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What I see is people turning more and more away from learning, actual knowledge, and truth, and turning back towards religion

Where do you see that? Church membership per capita is way down in the US.

Also keep in mind the the Pew Trust is notoriously liberal, especially related to environmental issues. It isn't a surprise that their survey pushes their agenda. They're also known for sending their own employees (and having them claim to be from the general public) to attend congressional hearings so it appears there's more grass root support for their causes than there actually is.

No, this is really an absurd profit, Standard Oil's net profit from 1882 to 1906 was $838,783,800 equal to roughly $22B today, so on an inflation adjusted basis Apple's quarterly profit was nearly equal to the majority of the lifetime profits of one of the classic robber baron trusts.

The U.S. population in 1906 was 85,450,000 compared to 2014's population of 322,583,006. Apple is definitively a world wide, global corporation. Did Standard Oil reach as far.

Sorry, but you don't have much of a comparison here.

~1500 multiple warhead weapons is still enough to blow up the world several times over,

No it's not. The very idea is preposterous. Blast radius of a 1mt Minuteman warhead is about .48km. Assuming an absurdly unrealistic "destroyed" zone 100 times the area of the blast, and assuming perfect coverage with no overlap, 1500 warheads gets us an area of 1.1 million square kilometers.

Making up numbers are we? The destruction radius of a typical 400 kT modern warhead (urban airburst) is actually larger than the "4.8 km" you pulled out your nether regions for a 1 MT warhead. Far from being "absurdly unrealistic", your urban destruction radius is actually a low-ball. In a nuclear urban annihilation attack (multiple warheads against large cities) a destruction radius of 7 km is reasonable (anyone outside is fatally burned, buildings are damaged enough to serve as efficient furnaces as the multitude of set fires merge into a fire storm).

This gives us an urban area destroyed of ~150 km^2 per warhead, or a total of 225,000 km^2. This is not the whole world, but it is about half of the world's total urban area with populations larger than 500,0000 numbering 2 billion people. Such an attack could easily destroy the world's entire petrochemical processing and storage infrastructure in a single stroke, as well as all of its major ports. Half the urban population in the world dead all at once. No oil or food shipments for anyone, anywhere. A billion deaths is just the starting point. How far would the population fall through famine and disease until it stabilizes?

Not the "end of the world", but the "end of the world as we know it" for sure.

Mmm, those are interesting numbers. They seem quite low, though.

How about these:
http://www.ofm.wa.gov/trends/economy/fig101.asp
http://www.demographia.com/db-pc1929.pdf
http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-Income-Distribution.php

Looking at the last one, it seems that the xls describes income levels for the 4th quintile. Do you have a link to the page that links to the xls?

Slashdot used to be populated by bold technologists, not NIMBYists with random fears and no concept of the magnitude of the risks.

Do you have any idea of how large the Earth is, and how small a fraction of it is covered with major cities? There are 683 cities above 500,000 people worldwide, with an average population density of 7,450 per km^2 and a total population of 1.24 billion (source). That makes 166,000 km^2 of major city area worldwide, versus a global surface area of 510,000,000 km^2, which gives us a 0.03% chance that a random asteroid strike is going to hit a major city, as you suggested.

And that's assuming that they don't, say, pick an asteroid orbit which avoids major cities, or even manage to prevent it from hitting the damn planet in the first place. Seriously, before you start arguing against proposals like this on the basis of your worst-case fears, take a moment to figure out how likely they are.

I HATE apples to oranges comparisons. Comparing the US to an unnamed —presumably small and high density — country is as silly as comparing a LAN connection to the one you get from your ISP and suggesting that the ISP is slow. Of course it is. They'd have to spend exponentially more to have it equal to your LAN, but they also have a lot more to overcome.

When you have population densities that are significantly higher, you make it significantly easier to provide higher quality service to more people, since you have to lay less high-priced cable to reach most of them and you're able to spread the costs out more because there are simply more people per unit of land area. It's not really a fair comparison when you can connect 3x, 5x, or 10x more people in one country than another with the same trunk line. For a fairer comparison, pick countries that have comparable population densities in urban areas, such as Australia, New Zealand, or Canada, and compare the service in them to the US. If the US is slower, fine. If it's faster, fine. But at least it's a fair comparison, and since we're all /.ers here, I should hope that we care about getting to the facts.

To provide some quick numbers on population densities, here's a list of sovereign states sorted by population density. The United States is far closer to the bottom of the list than the top in terms of population density, but that list considers the entire land area occupied by the state, which may give a false impression of success in countries that appear lower than the US on the list if they're able to have networks that are comparable to that of the US. The reason is that they may be able to circumvent the negative effects of a large land mass by concentrating more people into urban areas. For that, we need to check urban population densities.

in fact, we do see that many of the countries have more of their population in urban centers than the US does. If you look at the population densities of urban areas, we can see that countries which had a lower population density than the US on the first list end up having a higher urban population density. In particular, Australia and Russia stand out. Russia's urban population density is roughly 648x higher than its nationwide average, and Australia's is 474x higher than its nationwide average, while the US' is a mere 35x in comparison, suggesting that the first two countries have the vast majority of their people in a few urban pockets, while a large number of US citizens are spread out away from urban areas.

None of this is meant to suggest that America gets a free pass in having bad service, because they don't. But I hate when people try to compare apples and oranges to suggest someone or something is coming up short. That's just shoddy, and you need to compare countries that have similar hurdles to overcome when you want to compare service.

22 Mbps per channel ... and each channel covers 12,000 square miles. That's about 1.8 Kbps per square mile.

Assume a population density of 21 people per square mile (Iowa's rural population from 2000, see http://www.demographia.com/db-usa-staterural.htm), works out to about 87 bps per person.

  Figure that there are 5 people per household, so about 430 bps per household per channel. If there are roughly 80 available whitespace channels, then this works out to about 35 Kbps for each family.

Which is to say, it's roughly competitive with old fashioned dial-up service over a modem - V,34.

Clearly, this is not a panacea for rural Internet. It's a point-to-point system, similar to the wifi in your home.

A home wireless router might have a long range if there are no neighbors. But if there are twenty nearby wireless routers, channels 1, 5, and 9 get clogged up ... and then your wireless router can't reach beyond fifty feet.

Think about if comparable companies had to provide service (including costly infrastructure) to two areas, with the second area being 8906X larger. To which area do you think that comparable companies could offer cheaper service?

Actually the square created inside of the circle is what matters, making each tower, at best, able to cover a grid square of 625-4050 square miles.

http://www.demographia.com/db-uland2000.htm
then we have not to cover ALL of the US for some reasonable amount of coverage but, instead, the urbanized land where we actually need the towers: 92,505

At $300,000 (the highest possible cost) a 25mi tower(the lowest possible range) it would cost ATT about 44million to double the coverage in urban portions of the US.

It is important to not that by only paying the top executives at ATT an average of 3.2 million each ATT could double coverage every year.

Then why can't we get it in U.S. cities?

The top 190 U.S. cities have population densities ove 500people per sq km.

Published on 16 Jun 2006 by Energy Bulletin. [...] This review has concluded that the likely energy payback of a typical domestic sized rooftop grid connected PV cell is approximately four years.

WoW will go down in history as a classic game.

I would be curious to see a comparison of total man-hours spent enjoying WoW or EVE vs total man-hours spent watching a production of a Shakespeare play. Wow has about 6.5 million players, if we assume a safe average of 100 hours played per player WoW has been played for 605 million man-hours. Meanwhile, In 1600 the population of London was 200,00 by 1700 the population of London was about 600,000 So assuming every single person in London saw two productions of Shakespeare every year, that's only about 200 million man-hours of Shakespeare enjoyed in 100 years. I would say that by some measures WoW is already a greater cultural influence that Shakespeare.

I really roughed in these numbers (but do have sources), if someone who is better at figuring these things would be so kind as to try to supply some better total estimates I appreciate it.

2000
POPULATION
Urban 222,353,453
Rural 59,068,453
Total 281,421,906

Given that Los Angeles is the most densely populated place in the continental United States (25% denser than New York City). . .

Definitely not given. See the 2000 population density rankings for US cities. In your defense, the city of LA (7876 people / sq mi) is more dense than one of New York City's boroughs -- Staten Island (7588 / sq mi). The other four boroughs are far more dense. Manhattan is extremely dense (66,940 / sq mi).

Since the five boroughs are also counties, compare their respective population densities to LA county (2344 / sq mi).

Los Angeles does have the most-dense metropolitan area in the United States. That is because even its far-flung suburbs have relatively high population densities. Unlike the LA metro area (composed of Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, and Ventura counties), many metro areas have very low densities at the edges, no matter how dense the central cities and close-in suburbs may be.

In general, across the country, pre-WWII development is more dense, walkable, mixed-use, and economically diverse. Most of what has been built after that is sprawl. Keep in mind, density alone does not determine sprawl.

It is tyranny by majority all over again. Instead of focusing campaign advertising on populous states, the new era of campaigning will focus in on populous cities. Instead of New York and California it will be New York City and LA.

To repeat an earlier poster's point: you have to get a sense of the numbers. New York City plus LA is about 12 million people. We've got about 300 million nationwide. (Those are all raw population numbers, not voters.) See the list here; even if you imagine that all city people vote one way and all the others vote Republican, you'll see that for the Democrat to win the raw vote, he'd have to be getting people in San Atonio, Oklahmoa City, Omaha, and the like.

But to go back to the best comment on the thread: if you're worried about tyranny of the majority, why is tyranny of the minority supposed to be any better? Unless there's something wrong with those people in the cities, I mean.

> The point is, public transport just isn't available in a very large portion of the US.

No - the point is that the US (as a whole) has made a choice to live an energy-inefficient lifestyle.

You're "forced" to live far from work because of the size and luxury of house/apartment you culturally expect. Most other nations live in more modest dwellings, and hence use their land (and heat/AC) more efficiently. By contrast, the US is built on the assumption of cheap land and cheap energy, with the car allowing the latter to be used to exploit the former. Due to this cultural bias towards the car---which quite honestly has had a symbolic appeal (freedom/individuality) far outside its usefulness in the US for decades---more efficient systems such as passenger rail are not seriously considered.

It's worth noting, though, that about 80% of Americans do live in urban areas---which is the same fraction as in the UK---so most of your attempts to draw contrasts between the two countries are little more than red herrings.

So efficient options like public transit aren't predicated on living in a "tiny country" - they're predicated on public policy makers choosing efficient options. The US - perhaps because of its historical wealth - has done so to a lesser extent than many other industrialized countries. Trying to argue that it can't, though, is simply nonsensical - the near-identical urban-rural demographics between the US and European countries skewers that falsehood.

As crazy as it seems, World of Warcraft hit 5 million subscribers in December. It seems to appeal to high-school level students all the way up the age ladder.

Statistically, it's not crazy to think that one of those people might be president one day, just improbable. The population of Los Angeles in 2004 was 3.8 million, and you probably wouldn't think it that unlikely that a future president might be any one of those people.

And they say US schools are bad at teaching geography. What's YOUR excuse? The miles-to-kilometers conversion is too tough? What's your excuse for such a fundamental lack of economics knowledge? Here's my point.

I'm not at all worried about paying $4 per gallon, personally. What I am concerned about is the fact that something like 90% of our economy does business by diesel truck. The US does not have rail infrastructure capacity to replace those trucks. If I can't afford gas, I'll carpool. Hey Mr. $2 per litre, what's your next brilliant bit of genius? Suggest truck drivers start to car pool? And they say US schools suck?

So if this 200% increase in our gasoline prices create a significant dent in our GDP, that will create a significant dent in our federal tax revenue at a crucial point in history where we NEED to invest huge sums into rail and mass transit infrastructure. We have wastelands bigger than France, Germany, or Spain. We're not talking about some quaint little train system for Delaware.

Here's a list of densely populated cities. Notice anything? Very few American cities there. I've never heard of the sub-1m population European cities, but I bet I could name a dozen US cities you've heard of that aren't on that list at all.

Yeah really, what are we whining about? It's just that our entire nation is ill-equipped for mass transportation, our entire economy depends on cheap gasoline, and our gas prices have doubled in the last year. Fuck all, why don't you just burn down your schools? If you're any indication of average, you're clearly not doing you any good.

Well aren't we wearing rose tinted glasses...

The UK is hardly and example of Europe. Take a look at the rock solid unemployment and stagnation in Germany, France, Italy, Switzerland, Portugal, Spain... I'm not going to include eastern europe just yet -- because i'm east european, and I don't think Europe deserves the growth figures that might be mis-attributed to contries they don't represent.

I agree with you that Europe did incredibly well after the war, but the good decisions of the UK, Ireland, and especially Whales are to serve as no example of the current state of affairs of continental Europe's rush toward the overregulated economies they are today. I only hope the UK keeps up the good work, and refuses to subsidise the continental make-work culture.

And Japan.. ummm.. try here.

Yes, Japan is an example to the East, but the inflation of the Yen and decade long recession is nothing to be envied in terms of policy.

The U.S. current account deficit will pass as the East develops, but I don't think the Euro will long, if ever, serve as a benchmark currency.

The Pound, however, would make a good candidate.

Why not compare it to Countries like India and China. Places with very large populations and a very large land mass. I think it'd be a little more fair than comparing it to countries with a high population density (the majority of Canadia's population is settled within 100 miles or so of the US border

1. "100 miles or so of the US border..." In other words, most of Canada's population lives in a similar setting to their American cousins, just across the border. Here's a map. Here's an older, but more detailed map
2. Canada and the USA are both "rich" countries, with similar cultures. Most people in China and India do not have the average American's income or lifestyle.
3. The urban population density in Canada is only slightly greater than in the US, in other words... it is roughly the same.

Sorry...try again...

http://www.demographia.com/db-usa-staterural.htm

By percentage, the USA has a lower rural population than Canada....yet we still can't get our stuff together to provide decent broadband.

We suck...

Original source

The economy is bloated and full of beurocracy, if it weren't for government subsidy (State, Local and Federal) the Central Valley (Salad bowl) would have no chance.

Currently South American Farmers are beating the pricepoint by a few pennies for most grown foods in supermarkets. FDR era new deal bullshit subsidies are still around. People need to wake up and smell the gravy train that's been going on for a very long time. If these illegal tariffs continue, the bubble will be much bigger when it bursts.

There needs to be an econmic reformation in California.

Housing prices in the central valley are artificially inflated due to the steep rise in population.

The stress on schools and local hospitals combined with the huge crime rates in the Salinas Valley paint the picture pretty well. libraries are forced to close down, the city can't afford to keep them running. Schools cut vital programs to afford expensive survielance systems to cut back on the crime.

The citizenship by birthright is a nice ideal, but it's not a good way to control migration with open borders. People abuse this system. Parents of citizens who are non-citizens themselves is a byproduct of a fucking loophole. There is a lot of this. 35% of the Central Valley are illegal occupants. That's 1/3rd more people on the roads, 1/3rd more people occupying homes, and 1/3rd more kids in schools.

It's also been slightly more than 1/3rd more crime. But no more than the MOE.

A page from most other nation's constitution might be useful. A stipulation that requires one parent be a citizen.

It's good to see that Bush was concerned enough to throw .01% of the national debt at such a growing problem.

Still, just symptoms of what packing people into such a small area (#47 in population density) and paying them very little can do to a people.

If paper voting can work in dense areas like Toronto/Vancouver, it can certainly work for West Bumfuck North Dakota.

According to this site, Toronto has the second-highest population density in North America. Montreal is #7.

I think the above stats are a little skewed, they lump NY and Newark together. I'm pretty sure that New York would be the most packed place in NA, but what do I know?

http://www.demographia.com/db-uscity98.htm/

What are you talking about? Look at a bloody graph (bottom). Everyone but the Brits gained on the US from 1960 to the mid 1970s (roughly the peak of European and Canadian democratic socialism). Only two countries reached their GDP-comparative peak with the US at that point, which have remained relatively steady with the US since then: the Netherlands and Sweden. Of the rest, three peaked in the mid-80s, and the rest in the 90s. Seing as Europe has been becoming a more free-trade capitalist region since the late 70s, and most notably during the 90s...

I'd assume that you can look up statistics yourself. What do you need, a graph? :)

BTW, I should have mentioned the 1960s, too. They gained then as well.

One thing you'll notice if you look at the graph: the more that European companies have abandoned their social welfare policies (something that began mainly in the 1990s), the worse (on average) their economies have done. And, while it's not shown on this graph, wealth inequality really increased notably as well.

50 largest cities (2002) (from New York to Wichita)
276 Metropolitan Areas (2000) (from New York--Northern New Jersey--Long Island, NY--NJ--CT--PA CMSA to Enid, OK MSA).

I don't know how valid this is. Rather than focusing on the top rated, how about looking at those close to US figures. If the above poster's figures are correct, US = 6.5, Singapore = 5.5. Plainly, the population density of Singapore is WAY higher than US (Sing=6050/sq.mile, US=2404/sq.mile(urban density)).

Now, if we expected increased connectivity with increased density, Singapore should be way more connected than the US. Instead, Singapore lags.

Netherlands and US are dead even at 6.5 connectivity wise. However, Netherlands has 387/sq.km (2.6 sq/km=1 sq/mi, so about 1006/sq mile.

Being less dense than the US, we would expect Netherlands to also be less connected. It isn't.

Could it be that population density is just a lame excuse to explain why broadband sucks in the US?? Could it be that the lack of Broadband, or if it does exist, the lack of choice and competition, has to do with the way the Telecos and the Government are practically conspiring to ensure a broadband monopoly. Believe me, If I had a chance to ditch Cumcrust.net, I would.

I was about to post the exact same thing...

To bring a sense of perspective to this, let's contrast the US and Europe.

US: total population approx 280m.
EU: total population approx 380m.

IOWs, Europe alone is roughly a third larger than the US. Now consider markets in the rest of the world as well, and the law in the US isn't really as important to the economics of a company like Microsoft as a lot of people assume it is.

Realistically, any attempt to force upgrades by DRM-izing documents would more likely result in a mass rejection of upgrades to that DRM-enabled Office version. Even if people in the US upgraded, everyone else would carry on regardless, and the US would wind up sufficiently damaged by the lack of ability to exchange documents in a de facto standard format with outside bodies that something would have to give.

• 
  The World's 50 Largest Metropolitan Areas
  1 Tokyo-Yokohama Japan 33,190,000
  2 New York United States 20,270,000
  4 Mexico City Mexico 19,620,000
  8 Los Angeles United States 16,200,000
  27 Chicago United States 8,960,000
  29 Washington-Baltimore United States 7,430,000
  34 San Francisco United States 6,940,000
  37 Philadelphia United States 6,010,000
  39 Detroit-Windsor United States-Canada 5,810,000
  42 Boston United States 5,690,000
  49 Dallas-Fort Worth United States 5,010,000
  50 Madrid Spain 4,950,000

Bah, my initial starting figures for the surface of the earth are off by 1000. :(

Earth surface = 5.1*10^14 m2
Volume extruded from surface, 1km high, ignoring spherical distortion = 5.1*10^17 m3.
# atoms in that space = 1.48*10^46
one IP address for every 43 million atoms, which is a bit of a different story from my first post. But maybe my assumptions were too conservative?

This raises another question, which is what is the rough lower bound for the size (in terms of # of atoms) for a working nano-device? I evaded this question a bit in my earlier analysis, but remembering the Times Ten size comparisons showing viruses, particularly rhinoviruses as the smallest living things, I went to look at how many atoms make up such a thing. A google search led to a Caltech thesis saying that "The smallest important viruses, the picornaviruses (responsible for polio, the common cold, and hoof-and-mouth disease) are composed of protein coats of about 0.5 million atoms and a nucleic acid genome of about the same size." (Some smallest virus in theory calculations suggest lower sizes, I dunno how good the underlying assumptions are.) So 1 million atoms is a reasonable size for a nanodevice, right? Well, partially-- viruses can't do much without a host cell infrastructure to tap into. But on the flip side, for a working nanodevice sufficient to have its own IP address, we wouldn't necessarily need the self-replication infrastructure of a virus. So I'm not sure this line of thinking leads anywhere.

Stepping back, my volumetric analysis was probably too conservative (1km high all over the earth's surface?) Tallest buildings size today is ~400 meters to the top occupied floor, so in that respect my analysis isn't too off. But what's the average density likely to be anytime in the near future? My guess is there's a 1/x power law distribution of some kind (hmm, perhaps so?) More googling leads to a paper saying that average building height in Los Angeles is really more like 12 meters (with cities like Phoenix at 5 meters). So maybe we can chop off two orders of magnitude from our 1km height estimate. So 430K atoms per IP #?

Then there are two other factors that lead to further overestimates of usable volumetric space; that urbanization itself isn't spread evenly over the surface of the earth, and that within this, say, 10meter high volume, there's a limit to the nanodevice density that humans (and the atmosphere) will accomodate. That alone cuts the max number of atoms worldwide dedicated to nanodevices down by several orders of magnitude further. Enough so that I'm still pretty comfortable that nanotech won't exhaust IPv6.

OK, I've spent way too long satisfying my curiousity. Hope someone out there found it interesting. :)

--LP

Hmmmm.. This sounds interesting. So you want a communications network that doesn't actually require an infrastructure? If there's any additional equipment required, you'll always have to have someone to pay for it. Your phone bill goes to your telco's costs, like paying for the wires, hardware, physical locations, staff, etc, etc, etc...

I like the idea of the wireless peer networking idea.. If you're in range of other devices, you can relay through them. There was a PDA out a year or two ago targeted towards school kids that could do that. But it was limited to about 100' range. I suppose it could be done with an ad-hoc network, but there are definate problems with it.. Like, what happens if you have too many people in the same place? What if you're the only link to the next network?

I'd definately not want to be the only point between two large groups.

But, it's not on "the" internet, unless there's a peering.. Peerings don't come free. Without a peering, you don't see the Internet.

Wireless, as it is, won't cut it. There are a few places in the world that would be obsticles to this, such as oceans (a subtle percentage of the earth's surface), and deserts.. I drove across I-10 not too long ago, and saw a whole lot of dirt and rocks, but had no signal on my phone, and no AM or FM reception. I know what I drove across (4 lanes of pavement 2000+ miles long) is a very small sample of what's out there. A boost in power could work, but it would also cause *LOTS* of interference. Imagine 10 people broadcasting at high power in the middle of the desert. They'd have no problems reaching each other.. Now imagine the same broadcast power in a "hyperdense" area. 83,000 people per square mile in New York.. That would be messy. Good thing cell phones are low power, and they have a lot of towers.

To get access *anywhere*, you'd need a more distributed method.. Iridium has a beautiful network of satellites, with both data and voice service, but you're going to have to pay for using it.. Someone paid a few dollars to get those satellites up there.

Until people are willing to do things for free, and receive things for free, you won't see free connectivity.. Now you're looking at a Star Trek Utopia that will never happen.

I for one, am willing to give my time, but it's going to take a lot more than the two of us, and someone's going to have to figure out where the equipment comes from to do something like this. You can just go war-driving, and find poorly configured access points, and do VoIP on those. :) You're limited to being within range of their AP's though.

According to the article, each zip code will cover about 1 square km. This is almost useless
in the world's densest cities. 30,000 - 80,000 people/km^2 is quite common - New york's lower east side had 170k/km^2 in 1905; Cairo peak at 109k/km^2, and Hong Kong had almost 2 million people per square kilometer*!!

Hopefully, the system will be divisional based on local population density -- like zip codes are now . But if it is, then it will be neither simple (no GPS/zip translation), or it will be of variable length, and/or it will change over time as areas get denser and need redivision (like phone area codes)

* ok, that was a special case of 50k people living in a 0.03km^2 walled city.

It's not surprising that Toronto and other cities have decent broadband, particularly considering the higher tax rates in Canada than the USA. However, I doubt that the rest of Canada has good residential broadband service.

If cities are going to emulate Portland, they should make a lot of noise about density, then sprawl like crazy anyway. Portland has about 3.9k people per square mile. Compare to Seattle (6.7k), Los Angeles (7.9k) or San Francisco (16.6k). Portland isn't even that much denser than Phoenix (2.8k), for crying out loud! See a complete list of densitites for all US cities of with 50k or greater population.

This discussion could go on forever. Neither of us is wrong per se, but this is because the facts being presented to us aren't always black and white.

1) "US Crime and violence has not increased. In fact it is at it's lowest levels in reporting history. See: http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/cvict.htm Yep. The US Department of Justice's statistics."

True, the DOJ statistics do seem to show a decline in violent crime year on year but consider how these figures are being reported.

First of all, the DOJ's figures are adjusted, showing crimes per 1,000 people aged 12 and over have declined from around 50 to 35 between 1980 and 1999. But over that same period, the population has increased, it has got older (people aged 12 and over make up a greater proportion of the population) and more violent crimes go unreported. Also, the DOJ's methodology for gathering this data changed in 1993, which makes a true comparison of the imformation before and after that date more difficult.

These figures also bunch together different types of crime and do not take into account their varying degrees of severity. Muggings and assaults are treated the same as rapes and murders even though the former are by definition less violent than the latter.

I'm not saying that you're wrong, and that overall crime hasn't decreased, just that these massaged figures by themselves aren't exactly the best evidence for you case. Like I said before, there are lies, damned lies and statistics. Give a statistician enough data and he'll be able to prove just about anything.

2) "I'm sorry. Where's the evidence? I didn't realize Britain had so many problems with terrorism. And didn't Britain put cameras in banks long before this? So why has bank robberies decreased all of a sudden? And pickpocketing and car theft? What? A good pickpocket isn't going to be deterred by a camera. Their techniques can be done in broad daylight on a busy street with nobody knowing. Car thefts? In the US property crimes (such as theft) have been going down as well, all without the aid of cameras everywhere.

Perhaps you haven't heard of the IRA? The terrorist group responsible for the murder of hundreds of British citizens in Northern Ireland and the mainland including soldiers, policemen, politicians, members of the royal family and ordinary members of the public? Or about extremist Islamic groups that occasionally decide to wage their war against Israel on foreign soil?

Many CCTV cameras installed in London are around prominent terrorist targets (the royal palaces, the Houses of Parliament, the City of London, the US Embassy) and have acted as a major deterrent to terrorist cells. Why risk planting a car bomb somewhere where you know you will be photographed? Similarly, the introduction of CCTV surveillance in Oxford Street (London's major shopping precinct) has reduced the number of street crimes reported there. And car parks that have cameras have less thefts of and from vehicles than those without. Evidence enough that CCTVs can help against crime?

And as for voting, opening a bank account, using your credit card, etc, my point was to show that there are methods of surveillance and spying that involve a camera. Just as cookies can track your browsing behaviour online, companies can track your movements and behaviour offline by examining when, where and what you purchase.

The whole concept that a CCTV in a public place is somehow an invasion of privacy is a complete joke. After all, if someone can see you, your hardly enjoying privacy are you?

The future potential downside of CCTVs must be weighed against their current proven upside. For now, I firmly believe that their use is justified. You obviously don't. Perhaps when someone suggests putting one in my own home "for my own safety" then I'll start to worry.