I am talking about the ISP I use at home. I have a static IP address with sites hosted on it. The ISP I use appears to not have a roadmap to go to v6.
Locate another ISP that offers you the service that you want and migrate. Tell the old ISP to fuck themselves sideways AFTER your traffic through them has dropped to negligible.
If there's no ISP in your area that offers you what you want, then you need to either move, or take up a hosting option.
But you knew all that. You're just having a moan, because you don't want that hassle, aren't you? But equally, you either choose to host these web sites, or you're making a profit from them. So you know what your options are.
Bestiality? I didn't know that Al Qaeda was known for intercourse with livestock. Do you have access to secret intelligence? Wikileaks might be interested.
Well-known saying concerning the Sotadic Zone: "a boy for pleasure, a woman for children, or a goat for warmth."
Actually, that's a bad example - it implies that Al Quaeda are a bunch of pederasts, not a bunch of zoophiles, and you could read it as meaning that they do have a pragmatic contact with reality. Sorry about that - we all know how important it is to demonise enemy non-combatants with the proper unfounded allegations.
you need legislation. World-wide, if you want it to be effective.
Why it'll be the US govt! [...]They invented it so they feel they already own it.
[SIGH] While DARPA was one of the biggest forces in creation of "the Internet", it wasn't by any means the only body from the only government involved. For a fact, significant chunks of development were done in London England and Manchester England, and the Nordic countries had non-trivial involvement too.
Typical Septic braggadocio. No wonder half the world hates you.
At some point the powers-that-be will simply say "you're not using it, give it back"/p>
Regardless of Fluffy's (very likely correct) point, by doing it voluntarily and ahead of time, substantial kudos to Interop. Free advertising doesn't hurt.
Also the non-trivial point that by having "played fair" ahead of any mandatory deadlines, Interop will be in a good position to go to the back of the queue for mandatory stripping of unused blocks.
Nobody is working on migration, at least where I am.
If it is in your area of competence, then you need to be saying, in writing, to your supervisor(s) that "this is likely to be a problem ; we need to address this and have a plan ; here are some ideas about where we need to be and how to get there". If you don't, you're failing in your professional competence ; if you supervisor tells you to STFU and get back to the salt mines, then he's failing in his professional competence. That may not protect you when it comes time to execute the innocent, but you still need to do it. Or just move to another job, if you're afraid to even raise the topic.
My ISP doesn't publish a migration plan.
In the "how to get there" part of the above position, you may need to include "get a new ISP", and present a list of options. Your account manager at the ISP might be really interested to know about the outcome of such discussions, because he may be able to provide you with useful information.
Any migration to IPv6 is years away for me.
Retirement is years away too, but do you plan for that? Getting your 100000th employee may be years away for the payroll department, but they possibly use 6- or even 7-digit employee numbers "just in case".
This would touch the American voter far more seriously than WW2 rationing ever did - and I think modern generations are far less willing to accept that sort of hardship.
Did the citizenship of America have significant rationing in WW2 at all?
There was rationing. I don't know how you define "significant." No one starved, but rubber, food staples, farm equipment, gasoline, and cloth were all rationed...there is a list.
Hmmm, didn't know that. Well, you live and learn. No doubt there was a black market, much grumbling and all the usual extras.
I notice that the coffee ration was only in effect for around a year. Might that imply that either there was too much complaint, or that the bureaucrats who initially set up the scheme had an overly pessimistic assessment of how the war would affect transport of that commodity.
Typewriters? Thought control... or more likely a rapid expansion of the military with the associated rapid expansion of the military bureaucracy.
And almost all over in August 1945. My parents both remember (different) things coming off ration until they were around 10, in the late '40s and early 50's.
In the very unlikely event that I get paid as a script consultant for a film noir set in the mid-40s, I'll have to remember to work in a reference to the rationing. I don't think that I'll hold my breath waiting on that job option though.
"the U.S. holds rare earth ore reserves of up to 13 million metric tons. By contrast, the entire world produced just 124,000 metric tons in 2009". That means we have roughly 104 years worth of rare earth ore reserves, I think we'll be just fine.
[ellipsis] for 103 years. During 100 of those 103 years, the problem will be utterly ignored because it's [beyond the end of the budget forecast | after the coming election].
During the next two years, strategic implications and options will be evaluated.
And in the third year, people will discover that reserve estimates were about 2% too high and the shit and the fan will come together, messily.
Does anyone remember the furore a couple of years ago when large parts of the oil industry, over a period of a couple of years, decreased their reserve estimates by between 20 and 50%? That was a perfectly reasonable response to better information and the inherent technical difficulties of making reserve estimates. Naturally, the markets screamed, and the senior management were well reminded to never, ever tell the truth to the fucking investors. But WGAF? Everyone knows now that reserve estimation for everything never has an error bar associated with it. Ever.
This would touch the American voter far more seriously than WW2 rationing ever did - and I think modern generations are far less willing to accept that sort of hardship.
Did the citizenship of America have significant rationing in WW2 at all?
Jumping in before Alioth and his hardware Spectrum ethernet add-on get there - play Oolite (not the little calcareous stones, but the multigalactic tradeing/ fighting space game) more-or-less natively on your platform of choice.
lol, I would love to see the UK try and sue the US military for libel, that would be pretty funny.
That's not how it would work. WikiLeaks as an organisation or a figurehead (Assange, most plausibly) would sue the (or a) person who stood up in public and said rude things about them ("libelled", as opposed to slandering them in private) in a UK court (if the libel was published in the UK, which I'd cheerfully testify that it was). It would then be up to the rest of the US military to choose whether to publicly support their mouthpiece, or to leave him hanging in the wind.
Since the US military has (rarely) prosecuted it's own soldiers and officers, then it is clear that they don't ALWAYS support their mouthpieces.
Somehow, I think that Wikileaks as an organisation may magnanimously choose to not destroy the life and finances of an individual like this, in stark contrast to the US military's standard modus operandi.
Yep. But there will be no more 100w bulbs in a couple year.
Bullshit. You've been listening to the news, but not thinking about it. The manufacture (and import) of incandescent light bulbs has been banned in certain countries from last year, so retailers are selling off their inventory of incandescent light bulbs and switching to supplying non-incandescent light bulbs instead (CFLs, HIDs, W-Hal etc.). The reason for this is that these non-incandescents are much more efficient users of electricity for providing visible light than incandescent light bulbs are. But that doesn't prevent anyone from designing and marketing a 100W non-incandescent light bulb. With current technologies, that would be approximately equivalent to a 1400W incandescent light bulb. 1400W light bulbs would be in the range used by stage lighting, warehouse and workshop illumination and that sort of thing. And they've always had problems with disposing of the excess heat, so I'd imagine that the non-incandescent equivalents would sell pretty readily. It's not as big a market as domestic lighting, of course, but it's a market.
When I was listening to that on the radio in it's first broadcast (yes, remember that HHGTTG was first of all a radio series, and it was only the TV series that messed up the colour balance before the books introduced better sound effects), I took it as a reference to the then-popular TV series "Citizen Smith" which itself was parodying early-70s revolutionary political rhetoric from the likes of Baader. As sure as blazes, DNA didn't cut that one from whole cloth, but took it from other comedians of the time.
So the parent refers to a geek culture hero in more ways than one.
Yes, DNA did. Repeatedly. So, probably, did Baader (within her culture).
As bad as LibreOffice is, at least it doesn't have a stupid ".org" at the end of it.
Though I loathe the.org as much as you do, I wouldn't call it "stupid". Someone other than the OpenOffice.org managers had got a working product that they called, perfectly reasonably, "OpenOffice", and the ".org" appendage was a rational, if ugly, kludge to get around the clash of branding. I'm surprised that no-one noticed the potential for a clash earlier in the re-branding from StarOffice, but shit happens. I'm trying to remember who it was who said that "those who condemn history are condemned to repeat it", but the fact that the saying is over-used doesn't make it less true. Namespace clashes happen quite often, from this fairly obvious one to the less obvious examples of marketing "Smeg" arse-wipes outside their native Sweden or the "Nova" car in Spain. Or, for that matter, translating the "Triumph Acclaim" for the German market. "LibreOffice" sounds to me as if someone has learned the ".org" lesson!
significant advantages: no vendor lock-in, archived material remains accessible (even if you have to write a converter to a newer format - which may well be worth it for government archives)
s / government / large / i.e. if you've got a large (however you define the length of that piece of elastic string in a variable gravity field) archive, then it may become worthwhile to write your own converter. But on the other hand, if the file format "from" and/ or "to" are popular and Open, then there's likely a converter already written.
competition between vendors means lower prices (free markets always work better for the buyer), etc.
"always"? That sounds as if the Dismal Science (a.k.a. Economics) has acquired a degree of quantitative, mathematically-supported certainty that it didn't have while I was having my breakfast coffee an hour ago. Do you know of some recent advances to de-dismalise the subject?
Keep in mind that c-type asteroids have an average albedo of 0.03. Basically, pretty damn dark.
Yes, that's pretty damned dark. It's comparable to the albedo of a lump of tarmac, or the side of the Moon that faces us. We all know how it was practically impossible to see the Moon until the invention of good enough telescopes (coincidentally, at about the time that tarmac was invented. Or was it a coincidence?), and that all those references to the Moon in Homer, the Babylonian mythologies and Shakespeare were cooked up in the 19th century by the Illuminati. Or... how's this for an idea : what matters more than albedo is angular size? If you consider angular size as being the main constraint, then you start to see that we'd be able to see Moon-sized objects waaaaaay out in the Solar System (Pluto is within the reach of an off-the-shelf amateur telescope), Ceres-size objects in the inner (sub-Jovian) Solar System, and hundred-metre-scale objects in near-Earth space. (Objects smaller than a few tens of metres are not globally important. The damage they're likely to cause on landing is comparable to a good hurricane, earthquake, volcano or a small war. At least some of those causes of damage are amenable to human control rather more easily. Sub-metre objects only kill occasional dogs and dent cars.)
Yes, there is an issue for medium scale (around 100m) objects, particularly those in orbits mostly Sun-wards of the Earth. However the orbital mechanics are such that these objects must advance or retard from the Earth's orbital position fairly rapidly, at which points they move away from being in the glare of the Sun. Look at the known orbit of Cruithne to see how delicately balanced an orbital object we can see already. There are projects in place searching for such objects, and they are being catalogued steadily. This doesn't guarantee that there isn't something out there "with our number on it", but the probability of such an asteroid appearing unexpectedly before the surveys are complete is small and decreasing. Such surveys would probably be aided by (for example) a telescope at one or other of the Trojan Lagrange points. But to significantly accelerate the survey completion, we'd need to have started design a decade or so ago and launched it in the recent past.
You could make a case for putting up such a scope(s) to drive down the minimum size of uncatalogued asteroid in the future, but would the benefits (reduced likelihood of a city-buster, or a village-buster, or a hamlet-buster?) outweigh the costs? There's a few PhD theses to be had answering that question properly, if you've got 3 years to devote to the problem.
As survey efforts continue, the probabilities of an undetected planet-killer are shifting towards the biggest threat being from a long-period comet hitting us. That's a much different ball game in terms of detection, because they're at rapidly changing (increasing!) angular size, randomly distributed on the sky, and we're unlikely to have more than a year or so to work at deflecting them. For coping with them, the necessary orbital infrastructure and technologies are such that it rapidly becomes a question of "wouldn't re-colonising the Earth from the space colonies be easier?" But we're making almost no concerted effort in the direction of putting some of the human species' eggs into a different basket.
What about the concentration of the platinum group metals... 80% or so are found in South Africa
Is that figure relative to reserves, production or export? Yes, south Africa has a large proportion of the worlds PGE by all of the above measures, but it's by no means a monopoly. The reserves and production of the Russian Federation are also major, though export is less (as they use a lot themselves), then there are non-trivial reserves in Canada (Sudbury complex)...
Actually, the situations are quite comparable : the most profitable mines for REEs, PGEs, hydrocarbons, and many other materials are concentrated in relatively small areas, but that doesn't mean that they're the only mines, just that they're the most profitable ones. If your motives are not solely profit (say, you include strategic availability criteria), then the amount of price support or import tarriff you need to make domestic (or nearby) extraction profitable is relatively minor. Of course, that will have certain lunatic right-wingers screaming about reds under the bed, but just how different would that be from today?
but yeah, the step from office 2k/2k3 to OO is much smaller then to the new ribbon shit in 2k7
Somewhere in the Dark Tower of Redmond, some former medium-level marketing manager is paying a price, in unendurable pain, for that decision by his superiors.
(Yes, that is utterly unethical. Which is why I believe it is true in spirit, if not in detail.)
I've been dragged, protesting, into the wasteland of having a TV in the corner of the room since I got married. Last year I was dragged, unwillingly, into replacing a perfectly functional 28" TV with a perfectly functional 40" TV (OK, I'll grant that that does display the holiday photos off a memory stick quite well, but that wasn't a purchase criterion but something I found out when I RTFM'd. Was that side-effect of the purchase worth the purchase price? I don't think so.) Last year I also had a friend try and fail to convince me that the difference between standard definition and high definition was noticeable - he's the hi-fi and hi-def buff, so if he doesn't have it set up properly, I don't care ; no sale. Went to see a 3-d movie last year too. Crap storyline and a headache. No sale.
So, next TV purchase around 2015 or 2020. Sounds good to me. By that time I ought to be able to unroll the TV from it's shipping box and just tape it to the wall.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds the perfect solution, particularly for children who want to grow up in a single-parent household.
I am talking about the ISP I use at home. I have a static IP address with sites hosted on it. The ISP I use appears to not have a roadmap to go to v6.
Locate another ISP that offers you the service that you want and migrate. Tell the old ISP to fuck themselves sideways AFTER your traffic through them has dropped to negligible. If there's no ISP in your area that offers you what you want, then you need to either move, or take up a hosting option.
But you knew all that. You're just having a moan, because you don't want that hassle, aren't you? But equally, you either choose to host these web sites, or you're making a profit from them. So you know what your options are.
Ig Porno awards, here i comes! (Cums?)
Where? (The igPorno awards, not your cum. That, I assume, is in your omphalos, where it should be. )
Ig Noble... Here we come!!!
I agree, this is almost a shoe-in to win an Ig Nobel!
Spelling mistake, or light-brown brogue reference?
Bestiality? I didn't know that Al Qaeda was known for intercourse with livestock. Do you have access to secret intelligence? Wikileaks might be interested.
Well-known saying concerning the Sotadic Zone: "a boy for pleasure, a woman for children, or a goat for warmth."
Actually, that's a bad example - it implies that Al Quaeda are a bunch of pederasts, not a bunch of zoophiles, and you could read it as meaning that they do have a pragmatic contact with reality. Sorry about that - we all know how important it is to demonise enemy non-combatants with the proper unfounded allegations.
you need legislation. World-wide, if you want it to be effective.
Why it'll be the US govt! [...]They invented it so they feel they already own it.
[SIGH] While DARPA was one of the biggest forces in creation of "the Internet", it wasn't by any means the only body from the only government involved. For a fact, significant chunks of development were done in London England and Manchester England, and the Nordic countries had non-trivial involvement too.
Typical Septic braggadocio. No wonder half the world hates you.
Still, massive kudos to Interop.
And Fluffy said :
At some point the powers-that-be will simply say "you're not using it, give it back"/p>
Regardless of Fluffy's (very likely correct) point, by doing it voluntarily and ahead of time, substantial kudos to Interop. Free advertising doesn't hurt. Also the non-trivial point that by having "played fair" ahead of any mandatory deadlines, Interop will be in a good position to go to the back of the queue for mandatory stripping of unused blocks.
Win-win for Interop.
Nobody is working on migration, at least where I am.
If it is in your area of competence, then you need to be saying, in writing, to your supervisor(s) that "this is likely to be a problem ; we need to address this and have a plan ; here are some ideas about where we need to be and how to get there". If you don't, you're failing in your professional competence ; if you supervisor tells you to STFU and get back to the salt mines, then he's failing in his professional competence. That may not protect you when it comes time to execute the innocent, but you still need to do it. Or just move to another job, if you're afraid to even raise the topic.
My ISP doesn't publish a migration plan.
In the "how to get there" part of the above position, you may need to include "get a new ISP", and present a list of options. Your account manager at the ISP might be really interested to know about the outcome of such discussions, because he may be able to provide you with useful information.
Any migration to IPv6 is years away for me.
Retirement is years away too, but do you plan for that? Getting your 100000th employee may be years away for the payroll department, but they possibly use 6- or even 7-digit employee numbers "just in case".
There was rationing. I don't know how you define "significant." No one starved, but rubber, food staples, farm equipment, gasoline, and cloth were all rationed...there is a list.
Hmmm, didn't know that. Well, you live and learn. No doubt there was a black market, much grumbling and all the usual extras.
I notice that the coffee ration was only in effect for around a year. Might that imply that either there was too much complaint, or that the bureaucrats who initially set up the scheme had an overly pessimistic assessment of how the war would affect transport of that commodity.
Typewriters? Thought control ... or more likely a rapid expansion of the military with the associated rapid expansion of the military bureaucracy.
And almost all over in August 1945. My parents both remember (different) things coming off ration until they were around 10, in the late '40s and early 50's.
In the very unlikely event that I get paid as a script consultant for a film noir set in the mid-40s, I'll have to remember to work in a reference to the rationing. I don't think that I'll hold my breath waiting on that job option though.
Thanks. Interesting.
and I said nothing because...it's the Germans. Who cares? ;)
The Sudetenlanders?
"the U.S. holds rare earth ore reserves of up to 13 million metric tons. By contrast, the entire world produced just 124,000 metric tons in 2009". That means we have roughly 104 years worth of rare earth ore reserves, I think we'll be just fine.
[ellipsis] for 103 years. During 100 of those 103 years, the problem will be utterly ignored because it's [beyond the end of the budget forecast | after the coming election].
During the next two years, strategic implications and options will be evaluated.
And in the third year, people will discover that reserve estimates were about 2% too high and the shit and the fan will come together, messily.
Does anyone remember the furore a couple of years ago when large parts of the oil industry, over a period of a couple of years, decreased their reserve estimates by between 20 and 50%? That was a perfectly reasonable response to better information and the inherent technical difficulties of making reserve estimates. Naturally, the markets screamed, and the senior management were well reminded to never, ever tell the truth to the fucking investors. But WGAF? Everyone knows now that reserve estimation for everything never has an error bar associated with it. Ever.
This would touch the American voter far more seriously than WW2 rationing ever did - and I think modern generations are far less willing to accept that sort of hardship.
Did the citizenship of America have significant rationing in WW2 at all?
a version of Elite and an emulator to run it on.
Jumping in before Alioth and his hardware Spectrum ethernet add-on get there - play Oolite (not the little calcareous stones, but the multigalactic tradeing/ fighting space game) more-or-less natively on your platform of choice.
What will their families use for food if they don't continue to get royalties until 100 years after the engineers are dead?
Each other?
A point admirably repeated by Douglas Adams in Hitchhikers Guide. (Not that it was a new point then.)
That's not how it would work.
WikiLeaks as an organisation or a figurehead (Assange, most plausibly) would sue the (or a) person who stood up in public and said rude things about them ("libelled", as opposed to slandering them in private) in a UK court (if the libel was published in the UK, which I'd cheerfully testify that it was). It would then be up to the rest of the US military to choose whether to publicly support their mouthpiece, or to leave him hanging in the wind.
Since the US military has (rarely) prosecuted it's own soldiers and officers, then it is clear that they don't ALWAYS support their mouthpieces.
Somehow, I think that Wikileaks as an organisation may magnanimously choose to not destroy the life and finances of an individual like this, in stark contrast to the US military's standard modus operandi.
Bullshit.
You've been listening to the news, but not thinking about it.
The manufacture (and import) of incandescent light bulbs has been banned in certain countries from last year, so retailers are selling off their inventory of incandescent light bulbs and switching to supplying non-incandescent light bulbs instead (CFLs, HIDs, W-Hal etc.). The reason for this is that these non-incandescents are much more efficient users of electricity for providing visible light than incandescent light bulbs are. But that doesn't prevent anyone from designing and marketing a 100W non-incandescent light bulb. With current technologies, that would be approximately equivalent to a 1400W incandescent light bulb.
1400W light bulbs would be in the range used by stage lighting, warehouse and workshop illumination and that sort of thing. And they've always had problems with disposing of the excess heat, so I'd imagine that the non-incandescent equivalents would sell pretty readily. It's not as big a market as domestic lighting, of course, but it's a market.
To the uninitiated : be sure of your sources when talking to the uninitiated.
When I was listening to that on the radio in it's first broadcast (yes, remember that HHGTTG was first of all a radio series, and it was only the TV series that messed up the colour balance before the books introduced better sound effects), I took it as a reference to the then-popular TV series "Citizen Smith" which itself was parodying early-70s revolutionary political rhetoric from the likes of Baader. As sure as blazes, DNA didn't cut that one from whole cloth, but took it from other comedians of the time.
Yes, DNA did. Repeatedly. So, probably, did Baader (within her culture).
Though I loathe the .org as much as you do, I wouldn't call it "stupid".
Someone other than the OpenOffice.org managers had got a working product that they called, perfectly reasonably, "OpenOffice", and the ".org" appendage was a rational, if ugly, kludge to get around the clash of branding. I'm surprised that no-one noticed the potential for a clash earlier in the re-branding from StarOffice, but shit happens.
I'm trying to remember who it was who said that "those who condemn history are condemned to repeat it", but the fact that the saying is over-used doesn't make it less true. Namespace clashes happen quite often, from this fairly obvious one to the less obvious examples of marketing "Smeg" arse-wipes outside their native Sweden or the "Nova" car in Spain. Or, for that matter, translating the "Triumph Acclaim" for the German market.
"LibreOffice" sounds to me as if someone has learned the ".org" lesson!
s / government / large /
i.e. if you've got a large (however you define the length of that piece of elastic string in a variable gravity field) archive, then it may become worthwhile to write your own converter.
But on the other hand, if the file format "from" and/ or "to" are popular and Open, then there's likely a converter already written.
"always"? That sounds as if the Dismal Science (a.k.a. Economics) has acquired a degree of quantitative, mathematically-supported certainty that it didn't have while I was having my breakfast coffee an hour ago. Do you know of some recent advances to de-dismalise the subject?
Have you ever considered, you know, ASKING them?
"Hey Pablo, does my butt look big with this plug in?"
But you know better than to answer that sort of question already. I hope.
Yes, that's pretty damned dark. It's comparable to the albedo of a lump of tarmac, or the side of the Moon that faces us. We all know how it was practically impossible to see the Moon until the invention of good enough telescopes (coincidentally, at about the time that tarmac was invented. Or was it a coincidence?), and that all those references to the Moon in Homer, the Babylonian mythologies and Shakespeare were cooked up in the 19th century by the Illuminati. ... how's this for an idea : what matters more than albedo is angular size? If you consider angular size as being the main constraint, then you start to see that we'd be able to see Moon-sized objects waaaaaay out in the Solar System (Pluto is within the reach of an off-the-shelf amateur telescope), Ceres-size objects in the inner (sub-Jovian) Solar System, and hundred-metre-scale objects in near-Earth space.
Or
(Objects smaller than a few tens of metres are not globally important. The damage they're likely to cause on landing is comparable to a good hurricane, earthquake, volcano or a small war. At least some of those causes of damage are amenable to human control rather more easily. Sub-metre objects only kill occasional dogs and dent cars.)
Yes, there is an issue for medium scale (around 100m) objects, particularly those in orbits mostly Sun-wards of the Earth. However the orbital mechanics are such that these objects must advance or retard from the Earth's orbital position fairly rapidly, at which points they move away from being in the glare of the Sun. Look at the known orbit of Cruithne to see how delicately balanced an orbital object we can see already. There are projects in place searching for such objects, and they are being catalogued steadily. This doesn't guarantee that there isn't something out there "with our number on it", but the probability of such an asteroid appearing unexpectedly before the surveys are complete is small and decreasing. Such surveys would probably be aided by (for example) a telescope at one or other of the Trojan Lagrange points. But to significantly accelerate the survey completion, we'd need to have started design a decade or so ago and launched it in the recent past.
You could make a case for putting up such a scope(s) to drive down the minimum size of uncatalogued asteroid in the future, but would the benefits (reduced likelihood of a city-buster, or a village-buster, or a hamlet-buster?) outweigh the costs? There's a few PhD theses to be had answering that question properly, if you've got 3 years to devote to the problem.
As survey efforts continue, the probabilities of an undetected planet-killer are shifting towards the biggest threat being from a long-period comet hitting us. That's a much different ball game in terms of detection, because they're at rapidly changing (increasing!) angular size, randomly distributed on the sky, and we're unlikely to have more than a year or so to work at deflecting them. For coping with them, the necessary orbital infrastructure and technologies are such that it rapidly becomes a question of "wouldn't re-colonising the Earth from the space colonies be easier?" But we're making almost no concerted effort in the direction of putting some of the human species' eggs into a different basket.
Is that figure relative to reserves, production or export? Yes, south Africa has a large proportion of the worlds PGE by all of the above measures, but it's by no means a monopoly. The reserves and production of the Russian Federation are also major, though export is less (as they use a lot themselves), then there are non-trivial reserves in Canada (Sudbury complex) ...
Actually, the situations are quite comparable : the most profitable mines for REEs, PGEs, hydrocarbons, and many other materials are concentrated in relatively small areas, but that doesn't mean that they're the only mines, just that they're the most profitable ones. If your motives are not solely profit (say, you include strategic availability criteria), then the amount of price support or import tarriff you need to make domestic (or nearby) extraction profitable is relatively minor.
Of course, that will have certain lunatic right-wingers screaming about reds under the bed, but just how different would that be from today?
Somewhere in the Dark Tower of Redmond, some former medium-level marketing manager is paying a price, in unendurable pain, for that decision by his superiors.
(Yes, that is utterly unethical. Which is why I believe it is true in spirit, if not in detail.)
I've been dragged, protesting, into the wasteland of having a TV in the corner of the room since I got married.
Last year I was dragged, unwillingly, into replacing a perfectly functional 28" TV with a perfectly functional 40" TV (OK, I'll grant that that does display the holiday photos off a memory stick quite well, but that wasn't a purchase criterion but something I found out when I RTFM'd. Was that side-effect of the purchase worth the purchase price? I don't think so.)
Last year I also had a friend try and fail to convince me that the difference between standard definition and high definition was noticeable - he's the hi-fi and hi-def buff, so if he doesn't have it set up properly, I don't care ; no sale.
Went to see a 3-d movie last year too. Crap storyline and a headache. No sale.
So, next TV purchase around 2015 or 2020. Sounds good to me. By that time I ought to be able to unroll the TV from it's shipping box and just tape it to the wall.