Sobering indeed -- freedom isn't free, not by any means, and it's good to be reminded of that fact from time to time.

I only wish there was some way that the "pin" silhouettes could scale appropriately to the size of the map: when zoomed out all the way, they cluster together so badly that there's no way to get an idea of the actual scale, and the map looks a lot more filled than it actually is. And by the time you zoom in to where the scale of the pins fits the scale of the map, you're about four or five zoom levels in and you can't see the whole map anymore.

I don't see a way to fix that problem, though: Google's "pins" weren't designed to scale, since they weren't expecting to have hundreds of them on-screen at once.

Certainly each death is tragic to the friends and family of the soldier. But imagine if you used this mechanism to show the Vietnam war deaths, Korea, WWII or the Civil War. For an even more dramatic effect imagine if the size of the states were altered to reflect their population sizes. Now imagine this technique was applied to other countries and wars. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_toll#War_and_military_action
I think you would see that in the scale of human conflict this is a small price to pay to attempt to bring stability to that part of the world.

The people of England have been led in mesopotamia [Iraq] into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor.They have been tricked into it by a steady witholding of information.The Baghdad communiques are belated,insincere,incompleat.Things have been far worse than we have told ,our administration more bloody and inefficent then the public knows. We are to-day not far from a disaster. Aug 2nd 1920 Sunday Times T.E.Lawrence LAWRENCE OF ARABIA. PS we are their for oil not our freedom chump