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If you consider the Metroplex (DFW) as one unit (for those of you who haven't been here, we're talking abot an area that is at least 1,200 square miles of connected cities), you're looking at more than 5 million people. DFW considered as a whole (and not individual cities) is probably #2 or #3 in population size.


I'm not sure where you're getting your figures but the 2000 census indicates that the "DWF" area has only about 3,480,663 people.

Collin: 491,675
Denton: 432,976
Dallas: 2,218,899
Ellis: 111,360
Kaufman: 71,313
Rockwall: 43,080

Compare that with the 9,519,338 people in Los Angeles County alone and it looks like a long race for 7th or 8th. Add in all the other counties that make up LA (Orange, Ventura, Riverside, etc., etc.) and you're looking more like 15th or 16th.

Travel more, it'll do you good.

Sources:

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/GCTTable?ds_n ame=DEC_2000_SF1_U&geo_id=04000US06&_box_head_nbr= GCT-PH1&format=ST-2

http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/GCTTable?ds_n ame=DEC_2000_SF1_U&geo_id=04000US48&_box_head_nbr= GCT-PH1&format=ST-2

I actually agree with you there. It's not Reagan that did it all by himself. But Reagan, with a willing Congress, passed policies that within a few years had the desired effects.

And on a related note, inflation is only part of any economic picture, so I don't put nearly as much stock in it as you.

I agree it's only part of the economic picture. But it is a big part. When prices spiral higher and incomes don't do the same you end up with a net reduction in buying power, even if everyone were gainfully employed.

How about checking unemployment rates? Seems they were pretty bad until the mid-'90s, which was well after the Reagan/Bush era.

Unemployment was 7.1% in 1980, peaked at 9.7% in 1982 and was down to 5.3% in 1989 when Reagan left--that's nearly half. It pretty much stayed in the 5% neighborhood until about 1997 when it admitedly dropped to 4%--due in large part due to the tech bubble.

But to ignore the achievements of Reagan's policies is to ignore reality. I invite you to check the data. It's out there and it's hard to twist it into anything that suggest anything other than the fact that Reagan's policies worked.

As a completely off-topic point, check out U.S. Census. You can see the mean income for each fifth of the U.S. population. Browsing over it quickly I can't find a single fifth of the population that suggests "the rich got richer while the poor got poorer." Everyone's income seems to have increased quite substantially in the 80s in real dollars.

And today, inflation is still lower than in 1990, but unemployment is up from two years ago, and would you label that as an indicator that the economy is doing well?

No, it's not doing well. But it's not doing that bad, either. The tech bubble burst. I think things surged way ahead of reality in the last three years and now we're seeing a correction. It's a mild recession by any measure.

My point is that you cannot legitimately claim that taxes are universally a drain on economic efficiency just because the benefits of infrastructure happen in the long term.

I'll grant you that in the case of the highway system. That was truly an investment that I think was worthwhile and certainly helped the country.

I would be interested in how many other taxes you can find that simililary increased U.S. efficiency or productivity?

This is true of any investment, not just government spending, which spurred my rebuttal in the first place.

This is true of any economic investment. In the case of fees and taxes on things such as 100% clean PC disposal there is no economic benefit--only an environmental one. So in that case it most definitely is a strict cost/benefit analysis.

The military is quite productive, even above its listed function. It provides jobs and training to many. It performs research that finds its way back to private industry. It provides an infrastructure for huge investment in public works (the much-maligned Army Core of Engineers has put together stuff that private industry would never consider, but that has such effects on economy as disaster prevention/relief and power production). So I must dispute that the military is simply a necessary evil and a money sink.

Again, you've put me in an awkward position of trying to attack something that I personally am not against. I think the U.S. military is necessary and does lead to development of other products that are useful in the commercial sector as well. This is true of NASA, too.

Nevertheless, I honestly don't think the U.S. military produces this research and these benefits as efficienctly as they could be produced in a non-military environment. The military truly exists to defend the United States, and that's what it does very well. Sure, it leads to technological development--but that is not it's purpose. And if our $300 billion annual defense budget were truly spent on just R&D I don't think neither you nor I can imagine the types of technologies that would come out of it.

So I'm not disagreeing that the military produces side benefits. But I am disagreeing that it is the most efficient way to achieve those benefits, if those benefits are themselves the goal.

I think I've proven that long term gains in efficiency rebut this statement. You are right that misappropriated taxes are a waste, and you'd be right in thinking that a not-negligible percentage of taxes are misappropriated, but then that's not what you stated.

I stand by what I said. I said that all taxes and fees have a tendency to reduce the efficiency of the economy. This is true.

Now, you picked the case of the highway system in rebuttal. That's a good response, I'll admit. But I also believe it is most certainly atypical. It was truly an investment in the country. Most taxes and fees are not investments, they are costs that do little more than support the buearacracy or are punitive to discourage certain behaviors.

I'll go so far as to say there are exceptions to every rule. I'll give you that the highway system is an exception to the rule I've mentioned. But I seriously doubt you'll find that those kinds of economic investments are the norm.

I don't want to give a bad image of Quebec, there ARE some good hospitals and excellent doctors, a friend of mine had cancer and got really well treated, and today he's still alive.

Then what's your point? There are innumerable cases of malpractice in the United States as well. There are law firms that specialize in it.

In the U.S. 14% of the population is without health insurance. That's nearly 39 million people including over 8 million children. People with a catastropic illness can have their health insurance cancelled and be bankrupted in a single month.

In Canada, no one is denied treatment because they can't pay.

What do we do over the next 10-20 years as lifespans begin to move on average to 100 years or longer. It's going to happen. What if people are living longer? What do we do then?

...Deer are a good example of what happens when you overpopulate. Deer have a tendency to overpopulate because we've killed off most of their natural predators, either intentionally or unintentionally. Now they overpopulate and then starve en-masse. And then the cycle begins again.

You're forgetting several important things when comparing humans to deer.

1. Unlike deer, humans don't reproduce for most of their lifespans (IIRC), due to the aging of female's human eggs. Chances are we aren't going to have any 90-year-old pregnant women any time soon. There are a few men that have been fathers in their twilight years, but the women that were impregnated were young women. Of course, you could argue that maybe one day, a 90 year old women could be willing and able to give birth, but chances are that's not going to happen any time soon.

2. The second problem is the places on Earth with the most population growth aren't the countries with incredibly long lifespans. In fact, in many places with improved health care, the lifespans are going up and the birthrates are starting to decrease.

3. In Western countries, women are having opportunities to work. Thus, these women working full-time decide they either postpone childbirth, have fewer kids, or go childless. The places in the world with greater birthrates often do not offer these freedoms to women.

This U.S. Census bureau summary highlights what I'm talking about. Some relevant excerpts:

Ninety-six percent of world population increase now occurs in the developing regions of Africa, Asia and Latin America, and this percentage will rise over the course of the next quarter century.

The Census Bureau's projections indicate that early in the next century, crude death rates will exceed crude birth rates for the world's more developed countries, and the difference -- natural increase -- will be negative.

Life expectancies at birth, 1998:

Western Europe - 78
North America - 76
Latin America and the Caribbean - 69
Asia - 65
Sub-Saharan Africa - 49

The solution seems to be more freedom, education, technology, health care and rights for women. The question is, how are these nations in developing countries going to implement that-especially when the leaders of those countries don't always want to?

$120K a year now and taking home like $6,500 a month...Its rough.

Are you that out of touch with "the grim meathook reality?"
Understand that the average household income in this country was $42,148 (2000).
In North Carolina it was $37,057 (1997 - 1999 avg).
You're doing just fine. It could be much worse

'there are a class of people who should not be allowed to reproduce.' That is a dangerous and evil thought...

I agree, if fertility treatment and artificial wombs are available, it should be free.

6 204 857 565

After previewing: 6 204 858 037

You realize that Joe Average is 35.3 years old and probably is a little old for playing video games. All this means is that Linux may be dead on Joe 14-Year-Old 3l337 Warez Dood Script Kiddie's home computer.

US SSNs cannot begin with 000, 666, 729-749, or 764-999. (I had to learn this to write a SSN validator for a personnel project.) That gives 257 prefixes.. let's say 256 and keep 000 invalid for testing purposes. Now, the remaining six digits give us 999,999 suffixes (keeping the one with all zeros invalid for additional tests). That gives us just under 256 million numbers (actually 255,999,744). That may do it, especially if we can find a way to recycle the numbers.

Now unfortunately we cannot use this to give EVERYONE a number, as the US population according to the US Census bureau's census clock is somewhere around 285 million, but how many of those have drivers licenses?

In South Carolina our drivers license numbers look like SSNs and my number very well could be a valid SSN since it begins with 004, but it is specifically NOT your SSN. In fact, they used to be only seven digits (which is why the first two digits on mine are zeros) but they added the extra to to make it able to conform to the pattern of a SSN.

As much as I do not like the idea of a national ID or national drivers licence, it seems fairly simple to implement the number assignments. Preventing forgeries, however, is another story.

Hey! Isn't that how we pick our elected officials?

Too bad the (presumably mostly young male) Slashdot crowd is too busy doing helpful things like preaching to the converted about the cluelessness of these representatives or counterstuffing completely meaningless online polls. Otherwise, maybe you'd actually see young folks voting.

in an article from CNN China cell-phone use hits 140 million there are 140m cellphone users beating US with 118m.

so if everybody uses their 3g phones to access information and majority of the mobile phone users are chinese, then indeed chinese can outbeat english in internet use in less than 10 years.

let say that 4m people are added every month in 10 years, 4m x 12months x 10 years = 480m. the current population of the us is only around 286m according to US census. although the us population will grow, the us mobile phone usage is around 50% so after 10 years, the mobile users of china will definitely be more than internet and mobile users.

and if you say that most of there population is at the country side, i will say it is correct. but the number of people living in the urban areas also reache hundreds of millions. a small province in china has population more than most countries in the world.

On the other hand, in the past there were fewer births per minute, and thus there were proportionally more fools. This improves the spammer's hit rate.

So, to answer your question, you get about 1 in 250 'hits' for spam.

gus

Sorry, should always include a link wih a post! See here for the figures in September 2001

your numbers are wrong.

10E9 / 120 = 8.3 million.

the us population is currently 285.7 million according to the Census Department.

this is a market penetration of 2.9 percent, not thirty.

"According to the lecturer, there are over 50 million handicapped people in the United States..."

The population of the United States was 285,663,707 earlier today. That is one out of 6. When you look around you, do you see one handicapped person for every 6 people?

Okay, maybe they don't use Linux, but they aren't handicapped.

--
Links to respected news sources show how U.S. government policy contributed to terrorism: What should be the Response to Violence?

White - 499
Black - 5
American Indian, Eskimo, or Aleut - 9374
Asian or Pacific Islander - 5
Other race - 19

Take a look at this: http://www.gwu.edu/~econ270/Taejoon.html [gwu.edu] it's from 1996 but that's not too long ago to make it invalid. People in Shanghai make ~$1000/yr (USD) and nearly everyone else in the country is making less than $200. That's 5x the income. Per capita income in New York is not 5x that of Idaho - or anywhere else in the US - per capita income in New York is around 20% higher than the national average.

Well, for the US if you go by County data, (I'm afraid the 2000 census results aren't yet available in county by county detail, so we have to go by 1989 data) the per capita income is only $3,417 in Shannon county South Dakota (you were pretty close with the Idaho guess btw), but it was $27,862 in Manhattan (not actually the highest in the country which goes to Marin county CA at $28,381). The difference between Manhattan and Shannon, SD is over 8 fold. The national per capita income that year was $14,420, which is only slightly more than half of Manhattan or Marin.

If you want to go by 2000 state by state household income, then you find that the wealthiest state, MD at $51,695 has an average household income that is about 78% higher than the poorest state, its neighbor, West Virginia at $29,052. The State of New York is right about the same as the national average in the $41k/household range.

Take a look at this: http://www.gwu.edu/~econ270/Taejoon.html [gwu.edu] it's from 1996 but that's not too long ago to make it invalid. People in Shanghai make ~$1000/yr (USD) and nearly everyone else in the country is making less than $200. That's 5x the income. Per capita income in New York is not 5x that of Idaho - or anywhere else in the US - per capita income in New York is around 20% higher than the national average.

Well, for the US if you go by County data, (I'm afraid the 2000 census results aren't yet available in county by county detail, so we have to go by 1989 data) the per capita income is only $3,417 in Shannon county South Dakota (you were pretty close with the Idaho guess btw), but it was $27,862 in Manhattan (not actually the highest in the country which goes to Marin county CA at $28,381). The difference between Manhattan and Shannon, SD is over 8 fold. The national per capita income that year was $14,420, which is only slightly more than half of Manhattan or Marin.

If you want to go by 2000 state by state household income, then you find that the wealthiest state, MD at $51,695 has an average household income that is about 78% higher than the poorest state, its neighbor, West Virginia at $29,052. The State of New York is right about the same as the national average in the $41k/household range.

Let me get this straight:

How many Americans are there?
280 Million.
How many sq miles of land do you have?
3.5 million.
How many sq miles per person?
80.
(rough stats from here) That's a lotta space for you and me. Hence the automobile.

Now, pick a nation that does not reside in Europe or North America, and is not so automobile-centred. That is where this will take off. Places where cars are a luxury item, population is high and land is at a premium. Most of the developing/developed world.

This thing will not be used by anybody in Europe or North America simply because of the uncool factor. You said it yourself :
You will look so stupid riding these, that you'll get even more shit than those idiots who rode razor scooters around back in the .com days.
Yes, yes, and guys that drive cars get laid, and guys that don't...don't.

In the Phillipines, cell-phones are used to txt-msg most of the time, rather than talk. Funny how not everything is used the way Americans use it. I mean, gosh, did you know that in parts of the world, people drive on the OTHER side of the road? <gasp!>
For $3000 a person can buy a used car here. I don't know about the rest of the world, but I imagine a used car is a whole lot more than $3000, making this Ginger at least a cost-efficient, people-friendly etc, alternative solution. Just try removing yourself from the suburban shopping mall long enough to see that maybe, "changing the world" doesn't start in the U.S. of A.

OTH, if you wanna look cool in your car, while staying Saudi Arabia's bitch, be my guest.

P.S. Do you have a mustache? ;)

Dwarfed? Huh? The population of the United States is more than double that of Japan.

japan has about 125 million people

The US has about 281 million people

First, the total population of California is 33,871,648. This is based on the info from the following web site:

here

Based on this, 9 billion divided into the total population of california gives you 265.70894926635987714562928854244, meaning that this would be the refund for EVERY single person in California if the settlement was 9 billion. So if every person had been over charged by, say 50% then they are saying every single person in California spent at least $530 on Microsoft software. Every 1 year old. Every 90 year old. Every single person everywhere spent $500 on MS software.

Somehow I just don't think that is right. And on top of this, what is the lawyers % of a settlement? If it's 10%+ The lawyers would be getting 1 Billion dollars. And there's also the financial problems California is having because of the power problems (thankyou deregulation), the $1 million a day they are paying for people to guard bridges that aren't even being threatened. And then of course there is Silicon Valley and all the California computer companies there and elsewhere. Wouldn't it be nice for California if MS went away and all those good old California companies could start generating some serious tax money?

The point: Neither California, Microsoft, or the Laywers are doing anything for anyone's benefit. But out of the whole equation I'd rather see school kids get free software with the MS settlement than lawyers get richer and politicians line their own pockets with money from other companies. Look what happened with the tobacco money. Put to good use huh? Yeah, in someones pocket.

Simple answer: Because we're an order of magnitude bigger. More population. More beaurocracy

That's simply not true. The US has a smaller population than the EU (285M and 376M) and a proportionally smaller public sector (the EU tax burden is 41.5%, US 29%).

The real root of the matter is that the EU has far too many politicians, bureaucrats and civil servants, too much money, and too little idea or inclination to do anything other than expand their role.

We bring in the trash compactor method of squeezing people down, knock off another 10% and we get 5 people per cubic meter. One km^3 is 1,000,000,000m^3, so you get about 5 billion people mashed into a cubic kilometer. That "factoid" may have been correct when it was first stated, but the planet's WAY past the 5 billion population mark. Check out the World POPClock Projection from the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

The thing is, while it's not too difficult to corectly imagine square kilometers (humans are good with area), we pretty much suck once volume's involved. According to some architects I know (and some others in a documentary on skyscrapers), we do have the technology to build something a kilometer high, but we ain't even close to it yet, for a lot of reasons.

The tallest we've gone so far: Shanghai World Financial Center, which isn't done yet (expected completion: 2004), and the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia), which, at 1483 ft (452m), is only 10m higher than the Sears Tower in Chicago. And still not even half a kilometer high.

And there's not many buildings that have a square kilometer footprint, which would cover more than 12 streets and 6 avenues in Manhattan. That's a lot of space. Or ice.

The real reason we're so interested in this is probably because penguins live in Antarctica, which happens to be where most of the TuxRacer location shots were filmed.

woof.

There's no need to mod this as off-topic -- it's a tangent, but not unrelated. I also didn't take the +1. Save your mod points to knock off the flames, trolls, ASCII art and racist/nationalist crap which is sure to fill this story.

The population of the US is currently at about 285 million people. Your idea would mean that their would be about 30,000 members of congress. Think of the chaos. People say that it takes a long time to get legislation through congress now, well just imagine how bad it would be with that many representatives. Just imagine how much time that the House Rules Committee would have to allott for each debate. Nothing would ever get done.

"Unionized GM assemblers make $21.02 per hour, Ford assemblers $21.03 and DaimlerChrysler assemblers $21.01."

This from: http://www.auto.com/industry/qgm17.htm

I don't see the point in giving away PCs to people with these salaries. Especially considering the percentage of these people in two income households. (Check the census)

Now if Ford really wanted to do some good for the world, they'd give computers to their foreign workers and leave the Americans to buy their own.

Wouldn't that be great?

check out this link http://www.census.gov/population/censusdata/apport ionment/table-b.pdf

Imagine the representation we could get if each 30k people had there own Rep.. Heck, the town I live in would have its own seat in congress
We wouldn't have to create these convoluted districts that resemble a piles of snakes, just to create a minority district. (which is usually just 51% minority population, alot of good that does)

Additional benefit, with 8000 members of congress, the power/influence each member has would be diluted to a more reasonable amount

The city of DC has a comprable number of murders per year, yet they only have 570,000 residents and 61 square miles of land. Of course, we've got one of highest rates in the country, but we're also one of the few places that (like England) outlaws handguns. The murder rate is getting better, though:

Year-end homicide totals for the last 15 years:

1998: 260 1997: 301 1996: 397 1995: 360 1994: 399
1993: 454 1992: 443 1991: 482 1990: 474 1989: 434
1988: 369 1987: 225 1986: 194 1985: 148 1984: 175

Yes, the U.S. may be becoming a police state. Not only does the U.S. have at least three agencies that police the entire world, the NSA, the FBI, and the CIA, but the U.S. has the highest percentage of its citizens in prison of any country ever, in the history of the world.

Here are the official December 31, 2000 prison statistics from the U.S. Department of Justice. Sorry about the formatting. The lameness filter is lame. It won't let me post enough leading dots.

The total population of the United States, projected to September 24, 2001 at 6:34:55 PM PDT is 285,218,008. Therefore, 2.3 percent of the entire U.S. population is in prison or involved with the criminal justice system. But remember, many of those are babies or children. About 3.1 percent of all adult U.S. citizens are in prison, jail, or on probation or parole.

An April 20, 2000 ABC News article, U.S. Prison Population Rising says that the percentage of growth of the U.S. prison population is rising.

There is other evidence of social breakdown: An August 19, 1998 BBC News article, The United States of murder, says that the city with the highest murder rate, Washington, D.C., has a murder rate 170 times higher than the city with the lowest murder rate, Brussels, Belgium. The nine U.S. cities in this study of murder rates all were in the list of the 12 cities with highest murder rate.

There is evidence that the secret agencies of the U.S. government and the weapons manufactureres have too much control: What should be the Response to Violence? .

10,000 Americans die every day
gg made up stats

Made up stats? Let's see...
Assuming a population of 285 millions (U.S. Census Bureau), and an average life of 77 years (NCHS), we can work it out:

285.000.000 / (77*365) = 10140 deaths/day

Pretty close, I would say.

Our "defense" industry is largely what caused this debacle -- the number one export for the United States is weapons. Think about that for a second -- we make more money selling weapons to the rest of the world than any other thing that we make.

By contrast, according to the latest Statistical Abstract (Table 1329), electrical machinery accounted for $75 billion dollars worth of exports, computers and office machinery, $40 billion, power generating machinery, $30 billion, etc. Total exports were about $960 billion, so arms sales are only about 2% of the total.

High-availability? High-speed? You've never actually USED an Internet connection at an SC school, have you? In the school district of Aiken County (which is -- I shit you not -- about the size of Rhode Island), school Internet connections are well-nigh useless because of the massive number of people using them (in the district, there's about 30,000 students, faculty and staff) at any given time. ALL HTTP traffic from every school in the Consolidated School District of Aiken County is filtered through a single proxy server (yes, just one) on a T1 running Bess (N2H2 claims that their "high capacity, clustered appliances" [translation: Linux boxes running a hacked version of Squid]scale to "tens of thousands of users", but as far as I can tell from my experience, they're full of shit). And of course there are enough people browsing the web at any given time that the T1 is almost completely saturated.

So while there is a statewide backbone that all schools can hook up to, as long as they all have to filter their traffic like this, it's pretty useless.

This page shows the official numbers for the 2000 election. Gore won the popular vote by less than one percent. If you were to use this as a measure of conservativism vs liberalism (which is inappropriate) then it would seem that between 48.4% of those who voted are "liberal" and that 47.88% of those who voted are "conservative". (The remainder, I guess, are crazy people) These numbers fall exactly within the 45-55% range that the original poster cited.

Also, note that the total popular vote was 105,363,298, and the estimated population for the US in 2000 is 281.4 million. And while the popular vote may be a statistically accurate guess as to how the rest of the population would have voted, we may never know. 176 million is not an insignificant number of people (roughly 63% of the total) to not be able to account for.

As for your stats about the popularity of stem cell research, would you mind providing some sources to back them up? You questioned the original poster's sources but neglected to provide any of your own.

And finally, remember that there are three kinds of lies: A lie, a damn lie, and a statistic.

Website using CGI script to estimate light pollution:
http://www.darksky.org/ida/darksky/

Java Applet to estimate light pollution:
http://www.darksky.org/ida/darksky/darksky.html

To help you use the above tools, you'll need to know your latitude and longitude in degrees. Just type in your zip code at the bottom of this page:
http://tiger.census.gov/cgi-bin/mapbrowse-tbl/

When converting latitude and longitude for use in these tools, use a negative number to denote South and West (W); use a positive number to denote North (N) and East (E). For example, "49.147247 N" = "49.147247" and "73.996206 W" = "-73.996206".

You raise some very good issues. I agree that in some special circumstances, the government may be, in effect, subsidizing its own research efforts by giving up patents and copyrights. Companies that see commercial potential in a research project will be motivated to compete, and this would generally have the effect of driving down costs.

Also, I by no means believe that all Federally funded research is "corporate welfare". Actually, under the right conditions, I think that funding research is one of the most important functions of government. Under the right conditions, research funding stimulates innovation, creates entire new sectors of the economy, and has the effect of breaking down monopolies that otherwise naturally arise in a capitalist system. By the "right condtions", I mean an economic climate that encourages small business start-ups, and a research policy that mandates the free exchange of ideas and scientific knowledge. Unfortunately, the trend in recent times is towards restricting information flow and encouraging corporate merger and consolidation. Both of these trends are inherently anti-competitive, and under these conditions government funding of research sometimes can be corrupted into a form of corporate welfare.

Finally, I want to address your statement below:

I would agree that the government funds a lot of research, especially in the form of grants to Universities in order advance technologies in certain areas, but this is only a small portion of the research that goes on in this country.

If we look at the broad category of total research and development, you are actually correct in that industry spends more than government:
(Weird Table Warning - Circumvention device for slashdot lameness filter protection. When numbers are lame, only lamers will have numbers)

(Note dollar amounts are not adjusted for inflation)
Year, x, Total R&D, x, Fed Gov, x, Industry.
x, ($1 x 10E9), x, (%), x, (%).
1960, x, 13.711, x, 65.02, x, 32.94.
1980, x, 83.332, x, 36.04, x, 37.13.
1999, x, 247.000, x, 26.66, x, 68.55.
(Additional funding sources are Universities, Non-profits, and Non-federal governments)
(Source: US Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the U.S.:2000 (http://www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical-abstra ct-us.html),
Section 20, Science and Technology (http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/statab/sec20. pdf) , pg 603)

It is interesting to note that the proportion of total R&D performed by industry has increased dramtically over the past 40 years. It is not that government funding for R&D has decreased (since 1980, at least, in terms of real dollars government funding for R&D has increased by 34%),
rather, that corporate R&D spending has increased even more rapidly than government funding.

However, if we look at funding for basic research (not including product development costs and applied research), we see that the federal government still outspends industry:
(Note dollar amounts are not adjusted for inflation)
Year, x, Total R&D, FedGov, Industry, Univ., Nonprofit, NonFed Gov
x, ($1 x 10E9), (%), x, (%), x, (%) x, (%), x, (%).
1993 x, 28.754, x, 57.1, x, 24.8 x, 7.9 x, 6.9, x, 3.3.
2000 x, 47.903, x, 48.7, x, 33.9 x, 7.7 x, 7.0, x, 2.8.
Proportionally, corporate funding of all basic research is increasing, but is still significantly less than federal funding.

Finally, it is interesting to look at which institutions are receiving the funding for basic research:
(Note dollar amounts are not adjusted for inflation)
Year, x, Total R&D, FedGov, Industry, Univ., Nonprofit.
x, ($1 x 10E9), (%), x, (%), x, (%), x, (%).
1993 x, 28.754, x, 9.12 x,24.1 x, 57.8 x, 9.1.
2000 x, 47.903, x, 7.36 x,33.6 x, 49.0 x, 10.1.
(Source for the previous table: National Science Foundation,
National Patterns of R&D Resources: 2000 Data Update table 2A
Universities (and to a lesser extent, government labs) have been steadily losing their share of the total. Not surprising, as corporations tend to fund research internally.

You raise some very good issues. I agree that in some special circumstances, the government may be, in effect, subsidizing its own research efforts by giving up patents and copyrights. Companies that see commercial potential in a research project will be motivated to compete, and this would generally have the effect of driving down costs.

Also, I by no means believe that all Federally funded research is "corporate welfare". Actually, under the right conditions, I think that funding research is one of the most important functions of government. Under the right conditions, research funding stimulates innovation, creates entire new sectors of the economy, and has the effect of breaking down monopolies that otherwise naturally arise in a capitalist system. By the "right condtions", I mean an economic climate that encourages small business start-ups, and a research policy that mandates the free exchange of ideas and scientific knowledge. Unfortunately, the trend in recent times is towards restricting information flow and encouraging corporate merger and consolidation. Both of these trends are inherently anti-competitive, and under these conditions government funding of research sometimes can be corrupted into a form of corporate welfare.

Finally, I want to address your statement below:

I would agree that the government funds a lot of research, especially in the form of grants to Universities in order advance technologies in certain areas, but this is only a small portion of the research that goes on in this country.

If we look at the broad category of total research and development, you are actually correct in that industry spends more than government:
(Weird Table Warning - Circumvention device for slashdot lameness filter protection. When numbers are lame, only lamers will have numbers)

(Note dollar amounts are not adjusted for inflation)
Year, x, Total R&D, x, Fed Gov, x, Industry.
x, ($1 x 10E9), x, (%), x, (%).
1960, x, 13.711, x, 65.02, x, 32.94.
1980, x, 83.332, x, 36.04, x, 37.13.
1999, x, 247.000, x, 26.66, x, 68.55.
(Additional funding sources are Universities, Non-profits, and Non-federal governments)
(Source: US Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the U.S.:2000 (http://www.census.gov/prod/www/statistical-abstra ct-us.html),
Section 20, Science and Technology (http://www.census.gov/prod/2001pubs/statab/sec20. pdf) , pg 603)

It is interesting to note that the proportion of total R&D performed by industry has increased dramtically over the past 40 years. It is not that government funding for R&D has decreased (since 1980, at least, in terms of real dollars government funding for R&D has increased by 34%),
rather, that corporate R&D spending has increased even more rapidly than government funding.

However, if we look at funding for basic research (not including product development costs and applied research), we see that the federal government still outspends industry:
(Note dollar amounts are not adjusted for inflation)
Year, x, Total R&D, FedGov, Industry, Univ., Nonprofit, NonFed Gov
x, ($1 x 10E9), (%), x, (%), x, (%) x, (%), x, (%).
1993 x, 28.754, x, 57.1, x, 24.8 x, 7.9 x, 6.9, x, 3.3.
2000 x, 47.903, x, 48.7, x, 33.9 x, 7.7 x, 7.0, x, 2.8.
Proportionally, corporate funding of all basic research is increasing, but is still significantly less than federal funding.

Finally, it is interesting to look at which institutions are receiving the funding for basic research:
(Note dollar amounts are not adjusted for inflation)
Year, x, Total R&D, FedGov, Industry, Univ., Nonprofit.
x, ($1 x 10E9), (%), x, (%), x, (%), x, (%).
1993 x, 28.754, x, 9.12 x,24.1 x, 57.8 x, 9.1.
2000 x, 47.903, x, 7.36 x,33.6 x, 49.0 x, 10.1.
(Source for the previous table: National Science Foundation,
National Patterns of R&D Resources: 2000 Data Update table 2A
Universities (and to a lesser extent, government labs) have been steadily losing their share of the total. Not surprising, as corporations tend to fund research internally.

Atlanta grew much faster than Silicon Valley in the 90s. See http://www.census.gov/population/cen2000/phc-t3/ta b05.txt. The SF bay area attracted more VC money and more importantly, failed to build new housing.

However, in extremely simplistic generalities, most CS and tech majors are white, most Americans are white , and I am personally under the belief that the majority of coders that go to Africa would have to be extremely self-sacrificing (which, in a cynical view, is stupid.).

There was once a study done that showed every person in the world (this study was done between 1900-idon'tknow) could have a full acre in Texas. According to National Geographic, Texas is 267,277 sqare miles or 171,057,280 acres. At the Current World Population of about 6.16 Billion that works out to 0.0277 acres or about 1200 square feet per person.

Actually, most mapping software and websites(mapquest, along with the Deloreme products, etc etc) use TIGER US Census data, NOT USGS data. USGS DEMs only hold elevation data, and while there are also datasets made from overhead flights, etc. these are not suitable for mapping purposes. Its very easy to make maps using the tiger census data has some information, but the actual data is kind of hard to find on their site, so goto their FTP site. So, perhaps you should actually research the subject a bit more before posting about how everyone else is wrong, when you are yourself.

This looks something like a concept I've been working on for a little over a year. I call it " openreference ".

It's basically just "object-oriented" hypertext.

In the browser the interface could look something like the Windows SendTo menu. (The equivalent of the Unix Pipe.)

If anyone has ideas or is interested in helping out, send me an email.

Starting with the US Census Bureau!

Place and Zipcode Files

All files contain lat/long info, as well as some other tasty data.

But then again, I'm a self proclaimed "InfoManiac" :)

And many types of pollution are a crime. Witness the automobile emissions laws in California, a state that has even discussed outlawing barbecues because of their emissions. (I'm not sure whether that ever actually came to pass or not.) The air is certainly vastly cleaner there than it was 20 or 30 years ago (though I'm not sure about 50).

Electric heating and cooking is obviously pretty common too, at least in some places. Here in Seattle, where power is comparatively cheap, I have both electric heating and an electric stove.

Well according to http://europa.eu.int/comm/eurostat/Public/datashop /print-catalogue/EN?catalogue=Eurostat&theme=3-Pop ulation%20and%20Social%20Conditions for the EU and http://tier2.census.gov/cgi-win/PL94-171/pl94data. exe for the US, The population counts are (for all 15 EU member states)
EU: 375346459
US: 268396514
I don't know about the relative area, but they look to be about equal on an atlas too.
As for Data sources, well... those two sites are the appropriate bodies for such things (US Census Bureau and Eurostat)

Sidenote here, but your contention that there is only one language spoken in America is patently false. Check out this site at the census bureau for some information. Choose "Education and Language Spoken At Home". There are over 30 million in the US who have a native language other than English...that the Census found. I would guess that this number is very low, these are the folks who would tend to get skipped.

...and they want to drop the "actual enumeration" bit, too. They're not allowed to make up numbers for redistricting purposes this time; next time...

...and they want to drop the "actual enumeration" bit, too. They're not allowed to make up numbers for redistricting purposes this time; next time...

"That's more that one phone for each citizen of the U.S."

Not by much, besides, the article only mentions the phones will be produced in the United States. Considering this fabrication technology would be the cheapest technology available in less than a year; it is quite possible this many units will sell worldwide.

3,000,000 Phones / 6,000,000,000 Potential Customers = 0.05%. This doesn't seem unreasonable considering their apparent new hold on the market as well as the fact that fabrication costs may be lowest in these very large blocks. We have no idea what projected sales vs. projected fabrication costs really are.

Besides, being disposable - who's to say the customers won't need to order more than one in the span of a year? 8-).

"That's more that one phone for each citizen of the U.S."

Not by much, besides, the article only mentions the phones will be produced in the United States. Considering this fabrication technology would be the cheapest technology available in less than a year; it is quite possible this many units will sell worldwide.

3,000,000 Phones / 6,000,000,000 Potential Customers = 0.05%. This doesn't seem unreasonable considering their apparent new hold on the market as well as the fact that fabrication costs may be lowest in these very large blocks. We have no idea what projected sales vs. projected fabrication costs really are.

Besides, being disposable - who's to say the customers won't need to order more than one in the span of a year? 8-).

I realize this is about 24 hours too late to get any significant reading, but hopefully at least the poster of this posting's parent will see it eventually...

Anyway, I just wanted to point out that Maryland is one of the most completely urbanized states in the Union. Nearly half the 1999 estimated population of Maryland (5.171 million) lives in the Baltimore PMSA (2.491 million). That doesn't even count regions in Maryland which are directly outlying from the DC border (roughly another 1.8 million, adding the MD counties listed in the DC PMSA). All told, nearly 4.3 million of MD's 5.2 million citizens live in the Baltimore-DC MSA alone. By contrast, adding together Lexington and the parts of the Louisville and Cincinnati MSAs which are in KY, I get a figure of about 1.6 million of KY's 3.9 million people, and those are three separate MSAs, not one large one. Of Maine's 1.25 million people, only 310,000 live in an MSA larger than 200,000 people, and none in one larger than 300,000. Of Montana's 883,000 people, 127,000 live in Billings, the only MSA with more than 100,000. (All population data were taken from the US Census Bureau's web site, particularly this page.)

The link between urbanization and violent crime is much better documented and understood than that between gun control laws and violent crime. I mention this only to point out that drawing a direct relationship between gun control laws and violent crime based on the data you've provided may (or may not) be fallacious, as there may be more important factors at work in the violent crime numbers.

I recently moved from Seattle to Washington D.C. and the difference in racial makeup as a whole takes a while to get used to (see below). Whatever the statitistics on programmers' racial makeup might be, the additional statistic that might come into play is the local population as a whole.

Actaully, I just ran to the Census web site and got the following numbers;

Population of Washington State (esitmate): 5756361

Black Population of the state (esitmate): 203853

Percentage: 3.5%

It seems that blacks at Microsoft are slightly "under-represented", but there are so many other variables (education, age, etc., etc.)...

* I would kill for a decent bowl of Pho, an inexpensive vegetarian Phad Thai, or a good sushi restaraunt that doesn't cost an arm and a leg... If they build another goddamned steak house in D.C. I think my colon's gonna blow.

The US Census Bureau has a decent site. They've won awards for accessibility, and there's a lot of information stashed in there.