Which would work if it weren't for our trade deficits. The reality is that those USD's would go into the international currency exchange markets where they'd probably be used as an intermediary currency between other countries. The odds are that the 1 million USD that I send to China probably won't be used by China to buy American products, it will be used to import Pakistani rugs to Beijing, it will be used by Hong Kong trading companies to set up a distribution center in Australia, or it will be spent setting up a school in Africa. Since banks in most nations will gladly trade in US currency, it is often treated as a world currency in the business arena.
Based on that, my original point still stands. There is no gurantee that US Dollars sent to China will ever make it back into the US economy. Even though it's our national currency, the facts of the global economy have created a situation where the US dollar has value in nations beyond our own. In that environment, we're little more than a currency printer and gurantor.
Of course, if the Euro succeeds in upsetting the US applecart and replaces the USD as the preferred international exchange currency, we probably will revert to a traditional send & return currency exchange like you're describing. Of course, if that ever happens our trade deficits will make the US Dollar nearly worthless when buying from high quantity exporters. They'll have far more US currency flowing in than they can use in return, which will either drive prices through the roof or cause the US to begin exchanging dollars for euros when dealing internationally.
In addition, it should be remembered that US dollars flow back to where they can be used as legal tender. Ie: the US. Buying goods from abroad initiates the whole process of trade
Nice myth you have there. FYI, if I order 10 crates of goods from China and I send the company a check for a million US dollars to cover it, their bank is going to hand them 8.2 million yuan when they cash it. It's called currency exchange, and it results in no "US Dollars" flowing offshore to be re-spent on US goods. After I make my purchase, there is zero incentive for that Chinese company to spend that 8 million yuan on American goods.
Yep, I agree. I've downloaded three TV shows from BitTorrent in the past year. Two of them were series that I record on my DVR regularly but had been timeshifted due to sporting events. The other was a show that I'd accidentally deleted before I could watch it. In all three cases, I deleted the shows after watching them.
What the MPAA doesn't get is that there is a fundamental difference between MP3's and DVD quality AVI's. With the exception of a few hardcore swappers, most of us simply don't have the disk space to store dozens or hundreds of movies. Since even broadband users often have to wait many hours for a show to download, the idea that downloaded movies are going to replace the DVD in the same way that MP3's are replacing CD's is simply unfounded. Couple that with the fact that few people really want to watch TV on their computer and even fewer have any kind of connection between their PC's and home entertainment systems, and any reasonable person would conclude that movie swapping will never become mainstream. They are spending FAR more money on these legal actions than they'll ever lose to swappers.
If the MPAA really wants to improve their revenue streams, they should start offering these themselves. I'd have gladly paid a buck to watch those shows.
The primary market for residential elevators is for the elderly and wheelchair bound. From what I can see, this elevator isn't stable or safe enough for a frail elderly person, and it isn't large enough to fit a wheelchair or scooter.
So the only market for this thing is going to be for rich people who'd rather blow money on a toy than take the stairs. While I'm sure there's a market for that, it's not going to be a big one.
Lol, do you really believe that we could evacuate the entire shoreline of California, Alaska, Washington, and Oregon in a few hours? None of our west coast cities has the law enforcement required to handle an evacuation on that scale. At the most they'd empty the beaches and alert the buildings immediately facing the beach before running for higher ground themselves. If you lived a block in and were sleeping, you'd be screwed.
Exactly. The best we could hope for using our current technology is to nuke the thing a few minutes before it hits the atmosphere. It's too late to do much good at that point.
I should have been more specific. We can predict where and when it would come down but the course alterations due to its entering the gravity well would probably prevent the exact point of impact from being determined until the weeks, and possibly even days, before impact. Prior to that you're not going to get any more accurate that "it'll come down somewhere in north or south America, the Atlantic, or the Pacific", or possibly "Europe, western Asia, or Africa".
So yeah, the people on the side of the planet that it was coming down on would know that their hemisphere was about to be hit, but no more than that. And honestly...what good would that information do? Even if we could narrow the impact site down to a continent sized area like North America, do you really think we could evacuate the entire United States, Canada, and Mexico in that period of time? Where would those 400 million people go?
Nope, our technology simply isn't advanced enough to allow us to deflect, or even evacuate before impact, if a truly siseable asteroid ever stuck the Earth.
Correct, a nuke detonated against an asteroid could conceivably break it up or change its course. It's just a shame that we don't have a delivery system with the range, speed, or accuracy needed to actually HIT an incoming asteroid.
Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, ICBM's aren't designed to be launched into space and they have neither the thrust to propel a warhead out of our gravity well, nor the accuracy to hit anything smaller than 50km wide even if they did (and that's assuming that the asteroid is close). ICBM's were designed for one purpose...to put a small warhead within a few hundred yards of a stationary target less than 15,000 km away from the launch point. They are useless against moving targets hundreds of thousands of km away.
There is nothing else we could throw at an incoming asteroid. The simple reality is that if we humans spotted a big rock coming at us, even with a month or two to prepare for it, all we could really do is dig a shelter, store food away, and pray that it comes down on the OTHER side of the planet.
Actually it MAY NOT BE SMOKE. It's late afternoon, heavily overcast, and within 20 feet of the water surface so we can reasonably expect that the local humidity would be pretty high. Anyone who has ever seen war photography should be familiar with the concept of shockwaves creating momentarily visible cloud formations on their surface as the suspended water vapor is compressed.
What you are seeing as "smoke" may actually be the side view of a momentary bow shock created by whatever exploded.
Yes, but you don't even need Internet access to make this thing useful. What use would they have for a computer without Internet? We tend to be spoiled for space in our world of MP3's, video files, and multigigabyte games, but we cannot forget that a gigabyte is a LOT of data. A 20 gigabyte hard drive can hold as much text as an ENTIRE LIBRARY.
You have to look at these types of products in the context of how their going to be used. Nobody living in a shack in Botswana is going to be surfing EBay on this, and a Ghanian tribesman isn't going to give a flying rock about how it runs Half Life 2. What they're going to care about is the fact that they can add an entire library to their remote village for $249 thats compact enough to be easily moved when the river rises and they have to evacuate on foot every spring, thats integrated and durable enough so that they won't have to worry about shaking the PCI cards loose if they set it down too hard, and that will draw little enough power to run happily on their villages 20 watt in-stream hydro generator or 15 watt solar panel without frying itself.
The world is a lot bigger than the west people, and this type of hardware is badly needed in many parts of the world. Yes, you can probably piece one together using cheap Internet sourced parts for a lower cost, but will it have the durability, the low power consumption, and the ease of transport that this thing offers? Can you honestly tell me that Bahooba the tribal elder, who has probably never even held a phillips screwdriver in his entire life, would be better off building his own PC? These people need something braindead simple...plug in the wire, turn it on, and use it. When you live in an area where the nearest computer tech is 100 miles away on foot, you don't have the luxury of buying untested hardware configurations and calling for support when you run into a problem.
You would be thinking incorrectly then. In many of the worlds poorest and most remote areas power is provided either by small solar or hydro sources that generate incredibly small amounts of power by our standards. There are entire villages powered by instream hydro generators that produce no more than 20-30 watts of power, which is then spread to 10-15 homes. These homes often just have one 3 watt bulb (like a baby's nightlight), and maybe a very small radio. In a situation like that, the difference between a 1 watt processor and a 7 watt processor is enormous.
Heh, my wife is Native American, and there's a nasty secret here that most will admit if you press them on it. In the various tribal mythologies, almost EVERY halfway interesting tall mountain, plateau, valley, canyon, rock, or steep hill has some kind of ancient legend associated with it and could be construed as "sacred". In fact, in my wifes tribal tradition ALL mountains are the homes of the gods, and building on ANY mountain is defilement (no, she doesn't actually believe that, but there ARE still a few nutballs that do).
Unless there's a burial ground at the top, the term "sacred mountain" doesn't mean much to me.
But, by the same token, Google could not put a giant Joe Blow ad on their homepage (because the value of that one ad would exceed the individual contribution allowed).
That's the problem I have with this. I happen to have creative control on several websites, two of which get a substantial amount of traffic. According to your reasoning, it's perfectly OK for me to put a George Kerry bumpersticker on my car, but it should be a federal offense for me to put a John Bush ad on my website? What if I, as a content editor for my own highly popular site, want to run a series of stories on how John Bush dodged the draft in the Siamese War and why George Kerry deserves your vote? Will it be legal is my site gets 10 hits a day, but a felony if it gets 10,000? Now you're abridging my speech based on factors beyond my control!
It basically all boils down to this question: What, exactly, constitutes an advertisement? We can agree that the SwiftBoat vets television spot is an advertisement, but is their website an ad? Are sites like Indymedia and FreeRepublic, information sites on extreme opposite ends of the political spectrum, going to be considered ads because they constantly support one candidate and rail on the other?
We had these things called modems and telephones. And we logged on to Bulletin Board Systems. Lemme tell ya son, the world didn't start in 1990.
I was once in a CS class where a student stated, in all seriousness, that "there were no home computers before the Internet because there was nothing to do with them". It turned out in the ensuing discussion that the majority of the kids in the class had never even HEARD of BBS's and were under the impression that the term "online" was synonymous with Internet.
*sigh* Kids today...
The bulb actually does go out during power failures, and has been switched off three times while being moved, so you can't really say that it's been burning nonstop for over a century, but it's total downtime, from what I understand, is less than three days.
What can I say...I used to work in Dublin, got REALLY bored one day, and drove over to see this thing. It throws almost no light and honestly resembles a heated vacuum tube more than it does a light bulb, but it's only intended as a nightlight anyway.
Actually it is enforced, just not uniformly. I run a small consulting firm on the side doing low lost technology assistance for home based businesses (mostly custom software, but I do a bit of HW as well), and I've had my BEAR license for a while. Apparently I stole a contract from someone with a license, they turned me in, and I received a warning letter from the state advising me that I faced fines and prosecution for operating an electronics repair business without the proper permits.
Today I pay $165 a year to the great state of California for the "right" to fix peoples computers. One advantage though...I get to charge more! When somebody points out that company X is cheaper, I get to say "Are you sure they're a properly licensed facility?" The answer is invariably no, which often lands me the job;-)
The Amped article mentions that 28.8's were "slow", which I don't remember as the case. In 1996 the Net was far less congested than it is today, and the amount of data being tosssed around by the games was far more frugal, so gamers could actually get a decent gaming experience out of a 28.8 or even (*gasp*) a 14.4! The first experience I had with online MP games was Qtest via my U.S. Robotics 14.4, and it was very playable. I wouldn't try it today, but back then 28.8 was considered high performance, 64k ISDN was something most of us dreamed of, and those lucky enough to surf on a 1.5Mbit T1 were God's chosen ones.
Nowadays though, I bitch when my DSL drops below 2Mbit:)
Impeding traffic is an infraction in California, but there's no "passing lane" law in this state anymore...they're all driving lanes. Since most Californian's are from somewhere else, this fact tends to annoy the hell out of people:)
Nope. Some states, including California, did away with passing lane laws because they're not very useful in urbanized environments where optimizing traffic flow requires that all laned be used.
But the OP would be cited for other things out here, as a friend of mine learned the hard way last week after deciding to limit himself to 60MPH in order to save gas and money. His theory worked...his mileage went way up and his fuel bill went down, but the ticket he got for "Obstructing Traffic" will negate any financial gains he was hoping to see for quite some time.
Yep, My 4 door, 5 speed Mazda 626 with a 4 cyl averages 354MPG highway and 26 city, and it can do things that these hybrids can't...like accelerate to freeway speeds on a short ramp or cruise at 95MPH on the freeway at 2AM.
And to think, I was actually considering trading it in on a Prius to get better mileage (Cali gas is just stupidly outrageous right now).
I have an email archive with all of my personal messages (including spam and attachments) going back to 1994, and it's only about 4.5GB total. Unless somebody receives an absolutely incredible amount of mail, I don't see how you could realistically fill this up via a webmail service.
Of course, maybe that's the whole point. Like ISP's, Google may simply be offering the 1GB as a lure, while betting that most users will only utilize a tiny fraction of that space.
You shouldn't ******* *be* in the middle lane if you're not overtaking anything.
Depends on where you are. In states like California, the concept of the "left passing lane" isn't actually in any law, and it's not only perfectly legal to drive in the left lane all day long, but its also legal to PASS on the right on any "open highway...clearly marked for two or more lanes of vehicles moving in [one] direction of travel". In some states, that gets you a huge ticket, in others it's perfectly acceptable. 50 states, 50 standards.
Oh, and I drive in the left lane all day, but that's because I typically drive at 95-100MPH and am passing everything else on the freeway:)
Slashdot Mirror
Which would work if it weren't for our trade deficits. The reality is that those USD's would go into the international currency exchange markets where they'd probably be used as an intermediary currency between other countries. The odds are that the 1 million USD that I send to China probably won't be used by China to buy American products, it will be used to import Pakistani rugs to Beijing, it will be used by Hong Kong trading companies to set up a distribution center in Australia, or it will be spent setting up a school in Africa. Since banks in most nations will gladly trade in US currency, it is often treated as a world currency in the business arena.
Based on that, my original point still stands. There is no gurantee that US Dollars sent to China will ever make it back into the US economy. Even though it's our national currency, the facts of the global economy have created a situation where the US dollar has value in nations beyond our own. In that environment, we're little more than a currency printer and gurantor.
Of course, if the Euro succeeds in upsetting the US applecart and replaces the USD as the preferred international exchange currency, we probably will revert to a traditional send & return currency exchange like you're describing. Of course, if that ever happens our trade deficits will make the US Dollar nearly worthless when buying from high quantity exporters. They'll have far more US currency flowing in than they can use in return, which will either drive prices through the roof or cause the US to begin exchanging dollars for euros when dealing internationally.
In addition, it should be remembered that US dollars flow back to where they can be used as legal tender. Ie: the US. Buying goods from abroad initiates the whole process of trade
Nice myth you have there. FYI, if I order 10 crates of goods from China and I send the company a check for a million US dollars to cover it, their bank is going to hand them 8.2 million yuan when they cash it. It's called currency exchange, and it results in no "US Dollars" flowing offshore to be re-spent on US goods. After I make my purchase, there is zero incentive for that Chinese company to spend that 8 million yuan on American goods.
Yep, I agree. I've downloaded three TV shows from BitTorrent in the past year. Two of them were series that I record on my DVR regularly but had been timeshifted due to sporting events. The other was a show that I'd accidentally deleted before I could watch it. In all three cases, I deleted the shows after watching them.
What the MPAA doesn't get is that there is a fundamental difference between MP3's and DVD quality AVI's. With the exception of a few hardcore swappers, most of us simply don't have the disk space to store dozens or hundreds of movies. Since even broadband users often have to wait many hours for a show to download, the idea that downloaded movies are going to replace the DVD in the same way that MP3's are replacing CD's is simply unfounded. Couple that with the fact that few people really want to watch TV on their computer and even fewer have any kind of connection between their PC's and home entertainment systems, and any reasonable person would conclude that movie swapping will never become mainstream. They are spending FAR more money on these legal actions than they'll ever lose to swappers.
If the MPAA really wants to improve their revenue streams, they should start offering these themselves. I'd have gladly paid a buck to watch those shows.
The primary market for residential elevators is for the elderly and wheelchair bound. From what I can see, this elevator isn't stable or safe enough for a frail elderly person, and it isn't large enough to fit a wheelchair or scooter.
So the only market for this thing is going to be for rich people who'd rather blow money on a toy than take the stairs. While I'm sure there's a market for that, it's not going to be a big one.
Lol, do you really believe that we could evacuate the entire shoreline of California, Alaska, Washington, and Oregon in a few hours? None of our west coast cities has the law enforcement required to handle an evacuation on that scale. At the most they'd empty the beaches and alert the buildings immediately facing the beach before running for higher ground themselves. If you lived a block in and were sleeping, you'd be screwed.
Exactly. The best we could hope for using our current technology is to nuke the thing a few minutes before it hits the atmosphere. It's too late to do much good at that point.
I should have been more specific. We can predict where and when it would come down but the course alterations due to its entering the gravity well would probably prevent the exact point of impact from being determined until the weeks, and possibly even days, before impact. Prior to that you're not going to get any more accurate that "it'll come down somewhere in north or south America, the Atlantic, or the Pacific", or possibly "Europe, western Asia, or Africa".
So yeah, the people on the side of the planet that it was coming down on would know that their hemisphere was about to be hit, but no more than that. And honestly...what good would that information do? Even if we could narrow the impact site down to a continent sized area like North America, do you really think we could evacuate the entire United States, Canada, and Mexico in that period of time? Where would those 400 million people go?
Nope, our technology simply isn't advanced enough to allow us to deflect, or even evacuate before impact, if a truly siseable asteroid ever stuck the Earth.
Correct, a nuke detonated against an asteroid could conceivably break it up or change its course. It's just a shame that we don't have a delivery system with the range, speed, or accuracy needed to actually HIT an incoming asteroid.
Despite what Hollywood would have you believe, ICBM's aren't designed to be launched into space and they have neither the thrust to propel a warhead out of our gravity well, nor the accuracy to hit anything smaller than 50km wide even if they did (and that's assuming that the asteroid is close). ICBM's were designed for one purpose...to put a small warhead within a few hundred yards of a stationary target less than 15,000 km away from the launch point. They are useless against moving targets hundreds of thousands of km away.
There is nothing else we could throw at an incoming asteroid. The simple reality is that if we humans spotted a big rock coming at us, even with a month or two to prepare for it, all we could really do is dig a shelter, store food away, and pray that it comes down on the OTHER side of the planet.
Actually it MAY NOT BE SMOKE. It's late afternoon, heavily overcast, and within 20 feet of the water surface so we can reasonably expect that the local humidity would be pretty high. Anyone who has ever seen war photography should be familiar with the concept of shockwaves creating momentarily visible cloud formations on their surface as the suspended water vapor is compressed.
What you are seeing as "smoke" may actually be the side view of a momentary bow shock created by whatever exploded.
Yes, but you don't even need Internet access to make this thing useful. What use would they have for a computer without Internet? We tend to be spoiled for space in our world of MP3's, video files, and multigigabyte games, but we cannot forget that a gigabyte is a LOT of data. A 20 gigabyte hard drive can hold as much text as an ENTIRE LIBRARY.
You have to look at these types of products in the context of how their going to be used. Nobody living in a shack in Botswana is going to be surfing EBay on this, and a Ghanian tribesman isn't going to give a flying rock about how it runs Half Life 2. What they're going to care about is the fact that they can add an entire library to their remote village for $249 thats compact enough to be easily moved when the river rises and they have to evacuate on foot every spring, thats integrated and durable enough so that they won't have to worry about shaking the PCI cards loose if they set it down too hard, and that will draw little enough power to run happily on their villages 20 watt in-stream hydro generator or 15 watt solar panel without frying itself.
The world is a lot bigger than the west people, and this type of hardware is badly needed in many parts of the world. Yes, you can probably piece one together using cheap Internet sourced parts for a lower cost, but will it have the durability, the low power consumption, and the ease of transport that this thing offers? Can you honestly tell me that Bahooba the tribal elder, who has probably never even held a phillips screwdriver in his entire life, would be better off building his own PC? These people need something braindead simple...plug in the wire, turn it on, and use it. When you live in an area where the nearest computer tech is 100 miles away on foot, you don't have the luxury of buying untested hardware configurations and calling for support when you run into a problem.
You would be thinking incorrectly then. In many of the worlds poorest and most remote areas power is provided either by small solar or hydro sources that generate incredibly small amounts of power by our standards. There are entire villages powered by instream hydro generators that produce no more than 20-30 watts of power, which is then spread to 10-15 homes. These homes often just have one 3 watt bulb (like a baby's nightlight), and maybe a very small radio. In a situation like that, the difference between a 1 watt processor and a 7 watt processor is enormous.
Heh, my wife is Native American, and there's a nasty secret here that most will admit if you press them on it. In the various tribal mythologies, almost EVERY halfway interesting tall mountain, plateau, valley, canyon, rock, or steep hill has some kind of ancient legend associated with it and could be construed as "sacred". In fact, in my wifes tribal tradition ALL mountains are the homes of the gods, and building on ANY mountain is defilement (no, she doesn't actually believe that, but there ARE still a few nutballs that do).
Unless there's a burial ground at the top, the term "sacred mountain" doesn't mean much to me.
But, by the same token, Google could not put a giant Joe Blow ad on their homepage (because the value of that one ad would exceed the individual contribution allowed).
That's the problem I have with this. I happen to have creative control on several websites, two of which get a substantial amount of traffic. According to your reasoning, it's perfectly OK for me to put a George Kerry bumpersticker on my car, but it should be a federal offense for me to put a John Bush ad on my website? What if I, as a content editor for my own highly popular site, want to run a series of stories on how John Bush dodged the draft in the Siamese War and why George Kerry deserves your vote? Will it be legal is my site gets 10 hits a day, but a felony if it gets 10,000? Now you're abridging my speech based on factors beyond my control!
It basically all boils down to this question: What, exactly, constitutes an advertisement? We can agree that the SwiftBoat vets television spot is an advertisement, but is their website an ad? Are sites like Indymedia and FreeRepublic, information sites on extreme opposite ends of the political spectrum, going to be considered ads because they constantly support one candidate and rail on the other?
Where do you draw the line?
We had these things called modems and telephones. And we logged on to Bulletin Board Systems. Lemme tell ya son, the world didn't start in 1990.
I was once in a CS class where a student stated, in all seriousness, that "there were no home computers before the Internet because there was nothing to do with them". It turned out in the ensuing discussion that the majority of the kids in the class had never even HEARD of BBS's and were under the impression that the term "online" was synonymous with Internet. *sigh* Kids today...
The bulb actually does go out during power failures, and has been switched off three times while being moved, so you can't really say that it's been burning nonstop for over a century, but it's total downtime, from what I understand, is less than three days.
What can I say...I used to work in Dublin, got REALLY bored one day, and drove over to see this thing. It throws almost no light and honestly resembles a heated vacuum tube more than it does a light bulb, but it's only intended as a nightlight anyway.
Slashdot inserts a space into the URL. Take it out and the link will work fine.
Actually it is enforced, just not uniformly. I run a small consulting firm on the side doing low lost technology assistance for home based businesses (mostly custom software, but I do a bit of HW as well), and I've had my BEAR license for a while. Apparently I stole a contract from someone with a license, they turned me in, and I received a warning letter from the state advising me that I faced fines and prosecution for operating an electronics repair business without the proper permits.
;-)
Today I pay $165 a year to the great state of California for the "right" to fix peoples computers. One advantage though...I get to charge more! When somebody points out that company X is cheaper, I get to say "Are you sure they're a properly licensed facility?" The answer is invariably no, which often lands me the job
The Amped article mentions that 28.8's were "slow", which I don't remember as the case. In 1996 the Net was far less congested than it is today, and the amount of data being tosssed around by the games was far more frugal, so gamers could actually get a decent gaming experience out of a 28.8 or even (*gasp*) a 14.4! The first experience I had with online MP games was Qtest via my U.S. Robotics 14.4, and it was very playable. I wouldn't try it today, but back then 28.8 was considered high performance, 64k ISDN was something most of us dreamed of, and those lucky enough to surf on a 1.5Mbit T1 were God's chosen ones.
:)
Nowadays though, I bitch when my DSL drops below 2Mbit
Impeding traffic is an infraction in California, but there's no "passing lane" law in this state anymore...they're all driving lanes. Since most Californian's are from somewhere else, this fact tends to annoy the hell out of people :)
Nope. Some states, including California, did away with passing lane laws because they're not very useful in urbanized environments where optimizing traffic flow requires that all laned be used.
But the OP would be cited for other things out here, as a friend of mine learned the hard way last week after deciding to limit himself to 60MPH in order to save gas and money. His theory worked...his mileage went way up and his fuel bill went down, but the ticket he got for "Obstructing Traffic" will negate any financial gains he was hoping to see for quite some time.
GAH!!! That's 34 MPG. I WISH it got 354. Stupid keyboard....
Yep, My 4 door, 5 speed Mazda 626 with a 4 cyl averages 354MPG highway and 26 city, and it can do things that these hybrids can't...like accelerate to freeway speeds on a short ramp or cruise at 95MPH on the freeway at 2AM.
And to think, I was actually considering trading it in on a Prius to get better mileage (Cali gas is just stupidly outrageous right now).
I have an email archive with all of my personal messages (including spam and attachments) going back to 1994, and it's only about 4.5GB total. Unless somebody receives an absolutely incredible amount of mail, I don't see how you could realistically fill this up via a webmail service.
Of course, maybe that's the whole point. Like ISP's, Google may simply be offering the 1GB as a lure, while betting that most users will only utilize a tiny fraction of that space.
You shouldn't ******* *be* in the middle lane if you're not overtaking anything.
:)
Depends on where you are. In states like California, the concept of the "left passing lane" isn't actually in any law, and it's not only perfectly legal to drive in the left lane all day long, but its also legal to PASS on the right on any "open highway...clearly marked for two or more lanes of vehicles moving in [one] direction of travel". In some states, that gets you a huge ticket, in others it's perfectly acceptable. 50 states, 50 standards.
Oh, and I drive in the left lane all day, but that's because I typically drive at 95-100MPH and am passing everything else on the freeway