Reading and comprehending posts isn't your thing is it? You just like to skim and then jump to conclusions to try and support your narrow world view.

I noted that my sister has no trouble, she has a generous grant (a scholarship if you like, but it works a little different) and her expenses are handled. However I have a full understanding of what those expenses are, and that they not paid for all students.

So maybe more reading, less jumping to conclusions.

If you like Ubiquiti you could look at their Edgerouter Lite. I'm real happy with mine. $100 and it'll outperform monowall and pfsense on way more expensive hardware. With a basic NAT setup, plus SPI firewall (the basic "permit established and related, drop others" rules) I've measured it at over 500mbps throughput. It probably would do faster, it's CPU wasn't fully loaded, that is just as fast a test server as I could easily get to.

Now of course it is more on the routing, less on the firewall n' such so if you need powerful firewall config, it isn't as much your thing (and won't get as good performance). If you load it down with too much stuff it'll slow way down, particularly since part of its speed is derived from hardware acceleration on its chip, so if tons of stuff is hitting the software it won't be as fast.

Just another option to look at.

In terms of the realtek chips, ya it sucks but it is what you get for the price. Intel NICs are expensive, because Intel knows they are worth it. They charge more for their chips than other vendors by a good bit, so you don't see them in cheap solutions.

In a lot of the EU, students from other EU countries don't have to pay tuition fees. Foreign students? Not so lucky, and language doesn't matter. If you aren't from the EU you pay increased fees. For example in Sweden you pay about 15,000 EUR/year for a science degree. In terms of language, you have to already demonstrate a proficiency in English and Swedish just to be able to get in.

Also all of this assumes you can get a visa and get admitted. People from other EU nations, no problem, you can live and work anywhere in the EU, that is a big part of what the treaty means. Non-EU individuals have to get a student visa, the requirements of which vary.

And of course none of that deals with the cost of food, housing, transport, etc. You are on your own for that, barring a scholarship.

This is a subject I have more than a passing familiarity with, as my sister is currently working on her PhD in Europe (at two universities, one in the EU one outside of it). She got a generous grant that pays all her tuition, living expenses, and even some extra but that isn't what all students get. It wasn't as though she just walked in and said "I'd like to go to school here," and they said "Certainly, please come for free!"

Also she even had an easier in than many: She and I hold Canadian citizenships. Canada is a commonwealth country and England is in the EU so that makes a lot of the visa shit way easier than it would be for an American, not that it wasn't still a big production.

It is exceedingly narrow-minded to suggest that an American should just "Emigrate to an actual civilized country instead of a pretend one," for school, as though such a thing were trivial to do and people only did not out of ignorance (not to mention the misplaced cultural supremacy of the statement). No, it turns out that you can't just graduate from an American highschool and say "Well screw the US, I'm off to Europe!" and walk in and go to school for free.

Aside from the technical difficulties (which are certainly real; but probably surmountable with time and funding), I would be concerned about the political side of the project(politics being...somewhat less of a solved problem... than space and blowing things up).

The technology sufficient to divert an asteroid, especially with limited warning(which precludes some of the subtler 'attach an ion drive or give it a slow shove with a laser' type schemes), is probably pretty punchy, possibly 'basically an ICBM but better at escaping earth's gravity well' punchy. It would be an unfortunate irony if, in the attempt to mitigate the city-destroying-asteroid threat, we ended up with some sort of proliferation problem or another round of delightful nuclear brinksmanship.

In an ideal world, you'd hope that people could put "Stopping asteroid apocalypse" in the category of 'things more important than your petty nation-states and dumb ethnic and religious squabbles'; but I wouldn't exactly be shocked if people largely can't and every stage of an anti-asteroid project ends up being a bunch of delicate diplomacy and jingoistic dickwaving between the assorted nuclear powers, along with a lot of hand-wringing about anti-satellite capabilities, and generally a gigantic mess.

Well, probably the de-facto legalization of every drug ever, along with cataclysmic declines in production in all sectors where working kind of sucks...

Grad school was historically and is supposed to be the sort of thing not everyone does. It is for people who are really interested in a field, who want to start doing some original research (under the umbrella of a professor's overall research) and so on. The sort of thing only for those that are truly interested in pursuing the subject more deeply and pushing the boundaries.

Also most fields don't require graduate degrees. There are some that do (like lawyers), though usually they require a PhD or other advanced degree after it (like professors, medical doctors, etc). However for most an undergraduate degree is all they are after.

However where I work, I see a ton of students that go in to grad school that are hoop jumpers. They see it as the next thing, that will get them a better job. They aren't that interested in the work, and don't have a particularly good understanding of it. They take comprehensive exams instead of doing a thesis, and so on. They try and use more time in school to make up for a lack of talent.

So, if you are thinking of grad school, and it'll be any kind of financial hardship ask yourself: Why am I going? If it is because your field requires it, then ok no problem. Gotta do what you gotta do. If it is because you really love the field and you want to go to a higher level, that's good too, but just understand it'll be a pain financially. If it is "because I'll get a better job," then no, stop right there. That's not a reason to go to grad school, particularly if it is going to be a problem financially. It probably will NOT get you a better job, and will just give you more debt.

So if I just show up in a European country, they'll let me go to university for free? Hint: No they won't.

My sister went to Europe for her PhD. She didn't end up paying... because she got a generous scholarship. That also was what allowed her to get the visa to go. She didn't just show up and walk in to a university for free.

Same way it would have worked in the US or Canada, actually. If she had been accepted to a program with a generous scholarship, well it would have been free.

But it sounds like an absurd example of a false economy: Even at relatively cheap schools, the cost of running a student through is nontrivial. It seems like complete insanity to waste expensive instructional time on somebody who can't concentrate properly for want of a few dollars worth of calories. Nobody's interests are well served by that.

If you care about good beer you should be making your own. Thanks to Jimmy Carter you can do that since 1978.

OK I will give you that. Still a damn fine keyboard though.

Go to Canada some time, one of the US's closest allies. You'll find that you can travel to Cuba freely, buy Cuban goods (cigars being the most prominently advertised as being of Cuban origin) and so on.

The US is the only country that clings to an embargo and it is purely a face-saving maneuver, not wanting to admit it was a bad idea and hasn't worked to unseat Castro.

However for all that, Cuba is still poor... So sorry, you can't blame the big, bad 'ole US for this. Their policy is not helpful, but it isn't why Cuba is impoverished. That lies at the feet of their own government.

That is "recover" as in "having it land in once piece so we can perform engineering analysis on what worked and didn't work in our engines" (from the perspective of SpaceX).

The earlier recovery systems that SpaceX tried to put into place were some parachutes into the upper parts of the 1st stages. SpaceX doesn't talk all that much about their failures, but apparently the parachute recovery systems were an utter and miserable failure for SpaceX, which is one reason why they have gone to the active thrust recovery system that was tested yesterday. Gwynne Shotwell talked briefly about the parachute system in her interview with David Livingston on the Space Show, when trying to explain why SpaceX is using this particular approach.

The earlier approach would have been more like the Shuttle SRB recovery approach, where some salt and seawater would be flushed out of the system after an at-sea recovery. They really did try to do this, but the dynamic loads on the parachutes were simply too much and even a multiple drogue chute system wouldn't work... at least in terms of being able to fit within the rocket equation at the same time and being able to deliver a usable payload.

Just a bunch of oil companies who want to make claims all over the Arctic Ocean. Are you sure that nobody wants to fight over ANWR? Ever hear about Prudhoe Bay?

Yeah, nobody wants to go into the Arctic as obviously there is nothing to find there.

Don't even get me started about Antarctica. Oil and mining companies would have boom towns of over a million people crawling all over that continent if it wasn't for the current international ambiguity over property rights in that part of the world... an ambiguity that everybody involved is putting off in the hopes it doesn't trigger World War III so they try to give it a nice face by saying it is exclusively for scientific research. I don't mind the current state of affairs in Antarctica and I think all of the natural resources which can be found there are better found in some asteroid instead from an ecological viewpoint, but using the argument that we should settle Antarctica first before going to the Moon or Mars is a false argument to make because doing so is currently illegal and the governments of the world are active in preventing people from doing so.

Worse, the editors at Slashdot thought it was a separate flight rather than the same thing. That this 1st stage also performed a landing attempt is what makes this news. The "also" of what SpaceX did last week was to take yet another Falcon 9 launch core and do a point to point hop at their test facility in McGregor, Texas.

The engineers at SpaceX have been very busy this week, and I doubt any of them are on vacation except for family emergencies or because they are in the hospital for an illness themselves.

Right, telecom satellites are totally useless and not needed, so the several billion dollars each year those companies make from those satellites are just imaginary. Ditto for things like Google Maps and other surveying satellites.

BTW, there is a company who is setting itself up for asteroid prospecting too, by the name of Planetary Resources The interesting thing is that they have a business plan that essentially makes them a profitable business just from other space-based activity for equipment they plan on using for their prospecting.

I could name a dozen other space-based activities that make LEO profitable... indeed it is already profitable for quite a few companies. That you seem to be ignorant of commercial activity in space right now, you can continue to have your luddite dreams.