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Some people would count them as MMOs. I know the mmorpg site used to count some of those referral link games (you know the ones that people always had to disguise to get you to click? upon clicking it you'd be eaten by a zombie) as MMOs and even gave them a subforum.

the summary is misleading as usual. There comes a point where you have to wonder what sort of clowns are actually moderating this site.
the fine print clearly states that its 22% of guys, 21% of girls, but only 8 years and above and only of those with access to the internet.

According to: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats14.htm only about 71% of americans have access to the internet. Assuming it was equal across genders, you're actually only looking at about 14-15%. Nowhere near a quarter.

It is bad enough half the stories that show up here were on digg yesterday or the day before, even 3 or 4 days ago, but the utterly clueless moderation (for which kdawson could do a PSA, I'm really surprised this isn't one of his stories) is really beginning to push it over the edge.

As of June 2009, 1.67 billion people worldwide use the Internet. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Even just legitimate submitted complaints (assuming folks bothered) would bury the scheme. Now imagine a small shell script...

Considering the world soon has a population of 7 billion people, on which 1.7 billion people use the internet and usually people have several email addresses, it means it's still probably like 0.1-0.2 spam messages per day per person. Add filters to that which caught most of the spam and the 3 billion per day isn't actually that large number.

There's a heck of a lot more to the use of a language than the raw number of native speakers. Example, honestly, which of these would you rather learn? Italian or Tamil? Korean or Marlathi? German or Bengali? I'm not trying to diminish the importance of those languages, they're important too, but you've got to consider economic, scientific, cultural, ect. significance a language has as well as how many people speak it, and in those terms German ranks very high. In other words, you're wrong. German is very important, no matter who you are or where you live, especially on the internet.

The striping across all countries is a check whether your site is reachable from that part of the botnet, the purpose of the traffic is unclear; either to do a large data grab or it's a (very unsuccessful) bandwidth attack, or something. You should adjust it for number of internet connected users per country first then revisualize that.

To be fair a very large portion of that population (75%) have no internet access. 360M is still a lot of users, but it's a lot less than a billion.

According to this site: http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia.htm, roughly 360,000,000 citizens have access to internet of which 83,366,000 have broadband.

Even though it's not a billion, 360 million is still a very big audience.

OK, ABP has 11 million users. That's great. Can we compare to another open source project? VLC has a few more downloads than that. (I know I can't compare downloads to users, so I won't).

Let's try this instead: 1.7 billion people running web browsers, 47% running Firefox (815 million FF users), and only 11 million people choose to install ABP? That's 1.35%. Most of those are tech savvy people who are harder to brainwash with ads anyway. It's noise.

Well Nicaragua only has 2.7% internet penetration , so I would say that Middle America is lacking some Amazonian business.

I'm no rocket surgeon, but that doesn't seem like much of success rate.

I was going to post something similar.

Let's try to find a more realistic number.

According to this site http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm only about 25% of the people in the world have internet access.

We'll pretend everyone gets 8 hours of sleep and uses the internet 50% of the time when they are awake.

8/24 = 1/3 * 1/2 = 1/6 * 1,700,000,000 = 284,000,000 / 10,000,000 = 28.4

So about 29 people per sever at any given time.
(Realistically I think this number would be much lower, probably more like 5-10)

There is not one single idea in that list that could have a significant global impact.

First of all, all the idea submitters are people that have internet access. Letâ(TM)s not forget that ONLY 24.7% of the WORLD has internet access. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

This means that the people that really need help isn't heard on this 10^100 Project (75.3%)

So I wonâ(TM)t vote for this. or maybe I was expecting something else.

Like

1. Develop an accessible not fossil fuel dependant vehicle
2. Create an organization for exchange guns for [insert exchange here]
3. Offer developing countries support, with technology and money to invest in agriculture related projects
4. Create a free technology exchange portal, where countries can access for free
5. Destroy de Guantanamo Base

i don't know but nothing on that list, what do you think?, what coulld really change this world for the better?

I mean. If that is what 150000 people submitted to make this world better, we are DOOMED..

That's because republicans and computer rarely meet.

That's funny, cause see I work in an office full of engineers and software programmers, who work on their computers all day and automate their homes for fun (they are automation engineers, btw - you're not a geek until you write drivers in assembly to marry industrial automation hardware with your OS of choice), and every single one of them is a Republican, and some are hard-line conservatives.

It's also odd, considering I just saw on C-SPAN last night a conferance of people belonging to "RightOnline" - a group of right-wing bloggers.

Finally, what really gets me, is that Democrats only make up 36.8% of the population, Republicans make up 33.3%, and Unaffiliated make up 29.9% (everyone is up a point or two except the Dems, btw) as of August 1, according to Rassmusen.

Now, follow allong with me here, the US has a penetration rate of 74.7% according to internetworldstats.com. Assuming Republicans rarely use computers, and Democrats - 36.8% - plus Unaffiliated - 29.9% - equals 66.7%, where's the missing 8%? Well, obviously it must come from Republicans!

Ok, so assuming that's true, around 12% of computer users in the US must be Republicans. You say that's not significant, but look at it the other way! It means that a minimum of 25% or so Republicans use a computer, and that can hardly make a republican owning a computer a rare thing.

Since we've debunked the idea that Republicans owning a computer is rare, and since a large portion of democrats are old people (65% of whome don't own a computer) and elitist erudite snobs who shun technology (look at the senate, seriously, holy frickin cow!), clearly 100% of democrats and 100% of the Unaffiliated is not an accurate figure for computer use.

We can safely assume it's about 75% in each catagory.

In other words, you're an ass.

How many people can actually use the global language? David Graddol estimated a total of 750 million L1 (first or native language) plus L2 (second or nth language) speakers of English in his Future of English Report (pdf document) for the British Council. One of our subscribers, Martin Schell, has reviewed Prof. Braj Kachru's new book Asian Englishes which claims that India and China combined have over half a billion "users" of English.
Indeed, many people are bilingual or multilingual, but here we assign only one language per person in order to have all the language totals add up to the total world population (zero-sum approach).

In otherwords just because only 30% of internet users come from countries where English is the main language does not mean the only 30% of internet users understnd it, especially when you consider that Internet users will tend to be of a higher socio-economic status (thus more likely to understand multuple languages), that English is the most widely learned second language, and that a large majority of material on the internet is in Enlgish.

The initial mods were negative, presumably to stifle discussion of those aspects of the topic. My reply to that moron was mostly because I conclude that I've suffered too many /. fools too gladly in the past.

However, it should also be obvious that I'm somewhat seriously concerned by the potential of a Warhol Worm to build a very large zombot very quickly. There were several replies that considered variations on the configurations, but my focus is just on any open vulnerability that can be exploited without user involvement on the default configuration of Microsoft's most dominant OS of the day. I'm not sure how many machines are on the Web at any time, but I am sure that the biggest monoculture is pre-pwned by Microsoft. According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/, the current Internet user population is around 1.5 billion... Now I think I've scared myself by thinking it through...

As far as being insightful, I think that's a different stretch for that post, but I'm not supposed to complain about that, am I? It's more in the sense of a revelation, which a wise friend told me is always obvious--AFTER you hear it.

Seems a waste to include suggestions for improvements to the fossil that /. has become, but... In general I think the moderation system should be more directly reflected in the dimensionality of the karma, and the dimensionality of the moderation should be cleaned up. People with high karma in a particular dimension should have extra clout in that dimension, but in general the mod points should be much more widely distributed. I also think the mod point reporting should be logarithmic. I got to playing with the numbers and now feel like the natural log would be better than the base-10 log. That would mean that +5 funny would have to have about 150 mod points behind it.

I can't speak for the asian countries since I've never been there, but according to http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia/th.htm, the situation in countries like Thailand is way better than what you describe (I didn't take the time to check the other countries).
You'll find poor people with really bad jobs, that's true, but it's not the norm as most of the foreigners seem to think.

That link does not define what constitutes an "internet user" - but speaking about people I know with average jobs like school teachers, call center employees and accountants, they can't afford home computers with anything more than dial-up. If you look at the income numbers listed at that site - ~$210/month average for Thailand, ~$120/month average for philippines where DSL is at $15-$20/month - that's not affordable.

I can't speak for the asian countries since I've never been there, but according to http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia/th.htm, the situation in countries like Thailand is way better than what you describe (I didn't take the time to check the other countries).
You'll find poor people with really bad jobs, that's true, but it's not the norm as most of the foreigners seem to think.

To speak from my local experience: "Broadband" Internet Penetration (broadband by local standards is 128Kbps+) in Medellin was near 18% in 2008 (http://medellin.gov.co), not great but definitely nowhere near your numbers. The situation in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico is way better, so I don't know what you use to create your estimates.

the reason the usa lags behind other countries is that the other countries are small, compact and densely populated. like korea, or any european country

if you were to examine say, new york and new england, alone, or california, alone, the usa does fine in broadbrand penetration. but the usa is still sparsely populated in vast rural areas in the middle

want proof? look at canada. canada obviously has different governmental mechanisms, but it has virtually the same digital access ratings as the usa:

http://www.internetworldstats.com/list3.htm#dai

broadband penetration has to do with only two factors:

1. how rich the country is
2. population density

all other factors, including government policy, are neglible in comparison

Sarbanes-Oxley applies to the USA only. 95% of the world's population don't give a damn about Sarbanes-Oxley.

So, what? 75% of the world's population don't give a damn about email, so 79% of the world's email users do give a damn about Sarbanes-Oxley. (Here's the math: US population = 0.3e9, world population = 6.7e9, world email users = 1.2e9. Thus the US population is 4.5% of the world's, a little less than your estimate, but still pretty close.)

Actually, the 79% is totally bogus, I just divided 75% by 95%. According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm, the US has 15% of the world's Internet users. If we assume that everyone using the Internet also uses email and that everyone in the US gives a damn about SOX (since it's a US law, even if it doesn't effect them directly), then you're still too low by a factor of three.

Finally, I haven't seen any figures but I'd assume that most of the entities using Exchange are US businesses. Private individuals are much more likely to be using either webmail or email systems provided by their ISP; I've never heard of either using Exchange as a back end (no, not even Hotmail). And SOX compliance is more than just archiving. You need to be able to produce subsets of your email when requested, etc. Finally, you need to prove to your auditors that you are doing everything in an approved manner.

In conclusion, I'd say that SOX compliance is very important to the majority of those entities that own Exchange.

The main reason why your DVD never required updates is because Blu-Ray is a trainwreck of a spec that is still in heavy flux, while DVD was finalized and stable by the time players started shipping.

It didn't require updates because in 1995 only 0.4% of the world's population had access to the Internet, and the spec didn't allow for such things as 'upgrades'. It hadn't even entered their minds that people would actively crack the thing. Fast forward ten years later (digitally mind you, we had passed up analog tapes!) and one of the requirements was to be able to update the code used to decrypt the disc in order to combat piracy. The fact that many updates to the specification have already been made is only an ancillary to this motivation.

(4) The majority of humanity will carry on using Internet Explorer, which will continue to annoy every web developer who doesn't have a MS qualification.

The majority of humanity (78.1%), aren't on the internet, and thus does not use a web browser at all. I guess this will also be true when 2009 ends.

No, that's only the point of the commercial if you close your eyes.

Commercials make me want to close my eyes too, but that's not how they're intended to be watched. Further, as with every single thing on TV one should be prepared not to believe everything one hears or sees. As in the old saying: Believe half of what you read and none of what you hear.

In my opinion, the "speed" part was about the speed of the new iPhone that they call "3G" at the very beginning of the commercial and the jumping visually through the features really fast was about jumping through the features in 30 seconds.

First, go back to the article and look at the comparison video - how long it really takes to do all the things shown in the commercial.
Second, agree that almost everyone (here in the US anyway) has been on the internet before they saw the iPhone commercial and therefore should have an idea of what the speed of the internet is like already.

I have a really hard time thinking that anyone who's been on the internet *at all* is going to believe what's shown in that commercial is really how their experience is going to be. There're obvious edits in the footage for crying out loud.

So, perhaps if you're the person in the US who's never been on the internet before and never seen a commercial before you might mistake this Apple ad for saying you essentially gain the ability to time travel or speed up time when you get an iPhone, but probably nobody else would.

At least that's what I think from watching it.

-Matt

No add-ons. I want my ad block plus please.

According to one source, there are about 1.5 billion Internet users in the world. Another source estimates that maybe 20%, or 300 million of them, are using Firefox.

Now, Mozilla.org says that most popular add-on right now is Video DownloadHelper with about 340K downloads each week. However, its developers have released 32 versions in the last 22 months, so a big chunk of downloads will be for upgraders. Let's assume that a full one-half of all downloads are first-time users and not people upgrading from last week's version, and that 100% of downloaders actually use it. That means that Video DownloadHelper has about 16,000,000 users, or about 5% of Firefox's user base.

You like add-ons. I like add-ons. Objectively, though, we're a very small minority of users. The numbers look even worse for your position when you consider that the majority of Internet users are browsing with Internet Explorer, and therefore wouldn't miss add-ons were they to switch to Chrome.

There are a lot of reasons why people might not be using Chrome. The lack of add-ons is almost certainly not an important one, statistically speaking.

And certainly there are a ton more computers in the U.S. than in China, although that will certainly change within the next decade or so.

Actually, China has ~253 million Internet users. The US has only ~215 million. It could just be that your numbers are dated - They're increasing that number about 8x as fast as we are. Look for yourself: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

who is the internet market going to cater to when they are practically cut down from rest of the world ? excuse me, what was your population again ? ~300 mil. how much of that uses internet in a manner that will sustain it financially (apart from using only mail) ? probably ~100 mil. compare this number to the user number for the entire world, which is 1,463,632,361 , and youll see what will happen. http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

i hate to break it to you but an isolated economy cant survive. u.s. i.t. sector wont be able to live only doing small time automation websites/intranet bastardizations to mid size manufacturers. because thats what you will be reduced to when cut from rest of the world.

Slightly OT, but certainly pertinent:
More than one in five human beings have access to the internet .

Looking good for open sourcing governments.

in the 1990s we would have had a 1500% increase over 4 years

Internet usage has increased 290% in the last 8 years, or an average of less than 20% per year. If growth slowed from 100%/yr in the 1990s to 20%/yr in the 2000s, it should be no surprise that the next few years will see growth that's slower yet.

(This is, incidentally, a nice example of the folly of blindly extrapolating exponential growth rates; if the 2000s had seen the 100% growth rate you talk about, we'd have about 100 billion internet users on earth right now. The other response mentions logistic curves, which you really should look into; they're a standard technique for modelling adoption of technology, and show quite clearly how exponential early growth will progressively slow as the population becomes saturated.)

That's always been used as a significant metric, and I've never understood why. This article is a perfect example. 120million unique visitors in a month. If we assume that's a peak... and that it's been trending generally upward but not dramatically, it's not too hard to extrapolate at least 2 billion "unique hits" in 2 years. The problem with that is that there are significantly less than 2 billion people people online. So what do those numbers really mean?

Which is another way of saying 'less than 5% of the population of the world still uses Fahrenheit'.

• The US has 304 million people, the UK 60, South Africa 47, Canada 33, Australia 21. None of these countries are entirely native English speaking, of course, but many other countries have substantial English-speaking minorities. Only 215 million Americans have English as their first language. Over all, fewer than 70% of the world's native English speakers, and fewer than 30% of the world's fluent English speakers, live in the US.
• Slitly fewer than one and a half thousand million people use the Internet, of whom fewer than two hundred anf fifty million are in the US. Therefore US Internet users make up 17.5% of Internet users

Of course, the US isn't the only country in the world still to use Fahrenheit. There's also Belize.

I would be great to run this on my own trusted server, and would the be only way I might run the extension.

However I don't think Google should open source it in this case. Mostly because of my own needless paranoia. (But this is Slashdot so no one will notice.)

Why? What percentage of FF's user base runs their own server? We can only guess, but probably somewhere in the realm of 0.001%. Or less. (There are 1.4 bil internet users, you do the math.) So virtually no one is going to run their own server.

What a perfect opportunity for Lucky Nice Software Co! (A division of Lazy Nefarious Software Company.) LNSC sets up a server, pays some kid a few hundred bucks to put a custom front-end on it, pays another kid the same amount to set up a professional looking web site and then a little more to advertise. Add a long EULA that says they can store and rape all of your data and you've got a profitable business for little trouble and a small amount of capital.

An -now- it looks like something my Mom might use. And because it looks nice and legitimate and has been advertised it will be several orders of magnitude more popular than your version.

Sure, software isn't unique. If one person can do it, so can another. But there is making guns, and then there is selling guns to terrorists.

And in this case, there is one good alternative and another open source initiative that could replace (and supersede) it that you can contribute to. I encourage you to.

Internet users using P2P for downloading music has dropped from 20% to 19%

"Since 2003, while the RIAA has been filing 28,000 lawsuits, the percentage of US Internet users using P2P for downloading music has dropped from 20% to 19%" http://www.internetworldstats.com/am/us.htm Internet Users in 2003 - 172,250,000 - About 320000 file sharers Internet Users in 2007 - 212,080,135 - About 420000 file sharers That's not a drop by any means, although the sentence in the article reads: "Since 2003, labels have filed more than 28,000 lawsuits against individual file sharers.", so I don't know where these figures are coming from

According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats14.htm 71.4% of the entire US population uses the internet.

Assuming that the 6.8% of the population is under 5 years old and doesn't use the internet, and assuming that the 12.4% of the population is over 65 doesn't use the internet, leaves about 9.4% of the population unaccounted for.

Also, what about the 14 - 25 year old demographic who are using SMS rather than email?

So, I guess what I am saying here is that if only 71.4% of the US has access to the internet, how is it possible that 18% of all households don't use email?

Closed source = Diebold-style voting = totalitarianism by computer.

Open source = governance by the people = a free and mature human civilization.

Especially if projects like OLPC can continue to spread the internet to everyone. Note that already worldwide, 1 in 5 people have access to the internet. Universal access is a matter of when not if.

Your right, my initial estimations were a bit low. But, I was basing that on the 2001 US Census.

According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm the current number is actually closer to 238,000.

Still, even that my point stands. $16,000 per internet user is a bit high.

If the numbers in TFA are true (36 million students, growing to 52 million by the end of 2009), then this is absolutely huge in terms of Linux install base. In fact, I think this project would approximately double the install base.

I know that "counting" the number of Linux installs is essentially impossible, but here are some random numbers I've accumulated that point to the approximate size of the Linux user base:
1. The Linux Counter estimated 29 million installs in 2005. This estimate involved numerous assumptions, such as extrapolating from 8 million installs reported by Red Hat in 1998.
2. According to an IDC study, the Linux marketshare for PCs was ~3% in 2003.
3. There are about 1 billion Internet users. Browser logs indicate that Linux accounts for ~0.8% to ~3.9% of web traffic. This gives us an estimate of 8 million to 39 million Linux users. (The upper estimate is undoubtedly an over-estimate since the value comes from W3Schools, which probably has a greater fraction of 'technical' users.)
4. According to Canonical's server logs from OS updates, there are approximately 6 million active users of Ubuntu (see here and here). Assuming that Ubuntu represents 30% of Linux usage (based on this), you can come up with an estimate of 20 million Linux users.
5. According to Fedora's logs for OS updates, there are approximately 2.8 million installations of Fedora Core 6, and 1.6 million of Fedora 7. Assuming Fedora represents 9% of Linux installs (again, based on this), you can estimate 48 million Linux users.

Obviously all of these methods have their own problems. I'm not claiming that any of these estimates are robust. However they do at least suggest a range for the number of Linux users (~20 million) and the marketshare of Linux (~1% to 2%).

So, this single project, it would seem, is drastically increasing (doubling?) Linux usage. This is huge, in my opinion, because a generation of students who have learned Linux will be far more likely to use and improve upon FLOSS when they enter the job market.

"Here are up-to-date numbers for a single country, Turkey:"

Those statistics being "single country" also makes them less valid on the world scale.

I thought I smelled a fish when your statistics seemed to indicate that 1/3 of all Turks are "MSN users". This also means that if this and this is correct, there are more MSN users than Internet users in Turkey. So let us just assume that EVERY single Internet user in Turkey is also an MSN user.

Could this possibly be representative for the world?

The answer is pretty obviously "no".
If all your statistics are correct, Turkey accounts for approximately 8.3 % of the MSN users in the world, but less than 1.3% of the worlds internet users (based on 1.32 billion Internet users from here).

Either your numbers are completely wrong, or MSN is over 6 times as popular in Turkey as the average for Internet users. Either way, they are completely useless as proof of total MSN usage in the world.

The majority of Americans don't have Internet connectivity. Until then, high speed Internet will still be small compared to dial-up.

{zing!}

There are about 1.3 billion Internet users according to Internet Growth Statistics. That seems to add up to me. Firefox may have up to 150 million users by now. So where are all the complaints about web sites breaking with each release of Firefox? All I can see is lame "memory leak" complaints that no one can seem to verify.

The referenced stats for this article lack two key items: an "other" classification, and and explanation of how OS is being identified. A definition of the sample would also be useful, as browser/platform distribution can vary quite strongly across websites.

A competing set of web client statistics shows Linux at 1.77% of all clients, and (if you do the math) 2.16% "other" or unclassified clients. Missing, if you've any experience running yoru own website, are the various crawler and spider types which can account for a significant volume of traffic.

Regardless, it would appear that actual Linux web client share is somewhere in the 1% - 4% range. Given 1.26 billion people on the Internet, I'd estimate 12.6 - 50.4 million Linux users. More or less (or most or cat or dog....).

Karsten M. Self

According to this there 1.26 billion Internet users. According to Wikipedia there were 1.4 million iPhones sold by October 2007. Assuming every iPhone connects to the Net at some point, that means ~0.11% of the connected devices should be iPhones, which is remarkably close to the number the article quotes.

That having been said, I don't really trust the stats provided in the article. They claim 0.6% Linux usage, but most other estimates based on web traffic put Linux usage at 0.8% to 3% (and as we all know such techniques are inherently error-prone; e.g. Linux users may spoof their agent string).

As usual, estimating Linux market share is nearly impossible. It can be interesting to look at the numbers, but I wouldn't make any sweeping arguments based on such uncertain data.

Umm....3.5 billion? Yeah, it might have been downloaded that many times but I find it unlikely.

World Population est. = 6.6 billion.
Internet Population est. = 1.25 billion.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Installs per internet user = 2.8

I know for a fact that not all of those 1.25 billion people have Flash installed, and fewer still having flash 9. Especially since some of the internet population will be people who share computers such as internet cafes.

Now according to Adobe's own information they have a total flash penetration of flash 6 and higher of 838 million. Out of an estimated 858 million computers on the internet.

http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/PC.html

Now if they are able to move 60 million people to their Silverlight install base, they still have a long ways to go, but it is a good start.

This is unlikely, near term.

The developer community in India is not that large; computer ownership is 14 per 1000 people, which is barely over 1%, compared to them having ~5.2% of the population with cable television [Source: http://blogs.officialexportguide.com/country/].

Add to this the fact that most of the ownership of these machines is centralized, either in large corporations as business equipment, software shops where the employee only has access to work on what the software shop wants worked on, or cyber cafes, where they are not used for development at all, and you get a picture of a country where the resources to support a self-growing Open Source community really aren't there.

For India itself, given that they have ~ 1.6 million computers, and 42,000,000 Internet users [Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/asia/in.htm], most of these people are using public access facilities, such as cyber cafes.

ASIDE: cyber cafes do not grow up in areas where private computer ownership is prevalent; California, for example, has a total of 11 [Source: http://www.globalcomputing.com/Cafes.html].

So it's unlikely that India will become an Open Source power house any time soon, unless ownership of the means to participate in the community moves into the hands of the individual contributor, without being gated by either hardware availability or employer requirements.

It's far, far more likely to be Western, then Eastern Europe, followed by Asia, which displaces the U.S., if it's to happen any time soon. So much for those who complain about outsourcing...

-- Terry

Just to inform the discussion, note that now nearly one in five people are on the net:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

This link comes from the Metagovernment's FAQ, where they point out that when most people have net access, there will really be no reason to maintain representative democracy.
http://www.metagovernment.org/faq/
Once we can all participate in a connected network, why appoint other people to make the big decisions for us?

Maybe one can find a majority that does not like it ( http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm ).

Then I suggest the United States tells Those Who Don't Like to go fuck themselves with a cream-cheese dildo.

Look, the damn thing was designed and built largely at the expense of the US taxpayer. If others want to make use of it, fine. But the fact that other countries find it a valuable resource doesn't mean the United States owes them the time of day.

They knew what our policies were when they started using it. If they've decided they no longer wish to abide by those policies, fine. Then get the fuck off of it, and don't let the door hit ya where the Good Lord splits ya!

Maybe one can find a majority that does not like it ( http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm ).

The only issue here is that the United States currently has control, and is being presented with no good (or even clear) reason why it should give that control up.

Maybe one can find a majority that does not like it ( http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm ).

CC.

Who the hell is going to read all that shit?

We had an issue recently in my own data center where we were trying to trace a probable network issue with our backups. However, we couldn't find a sniffer that had the capacity to capture the entire session. We had to go buy an 8-terabyte device to allow us to capture one night's worth of activity.

So it's funny if we have 210 million Internet users, how many NSA employees does it take to read all of our traffic every day, and if some of them call in sick how far behind do they get?

This seems to be the very same malady that afflicts bloggers: the illusion of being popular and influential. People seem to forget that the Internet, vast as it seems to be, is only "used" by 18.9% of people, and even it still seems to be a lot, most of the use limits to email and an the occasional news site. Most people don't even know what a blog (or a webcomic) is, and even the ones who do, they don't care about those particular ones, except for a couple of dozen of fans.

It is the absolute numbers that seem to throw people into this illusion. Back in the days, if you wrote a college newspaper and got, let's say, 300 readers a week, that would be unquestionably an assessment of the quality (or, at least, the popularity) of the publication, and probably would get you a sweet job in the local newspaper. If you had a band, and managed to attract 300 loyal followers, that would be an amazing thing. But on the internet, that's a drop in the bucket, I got that much visits in an outdated blog only through google searches that happened to display my blog in the first page.

So, in short, leave the spotlight for the real notables, and go back to improve your own act in order to one day, with lucky, to deserve to be really famous like the "big boys".