For IEEE journals, the pay for a reviewer is zero. As other people stated, it is considered part of the job, and an honor actually, since you are regarded an "expert" in the field.

Back in the days when I was young, you could smoke almost everywhere (Europe here), and nobody cared. There are still ashtrays in the trains and bathroom stalls at our university, however you cannot use them anymore (at least for their original purpose). Whenever someone got bored, they smoked. And put a bunch of smokers together, and they start chatting...

Helium-3 is used in neutron detectors. Very handy if you want to monitor whether your collider or neutron source is behaving well.

Here in Belgium it was in the news some weeks ago that delivering a baby was getting disgracefully expensive here, up to 1000 euros for normal delivery, and up to the outrageous sum of 1500 euro for a cesarean. This includes everything by the way, no really, everything.I guess it's all relative...

Here in Belgium, any degree in any university (bachelor or master level) costs around 500 euro tuition per year, for anyone. Additional costs are housing (around 250-300 euro a month for a room in a university dorm or in a shared house), food (subsidized by the university, a decent meal in the university restaurants costs around 3-4 euro's), and books (most courses are printed as a stack of A4 paper and distributed by the university itself, for only the cost of the paper). Of course there is the occasional prof that insists you buy book XYZ for 50-100 euro's, but that is rather rare, and generates a lot of complaining. There are almost no other costs.

Furthermore, if you are a "needy" student (e.g. your parents died when you were 17), the tuition is dropped entirely, you get almost free housing, and about 1100 euro's a month for living expenses (nothing of this needs to be paid back by the way). It is almost impossible to go into debt for your higher education here... By the way, anyone is welcome here, we have great beer, and still have a decent old-style education.

Unfortunately, this is for United States citizens only. Sounded like a nice project to give a try.

What would I have to do if I can solve all puzzles, but cannot claim the prize? Sell it to the Chinese?

Won't such a concentrated injection of hot air high in the sky generate a massive cloud cover right above the solar installation? Must be fun to fly in the neighborhood of these things with a glider though :)

Borg queen, is that you?

This seems a common COBOL error I've seen numerous times: Define an alphanumeric field, redefine it as a numeric field, and don't bother checking your input for "performance reasons" (or just plain stupid/lazy programming). Read the alphanumeric fields from a DB or a flat file, where everything is nicely padded with spaces, and use the redefined numeric field for your accounting. Errors like this can occur easily by novice COBOL programmers, or by too lax compilers (the compiler at the developer's firm is configured to quietly convert these spaces to zeros in such cases, while the mainframe compiler at the client is not).

It's like the "peg in hole" experiment they did with the local cops here, a while ago. They discovered two kinds of cops: dumb cops, and very strong cops...