Doing some quick calcs, the inner rings would all lie within 1/6th mile of the South Pole; the starting rings would lie between 1 and ~1.16 miles away. (1 mile is the degenerate case, where you have to spin in place an infinite amount to "walk" 1 mile, so this probably shouldn't count.)

Of course, any elevation change in the terrain you're walking across would cause these rings to distort and contract inward. (E.g., the rings you calculate for a perfect sphere are going to be larger than the equivalent rings you calculate if you're going to count "walking distance" up and down slopes.)

The impact of actions like this is many many many times greater than any impact from the stupid waste on spying on Americans for the War on Terror.

The only spying that has worked has been that actually done in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and other real threats.

So, about time.

When minimum labor costs get too high for valuable or popular work, we end up with a lot of "volunteers." This happens all the time in science and medicine. In general, minimum wage hasn't had an impact on this (yet). Young scientists understand that working on a high profile project or in a "real world" clinic is good for your career. There's already enough downward pressure on scientific wages to prevent even the most jaded PI from offering a minimum wage position to paid technical staff. That all said, the average (non-graduate, but paid) student lab worker at UCLA makes $14/hr, with a $9/hr minimum. $15/hr is above the minimum salary for graduate researchers on campus. (Not picking on UCLA, their salary info is public and easy to search.)

So, we're getting into territory where minimum wage laws are putting cost pressure on scientific work. Interesting and a bit sad.

Will this even apply to schools? The federal and state governments usually don't apply all labor laws to universities.

I suppose University of Washington has the same issues. It would be nice to think that some of the more bloated administrative budgets would take a haircut to pay the student workers a bit more. It would be very sad if it simply became normal for young scientists to "work" for free their first few years.

I'm aware of the velocity of money and the perception that poor people pour money back into the economy rapidly while rich people don't (and it matches my personal biases, so I like the idea a lot) but -- I'm trying to figure out what the rich can do with money that actually takes it out of the economy. Unless they actually stick dollars in suitcases and store them in the wine cellar, almost anything else I can think of puts the money in someone else's pocket one way or another. Stuck in banks: used to back bank loans. Buying ferraris and Monets: money has gone to the previous owner. Investments, likewise. Taking money out of the country probably counts from a single country's economy standpoint, but not from a global standpoint. I'd be interested in hearing other people's thoughts on this.

But the press didn't show that.

Just like they did after WW II, pretending that all the superheroes who were women went "home".

Adapt. Because change is coming regardless.

Cygwin has changed a lot since you last looked at it. Cygwin's default terminal is now mintty.exe, which is a project based off of Putty's terminal.

I have used Cygwin daily at work and at home for ten years and have almost never seen the issues you are talking about. I'm sure they are real and affect people who do things differently than me. I don't typically download third party applications that depend on the Cygwin DLL. I use the complete official Cygwin package repository or (very rarely) compile from source. I use Eclipse, Java, ant, Cygwin, and am about as happy as I can be with my environment (I'd be happier writing Perl, but that's another story). I use Cygwin openssh every day and it works great.