Are you expecting PHP-like behavior here?
What exactly are you trying to do?
Jason
Well, as it stands, you need to stop what you’re doing and read up on how Rails works.
If you are up to buying a book, I highly recommend Agile Development with Rails v2: http://www.pragprog.com/title/rails/
Unfortunately, free tutorials on the net aren’t easy to find that help out, but here’s the Rails wiki page: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/GettingStartedWithRails
Also, just in case you don’t know about the MVC pattern (what Rails is built upon), there’s information here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model-view-controller
In short, link_to_remote sends an Ajax call to a controller (#index, in this case). params is available in that controller for you to use. I don’t think that’s what you want. Stick to non-Ajax calls (#link_to), it’s good practice anyways.
Also, here’s the Rails API docs: http://api.rubyonrails.org
Let us know if you need any specific help!
Jason