"... I shouldn't expect to be robbed, or for someone to come in and watch my TV and drink my beer any time they like. The cost of them watching my TV and drinking my beer might be minimal, but that's not the point. It's my TV and my beer."
well, that'd be true if it was "your" radio frequency band. Actually, it isn't. Its "our" radio frequency band, you know, "public", as in "not licensed". If the bit you are using is so important to you, secure it, or buy a chunk of licensed spectrum and go to town. This really isn't rocket science.
hmmm... I find that I get really bad mileage if I drive 140-160 mph in my car (12-15 l/100km) and really, really bad if I drive 180-200 mph (7-8 l/100km) with my bike. But you do it anyway - its the autobahn!!!
What I'm wondering is: when will the **AA expand their claims of "lost revenue" to include second-hand sales. I know that some software houses have already tried this, and lost out (I think) to the doctrine of first sale, but if the crux of **AA's argument is "we are missing out on boatloads of revenue, billions of dollars" and so forth, it presumes (as has been mentioned here repeatedly) that each copied movie/song/whatever is taking a sale away from the copyright owners. Personally, I think this is bull**it, as I don't think that the sum amount of available disposable income comes even close to the kind of volume **AA is constantly claiming, but the consquence is never the less still there - **AA is arguing that any possession of their copyrighted material not resulting from a direct (ok, more-or-less direct) transfer of funds into their coffers is the equivalent of theft.
Finally, I was wrong about Prof. Dr. Harrer - he chaired the "satellite symposium "HIV Vaccines - Perspectives in Germany" of which the tgAAC09 talk was a part, and held a presentation on MVA-BN nef - J.v. Lunzen presented the tgAAC09 presentation
and the "nothing new" comment took fuzeon into consideration - an acquaintance has been recieving fuzeon for around 9 months (I also wasn't aware of this). We hadn't heard anything yet about the Merck drug yet - do you have a name for it? Basically, the consensus was that there's nothing in the pipeline - I guess that they didn't consider the integrase inhibitors as promising enough, or far enough along to count (don't really know.)
The focus of the MAT 2004 was "Status and Start - What progess is being made in HIV-medicine" - major topics were drug resistence and compensation therapies, HIV in southern Africa, and alternative ways to administer/manage existing therapy regimes. There were several symposia on dealing with side-effects of existing drugs, and on incremental improvements in existing treatments including better management of opportunistic infections.
All of the usual Pharmacorps were there: Bristol-Myers Squibb, Lilly, Abbott, Pfizer, Hoffmann-LaRoche, GlaxoSmithKline.
ok, I'm not even going to try to compete with this. My wife (who is HIV+, and appropriately familiar with the material...) was at the seminar in Munich and heard Prof. Dr. Harrer's (from the Immune Ambulanz in Erlangen Germany, one of the premiere HIV/AIDS docs in Germany, and my wife's first doc after learning of her infection 15 years ago)presentation on HIV Vaccines, and gave me the info I posted above (except the HIV-B part - sorry typo, I meant HIV-C). Perhaps it was concerning a different Vaccine, as one of the relevant points of the presentation was the fact that the vaccine (that was presented...) is designed for long shelf life in extreme conditions (2years at 50C).
The comment on the meds also came from the Münchener AIDS Tage, and from my wife's primary care physician - she is currently in the process of switching meds (due to various resistences to her previous therapy-mix that popped up earlier this year, and caused a big leap in her virus load - from undetectable to several thousand - and a drop in her CD4 count). I haven't heard of Fuzeon, or the Merck integrase inhibitor, and will ask about them. It could be that "there are no new meds" is constrained to what my wife can take and/or what is available in Germany...
I'll see if I can find more about the vaccine I'm talking about this evening (i'm at work). I have proceedings/abstracts for the presentations at home, and will post again tonite.
Sorry for the confusion and thanks for correcting me!
Re:Mixed feeling
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Actually, the vaccine is being designed for use in countries where conventional therapy is simply much too expensive. It can be kept at temperatures up to 50 degrees (C) for up to 2 years - which, together with the fact that it seems to only work against the HIV-B strain (most common in Africa), seems to indicate that it is headed for sub-saharan Africa. One of the doctors following / contributing to this project gave a presentation on it at the Munich AIDS Days seminar last week. Although the stage one trials on people are showing some progress, the processing involved (own cells, own virus) still makes it kind of prohibitive - i heard that the time frame for wide-spread therapeutic use is 5-10 years.
The unfortunate fact is: it isn't a cure, but a management therapy which should allow infected people to live longer, more productive lives. Even worse - the pharma corps seem to be losing interest in designing new drugs - there hasn't been anything new for about 3 years now... No money in it, especially now that the UN and various charities are clamoring for reductions in trademark and other IP law restrictions. Good for HIV+ persons in poor countries, bad for the pharmacorps bottom line...
this is a bad argument. essentially, the article says that Linux _must_ work with the integrated sound card that the author is using, before it can be considered "mainstream". So, in his case, too, if the sound card dies, he will buy a new computer.
then why in hell would SCO's new MS overlords allow them to hire David Boies to do the legal work? I mean, ok, he probably has all kinds of inside information...oh...
Ok, I can answer myself. It was probably his idea in the first place.
well, i guess he likes (liked?) Star Trek the animated series. One of the episodes was a Trekified version of one of the Man-Kzin stories, complete with slaver stasis boxes and a K'zin telepath who got phyisically ill when he read Spock's (a vegetarian) mind. Of course, the K'Zin were called Kzinti, but otherwise...
actually, Be did this too. They did the cease and desist thing a few years ago with a company called SouthSoft that made a mail program for OS/2 called PM-Mail. It used the Be icons in its interface. the new icons kinda suck.
Thanks for keeping the site up, and making the decision to focus on the Tuesday's only important news. I was also at work, unable to get to a TV or radio, and couldn't get to any of the more traditional news sites. Thanks to your work, and the constant influx of working links posted by other users, I was able to follow the situation as it happened.
I just bought one of these, and its great. A bit pricey though (799 DM). Plays DVD, CD-R, CD-RW, VCD, Audio- and MP3-CDs. Works great, and the software toggle for the region coding was easy to find (input over the remote, and region coding is gone, at least for Region 1 and 2 DVD's).
Video quality is fantastic (it's only jumped/skipped/wigged-out once, near the end of a pretty scratched up copy of Blade), and audio is also super. Haven't been able to try the digital output yet, gotta get a new receiver first. With mp3 cds, it even plays some my PC has trouble reading due to overburns, scratching and the strange burns my last CD-burner (a phillips 2600) created shortly before it went toes-up.
MP3 names get munged to 8.3. Well, actually only 8, the.mp3 isn't displayed. The start up time for a full MP3-CD is pretty short (I'd say around 7-10 seconds) and the navigation is usable (displays 10 objects at a time, nav over the remote).
Only 3 complaints, 1) the manuals are skimpy on mp3 details (but otherwise very complete) 2) no online docs - I don't know if it is updateable, and 3) no jog-dial (none at all, neither on the remote or the unit itself).
I don't know if it is for everyone, but I'm quite happy.
I believe that one of the major driving forces behind the move to Exchange (2000)and other W2K subsystems (SQL-Server, IIS, SMS, etc.) is ease of administration, on the system level. Exchange 2000 requires the implementation of W2K's AD, to which many companies are moving for their server platforms. AD provides the "synergy" (god, I hate that word!). Admins don't need to take care of user/group/rights definitions in several different places (passwd, some obscure LDAP setup for the calendar, etc.), only in one - integrated - system, the AD. Notes provides equal or better calendaring, iCal systems probably do, too, Oracle and DB2 are great RDBMS's, and Apache is arguably the best web server -- but the multiple administration can be a pain in the ass. What we need is a standardized LDAP-based user/group/resource-information repository for Linux, that comes as a predefined component in the Distros, with a clearly defined extension mechanism/API, that can be our version of AD. Most important, it needs to be as "easy" to setup and understand as AD. And we need some apps that use it. Until we get this, its gonna be tough to penetrate the domain of W2K.
It seems to me that the "scratching an itch" approach on this problem is just like scratching an itch. It treats the symptom and not the disease, which can be a bad solution, as anyone who has had the chicken-pox can attest.
There was an article (either here, or on BBC - I'm way too lazy to check) about a week ago claiming that the wire for the headset acts as an antenna, collecting and concentrating the radiation that the phone emits. And pumps it straight through your ear into your brain.
Of course, this could result in a better world, one where all the morons that walk around hotel and convention center lobbies yelling at nobody have died of deep fried brain cells....
I just pulled a box full of around 500 old cassette-tapes out of my basement. Most of them are so old and so worn out that I don't want to listen to them any more as the sound quality really sucks. I was going to throw them out. Then it hit me. I already paid for all this music, that I can no longer listen to because the medium is worn out and/or obsolete. AFAIK, I can download all the songs on these tapes with Napster and claim fair use (archival backup), even if it is retroactive.
So, to get around the copyright infringment problem, everyone should run (not walk!) to the nearest fleamarket, garage sale or salvation army store and buy up those old 5-for-a-buck worn out cassettes and 8-tracks and LPs. Of course, this won't work quite as well for newer music, but, since most new music sucks anyway, who cares?
Does anyone know what W.A.V.E. stands for? I've been away from the states for a few years, and the last time I was there, I noticed all the D.A.R.E. bumper-stickers and associated paraphrenalia. Then I asked some people what D.A.R.E. stands for. Mostly I got a blank stare, closely followed by "uh, you know, that drugs thing." I still wonder if it doesn't mean "Drugs Are Really Exiting".
I've been living and working in Germany for almost 11 years now. Of course, my situation was a bit different, I didn't come here looking for work, but because my SO at the time was a german. She dumped me a couple of weeks after I got here, though, so I guess its just a matter of boundary values/initial conditions...
Anyway, my best advice for you ( in addition to what the guy in Japan said about culture) is to become fluent in the language of your country of choice _before_ you arrive. I didn't and had to spend about a year working in bars and restaurants for barely subsistence level wages before my German was at a level where I could even consider trying for a job in IT. You'd be amazed at how little english helps, even in a country where everyone is required to learn the language in High School.
As far as Immigration goes, yeah, it is a royal pain in the ass. I was on 3 month tourist visas for the first year. After that, I had gotten my first "real" job working for a Systems Integrator (CompuNet), and it got a little easier -- new visas and work permits every 6 months. Sometimes, though, even the job didn't help, as the Arbeitsamt (the office responsible for the distribution and control of work permits) tried once to get me fired and deported ("the job could be much better performed by a native citizen..." blah blah blah). My company's lawyers got me through that one...
Currently, though, IT skills are in high demand. The German government is currently going through its own version of the H1-B Visa crisis, trying to decide whether or not to import low-wage IT workers from India and China, so (at least here) you should be able to find a receptive climate.
Try to get a solid contract before you move permanently. Maybe you can convince your current employer to give you an unpaid leave (mine wouldn't/didn't), which could give you a back door in case things don't work out like you plan.
I know a lot of companies are looking for skilled workers, particularly with extensive experience, in all areas of IT. I work for the Deutsche Telekom now, doing "IT Services," which is basically anything above layer 3 in the ISO model. There is a lot of demand for specialists in Client Server system design, and anything related to the Internet, including programming.
Work over here is pretty cool. Strict labor laws prevent no-notice terminations and 60+ hour work weeks, and provide little things like 30+ days of paid vacation a year (Woo Hoo!!). The Social system is also ok, medical insurance is a guarantee, and retirement options are not bad. Pay isn't bad, but not great. I bring in about DM 120K + bonus, which is upper middle class. The kind of astronomic pay some guys get in the States is pretty much unheard of, but you can do pretty well. Cost of living is different but about the same on average. A liter of Gas is about a dollar, but a good dinner for 2 in a good restaurant (very good by US standards...) is about 60 bucks. It balances out.
I can't complain. The work climate over here is great. Still, I am currently working to gather the money I need to return to the States in comfort. Buying a house here is really a lifetime project (anything larger than a single car garage costs upwards of $300K), and I miss my desert (I'm from Tucson AZ originally). Nontheless, I'm glad that I made the move 11 years ago; I wouldn't trade the experiences I've had over here for anything.
Dune by Frank Herbert Grass by Sheri S. Tepper Anything by Niven and Pournelle (especially Footfall and The Mote in God's Eye) Hyperion by Ian Simmons The Chanur books by C.J. Cherryh The Rama Series by Arthur C. Clarke Contact by Carl Sagan 2001 and 2010 by Arthur C. Clarke The Heechee books by Frederick Pohl The Trigon Disunity triology by Michael P. Kube-McDowell Anything by James P. Hogan Glory Road by Alan Dean Foster The Forever War by Joe Haldeman Friday, Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
maybe a bit off topic, but this reminds me of an old Sam Kinneson routine - Jesus comes back and is a bit pissed at one of the Televangelists. He flips through the Bible and demands, "Where in the Hell does it say 'Build me a waterslide?'"
I think this just a blatant attempt to capitalize on the conflicting desires of a segment of the christian population - the ones that want to play Quake, but are honestly concerned about the condemnation it (and similar games) receive from the a portion of american christian leadership.
This kind of disgusting abuse of peoples' beliefs is nauseating. Makes me glad to be agnostic.
I'd love to get into DVD -- if the damn players weren't built with regional lock-out hardware. I want to buy US discs when I'm in the States, and be able to play them on a machine here in Germany. Its worse than Playstation.
Bah.
Of course, if anyone knows of a DVD player that doesn't have this "feature", or can suggest a non-destructive method to disable it, I'd appreciate an e-mail!
Slashdot Mirror
" ... I shouldn't expect to be robbed, or for someone to come in and watch my TV and drink my beer any time they like.
The cost of them watching my TV and drinking my beer might be minimal, but that's not the point. It's my TV and my beer."
well, that'd be true if it was "your" radio frequency band. Actually, it isn't. Its "our" radio frequency band, you know, "public", as in "not licensed". If the bit you are using is so important to you, secure it, or buy a chunk of licensed spectrum and go to town. This really isn't rocket science.
hmmm... I find that I get really bad mileage if I drive 140-160 mph in my car (12-15 l/100km) and really, really bad if I drive 180-200 mph (7-8 l/100km) with my bike. But you do it anyway - its the autobahn!!!
What I'm wondering is: when will the **AA expand their claims of "lost revenue" to include second-hand sales. I know that some software houses have already tried this, and lost out (I think) to the doctrine of first sale, but if the crux of **AA's argument is "we are missing out on boatloads of revenue, billions of dollars" and so forth, it presumes (as has been mentioned here repeatedly) that each copied movie/song/whatever is taking a sale away from the copyright owners. Personally, I think this is bull**it, as I don't think that the sum amount of available disposable income comes even close to the kind of volume **AA is constantly claiming, but the consquence is never the less still there - **AA is arguing that any possession of their copyrighted material not resulting from a direct (ok, more-or-less direct) transfer of funds into their coffers is the equivalent of theft.
When does this stop?
ok, heres the facts:
I D=14596820&full=1
1 .php
the vaccine I was talking about was a different one: tgAAC09 http://www.biospace.com/ccis/news_story.cfm?Story
Another vaccine (technology) candidate discussed was MVA-BN from Bavarian Nordic. They are currently working on 3 different approaches:
MVA nef a vaccine that expresses the HIV Nef antigen (clade B)
MVA-BN expressing "a large number of highly conserved epitopes of various HIV antigens from several clades in one construct (MVA-BN polytope vaccine)"
and
MVA-BN vaccine "expressing multiple HIV clade B antigens (NVA-BN multiantigen vaccine)"
(details are avaiable at http://www.bavarian-nordic.com/
Finally, I was wrong about Prof. Dr. Harrer - he chaired the "satellite symposium "HIV Vaccines - Perspectives in Germany" of which the tgAAC09 talk was a part, and held a presentation on MVA-BN nef - J.v. Lunzen presented the tgAAC09 presentation
and the "nothing new" comment took fuzeon into consideration - an acquaintance has been recieving fuzeon for around 9 months (I also wasn't aware of this). We hadn't heard anything yet about the Merck drug yet - do you have a name for it? Basically, the consensus was that there's nothing in the pipeline - I guess that they didn't consider the integrase inhibitors as promising enough, or far enough along to count (don't really know.)
The focus of the MAT 2004 was "Status and Start - What progess is being made in HIV-medicine" - major topics were drug resistence and compensation therapies, HIV in southern Africa, and alternative ways to administer/manage existing therapy regimes. There were several symposia on dealing with side-effects of existing drugs, and on incremental improvements in existing treatments including better management of opportunistic infections.
All of the usual Pharmacorps were there: Bristol-Myers Squibb, Lilly, Abbott, Pfizer, Hoffmann-LaRoche, GlaxoSmithKline.
Info in german at http://www.aids-tage.de/mic/veranstaltungen/87340
ok, I'm not even going to try to compete with this. My wife (who is HIV+, and appropriately familiar with the material...) was at the seminar in Munich and heard Prof. Dr. Harrer's (from the Immune Ambulanz in Erlangen Germany, one of the premiere HIV/AIDS docs in Germany, and my wife's first doc after learning of her infection 15 years ago)presentation on HIV Vaccines, and gave me the info I posted above (except the HIV-B part - sorry typo, I meant HIV-C). Perhaps it was concerning a different Vaccine, as one of the relevant points of the presentation was the fact that the vaccine (that was presented...) is designed for long shelf life in extreme conditions (2years at 50C).
The comment on the meds also came from the Münchener AIDS Tage, and from my wife's primary care physician - she is currently in the process of switching meds (due to various resistences to her previous therapy-mix that popped up earlier this year, and caused a big leap in her virus load - from undetectable to several thousand - and a drop in her CD4 count). I haven't heard of Fuzeon, or the Merck integrase inhibitor, and will ask about them. It could be that "there are no new meds" is constrained to what my wife can take and/or what is available in Germany...
I'll see if I can find more about the vaccine I'm talking about this evening (i'm at work). I have proceedings/abstracts for the presentations at home, and will post again tonite.
Sorry for the confusion and thanks for correcting me!
Actually, the vaccine is being designed for use in countries where conventional therapy is simply much too expensive. It can be kept at temperatures up to 50 degrees (C) for up to 2 years - which, together with the fact that it seems to only work against the HIV-B strain (most common in Africa), seems to indicate that it is headed for sub-saharan Africa. One of the doctors following / contributing to this project gave a presentation on it at the Munich AIDS Days seminar last week. Although the stage one trials on people are showing some progress, the processing involved (own cells, own virus) still makes it kind of prohibitive - i heard that the time frame for wide-spread therapeutic use is 5-10 years.
The unfortunate fact is: it isn't a cure, but a management therapy which should allow infected people to live longer, more productive lives. Even worse - the pharma corps seem to be losing interest in designing new drugs - there hasn't been anything new for about 3 years now... No money in it, especially now that the UN and various charities are clamoring for reductions in trademark and other IP law restrictions. Good for HIV+ persons in poor countries, bad for the pharmacorps bottom line...
this is a bad argument. essentially, the article says that Linux _must_ work with the integrated sound card that the author is using, before it can be considered "mainstream". So, in his case, too, if the sound card dies, he will buy a new computer.
then why in hell would SCO's new MS overlords allow them to hire David Boies to do the legal work? I mean, ok, he probably has all kinds of inside information...oh...
Ok, I can answer myself. It was probably his idea in the first place.
http://www.danhausertrek.com/AnimatedSeries/SW.htm l
Niven also wrote the episode.
well, i guess he likes (liked?) Star Trek the animated series. One of the episodes was a Trekified version of one of the Man-Kzin stories, complete with slaver stasis boxes and a K'zin telepath who got phyisically ill when he read Spock's (a vegetarian) mind. Of course, the K'Zin were called Kzinti, but otherwise...
I'm looking for sw to do this. What did you use?
actually, Be did this too. They did the cease and desist thing a few years ago with a company called SouthSoft that made a mail program for OS/2 called PM-Mail. It used the Be icons in its interface. the new icons kinda suck.
Thanks for keeping the site up, and making the decision to focus on the Tuesday's only important news. I was also at work, unable to get to a TV or radio, and couldn't get to any of the more traditional news sites. Thanks to your work, and the constant influx of working links posted by other users, I was able to follow the situation as it happened.
Way to go guys!
I just bought one of these, and its great. A bit pricey though (799 DM). Plays DVD, CD-R, CD-RW, VCD, Audio- and MP3-CDs. Works great, and the software toggle for the region coding was easy to find (input over the remote, and region coding is gone, at least for Region 1 and 2 DVD's).
.mp3 isn't displayed. The start up time for a full MP3-CD is pretty short (I'd say around 7-10 seconds) and the navigation is usable (displays 10 objects at a time, nav over the remote).
Video quality is fantastic (it's only jumped/skipped/wigged-out once, near the end of a pretty scratched up copy of Blade), and audio is also super. Haven't been able to try the digital output yet, gotta get a new receiver first. With mp3 cds, it even plays some my PC has trouble reading due to overburns, scratching and the strange burns my last CD-burner (a phillips 2600) created shortly before it went toes-up.
MP3 names get munged to 8.3. Well, actually only 8, the
Only 3 complaints, 1) the manuals are skimpy on mp3 details (but otherwise very complete) 2) no online docs - I don't know if it is updateable, and 3) no jog-dial (none at all, neither on the remote or the unit itself).
I don't know if it is for everyone, but I'm quite happy.
I believe that one of the major driving forces behind the move to Exchange (2000)and other W2K subsystems (SQL-Server, IIS, SMS, etc.) is ease of administration, on the system level. Exchange 2000 requires the implementation of W2K's AD, to which many companies are moving for their server platforms. AD provides the "synergy" (god, I hate that word!). Admins don't need to take care of user/group/rights definitions in several different places (passwd, some obscure LDAP setup for the calendar, etc.), only in one - integrated - system, the AD. Notes provides equal or better calendaring, iCal systems probably do, too, Oracle and DB2 are great RDBMS's, and Apache is arguably the best web server -- but the multiple administration can be a pain in the ass. What we need is a standardized LDAP-based user/group/resource-information repository for Linux, that comes as a predefined component in the Distros, with a clearly defined extension mechanism/API, that can be our version of AD. Most important, it needs to be as "easy" to setup and understand as AD. And we need some apps that use it. Until we get this, its gonna be tough to penetrate the domain of W2K.
It seems to me that the "scratching an itch" approach on this problem is just like scratching an itch. It treats the symptom and not the disease, which can be a bad solution, as anyone who has had the chicken-pox can attest.
actually, headsets might make it worse.
There was an article (either here, or on BBC - I'm way too lazy to check) about a week ago claiming that the wire for the headset acts as an antenna, collecting and concentrating the radiation that the phone emits. And pumps it straight through your ear into your brain.
Of course, this could result in a better world, one where all the morons that walk around hotel and convention center lobbies yelling at nobody have died of deep fried brain cells....
Then again, there is always bluetooth...
I just pulled a box full of around 500 old cassette-tapes out of my basement. Most of them are so old and so worn out that I don't want to listen to them any more as the sound quality really sucks. I was going to throw them out. Then it hit me. I already paid for all this music, that I can no longer listen to because the medium is worn out and/or obsolete. AFAIK, I can download all the songs on these tapes with Napster and claim fair use (archival backup), even if it is retroactive.
So, to get around the copyright infringment problem, everyone should run (not walk!) to the nearest fleamarket, garage sale or salvation army store and buy up those old 5-for-a-buck worn out cassettes and 8-tracks and LPs. Of course, this won't work quite as well for newer music, but, since most new music sucks anyway, who cares?
Does anyone know what W.A.V.E. stands for? I've been away from the states for a few years, and the last time I was there, I noticed all the D.A.R.E. bumper-stickers and associated paraphrenalia. Then I asked some people what D.A.R.E. stands for. Mostly I got a blank stare, closely followed by "uh, you know, that drugs thing." I still wonder if it doesn't mean "Drugs Are Really Exiting".
What's W.A.V.E. mean, "Will Actively Validate Evil"?
I've been living and working in Germany for almost 11 years now. Of course, my situation was a bit different, I didn't come here looking for work, but because my SO at the time was a german. She dumped me a couple of weeks after I got here, though, so I guess its just a matter of boundary values/initial conditions...
Anyway, my best advice for you ( in addition to what the guy in Japan said about culture) is to become fluent in the language of your country of choice _before_ you arrive. I didn't and had to spend about a year working in bars and restaurants for barely subsistence level wages before my German was at a level where I could even consider trying for a job in IT. You'd be amazed at how little english helps, even in a country where everyone is required to learn the language in High School.
As far as Immigration goes, yeah, it is a royal pain in the ass. I was on 3 month tourist visas for the first year. After that, I had gotten my first "real" job working for a Systems Integrator (CompuNet), and it got a little easier -- new visas and work permits every 6 months. Sometimes, though, even the job didn't help, as the Arbeitsamt (the office responsible for the distribution and control of work permits) tried once to get me fired and deported ("the job could be much better performed by a native citizen..." blah blah blah). My company's lawyers got me through that one...
Currently, though, IT skills are in high demand. The German government is currently going through its own version of the H1-B Visa crisis, trying to decide whether or not to import low-wage IT workers from India and China, so (at least here) you should be able to find a receptive climate.
Try to get a solid contract before you move permanently. Maybe you can convince your current employer to give you an unpaid leave (mine wouldn't/didn't), which could give you a back door in case things don't work out like you plan.
I know a lot of companies are looking for skilled workers, particularly with extensive experience, in all areas of IT. I work for the Deutsche Telekom now, doing "IT Services," which is basically anything above layer 3 in the ISO model. There is a lot of demand for specialists in Client Server system design, and anything related to the Internet, including programming.
Work over here is pretty cool. Strict labor laws prevent no-notice terminations and 60+ hour work weeks, and provide little things like 30+ days of paid vacation a year (Woo Hoo!!). The Social system is also ok, medical insurance is a guarantee, and retirement options are not bad. Pay isn't bad, but not great. I bring in about DM 120K + bonus, which is upper middle class. The kind of astronomic pay some guys get in the States is pretty much unheard of, but you can do pretty well. Cost of living is different but about the same on average. A liter of Gas is about a dollar, but a good dinner for 2 in a good restaurant (very good by US standards...) is about 60 bucks. It balances out.
I can't complain. The work climate over here is great. Still, I am currently working to gather the money I need to return to the States in comfort. Buying a house here is really a lifetime project (anything larger than a single car garage costs upwards of $300K), and I miss my desert (I'm from Tucson AZ originally). Nontheless, I'm glad that I made the move 11 years ago; I wouldn't trade the experiences I've had over here for anything.
Take a look at the nautilus screenshots here ...
http://www.ionet.net/~hestgray/nautilus/
Dune by Frank Herbert
Grass by Sheri S. Tepper
Anything by Niven and Pournelle (especially Footfall and The Mote in God's Eye)
Hyperion by Ian Simmons
The Chanur books by C.J. Cherryh
The Rama Series by Arthur C. Clarke
Contact by Carl Sagan
2001 and 2010 by Arthur C. Clarke
The Heechee books by Frederick Pohl
The Trigon Disunity triology by Michael P. Kube-McDowell
Anything by James P. Hogan
Glory Road by Alan Dean Foster
The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
Friday, Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
maybe a bit off topic, but this reminds me of an old Sam Kinneson routine - Jesus comes back and is a bit pissed at one of the Televangelists. He flips through the Bible and demands, "Where in the Hell does it say 'Build me a waterslide?'"
I think this just a blatant attempt to capitalize on the conflicting desires of a segment of the christian population - the ones that want to play Quake, but are honestly concerned about the condemnation it (and similar games) receive from the a portion of american christian leadership.
This kind of disgusting abuse of peoples' beliefs is nauseating. Makes me glad to be agnostic.
You're all wrong. Its obviously Mongo Planet of Doom.
I'd love to get into DVD -- if the damn players weren't built with regional lock-out hardware. I want to buy US discs when I'm in the States, and be able to play them on a machine here in Germany. Its worse than Playstation.
Bah.
Of course, if anyone knows of a DVD player that doesn't have this "feature", or can suggest a non-destructive method to disable it, I'd appreciate an e-mail!