But it also means oil and gas reserves are undervalued at today's prices. So go looking for long-term investments in the older oil companies with lots of acreage held by slow-decline domestic production, 'cause you can bet that as completion technologies evolve and new formations become economically producible, and wars and rumors of wars are commonplace, these guys will be in the catbird seat.
Now, if only I were in the ownership class, I could take advantage of that prognostication in a meaningful way...
Oh, you mean we'd all better hope fusion plants become a commercial reality pretty soon, or we're toast? Yep, probably agree with you there.
Or maybe you mean it's time to become a student of R. N. Elliott's work, and start learning about grand supercycles? Check.
Or perhaps you mean it's just about time that more of us find God so that we can have the willpower to do right in an increasingly cutthroat and evil world? Got that one covered personally.
K. Sooo we all now know that you're the Darth Vader type...
[chokehold]"I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further."[/chokehold]
Sounds to me like if you expect to be able to fire someone on the spot like that, that, since fair's fair, you should expect that someone who had a problem working for you should provide no notice of their intent to leave since that's the standard expectation you set.
A family-owned company I once worked for decided to outsource their HR functions to a company called Administaff. I decided I didn't wish to continue my employment under the changed terms, after I read up on what Administaff was telling prospective clients. So I told the owner why I was quitting, which boggled his mind that someone would even do such a thing. Yeah, right. He knew the guns he was hiring. So I decided to be a little more clear on some of the other reasons why I thought his business was not worth risking my professional reputation to continue working at. He didn't seem to like that much at all. I suppose I ruined it by becoming apologetic afterwards, but it did feel at least a little nice to get his attention. Somebody needs to get your attention and skip the apologetic part.
The more you tighten your grasp, the more good employees, the ones who know they have prospects elsewhere, will slip through your fingers.
At least in these parts, there is more than a mile of vertical distance between the hydrocarbon-bearing formation, which is several hundred feet thick, and the deepest fresh water aquifer. Things would have to go really really really wrong for cross-contamination to happen during hydraulic fracturing of deep shale wells. Various estimates of the likelihood of that happening are 1E-8 or less. My informed opinion is that it's "much less".
Good background here. (especially pp. 51-70), which is a joint publication of the Groundwater Protection Council, the DOE, and others.
And why exactly would you assume that, in the absence of human intervention, gas just stays put underground? Plenty of oil and gas reservoirs exist in rock strata that were not their source. Indeed, as you say, the fact that it migrates upward isn't shocking. It's physics. Been happening a lot longer than humans have had anything to do with it.
One should also keep in mind that there is an ecomomic incentive for oil and gas companies to contain it rather than letting it escape/dilute beyond their ability to produce.
The problem I have with your logic is that it just doesn't work that way.
There are fundamental economic and physical limitations which prevent this hypothetical simultaneous-frac over many square miles. In the real world, there is only so much equipment. Each wellbore (with its engineered casing and cement) can only handle so large of a frac. The zone you hope to produce from is only so thick. Each wellbore is so expensive to create, even before the frac. Each wellbore and each frac takes so much time. There is only so much (fresh) water available locally to do the frac with. And you need to cube your input energy for every increment of additional dimension to the frac, which means also cubing the cost.
All of which means, it's far more correct to think of these as individual wells with small local effects (which dissipate too rapidly to have an aggregate effect).
Now, as far as the public policy stance you take with respect to the immorality of privatizing profit and socializing losses, I'll throw my lot in with you there.
We absolutely need to do a better job of removing the externalities and cost and risk shifting that's endemic to the energy sector. But we'll still be using hydraulic fracturing to produce oil and natural gas from nontraditional reservoirs because we really don't have a choice in the short term. Again, the low-hanging fruit as far as cheap-and-easy-to-produce reservoirs are mostly in the tail of the decline curve. It's surely getting more and more difficult/expensive/risky to produce the fossil fuels that we are going to be depending on for years and years to come, because we apparently don't have the will to do otherwise.
My bottom line is that I don't think the apocalypse is near with respect to hydraulic fracturing. It bears watching, of course. But I'm far far more worried about fresh water supplies and AGW and GMO and income inequality and banking and monetary policy and the shameful state of healthcare and mental healthcare and the fact that our increasingly-authoritarian government appears to be largely coopted by the powers-that-be and the majority of people seem to be effectively propagandized that this is a good thing.
(replying to myself) To be explicit, I'll make one more point really clear. Frac-ing and disposal don't really go together in the same well. If it was a well that needed hydraulic fracturing to economically produce, that reservoir is probably going to be uneconomical to dispose into. The best reservoirs to dispose into are those which flowed freely until mostly drained, thereby becoming mostly depressurized.
Also, to be really clear, BP's Macondo well problems had nothing whatsoever to do with frac-ing. They had to do with failures in the engineering and implementation of the casing and cement, plus of course the blowout preventer which should have been the final line of defense against those other failures. I only brought that in as an example of what can happen when the human-engineered part of the picture fails. Your scenario imagines the human-engineered part being stronger than the ground itself, which pretty much has the true risks backwards.
The greatest fracking risk is a substantive earthquake in a major fracking field creative a deep vertical fault through large numbers of artificial gas and toxic water filled horizontal faults all under pressure and releasing it all to the environment in a huge explosive and poisonous rush. So basically all fracking fields in earthquake zones are ticking poisonous fuel air time bombs, buried under the feet of millions of Americans now at risk, not a matter of if just when they will go off.
That's true if the energy put into the ground were to accumulate. I suppose in the very short term, that may be true, but in the medium term (like a couple of months to a couple of years max), these producing wells are not only returning essentially all of the pressurized frac water, plus pressurized salt water from the production zone, plus pressurized natural gas, plus maybe pressurized hydrocarbon liquids. Dead-simple economics would make it clear that if you are spending more energy to insert the pressurized frac water than the energy you can recover, the well will not make the investors any money. The reason why this sector of the energy market has really taken off over the last 30 years isn't because it is a net loss, I can assure you. Therefore, the net energy "buried under the feet of millions of Americans", as you so vividly put it, isn't really increasing as you seem to think it is, at least not directly from the frac-ing that goes on in order to produce oil and (natural) gas. The net energy underground is diminishing as we depressurize reservoirs, not building up as you imagine. Also, to highlight a very important point, frac-ing a well is done for the purpose of liberating oil and natural gas from rock that would not naturally release them in commercial quantities. Oil and natural gas are being produced from less-and-less readily available reservoirs. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, as it were, so we have to work harder and harder to produce from less-and-less easy reservoirs. Frac-ing is one of the technologies which makes this possible.
People are just flat-out hysterical and wrongheaded about so much of this. What people *should* be scrutinizing is the injection wells. These are wells which are either drilled for the purpose of water (produced formation saltwater and recovered frac water) disposal, or which are repurposed (old) production wells which are no longer commercially viable. These wells *are* potentially subject to the buildup you describe, and therefore are at least theoretically/potentially long-term dangerous. Now, in old oil-producing country, these disposal wells and the geology underlying them tend to have been pretty well-understood for a long time now. The reasonably-safe disposal of produced salt water has been going on for a loooong time now. Particularly with repurposed old production wells, you are injecting water back where you have already greatly reduced the reservoir pressure, so in a way, you are restoring things closer to the way they used to be prior to human intervention.
Standing between a doomsday I-can-imagine-it-so-it's-a-real-danger scenario and life as we know it are some things people may not know. First, hydraulic fracturing is designed to break down (create cracks in) rock that contains hydrocarbons, so those hydrocarbons can be released. This is done at a few thousand pounds of pressure with a few thousand horsepower of pump. Since the fracturing pressure falls away pretty quickly in the 3-d rock formation (stands to reason it's a distance-cubed pressure decline), increasing the size/pressure of a frac job one order of magnitude is going to take three orders of magnitude increase in pressure pumping capacity. So where we are now, technically, is probably essentially where we will be for the forseeable future, in terms of energy we're pumping downhole. Capability-wise, just so we're all clear, current technology can fracture out up to several hundred feet from the drilled (and cased and cemented) hole.
Yeah, well, that would imply the electorate would need to know what in the hell they are doing, technical and otherwise, rather just knowing how to listen to the talking points...
Yes, well, Texas politicians are in the hip pocket of bidness, not of the people of Texas. See Molly Ivins' work for some wry and humorous perspective on how things are here.
It's the school boards driven by ideological dogmatic sheep who don't give a rats fuck about children being educated
Well, actually, they do care about children being educated. It's simply that what they care to educate children in is different from what you mean by education. </sardonic>
disclaimer1: I live in Texas
disclaimer2: I'm on the Left-Libertarian side of things, so I pretty much don't so much fit in politically with the majority of my fellow Texans (or the majority of my fellow Americans, for that matter)
disclaimer3: I have taught mathematics in a classroom setting in Texas, my wife has worked as an aide, and I have closely observed the education system as a parent also. The education system as it is is so so broken, just like all of our society is.
Agreed on the MDR-V6es. I still have my late-80's pair. Best audio investment I've made.
FYI, you can get replacement ear foam cushions as a relatively inexpensive Sony spare part. I believe I got my last pair from Sweetwater.
I'm morally opposed to buying or recommending Sony products, but I have made a solitary exception for the MDR-V6es. They are that good for the price. It's a shame the quality has apparently declined lately.
As manufactured products use more and more specialized materials (because of weight savings, usually), the manufacturing becomes more and more complicated.
Back in the day, blacksmiths could manufacture a wide variety of metal parts, each one unique by modern standards. Then, with the industrial age, interchangeable parts with tight tolerances became the norm, but an auto or tractor factory could still be retooled to make tanks or planes by following the prints and using the same machinery. Not so much anymore.
Yeah, sure, CNC machining has gotten much better, for a host of reasons. But it's not just material removal that's relevant. Stuff like heat treating is today even more of an art which is not easily replicateable for high-precision materials and parts. Or, to pick a nonmetallic composites example, there's no way that you could quickly ramp up massive new production of, to take a civilian example, something like Boeing's Dreamliner. Military composites even less so.
I remember when maintaining heavy manufacturing capability which could be quickly switched to wartime use was a matter of national priority and national pride. The emperor has no clothes today.
Dunno about DC, but Pittsburgh is probably because of this. CMU has a long history of working with DARPA, plus CMU and Pittsburgh generally have a long history in heavy manufacturing. They were driving around DARPA-funded full-sized autonomous robotic vehicles on the CMU campus in the mid-80s, and were also working on manufacturing technology transfer to industry (think AI and expert systems then).
Obviously, the Russians don't see a dichotomy between science/technology and their Eastern Orthodox faith. And that despite several generations of official state-sanctioned atheism.
I wouldn't presume to advise. One should probably bear in mind that the probability of a bad outcome seems... high. One shoud also probably consult a lawyer, which I am not.
Well, if you were really gutsy, you could always perform a citizen's arrest of the policeman for violation of civil rights under color of law and give a call to the local FBI office to come and take custody.
It seems that Germany's hubris prevented it from stopping at just Austria. Or just the Sudetenland. Or just Poland. Or just The Low Countries & France.
Given the rise in U.S. interventionism in the last half-century or so, one wonders if it's all just happening at a slower pace. Perhaps because the U.S. was starting the Post-WWII era from a position of supreme economic and geopolitical strength, in contrast to Post-WWI Germany.
I appreciate your thoughts. It could well be that I am not representative of HP's customer base, or of the consumer/small business/retail market in general. I can't speak to the large corporate world, or HP's presence there.
Frankly, I don't care about how busy HP is. I want well-engineered products that are a good value. I don't want an inkjet printer that takes chipped $50 all-in-one ink cartridges, even if you give me the printer. I don't want 100Mb Microsoft Bob-ified printer drivers that can't be shared over a network. I don't want to have to watch the screen as I punch the keys on my calculator to see if they registered. I am typing this on a Compaq laptop which has a BIOS whitelist for its miniPCI slot. It will be my last HP laptop purchase for that reason. It's a shame, really. Other than that, this has been a decent laptop.
It used to be that HP made products I wanted to buy, and I was proud to recommend to others. Now, for me, other manufacturers are doing a better job of that. I just don't have much confidence that if I walk out of the store with (or recommend to a client) an HP product, that it will just work the way it ought to.
I would not look to HP for enterprise-grade network infrastructure or storage. I figure that if HP can't get the mass-market things right, where the engineering cost can be amortized over a zillion units, why should I expect their enterprise gear to be better? Maybe I am wrong. But that's my logic.
Interestingly, HP had another shot at me with the acquisition of WebOS. Sigh. I used to like HP. I want to like HP again.
Old HP made excellent products. Products that were exquisitely engineered. Products that were best-in-class, or at least contenders for that.
Early Deskjets. Early Laser Printers (up to 5/6ish). Calculators. Test Equipment.
New HP is best-in-class in... (crickets)
The best HP products these days were engineered by acquired companies.
I have been responsible for many thousands of dollars of purchases in computer equipment since the days of Old HP. Canon got the majority of my inkjet business, because they have user-serviceable printheads, independent ink tanks, and good, very inexpensive aftermarket inks. They can have my i9900 when they pry it from my cold dead hands. Brother got the majority of my laser/copier/fax business. Good product, good price, good drivers, separate drum & very inexpensive aftermarket toner. They're not as well-made as Old HP, but nothing is. I reluctantly gave up on HP calculators when I got burned by the 49G. HP Corvallis was truly great though. The HP48GX (the last HP Corvallis calc) is, to this day, the best engineering calculator ever made. Amazing technology for its time.
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
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· Score: 1
Hard to dispute that.
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
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· Score: 1
Oh, I don't know, my personal malware scanner says I am not comfortable with the security of either Android or iOS offerings (particularly in combination with App Stores, which would seem to be a rather large part of the draw for these devices.) I don't really have a horse in the race you are running. (shrug) From the perspective of this (hypothetical) owner, something like the iOS location logging "feature" I mentioned is, in fact, manufacturer-installed malware. I just thought you might appreciate hearing a different perspective.
Re:What he took away is more precious than given
on
Steve Jobs Dead At 56
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· Score: 1
The volume potentiometer started to add a crackle when being turned lately, though - so I guess sooner or later I have to break out my soldering iron and fix the thing.
Actually, you are wrong about the Pandora. It's a general-purpose handheld linux computer that happens to also have gaming controls. Kinda like the Nokia N900 is a general-purpose handheld linux computer that is also a phone.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like a recipe for WWIII to me, personally.
But it also means oil and gas reserves are undervalued at today's prices. So go looking for long-term investments in the older oil companies with lots of acreage held by slow-decline domestic production, 'cause you can bet that as completion technologies evolve and new formations become economically producible, and wars and rumors of wars are commonplace, these guys will be in the catbird seat.
Now, if only I were in the ownership class, I could take advantage of that prognostication in a meaningful way...
Oh, you mean we'd all better hope fusion plants become a commercial reality pretty soon, or we're toast? Yep, probably agree with you there.
Or maybe you mean it's time to become a student of R. N. Elliott's work, and start learning about grand supercycles? Check.
Or perhaps you mean it's just about time that more of us find God so that we can have the willpower to do right in an increasingly cutthroat and evil world? Got that one covered personally.
I miss anything?
K. Sooo we all now know that you're the Darth Vader type...
[chokehold]"I have altered the deal. Pray I do not alter it further."[/chokehold]
Sounds to me like if you expect to be able to fire someone on the spot like that, that, since fair's fair, you should expect that someone who had a problem working for you should provide no notice of their intent to leave since that's the standard expectation you set.
A family-owned company I once worked for decided to outsource their HR functions to a company called Administaff. I decided I didn't wish to continue my employment under the changed terms, after I read up on what Administaff was telling prospective clients. So I told the owner why I was quitting, which boggled his mind that someone would even do such a thing. Yeah, right. He knew the guns he was hiring. So I decided to be a little more clear on some of the other reasons why I thought his business was not worth risking my professional reputation to continue working at. He didn't seem to like that much at all. I suppose I ruined it by becoming apologetic afterwards, but it did feel at least a little nice to get his attention. Somebody needs to get your attention and skip the apologetic part.
The more you tighten your grasp, the more good employees, the ones who know they have prospects elsewhere, will slip through your fingers.
At least in these parts, there is more than a mile of vertical distance between the hydrocarbon-bearing formation, which is several hundred feet thick, and the deepest fresh water aquifer. Things would have to go really really really wrong for cross-contamination to happen during hydraulic fracturing of deep shale wells. Various estimates of the likelihood of that happening are 1E-8 or less. My informed opinion is that it's "much less".
Good background here. (especially pp. 51-70), which is a joint publication of the Groundwater Protection Council, the DOE, and others.
And why exactly would you assume that, in the absence of human intervention, gas just stays put underground? Plenty of oil and gas reservoirs exist in rock strata that were not their source. Indeed, as you say, the fact that it migrates upward isn't shocking. It's physics. Been happening a lot longer than humans have had anything to do with it.
One should also keep in mind that there is an ecomomic incentive for oil and gas companies to contain it rather than letting it escape/dilute beyond their ability to produce.
The problem I have with your logic is that it just doesn't work that way.
There are fundamental economic and physical limitations which prevent this hypothetical simultaneous-frac over many square miles. In the real world, there is only so much equipment. Each wellbore (with its engineered casing and cement) can only handle so large of a frac. The zone you hope to produce from is only so thick. Each wellbore is so expensive to create, even before the frac. Each wellbore and each frac takes so much time. There is only so much (fresh) water available locally to do the frac with. And you need to cube your input energy for every increment of additional dimension to the frac, which means also cubing the cost.
All of which means, it's far more correct to think of these as individual wells with small local effects (which dissipate too rapidly to have an aggregate effect).
Now, as far as the public policy stance you take with respect to the immorality of privatizing profit and socializing losses, I'll throw my lot in with you there.
We absolutely need to do a better job of removing the externalities and cost and risk shifting that's endemic to the energy sector. But we'll still be using hydraulic fracturing to produce oil and natural gas from nontraditional reservoirs because we really don't have a choice in the short term. Again, the low-hanging fruit as far as cheap-and-easy-to-produce reservoirs are mostly in the tail of the decline curve. It's surely getting more and more difficult/expensive/risky to produce the fossil fuels that we are going to be depending on for years and years to come, because we apparently don't have the will to do otherwise.
My bottom line is that I don't think the apocalypse is near with respect to hydraulic fracturing. It bears watching, of course. But I'm far far more worried about fresh water supplies and AGW and GMO and income inequality and banking and monetary policy and the shameful state of healthcare and mental healthcare and the fact that our increasingly-authoritarian government appears to be largely coopted by the powers-that-be and the majority of people seem to be effectively propagandized that this is a good thing.
(replying to myself) To be explicit, I'll make one more point really clear. Frac-ing and disposal don't really go together in the same well. If it was a well that needed hydraulic fracturing to economically produce, that reservoir is probably going to be uneconomical to dispose into. The best reservoirs to dispose into are those which flowed freely until mostly drained, thereby becoming mostly depressurized.
Also, to be really clear, BP's Macondo well problems had nothing whatsoever to do with frac-ing. They had to do with failures in the engineering and implementation of the casing and cement, plus of course the blowout preventer which should have been the final line of defense against those other failures. I only brought that in as an example of what can happen when the human-engineered part of the picture fails. Your scenario imagines the human-engineered part being stronger than the ground itself, which pretty much has the true risks backwards.
The greatest fracking risk is a substantive earthquake in a major fracking field creative a deep vertical fault through large numbers of artificial gas and toxic water filled horizontal faults all under pressure and releasing it all to the environment in a huge explosive and poisonous rush. So basically all fracking fields in earthquake zones are ticking poisonous fuel air time bombs, buried under the feet of millions of Americans now at risk, not a matter of if just when they will go off.
That's true if the energy put into the ground were to accumulate. I suppose in the very short term, that may be true, but in the medium term (like a couple of months to a couple of years max), these producing wells are not only returning essentially all of the pressurized frac water, plus pressurized salt water from the production zone, plus pressurized natural gas, plus maybe pressurized hydrocarbon liquids. Dead-simple economics would make it clear that if you are spending more energy to insert the pressurized frac water than the energy you can recover, the well will not make the investors any money. The reason why this sector of the energy market has really taken off over the last 30 years isn't because it is a net loss, I can assure you. Therefore, the net energy "buried under the feet of millions of Americans", as you so vividly put it, isn't really increasing as you seem to think it is, at least not directly from the frac-ing that goes on in order to produce oil and (natural) gas. The net energy underground is diminishing as we depressurize reservoirs, not building up as you imagine. Also, to highlight a very important point, frac-ing a well is done for the purpose of liberating oil and natural gas from rock that would not naturally release them in commercial quantities. Oil and natural gas are being produced from less-and-less readily available reservoirs. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, as it were, so we have to work harder and harder to produce from less-and-less easy reservoirs. Frac-ing is one of the technologies which makes this possible.
People are just flat-out hysterical and wrongheaded about so much of this. What people *should* be scrutinizing is the injection wells. These are wells which are either drilled for the purpose of water (produced formation saltwater and recovered frac water) disposal, or which are repurposed (old) production wells which are no longer commercially viable. These wells *are* potentially subject to the buildup you describe, and therefore are at least theoretically/potentially long-term dangerous. Now, in old oil-producing country, these disposal wells and the geology underlying them tend to have been pretty well-understood for a long time now. The reasonably-safe disposal of produced salt water has been going on for a loooong time now. Particularly with repurposed old production wells, you are injecting water back where you have already greatly reduced the reservoir pressure, so in a way, you are restoring things closer to the way they used to be prior to human intervention.
Standing between a doomsday I-can-imagine-it-so-it's-a-real-danger scenario and life as we know it are some things people may not know. First, hydraulic fracturing is designed to break down (create cracks in) rock that contains hydrocarbons, so those hydrocarbons can be released. This is done at a few thousand pounds of pressure with a few thousand horsepower of pump. Since the fracturing pressure falls away pretty quickly in the 3-d rock formation (stands to reason it's a distance-cubed pressure decline), increasing the size/pressure of a frac job one order of magnitude is going to take three orders of magnitude increase in pressure pumping capacity. So where we are now, technically, is probably essentially where we will be for the forseeable future, in terms of energy we're pumping downhole. Capability-wise, just so we're all clear, current technology can fracture out up to several hundred feet from the drilled (and cased and cemented) hole.
Second,
Yeah, well, that would imply the electorate would need to know what in the hell they are doing, technical and otherwise, rather just knowing how to listen to the talking points...
Yes, well, Texas politicians are in the hip pocket of bidness, not of the people of Texas. See Molly Ivins' work for some wry and humorous perspective on how things are here.
It's the school boards driven by ideological dogmatic sheep who don't give a rats fuck about children being educated
Well, actually, they do care about children being educated. It's simply that what they care to educate children in is different from what you mean by education. </sardonic>
disclaimer1: I live in Texas
disclaimer2: I'm on the Left-Libertarian side of things, so I pretty much don't so much fit in politically with the majority of my fellow Texans (or the majority of my fellow Americans, for that matter)
disclaimer3: I have taught mathematics in a classroom setting in Texas, my wife has worked as an aide, and I have closely observed the education system as a parent also. The education system as it is is so so broken, just like all of our society is.
Agreed on the MDR-V6es. I still have my late-80's pair. Best audio investment I've made.
FYI, you can get replacement ear foam cushions as a relatively inexpensive Sony spare part. I believe I got my last pair from Sweetwater.
I'm morally opposed to buying or recommending Sony products, but I have made a solitary exception for the MDR-V6es. They are that good for the price. It's a shame the quality has apparently declined lately.
As manufactured products use more and more specialized materials (because of weight savings, usually), the manufacturing becomes more and more complicated.
Back in the day, blacksmiths could manufacture a wide variety of metal parts, each one unique by modern standards. Then, with the industrial age, interchangeable parts with tight tolerances became the norm, but an auto or tractor factory could still be retooled to make tanks or planes by following the prints and using the same machinery. Not so much anymore.
Yeah, sure, CNC machining has gotten much better, for a host of reasons. But it's not just material removal that's relevant. Stuff like heat treating is today even more of an art which is not easily replicateable for high-precision materials and parts. Or, to pick a nonmetallic composites example, there's no way that you could quickly ramp up massive new production of, to take a civilian example, something like Boeing's Dreamliner. Military composites even less so.
I remember when maintaining heavy manufacturing capability which could be quickly switched to wartime use was a matter of national priority and national pride. The emperor has no clothes today.
Dunno about DC, but Pittsburgh is probably because of this. CMU has a long history of working with DARPA, plus CMU and Pittsburgh generally have a long history in heavy manufacturing. They were driving around DARPA-funded full-sized autonomous robotic vehicles on the CMU campus in the mid-80s, and were also working on manufacturing technology transfer to industry (think AI and expert systems then).
Obviously, the Russians don't see a dichotomy between science/technology and their Eastern Orthodox faith. And that despite several generations of official state-sanctioned atheism.
I wouldn't presume to advise. One should probably bear in mind that the probability of a bad outcome seems... high. One shoud also probably consult a lawyer, which I am not.
Well, if you were really gutsy, you could always perform a citizen's arrest of the policeman for violation of civil rights under color of law and give a call to the local FBI office to come and take custody.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/civilrights/color_of_law
It seems that Germany's hubris prevented it from stopping at just Austria. Or just the Sudetenland. Or just Poland. Or just The Low Countries & France. Given the rise in U.S. interventionism in the last half-century or so, one wonders if it's all just happening at a slower pace. Perhaps because the U.S. was starting the Post-WWII era from a position of supreme economic and geopolitical strength, in contrast to Post-WWI Germany.
I appreciate your thoughts. It could well be that I am not representative of HP's customer base, or of the consumer/small business/retail market in general. I can't speak to the large corporate world, or HP's presence there.
Frankly, I don't care about how busy HP is. I want well-engineered products that are a good value. I don't want an inkjet printer that takes chipped $50 all-in-one ink cartridges, even if you give me the printer. I don't want 100Mb Microsoft Bob-ified printer drivers that can't be shared over a network. I don't want to have to watch the screen as I punch the keys on my calculator to see if they registered. I am typing this on a Compaq laptop which has a BIOS whitelist for its miniPCI slot. It will be my last HP laptop purchase for that reason. It's a shame, really. Other than that, this has been a decent laptop.
It used to be that HP made products I wanted to buy, and I was proud to recommend to others. Now, for me, other manufacturers are doing a better job of that. I just don't have much confidence that if I walk out of the store with (or recommend to a client) an HP product, that it will just work the way it ought to.
I would not look to HP for enterprise-grade network infrastructure or storage. I figure that if HP can't get the mass-market things right, where the engineering cost can be amortized over a zillion units, why should I expect their enterprise gear to be better? Maybe I am wrong. But that's my logic.
Interestingly, HP had another shot at me with the acquisition of WebOS. Sigh. I used to like HP. I want to like HP again.
No, it's not.
Old HP made excellent products. Products that were exquisitely engineered. Products that were best-in-class, or at least contenders for that.
Early Deskjets. Early Laser Printers (up to 5/6ish). Calculators. Test Equipment.
New HP is best-in-class in... (crickets)
The best HP products these days were engineered by acquired companies.
I have been responsible for many thousands of dollars of purchases in computer equipment since the days of Old HP. Canon got the majority of my inkjet business, because they have user-serviceable printheads, independent ink tanks, and good, very inexpensive aftermarket inks. They can have my i9900 when they pry it from my cold dead hands. Brother got the majority of my laser/copier/fax business. Good product, good price, good drivers, separate drum & very inexpensive aftermarket toner. They're not as well-made as Old HP, but nothing is. I reluctantly gave up on HP calculators when I got burned by the 49G. HP Corvallis was truly great though. The HP48GX (the last HP Corvallis calc) is, to this day, the best engineering calculator ever made. Amazing technology for its time.
Hard to dispute that.
Oh, I don't know, my personal malware scanner says I am not comfortable with the security of either Android or iOS offerings (particularly in combination with App Stores, which would seem to be a rather large part of the draw for these devices.) I don't really have a horse in the race you are running. (shrug) From the perspective of this (hypothetical) owner, something like the iOS location logging "feature" I mentioned is, in fact, manufacturer-installed malware. I just thought you might appreciate hearing a different perspective.
Does this count?
Quite.
The volume potentiometer started to add a crackle when being turned lately, though - so I guess sooner or later I have to break out my soldering iron and fix the thing.
Might want to try contact cleaner spray first.
Actually, you are wrong about the Pandora. It's a general-purpose handheld linux computer that happens to also have gaming controls. Kinda like the Nokia N900 is a general-purpose handheld linux computer that is also a phone.