Yes. Greenland. A country where most people own a firearm. Also Estonia and Lithuania. Poor countries.

All other european countries, even countries who where in civil war a few years ago have murder rates a factor of 2 to 8 lower than the US.
http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html
The link you posted ranks the US, one of the richest nations in the world, at place 103 of 180 countries in murder rate. Something you can be proud of!
Virtually all countries at comparable development to US have murder rates much lower than the US.

That would be 36kJoule per inane slashdot comment.

This is a bit to high. The real numbers are closer to a thousand joules per comment:
http://www.transitionnetwork.org/blogs/ed-mitchell/2010-04/how-much-energy-do-we-use-web

Almost everywhere in the world this would be 50 GW. But the US use strange units. I don't know. Maybe:
67 Million Horsepowers?
47 M BTU / second?
7E12 kilocalories / week?
1.6E25 ergs / year?
2.2 Tera foot pounds per minute?

http://www.loremo.com/

Botteled distilled water costs 11ct per Barrel (0,3ct/Gallon) on Alibaba.com.
The price in industrial quantities without bottles will be much lower.

My fault, wrong wording. If you go backwards you see a 30% price increase per year which is a 23% cost reduction when you go forward (1/1.3 = ca. 0,77) which equates to a factor of about 10000 over 44 years.
Photovoltaics system costs in 1969 where about 3000$/kwp compared to about 1.4$/kwp in 2013. This is a factor of 2150 (19% improvement per year). Together with shorter module liveteam and higher maintainance cost and much higher installation area you get the 23% improvement.
I currently can't find 1969 data, but here is a plot going back to 1972:
http://www.nzdl.org/gsdl/collect/envl/archives/HASH0123.dir/p17.gif

I currently don't find long term data for coal, but there is a slow increase since 1995. The gap between coal and solar has been rapidly closing.

It is not guaranteed that the same cost can be reached, but we are allready down to a factor of 3, coming from a factor of several thousand. Currently no significant slow down in improvement is apparent. There is no data to support that coal will continue to be less expensive than solar twenty years from now. Denying this is similar to those who in the face of moores law claimed that there never could be interactice 3D computer graphics with bump mapping.

a)
End customers often pay more than those 10ct due to transportation losses and other overhead. So if you are connected ton the grid and have a minimum power requirement higher than the peak output of this system, the system is profitable.

b)
Coal has seen very little cost improvement over the last decades while solar is co stantly improving at 30% per year since the sixties. It is intermediate steps like this system that are likely to make solar one of the least expensive technologies around.

(BTW: A recent survey revealed that solar installation overhead costs are 3x as high in the US compared to Germany due to less efficient work organization. So if IBMs numbers are for the US there is immediate room for improvement.)

You argument is completely unrelated to mine.
Observe that my argument of analysing demand could well result in the observation that more engineers are needed.
It could also come to the results that there are diminishing returns and that having less engineers will result in almost the same advantage for significantly less money. A demand analysis will show which is the case.

But it seems that you are arguing that more military tech is always better, not matter what.
I suggest that you at once stop producing food and train all these people to be engineers and mechanics to make sure that the taliban don't have better drones than you do.

What if the wrong amount of engineers has been trained? Don't you think it would be wiser to analyze how many engineers are needed to achieve the goals that you are describing and than find projects for them? (You know, this is the demand thing I was talking about) Instead of blindly assuming that the amount of engineers currently available is the right number due to some hidden magic?

So you are saying, the number of engineers and teachers available shall define how much is spent on military engineering and schools?

I believe that demand shall define the amount. If there are not enough engineers to meet this demand efforts shall be made to get more (either through education or hiring abroad). If there are more engineers than needed for military engineering there are two options:
- don't give government money to them and leave it to them to find other useful work
- use government money to hire these engineers for non military projects that are needed

But dveloping airplanes just because you have the engineers is a stupid waste of tax money.

Who are unavailable for other tasks due to this programm.

As would almost any other type of spending. The difference is, you get planes instead of schools, highways, vaccines or what else could be done with the money.

Also, the money for this programm is coming from taxes so not spending the money at all creates purchasing power all accross the population which might be the best thing for welfare and economy.

According to a recent study by LBNL the soft cost associated with installing the panels are more than three times as high in the US compared to Germany.

http://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/files/german-us-pv-price-ppt.pdf
Page 26: Costs that are not module costs. 4.46$/W in the US compared to 1.18$/W in Germany.

Higher cost results in lower volume.

Sorry, wrong URL. Here is a working link:
http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/photovoltaic-cost.jpg

There are your products:
http://deepresource.files.wordpress.com/2012/08/german-pv-price1.

Many incremental technology advances like the one in this article make these dramatic price reductions possible.

You can't have 0 latency audio drivers. But the latency can vary from system to system due to design decisions.

The main source of latency in audio drivers is related on how many audio samples are generated for each call to the interrupt handler (buffer size).
Bigger buffer sizes help avoid gaps in audio due to interrupt jitter. They also reduce the CPU load and energy usage which are very important in mobile devices.
Driver infrastructer for very small buffer sizes need to be designed very carfully to work reliably. So there are many reasons why android developers decided not
to use very small buffer. BUT of course for any kind of interactive audio low latency is crucial.