Now maybe they can reverse that ridiculous incandescent light ban.

There is no incandescent light ban, despite what Joe Barton (who co-sponsored the "ban" in the first place) would like you to believe. There is only a mandate for lights to become more efficient -- there is nothing in the law mandating that a particular lighting technology be phased in or out. In the end, it is likely a moot point anyway as market forces (partly as a result of European regulations, which the US Congress can do nothing about) have been pushing incandescent bulb manufacturers to close factories. In other words, with or without the law, incandescents are on the way out.

Like others, I would suggest LEDs. The prices are coming down fast, and the quality (and directionality, or lack thereof) is improving fast. Right now you still have to be pretty careful about what brand you buy and such -- the cheapest available bulb is likely to disappoint -- but by the time you have a hard time finding the incandescents you need I suspect LEDs will be much more viable.

If I were in your position, I would stick with the ME for now. For one thing, you can do a BS + MS in the same amount of time (or less) that you can do a double-major BS, and the MS will get you farther in the job market than a double BS. When you become an upperclassman, you will have the opportunity to choose electives from other departments, and maybe even some grad-level courses, which will allow you some limited space to explore your interests. If you're interested in controls, look to EE departments -- where I did my MS and Ph.D., the EE controls classes were filled with students from other departments. Perhaps other universities offer those in the CS department, but I doubt it. And don't limit yourself to controls: If you're interested in biofuels, maybe look for some relevant chemical or bioengineering courses. You should also look for undergraduate research opportunities, summer internships, and student projects that coincide with your interests (e.g., a solar-car-racing team, if you're going to a university that has one).

When you finish your BS, you will have a lot more opportunities to specialize during an MS year. Not only can you switch fields if you like (e.g., switch to CS if you think it is really the way to go), but many universities offer specialized multi-disciplinary MS and certificate programs that are targeted to specific skill sets. My university offered quite a few of those -- off the top of my head, I remember computer-aided manufacturing, a multidisciplinary semiconductor processing program, and a business certificate aimed at succeeding in the global (as opposed to American) business environment. Universities are now adding similar programs targeted at biofuels and other alternative energy technologies.

Only the '80s version had loud guitars and were called Stryper. They pollinated with Bibles, which might have helped churches but didn't do much for crops....

I assume that you are aware that all these books were produced at US Government expense?

What gives you that idea? The National Academies are private organizations and the books they publish do not all result from federally funded research. Even so, the only publications that are automatically public domain are those of US government employees, regardless of the funding source.

According to the article, part of the cell is composed of cadmium telluride. Both are toxic and various compounds of tellurium stink to high heaven. I wonder what happens if the cells get caught in a fire?

Right, the cell is composed of cadmium telluride, which is a binary compound. That is different from saying the cell is composed of cadmium and tellurium, which are separate atomic compounds with different properties. Toxicity and fire studies on cadmium telluride are ongoing, but so far they have found that cadmium telluride is not much of a threat. In fact, there was a chicken farm with cadmium telluride solar panels that burned down in Germany in late 2009, and while the place was treated by the authorities as a hazardous waste site, it was because of the chicken poo, not the cadmium telluride -- the burnt panels were collected and sent back to the manufacturer for recycling.

Put another way, assuming cadmium telluride is toxic and stinky just because it is composed of toxic, stinky elements is like assuming water is explosive because it is composed of explosive elements.

The only way I can see that one wins on cost with this technology is if one has electronics that are so low-powered that they can be powered by an amorphous solar cell with an area equal to that of the circuitry itself. If you need a point of reference on the practicality of this requirement, I point you to your average solar-powered calculator, which has a solar cell area of several cm^2, and an active circuit area of probably less than 5 mm^2.

According to the press release from University of Twente, they will use amorphous silicon or CIGS layers deposited on top of the integrated circuit. A pretty average amorphous silicon solar cell will produce 6 mW/cm^2 in full sunlight, and about 0.5 mW/cm^2 indoors. A CIGS cell, especially on such a small scale, could probably come close to tripling those figures (one of the biggest problems in realizing high CIGS cell efficiencies in mass production is getting layers of uniform quality over large areas, an issue that would be dodged in this case).

The press release from Twente says the power requirement is "well below 1 mW"; if you assume the actual requirement is 0.1 mW and you use CIGS cells then you could probably still get enough power to run the circuit indoors on 6-7 mm^2 area. That doesn't seem out of line to me, but then I'm a solar cell designer, not an IC designer....

That said, the primary reasons the 17th Amendment passed, which mandated election of senators by popular vote, were repeated bribery scandals and deadlocked state legislatures, causing some states to go years without one of their senators. Even before the 17th Amendment, some states used referenda to direct the legislatures as to who should be seated in the Senate, so some senators who were ostensibly chosen by the state legislatures were actually elected by popular vote.

At any rate, my point not that you are wrong, of course, but that the old way was not necessarily better than what we have now. I guess it comes down to whether you think it's better that a senator be beholden to shady state legislators or shady lobbyists....

Yes, since sometime in the mid-'00s it has been US law that you have to be able to keep your number when you switch carriers, provided you are not also changing your geographic location. Different parts of the US have different area code (like city codes in the EU), and if you go somewhere that is served by a different area code then your carrier can force to you take a new number. This is always the case with landlines, but not always with mobile numbers -- I have a friend who has lived in Washington, DC for years with an Atlanta phone number -- but if you change geographical locations and change your carrier then you generally have to get a new number.

I think you're missing the (rather badly made) point. Go to a Eurpoean mobile telco website (e.g. TMobile UK). It doesn't matter because the prices are all the same*. You can get a contract for £10, for a basic service, £15 with data and so on. That comes to £360 over two years = $580, give or take. So if your mobile bill is about $2000 over 2 years, you're effectively paying $1400 for the phone.

The problem with that logic, of course, is that in the US the telcos do not charge you a higher rate to subsidize your phone; rather, they lock you into a contract for a certain amount of time (usually 2 years) to guarantee a certain amount of cash flow from you.* Once the contract ends, you continue paying exactly the same rates. If you walk into a US carrier with an unlocked phone that you already own, you will pay the same rate as somebody who gets a "free" subsidized phone -- the only difference is that you will not be locked in to using their service for 2 years. Looked at from that perspective, you could argue that by not taking the subsidized phone you're paying hundreds of dollars to continue using the phone you already own (though a monthly rate plan is, of course, not your only option when you already own the phone, particularly if it is unlocked). * Unless, that is, something has changed in the 2-1/2 years since I moved outside of the US.

... then it will be easy to prevent criminal using the internet to escape. And it seems that, intentionally or no, that is the direction they're headed. These requirements sound like a recipe for drastically increasing expenses while simultaneously making the internet less useful to end-users. If they intend to pass those expenses on to their customers, I think it will be no surprise if an awful lot of Australians suddenly start remembering how well they got along in the pre-internet days.

When the installer came to install my Comcast service even HE had to wait on hold when he had to call into the office for something -- for an hour! Needless to say, we had a bit of time to chat while he waited. Come to find out that he lived in a part of my city that had a choice of cable providers, and he himself said he would never be a Comcast subscriber if he could help it....

What about the user input telling you to reboot?

It's worse than that. Putting together a powerpoint can give you the illusion that you've summarized and presented some issue clearly, when in fact, there is no content.

At work, we hired a contractor to do some initial investigation into a scientific problem for us. After spending some time gathering data, they gave us a summary powerpoint as the final report. We pushed back hard, saying instead that we wanted a written summary.

When it came back, the results had changed. By forcing them to actually put the summary of the data in writing, they were forced to spend longer thinking about the data, and through that analysis, they came up with a more accurate answer.

Well, I remember seeing a stand at a street fair for an organization which was pushing people to promise not to have children. I tried to find the name for this post, but when I searched for "organization which promotes having no children" on Google, the first link that came up was for NAMBLA, so I gave up in disgust.

"You can't really equate software and music/movies."

Thats where you're wrong, software do equate music, movies and photos etc. When you buy software, you get a bunch of bits with no promise that it will do anything at all. The only thing it has to do is perform roughly as stated in the brochures and its advertising laws that stands between you and a pile of worthless ones and zeroes, not copyright.

A new form of copyright with mandatory guaranties from the manufacturers would differentiate software from media but today, its exactly the same.