Krimzan
10-19-03, 10:37 AM
Do we really need clarification of, "...jihad, or holy war, ..." anymore? I mean really, I'm sure that by now, the amount of ink, paper, bandwidth and TV time that have been dedicated to the clarification that "jihad" is equivilant to "holy war" probably exceeds the GNP of a small Baltic republic. Every time Bin Laden releases another tape he goes off declaring jihad on the USA, Britain, Spain, Australia, Poland, Japan, Italy, Kuwait, all music made after 1963, women who wear platform sandles, Malabu Barbie, ChapStick and Milli Vanilli all the Newspapers and websites go out of their way to make us aware that when he says 'jihad' he really mean's 'holy war'. Nobody ever says, "Well that was a case of deja vu, or 'already seen'." We all know what deja vu means! Nobody ever says, "Well that was a case of deja vu, or 'already seen'."
Lets assume here that the words 'or holy war' are transmitted in ASCII instead of UNICODE. Each character in ASCII is 8-bits, 1-byte, 1/1024 Kb. This means that the phrase 'or holy war' is 88-bits long, 0.0859375 Kbits. It is not unrealistic to say that a site like MSNBC will get 10million hits a month. Ignoring some accuracy and just moving the decimal place, thats (potentially) over 850 Mbits a month for one website dedicated to the words 'or holy war'. Now then you have the BBC, Fox News, Reuters etc serving up articles on the current state of the angry Arabs so I think it's safe to assume that at the very least, a Gigabit worth of 'or holy war' gets transmitted each month on average for the past two years. That's 24 Gigabits of 'or holy war' per site. Now to deal with loads, I'm going to estimate that a website that got 10million hits a month would need at least a T1 JUST to handle pages regarding angry Arabs and holy wars. These are about 1.5 Mbps and since they are serving mainly text that should suffice (remember this is averaged and hypothetical, so quit scoffing). This will run around $1k per month. So each big news site now is spending $12k-ish a year to serve the text 'or holy war'. Lets say that there are 10 such websites that average that kind of traffic (we won't even go into Google) various people are now spending $120k a year to serve the text 'or holy war', and that's just the cost of bandwidth! (Completly abstracted, and a bit unrealistic, but you get the idea.)
Now think about the cost of newspaper area for every paper that gets printed in the United States with the words 'or holy war' clarifying the term jihad. Then there's magazine articles in Time, etc. Quickly it becomes obvious that 'or holy war' is a problem of epidemic proportions.
Lets assume here that the words 'or holy war' are transmitted in ASCII instead of UNICODE. Each character in ASCII is 8-bits, 1-byte, 1/1024 Kb. This means that the phrase 'or holy war' is 88-bits long, 0.0859375 Kbits. It is not unrealistic to say that a site like MSNBC will get 10million hits a month. Ignoring some accuracy and just moving the decimal place, thats (potentially) over 850 Mbits a month for one website dedicated to the words 'or holy war'. Now then you have the BBC, Fox News, Reuters etc serving up articles on the current state of the angry Arabs so I think it's safe to assume that at the very least, a Gigabit worth of 'or holy war' gets transmitted each month on average for the past two years. That's 24 Gigabits of 'or holy war' per site. Now to deal with loads, I'm going to estimate that a website that got 10million hits a month would need at least a T1 JUST to handle pages regarding angry Arabs and holy wars. These are about 1.5 Mbps and since they are serving mainly text that should suffice (remember this is averaged and hypothetical, so quit scoffing). This will run around $1k per month. So each big news site now is spending $12k-ish a year to serve the text 'or holy war'. Lets say that there are 10 such websites that average that kind of traffic (we won't even go into Google) various people are now spending $120k a year to serve the text 'or holy war', and that's just the cost of bandwidth! (Completly abstracted, and a bit unrealistic, but you get the idea.)
Now think about the cost of newspaper area for every paper that gets printed in the United States with the words 'or holy war' clarifying the term jihad. Then there's magazine articles in Time, etc. Quickly it becomes obvious that 'or holy war' is a problem of epidemic proportions.