They won't abandon it, they'll poke a hole somewhere else, slightly offset from the current hole. But the current hole probably can't be reused due to the damage caused, just like a car that's been rolled a few times can't be reused.
Of course, Piper Alpha exploded in the North Sea in the late 1980s. Big loss of human life, but no "gusher" (it was a gas platform rather than oil). But nonetheless, it shows that there are dangers inherent in these offshore operations, and the North Sea is not immune.
BP was one of the oil companies that lobbied against legislation to make this sort of operation safer. To save millions then, they are going to pay billions now. And people on the Gulf Coast of course will be paying with polluted coast lines.
I was trying to build Nethack for a server, and it was failing linking on some missing curses library. So I did a google search to try to find out which library I was missing so I could find which -dev package I needed to install to get this library.
The first Google search result was......a post by *me* asking *exactly* the same question ("Which lib do I need") almost 15 years earlier on one of the linux newsgroups!
I know that one of the original developers of the ARM CPU is working on a massively multicore ARM-based project (tens of thousands of cores). Apart from just the low power aspect of ARM, what makes it good for hugely multicore projects compared to x86 is that an entire ARM core is smaller than just the part of an x86 processor that figures out the length of the next instruction - x86's ISA becomes a huge ball and chain if you want to make a massively multicore system.
I've have yet to find a hotel in Britain that has free wifi. 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.
Same thing incidentally in Spain - either no wifi, or pay through the nose wifi. Next time I go to Spain I'm going to get a PAYG 3G sim card because it'll be much cheaper and I can use it to get maps/info when I'm away from wifi too.
I have a nice old Tek digital storage oscilloscope, also with a floppy.
I've considered things like that (even making a little piece of electronics using the excellent FTDI USB FIFO). Perhaps if I needed to lift data off the scope several times a day I'd do it, but I don't take data off the scope that often - so it's not really worth the bother when I've got a machine with a floppy drive right here. (It's the machine with a real parallel port for my JTAG lead too).
When I lived in Texas, the first vehicle I had was a rather ratty old Dodge Ram pickup. I also have black hair, so if you can only see the back of my head through the tint of the truck's rear window, I'm sure I didn't look any different from a Mexican. In the year I had that truck, I got stopped five times by the police (one time I deserved it, I'd just rebuilt the carb and I was enjoying the extra power a bit too much, and got a speeding ticket).
I replaced that with a 2 year old and in mint condition F-150. In the 5 years I had that vehicle I was only stopped once (three or four years after getting rid of the Dodge - I was stopped because I had forgotten to get the state inspection done and the sticker was out of date). My driving style hadn't changed nor had the routes on which I habitually drove.
So it seems to me that the police may be more "pro-active" at stopping people who look like they may be poor and/or Mexican.
Given Arizona used to be part of Mexico (as did most of the southwestern US, right up to Oregon and Colorado) - and the United States took this from Mexico by force - be glad that the Mexicans are just taking back what's theirs by peaceful means. So hardly an "invasion".
The A4 *is* an ARM processor. Just like the TI OMAP is an ARM processor.
There isn't such thing as an "ARM CPU" like there is a "Pentium Pro" or a "Core 2 Duo"; instead there are licensed ARM cores that go into all sorts of chips, one of which is the A4.
I have to wonder what controls the various AV companies have to prevent a malicious signature be inserted - for example, someone deliberately doing something like this (but hitting all versions of Windows).
It's not just McAfee that's had this particular style of false-positive problem - Symantec also falsely identified a legitimate part of the Windows 2003 Server resource kit as malware. Fortunately in Symantec's case the damage was very limited.
Oh for heaven's sake, the Polish aircraft crashed due to reasons that kill dozens of GA pilots every year: attempting an approach in weather that they had no business *at all* attempting an approach in. Stop with these idiotic conspiracy theories already.
There are *thousands* of propeller driven aircraft in commercial service by most airlines, the world over.
That they are propeller driven is irrelevant - they are still turbine (turboprop) aircraft, and it's the turbine that suffers the problem. On the other hand, the airline Manx2 is about the only airline operating in Britain at the moment (between the Isle of Man and Blackpool) because they fly below 8000 feet and are well clear of the ash cloud.
1. Get a breadboard of a decent size. 2. Get a whole pile of components. You don't have to spend a truckload of money - but get an assortment of NPN, PNP transistors, N and P channel MOSFETs (get one or two power MOSFETs so you can do fun stuff with switch mode supplies), resistors, capacitors, inductors, op-amp ICs, 555 timers. You can get bags with big assortments of resistors and capacitors of various sizes. Get a spool of magnet wire too so you can make your own inductors.
You may also want to get some CMOS 4000 series logic (runs from a wide voltage range), or 74HC/74HCT series (much faster).
3. Experiment! Go through online resources such as "Lessons in Electric Circuits" (google it). As you get stuck in you may also want "The Art of Electronics" (Horowitz & Hill)
It's handy to have an oscilloscope too - you can pick up a reasonable scope off ebay for not much money. (I prefer an actual big box scope to a PC-based scope, I just don't want to deal with PC problems when I'm trying to tinker with stuff).
If you want to get vector hardware for the home, there's always the Vectrex. A Vectrex in decent condition can be had for less than $100. The built-in game is Mine Storm, an Asteroids-like game, plus with some flash memory you can build a multicart with lots of games.
What you see on the web is the tip of the iceberg, in terms of what developers do. It's the shiny trendy end, so it gets talked about a lot.
But think about embedded. Every car, every washing machine, every microwave oven, every bicycle light, power shower, dishwasher, dryer... all those specialised instruments used in the construction industry, tools... the list goes on. Most of them today have a small 8 bit microcontroller which cost pennies per unit. If you don't want to use assembler, you use C. There still is an *awful* lot of systems programming and close-to-the-metal programming going on that requires C. You're not going to be using Java or the trendy Microsoft language of the day on an Atmel AVR with 1K of flash and 64 bytes of RAM that you want to clock at 1MHz.
IIRC, 70% of New Yorkers do not own a car. It seems like if the city has good public transport and good options for being able to walk, people will use them.
For survivability you don't want "sturdyness", you want the car to be crumply. The crumpling absorbs the crash energy so the occupants don't. Lighter cars also means lower crash energies. Lighter cars are less likely to crash in the first place owing to better handling and manuverablilty.
As I have already said, the numbers I quoted are for roads with at least 2 lanes each way separated by a median. The "highway" definition was only thrown out there to show you the United States also has a nebulous definition of "highway", that's why I was specific and stated "motorway" or "interstate", and also added restricted access, minimum of two lanes in each direction separated by a median. The United States does not have "dozens of times more" of these as you asserted, it only has slightly more. Before calling people idiots, you need to spend more time on reading comprehension.
Try drawing a best-fit curve on the 20/30/40mph figures and you'll find that the numbers in fact support the idea that kinetic energy to be dissipated (which increases at the square of impact velocity) is what is important when it comes to the probability of being killed. You're concentrating on the wrong number (speed), when the right number is kinetic energy to be dissipated. If you think 20% difference in impact energy is insignificant, then I have this bridge to sell you.
Let's assume all of the Toyota problems are due to the computer. Now how many crashes have occurred due to the problems? A small handful? Now compare that number by how many crashes have been caused by human error in the same makes and models of Toyota cars.
Highways in this definition are the standard of interstate highways, i.e. limited access with at least four lanes separated by a median and subject to special regulation. In Europe they are known as "motorways" (in the English language). Sorry, you are wrong.
If you want to pick nits like that, highways in the United States also include 2 lane back roads too. Many signposted US highways are like this. But the kilometer figures I give are *only* for roads of at least the standard of the M50 in England or I-10 in the United States; at least four lanes separated by a median.
As for pedestrians, no, the 20% decrease in kinetic energy is highly significant. According to UK stats, pedestrians hit at 20 mph have a 10% chance of dying, at 30 mph this increases to 50%, and at 40 mph this increases to 90%. So reducing the kinetic energy by 20% will have a measurable impact (pun intended) on the probability of a pedestrian being killed due to the rapidity at which the fatality rate increases.
I wouldn't have believed that kind of driver error was something that happened...until two years ago, an older driver in a small SUV with automatic transmission did just that and punched a large hole in the side of our building. Even though he actually needed to go in completely the opposite direction to leave his parking space. He put it in drive, then hit the gas instead of the brake when it started to creep forward. (And I thought they all had locking mechanisms on automatics to stop you from moving it out of park without your foot on the brake).
If we look at density, it's even less favourable to the United States - the UK has a much higher population density than the USA, and more cars per square mile. If we look at fatal accident rate per billion km travelled, the UK has just under half the accident rate of the USA. I've lived in both countries, and driving in the UK is definitely a lot more stressful and the roads are a lot busier (and I've lived in major metropolitan areas of the USA). I also have to wonder what the Texas highway planners smoke sometimes, they seem to be raving idiots with a love for decreasing radius turns on off-ramps and appallingly designed major highway interchanges.
If you think your state is the size of Europe, you must live in Alaska, which is large but has a very low population density, and therefore not much need for busy highways. (Even then, Alaska is still smaller than the EU - the EU at 4,324,782 sq. km is just somewhat larger than Alaska at only 1,717,854 sq km.) The European Union has a population of >500K, and therefore a great need for a great many highways. The size of somewhere does not necessarily mean it has a lot of highways. For example, Antarctica is very large, but has fewer miles of roads than, say, the Isle of Wight. Alaska has 2,000 miles of highways making up part of the National Highway System. On the other hand, Portugal alone has 1300 miles of highways of the same type, and Portugal is a relatively small country. The UK - still quite a small EU country - has more highway miles than Alaska despite being a fraction of the size of Alaska.
You assert that...
You know, the ones that we have dozens of times more than they all do combined? Their roads are cramped, twisted, uneven, and generally unsafe.
The US has 75,040 km of highways compared to an EU total of 63,839 km in the EU. Since when was 75,040 dozens of times more than 63,839? You assert that "their roads are cramped...and generally unsafe", yet the accident rates do not bear this out (for example the accident rate per bn kilometers travelled in the UK was half of what it was for the United States over the same period). Generally unsafe? Where I lived in the United States, in Houston (the 4th largest city), there are numerous (quite new) highway interchanges that were designed by raving lunatics, such as the IH-610/US 59 interchange near Westheimer which for most of the day causes near stationary traffic with much merging next to a lane flowing at 60 mph, or the I-610/I-45 interchange in the counterclockwise direction of I-610 which is so badly designed that traffic gets stopped with another on-ramp having to merge through this and onto the main lanes (with traffic at 70 mph) - even at 2.30 in the afternoon when there's comparatively little traffic. The funny thing is with the 610/59 junction is they recently redesigned it and made it even worse. Don't get me started on all the decreasing radius turns the Texas highway planners seem to love, despite there being enough room for a nice long deceleration lane. Or that they still haven't finished the improvements on NASA Road 1 after 15 years of work.
The difference between 22.7 and 25 might be statistically significant from a abstract perspective, but for real-life-on-the-ground scenarios it isn't.
So 20% less kinetic energy (the thing that actually kills in a collision - the need to absorb all this energy quickly) makes no real life difference? Can I have some of what you're smoking?
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They won't abandon it, they'll poke a hole somewhere else, slightly offset from the current hole. But the current hole probably can't be reused due to the damage caused, just like a car that's been rolled a few times can't be reused.
Of course, Piper Alpha exploded in the North Sea in the late 1980s. Big loss of human life, but no "gusher" (it was a gas platform rather than oil). But nonetheless, it shows that there are dangers inherent in these offshore operations, and the North Sea is not immune.
BP was one of the oil companies that lobbied against legislation to make this sort of operation safer. To save millions then, they are going to pay billions now. And people on the Gulf Coast of course will be paying with polluted coast lines.
A funny thing happened to me a while back.
I was trying to build Nethack for a server, and it was failing linking on some missing curses library. So I did a google search to try to find out which library I was missing so I could find which -dev package I needed to install to get this library.
The first Google search result was... ...a post by *me* asking *exactly* the same question ("Which lib do I need") almost 15 years earlier on one of the linux newsgroups!
Anything concurrent.
I know that one of the original developers of the ARM CPU is working on a massively multicore ARM-based project (tens of thousands of cores). Apart from just the low power aspect of ARM, what makes it good for hugely multicore projects compared to x86 is that an entire ARM core is smaller than just the part of an x86 processor that figures out the length of the next instruction - x86's ISA becomes a huge ball and chain if you want to make a massively multicore system.
I've have yet to find a hotel in Britain that has free wifi. 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.
Same thing incidentally in Spain - either no wifi, or pay through the nose wifi. Next time I go to Spain I'm going to get a PAYG 3G sim card because it'll be much cheaper and I can use it to get maps/info when I'm away from wifi too.
I have a nice old Tek digital storage oscilloscope, also with a floppy.
I've considered things like that (even making a little piece of electronics using the excellent FTDI USB FIFO). Perhaps if I needed to lift data off the scope several times a day I'd do it, but I don't take data off the scope that often - so it's not really worth the bother when I've got a machine with a floppy drive right here. (It's the machine with a real parallel port for my JTAG lead too).
A personal anecdote.
When I lived in Texas, the first vehicle I had was a rather ratty old Dodge Ram pickup. I also have black hair, so if you can only see the back of my head through the tint of the truck's rear window, I'm sure I didn't look any different from a Mexican. In the year I had that truck, I got stopped five times by the police (one time I deserved it, I'd just rebuilt the carb and I was enjoying the extra power a bit too much, and got a speeding ticket).
I replaced that with a 2 year old and in mint condition F-150. In the 5 years I had that vehicle I was only stopped once (three or four years after getting rid of the Dodge - I was stopped because I had forgotten to get the state inspection done and the sticker was out of date). My driving style hadn't changed nor had the routes on which I habitually drove.
So it seems to me that the police may be more "pro-active" at stopping people who look like they may be poor and/or Mexican.
Given Arizona used to be part of Mexico (as did most of the southwestern US, right up to Oregon and Colorado) - and the United States took this from Mexico by force - be glad that the Mexicans are just taking back what's theirs by peaceful means. So hardly an "invasion".
(yes, I am trolling).
The A4 *is* an ARM processor. Just like the TI OMAP is an ARM processor.
There isn't such thing as an "ARM CPU" like there is a "Pentium Pro" or a "Core 2 Duo"; instead there are licensed ARM cores that go into all sorts of chips, one of which is the A4.
I have to wonder what controls the various AV companies have to prevent a malicious signature be inserted - for example, someone deliberately doing something like this (but hitting all versions of Windows).
It's not just McAfee that's had this particular style of false-positive problem - Symantec also falsely identified a legitimate part of the Windows 2003 Server resource kit as malware. Fortunately in Symantec's case the damage was very limited.
Oh for heaven's sake, the Polish aircraft crashed due to reasons that kill dozens of GA pilots every year: attempting an approach in weather that they had no business *at all* attempting an approach in. Stop with these idiotic conspiracy theories already.
OSX *is* NeXTstep.
There are *thousands* of propeller driven aircraft in commercial service by most airlines, the world over.
That they are propeller driven is irrelevant - they are still turbine (turboprop) aircraft, and it's the turbine that suffers the problem. On the other hand, the airline Manx2 is about the only airline operating in Britain at the moment (between the Isle of Man and Blackpool) because they fly below 8000 feet and are well clear of the ash cloud.
1. Get a breadboard of a decent size.
2. Get a whole pile of components. You don't have to spend a truckload of money - but get an assortment of NPN, PNP transistors, N and P channel MOSFETs (get one or two power MOSFETs so you can do fun stuff with switch mode supplies), resistors, capacitors, inductors, op-amp ICs, 555 timers. You can get bags with big assortments of resistors and capacitors of various sizes. Get a spool of magnet wire too so you can make your own inductors.
You may also want to get some CMOS 4000 series logic (runs from a wide voltage range), or 74HC/74HCT series (much faster).
3. Experiment! Go through online resources such as "Lessons in Electric Circuits" (google it). As you get stuck in you may also want "The Art of Electronics" (Horowitz & Hill)
It's handy to have an oscilloscope too - you can pick up a reasonable scope off ebay for not much money. (I prefer an actual big box scope to a PC-based scope, I just don't want to deal with PC problems when I'm trying to tinker with stuff).
If you want to get vector hardware for the home, there's always the Vectrex. A Vectrex in decent condition can be had for less than $100. The built-in game is Mine Storm, an Asteroids-like game, plus with some flash memory you can build a multicart with lots of games.
What you see on the web is the tip of the iceberg, in terms of what developers do. It's the shiny trendy end, so it gets talked about a lot.
But think about embedded. Every car, every washing machine, every microwave oven, every bicycle light, power shower, dishwasher, dryer... all those specialised instruments used in the construction industry, tools... the list goes on. Most of them today have a small 8 bit microcontroller which cost pennies per unit. If you don't want to use assembler, you use C. There still is an *awful* lot of systems programming and close-to-the-metal programming going on that requires C. You're not going to be using Java or the trendy Microsoft language of the day on an Atmel AVR with 1K of flash and 64 bytes of RAM that you want to clock at 1MHz.
IIRC, 70% of New Yorkers do not own a car. It seems like if the city has good public transport and good options for being able to walk, people will use them.
For survivability you don't want "sturdyness", you want the car to be crumply. The crumpling absorbs the crash energy so the occupants don't. Lighter cars also means lower crash energies. Lighter cars are less likely to crash in the first place owing to better handling and manuverablilty.
Sigh.
As I have already said, the numbers I quoted are for roads with at least 2 lanes each way separated by a median. The "highway" definition was only thrown out there to show you the United States also has a nebulous definition of "highway", that's why I was specific and stated "motorway" or "interstate", and also added restricted access, minimum of two lanes in each direction separated by a median. The United States does not have "dozens of times more" of these as you asserted, it only has slightly more. Before calling people idiots, you need to spend more time on reading comprehension.
Try drawing a best-fit curve on the 20/30/40mph figures and you'll find that the numbers in fact support the idea that kinetic energy to be dissipated (which increases at the square of impact velocity) is what is important when it comes to the probability of being killed. You're concentrating on the wrong number (speed), when the right number is kinetic energy to be dissipated. If you think 20% difference in impact energy is insignificant, then I have this bridge to sell you.
Let's assume all of the Toyota problems are due to the computer. Now how many crashes have occurred due to the problems? A small handful? Now compare that number by how many crashes have been caused by human error in the same makes and models of Toyota cars.
Highways in this definition are the standard of interstate highways, i.e. limited access with at least four lanes separated by a median and subject to special regulation. In Europe they are known as "motorways" (in the English language). Sorry, you are wrong.
If you want to pick nits like that, highways in the United States also include 2 lane back roads too. Many signposted US highways are like this. But the kilometer figures I give are *only* for roads of at least the standard of the M50 in England or I-10 in the United States; at least four lanes separated by a median.
As for pedestrians, no, the 20% decrease in kinetic energy is highly significant. According to UK stats, pedestrians hit at 20 mph have a 10% chance of dying, at 30 mph this increases to 50%, and at 40 mph this increases to 90%. So reducing the kinetic energy by 20% will have a measurable impact (pun intended) on the probability of a pedestrian being killed due to the rapidity at which the fatality rate increases.
I wouldn't have believed that kind of driver error was something that happened...until two years ago, an older driver in a small SUV with automatic transmission did just that and punched a large hole in the side of our building. Even though he actually needed to go in completely the opposite direction to leave his parking space. He put it in drive, then hit the gas instead of the brake when it started to creep forward. (And I thought they all had locking mechanisms on automatics to stop you from moving it out of park without your foot on the brake).
If we look at density, it's even less favourable to the United States - the UK has a much higher population density than the USA, and more cars per square mile. If we look at fatal accident rate per billion km travelled, the UK has just under half the accident rate of the USA. I've lived in both countries, and driving in the UK is definitely a lot more stressful and the roads are a lot busier (and I've lived in major metropolitan areas of the USA). I also have to wonder what the Texas highway planners smoke sometimes, they seem to be raving idiots with a love for decreasing radius turns on off-ramps and appallingly designed major highway interchanges.
If you think your state is the size of Europe, you must live in Alaska, which is large but has a very low population density, and therefore not much need for busy highways. (Even then, Alaska is still smaller than the EU - the EU at 4,324,782 sq. km is just somewhat larger than Alaska at only 1,717,854 sq km.) The European Union has a population of >500K, and therefore a great need for a great many highways. The size of somewhere does not necessarily mean it has a lot of highways. For example, Antarctica is very large, but has fewer miles of roads than, say, the Isle of Wight. Alaska has 2,000 miles of highways making up part of the National Highway System. On the other hand, Portugal alone has 1300 miles of highways of the same type, and Portugal is a relatively small country. The UK - still quite a small EU country - has more highway miles than Alaska despite being a fraction of the size of Alaska.
You assert that...
The US has 75,040 km of highways compared to an EU total of 63,839 km in the EU. Since when was 75,040 dozens of times more than 63,839? You assert that "their roads are cramped...and generally unsafe", yet the accident rates do not bear this out (for example the accident rate per bn kilometers travelled in the UK was half of what it was for the United States over the same period). Generally unsafe? Where I lived in the United States, in Houston (the 4th largest city), there are numerous (quite new) highway interchanges that were designed by raving lunatics, such as the IH-610/US 59 interchange near Westheimer which for most of the day causes near stationary traffic with much merging next to a lane flowing at 60 mph, or the I-610/I-45 interchange in the counterclockwise direction of I-610 which is so badly designed that traffic gets stopped with another on-ramp having to merge through this and onto the main lanes (with traffic at 70 mph) - even at 2.30 in the afternoon when there's comparatively little traffic. The funny thing is with the 610/59 junction is they recently redesigned it and made it even worse. Don't get me started on all the decreasing radius turns the Texas highway planners seem to love, despite there being enough room for a nice long deceleration lane. Or that they still haven't finished the improvements on NASA Road 1 after 15 years of work.
So 20% less kinetic energy (the thing that actually kills in a collision - the need to absorb all this energy quickly) makes no real life difference? Can I have some of what you're smoking?