Nine Year Old Aims to Print the Internet

Dorothy and Dwight Darnell, were surprised last week when they discovered reams of pages printed from the Internet in their son Cody's bedroom and learned of his plan to print a hard copy of all of the Internet to win a $50 bet with his seventeen year old cousin, Mikey Darnell-Wilson. The bet came about during the main course of the family's Thanksgiving lunch after a heated debate between Cody and Mikey about the size of the Internet and the feasibility of printing it out. Under the terms of the bet, Cody has six months to complete the printing and if Mikey can find a site on the Internet which has not been printed he wins the bet, if he can’t he loses.

After hearing about the bet, Dwight phoned Mikey who immediately apologised to his aunt and uncle for unfairly teasing his younger cousin and offered to call off the bet. Cody, however, insisted that he be allowed to continue and Dorothy and Dwight reluctantly agreed under the condition that websites which contain adult or obscene content be excluded from the bet. Dwight explained, "I know there’s some nasty filth on the Internet that a good Christian family like the Darnells don’t want to see so we got us some clever software that stops it getting into our humble home."

News of the bet became public when Mikey's regular posts of progress reports and photos on his personal homepage were featured by one of Springwood’s local radio stations. Since then, the town's residents have flooded the Darnells with offers of assistance. The local computer supplies store, Big Frank’s World of Computers, has donated a large capacity laser printer and the Springwood Traders' Association is seeking donations from local businesses to cover the costs of paper and printer toner. Others are helping by taking it in turns to do the printing, creating lists of websites to be printed and providing storage space for the printouts.

Environmental organisations were outraged when they heard of the bet and the president of the Springwood Conservation Society, Art Grossmann, was forthright in expressing his opinion, saying "You have got to be joking. Some dumb kid is wasting all that paper to win a stupid $50 bet." In the light of this criticism, Cody has agreed to use recycled paper and to use a printer driver that can print eight pages on a sheet of paper.

This heart warming story of determination and community spirit has been featured on national and international news services and the Darnells have become local celebrities. Dorothy, a waitress at a local diner and Dwight, an unemployed truck driver, have been surprised by the amount of interest in Cody’s story. As Dorothy explained, "We've been getting hundreds of calls from all sorts of people. Most of them want interviews and we've even had Hollywood people wanting to make a feature film. Imagine that, a film about our Cody and little ol’ Springwood."

The bet will be decided on May 24th, 2006 and will be celebrated a special holiday proclaimed by the mayor of Springwood, Ed Newsome, as Internet Day. Cody summed up the sentiment of the town by saying, "This is like, totally, the coolest thing ever. I'm gonna show Mikey that he’s wrong." before returning to his computer and printer.

Comments (11)

... written by Karen on July 25, 2006 Everyone seems to be missing the point here, it may have started as a stupid bet amonst kids & yes I agree that the amount of paper wasted would exceed $50. But come on look at the larger picture,where is your community spirit ?? This simple bet has brought a community together & in today's environment I'd like to see any of you create such reaction - Good on ya CODY this is one impressed Aussie Girl !! ... written by Debbie on August 6, 2006 Good on you. There is no such word as 'can't'. ... written by Ph34r_Ph1r3 on September 14, 2006 ...Goodness. He printed it all!? omg written by Michael Sand on October 31, 2006 OMG what an idiot. what stupid parents. Easy way to win the bet written by Chris Carey on November 2, 2006 Print the first page of Google because that is a hard copy of the internet. Every page gets cached. You win Cody. Oh and print out noheat.com, just for good measure What a waste of resources written by ttz on November 22, 2006 This is a really stupid bet. What are you going to do with all the used paper. The internet is there for a purpose and reduces the waste of paper and money. Next time pick any f-ing charity and donate. Idiot. ... written by casey on December 4, 2006 this is probally made up and all these people are raving and disputing about paper...haha...good publicity!!!!!!!!!smart kid!!!!! what a dumb/kool idea written by Lindsey Earp on December 6, 2006 i do not get why kids want to do stupid things these days they just want to show off at their friend , and there friends , friends Internet day?? Puh-lease written by enchantedsleeper on December 7, 2006 'Internet day'?!? *shakes head* That's the dumbest. Why did they have to go and make it a holiday, it's stupid! What the kid did is kinda cool though. I wonder how it turned out? urgh written by nunni on January 17, 2007 That's the dumbest idea I've ever seen. This kid should get shot or something...wasting all that paper and money... what a shame. Like someone said, pick that money and give it to a charity center or something! maybe written by me on February 10, 2007 all that is cool,but jeese cody why waste our worlds resources? that is really not a good idea cody

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 OKOK I BET YOU $100 YOU LOSE THIS CONTESTS find my myspace http://www.myspace.com/boosie1

Pat, June 21, 2006 2:42

 yeah u should do what ever you want but come on there r so many sites that he doesnt no about it was impossible for him to it but how did i come across this any ways

sabeana, June 10, 2006 9:48

 Look I think its terrible that you guys are talking like this to a little boy, I think your all pathetic

Casey, June 7, 2006 1:49

 who cares

t, May 30, 2006 10:46

 um........do you people who are bashing this so harshly ON THE INTERNET think your any smarter than the kid or the people that are helping him? i mean the kid is nine give him a break. I always say if you want to do something then do it you may not get another chance. I may not think that printing off the internet is the smartest thing to do, but to each his own and i think this should be a lesson to everyone to follow your dreams and do whatever it is that you want to do no matter what people say or think. and cody if you do end up winning at least think about saving your money before you blow it on pop rocks and bubblegum, or maybe you can buy your parents some paper!

anonymous, April 26, 2006 4:30

 to all you people that say the kid can't do it should give him $50.00 when he does do it.. good luck kid

kandy0329, April 25, 2006 7:44

 Genau, die 5 o Dollar... man! o!=0 du penner!

dada, April 13, 2006 4:18

 Hey everybory! Stop saying that's impossible to do! It's obvious!!! Everybody knows that is not possible this kind of thing!! Stop making bullshit calculates like "if you type 'x' on google you will find 99000000000000000 pages, if you divide for XX days you will get 340000000000 per day......". Everybody just know that's impossible! And this fucking dumb 9 year old guy knows too! This is just a piece of marketing just to appear on newspaper, internet news, etc. There is no such a good comment on this... just it.

Diogo, April 10, 2006 2:18

 not the smartest thing in the world to do, but... To all the posts about how stupid the kid is - are you so far removed from your childhood and jaded with your lives that you don't remember what it was like at all?

Nyxy, April 9, 2006 5:50

 What a huge step for mankind!

Gabba Hey!, April 9, 2006 10:58

 This kid should be locked up... EPA should fine the kid for stupidity!

Jamie, April 9, 2006 12:53

 If this kid is our "future" then I think we are in trouble. Not only is he wasting paper on a bet he cant win, he is getting encouraged to continue. He cant even cache 1% of the sites on his pc, let alone all the sites on the internet. Unless ofcourse this is a spoof and well its still stupid. It may of been funny in 1993 but not 2006.

kidsourfuture, April 9, 2006 12:01

 "To all you anti Americans. Why don't you just think what war we saved your asses." the Russians Whould of taken germany out anyway, and we whould be speaking russian. Stupid kid, he should have to to cut down the trees helself, then replant them

MOOCOWGOMOO, April 8, 2006 8:32

 err... $50 bet... which will cost in excess of thousands of dollars in paper and ink cartriges? OOOk... moving right along

scott, April 7, 2006 7:07

 Go for it little Cody! Does anybody know where do I send the money to help him? I have an old printer in my house too! I wish I lived there to participate on this great party! Come on fellows, don't threat him like this, he is just a kid... []'s

Joseph, April 6, 2006 7:38

 who cares if its a net loss, stupid, or a waste of paper. all of you who are saying this shit are wasting resources everyday, too. so let the kid have try to prove his cousin wrong. he is fucking 9.

b00ger, April 3, 2006 6:06

 In less than an hour, I could write a program that generates an infinite amount of pages at request. Try printing an infinite amount of pages in just 6 months. HA! (I could also just make a little site and not tell anyone about it, it'd be on the internet but nobody would know it and such wouldn't be able to find and print it.) Talk about stupidity.

jfs, April 3, 2006 8:14

 Ohhhhhh this is so ... sad. I mean, that soooo many people believed it and used it as a reason to put down a country..? Just, wow.

ryran, April 1, 2006 7:42

 I wish his local community would cut there own tree's down for the paper so they have some idea how f***king irresponsable there being!

noddy, March 31, 2006 10:03

 GO FOR IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

star, March 29, 2006 10:54

 There are more webpages added to the internet everyday than he can print in the entire 6 months!

Ronen , March 27, 2006 12:52

 Oh my god! Shouldnt there be a stupidety limit. This is beyond imaginable. Why the hell doe´sn't anyone tell Cody: You're a dumb fuck, stop that bs. ANd the people who actually offer him assistance, they are adults for crying out lod, they should know better....

Ronen , March 27, 2006 12:50

 Printing off the internet without the adult sites? Where's the interest? ^_^ $50 - that's all this town's worth I guess :D - Also, printing out google, lycos, ebay,etc, "might" be a problem, as he'll have to search for everywords in every languages , everytime the db's are renewed ^_^ (I believe 1 google search pages IS an internet page... right? ^_^), which add sounds, movies, pictures etc... I'll make him win his best... Open notepad, Type "all of the internet", and print it... I believe this DOES qualify as being "all of the internet" doesn't it? ^_^, alternatively, type www.google.com , we all know that if it's not on google it doesn't exist ^_^ Now If you excuse me, I have to register a LOT of sites on www.da.ru ^_^

mike r. - super_canard, March 24, 2006 11:49

 "This heart warming story of determination and community spirit has been featured on national and international news services and the Darnells have become local celebrities." More like heart wrenching tale of collective stupidity. How can others stand by and allow this to happen?

Jonathan, March 24, 2006 8:46

 Maybee someone should create a page that will be generatet randomly on every load.. hahaa you`r f.cked now ! :)

Kakao, March 24, 2006 8:39

 If he`s gona kill himself trying to print it all .. he can be still awardet for darwin awards. For me personaly - He`s a winner :D

Kakao, March 24, 2006 8:33

 Well, this is also a manual, how to become an american celebrity, isn't it? Just act like idiot, you'll get famous :)

Alien, March 24, 2006 6:55

 A stupid event taking place in the US... Why am I not surprised?

Anders, March 24, 2006 2:27

 To all you anti Americans. Why don't you just think what war we saved your asses. Then consider what language you would be tying you responses. Then go hang yourselves.

American, March 23, 2006 5:46

 you are all a bunch of stupid motherfuckers

almighty, March 23, 2006 5:28

 sorry for this but...another american idiot(I dont think everybody from america is retardet but this is not unusual)

sNowman, March 23, 2006 2:19

 silly story. sounds a bit impossible, but live and let live, I always say. What's bothering me is all this American bashing. How did one little boy having determination turn into such cruelness? Should Americans, then, look to silly things people in other countries have done and assume every person that lives there is an idiot also? It's getting to be a very sad, hateful world. :(

busymom, March 23, 2006 1:22

 this kid is a fuckn prick. dosn't he know how much paper he is goin to use the fucker needs to be slaped repetedly with the paper he is goin to use and made to eat a nugget of shit for every page that the little twat wastes on this fuckin meaningless task!!

cammi666, March 23, 2006 5:56

 the kids retarted, the townspeople are retarted....everything about it is retarted

santino argenti, March 22, 2006 11:40

 Heh, cost more than 50 to print out the internet =)

Danikar, March 22, 2006 11:24

 stupid Americans greetings from Holland

erik, March 22, 2006 9:11

 The kid should be keelhauled for making that bet. But yeh, it's a real christian thing, jesus did that all the time (including the porn)

ashamed to be human, March 22, 2006 6:33

 It's very telling that the boy's parents have, shall I say, defined white trash jobs.

Joe P, March 22, 2006 12:01

 you wierd little boy i wouldn't do it for less then 100 $

tha ape, March 21, 2006 2:23

 puckon, waste nature for 50 dollars.

Stjärt Åke, March 21, 2006 1:57

 dude, liek you are using more money then what you will ever win in this bet... where is the logic?

Sasori, March 21, 2006 9:53

 /me runs for a bottle of chlorine. GET OUT OF MY GENE POOL! And people actually ask me why I am glad to NOT be from the U.S.??!?!?

Chris, March 21, 2006 8:37

 hahahahah

www.84th-usmc.com, March 21, 2006 8:06

 Is it April already?

Andi, March 21, 2006 3:32

 Assuming an optimistic price of one cent per printed page for the toner, ink, paper, electricity and wear on printer, he can print five thousand pages. Let them waste their money and maybe help get the US economy back on it's feet.

Hitorachan, March 21, 2006 2:02

 By rough estimate I calculate around $12 trillion dollars worth of paper would be needed to "print the internet" - ink not included. Seriously, there is real math behind this.

private dude, March 21, 2006 12:34

 It's not possible to do this. A 9 yr old thinking that it is- that I can see, but a whole town? Think a little more people.

Jennifer, March 20, 2006 11:15

 Okay lets, for some reason, be logical about this: Let's say there's gonna be approximately 3500 characters (bytes) per page. This is a very very conservative estimate, since 3500 characters is pretty much the most you can fit on one page. This doesn't include paragraphs, line breaks, images, menus, or anything that might add to the overal dimensions of a printed web page. Now, as of 2003, there was approximately 532,897 TB of data on the internet. We can cancel a lot of that out from Emails and "Deep Web" which is the backend of websites. Stuff like databases. (http://www.sims.berkeley.edu:8000/r...03/internet.htm) So, let's take the % of the internet that is the "surface". As of 2003, roughly 17.7% of the Internet was made up of HTML. So let's just assume there's 90TB (17% of 532) of web pages out there. Since I'm lazy and suck at math, let's also assume 1024 = 1000. 90 TB = 90,000 GB = 900,000,000 MB = 900,000,000,000,000 KB = 900,000,000,000,000,000 B Now, at 3500 bytes per page, that would account for... well... 900,000,000,000,000,000 / 3500 = 2,571,428,571,428,571 pages. Yes that's right, it would take 2 quadrillion pages to print the internet. Let's look at the paper costs, then. The cheapest office paper is roughly one half cent per page. (http://www.pcworld.com/howto/articl...d,114728,00.asp). So, 2,571,428,571,428,571 pages at $0.005 per page, paper costs would be roughly: $12,857,142,857,142.85. $12 trillion.

The Titan, March 20, 2006 10:50

 damnit boy! I hope you get infected with a virus during the printing process. your computer as well.

jeeez, March 20, 2006 10:22

 It shows again what stupid inbreeds all you americans are. Every generation your brain obviously gets a little bit smaller..

Frenchie, March 20, 2006 10:17

 Stupid fucking kid. "heart warming story of determination and community spirit" That's just fucking sick and disgusting. I'd like to disembowel all of those people with sporks. Fuck them.

bun cheese, March 20, 2006 6:40

 I'm gonna make a new webpage tomorow, Be shure to print it.

BAZE, March 20, 2006 6:34

 alright first... the city helping is against the rules, the bet was to the kid and kid alone. So i support his cousin in saying he loses either way. Cheaters never prosper, well maybe. also i will bet my life that no one can print off all the pages with the word "panda" in it. This is obsurd, give the kid some real task to do, he's printing pages off the internet people, he's watching hundreds of pages of information that he may be able to use(probably not)without really learning anything. A nine year old should be given incentive to tasks that will help add to his or her skills. plus i was a copy bitch once and now i believe there should be a copy bitch union to stop cities from stealing jobs from poor college students. this is a task for an independent firm not a kid with a ink jet printer. pandas! peace

wechosenfew, March 20, 2006 4:17

 i like pandas!

mirage, March 20, 2006 3:52

 Now it's written in stone, the Americans are a bunch of retarded inbreed hillbillies who doesn't care about the environment. Give me the kid's address and I'll write him a check. Sheesh!

Tore Skogman, March 20, 2006 3:45

 This can't really be real. Not even a christian American would do such a thing — and please don't use the words "Internet" and "Web" interchangably, they are most decidedly different.

Alex Wood, March 20, 2006 2:54

 get a life!

john, March 20, 2006 10:11

 Oh god, this has got to be the end of sanity for all of mankind. It's totally worth 50 bucks. thousands and thousands of trees, cut down for nothing, but hey, he wins 50 dollars!

Victor, March 20, 2006 6:37

 if you google the letter A you will find 24070000000 web pages.... divide that with 180 (number of days you've got) then with 24, and then with 60, and 60 again you will get how many pages you will have to print every second... and thats about 1550... so i think you are 50$ poorer

fredrik, March 20, 2006 3:49

 Printing the internet.... probably the kid should download the internet on to his computer before printing.... LMAO

Nagendran Nagarajan, March 20, 2006 2:54

 oh americans...

xisto, March 19, 2006 7:23

 Wow...Forget about high gas prices...printer paper will jump up after this impossible task.

Paul, March 19, 2006 3:42

 So, how exactly does he plan to get into all the [password] protected sites that are out there? This has to be one of the most stupid things I've seen ever, is this what humanity is being degraded into?

confused, March 18, 2006 7:14

 whats with all the whining about trees, what have they ever done to you? and its not like its your ink the kid's spending, let him have his fun

Joel, March 18, 2006 5:21

 idiotas.

cesar, March 18, 2006 5:09

 That kid ISN'T all that smart, and those donors are helping that "not very smart" kid to do something highly inconstructive. To be clean and honest and humble like that kid's retarded family, they're whacked.

Barry, March 18, 2006 10:33

 Give the kid the $ 50,-- and stop wasting Millions of dollars on paper!! Fucking idiots

Anonymus, March 18, 2006 6:23

 This is the best story ever! This is really determination at it's best I would be so glad if he makes it!

James, March 18, 2006 5:15

 stop wasting trees!!

runamuck, March 18, 2006 4:06

 Oh the humanity!

unknow dude, March 15, 2006 2:47

 is this kid retarded?

josh, March 13, 2006 7:50

 What an incredible waste of paper. I haven't heard of an idea that bad since, well... the War on Terror.

Steve, March 11, 2006 7:22

 I understand that cool.com.au gives people the crabs.

LarryC, March 11, 2006 7:20

 Good for you boy - don't you dumb fucks know that it's not always about the money? You housin' him! The wig

Knuckle Wig, March 11, 2006 7:13

 Hey Kid! Search google for the word "the" - it returns 22,990,000,000 results. Divide that by the number of days between now and May 24th and you get over 300 million pages. If you print 330 million pages a day you might break your printer :)

John Dover, March 11, 2006 7:08

 Just printing a tenth of the American commercial internet would waste thousands of trees. Printing the entire thing, even on 20% recycled paper, would destroy enough of the Brazilian rainforest to displace thousands of people and kill hundreds of thousands of animals. I hope it's worth it for $50 - that's pretty typical of a first-world colonialist attitude, though, isn't it?

Barney Tsutsi, March 11, 2006 6:32

 wikipedia by itself is 1.5 million pages. Even if the kid had a year, he'd have to print 2.5 wikipedia articles every minute, all day and night. For just wikipedia.

~, March 11, 2006 6:18

 Dur, listen up all yuo libaral hippies. I'm from springwood and our boy is gunna win this here contest. Ya'll think ya know everything, wut with yer fancy high skool edukashuns and whatnot. I got me on this here WebTv and I reckon I've seen durn near everything there is to see on the internets so printin it out cant be all that hard. SO Git R Done lil Cody... Git R Done. FOr America and the troops and Tom Delay and George W Bush and all the good Christians out there! GOD BLESS AMMERICA!

Cletus McJethro, March 11, 2006 6:08

 What a waste of paper.

james, March 11, 2006 5:54

 this is the dumbest thing i've ever read. the only thing that would possibly make it worse is if it was happening in SOUTH dakota on behalf of some fascist anti-abortion initiative.

Deza, March 11, 2006 5:45

 Please don't do this... this is such a huge waste of paper/trees. This kid should be taught some lessons of resource conservation.

Daniel Burns, March 11, 2006 5:38

 stupid hoax, "chica loca"

sdsddsd sddssd, March 11, 2006 5:12

 What kind of person would let their kid try to do something like that? Are they so naive that they think this is ACTUALLY POSSIBLE? Attention whores - a whole town of attention whores. Even without the porn it is still a futile (and pointless, and insanely expensive) endevor.

J3ph, March 2, 2006 2:50

 Pfft! Cody, I already accomplished that, back in 1985 when I was working for the NSF. Sonny, try to come up with something original, at least!

nanna, March 2, 2006 5:30

 dumb ass fuck of a kid

knucklez, February 28, 2006 7:28

 He'll spend way more on ink and paper then USD 50, even if he won the bet by some technicality it'll be a net loss.

http://www.ambrand.com, February 27, 2006 5:25

 alright first of all its impossible more pages are added by people every day!!!!!!!and what about all the porn you couldnt print all of the porn sites in 6 months way to many believe me i have first HAND eperience(did i spell that right??)give up cody your just gonna get fucked over

50$ down the drain, February 27, 2006 2:40

 OH WOW good luck kid and i hope you win your 5o dollars

joe, February 21, 2006 11:01