Boycotting Paypal would be nice, but for a lot of people, it's impossible. Would you tell people to boycott the banks by closing their accounts and keeping all their money in cash under their mattress? That's basically what you're saying when you advise people to boycott Paypal, because like it or not, it's basically a monopoly in many online-payment venues.
Uhm, really? A trivial Google search implies otherwise:
http://blog.webdistortion.com/2010/07/28/paypal-alternatives-e-commerce/
http://www.screw-paypal.com/alternatives/top_pick.html
Also fascinating, from an in-person-sales perspective:
https://squareup.com/
The source you are using stopped taking accurate measures because the real measures are so depressing and wouldn't paint the U.S. in a very good light. What you're looking at is what you get when you define 'literate' as the ability to scrawl out the word 'cat' when pointed at a picture of a cat in a pre-schooler book and maybe also sign your name in something more than an X. That's all you need to count as 'literate' by those measures.
When you start testing for functional literacy, the numbers get quite different. Sadly, there's no standard for that cross-country, so it gets very difficult to compare. I remember that a few years ago the U.S. was in 27th place world-wide by some study, but I can't find that source now, so I'm not sure how fair it was. What I did find was the NAAL numbers:
http://nces.ed.gov/naal/kf_demographics.asp
This shows 12-22% illiteracy (below basic literacy) in the U.S. in 2003, depending on content type, with an estimated 11 million people with insufficient literacy skill to even take the test.
More disturbing, perhaps, is that only around 13% of the population of the U.S. is fully proficient in English (about what skill you'd need to compare viewpoints in two essays or editorials, or interpret and compare multi-column charts or data tables that actually required you to do basic arithmetic for a comparison), a number that actually declined from 1992.
27th in the world might not be a horribly bad placing (assuming I haven't misremembered even the number), but don't make the mistake of thinking that literacy is a solved problem. That 99% number is utterly worthless.
And the counterexamples:
http://yarchive.net/comp/microkernels.html
http://www.realworldtech.com/forums/index.cfm?action=detail&id=66630&threadid=66595&roomid=2
Right. The scientists at RealClimate hated the film's science, as noted by the following quotes:
How well does the film handle the science? Admirably, I thought. It is remarkably up to date, with reference to some of the very latest research.
They were especially critical of its handling of Katrina:
As one might expect, he uses the Katrina disaster to underscore the point that climate change may have serious impacts on society, but he doesn’t highlight the connection any more than is appropriate
After documenting all the errors they could think of, they then went on to emphasize just how fatal those mistakes were, and exhorted people not to watch or put any faith in the movie:
The small errors don’t detract from Gore’s main point [...] In short: this film is worth seeing.
I think I'll take their word for it; they are, after all, the people doing real climate science.
It is possible, but once someone brings pictures and recorded conversations out in a trial obtained that way, there would be a mass uproar:
You mean, like in United States v. John Tomero, as the grandparent referenced? I missed the uproar.
If you want to put yourself on the map, publish your own map.
