Sorry, but I think you and many of the others here need to go back and read his question. He didn't say he wanted ideas for labs, he said he wanted his students to contribute to real science, as in, do things that lead to publications by professional physicists. While I did many of the experiments that you did and found them interesting and learned a lot from them, none of those produced publishable results. You made fun of Galaxy Zoo, but the work that the thousands of people did who participated in that experiment led to real publications in the astronomical literature. Astronomy in particular is a science where amateurs can contribute and I think he cited Galaxy Zoo not because he thought it was better than building a Foucault Pendulum, but because it has a different goal -- it is getting his students to put in their time as essentially free labor on science projects much larger than they could do in class. Although, maybe you know of a high school building a 3.5 meter telescope with a drift scan camera and multi-object spectrograph that is recording images and spectra for a million galaxies. Because at that school, kids could get the same experience the ones in his class got by participating in Galaxy Zoo.

According to the Senior Review summary, the budget for Arecibo is $12 million per year. Some of this goes to hardware maintenance, but most goes to employing the 155 people who keep the place running.

The problem with depending on small donations, I would imagine, is that long-range planning for such a large facility requires some kind of commitment that the source of funding will be stable year after year. In other words, there must be institutional support for the lion's share of the budget.

Apple may be cutting corners in QA in response to the lower premiums they've been able to charge over the years.

I've had hardware problems with a PBook G4 17", an iMac G5, and an older iBook. When I mentioned this to my local Apple Service guy, he told me that he's noticed that as Apple has come down in price, they've been forced to use less expensive components with correspondingly higher failure rates.

True or not, I agree with another poster who pointed out they've been much more responsive to these issues. I had all three fixed for free, even post AppleCare warranty period.