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Seriously, I can't wait for DMCA part II to happen. It's not a matter of if, but when, we end up with another ridiculous law that takes away consumer rights. Clinton (obviously no longer in the running) said she didn't discuss net neutrality because she didn't even consider it a priority. How is effectively making it so that you can take a freeway to get to a big box store and a freaking gravel road with potholes to get to a mom & pop store not important? Does she not realize that small businesses continue to employ over half of our country? My cousin runs a small music shop. She is able to compete with big companies like Guitar Center by making about half of her sales through her website... but if it takes 2 minutes to load her site - no one will go there.

The real problem is that not only are the candidates clueless about the technology but they're clueless about the cause and effect relationships.

They went down by over 14% in the last three months alone.

A minor dip in a long-term trend.

In 2000, the median value of an American single family home was $119,600. After the recent slump, the median value of a home in the first quarter of 2008 is $196,300. A 64% increase in eight years - I'm pretty sure salaries haven't risen that fast.

I purchased my house in 1995, for $130,000. Houses on my street - smaller houses than mine - have gone for upward of $260,000 in the past few years, and houses in the neighborhood have gone for over $300,000. Salaries haven't doubled in that time.

Yes, if you believed "real estate can only go up!" and bought too much house, or fell for a balloon mortgage, it sucks to be you. But that doesn't change the fact that housing prices have risen much faster than salaries over the past decade or so.

I was only stating the way I see things. You're correct our "educated public" is not very educated only 28% have a bachelors degree as of 2004 http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/004214.html I would like to see a way for our public to become more educated without the public having to give everyone and anyone a free education. Needless to say I don't know of a way.

$608 billion (+4.5%) - Social Security
$386 billion (+5.2%) - Medicare
$209 billion (+5.6%) - Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)
$324 billion (+1.8%) - Unemployment/Welfare/Other mandatory spending
$69.3 billion (+0.3%) - Health and Human Services

These add up to nearly $1.6 TRILLION DOLLARS!!! The current Population Clock puts the US population at 304,249,871, and the 2000 Census figures report 105,480,101 households. Doing the math, that's $15,168 dollars per year per household. The 2007 poverty level statistics show that $15,168/yr would exceed the poverty level for many family situations WITHOUT ANYONE IN THE HOUSEHOLD HAVING TO WORK A SINGLE HOUR. It also happens to exceed working all 2080 work hours per week at minimum wage BY $3000/year! ($5.85 * 2080 = $12,168).

$608 billion (+4.5%) - Social Security
$386 billion (+5.2%) - Medicare
$209 billion (+5.6%) - Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)
$324 billion (+1.8%) - Unemployment/Welfare/Other mandatory spending
$69.3 billion (+0.3%) - Health and Human Services

These add up to nearly $1.6 TRILLION DOLLARS!!! The current Population Clock puts the US population at 304,249,871, and the 2000 Census figures report 105,480,101 households. Doing the math, that's $15,168 dollars per year per household. The 2007 poverty level statistics show that $15,168/yr would exceed the poverty level for many family situations WITHOUT ANYONE IN THE HOUSEHOLD HAVING TO WORK A SINGLE HOUR. It also happens to exceed working all 2080 work hours per week at minimum wage BY $3000/year! ($5.85 * 2080 = $12,168).

$608 billion (+4.5%) - Social Security
$386 billion (+5.2%) - Medicare
$209 billion (+5.6%) - Medicaid and the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP)
$324 billion (+1.8%) - Unemployment/Welfare/Other mandatory spending
$69.3 billion (+0.3%) - Health and Human Services

These add up to nearly $1.6 TRILLION DOLLARS!!! The current Population Clock puts the US population at 304,249,871, and the 2000 Census figures report 105,480,101 households. Doing the math, that's $15,168 dollars per year per household. The 2007 poverty level statistics show that $15,168/yr would exceed the poverty level for many family situations WITHOUT ANYONE IN THE HOUSEHOLD HAVING TO WORK A SINGLE HOUR. It also happens to exceed working all 2080 work hours per week at minimum wage BY $3000/year! ($5.85 * 2080 = $12,168).

Aside from your claim about results, which has already been discussed, you should note that the reason private schools cost less on average is that most are subsidized by churches. Private schools without such support cost slightly more per student than public eduction.
http://www.capenet.org/facts.html
http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/010125.html

Of course not. But reality is usually not that simple.

No, it's not. But that's what it boils down to. The people who are most capable, who provide the most value make the most money.

But there are other people that get a lot of money working in an inefficient multicorp, earning an above average salary doing exactly nothing of any value. Those people don't get my respect.

No, they don't do anything of value to *you*. The corporations they work for disagree.

If you really think those people don't do anything and provide no value, why don't you apply for their jobs? Once you explain to the interviewer that the job doesn't entail doing anything of value, I'm sure they'll waive the requirements. If it's really that simple, people who aren't rich have only themselves to blame.

The larger a company grows, the less productive it's employees get. Imagine a Small Business, maybe 40 employees. Everyone knows everyone. The company is a team. Made up numbers: direct employee productivity is maybe around 60-80%.

Well, I guess we're in luck. The *vast* majority of businesses have less than 100 employees.

A. There were 119,117,000 housing units in the United States in 2001. Approximately 106,261,000 were occupied as regular residences and 12,855,000 were vacant or seasonal.
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/housing/ahs/ahsfaq.html

According to the Census Bureau, there are about 4.8 million businesses with 2-500 employees, and about 19.5 million companies with only a single employee. They don't have the clout of IBM, but there sure is a bunch of them. It'd be interesting to see what they do to the statistics.

I have no source, this is what I was taught in school 10 years ago. Your numbers are probably more recent and more right than mine. According to http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html the world population was 6,600,372,992 in 2007 and 6,677,563,921 in 2008, which results in +2.44 persons per second. Which actually means the world population has regained its level from before Cyclone Nargis in only 11.4 hours.

ZOMG - if the current trend continues we're all dooooooomed! History is full of ridiculous disaster predictions from extending some trend to infinity, ignoring the complexity of the real world. Here in the real world, the rate of populaiton growth is decreasing rapidly, and most moden nations either have decreasing populaitons are (lie the US) are compensating only with immigration. Data here: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html

World population is levelling off very quickly. http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/img/worldgr.gif

More data here: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html but basically people stop having lots of kids once their nation becomes industrialized, and most "first world" nations have a significant population decline if you ignore immigration. Japan in particular has a serious problem with population decline.

World population is levelling off very quickly. http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/img/worldgr.gif

More data here: http://www.census.gov/ipc/www/idb/worldpopinfo.html but basically people stop having lots of kids once their nation becomes industrialized, and most "first world" nations have a significant population decline if you ignore immigration. Japan in particular has a serious problem with population decline.

So if we wanted to power say, California, which as of 2006 has 36,457,549 people we would need something around (36,457,549/4=28044 so 28044*4=) 112,177 wind turbines. That is stupid ridiculous!

Why would we not have 2 or 3 nuke plants and achieve the same goal with way less environmental impact, better impact on the tax payers wallets and we wouldn't kill all the birds in the state!

Wind power 'feels good' but when you start running the numbers it gets dumb real quick.

It was already a law that residents had to pay sales tax on out of state items. But with no real way for the state to enforce it, most taxpayers are not going to bother.

Also, per resident this is a very small amount, which makes it almost silly to bother reporting on your state tax return. According to the first article, "The provision is meant to contribute about $50 million to the $122 billion budget" In 2006, the population of NY state was 19,306,183. By those numbers, each resident would be paying an average of $2.59. In NY, sales tax is different IN EACH COUNTY! (Statewide it varies between 7% and 9%). This means that a $24.95 book would have $1.74-$2.24 tax owed to NY state. Who would bother? Granted, some people order hundreds of dollars worth or merchandise off of Amazon, so it would be higher for some people, that's not the point. Obviously, not many people pay their share, which is why the greedy politicians passed this law.

One HIGHLY invasive option is for the state of New York to sue Amazon and force them to hand over the addresses of NY residents. Heck, they could probably even sue for the entire purchase history per year, per account. I am not sure that New York could enforce it even then, though. What are they going to do, knock on each Amazon shoppers door and threaten to take them to take them to jail if they don't pay two bucks?

(I am not saying that this is a GOOD option, but since it was already a law, I am surprised that the state of NY did not try to get their grubby mitts on taxpayers money this way. Bring on the flames...)

Hopefully Amazon will win this.

From the summary:

'Lots of Chinese people now view the Western media, human rights groups, and Western leaders' criticisms of their country as part of the Racist Western Conspiracy to Stop China From Being Successful.'

Wh...WHAT?

I posted this on CNET, but I might as well post it here as well:

Is there anything better than sensational bogus statistics? Some politicians claim states would lose half a trillion dollars in tax by 2011? Do they think most Americans didn't make it past 2nd grade math? Let's examine that claim with real math and logic:

Here are the e-commerce retail sales for the last 9 years:

2007 $136B
2006 $108B
2005 $86B
2004 $69B
2003 $57B
2002 $44
2001 $34
2000 $29
1999 $15

Source: http://www.census.gov/eos/www/archives.html

That's a total of $578 billion in revenue for 99-07.

Now, if we assume an average of 7% sales tax, and we assume that ALL items are taxable (which in most states they are not, like food and clothing), you would need $7.14 trillion in revenue to accumulate sales tax of $500 billion (which is the claimed lost tax by 2011).

That would mean that e-commerce would have to magically jump from $136B in revenue to an average of $1.6 trillion each year for 08-11. I mean, seriously, their figures are not even in the same ballpark as reality.

Personally, I think this is interesting: according to this spreadsheet forecast from the US census bureau (and a quick SUM), the total number of deaths in the US for 2006-2007 was 2,820,930. So you could say that almost 1 in 100 people who died in that period did so from a gunshot wound. That sounds...high, to me.

manage[s] to not make more than me. I find myself wondering if they're just lazy, or if we have that many drug addicts, or that many people addicted to government assistance. Are there really people content to run a cash register at the local Quick-E-Mart, who are willing to do nothing to better themselves and improve their family's quality of life?

[looks at this page]

That taxpayer-paid-for page says that as of 2006 there were 126,316,181 "housing units" in the US. The ownership rate in 2000 was 66.2%, so perhaps that was higher in 2006 with all these craptastic loans. So maybe um 75%?

That would make 94,737,136 homes.

So, if 1 in 100 were in some kind of foreclosure, that would not be "millions of households" BUT if every single one of those households have an average of 4.2 people in them (two adults plus the requisite 2.2 kids (doubtful)) then you might be looking at "millions of people."

HOWEVER, a vast quantity of these craptastic loans were given to people that were trying to make.money.fast in the housing market. So many many of these places being foreclosed upon aren't owner occupied.

I dunno, do the math on that one.

But so what? If they are the owners then they were renters before and couldn't get a loan to make.money.fast, and now they got a craptastic loan because both sides of the deal were greedy, and now the people living in the places have to go back to being renters and the people that gave the loans should have known better so they should eat it.

But of course, it's an election year! That means responsible taxpayers will be paying for all of it. wheee!

But for Bobby Joe redneck in the middle of the US with NO ONE around for miles, the kind of people who make up half the population of the US?

The rumors are true, Bobby Joe redneck doesn't exist. Even 20 years ago, he didn't exist:

http://www.bus.wisc.edu/realestate/images/resources/us_density.gif

(from http://www.bus.wisc.edu/realestate/resources/resdownl.asp)

Many of the areas that show less than 10 people per square mile are federally owned land. No one lives there. Also, note that something like 80% of US citizens live in urban areas:

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/GCTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=01000US&-_box_head_nbr=GCT-P1&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U&-format=US-1

Apparently, the problem is more related to people living in the little world that they made up in their heads.

Compare that to kids in the average US city, where 50% do not graduate high school.

I agree that the article doesn't express any bias in it's tone by just reporting the "facts". The bias comes from the choice of what "facts" to state. The statistics in the article are for graduation within only 12 years. The statistics would claim that a child who repeated kindergarten doesn't count when he graduates after 13 years of public school. And the stats are still rather obviously difficult to believe Come on, Detroit only graduates 24% of students. You believe that ? Only 70% of students graduate nation wide ? You believe that ?

How about the US Census Bureau statistics: "85 percent of adults age 25 and over had completed at least high school, an all-time high" http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/education/001863.html

How about Child Trends: "Dropout rates of young people ages 16 to 24 in the civilian, non-institutionalized population gradually declined between 1972 and 2005, from 15 percent to a low of 9 in 2005."

Choosing what nonsense to report also exposes a bias.

So overall how much have the chinese spent on the 2008 summer olympics?
 
Around $2 billion, which is less than a week's trade imbalance with the US. So don't worry, they can afford it easily. Where were the last 10 things made that you bought recently?

On this general subject, the Census Bureau has far exceeded its authority with the American Community Survey. If any here has received this, I'm sure you know whereof I speak. Intrusive is an understatement. Here is a link to it (a pdf file on the CB's website):

http://www.census.gov/acs/www/Downloads/SQuest08.pdf

We decided a long time ago that we'll answer the constitutionally mandated enumeration questions only. All the additional data gathering we have ignored. From when they used such data for the WWII round up of Americans of Japanese ancestry to their recent loss of nearly 500 laptops full of data and posting of some 60 thousand peoples' data on the web (including SSNs), we simply do not trust them. Besides, I'm not about to send out unencrypted or give to some random data collector all my personal details (health, finance, home culture, travel habits, SSN, etc.).

If you do not fill out the form, you get regular phone calls for a month - some after 10PM and some before 6AM (at least we did). Then, if you draw the short straw, you get regular visits for a month - up to twice daily near the end of the period (again, we did). Were I to do that to someone, no doubt I could be arrested.

The bizarre thing here is, much of the data is readily available from other federal departments. But that of course is too sensible to use. Fortunately, the web is proving useful in co-ordinating the increasing resistance to this intrusion.

I agree with your sentiment, however the problem with the "modern" census is, for many citizens, it goes far beyond the simple enumeration of all citizens proscribed by the Constitution and has become a multipage survey asking questions about plumbing, commute times, what languages are spoken at home, who raises your children, where you work, etc. It's so extensive, the government estimates it will take a person 38 minutes to complete the survey!
See for yourself: http://www.census.gov/dmd/www/pdf/d02p.pdf

• Both homeowner and rental vacancy rates are at all-time highs nationwide, see here.
• We are seeing year-over-year (factoring out seasonal differences) price declines nationwide, see here.
• Even supposedly immune markets are now seeing declines, see here (two years ago CAR would never have admitted it was even possible for prices to decline).

We are now going to see at least the same amount of declines. This is just beginning.

Two years ago, virtually no one would even admit that there was a housing bubble. One year ago, some were starting to acknowledge the bubble, but at the same time insisting that it wouldn't bust (and that even if it did, prices would not go down very much). Now, few would deny that there was a bubble, or that it did burst and cause price declines, however people still insist that the resulting shit-storm is confined to the "sub-prime" market. The layers are denial are getting peeled back one-by-one. The next one to go will be this ridiculous notion of it being purely a "sub-prime" problem.

> With the U.S. population having soared to 350 million
Close, only 270 million

I hate to be the one to break it to you, but in most of the US, the middle class is extinct. The few people making enough to be called a middle class family ARE "relatively affluent" as the GP poster stated. the 2006 census shows that the median human being in this country is making $26k. Depending on where that person lives, that's only barely above the poverty level.

In downtown Seattle for instance, you can expect to pay around $900 a month for a crappy studio without a kitchen. A few miles out of town, you could get a small house for rent for about $1400 a month, or a decent one-bedroom apartment for $700-900.

Move much further and you're looking at in excess of a two hour commute due to the effective death of the carpool in the state. At this point, making that $26k a year, it becomes financially infeasible to drive to work, so you need to buy bus passes (not cheap either) and spend hours on the bus every day.

Now walk down to your corner grocery or gas station, buy a local paper if they still exist in your area. Take a look at the job listings. Find 3 entry level jobs which pay more than $18,000 a year without a college education. It's going to be difficult in most areas.

The people who used to be lower middle to middle class are now the upper end of the lower class. The jobs that used to seat you squarely in a financially secure area are now below average. It's getting hard to make a living doing work which used to be considered good pay.

If you can afford a new Prius, realize that 80% of America cannot while maintaining their current standard of living, and that therefore you can consider yourself "reasonably affluent."

What we first need to do is change the FCC so that it's not headed by appointed officials, but rather by elected representatives.

The FCC's power has grown far beyond it's original intention (regulating airwaves frequencies in the U.S.). Apparently they only do things in response to complaints. Or at least that's how it once was. But the really fucked up thing is 99% of complaints come from one organization.

So essentially this one single organization is responsible for most of the - detrimental in my opinion - changes to what is allowed to be broadcast or not.

It's not the popular decision. People just think it is because this one fucked up organization has such broad powers and people just assume that it's the popular opinion. It is not.

The organization responsible for all this? The Parent's Television Council. The sick thing is they're proud to be the nation's most influential advocacy organization yet have barely a million members. That's right one million uptight fucks are responsible for 99.8-99.9% of all FCC regulation that affects 303 million people.

And the FCC allows it.

To other countries: The US is not up tight! Most of us love a good nipple on TV. It's this one organization that has been acting via the screwed up joke that is our FCC that has watered down our TV, not popular opinion.

According to this page, http://www.census.gov/Press-Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/007276.html , in 1915, the average annual earnings in the USA was $687. This makes the price equivalent to 3 to 4 years average annual salary. How many people do you know who would pay 3 years salary for a car, even with car loans?

This was an elite purchase, not a proletariat model.

"Back in 1917, a Detroit Electric cost anywhere from $1,775 to $2,375--in other words, fit for the proletarian or plutocrat."

This was my Father's era and he was a "prole". Working as a logger he earned somewhere around $200-300/year. The earliest data for per capita income I could find was 1929 here:

but even then it was ~$700/year.

So how does a car that cost 3-4 years salary qualify as being "fit for the proletariotarian"?

In today's terms that car would cost ~$120,000!

Aside from a announcing a publicity stunt by a company cashing in on a green fad in visible and public low-carbonism (believe me the replica cars will *not* be for the proles!) this article is shamefully low on any actual news or facts.

Just a bit of hype.

The water outflow of the Columbia River would provide each and every person with nearly 26 gallons of fresh water per day (cites: Columbia River).

We could feed all those people - about 500 square meters per person - with the existing farmland within the US (cites: vegan food estimates, farmland in the US).

Essentially, we could live mid-density, and feed and provide potable water for every single person on the face of the earth, and not require a single person living outside of Texas - no one on the other 6 continents, the oceans, or any other State. No one in Canada or Mexico.

We could feed everyone without a single acre converted from farmland - wouldn't need to touch a single acre of forest, nor city, nor ocean, nor park.

The earth can support a LOT of people; the problem is distribution of the resources. And that is a purely political issue. Concerns about too many people on earth are demonstrably false.

The water outflow of the Columbia River would provide each and every person with nearly 26 gallons of fresh water per day (cites: Columbia River).

We could feed all those people - about 500 square meters per person - with the existing farmland within the US (cites: vegan food estimates, farmland in the US).

Essentially, we could live mid-density, and feed and provide potable water for every single person on the face of the earth, and not require a single person living outside of Texas - no one on the other 6 continents, the oceans, or any other State. No one in Canada or Mexico.

We could feed everyone without a single acre converted from farmland - wouldn't need to touch a single acre of forest, nor city, nor ocean, nor park.

The earth can support a LOT of people; the problem is distribution of the resources. And that is a purely political issue. Concerns about too many people on earth are demonstrably false.

People have been saying that since Malthus and predicting a massive population collapse. The funny thing is, civilization keeps finding ways to accommodate larger numbers.

Agreed, but that does not mean it always can. So long as all our eggs are in one basket, we are constrained with finite space, and therefore, finite resources. With unchecked population increase, consumption will inevitably overtake maximum production limits, likely resulting in precipitous—and immensely uncomfortable—population decline.

The quantitative questions are being addressed. (What is that upper limit? When will we reach it?) However, whether will we choose wise reproductive habits receives much less attention. I think we would rather not find ourselves under the hardships of overpopulation.

You should also note that most industrialized countries are pretty close to zero-population growth without immigration

While the first two questions remain outstanding, it appears we may be deciding favorably on the qualitative point, and my angst may be for nothing. Global population increase is slowing; the trend of declining birth rates is not limited to industrialized nations.

Anyone knows about the actual accuracy of the clock?
Mashiyach

PS: This is about the time people claim that this world, or at least this run, will end or change (parameter change?) significantly.

Also look up some less well-known names like Allengheny Technologies. You're trafficking in the usual truisms about what the US economy has evolved into. The reality (which I don't pretend to have a full handle on) is much more complex.

You may be aware of that business about how the US share of world manufacturing "value added" is still the highest and has in fact been quite stable since WWII.

As a start, for the US data alone, I found it, of all places, at http://www.census.gov/mcd/. I'm still trying to make sense of it all, but one thing I think I've determined is that the largest industry in the US in terms of 'value added' is ... Chemicals.

The industry classifications to be found in the Annual Survey of Manufactures (ASM) are an international standard and so those are comparable.

The thing that makes me most uncomfortable is exchange rates. But recently, I've developed the theory that while PPP is all the rage, it, in fact, applies only to domestic economies and that Nominal values are in fact the best current way to measure international trade. And therefore, in some sense, comparative advantage.

If your talking about florida, your sadely mistaken. If your talking about nation wide, then it worked as intended.

The entire idea behind the electoral system is to not allow law population centers dictate the policies to the rest of the country. It is built in to favor smaller populated areas for this reason specifically. Philadelphia was originally the capitol because it had one of the largest populations at the time of writing of the constitution. I contained more people then the rest of the state did at the time. The same could be said for boston and so on. One of the fears of the founders was that the large population centers would become so large that they alone could control the presidential races. Here is some insight from the 1790 census

While New York City was 5000 people more then phili, if you took PA as a whole, in the scheme of the larges cities, PA would have something like 44000 votes. NY state only had NYC and Hudson city on the list with 33,131 for NYC and only 2,584 for Hudson City (35715 total). Mass had something like 6 or 7 of the largest cities with a combines total around 42232 population. So going with the 13 colonies which are now states, the populations of those cities along would have a very large impact on who was elected. Instead, they decided to give the power to the house of representatives with appointments of representatives based on populations and let the entire state determine their electorate for the president while leaving the senators to be appointed by the governor of the state.

The very real fear was that one or two large cities could elect a president over all the smaller cities. They also notices that with the likes of PA and MA being so large, those two states could run over the other 11 states. The compromise was the electoral system that is designed to allow someone who doesn't win the popular vote, to win the office of president because it would represetn the country as a whole and not just large populated areas. This is how Gore won the popular vote in 2000 but Bush won the office. It is politics as intended. If you take a look at the county maps, you will see this in practice. Look at how little territory Gore actually won in but ended up with the popular vote. It was only the large populated areas of the north east, Florida and california. that put him up so high.

The electoral system worked as it was designed to. Saying it over rode the popular vote is sort of a misnomer, it isn't like the popular vote represented the entire country, it represented a few largely populated areas. And that is the intent of the electoral system, to negate this effect.

Well, Ron Paul SHOULD still be in at this point. That's not trolling.

There are a lot of Republicans who just WON'T vote for McCain. Ron should and will stay in the race, and those McCain haters are going to vote for him, just like they did for Huckabee. Hopefully they'll also learn something. The current election is always about the next one for the candidates who don't win. I think that inspite of what we know here, and the best efforts of many on this board, there are about 300 million citizens in the US who don't know anything more about Ron Paul's positions than that he is completely against the Iraq war. If the nation becomes better informed about the REAL cost of lowering interest rates and devaluing the dollar, things might actually change.

I used to work for the Government as a cartographer. One issue with commercial based maps are the copyright controls. in order to keep competitors from stealing their work they purposely add or subtract roads. They know where the mistakes are and use them for copyright reference. on the other hand this is whats causes allot of trouble with GPS routers. One fix is to add a flag to the line data that could flag this and fix tons or routing trouble GPS devices have been having. Examples can be used for tonnage limits, rural routes, narrow streets, and low bridges. But because most maps are created using satellite or air photography overlays, that info is left out.

The U.S. Census Bureau's, Geography Dept. is in charge of creating and sourcing U.S. GIS maps. Most map's are updated during the census period when there are enumerator staff on location to send new road information. Some info is updated yearly when cities, and counties may update annexed land.

Files are created to be compatible with ArcView software and are free to download. Free maps are old, and can be as old as the last Census. In March, 2008 the Census Bureau will make the 2007 TIGER/Line Shapefiles available to the public. File formats include:
ARC/INFO EXPORT (.e00) format
ArcView Shapefile (.shp) format
ARC/INFO Ungenerate (ASCII) format.
These are NOT photographic maps, they have the look and feel of your standard GPS maps. They can be found here: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/tiger2006se/tgr2006se.html

This info is compatible with ArcGIS, But with the Ascii file its possible to create a opensource editor. I was using government software created to run under linux.

The US Gov't does have a free nationwide map you can use TIGER (Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing) Produced by the Census Bureau. When was the last Census done? 8 years ago? Yea that gives you an idea of how accurate the TIGER map is.

In 2002 the Census Bureau contracted Harris to update the centerlines and attributes nationwide. Approximately 1200 of 3200 counties in the US have been completed with another 300 or so due in March. Details on the "MAF/TIGER Accuracy Improvement Project" are here: http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/index.html

Tiger is still around....

http://www.census.gov/geo/www/tiger/index.html

2006 is last year though of the old data format. 2008 release will be a completely new format with better polygon definition rules.

I made GIS maps for years, always using public data. And there is a lot out there, and it is government subsidized, and it can be of marginal quality. The only nationwide project I am aware of is the TIGER project, which is supposed to release a new, provisional data set every year. When you can get it to work, its pretty good. Federal agencies also often release their own datasets, and we would often have forest service, national park service, and blm data on the same maps, sometimes in overlapping areas. Then there are the county datasets. And the city where I live put out their own dataset a few years back. So there's plenty of data, and it is almost all free. Companies that charge for it often have done post-processing or packaging which I believe they have government contracts to do and are allowed to recoup their investment.

Where trouble often comes in is in projections, spheroids, datums and the like. GIS data on different scale will use a different model of the globe to pinpoint places, will use different coordinate conventions, often related to the agency that produced the set (eg the city always used something called state plane, the fs always uses the nad27 datum, well, mostly). Two datasets that have location information for the same road can be meters off simple because they are not represented in the same projection correctly either by the software or the person doing the projection. And these are just location issues. Tabular data is a whole other thing.

The poster sounds a little uninformed about GIS in general.

Street names in the US are assigned by the government and the government can't own a copyright in the US. All most all of those maps have errors and they have a lot of the same errors because they are based on the TIGER, Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing system, database. The TIGER database is maintained by the U.S. Census and while they are huge, you can have a lot of fun with them especially when you mix in the Perl module Geo::Coder::US and GMT, Generic Mapping Tool. The TIGER is a database of any known and and a huge number of interpolated data points, for example my house is listed as a known point with it's "official" latitude and longitude, two blocks down is another known point and every house in between is estimated. One thing you quickly notice when playing with the database is that roads often have multiple "official" name, Roads may "officialy" exist but not physically exists and roads may physically exist with out "officially" existing. Roads can even meander and move, especially dirt fire-roads and trails in the woods.