Despite my being uneasy about the term "illegal combatant" and the government deciding who that is, I find it shocking that all allegedly innocent people being persecuted by the states turn out to be an enemy of the USA at least in spirit - even before there persecution. As a German I'm a bit more familiar with the El-Masri case and I while he's not a criminal (except for acts of non-terrorism related arson), his resume clearly tells the story of an anti-western loser who has cheated himself a German passport. You could call him an enemy if he wasn't so pathetic. Is it really so difficult to find an innocent victim of American aggression that is a bit more innocent that that? Maybe even pro-American?

Or he sorted a user defined type, which has to be a class in Java. In C#, it can be a struct. Java benchmarks often use sorts on primitive types, but real-world apps often have to operate on user-defined ones.

Why is he modded troll? Because he calls Java a slow piece of shit? Javas slowness is real, and it has nothing to do with bad compilers but with the screwed object model that don't allow for compact data storage (C# structs vs. Java classes). That's why Java benchmarks always use ints and doubles as data types - as soon as you use user defined types, the memory allocation madmess will block the pipe.

I agree that this is an important quality, but for leading CEOs and entrepeneurs that don't merely manage, there is something else important that most engineers just don't get. Jobs for example created the iPhone and everyone complained that it's just old technology looking cool. They don't see how old technologies combined and arranged in clever ways can be an innovation in itself. Now we have smart phones that are _actually_ usable. If that was Jobs vision (and I guess it was), then he's a geek and that's his achievement. Likewise Microsofts .NET initiative: Most techies are complaining that it's just a Java clone. .NET is a combination of existing ideas that, put together, are an innovation: A verifyable memory-correct bytecode targettable by mutliple languages including C, all runnning in as obscure host environments as Browsers (Silverlight) and Databases (SQL server stored procedures) _and_ having a memory model efficient enough (unlike Java) to support system-level code (like graphics engines). .NET is what made me see Microsoft in shades of gray rather than as the parasites I always thought they were. It is those visions that are very important, too, and it's rarely the actual coders that have them.

Mod this up. Humanism and Western Values are a magnificent achivement. I think unfortunately it lies in the nature of human beings to hate pluralism. The more free, democratic and rich a country gets, the more people think they are "on the decline". In fact they just feel marginalised or are pissed because people they don't agree with have free speech too.

It's not the system that makes broadband good or bad, it's the attitude of the people living in the respective country. Germans (I'm German myself) and Japanese, for example, have a high regard for "doing things properly" and that's why the cars are good, the broadband works and their carpets are clean. English people (I lived in the UK for a couple of years), on the other hand, just don't care so much when the light goes out once a year, the heating needs fixing before every winter and the broadband works only so-and-so-good. However, England has better movies, series, music and universities. I suppose America is England coming from Germany and a bit further. The "system" has only a limited effect on what countries are capable of. The peoples attitutes count much more. That's why looking for inspiration in other countries is not really as helpful as one might initially think.

You've obviously never been treated by a sys admin who was in the job for the wrong reasons. Please don't ever SUGGEST IT to people, unless they demonstrate a genuine compassion, patience, and willingness to help others even on their worst days.

Slutty cheap PHP whores!

That is not the reason, as there have always been more dangerous and maybe even more degrading jobs around. My personal, addmittedly excentric, theory is that puritan sex ethics are a form of socialism: You shouldn't leave to a free market what everyone desires so dearly.

Who modded this troll?

I opt for "solar energy", hee, hee...

Exactly. Why do most countries still speak languages other than English? Their argument always is "because everyone else around here speaks xyz".

Same in continental Europe. Most people here only look at titles. What you're actually able to do is secondary.

A matter of priorities. The few who want to achieve something go to the US and work until they die. The majority who want to live a good life stay in Europe.