I came to the USA following a professor I just wanted to work with. He came here in the 80's because of the weather (no kidding), given an existing research environment similar to Europe.
Before landing here I thought the USA was a great country. But my preconceptions have fallen.
I am aware I have started a thread that is drifting way off topic and can potentially get very personal. If you'd like to discuss the issue further over a beer, that'd be great. We can then talk about why I pay almost identical income taxes in the USA and in Spain, and yet here my money doesn't seem to come back to me. You can reach me at my surname at ucla edu.
"I am aware I have started a thread that is drifting way off topic and can potentially get very personal"
You sound like a nice guy, I just hate these myths that the US is somehow a hellhole compared to Europe. And you failed to demonstrate why the US is less free than Europe.
"We can then talk about why I pay almost identical income taxes in the USA and in Spain"
USA: top income tax rate and the top corporate tax rate are 35 percent.
Spain: top income tax rate is 45 percent, and the top corporate tax rate is 35 percent.
Now for the jugular (from heritage.org)!
USA: Unemployment: 5.5%, $39,676 per capita
Spain: Unemployment: 11%, GDP per capita $25,047
It would seem that Americans are almost twice as wealthy as Spaniards, pay less income tax, and have more than half the unemployment.
"Exactly who is in Guantanamo or the secret CIA prisons, and why?"
Well, not you, and not anyone you know.
The mere fact that you're comfortable posting this stuff on a public site, under your own name, demonstrates that you have ZERO fear that someone will break down your door tonight and take you off to a "secret prison".
To be quite blunt: you don't even believe your own bullshit.
The gratuitous U.S. bashing in this thread looks exactly like something you'd see on Reddit (more likely, Digg). Not only is it ugly, it's utterly irrelevant to the nominal topic of discussion. Even if the U.S. were Nazi Germany, the Stalinist U.S.S.R., and the Pol Pot regime rolled into one, it would have zero relevance to the ethical position of Google with the Chinese government.
I suppose I could have said that Paul B.'s position (and that of several others) is a classic example of the tu quoque variety of ad hominem fallacy, but that would basically just be using Latin to say the same thing.
My point is that no place is perfect and that different countries have different problems. It's not US bashing to suggest that we are not perfect, and that everything isn't black and white.
Wow, for $1,000 per year you could just about buy a MacBook and a copy of Parallels, which would let you create a full library of VMs with all the different browsers and operating systems, then load any one you wanted.
Plus -- you'd have a sweet machine to use for other purposes when you weren't testing. This sounds way overpriced.
You could do the same thing with VMWare Fusion (though it's still in beta, and I haven't tried it).
Err... what does doing math have to do with it? If I have a good (human) assistant, I can ask him or her to find me all the Y Combinator articles and it just works. I don't need to write some formal mathematical description of the task.
It's true that it's all math/physics/chemistry underneath, due to how the brain works, but in practice we never worry about that, just as an engineer doesn't generally consider quantum and relativistic effects when he's designing a bridge, or an outfielder doesn't scribble down a bunch of differential equations before catching a fly ball.
Sure, any standard computer is equivalent to a bounded Turing machine, but Turing machines are a real pain in the ass to program.
Mathematical purity is one thing. Getting your work done is quite another.
As a second source (it's sometimes helpful to hear material from more than one perspective), UC Berkeley has some podcasts from a Scheme course which uses SICP:
I listened to a few of them a while back, just to check them out. Not bad, if you can ignore the lecturer's occasional side-trip into politics (well, it IS Berkeley).
Yes, "bad marketing". It's been possible for years to significantly improve the look and feel at the scripting level, but they never bothered. Also, the fact that it took them so long to figure out that Gnome and KDE were where Unix was headed and get with the times is not a good sign that they have the marketing skills necessary to stay current.
Maybe try generating an Atom feed? Atom seems to be much better defined than any of the myriad competing RSS implementations.
Or maybe toss a hyperlink into the description tag rather than the comments tag ... from what I see in the RSS 2.0 spec, comments is a more of a "should" rather than a "must". The spec itself refers to it as an optional element, and Winer (I think) says in a note that implementers "should" support it. Clearly some of them don't. :-)
Someone mentioned below that it's working on Reddit. I just looked at their feed, and it looks like they are indeed putting the comments link inside "description" rather than "comments".
"I bet most people who use/used PHP got there because it was popular"
This is fairly accurate, but not quite the whole story.
Ascribing PHP's success to "popularity" makes it sound like a simple fashion statement. The reality is that, due to its popularity, PHP has a ton of libraries and an enormous base of existing code (ranging from little hacks to parse a certain data format all the way up to full-blown applications like MediaWiki). It's not just the language, it's the ecosystem.
That's a real advantage that's often overlooked by those who advocate other languages. Also, don't forget that PHP hosting is cheap and ubiquitous. Rails, not so much.
That said, Ruby is catching up pretty fast, and I've been using Ruby (and sometimes Rails) for any new project that isn't tightly coupled with existing code. For me, writing Ruby is vastly more pleasant and efficient than writing PHP, even though I've been using PHP for five years and Ruby for only one.
I still write a lot of Java, too, but JRuby is starting to eat into that pretty fast. It's an end run around the library/existing code problem.
MacBook (non-pro). I'm poor/cheap, plus I actually prefer a smaller form-factor for notebooks; I have full-sized external monitors at both home and work, so the smaller display is a non-issue where I spend most of my time, and a postive advantage when I'm mobile.
I'm curious: what made you decide to move to a country with no freedom, bad education and no culture?