Go for the weather and prices, not the politics. You can live as you want in the US. Plenty of hippy communes, survivalists, polygamists, vegetarians.
Work in the web, relax in good weather. The best weather in the US is either in Hawaii or on the coast north of San Diego.
Used to be people who wanted to get away went to the Soviet Union to help build the freedom of the Workers Paradise. I'd say be careful. It could be a one-way trip.
Tell us your politics, religion, sexual orientation and age and we can be of more help. I gather you're looking for a left-wing tech incubator. Don't know of any, but Israel and Ireland come close.
There are some truly free universities. But you've still got to pay for essentials. The MIT curricula are on the web somewhere for free. Including texts.
If you do your own open source project, it can work for you. It's hard work and it can stereotype you. If you do a great job at building a new test thing for, Ruby, say, you'll have a hard time escaping the stereotype for 'test' and 'ruby'. But it can work.
You can lie on your resume and then work crazy to get your jobs done. For certain lazy, pointy-headed bosses and certain smart and ambitious programmers this might be the best solution. You can easily do better than the idiots these fools would otherwise hire. If you do this then change jobs every 2 years. You'll then have enough of a real resume that you can drop off the original baloney.
Actually stealing the money to pay your way through school is against the law and the hard time simply isn't worth it.
I have friends in university administration and another whose a college guidance counselor; They say there are many more scholarships available than people think. If you're willing to dig you can find some. There are often local scholarships available, for example, there might be something from the banks or the Chamber of Commerce in Columbus. Or your church. Or your dad's union, or business group.
Spend a day on the web searching for federal and other scholarships. I understand it works.
I've had it, and it did get better slowly. It cost me many thousands of dollars of lost work. The doctors are pretty useless in many cases.
0. Proper sleep, exercise and nutrition are important.
1. Hit the keyboard more gently.
2. If you're a wide person, like me, your elbows are out to the sides and your hands come in from the sides. So get a split keyboard like the Microsoft Natural. There are plenty of other keyboards that are split and "Ergonomic".
3. I had to drop Emacs, as it overused the ^X and meta-x keys. I mapped them to Function keys but that wasn't enough.
4. Not all RSI is carpal tunnel. There are even other tunnels. The thing about tunnels is that both a nerve and a tendon will go through the same tunnel in bone. When the tendon inflames it enlarges and squeezes the nerve against the bone. Misery ensues. You're body has lots of tunnels. There's even a pair in the head.
5. The best voice software is or was from a company from "Dragon Systems". The business history of this company is fascinating. Their "Naturally Speaking" product might still be the best.
6. Find and talk to some people in your state who have been on Disability. In some states, your Disability claims get paid by the last company you worked for. This results in you being blackballed by the business community. The companies seem to share information on employees and this might be legal. That's what those industry organizations are for, among other things. People who go on Disability are likely to sue. They don't want that. In the US, it varies from State to State. Get local information.
7. In some times and places, Disability is a big con and the bureaucracy has learned to treat all claimants as crooks; you are guilty until proven innocent. This is an important psychological injury and leads to trouble.
8. RSI can cause people to hate their jobs, and hate computers, they become the enemy. Work attitude suffers. Some management knows this and will head of trouble by getting rid of injured employees at the first excuse.
9. Get three different styles of keyboard and two or three mice. You an actually plug them all in at the same time if they're all USB.
10. See a hand specialist and an orthopedist. There is also a chance that what you really have is some outlier; like cancer of the bone in the hands, or something weird. Nerve damage can also be caused by bone weakness or osteoporosis. Have it all checked.
11. Docs tend to look at bilateral problems (both hands) differently. The trouble might be in the common parts, the spinal cord or the brain. This could be good news if they're right, as some mental problems and neurological conditions are easier to treat than soft tissue injuries.
12. Physical therapy can be very annoying but also be very, very useful. Do whatever they say as if it is God Himself commanding you from the Mountain. Do it every day, if they say so.
13. Going Dvorak means a new keyboard for both home and work. Give up game-playing and some web surfing. TV is also bad for you. You need basic exercise, walk or run. No handball, racquetball, tennis, ping-pong, hammering. Make sure you have an electric screwdriver or don't do that at all. I found that swimming stressed my hands.
14. If you take as many breaks as the RSI experts say, your whole level of intensity will go down. I don't even know if it's possible to relax your body as you work your mind unless your a Zen master, or something.
15. If you research the subject, you can terrify yourself and be paralyzed with anxiety. If you research RSD/RSI together, you'll leave work and become a monk out on a mountaintop, and starve to death. Okay, I'm exaggerating, here.
16. Proper sleep, exercise and nutrition are STILL important.
18. The only way to sit up straight is to raise the monitor screens. If you raise them too high, you'll be looking up, which is just as bad.
19. The most expensive chairs, keyboards, and so on are worth it, financially, if they work. Lost work is more expensive than any of those.
20. In some states, employers have to assume that if you were out of work for a while, you must have been in prison. This is because prison records get sealed after a few years so that ex-prisoners can get jobs and rehabilitate. So if you've been out of work a few years ago and don't have a prison record, you look just like somebody who actually was in prison.
Contrary to the title, the book doesn't rule out the possibility of carpal tunnel, but it correctly points out that carpal tunnel only applies to a small set of RSI-related symptoms. I found the book helpful.
while it's possible that mentioning it to your employer may have negative consequences, I think it much more likely that your employer will get you what you need as far as an ergonomic workspace. Unfortunately you need to have some idea of what you need in an ergonomic workspace to ask. So if you have the money, try different things at home. You may also be able to borrow coworkers items to try them. Frequently, someone who has dealt with RSI and found some simple solutions will be excited to share whatever helped them.
Very few of us have extensive experience in more than one library. JavaScript muddled along without standard libraries for a long time.
I use Ruby on Rails, which has support for Prototype/Scriptaculous, so that's what I use. I like it a lot better than straight JavaScript. The thing that the libraries do well at is papering over browser differences. One good aspect is they collect "fixes" and tricks that have been spread all over the web and concentrate them one place.
I'm mystified why Prototype doesn't download in minified format. It's easy and useful to do but I'm sure most folks don't think of it.
Some people do better without caffeine. There is also a condition called Mononucleosis that can cause fatigue, as well as other conditions. Lots of things from vitamin deficiencies to cancer can cause fatigue.
If you look up the pill on the web you can get information but they tend to list any side effect ever seen. Check out the list of problems with Tylenol and you'll see the kind of CYA exaggeration I'm talking about.
I've never heard of any treatment for restless leg syndrome beside the medicine.
In some places the message is "Leave". Leave this grody little town. I think it's been the message of Detroit.
Jerusalem, where I live, has a message, "Pray". The biggest industry in Jerusalem is the Israeli government (analogous to DC). The second biggest is tourism. The Arabs and the Jews actually quit fighting and cooperate in business to sell trinkets to the tourists.
So the other messages of Jerusalem are "Survive", "Fight", "Sell", and actually, "Leave". A lot of the Israelis are moving to Tel Aviv for business/employment reasons. But apartments are hard to get in Jerusalem because the religious rich keep on buying up the snazziest spots. There are a lot of very expensive apartments that are used maybe half the year. So another message is "Visit". And people do. If you're into real estate, the message is "Build Luxury". The luxury apartments are crowding out the poor.
The only ambitious people I've met in Jerusalem are the newly arrived, and some business folk. Actually, the Torah Scholars are very ambitious in a way that is about academics but also about power. They want to master their subject, but also want their religiosity to change history through a sort of Divine Intervention. That's pretty ambitious.
The reason you saw TV's was because the kids were watching. Mom and Dad were online working or studying. Were the offices of Via Web lined with dead-tree books up to the ceiling?
And the books you saw in Cambridge might have been from decades past, but the scholars in the residences might have been online. Even sociology is hard.
I haven't looked at Django, so I can't compare. I've used Rails on a few projects and I like it. I've coded for decades and Ruby is the most programmer-friendly language I've found.
For the amateur, it is easier to approach PHP and start banging around than to learn Ruby and Rails.
The Rails free docs just aren't as good as say, the free MySQL or the free Postgresql docs. Or as good as the MS .NET docs. But there are several good books. And both Ruby and Rails work as advertised, they aren't bug-laden.
Nothing left. It's the end of the internet. In a few years every person and machine on earth will have a couple of web pages. A public one for professional use and a private one for friends and family only.
We'll have to address by content, not by name. Search engines are the future, baby!
