saool

I tether every now and then with the 2GB plan and it works fine. Sometimes they will "catch" me and tell me to pay up. When that happens I just use an agent switcher and spoof as Opera 12, works every time...

Then Scrum is smart.

It's Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, and it doesn't collect money anymore.

EU rendered their business illegal and recent corruption news obliged the government to pass a bill taking away their right to collect, afaik.

if you knew the URL... you wouldn't need search ;)

Both Paypal and the banks when using credit card do the currency conversion transparently (at a cost, of course). So for individuals it's pretty much the same, aside from patriotic issues...

For businesses, if you are targeting them, make sure you sort the VAT issue up front.

I'm €uropean too and it has never stopped me from buying products and services from the US, the perfidious a£bion or even china.

As if EU politicians weren't letting american IP lobbies bully the sh out of them and just passing laws that mirror american IP laws.

As a Spaniard and thanks to Wikileaks we've had the inside info on how the spanish government dropped their pants and let the american ambassador have a say on our IP enforcing laws so they followed the american lobby agenda. And we were one of the most rebel EU countries, others went down way easier... (Allô la France!)

Apparently they opened it up already for all people to join, at least here in Spain.

I think the windows xp box he says he had his wife turn off had a trojan in it.

hard work can be achieved in a reasonable amount of hours, not only by "keeping your chair warm" for 100 not-so-productive hours a week.

you wouldn't say a smart student aces tests out of dumb luck since he doesn't do much work.

That's not the way to look at it.

See creative destruction: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_destruction

e.g. the car being invented did mean less work for horse-carriage "drivers", but eventually everything was better than before.

We already have robots designed for games that drive cars, even besting most of the people skill-wise, and we have a nice traffic congestion example out of the network and medium access protocols too in the telecommunications science. so I guess that those problems are already almost sorted out.

Video-game bots are a nice research field for artificial intelligence which can provide solutions for the real world.

Unrelated: Check this out if you're interested in the topic, it's a nice read http://www.cs.rochester.edu/research/quagents/QuakeIII.pdf

While I don't buy the "facebook is just games and noise" stuff, I do think we should be focusing a bit more in things like clean tech, space missions, etc.

Why does almost everybody want to go work for facebook instead of tesla or any other innovative company not primarily focused in "web" development?

And yeah, the big equity bucks, but I think those could be moving towards other tech fields too...

practice, practice, practice

don't just read, but write too

Viola is the american far-too-spread wrong spelling of the french expression voilà, which could be translated roughly to "behold" or "that's it".

Et voilà :)

Bonus points for reading the whole article without flinching!

I guess fanatism is fanatism after all, no matter if it's about hardware companies or religion.

We want to believe, lol.

It's one of the most known cliches about Spain, isn't it? I find it funny since I'm from up north and we don't get that much of Canary Island-ish weather foreigners think of when they mention Spain. But yup summer in the south or the plains sucks sometimes.

While fine-targeted spending can foster growth and productivity, that thing you've thought of about having one person digging and other one filling holes is completely wrong.

How do I know? The idiot in charge in my country spent thousands of millions of euros developing that near-sighted idea to no avail. He just kept the housing-bubble men busy for a while longer.

And then along came deficit.

Oh but it's so sunny! I feel you paisano. I'm 24, finishing my second BSc and will probably flee soon.

Still it hurts so much to witness all this.

Most protests are actually about government's spending, corruption and overall blatant plutocracy:

City councils not paying gardeners while the mayor says he's won the lotto for the 4th time in 5 years (obvious shameless money laundering that leaves the council with millions of debt).

Banks pay-rolling whole parties to gain favor which is showed later on with no hint of shame.

In some autonomous communities (Länder), a third of the politicians running for office have ongoing lawsuits about corruption.

They just spend their entire hours wheeling and dealing while the countries becomes the next Argentina.

Spaniard here. Male, 24. People are mainly protesting against bipartidism not addressing the country's problems and working together for the greater good of the country, since they only play dumb and fight childishly.

The party in charge hasn't done shit about the whole economic crisis. First they tried to fool the people into thinking there was no crisis. When it was so obvious they couldn't keep lying, they passed some stuff that didn't really address the main problems (rigid two-tier labor market, too much spending on pointless bs, almost no-value added economy, too much regulation, and so on). They prefer to spend their time battling oh-so-important problems as fierce copyright laws or populating our roads with pickpocketing speed traps. Oh yeah right, and wether we should be able to speak to a civil servant in any of our languages (spanish is not the only language spoken in spain, almost every state has its own regional dialect/language, which are for the most part mutually intelligibility, but hey, let's make a big deal out of it anyways, who the fuck would care about easing conditions for the self-employed or the start-ups, right?).

The opposition, luckily in such a good place to just play the nice guy part and thus get the job with a few good proposals, are drowned in their own pile of corruption-related shit and instead of making easy proposals to win voters back, they prefer to try countless aggressive ad-hominem attacks against the prime minister and his clique wishfully hoping they'll eventually step down.

And while they all are pulling each other's hair as if this were a playground, there's +20% unemployment, +45% unemployment for young spaniards and a whole lot of just plain misery sweeping the country. I'm talking tonight-there's-no-dinner misery.