Come on, US is free. Sure, NSA collects a lot of data, but goddamn country has no notion of an ID for its citizens! You can buy a SIM card without leaving any personal traces (provided that you pay cash). You don't have to register your residence anywhere, you can leave the country without being thoroughly checked by border guards, you can be issued a credit card without proving that you are a citizen/lawful resident... now, try doing all that in European Union and compare where you have to disclose more information about yourself.

Disagree. European countries are not "very very different in all aspects". There is some variety, but Europe is locally continuous: differences between, say, Poles and Czechs are not that pronounced and you can find people that are hard to classify as either of these nations, the same could be said about differences between Belgians and Dutch (or Belgians and French), Norwegians and Swedish, Ukrainians and Russians, Portuguese and Spanish, Poles and Belarussians etc etc. Looking at Europe from bird's eye view, one may notice a few large clusters (Slavic nations, Germanic nations, Romance nations) that differ somewhat, but they blend into each other (migration, intermarriage) making people roughly compatible.

Note that doesn't mean that people of similar culture do not hate/despise/fight each other. Vice versa, it seems that the most fierce rivalry happens precisely between parties that are similar to each other (see Balkans, or Polish-Russian rivalry, or Norwegian-Swedish relationships, or Portugese-Spanish, historical English-French, etc etc), just like relatives happen to quarrel more often than strangers.

Why? I know a case when a person was asked about his github projects by recruiter (and that positively influenced his chances to get that job) - and I see nothing wrong with this. Isn't the whole idea of sites like github/sourceforge/etc to make your work (which you willfully shared) more discoverable?

I meant news that would be retrieved without my direct intervention. Prefetched and cached - better?

Will it fetch it for me in advance? :P

Web interfaces always look second-class to me, moreover, it's harder to control their behavior on the device. I can start with a web interface, but if I really like the site and going to frequent it, I want an app for it (preferably with some offline functionality, if applicable - like reading [pre-]cached news).

People will eventually learn to treat Android devices the same way as PCs. Nobody is voicing concerns regarding variety of PC resolutions (or even number of monitors), nobody suggests testing on thousands of "PC devices" out there. Android is the new PC.

I agree with that statement, but Macs come with a pretty hefty pricetag. In the country I currently reside (Poland) a Mac that can do all the aforementioned things costs you more than a typical monthly developer salary (which is averaging a bit below $2k/month). For the same price, you can get a monster PC here.

What iOS developers normally do here is getting used hardware (particularly Mac minis) for development while keeping PCs as their main machines. I have seen people who could afford (in my opinion) getting a "normal" Mac do this.

Imagine what terrorists could do had they infiltrated the government!

I don't think real programmers are in that industry only to earn money. You need to have passion for that, otherwise you will quickly move on to something which requires less work and brings more (or at least comparable) money. The abstraction level of the language you use is a measure how much passion you have - if you prefer higher level "lego constructor" languages like Java and whatnot, you are probably not that passionate, you are in just for money - or maybe you are a latent mathematician who sees programming as an uninteresting "implementation detail". If you aren't afraid to go down to bits and opcodes (or even wires), then you probably are passionate about computers and can qualify for "real" programmer.

Money is a good thing to have, but if all I wanted was to earn money, I would be "programming" people, not computers.

Well, uncontrollable empathy sounds dangerous. E.g. people who survived the war tend to be ones who were the meanest, not ones who had the most empathy towards their enemy (my personal impression after reading war veteran memoirs). Granted, war - which is "race to the bottom" empathy-wise - is not considered to be a "normal" condition anywhere except Freeciv...

Maybe normal people just have that switch broken - the same way as we lost controls over our ears :)

As far as I know nuclear plants are built to withstand an air attack (e.g. jet crashing into it). Meteors can be much more powerful though.

Fair enough, although I think that marginal commercial value is somewhat offset by anger resulting from excessive/unsolicited spam, and I am not sure that the net result is positive.

Why don't we hire people to break windows using the same logic?