My manager has never asked me to do overtime, although I think we have a similar arrangement.

However, sometimes I work late, particularly if I have no plans for the evenings, the office is quiet, and I'm busy concentrating on something. I leave early later that week, or if there are enough hours (like if the weather is really bad), take an afternoon or day.

I'm not sure what would happen if I didn't take my holiday. I think nothing, so long as I've taken the legal minimum (20 days in the UK, though I get 32).

(Inequality in the UK isn't that much better than in the US: http://inequalitybriefing.org/... )

An "intern" (not a very British word) at a bank in London died recently, perhaps from overwork after working 72 hours straight.

http://www.theguardian.com/bus...

(Respect for the banking industry has fallen so far, I'm not sure there was much sympathy...)

You aren't going back enough.

Before the industrial revolution, "according to Oxford Professor James E. Thorold Rogers, the medieval workday was not more than eight hours".

"Detailed accounts of artisans' workdays are available. Knoop and jones' figures for the fourteenth century work out to a yearly average of 9 hours (exclusive of meals and breaktimes)[3]. Brown, Colwin and Taylor's figures for masons suggest an average workday of 8.6 hours[4]. "

You missed the point: this was southern Britain, where most cities can keep all the salt/grit they need in a few heaps somewhere. It might snow once or twice, maybe 1-5cm. It hasn't snowed so far this winter.

When it snowed for two weeks, across the whole island, every city, town and village wanted more grit, and there wasn't enough available. Why would the grit-selling company have a 5 year supply on hand?

(Colleagues described the weather today is "bloody freezing". It was 10C. YMMV.)

I've only ever lived in neighbourhoods that have had all-buried utilities for decades and decades, and none of it has ever exploded. I can't remember a power cut lasting longer than a couple of hours; normally there's a brief interruption (seconds to ~10 minutes) every two-three years or less.

However, I don't live in the US, and probably pay 2-3x what you do for electricity.

I use the rsync app linked above. I already had a server (low-power ARM thing), so it took a few minutes to create a username and public key. The app has a list of defined rsync commands, I run it every so often.

No, you just need to pay a lot. Examples: railway signalling, air/spacecraft, industrial control equipment, ...

Not complex, but low-margin high-volume equipment -- a recall is very expensive. One of my tutors at university had worked for NASA, proving some systems on the ISS worked correctly, and an appliance manufacturer, proving washing machine software worked.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

I live in west London. Off-peak, I can travel to the centre of London for £2.20 (5 miles), or to Heathrow Airport (furthest west) for £1.50 (15 miles), or to the furthest point east for £3 (25 miles). At peak time, the fares and differences are all higher.

If the fare outside the centre wasn't so cheap, the massively underused capacity (train every 150 seconds) would be even more underused, and there'd probably be more traffic (and air pollution).

If the fare in the centre were cheaper, it would be even more crowded (trains are pretty full for much of the day -- standing room only). I suppose they could do that, but it would make journeys less reliable.

Most German metro systems are smaller, but seem to have "short trip tickets", which are a usually about half price and valid only for 3 or 4 stops. I like that idea too.

People in London do, although I doubt it's the most important thing for many. Property listings (especially commercial ones) usually say what fare zone the nearest station is in -- of course, that's also another way of saying how central somewhere is, i.e. time/distance.

It can cost £200-400 more for an annual ticket to be the wrong side of the zone boundary. (Zone 1 only: £1256, Zone 1-4: £1800, Zone 1-9: £3256.) I've known people working low-paid jobs who'd take the train to the last station in Zone 2, then either walk or take a bus into Zone 1. (Zone 2-4 inc. bus: £1040).

However, the 'crappiness' of the neighbourhood isn't really connected to the transport price -- it's easy in London to walk for 30 minutes and pass from a dodgy area to a luxury one, to a nothing-special one, and still be in the same fare zone.

The dots aren't redundant:

Dim x

With y
    x = 1 ' Which x?
End with

But, as someone wrote up there ^^, you could use a while loop:
$ while true; do
> echo -n "GitShell:"
> read command
> git $command
> done

"gitk" came with MSysGit (when I last used it), and you can right-click commits and choose "cherry pick".

"git gui" also works.

The standard advice in the UK is to put your hand over the keypad as you input the PIN, which also protects from criminals who modify the ATM to record the magnetic strip, add a hidden camera for the PIN, and send the details to their associates in the US to use in an ATM that doesn't support the chip.

The chip uses a cryptographic algorithm (RSA?) to sign the transaction. That's much more secure than a magnetic strip. You can't get the PIN out of the chip.

Every ATM I've ever changed my PIN on changes them in the 'passwd' way. If you're worried someone is watching, press "cancel".

There have been lots of ideas for software, but none for hardware.

Last year I bought an Odroid U2, which is roughly a smartphone board with ethernet and USB. The power consumption is minimal -- 0.2W idle, 2W under load. Mine is running Debian, but Ubuntu and Android are also officially supported. I have a 1TB external drive connected. This has been running my website, and a family photo gallery, without any problems.

Last month I bought an Odroid U3, which will be in my house. As well as the server stuff, I have a touchscreen (HDMI + USB) and will make some little apps to use it.

This guy has Hadoop running on an Odroid, which is probably more complicated than is worthwhile. (Hadoop has a distributed file system.)

We have 130GB of photos, which until very recently was far too expensive to store on a cloud service. SkyDrive apparently costs $100/year for 200GB, so that could save a lot of effort if it provides what you need.