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According to the shitty links here (United States' Internet usage) and here (users aged 3-17) it says that there are 232,655,287 users in the US total and the 34.3 million aged 3-17. That's about 13% and the article is quoting a little higher than that at ~16.5%

Whatever.

It *is* one indicator though of growth and market adoption, and it is probably the greatest example we've seen so far of mass *consumer* adoption of open source software. If we're seeing 15-20% usage through Web logs and there are now 1.2 BILLION users on the Internet [1], that's a lot of people using an open source, standards-based browser; and that's a Good Thing.

1: http://www.internetworldstats.com/

Congratulations Firefox, you've managed to get a boat load of people to download your browser, but somehow most people reject it after trying it.

could this mean the end of BitTorrent

So apparently 6Billion out of the 6.6Billion (Ref) people on earth have interweb access! Some how overnight the Internet usage went from 1.1Billion (Ref) to 6Billion overnight!

To debunk this author just a little more, Facebook has a comprehensive developer system which allows anyone to program features in to facebook. And the beauty is, facebook controls the style of the interface so it doesn't look like myspace does

you're kidding, right?

ISTR that if we assume that most TLAs consist of the 26 ASCII letters (case-insensitive), and therefore there are 26^3=17576 TLAs. However, according to
http://www.internetworldstats.com/blog.htm, there are currently 1,173,109,925 internet users. Clearly, there are not enough TLAs to go around, and so I propose TLAv2. TLAv2 will increase the number of available TLAs to 8031810176; this is almost seven times the number of people currently using the internet!

These fancy new seven-letter three letter acronyms (FNSLTLAs) also appeal because those using them will be able to spell out such phrases as DEDBEEF and PATRIOT (whoops, I think that one may already be taken). This, in addition to the easy availability of addresses (IANA will be selling a 26-address block, for example BOOBIE{A through Z}, for less than the price of a single TLAv1 address)

I'm not sure about the OECD statistics. The nationmaster stats also show that the US has the most (or close) radios, cars, and TV's per capita. The We're number 6 in the world for total internet penetration (a more important statistic than broadband penetration IMO). Don't mindlessly believe asinine slashdot articles like the rest of the hive mind.

more than 350 million visitors intermingle annually

By the way... I think the number of Linux users is probably already higher than any of the hypothetical numbers you threw out.

It's obviously impossible to know for sure how many people use a given OS... especially when that OS is distributed freely and requires no kind of registration. However we can get some vague ideas from a few sources. The Linux Counter estimated 29 million in 2005. This was in part based upon verifiable numbers from Red Hat indicating 8 million installs in 1998 (yes, this is including corporate installs, not just home users).

Another (again not totally reliable) way is to use browser stats. W3school reports ~3.4% of browsers are running in Linux. Since there are 1 billion internet users, that means 39 million Linux users.

Again, these numbers are open to massive debate. But I think the real number is somewhere in the ballpark of 10 million to 40 millions users. Alot more than most people think.

The US has the sixth highest internet penetration rate in the world. With a population of about 300 million. Did any of you unthinking, unknowing basement-dwellers ever consider that perhaps so many people have internet through dialup here that they weren't as motivated to get broadband? Same thing with cell phones.

The same mindless posters, the same mindless comments. ALL THE TIME.

This study shows there are already 5 times as many Vista workstations in use versus Linux workstations. Microsoft has sold ~20M copies through May

Citing a web survey is bad, but you got it wrong too. Your little link showed 2.18% for "other" and 3.74% for Vista, which is neither a five times advantage nor anything to crow about, but it's bullshit. There are more than a billion web users, so your little market share study has been gamed or there are 40e6 Vista users - twice the wild M$ estimates based on channel stuffing.

The only reliable numbers so far come from memory sales. Vista is not selling.

Most people's personal observations agree. I've seen exactly one install of Vista but my I see more GNU/Linux and plenty of Mac at LSU. That single install was quickly replaced with Fedora. It's kind of like Zune - you don't see it because it's not really there.

So, each Internet user in Australia is down loading more than 100 songs a year? Sounds like the usual hype, smoke, mirrors and bs the riaa uses in the US.

I don't buy this playing with numbers

The first thing here is not to confuse broadband 'availability' with broadband 'subscribers'. Canada and Nordic countries have both high availability, and high subscription rates.

In the case of a region like NYC, I'm sure it has very high broadband *availability*. (Meaning that if you live in NYC you could get broadband if you decided to, and you probably even have a choice who you get it from.) But I concede that even in places like New York, the subscription rate falls short of other countries.

That said, to address your comment:

New York alone contains more people than all of Sweden and Norway combined. I am sure New York City takes up far less space than Norway and Sweden combined. So why don't cities like LA, New York and Chicago have at least as good broadband penetration as nordic countries? From what I read they don't.

You make a valid point.

New York, is actually the 4th most wired city in the United States, according to this article:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/articles/art030. htm, and broadband penetration was nearly 70% (and that was in 2004!! So I'm sure the numbers are higher now).

That said, I don't know. If I were to speculate I would expect that the answer lies with social issues like poverty and illiteracy, and/or a lack of education. This strikes me as likely for two reasons:

Firstly, it seems logical to suggest that the poor/illiterate would be less likely to subscribe to high speed internet access

Secondly, this is an area where Canada and the Nordic countries differ from the US. Their inner city problems, poverty, and illiteracy rates are markedly lower than in the US, so its reasonable to suggest that it might be responsible for the difference.

regards

This site puts the US at a relatively high IP rate, so I'd gather that many users get their internet fix from work or school.

(161 exabytes) / 1,093,529,692 people[1] = 158.086639 gigabytes per person and 19.6380918 gigabytes per person if you don't count the duplicate data.

[1] Total est. of people on the Internet:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm

Sorry but any web developer can tell you that the 'if it follows standards it should work' myth has been dead for a long time.

A 'good' webpage can be written in xhtml and include every scrap of CSS defined in the 2.0 standard. Unfortunately, the standards in question (including the older CSS specs) are ambiguous in some places and even if they weren't there is no browser that fully implements them. You can write a 100% standard and validated webpage that doesn't rendered properly (read according to standard) in any modern browser.

This is further complicated because the implementations are not just incomplete, but no two browsers implement the same parts. And if the browsers all implement a function, the ambiguity of the standard comes into play and you will often seen something rendered differently in each to a small or large degree. Depending on how critical the visual element in question is to your design, an unexpected difference in behavior can make a page unworkable or at least broken.

The result is that a web developer who is doing everything right (the site in question is obviously not, but I am not defending them, just setting the record straight) must do what he always has. He must test the page in an assortment of browsers and then work out the kinks for them. He must then hope that the resolution to those kinks will result in an implementation that will generally work in the browsers he has not tested.

Such is life. Even among those who do design according to standards and validate properly, there are those who only actually test and resolve issues in one browser. They know this will make most of the market work and following standards means that nobody can claim broken functionality is their fault.

Of course, accessibility standards for any government type site (city, county, state, federal, etc) should be required to work in all modern browsers. After all, I suspect that the blind do not constitute 0.6% of the browser market but those sites are required to be accessible to them. Are the blind somehow better than Opera users?

"If he doesn't care if pages work in someone else choice of browser why would anyone care if they work in his?"

Because Opera has support for features and technologies that rival any browser on the market (meaning it is as easy to support as any other browser) and 6 out of every thousand web users are using Opera. Considering that there are roughly 1,086,250,903 Internet users (per http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm) that means Opera's 0.6% of the browser market is about 6.5 million people. Using percentages immediately favors the biggest players and belittles the mid-sized and smaller players when you are referencing a sample the size of the browser market. When you are talking about nine zeros, reducing your figures to two zeros doesn't magically make for a clearer picture, it only serves to mask reality.

Most users probably don't remember the rate of spam before filtering was common for a number of reasons:

1. The rise in internet usage since the year 2000 indicates, at best, only 1/3rd of the internet population could remember the rate of spam before filtering was common.
2. The rise of email usage indicates a large population of the people who were connected pre-filtering weren't using email.
3. The current volume of spam per person is at least triple what it was pre-filtering.

Most of us who were using the internet before spam filtering became so common have not seen what today's volume of spam would look like unfiltered. Assuming spam per person has tripled, anyone who was getting 20 spam per day pre-filtering would be looking at 60 spam per day now.

It would be a much deserved wake up call if spam filter companies were to shut down operations for a few days. It's obvious that the bodies overseeing this case think of Spamhaus as little more than a novelty. I think Spamhaus needs to send a crystal clear message, and perhaps the most effective way to do that would be to show the world how green the other side of the fence really is.

Where are the vast majority of Slashdot readers from? Vast majority of internet users for that matter?

China and the USA are behind in the broadband race; each have to catch up with Sweden.

China and the USA are behind in the broadband race; each have to catch up with Sweden.

China and the USA are behind in the broadband race; each have to catch up with Sweden.

World Total Population: 6,499,697,060 World Total; People with 'Net: 1,043,104,886 (16%) [Source: http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm ] Geh, that seems a bit high, but anyways. Gamasutra had an article saying 7 million people subscribe to wow these days... So that's less than 1% of the Population of the internet.

I guess the author never really leaves his room/basement/cabin/cave often, because 84% of the people in world still don't know what internet is, how it looks and what it eats.

Storing every single search performed by every person in the world

• USA: 23.2% of world spam, 20.1% of world internet users
• China: 20.0% of world spam, 10.9% of world internet users
• S. Korea: 7.9% of world spam, 3.3% of world internet users

This apparant discrepancy stems from the fact that not everyone on the planet has an email address.

We can solve for the assumed number of email accounts in use by:

50 billion emails sent = 32 emails received * number of email accounts to receive them
50 billion emails sent / 32 emails received = 1.56 billion email accounts to receive them

According to the this page with World Internet Usage Stats, the number of people online is: 1,022,863,307. Meaning that the average person has 1.5 email accounts. True, some have a lot more email accounts, but there are also a lot of people who only have the one their ISP provides them. While I won't say these are the correct numbers, they are certainly in the ballpark.

If these stats are even semi-accurate, then internet penetration is less then 10% of the population. I guess that would mean a whopping 90% really could care less about the great firewall. Now, how many of the 10% (roughly 110 million people) care about the great firewall? Well this is somewhat more debatable, but you'd have to imagine some of them are supporters of the current system and would therefore not mind...

Hi SpyDerMan, I appreciate that you're trying to make a positive difference, and I'm concerned that the project may be trying to solve the problem by entirely the wrong means...

We've received HUNDREDS of volunteers to help us. And with more than 700 diggs, i doubt it's "unrepresentative".

The number of volunteers is certainly promising, and although 700 is a good start its definitely not a representative sample of the 1 billion people who now use the internet.

I note that there are as yet no volunteers in the "Legal Advice" section. Hopefully this will change and you'll have some specialists in international law willing to help out (perhaps a call to the EFF - see if they know anyone?).

It should be obvious by now that you haven't RTFA.

Only "the FAQ", "Security Concerns", "Project Description", several diagrams and some of the google groups discussion - and I enjoyed your peer review idea.

You're forgetting something, currently there's *NO* mechanism to enforce ALREADY EXISTING laws regarding SPAM. Spammers' servers are across the globe, where there are no laws.

So if there are no opt-out laws, how will clicking an opt-out link help? Is Okopipi entirely helpless against international spammers?

Note: "Yarr! We'll DDoS those scurvey ridden pirates" is not the correct answer here, obviously. So is Okopipi impotent?

I already said that, the "attacks" will be controlled but significant enough to disrupt the spammers' business. As if that wasn't enough, people who have voted to punish an innocent website will receive bad karma, this eliminates corruption from the network.

Whilst that might deter people from being petty and spiteful; its not perfect:

1. it cannot stop mistakes from being made
2. genuinely honest people can be corrupted, hoodwinked or can have their machines compromised.

Perhaps a short example will explain my concern. Imagine a web company that has an email list for their customers (a company that never spams, because they have to pay for the limited inbound and outbound bandwidth).

That company has an opt-out web page for their customer-email list. If someone were to "spam in their name" (i.e. without their knowing) how would they be able to stop their entire month of bandwidth being wasted by Okopipi clients automatically trying to unsubscribe?

Who is responsible if Okopipi "accidentally" attacks such a company? What recourse does the company have against the members of the Okopipi network? Will individual members be liable to court action, or will Okopipi?

The author of the article didn't understand his research. He said that according to Nielsen Ratings, 68% of US internet users connect with broadband. That's not true.
The Nielsen information for 2005 says that 68% of Americans use the internet - not necessarily through broadband. No statistics are given for broadband specifically, but they're definitely much lower. According to this article, US broadband usage will reach about 62% in 2010, and was 29% in 2004. I don't know about current stats, but it's probably near 35-40%.

That's Internet users, not population.
      Those figures all come from here:

  http://www.internetworldstats.com/

        I was surprised to see there are 17 million Net users in Mexico. The most interesting thing to me was that if you got rid of every single last Net user in the North America and Europe, you'd still have more than half of the Net users on-line. So, supposing these info terrorists like the IFPI were able to supress free exchange of information completely in North America and Europe they'd be half way to their goal.
          They had better start going after twenty thousand at a time or more realistically at least a quarter million a year if they're even going to pretend to be serious about their information terrorism campaign.

Do you really think that isn't misleading? That it doesn't make the average person think that there are 100 million users?

India 2005 est. GDP: $3.678 trillion
US 2005 est. GDP: $12.370 trillion

Taking the ratio with your numbers,

India: $1.12 billion per sq. km
US: $1.28 billion per sq. km

Obviously that's not a terribly telling statistic, but neither is yours. I hear a lot of people claiming that coverage in the US is worse than in other countries/areas. However, I haven't seen hard numbers -- only anecdotes. Are we really comparing apples to apples? Is internet coverage in backwoods India really better than that in the backwoods United States? I'm willing to bet not.

Sure, I bet net service in Bombay is better than service in Palookaville, but that's hardly a fair comparison. Service in Boston is better than Palookaville too. How many reports of the lousy net access in the Indian equivalent of Palookaville do we actually hear? Every Indian friend I know comes from one of the big cities, so that's all the anecdotal evidence I've heard directly.

I was hoping to find information about internet coverage by geographic area and/or population by country, but all I could find were these statistics sorted by continent. It looks like North America does pretty well with 68.1% penetration compared to less than 10% in Asia.

Europe Internet Usage Statistics
USA Internet Usage Statistics

Europe Internet Usage Statistics
USA Internet Usage Statistics

The link doesn't like the trailing slash.

Try
http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm

IMHO you are 100% correct.

I notice with interest that we are approaching 1 billion users on the Internet.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/top20.htm/

How many people will have browser equipped phones in 1,2 and 5 years?

Mobile/PDA/Small Screen Internet will be HUGE.

I know you are joking but I notice that if you live in the UK you cannot get hold of an en-GB version of Firefox 1.5.

It seems a bit odd that Slovenia (population 2,011,070), Norway (population 4,593,041) and Finland (population 5,223,442) can all have 1.5 produced before us despite the fact that their population numbers combined are significantly less than the 60,441,457 for the UK.

(It's not like we're a backwater either, we have the second highest number of internet users after Germany)

Hopefully it'll be ready after the weekend.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm
North America ranks #3 after Asia and Europe in terms of internet usage. (not # packets but number of people) Plus unlike Asia, pretty much peaked. Unless you count fridges and toasters.

Cheers,
-b

Out of a population of 1,344,840, there are approximately 670,000 Estonians with access to internet. That's a paltry 49.8%. Any system where less than a majority is allowed to vote is not a success, compared to a much higher number. Clearly, it needs work.

Statistics Here

The main reason this can't work, is that Google already owns the mindshare of the internet.

AOL was once king. They had a huge portion of the marketshare. The management no doubt thought they were doing everything right and they rested in their dominant market position. The problem then and now is that the internet is a rapid growth industry. New customers are pouring in all the time. Less than 1/6 of the world is on the internet today, which means there are about 5 billion more potential new customers than there are existing customers. In some places, like Africa, the ratio is even worse with only 2% of the population having net access. stats

Google's mindshare is important, but it is not by any means a magical protective shield. ICQ and AIM went from being the only chat networks to a fairly competitive market in only a few years because new users poured in and other companies got to them before AOL.

Ok, but according this this our internet penetration is higher than yours. Canada has good broadband access but I the problem was that so many people in the US already had existing dialup connections that they didn't forsee the need to upgrade. I once read that Jamaica has nearly the same cell phone penetration rate tha the US and Canada does, but their overall phone penetration rate is very low. So many Americans and Canadians already have phones they don't feel the need to upgrade.

The real problem is that billions of people all over the world want to see us suffer and die. You can't just keep making more enemies every day and not expect any consequences. Those billions of people who want to see you die will figure out a way to kill you or spend you into bankrupcy trying to defend yourself.

I think you have it wrong. The only two countries that have billions would India (1,080,264,388 July 2005 est. CIA World Fact Book) and China (1,306,313,812 July 2005 est. CIA World Fact Book.) all of Africa has 896,721,874 according to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm. I don't recall any Chineese or Indian terrorists setting off nukes any where. Most African dicators seem happy enough to be warlords of their own country or butchering each other. Most African people most likely would just want stablity and a higher standard of living. What would really be scary is a unified Africa, which isn't likely to happen.

The sum of users of all p2p networks it tracks is about 8 million. Some of those use more than one network, so the actual number of unique persons using any of those is probably smaller. On the other hand some are not constant users so they show up for a day or two, then show again in a month. So, let's assume optimistically it's 10 million. Now, there is the BitTorrent which is not tracked by Slyck - let's put that optimistically at 10 million. Even if we add another 10 million for all other forms of file sharing not covered otherwise and end up with 30 millions of P2P users it is still just 3% of the total estimated number of Internet users.

This means that file sharers are a tiny minority and therefore file sharing can be successfully stigmatized and kept at bay as a marginal, shameful activity. I believe it's those numbers that make ??AA think they can win. And I can say I'm not sure they won't once I did this estimating.

That's right, because you could never agree on one [language].

There was never such a discussion on the EU level (which would be beneficial IMHO, but has not been held).

Fact is still that Europe is full of terribly provincial little fiefdoms with a totally myopic view of their self importance [...]

I am afraid, fact is you are ranting, and I seriously doubt you have any information about Europe other than Fox channel. Try providing factual support for your claims. Which cities would be armed camps?

Your country is smaller than most US states. There are states in the US 5 times the size of Norway that also have greater internet penetration. The correct comparision accounts for scale, i.e. Europe vs. North America. Sorry..

Fine, then size does matter. Then, according to the statistics of your site, the US have 201 million Internet users, and Europe as a whole has 260 million, of which the EU has 216. You are not getting anywhere, I am afraid.

You are the one who used the word Nazi.

I take this is your way to admit misquoting me.

in the US comparing anyone to a Nazi is deeply offensive.

Oh well, in Europe too. But it is kind of more offensive to act like a Nazi. I am sure most Americans are nowhere that nuts, but that particular celebration (veterans' day at Austin capitol) had a very creepy atmosphere to it, with militarism all over the place, glorification of wars like Vietnam, and also the very weird monument to the confederate army ("The spirit of 1776"? Fighting to maintain slavery is now "the spirit of 1776"?)

[...] it is clear that you are extremely lacking in what passes for civilized grace or behaviour by any reasonable standard.

I am afraid the moderators have already been the judges of that.

That's right, because you could never agree on one [language].

There was never such a discussion on the EU level (which would be beneficial IMHO, but has not been held).

Fact is still that Europe is full of terribly provincial little fiefdoms with a totally myopic view of their self importance [...]

I am afraid, fact is you are ranting, and I seriously doubt you have any information about Europe other than Fox channel. Try providing factual support for your claims. Which cities would be armed camps?

Your country is smaller than most US states. There are states in the US 5 times the size of Norway that also have greater internet penetration. The correct comparision accounts for scale, i.e. Europe vs. North America. Sorry..

Fine, then size does matter. Then, according to the statistics of your site, the US have 201 million Internet users, and Europe as a whole has 260 million, of which the EU has 216. You are not getting anywhere, I am afraid.

You are the one who used the word Nazi.

I take this is your way to admit misquoting me.

in the US comparing anyone to a Nazi is deeply offensive.

Oh well, in Europe too. But it is kind of more offensive to act like a Nazi. I am sure most Americans are nowhere that nuts, but that particular celebration (veterans' day at Austin capitol) had a very creepy atmosphere to it, with militarism all over the place, glorification of wars like Vietnam, and also the very weird monument to the confederate army ("The spirit of 1776"? Fighting to maintain slavery is now "the spirit of 1776"?)

[...] it is clear that you are extremely lacking in what passes for civilized grace or behaviour by any reasonable standard.

I am afraid the moderators have already been the judges of that.

Yup. It's a troll, and full of factual errors too.

Sorry, no factual errors. These are my experiences. I might have had especially bad luck, though that would defy statistics.

My GSM cell phone doesn't work in Europe either. Must be something wrong with the European cell phone system.

In Europe, there is a 900/1800 MHz dual band, in North America 850/1900 MHz. My phone is a tri-band (900, 1800 and 1900), one of those you pay more for to be able to go to the US and use them.

What do expect from a bunch of Chemical Engineers?

<coupdegrace>Well, American chemical engineers. At ECOS2003 in Copenhagen we had a whole room with Debian machines. Eheh.

Big enough for a million people on New Years Eve. What more do you want?

That's bullshit, no way a million people can fit in there. I was at a rally in September 2002 in Rome, and we were about 800,000 to one million. You have never seen one million people. They could never, ever fit in Times square. Not even 100,000 for that sake. I would expect it to be closer to 10,000 at maximum. Look at the pictures: this is St. John's square in Laterano: as a general rule, the square from the church on the west side all the way to the east limit of the picture can contain 300,000 people. Times square is nowhere that size.

An Europe is a bunch of little squabbling principalities that still haven't even adopted a common language

That might surprise you, but we are not aiming at one language. I for one am for Esperanto as a bridge language and everybody with his mother language, but the current policy is "translate everything". And for that sake half the advertisement in New York is in Spanish.

Typical Euro chavanism. I speak 3 languages, my wife 7.

Which ones, and with which certificates? Really, I'm curious. Chile has not exactly many borders with non-Spanish-speaking countries, are you counting argentinian as a language, che? That would not even be that incorrect.

These beasts are the sons and daughters of those who broke the Atlantic wall to help free Europe

I thought America used to be about deserving one's honours, and not inheriting them. GWB is not FDR. By the way, I did not say "they were Nazi", I said "the closest thing to a Nazi rally" I had experienced. At some point, the speaker said "We did a lot of good things in Vietnam! We built orphanages!", and my buddy Olaf started laughing. That's when I got scared. Olaf ikke le. Ikke nå, ikke her, for fandens skyld!

the cell phone was invented in the US by researchers at Bell Labs and Motorola

So what, the GSM standard (the one that did not work for me in the US) was invented in 1 km's radius from my workplace.

The penetration in the US is FAR higher than in Europe. The last published results show that the penetration in the North America is 67.4%. Europe 35.5%.

I almost feel bad, but in the link you provided my country is directly above yours. Sorry.

Yup. It's a troll, and full of factual errors too.

How comes that I can't bloody call Europe from a payphone in Chicago airport?

Don't know what you were doing, but I used to call my wife in Santiago Chile from O'Hare.

Why doesn't my damn GSM mobile work?

Don't know. My GSM cell phone doesn't work in Europe either. Must be something wrong with the European cell phone system.

Number of complimentary internet connections: 0

What do expect from a bunch of Chemical Engineers? The chemical industry is in decline without much real innovation. It is why I got out and into something more exciting, despite the fact I had invested the time to get a Ph.D. in ChE.

My Diners stopped working for a couple of days, and the Visa was dead.

Pay your bills? I've travelled all over the world on my credit cards; the only place I had problems was in Chonju, Korea.

The statue of Liberty is small!!

What do you expect? It's a gift from the French. Everyone knows the French are cheap. And short too like the statue because Napoleon picked all the tall men for his army, and we know what happened when they tried to attack Russia. And it had to be chopped up to fit on a boat to get here anyway.

Why are still stuck in the stone, pound and foot age?

An Europe is a bunch of little squabbling principalities that still haven't even adopted a common language, currency (getting closer on currency but not there yet) or constitution. Our system may suck, but at least we all use it.

Times square: it's not square to begin with, and it's ludicrously small

Big enough for a million people on New Years Eve. What more do you want?

Ok, there are people who speak other language than English

Typical Euro chavanism. I speak 3 languages, my wife 7.

Sorry for the people governed by these beasts, but for me it was an experience to see the closest thing to a Nazi rally I will ever witness (I hope).

The real Nazis came from Europe. These beasts are the sons and daughters of those who broke the Atlantic wall to help free Europe from those Nazis, funded the Marshall plan, the Berlin airlift and much of the military that kept Europe free over the past half century. Of course it seems declasse' in Europe would have or admit any knowledge of such a thing.

At least not in the level of technology the citizens

I don't know about that. I've travelled all over the world - Europe, Asia, South America. Sure, there are some things (cell phones) that have greater acceptance in other countries than in the US, probably because their land lines never worked very well. That doesn't mean the US is unsophisticated technically; the cell phone was invented in the US by researchers at Bell Labs and Motorola, rather that the life style of people in the US hasn't adopted the technology to the extent of other countries.

And the internet? The penetration in the US is FAR higher than in Europe. The last published results show that the penetration in the North America is 67.4%. Europe 35.5%.

http://www.internetworldstats.com/top25.htm

But each country has its idiosyncracies. Many European countries haven't even got up to the idea that mail should be delivered on a regular schedule yet, or that hotel rooms should be reasonably sized and clean, or that you shouldn't have to bribe a public official to get some paperwork processed.

Click here for data.

Your thinking is deeply flawed. People like you make the world embrace hostility and paranoia instead of unity and cooperation. It clearly shows that you have no idea what it means to live in a democracy, which is no wonder as you live in a plutocracy.

If your idea of fairness is that the biggest country should have everything while the smaller countries which make up the absolute majority should have nothing, then you really should be living in the middle ages not in the 21th century.