80% of the world's phone calls certainly don't run through the US. A call placed locally in France stays in France. Why would they route it over the Atlantic and back, adding noticeable delay?

Can you link to some of your old pre-Snowden posts where you made those claims? As far as I am aware very few people were claiming that 4 in 5 phone calls were being recorded in the US, and they certainly had no evidence to back up their claims.

Each bullet creates two more "terrorists", or "freedom fighters" as they were known back in the 80s when they were our friends.

The best thing to do is provide aid from a distance, but otherwise don't get involved. No troops, no arming one side or the other, just food and medicine. The Islamists were losing until we destabilized those countries to the point where they could start winning.

This is a common misunderstanding of how solar fits into the current grid. Demand is highest during peak solar hours. Even if you don't use the power in your own home it gets exported to the grid and runs the air-con and PCs where you work, or some industrial process.

Since the daytime peak consumption is supplied by sources that can ramp up and down, including coal, solar has a huge positive environmental impact.

Why not?

Because the FCC hasn't been completely bought by the industry... yet.

APC used to be good, but these days most of their range is crap. They went the same route as DeWalt and many other once good brands, relying on their name to sell rather than continued quality.

Also, they are a US company making things that connect to your network/computer, so you have to worry about the NSA. A surge protector filtering your entire internet connection as it comes into your house would be a fantastic place for a bug.

Oscilloscopes are not very good for testing audio equipment. Most only have 8 bit ADCs, or 12 bit at best. There is plenty of good test equipment out there, like spectrum analyzers and THD analyzers, but oscilloscopes only reveal the most glaring of problems I'm afraid.

Sounds a lot like what they are doing in the UK at the moment with paedophilia. They are actually talking about making it a law not to report suspicions now.

In the UK, university research departments are assessed base on the Research Excellence Framework (REF, formerly the Research Assessment Exercise [RAE]). Each faculty member is required to submit 4 things demonstrating impact. These are typically top-tier conference or journal papers, but can also be artefacts or examples of successful technology transfer. The exercise happens every four years, so to get the top ranking you need to write one good paper a year. The only incentive for publishing in second-tier venues is meeting other people who might lead to interesting collaborations.

Reproducing work is often a good thing to set for first-year PhD students to do. If they reproduce something successfully, then they've learned about the state of the art and are in a good position to start original research. If they can't reproduce it, then they've got a paper for one of the debunking workshops that are increasingly attached to major conferences and that's their first publication done...

Thousands of dollars for speakers that are no better than ones costing a few hundred dollars. Klipsch are well into audiophile mega-money bullshit land I'm afraid.

It's more like they had too many qualities that audiophiles didn't want. The 650MB driver, limited only by the available storage capacity of a CD-ROM, contained vast amounts of crapware with hundreds of effects and "enhancements" available. Audiophiles bought cheap Via Envy24 cards that let you bypass everything, including the Windows sound mixer, and output an unmolested signal.

PayPal is not exactly something to be proud of. It's only popular because eBay forces you to use it and excludes all other online payment methods, not because it's good.

But yeah, all the other stuff is awesome.

Marconi already had VLF working, sort of, before Wardenclyffe was built. Marconi's R&D approach was to transmit across short distances, test and improve the hardware, then try longer distances. Over a few years, he slowly worked up from across the room to across the ocean. Less grandiose than Tesla, but more successful.

Tesla is said to have assisted in the construction of the 1913 Telefunken VLF station on Long Island, but the IRE Journal article doesn't mention him. Telefunken built a VLF antenna much the way one would be built today - a simple guyed tower resting on an insulator base, with wires spreading outward to a circle of poles. They only used 35KW, instead of Tesla's 200KW. The station communicated with a similar station in Germany.

The Tesla Museum already exists.

Tesla did great work with AC generators and motors. Most common AC motors today still use approaches he invented. That's his legacy.

Wardenclyffe, though, is a monument to failure. From his patents, you can read how he thought it would work. He thought the ionosphere was a conductive layer. The Wardenclyffe tower was supposed to punch power through the atmosphere to that conductive layer, so that signals and maybe power could be received elsewhere.

The ionosphere does not work that way. Tesla's tower would have done nothing useful, although with 200KW at 20KHz going in, it probably could have lit up fluorescent lamps and gas tubes for some distance around. Since the location is now surrounded by a housing subdivision, rebuilding the tower and powering it up would annoy the neighbors.