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Re:Iceland Looks to Create Information Haven on Saturday February 13, 2010 @01:50PM (#1123333)
How much do you know about Icelandic privacy law? How many test cases are there? How many Icelandic IP lawyers can you hire tomorrow?

There is a reason for basing your company/data in the US/London and it isn't just that they speak English.

Re:Iceland Looks to Create Information Haven on Saturday February 13, 2010 @01:48PM (#1123330)
It's also a risk of instability. What's the chance of a far-right/far-left government getting in next time and screwing you business process?
Re:Maybe Greece Should Go Bankrupt on Thursday February 11, 2010 @02:36PM (#1118526)
Interesting idea though for a small country like Tuvavlu - just sell the country to the highest bidder. If say an online gambling company wants to be sure of favorable treatment it could just buy the government wholesale instead of having to buy it one politician at a time.

It's only what say Lichtenstein, the channel islands, Bermuda have de-facto done.

Re:Vatican Economist: Recession caused by low birth rate on Thursday February 11, 2010 @02:30PM (#1118507)
Italy is in a typical 2-generation pattern.

The first generation of women to get the chance at education, real careers etc = birth rate plummets.

A generation (or two) later, there are women in politics and at the top of companies, introduce generous maternity leave, childcare etc. as in Scandinavia = birth rate rises again.

Re:Euro MPs block bank data deal with US on Thursday February 11, 2010 @02:20PM (#1118482)
The problem is when this is used to give eg. Raytheon the details of payments made to a European company for eg a radar system in some 3rd country - which lets them put in an advantageous position to bid for the next bit of work.
Re:Euro MPs block bank data deal with US on Thursday February 11, 2010 @02:12PM (#1118460)
Not since Suez, the last time the UK got to play at soldiers against the US wishes was the Falklands.

The UK has a huge amount of investment in the US, if the US were to treat the UK like it did France after they refused to join the 'coalition of the willing' it would do a lot more harm to the UK economy than boycotting Perrier did to France's

Re:Maybe Greece Should Go Bankrupt on Thursday February 11, 2010 @02:08PM (#1118453)
But bankrupt means you don't run the company/country anymore - they call in the receivers, and KPMG or whoever sell off the assets for scrap.
Re:Maybe Greece Should Go Bankrupt on Thursday February 11, 2010 @01:33PM (#1118335)
What exactly does it mean for a country to go bankrupt? Do the creditors get the assets?

If a chinese construction company is owed money for a government project do they get part of the country?

Re:Euro MPs block bank data deal with US on Thursday February 11, 2010 @01:26PM (#1118315)
If you don't have a treaty then you are part of the axis of evil - or at the very least they don't let your soldiers play with their soldiers and your politicians don't get to stand on the Whitehouse lawn looking like a world statesman.
Re:Do School Libraries Need Books? on Thursday February 11, 2010 @11:36AM (#1117962)
Research libraries are the only ones that DON'T need books.

Research libraries are about timely access to journal articles. Journals are available, indexed, abstracted etc online. By the time a paper makes it from Arvix to dead tree and then to the annual review abstract it's probably irrelevent to your research.

Re:Euro MPs block bank data deal with US on Thursday February 11, 2010 @11:32AM (#1117948)
No it was very deliberate on the UK's part.

The concerns were that there are a few members of certain Irish cultural organisations happily living in the US and it would wreck the peace process to extradite them, while NOT extraditing them would raise objections from the other side.

And, it's rather easier to bring a private prosecution for say war crimes in the UK - and the government didn't want the embarrassment of having to arrest various senior US politicians. This happened recently with an attempt by a human rights group to prosecute an Israeli gerneral over the west bank 'invasion'. The government couldn't stop the warrant being issued but got round it by the politican not leaving the plane when it landed in London and the police claiming that an El Al plane was Israeli soil and they didn't have jurisdiction.

Re:Keep doing that and you'll go blind on Thursday February 11, 2010 @11:21AM (#1117923)
In the real world - you don't really see 3D very much.

Your eyes are only 0.1m apart so anything more than 3-4m away isn't really in 3d anyway. Everything in the distance is handled by your knowledge of it's relative size and position - which works just as well on a 2d screen anyway.

Try it, cover one eye and look at the scene, you will see a difference on your desk, but no difference for the scene outside your window.

That's why most 3d movies have lots of things flying at you and other gimmicks - it's because otherwise there wouldn't be much 3d-ness