I'm an American coder for a short while in Chermany living. I have found that not all Chermans are fluent in English. People with university educations perfect English speak. But I, in shops and other non-professional places (at least in Berlin), people with no English find. I was at that surprised. That said, it's amazing how much English has been incorporated both into the vocabulary and the culture. I am always advertising in English/Denglish seeing, and it strikes me as very odd that the Cherman culture would is so infected, linguistically, with an alien language. The Cherman people that I with speaking seem to think nothing of it though.

I've just started messing with Node, and so far it's fun, but it's nothing that lives up to what the fanboys who I know have implied. They seem to think it's got some kind of secret sauce to it that makes it unbelievably fast, completely stomping those Average Bargain Brand web frameworks that have been put together by ignorant clods who don't understand networking or application design. These fanboys are mostly JS devs from client-land who have taken some long drags on the Hype Pipe, and I suspect that many like them are behind all the Node noise. Mostly Node feels to me like an ultra-lightweight wrapper around my code. It makes me think of the minimalist Python frameworks I've assembled from parts like CherryPy and Genshi. The parent made a good analogy of it to a command line tool. I hadn't thought of it that way, but yeah. If you write your app code in CoffeeScript you'll be able to enjoy using a modern language with Node, or at least the illusion of one until it gets compiled.

You're right, that's what I should have said. I sit corrected.

Maybe not in the Congress, but thank the FSM for Bernie Sanders in the Senate.

You're giving credence to a rant from 2008 by someone who doesn't even know how to turn off Apache directory indexing on his own user directory? FWIW, Bitbucket did a complete redesign of their site and released it on October: http://blog.bitbucket.org/2012/10/09/introducing-the-redesigned-bitbucket/ .

As is Bitbucket (bitbucket.org), with the added bonus that the private repos that you create there are free too.

He said he had a wife, which casts doubt on your speculations. Current Slashdot theory holds that participants ARE indeed wankers in the basement, WoW glowing on the screen, surrounded by greasy old pizza boxes and assorted filth. Relationships with the opposite hand would strain the theory (it would show initiative) but relationships with the opposite sex would shatter it, as there is no known mechanism for the introduction of mating females into such habitats. That said, it's possible that he became a Slashdotter post-marriage.

During a co-op stint and also fresh from college I worked for a time at the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center in Kendall Sq. Back then, the Center had some sort of mission to interact with, assist, and leverage the local academic scene - MIT and Harvard students and researchers mostly. This posting makes me wonder if the company has now also given up on US universities and is spending its time, attention, and $ on Indian schools instead? It's amazing how far this company has fallen since back in the day (meaning prior to the mid-80s) when an IBM job was one that you had for life (there was a "no layoff policy") and one you could be reasonably proud of. In my numerous co-op gigs with them I learned more than I ever did at my (very good) engineering university. I suppose now that the kind of expertise and training that I was the beneficiary of is being provided only to overseas engineers.

OT, but one need only walk through an old cemetery in New England (and in the Old no doubt) to observe how many people lived deep into geezerhood. It's not at all uncommon to see gravestones with something like (b1724 - d1810) etched on them. It initially struck me as counter-intuitive, after all, these people had far less of the "medical science" that would have saved them from dying from routing ailments and injuries. I speculate, but maybe, just maybe, the relative lack of food additives as well as limited industrial (and I'm not referring to city life here) and auto pollution lead to overall better health? Also, perhaps, a relative lack of mental stress caused by, among other things, the modern rat race of life and wage-slavery, helped the otherwise-healthy to achieve long lifespans?

I'm thinking that, due to overpopulation, it simply capsized and sunk. Like Guam might. https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=bs23CjIWMgA#t=76s

Yes. In Washington state, and probably others, when you get your chipped "Enhanced Driver's License", the DOL issues it along with a "tinfoil" sleeve to keep it in when you're not producing it to display to The Authorities. Aside: I've yet to find a US/Canada border crossing that can read the chips. They always swipe the EDLs through what I assume is a magcard reader. Now that could just be a charade of some sort and they're actually reading the chips, but that seems somewhat unlikely, and, well, tinfoil-hattish. When asked, one of the US interrogators said that the smaller crossings didn't get all the high-tech goodies such as the readers and had to do things the old-fashioned way.

... I'm not surprised to see the carping about how the right-wing is allegedly being oppressed on college campuses. But it also makes me wonder to what extent Christian schools tolerate free speech. The Wikipedia page for Liberty U describes how the school "un-recognized" the Democratic student group for being ideologically unfit.

I passed through last summer. There's a primitive civilization there that probably deserves more study by anthropologists. The members worship a subset of their ancestors, referred to by them as "cowboys", and they build impressive monuments that they call "wind turbines" in "farms" that cover vast areas of land.

My WRT54G - the model that runs a Linux kernel - died about a week ago too. New-ish, but out of warrantee of course. I had DD-WRT on it from the beginning and it's been fine. I'd thought these models were tanks, but now I think I'll just save money and get a disposable AP/router that runs Tomato or DD-WRT. To be fair, I'd had the Linksys stacked on top of a Q1000 (I think) DSL box so if the Linksys had overheating issues to begin with, that may have sealed its fate. I wonder if using a mineral oil bath for cooling the AP would degrade the signal?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immortal_jellyfish Impressive, but I'm not sure if I'd want to keep going back to my sexually immature, colonial stage over and over and over again.