...and, once you make that change, you realize how much easier user and permissions management is on Postgres as compared with MySQL, and wish that you'd started using it 5 years ago.
Do you really think that Titanic passengers died because they chose not to retreat to lifeboats? You might want to look into finding some of those citations for your theory, as it has some merit but breaks down in the details.
The rivet story is not about lifeboats. There were not enough lifeboats and nothing in the ship's design or construction would have changed that, barring a design that called for more lifeboats (but that wouldn't have fit in with common practice of the time). The rivet story is about keeping some part of the ship above water long enough for help to arrive before the people who were deprived of a lifeboat died of hypothermia, fatigue, and/or drowning.
So you're saying that the bigger planets are going to start shooting at us and trying to get us to go home with them when we send manned missions to the Earthlike planet?
No no, you forgot about the fact that when it crash landed in 1885, it lost the ability to fly. Doc's letter to Marty that gets delivered at the end of the second movie says "Unfortunately, the DeLorean will never fly again."
I have a colocated Linux server and run a couple of monitoring daemons to watch my transfer usage, but in reality my bandwidth monitoring system basically comes down to a combination of the rhythm method and prayer.
But the DeLorean runs on regular unleaded gasoline, which isn't available in 1885! I think that fuel cells may be viable, or any other source that gives off a controllable amount of waste heat that can be used for creature comforts. But even a good hybrid car might be okay, because while you lose the efficiency gain in the wintertime by running gasoline all the time, I'd rather that the world have 3 months of decreased gas consumption than 0.
People like predictability. The amount of water you use is fairly constant over time. Same with electricity, fluctuating with the seasons. Also, both of those are fairly mandatory for continued life, so a little bit of uncertainty will not convince a consumer to forgo either one. Bandwidth and cell phone minutes are different - you can live without them and your usage is harder to predict and more likely to fluctuate on a monthly basis, so you will be less willing to just let them bill you for your usage and pay the bill each month.
The good thing is that smart lawyer tricks trump the stupid kind. If you can show damages due to the false advertising, go ahead and sue. If you can only show a few dollars of damages, get a class action going. Our legal system may permit a certain level of litigiousness, but it's also the necessary check and balance to our capitalist economy.
I've camped out in sub-zero temperatures without a tent. I've also spent the night in a car in severe cold. There is more to it than shelter from the wind, although I will give you that that's a large part of it. All the same, I've driven 6 hours in the winter without a working heater, and wouldn't choose to do it again.
Ever have your water bottle freeze solid inside the cab of your vehicle while you were driving it? The point about electric and hybrid cars needing to solve this problem in order to be viable year-round replacements for petroleum-fueled vehicles stands. Survivability when stranded is just the life-or-death question - nobody is going to drive electric cars if it means freezing their asses off all winter.
Or do you mean to suggest that people in colder climates give up their heated vehicles and bundle up for an arctic expedition every time they drive to work or to the store? We're not really very interested in doing that.:)
If you read the Wikipedia article on oil shale, you'll find that the name itself is at fault. Oil shale isn't shale and doesn't contain oil - it's shale-like and contains substances that can be turned into oil, apparently.
The Bakken formation isn't a big pool of oil, of course, and that's why extraction isn't as cheap as from some other formations. It's true that there is a lot of shale down there. But horizontal drilling is just the most efficient way to get the oil out of the Bakken formation.
And Slashdotters should be really interested about horizontal drilling - it's a really nerd-friendly technology. Normally you drill straight down by means of a drill bit on the end of a long chain of connected pipe, with drilling "mud" flowing down the pipe and up the hole outside the pipe to clear out the rock you're drilling and so forth.
In horizontal drilling, you do that for a few thousand feet and then you make a turn (or two - it's been fairly common to run two one-mile stretches from a single surface hole) that gradually goes from vertical to horizontal, I think with a curve radius of a couple thousand feet but I could be very wrong about that.
How they steer the drill bit underground is something I'm very curious about but can't find much information on through the internet. Maybe someone else can pipe up with more - I know we have at least one petroleum engineer posting around here somewhere.:)
But horizontal drilling is mostly about getting one vertical hole to pull oil from many acres of underground rock. Oil shale is mined as a rock and then transported elsewhere on the surface for processing into petroleum products. And oil shale is apparently most often strip-mined, whereas the Bakken formation as it lies under North Dakota is around 10,000 feet under the surface. Bakken oil comes shooting out of the ground just like in the movies.
How does your electric car behave in the winter? Most importantly, how does it maintain temperatures inside the vehicle? What happens if you get stuck in a snowbank and have no chance of rescue for, say, 6 hours? Will it keep you alive?
My single biggest concern even with hybrid cars is just that: Even assuming that cold temperatures don't have any adverse effect on their reliability, the passenger compartment is probably not survivable in the winter without running the gas engine all the time anyhow, and if you get stuck somewhere the survivability is almost certainly much worse.
The Bakken formation is not an oil shale formation. It is an oil formation. You drill a hole, line it, and perforate it in the right spots, and the oil shoots out of the ground, in one case in western North Dakota last fall at a rate of over 7,000 barrels per day but more typically 300.
Actually, you're wrong - but not far off the mark. This will keep US gas prices closer to their current levels for a longer period of time. Drilling in ND is only economically feasible when oil is around $70/bbl, and when the futures started going toward that point is when drilling activity picked up substantially. If prices drop below $70 again, drilling will stop. Basically, this puts an angle in the supply-demand curve, which of course does have an effect on prices, but will never drive them below that $70 mark. It may just keep us closer to that mark, though. (Oil is predicted to average $101/bbl in the US over the course of 2008 - without the drilling activity in ND, OPEC could easily decide to make that number $200 or $500.)
Don't forget the second reason for careful regulation and spacing: Drilling in the right places (which you, as a petroleum engineer, probably get to propose to the state industrial commission) reduces the amount of oil that becomes unrecoverable as a result of drilling in the wrong place. IANAPE so I of course can't explain it very well, but I do know that this is a factor behind such regulations.
In most of western North Dakota, I think that the spacing is 2 sections (square miles). And I think 3-5 surface acres might be a bit high after they frac and move on. But even so, let's go with 4 acres. That's 1 acre in 320 taken up by wellheads. Trust me, we North Dakotans don't mind them all that much. We just want those wells to finally tap oil we hold a share of the royalties to, especially those of us who missed out in the 50's or the 70's booms.:)
And, of course, when an oil well stops producing, it is far easier to return the surface to pristine condition than it is for a coal mine. Incidentally, North Dakota also has large coal mines, all of which are strip-mined, and the environmental recovery policy of those actually works well - the surface actually is returned to as good or better conditions than the mining companies started with.
Flint's roads, at least the one time I was ever foolish enough to be in Flint 8 years ago, made the rest of Michigan's roads seem like a pleasure cruise. I wonder how the cobblestones that the worn-out asphalt layer has exposed will fare against iron treads.
The day that Slashdotters come up with something better than Wired magazine does, I'll tune in to watch the original showing of the last episode of TNG.
Slashdot Mirror
...and, once you make that change, you realize how much easier user and permissions management is on Postgres as compared with MySQL, and wish that you'd started using it 5 years ago.
Do you really think that Titanic passengers died because they chose not to retreat to lifeboats? You might want to look into finding some of those citations for your theory, as it has some merit but breaks down in the details.
The rivet story is not about lifeboats. There were not enough lifeboats and nothing in the ship's design or construction would have changed that, barring a design that called for more lifeboats (but that wouldn't have fit in with common practice of the time). The rivet story is about keeping some part of the ship above water long enough for help to arrive before the people who were deprived of a lifeboat died of hypothermia, fatigue, and/or drowning.
Can't we all just agree that the waltz is an inappropriate dance for either science or religion to be performing?
Ugly chicks here in the US can be pretty aggressive.
So you're saying that the bigger planets are going to start shooting at us and trying to get us to go home with them when we send manned missions to the Earthlike planet?
No no, you forgot about the fact that when it crash landed in 1885, it lost the ability to fly. Doc's letter to Marty that gets delivered at the end of the second movie says "Unfortunately, the DeLorean will never fly again."
I have a colocated Linux server and run a couple of monitoring daemons to watch my transfer usage, but in reality my bandwidth monitoring system basically comes down to a combination of the rhythm method and prayer.
But the DeLorean runs on regular unleaded gasoline, which isn't available in 1885! I think that fuel cells may be viable, or any other source that gives off a controllable amount of waste heat that can be used for creature comforts. But even a good hybrid car might be okay, because while you lose the efficiency gain in the wintertime by running gasoline all the time, I'd rather that the world have 3 months of decreased gas consumption than 0.
People like predictability. The amount of water you use is fairly constant over time. Same with electricity, fluctuating with the seasons. Also, both of those are fairly mandatory for continued life, so a little bit of uncertainty will not convince a consumer to forgo either one. Bandwidth and cell phone minutes are different - you can live without them and your usage is harder to predict and more likely to fluctuate on a monthly basis, so you will be less willing to just let them bill you for your usage and pay the bill each month.
The good thing is that smart lawyer tricks trump the stupid kind. If you can show damages due to the false advertising, go ahead and sue. If you can only show a few dollars of damages, get a class action going. Our legal system may permit a certain level of litigiousness, but it's also the necessary check and balance to our capitalist economy.
I've camped out in sub-zero temperatures without a tent. I've also spent the night in a car in severe cold. There is more to it than shelter from the wind, although I will give you that that's a large part of it. All the same, I've driven 6 hours in the winter without a working heater, and wouldn't choose to do it again.
:)
Ever have your water bottle freeze solid inside the cab of your vehicle while you were driving it? The point about electric and hybrid cars needing to solve this problem in order to be viable year-round replacements for petroleum-fueled vehicles stands. Survivability when stranded is just the life-or-death question - nobody is going to drive electric cars if it means freezing their asses off all winter.
Or do you mean to suggest that people in colder climates give up their heated vehicles and bundle up for an arctic expedition every time they drive to work or to the store? We're not really very interested in doing that.
The article is dumb. :) Or at least misleading.
:)
If you read the Wikipedia article on oil shale, you'll find that the name itself is at fault. Oil shale isn't shale and doesn't contain oil - it's shale-like and contains substances that can be turned into oil, apparently.
The Bakken formation isn't a big pool of oil, of course, and that's why extraction isn't as cheap as from some other formations. It's true that there is a lot of shale down there. But horizontal drilling is just the most efficient way to get the oil out of the Bakken formation.
And Slashdotters should be really interested about horizontal drilling - it's a really nerd-friendly technology. Normally you drill straight down by means of a drill bit on the end of a long chain of connected pipe, with drilling "mud" flowing down the pipe and up the hole outside the pipe to clear out the rock you're drilling and so forth.
In horizontal drilling, you do that for a few thousand feet and then you make a turn (or two - it's been fairly common to run two one-mile stretches from a single surface hole) that gradually goes from vertical to horizontal, I think with a curve radius of a couple thousand feet but I could be very wrong about that.
How they steer the drill bit underground is something I'm very curious about but can't find much information on through the internet. Maybe someone else can pipe up with more - I know we have at least one petroleum engineer posting around here somewhere.
But horizontal drilling is mostly about getting one vertical hole to pull oil from many acres of underground rock. Oil shale is mined as a rock and then transported elsewhere on the surface for processing into petroleum products. And oil shale is apparently most often strip-mined, whereas the Bakken formation as it lies under North Dakota is around 10,000 feet under the surface. Bakken oil comes shooting out of the ground just like in the movies.
How does your electric car behave in the winter? Most importantly, how does it maintain temperatures inside the vehicle? What happens if you get stuck in a snowbank and have no chance of rescue for, say, 6 hours? Will it keep you alive?
My single biggest concern even with hybrid cars is just that: Even assuming that cold temperatures don't have any adverse effect on their reliability, the passenger compartment is probably not survivable in the winter without running the gas engine all the time anyhow, and if you get stuck somewhere the survivability is almost certainly much worse.
The Bakken formation is not an oil shale formation. It is an oil formation. You drill a hole, line it, and perforate it in the right spots, and the oil shoots out of the ground, in one case in western North Dakota last fall at a rate of over 7,000 barrels per day but more typically 300.
Actually, you're wrong - but not far off the mark. This will keep US gas prices closer to their current levels for a longer period of time. Drilling in ND is only economically feasible when oil is around $70/bbl, and when the futures started going toward that point is when drilling activity picked up substantially. If prices drop below $70 again, drilling will stop. Basically, this puts an angle in the supply-demand curve, which of course does have an effect on prices, but will never drive them below that $70 mark. It may just keep us closer to that mark, though. (Oil is predicted to average $101/bbl in the US over the course of 2008 - without the drilling activity in ND, OPEC could easily decide to make that number $200 or $500.)
You're thinking of oil shale, which is different from regular shale as present in the Bakken formation under western North Dakota and eastern Montana.
Don't forget the second reason for careful regulation and spacing: Drilling in the right places (which you, as a petroleum engineer, probably get to propose to the state industrial commission) reduces the amount of oil that becomes unrecoverable as a result of drilling in the wrong place. IANAPE so I of course can't explain it very well, but I do know that this is a factor behind such regulations.
In most of western North Dakota, I think that the spacing is 2 sections (square miles). And I think 3-5 surface acres might be a bit high after they frac and move on. But even so, let's go with 4 acres. That's 1 acre in 320 taken up by wellheads. Trust me, we North Dakotans don't mind them all that much. We just want those wells to finally tap oil we hold a share of the royalties to, especially those of us who missed out in the 50's or the 70's booms. :)
And, of course, when an oil well stops producing, it is far easier to return the surface to pristine condition than it is for a coal mine. Incidentally, North Dakota also has large coal mines, all of which are strip-mined, and the environmental recovery policy of those actually works well - the surface actually is returned to as good or better conditions than the mining companies started with.
They understand it fine. That's why they have to "expand" the tax, to include sales of intangibles.
I have no idea who he is. I'm signing the petition anyhow because I believe in calling bluffs.
Hey now! I wouldn't sell my children to cannibals for less than a grand!
.
and
are deprecated.
I wouldn't really cal it "new."
Flint's roads, at least the one time I was ever foolish enough to be in Flint 8 years ago, made the rest of Michigan's roads seem like a pleasure cruise. I wonder how the cobblestones that the worn-out asphalt layer has exposed will fare against iron treads.
The day that Slashdotters come up with something better than Wired magazine does, I'll tune in to watch the original showing of the last episode of TNG.