I have no problem with this ruling, seeing as the agency concerned has no evidence to show that what happened with the problematic rig is likely to happen, with any sort of likelihood, on any other rig.
Too right. And what happened on that rig was an accident, if by accident you mean "an easily foreseeable result of poor safety standards and corner-cutting that prioritized saving money over safety," what most people would call an inevitability.
Honestly, I am completely amazed at the mental gymnastics on display here. Usually you don't get failures this stark and dramatic outside of wars. We'd been assured these wells were safe, that everything was being handled to the highest standards, and then something like this happens. Is this the "come to Jesus" moment? Is this when there's an introspective reevaluation of just how off those assurances were from reality? This is like the general who just lost his whole army saying "I don't see why the outcome of one battle should invalidate the martial traditions that have well-served our fathers and our forefathers." Um, did you just see what happened?! If terrorists blew up the well you could maybe say that this was something unexpected and outside of the design envelope. If a freakin' radioactive dinosaur tore the thing down you could call it an act of Godzilla. But this was a rig operating outside of the standards set by industry best practice, a rig lacking the safety equipment used by other drillers, which suffered a catastrophic failure due to the management policies of BP. And the problems on this rig are not unique!!! There's no telling how many others are out there waiting to blow up.
But no, let's not be hasty. General Ripper may have launched a nuclear strike on the USSR under his own recognizance but you have to admit that our nuclear command and control system has worked fairly well up to this point. I don't think we should dismiss it entirely just because of this one incident!
Oil industry apologists are saying we're all being whining, ungrateful children because we reap the benefits of cheap energy but bash the poor, hard-working people who put the gas in our cars. But what they don't mention is the fantastic amount of money spent buying this oil-dependent reality in the first place. From buying politicians to clouding the issues in the public forum to preventing research in clean alternatives. It's a sick, terrible system. And it's impossible to use the tools of democracy to fix it because even when we try to vote for change it's bait and switch.
The thing that gets me is how the writing can be plain on the wall and people who don't know better take their cue from people who do know better but whose financial best interests depend on pretending they don't. "Global warming is just a theory! It's still debatable!" Yeah, about as debatable as the theory that tobacco is a carcinogen. Hell, we can even get Republican presidents to mouth the words "oil addiction" and "we need to kick the habit." We just can't get anyone -- reps or dems -- to do a fucking thing about it. They're both beholden to the special interests.
I can't even begin to fathom that latest talking point, Obama's being mean to BP. Chicago-style takedown! What the fuck?! And I bet you're still upset about those fucking Eskimos beating up on poor ol' Exxon for all those decades trying to get the money they've been promised. $20 billion is going to be a drop in the bucket for all the damages wracked up and there will never be a full accounting. Most victims will never be made whole.
From the bleating on the right, you'd think that Obama had nationalized BP, crucified their board of directors on a line of crosses on a tarred beach, and signed an executive order to go to 100% renewables before 2012. If only! I'm actually pissed at how anemic his response has been. No, he can't snap his fingers and make the well go shut, he can't stand on the heads of the engineers and make them work faster but he could at least help unsnarl the clusterfuck that is the disaster response. He could take BP's management out of the loop on disaster mitigation. He could put the environmental experts in the control room so they can get the unfiltered information from the well head minus the BP spin. At the very least he could prevent the BP contractors from burning the sea turtles.
Yeah, yeah, mod me down. Go and confirm exactly what I'm saying.
Are we visiting the same Slashdot? There is lots of outcry here about the DRM and walled garden that is the Apple mobile platform, just hang around in this story for another twenty minutes or so and you will see plenty of comments about it.
But you're going to have to read at -1 to see them.
For example, I have terminal cancer, although for now I feel fine. The doctors know that none of the FDA approved treatments will stop the cancer, the best they can do is slow it down some. If I saw a treatment that had a high risk of killing me, but a decent chance it would cure me, I'd go for it, even knowing it might kill me.
That fucking sucks. My condolences. I completely agree with what you're saying. If the patient is making an informed consent decision, I don't see what the problem is. There could be some room for argument if a healthy, overweight person signs on for a potentially lethal weight loss procedure since that's getting into violating the whole "do no harm" territory. But if a person's already terminal, it's not like the experimental treatments could make things any worse. The whole informed consent thing would avoid scams where uninformed patients are tricked into dangerous procedures of dubious medical value.
One of my favorite movies, The Man from Earth [wikipedia.org] cost $200,000.
It had 0 CGI, no big name actors but a kick ass story from Jerome Bixby.
Ditto, an utterly amazing movie. But I cannot stress enough that anyone viewing it should go in cold, not even knowing the premise. Don't read the box, don't read a blurb, don't even follow the link. Watch it cold. That's what I was told to do, that's what I did, and boy was it worth it.
Maybe it's time for thinking about mandatory destruction of satellites at the end of their useful life, instead of trying to make money out of launching things only...
There's low-orbit sats and geosync sats and a whole range of orbits in between. There's different amounts of propellant involved for moving one versus another. Is it safer to try to deorbit the old sats or push them up into graveyard orbits? Is there any chance of the graveyard orbits filling up or is that crazy talk?
The shuttle tested a power tether device that drags through the planet's magnetic field. Draw power from the tether and the orbit drops, add power in and the orbit boosts. Maybe something like this could be useful for deorbiting old sats.
In what country? Or did you mean "year" where you typed "month"?
Actually that was a mistyping on my part. But gee, it doesn't take much to get the fanboys up in arms. I'm as big a computer geek as the next guy but I don't have such rabid product loyalty. You still need to buy that super extended warranty to get three years protection.
I also got it wrong with the redesign for the RAM. It's about damn time. Still no word on whether the hard drive is accessible. Saying this repair is a trivial matter for the end user is Apple apologist BS.
About 10 years ago I got really into the game "Midtown Madness" which features races where you race free-form through downtown Chicago picking your own route to hit a number of checkpoints. The game requires you to read traffic patterns, lights, etc far in advance. After playing the game, I found that I was doing the same thing in real traffic. My brain had been trained to observe and anticipate as if I were driving through city traffic at 80MPH rather than 35. I became much more aware of what was happening on cross streets, and in lanes other than mine. It faded back to normal, though, as I moved on to other games.
I find any heavily repeated experience will likely bleed over into other parts of your life. The question is whether you are weak-minded enough to let it overcome you. That's why I think it's silly to say "World of Warcraft made these kids flunk out of college" or "these professionals lost their jobs!" They have addictive personalities. The game hit on those pleasure centers and addictive behaviors went wild. They could have gotten hooked on gambling at the casino or any other number of things. It's the addictive behavior problem, the particular thing they're addicted to is irrelevant. "Krispy Kremes made me fat!" No. Your uncontrolled binging made you fat. If your particular poison was Krispy Kreme fine, but that's not to say it's their fault. Johnny Walker didn't make me an alcoholic just because it's my favorite brand.
All that being said, I did start to look at traffic that way after playing GTA3 heavily. I started thinking "You know, I probably could gun it and slide right through there." But I can differentiate between reality and fantasy. Some people really have problems with that. There was some stupid kid obsessed with Pulp Fiction who jumped up in a bank and shouted "Everybody be cool, this is a robbery." He was shot and killed. His parents were trying to blame the movie. No, the problem was with the kid. He could have just as easily gotten obsessed with a book or a John Lennon song or something else. A sad novel can make me sad in turn but it won't make me kill myself; it might be enough to push someone else over the edge.
Oh my fucking Christ, that was not trolling. Trolling is saying "Ha ha! Jobs is gonna die from cancer! Mac bois, where is your God now?" Trolling is modding someone down for stating a balanced opinion in light of personal experience.
That's a nice change. How about the hard drive? Doesn't say whether you can get at it from there. You'd have to look at the dissection guide for the older minis to believe just how awful they were to work on. Not meant to be opened. Lots of stuff to break. Like twiddling with laptop bits, all the delicate plastic ribbon cables and parts that could bend and break just by looking at them crosseyed.
For all its sexiness (and $699, apparently) it comes with no screen, keyboard or mouse. Granted, people will probably use this with their TV, but having no bundled keyboard/mouse is a real shame. And to think that the Mini was supposed to be an entry point (price-wise) in the Apple Mac world.
I think the part we're supposed to be shocked about is that they really do consider this to be an entry price.
Whenever I replace my current mini I think I'll probably go the hackintosh route with one of the small form factor PC cases. I really do like having a computer permanently hooked up to my TV.
I have a mini. Bought it two years ago. The idea was to get my feet wet in the wide world of mac. A big deciding factor was that the mini was so much cheaper than the imac, the next lowest model. And my TV had a VGA in port so I figured it was necessary to finally get the living room computer.
So with the current mini you're looking at doubling the ram like you always have to for a stock machine and it's a proprietary case not meant for user fiddling so you have to pay the mac store to install the ram, then you have to get the mouse and keyboard which will be wireless and thus more expensive, plus any other accessories you might pick up. Over $1000 easy. Oh, and let's no forget the mandatory service plan since Apple gives you a flat one month warranty, that's it. My mini's hard drive took a shit at one year plus two months. They told me I was SOL.
I like OSX but Apple hardware is nowhere near the high-end, premium, top of the line reliable they keep trying to claim it is. It's the same shit that goes into all the other consumer computers and breaks about as frequently. Ok, let me take that back. HP laptops break even more frequently than that.
Are they even running software for these courses or are they just reading pdf's? Those are platform-agnostic, even if Acrobat seems buggier on PC.
As big of a tech geek as I am, most of the tech thrown at education is worthless. A $5000 home gym doesn't do a damn bit of good if the owner doesn't make use of it and just taking a walk around the block is more effective than the unused gym. A poor teacher with a gizmo is just a poor teacher with a gizmo; she does not automatically become great.
We're back to the big argument between directed and undirected learning. We've had learning machines for hundreds of years -- they're called books. Kids can learn a lot from them, have been learning for quite some time. But there's things that just can't be taught from books -- someone has to show you. We've had that for even longer than we've had books. Used together, a really proper education can be provided.
A good teacher can provide a proper education even if the classroom is nothing but a mud-bricked one-room hovel and the students are sitting on the floor. The best facilities and equipment in the world will not make up for a bad teacher and unmotivated, unengaged students. But sure, let's throw a laptop into the mix. That has to make kids smarter, it cost extra money.
I'm sorry, I'm just too used to corporations lying and making shit up. Have a third party with no conflict of interest audit their numbers and then we can talk. Until then I'll just assume this is another "fuck the customer" move by a major corporation.
It pisses me off that the decision over which program survives and which dies has more to do with which senator's district the plant that's going to build it resides in.
What really gets me is that these are the same congressmen who will bleat and whine about out of control spending by Washington. The democrats park their cars outside of the adult bookstore and proudly brag about the porn they watch. the republicans park their trucks down the street and sneak in wearing a hat and sunglasses; on sunday morning they'll decry the filth-flarn-filth that they found in there.
If you look at the way the shuttle pork has been divvied up across the country it's absolutely disgusting. We can't have nice things because it costs too much to grease all the palms.
See, it was all a plan - give us a day of "Google as Bing" and demonstrate with cold hard data that people don't like Bing's style and prefer Google. Shut up carpers among stockholders that were screaming "do something!" to respond to Bing grabbing 2 percent market share, AND wipe MS's nose it it.
Yeah, that was the plan all along.
And while they're telling us they've returned to the original recipe, they've substituted high-fructose corn syrup for cane sugar. Ingenious!
I thought this was just a one-day thing they were doing to show they're aware of the oilpocalypse. Bing has pretty pictures but I don't actually use it for anything. As Stephen Colbert said "Bing is the best search engine. I know because I googled it."
Slashdot Mirror
I have no problem with this ruling, seeing as the agency concerned has no evidence to show that what happened with the problematic rig is likely to happen, with any sort of likelihood, on any other rig.
Too right. And what happened on that rig was an accident, if by accident you mean "an easily foreseeable result of poor safety standards and corner-cutting that prioritized saving money over safety," what most people would call an inevitability.
Honestly, I am completely amazed at the mental gymnastics on display here. Usually you don't get failures this stark and dramatic outside of wars. We'd been assured these wells were safe, that everything was being handled to the highest standards, and then something like this happens. Is this the "come to Jesus" moment? Is this when there's an introspective reevaluation of just how off those assurances were from reality? This is like the general who just lost his whole army saying "I don't see why the outcome of one battle should invalidate the martial traditions that have well-served our fathers and our forefathers." Um, did you just see what happened?! If terrorists blew up the well you could maybe say that this was something unexpected and outside of the design envelope. If a freakin' radioactive dinosaur tore the thing down you could call it an act of Godzilla. But this was a rig operating outside of the standards set by industry best practice, a rig lacking the safety equipment used by other drillers, which suffered a catastrophic failure due to the management policies of BP. And the problems on this rig are not unique!!! There's no telling how many others are out there waiting to blow up.
But no, let's not be hasty. General Ripper may have launched a nuclear strike on the USSR under his own recognizance but you have to admit that our nuclear command and control system has worked fairly well up to this point. I don't think we should dismiss it entirely just because of this one incident!
Oil industry apologists are saying we're all being whining, ungrateful children because we reap the benefits of cheap energy but bash the poor, hard-working people who put the gas in our cars. But what they don't mention is the fantastic amount of money spent buying this oil-dependent reality in the first place. From buying politicians to clouding the issues in the public forum to preventing research in clean alternatives. It's a sick, terrible system. And it's impossible to use the tools of democracy to fix it because even when we try to vote for change it's bait and switch.
The thing that gets me is how the writing can be plain on the wall and people who don't know better take their cue from people who do know better but whose financial best interests depend on pretending they don't. "Global warming is just a theory! It's still debatable!" Yeah, about as debatable as the theory that tobacco is a carcinogen. Hell, we can even get Republican presidents to mouth the words "oil addiction" and "we need to kick the habit." We just can't get anyone -- reps or dems -- to do a fucking thing about it. They're both beholden to the special interests.
I can't even begin to fathom that latest talking point, Obama's being mean to BP. Chicago-style takedown! What the fuck?! And I bet you're still upset about those fucking Eskimos beating up on poor ol' Exxon for all those decades trying to get the money they've been promised. $20 billion is going to be a drop in the bucket for all the damages wracked up and there will never be a full accounting. Most victims will never be made whole.
From the bleating on the right, you'd think that Obama had nationalized BP, crucified their board of directors on a line of crosses on a tarred beach, and signed an executive order to go to 100% renewables before 2012. If only! I'm actually pissed at how anemic his response has been. No, he can't snap his fingers and make the well go shut, he can't stand on the heads of the engineers and make them work faster but he could at least help unsnarl the clusterfuck that is the disaster response. He could take BP's management out of the loop on disaster mitigation. He could put the environmental experts in the control room so they can get the unfiltered information from the well head minus the BP spin. At the very least he could prevent the BP contractors from burning the sea turtles.
Yeah, yeah, mod me down. Go and confirm exactly what I'm saying.
Someone asked me if I had ICP. I said only if it's cold out.
But you're going to have to read at -1 to see them.
Modding me down for saying that apple critics are modded down. Can you get any more meta?
Are we visiting the same Slashdot? There is lots of outcry here about the DRM and walled garden that is the Apple mobile platform, just hang around in this story for another twenty minutes or so and you will see plenty of comments about it.
But you're going to have to read at -1 to see them.
Glad to have helped. :)
For example, I have terminal cancer, although for now I feel fine. The doctors know that none of the FDA approved treatments will stop the cancer, the best they can do is slow it down some. If I saw a treatment that had a high risk of killing me, but a decent chance it would cure me, I'd go for it, even knowing it might kill me.
That fucking sucks. My condolences. I completely agree with what you're saying. If the patient is making an informed consent decision, I don't see what the problem is. There could be some room for argument if a healthy, overweight person signs on for a potentially lethal weight loss procedure since that's getting into violating the whole "do no harm" territory. But if a person's already terminal, it's not like the experimental treatments could make things any worse. The whole informed consent thing would avoid scams where uninformed patients are tricked into dangerous procedures of dubious medical value.
What I really hate are the "Rental Exclusive" editions of movies which have long, unskipable previews before the movie.
That sort of thing has me absolutely livid. I have netflix but it makes me want to go seed a hundred movies out of spite.
One of my favorite movies, The Man from Earth [wikipedia.org] cost $200,000.
It had 0 CGI, no big name actors but a kick ass story from Jerome Bixby.
Ditto, an utterly amazing movie. But I cannot stress enough that anyone viewing it should go in cold, not even knowing the premise. Don't read the box, don't read a blurb, don't even follow the link. Watch it cold. That's what I was told to do, that's what I did, and boy was it worth it.
Obligatory from the Onion.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TrPwOrf4sM
Blockbuster Offers Glimpse Of Movie Renting Past
I for one am glad to see the Islamic religion embracing their moderate side.
Death to all extremists!
I know I'll get downmodded for saying this* but do not fall afoul of the mac crowd. You will be downmodded for it.
*Will this inoculate me against downmodding?
Maybe it's time for thinking about mandatory destruction of satellites at the end of their useful life, instead of trying to make money out of launching things only...
There's low-orbit sats and geosync sats and a whole range of orbits in between. There's different amounts of propellant involved for moving one versus another. Is it safer to try to deorbit the old sats or push them up into graveyard orbits? Is there any chance of the graveyard orbits filling up or is that crazy talk?
The shuttle tested a power tether device that drags through the planet's magnetic field. Draw power from the tether and the orbit drops, add power in and the orbit boosts. Maybe something like this could be useful for deorbiting old sats.
I'm both surprised and feeling more hope for humanity.
In what country? Or did you mean "year" where you typed "month"?
Actually that was a mistyping on my part. But gee, it doesn't take much to get the fanboys up in arms. I'm as big a computer geek as the next guy but I don't have such rabid product loyalty. You still need to buy that super extended warranty to get three years protection.
I also got it wrong with the redesign for the RAM. It's about damn time. Still no word on whether the hard drive is accessible. Saying this repair is a trivial matter for the end user is Apple apologist BS.
About 10 years ago I got really into the game "Midtown Madness" which features races where you race free-form through downtown Chicago picking your own route to hit a number of checkpoints. The game requires you to read traffic patterns, lights, etc far in advance. After playing the game, I found that I was doing the same thing in real traffic. My brain had been trained to observe and anticipate as if I were driving through city traffic at 80MPH rather than 35. I became much more aware of what was happening on cross streets, and in lanes other than mine. It faded back to normal, though, as I moved on to other games.
I find any heavily repeated experience will likely bleed over into other parts of your life. The question is whether you are weak-minded enough to let it overcome you. That's why I think it's silly to say "World of Warcraft made these kids flunk out of college" or "these professionals lost their jobs!" They have addictive personalities. The game hit on those pleasure centers and addictive behaviors went wild. They could have gotten hooked on gambling at the casino or any other number of things. It's the addictive behavior problem, the particular thing they're addicted to is irrelevant. "Krispy Kremes made me fat!" No. Your uncontrolled binging made you fat. If your particular poison was Krispy Kreme fine, but that's not to say it's their fault. Johnny Walker didn't make me an alcoholic just because it's my favorite brand.
All that being said, I did start to look at traffic that way after playing GTA3 heavily. I started thinking "You know, I probably could gun it and slide right through there." But I can differentiate between reality and fantasy. Some people really have problems with that. There was some stupid kid obsessed with Pulp Fiction who jumped up in a bank and shouted "Everybody be cool, this is a robbery." He was shot and killed. His parents were trying to blame the movie. No, the problem was with the kid. He could have just as easily gotten obsessed with a book or a John Lennon song or something else. A sad novel can make me sad in turn but it won't make me kill myself; it might be enough to push someone else over the edge.
Oh my fucking Christ, that was not trolling. Trolling is saying "Ha ha! Jobs is gonna die from cancer! Mac bois, where is your God now?" Trolling is modding someone down for stating a balanced opinion in light of personal experience.
They actually designed the case so the RAM is user upgradable, just scroll down http://www.apple.com/macmini/design.html [apple.com]
That's a nice change. How about the hard drive? Doesn't say whether you can get at it from there. You'd have to look at the dissection guide for the older minis to believe just how awful they were to work on. Not meant to be opened. Lots of stuff to break. Like twiddling with laptop bits, all the delicate plastic ribbon cables and parts that could bend and break just by looking at them crosseyed.
For all its sexiness (and $699, apparently) it comes with no screen, keyboard or mouse. Granted, people will probably use this with their TV, but having no bundled keyboard/mouse is a real shame. And to think that the Mini was supposed to be an entry point (price-wise) in the Apple Mac world.
I think the part we're supposed to be shocked about is that they really do consider this to be an entry price.
Whenever I replace my current mini I think I'll probably go the hackintosh route with one of the small form factor PC cases. I really do like having a computer permanently hooked up to my TV.
I have a mini. Bought it two years ago. The idea was to get my feet wet in the wide world of mac. A big deciding factor was that the mini was so much cheaper than the imac, the next lowest model. And my TV had a VGA in port so I figured it was necessary to finally get the living room computer.
So with the current mini you're looking at doubling the ram like you always have to for a stock machine and it's a proprietary case not meant for user fiddling so you have to pay the mac store to install the ram, then you have to get the mouse and keyboard which will be wireless and thus more expensive, plus any other accessories you might pick up. Over $1000 easy. Oh, and let's no forget the mandatory service plan since Apple gives you a flat one month warranty, that's it. My mini's hard drive took a shit at one year plus two months. They told me I was SOL.
I like OSX but Apple hardware is nowhere near the high-end, premium, top of the line reliable they keep trying to claim it is. It's the same shit that goes into all the other consumer computers and breaks about as frequently. Ok, let me take that back. HP laptops break even more frequently than that.
Are they even running software for these courses or are they just reading pdf's? Those are platform-agnostic, even if Acrobat seems buggier on PC.
As big of a tech geek as I am, most of the tech thrown at education is worthless. A $5000 home gym doesn't do a damn bit of good if the owner doesn't make use of it and just taking a walk around the block is more effective than the unused gym. A poor teacher with a gizmo is just a poor teacher with a gizmo; she does not automatically become great.
We're back to the big argument between directed and undirected learning. We've had learning machines for hundreds of years -- they're called books. Kids can learn a lot from them, have been learning for quite some time. But there's things that just can't be taught from books -- someone has to show you. We've had that for even longer than we've had books. Used together, a really proper education can be provided.
A good teacher can provide a proper education even if the classroom is nothing but a mud-bricked one-room hovel and the students are sitting on the floor. The best facilities and equipment in the world will not make up for a bad teacher and unmotivated, unengaged students. But sure, let's throw a laptop into the mix. That has to make kids smarter, it cost extra money.
I'm sorry, I'm just too used to corporations lying and making shit up. Have a third party with no conflict of interest audit their numbers and then we can talk. Until then I'll just assume this is another "fuck the customer" move by a major corporation.
It pisses me off that the decision over which program survives and which dies has more to do with which senator's district the plant that's going to build it resides in.
What really gets me is that these are the same congressmen who will bleat and whine about out of control spending by Washington. The democrats park their cars outside of the adult bookstore and proudly brag about the porn they watch. the republicans park their trucks down the street and sneak in wearing a hat and sunglasses; on sunday morning they'll decry the filth-flarn-filth that they found in there.
If you look at the way the shuttle pork has been divvied up across the country it's absolutely disgusting. We can't have nice things because it costs too much to grease all the palms.
See, it was all a plan - give us a day of "Google as Bing" and demonstrate with cold hard data that people don't like Bing's style and prefer Google. Shut up carpers among stockholders that were screaming "do something!" to respond to Bing grabbing 2 percent market share, AND wipe MS's nose it it.
Yeah, that was the plan all along.
And while they're telling us they've returned to the original recipe, they've substituted high-fructose corn syrup for cane sugar. Ingenious!
I thought this was just a one-day thing they were doing to show they're aware of the oilpocalypse. Bing has pretty pictures but I don't actually use it for anything. As Stephen Colbert said "Bing is the best search engine. I know because I googled it."