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Sorry can't reply to your post for some reason.

I'm not american but have multiple copies of my own country's passport. I keep one 'clean' by not using it when I visit terrorist countries - ie cuba and anywhere that uses squiggly writing - and enter america on that one.

In the 70s and 80s it was trickier. If you had an Isreali entry stamp you couldn't go to any arabic country. I was even refused entry to Egypt once because some Egyptian immigration moron (they aren't all American) thought my Nepali trekking permit was Hebrew.

Similalry if you had a S African stamp you couldn't visit most african countries or anywhere describing itself as the 'democratic republic of'

South america was in theory tricky since every little tin pot dictator was always against every other little tin pot dictator but in practice their immigration was never organised enough to stop you

That's a little tricky - the earth being round and all. You can't put a satelite in orbit around New York (in spite of it being the center of the universe - orbital mechanics doesn't work like that)

Your only real option is how close to the equator you orbit them - you can get away with about 3 sats if you only want to cover the region very near the equator, unfortunately only poor people live there. As you improve coverage further north you have to add more satelites in higher inclination orbits. Iridium already limits this - the coverage in the far north is very poor, which is ironic since it's one of the few places where you really need sat phones!

Compared to the cost of installing conventional telecoms Iridium's $6Bn looked very cheap.

Their big mistake was assuming that mobile phone usage would be a limited special market alongside landlines. They didn't consider that much of the 3rd world would simply skip over the cost of installing landline infrastructure and cell phones would be the cheap alternative so leading to a much larger demand and cheaper phones and calls.

The main advantage is that optical aberations increase quickly with sensor size (upto diameter^4). That's why your cell phone is able to take pictures with such a crappy lens.

What Olympus did was exactly the opposite of the article - they gave themselves the ability to make lenses that were much smaller and cheaper, or much more ambitious in performance for the same size/cost - by gambling that semiconductor progress would make smaller sensors just as efficient as large ones.

In the 80s when only yuppies had cell phones and coverage was limited to a few square miles of financial districts could you have predicted 100% GSM coverage in Africa?

Most countries allow you to have multiple passports - it's useful when you have lots of business trips that need visas to 3rd world countries that take 6weeks to process the visa.

I work in mining and in the bad-old-days we used to have to keep multiple passports, to keep SAfrican, Isreali, Chilean etc entry stamps separate.

Now I tend to keep one passports just for the USA - it's easier than explaining to the TSA that visiting a country that doesn't speak English (like Jesus did) doesn't make one a terrorist.

Ironically the only problem I have had is that after being forced to get a brand new passport because the USA demanded RFID - I was questioned for 30mins on my lack of travel history!

I was part of a school exchange program to Moscow for the 1980 olympics - as part of the pre-trip briefing we were told not to write anything about our visit while we were there because anything we wrote would be checked by the Russians when we left and we could get our hosts into trouble.

Of course being from a free country we laughed at this ....

Part of this is the employers fault - they don't want CS grads they want specific start-on-monday skills. It's no more reasonable to want a CS grad that knows VB than it is to hire a Mech-Eng and expect that they know how to change the fanbelt on a 1987 ford.

The mean reason behind the article is that 'CS' grads covers a wide range of courses, a lot of which allow anyone to walk in off the street and start doing CS.

Imagine if the headline said, "50% of MBAs can't find jobs" - but in the small print they admitted that they included all business-type courses, including learning to type for beginners.