LJ/Kazakhstan: dirty deals edition

Actually, it looks like I've misunderstood the LJ/Kazakhstan timeline. It's more like this:

- Oct. 2008: Kazakhstan blocks livejournal
- 8. Nov 2010: Livejournal suspends the account of rakhataliev, a critic of the Kazakh president and ex-husband of his daughter
- 15. Nov 2010: Kazakhstan unblocks Livejournal

Which puts things in a very different light. It's pretty hard to look at that timeline without suspecting some kind of tit-for-tat between LJ and the Kazakh authorities.

(no subject)

There's a commission in the US, investigating the BP oil spill. Last week, the chief counsel said:

To date, we have not found a single instance where human beings made a conscious decision to favor dollars over safety,

I find this utterly bizarre. However angelic BP might be (?), surely it's impossible to run an engineering project on this scale without trade-offs between cost and safety? Won't there always be another layer of expensive and marginally-useful checks that you could add?