Info You Should Know  ARCHIVE  (below):
A little over 10-percent of U.S. households had Broadband connections as of January 1st, a penetration rate that makes the United States the seventh most wired country in the world.

The United Nations' Economic Commission for Africa says there is about one Internet user for every 250 people in Africa--4 million in total--most of whom are in South Africa. This compares with a worldwide average of one Internet user for every 35 people.

EBay has 11 million items for sale at any given time.  There are 8.2 million unique visitors worldwide.  EBay receives 200,000 queries [not all are fraud-related] per month; 70 percent are answered within 24 hours.  One one-hundredth of 1 percent of all eBay listings result in a confirmed case of fraud...an estimated 900 fraudulent items on the site each day.  Some psychologists think that eBay's particular type of format lends itself to an obsessiveness that borders on the unhealthy.

Spam...accounts for 30 to 50 percent of all e-mail traffic on the Net...when one bulk e-mailer started spamming in 1999, she could send out 100,000 e-mails and get 25 responses.  Today, she has to send out a million messages to get the same response (a .0025 percent hit rate).

AOL has about 150 million registered users...more than 2 billion instant messages (IMs) are sent daily...with about 12 million office users a month.

The U.S. Postal Service was conceived and started in 1775 by Benjamin Franklin.

When attacked, the Petrel, a giant bird of the Antarctic, repels it's enemies either by regurgitating food in their faces or by squirting a jet of vicous oil from it's nostrils with a force great enough to knock a person down.

A rodent's teeth never stop growing. They are worn down by the animal's constant gnawing on bark, leaves, and other vegetable matter.

Henry the VIII's second wife, Anne Boleyn, had six fingers on one hand. She wore special gloves all her life to hide her deformity.

Land tortoises can live to be well over 100 years of age.

Before 1859, baseball umpires sat in a padded rocking chair behind the catcher.

At the outbreak of World War 1, the American Air Force consisted of only fifty men.

PANGRAMS are sentences which use all the letters of the alphabet. Example: "The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs."

Kangaroo rats never drink water. Like their relatives, the pocket mice, they carry their own water source with them, producing fluids from the food they eat and the air they breath

In 1936, John Steinbeck's progress on his work "Of Mice And Men" was set back when his Irish Setter puppy chewed up half the manuscript. He spent two months rewriting that section.

Christmas was once illegal in England. In 1643, the Puritans outlawed all Christmas celebrations, banned the keeping of Christmas trees, and made the singing of Christmas carols a crime. These laws were maintained until the Restoration. Many Puritans in New England also adhered to these regulations, curtailing Christmas festivities to such a degree that even the making of mince-meat pies was forbidden.

The palms of the hands and soles of the feet contain more sweat glands than any other part of the body.

There are 10 million bricks in the Empire State Building in New York.

The month of August was named after Augustus Caesar.

The first operators employed by the Bell Telephone Company were young boys who worked standing up. Only after several years did it occur to anybody to provide them with chairs.

Smokers suffer 65% more colds than do nonsmokers.

The American Bible Society has distributed more than a billion bibles since it's inception in 1816.

A Pulsar is a small star made of densely packed neutrons. If one the size of a silver dollar landed on Earth, it would weigh around 100 billion tons.

There is a six foot high monument dedicated to the comic strip character "Popeye" in Crystal City, Texas.

A new car costs more today than it cost Christopher Columbus to equip and undertake three voyages to and from the New World.

You have to eat 11 pounds of potatoes to put on 1 pound of weight, a potato has no more calories than an apple. The potato was not known in Europe until the seventeenth century, when it was introduced by returning Spanish conquistadors. At first potatoes were thought to be disgusting, and were blamed for starting outbreaks of leprosy and syphilis. As late as 1720 in America, eating potatoes was believed to shorten a person's life.

Indians in the Andes Mountains have 2 to 3 more quarts of blood than people living at sea level.

One-fourth of the 206 bones in the human body are located in the feet.

Our galaxy has around 250 billion stars, and there are probably 100 billion other galaxies.

It takes 120 drops of water to fill a teaspoon.

In Brazil, Christmas is celebrated with fireworks.

In ancient Rome, it was considered a sign of leadership to be born with a hooked nose.

Those who actually buy a car online...account for a scant 4.1 percent of the U.S. auto market...Nearly two-thirds of car buyers now begin shopping with the click of a mouse, up from just one-quarter four years ago...The average Internet car shopper visits seven sites and cruise the Web for two months before buying.  They tend to be younger, more affluent and more distrustful of dealers.

The Windows operating system has 50 million lines of code (a line averages   60 characters) and grows 20% with every release. It's put together by 7,200 people, comes in 34 languages and has to support 190,000 devices--different models of digital cameras, printers, handhelds, etc. 

In a typical month, gambling surfers plunk down over $650,000.  Because  online players make more bets per hour than they would at Caesar's Palace, they literally lose money to the house twice as fast...Every week about 2 million players ante up at more than 1,800 online casinos...$3.5 billion will be lost on Internet bets this year, about three times the revenue of adult sites. 

About 17% of all adults wired to the Internet at home, work, or school say they've downloaded music...Some 43% say it should be legal, 46% say illegal, and 11% are undecided.  People are also split — 48% in favor and    42% against — on whether record companies should use technology limiting buyers' copying of new CDs to a few copies...Music executives blame digital copying for most of their collapse in sales.  Last year they sold 10.3% fewer albums and singles.  Meanwhile, seizures of counterfeit, pirated, or bootleg labels soared nearly 504% in 2002 to over 22.2 million, according to new data from the Recording Industry Association of America.