That rusted shut long ago.

The Pensacola Beach Blog covers the reaction to the oil spill by our Congresscritter, Jefferson Miller, the Chumuckla Chucklehead.

Miller prefers:

• Corporations over Cobia
• Tar balls over Turtles
• Petroleum over Porpoises
• Natural Gas over Nature’s Grace
• Profits over Paradise

He voted for drilling in Florida’s coastal waters before, and the huge oil spill hasn’t altered his opinion in the slightest.

The BBC gives him space to expound: Apple boss Steve Jobs explains ban on Flash

…

Mr Jobs said Flash was made for an era of “PCs and mice” and performed poorly when translated to run on touchscreen smartphones and handheld devices.

He also criticised the technology for being only under the control of Adobe.

The letter comes soon after Flash creator Adobe announced it was ending its efforts to make tools that translate Flash code into programs that can run on Apple gadgets.

Adobe’s announcement followed a change to the terms and conditions of the licence that software developers must sign when writing code to run on Apple products.

That change banned developers from using the automatic tranlsation tools Adobe had been developing.
…

So, a control freak complains about other control freaks. He complains that Flash works as badly on Macs as Quicktime works under Windows. Steve still won’t forgive Adobe for being so nasty about Postscript fonts, i.e. wanting to get paid when they were used.

The only things that prevents the world from realizing what jerks Apple and Adobe really are is the presence of Microsoft.

Update: the BBC is now reporting some oil has come ashore in Louisiana.

The BBC reports that US military joins Gulf of Mexico oil spill effort. This is to some extent the result of the revised estimate on the amount of oil coming from the leak from 1000 barrels per day to 5000 barrels per day, but what is a 500% increase among friends.

The article also reports that the well didn’t have the remotely controlled shut-off valve required by some countries because the US regulators didn’t think it was necessary. After all these huge spills are rare… well relatively rare… OK, not widely reported, in the Gulf of Mexico. You see, only two of the top five oil spills have occurred in the Gulf [See the sidebar near the bottom of the article. The Exxon Valdez is number 5].

I guess it would have been too expensive to have included an old fashioned gate valve at the well head, one that was over-sized so you could move the drill through it. Something that ROV could shut with just force and a long bar if necessary.