Vargas

Escape from my golden handcuffs

"We work in a sort of strange field where intelligence and ability are highly prized, but some of these same qualities made some of us victims of aggression and abuse earlier in life."

You USA-nians really have to work on changing your high school culture. Statements like this are so frequent yet so foreign to me... why is aggression and abuse frequent? Why is it tolerated? Why is it aimed towards those with "intelligence and ability"? Why don't you work on changing your society once you grow up? women rights, end of racial segregation, etc. prove that you can change the society you live in in a relatively short period of time. Why you all complain but don't try to change it?

Excel is really, really bad at what it does. It won because of Microsoft's former monopolistic position. Lotus was much better. Most of the heaviest users of spreadsheets just build their own internal "corporate" spreadsheet program.

I see most people in our democracy voting for what they "know" over what they have evidence for.

Kiss her now!

That's nothing.

The Øresund (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%98resund_Bridge) was built Lego style in Spain, shipped piecewise and assembled on site.

"Creative approaches to maths are usually verboten in education"

I will quote this.

TB = TeraByte RAM = Random Access Memory

I would have thought TB and RAM were easier than RHEL and NUMA.

Couldn't agree more! I will quote you in the future.

This. I agree completely. Get a bright kid to know other, possibly brighter kids in an environment that values them.

Yes, it is. I was involved in this kind of things before dropping my Ph.D. Have a look at biobricks, for example: http://biobricks.org/

An associative array: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associative_array

Couldn't agree more! English bizantine writing system is a major drag. Sadly a spelling reform doesn't seem possible at the moment.

They are middleware, They enable others to make something, build something.

You cannot change a fundamental law if you have a Democrat or Republican agenda. You need a broad consensus, only achievable if you focus on the big issues.

Say that you are trying to pass a new amendment to U.S. Constitution. You have to stay away from the most partisan issues like, say, gun control.

Elections in Spain are not rigged, but the quality of Spanish democracy is very low. There are three main points:

1. Electoral Law: In Spain votes are counted according to D'Hondt method in regional demarcations. It favours big parties while penalizing small parties. It makes votes in less densely populated regions more valuable. Both things are perceived as very unfair by many Spaniards. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Hondt_method)

2. Separation of Power: In Spain, Congress is very powerful while Senate is mostly decorative. People vote once every four years for Congress, then they elect the President. There is no separation between Executive and Legislative. In the U.S. or France you can have a Democrat President and a Republican Congress. That is not possible in Spain, Executive and Legislative are always in the hands of the same party by design. Judicial power is not independent as judges are appointed by the party in power. Older judges (some people may remember Garzon, the guy who tried to incarcerate Pinochet) are independent but younger ones ALWAYS vote whatever is decided by the party that granted them the seat.

3. Political regeneration: In Spain you cannot vote for a person for Congress, you can only vote for a party list. The party will put whoever they want in the list in whatever the order they want. This system has led to a progressive degeneration where only friends and family of powerful party members are listed. Many of the candidates in the upcoming elections (22nd of May) have been found guilty of corruption. Many more are awaiting trial. Almost all of them have no leadership qualities at all. Their only quality is to be a disciplined party member with connections. Parties in Spain are not democratic themselves. Primary elections within a party are almost unheard of. Candidates for any election are decided by the senior management. In Spain, when a candidate loses, they just wait for the next election, or the next, or the next... until they finally grab power. It is a case of "waiting your turn".

In Spain we frequently use "partitocracy" (rule of parties) and "fingercracy" (rule of those who have been chosen by a powerful party member by pointing at them with his finger) to describe our political system.

This is exactly what I was going to say.

I+D => Research and Development

Subvention => The government gives you free money if they believe that your startup is "good". In practice, there is some corruption (example: I will grant you a 2 million euros subvention if you casually happen to subcontract all the work to mi niece's company for 1.9 million). Even if you find honest people, there is A LOT of bureaucratic stuff to do to be eligible.

It's a trap!

(Sorry, couldn't resist)

My brain, mostly.

Same thing happening in Spain, I left in 2007.

The main reason for your downvotes is that you are not waving the U.S. flag. Also, you go against the idea that only democracy can deliver prosperity.

Both things will earn you downvotes.

It took some fiddling with my old email archive but I found it, Joe Hudson was my teacher:

http://www.pronunciationlondon.co.uk/joe.html http://www.anenglishaccent.com/author.html

He is very good. We spent half of every session learning 'high level' stuff (phrases, paragraphs) and the other half practising 'low level' elocution (where to place your tongue and your lips for each sound).

Spaniard in London with the same problem here.

The BEST on-line material is BBC's "The sound of English" http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/grammar/pr... Just watch it and practise with a mirror many, many, many times and you will improve.

If you are willing to spend some money, I recommend doing an elocution "soften your accent" course. I did it a couple of years ago (sorry, don't remember the name of the company, it was close to St. Pancras Station) and I improved a lot.

Pay special attention to "intonation patterns". Even if you make every individual sound right, natives will have trouble understanding you. You have to make all sounds in a sentence flow together in one of the few predefined sound patterns found in British English in order to get understood. Just changing the intonation pattern changes the meaning, even in the same phrase.

Example: 'I like YOUR new blue dress' vs. 'I like your new BLUE dress' vs. 'I like your new blue DRESS'.

It doesn't. English does not get along just fine.

Say 'cucumber'. The sound of the first syllable is very different from the second, even though both are written the same.

Say 'stake' and 'steak'. Different graphs for the same phonemes.

Say 'E as in elephant'. Two different sounds for 'e'.

etc.

Present day English is so bad that written language is divorced from spoken language, but it is not bad enough to unite all speakers behind a spelling reform.

Spaniards are less than 10% of the Spanish speaking population.

Pablo => Spanish. Paulo => Portuguese.

Spanish speakers tend to spanify Portuguese words, for convenience and for the fun of watching Portuguese speakers get annoyed :P

Sao Paulo => San Pablo

He truly deserves it. I don't like his personality but it always seemed unfair that Garcia-Marquez had it while Vargas Llosa didn't.

> I can speak as intelligently about code as any HNer

The level of technical discussion in HN is very low. Either HNers are not knowledgeable or is just that they/we don't use this forum for in deep technical discussion.

Narcissism of small differences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences