...if he were still alive. He built his (and the world's) first programmable binary computer with program storage, the Z3, from old mechanical relays.

'Installed' doesn't mean 'enabled'. Plus, 87% of all statistics are made up.

The 16 GB iPhone 2G appeared in February 2008.

How about a pdf vulnerability fix for the 2G? Or is it too much to ask for some basic OS support for a 2 year old $500 Apple product?
And while they are at it, maybe they could reverse the recent degradation of the 2G map accuracy. Might be just AT&T reducing the number of 2G towers, though.

You are an idiot. Taxation is no more theft than paying your cable bill. You're a citizen, you benefit from clean water, not getting blown up terrorists, the internet and a crap load of other things the government either pays for directly or has subsidized for development. Unless you like brown water and having the rent cops and firemen, stop whining. Please get over your Ayn Rand fantasy -- even Jesus told his disciples to pay their taxes. Roads provide voluntarily? By who? Whose gonna pay for the asphalt, upkeep or to make some knuckle head doesn't cause a 10 car pile-up because he's doing 110 at rush hour? And seeing as UNIX and ARPNET were both military (read government) creations, Slashdot wouldn't have existed with US taxpayers money.

That's a great list, I have every one of those and use them often, but it has a very steep starting point.

Books like Gettng Started in Electronics by Forrest Mimms, Practical Electronics for Inventors, Tab Electronics Guide to Understanding Electricity and Electronics (2000) by Randy Slone, Teach Yourself Electricity and Electronics (5th ed.) by Stan Gibilisco, Grob's Basic Electronics by Mitchel E. Schultz, or MAKE: Electronics: Learning Through Discovery by Charles Platt are more suitable first book for a starting point.

Also ARRL's Ward Silver has a great little hands-on book of lessons, ARRL's Hands-On Radio Experiments that is cheap ($20 US) and a great 2nd book. (Electrical Engineering 101 2nd. ed by Darren Ashby is another great 2nd book, oriented to new EE students / grads).

Make-zine and their blog are full of interesting hobbyist oriented stuff for beginners, and cool projects to inspire you to learn more.

For licensed amateur radio operators, the QRP community and their own QRPedia is a area of kit-building and home-made of simple radio transmitters and receivers that can be simple to get started, and fun to operate (as the solar cycle improves).

All About Circuits is partial (unfinished) online basic electricity and electronics textbook.

Fun stores (of many) include Ada Fruit Industries, and SparkFun.

The more hobbyist friendly big parts distributors in US are Jameco, Digikey, and Mouser. Anyone interested should request a catalog from them. They also ship to Canada, and Digikey does operate in Europe, but Farnell is generally better to deal with. G3SEK's Technical Topics website includes a list of UK electronics suppliers that deal with individuals (rather than businesses-only).

Enjoy!

Anyone who uses the word piracy (as in IP) in the same sentence as terrorism, murder, or tragedy should be kicked off the interwebz. Oh crap, guess I have to go now, noooo{#`%${%&`+'${`%&NO CARRIER")

...Armstrong also needs a good dunking in the Pacific.

Obama has a very clear plan. It goes like this:
1.Stimulate economy with massive government spending in 09-10.
2.Slash government budget in 2011. (this includes NASA funding)
3.Cross fingers that step 1 works.
4. Increased tax revenues caused by step 1 and spending cuts from step 2 yield budget surplus at then end of 2011.
5. Say, "See, I balanced the budget!" in 2012.
6. Get reelected in 2012.

..is a good dunk in the Pacific. Flying people around in low earth orbit is neither science nor particularly inspirational as human spaceflight, and uses up billions that could fund real space science missions.

I like SageTV ( http://www.sagetv.com/ ), especially the one-click commercial skipping; it has (had?) its occasional hiccups, but this might also be a function of how much one fiddles with the hardware/software setup :-) It seems pretty mature (it's at v6.x by now), has an active user/contributor base, and handles multiple receivers and set top/converter boxes with IR control nicely. It has a free trial.

http://lanl.arxiv.org/abs/0812.2299 is a better (free) link to the preprint.

...and was therefore dropped by e.g. Hongkong as a response to the swine flu 'pandemic'. While we were there in May they changed their policy from quarantine to supervised medication once a day. Would have sucked to get stuck there for a whole week just because of elevated facial temperature - whether it's caused by H1N1, or 'normal' flu, or just because you're lugging heavy bags around after dehydrating for 12 hours in some damn' UA airplane with smelly watertanks.

Yep - you could see that when they redid I-88 near Chicago: they only put maybe a foot of gravel instead of the three needed to get drainage below frost level - this guarantees frost damage and the next rebuilding contract.