Quite so. Of course, end-of-war savings (peace dividends) rarely seem to materialize. Still, spending is good for the economy -- even if you only pay people to dig holes in the ground and fill them up. Of course it's still better if they fix bridges and highways and avoid shooting people.

There's no bad way to spend $140 B (or more). A lot goes into the pockets of workers who dig trenches and string fiber. (We really need those jobs.) Some goes to electronics manufacturers, but it all stimulates the economy -- and serves somebody's interests. The problem is if AT&T, Verizon, et. al. are locked out, especially if it's a government investment.

As economic stimulus goes, I think I'd rather have bridges that don't fall down and railways that work than 1 Gbps to my home. A mere 100 Mbs should keep me happy for the next 5 years, I'm thinking. I making do with 18 at the moment.

It's an Olde English Cellphone.

Nope. Plutocracy. Aristocrats are aristocrats because their parents were aristocrats.

It's a British thing. Queen's English. What what.

Heat pipes work by evaporating a liquid at the hot end and condensing it at the cold end.. The fancy wicking stuff is to persuade the liquid to move back to the hot place to get evaporated again. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pipe .

There's a working fluid there somewhere, it must have come out, and it might be toxic. Or it might give you a high. The review is silent on this.

It's not a revolutionary invention, but it should be very helpful if they can cut the peak and the average power draw on the power grid by a substantial amount. There's an energy cost saving and also transmission grid saving. You don't need such a heavy connection between the train system to the general power grid.

For 30 seconds, more or less, if a home is ~ 2-3 kW.

This isn't the place!

You could try http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

Not a flame war for me, anyway. But it does seem like a lot of the pro-Mac anti-Windows comments are aimed at Win XP or even Win 98. I'm a Linux guy, but I do see Win 7 as pretty respectable in terms of GUI quality, stability, security, etc. A resource hog, sure, but that's what we have cheap RAM and CPU cycles for.

Mac OS X and Mac hardware are fine, too. For me, they're worth a premium, but not 2X compared to Linux-friendly laptops.

I'm retired and willing to spend time doing some system stuff on Linux. If your time is at a premium, that would tilt the scales. My grad student daughter just upgraded her Mac, so there you are. (If was a grad student again, I'd be wary of spending time on /. or games, though.)

A few more simple rules: Don't buy the cheapest, and don't buy the most expensive. The best value is usually somewhere in the middle. If I buy a laptop, it's generally in the $500-700 range, and it might be last year's model on close-out. Oh, and don't buy Apple... unless "cool" is worth a ~100% tax to you.

You have to read the instructions carefully. The current wants to flow in the proper direction. Don't hook it up backwards, or the warranty is void! I wonder how many /. readers have their 1000bT cables reversed?

You might also want to look into the pre-charged dielectric cable. It needs a (premium - of course) DC supply to be sure the dielectric is operating in the linear range.

These things really do work. Just ask the users who spend $K on their system wiring!

There are many ways to look at a university. It's about research, it's about federal funding, it's about raising money from alumni, it's about patent licensing and athletics, it's about recruiting faculty, promoting faculty, about running a big physical plant, internet pipes, etc. etc. Oh, and there are students, too. Teaching is just one of many things that happen there, not the most visible - even at places that claim to emphasize the student experience. Students do get to pay up to around $200K for the privilege of becoming alumni and then being asked to contribute cash. But a big research university actually loses money on every student. They'd be better off financially if they stopped admitting.

Universities, most of them, are non-profit corporations. You're right they aren't charities in the moral sense, but the US tax laws treat them as if they were. Pity the legislator who suggests repealing the their charitable tax deduction.