Seems like most people are fixated on dragging a piece of cloth through the ocean. What if you use the cloth in a different way. What if on a giant boat you have a giant suspended horizontal piece of cloth, and you get a whole mess of pumps to pump water on top of the cloth...the water drains back to the ocean and the oil stays on the cloth. Occasionally you'd have to "sweep" the oil off the cloth and into some container on the boat. This provides an efficient way of getting the oil off the cloth. I guess the only problem with this method is the questionable throughput of the pumps. Any thoughts?

I agree. The problem is with definition. Everyone plays ping pong, but very few people play table tennis. Ping pong is recreational while table tennis is a sport. Likewise, everyone knows how to program, but few people know how to program something beyond what a monkey can do.

Technically the link isn't missing. Click on "Vlad Dolezal" and it'll take you to the blog. But yeah, there prob should be a link where it belongs.