Dudes! Stop arguing about how y'all don't like all the nice 'innovations' we're making to the desktop with the new Gnome Interface/Unity, or the Linux Desktop Quest gets it! I'm not fooling around!

We've exported most of the industry to foreign governments where only state-owned corporations are allowed to drill for oil but "the price is determined by the free market?"

After having a front-row seat to the slow bleeding inflicted upon the industry over the past two and a half decades, I was curious about how the people the rest of y'all handed the power to felt about y'all. This morning I found out:

Putin: US is a 'Parasite'.

Have a day, guys.

It's not the Senate, House, and Courts.

It's the Congress, the Executive, and the Courts, or more precisely the Judiciary.

Congress is split between the House and the Senate.

For Civics Teachers, Slashdot's posters make very good perl hackers.

And an independent well operator in Oklahoma is benefitting from the US occupying Iraq, how?

All the US military presence abroad does is save y'all from the consequences of the nickel-and-diming-to-death that's been done to domestic oil and gas over the past twenty years.

Ah, so Joe Stripper Well Operator in Oklahoma should be paying more in royalties (or closing down his well, the more likely course of action) because even though the lower royalties mean it stays open and the government _gets_ more money than if it closed, we're going to call that "subsidies" and say he's not paying his fair share of the military costs involved with us buying the oil from Iraq instead of Oklahoma...

It's not that noone's ever made machines like this; many have, and the "industry leader" is a company called Prosep from Canada.

Keep in mind that using these machines, as long as they're not absolutely perfect, violates the Clean Water Act, which mandates perfection so strongly that 95% solutions are penalized. The bureaucracy sat around for a couple months basically trying to decide whether to ignore the fact that Costner's machines, while good, violate their rules, more or less, which is why these machines are (as another poster pointed out) used much more outside the US than within it.

I suspect the "dense population on the Nile" four thousand years ago was a very very small fraction of the people who live there today, or in New York today.

You may be the future, but Midtown Manhattan isn't. Way too much heating oil used in the winter, too much natural gas (guess where that comes from? drilling, baby, drilling!), too much transport of food from outside... it's a big energy sinkhole.

People like you have been telling damn lies like that for the past month. "Let's try our method, it only has a 20% chance of making the spill a hundred times worse..." You apply the same logic that caused the blowout in the first place, that you'll _always_ be lucky, and say that anyone who disagrees with you is just selfish.

No, but it has been decaptialized a lot over the past twenty five years; it's gone from producing 60% of US needs to producing 35%, all the while everyone saying we don't need to drill here. The majors have changed from companies that produce oil to companies that resell oil produced elsewhere by the state-owned companies of the Middle East, and produce in the United States only as a sideline.

Meanwhile... they're getting their outside experts from the field that has failed to produce and implement a plan for safely storing nuclear waste; we just keep the fuel rods in "temporary" storage tanks mostly co-located with the nuclear plants, and now that we've shut down Yucca Mountain, that's the way it's going to be for the next couple decades as well. They can bring that expertise to cleaning up the oil spill.

Of course China would outcompete us when it comes to "green" technology. They drill for oil and mine for coal with great enthusiasm, which directly correlates to lower costs for plastic and aluminum and steel with which to build renewable power sources from. Given their relative lack of environmental regulation, labor regulations, etc., it's a lot cheaper for them to build a windmill out of plastics and aluminum than for a US-based manufacturer to make the same thing.

China already produces more Tungsten than the rest of the world put together.

If anything, this could help create one of those situations where China still has access but noone else can use the stuff to make finished goods, the way China has threateneed to do re: cornering the rare earth market after they've driven everyone else out of business.

(Or did Slashdot cover that?)

Not only that; there are a lot of unexploited Tungsten sources in the United States; one supposes they could stop nickel-and-diming to death extraction industries here and we could probably produce them a lot more cheaply than the Congo; doing business in a war zone is expensive.

I also just checked Wikipedia, and I think this subject is sufficiently non-controversial/political that they will give accurate information; it looks like China produces several times the amount of Tungsten as the rest of the world _combined_.

That's the classic communist definition of 'fascism,' but it's also what most communist states invariably end up looking like. There's always a 'new class,' there's always lip service to communist tropes while the new class stratification is implemented, there's always corporations or corporation-equivalents, sometimes foreign based or sometimes 'design bureaus,' whose presense benefits the New Class more than the old one, and there's always control over public discourse and religious institutions. It happened in Russia, it happened in Cuba, in Eastern Europe, in SE Asia after the communists finally won there... you'd think by now people would be asking why communist-definition fascism seems to be the end state of communist governments, but it never seems to happen.