There are about 1 billion phone calls per day in the US and they average around 2 minutes each. The population is about 314 million people. It works out to only a little more than 6 minutes of phone calls per person, per day.

It may sound low, but those hour-long conference calls w/ 15 people are only 4 minutes per person to record and normal calls are split between 2 people. This also averages in infants, young children, and others who never use the telephone.

Bing image search gave me nude pictures of children when trying to find a picture of young Anakin Skywalker. I wouldn't recommend the service to anyone.

You can cash a check at a branch from the account holder's bank. Until fairly recently there weren't any fees to cash it, but now a some banks (notably Bank of America) are charging. These fees are a small part of everything dishonest the banks have done. The United States has given illegal amounts of power to the banks.

I still occasionally see software on cvs.

Off the top of my head: Hadoop, HBase, PHP, jQuery, JAVA, the Linux Kernel (e.g. make menuconfig), and MySQL all have better documentation than Oracle. I have trouble thinking of something that slashdot readers would know about with worse documentation.

No one but Oracle writes documentation in numbered pages anymore. It's a horrible format for getting around data in this newfangled age of hypertext links, which Oracle uses painfully sparingly. Their docs are extremely wordy, not extremely detailed. The details are disorganized and horribly lacking (e.g. set some variable to some value, with no explanation of how or what it's affecting). If you're so sure of the level of detail, then show me the guide on deciphering ORA-0600 errors without going through paid support (who always asked for tons of info, then started by telling me to recover from a backup and see if that fails). While installing from the Oracle guides does work, installing a single-node HBase server in 2010 was easier (and ran not just circles, but knitted-doilies around Oracle in terms of performance).

Thanks, I already have a multi-terabyte MySQL install with better uptime than Oracle than the last Oracle cluster I dealt with.

Facebook scales each node to multi-terabyte, and runs so many database servers that it would probably be cheaper to buy the company that licensing (~2 million cpu licenses aren't cheap). A year ago, Facebook was dealing with 2.5 billion content items shared, 2.7 billion likes, and 500+ TB new data ingested every day on their primary database (estimate about 15% higher now). Something else to add: Facebook's workload is 90% read and quite interlinked.

You're probably thinking of the rules against murder, which doesn't include all killing. For example, the Old Testament Law gave parents explicit permission to kill their perpetually disobedient children, and God often told them to kill all the women and children when they conquered a city. Jesus took the stance against murder even further by denouncing all hatred for others, and requiring his followers to love everyone.

Are you insinuating that someone antagonizing me (and the general public) and flagrantly attacking the government rule (US Constitution) isn't my enemy?

$2 trillion? What about handing a private banking cartel the ability to create new money without oversight, then standing idly by as they hand out $16 trillion in new loans to banks worldwide at near-zero rates.

This summer a fairly talented stringed trio (cello, violin and guitar or 2nd violin) would play for an hour on Saturday mornings at the city farmers market and leave with a 2-3 gallon jar full of money, with some large bills in there. If they would play two separate hours on 2 days, it would be decent money, especially considering how little they work.

You have to give 64-bit x86 some credit. Intel decided it couldn't be done successfully, and developed IA-64. If Intel said it couldn't be done, I would consider it a breakthrough. Next up is helium filled hard drives, for lower drag, less power, more platters and more storage. The idea has been around for some time, but helium is notoriously hard to contain (e.g. balloons deflating). To compound the problem, hard drives are made on razor thin margins, severely limiting the price of any solution. There's supposed to be some product announcements this year, if not actual drives.

By comparison, Edison's light bulb "invention" just used a different filament material and better vacuum than competitors, with the basic device demonstrated more than 40 years before Edison. The "fundamental invention" of the transistor was based on a combination of advances in radar semiconductors and knowledge of crystal radios. It was built to be a better replacement for the vacuum tube, not anything fundamentally new, and vacuum tubes were used to replace the function of mechanical relays in early computers.

Slashdot has high quality video (at least VCR quality) and connection to off site resources. The fundamental change is being interconnected connected (open many web sites at once) vs the single connection (dial 1 BBS at a time). What manner of BBS's were you on that could scale to 621180 users or more? Do you think any could have scaled to Facebook's billion users with 500 million daily visitors and an insane amount of data flying around? Am I just too cheap with my processor and hard drive to process and store 500+TB of new, extremely-interconnected data every day, or do I need to run a beowulf cluster?

Too late, Obama has already taken aim at US citizens (Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan), holding them guilty and assassinating w/o trial. It just hasn't happened to a US citizen on US soil. Keep taking your blue pills if you want, but it doesn't change the truth.

Try "how to shoot down a helicopter". Aim for the pilot or tail. The tail rotor is a weak point, but very necessary for preventing helicopter spin.

For starters, internation aid by governments creates terrible, horrific corruption. Secondly, some countries are starving because armed thugs tear up farms for fun, but giving them a couple months of food will cause even more damage to the local farming because you can't price compete against free. Third, taking away the rewards for producing jobs (how people usually get extremely rich) causes those producers to spend their efforts elsewhere. Have so many people forgotten the example of the USSR when you put the government in charge of wealth?

You think it's a great idea to ban social networking by taxing it to death. I personally appreciate companies learning I want something besides pornographic or slutty ads. I think most people like businesses to get to know their customers, but they've been scared by fearmongering media. How appropriate that you posted as an anonymous coward.