With Tesla’s recent announcement of their refreshed “Roadster 2.5,” I dove into my archives to find the post I made about the sloppy seam work the early models suffered from.
So how does the new Roadster compare? Using the photo above as evidence, I’d say much better. The rear seams are a bit questionable, but overall, the panels look much tighter and cleaner.
Looking good, Tesla!
An excellent piece that outlines precisely what happens when you let an App Store market operate freely with no curation whatsoever.
Spoiler alert: spam, spam, copyright infringement, more spam and lots of ringtones.
“This week the engineers at Google remotely activated the so-called Android “kill switch,” a technology which allows the company to remotely remove applications installed on users’ phones.”
What’s this? An “open” app store that can remotely wipe apps from your phone? Yet more evidence that an open marketplace isn’t much different than Apple’s App Store, besides lacking a middleman to vet the quality of submitted applications.
I know it’s the cool thing to hate on Apple these days, but the fact is since the iPhone launched, not much has changed — except that people can actually develop apps for it now! Remember 2007? If you wanted to develop a Windows Mobile app, it was very difficult, if not impossible. Apple made it easy to develop mobile applications for its devices and eventually changed the entire mobile landscape.
But will these haters berate Amazon for being closed by only allowing its Kindle users to buy books from Amazon? Of course they won’t; the Kindle is an amazing device and Amazon has a massive collection of books for it.
The launch of the iPhone 4 shouldn’t suddenly be the reason why people hate Apple. A better screen and another camera hasn’t changed the fact that the App Store has been a walled garden (walled gardens are pretty), and will continue to be.
jstn:
NOAA map showing 3,858 oil platforms along the gulf coast as of October, 2006. Katrina and other hurricanes sank or otherwise disabled over 100 of them the year before.
I was surprised to see how many there were, but I guess I shouldn’t have been. Prior to this calamity my two main sources of knowledge regarding oil production were There Will Be Blood and certain scenes from Armageddon. I’ve been trying to acquaint myself with some actual data.
We rank third in oil production in the world and that a third of our production happens off shore. We account for about a quarter of world consumption and a tenth of production (behind Saudi Arabia and Russia). Almost half our supply is used to make gasoline. BP is the fourth biggest company in the world but the third biggest oil company after Shell and Exxon.
I was horrified to read about another spill that happened earlier this month in Nigeria that seems to be amongst the worst ever and has yet to receive much media attention at all. That’s apparently par for the course there.
The Exxon Valdez is 31st in the world ranking of all time oil spills, and since it happened it’s become the “Library of Congress” to which all other spills are inevitably compared. This is quite useful because frankly there’s too many units available for talking about oil and it seems like every news source uses a different one. Wikipedia has tonnage but the American media generally prefers gallons, and the oil industry itself uses barrels. It’s difficult to compare and contrast the horror without converting to a common base. One “Exxon Valdez” is reasonable shorthand for “enough oil to fuck shit up”.
The exact quantities are always fuzzy, of course. The NY Times reports a range of anywhere from 2.25 Exxon Valdezes all the way up to 9 for the Gulf so far, and that’s under the glare of the American public. The one in Nigeria was supposedly 2.5, but who knows. The US produces 19.5 EVs every day.
Not that it’s any comfort, but we still haven’t reached the proportions of the Gulf War spill, which was an astounding 43 EVs. If the one in our own gulf keeps going through August at the most pessimistic rate we could easily see another 20, totaling three times as much as now.
CNN has a good map and USA Today has a good article illustrating the current offshore leasing situation by state. It’s easy to imagine oil executives seeing the planet’s surface as a real life Starcraft map. If we’re lucky, someone will tell them about the hundred billion dollars for every human being on Earth lying in the minerals of the asteroid belt.
Is it asking too much for underwater aliens à la The Abyss to reveal themselves to humanity and show us the error of our ways?
I’d like to preface this data by saying I’m a big Lance Armstrong fan. He’s done a lot for cycling awareness. I’d almost say he’s directly responsible for fewer cyclists being threatened by drivers on the road. That’s a good thing.
Still, on paper, this doesn’t exactly bode well:
1999, GC
1. Lance Armstrong
2. Alex Zülle - admitted doper; suspended
3. Fernando Escartín - ?
2000, GC
1. Lance Armstrong
2. Jan Ullrich - alleged doper; suspended / retired
3. Joseba Beloki - alleged doper; later cleared?
2001, GC
1. Lance Armstrong
2. Jan Ullrich - alleged doper; suspended / retired
3. Joseba Beloki - alleged doper; later cleared?
2002, GC
1. Lance Armstrong
2. Joseba Beloki - alleged doper; later cleared?
3. Raimondas Rumšas - alleged doper; suspended
2003, GC
1. Lance Armstrong
2. Jan Ullrich - alleged doper; suspended / retired
3. Alexander Vinokourov - alleged doper; suspended
2004, GC
1. Lance Armstrong
2. Andreas Klöden - alleged doper
3. Ivan Basso - alleged doper; suspended
2005, GC
1. Lance Armstrong
2. Ivan Basso - alleged doper; suspended
3. Jan Ullrich - alleged doper; suspended / retired
Self-regulation is a facade.
The benchmark for sheer ridiculousness continues to rise. BP, Halliburton, and apparently everyone else involved in the oil disaster have absolutely no idea how to stop the leak.
They’ve actually resorted to using a “suggestion box,” which has thus far received thousands of ideas — 700 of them being fast tracked. Water-oil separating centrifuges are also being entertained, though they’ll only be used if someone else builds them.
As I was saying, pure self-regulation does not work. For-profit companies must inherently choose the options that maximize their bottom line, which is why there was no redundant safety mechanism in the “blowout preventer.” Additional backups rise operational costs, and businesses have an obligation to select the cheapest long-run option, always.
This extra overhead is why big companies hate government regulations and lobby like crazy to stop them. It hurts revenues. It has nothing to do with being morally against more government “control,” which is the messaging that gets passed to the general public.
Regardless, if the oil industry were more regulated, a drill tower would have more than a single blowout preventer containing 260 documented flaws.
Ironically, the costs attributed to the inevitable cleanup efforts in Louisiana will far exceed what a few extra backup mechanisms would have.
From the outset, there’s been a sense that Hayward wasn’t quite prepared for this and didn’t quite grasp what is at stake. The Wall Street Journal reported that Hayward “admitted that the oil giant had not the technology available to stop the leak. He also said in hindsight, it was ‘probably true’ that BP should have done more to prepare for such an emergency.”
As the spill worsened, Hayward fretted that he and BP were its victims. “What they hell have we done to deserve this?” he reportedly told fellow executives. Of course, Hayward isn’t the victim here. The sea life, the sea itself, the employees who died, the fishermen who are losing their livelihoods, the tourism industry, responsible drillers—they’re the victims. Hayward should have been asking himself: What they hell did they do to deserve this? And what am I going to do fix it?
The private grumbling has been matched by public bumbling. Hayward has used unfortunate metaphors. “We will only win this if we can win the hearts and minds of the local community,” he said, apparently unaware that “hearts and minds” is a phrase forever identified with the debacle of the Vietnam War. And in a moment of exquisitely bad taste, Hayward said: “Apollo 13 did not stop the space program. The Air France airplane that fell out of the sky off of Brazil did not stop the aviation industry.” Among the many crucial differences between Apollo 13 and this oil spill: Apollo 13 turned out to be a feel-good triumph of engineering, since the astronauts came home alive. The BP spill is simply an epic fail.
Gross, on how BP CEO Tony Hayward is making the Gulf oil-spill disaster even worse (via newsweek)Even though the oil industry is incredibly competitive and lucrative, it’s amazing that the combined knowledge of all parties responsible for the oil spill in Louisiana has amounted to a big metal cap to try to plug the leak.
After the initial failed attempt, which yielded the spontaneous creation of methane ice around the pipeline, it was obvious the entire rescue effort was being spearheaded by business executives and not scientists.
Now, the president, ostensibly sick of the bickering and band-aid approaches, has assembled a team of actual scientists to go Cold War-style on this oil spill.
As part of these efforts, I hope the team manages to develop a failsafe way to prevent spills like this from happening in the future. Our dependence on oil won’t be changing anytime soon, so any solution that makes drilling cleaner and safer is great.
