Exactly. It is especially ridiculous if you consider that most government funding to the University comes from the STEM fields..

On a more serious note, what does "in a few minutes" even mean? You can already charge commercially available lithium polymer batteries in about 15 minutes (4C charge rate). So the actual number of minutes would be nice to know.

Exactly. It's funny, a guy from comcast came by last week to see if we want to get any of their services.. I told him that we have DSL and we don't need cable. Then he asked if we get everything through DSL (TV, phone, internet), so I said yes, which is true as we use skype and mostly watch Hulu, Netflix, and movies from Amazon. He wanted to know how much we pay and I told him $35 per month.. then he just said good bye and left.

Being from Europe I was pretty surprised when I came to the US and learned that virtually all* banks use ordinary passwords for online banking.. *the ones I know of: Citi, Bank of America, US Bank

This is a good example how open systems drive innovation. Allowing people to tinker with the device (root access, access to the DSP) attracts hackers, which in this case lead to DSP accelerated Theora video decoding. It's quite fitting that Apple is resisting Theora in HTML 5, mainly because their devices don't have accelerated Theora decoding (this is what I assume). While at the same time the restrictions imposed by Apple make it impossible to develop something like this for their iCrap devices (apart from not having root access, no API for accessing the DSP, it would also violate the developer agreement.. since you need some DSP assembly, which is not an approved language).