This stimulates a question for me. How do people from your country feel about the American invasion to capture Noriega? I have studied a bit of the politics behind it, but not the views of the people involved.

Anyone who follows the NHL could probably name a few.

one of my best friends' mother is a cousin of Linus Torvalds. That should count as a celebrity in these circles :p
we have exactly the same system, and the production values are just awful. Haven't watched NRK much, but i like their Jazz-jukebox :p
But the country/danseband... well you know...

And to the average peasant at the time no different to each other. Pretty much fighting to replace one controlling religion with another controlling religion that the first religion had already replaced doesn't really do much for me. Also questionable whether Guy Fawkes actually did plan it and whether it was all a setup, shows that same shit happened back then as it does now really.

A question to the Americans: how close was the American Civil War? I mean, was there a fair chance that the Confederates would have won or was it pretty much a cert as to who would win, and if the South had won how do you think things would have turned out? Always wondered what the average American Joe thought of it outside what the extreme points of view shown by the media.

Subversion rocks. I'd highly suggest trying it out. Most of the original CVS guys took all their lessons learned and actually made an amazing piece of software. What's more with TortoisSVN (I use an Eclipse plugin myself) I can set new people up to update/commit wrapped in a SSH session authenticated via public/private keypair in a snap. It's nearly transparent to them, they just have to load their key into pagent when they boot up or need access.

Not at all, at least here in Spain; although I guess we drink a lot more wine than most northern european countries, we still drink A LOT more beer than wine. Of course it's a generalization but, in Spain beer is a drink for almost any social occasion, while wine is more closely associated with food. You won't see folks in a pub drinking wine while watching a soccer match.
As an example, when you're on a dinner with people, it's very common to have one or two beers for starters and then go for a red wine with the main course.
And a last word of advice: never, repeat, NEVER buy bottled sangria when you're in Spain. Spaniards very rarely drink sangria, It's a mixture of cheap wine with soda and fruit juices we only make and consume when in summer parties and such, very much like your punch. And when we do, it's never one of those poisonous bottled concoctions.

I used it exclusively until I switched to Git. You don't think the distributed nature or extremely enhanced merging capabilities make it worth using Git? I'd say it could do anything SVN could with a wealth of advantages, but it's possible I'm wrong about that.

It was like that here too. We had to pay a radio-transfusion tax (or something like that). Meaning if we wanted to listen to radio or watch TV we would have to pay to the Macedonian Radio Television, on top of the monthly subscription.

Few years ago, people got fed up with that. Nobody, and I say nobody was paying them one bit. Hell you can't sue almost every citizen of your country...

... Ever since then, we have free radio (nothing is regulated here, its a free radio as it should be!) and free TV (a dozen channels). If we want more (usually an addition of around a hundred channels (including Fox Crime/Life, CNN, Discovery, Explorer, Eurosport, and similar high profile channels) we only have to pay $10-$20 per month.

No, I think if you have those as a requirement that SVN doesn't fulfill then you should definitely use Git. I'm just a SVN fan (I've been cheerleading that project since around the time they started self hosting their source code in their own built code). I wouldn't move away unless requirements indicated I should. I will acknowledge that it is partially because I am more comfortable (I usually do source code control admin wherever I work so this plays into it as well).
Wow, no FCC equivalent with stupid decency standards? I would be in Nirvana.

I don't quite understand what you mean. Do you mean that you pay for the right to watch TV, or that you pay for the channels? If it's the latter, it's the same thing in North America : we get a basic cable package free, but anything beyond a few channels is in other packages that you have to pay for.

It's basically paying because you can watch TV. I think.

Though I could imagine they have to pay for more channels, beyond the free ones.

You pay just for the right to watch, then having to pay for the channels as well.

Even if I didn't have the TV hooked up, I would still have to pay. I had to get an electrician to come in and physically remove the TV outlets in my apartment. It was not good enough that they where disabled, or that I didn't have any TV channel subscriptions. They would still demand payment.

It sounds like a tax on having a TV, just like in the UK.

Tax? Well that I would accept.

Except it's not the government/state/country behind it. It's just a TV company that has been enforcing this on them, and have even managed to make it "law" that people HAVE to pay them.

Think of it this way: BBC demands you pay them X amount of money just because you have a TV. Even if you do not watch their channel, or have access to their channel.