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On the other hand the census bureau is planning on having a new improved database for the 2010 census that includes every home in America with relative precision in the centimeter range and absolute precision in the meter range. Some of the tech that they use for this is VERY cool stuff.

You can start learning here.

Technically everything north of (and including) Panama is in North America: USA, Canada, and Mexico being the largest by area. Here's some maps of North America, which lists 25 countries, most of which are island nations.

In surface area (which is what matters in telecom), the continent of Europe is est. 3,837,000 Sq. Miles (9,938,000 Sq. Km) vs North America at 9,365,000 Sq. Miles (24,256,000 Sq. Km). The United States alone comes out to 3,537,438 Sq. Miles.

Politics campains should be maid on the streets, squares, not on TV. We should be able to contact in person our representatives.

So, it'll just get easier and cheaper to build UPWARDS (including space, once the elevators are built), OUTWARDS (onto the oceans which is 70% of Earth's surface area), DOWNWARDS (below the surface of land/water), and INWARDS (transhumans don't need to live in meatspace).

--

• Tiger official street maps.(Your US Tax Dollars At Work) Mouse clicks recenter with D.dd lat-lon readout.
• Topo maps (topos free, now with aerial photo quads for fee). Cursor readout in DMS, D.dd, DM.mm, UTM. My favorite for Topos, but I also use
• TopoMaps and more; click Online Maps menu then MapServer sub-menu. Usually has Nautical and Air Navigation and Aerial Nav photo as well, all for free. (Popups ads in browser to sell their other services.) Cursor readout in DMS

Well holy shit. Check this out. (This data only up to 1994, but it was pretty stable over the last 50 years so I'm assuming it is still representative.)

Considering that the top 20% of income earners earn nearly 50% of the money and the top 40% earn over 2/3 of the income this is not all that surprising. The bottom 40% only earn 15% of the income. Obviously you're against progressive income taxes, but even most diehard conservatives and libertarians recognize that the very lowest income earners should have a tax break so that they can do things like buy food, so sure, the burden will be shifted to the top. If you're going to quote these end of the world statistics to us, at least paint the whole picture for us.

I'm not sure what you propose in place of our "flimsy social contract" but a defense of it is a bit too complicated to attempt here.

most american children can't even read.

Think about the genius/population ratio. According to this world population data, there were roughly 600 million to 1.1 billion people on earth during the 17th century. Currently there are something like 6.3 billion people on earth. Since there are more people there are more geniuses also.

about .31% of the US population is HIV positive.
about .66% of the Earth's population is HIV positive.

This disease has not been around very long, and is quickly approaching 1 out of every 100 people having it. While some of your points are valid, your seeming callousness is alarming and somewhat disturbing. After all, the post you so articulately derided was only quoting a Saturday Night Live character. I tend to agree with that post's general sentiment that a study on how cookies crumble is somewhat frivolous. Especially when my Grandma has been making sturdy, delicious cookies for 70 years.

Information comes from here, here, and here.

Average income peaked in 1973, bottomed in 1996, and is currently about where it was in 1984. See the BLS statistics page.

The Census Bureau publishes less frequently updated median household income figures. Basically, median household income increased about 6% from 1969 to 1966. Average per capita income is up 51%; thus most of the increase is in the upper (wealthier) half of the population.

The census figures are per-household; BLS figures are per-worker. The discrepancy reflects the increase in two-worker families. You get less per hour worked than in 1973, and families are keeping up only by having both people work.

By comparison, median per capita income increased 50% between 1953 and 1973. Those were the days when the future looked bright.

There exists a division between federal rights and states rights and your are entrusted to vote on state issues. The catch is that the state (little s) can not trump the State (big s). In theory anything the states do that violates the constitution will eventually be bitch slapped by the SCOTUS.

So yeah, the State gives you the illusion you have some power by letting you vote on some local issues. But in reality this is like deciding if you want your car in Black or if you want your car in Black, your choice!

Clause 1. The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof, for six years; and each Senator shall have one vote. The electors in each State shall have the qualifications requisite for electors of the most numerous branch of the State legislatures.

Two senators per state doesn't seem very democratic, I give you that, but the House is much more democratic. Constituents get their own Congressman representing their Congressional district. Congressmen are of course elected by popular vote.

California for example has 52 Congressional districts currently, and a population of 34,501,130 as of 2001 (estimate). That's about 663,483 people per Congressman. Quite democratic. The Congressman, if he or she wants to be reelected, will use franking priviledges, credit claiming, and position taking to please the constituents. If they do not, the incumbent can be defeated in the next Congress or 1/3 replacement phase.

The House and Senate together represent the citizens to the federal government through their respective states. Its called indirect representative democracy.

Dude - good argument, but let down a bit by your stats.

50 million is actually rather less than the 105,405,100 people who voted in the last Presidential election. Both Bush and Gore received more than 50 million votes, though by relatively slim margins.

And there aren't 200 million people in the US - there are nigh on 300 million.

Well if you look at the original description of the project it used data from TIGER and
FIPS , which are US centric, so if that's the way it's still being done, I guess they'd need that data for the rest of the world.

Once China has a huge economy, capitalist, communist or otherwise, if the wealth is not spread a bit more than now (which has gotten better than ten years ago), the people just might wise up.

Like in America, you mean?

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Hetro community when SDC confirmed that Hetro market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all porn. Coming on the heels of a recent Sexcraft survey which plainly states that Hetro has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Hetro is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent census.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Heterosexuality's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Hetro faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for breeders because
hetro is dying. Things are looking very bad for het. As many of us are already aware, hetro continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of cum.

FreeBreeders is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core procreators. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time procreators Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Heterosexuality is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

HetLife leader Theo states that there are 7000 Heterosexuals. How many are breeders? Let's see. The number of Breeder versus Non-reproductive Hetro posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 breeders. Norep posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of all Hetro posts. Therefore there are about 700 Breeders. A recent article put Noreps at about 80 percent of the Hetro market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Noreps. This is consistent with the number of Non-reproductive Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Preggers Creek, abysmal sales and so on, Hetro went out of business and was taken over by GayLife who turned it into a lesbian artificial insemination rag. Now AI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Hetro has steadily declined in market share. Hetro is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Hetro is to survive at all it will be among bizzare fetish dilettante dabblers. Hetero continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Hetro is dead.

Fact: Heterosexuality is dying.

One of the arguments for the rich maying more taxes is simply that the poor are spending their money in the very industries which make the rich become rich. But that's a judgement call, and i don't know how true it is in real life. I do know that practicality dictates that taxing the poor just isn't going to work, and that not taxing anybody doesn't work, either. The whole point behind social programs is that they are designed to keep the poor from getting poorer, and (where possible) help the poor become richer.

Now. As for those statistics. The census indicates that not only are the poor getting poorer, the very old and the very young are suffering from it the most. (While you're there, check out the difference in median salary between men and women, too.) And bear in mind that the lowest percentage of the poor, the homeless and in shelters, don't even get counted. It's not just liberal propaganda to expect that improving the base income for everyone improves the economic structure as a whole. Political thought tends to split over how to deal with it, not whether that wage gap happens.

Just my two cents... from the just-barely-solvent side of the wage gap...

The notion that this is limited in the US because of high density populations is a little flawed.

If you consider Canada and all it's terrotories in ratio to their population they have a population density somewhere comparable to Greenland and the South Pole. But everyone counters with the arguement that just about everybody lives in the southern-most 100 miles of the country thereby providing a much higher LOCALIZED population density.

If you are going to apply that arguement then you really need to consider the market penetration of Broadband into the Metropolis communities of the United States.

Of all the people living in a high density population areas of Greater Detroit, The Bay Area, New York City, The Eastern Seaboard, The LA valley and so on. Not specific cities, but the Greater Areas of each major city.

If you assume that 75.2 percent of the American population lives in a non-rural location (Urban + Suburban) and an overall coverage of 6.9 percent, then the Metropolitan adjusted coverage might be around 6.9/.752=10.89 percent coverage.

Let's see exactly how much a Porsche Carerra GT would cost Bill Gates (relatively speaking).

His net worth is currently $US34,234,884,352.40 (according to the Bill gates Net Worth Page).
A brand-new Porsche Carerra GT costs an estimated $US400,000.
That means that the cost to Bill Gates is approximately 0.0012% of his total worth.
According to the US Census Bureau, the median net worth of a US household in 1995 was $US40,200. Let's adjust that upward by, say, 10% to take into account the past eight years - the amount is now $US44220.
0.0012% of 44220 is 53 cents.

Conclusion: A Porsche Carerra GT for Bill Gates is equivalent to a couple of cans of Coke for the average American.

And easy, actually. I've done some proximity-based searching for a store locator, and it is simple if you have the data (ZIP to lat/long db).

Algorithms and ASP code here:
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/010500-1.sht ml
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/040100-1.sht ml
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/010500-2.sht ml

Just re-write in Perl or Python, and run it anytime there's an earthquake, emailing anyone within X (user definable) miles of the event. (email addresses, zips, etc in MySQL or PostGres)

Free 2000 data at: http://www.census.gov/tiger/tms/gazetteer/

Cheap ($29) data at: http://www.zipcodedownload.com/index.aspx

More expensive data at: http://www.GreatData.com/

As the other poster said, you'll probably have to write this yourself. I recommend looking at TIGER and FIPS, which may allow you to have your program be completely dynamic--people could choose to be alerted of seismic events within 100, 500, 1000 miles of their home relatively easily. (I'm not familiar with either of these services, but I remembered their use by the winner of the Google Programming Contest.)

Now for magnitude, you can just flag each seismic event with an appropriate value and see if it meets the threshold the citizens want. And since you have the distance from the epicenter to the citizen's home, you can calculate the effective magnitude that the citizen feels, or you can just leave it as the magnitude found at the epicenter.

Times have changed and computers have proliferated, and I've only done some casual investigation, but I've never found any guarantee by the US government that the SSN is unique.

I delved into this up a while ago for a project at work.
Due to the way they are assigned, it seems the SSAN cannot be unique in all areas.

The SSAN is assigned by state or area. The first 3 digits denote what state the number was assigned in.

For instance, an SSAN created for a New York resident gets 050-134 as the first 3. That leaves 86 million possible combinations. Fair enough, since the pop. of NY is currently ~18 million. A lot left over to prevent duplication.

New Hampshire doesn't seem to be too bad. A pop of 1.2 million, and SSAN's from 001-003. Just over 50% free combinations.
Consider though all the people who were born there, and have passed away. You may be getting a recycled SSAN.

But consider Florida. The pop. of Florida is currently ~15.2 million. Florida SSAN's range from 261-xx-xxxx to 267-xx-xxxx. Leaving a possible 7 million combinations. How can that be truly unique? (Ok...a LOT of Florida residents moved in from out of state, but still).
California is just as bad. SSAN's from 545-573 (28 million combo's), with a population of 32.5 million.

North Carolina, with a single SSAN group (232) has a population of just under 8 million. Unique? Doesn't seem to be.

Attach the person's name to the SSAN, and you get pseudo uniqueness. Joe Blow, 001-01-0001 will be the only one. But that is only uniqueness through chance, not truly unique.

I am busy writing a complete response but wanted to address this quick. My Source shows growth of 296 million between 2000 and 2004. That is updated as of July 17, 2003. Are you going to tell me that the estimate has changed by 200 million since July? Please provide a link to your source.

Um, the US has a bunch more citizens than the number that voted in the last election. Look here.

According to these numbers, less than 20 percent of the population uses file sharing services - and I doubt that ALL of the people who use file sharing services use them for illegal purposes - either using them to transfer personal data, downloaded it and installed it but don't use it anymore, etc. I'd be really curious to know exactly how The Yankee Group established those statistics and who funded the study.

Now then, look at the first column, the bottom 20%. The upper income limit of the bottom 20% has increased by 33% from 1967 to 2001. On top of that, the average household size has been falling, so that money does not have to be spread around to as many people. Now obviously, the top 5% has increased at a faster rate, the lower limit on the top 5% has doubled in the same period.

The point I'm trying to make is that even though wealth has been concentrating more in the upper classes, the lower classes have been gaining as well! In fact, one of the reasons the wealthy are gaining faster has nothing to do with technology, it's because of feminism. Whereas 35 years ago, the wives of most wealthy men were housewives, today they're more likely to have high paying jobs themselves, being doctors, lawyers, what have you. In contrast, poor women have always had to work, simply as a matter of survival. Anyway, until we find a 10 year period where incomes fall for any age group, I think we can dismiss this as hysterical FUD.

What no one saw was that freeing up the most important capital, human labor, from inefficient application to the task of growing food for other purposes. What those who looked at the farms failing and saw disaster were missing was that now the farmer was able to go to the city and be basically as well off working in a factory, and that the farmer's children would go on to become doctors or lawyers or engineers or skilled laborers. Indeed, the industrialization could not have happened without the farm failures.

True, but you miss the point of the article, which is that the upcoming wave of automation won't just make farmworkers or industrial labourers or any other arbitrary sector of the working population redundant, it'll make damn near everyone redundant. It'll be a long wave, but it's coming. Damn, I was in an internet cafe an hour ago. Last time I was in they had staff, who would take your payment and give you a ticket for your purchased time. Tonight they have vending machines. OK, it's a trivial example but I was surprised.

We are heading towards a world where the only use for people is thinking up what to do next, and as plain as your nose, that isn't a job for everyone, not when we have seven or eight billion people in the world.

Mass automation is a huge opportunity and also a huge risk for billions of people. It has to be managed, not left to the whims of the market, which will be increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer extremely wealthy people.

If we continue to do what we did yesterday to meet the problems of tomorrow, we are destined to fail at every step. Mankind cannot rely on the market of the last millenium to meet the dizzying challenges of the new one. And if think it's all pie in the sky, look at the pace of change right now. It's only going to accelerate.

Fourteen lives to find two ways that don't work.

Pretty expensive research.

Nonsense. There are well in excess of six billion people on this rock. Fourteen in twenty-something years is a pittance.

There are 74 million families in America.
-- http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/cp s2002/tabF1-all.pdf

Assuming a phone number represents a family, 41 million families (55%) explicitly stated that they don't want to be called.

Should there not be an "I-Want-To-Be-Called-List" instead?

3 out of 10 eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 44 vote.
-- http://www.fec.gov/pages/98demog/98demog.htm

41 million people hate telemarketing calls enough to put themselves on a list, out of only
300 million people in the U.S. (apparently 94% of those have telephones, but presumably that counts telephones shared between a family?)

It would be interesting to see how many people signed up for a please do call list... I suspect less than this 1.4%!

That and Fairbanks has only 30,224 people as of the 2000 census. Ever think of verifying information before it makes it to the front page?

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/GCTTable?ds_n ame=DEC_2000_SF1_U&geo_id=04000US02&_box_head_nbr= GCT-PH1&format=ST-7

The trouble is that this is a marketing survey. They care about the relative size of their marketing groups: i.e. what percentage of the gaming market is represented by each demographic group. What most people want to know is what is the rate of gaming in each group. The following analysis calculates that (in a relative way, based on their data).

Based on population data from the 2000 US Census, the US population breaks down like this:

female 6-17: 9.6
male 6-17: 9.3
female 18+: 37.8
male 18+: 36.5

The ratio of the percentage of gamers to the percentage of population gives us a relative measure of "gaming likeliness":

female 6-17: 1.25 = 12/9.6
male 6-17: 2.26 = 21/9.3
female 18+: 0.69 = 26/37.8
male 18+: 1.04 = 38/36.5

What the hell does this ratio mean? Well, it can't be translated into an absolute gaming rate since we don't know the total rate of gamers in the population. But it does tell us that males between 6 and 17 are 3.28 (=2.26/0.69) times as likely to be gamers as females over 18.

So the numbers are really not as surprising as they seem to be. However, they are significant from a marketing perspective: women are an important gaming market these days. This is excellent news and should keep things interesting.

The real lesson: statistics are tricky.

According to Webster's: "minority: ...the smaller in number of two groups constituting a whole."

Yet, the US News & World Report ranking of colleges shows statistics in which "minorities" comprise more than 50% of the student population.

It seems to me, a group is not a "minority" if it constitutes 98-99% of the population at an institution (especially in the case of the historically black colleges).

The minority being referred to in those articles would be the portion of the US population as a whole (which was 75.1% white in 2000 according to the US Census Bureau). So an institution with 99% minorities would mean 99% of the students belong to the "not white" ethnic group, which is a country-wide minority.

Of course, that link also shows the US as 50.9% female, leaving /. with, more than likely, a heavily minority membership!

This may surprise you, but the median household income for the US in 2001 was $42,228, and most families have more than one child. The 80th percentile begins at $83,500.

As I'm sure has already been pointed out to you:

1. Georgy's a woman.
2. 890,000 valid signatures (they actually collected, by some accounts, 1.6 million) is peanuts in a state of 33 million people. Only 2.6% of the entire population of the state had to sign in order to get the recall on the ballot. Spend enough time in the Republican strongholds of the central valley or Orange County, and you'll find those signatures no problem.
3. Darrell Issa, a hard-right Republican, spent nearly $1.8 million of his own money to hire people, perhaps illegally, to come in from out of state and collect signatures. Spend enough money and ask enough times outside of a supermarket and people will sign just about anything.
4. Your power bill was FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS last month because power companies asked Californians to de-regulate the market, got voter momentum by promising lower electricity bills in expensive slick commercials, and then abused the open market and illegally gouged prices high. Once that was done, they offered 'cut-rate' prices on long-term contracts, in order to lock in the high prices they wanted before they were caught manipulating the market. Once they had their high prices locked in, they let the market churn subside. Davis made the correct decision, and the right decision, even the smart decision, in signing those contracts, based on the information available to the general public in 2001. That as consumers most Californians were robbed by these contracts is knowledge only available now, in hindsight.*

Where you're right, and don't even know it, is when you say voter disgust with Davis is what paved the way to this recall tomfoolery. Given the choice between Bill "Tax Fraud" Simon and Gray "Prison Guard Union Bitch" Davis, most voters chose to give a de facto 'none of the above' vote and just stayed home last November. These incredibly low turnout figures influenced how many signatures were necessary to get the recall on the ballot, and in the end paved the way for what we see now.

Also as an aside: I think it's BRILLIANT the way the Republican party of CA. has found a way to attack Davis for the budget shortfall, when at the same time holding fast in the legislature against any tax increases in the senate, leading to the pathetic budget we currently have. Absolute genius in the way they managed to eat their cake and have it, too.

And finally: If Georgy would come out pro-gun, she'd be my ideal candidate. As it is, I'll take what she's offering. Definitely the choice my conscience will tell me to vote in October.

* I say "most" because, like a few other municipalities, the town in which I live chose to maintain its own municipal power authority instead of trusting PG&E, so while you're paying $400, I'm paying $65. Thank you, bitch. Suck it dry!

As I'm sure has already been pointed out to you:

1. Georgy's a woman.
2. 890,000 valid signatures (they actually collected, by some accounts, 1.6 million) is peanuts in a state of 33 million people. Only 2.6% of the entire population of the state had to sign in order to get the recall on the ballot. Spend enough time in the Republican strongholds of the central valley or Orange County, and you'll find those signatures no problem.
3. Darrell Issa, a hard-right Republican, spent nearly $1.8 million of his own money to hire people, perhaps illegally, to come in from out of state and collect signatures. Spend enough money and ask enough times outside of a supermarket and people will sign just about anything.
4. Your power bill was FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS last month because power companies asked Californians to de-regulate the market, got voter momentum by promising lower electricity bills in expensive slick commercials, and then abused the open market and illegally gouged prices high. Once that was done, they offered 'cut-rate' prices on long-term contracts, in order to lock in the high prices they wanted before they were caught manipulating the market. Once they had their high prices locked in, they let the market churn subside. Davis made the correct decision, and the right decision, even the smart decision, in signing those contracts, based on the information available to the general public in 2001. That as consumers most Californians were robbed by these contracts is knowledge only available now, in hindsight.*

Where you're right, and don't even know it, is when you say voter disgust with Davis is what paved the way to this recall tomfoolery. Given the choice between Bill "Tax Fraud" Simon and Gray "Prison Guard Union Bitch" Davis, most voters chose to give a de facto 'none of the above' vote and just stayed home last November. These incredibly low turnout figures influenced how many signatures were necessary to get the recall on the ballot, and in the end paved the way for what we see now.

Also as an aside: I think it's BRILLIANT the way the Republican party of CA. has found a way to attack Davis for the budget shortfall, when at the same time holding fast in the legislature against any tax increases in the senate, leading to the pathetic budget we currently have. Absolute genius in the way they managed to eat their cake and have it, too.

And finally: If Georgy would come out pro-gun, she'd be my ideal candidate. As it is, I'll take what she's offering. Definitely the choice my conscience will tell me to vote in October.

* I say "most" because, like a few other municipalities, the town in which I live chose to maintain its own municipal power authority instead of trusting PG&E, so while you're paying $400, I'm paying $65. Thank you, bitch. Suck it dry!

Well. Uneducated, I can still speak another language (american). Are you at least uneducated ?

There is less than 300M inhabitants in USA www.census.gov, and the british times estimates 50M of them can't have electricity. Thus the small fraction you're speaking about seems to be something like 16.67%. Not so small in my opinion. And this part that cannot have electricity counts for much more than 16.67% of the economical and political power of the USA.

And you know, I remember than just last year, it is your silicon valley that couldn't turn on their computers because there was no electricity !! People said at the time that it was because California didn't do what was required to provide people with enough electricity, that it was just a local problem and couldn't happen elsewhere in USA...

For your information, I did actually make some points. I would kindly and respectfully suggest you read my post again.

Is just under 1/3% based on 2000 census data

Based on your current practices I calculate that you are more likely to be eaten by a grue than to have your ID stolen.

-Peter

If, as is usually claimed, there are 40 or 50 million file sharers in the U.S., then there just aren't enough young people to properly dominate trading. Even the Amish teens would have to be downloading, as would ghetto kids who can't afford food. There are only about thirty million people in the U.S. older than 9 and younger than 25. That leaves a lot of trading to be done by people over 25.

Census data from 1995
FBI Crime data from 1995

That's the US census data for 1995 and the FBI crime statistics. During that year, Blacks committed 54% of American murders. Note that Hispanics are counted as Whites in the FBI statistics when they commit crimes, but as minorities when they are victims.

You will notice from the census data that Whites (including Hispanics) comprise 68.5% of the nation's poor. They committed at most 46% of the nation's murders (neglecting non-Black and non-White murders).

You'll find some equally interesting statistics from the Department of Justice at:
Homicide by Race

Frankly, culture matters. Crime causes poverty as well as poverty causing crime -- throwing money at things won't help. A more profitable approach would attack the horrendous level of Black illegitamacy (68%), the glamour of crime in popular Black entertainment, and the widespread welfare dependance.

2 Million Jobs! You have to be kidding me!

Consider that the population of the US is approximately 300 Million, that's one telemarketer for every 150 people. Assume that each call takes 5 minutes and a caller works four hours a day (5 to 9 PM, to maximize the chances of interrupting dinner). That's about 50 calls a day. At that rate it takes three days for each marketer to call his 150 people. So we all should be getting a couple of calls a week. That's not that far off.

When I started this comment I had intended to argue that 2 Million had to be an exaggeration, but I changed my mind. Consider that not all of those 2 Milion are actually making calls, and many of the jobs are part time. I'm not defending the telemarketers, mind you.

-- Steve

That's great with IPv4's 4.2 billion addresses, so if we handed one IP to each person to use for NAT, what will the other 2 billion (at time of this posting) do?

There are a few misconceptions in this thread, but first...

You may be interested to know there already exists a type of low-power FM radio station that may be legally operated 0.6MHz - and even 0.4MHz - from existing stations. They're called "FM translators".

As an example, there's an 80-watt translator K213CN on 90.5FM in West Memphis, Arkansas. If K213CN didn't exist, it would not be possible to create a legal LPFM station on 90.5 at its tower site. It's too close to WEVL (89.9) and WKNO (91.1) across the river in Memphis.

FM translators have NO technical differences from FM stations. The difference is simply legal: a translator must rebroadcast the programs of another station, while a station may originate its own programs.

This strikes me as a serious inconsistency in the FCC regulations. (created by chance, not really intentionally) I have considered filing a petition to close the gap...

There are a few misconceptions in this thread, but first...

You may be interested to know there already exists a type of low-power FM radio station that may be legally operated 0.6MHz - and even 0.4MHz - from existing stations. They're called "FM translators".

As an example, there's an 80-watt translator K213CN on 90.5FM in West Memphis, Arkansas. If K213CN didn't exist, it would not be possible to create a legal LPFM station on 90.5 at its tower site. It's too close to WEVL (89.9) and WKNO (91.1) across the river in Memphis.

FM translators have NO technical differences from FM stations. The difference is simply legal: a translator must rebroadcast the programs of another station, while a station may originate its own programs.

This strikes me as a serious inconsistency in the FCC regulations. (created by chance, not really intentionally) I have considered filing a petition to close the gap...

There are a few misconceptions in this thread, but first...

You may be interested to know there already exists a type of low-power FM radio station that may be legally operated 0.6MHz - and even 0.4MHz - from existing stations. They're called "FM translators".

As an example, there's an 80-watt translator K213CN on 90.5FM in West Memphis, Arkansas. If K213CN didn't exist, it would not be possible to create a legal LPFM station on 90.5 at its tower site. It's too close to WEVL (89.9) and WKNO (91.1) across the river in Memphis.

FM translators have NO technical differences from FM stations. The difference is simply legal: a translator must rebroadcast the programs of another station, while a station may originate its own programs.

This strikes me as a serious inconsistency in the FCC regulations. (created by chance, not really intentionally) I have considered filing a petition to close the gap...

1. Inflation. According to the Consumer price index, an item that cost $100 in 1980, cost $143.57 in 1988.

2. Population increase. The US population in 1980 was 226.5 million. In 1988 it was 243.9 million. An increase of 7.7%. So there were more people to pay taxes, and more people to receive benefits.

I'm not a lawyer but maybe this kind of tack would work...

Population of Michigan ~ 10,000,000 (Estimate from here)

Population of the World ~ 6,250,000,000 (Estimate from here)

Now provided that spam has a regular distribution, that means that one in every 625 spam emails will be sent to a Michigan resident. Given that spam is sent to thousands of addresses each day, there is a reasonable expectation that at least one of the recipients is from Michigan.

Due to the very nature of spam, it would be easier for the spammers to comply overall rather than to make efforts to determine the real destination of each message.

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed."
President Dwight D. Eisenhower
April 16, 1953

Nope.

His employees, who make $19 to 30k plus the income of their working spouse, are typical Americans.

I, personally, feel no more sympathy for the so-called 'slashdot poster' than I do for the equally so-called 'used car salesman.' The whole nation is lying to each other right now, not just the slashdot posters. And, you know, a teacher (obviously an unimpeachable source) once told me that only 5% of the population had a college degree, partly in an effort to scare me somehow but mostly to justify her worthless career which earned less than pizza dilivery, and I never bothered to go to the goddamn fucking source and find out the the true number was at least 27.5 percent, maybe more if you count people over 34. That's not a big difference. To the people who care about truth, it matters, sure. But to me, well . . . surely I'm an uninformed idiot, but since when did that ever hold anyone back in America ?

Last I heard, the Australian government owns approx. 49% of Telstra, a major telco. I believe the previous poster is correct in that the AU gov is looking to liquidate some of its shares.

Talking to Australians who live in Toowoomba, Dalby, and Longreach (L. is near the edge of the 'outback'), the residents feel that a fully privately owned telco would not provide adequate (or any) service to those living in the countryside. Granted that this is a small amount of the population (and problems like this also exist in the rural US), the purpose of being publically owned is in the intrest of ALL people. So that all Australians can communicate.

Yes, [A]DSL sucks there now, but consider that the entire population of the contry/continent of Australia is about the same as the population of New York State.

From other posts in this topic, sounds like alternatives are slowly becomming available.

Ever population has a magic number that determine the minimum number of individuals required to maintain its existance. For birds this number is about 4,000. We witnessed one population recently dip below the magic number and cease to exist: the Carrier Pidgeon. There were some pretty heroic attempts on the part of humans to get the population back on its feet, but all for naught.

Giving the benefit of the doubt that the bible simply didn't count women, you have 9 breeding pairs. (Noah, his wife, 8 sons, 8 wives.) Now, a woman can carry 1 child at a time, about every other year in primative conditions. (It's not until recently that we've become well nourished enough to have back-to-back pregancies.)

Going for the benefit of the doubt again, we will assume that all of the women start off this breed-a-thon at around 14 or so, with fertility tailing off around 36. 36-14=22=11

Each woman can effectively have about 11 pregancies, about 1/3 of them will not go to term, and another 1/3 will die before age 5. Rounding up, we effectively have each woman bringing about 4 kids into the world before her body wears out.

If you think I'm being pessimistic with these numbers, they did not have pre-natal care, vitamins, or even a steady food supply. I'm just working with rough estimates based on what goes on in the third world, which is about the best guess for what conditions would be like following the complete distruction of the Earth. (And I'm not even factoring in death during labor.)

We are going to estimate that the population can quadruple in size every generation. By that estimate... damn. You actualy have about 38 million people after 400 years.

But this estimate is completely bunk. If you look through historical estimates, until the 19th century humans NEVER even doubled in size within a generation. Our growth rate before shows a doubling about avery 1000 years or so. Mind you that is taking into account disease, wars and disasters,

So whatever happened, you need a much larger population than 8, or even 2. There are more than 8 different genes controlling eye color. The chances that 8 individuals in the same family all had type AB+ blood, as well as O- blood is also unlikely.

The "Mitochondrial Eve" theory is a mathematical extraction. Frankly I use the same sort of estimates to show that throwing a light switch would generated in infinite amount of current, for an infantesimally small fraction of a second immediately after it's thrown. Our number systems are terrible about handling beginning and endings.

Which is probably why the big guy simply started by stating THIS is on. THIS is off, and was content to just flip on and off for the first day.