A friend of mine -- a maths graduate -- did something similar at his first job. He worked for a bank, and told them he wouldn't give them the source code he'd written as it was "his".
They sacked him, and said they wouldn't sue / press charges if he signed up and completed a 1-year Masters course in computer science, which he did (paid for by himself). I think he got the good deal as his father worked at the same bank.
If this is using the same system as is being promoted (but isn't yet widespread) in the UK, then it is quicker than cash. It's closer to 1s than 10. The cashier hits the "total" button, and "£2.99" shows up on the screen (start the clock!). That activates the reader, and you touch the card against it. Done. (No signature, no PIN -- the maximum is £10, I'm not sure who takes the fraud risk, but it's not the customer.) Alternatively, you hand over cash, the cashier counts it, types in how much you handed over, puts it in the right place in the drawer, maybe gives change...
It can add up in a very busy place, but it's not yet widespread. My current credit card is slightly too old to support it, but I've only seen the readers in a few places.
(For the same reasons of speed, buying bus tickets with cash was stopped in central London some years ago. You either use the smartcard, or buy a paper ticket from the machine on the street. Few people use the paper tickets, so everyone just walks onto the bus, touching the smartcards as they pass the driver. There's rarely any interaction required, I feel a bit sorry for the drivers because of that...)
In the EU you only need to pay VAT in the state you're registered in. Amazon is registered in Luxembourg, so pays Luxembourg-rate VAT, generally 15% (the few exceptions are dependent on the product, I don't know Luxembourg but in the UK books and children's clothes have 0% VAT, for example).
It doesn't matter where Amazon ship to (within the EU), there are no fees or taxes for good moving between EU states. As far as I know, there are also no funny local goods/service taxes. (That's done with other taxes, e.g. property taxes might vary by location, I think businesses in London pay a small amount more tax than those outside London to subsidise a new railway.)
I've flown with Ryanair and Easyjet for crazy-cheap prices -- all inclusive, the least I've paid has been £5 (1p + £4.99 "fee") from Bratislava to London, and I've paid between £30 and £50 a few times. In places where they fly to a "real" airport (e.g. London) they leave really early in the morning, elsewhere it's often a long way to get to the city.
Look up what you're getting, and it can be a very good deal. For example, Gothenburg City airport (used only by Ryanair) is closer to the city centre than the main airport, and has so few flights that the shuttle buses are timed to the flight arrivals, so there's no waiting -- everyone gets off the plane and onto the buses, which drive to the centre of the city in 15 minutes. The budget airport supposedly in Stockholm is a 90-minute bus journey away from Stockholm, however. In Eastern Europe it's often the real airport of a non-capital city, so there are plenty of serious airlines with flights to Russia, Ukraine etc, and good public transport.
I've been served a free drink on a 45-minute nice-airline flight (from an island) before, and seriously wondered what the point was.
There's competition by rail for Glasgow - London, which probably helps keep the air fare competitive. I won't guess the proportions, but many people on those flights will be getting a connecting flight at Heathrow.
A cheap (I haven't tried to find the cheapest) one-way train fare on 15 January is a little under £30 (arriving at 16:30, so that's why it's cheap). Arriving around lunchtime is £40-50, so roughly the same as your flights.
The trip is 4h32m, and takes you from central Glasgow to central London (and with the walk to the street/metro being not much more than the length of the train, say 300m). Onward travel to an office shouldn't take more than 15 minutes, and will cost less than £2.
From the plane at Heathrow it will be a long walk (huge airport), then either £18 + £2 (20 minutes + 20 minutes), or £5-ish and about an hour. (Or you can take a taxi, but that's £70 and well over an hour.)
There are no security checks for the train (no ID, no x-ray) and you don't need to be at the station early, so long as you're on the train 1 minute before the departure time. Flexible train tickets are £120 (off-peak) and £160 (peak), which let you take any train without booking, and return on any train within the next 30 days. There's a train every hour.
(Hopefully they'll build the high-speed line from London via Birmingham and Manchester to Glasgow, which will reduce the journey times.)
We call those death traps in earthquake country and what you people on the east coast don't realize is that the you can have earthquakes too, they just aren't as common, but they can still happen.
Hey, calm down! I was only asking, and I think I'm near a different east coast than the one you presume.
It's the behaviour I've seen from every single other company that has had to do similar things. Corporations are like children. This is why people who think we don't need regulations are retards.
This kind of thing isn't unknown in the UK (although it is rare, as most companies don't lie as much as Apple did).
Anyway, I have seen adverts in newspapers before with apologies and retractions -- I can't remember the company, I think it was probably a European airline. They normally publish a straightforward apology and any facts as required, just their logo and some black text; nothing clever. British people will accept that and move on, but Apple won't be looking good at the moment -- I've seen Apple's news on the front page of the BBC and Guardian websites.
My language isn't accurate, I know very little about the subject, except that older houses in the UK usually don't have any insulation in the space, unless it was added later. The government will subsidise adding it in order to reduce energy use: http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Insulation/Cavity-wall-insulation
Fibreglass is probably the usual material for insulating ceilings and loft spaces (i.e. underneath the roof tiles).
(Oh, and I didn't mention: my parent's brick house is 106 years old, one I rented in London was ~120, another ~80. As far as I know, the only maintenance necessary to the walls is to repoint the brickwork -- i.e. replace any cement that's crumbled from between the bricks. My parents did it when the house was about 100 years old, and it should be another 100 years before it needs doing again...)
Are there any European-style brick houses in New England (or anywhere else) with extreme weather? (More extreme than Europe.) Are they robust enough?
Every house I've ever lived in has been built from two layers of brick, with either an air gap (older) or fibreglass (you call it mineral wool then?) or similar between, for insulation. I live in England, so we don't need shutters, but they're normal in some places -- generally for temperature control rather than protection. A tiled roof might not do very well in a hurricane. Some small changes (strong shutters, better-attached roof) and you're almost there...
TV reports of a house fire in Europe generally show a house with soot marks above some windows, and possibly a burnt and partially collapsed roof. They have to burn for a *long* time for walls to collapse. Flood damage means replacing all the ground-floor carpets and making sure the space under the house is dry, to avoid damp/mould. Wind damage usually means replacing a missing roof tile, but we don't get wind like America.
(For that matter, how are the big buildings in Manhattan? They're brick or concrete and presumably don't have shutters.)
GMail was called GoogleMail for a while in the EU, as a German company had a trademark for GMail. I can't remember any details, except that a few people I know still have @googlemail.com addresses (if they signed up before Google bought the trademark). (You can change to @gmail.com, and both work anyway. It's just what other people see, I think.)
Perhaps a device where the typical user can execute programs other than those supplied by the manufacturer.
The includes your PC, smartphone, tablet, Arduino, but excludes your car's ABS and your toaster. However, it also excludes your TV -- at least until that gets an app store, or the ability to run general Java programs. Would that be OK?
If you have a system of proportional representation, rather than "New York is a blue state, because the result was 63% voted blue and 36% voted red, so we have one blue guy who gets 31 votes", it'd be "New York is a mostly-blue state, represented by two blue guys with 21 votes and a red one with 12 votes, plus [an independent?] with 1 vote". (The independent only gets in if they have enough votes, not simply as the left-over.)
(There are many variations on how this is implemented, I just made one up without knowing much about how the US runs its government.)
I use a fountain pen. It was required to use one at school (I think it still is, as the supermarket still sells cheap ones and the stationary shops sell nice ones).
When I was about 16 I switched to a ballpoint as a minor rebellion against school, but I switched back when I realised that ball pens hurt my hand -- I don't need to press with a fountain pen.
Just after I graduated I moved more of my stuff out of my parents' house, and I found the pen I was given when I was 13. It still works fine, I use it most days at work. I don't like heavy pens, so that rules out most of the good-quality fountain pens sold in the UK, and I don't want something so expensive I need to worry about it, so last time I was in Germany I picked up a couple of good-ish-quality plastic fountain pens for €8 each (The brand is the un-Googlable "Online", which is a German company's idea of a pun). They come in about 80 different designs, most have cartoons, but there are a couple of plain-coloured barrels.
I live in the UK, and have flown out every 4-6 months or so in the last 4 years. I've not been touched once, and only ever been metal detected. I don't even remove my shoes. Sometimes I go through the detector twice, if I forget to remove my belt/keys.
Last week my hand luggage was selected for "extra screening" -- they emptied it into a tray and swabbed it, then checked if the machine went "ping". I saw someone getting patted down (patted, not rubbed like in the US) and was surprised.
As other replies have said, the EU backscatter trial at Manchester is about to end (the end of the month, I think) and the machine removed.
That flyertalk website doesn't make sense. It says LHR uses MMW (millimetre wave), and at the top says this isn't a nude-o-scan, and to be sure not to mistake it.
The Heathrow website says they use MMW and not backscatter (since backscatter isn't approved in the UK, except for a trial at Manchester, which will completely end at the end of this month).
They have metal detectors at Heathrow, unless something changed since last week when I went through...
Depending on the area, it can be very difficult to find good food. I know it exists, but where? Many places aren't set up to allow a visitor to wander round and look in the windows of 10 restaurants in 15 minutes, you need to know where to go.
My country, Britain, isn't much better in this respect, and in some ways even worse. You can walk round and find the good places, but lots of tourists in London go to large restaurants around the West End, and they're awful -- e.g. Aberdeen Steak House [or whatever it's called]. It looks busy (tourists), and it's on a major road... but the food isn't very good.
Many pubs, especially the larger franchise/chain pubs, just sell ready [microwave] meals! But as a tourist, how would you know that, until you've been somewhere better? (Hint: massive range on the menu.) I can see two pubs from my office, and one gets deliveries from an plain white van, mostly trays of fresh vegetables. The other gets deliveries of frozen boxes from a van labelled "Brakes Brothers Ltd", probably stuff from this list: http://www.brake.co.uk/food/the-list-online/frozen/prepared-meals/brakes-british-influence/
My mum asked me about the airport security, as she'd heard "bad things". America should be worried when bored British 50-something women know about the TSA -- I only really hear about it on Slashdot, but it seems it's been covered on BBC radio.
(And it was awful, and I'll avoid going where possible -- I won't pay for my own trip there, and I'll discourage anything work-related being there.)
They wouldn't let me go somewhere by myself when I was 11 (and the other kids could). I went where I wanted anyway, when I could get away with it -- I made up after-school clubs, and wandered round the city instead, or said I was going to a friend's house and met them at the agreed time outside, explaining that the friend had had to visit his grandma or something. Of course, that meant no one ever told me which bits were "OK".
When I was 13 I was finally allowed to take a bus, so long as I went with a friend. The friend was sick the first day, so I went myself and they were really mad. Another time I went shopping for half an hour (with the friend), and came back to find my mum yelling at his parents -- they didn't even know about the arrangement.
My choice of university (against their wishes) was partly based on being sufficiently far from them that they couldn't visit regularly. My grandma -- who didn't like my parents' approach -- told me a few months in that my parents had expected me to come home crying by the end of the first week. As it happens, I didn't get round to phoning them for about a month...
They emailed my tutor at the university, who asked me if I wanted her to respond. I said no, so she told them that under British privacy law, they had no right to any information about me.
My younger brother turned out much worse, I think. I don't think he was very good at lying. He's at university now, and won't even get the train to my mum's house (50 miles, direct journey, any northbound train is fine, trains every 20 minutes, couldn't be simpler). My mum drives to pick him up every Friday evening. I don't know what he'd have done if he'd gone to university in London like I did (day two, about 3am: I didn't realise the trains didn't run all night, so had to figure out the night buses while hardly knowing where I was, where I had to go in relation to that, or how much I'd had to drink).
I'm in Beijing. I've never been to China before, and this is only night two.
The metro is Y2 a ride. Buses are apparently Y1. That's about 20% of the prices in Europe.
It's clear there's a *huge* middle-class, with money to spend. A soft drink at a tourist site is Y5, a soft drink at a non-tourist (no English menu) restaurant maybe Y10, as at the nice hotel. A nice meal at a normal-looking place just cost Y40 each.
Some (special?) tea they sell here at the hotel is Y400 or more! People are buying it. There are many more fancy cars than I expected, and people with nice cameras, phones and clothes at tourist sites.
China already has a huge middle class, and judging by the rich 16-year-old who sat next to me on the plane (she was studying at a school in England), they want to travel for tourism. (Presumably business too.)
In England (and Wales) the system allows unusually early specialisation.
Towards the end of Year 9 (age 13-14), I elected not to study "modern" (~700CE to the present) history in the next two years. I knew that it would be mostly 20th century history (World Wars, Cold War etc), and at the time thought that was very dull. Instead, I took "Classical Civilisation", i.e. ancient history and literature. The ancient history was certainly interesting, and I certainly know more about the Odyssey than most people, but a few years later I thought it was a bit odd that I'd managed to go through school without any specific teaching about World War 2.
At the same time, I decided not to study any more art, music, Latin, German, "technology" or sport, and chose geography, French and extra science. My school required me to study English literature and religious studies, and all schools require the study of maths, science and English unless the child has very severe learning difficulties. (Note that there other schools may have other options, e.g. different languages, food, electronics, textiles...)
Towards the end of the year when I was 15-16, I specialised further, choosing only four subjects (as standard). I chose Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry. I'd have liked to study in more breadth, but at the time I thought I wanted to study Chemistry at university, so there wasn't much choice. There were some new choices, I remember I could choose economics or politics.
Most students in the rest of Europe continue to study a broader range of subjects until they leave school, which I think is a better system -- at university they didn't seem particularly disadvantaged by not knowing so much depth.
Most of us with degrees and skills usually put in more than 40 hours a week in our work. We do it because we enjoy the work, the pay is good, and our employers give us time off when we want it. Besides, it doesn't mean your stuck behind a desk for 10-12 hours a day. Many of us take our work on the go, or do some of it from home.
But why? I have all the above, except I never need to work on the go, and I work 37½ hours a week. I get 30 days paid leave a year, paid sick leave, etc.
If you really meant only 40 hours then that's fine, but the article is about working double that amount.
A college (for 16-18 year olds) that one of my friends attended had a simpler version of this system -- student cards had to be swiped into a reader to show attendance. The teachers didn't care much about the system -- they're teaching adults, so there were fewer in loco parentis responsibilities, and the "adults" are supposed to want to be there...
My friend made good money for a while, swiping people's cards for them. At the time, the government paid 16-18 year olds from poor families to go to school once they were 16 (i.e. once school was optional), so for some students it was well worth faking attendance.
A Smart Car doesn't even have a rear seat, so it's irrelevant for a family.
Other European compact cars are fine though -- my parents had a mid-sized car and a small car for most of my childhood, and we had no problem fitting into the small car. Of course, we took the larger car on most longer trips, but there are plenty of journeys where it wasn't necessary and three children plus two adults were fine in the small car.
Two adults plus three teenagers was a bit of a squash, so by that point my parents replaced it with a slightly larger small car.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of mine -- a maths graduate -- did something similar at his first job. He worked for a bank, and told them he wouldn't give them the source code he'd written as it was "his".
They sacked him, and said they wouldn't sue / press charges if he signed up and completed a 1-year Masters course in computer science, which he did (paid for by himself). I think he got the good deal as his father worked at the same bank.
If this is using the same system as is being promoted (but isn't yet widespread) in the UK, then it is quicker than cash. It's closer to 1s than 10. The cashier hits the "total" button, and "£2.99" shows up on the screen (start the clock!). That activates the reader, and you touch the card against it. Done. (No signature, no PIN -- the maximum is £10, I'm not sure who takes the fraud risk, but it's not the customer.) Alternatively, you hand over cash, the cashier counts it, types in how much you handed over, puts it in the right place in the drawer, maybe gives change...
It can add up in a very busy place, but it's not yet widespread. My current credit card is slightly too old to support it, but I've only seen the readers in a few places.
(For the same reasons of speed, buying bus tickets with cash was stopped in central London some years ago. You either use the smartcard, or buy a paper ticket from the machine on the street. Few people use the paper tickets, so everyone just walks onto the bus, touching the smartcards as they pass the driver. There's rarely any interaction required, I feel a bit sorry for the drivers because of that...)
In the EU you only need to pay VAT in the state you're registered in. Amazon is registered in Luxembourg, so pays Luxembourg-rate VAT, generally 15% (the few exceptions are dependent on the product, I don't know Luxembourg but in the UK books and children's clothes have 0% VAT, for example).
It doesn't matter where Amazon ship to (within the EU), there are no fees or taxes for good moving between EU states. As far as I know, there are also no funny local goods/service taxes. (That's done with other taxes, e.g. property taxes might vary by location, I think businesses in London pay a small amount more tax than those outside London to subsidise a new railway.)
I've flown with Ryanair and Easyjet for crazy-cheap prices -- all inclusive, the least I've paid has been £5 (1p + £4.99 "fee") from Bratislava to London, and I've paid between £30 and £50 a few times. In places where they fly to a "real" airport (e.g. London) they leave really early in the morning, elsewhere it's often a long way to get to the city.
Look up what you're getting, and it can be a very good deal. For example, Gothenburg City airport (used only by Ryanair) is closer to the city centre than the main airport, and has so few flights that the shuttle buses are timed to the flight arrivals, so there's no waiting -- everyone gets off the plane and onto the buses, which drive to the centre of the city in 15 minutes. The budget airport supposedly in Stockholm is a 90-minute bus journey away from Stockholm, however. In Eastern Europe it's often the real airport of a non-capital city, so there are plenty of serious airlines with flights to Russia, Ukraine etc, and good public transport.
I've been served a free drink on a 45-minute nice-airline flight (from an island) before, and seriously wondered what the point was.
There's competition by rail for Glasgow - London, which probably helps keep the air fare competitive. I won't guess the proportions, but many people on those flights will be getting a connecting flight at Heathrow.
A cheap (I haven't tried to find the cheapest) one-way train fare on 15 January is a little under £30 (arriving at 16:30, so that's why it's cheap). Arriving around lunchtime is £40-50, so roughly the same as your flights.
The trip is 4h32m, and takes you from central Glasgow to central London (and with the walk to the street/metro being not much more than the length of the train, say 300m). Onward travel to an office shouldn't take more than 15 minutes, and will cost less than £2.
From the plane at Heathrow it will be a long walk (huge airport), then either £18 + £2 (20 minutes + 20 minutes), or £5-ish and about an hour. (Or you can take a taxi, but that's £70 and well over an hour.)
There are no security checks for the train (no ID, no x-ray) and you don't need to be at the station early, so long as you're on the train 1 minute before the departure time. Flexible train tickets are £120 (off-peak) and £160 (peak), which let you take any train without booking, and return on any train within the next 30 days. There's a train every hour.
(Hopefully they'll build the high-speed line from London via Birmingham and Manchester to Glasgow, which will reduce the journey times.)
We call those death traps in earthquake country and what you people on the east coast don't realize is that the you can have earthquakes too, they just aren't as common, but they can still happen.
Hey, calm down! I was only asking, and I think I'm near a different east coast than the one you presume.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_earthquakes_in_the_British_Isles#21st_century
It's the behaviour I've seen from every single other company that has had to do similar things. Corporations are like children. This is why people who think we don't need regulations are retards.
This kind of thing isn't unknown in the UK (although it is rare, as most companies don't lie as much as Apple did).
Anyway, I have seen adverts in newspapers before with apologies and retractions -- I can't remember the company, I think it was probably a European airline. They normally publish a straightforward apology and any facts as required, just their logo and some black text; nothing clever. British people will accept that and move on, but Apple won't be looking good at the moment -- I've seen Apple's news on the front page of the BBC and Guardian websites.
My language isn't accurate, I know very little about the subject, except that older houses in the UK usually don't have any insulation in the space, unless it was added later. The government will subsidise adding it in order to reduce energy use: http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Insulation/Cavity-wall-insulation
Fibreglass is probably the usual material for insulating ceilings and loft spaces (i.e. underneath the roof tiles).
(Oh, and I didn't mention: my parent's brick house is 106 years old, one I rented in London was ~120, another ~80. As far as I know, the only maintenance necessary to the walls is to repoint the brickwork -- i.e. replace any cement that's crumbled from between the bricks. My parents did it when the house was about 100 years old, and it should be another 100 years before it needs doing again...)
Are there any European-style brick houses in New England (or anywhere else) with extreme weather? (More extreme than Europe.) Are they robust enough?
Every house I've ever lived in has been built from two layers of brick, with either an air gap (older) or fibreglass (you call it mineral wool then?) or similar between, for insulation. I live in England, so we don't need shutters, but they're normal in some places -- generally for temperature control rather than protection. A tiled roof might not do very well in a hurricane. Some small changes (strong shutters, better-attached roof) and you're almost there...
TV reports of a house fire in Europe generally show a house with soot marks above some windows, and possibly a burnt and partially collapsed roof. They have to burn for a *long* time for walls to collapse. Flood damage means replacing all the ground-floor carpets and making sure the space under the house is dry, to avoid damp/mould. Wind damage usually means replacing a missing roof tile, but we don't get wind like America.
(For that matter, how are the big buildings in Manhattan? They're brick or concrete and presumably don't have shutters.)
GMail was called GoogleMail for a while in the EU, as a German company had a trademark for GMail. I can't remember any details, except that a few people I know still have @googlemail.com addresses (if they signed up before Google bought the trademark). (You can change to @gmail.com, and both work anyway. It's just what other people see, I think.)
Perhaps a device where the typical user can execute programs other than those supplied by the manufacturer.
The includes your PC, smartphone, tablet, Arduino, but excludes your car's ABS and your toaster. However, it also excludes your TV -- at least until that gets an app store, or the ability to run general Java programs. Would that be OK?
If you have a system of proportional representation, rather than "New York is a blue state, because the result was 63% voted blue and 36% voted red, so we have one blue guy who gets 31 votes", it'd be "New York is a mostly-blue state, represented by two blue guys with 21 votes and a red one with 12 votes, plus [an independent?] with 1 vote". (The independent only gets in if they have enough votes, not simply as the left-over.)
(There are many variations on how this is implemented, I just made one up without knowing much about how the US runs its government.)
I use a fountain pen. It was required to use one at school (I think it still is, as the supermarket still sells cheap ones and the stationary shops sell nice ones).
When I was about 16 I switched to a ballpoint as a minor rebellion against school, but I switched back when I realised that ball pens hurt my hand -- I don't need to press with a fountain pen.
Just after I graduated I moved more of my stuff out of my parents' house, and I found the pen I was given when I was 13. It still works fine, I use it most days at work. I don't like heavy pens, so that rules out most of the good-quality fountain pens sold in the UK, and I don't want something so expensive I need to worry about it, so last time I was in Germany I picked up a couple of good-ish-quality plastic fountain pens for €8 each (The brand is the un-Googlable "Online", which is a German company's idea of a pun). They come in about 80 different designs, most have cartoons, but there are a couple of plain-coloured barrels.
I live in the UK, and have flown out every 4-6 months or so in the last 4 years. I've not been touched once, and only ever been metal detected. I don't even remove my shoes. Sometimes I go through the detector twice, if I forget to remove my belt/keys.
Last week my hand luggage was selected for "extra screening" -- they emptied it into a tray and swabbed it, then checked if the machine went "ping". I saw someone getting patted down (patted, not rubbed like in the US) and was surprised.
As other replies have said, the EU backscatter trial at Manchester is about to end (the end of the month, I think) and the machine removed.
That flyertalk website doesn't make sense. It says LHR uses MMW (millimetre wave), and at the top says this isn't a nude-o-scan, and to be sure not to mistake it.
The Heathrow website says they use MMW and not backscatter (since backscatter isn't approved in the UK, except for a trial at Manchester, which will completely end at the end of this month).
They have metal detectors at Heathrow, unless something changed since last week when I went through...
Depending on the area, it can be very difficult to find good food. I know it exists, but where? Many places aren't set up to allow a visitor to wander round and look in the windows of 10 restaurants in 15 minutes, you need to know where to go.
My country, Britain, isn't much better in this respect, and in some ways even worse. You can walk round and find the good places, but lots of tourists in London go to large restaurants around the West End, and they're awful -- e.g. Aberdeen Steak House [or whatever it's called]. It looks busy (tourists), and it's on a major road... but the food isn't very good.
Many pubs, especially the larger franchise/chain pubs, just sell ready [microwave] meals! But as a tourist, how would you know that, until you've been somewhere better? (Hint: massive range on the menu.) I can see two pubs from my office, and one gets deliveries from an plain white van, mostly trays of fresh vegetables. The other gets deliveries of frozen boxes from a van labelled "Brakes Brothers Ltd", probably stuff from this list: http://www.brake.co.uk/food/the-list-online/frozen/prepared-meals/brakes-british-influence/
I went to America last year (work paid).
My mum asked me about the airport security, as she'd heard "bad things". America should be worried when bored British 50-something women know about the TSA -- I only really hear about it on Slashdot, but it seems it's been covered on BBC radio.
(And it was awful, and I'll avoid going where possible -- I won't pay for my own trip there, and I'll discourage anything work-related being there.)
My parents did this.
They wouldn't let me go somewhere by myself when I was 11 (and the other kids could). I went where I wanted anyway, when I could get away with it -- I made up after-school clubs, and wandered round the city instead, or said I was going to a friend's house and met them at the agreed time outside, explaining that the friend had had to visit his grandma or something. Of course, that meant no one ever told me which bits were "OK".
When I was 13 I was finally allowed to take a bus, so long as I went with a friend. The friend was sick the first day, so I went myself and they were really mad. Another time I went shopping for half an hour (with the friend), and came back to find my mum yelling at his parents -- they didn't even know about the arrangement.
My choice of university (against their wishes) was partly based on being sufficiently far from them that they couldn't visit regularly. My grandma -- who didn't like my parents' approach -- told me a few months in that my parents had expected me to come home crying by the end of the first week. As it happens, I didn't get round to phoning them for about a month...
They emailed my tutor at the university, who asked me if I wanted her to respond. I said no, so she told them that under British privacy law, they had no right to any information about me.
My younger brother turned out much worse, I think. I don't think he was very good at lying. He's at university now, and won't even get the train to my mum's house (50 miles, direct journey, any northbound train is fine, trains every 20 minutes, couldn't be simpler). My mum drives to pick him up every Friday evening. I don't know what he'd have done if he'd gone to university in London like I did (day two, about 3am: I didn't realise the trains didn't run all night, so had to figure out the night buses while hardly knowing where I was, where I had to go in relation to that, or how much I'd had to drink).
I'm in Beijing. I've never been to China before, and this is only night two.
The metro is Y2 a ride. Buses are apparently Y1. That's about 20% of the prices in Europe.
It's clear there's a *huge* middle-class, with money to spend. A soft drink at a tourist site is Y5, a soft drink at a non-tourist (no English menu) restaurant maybe Y10, as at the nice hotel. A nice meal at a normal-looking place just cost Y40 each.
Some (special?) tea they sell here at the hotel is Y400 or more! People are buying it. There are many more fancy cars than I expected, and people with nice cameras, phones and clothes at tourist sites.
China already has a huge middle class, and judging by the rich 16-year-old who sat next to me on the plane (she was studying at a school in England), they want to travel for tourism. (Presumably business too.)
In England (and Wales) the system allows unusually early specialisation.
Towards the end of Year 9 (age 13-14), I elected not to study "modern" (~700CE to the present) history in the next two years. I knew that it would be mostly 20th century history (World Wars, Cold War etc), and at the time thought that was very dull. Instead, I took "Classical Civilisation", i.e. ancient history and literature. The ancient history was certainly interesting, and I certainly know more about the Odyssey than most people, but a few years later I thought it was a bit odd that I'd managed to go through school without any specific teaching about World War 2.
At the same time, I decided not to study any more art, music, Latin, German, "technology" or sport, and chose geography, French and extra science. My school required me to study English literature and religious studies, and all schools require the study of maths, science and English unless the child has very severe learning difficulties. (Note that there other schools may have other options, e.g. different languages, food, electronics, textiles...)
Towards the end of the year when I was 15-16, I specialised further, choosing only four subjects (as standard). I chose Maths, Further Maths, Physics and Chemistry. I'd have liked to study in more breadth, but at the time I thought I wanted to study Chemistry at university, so there wasn't much choice. There were some new choices, I remember I could choose economics or politics.
Most students in the rest of Europe continue to study a broader range of subjects until they leave school, which I think is a better system -- at university they didn't seem particularly disadvantaged by not knowing so much depth.
Most of us with degrees and skills usually put in more than 40 hours a week in our work. We do it because we enjoy the work, the pay is good, and our employers give us time off when we want it. Besides, it doesn't mean your stuck behind a desk for 10-12 hours a day. Many of us take our work on the go, or do some of it from home.
But why? I have all the above, except I never need to work on the go, and I work 37½ hours a week. I get 30 days paid leave a year, paid sick leave, etc.
If you really meant only 40 hours then that's fine, but the article is about working double that amount.
A college (for 16-18 year olds) that one of my friends attended had a simpler version of this system -- student cards had to be swiped into a reader to show attendance. The teachers didn't care much about the system -- they're teaching adults, so there were fewer in loco parentis responsibilities, and the "adults" are supposed to want to be there...
My friend made good money for a while, swiping people's cards for them. At the time, the government paid 16-18 year olds from poor families to go to school once they were 16 (i.e. once school was optional), so for some students it was well worth faking attendance.
No, they don't. European regulators like to cause trouble to US companies, while European governments and many European companies get a free pass.
No, they don't -- but I doubt the stories hit the US news.
http://positivepulse.co.uk/482/482/ (NHS, presumably, i.e. British government)
http://www.yourlocalguardian.co.uk/news/local/kingstonnews/9687652.Kingston_Council_faces_privacy_breach_claim/ (Local government near London)
http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/uk/probe-into-airline-privacy-breach-16141298.html (British airline)
Of course, as with many local European issues, it's more difficult for me to find stories from other countries as they're usually in another language.
Here's some kind of summary from Ireland: http://www.algoodbody.ie/knowledge.jsp?i=1846
And here's one from Germany http://www.dw.de/deutsche-telekom-suspected-of-privacy-breaches/a-3357090-1 (German telecoms)
A Smart Car doesn't even have a rear seat, so it's irrelevant for a family.
Other European compact cars are fine though -- my parents had a mid-sized car and a small car for most of my childhood, and we had no problem fitting into the small car. Of course, we took the larger car on most longer trips, but there are plenty of journeys where it wasn't necessary and three children plus two adults were fine in the small car.
Two adults plus three teenagers was a bit of a squash, so by that point my parents replaced it with a slightly larger small car.