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Any idea how much money is spent in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean on bleaching creams?

Probably less than the amount spent on fake tanning spray by Donald Trump.

http://web-images.chacha.com/i...

http://www.chacha.com/gallery/...

If the super volcano were a Twinky, how big would it be?

According to this reputable source, the volume of a Twinkie is ~140 milliliters and the volume of the goo inside is 42.8 ml or ~30.5% of its total volume.

If Yellowstone's magma chamber is its goo and its volume is 200 cubic kilometers (low estimate), then the Yellowstone Twinkie itself would have a volume of ~656 cubic kilometers. If Twikie's W:L:H dimensions follow the ratio 15:39:11 then the Twinkie would be ~18.2 kilometers on its longest side, or 716,535 inches.

But supervolcanic calderas tend to form in roundish not Twinkie shapes, so it would be best to use the circular Ding Dong or its ellipsoidal counterpart, the Long Dong.

I'm totally opposite. I tried to enjoy classical music but it always seems to be too bland for me. I might listen to a classical music track once or twice, but I never really want to keep listening to it. But if somebody takes a good instrumental track, adds nice vocals (choir singing is super-good) and at least somewhat decent lyrics then I won't be able to stop listening to it. Alas, I probably have almost all of the bands that do this :( Also, I like to listen to some movie soundtracks even though they might not have lyrics or vocals. I guess that the memory of the story from the movie is enough.

Take a stab at really listening to the entire Le Sacre Du Printemps some time in your life if you get the time. The average music consumer these days is not capable of listening to anything over 4 minutes in length, the attention span of roughly 3/4 of todays population. Or the average length of a song by the Monkees, which may or may not satisfy some species of real monkeys because they actually might have the ability to listen to real classical music in a more attentive way!

Wearing masks in public illegal in at least 18 states, mostly in the south-east, due to the prevalence of the KKK wearing masks and hoods while terrorizing, burning, lynching, and killing blacks and others:

If we assume a 15cm diameter power cable (which means a 15cm effective width; sure, the actual cable circumference is more than that but half of it's out of the sunshine and the rest isn't all perpendicular), a one kilometer length of cable would have a 'collection area' of 150m^2. Given full-time sunshine (dicey) and 40% efficiency of conversion (roughly state of the art, iirc) that one kilometer cable will generate about 84 kW. Assume that an average day has about 6 hours of full sunshine (wild-ass guess) and we're looking at 504 kWh per day. Call it 500.
The average household power consumption in the US is about 12000kWh/year, or around 33kWh/day. So a 1km cable could supply about 15 houses, which isn't bad. But that's houses. Wikipedia says that overall power usage in the US per person is a bit over 83000 kWh/year, or 228 kWh per day. So that kilometer of wire can support two people, and we need 600 million kilometers of cable for the US. A probably questionalbe source I found on google indicates that the current US power grid has about 300,000km of power lines, so we're looking at multiplying that by 2000. Definitely a big infrastructure task. That much cable would also cover 90,000 square _kilometers_, roughly the size of Indiana or 1% of the US.
Short answer: It's conceivable, but probably not practical.

Ultimately the issue is really basic.

Console lockdown has created a giant opening for cross-platform gaming. The platform is not "the device" but simply "the genre of the game" Something that runs on the tablet/smartphone will almost guaranteed be able to run on any computing device, basically. Which is something consoles don't really lean towards (see: "Exclusive" titles, PC only, etc).

so the question of "what will it play on?" is basically gone. Which is why companies like gameloft are going to be out of business - they rip off games and market them to specific devices and try to create this exclusivity, and then blame the market for their own failures in 2009. Yet a year later? "we're moving in on android!" etc etc.This is a company trying to become another console manufacturer equivalent (failure) for smartphones, and thus has huge money being poured in from console manufacturers. Why? Because they are one. Owned by lovely Ubisoft.. Half of their games are exclusive to specific iphone models or specific android phones. Yet, long term? colossal failure.

You are incorrect. Obama came into office on January 20, 2009. By the first Monday in February, the President must submit his budget request (Congressional Budget Act of 1974). That budget takes effect starting October 1. So FY2009 was already well in effect. The FY2009 Budget was proposed to Congress by George W. Bush on Feb 4, 2008.

According to the Treasury Department, the debt ending Sept 30, 2008 was just over $10T. The debt ending Sept 30, 2009 was just over $11.9T. So the last budget from George W. Bush was almost $1.9T deficit, an increase of over $800B from the previous year. Obama's first budget (FY2010) ending on Sept 30, 2010, gave us an overall debt of just over $13.5T. That means the deficit from his budget was just over $1.65T, which is LESS than the almost $1.9T from Bush. In fact, it was a net reduction in deficit of $233B.

So yes, the GP post was correct that Obama inherited the largest deficit in history, and the deficit has decreased each year since Obama came into office. In fact, someone was nice enough to go through all the data from the Treasury Department website and show a breakdown of the numbers to make it easy to see how the budgets/deficits have changed over time.

Perhaps "long time goal" was a bit of an overstatement. I do stand by the that it's been a recent goal, since the radical Randian/pseudo-literal-constitutionistl wing of the party became ascendant. (I will take those arguments seriously, when those spouting them take equally stern view at the Air Force.)

This year Randy Neugebauer (R-TX) has proposed a 28% cut in funding . This adversely effect forecasting.

In 2005, Rick Santorum, former Senator from Pennsylvania, now GOP Presidential candidate, in proposed to forbid the NWS from disseminating forecasts and data free of charge, and instead force access of the taxpayer supported data through for-profit companies such as AccuWeather. Why? The NWS unfairly competes with for profit companies, even though the companies get 90% of their data from the NWS, thus meaning people would be effectively purchasing the same data twice.

Of course we can follow this up with accounts of GOP meddling with NOAA funding of climate science, but I chalk that up to their run of the mill corporate-religous synergistic anti-science policies.

Also dear mods, a question can't be "informative," since it is a request for information. It may be "insightful," or maybe "interesting," but it is never "informative."

http://www.chacha.com/question/what-does-it-mean-to-get-nooked

"Nooked is a slang term which means the act of getting owned so hard you black out."

You Penguins? You definitely got NOOKED! LMAO

Know what's ironic? Dandelions are not native to the US. Scandinavians brought it as food, the leaves are used as greens for salad, the roots can be cooked, and the flowers are used to make dandelion wine.

Yet today most people treat them as a weed.

Falcon

I don't trust Harper's government further than I can puke

Apparently, about 9m.

Joking aside, I have no love for Harper but if there is anything that I've learnt from the US Bush/Obama fiasco, Ignatieff's government will be just as revolting, possibly more so.
However, I'm afraid that will remain academic.

I wasnt referring to people vs corporations, I was referring to gov't vs Corp ownership, how many corporations do you know that are even half as old as the US, and we are a baby amongst the nations.

First, nations change their form of government, this past century we had nations change their government at least twice. Llyod's of London was founded in 1688. Though not older the Insurance Company of North America was founded in 1792 and the Hartford Insurance Group in 1810. The Insurance of Houses from Loss by Fire incorporated in 1768. The Hudson's Bay Company in Canada was founded in 1670.

I'm sure if I look longer I can find more corporations that are as old.

Falcon

Why don't you see how many congresspeople ARE lawyers?

A web site for the ABA young lawyers division claims 36% of all Congressmen were lawyers before being elected. http://www.abanet.org/yld/chooselaw/trivia.shtml According to the Congressional Research Service 170 members of the House and 58 Senators have law degrees http://www.chacha.com/question/how-many-congressmen-and-senators-are-lawyers There are about 1.1 million active lawyers http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_lawyers_are_in_the_US, or about 0.3% of the population. If we assume that number is half the trained lawyers, that is still a huge disproportionality.

Since this is 60 to 120 times the national average there seems to be a good correlation to allow a generalized bashing of lawyers when one might more correctly aim their attacks on Congress.

The national average GPA for college graduates is 3.2 (according to a quick google search)

you mean this site?. Yes, i'm sure "your mobile BFF" is accurate.

"Why should they shut it down in the first place, or have me pay the cost?"

don't worry, apparently they're getting a great deal on helicopters:
"where they were watched by a police helicopter for about 15 minutes.....A police spokeswoman said the helicopter was deployed for less than 20 minutes at a cost of about £200."

That's roughly $400, which is a great deal considering you have the pilot, fuel, oil, and the maintenance since they're not like cars, ignore maintenance on a car and you pull over, ignore it on a helicopter and you crash the 2 million dollar helicopter. Every flight you have to check everything again to make sure everything's working right, and every so many hours of flight time the engine must be overhauled.

And I don't buy their time-line. If they watched for 15 minutes, was the trip there and back to the hanger only 5 minutes? Unless the house is on a airfield it'd take longer than 5 minutes to get there an back, especially since helicopters don't really travel that fast, few go over 150mph, even Apaches only go 192mph.

I'd say it easily cost double or triple that quote.

http://www.abc.net.au/quantum/poison/caffeine/caffeine.htm
it may range between 40 and 176 mg

http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/fea/healthyliving2/stories/011608dnlivcaffeine.3d6c6.html
Starbucks' drip (16 oz.): 400 mg (f*ck me!)

http://www.nancyscoffee.com/
1 cup of coffee contains 230 milligrams of caffeine

Apparently 100mg is not that hard to come by in one cup of coffee...

chacha.com

Yes, the old troll-bait live chat-based search engine has shut off the chat and is now doing exactly what Google is now trying to do.

There have been several challengers, but so far Google has won out. The human-powered element is cropping up in some of the latest sites trying to get in to the game, like ChaCha.com. My hope is that connecting users with a wide base of human "search experts" will eventually make it much harder for search engines to arbitrarily tamper with their data. Granted, we are still a long way from reaching that ideal, but it sounds like a good direction to go. Especially if you have any control over what search experts you're getting connected to.

Come on, Captain D! If I was going to use a search engine, I'd need the kind of help that only http://www.chacha.com/ can give.

Now why don't you just hit the Ho Chi Minh trail out of here, Captain "Put Your Dick In My Face"? Oh wait, I forgot you're an "Indian national currently living in Redmond and working on the GUI design team for LiveMeeting" and there's no Ho Chi Minh trail in India. No siree. Hmmm, well speaking of being Indian, boy, it must be tough being the equivalent of a Dalit in the heirarchy of nations. I mean, don't you ever have the urge to pretend you're something classier? Like a Mexican? A Captain Don Diego de la Vega Dickface, if you will. That just rolls off the tongue like butter, doesn't it? Yes, I think that is the kind of name that would pay homage to your oeuvre. The vicious verbal ripostes ..... the cunning, catlike intellect .... the rapier thrust of your dick into another man's ass. Bahaha. The sea bass is taking it in the ass! At least you're ill-tempered though, that's a start.

Yeah, looks like it's exactly like Google but with a ton of ads ("sponsored links") disguised as search results. Do the following searches for "stokes scattering":

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=stokes+scatte ring&btnG=Google+Search
http://search.chacha.com/search/query?query=stokes +scattering&search=ChaCha+Search&tid=&rid=&mode=we b&page_num=1

Notice something? All of Google's links are (surprise) about stokes scattering. Compare with some of ChaCha's results:
1. Dignified Ash Scattering. Burial at sea in MidAtlantic New Jersey Waters, Family owned/operated.
4. Stokes Ringtones. Download Complimentary Stokes Ringtones Instantly.
8. Stokes. Over 11 million pieces of china, crystal & silver - old & new.

Thanks but no thanks, ChaCha. This is really disgusting. Here's the seventh link from a search on "raman scattering":

7. Raman Scattering. Find and Compare prices on raman scattering at Smarter.com.

Indiana's government website also uses Cha Cha. Coincidence? I think not. http://ingov.chacha.com/search/query?query_text=

I think site like Wikia will be great. I think ChaCha.com http://www.chacha.com/ has a good idea too. Human's searching, finding and ranking sites.

I'm not sure why this site is so frequently dismissed or ignored in these sort of polls and collections of answer sites, but I'd recommend it.

Don't fear, ChaCha is here!
http://chacha.com/

Seriously, ChaCha.com seems to be a sort of stripped-down version of Google Answers: a way to get help from a real live person in finding the answer to your search problem. Faster, too. And cheaper. It's not surprising Google Answers would go under...

http://www.pbnation.com/showthread.php?t=1872475

http://www.genmay.net/showthread.php?s=a69fba41b66 d1eff21a2f920476dbe65&t=691767

http://chachachats.wordpress.com/

http://www.rotteneggs.com/r3/show/se/700-forum-dis play_topic-0-1-1298121.html

Just to name a few places where it's not only mentioned, but enjoyed and abused far more than google answers ever could have been, in less than 3 months of chacha's running.

yet another example of "open" failing....

Completely the opposite. The openness allows someone with a "better idea", yet to be proven, to attempt to prove it better, without having to start from scratch.
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I'm voluntarily declare shill! on this and else where it's appropriate:
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It's tried before (and failed), but my pal (creator of voicemail) eight miles (to the inch) has launched an alpha of social searching ChaCha. You can search alone or with a guide.