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.

Now that the lasers from space idea has been suitably demolished, perhaps we can consider the other way around: Ground based lasers to write a warning on the moon! It will only work during new moon of course so lets forget about tsunami warning, lets put up commercial messages. I'm betting there a few companies willing to part with a few million dollars to have their logo written on the moon for a day. Great business plan. Publicity is instantaneous global and free. Endless debates in the press, Greenpeace is going to freak out. Technically feasible?

You are confusing bytes (8 bits) with words (32 bit or 64 bit depending on the system). A byte will only hold 256 discrete values so you could perhaps store the year in there but certainly not an entire date, let alone the time as well.

There was a time once when converting an integer value to and from ascii was prohibitively expensive (hard to imagine now), so it was not unheard of to store a year as 4 bytes.

Correct. Coincidently, that's also why the pot in the Netherlands is of excellent quality: if they sell you garbage you would go back to complain (and you could even threaten to call the cops if you want to make a scene).

Dear mods,
I just noticed several of the "anonymous coward" posters are Chinese posters with useful insights, but with zero mod points. Even if you don't usually read ACs this might be a good occasion to make an exception.