I wasn't talking about the kurds but his entire history PLUS 10 years of evading UN sanctions after the first gulf war. The US used him against Iran but didn't control him. Why would the US be to blame? There's only so much the US can do since reality, not idealism dictates options.
At least you agree he would have made a bomb given the chance. How does that tie into your rant against DU munitions? Sure it's dangerous, but would you rather they use something that doesn't penetrate armor? I don't like DU either, but I'd rather use it now and win a battle than not and lose one. If there's associated morbidity and mortality, how does that compare statistically with the cost of losing the battle?
The decision to use Saddam against Iran worked as long as he wasn't attacking anyone else. That changed with Kuwait. Are you saying we should have gone to war for the Kurds? You might be right about that, but it's also matter of domestic and international political will.
You don't seem like much of a constitutional scholar to me so I'll let the rest go, except to agree that the US government is going to hell in a handbasket. It's not all Bush though, the Dems are gleefully playing along. Takes two to tango.
Yellowcake can be refined- what part don't you understand? We have elections to deal with people like Bush, did you think he took power in an armed coup? Ok, then you rant on about it all being about oil and that the US is always the bad guy blah blah blah. Or was it that the nazis and imperial japanese were such good guys? Facing down the Soviets was just plain wrong? North Korea just wanted to be loved? The communist Vietnamese were sweeties? I have Vietnamese and Korean friends that would beg to differ. Iran regularly advocates the destruction of Israel, not the other way around.
You obviously form your opinions without reference to fact. Please get a clue, before you hurt someone.
Re: Kosovo = Multilateral my shiny white ass. That crap dragged on for years because none of the euros wanted to shit in their own back yard. What finally fixed it? American pressure to cut throught the bullshit and American FA-18's bombing the living shit out of the serbs until they cried uncle. Remember the Danish "peacekeepers" armed with a couple of popguns they were afraid to use? The serbs bullied them into helping separate out the muslim-croat men to be killed. It sure was multilateral; the euros (as always) wrung their hands while the US did the dirty work. The same thing is happening in Afghanistan - the krauts aren't allowed to fight, they just sit on their asses. What kind of multilateralism is that? The Brits are just about the only other country consistently willing to dirty it's hands.
Re:Saddam - It's been documented that Saddam HAD a nuclear weapons program and he actually used Chemical weapons vs Iran AND the Kurds in his own country. He also did everything he could to maintain the illusion that the weapons were still available. Who's fault is it if we believed him. He also attacked Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and Israel. What were we waiting for?
Besides, the question isn't whether Bush had justification, but what IS justification? Or perhaps what is enough justification? Some people will never be convinced, which to me is more dangerous than being too quick on the trigger.
I don't recall Blix saying that - it doesn't sound like him. Usually he went out of his way to claim that everything was lollipops in Iraq - something I still don't really understand.
The thing I don't get is why, given Saddam's previous behavior, everyone seemed willing to give Iraq a pass. The international community has no mechanism with which to deal with people like him. Does anyone really think they would not have tried to make a bomb as soon as he could? Even if they couldn't achieve fission, they had the technology to refine it enough to make a bunch of dirty bombs, load them on scuds and contaminate large swaths of territory.
I guess the central question is this: At what point does war become the right course of action? How bad does it have to get? Bush invaded because he claimed the threat was bad enough to warrant action. Regardless of whether or not he was correct, where do you draw the line?
Are the weasle words at the end? "which could impede the placing of equipment on the market and the free circulation of such equipment in and between Member States"
Does a DRM chip impede in this manner? No? Well, OK then.
The support thing is key. Like it or not, MS is going to be in the support business big time and needs to find ways to profit from support that are simple, easy and cheap for the end user. Hell, 90% of the time all they need to do is put someone on the phone that understands how to use the software and that's all. Software can be free but on-demand support will always cost you.
The libertarian party IS the closest thing to a viable 3rd party in the US, but why do they still lack general appeal and influence? Is it because the republi-crats effectively bar competition, or is it their platform? What about Ron Paul? His stated platform doesn't appeal to me because I disagree with his views on some major issues. Is it just me? Why he doesn't get more support? Should people vote for a party with no support & waste it or is it better to vote issues even if you don't particularly like the candidate?
The bar for viability in terms of platform or ideals isn't that high. Actual electablilty is another story. IF a 3rd party ever has a shot, I hope to hell it's not another corporatist donklephant clone or some one-issue party since neither will be able to make any positive changes stick.
It's hard to see how respecting the constitution and voting for constituent's interests rather than corporations is unrealistic idealism. Until a party comes along that does this consistently, at best we're all stuck voting issues for the candidates on the ballot.
Of course it's relevant. What we have seen of Obama so far has been Obama running for president. Since he took public office, everything he's done has been carefully vetted for a presidential run. I really wonder what he'd be like if he'd been focused on his current job rather than a presidential run. He's been in public office for a very short time and there really isn't much there to take his measure.
Speeches and books are one thing, performance under long term pressure is quite another.
This is an interesting point, except that the telecoms already had a relationship with the NSA, etc.. However, it should be pointed out that at the time, everyone thought invading Iraq was a good idea, too. I don't thing the telecoms are really the bad guys either.
It was bound to happen. Reading the "walks-on-water" posts by supporters on various websites has been a laugh. Who really believes in election-year promises anyway? The democrats walked away from their traditional base of labor and minorities during the Clinton administration, but the younger voters don't remember that. Both parties are now firmly tucked into their respective corporate pockets and neither one represents the interests of the average voter. Oil and finance on one side, media and entertainment on the other, both marching in lockstep toward corporate-controlled fascism.
The only thing Obama (or anyone else) could do to impress me is tell the far left/right to f*ck off, but since they're the ones controlling their respective parties, it ain't gonna happen. The other parties are non-entities locked into unrealistic idealism. Until we get a viable 3rd party that actually considers the constitution a relevant document and the needs of the individual voters over special interest groups, it's all downhill from here.
In the meantime, grab the popcorn and keep filling out your bullshit bingo cards. Actually, can anyone suggest rules for a fascism bingo game? That would be fun. Papers please!
MS isn't about legacy apps, kernels or anything like that. MS has always been about taking someone else's ideas and using various forms of coersion to maintain market share dominance.
When they can leverage their market position and force people to use their products they win (think OS market, IE) when they can't, they lose (zune).
They never have been and never will be about good software that meets the needs of their customers. Expect it to get worse before it gets better, if it ever does. Perhaps if they oust Ballmer, but that won't happen anytime soon.
Most of the arguments about when an embryo becomes a human rely on either emotional "stills a beating heart" type stuff or irrelevant "it's just a bunch of cells" crap. Let's cut through the crap and state the obvious:
HUMAN LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION.
There, problem solved! That was easy! Now for the hard part: Under what conditions is it ethical to terminate a human pregnancy?
In case nobody noticed, Nature does not really value individual life. Spontaneous abortions happen all the time and a plethora of other species exist that will freely terminate human life including various carnivores, parasites and disease-causing microorganisms. Nature also did not provide us with a perfect environment in which to live - humans compete with each other and with other species for limited resources. Additionally, tsunamis drown us, droughts parch and starve us, etc.. Hence it's possible to conclude that Nature in and of itself does not provide us with an ethical framework with which to value human life.
Or perhaps it DOES, by the very absence of such a framework. The only time we see any concern for individual life is among members of the same family groups and even then it's dicey. How many species exist in which the female kills and eats the male after mating? Or in which the dominant female kills the offspring of other females in the family group? These strategies work toward the survival of the species, not the individual. More often than not mating pairs only cooperate for one season and the resulting increased genetic diversity enhances survival of the species. What about the individual? Not really all that important, so far as nature is concerned.
Basically we're left with what WE decide is ethical. If we value the individual, the decision to select an embryo ought to be based on enhancing that individual's survival. Or should it? What if Down's syndrome also conferred resistance to the next major disease epidemic? Do we really know what we're getting with a given genome? Survival of the individual certainly ought to be a criterion to select out major life threatening diseases, but enhancing the survival of the species lies in diversity.
I'd argue that selecting out those few major untreatable diseases and deformities in which the individual cannot survive or live a remotely normal life is desirable, whereas selecting out a gene for something treatable like colon cancer is not. If you ask someone dying of breast cancer whether they would prefer not to have been born, nobody but the pathologically depressed is going to agree.
I'm sorry, but genetic manipulation scares the crap out of me. I can see repairing a damaged sequence back to a *known* normal sequence, but I have no faith that anyone really understands the ramifications of this kind of fiddling around. The natural order of things is what it is because it's what works. I'm no luddite but to me the genome is sacred.
"And they gotta have really nice hair, because usually that's what you'll be seeing the most of due to the way the camera zooms in and out on the back of the characters head"
I like to play bald guys for exactly the same reason and also because nobody else plays them, rendering you instantly recognizable.
I always understood it to mean that when the torture, wiretapping and disregard of habeas corpus gets bad enough, we are supposed to bear the arms and water the garden of liberty with the blood of tyrants, or something.
Here in Philly, the murder epidemic is bad enough that they're talking about random "stop and search" in an effort to crack down. Since we have an underfunded police department, city courts and prison system I'm not sure any further restrictions would really make a difference anyway. There's too few cops to enforce too many laws, too few courts to handle too many cases, and too little prison space to house too many criminals.
Regardless of the societal problems that lead to the endemic poverty, drug abuse and crime it doesn't seem like more rulemaking will make a difference.
Thank you. Sure, there's a ton of data out there, but how was it collected? What statistical methods were used to analyze the data? How did you select the data set you're analyzing? Nothing I understand about science really applies to data mining a so-called "cloud". Prediction without explanation is just observation. Observation in and of itself is not science. You might have data, but is it the right data?
I see all this petabyte stuff as interesting and even as a valuable adjunct to real science, but a basic requirement of science is reproducibility and you can't reproduce the data collection.
Seriously! Doesn't anyone read the news? Most of the world's population lives in abject poverty compared to western standards. All you need to is see that pic of the world at night from space - lights visible in the US, Europe, Japan and a few scattered major cities - everything else is dark.
Well, certainly SOMEONE doesn't, but don't generalize to all Christians. I would't write off the entire Bible as ridiculous mythology since at least some of it can be linked to other sources.
Besides, it really IS a matter of faith. If people take ideas from it that make their lives better, who am I to say they're wrong? However, even the Catholic church recognizes science as a better source of information for astronomy. All too often people equate Christianity for Homo-hating fundamentalists who are certainly in the minority.
We recently pleasure of telling both comcast AND verizon to f*ck off as we also have RCN in our area. Not only are they cheaper, but download speeds have are about 3x faster in some cases.
What comcast hasn't admitted is that they apparently throttle ALL downloads: I could only ever get about 750 KB/s when downloading large files, whereas the same files from the same sites (ftp's of linux distro ISO's from university servers) download at roughly 2400 KB/s via RCN. Ping times are basically the same. I always suspected this was happening and it was the first thing tested when we switched.
Another difference is the telephone service: comcast and verizon both use VOIP, verizon even disconnects your POTS wire even if you dont want them to. With RCN we get plain old POTS which is often the only thing working in a blackout.
Screw comcast and their "network management", screw verizon and their overpriced FIOS. RCN kicks their asses. THIS is free market competition in action.
Oh, come on - people seem so damned intent on demonizing the US. You can pick and choose your examples of bad behavior but it doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Ask someone from Vietnam that now lives in the US about THEIR feelings before you blame it all on the US.
The world is not really a nice place and most of the people running various countries are not nice people. Although the kind of tactics described may be unsavory, they're often direct counters to similar tactics used by insurgents etc.. Not that this excuses all bad behaviors but generally these get exposed and dealt with.
Sorry, but Jeffersonian democracy does not spring fully formed from chaos.
If they buy it, they might well use it. Right now in the US there's a massive shift away from large, inefficient vehicles like SUV's and pickups toward small cars and hybrids, all due to the fuel prices and the net effect of which is to reduce demand for crude oil. It's in everyone's best interest for the oil companies to continue using the existing infrastructure for refining and distribution since infrastructure is *expensive* and the consumer pays for it in the end. I'm not sure exactly where the profit "sweet spot" is on the supply &s demand chart, but certainly they want to optimize sales volume vs price. Sell less oil = make less money in any case. Besides, Americans *like* big cars - history has proved that over and over.
Enter these oil producing bugs. You could take any kind of organic scrap and turn it into oil (so long as they don't use food crops for substrate and cause worldwide food riots, but that's another story). If the $50/barrel claim is accurate AND it turns out to be carbon negative, you have the greatest marketing pitch in the history of the world:
"Buy a Hummer and save the planet from global warming!"
Tangentially, you may be interested to know that when the post office was going to murder all of us with anthrax and the media was trumpeting on about how Cipro was our only hope, a quick look at a the literature revealed that doxycycline is both 1) equally effective and 2) no longer covered by patent and about a hundred times cheaper.
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I wasn't talking about the kurds but his entire history PLUS 10 years of evading UN sanctions after the first gulf war. The US used him against Iran but didn't control him. Why would the US be to blame? There's only so much the US can do since reality, not idealism dictates options.
At least you agree he would have made a bomb given the chance. How does that tie into your rant against DU munitions? Sure it's dangerous, but would you rather they use something that doesn't penetrate armor? I don't like DU either, but I'd rather use it now and win a battle than not and lose one. If there's associated morbidity and mortality, how does that compare statistically with the cost of losing the battle?
The decision to use Saddam against Iran worked as long as he wasn't attacking anyone else. That changed with Kuwait. Are you saying we should have gone to war for the Kurds? You might be right about that, but it's also matter of domestic and international political will.
You don't seem like much of a constitutional scholar to me so I'll let the rest go, except to agree that the US government is going to hell in a handbasket. It's not all Bush though, the Dems are gleefully playing along. Takes two to tango.
Yellowcake can be refined- what part don't you understand? We have elections to deal with people like Bush, did you think he took power in an armed coup? Ok, then you rant on about it all being about oil and that the US is always the bad guy blah blah blah. Or was it that the nazis and imperial japanese were such good guys? Facing down the Soviets was just plain wrong? North Korea just wanted to be loved? The communist Vietnamese were sweeties? I have Vietnamese and Korean friends that would beg to differ. Iran regularly advocates the destruction of Israel, not the other way around.
You obviously form your opinions without reference to fact. Please get a clue, before you hurt someone.
Re: Kosovo = Multilateral my shiny white ass. That crap dragged on for years because none of the euros wanted to shit in their own back yard. What finally fixed it? American pressure to cut throught the bullshit and American FA-18's bombing the living shit out of the serbs until they cried uncle. Remember the Danish "peacekeepers" armed with a couple of popguns they were afraid to use? The serbs bullied them into helping separate out the muslim-croat men to be killed. It sure was multilateral; the euros (as always) wrung their hands while the US did the dirty work. The same thing is happening in Afghanistan - the krauts aren't allowed to fight, they just sit on their asses. What kind of multilateralism is that? The Brits are just about the only other country consistently willing to dirty it's hands.
Re:Saddam - It's been documented that Saddam HAD a nuclear weapons program and he actually used Chemical weapons vs Iran AND the Kurds in his own country. He also did everything he could to maintain the illusion that the weapons were still available. Who's fault is it if we believed him. He also attacked Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran and Israel. What were we waiting for?
Besides, the question isn't whether Bush had justification, but what IS justification? Or perhaps what is enough justification? Some people will never be convinced, which to me is more dangerous than being too quick on the trigger.
I don't recall Blix saying that - it doesn't sound like him. Usually he went out of his way to claim that everything was lollipops in Iraq - something I still don't really understand.
The thing I don't get is why, given Saddam's previous behavior, everyone seemed willing to give Iraq a pass. The international community has no mechanism with which to deal with people like him. Does anyone really think they would not have tried to make a bomb as soon as he could? Even if they couldn't achieve fission, they had the technology to refine it enough to make a bunch of dirty bombs, load them on scuds and contaminate large swaths of territory.
I guess the central question is this: At what point does war become the right course of action? How bad does it have to get? Bush invaded because he claimed the threat was bad enough to warrant action. Regardless of whether or not he was correct, where do you draw the line?
Are the weasle words at the end? "which could impede the placing of equipment on the market and the free circulation of such equipment in and between Member States"
Does a DRM chip impede in this manner? No? Well, OK then.
The support thing is key. Like it or not, MS is going to be in the support business big time and needs to find ways to profit from support that are simple, easy and cheap for the end user. Hell, 90% of the time all they need to do is put someone on the phone that understands how to use the software and that's all. Software can be free but on-demand support will always cost you.
The libertarian party IS the closest thing to a viable 3rd party in the US, but why do they still lack general appeal and influence? Is it because the republi-crats effectively bar competition, or is it their platform? What about Ron Paul? His stated platform doesn't appeal to me because I disagree with his views on some major issues. Is it just me? Why he doesn't get more support? Should people vote for a party with no support & waste it or is it better to vote issues even if you don't particularly like the candidate?
The bar for viability in terms of platform or ideals isn't that high. Actual electablilty is another story. IF a 3rd party ever has a shot, I hope to hell it's not another corporatist donklephant clone or some one-issue party since neither will be able to make any positive changes stick.
It's hard to see how respecting the constitution and voting for constituent's interests rather than corporations is unrealistic idealism. Until a party comes along that does this consistently, at best we're all stuck voting issues for the candidates on the ballot.
Of course it's relevant. What we have seen of Obama so far has been Obama running for president. Since he took public office, everything he's done has been carefully vetted for a presidential run. I really wonder what he'd be like if he'd been focused on his current job rather than a presidential run. He's been in public office for a very short time and there really isn't much there to take his measure.
Speeches and books are one thing, performance under long term pressure is quite another.
This is an interesting point, except that the telecoms already had a relationship with the NSA, etc.. However, it should be pointed out that at the time, everyone thought invading Iraq was a good idea, too. I don't thing the telecoms are really the bad guys either.
It was bound to happen. Reading the "walks-on-water" posts by supporters on various websites has been a laugh. Who really believes in election-year promises anyway? The democrats walked away from their traditional base of labor and minorities during the Clinton administration, but the younger voters don't remember that. Both parties are now firmly tucked into their respective corporate pockets and neither one represents the interests of the average voter. Oil and finance on one side, media and entertainment on the other, both marching in lockstep toward corporate-controlled fascism.
The only thing Obama (or anyone else) could do to impress me is tell the far left/right to f*ck off, but since they're the ones controlling their respective parties, it ain't gonna happen. The other parties are non-entities locked into unrealistic idealism. Until we get a viable 3rd party that actually considers the constitution a relevant document and the needs of the individual voters over special interest groups, it's all downhill from here.
In the meantime, grab the popcorn and keep filling out your bullshit bingo cards. Actually, can anyone suggest rules for a fascism bingo game? That would be fun. Papers please!
MS isn't about legacy apps, kernels or anything like that. MS has always been about taking someone else's ideas and using various forms of coersion to maintain market share dominance.
When they can leverage their market position and force people to use their products they win (think OS market, IE) when they can't, they lose (zune).
They never have been and never will be about good software that meets the needs of their customers. Expect it to get worse before it gets better, if it ever does. Perhaps if they oust Ballmer, but that won't happen anytime soon.
Most of the arguments about when an embryo becomes a human rely on either emotional "stills a beating heart" type stuff or irrelevant "it's just a bunch of cells" crap. Let's cut through the crap and state the obvious:
HUMAN LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION.
There, problem solved! That was easy! Now for the hard part: Under what conditions is it ethical to terminate a human pregnancy?
In case nobody noticed, Nature does not really value individual life. Spontaneous abortions happen all the time and a plethora of other species exist that will freely terminate human life including various carnivores, parasites and disease-causing microorganisms. Nature also did not provide us with a perfect environment in which to live - humans compete with each other and with other species for limited resources. Additionally, tsunamis drown us, droughts parch and starve us, etc.. Hence it's possible to conclude that Nature in and of itself does not provide us with an ethical framework with which to value human life.
Or perhaps it DOES, by the very absence of such a framework. The only time we see any concern for individual life is among members of the same family groups and even then it's dicey. How many species exist in which the female kills and eats the male after mating? Or in which the dominant female kills the offspring of other females in the family group? These strategies work toward the survival of the species, not the individual. More often than not mating pairs only cooperate for one season and the resulting increased genetic diversity enhances survival of the species. What about the individual? Not really all that important, so far as nature is concerned.
Basically we're left with what WE decide is ethical. If we value the individual, the decision to select an embryo ought to be based on enhancing that individual's survival. Or should it? What if Down's syndrome also conferred resistance to the next major disease epidemic? Do we really know what we're getting with a given genome? Survival of the individual certainly ought to be a criterion to select out major life threatening diseases, but enhancing the survival of the species lies in diversity.
I'd argue that selecting out those few major untreatable diseases and deformities in which the individual cannot survive or live a remotely normal life is desirable, whereas selecting out a gene for something treatable like colon cancer is not. If you ask someone dying of breast cancer whether they would prefer not to have been born, nobody but the pathologically depressed is going to agree.
I'm sorry, but genetic manipulation scares the crap out of me. I can see repairing a damaged sequence back to a *known* normal sequence, but I have no faith that anyone really understands the ramifications of this kind of fiddling around. The natural order of things is what it is because it's what works. I'm no luddite but to me the genome is sacred.
"And they gotta have really nice hair, because usually that's what you'll be seeing the most of due to the way the camera zooms in and out on the back of the characters head"
I like to play bald guys for exactly the same reason and also because nobody else plays them, rendering you instantly recognizable.
I always understood it to mean that when the torture, wiretapping and disregard of habeas corpus gets bad enough, we are supposed to bear the arms and water the garden of liberty with the blood of tyrants, or something.
Here in Philly, the murder epidemic is bad enough that they're talking about random "stop and search" in an effort to crack down. Since we have an underfunded police department, city courts and prison system I'm not sure any further restrictions would really make a difference anyway. There's too few cops to enforce too many laws, too few courts to handle too many cases, and too little prison space to house too many criminals.
Regardless of the societal problems that lead to the endemic poverty, drug abuse and crime it doesn't seem like more rulemaking will make a difference.
Thank you. Sure, there's a ton of data out there, but how was it collected? What statistical methods were used to analyze the data? How did you select the data set you're analyzing? Nothing I understand about science really applies to data mining a so-called "cloud". Prediction without explanation is just observation. Observation in and of itself is not science. You might have data, but is it the right data?
I see all this petabyte stuff as interesting and even as a valuable adjunct to real science, but a basic requirement of science is reproducibility and you can't reproduce the data collection.
Seriously! Doesn't anyone read the news? Most of the world's population lives in abject poverty compared to western standards. All you need to is see that pic of the world at night from space - lights visible in the US, Europe, Japan and a few scattered major cities - everything else is dark.
Well, certainly SOMEONE doesn't, but don't generalize to all Christians. I would't write off the entire Bible as ridiculous mythology since at least some of it can be linked to other sources.
Besides, it really IS a matter of faith. If people take ideas from it that make their lives better, who am I to say they're wrong? However, even the Catholic church recognizes science as a better source of information for astronomy. All too often people equate Christianity for Homo-hating fundamentalists who are certainly in the minority.
NO NO NO!!! It's from "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish"!!!
Actually, it all comes down to a matter of faith doesn't it?
http://www.justfuckinggoogleit.com/
We recently pleasure of telling both comcast AND verizon to f*ck off as we also have RCN in our area. Not only are they cheaper, but download speeds have are about 3x faster in some cases.
What comcast hasn't admitted is that they apparently throttle ALL downloads: I could only ever get about 750 KB/s when downloading large files, whereas the same files from the same sites (ftp's of linux distro ISO's from university servers) download at roughly 2400 KB/s via RCN. Ping times are basically the same. I always suspected this was happening and it was the first thing tested when we switched.
Another difference is the telephone service: comcast and verizon both use VOIP, verizon even disconnects your POTS wire even if you dont want them to. With RCN we get plain old POTS which is often the only thing working in a blackout.
Screw comcast and their "network management", screw verizon and their overpriced FIOS. RCN kicks their asses. THIS is free market competition in action.
It wasn't mine. I'm pretty sure I'm not interesting enough to bother tapping.
Oh, come on - people seem so damned intent on demonizing the US. You can pick and choose your examples of bad behavior but it doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Ask someone from Vietnam that now lives in the US about THEIR feelings before you blame it all on the US.
The world is not really a nice place and most of the people running various countries are not nice people. Although the kind of tactics described may be unsavory, they're often direct counters to similar tactics used by insurgents etc.. Not that this excuses all bad behaviors but generally these get exposed and dealt with.
Sorry, but Jeffersonian democracy does not spring fully formed from chaos.
If they buy it, they might well use it. Right now in the US there's a massive shift away from large, inefficient vehicles like SUV's and pickups toward small cars and hybrids, all due to the fuel prices and the net effect of which is to reduce demand for crude oil. It's in everyone's best interest for the oil companies to continue using the existing infrastructure for refining and distribution since infrastructure is *expensive* and the consumer pays for it in the end. I'm not sure exactly where the profit "sweet spot" is on the supply &s demand chart, but certainly they want to optimize sales volume vs price. Sell less oil = make less money in any case. Besides, Americans *like* big cars - history has proved that over and over.
Enter these oil producing bugs. You could take any kind of organic scrap and turn it into oil (so long as they don't use food crops for substrate and cause worldwide food riots, but that's another story). If the $50/barrel claim is accurate AND it turns out to be carbon negative, you have the greatest marketing pitch in the history of the world:
"Buy a Hummer and save the planet from global warming!"
Tangentially, you may be interested to know that when the post office was going to murder all of us with anthrax and the media was trumpeting on about how Cipro was our only hope, a quick look at a the literature revealed that doxycycline is both 1) equally effective and 2) no longer covered by patent and about a hundred times cheaper.