Funny, the biggest issue I get with switching RHD to LHD is checking my blind spot over the opposite shoulder. The motion feels unnatural.

PAL actually has reasons besides intentional incompatibility. Alternating phase on alternate lines makes it possible to correct for phase shift, so the tint control can be set and forgotten.

Samsung Galaxy S4 and S5 are capable of emulating EMV provided you have an app from your bank (in Australia CBA and Westpac provide apps, I think some UK banks do as well). It's coming to everyone slowly but steadily. Apple Pay is just Apple's spiffy marketing for their implementation of EMV emulation on a smartphone.

I seriously don't understand all the love for SwiftKey. When Samsung switched from their own proprietary predictive input to SwiftKey, the net effect was that input became a whole lot slower and less accurate for me. It just doesn't seem to be that good.

The only consumer-oriented places I go that require payment by credit/debit cards are hire car joints. However many trade supply shops, web hosts, and other business-oriented places only accept payment by direct deposit, credit, etc.

Apple Pay is EMV-compatible and requires no work for the merchant to support over supporting regular Visa/Mastercard NFC cards.

So true. I check in at home, then print a boarding pass at the airport because it's so much quicker and more convenient when going through the gate.

My brother was a nurse in Australia for a few years before advancing to become a paramedic. He actually did encounter a lot of sexism at work. The older female nurses would treat him as though he shouldn't be there - "What kind of girly man are you? What are you doing here? This is a women's domain!" The younger female nurses would flirt, proposition him, grab his arse, etc. Basically all the same stuff that women in male-dominated spaces complain about. Makes you wonder whether men and women really are all that different.

Yes, she would have needed to obtain redistribution rights for the source code from all copyright holders.

The trouble is there's so much cross-licensing and license pollution involved. No-one would know for sure whether a codebase contains something licensed in a way that prevents them from redistributing it in source code form. Well, IBM might, but I wouldn't expect anyone else to.

Mechanical pencil is definitely fastest for me, but if I'm writing for an extended period of time I find a pen more comfortable to use. Speed isn't the only consideration.

Mod parent up. If you're always looking to make sure your partner's doing "their 50%" and you're not doing more than "your 50%" you're going to end up bitter very quickly. You don't want to go there.

Yeah, but in his position would you rather have the assets in a trust fund for your kids, or appropriated by the MafiAA? Even if the wife leaves, his kids ultimately get the proceeds of the fund.

I don't know any more. I learned to drive with manual transmission, and drove manuals for years. The few occasions when I had to drive autos were incredibly frustrating: can't control speed precisely in a low gear with just accelerator, engine braking not very effective, etc. Then I drove an Lexus IS-F. Granted, it isn't an epicyclic gearbox like a traditional auto, it's effectively an electronically actuated manual with a torque converter stuck on the front. But it was like a glimpse of the future - almost instantaneous shifts, near-perfect throttle blipping, and the torque converter stays locked up all the time when you have anything other than first gear selected.

This technology is slowly filtering down to cars that normal people can afford. The seven-speed auto in the current Toyota Auris feels like a similar setup. I think it's finally getting to the point where a manual gearbox really could become obsolete soon. Or I could just be getting old.

(As an aside, I've been pretty unimpressed with the VW DSG. It adds a lot more weight than a torque converter, and in city driving it grinds the clutches all the time - I can see why those things overheat and fail so often. Also, the stop/start thing can be borderline dangerous. For example if you come to a standstill in a position where you're having to hold the steering (e.g. waiting to turn facing down a hill), the wheel will kick very hard when the engine cuts out and you lose power steering. I'm sure it saves fuel, but it's got to have got someone into trouble at least once.

Every commercial software product I've worked on has had at least some level of unit testing, QA and UAT before it's considered ready for prime time. You'd be sacked for using, "Does it compile?" as your metric for it being ready.

You know, I wonder if that isn't just a smart business move on his part. Break up with wife on paper so she and the kids get the money and MafiAA can't take it away from them. Worst that can happen is they drag his fat arse off to jail, and daddy becomes a martyr who stuck it to THE MAN.