I moved to Germany for my now wife. I've learned to speak fluent but grammatically poor German. My colleagues are all German. The biggest difference I've noticed, is dealing with the pain-in-the ass , . separator issues. English speaking developers who have their computers configured for English-language separators have NO IDEA how much hassle it is for the rest of the world. The single most useful thing you could do, is run your computer in another language, including different thousand/decimal separators. You'll find a whole pile of bugs, it'll be a build nightmare at first, but the code WILL make less assumptions about how people use their numbers. We even found third party software where the XML we were using to control it changes, based on your current language settings. APART from one of it's features, that's always in English, whatever your language settings. The firm that wrote it hadn't realised, because all of their developers used German. Ugly, ugly ugly.

Then at least disclose that it's a European experiment. We spent billions on it, credit where its due please. Americans generally work on the principle that if nothing is said about location, it's American. Quoting an American regarding the experiment reinforces this view.

I left the UK and moved to Germany, about 18 months ago. I barely spoke a word of German when I arrived. Admittedly the main reason was that my fiancee is German, but I'd been uncomfortable about the same issues you mention regarding the UK and the direction it's heading. It's the best thing I ever did.

I learned German for 4 months, then started looking for work. I had an MSc in IT, but no IT experience. I got a job within 1 month of looking, the firm speaks German, but most of the developers speak good English. At first I only spoke English at work, but now I speak German where I can, English the rest of the time

I have to say that Germany is FAR better than the UK on most of these issues. Whilst they do have ID cards here, they're not electronic and probably only exist as a hangover from being an occupied state after WWII (the allies required it).

My advice would be take the plunge! Don't worry about language too much within the EU if you're going for IT jobs (maybe apart from France, but that could be just reputation).

ITER is the world's best chance of obtaining almost infinite amounts of clean energy. Most of the recent press about the National Ignition Facility has ignored one key fact - the NIF is about creating fusion explosions to model bombs. Sure, it can also be used for fusion power research, but that's not the primary reason it received it's funding. ITER is about developing commercial fusion using a tokamak.

Also, the way the US cancelled all funding for ITER for 2008 was pretty disgusting. If a country becomes a partner in such large science projects, they need to stick with it, rather than screwing everyone around

And as they say, people who know radio use wires.

Sorry, I didn't think enough about what else to write: The plot is drawn from the appendixes of the book, it's about Gandalf and Aragorn's hunt for Gollum, which takes place between the hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. There are two stunning trailers available. The film will be released on Sunday, 3rd March at 16:00 GMT.

Argh, make that Pulsar! (whoops)

Atomic decomposition is not the most accurate known means of keeping time. AFAIR Quasars are. At the least, they're more accurate than atomic clocks - when someone first tried measuring how accurate quasars are by comparing them to an atomic clock, they found that ALL quasars were drifting at the same amount relative to the atomic clock - the drift was the clock, not the quasars. Unfortunately, individualy they skip the occasional tick, but that can be evened out.