I speak 5 languages myself, work in a technical environment, and it is not appreciated at all. I applied for a job where my knowledge of languages would be an obvious asset (international helpdesk), but my 10 years of language learning was wiped out by a 10 minute psycho-test showing I wouldn't throw down the phone fast enough. Don't get me wrong: learn french and you will see how Jacques Brels lyrics will send John Lennon running home to his mommy crying. Every language you learn means new people you meet and new treasures you discover. But I have never gotten a job or a raise because of it. It is like juggling oranges: nice conversation topic at the xmas party, but not something that adds to your bottom line. If you are going to do it, German is the obvious second technical language in both west and eastern Europe.

I never understood why Linksys, DLink et al don't push hard into brownware. Imagine a Blue-Ray with buildt in DNLA and powered by POE. Only one cable, no separate power supply needed. DVB-T? Put a box in the attic and connect it wih a single ethernet cable. Make an amplifier with a POE switch up its ass, and a DNLA client. Could be the start of a very nice product line.

Germany will have to invest billions in (HVDC) power lines to carry all that volatile electricity around. Windmills are mostly in the north, solar in the south etc. Guess who will complain when they get an ugly power line in their backyard? The same people who protested the nuclear powerplants of course.
And by the way: lot of nukes are closed in europe because they found small fractures in the reactors. In Belgium even the government starts talking about brownouts this winter.

Something tells me you won't be able to see the difference...

I agree, but why involve a poor bird in this?

yes, but those demonstrations weren't headed by imams.

Even if it doesn't dissolve in perovsky, it actually dissolves very well in Topatourbiolilepiquorthite !! So that is not a good reason!

_ONE_, very good ground. Make sure *ALL* the outlets are connected to the same ground, with nice thick juicy cables. I have seen a lab where you could pull sparks between the grounds of 2 outlets.

Will they attempt crowdsourcing like Googles mapmaker? They have it available right now, but only for African countries. Google has shown it isn't easy. Mapmaker IMHO sucks. Edits I've done misteriously sissappeared after a few weeks live, and their cycle maps don't come anywhere near OpenStreetmap.

Double (or triple) glazing where the winow panes have a different thickness prevents resonance. Filling up the space between the panes with helium works well too, and no id doesn't diffuse, not through several mills of glass. For the roof, consider a fake ceiling of sound absorbing material. Have a look at www.rockfon.com.

How about a plastic chocolate bar with a phone number engraved: phone here and get ££££!

That thing has been around for years, no? Is it so good there is no point in making a PS4?

Use AES with a very long random gobbledigook password. Write the password down on the back of your router. from wikipedia:
Weak password Shared-key WPA remains vulnerable to password cracking attacks if users rely on a weak password or passphrase. To protect against a brute force attack, a truly random passphrase of 13 characters (selected from the set of 95 permitted characters) is probably sufficient.[12] To further protect against intrusion, the network's SSID should not match any entry in the top 1000 SSIDs[13] as downloadable rainbow tables have been pre-generated for them and a multitude of common passwords.

just because oranges are healthy, you shouldn't have a diet based SOLELY on oranges. What you want is a good mix of different clean energy sources because:
+ they will compete and advance technologically
+ they won't all fail at once
+ they will all pollute in a different way, diluting the total footprint

No energy form is safe, no energy form is (totally) clean.