  Over $\C$, Henry Laufer classified all taut surface singularities. We adapt
and extent his transcendental methods to positive characteristic. With this we
show that if a normal surface singularity is taut over $\C$, then the normal
surface singularities with isomorphic dual graph over algebraically closed
fields of characteristic exponent $p>1$ are taut for all but finitely many $p$.
We conjecture that this is actually "if and only if".
