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.

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?

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.

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.

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?

It just means they default on the loans. The creditors only get what the country chooses to give them (if anything), which is usually negotiated with some eye towards balancing the country's interests against the harm to their future ability to get loans if they screw the creditors too much. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_(finance)#Sovereign_def...

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.

Yeah, from that definition of bankruptcy it's a poor choice of words, because sovereign countries can't go bankrupt in the sense that bankruptcy law means. They're colloquially bankrupt in the sense of "not able to pay their bills", but not legally in the sense of "in court-supervised receivership"--- because there is no world government, and therefore no bankruptcy court with jurisdiction.

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.

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.

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.

[citation needed]

If this were the case, wouldn't it be better not to have the treaty in the first place? Then no questions are asked at all.

And what was wrong with the old treaty, apart from the inconvenience of having to produce enough evidence to satisfy a British judge?

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.

BS. It's the UK. They have international standing regardless of what the US thinks.

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

Canada refused to join the coalition of willing for Iraq and we are the US largest trading partner.

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

Agreed. This is one of the reasons a sufficiently large (non-3D) IMAX screen provides an incredibly immersive experience for all kinds of long distance "big" shows like "Everest" or my childhood favorite "The Dream is Alive". You get all the right visual cues to feel as though you're looking out an airplane window zooming over terrain or standing on a mountain peak. In my experience, the IMAX shows that have been less impressive have been the ones relying on lots of close-up work. Undersea ones in particular don't feel as immersive because the camera needs to be too close to the subject in order to have sufficient detail.

I would argue though that just because you don't see in 3D at a long distance, doesn't mean that the little area at 3-4m away isn't important for traditional movies. Most personal interaction is at that distance. In fact, a lot of the dialog scenes in movies are shot as though you're standing right there looking the actors in the face. I think good 3D in that range is also what pulls you into the scene and really makes you feel like you are there. There were a couple of scenes in Avatar where this was really well done, most notably when they were in the thick of the jungle and insects were buzzing around your head. That little detail really made me feel like I was standing there.