work abroad are scumbags too, and for at least some of them I know they're abroad because they can't remain in their employment in the civilised world due to their racist behaviours, or their liking for illegal activities of various sorts, or because they know inconvenient facts and have the photographs to prove them.
About 6 months after you can buy food colouring in stores which gives it's actual chemistry, in detail, on the carton. Do you, for an example, want to put anything containing cornstarch through micron-size holes that get hot? Didn't think so.
(I'm not defending the obscene prices of printer inks ; I'm pointing out that there is precision engineering in those cartridges, and there isn't precision chemistry in kitchens.)
You people out in consumer-land, and oil company people who live in spreadsheets not in cabins on rigs might not know that Peak Oil is happening until after the event. Those of us who move from oil company to oil company on a monthly to weekly basis, and can change continents with every operation, have known that the peak is looming for over a decade now. We only do the trivial, non-essential task of drilling the wells to identify the stuff, then to produce it. What would we know, apart from how many tiny fields are being attempted, how many wells are coming up dry, and how many Indian and Chinese oil companies are getting their names into the "ownership" boxes in the reports we write.
The most effective way of staving off Peak Oil would be to start a nuclear world war by dumping as much nuclear inventory as you can onto central India and the Yangtze basin ; save a few of the bigger nukes for the most populous parts of America and their gun nuts would do the rest of the population culling that's necessary. The big population control tools of famine, plague and pestilence will take out the other 3 or 4 billion necessary and the survivors might have a chance of long term survival.
You can tell us that your opinion of yourself is that you don't think that way. But myriads of psychological tests of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people have shown that there is a wide gap between how people act and how they tell themselves (and other) that they act, or for hypothetical situations, how people think that they would personally react. Sorry to deflate your opinion of yourself, but you're probably not as nice a person as you'd like to think that you are. (Bear in mind that I'm using probabilistic argumants - you might actually be a person of Mahatma-esque self-control and dedication to nice behaviour, but the likelihood is that you're not. For what it's worth, I know there is a significant difference between the relatively nice persona that I put on in public - SlashDot included - and the person I am in my mind, when no-one is watching. Which makes me perfectly normal.)
As a contractor on a drilling rig owned by an American company, I'm fuming at having just been piss tested (again). Fucking stupid paranoid intrusive American bastards : my employers don't give a fuck what I do in my own time ; the client I'm working for doesn't give a fuck (they also hired the rig) ; the government authorites don't give a fuck (as long as we're not intoxicated while flying or operating machinery near other workers). It's just some paranoid twat in RigCompany corporate headquarters in Houston (Texas, not Moray) imposing their opinion about how the world should work on people in the rest of the world. The Chinese don't do that (I have friends working for CNOC). But equally, the Chinese really don't give a shit if they kill someone, as long as there's a replacement available.
It's not just Americans - it's a general human thing. Here is a boundary of some sort (ocean, river, line in the sand, skin colour, which end of the egg you open to eat it, whether you're willing or unwilling to eat the foetuses of intelligent animals), and on each side of the boundary there are organisms which bear a superficial resemblence to humans. You and your tribe exist on one side of the line ; other organisms superficially similar to humans live on the other side of the line. As a perfectly normal human being you know in your heart of hearts that humans only live on the same side of the line as you, and that on the other side of the line live organisms that are superficially similar to humans, but are not proper humans. It's a basic human reaction - xenophobia: the fear (and therefore hatred and denegration of) foreigners.
From xenophobia like that you go all the way from jeering about the undersized sexual organs of supporters of a different football team to you, through tasering the man with the different skin colour, to knifing the soccar fan with the wrong colour scarf on, to chaining the animals into the hold of the ship so you can sell them in the Carolinas, to carpet-bombing Dresden, to dropping a second nuclear bomb on an enemy city. Gitmo, Abu Ghraib and the Stanford prison experiment just get lost in the small change.
It would be nice if people would learn to think better than that, but it's not a very healthy mindset to promote. Mahatma Ghandi got shot for thinking non-xenophobically (and, of course, for acting non-xenophobically) ; some would claim that Brian got nailed to a tree for the same reason. I suppose that I'll have to surrender my membership card for the "Card-Carrying Anti-American Easy-to-Dismiss Society" as well, now that I've pointed out that Americans are neither significantly better nor worse than almost everyone else in this respect.
OIC. Dropping the parrot's tail into the grooves of the record. Heh - try explaining that one to some spotty little kid who was born a decade after CD killed vinyl [GRIN].
Architectural Coral - now there's an idea!How did Al-dibblah put it (in Small Gods IIRC) ? "Pets can be a great solace in times of stress. And in times of famine."
Your life, your choice. If you die, then your son grows up as the orphan of someone who died for someone else's money. Pay stops on the day of your death, and you only get paid for days in-country.
I thought for quite a time about the $1000 a day offer (and again over the increased offers). I thought about my newly married wife and her daughter. I thought about the various times I've had machinery (or rocks) trying to kill me. I thought about a lot of things. And I told the Boss that I wasn't interested in the work. TTBOMK, I was the only married member of the staff the Boss offered the job to, because he knew that I have a liking for exotic workplaces and living on the edge. If I couldn't justify it to myself, then there wasn't really any reason to waste the nerve ending of the other married staff members with the prospect - they'd very likely come to the same conclusion as me, but agonise over it for longer.
Of course, there was (and is) nothing to stop any of the company's staff from resigning, going freelance, and taking up the offer. Just don't expect there to be a staff job waiting if you don't like it on the freelance side of the road. You get the full day rate, but you have to be prepared to take 6 months with zero income, and to then have two long-cultivated jobs come to the payback phase at the same time. (You can only be in one place at a time!)
I've not heard anything to suggest that Eros (in particular) is anything other than fairly normal silicates ; NiFe would have a pretty distinctive reflection spectrum, but in any case neither are rare metals. The PGE (Platinum Group Elements, including gold) might be worthwhile, if they were in any significant concentration. That's a big IF : PGEs are, if I recall my geochemistry correctly, strongly partitioned into sulphide phases, so in an asteroidal setting are going to go into any differentiated "core" with the NiFe. It's only on planetary-scale objects (Mars fits ; Ceres might ; Vesta probably didn't, even before it's big bang) that you're going to get enough hydrothermal activity for long enough to have a real chance of doing significant hydrothermal concentration.
Don't confuse Sci-Fi "wouldn't it be nice if" with "is" (or even "is probably", or "is possibly"). I like my Sci-Fi too, but it isn't reality.
What you can get from asteroids in the realistic term is reaction mass and volatiles. Without going to the "bottom of a hole".
Bugger - missed that trailing .LT. /i .GT.
And at this time of night I can't remember the appropriate HTML entities.
I didn't even notice there was an edge to the comment.
If you needed the navy to "defend your claim", then it would be pretty obvious that even you didn't believe your claim of legality. So I wouldn't touch your business with a 10 foot barge pole of someone else's.
To put that in context - I'm actively pursuing work in Iran, North Korea, and various East African countries, as well as having been at the previously-mentioned conference specifically to hob-nob with companies working in both the Falklands and Malvinas Basins. And don't forget Angola and Namibia too.
As for working in legally-dubious areas, one of my university classmates has spent some of the last couple of years on a Halliburton contract for redeveloping fields around Mosul in the relatively-safe part of Iraq ; when we hung the phone up on Halliburton telling them that we thought staying alive was more important than big pay checks, the day-rate was going over $2500. I never bothered asking my friend what he stuck out for, but the photos of catching core in a flack jacket, with a "private security guard" who looks like a refugee from a 3rd-rate remake of Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Thinking about it, I haven't had an email from him for several months. I hope that he got out of the job before the current Turkish brohaha.
But of course. A typical land well costs a million or two (USD or GBP, doesn't really matter). A typical North Sea (my main stamping ground) would be 10 to 20 million. Deep offshore, you're looking at 20 to 30 million. Per well. Add a few 10s of million for seismic surveying and detailed prospect evauation seismic. Per field, but you keep on re-doing it as seismic gets better. Don't forget to allow for building infrastructure to get to the prospect (and to get the hydrocarbons out) - that can be a good few bucks. If you're going into the Southern Ocean, you're going to need to service a marine rig from Cape Town or Punta Arenas, so look at a week of steaming time each way with equipment. Budget for around a half-million a day for renting the big boats you're going to need - one at the rig, one sailing in , one sailing out, one in or around harbour. You might as well make them all anchor handlers, and on exclusive hire (well, who you're going to share them with?) ... that's no small ticket. You might have to delay your well until you can get supply boats.
Just going for a gut feeling (IANA-drilling-engineer, IANA-accountant), I'd guesstimate a Weddell Sea well at $100 to $150 million. That's per well drilled. How you're going to produce the field is a separate question, where the really big bucks get involved.
Producing a small North Sea field pushes a billion USD, in an area with abundant infrastructure and absolutely riddled with pipelines and refinery capacity. So applying a similar multiplier as for a single well, look at an investment in the region of 5 billion for a field in the Weddell Sea. ASSUMING there is something there (see previous comment). That's why the 1998/1999 drilling campaign in the Falklands "failed" : they found hydrocarbons, but not in anything vaguely like sufficient quantities to make it worth developing. (Corollary : oil prices around 6 or 7 times higher today ; conference on development prospects in the South Atlantic last month ; 2 + 2 = 4 ; drilling maybe 2010? ; producing maybe 2015?)
Urrrgh, you got me. I saw the description of the problem go by, and thought to my self "I'd better remember that name, because some one is bound to ask me." and I didn't remember it. I didn't even write it down. I didn't even make the attempt.
Excuse me, I'll just go off and commit hara kiri with the blunt edge of this keyboard.
Sorry.
I know that you were joking, and why.
I wasn't joking, and this is why :
In case you hadn't guessed, I work in the industry. The industry is examining the question of "IF we got permission to look, where would we look first?" We'd be remiss not to, even though it might be 30 or 50 years before we get any opportunity to work there. The conference I attended may have cost in the order of £100,000 to stage, and represent the results of a considerable amount more of investment in regional research. But since that money wouldn't hire a 5-6 generation floater rig for 12 hours (compared to the 6 or 7th generation rigs that would be needed to handle the Belgium-sized icebergs
Does Washington DC have no democratic bodies at all, or does that line about "representation" mean specifically and solely "representation in the US Congress by a person carrying the title [quote]senator[unquote]" (or whatever your local names for upper and lower house members are)?
It must be really difficult to design the wording of a constitution to cover all future abuses. the current "taxation without representation" issue should (in theory) have your "well-regulated militia" literally up in arms to resist "oppressive government" (I can't remember the exact phrase used in the constitution's preamble.) As for the later amendments designed to stop Jim Crow laws etc, well you seem to still have a worrying amount of local variation in democratic standards.
You'd better stop talking about this - you're transgressing on HomeLand InSecurity territory. One way ticket to Egypt looming for you (now that Gitmo is being run down).
Hang on - am I understanding you correctly? I think you're saying that in America a convicted criminal loses the right to vote for the rest of their life?
I assume that the founding principles of the American revolution still apply, specifically the "no taxation without representation" principle.
So I deduce that once you've been convicted of a crime and carried out your sentence, then you never get another opportunity to vote and consequently never have to pay another dollar of tax either.
Or am I missing something here?
Well that's it. He goes out and buys CDs for personal use, then he lets other people listen to them. Which part of "personal use" did he think he could get away with while letting other people listen to music which he'd only got a personal use license for?
If I went out and brought a copy of Windoze Vista (on sale at the "Scoop my eyeballs out with red-hot teaspoons Computer Emporium" in town.) and installed it on my computer - no problem. If I then stick the disc into my wifes computer and install it there - big trouble. She'd never accept the change.
Oh, and MicroSloth would probably think there was something wrong about it too.