What else would be more important to maximize than happiness?
Means of getting happiness are a different discussion, and what happiness is might differ from person to person. But why would you e.g. accumulate more money or power if it didn't bring you any happiness?
Why not use Varnish? POST messages of 500 bytes could easily be rewritten / proxy'd to GET requests. That might not be 100% restfull but seems like a lot less work. On our production environment Varnish always responds in less then 2 ms. Even on my development VM I never see response times > 5 ms. It has all the other requirements they state.
Perhaps I'm prejudiced because Varnish has proven to be such an awesome caching mechanism (we still use Redis as a key/value store), but this seems like NIH.
I'm not opposing this idea, but I'm not sure it would have helped in the VW case. There were some people (engineers? Managers?) who were cheating and they knew that what they were doing was wrong. I don't believe a license would have changed that.
There are a lot of people outside of the US, and most of them aren't using either Bing nor Yahoo. Over here in europe, google is still king and I think that in Asia it's Baidu. I don't want to downplay the successes of Bing, Yahoo or Baidu, but looking globally Google is still pretty much uncontested.
Over here in the Netherlands, part time working is pretty normal. I've been working four days a week for a couple of years now and I can really recommend it. Perhaps you will be a little bit less productive, but definitely not 20%.
A 99 euro vacuum food saver will get you a long way in sending drugs worldwide. Combine that with some clever packaging and the chances of it getting caught at customs are pretty small.
That's not surprising. The Netherlands have a long history of producing quality XTC / MDMA and are one of the biggest XTC exporting countries worldwide. Furthermore, given the relaxed weed legislation a lot of marijuana is produced here.
Why not? As a tourist in Holland, there is absolutely no reason to drive a car. If you go to Amsterdam, there are a lot of interesting cities within 45 minutes by train. Even Groningen or Maastricht are within less than 3 hours by train (which is too far to do fore one day, but if you book a hotel over there for 1 or 2 nights is perfectly feasible)
Traffic in downtown LA, NYC or even Rome is worse than Amsterdam, and I'm really glad that I never had to drive in places like Vietnam or Cambodia. Sure, driving in Amsterdam requires you to pay attention but it isn't that bad.
It works pretty well though. Giving 1 meter of clearance is just not possible in the very tight old city centers of the Netherlands, which also have a lot of biking traffic.
As someone who is working for one of the travelling agencies who had people on board (and I'm 99% sure one of my previous employers also had customers on that aircraft), could we please wait with all the speculation? Querying the database to see who might have been on board was no fun. I think that our customer rep's had an even harder time to answer questions. The suffering of relatives and friends must be much worse. I'm pretty sick of all the speculation in Dutch media right now, let's wait for some kind of official investigation and in the mean time light some candles for the deceased.