You drive a car (ie. not a truck) that gets 15 mpg? That's seriously pitiful mileage.
My car gets 24-28mpg, and I think it's far too inefficient to be practical.
On the other hand, you can easily hit 30-35mpg in a solid car. VW/Audi's 2.0L Turbo will easily hit that mark on the highway, and is fast as all hell. The cars built around it tend to be solid, good performers in crash tests, and more comfortable than anything that's ever come out of Detroit.
VW's TDI (diesel) engine can easily do 50mpg on the highway, and can be very economical if you rack up a lot of miles. Once again, the cars built around it are far from "rattletraps." Modern diesels are basically indistinguishable from gas engines in terms of driving characteristics, noise, and pollution.
The Prius won't go as fast, but is also a nice car, even after you take away the fact that it's a hybrid.
I don't like comparing them to "serious" RPGs. They're less complex, take less time to complete, and are fairly linear.
That's not to say that they're not enjoyable -- they keep my attention throughout the story, and have some of the best art/graphics I've seen in an RPG (with distinctive graphics and monsters in each dungeon, which is a very nice touch). If anything, their simplicity makes it easy to pick up or put down on a whim.
This is the same thing that happened to phone companies with local and then long distance service, as well as a host of other industries over time.
Doubtful. It took the telecommunications act, 10 years, and the proliferation of internet access for that to happen.
You'd think the same thing would happen to cable companies (or power companies, thanks to energy choice schemes). It hasn't. Instead, they run a confusopoly.
The MacOS Flash Player is also terrible, often sucking up 100% of CPU cycles no matter how fast the computer is. It's been bad for a few years, and has gotten progressively worse with each release.
For those of us with PPC macs, this has made internet video all but unusable (despite the machines being powerful enough to do anything else). My PowerBook can play back 720p H264, XViD, or even FLV video without stuttering through VLC. However, it's completely incapable of playing back a tiny 320x240 video on YouTube when using the official Flash Player.
Is it possible to use this Javascript magic to write a greasemonkey script to interpret the Flash, and strip the video out into an embedded instance of VLC, Quicktime, or (in the case of H264 flash files), HTML5 <video>
I don't like my power company. They advocate the use of fossil fuels, and engage in unethical business practices.
However, I'm sure as hell not going to turn my power off.
Same thing with Facebook. I can simultaneously disapprove of their company, and still continue to use their service. It's become an essential tool for certain demographics (of which I happen to be a member). I'm not about to cut myself off from my peers over some privacy issues.
Indeed, we wouldn't have this particular problem if people weren't propagating moronic notions of "property rights" trumping every other constitutional right, including that of free speech (and freedom of association).
You're absolutely correct that property rights play a huge role in American culture and thought. I wouldn't have thought very much of this until somebody pointed out to me that there are no trespassing laws in Scotland. None at all....and honestly, they get by just fine without them, as unfathomable as it was for my American mind to ponder.
Add me to the club of 6P fans! I've had mine since ~1997. Still works like the day it was new, and the cartridges last forever. Talk about a good investment....
(It's hard to believe, but the Laserjet 4000 Series were also from the same era, and are absolute workhorses of printers. If you replace the fuser every quarter-million pages or so, they'll keep going forever, and are quite fast to boot. Yes, that's million with an M.)
My new Samsung color laser is nice, and prints pretty graphics (and is apparently crap compared to other color lasers, but is what I could afford). However, it burns through its tiny and expensive toner cartridges like no tomorrow, and I sincerely doubt that it'll be working 13 years from now.
I've been writing some code for Blackberry over the past few months. The "developer experience" ranges from undesirable to makes me want to gouge my eyes out.
Inconsistent and poorly-documented APIs, device incompatibilities, depressingly anemic hardware, a simulator that likes to use over a gig of RAM, and a web browser that makes IE look great by comparison (and an embedded HTML widget that doesn't support the same set of features as the web browser, neither of which properly implement the DOM)
The fact that they have the largest installed base of smartphones, and the smallest pool of 3rd-party applications should speak volumes.
RIM's user base is ripe for the picking, as long as somebody can come up with a good alternative to BES, and provide a good migration path from it.
I wasn't talking about the drilling methodologies or techniques used (these are coming under fire, and rightfully so).
I was specifically referring to the BOP, which as far as I'm aware was installed correctly, and should have prevented a continuous spill, regardless of whatever nonsense took place at the surface. It was a last-resort failsafe that was supposed to have been rock-solid.
There's also the possibility that the accident would have occurred even if they were following proper protocols. This one's harder to know for sure, although the scale of the accident is unprecedented at so many levels that it seems entirely possible.
The leak is not uncontained. The BOP and (partially-destroyed) riser stack are providing resistance against the flow of oil. The concern is that this proposed solution could cause enough pressure to build up inside the BOP that the entire apparatus fails completely, which could then increase the flow of oil by at least an order of magnitude.
In all fairness, we still have no idea what went wrong. I want BP to be dragged across the coals for this as much as the next guy, but the truth of the matter is that we still don't know why the BOP failed, given that it was designed and certified to protect against this very sort of disaster.
As others in this thread have mentioned, several aspects of this accident are unprecedented, and although the oil industry should be faulted for pushing too hard too quickly, this accident may simply have to serve as a learning experience, given that it's entirely possible that BP, Transocean, SLB, and Halliburton were all following the established safety protocols in conformance with past experience.
Jurors, who mostly do not understand the science behind DNA, will accept that DNA evidence must mean the accused is guilty.
Isn't it the defense attorney's job to expressly make sure this doesn't happen? We could alternatively force juries to sit in on a lecture before deciding a case in which DNA evidence was presented.
I agree that multiple points of solid evidence should be needed to convict. However, this is a separate and solvable problem.
They're already in the process of plugging the well permanently. Unless I'm interpreting this plan incorrectly, this will also create two new wellheads (although I'm not sure that they will be usable as production wells).
In any event, the currently leaking well was for exploration purposes only.
We also want to prevent something like this from happening.
I've got a PowerBook G4. Still works just fine with 10.5.
I was irked when Apple dropped PPC support in Snow Leopard, but it wasn't an entirely unreasonable decision for them to make. Almost everything still runs on 10.5. If/when they finally do stop updating Safari for 10.5, you can use Firefox.
32-bit processors are still supported across the board, and I do not know of any plans to drop support in the near future. Prior to the x86 transition, Apple were actually quite good with supporting older hardware. I have a G4 tower from 1999 that runs 10.4 with tolerable levels of performance, provided you've got enough RAM (the system maxes out at 1.5GB, which is more than some systems being sold today). It could run 10.5 if I bothered to put a DVD drive in it to install the OS, and I imagine that performance would be adequate. Recent versions of Final Cut Pro are perfectly usable on this system, provided you're not doing HD.
You might be bitter. However, you're definitely trolling.
You missed the "In San Francisco" part, along with the rest of the summary. Bank of Italy purchased a smaller bank named Bank of America Los Angeles," in 1929 and took (part of) its name. This is not at all uncommon in corporate mergers (I'll be damned if I know who actually owns AT&T or Westinghouse these days)
The original Bank of Italy name stemmed from the fact that its founder was an Italian immigrant, and many banks at the time refused to offer accounts to immigrants.
Coincidentally, this is the same exact disease that Viagra was designed to treat.
It wasn't designed to treat ED -- it just turned out to have one really noticeable side-effect. It also wasn't expected to be the blockbuster that it is, as estimates for the prevalence of ED at the time were way off, as few men were willing to admit to having it, while no practical treatment options existed.
(There's also a growing body of work suggesting that men who have sex frequently are less likely to get prostate cancer, so there's that... )
So... yeah. Shame on them for accidentally creating a successful product.
Completely and categorically incorrect. BP's current plan is to drill two connecting shafts to connect to the already-existing bore, and pump concrete down into it to permanently seal the well.
I imagine that they'll want to tap the same field elsewhere. However, they'll drill a new well to do that. This was an exploratory well. I'm pretty certain that they've confirmed the presence of oil in the area by now.
They also may want to walk away from the site for a few years until it's a bit less politically sensitive.
4.5) Build passively-safe nuclear power plants, and lots of electrically-powered mass transit.
We have the technology and the money to to this. Even outlandishly expensive public transportation usually turns out to make more sense than car ownership, provided that you can maintain frequent service levels.
4.75) Abandon the suburbs. Build up the ones that can be salvaged. The average New Yorker uses virtually no fossil fuels over the course of a day.
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You drive a car (ie. not a truck) that gets 15 mpg? That's seriously pitiful mileage.
My car gets 24-28mpg, and I think it's far too inefficient to be practical.
On the other hand, you can easily hit 30-35mpg in a solid car. VW/Audi's 2.0L Turbo will easily hit that mark on the highway, and is fast as all hell. The cars built around it tend to be solid, good performers in crash tests, and more comfortable than anything that's ever come out of Detroit.
VW's TDI (diesel) engine can easily do 50mpg on the highway, and can be very economical if you rack up a lot of miles. Once again, the cars built around it are far from "rattletraps." Modern diesels are basically indistinguishable from gas engines in terms of driving characteristics, noise, and pollution.
The Prius won't go as fast, but is also a nice car, even after you take away the fact that it's a hybrid.
I don't like comparing them to "serious" RPGs. They're less complex, take less time to complete, and are fairly linear.
That's not to say that they're not enjoyable -- they keep my attention throughout the story, and have some of the best art/graphics I've seen in an RPG (with distinctive graphics and monsters in each dungeon, which is a very nice touch). If anything, their simplicity makes it easy to pick up or put down on a whim.
Forget Linux. YouTube hasn't been usable on PPC macs for well over a year now. Even Intel macs struggle with FLV.
FiOS competes with cable, but (the few) areas served by two cable companies generally see no competition.
And that sucks, because Verizon won't be building out the FiOS network any further, leaving some of us stuck with Comcast forever.
This is the same thing that happened to phone companies with local and then long distance service, as well as a host of other industries over time.
Doubtful. It took the telecommunications act, 10 years, and the proliferation of internet access for that to happen.
You'd think the same thing would happen to cable companies (or power companies, thanks to energy choice schemes). It hasn't. Instead, they run a confusopoly.
The MacOS Flash Player is also terrible, often sucking up 100% of CPU cycles no matter how fast the computer is. It's been bad for a few years, and has gotten progressively worse with each release.
For those of us with PPC macs, this has made internet video all but unusable (despite the machines being powerful enough to do anything else). My PowerBook can play back 720p H264, XViD, or even FLV video without stuttering through VLC. However, it's completely incapable of playing back a tiny 320x240 video on YouTube when using the official Flash Player.
Is it possible to use this Javascript magic to write a greasemonkey script to interpret the Flash, and strip the video out into an embedded instance of VLC, Quicktime, or (in the case of H264 flash files), HTML5 <video>
And yet you still have an account there.
I don't like my power company. They advocate the use of fossil fuels, and engage in unethical business practices.
However, I'm sure as hell not going to turn my power off.
Same thing with Facebook. I can simultaneously disapprove of their company, and still continue to use their service. It's become an essential tool for certain demographics (of which I happen to be a member). I'm not about to cut myself off from my peers over some privacy issues.
It's news, because the tax code does cover sales such as the ones on eBay and Craigslist, but the users have been notoriously non-compliant.
No news here, but no new taxes either. Just even-handed enforcement of the existing tax code.
Indeed, we wouldn't have this particular problem if people weren't propagating moronic notions of "property rights" trumping every other constitutional right, including that of free speech (and freedom of association).
You're absolutely correct that property rights play a huge role in American culture and thought. I wouldn't have thought very much of this until somebody pointed out to me that there are no trespassing laws in Scotland. None at all. ...and honestly, they get by just fine without them, as unfathomable as it was for my American mind to ponder.
Add me to the club of 6P fans! I've had mine since ~1997. Still works like the day it was new, and the cartridges last forever. Talk about a good investment....
(It's hard to believe, but the Laserjet 4000 Series were also from the same era, and are absolute workhorses of printers. If you replace the fuser every quarter-million pages or so, they'll keep going forever, and are quite fast to boot. Yes, that's million with an M.)
My new Samsung color laser is nice, and prints pretty graphics (and is apparently crap compared to other color lasers, but is what I could afford). However, it burns through its tiny and expensive toner cartridges like no tomorrow, and I sincerely doubt that it'll be working 13 years from now.
I've been writing some code for Blackberry over the past few months. The "developer experience" ranges from undesirable to makes me want to gouge my eyes out.
Inconsistent and poorly-documented APIs, device incompatibilities, depressingly anemic hardware, a simulator that likes to use over a gig of RAM, and a web browser that makes IE look great by comparison (and an embedded HTML widget that doesn't support the same set of features as the web browser, neither of which properly implement the DOM)
The fact that they have the largest installed base of smartphones, and the smallest pool of 3rd-party applications should speak volumes.
RIM's user base is ripe for the picking, as long as somebody can come up with a good alternative to BES, and provide a good migration path from it.
Not to play pedantics, but wouldn't that actually have been Halliburton and Transocean's fault?
A loosely-compressed 480p video (ie. DVD) can look superior to a 1080p encode if said 1080p video is compressed to death.
Similarly, 720p videos rarely look worse than 1080p videos, and occasionally manage to look better.
Here's a source. Foxconn has 486,000 employees according to fairly reliable sources.
According to this 2007 WSJ article, they had over 450,000 factory workers, 270,000 of which were at a single 2x1mile site.
In other words, the suicide rates for Foxconn workers is slightly below average.
Fair enough. The leak is uncontained, but the flow is partially constrained.
(PS. Know who else liked semantics?)
I wasn't talking about the drilling methodologies or techniques used (these are coming under fire, and rightfully so).
I was specifically referring to the BOP, which as far as I'm aware was installed correctly, and should have prevented a continuous spill, regardless of whatever nonsense took place at the surface. It was a last-resort failsafe that was supposed to have been rock-solid.
There's also the possibility that the accident would have occurred even if they were following proper protocols. This one's harder to know for sure, although the scale of the accident is unprecedented at so many levels that it seems entirely possible.
The leak is not uncontained. The BOP and (partially-destroyed) riser stack are providing resistance against the flow of oil. The concern is that this proposed solution could cause enough pressure to build up inside the BOP that the entire apparatus fails completely, which could then increase the flow of oil by at least an order of magnitude.
In all fairness, we still have no idea what went wrong. I want BP to be dragged across the coals for this as much as the next guy, but the truth of the matter is that we still don't know why the BOP failed, given that it was designed and certified to protect against this very sort of disaster.
As others in this thread have mentioned, several aspects of this accident are unprecedented, and although the oil industry should be faulted for pushing too hard too quickly, this accident may simply have to serve as a learning experience, given that it's entirely possible that BP, Transocean, SLB, and Halliburton were all following the established safety protocols in conformance with past experience.
Jurors, who mostly do not understand the science behind DNA, will accept that DNA evidence must mean the accused is guilty.
Isn't it the defense attorney's job to expressly make sure this doesn't happen? We could alternatively force juries to sit in on a lecture before deciding a case in which DNA evidence was presented.
I agree that multiple points of solid evidence should be needed to convict. However, this is a separate and solvable problem.
They're already in the process of plugging the well permanently. Unless I'm interpreting this plan incorrectly, this will also create two new wellheads (although I'm not sure that they will be usable as production wells).
In any event, the currently leaking well was for exploration purposes only.
We also want to prevent something like this from happening.
I've got a PowerBook G4. Still works just fine with 10.5.
I was irked when Apple dropped PPC support in Snow Leopard, but it wasn't an entirely unreasonable decision for them to make. Almost everything still runs on 10.5. If/when they finally do stop updating Safari for 10.5, you can use Firefox.
32-bit processors are still supported across the board, and I do not know of any plans to drop support in the near future. Prior to the x86 transition, Apple were actually quite good with supporting older hardware. I have a G4 tower from 1999 that runs 10.4 with tolerable levels of performance, provided you've got enough RAM (the system maxes out at 1.5GB, which is more than some systems being sold today). It could run 10.5 if I bothered to put a DVD drive in it to install the OS, and I imagine that performance would be adequate. Recent versions of Final Cut Pro are perfectly usable on this system, provided you're not doing HD.
You might be bitter. However, you're definitely trolling.
You missed the "In San Francisco" part, along with the rest of the summary. Bank of Italy purchased a smaller bank named Bank of America Los Angeles," in 1929 and took (part of) its name. This is not at all uncommon in corporate mergers (I'll be damned if I know who actually owns AT&T or Westinghouse these days)
The original Bank of Italy name stemmed from the fact that its founder was an Italian immigrant, and many banks at the time refused to offer accounts to immigrants.
Coincidentally, this is the same exact disease that Viagra was designed to treat.
It wasn't designed to treat ED -- it just turned out to have one really noticeable side-effect. It also wasn't expected to be the blockbuster that it is, as estimates for the prevalence of ED at the time were way off, as few men were willing to admit to having it, while no practical treatment options existed.
(There's also a growing body of work suggesting that men who have sex frequently are less likely to get prostate cancer, so there's that... )
So... yeah. Shame on them for accidentally creating a successful product.
Completely and categorically incorrect. BP's current plan is to drill two connecting shafts to connect to the already-existing bore, and pump concrete down into it to permanently seal the well.
I imagine that they'll want to tap the same field elsewhere. However, they'll drill a new well to do that. This was an exploratory well. I'm pretty certain that they've confirmed the presence of oil in the area by now.
They also may want to walk away from the site for a few years until it's a bit less politically sensitive.
4.5) Build passively-safe nuclear power plants, and lots of electrically-powered mass transit.
We have the technology and the money to to this. Even outlandishly expensive public transportation usually turns out to make more sense than car ownership, provided that you can maintain frequent service levels.
4.75) Abandon the suburbs. Build up the ones that can be salvaged. The average New Yorker uses virtually no fossil fuels over the course of a day.