Seeing a thread with this many good puns in it is pretty rare.

True enough I'll give you that one. It's pretty rare that news is posted here. I hit a link on the front page this morning that linked to an article from June 2009, so if that's any indication...

So wait, you mean its impossible to post an article and then have people post continuing updates in the thread? The mind reels.

Chances are, he's an American. Enough answer for you?

I never said they needed all that custom built hardware at every well. That would be insanity. They should have had one or two sets of this hardware on standby in the event that something like this happens.

Yea OK, considering BP is still pulling in MILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN PROFIT. They can certainly afford to put a few million bucks towards NOT destroying the ecosystem, without raising oil prices by a penny.

If the plan was to "immediately" seal the well, then they should have immediately sealed the well, instead of letting it pour millions of gallons of oil into the ocean. God knows they had the money to do it, they just chose not to.

Corporate greed at its finest.

Bottom line: If proper safety procedures were in place and followed, none of this would have ever happened. BP isn't exactly in the poor house, they could easily afford to enforce these procedures, they chose not to. Of course its not BP whose really going to suffer from this, its the ecosystem they destroyed.

I don't think its too much to ask that they had all of this hardware ready to go in the event of a spill is it?

In my view, this entire situation is a huge failure on BP's part. The well being open for more than 1-2 days after the rig went down is completely unacceptable, and anyone settling for less is, well, insane as far as I'm concerned.

Look, if you are going to do drilling 5000 feet down in the ocean, you damn well better be ready with all the equipment you need to seal that well should it decide to pump oil into the ocean.

Actually its more like "we wanted to try and save as much oil as possible so we tried a bunch of bullshit solutions that didn't work and destroyed an ecosystem"

This entire situation boils down to one simple thing: Greed.

What could possibly go wrong?

Extensions that don't get updated often are massive security holes waiting to happen. If the dev has stopped updating an extension, you should stop using it. Why would you continue to use software that can put your entire system at risk?

From my experience, if autoupdate kills an addon it generally wasn't a useful one anyway. The core addons that are needed to run a FF install (Adblock, NS, etc) are updated regularly. Everything else is just bells and whistles really. I'm not willing to risk my computers security for bells and whistles.

Sounds about right, the US uses Oil for everything else, midaswell use it for this too!

Agreed. I really think that the folks over at Scroogle are trying to paint Google in a bad light on this when its their own software that is inadequate. If you are doing scraping and are going to throw a hissy fit whenever the page you scrape changes you might want to try something other than scraping...

A good days worth of work would fix this for Scroogle. I give them a day only because its clear they don't know what they are doing :)

What a horrible summary. Google didn't block anything, they just changed the page that Scroogle scrapes off of. Scroogle claims that they need a "simple" interface to scrape off of. Sounds to me like they are too lazy to adjust their service.

Like I said, if you want to run out of date, potentially buggy software, that's on you. For the general user it makes a lot more sense to have auto updates enabled by default.

You are a power user, you can't expect software designers to design their apps to your ridiculous (and frankly IMHO stupid) expectations. For every one of you there are 30 Joe Average's using the browser. Joe Average needs those updates on.

So wait let me get this straight. You don't use the browser because it lacks a feature, and you come to /. to complain about it. Someone tells you how to get around it, and you say "I don't use it often enough to bother googling" ...? Do you see whats wrong with this picture here?

Auto updates should be on by default. If you want to run buggy out of date software then you can disable the updates on your own.