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For Sweden you have the official job agency ArbetsfÃrmedlingen.

As for being an American in Sweden it's no big deal. I have a workmate from Vancouver that has moved here. And on an earlier place there were a few too. Most people in Sweden speaks English too, so the language barrier isn't huge, and the cultural barrier is relatively small too. In fact small enough that some companies tests their new brands and products in Sweden before they release them in the US.

As for computer related work you do have a few of the international businesses like Accenture, IBM, HP, Logica over here too, but also a few local ones like Ã...F, Cybercom Group, Epsilon, Semcon, Sigma.

So there are a few to pick from. But the use for Swedish outside Scandinavia is very small, so if you want to do this for learning a new language it may be better to pick one of the bigger languages like German, Spanish, Italian or French. Maybe Switzerland is a good place, since they have four different languages in that country.

Just be aware that people in some countries or areas of countries are less welcoming to Americans and that you will have to expect them trying to get you into heated discussions about American presidents, especially Bush...

You definitely do not want to work in Switzerland!

- IT and CS are extremely underdeveloped here
- finding challenging technical work is next to impossible
- the language (Switzerdüütsch) is extremely difficult to learn (even though I speak it fluently now, I BLED before I got to where I am today with it)
- the people here are racist (though they'll NEVER admit it) - one will ALWAYS be a foreigner here, no matter what

So much so, after six years of living here, making TONS of cash and learning two languages fluently, I'm really, really looking forward to moving back to the good ol' US of A, where I'll hopefully be able to land a technical job that will allow me to do *everything*, from crimping that cable to implementing that cluster specification I wrote.

Avoid Switzerland like the plague, the natives are extremely complicated and hard to deal with!

For Sweden you have the official job agency ArbetsfÃrmedlingen.

As for being an American in Sweden it's no big deal. I have a workmate from Vancouver that has moved here. And on an earlier place there were a few too. Most people in Sweden speaks English too, so the language barrier isn't huge, and the cultural barrier is relatively small too. In fact small enough that some companies tests their new brands and products in Sweden before they release them in the US.

As for computer related work you do have a few of the international businesses like Accenture, IBM, HP, Logica over here too, but also a few local ones like Ã...F, Cybercom Group, Epsilon, Semcon, Sigma.

So there are a few to pick from. But the use for Swedish outside Scandinavia is very small, so if you want to do this for learning a new language it may be better to pick one of the bigger languages like German, Spanish, Italian or French. Maybe Switzerland is a good place, since they have four different languages in that country.

Just be aware that people in some countries or areas of countries are less welcoming to Americans and that you will have to expect them trying to get you into heated discussions about American presidents, especially Bush...

That's not quite true...

in either case, however, the spirit does not change: a google is still sufficiently big that the physical universe have trouble filling up into its large-ness.

below is slightly off-topic, but:

for ever bigger, interesting numbers (that puts the googleplex to shame, actually), try Grahams Number, Another link to Graham's Number. Please note that, interestingly (in a mathematically geeky fashion) the result Graham's Number tries to limit (it's an upper bound) is generally believed to be 6. there is also Moser's Number... i am not sure which one is bigger...

Those languages even let you shoot yourself in the foot.

A shotgun is meant to hunt birds

First: if you post this at "news for nerds" you should know that a gun is more useful to Shoot yourself in the foot with a gun.

2nd: Why hunt birds? did they anything wrong for you or are you hungry?

the normal use of Celine Dion CDs will be to launch them as clay pidgeons

CD's are much to light for this. You would first have to collect some of them and mold them into a better launchabe package.

Doh, should've included this before. Here's a page that has values for Ackermann's function. It grows fast. The reason that it's so hard to compute is because of the depth of recursion that it requires to solve even a low order problem.

Essentially, the "no split infinitives" rule is just an attempt by some to impose Latin rules on English.

In fact its such a big thing that even respected global players such as Logica (their software runs over 50% of the SMS gateways in the world) are getting involved according to this article in the Financial Times.

In short getting people responding to SMS spam is unreliable because due to difficiencies in the GSM protocol you can only catch about one SMS reply to an advert every 5 seconds.

Because of this, take up of bulk SMS advertisements (where people respond) is slow. But thanks to the boffins at Logica, they now have software which can harvest 1,000 replies a second.

Which suddenly makes pumping out SMS spam look a lot more worthwhile.

Coming soon to a phone near you ...?

In fact its such a big thing that even respected global players such as Logica (their software runs over 50% of the SMS gateways in the world) are getting involved according to this article in the Financial Times.

In short getting people responding to SMS spam is unreliable because due to difficiencies in the GSM protocol you can only catch about one SMS reply to an advert every 5 seconds.

Because of this, take up of bulk SMS advertisements (where people respond) is slow. But thanks to the boffins at Logica, they now have software which can harvest 1,000 replies a second.

Which suddenly makes pumping out SMS spam look a lot more worthwhile.

Coming soon to a phone near you ...?

Nice going you unoriginal bastard. You just copied and pasted from here

DAMN! I wish I would have thought about it first!

I think we'd become the nanites in the Grey Goo scenario, only we'd be able to jump from planet to planet. We humans tend not to know when to quit exploiting something for its resources. Or is there nothing wrong with doing this to an uninhabited planet? (I'd like to hear opinions on that)

U.S. workers average more hours on the job per year than workers in any other industrialized country -- Greenies.

Time to destigmatize leisure time! Being particularly lazy, I've been watching the work phenomenon closely. When I worked at an investment bank, the analysts would routinely put in 80-100 hours per week. A paralegal friend of mine easily put in more. To no effect: they aren't going to retire earlier, they've experienced less life, and the money was eh.

Unless your job is your career (lifer entrepreneurs, artists), I don't see a problem with working 20hrs a week to live. In a resource-rich, modern and enlightened society, there shouldn't be a stigma attached to doing as little labor as possible, especially if that labor is nonessential to your interests. Of course, capitalism doesn't seem to be set up this way... but apparently it's possible to survive in an industrialized culture while doing less work, so long as you're not American:

France & Germany make do with shorter work weeks. Germans are much more productive than either the Japanese or the Americans. They don't spend their time off recuperating so that they can go back to work on Monday, which seems to be the case in the States. And, Not all of the industrialized world has the same balance of work and non-work time that we do in the US. Work Time, Free Time.

A hasty Google search has more info on this topic.

In his award-winning "Culture" books, scifi writer Iain M. Banks creates stories in a created a post-plenty universe where all physical needs are satisfied without cost. Difficult to envision, but he does a good job.

a high speed network and a google of different communications devices.

I think you mean a googol, not a google. See also Google's explanation. Please keep you're words straight. ;-)

(Oh, it's also available at MathWorld - great to have it back!)

So tell me what to do!

Quote someone like Beatrice Hall who was really the one who said 'I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it...'.

Or just be crude about it and says Nazis are assholes but even assholes have the right to make fools of themselves via the spoken or written word.

"if one exists. "

There are an infinite number of primes therefore one exists with at least 10 million digits.

This is completely off topic, but Voltaire actually never said that. Check this page for more information.

OK, so the quote was ABOUT Voltaire, not by him.
Voltaire's actual quote, according to that link, was "What a fuss about an omelette!"

Not quite as profound, but I'm sure someone is still willing to defend (to the death) his right to say it.

This is completely off topic, but Voltaire actually never said that. Check this page for more information.

I declare this contest pointless. I further declare that, by definition, Jim Theis' The Eye of Argon wins all bad writing contests from here on out. Period. Even ones that are only supposed to judge an opening sentence. End of Discussion.

Secret message to MST3K fans: Do not under any circumstances read the link above. Read this one instead. Friends don't let friends read this thing without Mike and the bots.

The foot test is already done.

This is supposedly a true story from a recent Defence Science Lectures Series, as related by the head of the Australian DSTO's Land Operations/Simulation division.

They've been working on some really nifty virtual reality simulators, the case in point being to incorporate Armed Reconnaissance Helicopters into exercises (from the data fusion point of view). Most of the people they employ on this sort of thing are ex- (or future) computer game programmers. Anyway, as part of the reality parameters, they include things like trees and animals. For the Australian simulation they included kangaroos. In particular, they had to model kangaroo movements and reactions to helicopters (since hordes of disturbed kangaroos might well give away a helicopter's position).

Being good programmers, they just stole some code (which was originally used to model infantry detachments reactions under the same stimuli), and changed the mapped icon, the speed parameters, etc. The first time they've gone to demonstrate this to some visiting Americans, the hotshot pilots have decided to get "down and dirty" with the virtual kangaroos. So, they buzz them, and watch them scatter. The visiting

Americans nod appreciatively... then gape as the kangaroos duck around a hill, and launch about two dozen Stinger missiles at the hapless helicopter. Programmers look rather embarrassed at forgetting to remove that part of the infantry coding... and Americans leave muttering comments about not wanting to mess with the Aussie wildlife...

As an addendum, simulator pilots from that point onwards avoided kangaroos like the plague, just like they were meant to do in the first place...

The company I work for has just put out a press release that shows it is about to be developed for the European and Japanese Mobile Phone Market. Now if that gets going then there really will be a micropayments system of interest.

I was listening to a National Public Radio broadcast a year ago or more...you can't just name your child whatever you want in Germany. An American couple living abroad wanted to name its child "Robin" or something unconventional, and the German gov't wouldn't issue the birth certificate, IIRC. Names have to be easily distinguishable as male or female, and I think there are other criteria, too. No "Myxylplikt" or "Grignr" for you (Eye of Argon reference)...

This article isn't really about the ethics of free software, it's about the ethics of commercial software and the ethics of free software programmers.

That said this article is overly turgid, and devotes a fair amount of space to the tired old "you're stealing paper clips from the company" viewpoint. It tends to downplay the value of non-commercial activities in the sphere of human endevour and reduce matters to base currency. I'd like to think that most of the things that make me a worthwile human being (or rat) occur when I'm not making money. It's packed full of straw men besides (like a particular free software advocate's opinions on gun ownership); he devotes a fair bit of space to this sort of criticism which he himself earlier calls foul on.

His inclusion of property rights amonst the paramount human rights is interesting, and I think he's commiting the sin of cultural relativism he's warning about; introducing a principle which is primary intended to support his arguments. Personally, I'd prefer to live in a Iain M Banks style world without personal property, if it ment that I could have practically any material thing I wanted. I like the idea that I might one day live in a world where this is at least true of software.

Anyway to take issue with two other points:
"For all that, it is easy to miss the incredible contributions of Microsoft--and its defacto partner, Intel--to the just as incredible progress of the computer industry. By establishing a mass market that enabled staggering price reductions, 'Wintel' has made the computer revolution possible."

There were other PCs before the "IBM-PC" became the dominant type; Acorn, Amiga, Archemedies, BBC, Mac (just off the top of my head). I think at least a couple of them were superior to the PCs of their day. I'd like to think if it weren't for "Wintel" we'd have better machines today; quite frankly PCs are full of hardware bottlenecks compared to some of those more "distributed" architectures.

The story goes on to state that Stallman "resigned"-- presumably meaning that he stopped using the MIT's machines, since it appears from the above that he had already resigned --- because "sometimes, universities take software written by their employees to sell them as proprietary products". (What a shame indeed: that a university would think it has any rights at all on products developed by people it pays, on machines that it owns!)

Indeed what. Would he think it unreasonable that a mathematician publish their work? An economist? A historian? He seems to think it unreasonable that computer scientist would want to publish his.

In short (one more time) this article is about commerce, and takes little notice of issues like academic freedom, art, science or the field of human knowledge; matters which should be included in any proper discussion of ethics.

Oh, wait. Lynx doesn't care, and I tell netscape to "always use my colors" and "always use my fonts".

I mean, isn't this the point of web-browsers? To give the reader control because the web-designers of the world have, on average, the design sense of a slug on LSD?

Everyone involved in creating web-pages should at least read Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information. Good stuff.

This book list will give you a good idea of just how much she contributed to the science fiction and fantasy world over the years.