Wow, how convenient that your sexual insticts matche the law of the very country you happen to live in. That way you won't feel a slave of the system, that commands you what to do, what to think, and how to feel.
Though I wonder if you would be able to tell whether you like a girl before knowing her age. That would be an interesting experiment, and you would probably learn something about yourself.
In USA everything can be rape, even consensual sex between two 17 y/o teenagers. So please don't talk like this was or had to be universal or something. Nobody is a child until 18, and then magically become an adult when law makers say so. I'm proud to say that 15-17 years old girls can be hot, and I can feel attracted to them.
The web wasn't born with Google, and is not going to end if it goes away. I use the web everyday, I can't live without it. I learned half of everything I know thanks to it, and with that knowledge I'm now working from home, earning more than any of my friends. I recommend you to try to replace the services you use one by one, until there is only one big step left to make, and that's it. You can be free again after that (or for the first time, if you are very young and have always used google products).
I stopped using all of their products about a year and a half, thank you very much. And I never looked back, I feel safer than ever, I'm not being tracked all the time, I own my data, and I will never have to fear again being banned for no reason or having a service shut down overnight and losing all of my data. I can do whatever I want.
Thank you sillysaurus, I was about to go buy BTC at 270 to a local guy (I don't have any other way for buying bitcoin here). I forgot to check the price again, but I didn't forget to check HN ;)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but BTC banks can be attacked just like normal banks by the very central authorities we are trying to be safe from. Eg: "Oh noes, our economy is doing terrible, so much public debt. Let's just steal from the people.". Sure, they can't use inflation, but that's not the only way.
Bitcoin needs more security than credit cards because transactions are irreversible. Say his mother has a significant part of her savings in BTC, and they get stolen. What's she gonna do then?
I feel you, but it's just a matter of finding the right circles. I would never apply for a job just because it says 'php', you have to dig deeper. At this point in my career, I would never accept a freelance gig like the one you described, because I know how that goes.
You don't need to try other languages, do it only if you want to. If you wanna save time just take my word, Symfony2 has nothing to envy to Django or Rails (I have used them and also digged into their architecture). In fact, it's more modern and better designed.
I'll leave these links here, you might find them useful:
- http://silex.sensiolabs.org/ (minimalistic version of Symfony2, it's called Silex, and might be useful for small websites)
If you still want to try something else, try something that has nothing to do with all this, like Clojure. For example, Ruby/Rails is the same as PHP/Symfony2, you won't learn much. I jumped into Rails and just started coding, because I already knew web development, I wasn't impressed, the differences were mostly syntactic sugar, monolithic vs decoupled, and issues like the lack of interfaces and type hinting. But Clojure? Mind blown. I'm gonna spend my next summer learning more Clojure, because I already know it's my perfect language, but it's hard and full of new concepts. Meanwhile, php/Symfony2/nginx is my perfect stack for web development.
Server's filesystem? Are you serious? Welcome to 2013, all the problems you mention are long gone, and are only brought back from time to time by people like you who stopped learning a decade ago. You should check out symfony.com... Or any other framework for that matter! For Christ's sake.
Do you even Bitcoin? One of the main features of Bitcoin is that it can't be manipulated by a central authority like a bank or government (ie: they can't steal from the people by printing money).
