Madness Is …, cont’d
Posted on December 1, 2008 by Markus Stocker,
In a previous blog post I quoted IEEE Spectrum,
$21 million is the amount the Pentagon spends per hour to produce new defense systems (IEEE Spectrum, 11.08).
For what did the Pentagon spend its millions this hour? Or the hour you, dear reader, are scrolling through my blog and are rolling your eyes over this post? Here is an example (of some hour in the past …),
What if a sniper could fire a bullet that changed course in mid-flight, to hit its target? The Pentagon is handing out nearly $22 million to try to find out (WIRED).
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Americans are saying that with their planes they can see an egg 18 kilometers away, so why can't they see the Taliban?
Abdullah Wasay, 60
Pharmacist in Charikar
The New York Times
Abdullah Wasay, 60
Pharmacist in Charikar
The New York Times
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January 2nd, 2009 @ 11:47 pm
[...] Think about this number, it is interesting. Switzerland has a population of 7,689,100 (Wikipedia, 2008 estimate); 13.78 messages per capita. The country counts 8.4 million mobile phone subscriptions (Wikipedia, Q2 2008); 12.62 messages per subscription. Let’s assume, it takes an average of 30 seconds to type and send a message; Swiss invested overall 100.84 years to type the 106 million messages. (Worth 1.53 lives, Wikipedia average overall life expectancy at birth of World countries, CIA World Factbook, 2008 estimates.) With the incomplete figures it is hard to estimate the monetary cost of 106 million SMS and MMS. As the NZZ article suggests, the MMS share is comparatively small. Furthermore, different providers, mobile phone plans and options have different tariffs for short messages. For the purpose here, I’ll assume the Swisscom cost for the transmission of SMS messages, CHF 0.20; CHF 21.2 million worth in short messages over New Year’s Eve. (On a side note, more or less the amount the Pentagon spends per hour to produce new defense systems.) [...]