It's time to admit that government makes everyone worse off than we would otherwise be. And before anyone says "but wait, they built the roads!", yes, I believe roads could be provided voluntarily without taxation. along with every other important function they do.
You are an idiot. Taxation is no more theft than paying your cable bill. You're a citizen, you benefit from clean water, not getting blown up terrorists, the internet and a crap load of other things the government either pays for directly or has subsidized for development. Unless you like brown water and having the rent cops and firemen, stop whining. Please get over your Ayn Rand fantasy -- even Jesus told his disciples to pay their taxes. Roads provide voluntarily? By who? Whose gonna pay for the asphalt, upkeep or to make some knuckle head doesn't cause a 10 car pile-up because he's doing 110 at rush hour? And seeing as UNIX and ARPNET were both military (read government) creations, Slashdot wouldn't have existed with US taxpayers money.
That's a great list, I have every one of those and use them often, but it has a very steep starting point.
Books like Gettng Started in Electronics by Forrest Mimms, Practical Electronics for Inventors, Tab Electronics Guide to Understanding Electricity and Electronics (2000) by Randy Slone, Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics (5th ed.) by Stan Gibilisco, Grob's Basic Electronics by Mitchel E. Schultz, or MAKE: Electronics: Learning Through Discovery by Charles Platt are more suitable first book for a starting point.
Also ARRL's Ward Silver has a great little hands-on book of lessons, ARRL's Hands-On Radio Experiments that is cheap ($20 US) and a great 2nd book. (Electrical Engineering 101 2nd. ed by Darren Ashby is another great 2nd book, oriented to new EE students / grads).
Make-zine and their blog are full of interesting hobbyist oriented stuff for beginners, and cool projects to inspire you to learn more.
For licensed amateur radio operators, the QRP community and their own QRPedia is a area of kit-building and home-made of simple radio transmitters and receivers that can be simple to get started, and fun to operate (as the solar cycle improves).
All About Circuits is partial (unfinished) online basic electricity and electronics textbook.
Fun stores (of many) include Ada Fruit Industries, and SparkFun.
The more hobbyist friendly big parts distributors in US are Jameco, Digikey, and Mouser. Anyone interested should request a catalog from them. They also ship to Canada, and Digikey does operate in Europe, but Farnell is generally better to deal with. G3SEK's Technical Topics website includes a list of UK electronics suppliers that deal with individuals (rather than businesses-only).
Enjoy!
Actually, it still is quite fast. Nobody wants to risk further damage to the machine just to get the first data in a few months earlier. Ok, except maybe for a few grad students and post docs whose time is running out...
All the gory details on the decision making process can be found here: http://tinyurl.com/chamonix2009
In the mean time we can run the Tevatron a little bit longer...
After Goliath's defeat, giants ceased to command respect. - Freeman Dyson