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Both are a bit above your price range. But the PicoScope 2200 is a nice entry level scope. Alternatively some assembly required with OpenADC.

In addition to this parental and, yes, proper advice: Go read some books in stead of throwing toys.
There are good arguments for and against manmade global warming, and personally I think there is no such thing as MMGW.
Thing is; there is no way of telling just yet. It is just a way of predicting the future, and there is no such business. The models are only as good as the information (=pre-assumptions) one puts in there, and then there is a huge lag of possible parameters in all those models. ...
In short; it is a bit to much:"*staring at handpalm, gipsy-accent* There will be a dark lady in your life! And great fortune as well!". We will know what the weather will be in 20 years after 20 years have gone by. The rest of all the people who (think they) can predict the future: GO BUY LOTTO TICKETS YOU IDIOT!!!

Go do this, then this. Then do some simple math involving number of vehicles and yearly gas consumption. Now, tell us again how AGW is mystic mumbo jumbo.

I thought that Colossus would take this title? Not only is it older and British, but it's also (I'm told) the World's oldest electronic computer.

Better would be an oscilloscope, but that's a much bigger outlay.

If you aren't working with high frequencies, second-hand analogue oscilloscopes are cheap. I got a 20MHz, 8-input Tektronix rackmount oscilloscope for about $40 on eBay. Since I'm mostly interested in working with audio frequencies, I don't need 100+ MHz.

Of course, the two probes I bought were also about $40 each, but I can use those on other Tektronix oscilloscopes I might buy in the future.

An alternative is something like a PicoScope, but even their cheapest model is more expensive than a secondhand analogue oscilloscope and a couple of probes.

The export ban always made me laugh because it arrogantly assumed that no one outside of the US/Canada was capable of developing their own encryption technologies.

This is something that British Secret Services have used to their advantage. Public key encryption technologies were developed at GCHQ in the early 70s but unlike the US, they didn't tell anyone until recently so they could use it without anyone knowing.

Something similar was done with Enigma. The fact that Enigma had been cracked was kept very quiet so that Enigma machines could be sold by the Brits to foreign governments after the war and we could listen in! News that we invented the World's first electronic computer was also kept secret for the same reason.

Aren't those all American inventions? (Okay, there may have been mechanical computers that weren't invented by Americans, but I take you to have meant the digital computer.)

The first true digital computer was invented by a British Post Office engineer named Dr. Tommy Flowers for use at the Bletchley Park intelligence facility, in England during the WWII.

See: Colossus

I found several serious software bugs. I can't remember them all now. It has an AC voltmeter function, the spec page claims 1% accuracy. It worked ok up to about 10KHz and above that the reading were completly wrong. The hardware is just a fast ADC so the PC software did the task of adding up the area of the voltage versus time graph.

A picotech support person reproduced the problems I found and promised to send a new version of the software. Months later after a few reminders they finally emailed me some software, the same buggy software I'd already been supplied with the unit.

Colossus
Baby

They believe that this knowledge could be applied to optical fiber networks as well, greatly improving their efficiency and speed.

It's wrong to say that the speed can be improved, because it's obviously impossible to go faster than the speed of light. The bandwidth might of course still be improved though.

First off, nothing is impossible.

Saying that, I ask you: Faster than the speed of light traveling through WHAT?

Remember light has been measurably slowed down, and 'C' is supposedly speed of light in a vacuum, is it not? Therefore, it's easy to speculate that the speed of light traveling through fibre != C.

A simple Google search seems to confirm my theory.

Now it's time to revel in my 1.9 GPA...Hope you didn't do better than that in HS.

Game ports don't actually have ADC's on them. The standard design is to discharge a capacitor, then charge it through the resitance of the joystick pot, and tim ehow long it takes to get to a specific voltage. This is related to the resistance. So, you can't use the game port for measuring voltages directly.

Picotech have addons for PCs to convert into a datalogging scope. I've never used one - and note that they tend to connect via the Parallel port. You can't get a whole lot of data through that port, so a 100Mhz scope won't actually show on the screen in real time. This doesn't usually matter, but you do want to bear in mind the delay between the measurement being made, and it actually appearing on the PC monitor.

On the plus side, they normally have data processing facilities that you only find on top of the range digital scopes - things like "trigger before", and FFT's.