ninalanyon

Same in the UK.

How do they manage that? Do you have to visit a government office to get a passport? I only have a UK passport and it definitely does not include my finger prints as it was obtained by post.

No. Unless you expect everyone to always have those things you will need the street lights anyway so why not make them smart and efficient. This especially applies in northern latitudes where it is dark in the evening even before people leave work.

A backup that isn't offline is not really a backup as it far too easy to destroy it even by accident/carelessness/lack of understanding.

When I was responsible for backups we kept the tape cartridges in a fire safe in a different building. We took a full backup weekly and moved the tape from the robot to the firesafe as soon as the backup was complete. Only the daily incremental backups stayed in the robot for more than a day.

Why does a monitor install anything at all? Why does it even have a mechanism to do so?

Perhaps I'm misreading you but giving up rights and losing rights are two different ideas.

I'm 70 by the way. If I want to plan for this I can set up a power of attorney.

I wasn't affected either as I had given up using Windows already but it hit No. 2 son's machine. I decided that the intent was more important than their technical incompetence.

I did buy a Sony ultrazoom camera recently but that was a secondhand purchase. The hardware is brilliant but as usual the software ranges from barely usable and to totally broken. In theory it is supposed to be able to run a wifi hotspot that lets you transfer images wirelessly but instead of just putting a minimal web server on it they created their own opaque protocol, the only client was Windows only, and you can no longer download it. Had I bought it new in the expectation of being able to unload it wirelessly I would have sent it back for a refund

I gave up on Sony for life when they tried to install a rootkit on my computer from an audio CD years ago and I see no reason to change.

limited rights for old people

How old did you have in mind?

an old person is already looking forward to declining and dying

All of my colleagues who have died in old age (at least late seventies) did so in full command of their senses, one of them still contributing to international technical committees into their eighties.

Age is not a useful measure in this field.

That blog entry is a delight to read!

As a result of advertising people being bastards,

The gov.uk Design Team are a treasure.

You can turn it off.

Instead of using two diagonal strokes, I draw two mirrored c’s, as my Russian penmanship teacher would suggest.

The "mirrored c's" is a perfectly normal way to write x longhand in English. At least that's how I was taught in England 65 years ago.

Tesla has also been guilty of some particularly awful designs on later models,

Absolutely! They loaned me a Model 3 while my 2015 Model S 70D was having the battery replaced (just before the warranty ran out). I really disliked it despite it being considerably newer and having longer range. The big portrait screen on the old Model S being firmly embedded in the dashboard makes it much easier to use. Also part of the landscape screen on the Model 3 was obscured by my left hand on the steering wheel (UK spec right hand drive car).

I was very glad to get back into my ancient Model S.

Surely an Android or other mobile and a USB GPIO device can do much the same. For most the outlay is then just the USB to GPIO. 15 USD from Adafruit: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2264

You must be from the US.

Neither of those are a problem in my 2015 Tesla Model S for the buttons that control the climate control or media player.

It seems to me that many of the problems that people report related to touch controls are more to do with how they are laid out than the fact that they are touch controls.

I wish he would. Then the authorities would have to fix the problem.

It's a bit more standardised in Europe I think.

But the name of the month of June was said to mean haymaking in Finnish.

with a clause that they could remove them at any time.

Then they did not sell them.

Isn't June a little early for haymaking in Finland?

They send your transcripts out with an explanatory note, so that the recipient will not view the graduate poorly when they see the numbers.

That's odd, I would expect any employer for whom the class of degree mattered to know the reputation of the university. For instance second from Oxford is probably going to be as desirable as a first from Oxford Brooks (formerly Oxford Poly).

< I'm sure my score was below 40%.

Such scores were expected when I was studying. No one got 100% in the kind of exams we had, not even those who got firsts.

How long is too short? Each exam in my BSc Applied Physics final (1977, Exeter Uni.) was three hours and we had similar exams in each of the preceding years to weed out those who weren't keeping up. I'm pretty sure that having more time would not have helped the weaker students get through the Quantum Mechanics exam.

In addition I had to defend the report (120 pages of typescript and charts) of my final year project to my supervisor and another senior academic. And it was clear that they had actually read it.

All those exams were open note; anything in your own hand or a copy of a lecture handout was permitted. Again the weaker students would not have been helped by more time because they hadn't understood that you have to have enough familiarity with your notes to be able find the right information. Some brought in 50 litre rucksacks stuffed with ring binders and the noise of them furiously leafing through was enough for the invigilators to warn them to make less noise or risk being ejected.

In Norway it is typical that an exam of similar standard allows five hours.

Do I? And if so why?

If your school just had you silently reading Shakespeare they were doing it wrong. It is meant to be performed and watched, his works are plays and poetry not novels. I was lucky, my English Literature teacher in high school was a (very) minor playwright and well aware of how important speaking the lines out loud is, and how watching a play is so very different from reading it.

Because physical exams are performed in mobile vans in NHANES, data could not be collected in northern latitudes during the winter

Why not?

In Norway e-scooters don't require registration plates but do require liability insurance. It's less than 100 NOK per month (~10 EUR).

So now I have to have a mobile phone?

Such things already exist in Europe. The RAC for instance:

https://www.thecarexpert.co.uk/call-breakdown-provider-ev-ru...