If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.
New stuff is coming out so fast there's no time to teach about it. When I was a student, it would have been nice to have lectures on the newest thingamajigs but profs just taught the fundamental theory and students were expected to learn new technologies on their own. There are vocational schools devoted to the nitty gritty, but they just target the techniques that are used in paying jobs.
Schools have a limited role anyways. Anyone with a personal goal has to plan our their own learning, whether it is from a school, a mentor, self learning, etc.
R&D costs money. Looking at computers, the first ones were so expensive only governments or rich companies could use them.
Why not sell to the rich? They're buying, and cars depreciate like crazy so in a few years a poor schmuck could buy used. With all the problems that early models have, the whole system of maintaining these cars costs so much that the industry will not set up en masse to sell to the masses. They will get their feet wet with a few toys for the rich and find out what it takes to move into the economies of scale.
if you can get it elliptical enough you put the perigee inside Earth's atmosphere
Lovely, if you can have ALL items touching the atmosphere in the same zone, and they all line up in the same path.
However, the orbits will likely just be in every possible plane and have every possible center. As they approach Earth, they get accelerated by the smaller radius, and pretty soon there will be superspeed space junk everywhere coming from all directions.
A very expensive brute force solution: capture each object and then act - take it to the sun, cut it up with lasers, collect it in a single container. Just don't drop it in my back yard.
decrease in the T-Bones and an increase in rear-endings
advice: drive defensively, and never assume everyone else will ensure your safety. Always have a way out, before zipping through an intersection look both ways including entrances to private areas, and watch people on the other side. Many major accidents are caused by people crossing the center line. Accidents are rare but coming out of an accident without damage or injury is also rare.
The problem with the guy is he has practically no vision
I suspect his vision to be farsighted. With access to so much liquid money, he can investigate numerous ideas, but there are some factors that work against Microsoft.
You can't win them all, meaning every company faces challenges. Apple and Google look like the winners of today but Apple and Google compete directly with each other in the phone market, and they are hardly in a position to guarantee dominance in their most powerful lines of business. Google works on a huge number of ideas, and most people only think of Google for a few things.
Free software abounds, making it hard for Microsoft to sell something new. Microsoft also has the anti-Midas touch - the software they produce drives the price of that software down. Microsoft seems reluctant to compete directly with AutoCAD, but if they did, it would likely become a module of Office.
Quantum leaps in software features outstrip hardware advances. As an example, almost 10 years ago the tablet PC was introduced but only recently I acquired one. Before that, they were too expensive and too slow. Even the one I bought isn't always smooth in capturing handwriting, it is very heavy, the screen is small, and starting all the software to handle pen input is time consuming. At this level of development, the platform is functional but has a long way to go. More computer manufacturers are needed to compete in order to bring the feature set to the next generation. Microsoft has been ahead of the curve already, and I think Apple's iPad will have to catch up, as I see newer tablets looking to make a kill based on Apple putting the idea of the tablet back into the forefront. I have yet to see someone actually using an iPad on a casual basis, but I have spotted many people reading paperbacks and newspapers. The iPad felt fun to me but it also felt like a big sinkhole of money that a tablet PC can work around. Today's tablets have as much RAM and disk space as any major laptop, but lag in CPU power because of the heating and battery needs of the mobile user. This lag will not be prolonged, I hope.
Another example of software that will emerge is automated car driving, not to mention many other kinds of automation. This is risky but has potential for a world wide customer base, so it is something along the interests of Microsoft and other big players. Again, hardware may be lagging the needs of software.
People have not raised their purchasing power. Apple has had the foresight to understand this with the affordable iPhone and iPad.
The trick is to angle them so that you're not looking directly at them
Lotsa luck. I see desktop monitors with glossy screens for sale too.
Typical gimmick - once everyone has upgraded to glossy the next round of upgrades will be "glare-free". Also baked into this cake is the baby step upgrade for people to buy a tiny laptop with 600 vertical dots, go up to 768, and then 900. This keeps the revenues flowing in the sales of sub $400 computers. I don't begrudge business from profiting but the industry should be looking for better ways of attracting customers instead of selling on the basis of "less annoying"
You will buy a computer that will do what you need done plus provide a bit of headroom for future applications
The future is now. Ever since I've been searching for a fast enough computer for the tasks of yesterday, I have found new ideas that make the computers of today too slow.
The whole problem is with the way programs are written - they were designed in the era of single thread/single core, and do not use multiple cores perfectly. Software will take a while to catch the advances of hardware, so the ideal solution would be to have processor makers get back to the clock speed race.
Of all the designs to try, what about using waste heat to power the current in a different part of a chip?
When I was in school, numbers wren't invented. But it wasn't that bad. The math questions were essays on "How dost thou fancy a number system?" and "In the beginning it was void. A God created tinyint." After Moses wrote Numbers, mankind tended to think more precisely.
The handwriting recognition on my tablet PC is mistaking a lot of punctuation as it is. The rupee symbol sure looks hard to confuse with some other symbol if written properly.
If handwriting recognition can work in far more contexts like math and programming, it would be a major driver for software to handle all the symbols properly, as people would find it really simple to input these symbols.
Re:Creativity is disappearing for many reasons
on
The Creativity Crisis
·
· Score: 1
Kids arent being allowed to be kids anymore. When I was a kid in primary school, I used to take my 2 bucks pocket money on a Saturday morning and go tearing out of the house, down the street and across the local oval to the local shop
So right - When I was young, I went everywhere without parents to limit me, but now kids go everywhere only with an adult.
The math and logic of this situation needs to be looked at closely. The situation is caused by too many people, forcing people to live in suburbs and parents to have to work more to pay for transport and housing.
ERGO, the problem with kids is that a generation ago, people had too many kids.
They don't let banks cheat and collapse the country like in the US where everyone must get the latest HDTV, big cars and just spend money on non-important items and entertainment.
But when you look around, don't you think the world has somehow become a more friendly and peaceful place? If people buy their toys, this leads to jobs for manufacturers and retailers as well as career-oriented teenagers who might otherwise wander aimlessly and seek destructive and violent outlets because of boredom.
Jobs, jobs, jobs. Why isn't government able to improve employment? The people of the developed world ought to dream more and collectively reach for the ultimate toys and goals that only rich nations can think of.
Decades ago, generations ago, individuals could find a living easily. Not so today - competition and mature products are forcing many people out of work. Even many of the "non-important items" have become affordable and marginalized.
The problem is that individuals cannot collectively attain a higher economic plateau if they continue to aspire as individuals. An individual's consumption, even Gordon Gecko, touches only a limited number of other individuals - this cannot lead to enough demand to employ everyone.
Corollary: It only makes sense that China wants to hire the best. Proof: Jobs are limited. Q.E.D. I live in a place where people are scarce - at times, teenagers used to be hired to do sophisticated work. With demand falling off in the last couple of years, competition for jobs has become more arduous.
Cutting to the chase - what kind of toys and goals are at a national level?
health care, curing diseases
renewable energy, reducing the dependence for nonrenewable energy
space travel
raising the economic potential of all citizens - education, knowledge bases, publicly accessible laboratories
National level goals are things that can stay in the mind of a populace. For the last decade, a major national level goal has been war on terror, fat lot of good that is doing. This sort of goal did not demand the highest IQ, and that may be the reason for fears of a double dip recession. Now, people each and every one needs to put themselves into the frame of mind of a more challenging goal - pick something, no one is going to tell you that you have to pick anything, and try to make an advancement or at the very least a profit.
I have a Microsoft wireless mouse. There is room in the mouse for 2 AA cells but it is completely functional with just one, and the time to run down a battery doesn't seem to be affected by putting 2 or 1 batteries in. So why would I ever want to put in 2 when it is lighter with 1?
The probability of the second child (though not necessarily born earlier or later) being a boy is 1/2 given whatever you want to say about the other child. That is the intuition, and that is the driver of many of the other arguments posted.
Conditional probability: P(A | B) = P(AB) / P(B)
OK. That's the theory
A simple breakdown:
A = is boy B = is boy born on a Tuesday
(A more complex breakdown might involve all people, then ask who is a child and who is too old to be a child... But let's not worry about that too much, as there's enough fun already.)
P(B) is relevant? Really? Maybe... What is P(B)? After a good night's sleep, I have some wild ideas to mention.
Intriguingly, what is this probability of anyone being a boy born on a Tuesday? Of all the people in the world wiggle yourself if you are such a dude! So by the frequency interpretation of probability, take the entire human population of the world past and present. Categorize people according to gender and day of week born. Count the ones that are male and gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. Divide by the entire population - that is the probability P(B)
Quantum mechanics and fate aside, isn't P(A|B) = 0.5? After all, what linkage is there between A and B? Based on probability from population, P(A|B) ought to be population of boys (past and present) divided by number of all people (past and present). In the statement of the situation, there's no stipulation that the children are the offspring of the same parents even. They could merely be two kids together for a moment. P(AB) is the probability of being a boy together with another boy Tuesday. Wouldn't he rather be with a girl Friday? Let's contemplate the probability of that.
>> That's like saying "Why would I want an email client, twitter client, ipod, *and* telephone in the same device"
> Or you could get REALLY short cables, stack the units properly for airflow, and if something fails, you're less likely to have to wait upon a service technician to deliver something
Great advice. With 4 phones wired together on a belt, you'd like a suicide bomber.
Wait. So as if her action alone wasn't stupid enough, she started a fire at Bayonet Point Oxygen? An oxygen supply company? There's a reason they tell people on oxygen not to smoke
Even when they suspected her after she said "filing cabinet", her defense should have been "Duh, that's the only thing that can catch fire around here. We sell oxygen but it's not like it's, flammable."
To game makers: after each level, player writes essay to advance, and stupid behavior from player to provoke a response does provoke a respones - uninstallation.
It's a complicated world - parents can't always keep up with how to get their kids to work harder. Microsoft, please do more for the kids. Ideas:
Memory and hard drive space being so big, record what kids are doing with the computer so a parent can play it back.
Educational software that holds a kid's attention and teaches something powerful
The Internet is full of good things. A motivated youngster can self-educate and save a lot on tuition. To each his own. I could say that a falling grade would be enough motivation to change behavior but a smarter approach is to spend some of the education budget in guiding kids to self-educate. This is a world of books, experts on line, productivity tools to help one organize information, etc. Granted this goodness has been evolving rapidly but the time has come to make a population-wide approach to using computers more effectively.
The goal of low power transistors is reasonable, but a new transistor design may be needed. The brain can do a lot of operations with little power but in terms of clock speed, the brain isn't that fast. A similar design may be good for low power electronic decisions - massive number of circuits at low frequency.
I can't give full credit yet, but this may be the path to settling this conundrum of artistic material being expensive to produce yet easy to copy. Clearly we have a growing socioeconomic problem that threatens creativity. With the intelligence of mankind evident in creating such good technology, the solution to making this technology usable to the benefit of all is simple.
Once copying is accepted by law, copying becomes taxable.
Copiers pay a tax (probably based on mere bandwidth usage, which will nail people who don't copy, but that's life in an age where everyone is "borrowing" good content), and producers of content get paid (based on unique downloads to unique IP addresses from official servers, so no you can't download to yourself just to tick up your score).
A few decades ago, libraries funded by taxes made it possible for many people to experience knowledge without having to pay full price per book. At present, it is fair to use taxes to make digital information and art available without even paying the astounding sum of $0.99 per item.
For a fair tax all around and for practicality, several criteria must be met.
Creators are paid relative to quality and demand.
The tax is used only fund the system for distributing creative works, including authors, artists, journalists, websites, Internet infrastructure, etc.
Creative work made available on the system must remain available, so it can't be withdrawn to inflate the price.
I, and many of my friends have 4000 songs plus. Do we really have 4K to spend on music? Not a chance! I might have the budget for $100
There's a business point here.
People like having a collection of their favorite music to play over and over. 4000 sounds a bit over the top - especially if these are all favorites, because if they were played consecutively, at an average of 4 minutes per tune, that would be 16000 minutes = 267 hours = 11 days. But whatever, - suppose that the industry just lets people pay a 500 (as opposed to this skinflint's $100) as a one time fee to accumulate 5000 favorites, selected from widely available titles, over a span of 50 years (a big chunk of anyone's average lifetime), thus permitting people to practically download anything so they can reject the ones they don't like.
That's reasonable, isn't it? Anyone who has a collection of 4 or 5 thousand isn't a connoisseur, and probably plays the stuff just to pass time. To these people the value of a tune is only nickels and dimes, so if the price is at that level, at least there will be a larger number of people who will pay up and not be looking over their shoulder.
Damn - that doesn't display well. The nonalphabetic chars for profanity killed a lot of my text.
They are, reportedly, afraid that if they try to stop the flow completely at the blowout preventer that the pressure will destroy the blowout preventer
Are the drillers fucking insane????
Using the blowout preventer destroys the blowout preventer - Therefore, may as well never have installed a blowout preventer. It's useless anyways. Is that how they figure it? More evidence that the drillers don't know how to drill safely.
Even if the blowout preventer is a wimpy piece of shit, in spite of the fact that it is a 400 ton mechanism, propping it up with surrounding sand and rock would leave nothing but a hole on top of a hill. That should be simple enough to fill up with something solid.
A partial fill would still help to reduce the flow. The problem may be that a partial flow would be a high velocity flow, which would erode the cap. The flow has to be practically slammed shut - stuff it up and then lower a heavy slab or maybe a stack of slabs on top. Brute force is what is needed here, not golf balls.
They are, reportedly, afraid that if they try to stop the flow completely at the blowout preventer that the pressure will destroy the blowout preventer
Are the drillers #()That should be simple enough to fill up with something solid.
A partial fill would still help to reduce the flow. The problem may be that a partial flow would be a high velocity flow, which would erode the cap. The flow has to be practically slammed shut - stuff it up and then lower a heavy slab or maybe a stack of slabs on top. Brute force is what is needed here, not golf balls.
It's like the Mythical Man-Month -- Just throwing resources at the problem isn't necessarily going to make it better
Here's an idea that's been spinning in my head for the last couple of days. But of course BP is flooded with ideas so I'll just post it on Slashdot to see if the world hypes it or tells me how stupid it is.
And maybe we'll have a Reality Man Month - so here goes: The riser pipe has be cut so the whole thing sticking out of the sea floor is vertical. The situation has been simplified. While the Top Hat is funneling some oil up, they should throw some very simple resouurces like rocks and sand all around the blowout preventer, to make a mound. The mound is to ensure that the blowout preventer doesn't topple over. After this shoring up, lower a large "cork" on this bottle of champagne, and clamp it down. Finally, put the Top Hat back on to catch the crap leaking out the edges. This will significantly reduce the flow rate. This task wouldn't take more than a week, and the situation would be highly improved even as the ships on top need to scurry away during hurricanes.
The American way was MMS letting the oil companies write their own inspection reports in pencil, which would be officially completed in ink. If BP coughed up the $11 mil to the winners, that would be
Slashdot Mirror
If you're spending half the lecture writing something on the board that could very well be flashed up there in an instant using PowerPoint or similar, you're wasting the students time.
New stuff is coming out so fast there's no time to teach about it. When I was a student, it would have been nice to have lectures on the newest thingamajigs but profs just taught the fundamental theory and students were expected to learn new technologies on their own. There are vocational schools devoted to the nitty gritty, but they just target the techniques that are used in paying jobs.
Schools have a limited role anyways. Anyone with a personal goal has to plan our their own learning, whether it is from a school, a mentor, self learning, etc.
R&D costs money. Looking at computers, the first ones were so expensive only governments or rich companies could use them.
Why not sell to the rich? They're buying, and cars depreciate like crazy so in a few years a poor schmuck could buy used. With all the problems that early models have, the whole system of maintaining these cars costs so much that the industry will not set up en masse to sell to the masses. They will get their feet wet with a few toys for the rich and find out what it takes to move into the economies of scale.
if you can get it elliptical enough you put the perigee inside Earth's atmosphere
Lovely, if you can have ALL items touching the atmosphere in the same zone, and they all line up in the same path.
However, the orbits will likely just be in every possible plane and have every possible center. As they approach Earth, they get accelerated by the smaller radius, and pretty soon there will be superspeed space junk everywhere coming from all directions.
A very expensive brute force solution: capture each object and then act - take it to the sun, cut it up with lasers, collect it in a single container. Just don't drop it in my back yard.
decrease in the T-Bones and an increase in rear-endings
advice: drive defensively, and never assume everyone else will ensure your safety. Always have a way out, before zipping through an intersection look both ways including entrances to private areas, and watch people on the other side. Many major accidents are caused by people crossing the center line. Accidents are rare but coming out of an accident without damage or injury is also rare.
The problem with the guy is he has practically no vision
I suspect his vision to be farsighted. With access to so much liquid money, he can investigate numerous ideas, but there are some factors that work against Microsoft.
Another example of software that will emerge is automated car driving, not to mention many other kinds of automation. This is risky but has potential for a world wide customer base, so it is something along the interests of Microsoft and other big players. Again, hardware may be lagging the needs of software.
The trick is to angle them so that you're not looking directly at them
Lotsa luck. I see desktop monitors with glossy screens for sale too.
Typical gimmick - once everyone has upgraded to glossy the next round of upgrades will be "glare-free". Also baked into this cake is the baby step upgrade for people to buy a tiny laptop with 600 vertical dots, go up to 768, and then 900. This keeps the revenues flowing in the sales of sub $400 computers. I don't begrudge business from profiting but the industry should be looking for better ways of attracting customers instead of selling on the basis of "less annoying"
You will buy a computer that will do what you need done plus provide a bit of headroom for future applications
The future is now. Ever since I've been searching for a fast enough computer for the tasks of yesterday, I have found new ideas that make the computers of today too slow.
The whole problem is with the way programs are written - they were designed in the era of single thread/single core, and do not use multiple cores perfectly. Software will take a while to catch the advances of hardware, so the ideal solution would be to have processor makers get back to the clock speed race.
Of all the designs to try, what about using waste heat to power the current in a different part of a chip?
Bacteria suck oxygen though - huge dead zones are happening as the bacteria chow down. Still, it may be less toxic overall, and works 24/7.
When I was in school, numbers wren't invented. But it wasn't that bad. The math questions were essays on "How dost thou fancy a number system?" and "In the beginning it was void. A God created tinyint." After Moses wrote Numbers, mankind tended to think more precisely.
The handwriting recognition on my tablet PC is mistaking a lot of punctuation as it is. The rupee symbol sure looks hard to confuse with some other symbol if written properly.
If handwriting recognition can work in far more contexts like math and programming, it would be a major driver for software to handle all the symbols properly, as people would find it really simple to input these symbols.
Kids arent being allowed to be kids anymore. When I was a kid in primary school, I used to take my 2 bucks pocket money on a Saturday morning and go tearing out of the house, down the street and across the local oval to the local shop
So right - When I was young, I went everywhere without parents to limit me, but now kids go everywhere only with an adult.
The math and logic of this situation needs to be looked at closely. The situation is caused by too many people, forcing people to live in suburbs and parents to have to work more to pay for transport and housing.
ERGO, the problem with kids is that a generation ago, people had too many kids.
They don't let banks cheat and collapse the country like in the US where everyone must get the latest HDTV, big cars and just spend money on non-important items and entertainment.
But when you look around, don't you think the world has somehow become a more friendly and peaceful place? If people buy their toys, this leads to jobs for manufacturers and retailers as well as career-oriented teenagers who might otherwise wander aimlessly and seek destructive and violent outlets because of boredom.
Jobs, jobs, jobs. Why isn't government able to improve employment? The people of the developed world ought to dream more and collectively reach for the ultimate toys and goals that only rich nations can think of.
Decades ago, generations ago, individuals could find a living easily. Not so today - competition and mature products are forcing many people out of work. Even many of the "non-important items" have become affordable and marginalized.
The problem is that individuals cannot collectively attain a higher economic plateau if they continue to aspire as individuals. An individual's consumption, even Gordon Gecko, touches only a limited number of other individuals - this cannot lead to enough demand to employ everyone.
Corollary: It only makes sense that China wants to hire the best. Proof: Jobs are limited. Q.E.D. I live in a place where people are scarce - at times, teenagers used to be hired to do sophisticated work. With demand falling off in the last couple of years, competition for jobs has become more arduous.
Cutting to the chase - what kind of toys and goals are at a national level?
National level goals are things that can stay in the mind of a populace. For the last decade, a major national level goal has been war on terror, fat lot of good that is doing. This sort of goal did not demand the highest IQ, and that may be the reason for fears of a double dip recession. Now, people each and every one needs to put themselves into the frame of mind of a more challenging goal - pick something, no one is going to tell you that you have to pick anything, and try to make an advancement or at the very least a profit.
I have a Microsoft wireless mouse. There is room in the mouse for 2 AA cells but it is completely functional with just one, and the time to run down a battery doesn't seem to be affected by putting 2 or 1 batteries in. So why would I ever want to put in 2 when it is lighter with 1?
A conditional probability situation ...
The probability of the second child (though not necessarily born earlier or later) being a boy is 1/2 given whatever you want to say about the other child. That is the intuition, and that is the driver of many of the other arguments posted.
Conditional probability: P(A | B) = P(AB) / P(B)
OK. That's the theory
A simple breakdown:
A = is boy
B = is boy born on a Tuesday
(A more complex breakdown might involve all people, then ask who is a child and who is too old to be a child... But let's not worry about that too much, as there's enough fun already.)
P(B) is relevant? Really? Maybe ... What is P(B)? After a good night's sleep, I have some wild ideas to mention.
Intriguingly, what is this probability of anyone being a boy born on a Tuesday? Of all the people in the world wiggle yourself if you are such a dude! So by the frequency interpretation of probability, take the entire human population of the world past and present. Categorize people according to gender and day of week born. Count the ones that are male and gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. Divide by the entire population - that is the probability P(B)
Quantum mechanics and fate aside, isn't P(A|B) = 0.5? After all, what linkage is there between A and B? Based on probability from population, P(A|B) ought to be population of boys (past and present) divided by number of all people (past and present). In the statement of the situation, there's no stipulation that the children are the offspring of the same parents even. They could merely be two kids together for a moment. P(AB) is the probability of being a boy together with another boy Tuesday. Wouldn't he rather be with a girl Friday? Let's contemplate the probability of that.
>> That's like saying "Why would I want an email client, twitter client, ipod, *and* telephone in the same device"
> Or you could get REALLY short cables, stack the units properly for airflow, and if something fails, you're less likely to have to wait upon a service technician to deliver something
Great advice. With 4 phones wired together on a belt, you'd like a suicide bomber.
Wait. So as if her action alone wasn't stupid enough, she started a fire at Bayonet Point Oxygen? An oxygen supply company? There's a reason they tell people on oxygen not to smoke
Even when they suspected her after she said "filing cabinet", her defense should have been "Duh, that's the only thing that can catch fire around here. We sell oxygen but it's not like it's, flammable."
Re: distractions
Maybe helpful - allow only educational games
To game makers: after each level, player writes essay to advance, and stupid behavior from player to provoke a response does provoke a respones - uninstallation.
It's a complicated world - parents can't always keep up with how to get their kids to work harder. Microsoft, please do more for the kids. Ideas:
The Internet is full of good things. A motivated youngster can self-educate and save a lot on tuition. To each his own. I could say that a falling grade would be enough motivation to change behavior but a smarter approach is to spend some of the education budget in guiding kids to self-educate. This is a world of books, experts on line, productivity tools to help one organize information, etc. Granted this goodness has been evolving rapidly but the time has come to make a population-wide approach to using computers more effectively.
It's what separates us from the animals! Except the weasel
A worthy animal. Could be another Slashdot moderation category, alongside the troll, but with, let's say a random score ranging from +1 to -1.
The goal of low power transistors is reasonable, but a new transistor design may be needed. The brain can do a lot of operations with little power but in terms of clock speed, the brain isn't that fast. A similar design may be good for low power electronic decisions - massive number of circuits at low frequency.
I can't give full credit yet, but this may be the path to settling this conundrum of artistic material being expensive to produce yet easy to copy. Clearly we have a growing socioeconomic problem that threatens creativity. With the intelligence of mankind evident in creating such good technology, the solution to making this technology usable to the benefit of all is simple.
Once copying is accepted by law, copying becomes taxable.
Copiers pay a tax (probably based on mere bandwidth usage, which will nail people who don't copy, but that's life in an age where everyone is "borrowing" good content), and producers of content get paid (based on unique downloads to unique IP addresses from official servers, so no you can't download to yourself just to tick up your score).
A few decades ago, libraries funded by taxes made it possible for many people to experience knowledge without having to pay full price per book. At present, it is fair to use taxes to make digital information and art available without even paying the astounding sum of $0.99 per item.
For a fair tax all around and for practicality, several criteria must be met.
I, and many of my friends have 4000 songs plus. Do we really have 4K to spend on music? Not a chance! I might have the budget for $100
There's a business point here.
People like having a collection of their favorite music to play over and over. 4000 sounds a bit over the top - especially if these are all favorites, because if they were played consecutively, at an average of 4 minutes per tune, that would be 16000 minutes = 267 hours = 11 days. But whatever, - suppose that the industry just lets people pay a 500 (as opposed to this skinflint's $100) as a one time fee to accumulate 5000 favorites, selected from widely available titles, over a span of 50 years (a big chunk of anyone's average lifetime), thus permitting people to practically download anything so they can reject the ones they don't like.
That's reasonable, isn't it? Anyone who has a collection of 4 or 5 thousand isn't a connoisseur, and probably plays the stuff just to pass time. To these people the value of a tune is only nickels and dimes, so if the price is at that level, at least there will be a larger number of people who will pay up and not be looking over their shoulder.
Damn - that doesn't display well. The nonalphabetic chars for profanity killed a lot of my text.
They are, reportedly, afraid that if they try to stop the flow completely at the blowout preventer that the pressure will destroy the blowout preventer
Are the drillers fucking insane????
Using the blowout preventer destroys the blowout preventer - Therefore, may as well never have installed a blowout preventer. It's useless anyways. Is that how they figure it? More evidence that the drillers don't know how to drill safely.
Even if the blowout preventer is a wimpy piece of shit, in spite of the fact that it is a 400 ton mechanism, propping it up with surrounding sand and rock would leave nothing but a hole on top of a hill. That should be simple enough to fill up with something solid.
A partial fill would still help to reduce the flow. The problem may be that a partial flow would be a high velocity flow, which would erode the cap. The flow has to be practically slammed shut - stuff it up and then lower a heavy slab or maybe a stack of slabs on top. Brute force is what is needed here, not golf balls.
They are, reportedly, afraid that if they try to stop the flow completely at the blowout preventer that the pressure will destroy the blowout preventer
Are the drillers #()That should be simple enough to fill up with something solid.
A partial fill would still help to reduce the flow. The problem may be that a partial flow would be a high velocity flow, which would erode the cap. The flow has to be practically slammed shut - stuff it up and then lower a heavy slab or maybe a stack of slabs on top. Brute force is what is needed here, not golf balls.
It's like the Mythical Man-Month -- Just throwing resources at the problem isn't necessarily going to make it better
Here's an idea that's been spinning in my head for the last couple of days. But of course BP is flooded with ideas so I'll just post it on Slashdot to see if the world hypes it or tells me how stupid it is.
And maybe we'll have a Reality Man Month - so here goes: The riser pipe has be cut so the whole thing sticking out of the sea floor is vertical. The situation has been simplified. While the Top Hat is funneling some oil up, they should throw some very simple resouurces like rocks and sand all around the blowout preventer, to make a mound. The mound is to ensure that the blowout preventer doesn't topple over. After this shoring up, lower a large "cork" on this bottle of champagne, and clamp it down. Finally, put the Top Hat back on to catch the crap leaking out the edges. This will significantly reduce the flow rate. This task wouldn't take more than a week, and the situation would be highly improved even as the ships on top need to scurry away during hurricanes.
Its the American way
The American way was MMS letting the oil companies write their own inspection reports in pencil, which would be officially completed in ink. If BP coughed up the $11 mil to the winners, that would be
.