Some of those students come from countries with poorer educational systems, although I doubt you'll find thousands coming from Germany to pay through the nose for an undergraduate education.

My school (University of Edinburgh) had well over a thousand US students alone, and enough students from asia and the middleeast that scots were among the minority in plenty classes.

Would i have preferred a CS degree from MIT - almost certainly - but when i could go to a school that's consistently in the top 20 worldwide, without paying fees, why would I?

I've seen them run at 50 and 60 mph just fine, of course it just takes one dumbass doing something stupid to screw up the whole traffic flow (though isn't that true of nearly all traffic flows).

For high traffic levels i'm not sure they are any better than traffic lights, but they are great when traffic is low because they don't slow down your journey by making you wait at reds when no-one is coming the other way.

Yeah, it's especially tough since there's no straight ahead signal. It's very hard to tell if someone knows what they are doing and is leaving via the opposite exit, or if they don't know what they are doing and are turning left.

Colorado has a lot of californian drivers too. As best I can tell, california removes the bulbs from all their cars' signals - must be some fuel efficiency standard.

I've never seen one with more than 2 lanes going round it in the US. That seems to freak out enough drivers that i'm not sure the 4 and 5 spiraling lane ones would work well.

I always thought the point of a roundabout was that you didn't have to slow down significantly if there wasn't other traffic. Though in the US they are generally designed quite tight and it makes it hard to do that safely.

Although i've never seen a roundabout with a limit above 35mph. I used to know of a 60mph, 5 lane wide one in the UK, but it had been dropped to 50 last time i was there.

My town in the US does have a few roundabouts and they are actually working quite well. I started a personal campaign to signal properly when using them and maybe 15% of drivers now do that too.

Still it happens in real schools too. I went to a school that's ranked in the Top 20 in the world for a CS&E degree and first year was a joke. Stuff like univariate differential algebra that i'd covered previously in high school. Even second year math had stuff like fourier and z-transforms which was also covered in advance high school classes.

Can't remember any of that shit now, but it turns out a degree is more of a tool to open doors than learn stuff.

I think you've smoked that already. I can't wrap my head around that many dimensions.

Call your local news network. It'll be a nice feel good story about the internet if they can get your laptop back

Well it's a moving sidewalk that goes up a hill, although i don't recall it really having steps as such - more like an airport people mover.

I think you are exactly right.

You don't need their set-top box at all. If you've got a cablecard capable tv then you can rent a cablecard for $2/month from them and you are home free. Perhaps that'd be a better solution for the OP - i can't imagine the cablecard draws much power.

How does that work with the franchise agreement.

From a casual reading of the denver agreement, the city provides access to rights of way for cable laying and comcast provides various services like local municipal channels, service to public buildings etc...

If comcast are violating their franchise agreement then surely the municipality can tell them to stop running cables under roads.

The Central Mid-Levels Escalator moves you up and down about a half mile in a busy hilly part of the city. It has its critics but it seemed to be pretty well used when i was there.

It was an honest mistake.

A friend of mine got banned from fark late one night, and my response was along the lines of "fuck fark, we can make something better". By 9am the next morning bannination.com was live and i had one hell of a hangover coming on. It had hundreds of users the first day and i'm now kinda stuck with it.

It's proven to be a pretty entertaining hobby, and despite the level of stupidity, there are certainly gems of humour and moments of educational value.

I know quite a few of my facebook contacts haven't used their real name, however i'd say facebook and linked in fall firmly in the domain of social networking which is of course tied to your identity.

I'm looking for a site like slashdot which focuses on the discussion but requires up front identification.