It's probably not a matter of will, but of opportunity. The guy said he took work in a warehouse stacking boxes... how the hell do you expect him to afford an Altium license? Obviously, that's something you learn on someone else's dime. But if they're not willing to hire you because you don't know that tool, then you have a catch-22.

Wow, that's rather ridiculous: $30/month (USD equivalent) for some stupid radio website? That should be what you pay for internet access!

As for blocked sites, that's easy to get around with a VPN. Which is a lot cheaper than $30/month I might add.

Why would Germans of that time have a Browning, instead of a Luger?

It's surely crap, just like QWERTY. Dvorak and Colemak are superior.

Out of curiosity, how does Quebec French compare with the French spoken in Louisiana by the Cajuns?

He's probably assuming he's talking to an American. Everything is going to be in Spanish here in many parts of the US before long, the way things are going.

Rooms go quiet when you enter, people cross the street to avoid meeting you on the sidewalk then cross back after you've passed.

Ok, how do random people on the street tell that you're not a tourist and are there to stay, and more importantly how do they tell you're not a native Quebecoi?

Taxis wont pick you up.

Ok, how exactly does a taxi driver look at you standing on the street and tell that you speak English instead of French? It's not like French people look significantly different from other white people (assuming you're white of course). (If you're not white, that's just plain ol' racism, not discrimination against non-French people. And it's not like all French speakers are white anyway; there's whole countries in Africa full of French speakers, plus lots of African-descent people in France.)

And why wouldn't you just learn French anyway?

Quebec is the only way for an English white person to get an idea what life was like for African Americans in the time immediately after emancipation.

It was like that for AAs all the way until the 1960s, and beyond in some places.

But you're still not making sense. How do people tell at a distance that you're a white native English speaker instead of a white native French speaker? French people do not look remarkably different from people of British or German ancestry, at least not enough to tell at a distance.

BS, this is the exact same thing every libertarian regurgitates and it isn't true. What you're describing is the Articles of Confederation. Those were tossed out in the 1790s in favor of the Constitution, which provides a much stronger central government though still with some federalism. What you describe also isn't feasible at all with all the tiny states we have, some no bigger than Luxembourg (which itself saw the value of union and created a trade union with Belgium and Netherlands, called Benelux, back in the 70s). That's why I propose breaking North America up into only handful of new nations, somewhere between 5 and 12. Each would have about the population of a good-sized European nation like France or Spain, not too small (small countries have no power or clout on their own) and not too large (large nations get you all the problems we have now, too much infighting and too much corruption due to too much diversity and disagreement between the regions). Then, coordinating 10 or less countries together in a more-limited trade union isn't that big a task, unlike trying to get 50 little (and some big) states to agree on anything.

While we're at it, we should eliminate all the state lines (each of these nations would probably have ~5 states) and redraw them in a more sensible ways, to account for local cultures and values, instead of just drawing straight lines on a map arbitrarily. A series of referendum elections, allowing people (probably at the county level) to choose which state they want to be in would fix this.

Same is true for subversion. In both cases you can develop and test your code and review your changes against what was last seen original copy.

It's admittedly been a while since I last used SVN, but it was not at all like Git; it was entirely centralized and required server access to do almost anything. Not every developer has a full copy of the repo, as they do with Git. It was pretty slow when I used it too (though nothing like ClearCase).

With Git, you can check in changes, create branches, etc. all you want without needing any network access at all. You only need network access and server access when you want to share those changes with others. This just isn't possible in a centralized version control system.

Github changes git into centralized subversion-like system

No, it doesn't. It facilitates sharing between developers, and that's all. This is not like a centralized VCS, where you need server access to actually do version-control.

but if it is down, your cooperation workflow is going to suffer badly.

No, not really. The whole point to the GitHub (or similar) server is to provide a single point to facilitate sharing. Without it, you'll need to do pushes and pulls directly between developers' machines, which obviously is inefficient, but is doable. However, it's also trivial to switch to a new central server at any time: just stop using the old one, clone the latest version of the repo (which whoever last pushed to GitHub would have) to the new server, have everyone point to the new server, and you're done. That's something you can't easily do with a centralized VCS.

It does seem like it'd be really nice if we had some easy way of replicating wikis and bugtrackers, so we could move those around as needed, like we do with Git.

If you're not French (and don't like Quebec culture and language), then WTF are you doing living there? That's your own dumb fault for moving to a place you don't like.

This is why both Canada and the US should be abolished as nations, and new (smaller) nations should be formed in their places. Quebec should be an independent country, the west coast should have its own country, the US northeast should be a country (perhaps combined with Canada's maritime provinces) the US southeast should be a separate country, etc. Then these new countries can form a trade union much like the EU, with a shared currency (maybe) and free trade between them, but still having a huge amount of autonomy so that each region can do its own thing, such as legalizing pot (as the PacNW wants to do), or banning pot and abortion (as the Dixie states want to do).

Don't blame me, I never bought their crap or attended their shows. But yes, when you worship the "Free market", you get low-forehead crap like Nickelback, Britney Spears, Justin Bieber, Honey Boo Boo, The Kardashians, and the various Hollywood trash movies, so we can thank the masses of our fellow citizens for that.