The studies say it's probably not an issue for intermittent viewing. Of course the average US couch potato watching a ridiculous amount of TV, which has been show to reduce depth perception and intelligence. Or maybe the lower intelligence just means you'll fall for fake reality TV shows and crap like dirty dancing with the stars. You want your kid to have good eyesight and not be a fat slob, get them outside being active! Don't park them in front of the TV or computer.
Well it is technically illegal to use the soc number for anything other than soc security or taxing purposes. Do you really want your ISP account to require it? Your netflix account? Or how about the phase where they require all websites to implement SSL that requires a trusted ID. If you thought cookies were bad, try a universal identifier that you can't avoid using and can't change.
Except you'll probably be required by the states (who are held hostage by federal funding) to have one to get a drivers license or benefits. This is yet another back-door attempt to institute a national ID card, except this would also happen to let the govt decrypt all your transactions.
First, they do invade privacy it's just that folks have given up in arguing with the Government or there's the folks who are stupid enough to believe that it's important - I know a couple of them.
Secondly, that Nigerian boarded the aircraft IN NIGERIA! How many of these scanners do you think are going to be in piss poor third world countries?!
Didn't he go through security again in Amsterdam before boarding the NW flight 253? I don't really care about the body scans myself even though I do consider them to be an invasion of my privacy. I'd much rather keep the janitorial staff from rummaging through my luggage. Bomb sniffing dogs are cheaper in the long run.
Even if we actually manage to secure the airports without making it painful for the average citizen to fly, the terrorists will simply focus on something else. There are potentially thousands of other viable targets such as the railways, subways, water supplies, refineries, the dikes surrounding New Orleans, etc. The whole reason terrorism is successful is that we're bankrupting ourselves to protect against a threat that is trivial to pose. An enemy spent less than $5000 to talk an impressionable Nigerian into boarding a plane with a bomb in his pants and suddenly the US is spending $200 million on body scanners.
Technically, NSA is not authorized to monitor communications in the US without court authorization. The fact that the FISMA court process to get that approval is a joke and frequently ignored is a separate issue.
Personally I have no issue with them monitoring public forums, internet or not, or obvious trouble signs. I do draw the line at intercepting and monitoring communications where the people involve have some expectation of privacy. If there is reasonable suspicion then get a warrant and monitor deeper. Facebook or slashdot postings don't count as private. The problem is when they started maintaining a database of internet id and email addresses cross-referenced to individuals. I know somewhere there is a file with everything I've ever posted under my various ids.
Test after test shows that Firefox uses less memory than other browsers. What memory issues are you referring to? If you can explain how to reproduce them, someone can file a bug report for you.
Why bother filing reports anymore? The devs have consistently denied there are memory leaks despite tons of bug reports. They just blame plug-ins. They seem more focused on adding more fluff and dorking with the gui that fixing problems like memory leaks, lack of protection from unstable plug-ins, all tabs running in one thread so a single tab can kill them all, etc.
Not sure I understand your approximation versus accuracy comment? I do agree with yuo that a smoother load or at least a better prediction of the load can improve efficiency.
Power plants need to have a minimum baseline of power production to prevent voltage drops (not power loss) also called brown brownouts.
Again, they use big, efficient plants to handle the base load. Their drawback is that they are slow to ramp up and down. Gas turbines are expensive to run, but very responsive to changing load/power requirements. Also keep in mind that the power grid as a whole sells/buys energy between systems as needed, so its also a cost issue of whether to buy power from elsewhere or ramp up your more expensive production facilities to meet peaks.
Individual plants don't just throw away excess power production. They just throttle back on the gas turbines, or they may employ other methods of smoothing the load peaks. A good example is dams that pump water up to holding lakes at night and drawing it back down through the turbines during the day. Or they may sell it on the grid if there is demand - that whole process gets quite complicated in itself.
People fail to realize how the whole system works.
Apparently that includes you as well. Go look up words like load-leveling and peak load handling. They don't simply dump excess power somewhere. Its more like predicting the load so they can produce it cheaper. For example not having to fire up the gas turbines to handle peak loads as they are expensive in $/kw versus the cheaper but less flexible coal fired plants. Ideally a steady grid load is ideal, but obviously nighttime and mild weather loads are less.
Thanks and now I'm left wondering if the ground there is so muddy what prevented the oil from bursting out in the first place. But at this point I can use my imagination.
And thanks for pointing out what security measures weren't taken. Yes I know we do use a lot of potentially catastrophic technology but not without a backup plan. as you stated, the backup plan was know in advance, it just wasn't implemented.
About 6000 feet of rock starting somewhere below the seabed.
Honestly, if fixing an eventuality is that impossible maybe they shouldn't have been allowed to drill in the first place.
And yes I'm an armchair underwater mining engineer (but an actual, licensed, systems engineer) and I can't quite believe that BP can't drop a hundred tons of rock over the spill
An apparently clueless about oil drilling, but quite willing to express your uninformed opinion! Try dumping a bunch of rock on top of your pressure washer hose and see how well that stems the flow. It won't. It'll just flow out everywhere else and be a heck of a lot harder to stop or capture. Maybe a nuke will just melt it all into a blob and not just fracture the bedrock and cause even worse damage!
I'm pretty sure they're trying to find the most "cost effective" way of dealing with it.
I'm pretty sure they started with the quickest to implement, ie try to get the BOP to function as designed. The started relief wells asap, and then moved up in risk for options. The coffer dam had some promise, but would not have captured it all, just as the cap is never going to capture it all if its not sealed tight and held down with enough force to overcome the head pressure.
But what I seriously can't believe is that what is stopping is water too muddy to see. Don't we have radars and laser and x-rays, weaponizable grade sonars and of course GPS? And don't tell me GPS doesn't get that low, we can set up repeaters, heck we can tie a million ropes together if that helped. Shouldn't BP know exactly where the spill is? Surely they sent equipment back and forth the drilling site!
I'm obviously expecting to get my ass whooped by an actual mining engineer but I seriously struggle to believe our technology is that lame,
Also you seem intent on BP *not* paying the bill,exactly what do you want everybody to do? Giving them money with no strings attached?
GPS is pointless, but sonar and underwater tracking is possible. Try making dinner in the dark, even though you know exactly where you're standing in the kitchen.
What is claimed is impossible: sustained faster than wind speed. You could have transient bursts of faster than wind speed using energy that was stored when you were going slower than the wind. What I'm not perfectly sure of is if you could sustain an average (not continuous) speed greater than the wind. But I don't think so.
Or simply imagine that the wind isn't directly behind the vehicle, and isn't necessarily outrunning the wind as you've assumed
I volunteer for this and Verizon fixes the oversubscribed upstream bottleneck that's making my 1.5meg DSL drop to 600k during the day? That sounds like it winner to me. Where do I sign up? Think they'd notice if I ran BS data through their box?
Yeah the latency is a minor issue, particularly for video content where actual bandwidth and jitter matters. Adding up the latency for lots of gets on a single web page might be noticeable. In the bigger scheme of things, having your traffic travel a longer path ends up costing someone more money. Traffic taking longer paths increases the bandwidth use on cross-country fibers, may involved farming out to other backbones for delivery, etc. It's the same notion (or at least used to be) of local calls being cheaper than long distance.
The kid spends too much time in front of a computer, and you want to turn him into a dime-a-dozen programmer? Teach the boy some useful skills. Like how to deal with money and get a job that might pay a little more than McDonalds. At 16 he should have some real world skills and be thinking seriously about college.
"Regardless of what happens after the top kill, [Adm. Thad Allen] told HSToday.us that it would not be appropriate for the federal government to exert direct control over the disaster response efforts currently led by BP.
"I think it's legally possible. I don't think it's advisable," Allen declared."
I did. Obama's statement "BP is operating at our direction" contradicts Obama's earlier statement that BP was the expert and that the govt stood by to assist but was not going to interfere. The coast guard also has zero legal authority over BP.
XP mode is essentially a full XP install running under Virtual PC. When you start an app in XP mode, it uses remote desktop to connect to that virtual machine and run the program as a remote app. It's a clever hack of putting some existing pieces together. Truthfully though its pretty slow and there are better solutions.
Sun's Virtual Box is a great package. Much better than Virtual PC and basically a knockoff of VMware. The only think I don't like (at least on the windows version) is the inability to use some of the more powerful features without having to use the command line. Simple stuff like making a read-only vhd file or using a physical disk. VMWare or Virtual PC handle those options much better. I have a n'lited XP install under Virtual Machine. The stripped down XP under virtualbox is booted to a desktop in 10-seconds.
Their service must not actually be trying to prevent identity theft, but trying to keep you from knowing when it happens.
Close. When they see something they clean it up and then tell the customer they blocked the attempt, so the customer thinks they got their money's worth.
I hate replying to myself, but thought I'd put the whole dispersant thing in perspective. Lets assume they are trying to treat a volume that's 20 miles x 20 miles x 1000 feet deep. That's around 87 trillion gallons or somewhere around 6 parts per billion. Thats a really small number to worry about having any long term environmental impact once its mixed in. Short term exposure to a higher concentration is still an issue for marine life, but its probably less problematic than the oil itself.
What part of readily available and works did you miss? BP still chose to use what was already on-hand somewhere (not a piddly amount off in Britain) of a chemical that has historically been used effectively.
Which US companies do you propose we hire? How about the ones with lots of deep sea drilling an oil clean expertise. Oh that's right, they are already on the job being paid by BP. I still don't understand the misconception that there are experts out there who are not already on this.
The only thing the Navy has that can go to that depth is their deep submersible rescue vehicles. They would be far less useful than the specialty ROVs that are already on site. The use of ROVs as is, must be carefully coordinated so you don't entangle their lines and you don't want a third party running something down there. I can speak with some authority on this as I happen to work with large underwater structures via ROVs and top-side support barges.
At this point, oil booms at sensitive areas with proper collection will only limit the damage. There just isn't enough oil booms or even production capacity in the world to totally contain this.
Right, because the solution to a leaky faucet is to drop a nuke on it and hope you just melt the valve into a plug and don't just blow the end off and have a full blown leak. Keep in mind that it's a leak. The BOP didn't fully shut off the flow. Damaging the well head or fracturing the well casing would cause a far more difficult leak to stop.
Yeah the Russians did it on a few full blown leaks with success, but that doesn't mean it's not a very high risk option with more serious environmental impact than the oil leak..
Are we to believe that a company with profits equal to a middle sized nation's GDP cannot afford to plug this hole? Sure, it may take hauling 500.000 tons of rocks from the coast, and would cost a few billions of $, but BP can very easily afford that.
Because that won't work? Try dumping rock and sand on the open end of a pressure washer hose and see how that works for ya.
Believe you me, the only reason why this crisis is lasting this long, is because BP is doing it piece-meal, so as to not affect the profits almost at all.
BP is proceeding slowly and carefully so they don't make this worse. The leak is small compared to what it could be. They don't want to fuck it up and have a full blown, uncapped well.
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The studies say it's probably not an issue for intermittent viewing. Of course the average US couch potato watching a ridiculous amount of TV, which has been show to reduce depth perception and intelligence. Or maybe the lower intelligence just means you'll fall for fake reality TV shows and crap like dirty dancing with the stars. You want your kid to have good eyesight and not be a fat slob, get them outside being active! Don't park them in front of the TV or computer.
Well it is technically illegal to use the soc number for anything other than soc security or taxing purposes. Do you really want your ISP account to require it? Your netflix account? Or how about the phase where they require all websites to implement SSL that requires a trusted ID. If you thought cookies were bad, try a universal identifier that you can't avoid using and can't change.
Except you'll probably be required by the states (who are held hostage by federal funding) to have one to get a drivers license or benefits. This is yet another back-door attempt to institute a national ID card, except this would also happen to let the govt decrypt all your transactions.
First, they do invade privacy it's just that folks have given up in arguing with the Government or there's the folks who are stupid enough to believe that it's important - I know a couple of them.
Secondly, that Nigerian boarded the aircraft IN NIGERIA! How many of these scanners do you think are going to be in piss poor third world countries?!
Didn't he go through security again in Amsterdam before boarding the NW flight 253? I don't really care about the body scans myself even though I do consider them to be an invasion of my privacy. I'd much rather keep the janitorial staff from rummaging through my luggage. Bomb sniffing dogs are cheaper in the long run.
Even if we actually manage to secure the airports without making it painful for the average citizen to fly, the terrorists will simply focus on something else. There are potentially thousands of other viable targets such as the railways, subways, water supplies, refineries, the dikes surrounding New Orleans, etc. The whole reason terrorism is successful is that we're bankrupting ourselves to protect against a threat that is trivial to pose. An enemy spent less than $5000 to talk an impressionable Nigerian into boarding a plane with a bomb in his pants and suddenly the US is spending $200 million on body scanners.
Technically, NSA is not authorized to monitor communications in the US without court authorization. The fact that the FISMA court process to get that approval is a joke and frequently ignored is a separate issue.
Personally I have no issue with them monitoring public forums, internet or not, or obvious trouble signs. I do draw the line at intercepting and monitoring communications where the people involve have some expectation of privacy. If there is reasonable suspicion then get a warrant and monitor deeper. Facebook or slashdot postings don't count as private. The problem is when they started maintaining a database of internet id and email addresses cross-referenced to individuals. I know somewhere there is a file with everything I've ever posted under my various ids.
Or how about the devs saying "the general increase is normal"
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Reducing_memory_usage_(Firefox). or
http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/forum/1/626951
Firefox still slowly increases its memory footprint over time. Any other programmer would call that a leak.
Where have the devs denied there are memory leaks?
Prime example - http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9046561/Fix_Firefox_s_memory_problems_says_Mozilla_director.
Basically they said its not a leak, it just uses memory intensively after a while.
Test after test shows that Firefox uses less memory than other browsers. What memory issues are you referring to? If you can explain how to reproduce them, someone can file a bug report for you.
Why bother filing reports anymore? The devs have consistently denied there are memory leaks despite tons of bug reports. They just blame plug-ins. They seem more focused on adding more fluff and dorking with the gui that fixing problems like memory leaks, lack of protection from unstable plug-ins, all tabs running in one thread so a single tab can kill them all, etc.
Not sure I understand your approximation versus accuracy comment? I do agree with yuo that a smoother load or at least a better prediction of the load can improve efficiency.
Power plants need to have a minimum baseline of power production to prevent voltage drops (not power loss) also called brown brownouts.
Again, they use big, efficient plants to handle the base load. Their drawback is that they are slow to ramp up and down. Gas turbines are expensive to run, but very responsive to changing load/power requirements. Also keep in mind that the power grid as a whole sells/buys energy between systems as needed, so its also a cost issue of whether to buy power from elsewhere or ramp up your more expensive production facilities to meet peaks.
Individual plants don't just throw away excess power production. They just throttle back on the gas turbines, or they may employ other methods of smoothing the load peaks. A good example is dams that pump water up to holding lakes at night and drawing it back down through the turbines during the day. Or they may sell it on the grid if there is demand - that whole process gets quite complicated in itself.
Here let me point you to a few nice wikipedia articles to get you started.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base_load_power_plant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_balancing_(electrical_power)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_energy_storage
People fail to realize how the whole system works.
Apparently that includes you as well. Go look up words like load-leveling and peak load handling. They don't simply dump excess power somewhere. Its more like predicting the load so they can produce it cheaper. For example not having to fire up the gas turbines to handle peak loads as they are expensive in $/kw versus the cheaper but less flexible coal fired plants. Ideally a steady grid load is ideal, but obviously nighttime and mild weather loads are less.
Thanks and now I'm left wondering if the ground there is so muddy what prevented the oil from bursting out in the first place. But at this point I can use my imagination.
And thanks for pointing out what security measures weren't taken. Yes I know we do use a lot of potentially catastrophic technology but not without a backup plan. as you stated, the backup plan was know in advance, it just wasn't implemented.
About 6000 feet of rock starting somewhere below the seabed.
Honestly, if fixing an eventuality is that impossible maybe they shouldn't have been allowed to drill in the first place.
And yes I'm an armchair underwater mining engineer (but an actual, licensed, systems engineer) and I can't quite believe that BP can't drop a hundred tons of rock over the spill
An apparently clueless about oil drilling, but quite willing to express your uninformed opinion! Try dumping a bunch of rock on top of your pressure washer hose and see how well that stems the flow. It won't. It'll just flow out everywhere else and be a heck of a lot harder to stop or capture. Maybe a nuke will just melt it all into a blob and not just fracture the bedrock and cause even worse damage!
I'm pretty sure they're trying to find the most "cost effective" way of dealing with it.
I'm pretty sure they started with the quickest to implement, ie try to get the BOP to function as designed. The started relief wells asap, and then moved up in risk for options. The coffer dam had some promise, but would not have captured it all, just as the cap is never going to capture it all if its not sealed tight and held down with enough force to overcome the head pressure.
But what I seriously can't believe is that what is stopping is water too muddy to see. Don't we have radars and laser and x-rays, weaponizable grade sonars and of course GPS? And don't tell me GPS doesn't get that low, we can set up repeaters, heck we can tie a million ropes together if that helped. Shouldn't BP know exactly where the spill is? Surely they sent equipment back and forth the drilling site!
I'm obviously expecting to get my ass whooped by an actual mining engineer but I seriously struggle to believe our technology is that lame,
Also you seem intent on BP *not* paying the bill,exactly what do you want everybody to do? Giving them money with no strings attached?
GPS is pointless, but sonar and underwater tracking is possible. Try making dinner in the dark, even though you know exactly where you're standing in the kitchen.
What is claimed is impossible: sustained faster than wind speed. You could have transient bursts of faster than wind speed using energy that was stored when you were going slower than the wind. What I'm not perfectly sure of is if you could sustain an average (not continuous) speed greater than the wind. But I don't think so.
Or simply imagine that the wind isn't directly behind the vehicle, and isn't necessarily outrunning the wind as you've assumed
I volunteer for this and Verizon fixes the oversubscribed upstream bottleneck that's making my 1.5meg DSL drop to 600k during the day? That sounds like it winner to me. Where do I sign up? Think they'd notice if I ran BS data through their box?
Yeah the latency is a minor issue, particularly for video content where actual bandwidth and jitter matters. Adding up the latency for lots of gets on a single web page might be noticeable. In the bigger scheme of things, having your traffic travel a longer path ends up costing someone more money. Traffic taking longer paths increases the bandwidth use on cross-country fibers, may involved farming out to other backbones for delivery, etc. It's the same notion (or at least used to be) of local calls being cheaper than long distance.
The kid spends too much time in front of a computer, and you want to turn him into a dime-a-dozen programmer? Teach the boy some useful skills. Like how to deal with money and get a job that might pay a little more than McDonalds. At 16 he should have some real world skills and be thinking seriously about college.
Hmm. A bit more homework and it appears that legally can take over and direct an oil spill response. See http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/dpettit/the_coast_guard_is_in_charge_i.html.
However the Coast Guard did not. http://www.hstoday.us/content/view/13385/149/
"Regardless of what happens after the top kill, [Adm. Thad Allen] told HSToday.us that it would not be appropriate for the federal government to exert direct control over the disaster response efforts currently led by BP.
"I think it's legally possible. I don't think it's advisable," Allen declared."
RTFA
I did. Obama's statement "BP is operating at our direction" contradicts Obama's earlier statement that BP was the expert and that the govt stood by to assist but was not going to interfere. The coast guard also has zero legal authority over BP.
I wonder why it wasn't ready earlier
The Coast Guard did not give BP the green-light to do a top kill until yesterday. It was one of the first items in Obama's press conference today.
Since when did the Coast Guard have a vote in what measures BP employed to plug the well?
XP mode is essentially a full XP install running under Virtual PC. When you start an app in XP mode, it uses remote desktop to connect to that virtual machine and run the program as a remote app. It's a clever hack of putting some existing pieces together. Truthfully though its pretty slow and there are better solutions.
Sun's Virtual Box is a great package. Much better than Virtual PC and basically a knockoff of VMware. The only think I don't like (at least on the windows version) is the inability to use some of the more powerful features without having to use the command line. Simple stuff like making a read-only vhd file or using a physical disk. VMWare or Virtual PC handle those options much better. I have a n'lited XP install under Virtual Machine. The stripped down XP under virtualbox is booted to a desktop in 10-seconds.
Their service must not actually be trying to prevent identity theft, but trying to keep you from knowing when it happens.
Close. When they see something they clean it up and then tell the customer they blocked the attempt, so the customer thinks they got their money's worth.
I hate replying to myself, but thought I'd put the whole dispersant thing in perspective. Lets assume they are trying to treat a volume that's 20 miles x 20 miles x 1000 feet deep. That's around 87 trillion gallons or somewhere around 6 parts per billion. Thats a really small number to worry about having any long term environmental impact once its mixed in. Short term exposure to a higher concentration is still an issue for marine life, but its probably less problematic than the oil itself.
What part of readily available and works did you miss? BP still chose to use what was already on-hand somewhere (not a piddly amount off in Britain) of a chemical that has historically been used effectively.
Which US companies do you propose we hire? How about the ones with lots of deep sea drilling an oil clean expertise. Oh that's right, they are already on the job being paid by BP. I still don't understand the misconception that there are experts out there who are not already on this.
The only thing the Navy has that can go to that depth is their deep submersible rescue vehicles. They would be far less useful than the specialty ROVs that are already on site. The use of ROVs as is, must be carefully coordinated so you don't entangle their lines and you don't want a third party running something down there. I can speak with some authority on this as I happen to work with large underwater structures via ROVs and top-side support barges.
At this point, oil booms at sensitive areas with proper collection will only limit the damage. There just isn't enough oil booms or even production capacity in the world to totally contain this.
Right, because the solution to a leaky faucet is to drop a nuke on it and hope you just melt the valve into a plug and don't just blow the end off and have a full blown leak. Keep in mind that it's a leak. The BOP didn't fully shut off the flow. Damaging the well head or fracturing the well casing would cause a far more difficult leak to stop.
Yeah the Russians did it on a few full blown leaks with success, but that doesn't mean it's not a very high risk option with more serious environmental impact than the oil leak..
Are we to believe that a company with profits equal to a middle sized nation's GDP cannot afford to plug this hole? Sure, it may take hauling 500.000 tons of rocks from the coast, and would cost a few billions of $, but BP can very easily afford that.
Because that won't work? Try dumping rock and sand on the open end of a pressure washer hose and see how that works for ya.
Believe you me, the only reason why this crisis is lasting this long, is because BP is doing it piece-meal, so as to not affect the profits almost at all.
BP is proceeding slowly and carefully so they don't make this worse. The leak is small compared to what it could be. They don't want to fuck it up and have a full blown, uncapped well.