... which means that the Raspberry Pi would have to be 15-30% more expensive. Yes, $5 does not look much in absolute terms, but compared to a $35 base price, it's a huge amount. If an educational society orders 1000 pts of them, $5000 makes a big dent in a tight budget.

The Raspberry Pi has the hardware to be very cheap while still being able to connect to a general lab setup and powerful enough for a lot of nice little projects.

That's not what quotation marks were invented for. And yes, his middle name is Hussein. So what? The first name of the world best track and field runner is Usain, which is Hussein with a different spelling. Do you also write him "Usain" Bolt?

You are argueing as if it was either existing ISPs or a government-run (municipal) ISP. Why can't they coexist? That's what happens here around. I can get the Internet connection from the local utility (which is basicly a municipal ISP), I can get it from the former telco monopolist, or I can get it from numerous other privately owned ISPs, of which some are just resellers of lines of others.

What we have is only the governmental mandate that an ISP with a local monopoly of lines has to offer capacity on the last mile to other ISPs in a non-discriminatory manner. That's all. Thus about every ISP is potentially able to offer his product everywhere. If he is not present with its own lines, they can be rented from the local monopolist or quasi-monopolist. Problem solved.

If you get hold of a list of robocallers, you could put something similar up yourself with Asterisk or any other of the free phone switch software packages.

This test track is the Autobahn A9, one of the most used Autobahns in Germany, connecting Berlin and Munich, largest and third largest german city.

You probably could even get the BMW turbo engine street legal with lots of exhaust filtering, but that was not the point I was trying to make. Yes, the BMW engine was consuming immense amounts of gas, it was extremely noisy, and it would a bad idea to build it into a normal street car, as it had a high probability to break within the next 1000 miles.

But in general, getting more sheer power out of a certain engine size or configuration is not so much of an engineering problem (e.g. just add lots of chargers, and don't forget the cooling). It's more of a design decision if you want to have better all day behaviour and more stability under load, or if you want more impressive data sheet numbers. You surely can tune the Bugatti W16 to put out 1300 or 1400 hp and still being street legal, but what's the point? Koenigsegg decided to go a more extreme route, getting more power out of their engine, knowing well that their cars won't be used in the daily commute anyway.

It gets even worse. BMW got 1300 HP out of a 1.5 litre 4cyl in 1986. It was the "qualification" setting on their Formula 1 race engines for the Brabham team built into the Brabham BT55.

That's akin to say that until we have all the results from all supporting structures in a crumbling building, we shouldn't start to evacuate.

Global Warming is a fact. The last year was globally the warmest on record, and the next 10 warmest years on record were all in the last 20 years.

So the Earth surface is indeed getting warmer since the times we started to record it, which goes back in some regions to the 18th century. If the average temperature of the Earth's surface is getting warmer (which it does at least since we started to measure it), and if it is happening globally, there is good reason to call it Global Warming.

That there can be local warming that is even larger, or that there are locations which are colder on average now than they were when we started to record temperatures, is quite possible. The region I live in has gotten 2 K warmer on average since the begin of the records (which were somewhere around 1760, thus encompassing the whole era of Industrialization), much larger than the 0.7 K on average we measure globally. So there surely are regions which warmed less than 0.7 K on average.

This is a fact you can read at NOAA or whatever organisations keep record of local and global temperatures.

Where the theorizing starts is if this trend continues in the future, and what causes the Global Warming. But the single fact that the Earth's surface got warmer globally and on average is no hypothesis, is a fact we have measurements of.

And those facts the jury votes one are (or should be) worth nil, if new evidence pops up that contradicts it. Then people get exonerated for crimes they didn't commit, and the former conviction is vindicated.

No, he claimed that the temperature of the Venus' atmosphere at "earthly" conditions, e.g. at a pressure of about 1 bar (somewhere 100,000 feet above the Venus surface) is, after correcting for the distance to the Sun, the same as on Earth.

Just some examples of non-normal distributed events:

• Most things related to speech and text: Distribution of letters, of words, of word length etc.pp. (a phenomenom called Zipf's Law).
• The height of the Earth's surface: It has two large maxima, one at sea level, and another one at about 10,000 feet depth.
• Income, sales, wealth and other economic numbers (Pareto's Law).
• The size of lakes, the length of rivers and other geographic numbers.

Actually, the distribution will be normal, because the IQ is defined to be normally distributed. For each task in the test, the points awarded are carefully tested with many probands, and the weights calculated until the resulting score has a normal distribution.

There is not reason why a distribution in general should be normal, and many of them aren't.

You mean, it tries to start services and also logs the events that happen during the startup? How barbarishly un-UNIX-y!

It might be one of the problems with the U.S. discussion about Global Warming. It's impossible in the U.S. to separate the actual global warming (2014 set a new global temperature record) from the politics. Everyone who argues that there is a global increase in temperature (the global warming), is immediately suspected of having an agenda, and the agenda has to be Big Government or Communism or some other scarecrow.

So arguing that there is no global warming, that the global warming has stopped, that it is not man-made or that it is a non-issue, because it will actually benefit us, is seen as some way of defending Freedom[tm], and many libertarian leaning people and a lot of conservative ones feel a mission to cast doubt on solid science, because defending Freedom is always good work, right? And because the science itself is quite solid (we can actually measure the heat trapping properties of different levels of the components in the atmosphere, and we have a good way to estimate the amount of carbon dioxide and methane we release in the atmosphere), the doubt is cast either on the researchers (they are accused to have an agenda, they are called liars, they are suspected to conspire against us all...), or on the immediate conclusions. Models are called misleading, every new discovery how to more correctly assess an effect gets hailed as proof that the evil climate scientists are wrong again etc.pp..

Try to separate the science and the politics! And yes, denying the science on whatever level is at first an attempt to politice the science.