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Oh, come now. This isn't morality; it's prejudice and spite masquerading as morality.

1. All else being equal, a kid is better off being raised by both biological parents.

No, definitely not. Not as a generalisation. A kid is better off being raised by happy, low stressed people in a stable relationship. Biological relationship simply does not come in here. It's always been 'a wise child who knows who his father is' - infidelity is a fact of life in all communities and at all periods of history. Kids grow up just fine raised by cuckolds, grandparents, siblings, aunts and uncles, adoptive and foster parents. Biological relationship really isn't critical. Stability is critical. It may even be possible that it's important for children to have access to adult role models of both genders, which, if true, would be an argument against gay people adopting kids. But biological parents? No.

2. Society wants kids to be well off.

Little evidence of that. One fifth of US children are below the poverty line (1998 data); and, before you accuse me of being down on the US, the situation here in Scotland is also bad.

3. Using tax laws and so forth, we can encourage families to stay together.

That's pretty naive. If a relationship isn't working, it's not very likely that people are going to stay together for a few hundred dollars worth of tax allowance. And it's not in the interests of the children that they should. Few things are worse for children than growing up with their parents locked into an abusive or disfunctional relationship.

4. A gay couple, collectively, can never produce offspring of their own.

My wife, after she left me, lived in a homosexual relationship for eight years. Why should her son (who wasn't mine - see one above) suffer financial penalties because of his mothers choices? Wouldn't it have been better for him if that relationship had stayed together?

5. If you allow gays to be legally married, they enjoy the benefits which were put in place for the sake of keeping families together, which is fundamentally unfair to single people and common-law marriages, who also do not enjoy said benefits.

If the benefits are for raising children, give those benefits to all people raising children (and not to, e.g., married couples who are childless). If childless married couples get the benefits, don't pretend they've got anything to do with children.

When you grow up, you'll find that live is much more complex (and much more painful) than you possibly imagined it could be. And with luck you'll learn to be a bit more tolerant of people who aren't like you.

It is not a valid measure, because even within the same demographic groups between nations, there may be differences in lifestyle, culture, etc.

Statistics Canada also does not break down life expectancy statistics by race, it is not possible to compare life expectancies between different racial groups with those of the US.

Uh, no. Fascism is a form of corporatism. It is the antithesis of socialism.

Corporatism is a form of syndicalism - guild socialism. It does not refer to business corporations.

From Wikipedia:

Historically, corporatism or corporativism (Italian corporativismo) is a political system in which legislative power is given to civic assemblies that represent economic, industrial, agrarian, and professional groups. Unlike pluralism, in which many groups must compete for control of the state, in corporatism, certain unelected bodies take a critical role in the decision-making process. These corporatist assemblies are not the same as contemporary business corporations or incorporated groups.

"The word "corporatism" is derived from the Latin word for body, corpus. This original meaning was not connected with the specific notion of a business corporation, but rather a general reference to anything collected as a body.

Canada has no death penalty.

So what happens when somebody exercises his fundamental right to use his resources to open a for-pay medical center in Canada, and rightfully resists all attempts by the State to shut him down?

Do the authorities plead with him? Do they ask him very nicely to stop?

Again: fuck, you're stupid.

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Sorry! You are right. It is an over all decline in the growth rate - not population. Population is still increasing but growth rate has decreased.

See:Growth Rate for the United States and World Population

My bad.

(Although the second site is predicting an upturn in growth rate once the third world countries have become more moderized and then there is a sharp drop off in growth rate once 10 billion people are on the earth. I would think, given that people still only live to be around 80 or 90 that at some point there will be as many people dying as there are being born.

Some were incensed at the American's with Disabilties Act (ADA) when it was passed, wondering why they had to go through all this trouble to accomodate a tiny fraction of the population. But the disabled population is not that small and it grows larger every year due to various factors most people don't think about or recognize.

Before getting back into computing, I spent 8 years in social services, working with the autistic and developmentally disabled. You don't realize what challenges there are to everyday living until you see how hard it is for anyone with any type of disability to do the simple tasks we "normals" take for granted.

Ultimately MA is going to have to decide whether it can afford to turn its back on a small slice of its populace or continue the process of inclusion. I'm hoping for the latter, since within the disabled spectrum, there are plenty of people still capable of working and being productive members of society.

Even if I lost the use of my legs, I could still program...

Here's some insight:

How many people have ever lived on Earth?

Well, yes. In fact, it's high among the poor. Check out Washington D.C. stats, which is the only 'state' that consists of one poor inner-city area.

So at the end of the day, how much does sexual permissiveness at the societal level contribute to teenage pregnancy? Probably not that much either way. I think it is probably safe to say though the open sexual permissive makes it harder (but not impossible) for parents to instill an attitute in their children that it is better to wait before having sex. Parents just need to talk about it early and often with their children.

There are more people alive right now than have ever lived in the entire history of man kind.

It doesn't show before 1750, but here's some info.

It would seem so, except most of the world's population growth comes from poor or developing countries. The populations of developed nations tend to grow at a much slower rate, and some of them are stable or even shrinking.

Here's a link

AFAIK inovations tend to occur the most frequently in developed countries.

Take a look here for an answer to your questions. I don't think it surprising that innovation per billion people has decreased, because a large proportion of people that have ever lived are on the planet right now. We'd have to be _really_ innovative (exceed population growth). In the last hundred years or so, we have TV, phones, radio, airplanes, rockets, nukes, computers, the Internet, etc., so I think the number of innovations per year have certainly increased. The per billion quantity will throw everything out of whack especially when much of them are in under-developed countries.

"Most of us living in the US are NOT living in high-population density areas."

I'll pick a nit here on a possibly semantic basis. Given a definition of Metropolitan from the Population Reference Bureau as:

"Metropolitan areas include an urbanized area of at least 50,000 people, the county where the urbanized area is located, and adjacent counties linked by commuting ties."

The U.S. census of 2000 records that in a Resident U.S. Population of 281,421,906 people, 232,579,940 reside in what is considered a Metropolitan area. That's about 83% of the U.S. Resident Population. Certailnly this does not specify the amount of territory the at least 50,000 people are spread over, but even given some variation in terms I find it unlikely that the number of people living in any empirically agreeable notion of high population density areas is less than 50% among U.S. residents. It looks like most people in the U.S. do live in what would be considered relatively high population density areas - the GP is invalid in this regard. We're highly urbanized, and the dirtiest country in the world as far as polution production - those are facts.

Others have given note of possible evidence that the weather has indeed changed noticeably over the last 30+ years in some areas. It's not just about global warming - it's about ecological and general climatic trauma. Global warming is just one possible symptom. Also the arguments supporting the possibility of economic upturn due to technological advances seem just as viable as those espousing economic downturn. If politicians wanted to they could easily sell that angle - but many are already heavily invested in the status quo re the environment - it's not a U.S. economic downturn they truly fear, it's a personal one. If we had representatives worth their weight in water, they'd be willing to commit political suicide to protect the true interests of their constituants - namely avoiding ecological and climatic suicide. If they were truly concerned with the economic well being of U.S. citizens they'd do a bit more questioning of how our taxes are being spent, a bit more pondering on whether outsourcing all skilled jobs is truly best for everyone in this country and a little less time harping on hollow xenophobia wrapped up with a pretty Michael Crichton junk science bow .

• United States: 293,633,000
• China: 1,300,060,000

• United States = 293,633,000 persons * 4.7 tons / person = 1.38 billion tons of Carbon.
• China = 1,300,060,000 persons * 0.73 tons / person = 0.95 billion tons of Carbon.

• United States : 774
• China : 16

• United States: 293,633,000
• China: 1,300,060,000

• United States = 293,633,000 persons * 4.7 tons / person = 1.38 billion tons of Carbon.
• China = 1,300,060,000 persons * 0.73 tons / person = 0.95 billion tons of Carbon.

• United States : 774
• China : 16

It's interesting to note that the only one of the first twelve constitutional amendments proposed by the first Congress that has not (yet) been ratified was a mechanism for automatically increasing the size of the House with the census. It was still linear so even that would prove to be unworkable today, but it's interesting that it's quite possibly the first outright alteration (as opposed to an addition) of the constitution proposed and passed by Congress.

There are arguments for a cube root formula here and there that sounds reasonable, but I don't see it happening any time soon, what with the House of Representatives becoming a career often spanning decades (why bother with the biennial elections at that point?). It would reduce the power and influence of individual members of Congress, and I give it as much a chance of passing Congress as, say... a repeal of the federal law that requires single-member districts (now that would kill gerrymandering in its tracks).

If states start making noise about calling for a constitutional convention in which to propose such an amendment, the House might take action, but otherwise...

We can't stop people from having kids. We can try and conserve natural resources, but eventually the number of people will be more than the planet can support.

Over-population is not quite the problem you think it is. In the United States, pop growth has slowed to a crawl, and most of our growth is due to immigration.

Developed countries the world over have slow (and declining) birthrates. Heck, Italy is trying to encourage their population to reproduce - they are suffering from net population decrease!

World population, based on current trends, is due to stabilize around 2075 at around 9 million people.

There are a number of reasons for this. Affluent people tend to have fewer kids, merely because they are a hassle. In the more impoverished nations, existing infrastructure is failing to provide for current needs, let alone future growth. For example, one of the largest mass poisonings ever in human history is taking place in Asia because of arsenic-laced drinking water.

<RANT>

What truly amazes me is the sheer number of people who don't google whatever they're talking about before they say it. The volume of uninformed, stupid comments on the Internet that can be corrected with 10 minutes of googling and quick research is mind-boggling.

People with access to this kind of information should not be making the stupid comments they are. That they do, anyway, and don't get flogged on the streets is a mere testament to the fact that humanity does not yet value intelligence and critical thinking over stupidity.

I daresay we are entering a new era of humanity - the era of the informed but ignorant idiot. The information is there - cheap, easily available. Tools that our ancestors would have killed for - and we use it to pass along mundane drivel because "we feel" or "we think" rather than actually use that tool to anywhere near its true potential.

Sad. TV is used for network television and advertising, instead of mass education and information. News shows on TV are remarkably shallow and uninformative. The best bet are the "nature" shows, which are nice but curiously designed towards complacency.

We are in the middle of a mass extinction event brought about, no doubt, by people who chcose not to be informed, and make decisions based on ego and inadequate information.

We need to pay attention, people!

</RANT

Actually I think the most impressive leaps have already been taken in a previous age.

check out this graph of the population of the world. the sudden explosion during the Industrial Revolution is staggering, dwarfing even the exponential increases in computer power.

graph 2
graph 3

I wonder if tumors stop growing during hibernation. If they do, then everybody with (expected-) fatal cancer can just hibernate until there's a cure.

Likewise aging...

There would be no incetive to do any research in cancer, as we will know somebody else will solve it. In the extreme we all go into hibernation and wait till sombody wakes us. As we are all already in hybernation, there will be nobody to wake us.

I can see things being helpfull on an individual basis. On a society basis it can prove desaster. Imagine thousands or even millions getting up because the cure has been found. Imagine that today we find a cure agains AIDS and all people who have died of ageing in the history suddenly all come back at once.

The number of people that have ever been born is 106,456,367,669. Imagine only 1% dying of old age that came back. That would be about 1.000.000.000 people. If there is only place for 1% of that, who will decide who comes back and who not.

http://www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/PRB/Educ ators/Human_Population/Population_Growth/Populatio n_Growth.htm
http://www.cmu.org.uk/demography/05pop/pop_index.h tm
http://darwin.bio.uci.edu/~sustain/bio65/lec16/b65 lec16.htm#HUMAN%20POPULATION%20GROWTH

, even.

Yes, 80 Billion is way over the top, but you're spouting just as much FUD as he is.

From the linked article:
For the last 50 years, world population multiplied more rapidly than ever before...

You've never heard of exponential population growth, have you? Every 36 years, the world will have half as much space per person as we do now. In 72 years, a quarter. In two centuries, a 47th as much free space. In three centuries, one 322nd as much free space. In four centuries, 2200 times less space per person as we do now. Does the earth have enough space for that?

The growth rate of the human population is currently declining and is expected to continue declining. In fact, there is increasing optimism that the worl population will stabilize at about 9 billion fifty years from now.

http://www.prb.org/Content/NavigationMenu/PRB/Educ ators/Human_Population/Population_Growth/Populatio n_Growth.htm
http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyP ages/P/Populations.html#Predicting_Future_Populati on_Size
http://www.enn.com/features/1999/05/052799/worldwa tch_3421.asp

Population is not really expected to continue growing at current rates. IANAD[emographer], but they say growth is starting to decrease, and by 2070 it will be almost flat. The link has a nice graph too.

What do I mean by positive sum? Heck, I figured you knew... you used the term:

[...] folks don't even put sigificant effort into conceiving of truly positive sum approaches to humanity's future they are so stuck in a narrow way of looking at the world.

Positive sum, or more generally non-zero-sum, is a buzzword that describes the benefits of cooperation in a system. See nonzero.org.

First off, it isn't a matter of bringing materials back to earth. The fundamental question is the surface of a planet the right place for a technological civilization [...]

That may be so, but it isn't what you asserted in the previous post that I replied to. If you want to engage in a constructve conversation, you'll have to make up your mind about what you mean to assert. :)

There _may_ be some folks that can successfully create a population control policy that has no negative side effects [...] but I sure haven't seen it.

Who said it wouldn't have negative side effects? Most methods of population control will be highly unpleasant, even if they're preferable to the traditional War, Pestilence, Famine and Death. Global human population will eventually stabilize, or it will peak and crash. How long it takes to stabilize, at what population number that is, and how painfully the stability is accomplished is up to us to work out.

But don't lose hope. It appears that the single most effective population control measure is the education of young women. The effect may or may not be directly causal, but the association is clear enough to warrant action: Teach the children well, especially the girls.

My sense is that societies without frontiers have an inherent tendency to become authoritarian and insular--I really can't think of good exceptions.

This is a common American idea that has roots in Manifest Destiny. (Or maybe just Heinlein.) But it does not appear to be supported by facts. What about The Netherlands, Switzerland, and Japan? Sure, Japan was authoritarian and insular, but it wasn't the addition of frontiers that changed the society. There are plenty of other examples of frontierless societies that are neither authoritarian nor insular, or at least no more so than the good ol' US of A.

Colonizing in or above orbit would be nice, for a variety of reasons. But it is not necessary or sufficient to achieve a "a democratic, non-authoritarian, non-genocidal world order with population stability and preservation of human diversity."

We are getting pretty big real fast, and unless someone wants to take steps to de-populate earth in a very unfortunate manner, we are going to have to go somewhere.

I see this line of thinking bandied about quite a bit, but recent projections (1998) show eventual leveling of growth post-2050, with the UN World Population Prospects (2002) noting further negative impact on growth as a result of increased use of birth control and the spread of HIV/AIDS.

One can generate projections based on the 2002 population database, even, though only through 2050.

Yes, world population growth continues, and yes it seems we're still on the steep upward slope of the graph, but if the people responsible for these projections know anything at all, there's more than enough room to believe the present explosive rate of growth will abate in time.

In other words, by the time we all can go "somewhere else" world population may have stabilized with the worst growing pains having already passed.

We are already at the point that we are waging wars for control of oil (i.e Iraq and Venezuela), control which will determine the economic winners in the near future. Once the earth's population hits 9 or 10 billion and has to be maintained there, for an extended period, its unlikely that you will have enough "water, food and fresh mangos" unless you are affluent and living in a 1st world nation with a military defending its resources and borders. A runaway climate could also rob the first world of the basics needed for survival.

Mars is a desert island to an Earth that resembles a leaking ship. Its precisely because its hard to get to and to live on now that means, to a handful of people, it may be the only refuge from an Earth that will be an increasingly unpleasant to live if the leak isn't fixed and it starts to go down. Mars is unpleasant for natural reasons while Earth is becoming unpleasant due to man made causes.

We could hope for technological and social breakthroughs that would solve earth's looming crisis, and plug the leak. We could, for example, launch an Apollo program to break Earth's dependence on fossil fuels, through nuclear fusion or solar power, but that doesn't seem to be happening. Perhaps its because no one has the capital and the wisdom or perhaps its because breakthroughs would threaten the economic empires of some powerful corporate nations who are acutely short sighted.

Mars is a blank slate. It could go to either of two extremes with a rainbow in between.

We could go there and start fresh, starting with a wealth of knowledge and technology and with no social or economic inertia. We could solve the problems involved with making Mars a habitable place and hopefully build a society that would control population, poverty and pollution and avoid the ravages of capitalism on one extreme and totalitarianism on the other. It may be the only place to create a first world nation that won't have to struggle to shut out the starving masses of the 3rd world.

On the other hand we could go there and repeat all the mistakes we made here and eventually ravage it too, though it would take a while which is some comfort I guess.

If you want to spark your imagination about the possibilities in Mars there are several books though my favorite is Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars trilogy. Its is not Star Wars or Star Trek action packed sci fi, but if you have the patience to read it, it is thought provoking and can light a fire under you for a colonizing mission to Mars.

Correction

http://www.prb.org/Content/ContentGroups/PTarticle /0ct-Dec02/How_Many_People_Have_Ever_Lived_on_Eart h_.htm

See here for example: How_Many_People_Have_Ever_Lived_on_Earth

"making many seats in the House of Representatives 'safe seats' which effectively gives incumbents a permanent seat."

There's a very simple solution here. Congress set an arbitrary size for the House of Representatives in 1910. Four more states and 200,000,000 more people, we're still stuck with 435 (nowhere near the current costitutional limit of 9,380).

Voting districts too polarized? House seats too stable? Break them into smaller chunks. It's easier to polarize large groups of voters than smaller groups, and smaller groups tend to be more dynamic (meaning more congresscritter turn-over for the district). This also has the added benefit of lowering campaign costs (fewer voters to reach).

I'm not saying we should jump straight to 10,000, but there seems to be an argument for a cube-root relation, and 655 seem to be as good a number as any.

I was about to post the exact same thing...

To bring a sense of perspective to this, let's contrast the US and Europe.

US: total population approx 280m.
EU: total population approx 380m.

IOWs, Europe alone is roughly a third larger than the US. Now consider markets in the rest of the world as well, and the law in the US isn't really as important to the economics of a company like Microsoft as a lot of people assume it is.

Realistically, any attempt to force upgrades by DRM-izing documents would more likely result in a mass rejection of upgrades to that DRM-enabled Office version. Even if people in the US upgraded, everyone else would carry on regardless, and the US would wind up sufficiently damaged by the lack of ability to exchange documents in a de facto standard format with outside bodies that something would have to give.

Lookinghere I get the following figures:
Rank Country Population (millions)
1 China 1,289
2 India 1,069
3 United States 292

So assuming a world population of around 6 billion, the USA has around 20% of the world's population. That's a lot, but not nearly as many as India which speaks "english" english.

I'm not a lawyer but maybe this kind of tack would work...

Population of Michigan ~ 10,000,000 (Estimate from here)

Population of the World ~ 6,250,000,000 (Estimate from here)

Now provided that spam has a regular distribution, that means that one in every 625 spam emails will be sent to a Michigan resident. Given that spam is sent to thousands of addresses each day, there is a reasonable expectation that at least one of the recipients is from Michigan.

Due to the very nature of spam, it would be easier for the spammers to comply overall rather than to make efforts to determine the real destination of each message.

World population will hit 7 Billion by 2011. So all those extra tech guys will be working for Total Information Awareness keeping tabs on all these new terrorists.

Where do I sign up?

China is much bigger than the US.

considering Europe's population is more than double that of Canada/US.

OOps...I made a mistake...I'm a dumb Australian ;)

I read the table wrong...I was reading the total BTU output (quads) when I should have been reading the per/capita BTU output. Anyway US is still no.1 but not by such a huge margin...

Anyhow I got some population density data here.

Your theory that the US's size causes the increased energy consumption is interesting and probably half-true... but we have a much, much lower population density (6 ppl per sqm compared with 77 ppl per sqmile in the US) here in Australia, yet our per capita energy use is still only 2/3 that of the US...and we are a first tier industrialised developed nation.

Now as for comparing the US to Europe it depends on what you mean by "Europe". Europe overall has a population density just slightly higher than the US (82 vs 77 ppl pr sq mile), but I get the feeling that you are actually referring to Western Europe. I suppose it's like people call the US America, people call Western Europe Europe, or something. In which case you are correct, as Western Europe has a density of 429 people per square mile.

So points taken. But perhaps as America + Australia grow more urbanised and denser we could take a few pages out of Europe's book. For example, people who live and work in the city 99% of their time, here in Australia, buy 4WDs despite the fact that they are very inefficient (they don't care, they are rich). When you have an accident with a 4WD if you are in a smaller car you will more likely be crushed than the 4WD driver, so they are kind of an urban weapon. In Europe on the other hand, small, fuel-efficient cars are the rule. So maybe both of us (Americans + Australians) have something to learn from Europe: smaller cars and more public transport.

Stop breeding! Would it really be so bad, a few generations where two people get together and produce a total of one offspring?

While I agree with your sentiments, the problem ain't the average Slashdot reader. Check out the Population Reference Bureau". Especially useful is their DataFinder feature. Compare stats for "developed" vs. "less-developed" world regions. The developed world has a birth rate of 11 (per 1000 people) vs. a death rate of 10. That's just about replacement breeding, with a project 4% increase by 2050. Less-developed regions, on the other hand, have a birth rate of 25 vs. a death rate of 8...giving you a 58% projected population increase by 2050! That's staggering. There's similar differences by economic class within developed regions (poorer people breeding much more than wealthier people).

2^96 (2 to the 96th power), or
79 octillion, or
79,228,162,514,264,337 trillion, or
79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336
unique identifiers.

According to the Population Reference Bureau there are 6.137 billion people on earth, 1.193 billion of those in "more developed countries".

Doing a little quick math:

Each human can be equally assigned
12,909,917,307,196,405,017 IDs, or
12 quintillion ID's, or
12,909,917 trillion ID's per person, equally distributed among all humans.

I don't think I have that much stuff in my house, even if you break down every item into its simplest parts. And I have 6 PC's!

So my question is, can someone drive by in a van, by my house, and get an entire inventory of what I have in my house? Or does it only work within a few feet?

Could the Gas Man (natural gas) with a little wand walk around my house and get a good idea of what I have? Yikes!

2^96 (2 to the 96th power), or
79 octillion, or
79,228,162,514,264,337 trillion, or
79,228,162,514,264,337,593,543,950,336
unique identifiers.

According to the Population Reference Bureau there are 6.137 billion people on earth, 1.193 billion of those in "more developed countries".

Doing a little quick math:

Each human can be equally assigned
12,909,917,307,196,405,017 IDs, or
12 quintillion ID's, or
12,909,917 trillion ID's per person, equally distributed among all humans.

I don't think I have that much stuff in my house, even if you break down every item into its simplest parts. And I have 6 PC's!

So my question is, can someone drive by in a van, by my house, and get an entire inventory of what I have in my house? Or does it only work within a few feet?

Could the Gas Man (natural gas) with a little wand walk around my house and get a good idea of what I have? Yikes!

Most /. readers are NOT the richest 25 percent of the world, at least I'm not...

Really? R U sure you mean the world and not the western world or first world or something?


More than 1/3 of the world's population lives in China and India. 5 of the 6 billion people on Earth live in "less developed" countries.


The poorest 10% of Americans are still better off than two-thirds of the world population.

Most /. readers are NOT the richest 25 percent of the world, at least I'm not...

Really? R U sure you mean the world and not the western world or first world or something?


More than 1/3 of the world's population lives in China and India. 5 of the 6 billion people on Earth live in "less developed" countries.


The poorest 10% of Americans are still better off than two-thirds of the world population.

The same is true in the House, though to a lesser extent. Missouri and Michigan don't have the biggest populations (California, New York, Texas, Illinois, etc.), and yet those are the states where the chief Democratic leaders (Gephardt and Bonior) are from. The House is supposed to allocate influence and power according to population, and yet it is instead being allocated according to other factors such as seniority.

Still, the original comment is outrageous. Consider a horrible century like the 20th. Somewhere around 200 million people died due to war. I sincerely doubt the war figures from previous centuries would double that figure, leaving us well short of even a single billion!

Helevius

Current estimates place the number of people that have ever lived at a little over 100 billion people. There's about six billion around today, which would imply that closer to 94% have been and gone.

United States 272,500,000
United Kingdom 59,400,000
South Africa 42,600,000
Canada 30,600,000
Australia 19,000,000
New Zealand 3,800,000
Ireland 3,700,000
Total 431,600,000

Additionally, several other African and Carribean nations speak English. You can try to separate out tribal languages in Africa, but simply counting those nations out is ridiculous.

Also note that there are so many dialects of even Mandarin that it's ridiculous to lump all Mandarin speakers together.

I took my data from the 1999 estimates at http://www.prb.org/pubs/wpds99.htm

Now on the rural vs. urban topic it is true that urban dwellers (100k+ towns) will be enabled less, but they will be enabled. I know I have been. Communcation is alot easier for me now. True rural people will be helped the most, but this is not to say that the other 75% urban dwellers aren't going to be helped to it's just not going to make as much of an impact on their lives.

The point I was trying to make is that there is very little data to support the conclusions that this study implies: that the net has in some how negatively impacted interpersonal communication. Instead it seems that there is a large amount of contrary anecdotal evidence to suggest that were there a different methodology, different questions asked (perhaps less (net==evil & net communication != real communication)) then this study would arrive at conclusion's that more closely reflect what people are themselves observing.

I don't think we have to worry for a little while

Each ipv6 address is made up of 16 octets (2^128):
~340,282,366,921,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ,000

World Population (2010 est.): 6,883,000,000
http://www.prb.org/prb/pubs/wpds99/w pds99b.htm

Number of addresses per person worldwide in 2010:
~49,438,089,048,500,000,000,000,000,000

estimated number of cells in the human body: 100,000,000,000,000
http://madsci.wust l.edu/posts/archives/mar98/889221957.An.r.html

Number of addresses per cell for every human being on earth in 2010:
~494,380,890,485,000

Personally, I think we'd have been just fine with 64 bits. I had to write some DNS stuff a few months ago and had to write my own routines to deal with IPv6. Heck, there aren't even standard datatypes for dealing with 128-bit numbers.

64 bits would have resulted in:
2,680,044,177 addresses per human being