And no doubt in these super high transistor count and clock frequency CPUs and chips we are using these days there must be devices and methods used inside them to keep the logic transfer and computation validity on the straight and narrow.
Other than ECC on the cache arrays... No. Not a scrap.
If you want reliability on every internal signal and register against cosmic ray strikes, because you're a military or aerospace contractor, you pay boku bucks for it, settle for having way less than what we would currently call performance. And even then I highly doubt anyone is actually putting ECC on each and every bus or set of latches. You just radiation harden the device as much as possible, and then use three of them so if one gets the wrong answer because of a particle strike, the other two will out-vote it.
Would the perl script be loaded at the same address in RAM every time? Wouldn't that likely be a one-time unrepeatable problem?
If the stuck bit was in the file cache, then it would be repeatable for as long as the script stayed cached, plus you could load the file up in a text editor and see the changed character, etc. Then it would mysteriously go away.
That was the point of my last paragraph... Observatories are facilities that contain astronomical instruments. But you don't call the instrument itself an observatory whether that instrument is a telescope or not.
There should be no dispute whatsoever that IceCube is an observatory. But I think it is fair to call it a neutrino telescope as well.
Besides, no one in these fields ever calls anything like this an (unqualified) telescope.
Yeah, but they do say things like radio telescope or x-ray telescope, and those are very different from what most laypeople think of as a telescope. I certainly think that omitting the word "neutrino" was a big mistake, but does it go beyond that? The question is, can it be called a type of telescope?
Curiously, the link you provide to Auger describes it as a "cosmic ray observatory", almost as if the people who created the site were scientists, aware of their responsibility to communicate clearly.
"Observatory" doesn't mean "not a telescope" though. Observatories are facilities that contain instruments, frequently including telescopes. Auger is a facility, so regardless of what is in it they're going to call it an observatory. McDonald Observatory contains the Hobby-Eberly telescope and a couple others, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory contains two gamma ray telescopes.
It may be worth mentioning that no one working in the field ever calls a neutrino detector a "telescope", as in English that word when used without qualification virtually always means "optical telescope", so the usage in this article is misleading and confusing, to the point where if were done deliberately I would consider the person doing it to be either stupid or dishonest. I guess maybe the person who wrote the article or provided the information for it has English as a second language.
Sure, unqualified it implies optical, but on the other hand we have radio telescopes, infrared telescopes, x-ray telescopes, and gamma-ray telescopes. Why not the IceCube neutrino telescope? Surely, though, the lack of the word "neutrino" in the title and the summary was a gross omission.
This may not be in a physical sense and may be done inside of a computer via munging of captured data from various physical detectors.
In that respect, I still come to the same conclusion, that this is not a telescope.
Um, if you accept that a telescope need not focus by using physical reflection but by combining data from multiple detectors distributed over an area, then this would most definitely be a telescope in that respect.
If we must for some reason draw a distinction between traditional telescopes and IceCube (i.e. we're not being pedantic, we're deliberately defining the term to exclude IceCube), then I'd draw it where you didn't, at requiring physical reflection/refraction to focus.
The key feature of a telescope as I interpret the word is amplification of visual phenomena. It makes tiny things seem big.
This neutrino detector doesn't have any sort of magnification in that sense. It doesn't even work in the electromagnetic spectrum! It's purpose isn't to zoom in on a phenomenon, but to detect it and tell us where it came from. It doesn't zoom in.
Sure it does. It allows you to take a source of infrequent interactions and amplifies them by increasing the size of the detector. This is what electromagnetic telescopes do. A faint source of photons is amplified by increasing the collection area. A faint source of neutrinos is amplified by IceCube. The biggest difference is simply that photon interactions are much more probable than neutrino interactions, like a traditional a telescope that was looking at an object so distant only a few photons arrived per year,.
It's quite analogous, and I see no problem with calling IceCube a neutrino telescope. I'd call the facility as a whole an Observatory, because that's what an observatory is -- a facility which contains instruments for astronomical observation. An observatory is not itself an instrument.
Notice that they called [the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory]an "observatory", not a "telescope."
That's because it contains multiple instruments, including the COMPTEL Imaging Compton Telescope and the EGRET Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope.
So see? There are gamma ray telescopes that are called telescopes. Neutrino telescope may be more of a stretch, but I think it still applies for the same reason it does for gamma ray 'scopes -- it amplifies rarefied astronomical phenomenon.
Just to clarify the distinction between telescope and observatory, Hubble is also refered to as an Observatory from time to time, though its only main instrument is a single telescope so we call it the HST. It, Compton, Chandra, and Spitzer are collectively called The Great Observatories. Because those words are not exclusive, quite the opposite in that an observatory typically contains a telescope.
Your comment seems very similar to "every download is a lost sale", because, to me, at least, it's pretty clear that "Moryath" isn't going to buy anything advertised in that irritating way --- in fact, I wouldn't even be surprised if he might actually consider boycotting products pushed by "those stupid annoying ads". In that case, his avoiding the ads is doing the advertisers a favor.
Remember X10, the little computer-interfaced security camera company? I was actually interested in buying a number of their products -- mostly to satisfy vague James Bond-only-nerdy urges -- ha ha, I can see it's the pizza guy who just rang my doorbell without leaving my computer!
That is until they began a marketing blitz of pop-up ads. I recall it as the first such assault I experienced. And I vowed never to buy products from such a company. And I haven't.
If blocking the pop-up ads on Youtube hurts the advertiser, and especially if it hurts Google, then good. Maybe they'll recognize that they're being hurt by their own behavior, and change their policy.
Dreaded? Incredibly annoying? Come one, it's just a trumpet.
Have you actually fucking heard the noise just coming over the television? Are you deaf? Or is your opinion simply irrelevant to any normal person's perception of what is annoying?
The walls are damaged by the neutron emission, but not all radiation damage results in the material becoming radioactive. The induced radioactivity in the walls of the reactor is much less significant than it simply becoming brittle. That's the reason why it needs to be replaced.
The consequence of not going above and beyond the law is carried out through the court system AND various executive regulatory actions.
Yes, all of which has yet to occur. BP has yet to face those consequences. Which is why the government offering a way for them to reduce those consequences is the opposite of a shakedown. This is a simple concept. You do something stupid and damaging. You are facing massive lawsuits and regulatory action for this. The government says, help to make it right now, demonstrate good will (and no, saying "I will comply with the law" doesn't count because you don't have a choice), and we'll go easy on you in said future legal action. Otherwise, we will not go easy on you.
ZOMG MAFIA SHAKEDOWN!
Jeezus. Do you think being offered the chance to take defensive driving for a speeding ticket before you've even been proven guilty in court zomg is a shakedown?
through the likely expense of hundreds of millions of dollars to defend against even baseless prosecution by the government.
I don't know which is more ridiculous -- that you're implying that hundreds of millions is a serious penalty for the negligence of a company the size of BP, the kind that would supposedly make them pay out billions of "extralegal" damages, or that you're suggesting that prosecution against them would be baseless.
No, wait, I know. It's the latter. Acting like BP are innocent victims here, like this isn't a direct consequence of their own negligence and cutting of corners on safety and ignoring signs of danger all in the name of saving a few bucks, is beyond stupid, it's disgusting.
Tell that to the shareholders who lost $89 Billion. Just because you don't understand this loss doesn't make it any less real to the people who used to own something valuable and now they no longer do.
Most investors already understand the difference between a loss of market value and an actual loss, so maybe you should be asking them to clue you in. Here's a quick hint, though, as to one of the differences: Unless BP starts posting real losses, then their stock will recover and every investor who didn't liquidate while the stock was low will have lost nothing.
The President develops energy sources now? How does he find time to do all that scientific work and still fit in so many parties and rounds of golf?
That's an interesting question. It makes me wonder: Are you pretending not to understand the difference between a loss of market value and actual expenses just like you're pretending not to understand that we're talking about energy policy?
Also, alternative energy sources are still so economically inferior to petroleum that we could have a spill like this every summer, make oil companies pay double for each cleanup, and the alternative sources still couldn't compete. Alternative energy is just another way of saying "please let me pay 5-10 times as much for energy".
Please. Alternative energy would already be economically viable if we gave them the same assistance we do to oil. It's already viable in many places with no assistance at all.
Actually making oil companies pay the full price of their environmental damage? Ha! You'd be gagging for any alternative in a week!
Electric cars are similarly limited in comparison to real cars. As a real product, they don't make sense. They're more understandable as an environmental religious sacrifice or some kind of green asceticism.
They make great sense for anyone who isn't regularly traveling great distances. Gas cars will still exist for those times where its needed.
Where has it been shown that regulations would have made any difference?
Effective regulation at any one of the steps where BP decided to cut corners might have prevented this spill.
Of course, to have effective regulation, you have to not gut the regulation, and not run the regulatory body under the assumption that regulation itself is bad and collusion with the industry is good.
Eleven guys were killed in the explosion. You think they care more about what some bureaucrat says than whether they live or die?
"They", as in the ones who make decisions, don't give a flying fuck about the lives of "they" as in the workers who died. Just like they don't give a fuck about the environment, or the non-oil economy of the Gulf. That's why they cut corners that could result in the damage they did.
What they care about is the bottom line and their own asses. So yes, if a bureaucrat says "You are going to lose billions of dollars in future oil revenue if your rig doesn't pass a real inspection" they are going to care way more about that than mere loss of (not their) life.
No, you don't have to wait until there is legal action against you to strike a deal. That's only in the specific case of the plea bargain, but many deals are struck before the courts are ever involved. There is nothing unusual or extralegal about this.
Happy versus unhappy government is describing how rigorously they will pursue legal remedies. Of course BP said they'd pay for the legal consequences; how could they claim otherwise seeing as they have no choice in the matter? Of course they were also going to fight those consequences in court to have them reduced as much as possible. But if they demonstrate good faith beforehand, then those legal consequences may be less than they could, legally, be, without having to go through the trouble of a court fight. This again is quite common and completely legal.
That's the whole point, that's why there is nothing extralegal about this -- if BP doesn't cooperate with the government, the government will pursue the maximum legal penalties against them, which of course still means the government has to win their case in court which makes this completely unlike actual shakedowns. Offering to pursue less than the maximum legal penalty is a deal, not a shakedown.
You say they've done everything they're legally required to do, but the investigation into what happened and what safety guidelines BP evaded is still ongoing and it's the legal consequences of that which they are -- based solely on what is known up to this point -- rightfully afraid of. It is for that reason that BP has every incentive to cooperate with the government, in hopes that compliance now will make them look better in the coming legal shitstorm.
The total budget is still larger, and thank goodness they're getting rid of Operation Lets-Repeat-Apollo-And-Act-Like-That-Means-Something which was preventing other actually new and interesting things from being accomplished.
BTW I got that you were joking, but it wasn't funny. It seems like there could be a joke premised on NASA hiring 7th graders, so maybe try working on it. Or not.
What I've always wondered is -- what do you call one thousand billions? What do you call two hundred thousand billions? It just seems awkward to have to string so many sizes together, but that's obviously from my perspective of having grown up doing it our way.
There are broad classes of algorithms where you can make good use of essentially arbitrary amounts of computing power to get better answers. When doing physical simulations of something like airflow over a jet wing, or the movement of a weather system, or the explosion of a hydrogen bomb, you'll break everything up into tiny units that you treat as monolithic elements whose behavior can be treated relatively simply, and calculate what happens to them over some tiny timescale, call the result the new state of the universe, and repeat. This is called "finite element analysis".
Because you're calculating everything in discreet steps, though, errors creep in and accumulate. The more processing power you have, the more elements you can use and the smaller time scales you can calculate over and get a more accurate answer in the same amount of time. The reason it's unacceptable to do the same calculation but have it go 1,000 or 1,000,000 times slower is that these simulations might already take hours, days, weeks, or even longer. Even the longest DoD contract needs an answer to the behavior of a proposed jet fighter wing in less than 1,000,000 days.:)
Scientific computing is an area where there will always be a use for more processing power.
There are other areas where it can be important, when you have real time constraints and can't just reduce your accuracy to make it work. I recall a story from advanced algorithms class where a bank was handling so many transactions per day that the time it took to process them all was more than 24 hours. Obviously this was a problem. The solution in that case was to modify the algorithm, but that's not always possible, and you need more computing. This is a little different in that you need the extra power to allow growth, as opposed to science where you could hand them an exaflop computer today and they'd be able to use it to its fullest.
Give us the money now or things could get hard for you later.
When the "things" that could get "hard" are the legal consequences of your actions, then that's not a shakedown.
People and corporations make out-of-court deals all the time. The idea is that you agree to some penalty that is less than if you were to go to court and lose, while the prosecutor/plaintiff gets a positive outcome for them without the expense and risk of litigation.
The difference between striking a deal with prosecutors, and being shook down by the mafia, is that if you refuse the deal with the prosecutors then you still get your day in court. The penalty for not paying the mafia is not a matter of due process, it was not a penalty you would ever legally owe. The government on the other hand has every right to pursue every legal penalty against BP.
Offering to go easy on them if they play ball now is not a shakedown, it's a deal -- and it tends to annoy people when dealing with ordinary criminals. But when its a fabulously wealthy multinational, suddenly it's unfair to try to get them to cooperate in return for better treatment.
If BP thinks this "shakedown" is unfair, all they have to do is say no and go to court. Obviously they think their chances are better with a happy government than with a pissed one. They think they're getting a deal, or they'd just say no.
Because many years after Chernobyl, it is clear that it was a uniquely horrible reactor and beyond idiotic test procedure that lead to the accident, and that technology has developed to the point where none of its failings are in any way relevant.
In contrast, every rig in the gulf is using the same safety technology that failed at Deepwater Horizon, and many were certified by the same corrupt regulators who gave Deepwater Horizon a clean bill of health despite failing and deliberately disabled safety equipment. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this rig is unique or exceptional, other than that it is the one where the chickens came home to roost.
Chernobyl was an outstanding argument to stop construction of Chernobyl-style reactors (obviously), and to reconsider regulation of reactors (particularly in Russia) to make sure nothing as stupid as the disaster-causing test would be allowed.
Similarly, if in twenty years it's clear that the Deepwater rig was unique, and technology has moved beyond the current state of the art to a regime of "inherent safety" like nuclear, then Deepwater will no longer be a good argument to stop drilling.
Yes, anyone with half a brain knows nothing is literally "absolutely" safe. At the same time, anyone thus equipped automatically understands "absolutely safe" to mean "with a high degree of probability" or "absolutely safe to the best of our ability to ensure it, barring highly unusual circumstances", or hell at least "very safe". These are not inherently unreasonable statements, and I'd like to credit the President with the half a brain necessary to understand that. Indeed, I'd like to think that most of the country's acceptance of off shore drilling was based on the reasonability of these safety assurances.
By the same token, nobody claimed the Titanic was literally unsinkable, until after the fact. They claimed specific safety features that would allow it to float under many circumstances that would sink other ships.
But therein lies the key difference between the Titanic and Deepwater horizon.
The Titanic sank because it hit an iceberg which opened up five of the hull's sixteen compartments to water, exceeding both it's specified and hypothetical ability to float. While there's a lot to be said about errors occurring up to the impact, the fact is that the ship was never designed to survive that kind of damage.
Deepwater Horizon, on the other hand, was supposed to be able to prevent a spill in exactly the circumstances that occurred. Pockets of methane gas coming up the pipe were not unexpected phenomenon. That's why so many were shocked that the safety devices apparently failed. But then we learned that some of the equipment had already failed inspections, had shown signs of failure (like pieces of a seal floating up the pipe), and even that one of the safety devices had been deliberately disabled.
This would be like if the Titanic sank even though only a couple of its cmpartments were breeched, but, woops, the builders hadn't bothered to actually separate them because that would have taken too long.
Tone down the statement "absolutely safe" to whatever reasonable degree you want, and BP still failed to reach it.
The magazine frowns upon all these things and it makes some sense. If, as The Economist suggests, BP's value has already dropped by $89 billion and that's "far in excess of all but the most dire forecasts of the ultimate costs of the spill," what is to be gained by all this backlash against the oil industry but a bunch of political posturing?
If a reduction in market capitalization was an actual expense for BP, this would be a moderately reasonable point.
Since that's absolutely not the case, then the point of the backlash is to ensure that BP actually pays the price for the spill, with the result that they and other companies are actually driven to improve their safety procedures and more importantly follow those procedures that they already should have been.
All that $89 billion means for BP is that they're a somewhat easier target for a stock buyout. It means that the fraction of their own stock that they own is less valuable, so if they were planning on any acquisitions using stock it's going to be more costly as long as the stock price is low. It means anyone who plans on cashing out their holdings in BP right now will make less money. It's not insignificant from a larger corporate strategy perspective, but it's actual impact to BP is nothing like what an actual $89 billion actually suggests.
Shame on The Freaking Economist for suggesting otherwise.
News flash: The United States is still inexorably reliant on its oil industry. If the Obama administration wants to do something about future oil disasters, maybe it should think more seriously about that and what can be done about it.
Like developing alternative energy sources from solar to nuclear, and encouraging the development and adoption of fuel efficient and preferably electric vehicles? Yeah, that's being done. I'm sure more can be done. I'm all for it. I hope you are too.
Also, had government done a better job of regulating the oil industry in the first place, BP's shoddy practices might not have gone unchecked and this disaster might never have happened.
Yes, that's very true. Who would have thought that doing everything possible to deregulate, and the underlying philosophy that regulation is unnecessary, would result in insufficient regulatory action?
Unfortunately firing the new MMS head for not cleaning up the cesspool of corruption and deliberate inefficacy that she inherited was only just the beginning of a long, long road to fixing this.
Seriously. I should have said "this is only a problem if you have assumed that intelligent life would inevitably get around the speed of light, and want to announce themselves to us".
Slashdot Mirror
Uh, no, not at all... *shifty eyes*
In any case, the U. Wisc. team that is running the project calls it a telescope. So I'm going with that.
The IceCube website and U Wisc. says it's a telescope. So, case closed as far as I'm concerned.
And no doubt in these super high transistor count and clock frequency CPUs and chips we are using these days there must be devices and methods used inside them to keep the logic transfer and computation validity on the straight and narrow.
Other than ECC on the cache arrays... No. Not a scrap.
If you want reliability on every internal signal and register against cosmic ray strikes, because you're a military or aerospace contractor, you pay boku bucks for it, settle for having way less than what we would currently call performance. And even then I highly doubt anyone is actually putting ECC on each and every bus or set of latches. You just radiation harden the device as much as possible, and then use three of them so if one gets the wrong answer because of a particle strike, the other two will out-vote it.
Would the perl script be loaded at the same address in RAM every time? Wouldn't that likely be a one-time unrepeatable problem?
If the stuck bit was in the file cache, then it would be repeatable for as long as the script stayed cached, plus you could load the file up in a text editor and see the changed character, etc. Then it would mysteriously go away.
That was the point of my last paragraph... Observatories are facilities that contain astronomical instruments. But you don't call the instrument itself an observatory whether that instrument is a telescope or not.
There should be no dispute whatsoever that IceCube is an observatory. But I think it is fair to call it a neutrino telescope as well.
Besides, no one in these fields ever calls anything like this an (unqualified) telescope.
Yeah, but they do say things like radio telescope or x-ray telescope, and those are very different from what most laypeople think of as a telescope. I certainly think that omitting the word "neutrino" was a big mistake, but does it go beyond that? The question is, can it be called a type of telescope?
Curiously, the link you provide to Auger describes it as a "cosmic ray observatory", almost as if the people who created the site were scientists, aware of their responsibility to communicate clearly.
"Observatory" doesn't mean "not a telescope" though. Observatories are facilities that contain instruments, frequently including telescopes. Auger is a facility, so regardless of what is in it they're going to call it an observatory. McDonald Observatory contains the Hobby-Eberly telescope and a couple others, the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory contains two gamma ray telescopes.
It may be worth mentioning that no one working in the field ever calls a neutrino detector a "telescope", as in English that word when used without qualification virtually always means "optical telescope", so the usage in this article is misleading and confusing, to the point where if were done deliberately I would consider the person doing it to be either stupid or dishonest. I guess maybe the person who wrote the article or provided the information for it has English as a second language.
Sure, unqualified it implies optical, but on the other hand we have radio telescopes, infrared telescopes, x-ray telescopes, and gamma-ray telescopes. Why not the IceCube neutrino telescope? Surely, though, the lack of the word "neutrino" in the title and the summary was a gross omission.
This may not be in a physical sense and may be done inside of a computer via munging of captured data from various physical detectors.
In that respect, I still come to the same conclusion, that this is not a telescope.
Um, if you accept that a telescope need not focus by using physical reflection but by combining data from multiple detectors distributed over an area, then this would most definitely be a telescope in that respect.
If we must for some reason draw a distinction between traditional telescopes and IceCube (i.e. we're not being pedantic, we're deliberately defining the term to exclude IceCube), then I'd draw it where you didn't, at requiring physical reflection/refraction to focus.
The key feature of a telescope as I interpret the word is amplification of visual phenomena. It makes tiny things seem big.
This neutrino detector doesn't have any sort of magnification in that sense. It doesn't even work in the electromagnetic spectrum! It's purpose isn't to zoom in on a phenomenon, but to detect it and tell us where it came from. It doesn't zoom in.
Sure it does. It allows you to take a source of infrequent interactions and amplifies them by increasing the size of the detector. This is what electromagnetic telescopes do. A faint source of photons is amplified by increasing the collection area. A faint source of neutrinos is amplified by IceCube. The biggest difference is simply that photon interactions are much more probable than neutrino interactions, like a traditional a telescope that was looking at an object so distant only a few photons arrived per year,.
It's quite analogous, and I see no problem with calling IceCube a neutrino telescope. I'd call the facility as a whole an Observatory, because that's what an observatory is -- a facility which contains instruments for astronomical observation. An observatory is not itself an instrument.
Notice that they called [the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory]an "observatory", not a "telescope."
That's because it contains multiple instruments, including the COMPTEL Imaging Compton Telescope and the EGRET Energetic Gamma Ray Experiment Telescope.
So see? There are gamma ray telescopes that are called telescopes. Neutrino telescope may be more of a stretch, but I think it still applies for the same reason it does for gamma ray 'scopes -- it amplifies rarefied astronomical phenomenon.
Just to clarify the distinction between telescope and observatory, Hubble is also refered to as an Observatory from time to time, though its only main instrument is a single telescope so we call it the HST. It, Compton, Chandra, and Spitzer are collectively called The Great Observatories. Because those words are not exclusive, quite the opposite in that an observatory typically contains a telescope.
Your comment seems very similar to "every download is a lost sale", because, to me, at least, it's pretty clear that "Moryath" isn't going to buy anything advertised in that irritating way --- in fact, I wouldn't even be surprised if he might actually consider boycotting products pushed by "those stupid annoying ads". In that case, his avoiding the ads is doing the advertisers a favor.
Remember X10, the little computer-interfaced security camera company? I was actually interested in buying a number of their products -- mostly to satisfy vague James Bond-only-nerdy urges -- ha ha, I can see it's the pizza guy who just rang my doorbell without leaving my computer!
That is until they began a marketing blitz of pop-up ads. I recall it as the first such assault I experienced. And I vowed never to buy products from such a company. And I haven't.
If blocking the pop-up ads on Youtube hurts the advertiser, and especially if it hurts Google, then good. Maybe they'll recognize that they're being hurt by their own behavior, and change their policy.
Dreaded? Incredibly annoying? Come one, it's just a trumpet.
Have you actually fucking heard the noise just coming over the television? Are you deaf? Or is your opinion simply irrelevant to any normal person's perception of what is annoying?
The walls are damaged by the neutron emission, but not all radiation damage results in the material becoming radioactive. The induced radioactivity in the walls of the reactor is much less significant than it simply becoming brittle. That's the reason why it needs to be replaced.
The consequence of not going above and beyond the law is carried out through the court system AND various executive regulatory actions.
Yes, all of which has yet to occur. BP has yet to face those consequences. Which is why the government offering a way for them to reduce those consequences is the opposite of a shakedown. This is a simple concept. You do something stupid and damaging. You are facing massive lawsuits and regulatory action for this. The government says, help to make it right now, demonstrate good will (and no, saying "I will comply with the law" doesn't count because you don't have a choice), and we'll go easy on you in said future legal action. Otherwise, we will not go easy on you.
ZOMG MAFIA SHAKEDOWN!
Jeezus. Do you think being offered the chance to take defensive driving for a speeding ticket before you've even been proven guilty in court zomg is a shakedown?
through the likely expense of hundreds of millions of dollars to defend against even baseless prosecution by the government.
I don't know which is more ridiculous -- that you're implying that hundreds of millions is a serious penalty for the negligence of a company the size of BP, the kind that would supposedly make them pay out billions of "extralegal" damages, or that you're suggesting that prosecution against them would be baseless.
No, wait, I know. It's the latter. Acting like BP are innocent victims here, like this isn't a direct consequence of their own negligence and cutting of corners on safety and ignoring signs of danger all in the name of saving a few bucks, is beyond stupid, it's disgusting.
Tell that to the shareholders who lost $89 Billion. Just because you don't understand this loss doesn't make it any less real to the people who used to own something valuable and now they no longer do.
Most investors already understand the difference between a loss of market value and an actual loss, so maybe you should be asking them to clue you in. Here's a quick hint, though, as to one of the differences: Unless BP starts posting real losses, then their stock will recover and every investor who didn't liquidate while the stock was low will have lost nothing.
The President develops energy sources now? How does he find time to do all that scientific work and still fit in so many parties and rounds of golf?
That's an interesting question. It makes me wonder: Are you pretending not to understand the difference between a loss of market value and actual expenses just like you're pretending not to understand that we're talking about energy policy?
Also, alternative energy sources are still so economically inferior to petroleum that we could have a spill like this every summer, make oil companies pay double for each cleanup, and the alternative sources still couldn't compete. Alternative energy is just another way of saying "please let me pay 5-10 times as much for energy".
Please. Alternative energy would already be economically viable if we gave them the same assistance we do to oil. It's already viable in many places with no assistance at all.
Actually making oil companies pay the full price of their environmental damage? Ha! You'd be gagging for any alternative in a week!
Electric cars are similarly limited in comparison to real cars. As a real product, they don't make sense. They're more understandable as an environmental religious sacrifice or some kind of green asceticism.
They make great sense for anyone who isn't regularly traveling great distances. Gas cars will still exist for those times where its needed.
Where has it been shown that regulations would have made any difference?
Effective regulation at any one of the steps where BP decided to cut corners might have prevented this spill.
Of course, to have effective regulation, you have to not gut the regulation, and not run the regulatory body under the assumption that regulation itself is bad and collusion with the industry is good.
Eleven guys were killed in the explosion. You think they care more about what some bureaucrat says than whether they live or die?
"They", as in the ones who make decisions, don't give a flying fuck about the lives of "they" as in the workers who died. Just like they don't give a fuck about the environment, or the non-oil economy of the Gulf. That's why they cut corners that could result in the damage they did.
What they care about is the bottom line and their own asses. So yes, if a bureaucrat says "You are going to lose billions of dollars in future oil revenue if your rig doesn't pass a real inspection" they are going to care way more about that than mere loss of (not their) life.
No, you don't have to wait until there is legal action against you to strike a deal. That's only in the specific case of the plea bargain, but many deals are struck before the courts are ever involved. There is nothing unusual or extralegal about this.
Happy versus unhappy government is describing how rigorously they will pursue legal remedies. Of course BP said they'd pay for the legal consequences; how could they claim otherwise seeing as they have no choice in the matter? Of course they were also going to fight those consequences in court to have them reduced as much as possible. But if they demonstrate good faith beforehand, then those legal consequences may be less than they could, legally, be, without having to go through the trouble of a court fight. This again is quite common and completely legal.
That's the whole point, that's why there is nothing extralegal about this -- if BP doesn't cooperate with the government, the government will pursue the maximum legal penalties against them, which of course still means the government has to win their case in court which makes this completely unlike actual shakedowns. Offering to pursue less than the maximum legal penalty is a deal, not a shakedown.
You say they've done everything they're legally required to do, but the investigation into what happened and what safety guidelines BP evaded is still ongoing and it's the legal consequences of that which they are -- based solely on what is known up to this point -- rightfully afraid of. It is for that reason that BP has every incentive to cooperate with the government, in hopes that compliance now will make them look better in the coming legal shitstorm.
The total budget is still larger, and thank goodness they're getting rid of Operation Lets-Repeat-Apollo-And-Act-Like-That-Means-Something which was preventing other actually new and interesting things from being accomplished.
BTW I got that you were joking, but it wasn't funny. It seems like there could be a joke premised on NASA hiring 7th graders, so maybe try working on it. Or not.
Yeah, different places use different standards.
What I've always wondered is -- what do you call one thousand billions? What do you call two hundred thousand billions? It just seems awkward to have to string so many sizes together, but that's obviously from my perspective of having grown up doing it our way.
There are broad classes of algorithms where you can make good use of essentially arbitrary amounts of computing power to get better answers. When doing physical simulations of something like airflow over a jet wing, or the movement of a weather system, or the explosion of a hydrogen bomb, you'll break everything up into tiny units that you treat as monolithic elements whose behavior can be treated relatively simply, and calculate what happens to them over some tiny timescale, call the result the new state of the universe, and repeat. This is called "finite element analysis".
Because you're calculating everything in discreet steps, though, errors creep in and accumulate. The more processing power you have, the more elements you can use and the smaller time scales you can calculate over and get a more accurate answer in the same amount of time. The reason it's unacceptable to do the same calculation but have it go 1,000 or 1,000,000 times slower is that these simulations might already take hours, days, weeks, or even longer. Even the longest DoD contract needs an answer to the behavior of a proposed jet fighter wing in less than 1,000,000 days. :)
Scientific computing is an area where there will always be a use for more processing power.
There are other areas where it can be important, when you have real time constraints and can't just reduce your accuracy to make it work. I recall a story from advanced algorithms class where a bank was handling so many transactions per day that the time it took to process them all was more than 24 hours. Obviously this was a problem. The solution in that case was to modify the algorithm, but that's not always possible, and you need more computing. This is a little different in that you need the extra power to allow growth, as opposed to science where you could hand them an exaflop computer today and they'd be able to use it to its fullest.
Give us the money now or things could get hard for you later.
When the "things" that could get "hard" are the legal consequences of your actions, then that's not a shakedown.
People and corporations make out-of-court deals all the time. The idea is that you agree to some penalty that is less than if you were to go to court and lose, while the prosecutor/plaintiff gets a positive outcome for them without the expense and risk of litigation.
The difference between striking a deal with prosecutors, and being shook down by the mafia, is that if you refuse the deal with the prosecutors then you still get your day in court. The penalty for not paying the mafia is not a matter of due process, it was not a penalty you would ever legally owe. The government on the other hand has every right to pursue every legal penalty against BP.
Offering to go easy on them if they play ball now is not a shakedown, it's a deal -- and it tends to annoy people when dealing with ordinary criminals. But when its a fabulously wealthy multinational, suddenly it's unfair to try to get them to cooperate in return for better treatment.
If BP thinks this "shakedown" is unfair, all they have to do is say no and go to court. Obviously they think their chances are better with a happy government than with a pissed one. They think they're getting a deal, or they'd just say no.
There's no violation of due process here.
Because many years after Chernobyl, it is clear that it was a uniquely horrible reactor and beyond idiotic test procedure that lead to the accident, and that technology has developed to the point where none of its failings are in any way relevant.
In contrast, every rig in the gulf is using the same safety technology that failed at Deepwater Horizon, and many were certified by the same corrupt regulators who gave Deepwater Horizon a clean bill of health despite failing and deliberately disabled safety equipment. There is absolutely no reason to believe that this rig is unique or exceptional, other than that it is the one where the chickens came home to roost.
Chernobyl was an outstanding argument to stop construction of Chernobyl-style reactors (obviously), and to reconsider regulation of reactors (particularly in Russia) to make sure nothing as stupid as the disaster-causing test would be allowed.
Similarly, if in twenty years it's clear that the Deepwater rig was unique, and technology has moved beyond the current state of the art to a regime of "inherent safety" like nuclear, then Deepwater will no longer be a good argument to stop drilling.
In short, the difference is context.
Yes, anyone with half a brain knows nothing is literally "absolutely" safe. At the same time, anyone thus equipped automatically understands "absolutely safe" to mean "with a high degree of probability" or "absolutely safe to the best of our ability to ensure it, barring highly unusual circumstances", or hell at least "very safe". These are not inherently unreasonable statements, and I'd like to credit the President with the half a brain necessary to understand that. Indeed, I'd like to think that most of the country's acceptance of off shore drilling was based on the reasonability of these safety assurances.
By the same token, nobody claimed the Titanic was literally unsinkable, until after the fact. They claimed specific safety features that would allow it to float under many circumstances that would sink other ships.
But therein lies the key difference between the Titanic and Deepwater horizon.
The Titanic sank because it hit an iceberg which opened up five of the hull's sixteen compartments to water, exceeding both it's specified and hypothetical ability to float. While there's a lot to be said about errors occurring up to the impact, the fact is that the ship was never designed to survive that kind of damage.
Deepwater Horizon, on the other hand, was supposed to be able to prevent a spill in exactly the circumstances that occurred. Pockets of methane gas coming up the pipe were not unexpected phenomenon. That's why so many were shocked that the safety devices apparently failed. But then we learned that some of the equipment had already failed inspections, had shown signs of failure (like pieces of a seal floating up the pipe), and even that one of the safety devices had been deliberately disabled.
This would be like if the Titanic sank even though only a couple of its cmpartments were breeched, but, woops, the builders hadn't bothered to actually separate them because that would have taken too long.
Tone down the statement "absolutely safe" to whatever reasonable degree you want, and BP still failed to reach it.
The magazine frowns upon all these things and it makes some sense. If, as The Economist suggests, BP's value has already dropped by $89 billion and that's "far in excess of all but the most dire forecasts of the ultimate costs of the spill," what is to be gained by all this backlash against the oil industry but a bunch of political posturing?
If a reduction in market capitalization was an actual expense for BP, this would be a moderately reasonable point.
Since that's absolutely not the case, then the point of the backlash is to ensure that BP actually pays the price for the spill, with the result that they and other companies are actually driven to improve their safety procedures and more importantly follow those procedures that they already should have been.
All that $89 billion means for BP is that they're a somewhat easier target for a stock buyout. It means that the fraction of their own stock that they own is less valuable, so if they were planning on any acquisitions using stock it's going to be more costly as long as the stock price is low. It means anyone who plans on cashing out their holdings in BP right now will make less money. It's not insignificant from a larger corporate strategy perspective, but it's actual impact to BP is nothing like what an actual $89 billion actually suggests.
Shame on The Freaking Economist for suggesting otherwise.
News flash: The United States is still inexorably reliant on its oil industry. If the Obama administration wants to do something about future oil disasters, maybe it should think more seriously about that and what can be done about it.
Like developing alternative energy sources from solar to nuclear, and encouraging the development and adoption of fuel efficient and preferably electric vehicles? Yeah, that's being done. I'm sure more can be done. I'm all for it. I hope you are too.
Also, had government done a better job of regulating the oil industry in the first place, BP's shoddy practices might not have gone unchecked and this disaster might never have happened.
Yes, that's very true. Who would have thought that doing everything possible to deregulate, and the underlying philosophy that regulation is unnecessary, would result in insufficient regulatory action?
Unfortunately firing the new MMS head for not cleaning up the cesspool of corruption and deliberate inefficacy that she inherited was only just the beginning of a long, long road to fixing this.
Seriously. I should have said "this is only a problem if you have assumed that intelligent life would inevitably get around the speed of light, and want to announce themselves to us".
Which are a couple of pretty big assumptions.
Funnily enough I remember learning that definition in computer science, not physics.
By the way, wouldn't that mean an "atomic" bomb would be useless, since it couldn't explode? Heh.