Every country has its moments - some go up only to go down, some stay down for long time. We will see what the future will bring. EU (which is not whole Europe) is being charged by waves of immigrants from Africa now which it tries to stop by building modern versions of roman walls. We know how it ended back then - destruction of empire and dark ages. These were followed by Enlightenment and wars and massive destruction in 20th century followed by growth etc. So yes we lost part of our energy in Europe. Look at US and you will see that the country lost part of its energy too. Big advantage US always had was to be a magnet of immigrants. This is changing for many reasons. There are other factors. You are right of course about the raise of new powers. Yet the history is never linear.

The winds of change are blowing - this much is true.

It is always good to have one scape goat guilty of the biggest evil etc. That is why results of neither Milgram experiment nor Stanford Prison experiment are valid for US citizens who are holly angels.

Is that not a perception game? People think - this president he can do all why is he not helping me and my uncle Fred? At the end the guys can end marines here and there but that is expensive. He can try to propose some laws but that is ineffective - just look at your lawmakers. He cannot even appoint judges properly, it seems. So you confront expectations of (often perceived as evil) power which in fact is not as big as people think. As for evil - it often helps to look in the mirror first when one looks for people guilty of things. He may have acted differently but if that would bring anything is doubtful. He is just a sign on the wall that US political system has some problems.

As a friend of mine who is a physician likes to emphasize: if you push hard enough shit comes out - different people have different levels at which this happens. What I wanted to say is this: some of these stasi agents were coerced into doing this, some of them believed what they did was good for the society. What good is coming out of knowing that stasi had enough muscle to force your ex-lover to file mostly meaningless reports on you? We in Europe are not as vindictive as US people seem to be. I like to attribute that to culture but the bottom line is - in countries that pushed their secret service people too hard after change of system, these secret service people started building quite effective mafias.

I do not know that many Germans that are seriously pissed off about that spying. Most of them do not even understand what the hell is going on - you can try to explain what metadata is or what it can be used for and see how far you get with that. Even for tin foil brigade the Snowden revelations were a bit of a shock, I am sure. Media are having field day after day of course and opposition parties have their fun too. Still, the way our, that is US and German, citizens' rights are twisted and reinterpreted is even more damaging. What the government is doing is what it is supposed to do: they found some spies they show them/us their anger and how strong they are and expel some 'diplomats'. The actual meaning of this is most likely hidden. I wonder how did they got these guys and if there were barely pawns sacrificed to achieve some other goal.

and 'working directly with NSA' involves what - bombing them with modern day equivalent of V2? How exactly should one work with an agency that is apparently out of control - or do you still think that US authorities (being government and/or congress) have any control over NSA?

it is actually about moral high ground as this is normally achieved by public show of how evil somebody else is. It helps if everybody already expected it anyway and it adds additional moments of joy if the side whose moral stand is being maimed is a pack of useless but nuclear armed fuckwitts.

I thought the gold was stolen by east Germans and moved to Canada or should I have watched die hard 3 till the end?

Assuming you have the means why the hell would you want to go there from all other places? Security? Isolation from the rest of the (poor world)?

I saw a documentary about solar panels in west Africa where main problem seemed to be cleaning those f. panels from dust. Guest what substance was used to remove the dust off the panels' surface.... To give you a hint - it is a drinkable liquid and there is not enough of it on a desert.

well thought out? I mean they can build there what the fuck they want - it is t heir money. Still why people live in such places and what is the purpose of this exercise is not clear to me. However I can think of building there a huge set of nuclear plants so that inevitable accidents affect limited space - that would make sense.

boring pictures - why is this a story in the first place and why assholes that obviously got to pinkmeth because of media noise about the case must post profanities there - I shall never know. People can do with their bodies what they want. If it is in their free time this should never affect their careers or relationships (this of course unless it does not reveal cheating etc). As long as no wrong doing is on the pictures they may have entertainment value but that is it. No reason to get excited. Other that now I am on the NSA terrorists list for using tor. And this is bigger story.

why C only? I think memory management is as important aspect of developing an application as anything else but there are cases where you can use gc and it will take care of it all. There are also cases where it is not available or cases where it is but you still need to know consequences of its use and where are the limitations.

It is also interesting to discuss issues like access to shared memory in concurrent env. and different paradigms that are available. I happened to work with java and c++ cohders (creating big complex real time applications that theoretically were to be highly available) and they all suck big time in anything that goes beyond the book they read when they learned their tools of trade. There were cases however, where this (lack of) knowledge was irrelevant.

There are also other areas like project management and communication techniques, planning, maintenance aspects and many other that universities do not teach at all. Why not cover those too - these are useful general skills that most of us lack.

This starts happening already. They get some of their billing outsourced to India and some of it done by machines. The linked article is 4yo now. I guess the billing is as painful as it always was but part of the profits are siphoned out of the system to few guys that own legal rights. Now if they automate and offshore the plumbers that would mean revolution. It will happen eventually.

I know this is off topic and off the main line of your argument but why do you consider M.D. in falling down as a guy who 'went nuts'? I mean the movie is (slightly) overblown but in any of the situations that we see Defence guy taking action against the system, I actually could agree that the actions were reasonable except maybe blowing up street with a missile which could injure bystanders. Come to think of it - our meaninglessness is so profound these days that just the only way we can get message across is with direct and possibly violent action as other means are not available due to corruption of the overwhelming system and inactivity of bored majority. Only then, after such direct action, we may realize that this has been pointless anyway as nobody caring watches and those that do are already blinded by many of such actions in the past.

As for the rest of your story - I wonder how it will all change (assuming no dino killing meteor event interrupting the experiment) in few years - more factories coming back to 'developed world' going full automatic so good jobs going away now not only to offshoring but also to automation. What jobs will our kids have to support their families? Human tendency is to go for utopia and end up with dystopia so ....