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Politics : Foreign Policy Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (7885)	12/22/2006 4:37:22 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15987

Tim, anything that people achieve, starts with the idea, usually quite a small idea. Which is then built on when it proves successful and popular. The USA has a constitution, for example. <having a good constitution is a rather small step on that path. > It is now treated with near-fanatical adulation, with the "founding fathers" near-deities. I have inspected a big statue of Thomas Jefferson for example, right there in Washington. King George II swears to uphold the constitution while hordes look on. You might say a constitution is a rather small step. Yes, it is. Which is nice because it makes it a very easy one to take. Big steps are much more difficult, such as launching a constellation of Globalstar satellites which might or might not find sufficient takers at the expected prices. With the right constitution, it's hard to see why anyone would NOT sign up. It's like CDMA. It didn't exist. Irwin Jacobs was driving back on a long trip from northern California and thought of CDMA as a mobile phone solution. So they did some fourier transforms, wrote a few patents, and software, hacked some silicon and hey presto, it worked. Then hordes of others came clamouring to sign up to the constitution and now there are hundreds of millions [even billions since it seems GPRS is based on QCOM technology too] of users and soon to be billions using CDMA2000 and W-CDMA versions. The idea was exceedingly popular. Just one bloke driving and thinking. That's all it takes to start. Then a licensing constitution. A modest royalty fee. All the benefits of membership start flowing to those signatories. Easy peasy. Mqurice