I did read the RTFM, and I didn't call anybody to track down the sources. I'm not a reporter for TIME, unfortunately.
Time is a conservative publication -- it's not middle of the road. If time says that four guys from the US can't go to some international telecom meeting in Guatemala-freakin'-city because some administration official knows that they made political contributions (and wants to make an issue of it), this IS news and not very good news. It's Stasi-style stuff, kinda like what pre-WW2 russia was doing -- if you wanna do business, you can't do anything that doesn't benefit the party.
As a libertarian, you should be very bothered about this, shouldn't you?
This is the ultimate in big government intrusion and exertion of power over innocent individual citizens who have broken no law. They've used their consitiutional rights to make political contributions to a presidental campaign -- republicans do this too, yunno, with fewer donors and fatter checks.
The dems lost. The extra money these guys threw at the Kerry cause didn't put enough of the votes in the dem column did it? Yet, because they exercised their constitutional rights to support a legitimate political cause, that information alone is being used to bar them from what's really an economic strategy meeting and engineering mixer for telecom business and engineering people... in Guatemala-freakin'-city.
You ought to be pretty po'd. One guy only made a $250 donation. You can bet that when the political establishment rolls left again, your libertarian donations may preclude you from some business activity. Not because dems or republicans used to do that kind of stuff in the past, but because republicans started it and it's now fair game. This activity breaks new ground, because these conferences have never been filtered like this in the past.
It must be easier to dismiss it all as "poison" and "bitter negativity", I guess, than to listen, blow it off and move on.
How is making a political contribution to the campaign of a democratic presidental candidate evidence of "bitter hatred"? Maybe you didn't get the memo, but the election's over. Strong feelings crop up in election cycles, sure, but I have yet to talk to a single democrat that hasn't gotten over the fact that this is how it worked out. According to you, half of the country is consumed by "bitter hatred". I don't see it.
The desire of these telco folks to participate in the event should be indicative of a willingness to listen and participate in the international business climate as it stands today.
Actually, since it'd be General Jar Jar Binks by then, I'm picturing a variant of Mail Call, but instead of Gunny, you'd get something like:
"Hiya much welcome to thee Mail Call. Meesa get a subspace transmission from Qinxshplote Brnftbbl of Vega 6 who askee 'Dear General, the empire has installed eleven new plasma cannons in my town. They look cool, but I've never seen them in action. Can you tell me how they were developed and how they're used?"
"Well Qinxshplote, you know meesa like blowins stuffsa kaboom, so meesa have deese nabooean watermelons strapsed to mynocs to show yousa what it all about..."
What does a soyuz look like (on the outside) after it makes bumpdown?
We tend to see pictures of the cosmo/astronauts whenever one of these things lands, but I'm curious about how the vehicle withstands the head of re-entry and what it looks like when it's all over.
Thank you for copying the latest anti WALMART/MICROSOFT/PHARMA/TOBACCO press release and posting it, sans formatting, sans editing, sans your-original-opinion.
Look, my company has a PAC. I don't care about the PAC.. your PAC, my PAC, any PAC. I care about how gay rights are handled in the workplace, and that gay/bi/les/tg/tv people can work and contribute alongside everyone else.
The dollar figures you show are less than 1% of all donations to the respective parties. If you keep your eye on conservative or liberal money, thinktanks gobble up an order of magnitude more than these paltry contributions your press release laid out.
Really, that's it, and I hope there's no quid pro quo from a religeous standpoint. Microsoft will make money regardless. The question is "Do you want employers to have the freedom to fire/not hire gay people as they wish?"
In my book, you oughta get hired and fired based on your skills, your challenges, your ability to work well with others, your opportunities and your ability to execute well. Being gay, to me, or l/bi/tg/ts simply is not a factor.
Gosh, I'm right with you up until the last sentence. Microsoft products are all over the govenment landscape already -- what more contracts could there be that they don't already have?
Now, without intending to add fuel to the fire, it would certainly make sense to me if The Administration mentioned that they were considering moving some systems to Linux, but would probably reconsider that idea if Microsoft were to similarly reconsider its support for this little dinky employment bill in the state of Washington.
... I'm not sure that so much needs to be in the base unit. The processor is in there, as is a hard disk and memory, and you're carring that same configuration from one shell to another as if the use-cases for the shells are the same.
I like the idea of shells, but I'm not sure how much I like the idea of having to use the same processor & memory in each shell. Why not keep the processor & memory in the shell, so that the processor is appropriate to what you're trying to do? If I'm walking around just looking at an e-book or surfing the web, I might only need a 1 GHz CPU, not much RAM and maybe a garden-variety graphics card. If I'm using a laptop for traveling, I'd want to use a faster CPU with on-chip wifi (a la pentium M) and maybe a slightly better graphics card. If I'm gaming at my desktop, I'd want a really juiced CPU and scads of low-latency RAM plus a pretty powerful graphics card. The use cases are different in each shell-type, as I see it.
What's common among all the shells is that the data on disk would be great to stay the same. So, in my estimation, the key part to put in the base unit is the hard disc. There's be a bunch of other crap in there, sure, to be able to successfully operate in different power and CPU circumstances as needed by the shells, but the data you march around with or move from shell to shell would be the best thing to stay the same.
I have a vision of a base unit that's something like an iPod, and you slap that thing into whatever shell you happen to need at the time. It'd be even cooler if you could outfit the shells with your own componentry picks (RAM, Processor, and graphics). The cost of barebones shells would be considerably less, I'd guess.
Actually, Quark, Inc., makers of the market-dominating prepress application QuarkXPress, was founded by Tim Gill, gay, who also established the Gay & Lesbian Fund for Colorado. When I worked there, prior to Tim's departure from R&D, Quark was the leader in anti-discrimination workplace practices.
Not that there's any connection, but Quark was (at the time) very much a Mac shop.
I agree that a wiki can be a good place to start, but once you've made a couple passes to gather ideas and rough them, a more formalized document has offered better payoff for me in the past.
I may not be reading you correctly, but you appear to say that you change your design to fit how you're implementing the project. That's pretty bad mojo and would suggest that the design was not very good to begin with. Requirements and Design docs should be pretty much solid once implementation begins, and should need very little extra editing from the time the implementation phase begins.
What you may be referring to is what I'd call Project and/or Implementation documentation that records how things got put together, what pitfalls or challenges made the design tough to implement, or how progress and timelines unraveled. For these notes, a wiki is a great vessel to store the stuff until a more formal document (near the end of implementation) is needed.
We did this for a couple projects at my last job, and it started out just fine, but entropy eventually set in and allowed the documents to drift, for a few reasons:
folks would either forget to update the pages with all of the new information or forget to delete/rewrite old content
the tendency to start new wiki pages is hard to resist, so what starts out as a cohesive set of docs smooshes out into a big soupy unorganized blob, even if it is updated regularly
the review of changes in a wiki-based approach tends to be less formalized than a requirements/design process that's conducted on paper (with signoffs). You can tell someone to review a wiki page and make corrections (which they may or may not do). On the other hand, a paper document that needs initials/sigs is something physical that lands on a desk, sits there waiting for attention, and eventually gets some kind of review and the application of some ink that says that it was reviewed.
depending on which type of wiki you're running, images (putting them in the doc, recording the changes) can be a hassle. Plain old Word (or OpenOffice Write) docs seem to be able to handle diagrams much more easily.
I used to think that everything in software could be done without paper, but there are some things that paper is really good for. Wiki can be good for a lot of things, too, but my experience has taught me that it's not the best tool for requirements/design.
I was a big fan of the early 80s BBC TV show and enjoyed the characters in it. When I think of Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent I think of the those guys. As you were making the film, how much of an influence was the television production on the film, particularly with regard to the casting and portrayal of the characters but also with regard to production design?
Yunno, you might have something there, though as far as mexican immigrants not paying income tax you've forgotten about Medicare and Social Security taxes, which are not federal income taxes. Regardless of whether your income bracket says you have to pay State/Federal taxes or not, an employer must pay the Social Security and Medicare taxes and these are not subject to any refund when tax returns are filed.
Social Security and Medicare are pretty big expendiatures, so the added cash flow for those programs would no doubt be welcome.
My ex father in-law is from Brownsville, TX, which shares the border with the Mexican city of Matamoros. It's common practice for pregnant women in Matamoros to cross the border to have their kids in Brownsville and return to Matamoros once the kid's been hatched. It gives the kid citizenship, which makes it much easier for him/her to negotiate the border in the future. The odd thing is that many of these families choose to stay in Mexico, not necessarily because it's so great down there but because that's their home, where the family and all the relatives are. From a cultural standpoint, it's just more commfortable, too.
There's an unmentioned fact in all this hullabaloo, too. There are a great many businesses that are started here in the US by Mexican nationals, and not all of them comply fully with business regulations -- partly out of fear of being discovered, shut down and deported -- partly also in order to operate outside of the view of the IRS and state departments of revenue. My uncle, who's in the garment business, once tried to sell apparel to some of the mexican clothing shops here in the Denver area. He found that many (more than half) of those he called on did not have a license to collect taxes. A few of those who did were sporting forgeries (they had ID numbers that were either not real or had been assigned to other businesses). So after a couple days of having most of the shop owners he visited agree to buy goods and then pull out fist-sized rolls of cash to pay for them (which is NOT the way legitimate retailers buy their goods in this country), he got the idea and never went back to that part of town.
What I'm driving at is that while it's important to legitimize folks that come over here to work from Mexico, it'd double the power of the legitimization effort if Mexican-owned businesses could be brought into the fold as well. The people part is easier, but the business part is equally important, imho.
I think you may have missed a couple points regarding Antarctica.
Antarctica is continously inhabited all year round. I'm not sure what your definition of "colonized" is, but a dozen different countries keep people there all through the year.
Human presence in the Antarctic is governed by the Antarctic Treaty, which was laid out in the International Geophysical Year of 1957. The provisions of the treaty state that Antarctica cannot be developed by nations, ever, for commercial means. That is, you can't mine anything there, can't dump anything there, and you can't harvest animals there. Animal and mineral specimens can be taken for research purposes, but their removal from Antarctica is strictly regulated. If you decide to take a job down there, everything you bring (even the feces you create while there) must be shipped out. No base or research facility on the continent is permitted to be "permanent" -- that is, anything that's built there must be moveable or dismantleable. The treaty's overarching provision was that Antarctica is there for conducting research only, and no nation can colonize it or plant a flag that establishes any border. There are lines that separate one country's pie-slice area from another's, but these are not borders in any practical sense of the word.
I, frankly, would never want the Antarctic to be developed such that it became "habitable" -- it'd be disgusting. Oddly enough, there are private companies that bring "eco-tourists" (more like "eco-destroyers") down there on cruise ships and airplanes. The air space is not controlled, and there is no port of entry since there are no national territories. These companies assume all risks in getting down there (and the risks are huge) and they leave fuel dumps and pollutants that they may or may not be able to ship back with them, depending on market or weather conditions. Fortunately, the logistics are so difficult that the number of these firms is pretty small, but it's not a good thing.
So while Antarctica will never be colonized, it may serve as a template for handling territorial questions and environmental issues on the moon, for example, and perhaps mars, too, eventually.
When buzz started to develop about the thing late least year, I was pretty interested in how it would shape up. Apart from the dead/stuck pixel snafu that's been widely covered, I haven't heard anything bad about the display and it sounds like you experience was positive.
With regard to media, I've always had a bone to pick with Sony on their desire to stick to their own proprietary formats. The memory stik was a pretty early entrant into the compact RAM storage segment, but nobody apart from Sony (as far as I know) has been able to license it. Non-Sony PCs, for example, that have built-in flash card readers for cameras, mp3 players, digital recorders, etc., never have the stik option. If someone knows of one, fill me in, but it appears that Sony's very concerned about diluting the brand if they license the stik to others. It's nothing but a storage device, and if it were really the greatest thing since sliced bread, I would have hoped that Sony would have wanted as many of the things to be used in as many player/camera/recorder/handheld/phone platforms as possible. Apparently not.
What I was hoping, months ago, was that Sony would incorporate a small HD inside the unit, a la iPod. Sony has great purchasing clout with hardware manufacturers, and having a shrimpy little 10 or 20 GB disk drive stuck inside would go a long way -- they billed the thing as a little multimedia powerhouse and with multimedia apps being big hogs for storage I kinda thought the HD option would have been a no-brainer.
Of course, when reality sets in I realize that the power consumption of an HD, in such a little device with a pretty power-hungry display and an optical drive, would probably have pissed off many people who wanted better battery life. It had to be comfortably small to be a handheld, and it had to be able to take a certain amount of abuse, I suppose.
I've been considering buying one ever since launch, but I'm not enough of an early adopter to take the plunge. Your observations have given me food for thought, though. Thanks for sharing them.
... if I were to actually order these haha-funny thinkgeek items, would I be 1) charged for the item, 2) charged, then refunded, or 3) not charged at all?
I love hearing that good ol' "(J)ust don't do it with my tax dollars." You hear that one from conservatives all the time, though there are a few liberals that use it, too.
Here's a few other things that are already being done with your (and everyone else's) tax dollars which (presumably) you must like:
Millions of local tax dollars every year to protect neo-nazis and white supremacists when they hold their yearly rallies
Tens of millions of dollars to conduct and write bogus DOE studies supporting Yucca Mountain as a long-term nuclear storage facilities.
Tens of billions of dollars for post Sept. 11 airport security systems that still cannot prevent gun- and knife-toting passengers on commercial airplanes.
More than a hundred billion of federal tax dollars every year to protect the poppy fields and opium farmers in the nation that supplies 75-80% of the world's heroin (Afghanistan).
Maybe you're okay with these, but I confess to being less-than-thrilled.
I'm all for people paying attention to where taxes go, but subsidizing college education for academically-resourceful yet economically-challenged high school kids (even if they are undocumented) is a far better allocation of resources, imho. It's been proven time and time again that foreigners (whether here illegally or not) who attend high school and college in the US become successful and productive members of our society.
Here's a Rand study about immigrants and education:
As a (somewhat unrelated) side note, the conservative folks who seem to want to pick and choose where their tax dollars go (not to undocumented illegal alien (read: Mexican) lawbreakers!) are oddly also the same people that don't want to document them so that they CAN become taxpayers that stay here. Great. What you get then is an "Envios a Mexico" money-sending station in every taco stand, tire store and boteria in the Latino parts of town -- where are those American dollars going? Yup, down to old Mexico.
As much as I don't care for it, it so happens that my rep is THE Tom Tancredo, and he'd rather lock down the border and shoot those fence-jumpin' spanish-jabbering brown-faced sonsa-bitches than find a way to make 'em taxpayers. I find it kinda ironic, actually, since he claims to be a fiscal conservative, too.
The "War on Drugs" was not a creation of the Clinton administration. It's actually a very very old propaganda effort, and most of its proponents have been republicans.
From my own formative years, I remember when Reagan re-invigorated the Nixon anti-drug efforts after Ford let them fade out. Carter was very much anti-drug (still is), but thought that there were more pressing concerns for the executive.
If you do your homework (which it seems you do not), you'll see that your perceived "democratic legislation of morality" has historically (over the last 40-50 years or so) included legalized abortion, civil rights and equal rights for women.
Sadly, it is republicans that want to pass laws that restrict personal freedoms and civil rights... controlling who you marry, how you die, what you watch, where you can go, what you can see and where you can travel. Now that they have majority, this is also their great opportunity to force christian values on everyone -- not by bringing them to church in fellowship, but by only passing laws that pass a christian fundamentalist litmus test. For shame.
I did RTFA, and while I can sympathize with his motives for developing broad international consensus on things like IPv6, address allocation, spam laws, etc., I think that he's off the mark (and a bit too paternalistic) in how he seeks to achieve what he wants.
IMO, the marketplace shoud determine which standards get adopted and what the most efficient ways are for address allocation. Sure, governments have a role to play. But where we've seen nations restrict the type and content of 'Net access available to their citizenry (China, Iran), we've also seen persons in those countries look for ways to get around or soften the impact of those restrictions.
He talked about how the ITU is 140 years old, but the ITU was created to plan, build and expand on telegraph lines. We're so far past those challenges, by now. I'd rather see the ITU pay more attention to the planning, expansion and maintenance of stable telephone networks worldwide than mucking about with the 'Net.
The quote in the synopsis comes from the end of the interview, and it pretty much shows what he's missing. He's missing the fact that the 'Net may have been developed as a civil defense project, but it grew and evolved so quickly precisely because the government didn't try to shape it any more than it had to. His assumption that you have the 'Net precisely because the government wants you to have it (because it's not explicitly denied) is whack doubletalk.
When I started BBSing 20+ years ago with an acoustically-coupled 300baud modem, the government had no idea what I was doing, and really didn't care, anyway. No government agency told me "Here's this civil defense network that links the county bomb shelters. You can use it to play poker and look at pr0n. Go for it!" Instead, I learned to use it by hanging out with the other kids who liked to play with the telephone and camp out with the teletype after school, sending messages to the other kids at other schools on the Jeffco CDN. It was fun because nobody was watching and there were no rules other than what most kids already learn at home -- "be nice and don't break stuff".
The UN has many great roles to play in the world, but expanding the territory of the ITU mandate is just dopey. IMHO.
Sperm-sorting been done with animal husbandry for a long time. There's a machine that takes a tube of semen and sorts the sperm by weight into two vessels. It's done with compressed air as I recall.
The centerfuging was the last step in the process.
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Time is a conservative publication -- it's not middle of the road. If time says that four guys from the US can't go to some international telecom meeting in Guatemala-freakin'-city because some administration official knows that they made political contributions (and wants to make an issue of it), this IS news and not very good news. It's Stasi-style stuff, kinda like what pre-WW2 russia was doing -- if you wanna do business, you can't do anything that doesn't benefit the party.
As a libertarian, you should be very bothered about this, shouldn't you?
This is the ultimate in big government intrusion and exertion of power over innocent individual citizens who have broken no law. They've used their consitiutional rights to make political contributions to a presidental campaign -- republicans do this too, yunno, with fewer donors and fatter checks.
The dems lost. The extra money these guys threw at the Kerry cause didn't put enough of the votes in the dem column did it? Yet, because they exercised their constitutional rights to support a legitimate political cause, that information alone is being used to bar them from what's really an economic strategy meeting and engineering mixer for telecom business and engineering people... in Guatemala-freakin'-city.
You ought to be pretty po'd. One guy only made a $250 donation. You can bet that when the political establishment rolls left again, your libertarian donations may preclude you from some business activity. Not because dems or republicans used to do that kind of stuff in the past, but because republicans started it and it's now fair game. This activity breaks new ground, because these conferences have never been filtered like this in the past.
I don't see it as a good thing, really.
It must be easier to dismiss it all as "poison" and "bitter negativity", I guess, than to listen, blow it off and move on.
How is making a political contribution to the campaign of a democratic presidental candidate evidence of "bitter hatred"? Maybe you didn't get the memo, but the election's over. Strong feelings crop up in election cycles, sure, but I have yet to talk to a single democrat that hasn't gotten over the fact that this is how it worked out. According to you, half of the country is consumed by "bitter hatred". I don't see it.
The desire of these telco folks to participate in the event should be indicative of a willingness to listen and participate in the international business climate as it stands today.
"Hiya much welcome to thee Mail Call. Meesa get a subspace transmission from Qinxshplote Brnftbbl of Vega 6 who askee 'Dear General, the empire has installed eleven new plasma cannons in my town. They look cool, but I've never seen them in action. Can you tell me how they were developed and how they're used?"
"Well Qinxshplote, you know meesa like blowins stuffsa kaboom, so meesa have deese nabooean watermelons strapsed to mynocs to show yousa what it all about ..."
We're not alone, you and I, you can bet.
We tend to see pictures of the cosmo/astronauts whenever one of these things lands, but I'm curious about how the vehicle withstands the head of re-entry and what it looks like when it's all over.
Can anyone point me to some decent pictures?
Thanks
Look, my company has a PAC. I don't care about the PAC.. your PAC, my PAC, any PAC. I care about how gay rights are handled in the workplace, and that gay/bi/les/tg/tv people can work and contribute alongside everyone else.
The dollar figures you show are less than 1% of all donations to the respective parties. If you keep your eye on conservative or liberal money, thinktanks gobble up an order of magnitude more than these paltry contributions your press release laid out.
Really, that's it, and I hope there's no quid pro quo from a religeous standpoint. Microsoft will make money regardless. The question is "Do you want employers to have the freedom to fire/not hire gay people as they wish?"
In my book, you oughta get hired and fired based on your skills, your challenges, your ability to work well with others, your opportunities and your ability to execute well. Being gay, to me, or l/bi/tg/ts simply is not a factor.
Now, without intending to add fuel to the fire, it would certainly make sense to me if The Administration mentioned that they were considering moving some systems to Linux, but would probably reconsider that idea if Microsoft were to similarly reconsider its support for this little dinky employment bill in the state of Washington.
Food for thought, anyway.
I like the idea of shells, but I'm not sure how much I like the idea of having to use the same processor & memory in each shell. Why not keep the processor & memory in the shell, so that the processor is appropriate to what you're trying to do? If I'm walking around just looking at an e-book or surfing the web, I might only need a 1 GHz CPU, not much RAM and maybe a garden-variety graphics card. If I'm using a laptop for traveling, I'd want to use a faster CPU with on-chip wifi (a la pentium M) and maybe a slightly better graphics card. If I'm gaming at my desktop, I'd want a really juiced CPU and scads of low-latency RAM plus a pretty powerful graphics card. The use cases are different in each shell-type, as I see it.
What's common among all the shells is that the data on disk would be great to stay the same. So, in my estimation, the key part to put in the base unit is the hard disc. There's be a bunch of other crap in there, sure, to be able to successfully operate in different power and CPU circumstances as needed by the shells, but the data you march around with or move from shell to shell would be the best thing to stay the same.
I have a vision of a base unit that's something like an iPod, and you slap that thing into whatever shell you happen to need at the time. It'd be even cooler if you could outfit the shells with your own componentry picks (RAM, Processor, and graphics). The cost of barebones shells would be considerably less, I'd guess.
Then again, maybe I'm full of it.
Not that there's any connection, but Quark was (at the time) very much a Mac shop.
What I want to know is 1) where's the cigar?, and 2) if you stick a magnet on him does he sing "She'll Be Comin' 'Round the Mountain"?
Technically, 3) it looks like the fan is on the underside and I don't recall seeing a vent on the back -- was there one?
A very cool case. Very cool. I want one.
I may not be reading you correctly, but you appear to say that you change your design to fit how you're implementing the project. That's pretty bad mojo and would suggest that the design was not very good to begin with. Requirements and Design docs should be pretty much solid once implementation begins, and should need very little extra editing from the time the implementation phase begins.
What you may be referring to is what I'd call Project and/or Implementation documentation that records how things got put together, what pitfalls or challenges made the design tough to implement, or how progress and timelines unraveled. For these notes, a wiki is a great vessel to store the stuff until a more formal document (near the end of implementation) is needed.
I used to think that everything in software could be done without paper, but there are some things that paper is really good for. Wiki can be good for a lot of things, too, but my experience has taught me that it's not the best tool for requirements/design.
It's just my experience, though. YRMV.
"God not only plays dice with the universe, but sometimes throws them where they can't be seen." - Stephen Hawking
Thanks,
See: http://www.blinkenlights.de/
Social Security and Medicare are pretty big expendiatures, so the added cash flow for those programs would no doubt be welcome.
My ex father in-law is from Brownsville, TX, which shares the border with the Mexican city of Matamoros. It's common practice for pregnant women in Matamoros to cross the border to have their kids in Brownsville and return to Matamoros once the kid's been hatched. It gives the kid citizenship, which makes it much easier for him/her to negotiate the border in the future. The odd thing is that many of these families choose to stay in Mexico, not necessarily because it's so great down there but because that's their home, where the family and all the relatives are. From a cultural standpoint, it's just more commfortable, too.
There's an unmentioned fact in all this hullabaloo, too. There are a great many businesses that are started here in the US by Mexican nationals, and not all of them comply fully with business regulations -- partly out of fear of being discovered, shut down and deported -- partly also in order to operate outside of the view of the IRS and state departments of revenue. My uncle, who's in the garment business, once tried to sell apparel to some of the mexican clothing shops here in the Denver area. He found that many (more than half) of those he called on did not have a license to collect taxes. A few of those who did were sporting forgeries (they had ID numbers that were either not real or had been assigned to other businesses). So after a couple days of having most of the shop owners he visited agree to buy goods and then pull out fist-sized rolls of cash to pay for them (which is NOT the way legitimate retailers buy their goods in this country), he got the idea and never went back to that part of town.
What I'm driving at is that while it's important to legitimize folks that come over here to work from Mexico, it'd double the power of the legitimization effort if Mexican-owned businesses could be brought into the fold as well. The people part is easier, but the business part is equally important, imho.
Antarctica is continously inhabited all year round. I'm not sure what your definition of "colonized" is, but a dozen different countries keep people there all through the year.
Human presence in the Antarctic is governed by the Antarctic Treaty, which was laid out in the International Geophysical Year of 1957. The provisions of the treaty state that Antarctica cannot be developed by nations, ever, for commercial means. That is, you can't mine anything there, can't dump anything there, and you can't harvest animals there. Animal and mineral specimens can be taken for research purposes, but their removal from Antarctica is strictly regulated. If you decide to take a job down there, everything you bring (even the feces you create while there) must be shipped out. No base or research facility on the continent is permitted to be "permanent" -- that is, anything that's built there must be moveable or dismantleable. The treaty's overarching provision was that Antarctica is there for conducting research only, and no nation can colonize it or plant a flag that establishes any border. There are lines that separate one country's pie-slice area from another's, but these are not borders in any practical sense of the word.
I, frankly, would never want the Antarctic to be developed such that it became "habitable" -- it'd be disgusting. Oddly enough, there are private companies that bring "eco-tourists" (more like "eco-destroyers") down there on cruise ships and airplanes. The air space is not controlled, and there is no port of entry since there are no national territories. These companies assume all risks in getting down there (and the risks are huge) and they leave fuel dumps and pollutants that they may or may not be able to ship back with them, depending on market or weather conditions. Fortunately, the logistics are so difficult that the number of these firms is pretty small, but it's not a good thing.
So while Antarctica will never be colonized, it may serve as a template for handling territorial questions and environmental issues on the moon, for example, and perhaps mars, too, eventually.
Thanks for posting the link.
When buzz started to develop about the thing late least year, I was pretty interested in how it would shape up. Apart from the dead/stuck pixel snafu that's been widely covered, I haven't heard anything bad about the display and it sounds like you experience was positive.
With regard to media, I've always had a bone to pick with Sony on their desire to stick to their own proprietary formats. The memory stik was a pretty early entrant into the compact RAM storage segment, but nobody apart from Sony (as far as I know) has been able to license it. Non-Sony PCs, for example, that have built-in flash card readers for cameras, mp3 players, digital recorders, etc., never have the stik option. If someone knows of one, fill me in, but it appears that Sony's very concerned about diluting the brand if they license the stik to others. It's nothing but a storage device, and if it were really the greatest thing since sliced bread, I would have hoped that Sony would have wanted as many of the things to be used in as many player/camera/recorder/handheld/phone platforms as possible. Apparently not.
What I was hoping, months ago, was that Sony would incorporate a small HD inside the unit, a la iPod. Sony has great purchasing clout with hardware manufacturers, and having a shrimpy little 10 or 20 GB disk drive stuck inside would go a long way -- they billed the thing as a little multimedia powerhouse and with multimedia apps being big hogs for storage I kinda thought the HD option would have been a no-brainer.
Of course, when reality sets in I realize that the power consumption of an HD, in such a little device with a pretty power-hungry display and an optical drive, would probably have pissed off many people who wanted better battery life. It had to be comfortably small to be a handheld, and it had to be able to take a certain amount of abuse, I suppose.
I've been considering buying one ever since launch, but I'm not enough of an early adopter to take the plunge. Your observations have given me food for thought, though. Thanks for sharing them.
Here's a few other things that are already being done with your (and everyone else's) tax dollars which (presumably) you must like:
Maybe you're okay with these, but I confess to being less-than-thrilled.
I'm all for people paying attention to where taxes go, but subsidizing college education for academically-resourceful yet economically-challenged high school kids (even if they are undocumented) is a far better allocation of resources, imho. It's been proven time and time again that foreigners (whether here illegally or not) who attend high school and college in the US become successful and productive members of our society.
Here's a Rand study about immigrants and education:
http://www.rand.org/publications/MR/MR718/
Here's another (a little dated, but applicable) paper from the IRDA that touches on economic topics:
http://www.idra.org/Newslttr/1996/May/Abel.htm
As a (somewhat unrelated) side note, the conservative folks who seem to want to pick and choose where their tax dollars go (not to undocumented illegal alien (read: Mexican) lawbreakers!) are oddly also the same people that don't want to document them so that they CAN become taxpayers that stay here. Great. What you get then is an "Envios a Mexico" money-sending station in every taco stand, tire store and boteria in the Latino parts of town -- where are those American dollars going? Yup, down to old Mexico.
As much as I don't care for it, it so happens that my rep is THE Tom Tancredo, and he'd rather lock down the border and shoot those fence-jumpin' spanish-jabbering brown-faced sonsa-bitches than find a way to make 'em taxpayers. I find it kinda ironic, actually, since he claims to be a fiscal conservative, too.
The "War on Drugs" was not a creation of the Clinton administration. It's actually a very very old propaganda effort, and most of its proponents have been republicans.
See: http://faculty.ncwc.edu/toconnor/pol/495lect03.htm
From my own formative years, I remember when Reagan re-invigorated the Nixon anti-drug efforts after Ford let them fade out. Carter was very much anti-drug (still is), but thought that there were more pressing concerns for the executive.
If you do your homework (which it seems you do not), you'll see that your perceived "democratic legislation of morality" has historically (over the last 40-50 years or so) included legalized abortion, civil rights and equal rights for women.
Sadly, it is republicans that want to pass laws that restrict personal freedoms and civil rights... controlling who you marry, how you die, what you watch, where you can go, what you can see and where you can travel. Now that they have majority, this is also their great opportunity to force christian values on everyone -- not by bringing them to church in fellowship, but by only passing laws that pass a christian fundamentalist litmus test. For shame.
IMO, the marketplace shoud determine which standards get adopted and what the most efficient ways are for address allocation. Sure, governments have a role to play. But where we've seen nations restrict the type and content of 'Net access available to their citizenry (China, Iran), we've also seen persons in those countries look for ways to get around or soften the impact of those restrictions.
He talked about how the ITU is 140 years old, but the ITU was created to plan, build and expand on telegraph lines. We're so far past those challenges, by now. I'd rather see the ITU pay more attention to the planning, expansion and maintenance of stable telephone networks worldwide than mucking about with the 'Net.
The quote in the synopsis comes from the end of the interview, and it pretty much shows what he's missing. He's missing the fact that the 'Net may have been developed as a civil defense project, but it grew and evolved so quickly precisely because the government didn't try to shape it any more than it had to. His assumption that you have the 'Net precisely because the government wants you to have it (because it's not explicitly denied) is whack doubletalk.
When I started BBSing 20+ years ago with an acoustically-coupled 300baud modem, the government had no idea what I was doing, and really didn't care, anyway. No government agency told me "Here's this civil defense network that links the county bomb shelters. You can use it to play poker and look at pr0n. Go for it!" Instead, I learned to use it by hanging out with the other kids who liked to play with the telephone and camp out with the teletype after school, sending messages to the other kids at other schools on the Jeffco CDN. It was fun because nobody was watching and there were no rules other than what most kids already learn at home -- "be nice and don't break stuff".
The UN has many great roles to play in the world, but expanding the territory of the ITU mandate is just dopey. IMHO.
The centerfuging was the last step in the process.
I found this paper:
http://www.cals.ncsu.edu/an_sci/extension/animal/r epro/spw96-1.htm