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Or, you know, you retards could try some data to make sure you know what the hell you're talking about. Read this for starters. The US imports most from Canada, not China. Then, learn about steel grades. Meeting demand requires sourcing, so buying steel of a certain type and quality from China or Canada isn't anything like a security risk. In fact, US steel production is so extensive it is 4th worldwide.

Organic material that has been enjoying the company of whatever rocks and minerals have been sitting next to it for a zillion years, possibly leaching interesting inorganics(sulfur is the star name, because it shows up in fair quantity and sulfur oxides are pretty visibly noxious; but all kinds of inorganics show up in smaller quantities: calcium, copper, lead, vanadium, sodium, etc.) Oil is mostly organic; but sometimes the exceptions count.

Quantities depend on where the crude the diesel was distilled from originated, how exacting the refining process was, what the additives were(and, depending on the plant and where it was grown, may well not be zero in the biodiesel either); but they definitely do show up, and in quantities significant enough to be of engineering concern for fuel users, particularly of very expensive or very delicate engines.

You'll see references to sulfur and trace metal limits and testing methods in various standards for fuels: ASTM D3605 is one testing method, MIL-F-16884 one standard that sets requirements for trace metal content.

There's even a pricey textbook!

bribery, hidden agendas, employee abuse, poor environmental practices

Did you even try googling any of those? Perhaps you've been so poorly bribed that, abused by Microsoft though you may be, your hidden agenda is to astroturf on tech news sites, polluting them?

Bribery:

• 2005-2010 Bing "Loyalty Rewards" program - widely derided as an attempt to grab customers with bribes. If Bing is as good as they want it to be, why do they need to offer cash?
• 2007 OOXML ISO process bribes - you may want to argue about rewarding people for using Microsoft products, by "competitive behavior" maybe you mean offering incentives to a few key people to get things done. But for a standards process, that is bribery. Standards must be evaluated on their technical merit alone. (PDF warning)
• 2006 Bloggers bribed with laptops - when every news site is calling it a bribe, I'd say it's not just "competitive behavior."

Hidden Agendas

• 2010 - Microsoft's shell company, Attachmate, attempted to buy 882 patents from Novell.
• 2007 - Here's the same wired story about OOXML. I'm not going to do your googling for you; this one's obvious.
• 2005 - Microsoft's addition of PDF support. I didn't even know about this one, but it turns up in a google search... Dude, do your own homework next time.

Employee Abuse

• Have you never heard of throwing chairs? Seriously?
• Microsoft's continuing problems with their Chinese workforce - remember, don't hire them directly. Farm it out to a subsidiary to distance yourself from the inevitable PR disaster.

Poor Environmental Practices
Did you mean to suggest Microsoft is a hardware company?

Or can we count all the useless trash they have pushed out the door, forcing users to reformat their machines as soon as they buy them so they can downgrade to a decent OS, Vista ending up straight in the landfill?

Thank you, Judge. I'm so happy you're here to tell us we can't be impressed by someone's paint job or check out their bobblehead.

The assertion was that they were hanging out in a parking lot looking into cars. If it was "looking into a car" I would feel differently. You might argue that I am splitting hairs, but that would be stupid, because what I said is at the heart of the matter.

The reality is that it is reasonable to assume that people engaging in certain types of behavior are up to something. In almost every case where someone actually gets arrested for something like this you find out there actually are other mitigating factors, like they have priors or are carrying a broken spark plug tied to a string (glass-breaking device, JIC you didn't know.)

Do the cops often just bully people? Yes. But if you're wandering around through a parking lot checking out the contents of cars, you can go fuck yourself.

And who will oversee the overseers? And how can the agencies be independent when they are being "overseen"?

you cannot totally rely on any single agency for anything. That's why you have indepenedent groups do indepenedent tests. Except, if they are all "overseen" by the same overseer, they are not independent. In fact, there is in effect only one agency.

That's why we have agencies like NIST, ASTM, SAE, UL, and others. They are independent, monitored by government agencies, and composed of a wide variety of groups so that they can't be easily subverted by any one group. It is these groups that certify laboratories and test procedures and ensure that testing is done in a rigorous and scientific fashion. Yes, you can't have 100% certainty that an agency is completely immune to influence but you can take reasonable steps to safeguard against it.

Oh and by the way, where did I say anything about a single agency or oversight group? The best would be several independent evaluations and oversights. Again, it's up to the consumer to judge the proper level of validation to which they feel comfortable about a product. To some people all it takes is a smiling face in a TV commercial, to others it will be many years of intense scrutiny. Personally, I tend toward the latter.

Urea itself, which is the starting material for urea nitrate, does not react with p-DMAC under the same conditions. Other potential sources of false positive response e.g., common fertilizers, medications containing the urea moiety and various amines, do not produce the red pigment with p-DMAC. Exhibits collected from 10 terrorist cases have been tested with p-DMAC. The results were in full agreement with those obtained by instrumental techniques including GC/MS, XRD and IR.

From what I know of the chemistry of aldehydes (there's a great icebreaker at parties...), this dye should react with any primary or secondary amine- like regular old urea, ammonia, amino acids, etc. What this group claims, however, is that there is a particular color change reaction for this dye which occurs for urea nitrate which does not occur for other amines.

I think what the article's confusing picture of the dye and urea nitrate interacting is suggesting is that the hydrogen bonds between the nitrate and urea moieties remain intact even after the urea has bonded to the dye, so the nitrate moiety affects the dye complex and the color it appears. I'd still be concerned about false positives, personally, particularly from different amine salts. The color produced might be uniquely identifiable to a spectrophotometer, but for a visual test I'd be worried about anything that turns "reddish" enough to produce a false positive.

The writer is (deliberately) confusing open source with open standards. Open standards are how progress happens. Take for example ASTM Think what would happen a a large construction company owned and wrote the ASTM building codes. This is the problem with a proprietary document format from one company. Microsot is free to implement OpenDoc, but then is will reduce their "lock in".

They did this with Jesse James in the Mt. Olivet Cemetery in Kearney, Nebraska and that didn't change a thing, people went on believing what they wanted to believe.

So in the end the towns will still have their claims

But I guess the added publicity will still have the affect of getting the towns in the paper and perk peoples interest. Which in the end is all that matters in this case anyway.