By mark.wilcox on October 1, 2007 5:07 PM
An interesting subtext on the current US/Iran relationship is our fascination with the current Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
It's interesting because we spend a lot of time covering him, yet he really doesn't hold much power (or at least not as much as we think). He doesn't really rule either the country or the military - the Mullahs do. And they're not exactly backing him at the moment (their relationship to him is very similar at the moment to the general US Republican party to Bush). I've generally said he's more like the Mayor of Tehran (though the actual Mayor of Tehran may in fact have more governing power :)).
And it occurred to me it's an identity management problem. We in the US hear "President" and think of the power of our own President.
It does not occur (or compute) to us that the "role" of President could have "separation of duties" policies different than our own.
I have various ideas on how to flesh out this analogy but I thought I'd throw this one over the wall and see what sticks.
By mark.wilcox on October 8, 2007 7:30 AM
Nothing related to identity management here I just wanted to use the blog to say that if you've got old personal computers lying around -- you should look into Staples recycling program. I used it over the weekend to clean out my stash of dead personal PCs that I had been trying to figure out what to do with. I'm not an overly concerned environmentalist by any means - though I do recognize that the chemicals in a system are potentially a pollution problem.
Though just as important - I figure the amount of copper and gold and similar metals in the system itself might now be worth as much as the system itself when it was new :).
And I stumbled upon that Staples will recycle them for you (using a 3rd party service) for $10. Sure free would be nice but there is a cost for Staples to handle all of this before the service picks it up and $10 seems reasonable to me.
Also they have a service in the store to transfer data from old systems to new. None of the systems I dropped off had anything left of them so I can't say anything about that service.
It really couldn't have been simpler. Drop off - pay the $10 (per PC/monitor) and go.
As they say "That was easy" :).
I really hope that this program gets the other similar chains to do similar programs.
