Hi,

Apparently many of your <slightsnark>freedom-loving</slightsnark> countrymen *do* want it that way.

I mainly freelance, but I believe 2 weeks + about 2 weeks of public holidays is pretty much the EU minimum for permanent staff.

(I did fairly badly at school for a long time and then was ill; I don't think I'd have have been able to have had in the US the relatively good and 'entrepreneurial' life that I've had here in the UK. I'm just in the process of getting a new start-up into gear for example.)

Rgds

Damon

Um, in a reasonable employment environment that is a straw man.

In the UK it would be illegal to only give an employee a week off per year.

Rgds

Damon

Indeed, let's do both please.

Rgds

Damon

I'm a primary school governor and I believe that the teachers at my school would much prefer a shorter summer break as the amount that gets forgotten each time, especially by pupils with marginal progress and attainment, is eye-watering. And that hurts them LOTS in later life. That does NOT necessarily mean more school days in the year, just differently distributed.

Also, more breaks spread out and less contention for the same block of a few weeks over summer would possibly make for cheaper and less stressful / crowded holidays.

(I also happen to believe that letting teenagers start the school day much later would be more humane and conducive to good results also.)

Rgds

Damon

No.

I very deliberately did NOT set up a Google account on my Android Fairphone, and it does the basic things just fine, like, um, phone calls and even alarms. It even takes OK pictures.

I have EU citizens' contact details in my phone and I think that, given NSA revelations, I would be breaking the law to knowingly share/sync those details with/via a US entity such as Google (or Apple).

Would be nice to have local contact and calendar sync with my MacBook (OS X 10.9) but Apple made that hard, not the lack of apps on the phone so far as I can tell.

Rgds

Damon

Only to a degree, and typically less following is possible as the fuel load gets older in each reactor.

Rgds

Damon

They already do from time to time in (eg) Germany and Spain.

Rgds

Damon

On which planet? They work just fine as long as you are not expecting unicorn farts. 15% of UK electricity roughly, ~50% of German.

And nukes are hardly perfect (though I have nothing against them and want at least some in the mix); ignoring the waste issue they don't load-follow well or at all (solar PV is a natural match for some/most load given that we're diurnal), and sometimes only manage twice the capacity factor of wind (eg look at some UK nuke fleet capacity factor vs offshore wind).

Rgds

Damon

Solar PV and reglazing (unless currently in a very poor state) should usually be low down the list of things to do if you are driven by maximising ROI (or ERO(E)I).

Rgds

Damon

PS. Having said that I have already done PV and triple-glazing though have not quite finished internal wall insulation works: see earth.org.uk

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/u...

http://www.rsc.org/chemistrywo...

http://phys.org/news/2013-10-a...

Rgds

Damon

Still here, wasting food and oxygen, or it is just (say) brown people in far away countries unlike you that are useless?

Ha!

Ed is too painful to use under any circs IMHO, but I have been using vi (or in fact "pcz" + vi variants) since ~1984, so I was only 8 years late to the party.

I prefer non-interactive editing in the absence of vi, eg sed/awk/egrep...

Rgds

Damon

Yes, they do materialise, just not in your/GGP's attention span it seems, nor all at once, nor at your convenience. Read an electronics catalogue rather than /. if all you want to know about is things ready *now*.

I have the benefit of a nice big LiPO4 pack at home, enough to run my server for a couple of days, which would absolutely not even have been a twinkle in my eye when I started in electronics and computing for example. Oh and a couple of months' worth of lead-acid behind it, essentially a century-old technology with a little bit of gel and MPPT cleverness folded in much more recently.

Retail tech is full of tiny incremental improvements, which sometimes started as R&D tech breakthroughs many many years before.

Rgds

Damon

The solution is to have (almost) anyone use (almost) any socket and use a little thing called technology to bill the right person. Then sockets can be installed on public streets and in communal parking areas as well as in private driveways.

We do it with mobile phones, and we already do it with *some* plug-in EV points.

The tech isn't that hard.

Actually getting a suitably universal plug and socket seems *as* hard.

Rgds

Damon

PS. I have no driveway and would need a solution like this.

Because YouTube is not a monopoly and it's not unreasonable or unfair of it to try to recover costs (or, gasp, make a profit) somehow.

Nothing stops you nor anyone else hosting elsewhere or on your own physical server etc etc. I have several (media) servers around the world but for the latest media I put up YouTube was convenient and fast and free. Bandwidth is not free, even for Google.

Rgds

Damon