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It's krypton that is one of the most unreactive elements. Kryptonite would be a krypton oxide.

According to this: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0933606.html there are about a billion internet users worldwide. 2% would be 20 mil. MS claims to have shipped 20 million, or so, copies of vista. So that means that every copy they have shipped, even on new computers at stores, has been sold and brought up on the internet pretty much. This seems... fishy.

http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/sci/A0814845.html

The biggest problem during the last trial, if I recall correctly, was kids standing outside in the winter cold and dark, to get on their school buses.

(a) Ineffectual: writing or congresspersons, letters to the editor, voting.

(b) (Typically) Crazy: armed revolt.

It's like none of us (including me) knows how to navigate the territory between those two extremes.

What is takes is both.

The power structure can ignore a fairly large movement is there's no potential for it to spark into something radical; it can ignore a radical spark if there's no "fuel" of a larger movement that it might ignite.

We didn't get much progress in civil rights for people of African descent in this country until we had both the peaceful politics of Martin Luther King, and the armed direction action of Heuy Newton. Imagine looking at the 250,000 people at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and thinking, "What if they picked up guns like the Black Panthers?" Suddenly listening to them while they're still peaceful protestors seems like a good idea.

(Of course, the other side of that is "we need to do anything possible to prevent that spark", so you get COINTELPRO, agents provocateur sent into radical groups, and so on...never mind that that make for more chances of a spark.)

I count only 4 attacks on U.S. soil before Sept. 11, 2001 since 1920, 2 (possibly 3) of which were by Americans citizens. The attacks outside of our country are much harder to prevent without going outside our jurisdiction.

There were no attacks from 1995 (OK. City until 2001) and the indication is that the potential for the attack on 9/11 was known but ignored. Since that time the first world trade center bombing in 1993 all we get is reactive measures, and very little proactive measures to security. Only now when some detail comes out about a potential threat, everyone freaks out, and there is a larger knee-jerk reaction, and then everything goes back to the way it was 6 months ago. For example, after the attempt with shoe bomb, we had months of taking shoes off before boarding planes, then there was the "explosives" in water bottles, no carry-on containers.

I think the problem is administration wants to be seen to do something, so does the things that affects us the most directly and therefore most visible, rather than the things that prevent then from happening.

I disagree that massive spending and concomitant high taxation is or was a necessary, intrinsic aspect to the United States Federal Government. The single, most important reason as to why our government got so expensive was because politicians got ready access to massive funds because of various war efforts and they liked it. The personal income tax was first instituted for that reason, but people still had to figure their own taxes and pay them: it wasn't simply taken. However, the kicker was in 1943 when the Withholding Tax was instituted.

Withholding was of those things that was justified as being necessary to fight the war (and it probably was) and that would be eliminated once the war was over (and, naturally, was not.) We trusted them, again, and they let us down. No surprise there, I suppose. But it wasn't that way in this country for a couple of hundred years, and I refuse to accept that other nations' failures in this regard in any way justifies our own. We were better than that, once.

I don't actually understand why you would call our current government either accessible or accountable. In truth, it is now less accessible and less accountable than it has ever been in the history of this great nation. We may have wanted more accessibility and more accountability, but instead we got more taxation and less of either. Those are the facts, jack. What you are really saying is that, in the decades following "the Great Society" people got accustomed to more and more and even more government freebies and handouts. And they got them ... but at the cost of more taxation.

Realistically, the Democratic strategy for government has been one of continuous expansion and more welfare in direct exchange for votes. Unfortunately, the other party has finally figured out just how well that works: consequently, I think we're in bigger trouble than we realize.

Face it, once we made the mistake of allowing our leaders to take our money before we even saw it, the battle for small government was lost. A good capsule history of taxation in the United States is here

"For all the anti-US trolling on slashdot you seem to be very ignorant of one very obvious question: why does Iran, which holds the second largest oil supply in the world, need nuclear energy?"

I think natural gas reserves are more important than oil...

Iran holds also second largest natural gas reserves:
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0872966.html

The British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT) is a unique case. The BIOT was created in 1965 from parts of the Seychelles and Mauritius for military use (parts of the BIOT were returned to the Seychelles in 1976). In 1966, the US and UK signed an agreement to use the territory for a military base. As a result, the native population was expelled to make way for the base. (For more details, see here or google for "Diego Garcia"). As for the ccTLD...The lease the US and UK signed in 1966 expires in 2016. If the US decides not to renew the lease, then .io could go away, as the British government has promised Mauritius that the rest of the BIOT will be returned to them when it is no longer needed for military use.

Overall, the murder rate in Brazil is five times that of New York City. As in the United States, much of that violence is poor-on-poor, although the toll redounds everywhere. The New York Times reported recently on a World Bank study concluding that if Brazil had the much lower homicide rate of Costa Rica, Brazil's GDP would have been three to eight percent higher in the 1990s.

I'm no fan of New York City, but he's definitely using a bogeyman here. In 2002, the murder rate in Washington, DC, was six times that of the Big Apple. New Orleans was nearly eight times more deadly, and that was before Katrina. The state of my birth, South Carolina, which is relatively rural, has a murder rate of around the same magnitude of New York City.

FWIW, I agree with the general thrust of the article, that such large wealth and income inequities are not a good thing.

With that much money you could probably find a small country and buy some of their land.

For example, Palau's GDP was $174 million in 2001 (source).

Pay them 2 years of GDP for a decent island with a bit of infrastructure, provide a few jobs for the local people... now you've got a wonderful tropical island perfect for pirating... arrrgghhh.

Oath of Office

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

"The President, Vice President and all civil officers of the United States, shall be removed from office on impeachment for, and conviction of, treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors."

--------

"Bribery and treason are among the least ambiguous reasons meriting impeachment, but the ocean of wrongdoing encompassed by the Constitution's stipulation of "high crimes and misdemeanors" is vast. Abuse of power and serious misconduct in office fit this category"

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0764613.html

They sell hardware not software. I for one would be looking hard at it if it sold me more hardware.

Sure, but how much more, in real terms, are we talking about? I feel pretty safe stating that the US is the largest market for video cards (based on these numbers) but how many of those machines are non-Windows operating systems, with a need for a high-end graphics card?

Linux, inside the US, in the major market, has a very minority share of the desktop OS market. So one really has to wonder if the gains made from opening up the drivers would offset the losses.

How could they lose? Several ways:
1) No longer be able to access proprietary methods of speed enhancement and optimization from outside closed-source vendors. They're not going to touch an open-source company, as we've already seen.
2) Be open to lawsuits from same for using open-source drivers implementing the same methods. This one is notable, since even defending against an unsuccessful lawsuit could wind up eating up serious chunks of revenue. Imagine the hell that would happen if the video card vendor lost. The open-source non-company coders are perfectly safe, but the company itself could be in deep manure, to say the least.
3) Instead of having to test against a single platform with a single operating system (or even a few), they instead have to test against potentially hundreds, since there is no guarantee that any single distribution will follow the same patterns as any other. In general, they do, but there's no guarantee of it in the future.
4) Closed-source competitors immediately have the inside scoop on the capabilities of their product. Instead of at least pretending to be innovative, they will have to play catch-up, forever, in terms of features and capability. Why? As soon as a product goes out for testing, the competition can get it, with full access to source, without having to reverse-engineer a single thing.
5) Their competitors can use it against them. Remember, in marketing, "free" can also mean "cheap" and not in the good way.

I don't mean say that Open-Sourcing a product is a completely bad idea, but one must consider the real-world ramifications.

It seems to me that life expectancy is a really good proxy for standard of living as it encompasses access to better nutrition, better shelter, and better healthcare. Let's see what the numbers tell us then:

White male life expectancy, 1900: 48.2 years
White male life expectancy, 2000: 74.8 years
Non-White male life expectancy, 1900: 32.5 years
Non-White male life expectancy, 2000: 68.3 years

source: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html

A factor of 2 improvement! So much for "pauperization". Perhaps you can explain for those of us not as enlightened as you why may post was a medal-worthy false dichotomy?

You're right. I knew it was the post Civil War president. D'oh! A quick Google search turned up an interesting article on Info Please that discusses the 35 impeachment attempts in US history. A lot of judges on the list.

1. more food for us (unless the person was a fashion model).
2. more jobs for us (unless the person was unemployed)
3. more housing available to us (unless the person was a hobo)
4. less mating opportunities available to the opposite sex (unless the person was just as much a loser as you)
5. it gives cops and forensics experts a job
6. it helps Hollywood plotlines
7. helps the environment (less strain on resources, and the body will eventually be used as fertilizer)
8. There's a 19.8% chance that he isn't white (unless you aren't white)
9. Supermarket lines will potentially be shorter.
10. There will probably be free food available at the funeral.
11. Dressing up in black suits is always cool.
12. You could take a hair comb, attach a LED to one end of it, and act as if you're from MIB.
13. If there weren't any suicides, then this list wouldn't have existed.

They're Chicago's equivalent of the NY Post or Daily News; the tabloid-ish irreverent paper, though my impression (I'm new to Chicago) is that some of their investigative stuff is stronger than the NY equivalents.

But, let's see: NYTimes, LATimes, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, USA Today, etc. . . . I think you have to work down the line to get to the Sun-Times.

And if you check Wikipedia or a quick Google for daily newspaper circulation, they're not even in the top 100. (Which I admit seems a bit off to me -- you'd think they'd beat out Springfield, MA or Allentown, PA, no matter what. But maybe they're some trick to what got included in the list.)

But it seems pretty definite they're not top 10, and definitively not top 3.

You'd realize this if you ever got out of your ivory tower.

Why are you injecting race into this?

Huh? Christianity got the brutality out of its system in the crusades? Oh no no no.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition
http://www.religioustolerance.org/wic_burn.htm (witch burning)
http://www.infoplease.com/spot/northireland1.html (northern Ireland)
http://www.americancatholic.org/News/ClergySexAbus e/

For example.

I think there should be an international treaty banning all lethal weapons without a brain attached to the trigger.

Why go for half measures? Why not just ban war by treaty? Its been done before, and would be at least as effective as what you suggest. I think it would also be much easier to reach agreement on simply banning war since it could be done on simple principle. Your proposal would require all manner of messy discussions about different type of weapons, their munitions, and variations. If you have having that discussion you might have to include some types of obstacles too, since some of them are dangerous and can kill passively. You are better off just banning war since that means that tiny little countries are safe from big, aggressive neighbors. Under your proposal, the tiny countries would be stripped of many useful defensive weapons that can act as combat multipliers to help defend them from a much bigger attacker. That would leave them vulnerable to being easily conquered, and who wants that?

Not really on topic but I thought it was interesting that the gap between the rich and the poor is actually larger in the UK.

hmm:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0908770.html

Can't even see India on that list. I believe the UK is in the 30s with India just below it.

Many people are well aware of what platform the first virii originated on, since once you know, it's a bit of a no-brainer. To many others it comes as a huge surprise due to all the FUD that is spread about Apple by non-users who think that it's all very mysterious and full of voodoo.

As shown on this timeline http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0872842.html you can see that the first virii were written for the Apple I, II and III machines. It was a full FIVE YEARS later before the first virus to infect PC's was found in the wild. Why ? Because Apples were the only affordable personal computers of that time. No home user could afford a PC, and PC users in large corporations had better things to do with their time.

This to a large extent reinforces the theory that virii will be written for the most common, accessible platform of the time.
Forgetting for the moment the security model of OS X which makes virii rather more like a manually run trojan without any significant ability to spread, you could ask: "Why aren't more DECENT proof of concept virii written for OS X ?", and even more significantly; "Why weren't more real virii written for Mac OS 7-9, which didn't share this fantastic unix security model and therefore were ripe for virii ?"

The answer is in the first paragraph. The more expensive and inaccessible the hardware is to bored kids, the less likely they will write virii for it. Kids don't use Macs. They certainly don't buy them. Maybe their rich parents might give them a powerbook but the fact is: these kids probably have better things to do with their time than the bored PC tinkerers who assemble computers out of $5 components found in any bargain bin or even rubbish tip.

Is this the reason that there's no good virii for OS X ? No. Primarily the reason for that is it's security. Or is it ? Perhaps primarily it's that the people who use expensive Apple hardware have real jobs, they often work freelance and therefore have a stronger work ethic, and they just plain don't have the inclination to destroy things in the same way that PC users do. Apple users create. Windows users destroy.

Why ? This will be a contentious assertion, but here goes. Let's say that Apple users live in Beverley Hills and Windows users live in Compton, just for the sake of comparing their income and lifestyles. Kids in Beverley Hills aren't as likely to go vandalising things and getting involved in street thuggery as those from Compton. They find higher-class ways to act out. They do it with their rich parties and such, rather than just cruising the streets beating up on randoms.

The reason why this particular proof-of-concept "virus" is a bit of a joke, and why there are so few other proof of concept virii is that there's just not enough bored kids around who own Macs. This is changing, but not exactly snowballing. Ultimately, the fact is, Apple users already made a conscious choice to choose a platform designed for productivity and not games. Productivity and the creation of destructive viruses are just not a common marriage. Most Mac users are above that.

Virtually no Americans died in America from terrorist attacks prior to the Patriot Act, either, excepting one particular day in September.

Just be like most people and don't bother voting.

The other side will be happy to steal it for you. And they can do it the old fashioned way.

What you describe above is a country with no government. I don't think we should dissolve all government. I think small government, with as much power as possible devolved to the lowest levels, is the ideal solution. Schools will continue to exist without Federal Ed frog-marching them around to the latest federal song (a tv... no, a computer on every desk!); roads will continue to be built without Federal DOT threatening to take states' allowances away for not making all their speed signs say "55"; Police will still be hired without Federal DOJ giving them handouts in exchange for a promise to arrest more underage drinkers.

Your solution fails for the simple reason that large groups of people gang up on small groups of people for no other reason than it's to their advantage. That's what the 300M residents of the USA are doing to a number of other countries at the moment.

Until you solve the problem of small groups being vulnerable to that you'll see more and more concentration power, whether it be corporate or government. The only limits to this process appear to be the increased internal communication inefficiency and increased internal competition of large groups. In an age of instant communication and mass marketing borgify'ing groups those limits appear to be becoming more fragile.

Your points about a US federal government being inefficient make sense until you realise that a weak central government might've been rolled over by the Germans or the Russians. A lot of power centralisation comes in times of war e.g. income tax.

Not saying that I have a solution, just that strong central government seems to be a necessary, albeit inefficient in the short term, evil, to stave off control by other large groups.

---

Marketing talk is not just cheap, it has negative value. Free speech can be compromised just as much by too much noise as too little signal.

If that's true, that's pretty good, though the numbers I've seen don't support your assertions. I'm not really arguing whether the U.S. is doing a good or bad job, just arguing that per capita is the most appropriate way to measure it.

Actually, you wrote that there was a federal program that provided health care to all Americans. You then specified that the program you were on was AHCCCS. The conclusion that you were implying that AHCCCS was available to all American students comes directly from your sloppy writing. And despite your insistence that Medicaid provides health care to everyone, there's still 46 million Americans without health insurance. Even in Arizona, apparently, 18.7% of the population doesn't have health insurance. Oh, and here's a demographic breakdown of the people without insurance.

Furthermore, you don't seem to know the difference between "anecdotes" and "evidence". Your friends, money-driven nice-people that they may be, are going to be pretty self-selectingly biased. You would only meet nurses and/or doctors who decided to emigrate. Beyond that, you're just plain wrong. Every study I've ever seen on the issue has agreed with one fact: The U.S. pays a higher percentage (16%) of it's GDP for health care than any other country in the world. FYI the number is 9.7% in Canada. Thus, your UK doctor friend is simply wrong.

As for why they don't mention AHCCCS, I would hazard a guess that they don't mention the existence of those plans for the same reason they don't enumerate the private plans that exist, the annual budget of NASA, or the percentage of people who drive cars. It's not actually relevent.

Actually, you wrote that there was a federal program that provided health care to all Americans. You then specified that the program you were on was AHCCCS. The conclusion that you were implying that AHCCCS was available to all American students comes directly from your sloppy writing. And despite your insistence that Medicaid provides health care to everyone, there's still 46 million Americans without health insurance. Even in Arizona, apparently, 18.7% of the population doesn't have health insurance. Oh, and here's a demographic breakdown of the people without insurance.

Furthermore, you don't seem to know the difference between "anecdotes" and "evidence". Your friends, money-driven nice-people that they may be, are going to be pretty self-selectingly biased. You would only meet nurses and/or doctors who decided to emigrate. Beyond that, you're just plain wrong. Every study I've ever seen on the issue has agreed with one fact: The U.S. pays a higher percentage (16%) of it's GDP for health care than any other country in the world. FYI the number is 9.7% in Canada. Thus, your UK doctor friend is simply wrong.

As for why they don't mention AHCCCS, I would hazard a guess that they don't mention the existence of those plans for the same reason they don't enumerate the private plans that exist, the annual budget of NASA, or the percentage of people who drive cars. It's not actually relevent.

I'm no expert... Far from it really. But you make it sound like english is hardly spoken at all... According to http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775272.html english isn't really all that far down the list (#2). And as far as it's usefullness goes according to http://www.krysstal.com/english.html "It is the language of science, aviation, computing, diplomacy, and tourism." I'd say that's a pretty good reason to learn it...?

You've named a couple of odd cities. Vegas and Miami aren't exactly what I would consider large. Granted I grew up in a big city and liked it.

You mentioned: (numbers according in 2005)
New York( 1st, 8,143,197 )
Los Angeles( 2nd, 3,844,829 )
San Francisco( 14th, 739,426 )
Boston( 24th, 559,034 )
Las Vegas( 29th, 545,147 )
Miami( 45th, 386,417 )

But you did not mention:
Chicago( 3rd )
Houston( 4th )
Philadelphia( 5th )
Phoenix( 6th )
San Antonio( 7th )
San Diego( 8th )
Dallas( 9th )

all of which have over one million people. In fact of the top 50 cities in the US you'll find relatively few in the North. California has 8, Texas has 7, Arizona has 3, Colorado has 2, New Mexico has 1, Washington has 1, Oregon has 1, Hawaii has 1, Nevada has 1 and that equals 25 of the largest 50 cities. There's also quite a few in the south and midwest.

Wow, I started off only thinking it was odd that you mentioned Vegas, and now I'm talking about weird stuff. I'll just give you the link and you can play with it.

One could argue that it can be inferred from the 9th Amendment. However, one not even need stretch the point that far. The Supreme Court found an implicit Constitutional 'right to privacy' during Roe v. Wade.

The decision, written by Justice Harry Blackmun and based on the residual right of privacy, struck down dozens of state antiabortion statutes.

Microsoft has threatened to invade France to reimpose "order" on the chaos of the ODF. France has pre-emptively surrendered.

This idotic attempt at making fun should not call for an answer, but it is offensive enough that I'm making one. France casualties in WWI alone were higher than the total of USA casualties among all wars they fought, american civil war included, while our population ratio has been a steady one fifth of yours (sources : http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004615.html, http://europeanhistory.about.com/library/weekly/bl ww1castable.htm). WWII was a sad mess, we were thrown to war without adequate preparation by politicians who betrayed us, and we were beaten fair and square by Germany (which was a nation of strong warriorship traditions too). So, I don't think we need to take any lesson of fighting spirit from anyone, considering that after France liberation in WWII our Free French Forces kept fighting along with Allied forces all the way up to Berlin.

But if you still want to dig into this, let me just remind you that we're currently the only european nation with independent nuclear power with a worldwide strike capacity (usa included, in case you ask).

We are currently a pacific nation, and being perceived as harmless may not be bad advertising ; but don't get fooled by your own propaganda. We're not in the habit of making the same mistakes twice, and any hostile power would have a surprise trying to play fool with us.

The bottom 50% of all federal tax payers pay only 3.5% of all federal income taxes. In essence one-half of America is paying to run America, while one-half pays nothing and gets all the benefits! In fact, the top 5% of tax payers pays more than 50% of all taxes collected; the top 1% pays more than one third of all taxes. The top-earning 25 percent of taxpayers (AGI over $57,343) earned 64.9 percent of nation's income, but they paid more than four out of every five dollars collected by the federal income tax (83.9 percent). See for example http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0923085.html and http://www.taxfoundation.org/news/show/250.html. Taxes paid by about 6 million filers (top 5%) covered more than what nearly 65 million "poor" people (bottom 50%) did.

• Guam
• The U.S. Virgin Islands
• American Samoa
• The Northern Mariana Islands
• The Midway Islands
• Wake Island
• Johnston Atoll
• Baker, Howland, and Jarvis Islands
• Kingman Reef
• Navassa Island
• and Palmyra Atoll

Go here http://www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Debt/USAi d.asp and scroll down to the chart for Official Development Assistance and see what you find for the year 2005 in billions of dollars: ...

The USA gives out over double the amount of aid money than the next closest country. Yeah I can see why the world has contempt for us, we are such assholes and don't share any of the wealth right?

Let's have a look at that table again, and this time make it more REPRESENTATIVE, and talk about /per capita/ aid:

http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0930884.html

Of the five countries you listed, US comes 5th, not 1st:

1. France 26c per capita
2. United Kingdom, 25c
3. Germany, 21c
4. Japan, 20.4c
5. United States, 18c

So you know what? Yeah, get the fuck off your high horse.

As far as my 99% statement, well, it looks like it might be slightly off, according to this website-- http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001454.html It's actually about 97% of all terrorist attacks against Americans in the last 40 years were committed by Muslims and/or Arabs. Note that I wasn't referring to actual deaths caused, but terrorist events (don't forget, though, that the 9/11 hijackers were hoping to kill at least 20,000 in one day, and easily could have). Since you like math, I encourage to add the attacks up. Be sure to count each 9/11 hijacking as a separate attacks.

Do the math, then face reality.

I, myself, however, think it's fair to also count every car bombing in Iraq that has targeted American soldiers as individual terrorist attacks as well. These cowardly attacks don't have achieve any true military objection and purposely kill hundreds of Iraqi non-combatants as well. Add these to the attacks to the list, and the number of terrorist attacks against Americans committed by Muslims/Arabs easily rises to more than 99%.

So actually, I stand by my original 99% statement. It's probably closer to 99.9%.

votes talk waaay more than anything else

http://www.infoplease.com/spot/jonestown1.html

"Jones's 912 followers were given a deadly concoction of purple Kool-Aid..."

Wrong; it was Flavor Aid:

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown

According to "The Truth About Jonestown" by Sheila Yohnk, on November 18, 1978, a large vat of grape-flavored Flavor Aid was prepared; the brew included potassium cyanide, Valium, Penegram, and chloral hydrate.

Popular culture references

* The phrase drink the Kool-Aid, meaning "to become a firm believer in something; to accept an argument or philosophy wholeheartedly or blindly",[12] is a product of the Jonestown massacre, despite the fact that the beverage consumed by the Jonestowners was actually Flavor Aid.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flavor_Aid
Around 913 followers of Jim Jones committed cult suicide by drinking cyanide-laced grape Flavor Aid in 1978.

For more see:

http://sparklepony.blogspot.com/2006/01/language-v irus-oh-yeahhh-oh-nooooo_20.html

Microsoft finally drank the Kool-Aid.

matt328, you are right, of course about the bloat.

And, you are right about us not needing that large a program just to get on-line.

But there are people who feel intimidated by all of this technology, who probably don't frequent Slashdot who really needed the bloated program to be able to figure it out. And one of them was my aunt.

With AO-Hell (3.0 and forward), she discovered the joys of e-mailing grandchildren (as well as nephews) and staying in closer touch with them. I sent her photos in my e-mails and her grandson showed her how to look at them and download them from my e-mails and look at them. This was a wonderful thing for her.

My aunt is now using a regular ISP and has a really good command of many of the same applications for access that we all have. But the handholding and extensive support available from AO-Hell and her grandson gave her the confidence necessary to function in the 21st century with modern technology.

I should mention that my aunt (and her younger brother, my father) grew up without electricity. The REA didn't get out to my grandparents' farmhouse until after my father went to college. So a lot of this modern technology is pretty advanced for someone who went from a childhood where electric lights were only available in town to instant high-speed connectivity almost anywhere all of the time. Neat thing is, one doesn't have to wait for the postal service to get the mail. One also doesn't have to find a stamp to send a note or a photo.

I found some other interesting information on this subject, BTW. The US Government expenditures an average double every 10 years, and have since basically World War II - but they aren't doing that anymore. Since 2000, the growth rate has slowed significantly.

I find this interesting because I have always assumed that the way to lower spending is to have Congress and the President in opposing parties - but the evidence does not seem to favor that.

I always like it when people work out the math of problems on /. And while your math seems fine, I think a few of your assumptions are...well, a bit on the high side. That said, I am not a statistician (and statistics was one of my weaker engineering degree subjects).

For starters, you assume that each person talked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (6.5KB/s * 2 * 86,400 sec = 1.066GB/day). Longest time I ever spent on the phone in one shot was 10 hours. I think perhaps there are numbers out there that might show it's slightly lower than that. We could say up to 2 hours a day, on average, for fun. My guess is it's closer to that of the link I cited, about .18 hours a day (again, on average). That gives us 93.6MB/day, or 34GB/yr. The numbers from the table would be about 8.5MB/day or 3.1GB/year.

Second, you assume that all 250 million people in the US have phones. Five live in my house, and we have a land line and two cell phones (my oldest is 5). There are about 110 million households in the USA. The last census said about 93% had phones. There are more than 100 million cellphones out there. But I don't use both at once. There are 220 million people in the US, age 16 and up, arguably the predominant class of phone users.

You also assume that no two people are talking to one another (250 million bi-directional conversations). That's 500 million "conversers" (assuming no three way calling). Hopefully a sophisticated spying system wouldn't record both conversation directions on each end.

Anyway, I work out that, assuming more probablistic use of the phone system, in terms of raw storage, they'd need:

6.5KB/s * 648sec/day * 365days = 1.58GB/yr per channel (on average nationwide)
220 million users, one 'speaking' channel each * 1.58GB/yr = 347,600,000GB/year.
347,600,000GB / 300GB = 1,158,666 $100 hard drives, or $115 million. Peanuts.

My math could be wrong though, I did use windows calc ;).
Oh, and there are also pretty good compression routines for voice out there (much better than 53kbps/channel), speech recognition for suspicious keywords that would allow routinely deleting obvious calls to grandma about aunt Mildred's bunions, etc.

I hope this didn't come off as a flame. I thank you for motivating me to actually think about it, actually :).

hardly a miniscule runoff

the world ocean covers 71 percent of the earth's surface, or about 361 million sq km (140 million sq mi). Its average depth is 5,000 m (16,000 ft), and its total volume is about 1,347,000,000 cu km (322,300,000 cu mi).

Way too late:

This is what I was referring to:
http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/history/A0812484.htm l

I mean every household only owes about $400,000 in government debt which I'm sure is sustainable.

That number looked really wrong to me so I looked it up:
Debt = 8.4 trillion
Households = 110 million
Population = 295 million

So we owe $28,000 per person, and about $76,000 per household.

Let's get some facts straight. Here's a site I found: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0004395.html

Some European countries are falling, like Germany and Italy, and they have negative growth rates. The United States, however, has a 0.9% growth rate. We're getting bigger, not smaller.

Now, I might have seen the problem with your math. Keep in mind that, in 2004, 36% of all babies were born to single women. http://www.webmd.com/content/Article/114/111283.ht m

Why are we lead to believe that birth rates are too low? Because in our welfare/social security society, we need more workers than retired people. That's why Europe and Japan are all in a fluster. If less tax money is coming in, governments have to shrink. They don't like that.

We are talking about ALL terrorist attacks against the United States and if you consider that then you will see the majority (and quite large majority) were carried out by militant Islamists. Take a look here: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001454.html [infoplease.com]

Your list is woefully incomplete. What about Eric Robert Rudolph, who bombed abortion clinics in Birmingham and Atlanta, a gay nightclub in Atlanta, and a concert given during the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta? What about the vast number of attacks on Americans -- kidnappings, hijackings, bombings -- in and around Columbia over the past several decades? I'm rather certain those attacks far outnumber attacks against Americans by "militant Islamists" prior to the U.S. invasion of Iraq (assuming you classify all the suicide bombings in Iraq as terrorist acts, as opposed to acts of war). What else can I come up with off the top of my head? The Hutu rebels who attacked tourist camps in Uganda in 1999. The disgruntled FedEx employee who, sometime in the '90s, attempted to hijack a FedEx 747 on takeoff and crash it into the company's headquarters in Memphis (he was stopped by the pilot and copilot, but not before he cracked their skulls with an axe). The rocket-propelled grenade fired through the window of the U.S. embassy in Moscow in 1995. The Catalan rebels who bombed a bar full of U.S. servicemen in Barcelona in the late '80s. For that matter, it's missing the world's first bombing of an airliner, which was committed in the '60s by a man from Missouri in an insurance scam.

Heck, with a little research I might really be able to make a list. If you think Muslims are the only significant perpetrators of terrorism in the world, you aren't paying attention. Your point of view is precisely why the idea of racial profiling is so popular these days. The more fact-based approach is the reason security experts say racial profiling not only doesn't work, but makes us less secure by focusing our attention in the wrong places.

Actually, most terrorists in the United States have been white Christians.

Of course most terrorists inside the US will be white Christians since approximately 70% of the US population is white non-hispanic and about 80% of the population is Christian. We are talking about ALL terrorist attacks against the United States and if you consider that then you will see the majority (and quite large majority) were carried out by militant Islamists. Take a look here: http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0001454.html

It is also true that the majority of terrorist attacks carried out worldwide are done by militant Islamists. They are violent by nature and it is no suprise that they are the leaders of most terrorist attacks.

If by the "current crop" you mean the "terrorists" who are fighting against our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, yeah, those are mostly Arab and Muslim, but there's a good reason for that.

If you mean the terrorists on TV and in movies, then, yeah, I'll grant you that. Almost exclusively Muslim these days.

This is because it is actually true that the majority of terrorist attacks against the US (at least for the last ~30 years) were carried out by Muslims/Arabs. Of course there have been attacks that are exceptions to this rule but not many. If you have proof showing another group that has indiscriminately gone after Americans more often then I would love to see it.

As far as the article goes, I do think that filtering based on either first or last name is a bad idea but using both together from a list of known terrorists to do a little more checking doesn't seem bad to me. In the article it mentioned there are other ways to send money so if it is too much of a hassle then don't use the service.

Actually, I didn't make anything up. I did a spot check against a list found at http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0777460.html. Without doing a thorough comparison, there were many common entries on both lists.

So, doing a careful comparison, there are 26 out of the 43 that support the death penalty. In either case, both list puts the US in some pretty sad company.

The fact that it's just more than half are shared between the two lists doesn't really do a whole lot to make me stand up and say I'm proud to be an American. As an American and a veteran, I'd personally like to see my country hold itself to a higher standard.

Countries that both support the Death Penalty and are not signatories to the land mine ban:
Bahrain
China
Cuba
Egypt
India
Indonesia
Iran
Iraq
Kazakhstan
Korea, North
Korea, South
Kuwait
Kyrgyzstan
Lebanon
Libya
Mongolia
Oman
Pakistan
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
Somalia
Syria
United Arab Emirates
United States
Uzbekistan
Vietnam

If Russian Courts can't close a russian website...

...first you have to provide the state prosecutor with an incentive to prosecute these guys, then you have to provide the judge with an incentive to find them guilty, then you have to provide the cops with an incentive to shut them down, then ...

Isn't justice wonderful in countres with a low TI corruption rating?

I remain unconvinced. Consider Australian aborigines http://www.infoplease.com/spot/aboriginal1.html: isolated for 30,000 years, pop. 400,000 currently. In that population there are none that don't have European ancestry? From what I could glean from TFA they don't address this, nor isolated (LONG TERM ISOLATED) populations in New Guinea and the Amazon.