Yeah... that's what my friends said too. But actually i did do it for amusement. Remote control robots using wrenches and saws a mile down has certain universal nerd appeal. There was an IRC channel #TheOilDrum (iirc) on freenode where people hung out and followed the video feeds, the Adm. Thad Allen press briefings (which were excellent, btw) etc. The video feeds were publicly available due to a request by some Congressperson or Senator. It was exciting stuff like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dwe0myy4zU

(as an editorial point, it was pretty sad how far behind and/or misinformed people like CNN were. The stuff they were reporting was prob... 12 - 36 hours behind even though they had access to the same streams)

nicely said.

It wasn't the same thing, but there are some important similarities. In both cases the responsible parties misrepresented their real risk exposure and they were then caught with their pants down when the market turned against them. In the case of mortgage brokers there was pretty clearly outright fraud; people lying on their applications at the brokers suggestion, etc. Presumably better "corporate governance" should have prevented that, but it didn't.

As far as the ratings agencies go... yeah... why they're still in business and have suffered no consequences (that i'm aware of) after they so massively failed in their one and only task is a mystery. Perhaps their SarBox violation is lying in claiming in their SEC filings that they actually offer a bond rating service when in fact they're a massive marketing company for bond issuers. Com to thing of it maybe they can be prosecuted under RICO statutes. Or perhaps for mail and wire fraud for disseminating their ratings across state lines. That's hyperbole of course, but man, they screwed up bad.

That would be different (and i believe such tests already happen a good deal in actual research).

  In this art project they're pitting blood cell against blood cell, not blood cell against things that are actually harmful to humans, so success here doesn't prove anything. Also, given that auto-immune disorders are probably currently a bigger health problem for people than infectious disease, figuring out how to moderate white-cell action is arguably more important than finding the most bad ass killer white blood cell.

Had also meant to include this link, but couldn't find it at the time: http://www.louisianaseafoodnews.com/2011/02/11/gulf-shrimp-safe-enough-for-1575-per-day-diet/

(and no, i'm not in the seafood industry or even within 1000 miles of the Gulf. Just tired of the un-scientific and anti-scientific scare mongering about the impact of the spill. Yes, it did some damage, and it sucks for the birds, dolphins and turtles that got killed by the oil, but there's just no evidence of wide spread, ecosystem changing disaster here)

This article doesn't pass the smell test for a few reasons.

a) Everything i've heard so far about the dissolved methane has been pretty positive. e.g. http://www.upstreamonline.com/incoming/article240856.ece
The current article doesn't make anything but a FUD statement that the methane is "a big deal".

b) Having watched live video feeds (for hundreds of hours (Go CRAW! )) from the well area during the capping process two things don't jive: First of all the area immediately around the well, say within 200m or so didn't have anything living on it. It was just mud. Occasionally (maybe once a day at most ) a fish , squid or shark would swim by, but that's it. No crabs, sea cucumbers, corals or anything else were on the bottom. This is probably because it was all at 5000 ft depth where there's no light and not a whole heck of a lot going on. Second, even around the well there was no actual oil visible.

c) I'm glad they took samples over "2600 square miles". What percentage of the area was impacted ? where ? over such a huge area even if all the oil had sunk straight to the bottom it would be a vanishingly small amount. certainly not enough to "choke off" anything. Also, as noted in point "b" the corals and sea stars etc would have to be some distance away from the well anyway because coral needs sunlight... which doesn't exist 1 mile down.

d) there's no mention of just how many natural oil and gas seeps there are in the GOM. (answer: thousands). Let's wait and see if those samples really show that the oil is from the mc 252 well.

i fully believe that some of the oil ended up on the bottom and that it's caused damage, but on the balance whatever truth there may be in this article is being spun in a misleading and scare-mongering way. The GOM is open for shrimping and the shrimp is testing out fine.

Ok. If you're proposing something that will be as good as Sarbanes-Oxley... you probably need to find a better idea. Sarbox was a knee jerk response to Enron and has done nothing but drive up costs.

Good thing that those tight accountability rules prevented the massive credit / derivatives bubble.

Indeed. Your blood cells are just hanging out patrolling your body and keeping you safe from bad stuff. These people would have you sacrifice them in an arena for no purpose other than entertainment. Even the "winner" blood cells are going to die in the end. I know they're not people, but it still seems like a "mean" thing to do.

(And yes, i know blood cells die all the time etc. but if i were a blood cell, i wouldn't want to go out like this)

You guys are so right. I've heard him a few times on the radio on some NPR show (the web says it's All Things Considered) dispensing supposed ethical advice, but i've been disappointed every time. I expected him to contextualize the question: maybe describe how the law and/or different philosophical, religious , cultural traditions look at the issue and then perhaps give his personal pronouncement. Instead he didn't even necessarily seem to get the root of the questions and dispatched them with like 2 or 3 sentences and a joke. Basically the same thing as what his column seems to do but even shorter because it's on the radio. It was all really disappointing and just didn't deliver. Maybe i'd think differently if I found him funny, but making fun of people who are asking earnest questions doesn't work for me.

On the point of the ethicists job being to clarify ideas, i definitely agree, HOWEVER, i have little patience for "experts" who just won't offer an opinion because "it's not their decision to make", etc. That's a cop out. They should lay out the options AND then if they have an opinion they should give it.

Your statement doesn't really address the ethics of the situation, but rather whether it makes good business sense. Your argument against it is that the apparent savings in costs won't materialize because the quality of the product will be worse which will lead to decreased sales, injury to the brand, higher replacement cost etc.

But that dodges the question. Assuming you could get the equivalent productivity (from your business' point of view) for lower cost by offshoring, is it ethical to do so ? Or to flip it around, how much of a premium would you be willing to pay to keep your operations on-shore. 1% ? 5% ? 10%? 100%? That's the real question.

(and my answer is " idon't know". personally i'd be willing to give maybe 20% - 25% of profit to keep things on-shore... 50% would be a lot harder. )

What i don't understand is why the network providers keep pushing mobile video and tethering.

T-mobile is pushing their video chat... Sprint is saying you can upload live video directly to the web etc.

The networks already can't handle the level of data usage they currently get, yet they're pushing these very high bandwidth services. Don't get me wrong, i like that my t-mo G2 with stock firmware can do wifi and USB tethering. But i would also like it if my "4G" phone on the "4G" network got more than 400kbps download rates (in one of their 4G launch cities). If there's any level of adoption of this stuff it'll bring their networks to a halt and not due to any top 5% users.

yeah... haven't whipped out firebug to see what's causing it (mostly because i'm running Chrome right now) but something is definitely taking most of the CPU in this one tab according to Chrome's task manager. I'm guessing/hoping that that's a bug rather than an inherent feature of the new design because as a permanent feature that would be quite lame.

Display on my older Atom netbook though is actually faster than the previous version. (in Google Chrome anyway, haven't tested it in anything else yet.)

Have you ever tried to contact google about anything ever? It's near impossible whether as a user or a webmaster. You can't even send them an email or report a bug. If you buy advertising from them the experience is a little better, but not all that much (based on the experience a previous company had with them. Our monthly spend w/ them was in the mid four figures iirc). That's not huge, but it meant that we'd occasionally get our emails acknowledge even if they never answered why our site would occasionally drop entirely from their index for certain terms and then return to the first results page a few weeks later when there was absolutely no change to the page or our server set-up or anything else and there was no indication of anything different on the Webmaster Tools pages). On two occasions we dropped out of the results entirely for our own site name even though people linking to us were still there. A few weeks later we were back. No explanation or indication of what, if anything had happened.

Basically google does whatever it does and they don't want to hear from you because they know better. Sometimes it does it well (e.g. spam filtering), sometimes it doesn't (e.g. indexing any type of DHTML, allowing for flexibility in search results, dealing with non-RESTful urls etc). Your choice of interaction with google is primarily to use what they offer (which is sometimes excellent) or not to. Same as with other large companies like Facebook and even Comcast, AT&T, T-mobile etc.

The ones that you give money to seem to be a bit more responsive in that they at least will give you someone to talk to but that's about the only difference.

A better question even is why dual boot at all (as a user)? Nowadays what I care most about is the documents and tabs I have open.

I could probably remedy this with some utilities for session saving/restoration... but dual booting is a clunky solution for a user and it's especially unnecessary w/ the rise of virtulisation over the past few years. Want a different OS for some tasks or "just because"? Get another gig of ram and run a VM.

Getting a new/different OS to run on some hardware is cool, but multi-boot for a general purpose box? Forget it.

Heh. I searched for "bruce perens" in the comments just to see if anyone else picked up on this. My first reaction was also "huh ?" especially since the summary doesn't capitalize Open Source and just refers to it as a concept. (note this is nothing against Mr. Perens, who is certainly a beg cheese in Free/free software, just against whoever wrote the summary).