This is the part I always wondered about. why haven't they at least tried to have new military spec radiation hardened chips created (faster procesors, etc)?
Stop buying the cheapest shitty bulbs you can find.
Change your name from "goaway" to "goawaywalmart" and we'll see how it turns out.
And don't forget Greshams law that the bad always drives out the good. We might be able to spend days researching on the internet to special order "good" bulbs from... somewhere... but the other 99.99999% of humanity is stuck with walmart.
And you can't dim them. Yes Yes I know that if you order a special fixture from Uzbekistan and a special bulb from Mauritania and the phase of the moon is correct, it'll work for a couple hours, but I mean "can't" as in compared to old fashioned bulbs.
In the winter, with the much shorter days and VERY cold weather, the incandescent bulbs provide heat and are actually much more efficient than my wood stove.
Switch to a high powered video card and monitor... Higher power output, plus built in circulation fan.
Because of energy conservation, the contents of the box must loose energy and thus mass. Since there is nothing in the box except a black hole, it must loose mass.
I think whats missing is the energy transport mechanism. Convection (whats circulating, certainly nothing from inside the event horizon...) Conduction (touch the event horizon and fly away?) Radiation (the hot surface is inside the event horizon so light can't escape, right?)
Saying the energy transport mechanism is magic is no better than saying energy does not have to be magically conserved in that environment.
Dude, I can't believe you just publicly wrote that printing out a picture and holding it up to a camera is "considered difficult". God knows there will be no traffic in stolen corporate data of iris pictures, because that's illegal, I mean if that happened, next thing you'd know people would be trading in stolen CC numbers, and that could NEVER happen.
The biggest problem with biometrics is the combination of being relatively easily and cheaply faked for great monetary reward, and the inability to cheaply change your "key". A true story, I worked at a dead/dying telco in the past and they've got a computer with all my biometric data on it, somewhere. As that company finishes dying, I may as well just post my biometric data here on slashdot, its not like its going to be private anymore. Over the long term, using biometrics for identification is about as private as using your slashdot username to prove id.
But did they even need a controllable ramp up of user requests? It sounded like the overloaded system was overloaded by internal requests, that were unrelated to the number of requests they got from end users.
When you hear hoofs, think horses not zebras.
Seeing my servers spike to 100% CPU or 100% I/O and stay there, I'd look outside first before looking inside... So my first goal would be to act for a controllable ramp up of user requests. If the systems are so overloaded I can't troubleshoot at 100% of users, maybe I COULD log in and troubleshoot at 50 or 90 % load.
Also, I've worked at places that won't upgrade until outages due to high utilization are some large multiple of the cost of upgrading, this would be strong indication facebook works the same way.
more advanced users will be able to reprogram the USB chip to make the board show up as a variety of USB devices (Keyboards, Mice, Joysticks, MIDI etc)
The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful - we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site.
I'm, uh, taking a wild guess that simply shutting off port 80 is not going to allow for a controllable ramp up... they could redirect to another site, Orkut or myspace would have been mildly humorous. I am mildly surprised they don't have a simple emergency box with a simple static "undergoing repair" page, but, whatever...
So, other than zapping the A records and waiting, what are they supposed to do? Bonus points if they were doing DNS based load balancing and simply unplugged their (dns based) load balancer.
I have no dog in the fight, having deleted my facebook account months ago. It is kind of funny that a page of technobabble is described as "technical details" as if folks like us/me would find it to be a complete description rather than pretty vague. Then again we're dealing with farmville addicts and you can't reason with addicts.
Er, a fireman who holds a PTT down for 15 minutes would make the tactical public safety system useless by himself.
Well, actually, no. I hung out with ham radio guys whom reprogrammed old public safety radios for ham radio purposes. Was quite a popular activity a decade or two ago when trunked systems came into the area and made the "plain FM" radios obsolete and thus dirt cheap on the surplus market. The main problem is getting a programing cable and the programing software. Secondary problem is the expendable parts (rechargable batteries, etc) are priced at "public safety prices" meaning if you have to ask what they cost, you certainly can't afford them.
Anyway most of the manufacturers have a feature to prevent the PTT problem. Motorola called it "Time Out Timer" (probably a (TM) of Motorola). Transmit more than X seconds and it stops transmitting and blasts out an alert signal on the speaker, terrifyingly loudly on some models...
Reason for this, is worst case scenario a fireman gets trapped in a structure with his radio jammed on and no one can communicate to rescue him or even figure out who's stuck.
I would imagine this "feature" annoys the hell out of long winded public safety personnel, but its overall a good idea.
putting estimates of the total number of victims at around 500,000 according
What if each text costs ten cents, thats $50K of revenue for the telcos. Since "everyone knows" the actual cost of service is like a million of a cent per text, thats about $50K profit for the telcos.
Interestingly enough, maybe I mis wrote and should have said "having a gun safe worth as much as their car"
As I think back, as a kid my friends mostly had 10/22 class of rifles for plinking or cheap airguns. Like hundreds of dollars. And I had many coworkers as a highschool kid whom owned "hundred dollar clunker cars".
Got older, got a "low thousands of dollars" car and a starter-real job. Coworkers were into this competitive target shooting deal with fancied up 22 pistols and 45s, alternately revolvers with speedloaders. They, overall, dumped "low thousands" into their pistol collections.
I'm sure you'll be completely shocked to hear, once I got a decent job, and a bought a brand new car, and I'm working with guys whom own (multiple) four digit duck hunting shotguns. Really too beautifully engraved to take out to a swamp, but...
I don't hunt because around here, frankly "hunting" is 5% hunting and 95% drinking and I mostly don't drink, so I'd be 19/20ths bored. But, yeah, guns very much seem to turn into a hobbyists 'second car'. It is important to note that all my past cars have long since been turned into scrap metal, whereas my friends guns are all in their gun safes...
I don't know why you people keep badgering Bruce about this, when I could figure out the answers to all that within minutes of looking at the linked site. How about going and reading for yourself?
Because almost all codecs have a certain inherent fixed latency. And its by far the most important figure of merit in the real world. And no one wants to discuss it, therefore it must be horrifically bad.
Number one priority for codec designer is always will it fit in the available B/W goal. This is a simple T/F Y/N 1/0 either it fits or it doesn't.
Number two priority is minimum inherent codec latency. Humans don't talk so well above 100 ms or so (debatable). That doesn't mean you get 100 ms to blow in the codec, because you've got radio / buffering / FEC / ping time type latencies.
As a codec designer you get to fight the network/RF guys constantly over whom gets to budget how much of the available latency. Not to mention fighting marketing whom claim it'll use zero bits/sec while somehow having zero latency.
If, for some reason latency is an issue when it's first shoehorned into a DSP chip, Codec2 will be refined until it works well on a DSP chip, in real real time.
I think you are not using the definition of latency that most in the field would use.
Latency is how long it takes to process the data. Its a computer science type of thing. If you understand Knuth and his tape drive sorting examples, this is pretty obvious...
For example, heres a nice, simple, hopelessly useless codec that has almost exactly 100 ms of latency:
1) Get yerself a buffer that holds 1000 samples. 2) Run a A/D converter at 10Ksamples/sec until the buffer is full. 3) Run "gzip" on the 1000 sample buffer, squishing it down to maybe 500 bytes. Optimistically. 4) send the 500 byte chunk to the other side (radio, internet, whatever) 5) Run "gunzip" on the hopefully unerrored compressed 500 bytes, expanding it back to 1000 raw samples. 6) Squirt yonder 1000 raw sample values out the D/A converter at 10Ksamples/sec 7) Pray ye get another packet of compressed voice data before the well runs dry. Or maybe listen to a bit of silence. Or play interpolation games.
Your argument is once steps 3 and 5 are quick enough, the codec latency will be zero. A fine bit of analysis, however, shows that the first sample to enter the buffer in step 2 cannot possibly be decompressed and played back, until the buffer fills, which takes... 100 ms aka 1/10 of a second. This is the latency we're talking about in voice codecs. Most are somewhat faster than 1/10 of a second.
It is quite possible to make a very efficient codec where a fireman would hit the PTT button, yack into the radio for a fifteen minutes, and then the entire message would be compressed down to maybe 1000 bits/sec theoretical average, then sent and played back. This would, of course, be completely useless for tactical public safety comms.
Anything involving buying some gear, sweating, and an element of luck, seems to be considered a sport, anything more hard core than driving around a game farm in a golf cart would probably qualify.
As for "teams of equals" we have hunters/poachers vs game wardens and the law enforcement complex as the refs. Sure there's more hunters than wardens, but the rules and the refs always side with the warden...
On the other hand 2 hunters competing against each other would be a different matter
Oh, hunters shoot each other quite often. Supposedly accidentally, supposedly.
I dare you to list one single reason why a modern society _needs_ to _hunt_ for _food_. There are none.
Because they want to? No further justification necessary.
Otherwise you get stuck on the slippery slope to micromanagement madness. So, are cows more or less sentient than pigs? Is it more immoral to yank a living green onion out of the dirt and chop it up while its still alive, than to tear the dormant seeds off a fruit tree and eat them while they're "sleeping"? Is it more or less immoral to chop up an apple and then bake it into a pie, thus only torturing it for an hour or two, vs dehydrating apple slices slowly over a period of days?
I've seen perhaps 3 or 4 guns in private possession in my life.
As kindly as I can say this, maybe they think you're a burglary risk? Or your friends/coworkers live in a generally high crime area like the coasts?
Only criminals or the extremely poor have cheap guns. Guns are generally a very long term capital expense, unlike virtually all other hobbies discussed on Slashdot. Realize that my grandfathers.45 has had a vaguely constant value for a couple decades, unlike say, used PC video cards. That leads to "trading up" and "collecting" behavior, and after a couple decades and/or generations of inheritance, ending up with a gun safe worth as much as a car. Sure, you could sell and get the cash, but if you went hunting with grandpa for 20 great seasons, after he dies and you inherit his rifle you're not going to sell either yours or his, way too many good memories about growing up, etc.
Someone whom would discuss their collection of decent condition rare engraved inlaid over-under duck hunting shotguns with anyone they meet is about as intelligent as someone whom would discuss their extremely heavy gold coin collection with anyone they meet...
But if you never leave the city, then I think there should be strict licensing with psychological evaluations and periodic retesting to be allowed to own a firearm.
Don't know what its like where you live, but around here it is the default assumption that ALL men go hunting in the fall. ALL of them. Personally I don't, but I'm well aware that makes me an oddball. Also its important to note, that "going hunting" mostly means sitting around a forest for an hour or two around dawn with a rifle gossiping with your friends, and then spending the rest of the day and night at the cabin / local bar / pub / strip club / etc getting drunk.
was a NORMAL and intellectually stimulating thing to read, just like the Bible.
You ever actually read the bible? There's a reason most psuedo-xtian religions have someone as an interpreter and only read certain very carefully selected passages. I've read both books and frankly the Bible was staggeringly more racist, less logical, and overflowing of hate. Before anyone gets all wound up, I'm merely speaking of the contents of a book, not the nice little old ladies at your church social, or mom and apple pie.
Firstly, sand control can be an issue...but it's commonly felt at the surface (pre and post-separation.) Secondly, sand is semi-controlled via flow rate. You don't open the well to atmosphere during production - you use an adjustable choke. If a well produces a lot of sand, then surface sand filters are deployed.
Ah, I think, you think, I think the problem is the crude is sandy. I was writing about the severe erosion seen in the BOP and presumably the rest of the well. Check out theoildrum.com, someone somewheres had a nice link to initial pictures of the innards of the BOP, severe erosion.
Thirdly, drilling a well is far more costly than a workover (where one replaces the production string.) Lastly, testing pressure control equipment happens at the surface as part of manufacturing QA, but it's also tested in the hole - where it really matters. The cost of surface and downhole testing is not relevant.
The BOP was removed, inspected, and pretty well sandblasted/trashed inside by the high flow rate. Also hard to predict what has washed out of the formation. All at great expense you can figure it out.
A well that runs free for long enough is going to be trashed internally to some extent. "Worst disaster in recent history", depending on if you count ixtoc as recent, is probably the worst trashed. Or it could be nearly pristine down there. Theres about 5 kft of cement at the bottom now so its not like we'll ever know.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how many "nines" reliability there is on a shuttle computer.
The reliability is high enough that it has little meaning.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/flyout/flyfeature_shuttlecomputers.html
"Well, it has been 24 years since the last time a software problem required an on-orbit fix during a mission."
So a MTBF of 24 years?
"But perhaps the most meaningful statistic is that a software error has never endangered the crew, shuttle or a mission's success."
100% uptime, essentially? Assuming no computer problems on the last flight, they might actually achieve 100% uptime?
This is the part I always wondered about. why haven't they at least tried to have new military spec radiation hardened chips created (faster procesors, etc)?
They have...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Radiation-hardened_microprocessors
Specifically
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proton200k
About a gigaflop or a couple gigamips or giga-whatevers.
The problem is not finding an app to burn some mips, but finding the weight for the power supply and cooling ...
And the realistic market shipping quantity is probably triple digits at most.
And running a thousand times quicker, seems to mean on land based processors that it'll crash by memory leak or whatever a thousand times more often.
Stop buying the cheapest shitty bulbs you can find.
Change your name from "goaway" to "goawaywalmart" and we'll see how it turns out.
And don't forget Greshams law that the bad always drives out the good. We might be able to spend days researching on the internet to special order "good" bulbs from ... somewhere ... but the other 99.99999% of humanity is stuck with walmart.
And you can't dim them. Yes Yes I know that if you order a special fixture from Uzbekistan and a special bulb from Mauritania and the phase of the moon is correct, it'll work for a couple hours, but I mean "can't" as in compared to old fashioned bulbs.
In the winter, with the much shorter days and VERY cold weather, the incandescent bulbs provide heat and are actually much more efficient than my wood stove.
Switch to a high powered video card and monitor ... Higher power output, plus built in circulation fan.
Because of energy conservation, the contents of the box must loose energy and thus mass. Since there is nothing in the box except a black hole, it must loose mass.
I think whats missing is the energy transport mechanism. Convection (whats circulating, certainly nothing from inside the event horizon...) Conduction (touch the event horizon and fly away?) Radiation (the hot surface is inside the event horizon so light can't escape, right?)
Saying the energy transport mechanism is magic is no better than saying energy does not have to be magically conserved in that environment.
Manufacturing an iris is considered difficult.
Dude, I can't believe you just publicly wrote that printing out a picture and holding it up to a camera is "considered difficult". God knows there will be no traffic in stolen corporate data of iris pictures, because that's illegal, I mean if that happened, next thing you'd know people would be trading in stolen CC numbers, and that could NEVER happen.
The biggest problem with biometrics is the combination of being relatively easily and cheaply faked for great monetary reward, and the inability to cheaply change your "key". A true story, I worked at a dead/dying telco in the past and they've got a computer with all my biometric data on it, somewhere. As that company finishes dying, I may as well just post my biometric data here on slashdot, its not like its going to be private anymore. Over the long term, using biometrics for identification is about as private as using your slashdot username to prove id.
But did they even need a controllable ramp up of user requests? It sounded like the overloaded system was overloaded by internal requests, that were unrelated to the number of requests they got from end users.
When you hear hoofs, think horses not zebras.
Seeing my servers spike to 100% CPU or 100% I/O and stay there, I'd look outside first before looking inside... So my first goal would be to act for a controllable ramp up of user requests. If the systems are so overloaded I can't troubleshoot at 100% of users, maybe I COULD log in and troubleshoot at 50 or 90 % load.
Also, I've worked at places that won't upgrade until outages due to high utilization are some large multiple of the cost of upgrading, this would be strong indication facebook works the same way.
The blog post mentions a stream but does not say where it can be found...
I think its:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/world-maker-faire-1
Not a rick-roll, I promise.
From http://arduino.cc/blog/2010/09/24/dinner-is-ready/
more advanced users will be able to reprogram the USB chip to make the board show up as a variety of USB devices (Keyboards, Mice, Joysticks, MIDI etc)
How bout a PS3 controller?
So why was DNS blamed?
From http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=431441338919&id=9445547199&ref=mf&_fb_noscript=1
The way to stop the feedback cycle was quite painful - we had to stop all traffic to this database cluster, which meant turning off the site.
I'm, uh, taking a wild guess that simply shutting off port 80 is not going to allow for a controllable ramp up... they could redirect to another site, Orkut or myspace would have been mildly humorous. I am mildly surprised they don't have a simple emergency box with a simple static "undergoing repair" page, but, whatever ...
So, other than zapping the A records and waiting, what are they supposed to do? Bonus points if they were doing DNS based load balancing and simply unplugged their (dns based) load balancer.
I have no dog in the fight, having deleted my facebook account months ago. It is kind of funny that a page of technobabble is described as "technical details" as if folks like us/me would find it to be a complete description rather than pretty vague. Then again we're dealing with farmville addicts and you can't reason with addicts.
Er, a fireman who holds a PTT down for 15 minutes would make the tactical public safety system useless by himself.
Well, actually, no. I hung out with ham radio guys whom reprogrammed old public safety radios for ham radio purposes. Was quite a popular activity a decade or two ago when trunked systems came into the area and made the "plain FM" radios obsolete and thus dirt cheap on the surplus market. The main problem is getting a programing cable and the programing software. Secondary problem is the expendable parts (rechargable batteries, etc) are priced at "public safety prices" meaning if you have to ask what they cost, you certainly can't afford them.
Anyway most of the manufacturers have a feature to prevent the PTT problem. Motorola called it "Time Out Timer" (probably a (TM) of Motorola). Transmit more than X seconds and it stops transmitting and blasts out an alert signal on the speaker, terrifyingly loudly on some models...
Reason for this, is worst case scenario a fireman gets trapped in a structure with his radio jammed on and no one can communicate to rescue him or even figure out who's stuck.
I would imagine this "feature" annoys the hell out of long winded public safety personnel, but its overall a good idea.
putting estimates of the total number of victims at around 500,000 according
What if each text costs ten cents, thats $50K of revenue for the telcos. Since "everyone knows" the actual cost of service is like a million of a cent per text, thats about $50K profit for the telcos.
or you have to obfuscate the URL through a redirection service.
I refuse to click on those, too easy to be goatse'd or rickrolled
Interestingly enough, maybe I mis wrote and should have said "having a gun safe worth as much as their car"
As I think back, as a kid my friends mostly had 10/22 class of rifles for plinking or cheap airguns. Like hundreds of dollars. And I had many coworkers as a highschool kid whom owned "hundred dollar clunker cars".
Got older, got a "low thousands of dollars" car and a starter-real job. Coworkers were into this competitive target shooting deal with fancied up 22 pistols and 45s, alternately revolvers with speedloaders. They, overall, dumped "low thousands" into their pistol collections.
I'm sure you'll be completely shocked to hear, once I got a decent job, and a bought a brand new car, and I'm working with guys whom own (multiple) four digit duck hunting shotguns. Really too beautifully engraved to take out to a swamp, but...
I don't hunt because around here, frankly "hunting" is 5% hunting and 95% drinking and I mostly don't drink, so I'd be 19/20ths bored. But, yeah, guns very much seem to turn into a hobbyists 'second car'. It is important to note that all my past cars have long since been turned into scrap metal, whereas my friends guns are all in their gun safes...
I don't know why you people keep badgering Bruce about this, when I could figure out the answers to all that within minutes of looking at the linked site. How about going and reading for yourself?
Because almost all codecs have a certain inherent fixed latency. And its by far the most important figure of merit in the real world. And no one wants to discuss it, therefore it must be horrifically bad.
Number one priority for codec designer is always will it fit in the available B/W goal. This is a simple T/F Y/N 1/0 either it fits or it doesn't.
Number two priority is minimum inherent codec latency. Humans don't talk so well above 100 ms or so (debatable). That doesn't mean you get 100 ms to blow in the codec, because you've got radio / buffering / FEC / ping time type latencies.
As a codec designer you get to fight the network/RF guys constantly over whom gets to budget how much of the available latency. Not to mention fighting marketing whom claim it'll use zero bits/sec while somehow having zero latency.
If, for some reason latency is an issue when it's first shoehorned into a DSP chip, Codec2 will be refined until it works well on a DSP chip, in real real time.
I think you are not using the definition of latency that most in the field would use.
Latency is how long it takes to process the data. Its a computer science type of thing. If you understand Knuth and his tape drive sorting examples, this is pretty obvious...
For example, heres a nice, simple, hopelessly useless codec that has almost exactly 100 ms of latency:
1) Get yerself a buffer that holds 1000 samples.
2) Run a A/D converter at 10Ksamples/sec until the buffer is full.
3) Run "gzip" on the 1000 sample buffer, squishing it down to maybe 500 bytes. Optimistically.
4) send the 500 byte chunk to the other side (radio, internet, whatever)
5) Run "gunzip" on the hopefully unerrored compressed 500 bytes, expanding it back to 1000 raw samples.
6) Squirt yonder 1000 raw sample values out the D/A converter at 10Ksamples/sec
7) Pray ye get another packet of compressed voice data before the well runs dry. Or maybe listen to a bit of silence. Or play interpolation games.
Your argument is once steps 3 and 5 are quick enough, the codec latency will be zero. A fine bit of analysis, however, shows that the first sample to enter the buffer in step 2 cannot possibly be decompressed and played back, until the buffer fills, which takes... 100 ms aka 1/10 of a second. This is the latency we're talking about in voice codecs. Most are somewhat faster than 1/10 of a second.
It is quite possible to make a very efficient codec where a fireman would hit the PTT button, yack into the radio for a fifteen minutes, and then the entire message would be compressed down to maybe 1000 bits/sec theoretical average, then sent and played back. This would, of course, be completely useless for tactical public safety comms.
If that was TLDR, heres my summary:
"... it is recommended that you ... refrain from social media altogether ..."
Works for me!
We could drop the word "sport" for a start
Anything involving buying some gear, sweating, and an element of luck, seems to be considered a sport, anything more hard core than driving around a game farm in a golf cart would probably qualify.
As for "teams of equals" we have hunters/poachers vs game wardens and the law enforcement complex as the refs. Sure there's more hunters than wardens, but the rules and the refs always side with the warden...
On the other hand 2 hunters competing against each other would be a different matter
Oh, hunters shoot each other quite often. Supposedly accidentally, supposedly.
I dare you to list one single reason why a modern society _needs_ to _hunt_ for _food_. There are none.
Because they want to? No further justification necessary.
Otherwise you get stuck on the slippery slope to micromanagement madness. So, are cows more or less sentient than pigs? Is it more immoral to yank a living green onion out of the dirt and chop it up while its still alive, than to tear the dormant seeds off a fruit tree and eat them while they're "sleeping"? Is it more or less immoral to chop up an apple and then bake it into a pie, thus only torturing it for an hour or two, vs dehydrating apple slices slowly over a period of days?
I've seen perhaps 3 or 4 guns in private possession in my life.
As kindly as I can say this, maybe they think you're a burglary risk? Or your friends/coworkers live in a generally high crime area like the coasts?
Only criminals or the extremely poor have cheap guns. Guns are generally a very long term capital expense, unlike virtually all other hobbies discussed on Slashdot. Realize that my grandfathers .45 has had a vaguely constant value for a couple decades, unlike say, used PC video cards. That leads to "trading up" and "collecting" behavior, and after a couple decades and/or generations of inheritance, ending up with a gun safe worth as much as a car. Sure, you could sell and get the cash, but if you went hunting with grandpa for 20 great seasons, after he dies and you inherit his rifle you're not going to sell either yours or his, way too many good memories about growing up, etc.
Someone whom would discuss their collection of decent condition rare engraved inlaid over-under duck hunting shotguns with anyone they meet is about as intelligent as someone whom would discuss their extremely heavy gold coin collection with anyone they meet...
But if you never leave the city, then I think there should be strict licensing with psychological evaluations and periodic retesting to be allowed to own a firearm.
Don't know what its like where you live, but around here it is the default assumption that ALL men go hunting in the fall. ALL of them. Personally I don't, but I'm well aware that makes me an oddball. Also its important to note, that "going hunting" mostly means sitting around a forest for an hour or two around dawn with a rifle gossiping with your friends, and then spending the rest of the day and night at the cabin / local bar / pub / strip club / etc getting drunk.
was a NORMAL and intellectually stimulating thing to read, just like the Bible.
You ever actually read the bible? There's a reason most psuedo-xtian religions have someone as an interpreter and only read certain very carefully selected passages. I've read both books and frankly the Bible was staggeringly more racist, less logical, and overflowing of hate. Before anyone gets all wound up, I'm merely speaking of the contents of a book, not the nice little old ladies at your church social, or mom and apple pie.
Firstly, sand control can be an issue...but it's commonly felt at the surface (pre and post-separation.) Secondly, sand is semi-controlled via flow rate. You don't open the well to atmosphere during production - you use an adjustable choke. If a well produces a lot of sand, then surface sand filters are deployed.
Ah, I think, you think, I think the problem is the crude is sandy. I was writing about the severe erosion seen in the BOP and presumably the rest of the well. Check out theoildrum.com, someone somewheres had a nice link to initial pictures of the innards of the BOP, severe erosion.
Thirdly, drilling a well is far more costly than a workover (where one replaces the production string.) Lastly, testing pressure control equipment happens at the surface as part of manufacturing QA, but it's also tested in the hole - where it really matters. The cost of surface and downhole testing is not relevant.
The BOP was removed, inspected, and pretty well sandblasted/trashed inside by the high flow rate. Also hard to predict what has washed out of the formation. All at great expense you can figure it out.
A well that runs free for long enough is going to be trashed internally to some extent. "Worst disaster in recent history", depending on if you count ixtoc as recent, is probably the worst trashed. Or it could be nearly pristine down there. Theres about 5 kft of cement at the bottom now so its not like we'll ever know.
shut down websites trafficking in ... counterfeit goods
Bye Bye EBAY, and good riddance