Eh?! Any internal combustion engine will benefit from turbocharging, simply because packing more air into the engine allows more fuel to be burnt. Whether the engine has a throttle plate or not is irrelevant - even at light throttle the intake air being at positive pressure helps increase the VE of a petrol engine. As for 'a little bit more power' - the BMW M12 Formula 1 turbo engine (probably the epitome of competition turbos, at least on ultimate power output) - 1.5 litres, 1,300bhp (cf. production 1.5l petrol engine approx. 100bhp, competition 1.5l naturally aspirated petrol engine approx. 200-250bhp and very peaky).

Yup, it's a shame that the vast majority of commercial power generation reactors are water cooled, primarily because most of the early design work in nuclear power reactors (in the US and USSR at least) was led by Naval interests wanting reactors suitable for vessel propulsion. Gas cooled reactors have their own issues but are far less likely to suffer a core meltdown due to loss of coolant than a water cooled reactor.

Yup, and I'm old enough to remember the multi-page article in Byte (from when it was great) on the move to kernel mode drivers in NT4 and the ramifications of said move. As I recall the gist of the article was that Microsoft was being brave/foolish compromising the stability of NT for the sake of graphics performance, particularly on NT Server.

Most of my generation (late 30's/early 40's) in the UK started out with Tom Duncan's excellent book, Adventures with Electronics. It's definitely old school - transistors, resistors, capacitors and (from memory) one project which used a small 3-pin IC in a radio receiver. No logic devices and definitely no PLCs. There's a follow-up, Adventures with Microelectronics and (after my time) a third book, Adventures with Digital Electronics. To me the great thing about the book was that it's divided into projects which you can just dive into - you don't need to follow the book sequentially, although it will help your understanding if you do. Every project had a written description of how it works, circuit diagrams, a layout to build it on an 'S-Dec' (solderless prototyping board) and ideas to change, improve, modify the circuit. Using the S-Dec for prototyping made it very easy to swap components to see what effect that had on the circuit's operation. All the components used were (are?) standard, unlike a lot of kits which involved daisy-chaining together proprietary modules. For a basic grounding in electronics you can't go far wrong and my son will definitely be getting my old copy and component box when he's old enough.

My advice would be to start with the basics of analogue circuits (as in the book above) and get a grounding in these things before you get into digital electronics. I have a friend who is an EE in mobile communications, at the moment 3G hardware, and he's always commenting on the lack of analogue/RF skills in the more recent EE graduates, who focus on digital. Which is good for him, as his skillset is much in demand. I'd agree with the two posters who mentioned audio/hi-fi and ham radio - hi-fi is more immediately practical in that you can make big amps etc. but there's nothing like VHF/UHF/microwave for teaching good construction skills.

Have fun and don't get too addicted to the smell of hot solder.

AC :)

If one $500 drone can force the US to shutdown the entire GPS coverage for a region, that's a pretty big win for whoever launched that drone when you think of the amount of havoc that would cause.

Troll. Since when was ham radio all about providing disaster comms? It's about radio - the electronics of the transceivers, the physics of propagation, the engineering of masts and antenna (not to forget microwave transceivers, which seems as much to do with precision mechanical engineering as electronics) and add in the mix a bit of old-fashioned social interaction by talking with people. It's a hobby, nothing more, nothing less and as hobbies go, a pretty benign one at that. BTW - I'm not a ham, so no woodwork to crawl out of.

Tritium lights are great - I bought a couple and taped one to the dog's collar so I don't trip over him at night and one to the toilet seat so I can pee at night without putting the light on. The only thing was I got confused and peed on the dog...

You see plenty of them here in Cambridge, UK, but they generally tend to be ridden by the sort of people who would really benefit from having to pedal their bikes...

...with three bullets holes in it would give Steve Balmer a chubby.

Erm, apart from the fact the HP's Procurve networking kit is already enterprise class and shed loads better than anything 3Com has made in many years.

On the contrary - I to am British but have travelled a fair bit, mainly around mainland Europe and every time I have done so, I've learned a lot from other cultures. I've also found that the best journeys are made cash-poor and time-rich (which if you're working you may not be) - pack the family into the car and spend a lot of time going not very far and it'll be good - particularly if you can stay in local accommodation (i.e. not the local Best Western, but gîtes, gasthofs, agritourismo, etc.). To display my own prejudices, I don't understand why so many of my compatriots spend vast amounts of money traveling to the other side of the world when we have so much to see on our door-step - from Iceland in the north, down through Scandinavia, the low countries, the former eastern bloc, France, Spain, Italy and on to the Balkans, Greece, Turkey, north Africa...