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BLM lands are still open, you may visit and use undeveloped lands as you would normally. It is only the facilities that are closed.

No actually that is the mainstream opinion.

Let me quote the President BLM: http://www.doi.gov/news/pressreleases/loader.cfm?csModule=security/getfile&pageid=293917

Which basically summarized is, fracking is a huge economic benefit and the we need to evaluate safety procedures in terms of their costs to keep them down for the oil and gas industry while protecting the long term viability of fracking as an energy source. Both parties are pro-fracking. The debate is over the amount of regulation ranging from the Republican position of almost none to the Democratic position of some but not enough to threaten the growth of this process.

Even the Sierra Club is pushing for more regulation not a halt to the process: http://www.sierraclub.org/naturalgas/rulemaking/

FoxNews is not reality. No one (in any large measure) is against this.

There are 600 coal plants in the US, generating about 2000TW. A few recent projects for large scale solar range from 50MW to 700MW. It would only take a few hundred of these to make a significant dent in the need for US coal and nuclear generating capacity. What is lacking is determination, and money. The fossil fuel subsidy per year is about $70B and roughly $13B per Nuclear plant. That should pay for a whole lot of alternatives including solar.

I'm waiting for someone to somehow say that this was an inherited problem from the previous administration.

Ahem.

Just like Guantanamo, the bullshit is 100 percent Dubya's fault. And just like Guantanamo, the lack of progress since January 2009 is 100 percent Obama's fault. But it is inherited nonetheless.

Actually, the federal government does, in fact, pay taxes to local governments where they have property through the Payment In Lieu of Taxes program. Nevada and other western states, for example, receives property taxes in exchange for the copious amount of BLM land the feds own.

More interesting is the contrast between that USA map and the one on page 3 of the report summary. Differences include more areas off the coasts mapped (e.g., near California/Oregon) and data for 50m above the surface, as well as extra-superb category names.

"Offshore wind resources have substantial potential to supply a large portion of the Nation's electricity demand (Figure 1). According to estimates by the NREL, developing shallow water (typically 0-30 meters) wind resources, which are the most likely to be technically and commercially feasible at this time, could provide at least 20 percent of the electricity needs of almost all coastal States."

How did this turn into 'meet or exceed the nations current demand'?

Report url: http://www.doi.gov/ocs/ExecutiveSummary-final.pdf

Well, TFA is just about incoherent as to what percentage of whose demand when could be produced from wind turbines where. This article is a great deal clearer about its claims.

Or, you could peruse the report summary itself.

and is not part of the United States of America (neither are Navassa Island, the US Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Baker Island, Guam, Howland Island, Jarvis Island, Johnston Atoll, Kingman Reef, Midway Atoll, the Northern Mariana Islands or Wake Atoll). It is a commonwealth, and a US insular area.

That there may not be copper reserves available for a massive deployment of additional copper. Due to increased demand in developing countries there is a copper shortage coming in the next 15 years.

Please see:

http://www.doi.gov/ocl/2006/RenewableAndAlternativ eFuels.htm

The US has territories, like Puerto Rico and Guam, but not, say and enclave in China or an administered territory in Africa.

It doesn't take territory in Africa or China to be a colonial power. I bet a lot of people in American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, and other dependencies and territories feel they've been colonized. And ask those from the Marshall Islands how they feel about the US using their islands to test nuclear weapons.

The Department of the Interior manages over 1/5th the land of the United States. A good portion of that land (at least in the Continental US) comes into direct contact with private ranch and farm land. Many ranchers use federal land to provide grazing for their cattle. As I recall, that grazing is at a subsidized rate(firefox warning, that is a pdf file).

The rancher is upset because Mountain Lions do indeed pose a threat to cattle. But, many ranchers are using my tax subsidies to make a living. As a die-hard east coaster, I find it to be rather odd that many of the people that desire to kill wild animals depend upon my tax dollars for their jobs. If it wasn't for my tax support of their job, there wouldn't be a "debate" around whehter or not we should kill the mountain lion.

Therefore, I disagree with your premise that "The wild animal issue doesn't depend on money". It most definitely depends upon money.

As for my "pigheadedness"...Yes. It is a pigheaded point of view. But, there is nothing wrong with it. Most people in the U.S. are permitted to make a choice as to where they live. As long as their choice doesn't impact me, I don't care. But, whether it is a hurricane or a Mountain Lion, the Financial Impact of the issue gives me a right to be as pigheaded as I want.

Yes and this is a systematic problem with our government, not a particular political party.

Um, yes. Your point? Both parties also have started pointless foreign wars, which mitigates the current pointless war not at all. Get this straight: I don't care what party a rotten politician is from, I care that they are rotten.

So if cheny used to say head up the red cross should they not be allowed in? This argument *might* hold some water if Clinton had not done the *exact same thing*

That depends. Is the Red Cross a publicly traded company in which Cheney had more than 400,000 stock options? Do we give them multi-billion contracts?

Ok So if I get you right, even though oil is fungable, and even though Clinton gave no bid contracts to halliburton in the 90's its still blatent proof this was was about oil?

So those are our two options as you put them: blatant proof, or no basis in reality. Sorry, but this discussion would be more fruitful if we could acknowledge shades of grey. Substantial conflict of interest, acting in ways beneficial to said interest, all while lying about the conflict of interest is not proof of anything, but is still as real as anything.

No I pointed out facts, I fully expected you to ignore them and contiune an anti-bush rant

I'm not ignoring it, I'm questioning how you think it is supposed to sway me.
Me: Handing these overpriced contracts to Halliburton was indefensible.
You: Just as it was when Clinton did it.

Okay. That changes the word "indefensible" in my first statement how?

Do you really think Iraq was the most politically expedient way to get halliburton money? hell Bush could have rammed anwar through (he did have the votes) and gave halliburton a no bid contract for that.

Who said it was the most politically expedient, or had to be?

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, possibly more in the nine tenths of the country that are unexplored, more than ten times the amount in the ANWR. And Alaska isn't going anywhere, so Iraq or ANWR is a false dichotomy. Lifting the sanctions may have lowered oil prices, but it wouldn't provide long term strategic control over the 3rd largest oil reserve on earth. That this would also result in financial benefit to Halliburtion is something I'm sure Cheney would say doesn't impact the decision at all, while eyeing the stock price.

It's not just about oil; it's not just about feeding Halliburton money. Those are strawmen. And yet, the first thing we secured was the oil fields, which are still better protected than Iraqi cities outside the Green Zone. We'll let cities go without electricity for weeks, but damned if we let the terrorists stop the flow of oil for more than a day. It's not all about oil and money for Halliburton, but it's a far, far cry from not being about oil.

We're bringing them Democracy! That's a great excuse to invade a sovereign nation (that just happens to have oil).

Why is it that everyone cries "He's just doing it for oil!" ANWAR has a projected yield of 1.4million barrels/day and one can assume would come at a much lower price tag than the price of getting oil out of Iraq. There is a republican president, a republican congress, and Alaska has a republican governor. If it was all about oil then I think ANWAR would be drilled well before Iraq would be invaded.

Just for you, here's some figures from the gov't:

The US uses 20 million barrels per day.

The ANWR has could produce 1.4 million barrels per day.

We import 12.2 million bbl per day. So we would reduce our imports by around 11.5 percent.

Of course, if we managed someohow to use the oil from the ANWR at the rate we use oil overall, we'd be out of oil in 520 days.

So it's not quite 30 days. That's an extreme exxageration. But it's not any sort of a real solution either. It wouldn't even let us stop importing oil from the Persian Gulf. We could stop importing from Venezuala if we wanted to. However, if people could get over their light truck and high power addiction in cars, we could stop importing oil from the terror-funding Saudis. Just a 21% improvement in fleet mileage would do it.

1. Whoever ... gives, offers, or promises anything of value to any person, for or because of the testimony under oath or affirmation given or to be given by such person as a witness upon a trial, hearing, or other proceeding, before any court...
2. shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for not more than two years, or both.

Buzztt.. Wrong... 345 Gallons can only yield around 5 MWh of electrical power.
Thermally it's around 12.6 MWh.

An acre can of photovoltaics in NJ can product about 668 MWh per acre per year.
4071 M^2 * 0.1(conversion factor) * 4.5 KWh/M^2 (typical daily solar constant) * 365 = 668 MWh/year. Or the electrical needs for 133 people.

State of New Jersey.. 4,746,880 Acres * 133 == 631 Million people..
Thus, you are Still OFF by several orders of magnitude in the wrong direction.

The state of NJ covered with photovoltaics could power the ENTIRE US.
Once again Exxon's CEO demonstrates that he is scientifically illiterate joke.

• Electronic Library of Interior Policies
• US Geological Survey
• National Park Service

• The US Department of the Interior web site is not responding.
• We Slashdot users are glad to assist in ensuring that DOI web servers can not function for the next 48 hours.
• The DOI is required to accept gifts from Indian Tribes under several circumstances. Are the DOI mail servers and web servers properly accepting gifts from tribe representatives?

  "(g) No Refusal Gift Acceptance Policy
  All Department of the Interior employees may accept gifts offered to them by representatives of Indian Tribes, Alaska Native Organizations, Insular and foreign governments when refusal to accept such gifts would be likely to cause offense or embarrassment or otherwise adversely affect relations with the United States."

• Are DOI machines accepting gifts from Indian Tribe servers which are equipped with generous worm programs?

• The US Department of the Interior web site is not responding.
• We Slashdot users are glad to assist in ensuring that DOI web servers can not function for the next 48 hours.
• The DOI is required to accept gifts from Indian Tribes under several circumstances. Are the DOI mail servers and web servers properly accepting gifts from tribe representatives?

  "(g) No Refusal Gift Acceptance Policy
  All Department of the Interior employees may accept gifts offered to them by representatives of Indian Tribes, Alaska Native Organizations, Insular and foreign governments when refusal to accept such gifts would be likely to cause offense or embarrassment or otherwise adversely affect relations with the United States."

• Are DOI machines accepting gifts from Indian Tribe servers which are equipped with generous worm programs?

jeremycec writes " Evidently, nothing's been resolved since 2001 , when this happened the first time. In these Memorandum Opinion and Preliminary Injunction documents from Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., we see how the court stepped in to pull the plug on a system, which, through its abject lack of due care, left someone's important financial information wide open to attackers. According to the former CIO of the Bureau of Indian Affairs: 'For all practical purposes, we have no security, we have no infrastructure, ... Our entire network has no, firewalls on it. I don't like running a network that can be breached by a high school kid.' So, when the BIA could get no relief through Interior's IT Dept., it went to the courts. Source: Government Computer News "

jeremycec writes " Evidently, nothing's been resolved since 2001 , when this happened the first time. In these Memorandum Opinion and Preliminary Injunction documents from Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., we see how the court stepped in to pull the plug on a system, which, through its abject lack of due care, left someone's important financial information wide open to attackers. According to the former CIO of the Bureau of Indian Affairs: 'For all practical purposes, we have no security, we have no infrastructure, ... Our entire network has no, firewalls on it. I don't like running a network that can be breached by a high school kid.' So, when the BIA could get no relief through Interior's IT Dept., it went to the courts. Source: Government Computer News "

jeremycec writes " Evidently, nothing's been resolved since 2001 , when this happened the first time. In these Memorandum Opinion and Preliminary Injunction documents from Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for Washington, D.C., we see how the court stepped in to pull the plug on a system, which, through its abject lack of due care, left someone's important financial information wide open to attackers. According to the former CIO of the Bureau of Indian Affairs: 'For all practical purposes, we have no security, we have no infrastructure, ... Our entire network has no, firewalls on it. I don't like running a network that can be breached by a high school kid.' So, when the BIA could get no relief through Interior's IT Dept., it went to the courts. Source: Government Computer News "

As mentioned in another post, the USGS webpage itself is unusable unless you're running Netscape 4 (windows or linux only) or IE for Windows.

I think it would be a good idea for as many people as possible to emailthe maintainer of the web page.

Unsurprising for the gov't to so thouroughly screw-up like this, especially with Interior Secretary Gale Norton at the helm. FWIW, she is facing contempt of court charges for lying in Federal court during a trial of gross mismanagement of the Native American Trust fund. Mismanagement by completely failing to secure a computer system...

Hell, why don't we all email Gale herself?!

However to help all of you out here are some relevant email addresses:

• P.Lynn Scarlett
  Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management, and Budget
  Lynn_Scarlett@ios.doi.gov
  202 208-4203
• W. Hord Tipton
  Chief Information Officer, Acting
  Hord_Tipton@ios.doi.gov
  202 208-6194
• Sue Rachlin
  Deputy Chief Information Officer
  Sue_Rachlin@ios.doi.gov
  202 208-6194
  

Hope that this helps everyone that is interested.
(Sorry about the double posting... I'm new at posting things on slashdot)

However to help all of you out here are some relevant email addresses:

• P.Lynn Scarlett
  Assistant Secretary for Policy, Management, and Budget
  Lynn_Scarlett@ios.doi.gov
  202 208-4203
• W. Hord Tipton
  Chief Information Officer, Acting
  Hord_Tipton@ios.doi.gov
  202 208-6194
• Sue Rachlin
  Deputy Chief Information Officer
  Sue_Rachlin@ios.doi.gov
  202 208-6194
  

Hope that this helps everyone that is interested.

The cited reasons for making this move are all rather interesting and generally interestingly flawed.

• Lower Total Cost of Ownership for the desktop, including lower user training costs.
  I'm interested in how they determine total cost of ownership, but even so "lower user training costs" is a fun one. Translates to "All our users already know windows, so give it to them ". Seems reasonable, but if this becomes normal in the government, then everyone will need a Windows UI because no users will ever know anything else. Self fulfilling prophecy (profitcy?) anyone?
  I guess they're getting Windows for free too as getting a linux distribution for the entire DOI would have cost (just for the software) essentially nothing. (If they're getting it cheaply enough, one must wonder if the consumer isn't subsidizing the government - including consumers in (say) Peru.)
  Then too, while it would take a bit of training, I expect I could, with only a few (however radical) changes change the total cost of using most of their tools down by probably 80%. The learning curve would be steep and the users would scream their heads off. In the long runthough, I believe they'd save enough that it would far overcome the training costs.
  I don't know to what extent windows boxes can be set up as remote GUI servers (such as Xterms) but I'd bet that with the number of seats they need, that a good deal could be found for minimal UI boxes and with an openMosix like system behind them. I suspect this would lower the total cost of hardware by 50% or more since most of the time most of the computers on someone's desk are running screensavers while the user is drinking coffee or on the phone.
• Centralized and efficient security policy administration
  Unix has allowed this for years. Long before microsoft even invented networking.
• Greater flexibility and management functionality from products that offer a broader range of management solutions that integrate with non-Microsoft environments
  This is a wonderfully fun one - since Microsoft has said from time to time that it is their policy to not "integrate" with any system they don't approve of - especially open source systems.
• Greater productivity and reliability attributed to less downtime.
  It does seem to be true that windows 2000 is doing well for staying up for long periods of time - but I've had linux boxes that (several years back) stayed up for a year or so without problems. This at a time when one person I knew -- a true Windows NT fanatic -- reinstalled everything every two weeks because he claimed the system wasn't stable if he didn't do that.
• Extended support for a large base of software applications. Applications almost entirely written by Microsoft?

Do they also have a policy of writing their web pages for only IE? (Assuming it works on IE) (I don't remember which, but at least one other US government web site only works right with IE and the webmaster told me that they were "considering" using the standards, but that it would be a lot of work and I should not expect it quickly.)

obmisquote "Malt does more than anyone can To justify the government's ways to Man"

Folks, this is not rocket science. The easiest way to determine if the DOI is on the net or not is to try to connect to the DOI homepage itself. As of this moment (1:00 AM Central time), the entire DOI is off the net. It's not just the BIA or the agencies and sites directly related to it. It's the entire DOI. I am a DOI contractor and I can assure you that our facility (which has nothing to do with the Bureau of Indian Affairs) was most certainly yanked off the net this afternoon, and it remains off the net.

This is really causing pandemonium at our workplace. We cannot access our electronic timesheets because the server is external to our network, and as a result, I've just finished filling out my timesheet from home (because otherwise, it's not going to get done.) The silly part of it is that the facility that I work at has quite robust security, and yet we were still forced offline. This is not an "intelligent decision." This is a knee-jerk reaction that is going to end up inconveniencing a lot of people that have paid a lot of money for Earth science data. It's going to cost the government (and, as a result, you, the taxpayer) a lot of money.

By the time you read this comment, the whole issue may have been rendered moot; there was some hope that the court order might be rescinded overnight. If the order was rescinded and you are able to connect to the above links, then I'm glad (because I'll be able to do my job tomorrow.) But rest assured that the entire DOI lost network connectivity this afternoon. This is judicial idiocy, plain and simple; there is no more diplomatic way to put it.

If the article says one thing and reality reflects another, then the article is wrong. I am a USGS contractor (the USGS is part of the DOI) and we were forced to cut our Internet connection at approximately 2:30 this afternoon. We have nothing to do with the BIA. Furthermore, our operations rely very heavily on Internet connectivity (customers order products online and can retrieve them via FTP.) This is going to have a huge negative impact on our facility and our customers, and we are not even remotely related to the BIA (not to mention the fact that we have a very secure and robust firewall.)

Trust me on this one. But if you don't, try to connect to the DOI homepage if you don't believe me. By the time you read this, connectivity may be restored; we were hoping that the court order might be rescinded overnight. But rest assured that as of right now (12:56 AM Central Time) the entire Department of Interior is offline, regardless of what some article says.

You know.. I just thought of something. There is the WayBack Machine which lets you get past copies of ANY website. Do you think one could get a copy of the DOI and get cached copies of the data, or some such stuff?