BP might pay handsomely if you could find a highly unethical biologist to identify tarballs as a new sort of petroleum-based jellyfish.

Takeovers are about reducing competition and increasing market share so the don't need to compete. One serious flaw in capitalism is that companies don't want to compete because it's difficult and generally not very profitable.

TV stations leased the band, they didn't buy it. It's owned by the public as in public airwaves. The public took it back and they can lease it out again.

Obama got credit for this in the headline but he isn't behaving as if this were his project so the only jackass here is you with your childish, ignorant Chairman Mao comment. You made the world a little dumber today.

I don't support a moratorium because the other off shore drillers are likely to repeat what is clearly starting to look like shoddy work by BP. I think we need this break to rebuild the Minerals Management Service so they can do a better job regulating these drilling operations. It's starting to look like this disaster is another example of how industry can't regulate itself. The theory was that the financial industry and others wouldn't take on ridiculous risks and cut corners to make a little more money but just isn't the case.

We've spent far too long with a government that didn't believe in governing and every regulation they couldn't scrap wasn't enforced by people who were either intentionally incompetent (Brownie'd) or people who were on a revolving door situation with the industry they were tasked with regulating.

We'll be a generation cleaning up this mess and these disasters aren't over.

The liability limit won't be capped if (when) BP is found negligent but all of that is a long way down the road. The point is BP was almost surely going to pay more than $75 million in liability for this. This also wasn't really a matter of law as much as an agreement that BP didn't have to take. BP would have been well within their rights to say no and the US government was well within its rights to tell BP they'd never get another drop of oil out of a US well ever again and sell the US government another drop of fuel. That's completely reasonable as I wouldn't trust BP to drill in the US under the measly threat of a $75 million liability.

My sister's cat is going to feel pretty silly about gnawing through all of her umbilical cords and eating the placentas. Next time I'll be sure to let Mittens know about the stem cells.

The Kindle doesn't do Facebook or IM so it is not going to work well for what people are doing in class with computeresque devices. The iPad types too slow, netbooks have too small of a screen to really read on, and most laptops are too bulky and don't have a great battery life. Fix those issues and you should be set classroom use.

I like it when web developers use them as it makes it convenient to ad-block a lot of ads on a site at once. It's possible that isn't what they had in mind.

It does help you get a job and keep it when times are hard. The unemployment rate for high school graduates is about twice the rate for college graduates in this recession.

'If people want to go out and get a master's degree in history and then cut down trees for a living, that's fine. But I don't think the public should be subsidizing it.'"

People don't generally want to do that. People generally want a decent wage so they can provide for their family, eventually buy a house, have health insurance so they lose everything they've worked for (or lose a family member) because you can't afford medical care, and they want to retire some day. Getting an education was a good way to accomplish that once upon a time but globalization and competing with emerging economies means we'll ultimately need to become accustomed to a lower standard of living.

Apple chose to only sell under one carrier and while the iPhone is clearly a very successful product they risk losing developers to a platform with more customers and a less obnoxious development situation.

With citizens so busy these days they should form a counsel to promote the public interest when public lands or other resources are used. Since those cables cross state lines for the purposes of trade we should make it federal. This idea of yours to make a Counsel of Federal Trade is a grand idea indeed.

Since the FCC spent a long time shirking any of their duties that didn't include punishing the odd dirty word or errant nipple on the public airwaves or sifting through the small mountain of automated emails from nutty parents groups it may be a while before they are up to doing any meaningful work.

I say we send one up there and plug it in and point a webcam at it.

This project sounds like a non-nuclear deterrent for the new junior members of the nuke club.

1. An attack on Russia or China from us wouldn't just look like one missile so as long as we only agree to shoot one or two at a time and Russia and China agree to monitor for that then they could be convinced that we're just trying to prevent nuclear war and they can hold up the threat of retaliation to keep this whole MAD thing going.

2. Maintaining bomber bases and aging bombers throughout the world and aircraft carriers near the Arabian peninsula and the north pacific probably costs a whole lot more money than dusting off a couple of old minuteman sites and refitting them.

3. Right now this is probably for North Korea and Iran. It also has the advantage of being difficult to retaliate against assuming we replace easy to attack bomber bases with a few very fast missiles.