I live in the Silicon Valley, and I had a choice of moving to NYC, and chose not to. Basically for the same reason - not a great place to raise a family. In the valley, your huge companies aren't all on top of each other and their employees aren't always competing over the same one-mile-radius from the center. You have Google in Mountain View, Apple in Cupertino, Yahoo in Santa Clara, Facebook in Menlo Park, etc. That makes commutes saner and housing cheaper. And each of these cities has its own little "cultural" thing, and you can go to one of the larger cities for bigger events and places.

In 1953, when Stalin died, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia was in the middle of being published. In the reshuffle the chief of State Security, Lavrentiy Beria, was declared a spy, but his article was in the B volume which was already published. As a result, an update was sent to all libraries in the form of a page be glued on top of his article, and the encyclopedia has an unexpectedly long article on the Bering Sea.

Hear, hear! Complete waste of time.

So I looked at the Perl5To6 Manual, and it gave me a headache. Really, I had to get some medicine just now. There used to be 10 ways to do anything in Perl 5, and in Perl 6 there's 20. And operators are approaching APL in obscureness and number. It has ways of being even more terse at the expense of the maintainer's head possibly exploding. Some changes are very nice and clean up some weirdness, but they compensated for it with a vengeance.

There's macros, and more contexts (where function returns different things depending on how its value is getting used), and meta-operators, and operator overloading on never-before-seen scale, and weird variant types, and ways to embed an enum into any object, even more complicated regular expressions, and so on ...

This is a great approach, but it has a big drawback: it relies on students' ignorance. If the class has anyone remotely interested in math, he'd know about this topic way before it's done in class. I learned basic calculus in 7th grade because I was curious about integral signs and what not. That was 3 years before I saw it in class. And there were several other kids in class who already saw it at that point. In fact we've discussed it in Physics (velocity, etc) before we talked about it in Math.

Actually, you have no clue. It was impossible to become non-Jewish in Soviet Union. Most Jews tried, I think. If it were possible, I think many would have succeeded. It has nothing to do with faith anyway, most people were atheists. It had to do with ethnicity, whether you parents were Jews.

You have to be careful about generalizations. They may all be amoral (or not, I don't especially care), but they happen to vote in certain predictable ways, different for each one, so by supporting a certain politician over another, you can in fact get different results. Just don't fall in love with them.

I think you are forgetting that the man is appealing to Putin, not against him, and very respectfully, too. It's an old Russian tradition - to appeal to the czar against evil officials. Putin rather likes playing rescuer, swooping in and punishing the evildoers. So it may well turn out allright for him.

You must be joking. There's lots of apps for Android. Probably fewer than for iPhone, but not dramatically so. I was able to find an app for any task I needed.