> A big impediment is the federal structure of Germany, as high-speed trains need to have at least one stop in every federal state they cross for political reasons, which of course makes them slow.
That's not generally true. For example, the ICE train from Hamburg to Berlin goes through 3 other states (Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg) without stops.
There may be local politicians in some states making such demands ("If you want to build your tracks through _my_ state, ..."), but I would assume they are trying to make an impression in an election campaign or something.
I'm German and I never heard the term "Kleincousin". According to Wikipedia [0] it seems to be used regionally to refer to 2nd degree cousins (which I would call "Großcousin").
Anyway, "Kleincousin" and "Großcousin" don't imply the age of the cousin, but a degree of relationship (with regional differences to what is actually meant).
To refer to a younger cousin, I would just say "jüngerer Cousin". "kleiner Cousin" may be possible too (like "kleiner Bruder" for a younger Brother), but it sounds a bit like childs talk and it may not be immediately clear to everyone what is meant.
We have mandatory 1 business day bank transactions in Euro currency in Germany and the EU since 2012. If your bank is taking "up to three _work_ days" for regular Euro transactions they are violating the law (§675s BGB).
As of last year, most banks also offer instant (10 seconds) transactions for a small fee. This is planned to be made mandatory at the end of 2021. My bank is charging 0.50€ for such transactions which is significantly less than the median Bitcoin transaction cost (more than $1 in 2020 average, more than $5 currently).
Does it? Apple's documentation seems to disagree [1]:
"A weak memory ordering model, like the one in Apple silicon, gives the processor more flexibility to reorder memory instructions and improve performance, but doesn’t add implicit memory barriers."
> But do you understand people who dare to run executables from 'proper-company' site? It's closed source, you have no idea what you are running, isn't it? As long as it's not free software in terms of FSF there is not guarantee what so ever that it's not harmful or even worse intentionally harmful.
You'll have to trust somebody at some point.
Do you trust the company who designed your Ethernet chip? Do you trust the person who wrote the firmware for it? If not, go and design your own network chip. Otherwise, there's no guarantee it won't spy on you.
You'll also want to write your own compiler that you'll then use to build the operating system you intend to run. You won't just go download some Linux .iso to install, would you? After all, there's no guarantee it's not been manipulated by those who offer it on their website.
These 320k tests were performed in the Guangdong province which has a population of 113 million and ~10,000 confirmed COVID-19 cases, or about 0.009% of the population.
If they found a 0.5% positive rate on background tests there, that would suggest the real number of cases to be hundreds of thousands in that province alone.
That article suggests that the 320,000 tests were not a background test, but they tested "worried people [who] flooded fever clinics to be tested". Actual numbers across all population would hopefully be much less than 0.5%.
The article also states "The claim [that there's not huge transmission beyond what you can see clinically] was quickly challenged by an infectious diseases expert who serves on a committee that advises the WHO's health emergencies program.".
> We re-estimated mortality rates by dividing the number of deaths on a given day by the number of patients with confirmed COVID-19 infection 14 days before.
This seems seriously flawed to the point of being outright stupid and irresponsible to spread in my opinion.
They basically assume the number of confirmed infections 14 days ago better represents the real number of infections on that date than the number of confirmed infections today. That does not seem right.
1. Infected persons test positive for the virus only after it breaks out, so the number of confirmed cases is always lagging behind the real number of infections.
2. As they mention in the article, but choose to ignore, a large number of infected people are asymptomatic or show only mild symptoms and will usually not be tested. The UK government yesterday assumed the real number of infections to be 10-20x higher than the number of confirmed cases. [1]
So taking the - IMHO still valid - approximation of 2-3% mortality rate for confirmed COVID-19 cases and considering the assumption of an infection rate 10-20x higher than the number of confirmed cases, the real mortality rate should be in the ballpark of 0.2%.
Yes, that's my own custom UI framework. Most of the platform dependent stuff is implemented in the smooth library.
In hindsight, it would have been easier to just use Qt, GTK or wxWidgets. But I learned a lot by doing this myself and wouldn't want to miss that experience.
As an open source developer, I have mixed feelings about this.
Yes, Microsoft seems very keen on keeping Windows compatible even with ancient versions of the OS. New stuff usually is optional and APIs that behaved strangely in Windows 95 still behave the same way in Windows 10.
In Apple land, APIs may change their behavior whenever Apple deems it necessary. I ran into issues because of this with almost every macOS update since 10.8. And I see that even big players like Adobe keep running into compatibility issues all the time.
On the other hand, I'm spending just a few hours per week working on my project [0] and I manage to support an app that now runs on 10.5 through 10.14 and on three different CPU architectures with a single package. So no, I don't think you need to "throw 100 programmers at it" to get a working macOS version.
Apple gets a bad reputation for their supposed lack of backwards compatibility. Nothing is further from the truth.
Well, they definitely break a lot of things. Mostly things that were never documented or guaranteed to work, though.
My app [1] regularly broke with new macOS releases between 10.9 and 10.12. So often I actually shivered when they announced a new version.
I was calling Cocoa stuff from separate threads which is almost never guaranteed to work on macOS (the UI is explicitly not thread-safe). It usually worked on older releases though, but since 10.9 or so, it broke a little more with almost every new release.
Not really Apple's fault as it's mosty breaking stuff that was explicitly not guaranteed to work in the first place and which I shouldn't have used. On the other hand, Microsoft seems to keep every quirk from Windows 9x time still working until today.
No, "we may monitor your communication for any business purpose" would not be consistent with that ruling. There's no chance "any business purpose" would qualify as a legitimate reason for monitoring communications.
From the PDF press release linked on the COE site:
"The national courts [have not] carried out a sufficient assessment of whether there had been legitimate reasons to justify monitoring Mr Bărbulescu’s ommunications."
"Neither of the national courts had sufficiently examined whether the aim pursued by the employer could have been achieved by less intrusive methods than accessing the contents of Mr Bărbulescu’s communications."
In other words: You need a legitimate reason for accessing your employees' communication and you need to consider less intrusive ways of achieving your aim first.
So your boss is not allowed to just read your mail whenever he likes. Or maybe he is, if you're working in the US. But European courts, especially the international ones, are very strict about privacy and protecting personal rights.
Requiring approval of the worker's council is how an employer's demand to read an employee's mail is usually handled in Germany. I did not mean to imply that it is handled the same way in the whole EU, just that unsubstantiated monitoring is likely illegal in the whole EU.
The European Court of Human Rights recently ruled that an employee's communication may not be monitored without prior notice and without specific reasons. [1]
This ruling applies not only to the whole EU, but to the 47 member states of the Council of European, including for example Russia and Turkey.
The European Court of Human Rights recently ruled that an employee's communication may not be monitored without prior notice and without specific reasons. [1]
In Germany (and probably the whole EU) it's illegal for an employer to read an employee's mails without approval of the workers' council for each individual case.
That's not generally true. For example, the ICE train from Hamburg to Berlin goes through 3 other states (Schleswig-Holstein, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Brandenburg) without stops.
There may be local politicians in some states making such demands ("If you want to build your tracks through _my_ state, ..."), but I would assume they are trying to make an impression in an election campaign or something.