Yeah, right... like PC's need any help looking bad in general

*hugs* his Sun Blade 2000. Running Solaris.

Really? There's you don't see any cultural difference between people from the Louisiana bayou, Texas, New York, and central California at all?

Then it's a good thing Sun keeps coming up with new ideas, so that they aren't circling the drain.

The old McNealy strategy of 1980's UNIX vendors failed and that's why Sun's in the state that it is, but taking on NetApp and EMC with the storage strategy ( storage 7000 boxes ) is brilliant

Culture and language are inseparable. Most Bilinguals agree that there are thoughts you can have in one language that you can't really have in the other. The ideas might be the same but the expression is not. Language is a huge part of culture

How is it any different from Europeans worried about losing their local cultural expressions to the Muslim immigrants? Or Americans worried about the influx of Spanish speaking latinos (some of which may just be blind racism but some might be people wanting American culture to survive)

People think their cultures are valuable. Quebec does something about it.

It is now, yes. I'd give the language laws some credit

No, why would they be? English wasn't the declining language in the 60's. Nobody finds it more convenient to teach their kids French rather than English.

The whole idea behind the laws are that both cultures are intrinsically valuable and worth protecting. Except English culture and language doesn't need protection, it's doing quite fine on it's own

French culture and language was declining rapidly before the introduction of the language laws.

There's an Anglophone upper class in Quebec, and immigrants from non-English countries come in and generally want to learn English. That doesn't bode well for French so laws were introduced to attempt to encourage Francophone Quebequois from becoming Anglophone.

It's worked well enough that Latvia introduced similar laws to try to protect the Latvian language and culture from the massive influence of Russian after the Soviet Union fell apart

So you've never worked anywhere big and complex enough to take advantage of problem escalations. Point?

Managers also have to make decisions based on things more than "what would be fun to work on"

The programmers may want to use some random opensource tool because it would shave a bit of dev. time in an integral role and the manager saying "no" and insisting on something that's a pain in the ass may actually have a reason for doing so. Availability of support contracts, for instance.

Your experience is probably due to the fact that programming is a marketable skill that is relatively easy to learn combined with other peoples' technophobia.

Once you're (using the general "you", not specifically "you") about 2 years in to your undergrad you'll understand that you can teach a monkey how to program a computer, it's programming it well that's the sticker. A handful of my peers @ uni. were self-taught programmers from highschool but they turned out to be sub-par software developers that didn't understand simple things like big-O analysis or basic formal linguistics, and half dropped out.

That you understand that teaching yourself how to program isn't terribly impressive is promising, you'll have a painfully easy first year of university and won't be struggling with the basics while trying to learn other things for the rest of it.

Idiocracy will be accurate only in so far as we manage to avoid disaster. Some catastrophic event that causes enough scarcity and hazard for long enough will result in the intelligent ( = resourceful ) people surviving and thriving, and the unintelligent ( = unresourceful and uncreative ) either dying or positioning themselves so low on the hierarchical totem pole their genes will become less relevant.

For the unintelligent to survive at all ( which is a biological imperative that animals as dumb as flatworms manage to pull off ) in the face of catastrophic events they need a larger number of offspring as a contingency for their genes... Like how crocodiles lay 50 eggs so that a few survive.

It makes evolutionary sense that low intelligence is correlated with large brood

So learn another language and get a leg-up on the competition. Life is capitalism in slow motion, if you can't compete you fail.

And which concept is that? The concept of chattel property that defined the family until recently ? The concept of breeding yourself a labour force for your farm ? "Family values" conservatives are incredibly myopic about what's traditionally defined "family".

What we've ultimately lost is the concept that a person can be owned in some capacity by another person, and with that for better or worse goes the concept of the traditional hierarchical family and the definition of marriage as an ownership relationship in favour of a contractual but I believe that it's principally a positive direction.

I get sent internationally once a year or so.

The trick is to work for a company that's gigantic, and has a workforce all over the place. Then get yourself inserted in to the most international team you can find there. Some team that works on a disproportionately foreign open-source project for instance ( like KDE, or for that matter just Linux ). Then you need to do a bit of extra work to warrant your being sent places ( write papers for conferences, etc )

Technical marketing is another mostly-technical field that involves a lot of international travel ( though you'll find you spend an inordinate amount of time in SFBay ) since you need to keep your ear on the buzz of the industry and make sure your company has a showing at various trade shows.

If international travel is high on your list of job satisfaction goals, you can achieve it. You may need to do extra work or take a bit of a salary cut to get it, but you can do it.