Please enlighten me. What does "civic society" here mean? And why does it exclude Asian tech CEOs even if they are American citizens?

It is very hard for anyone on an immigrant visa to start a business. Almost every one of the tech CEOs he rails against is an American citizen. He cannot stomach the fact that they aren't, to put it bluntly, white.

From the effing summary:

What does where you are from having anything to do with anything here?

Right Wing != Freedom. The right wing orgasms at the thought of a dictator president as long as it is by their rules which are usually from a fictional version of the story of a guy that took place over 2000 years ago and in most places not to be interpreted literally.

There are a few axis along which you can do the comparison -
1. Developer Productivity - A save and reload framework might be more suitable if that is the existing mindset in your group. This seems to be a very underrated factor while judging your framework/dev set-up.
2. Existing codebase's dependencies - If you have a lot of dependencies which cannot be easily replaced in your new language, that is going to be a problem.
3. Performance of the framework - You want to have at least one large software shop using the framework whom you can use as a guide.
4. Community - This comes down to not just library support for future use cases; the rule of thumb is, if the first few setup issues you are having are easily solved by answers from StackOverflow, you are probably OK.
5. Recruitment - Languages/Frameworks often define the culture of a workplace and directly affect your recruitment base.

Actual Suggestions - 1. Scala/Play - Can use existing Java libraries. Encourages a less verbose coding style than is typical for Java. Twitter moved their Rails circus to Scala. A big con - their language bumps are apparently frequently non backwards compatible. So you might have to hold for a bit until things stabilize.
2. Rails - Easy setup. Solid Community. Good testing framework. Cons - Proven to not scale at Twitter. There are at least two other examples of Rails not scaling. Why jump ship twice eh? Dynamic typing is not exactly helpful when your code reaches a certain LoC count.
3. Golang - Good concurrency model. Easy to read code, almost a C-with-concurrency. Backed by Google; this is not going to be abandoned because a lot of internal Google teams are deeply invested in Go. Cons - Not as popular yet as Scala or Rails, so lesser library support; but rapidly expanding community.

ThoughtWorks has a languages and frameworks radar that can serve as a good 10,000 feet survey of the field - http://www.thoughtworks.com/ra... . In an ideal world, do not get too invested in any one framework.

The problems with perl - (I work in a large perl shop, if not the largest perl shop.)
Recruiting is a pain.
New devs need to get comfortable with perl idioms; a pattern that seems to encourage code obfuscation more than readability.
Optimal runtime concurrency is impossible. Even if you roll our own Futures library.
Bless is not safe. Consequently, you lose any sort of concrete interfaces.
There is no concept of unit testing.

Google Glass is just going to be seen as a crude precursor when some day in the future, we can serialize and deserialize memories. What will be the objections then?

But the end goal is to get joe-on-the-street to watch NetFlix on Linux. And this does give good performance, with the usual linux gpu caveats.
Drops frames on my AMD machine, but my roomie's nVidia is all smooth sailing even at SuperHD.

No discussion of this seminal work yet ??!

That is the point. Knowing this much of the language, "the Good Parts" is enough to be productive and not screw up. Until you dig deeper and learn the bad parts and why they are bad.

The wikipedia article on the Hyperloop quotes Musk as saying the hyperloop and vacuum tunnel are not the same. Anyone know the difference ?

Disclaimer: I am an Indian, completed my MS in CS a year back, been working at a small e-commerce firm named after a large river for over a year now.
There is a lot of hate that seems to be directed at companies hiring H-1Bs at a much lower than average salary rate. This hate is well deserved, it is nothing but exploitation. On the flip side, did you ever think about what makes people agree to those "lower" salaries? The Indian Rupee's exchange rate is at a historical low. That is the downside of having an artificially strong dollar (which gives you some other benefits, but hey, those benefits might not affect you, so who cares, right?)
There also seems to be a lot of hate directed at Facebook and Microsoft. You people are definitely trolling. Most of the top ten software firms start the green card and naturalization process ASAP when you join. MS is specially regarded for this. And most of the H-1Bs they hire are students who came here for undergrad or (more likely) grad school. So hate on Facebook as much as you want, just not in this.
The problem is that, all the IT firms who "import" cheap labor, coagulate the H-1B system. So those who would actually gain from this (and America would also gain from them) essentially go into a lottery for the H-1B slots. These are usually your giant IT (big difference when it comes to software and IT, especially with relation to job market in India) firms like Accenture.
I have not read the full bill yet, saving that for the weekend. But if it has some provision to split these two types of H-1Bs, this would be a big win-win.

P.S. America does really not have enough Electrical, Mechanical and Civil (maybe more disciplines, but these are the ones I have close friends in) engineers. Please do not conflate software with tech.

I haven't kept my eye on every twist and turn in this story.
My mental model of the stack pre all these Mir, Wayland shenanigans was this -
applications
window manager
X
kernel

I guess a couple of layers have been added now? Wayland seems to be a replacement for X that removes the X part from the stack compressing window manager and display server into one layer, so where does Mir sit?

One of my most needed feature is quick multi-tasking ala alt-tab.
Are these versions of android having some support for that? Do they have a custom launcher that shows something like a taskbar? Or is it more like the gnome shell mess?

I think Gräßlin's stance is actually more responsible. His dilemma is "Just because I do not agree with opinions on my blog, should I delete them?". This is a choice of conscience, in a way, the implication being that he realizes he is not in the most objective viewpoint about doing the censoring.
True, moderation is not censorship, but by his stance and (initial) arguments, he seems to be holding himself up to a higher standard.

Wouldn't that be the point of a Control group?