As many have mentioned, microwaves are the ones I get the least. What is the urgency for opening the damn thing when it is done!?
For dishwashers, we now have one that just opens by itself when it is done (to dry) - no beeping or anything. Maybe a bit hyperbolic, but it was quite a life changer!
In my experience, water pipes (not sure about heating) routed outside the walls are pretty common in houses in Amsterdam build pre ~2000 (and not renovated since)
I think the advise in the article and various comments here won't work, for the simple reason that Safari does not allow ajax requests from non localhost origins to localhost. I suspect this is the real reason they used an image request.
You can link any of your bank cards to any of your accounts using the mobile app (change is instant AFAIK)
You can even configure different pin codes per card, where each pin code corresponds to a different account
That would mean that anything that responds to click events is a button. From your experience of using UIs, you can probably think of many more UI elements that respond to clicks and are not buttons
It is a bit paradoxical of course, since, as you pointed out, the British empire is the reason that the US speaks english. However, I would still argue that the US is really the reason English became widely spoken in Europe.
The British Empire dominated large parts of the world, but it never dominated continental Europe. English was not widely spoken or taught in Europe until the end of WW2, when American culture became highly influential (although the UK did have its part through pop music).
The final push for English came with the internet and thus again from the US, I think. In many European countries there is a big divide in terms of English proficiency between people who grew up in pre or post internet era.
Aside from the point others have made that carbon based chemistry is a likely candidate for life, there is another factor I think:
We already know that carbon based can exist and we know what it looks like. Since our means for searching for life in the rest of the universe are still very limited, it is best to focus on what we know, instead of searching for a different form of life of which we
* don't know what it looks like
* don't know whether it can exist in the first place
For dishwashers, we now have one that just opens by itself when it is done (to dry) - no beeping or anything. Maybe a bit hyperbolic, but it was quite a life changer!