speleo_engr

Two countries close to Antarctica, Chile and Argentina, are not signatories to the Antarctic Treaty and have territorial claims. Both of these countries already have a decent amount of natural resource extraction (especially Chile), so one would reason that if it is worth mining, they would be.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_Antarctica https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilean_Antarctic_Territory

One could also look at the interior of Greenland, which is Danish territory. No serious development of any kind occurs there - it's all along the coasts.

The US National Map has better, more recent topos. These GeoPDFs allow turning on/off layers (e.g., satellite image, PLSS grid lines, etc). You can also download historic topos.

http://nationalmap.gov/ustopo/

"If you do have the misfortune to have to work with SPARC"

So true... I work with the LEON (GPL implementation of SPARC) and have the occasional very bad day of SPARC asm code.

Those are good. The only one I have worth mentioning was a conversation that went like this:

Manager: So you like caving?

Me: Yeah, I was able to go on a month long expedition last summer to the mountains of Peru.

Manager: I can't believe your old job didn't fire you for taking a month off.

Me: I gave a lot of notice and had the vacation saved up.

Manager: That would never happen here. I have a problem leaving for a week.

In retrospect, I really appreciated the honesty. Declined that offer without hesitation.