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This guy types faster than he does graffiti - even on an iphone software keyboard:
http://www.gyford.com/phil/wri...

Americans are more unlikely to have a passport vs a State issued ID.

But are they more unlikely to have a passport or be functionally literate? For this shitty country's brainwashed masses to take their own unearned "exceptionalism" as an article of faith is just hilarious in the face of the facts.

Just to confirm my thought:

78% of americans own a cell phone:
http://www.itfacts.biz/78-of-americans-own-cell-phones/11802

28% of american population own a passport
http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2003/01/31/how_many_america.php
(according to the 2008 GAO report)

Here's an interesting speed comparison of: A full-size QWERTY keyboard, the Apple iPhone 3G’s software QWERTY keyboard (2009), the Palm Treo 650’s hardware QWERTY keyboard (2004), pen and paper, the Apple Newton MessagePad 2100’s handwriting recognition (1997), and the Palm Vx’s Graffiti (1999).

The full-size keyboard was fastest, the iPhone keyboard (in portrait orientation) was second (about one third slower), than came the rest (order as above). At least in this test the iPhone keyboard was faster than both the Palm Treo hardware keyboard *and* pen and paper.

http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/2010/01/18/input.php

My issue with the graph is someone needs to take a class on "how to make a graph". 0% performance and $0 cpu.... why? Was there a $0 cpu? Did any of the cpus get a 0%?

Probably because the person who made that graph for The Tech Report wanted all the proportions to be honest.

Did you ever read the book How to Lie with Statistics? Or the book How to Lie with Charts? Or a nice, short blog post called Graphs That Lie?

When you chop out some of the "wasted space" in a graph, you distort the graph. Unless people are careful and check where your axes begin, and then mentally visualize where the axes go, they'll get a misleading idea of the data from the graph.

Suppose the bottom part of the graph was sliced off, at the 90% line, to make you happier. Imagine what it would look like. The AMD X2 6400+, sitting at the 100% line, would have very little white space under it; and the Intel i7-920, sitting a bit below the 200% line, would now appear to be ten times faster than the AMD X2 6400+. The numbers would be the same, but the visual impact would be that the Intel chip totally blows away the AMD chips.

The graph is good the way it is.

I'll meet you halfway, though: it wouldn't have hurt for them to have put in a second chart, zooming in on just the most crowded areas.

steveha

A large part of the prejudice is that until very recently, less than 7% of americans had been issued a passport. That number has increased in recent years, to around 20% ish, and I suspect the stereotype is becoming outdated. slashdot isn't letting me enable HTML in this post to linkify the link, but the graph below shows the trend (although it's somewhat outdated, the number of passports has continued to rise). http://www.gyford.com/phil/writing/resources/2003/01/31/uspassports.gif

So with over 80% of Americans not even having a passport, is that really a problem?

Most people in Europe seem to espouse the "hate the sin, not the sinner" ideology when it comes to Americans. I never had a negative reaction because I was an American when I was in Spain, and this was all throughout 2003 when such sentiments were at an all-time high. Even on the day we invaded Iraq, when I was at Les Falles in Valencia with of a group of 40 or 50 (very obviously) Americans, and nobody said a word. Granted this could have a lot to do with the fact that I was even more pissed at my country than they were, and made no effort to hide it.

In general, if you are living abroad you are very much selected-for in terms of being more enlightened and worldwise (read: liberal) than Joe Redstate. Estimates on how many Americans even hold a passport are all over the place, but suffice it to say it's a teeny fraction of the overall population. Those who do, in my experience, tend to be--politically--very skewed away from mainstream America and are a lot more in line with European/Asian/Latin American/everywhere else values.

The european way is to try to cooperate, because we have to. The american way is "are you with us, or are you against us?". And it rubs the whole of EU the wrong way.

And this is so at many levels. For example, here in Tokyo I meet new French, Germans, Americans, Swedish, Canadians, Australians etc weekly. And here is the principle difference between Americans and people of every other nationality: Americans will say, "I'm going to the cinema. Do you want to come?" while everyone else will say, "How about the cinema?"

The Americans I meet in Tokyo are, by definition, atypical: they've got passports. But they share with their politicians a sense of certainty and rectitude which most other peoples (barring, in my experience, Jewish Israelis) don't have. Personally, I find the vitality and self-centred certainty sometimes quite attractive, but it sure as hell rubs most people the wrong way.

These days I get most of my web reading from links on weblogs of one kind or another - I'd personally count Slashdot as a weblog. I read Ars Technica, Scripting News, Robot Wisdom and Tomalak's Realm, and I'm on Haddock which has several great links every day.

NTK is often listed as a weblog, innaccurately - it's a weekly mag. But it's completely brilliant. Subscribe.

Also, h2g2.com (The HitchHiker's Guide To The Galaxy, online) has, amongst its many fab features, the ability for users to create their own weblogs on their homepages, with forums hanging off each entry. Worth a look, and I'm not just saying that 'cos I work there.