Comment by anthk

Ditto here in Spain. If you were able to watch Northern Exposure or The X Files with the Spanish dub in the 90's with a normal TV schedule (read: with human schedules, you need to sleep), I would ask you a unicorn just in case, because I woudn't believe you. After 2003 with Emule and BT? Damn it, I've got whole NE series over torrent and I regret nil.

My public TV already paid the US TV producer with money from our taxes, so in the end it's a draw.

Programming books? Your elder brother/sister it's doing CS at some uni, right? Then, good luck paying $50 on big book stores from malls. Entry courses you mean? Pay ~$50 a month for a private school and try enjoying Visual C++ 98. Linux? That's was for CS engineers and PC freaks right?

Nowadays you can learn damn Calculus on your own and install Maxima from any distro with online guides and tutorials. I had to learn Calculus from my own (I was some HS dropout) early Debian DVD's which had a PDF on Mathematics and from that I tried to understand every exercise and equation under Maxima. No upgrades, no updates, no tutoring. Hard mode my default for everything. Your TV tuner didn't work? Messing with Linux kernel modules like crazy and even editing the source code to fake the tuner and PLL and watch something in XawTV.