lol. "Dear Google, we realise you have decided to pull out of business with the EU member states so we write to you to regretfully inform you that all your companies in Ireland and the Netherlands that you created for some reason or other will also be pulling out of doing business with the EU. We have communicated this information to the US treasury department as we believe the cash held by those companies will be sent back to the USA and we're all wondering whether you'll be paying the tax bill by money transfer or several truck loads"

I was referring the OP to it. I have updated OSM data for my local area when I found it was lacking absolutely vital information on the location of the local pubs. I also helped my work colleague fix a road section as it wasn't giving him the correct satnav details for his drive home.

OSM is awesome because I can do these things. Its not difficult to do either, just enough of an impediment to deter those who might want to deface the data.

but nobody sensible develops .NET without Visual Studio. .NET is becoming true to its Java roots - write once (on a Windows box with Microsoft tools and you might as well use Outlook and Office too) run anywhere.

In the UK, the borders were opened back in 1998. You'd think the initial rush would have stopped by now, but it is increasing (hence all the hooha over it today)

Because they are trying to destroy your jobs, not their own.

The day that the H1B programme also applies to MBAs and Managers is the day that corporations stop using H1Bs.

That is also naive. The US is still the largest economy in the world, the companies are here because the money is here

I think you'll find the money is not in the USA, otherwise those companies would have to pay tax on it, hence all the 'not here' companies with the same name.

So, if they are happily opening offices overseas to save on tax anyway, why not employ workers in those companies and get them to collaborate with the parent company? With today's technology in comms and remote working, its not so much of a problem at all - in fact it can be a better condition to be in if your company places a lot of emphasis on having meetings, your offshore team would simply get on with their work while you wasted yours!

You could also pay them less in their own country, so I really do wonder why these companies are so hell-bent on increasing immigration.

partly population concerns - while Amwerica is a big, wide, empty country you all want to live in very crowded little communities. Increasing immigration causes more pressure on those communities for things like housing and traffic.

Then there's the economic issue, while the wild west had no social care benefits, today you have many. So every new immigrant either has no job and gets benefits, or has a job and pays his own way but helps to displace another worker who then ends up on benefits.

In the UK we see this a lot, while immigration has increased dramatically, the number of jobs has increased relatively slowly, so we have 6 million immigrants but 2 million unemployed. Our health and education systems have not been funded accordingly though, and are showing signs of collapse. Hence, immigration is a good thing, but only to a point - not as an unlimited influx.

Its probably entirely linked to the rate of immigration overall, in the old days when we had few immigrants being drip-fed into the system things were OK, now we have a flood people are getting concerned.

Actually that was one of the "great new things" for .NET applications - you could deploy your application using the DOS copy command!!! Fantastic...

except then they added the GAC and the crap in the various .net frameworks folders like installutil etc and now they'vbe come up with a new 'great new thing' to let you deploy your applications using the copy command.. I wait with anticipation for it to get a dependency on hyper-v administration console and various Windows Server features and updates.

correct - that's because once your fizzy drink that is designed to be drunk cold warms up you start to taste it....

real ales should be drunk at room temperature so you can appreciate all their complex flavours

it was just an example.. its been years since Latin was the most common language too.

that, and the fact that the people using it got a kicking from some other group. We don't speak much Latin anymore, we speak a bastardised Germanic-y language called English even if we have kept a few words for specialists.

And I'd say we only speak English nowadays, not because how the sun never once set on a salmon-pink part of the map, but because the Americans chose to speak it. If the USA had chosen German as their national language years ago, perl would probably be quite different!!

Now that happened, and we add the previous corpus of English-speaking people, I think its reached a critical mass to make it a de-facto standard (like how Windows and not anything really good is our most common OS, or javascript is the only browser-based language worth knowing :-)

Maybe one day we'll replace it with Marain, but we'll need either a Utopia or Dictator to arrange that for us!

But that's because people are fucked up - and the language evolves to fill our needs of being weird and wonderful.

I think what's proposed here is the same ilk as that of Swatch Time. Someone thought its better if we have a dull but efficient system that reflects how computers want to work and not how people do. They forget that we're not (yet) servants of the machines and we like the craziness, the nuances allow us to express our creativity.

Now, I'm off for a pint, you can go and enjoy your 0.568261 litres of fizzy beverage while you sit in the corner with your po-faced mates and discuss base 10 maths :-)

I didn't mean "not use stackoverflow" but "don't surf it as a hobby".

I happen to have quite a big rep on there, but my 2 work colleagues here who are older than I am both use SO without having a user account on there. (yes, they agree they should have one if only to show their appreciation in upvotes). And besides, it wasn't as heavily advertised as I never noticed it (though I do spend most of my time on Programmers rather than SO).

I think many older guys just aren't as likely to be filling in surveys on SO as opposed to using it.

dammit, I'm self-taught!! :-)

I'm not sure he is - I studied late 80s and there were very few women in my comp.sci classes at my university.,

Maybe its a regional thing, I was in the UK.

Mind you, in my first year I had to take maths and another subject - I chose religious studies as it was 2 hours a week and the tutor explained that there were no wrong answers... I was 1 out of 2 males in the entire class of about 40. Best. Course. Ever.