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No, we have volcanoes. See: http://www.nationalatlas.gov/dynamic/dyn_vol-ca.html

Just because they haven't been active lately isn't any terribly good guarantee for volcano timescales.

However we are completely lacking in hurricanes, also blizzards (unless you go pretty far up into the mountains), and tornados.

The usual suspects like floods and fires we have, and more than the country's share of earthquakes. Also more than our share of infrastructure issues.

What we're trying to do is grow SPECIFIC plants that are useful to people. We have never cared much if at all that what we are really doing is converting areas that grow one kind of plant to grow another kind of plant. If we were trying to increase primary production, no doubt we could do that, but we would be up against the same things that limit agriculture now: mainly water availability. But if you built a lot of greenhouses and water recycling systems we could probably increase primary production substantially.

Well, that's a nice theory, but its simply not true.

The amount of land dedicated to farming has not substantially increased, (in fact it has decreased) as farming becomes more efficient. Vast tracts of the
midwest have returned to forest because there is simply no economic need to keep these lands under the plow.

This whole theory is nothing but a huge rehash of the Limits To Growth, cited in TFA. Yet 40 years hence, LTG has been proven wrong in just about every single prediction they made. Their methodology and assumptions were simply wrong.

Measurement of plant tonnage via satellite imagery has revealed that plants still grow just about everywhere they ever did. Wow. Major revelation.

Yet the satellites seem to miss the fact that global food production has more than tripled since 1961, and worldwide, we are only using 7% more land in the process. In North America Europe, and Russia, we are actually cultivating less land, and producing vastly more food. Marginal lands have fallen fallow, and returned to prairie or forest of a 2 hundred years ago.

Measuring the area covered by plants says nothing about the tonnage harvested every year off of that land. Nor does it say anything about the reduced pollution produced in the process, and the return of natural flora coverage. The total forest area in the U.S. has been relatively stable for the last 100 years (currently about 747 million acres). The species may change (they always have over time). But its not because we have converted the land to farming. For the last 100 years, the biggest threat to forests has been housing development, not farming.

The imagery is beneficial but the .shp files are of much more use and various localities give them away for free. For the twin cities area in Minnesota there is Metro GIS and for the whole state there is the DNR Data Deli and the MN DOT GIS sites. Not to mention the various stuff available from the fed the like TIGER or any of the stuff from the USGS, not to mention the National Atlas, National Map, or any number of other sources of info available.

My state does that as does the US federal government. My personal favorite is:
The MN DNR data deli

There are others as well:
Federal GIS data
MN legislature GIS resource
MN DOT
Minnesota MetroGIS
2011 US Tiger data set
USGS data
National Atlas
This data is all freely available and you can go do what you want with it. Granted you need some program that can parse and display shapefiles but those aren't too hard to come by as there are some very capable open source ones available.

http://nationalatlas.gov/articles/water/a_wateruse.html

According to this website public water supply domestic water use (85% of domestic water use) is about 11% of american water consumption

http://www.epa.gov/WaterSense/pubs/indoor.html

According to this website, the toilet uses about 25% of water in the home.

Thus, by mandating a change to high pressure low flow toilets, if we assume that most people are still using the old toilets (3.5-7 gallon flush) and extrapolating from those figures, toilet water use is roughly 2.5% of american water use. By changing to efficient toilets (80% less water), this could maybe be brought down to 0.5%-1% of american water use.

In contrast, according to above mentioned first website, thermo-electric power generation comprised 52% of water use. So theoretically if America cut power consumption by 4%, it would equal the water savings of more efficient toilets. Since residential counts for about 35% of electrical use, if you saved 12% power in your home, you could save enough (and consequently the water required to generate it) to run a large volume flush toilet. There are also more ways to reduce the water consumption of electrical generation, like wind power, solar power, and hydro power.

Excepting private property and Federal Military Reservations, you can pretty much hike wherever you want in the US, like on the bulk of the National Forest, National Wildlife, National Park, State Park, BLM lands.

The Federal Government owns nearly 650 million acres of land - almost 30 percent of the land area of the United States.

http://www.nationalatlas.gov/printable/images/pdf/fedlands/fedlands3.pdf

But I doubt there is any nation on the planet where someone can roam over all 100% of it

Extremely large swaths of land have been turned back to forests because they are no longer needed to grow crops to feed us and our livestock.

Urbanization is only about three percent of the US area, while farmland is a lot more, yet continually shrinking.

There are multiple factors, http://www.nationalatlas.gov/articles/biology/a_forest.html

"The forest cover in the U.S. has actually increased in the last 100 years - mostly due to farm abandonment in the East and fire suppression in the West."

Lat/long:

http://www.batchgeocode.com/

County and Township:

http://nationalatlas.gov/mld/countyp.html
http://nationalatlas.gov/mld/plss00p.html

There is also city information, but I probably wouldn't rely on it as much as the county and Township data:

http://nationalatlas.gov/atlasftp.html?openChapters=%2Cchpref#chpref

And then there is the argument that those aren't accessible resources, but they are certainly available, and it isn't that big a deal to get the data together and run queries against it, and you can at least view the county and land survey boundaries here:

http://nationalatlas.gov/natlas/Natlasstart.asp

I don't think it is really a problem that is worth heaping onto businesses, but I think you are probably overstating the difficulties, especially when you figure that a few intermediaries can do most of the work and sell it as a service, rather than each business doing all the mussing about themselves (cheapo businesses could even have a "You are requesting shipping to an out of state address. There is a $1 surcharge in order to purchase the information required to calculate the sales tax on this transaction." disclaimer or whatever).

Lat/long:

http://www.batchgeocode.com/

County and Township:

http://nationalatlas.gov/mld/countyp.html
http://nationalatlas.gov/mld/plss00p.html

There is also city information, but I probably wouldn't rely on it as much as the county and Township data:

http://nationalatlas.gov/atlasftp.html?openChapters=%2Cchpref#chpref

And then there is the argument that those aren't accessible resources, but they are certainly available, and it isn't that big a deal to get the data together and run queries against it, and you can at least view the county and land survey boundaries here:

http://nationalatlas.gov/natlas/Natlasstart.asp

I don't think it is really a problem that is worth heaping onto businesses, but I think you are probably overstating the difficulties, especially when you figure that a few intermediaries can do most of the work and sell it as a service, rather than each business doing all the mussing about themselves (cheapo businesses could even have a "You are requesting shipping to an out of state address. There is a $1 surcharge in order to purchase the information required to calculate the sales tax on this transaction." disclaimer or whatever).

Lat/long:

http://www.batchgeocode.com/

County and Township:

http://nationalatlas.gov/mld/countyp.html
http://nationalatlas.gov/mld/plss00p.html

There is also city information, but I probably wouldn't rely on it as much as the county and Township data:

http://nationalatlas.gov/atlasftp.html?openChapters=%2Cchpref#chpref

And then there is the argument that those aren't accessible resources, but they are certainly available, and it isn't that big a deal to get the data together and run queries against it, and you can at least view the county and land survey boundaries here:

http://nationalatlas.gov/natlas/Natlasstart.asp

I don't think it is really a problem that is worth heaping onto businesses, but I think you are probably overstating the difficulties, especially when you figure that a few intermediaries can do most of the work and sell it as a service, rather than each business doing all the mussing about themselves (cheapo businesses could even have a "You are requesting shipping to an out of state address. There is a $1 surcharge in order to purchase the information required to calculate the sales tax on this transaction." disclaimer or whatever).

Lat/long:

http://www.batchgeocode.com/

County and Township:

http://nationalatlas.gov/mld/countyp.html
http://nationalatlas.gov/mld/plss00p.html

There is also city information, but I probably wouldn't rely on it as much as the county and Township data:

http://nationalatlas.gov/atlasftp.html?openChapters=%2Cchpref#chpref

And then there is the argument that those aren't accessible resources, but they are certainly available, and it isn't that big a deal to get the data together and run queries against it, and you can at least view the county and land survey boundaries here:

http://nationalatlas.gov/natlas/Natlasstart.asp

I don't think it is really a problem that is worth heaping onto businesses, but I think you are probably overstating the difficulties, especially when you figure that a few intermediaries can do most of the work and sell it as a service, rather than each business doing all the mussing about themselves (cheapo businesses could even have a "You are requesting shipping to an out of state address. There is a $1 surcharge in order to purchase the information required to calculate the sales tax on this transaction." disclaimer or whatever).

I think you're off by a few orders of magnitude.

According to http://www.nationalatlas.gov, the driest parts of Colorado get about 7" of rain annually (average rainfall is about 15"). that comes to 190,080 gallons per acre and would provide the total (drinking, washing, etc.) annual water usage (approximately 100 gallons per day per person, according to the US geological survey) of 5 people.

What protects the minority is NOT the president it is the House. Thoes are tiny districts which are constantly under review by it's constituents.

Roflmao! You owe me a new monitor for all the soda I just spit up on it.

You might have actually had a valid point if you were talking about State Assemblyman but Representatives? The average district had almost 650,000 people in it at the time of the 2000 census so that number is probably a low estimate today.

"Under review by their constituents"? Give me a fucking break. My Congressman is under review by the most partisan elements of his party because that's who he needs to win over to keep his seat. The primary is the real election in most gerrymandered districts. Short of indictment, the actual election is just a formality for most members of the House.

Get back to us when you actually know something about our political system and just how rigged it really is.

So Doc...

Are you going to let New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and all the rest of the Southwestern states actually use all that land the Federal Government has marked off as special?

I mean, you can't bitch about them getting more in Federal dollars when 50% of their land is Federal property.

http://www.nationalatlas.gov/printable/images/preview/fedlands/az.gif

The largest is the Navajo Reservation of some 16 million acres of land in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah.

which you can see in this map(PDF warning).
They have few utilities which is a combination of the extreme size, distances between "settlements", poverty, cultural differences and good old fashioned greed. NPR ran a whole series about life on the reservation and the so-called border towns. Doing business on the reservation The mp3 on the linked page describes how the tribe (that now complains about the lack of connectivity and phone service) essentially blocked the installation of cell phone towers at nearly every turn; how the tribe wants to collect leases on the land of nearly twice what can be paid off the Rez.
TFA complains that 911 and other important services are not available or might not be available but that has almost always been the case. The Universal Service Fee that everyone pays is supposed to pay for running copper and extending these services to places that it doesn't "pay" for the phone companies to run wire to.
On top of that, anyone who wants to operate a business spends five years or more just for approval for a lease to operate on the land - and forget it if you're not Navajo. Anyone at all enterprising has to move off the reservation due to the crab bucket mentality.
Want a FOSS solution to all of this? The terrain is rugged, hills, etc. obstruct line of sight. That's the primary reason for satellite service. How about the OLPC project? How about the tribal government lower its barriers to business? Answer those questions and we can move forward.
---
From the border town of Flagstaff.

Gerrymandering? Nah, Congress wouldn't do that. Like the Democrats did here: http://nationalatlas.gov/printable/images/preview/congdist/GA13_109.gif If it were merely gerrymandered, it'd not be this bad.

What keeps the most important and powerful communication tool since the telephone from being universally embraced?

Answer: an aging population.

I just learned that this guy is, in fact, my representative. I didn't even know I'd moved into the 21st district; this map should explain why.

The district stops at IH 35 and neatly dodges the bluer University district, but runs further north to cover parts of the rich suburb of Cedar Park. The southeast corner of Austin is the poorest area, home to low-cost student housing and ancient buildings that aren't seeing renovation any time soon. (Whereas the southwest corner is the area of new development and suburbanization.) The 21st district also covers the expensive developments near Bee Cave, as well as the lavish riverside estates and McMansion tracts out FM 2244.

Further out in Blanco county, we have some ranch towns with less income but stronger conservative tendencies. I don't know a lot about the demographics on San Antonio, but it looks to me like the district covers suburban areas.

In short, this guy represents rich Austinites, socially conservative farmers and middle class suburbanites. What a happy coincidence.

The typical Congressman represents about 650,000 voters. Congressional Apportionment.

It ix fair to suggest that he has little to fear from a posting to Slashdot.

You mean like this:
http://nmviewogc.cr.usgs.gov/viewer.htm

or maybe this:
http://nationalatlas.gov/

Or is that not enough?
I know they're not overly professional, but it's still not bad for something free to the public available through an internet browser.

While those are some great and informative links, they are useless for actual geologic applications. The grandparent poster isn't talking about the pretty aerial photograph (orthoimagery) you see available in programs such as World Wind and the National Map Viewer. Those simply have high resolution aerial photography for a small number of urban areas in the United States.

The grandparent post is specifically talking about extraordinarily high resolution aerial photography sets that can be put together to exam under a stereoscope, which basically allows you to exam a high resolution photograph in 3D, giving the picture depth/relief.

This is useful in various studies, such as mapping past/potential landslide areas, mapping active/inactive fault traces, and determining relative elevations of various topographic features to see if they are related (just a topographic map will not help for this, since you want to see if rock type, erosional properties, vegetation, etc are the same between multiple features if you want to correlate them). There's a multitude of reasons for this information. It serves a great purpose when time/financial constraints make it inconvienent to go out into the field, or even doing preliminary work BEFORE you go out into the field, so you know what the area is like.

These aren't available online or for free, and the USGS has extensive high resolution aerial photography for most of the United States. But you have to order it, which can be quite expensive (especially if you are a student/academic doing a research project) and the fact that your taxpayer money has already payed for this to put it into the public domain.

You mean like this:
http://nmviewogc.cr.usgs.gov/viewer.htm

or maybe this:
http://nationalatlas.gov/

Or is that not enough?
I know they're not overly professional, but it's still not bad for something free to the public available through an internet browser.

It is ludicrous to claim that Google invested that much in the original content, since everyone just gets it from US Geological Survey.

So, go to the National Atlas and download and use to your heart's content. If that is not good enough, then go download all the data you can imagine. Still not enough, you can access all the layers via web services that comply with specifications published by the Open Geospatial Consortium at run time from your own web pages.

Now, write your congressmen and tell them how you appreciate that they made all this available to you, the citizen, for free, instead of spending all that tax money only to add a fee that makes it prohibitive for all but corporations who can be gatekeepers to keep you out. And hope that this doesn't become another casulty of Iraq budgets.

While you are at it, start a USGS support mailing list and an open source project to keep this sort of alive.

It is ludicrous to claim that Google invested that much in the original content, since everyone just gets it from US Geological Survey.

So, go to the National Atlas and download and use to your heart's content. If that is not good enough, then go download all the data you can imagine. Still not enough, you can access all the layers via web services that comply with specifications published by the Open Geospatial Consortium at run time from your own web pages.

Now, write your congressmen and tell them how you appreciate that they made all this available to you, the citizen, for free, instead of spending all that tax money only to add a fee that makes it prohibitive for all but corporations who can be gatekeepers to keep you out. And hope that this doesn't become another casulty of Iraq budgets.

While you are at it, start a USGS support mailing list and an open source project to keep this sort of alive.

Makes you wonder how much longer Rand McNally will let this go on...

Yup. Your tax dollars at work/a>. They also have the data in an online browser based "find your locality" thingy, as i recall, but i cant be bothered to track that down at the moment.

These may be a bit moot now but the national atlas is cool - click on "history" and you can get county by county popular votes from 2000.

Fairdata2000 doesn't have all the states but it is MUCH more detailed going down to the precinct level with tons of demographic data.

This is part of what truly makes the Slashdot community great, and why I am proud to be a part of it. Geeks helping out others by poling a resource that has a truly flabbergasting diversity of combined knowledge. This question hits a bit close to home as my research is centered around vision and vision rescue strategies, but this is a more immediate need that I truly hope somebody here can help with.

Just to clarify: I am not sure if you are asking for screen reader software or not as part of the solution? If so, there are a number of alternatives for Windows (fairly pricey), but the next version of OS X will have a built in screen reader solution! combined with other visual aids that will help the blind and near blind use their computer systems without having to invest in another solution.

For the maps, there are a number of high resolution maps available from the USGS which can be obtained in digital form here and in atlas form here. In addition the CIA world factbook is a nice resource for kids with text and maps that can be remapped with higher resolution.

Finally, a last resort would be Adobe Photoshop. You can take any map or image and simply resize the image with a much higher resolution (say take a map from 72dpi to 600 or 1200 dpi). If there is enough information in the original image to interpret, this might be a good solution to allowing one to zoom in images and maps for ease of interpretation.

National Map (National Map Viewer)

(and the somewhat related National Atlas)

Yes, you have "missed something" the National Atlas (a service of the USGS) is clearly public domain material. As is (I think) all published government sources. In fact, most of what the map makers do is based on government surveys and publications. The companies do some fact checking(some better than others), add "features", and consolidate information, but the 'base' work is often public domain.

Every year it drains it aquifier and every year it gets less and less. It isn't refilling. The chance Inida had to avoid it it lost in the 90's.

Have you ever looked at a map of the US aquifer system? More details here. I'd be most worried about the Ogallala Aquifer that serves Kansas, Missouri, and Nebraska. That's draining quickly. Another generation or two and its Ogallala's remaining water resources will not be economically viable to extract. Bye bye US grain production. Of course, the reduction in Canadian natural gas exports will have shut down the US fertiliser production long before then...

More information about the zebra mussel can be found here:

The Zebra Mussel Page

The slide show link is informative. To quote: "Zebra mussels are a pest organism because they not only attach to one another, but also to man-made objects, including water intakes and other plumbing of water, power, and other companies that use fresh water. [snip] Zebra mussels also attach to other organisms, such as these native (North American) mussels from Lake Erie. Heavy loads of zebra mussels have killed essentially all native Unionid mussels in western Lake Erie, an early site of the zebra mussel invasion. Zebra mussels first appeared in Lake St. Clair (yellow star, north of Lake Erie), possibly from ship's ballast water from the Black Sea region. They rapidly spread downstream with the current, and upstream and to other watersheds on boats, with bait, and by other man-mediated mechanisms."

The National Atlas website has a nice Shockwave animation illustrating the invasion between 1988 and 1999:

Animated Map Showing Zebra Mussel Distribution

The govt is spending a lot on military hardware & supplies for current activity as well as getting readiness back up (Clinton's DOD shot a lot of cruise missles in Bosia and at other things whenever there was a scandal). Most of the budget increases are due to congressional pork frenzies which along with the tax cuts, do also help. A weak dollar helps US manufacturing because it makes our products cheaper in foreign markets, which helps drive consumption & production of those goods. What are the rational reasons behind any of the up & down cycles of the economy?

What are you basing your democratic population stats on? Registered voters or the results of the last election? The latter just means that Gore had a better turnout in the states that he won, than Bush did. According to this, the counties that Bush won had more population and are growing faster than the counties Gore won. Other maps show the pop densities and the strength of each win. Combined with the shifting of electorial votes towards Republican-friendly states, I would guess a Bush win would probably be bigger than last time.

Hmm, you tell me. 2000 Election Map

NOAA provides Bathymetry data and electronic navigation charts (vectorized) and NIMA (that's right, .mil, -- NIMA used to be the Defense Mapping Agency provides city lists and populations for all the countries in the world, as well as DEMs (digital elevation models--i.e. gridded topography). The National Atlas project provides boundaries of federal lands, outlines of states, locations of major cities, stuff like that.

ENJOY!

Someone else posted this link within the past week on Slashdot:

http://nationalatlas.gov/natlas/natlasstart.asp

Once the page has loaded, go to the top right frame titled "Map Layers" and scroll down to the "People" section. Try selecting the "Nighttime Lights" option and then click the "Redraw" button over on the left underneath the main map. It gives a good rendition of where the greatest sources of light are.

Perhaps a better way of estimating possible light polution is to instead select "Population per square mile - 1995" in the "Map Layers" frame, and then redrawing the map.

It's too bad they don't have population density information for Canada at that site.

Some good points about being away from everything:

• At night, you don't here sirens, and gunfire, and cars, and "city noise". You hear crickets, and wind, and a few cars.
• When you want a breath of fresh air, you can get it.
• If you want to go camping or hiking, swimming or fishing, et cetera, you can. You don't have to spend a few thousand planning a getaway when you're almost there.
• At night, you can drive to where there are no street lights, and see the Milky Way. You can count shooting stars - even without meteor showers.
• You can visit big cities and experience all the good things they have to offer if you choose, without having to life with the bad things.

And:

• I don't ACTUALLY want to go to Miami or San Diego. Some people don't enjoy large cities, while others do.
• If you think Albany, NY is the sticks, you've never travelled the open expanses of the Mid-West or the woods of Maine. Check the National Atlas and look at population density.
• There may not be as many places to go, but there's plenty to do.

Just thoughts.