The top 20% of American universities are among the best in the world. The rest, not so much. (I hold Master's degrees both from a US and an EU university)

Actually an important reason for the much higher speeds where I live (the Netherlands) is because there is a lot more competition between ISPs, no government subsidies at all (on the contrary, you pay sales tax on your connection fee).

Has anyone got that to work yet? (I signed up for the beta two days ago but didn't get an invite yet). That would be really useful, I work with Google calendar people and need to check two calendars.

Mod parent insightful please

Actually in those days Philips still had a wonderful engineering culture, combined with true in depth research. The current Philips just markets Chinese built products, with all the serious engineering contracted out. Philips actually had a science museum of their own at their headquarters in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, called the Evoluon, and I clearly remember playing with a vowel machine there (although it probably said "koffie" instead). Sadly the Evoluon was closed with the whole redirection of Philips when they decided there was more money to be made in marketing than there was in actually designing cool new stuff. Probably makes sense from a shareholder point of view, since they did become a bigger business success. As a geek it still pains me to see a place that managed to invent the Compact Disc become a shade of it former self in the tech world.

You have to bear in mind that the UK police only invested in CCTV cameras, not in people or software to actually do something with the footage. This was mentioned in many media reports so you can assume criminals know about it too. So the only thing that this proves is that crime does not go down if you only put up cameras, if you actually start using the footage to catch bad guys the statistics might be very different. -j

They're called judges

Entirely off-topic, but several (democratic) countries have a judicial system with law experts instead of laymen on the jury.

"Safety group Eurocontrol"... Eurocontrol is the European air traffic management center.