What has the government under which you live done for you lately?

Was it something you couldn't have done (better?) for yourself? If so, what enabled the government to do this for you?

What is with that banner ad for Rackspace? Every time I load a slashdot page with this ad, my pc slows to a crawl. This is with Firefox 1.06, Macromedia flash 7, and a thoroughly up to date copy of XP, running on a 1.5GHz centrino with 512MB of RAM. Task manager shows firefox using 92% of of the CPU when this one cursed ad loads. What is the problem?