Well, Bad Bargain Lane is a real road in York, North Yorkshire. It's nearly flat..

You are using a different definition of phonics from the parent post. Phonics as used in educational circles means _only_ teachning what sounds the letters (or clusters of letters) make and not reading whole words by sight. Method currently popular in England according to my sources there. New Zealand and Australia teach a mixed method with whole-word recognition and phenetic recognition used where they work best and somewhat according to what works for the child.

I don't have any direct experience of the US educational systems so I can't comment on how they teach reading.

I was taught to read before I could talk! (yes, really!) It was a popular idea at the time - works like this: Cards with words on them. Mother says "Fetch me the card that says 'Mummy'" (or 'dog' or 'cat', etc.) Child crawls off to get the card. Plus other similar exercises with the cards. Also note that I was late talking...

I think you meant most famous declarative language - that is one where you declare what outcome you want rather than telling the computer how. The dbms finds an execution plan for the SQL and then runs that.

A functional language (like lisp or scheme) is one where everything is composed of functions - and in theory there are no side effects (ie no global variables or common state). The most widely used one is in fact Excel (not the VBA macros, the spreadsheet itself). The functions in cells are treated as first class items (you can refer to a function or a constant in the same way). Evaluation order is determined by the system. The newer versions even include lambda functions (functions that define functions) which are a feature of some functional languages.

Most (all?j functional languages are declarative, but declarative languages are not necessarily functional ones.

I’m waiting for Mr Musk to make a major mistake so we can have Elongate!

By the late 90s I for one paid most bills by direct debit. All the major utilities in Australia were able to run the bank tapes needed to enable this.

A few other recurring payments were taken care of by automatic payment (fill in a form at the bank, pay a small setup fee and the money comes out your account each fortnight or month)

Cheques were for one-offs and irregular bills - like say from a plumber or builder.

These weren’t bank fees, but a state-level tax. It varied by state/territory, so it’s possible you were in a state without one. I was in the ACT in the late 90’s and I remember it well. My bank set me up with a seperate cheque and ‘savings’ account and when I wanted to write a cheque I moved money across from the savings account to minimise exposure to the tax.

I don’t know that it has a serious impact on the decline in cheque usage though - New Zealand had a similar decline, but no similar tax (there was a 5c stamp duty on each cheque at one point, but it wasn’t the pain point that the Australian definitely-not-a-tax was.)

I’ve found the Wikipedia article on it too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_account_debits_tax.

One thing to note here : this item comes from Australia. Australia is the only country I know with no viva component required on a PhD. One can be called for if there is suspicion of issues, or if a thesis is borderline, but is is not generally done. They could add that back quite easily.

I'd like to point out that the caps lock, and it's predecessor, shift lock, has been middle left /forever/. Or at least since the early days of typewriters - see for example this one
It was usually there to make the mechanical linkage between the shift key and the mechanism to hold it down easier to build.

I agree with your sentiment, but the key location is not some new trend.

I think replacing it with somthing useful - even somthing like an accent-compose key - would be a far better use of space, and get rid of the dangerous and annoying key. We could have a double-tap of shift lock it down for those who need to do lots of shouting if such a function is really necessary.

The report you link to shows Solar as being lower average price than Nuclear.

There is a kind of Solar that looks higher - rooftop. But the report is only looking at cost at point of generation, not the cost including delivery, which is what rooftop Solar competes with. I know you still need some kind of grid to support Solar, rainy days, etc - which is why they report in the way they do, but, as Solar rooftop are the only items there with local generation function it doesn’t give the whole picture.

Also, Solar cost per unit has dropped quite a bit since this report was published e years ago

Terribly worded summary and title! They imply the intent of the ban is to block 8k TVs even though that’s an incredibly unlikely position for any government to take. That current designs of 8k TV have trouble being efficient enough to fit required energy consumption levels is an interesting story, but spoiled be clickbait headlines that are deliberately misstating the intent of the regulation to get attention.

I asked the Garbage man about his truck when they moved to single driver here (And, for clarity, here they have a second set of driving controls on the 'passenger' side that are operated standing up so the truck can be driven short distances and got in and out of without walking round the truck) He said they were great - as they had massively reduced the number of small accidents where the driver is not aware of what the other garbage man is doing and drives or operates the machanery when the other person is not ready.

Sure, care, thinking and OH&S training help, but going single-threaded avoids all those tricky concurrency issues!

And we don't have dropped gargage issues here. Perhaps poor truck design plays a part - or not rethinking the design when moving to single-driver. The driver is out of the cab operating the bin-lifter here (again, due to good cab design)

The primary difference is that propane (LPG) is heavier than air, so will sink an pool at ground level or in any dips or holes. This creates a larger fire and explosion hazard, and also can create a risk of suffocation. A gas range on natural gas (Methane) will not have that problem as Methane rises. This is mostly a problem if the appliance leaks, or is left on but unlit.
The main purpose of the vent hood is to get rid of damp from the cooking steam and combustion byproducts - though it will contribute to getting rid of any leak hazard too...
Alarm systems are available where LPG applicanes must be operated in a difficult to ventilate space, like in the galley of a boat.
Running outdoor propane stuff indoors needs you to make your indoors as ventilated as possible, and don't leave it indoors when you're finished cooking.

Qiute a few years back Europe brought in some laws around respossability for recycling of consumer electronics (TVs, DVD players, etc) and placing that recycling (and therefore the cost) on the Manufacturer. It caused the manufacturers to immediately develop ways to make their products more easily recyclable.

One example I remember is that name plates and serial number panels were often made of a different kind of plastic that had to be separated at recycling time. It was done that way because each plastic was the best or cheapest one for the job at the time it was selected, and the recycling was somebody else's problem. Soon the labels were either made of the same material as the set, or were embossed, etched, or laser engraved instead. Making the organisations that were capable of fixing the problem responsible for it resulted in innovations that would have been difficult to individually regulate into existence.

Good point for US based people, but this story is about New Zealand, where this is already in place. Standard Health care is government provided or subsidised, by a combination of state run hospitals, funding to partially pay doctor’s fees and government run accident and medical misadventure insurance (ACC) which both means that no one is uninsured, and reduces doctor’s fees as they’re not paying massive insurance costs to cover the risk of being sued.

Most of the rest of the world banned them years ago. If this is really a headline perhaps it should be “California might catch up with the rest of the world in a couple of years”. I’m surprised anywhere is still using them - let alone somewhere supposedly concerned about the environment like California.