I'd love to have my tax rate fall to 39.6%! Alas... here, it's more like 53.5%.

Petter Reinholdtsen of Debian Edu/Skolelinux fame will have a lot of useful no-nonsense suggestions. Contact information at http://www.hungry.com/~pere/ .

Almost 20% more traffic deaths per km than Germany is 6085 people per year. That's more than two times 9/11 in number of casualties. I wouldn't just call that significantly higher accident rates. I would call that criminal neglect.

It even gets a lot more dramatic when you look at the important numbers: 12.3 versus 4.5 fatalities per 100000 inhabitants. Roughly three times the number of car traffic related deaths in the US compared to Germany.

21439 deaths per year can be avoided by doing whatever is done right in Germany. That's one Vietnam war every 2 years, 8 months and 2 weeks in number of casualties.

Even if you're a psychopath, and you don't care about the casulaties per se at all, it might make economic sense to make transportation safer!

Hah, the wikileaks "insurance" file!

Imagine you're a honest politician (they exist), and you want to do something about US citizens dying prematurely. You don't want to touch the guns issue because that's political suicide, so... What about traffic deaths then? Over 15000 people a year die in the US because of the inadequacy of the traffic system. US roads are over two times as dangerous as German roads, and almost three times Swedish or Dutch roads. And it's not as if Germany has some magic recipe. They just about make the OECD average.

http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/by%20Subject/1301.0~2012~Main%20Features~International%20comparisons~191

33000 US citizens were road kill in 2009, and international experience shows that at least 15000 could have been avoided. How many US soldiers died in Vietnam?

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_US_soldiers_died_in_the_Vietnam_War

One Vietnam of easily avoidable US traffic deaths every four years is low hanging fruit in comparison to gun control. But even that doesn't seem to be high on the political radar.

That's an old tactic used in political negotiations very often. It's very popular in scenarios where you don't trust al your negotiation partners. This makes it especially common in countries with coalition (multi-party) governments for example.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_power_debate#Indirect_nuclear_insurance_subsidy

Have a look at Archos tablets. They support Debian on their gen8 series, but those are still a bit slow. People are already running debian on their gen9 products, and official support for that is coming soon.

See also:
http://www.archos.com/support/support_tech/updates_dev.html?country=us&lang=en
http://dot.kde.org/2011/11/30/plasma-active-archos-g9-tablet
http://dev.openaos.org/wiki/Debian