An online buddy of mine posed an intriguing question . . . "If all the free discs and CDs that AOL has distributed were stacked end-to-end, I wonder how many times it would circle the globe?"
I found it inspiring and profound, and therefore I bring it here for discussion.
Earth’s diameter is 24,901.55 miles (40,075.16 kilometers).
A CD has a diameter of 12 cm.
It’d take 106,300,159 AOL CD’s to circle the globe.
If you stacked all those 1.2 mm thick discs on top of each other, you’d have a pile 127.5 km tall.
At 700 megabytes a pop, those same discs could hold a total of 70,963 terabytes of useful data.
So I guess the missing piece of information is whether AOL has in fact sent out at least 106 million CDs.
I can vouch for receiving at least 30,000, but some of mine might have gotten lost in the mail when I moved.
That’s almost certainly true.
Yup, it certainly is the missing piece of information. 
From Wikipedia:
That’s enough to circle the globe 10 times, but not enough to reach the moon.
Could we reah the moon if they were edge-to-edge, not stacked?
Sorry, that’s what I meant.
Also, I made a math error.
Earth’s circumference is 40,075.16 kilometers, that’s 4007516000 cm.
Divide by 12, and it’d take 333,959,667 CD’s to circle the globe.
I will now step away from the calculator. :smack:
And to think, nearly every damn one of them has ended up in a landfill somwheres.
Landfill?
Phsaw…
COASTERS! 
Nonsense, they’re being used to build really shiny roads circling the world.
By AOL are we just talking about America OnLine, or are we also including its spinoff child companies including AOL (Australia OnLine) and those in other countries?