At least for Antwerp, yes. (Although the premetro is not technically a subway, it's a tramway that's been put underground in the city center; it has overhead power instead of a 3rd rail.) The power sections run from station to station (the connection diagrams are on the emergency separator switches in the stations so you know if it switches the section before or after the current station.)

The things you pay attention to as a geek.

I think the easiest explanation for this would be that that would be a manual intervention in an automated process, which is expensive, so they won't do that. (The Dutch would rather throw a couple of millions at improving efficiency rather than accept a couple hundred thousands of losses because things aren't quite as great as they could be. Apart from that it commonly also happens at big companies, it's also a cultural thing. I've lived there for over a quarter of a century; fortunately I was able to get away from it a bit ;-p )

Skip that piece, I mistyped and forgot to correct. (The insurance is there to rebuild the house as I said after that, not to pay off your loan. I got confused with the life insurance, which does have that function.)

Having bought a house last year, I can say that (at least over here) the insurance for the house is primarily for the bank providing your mortgage loan and not for you. The insured value of your house is there to pay back your loan if you can't do that anymore (and chances are you can't if it burns down because you have to pay for rebuilding it), so the bank demands that it's insured it so that it can be rebuilt if it's damaged beyond repair, protecting their investment. Actually the insurance or loan contracts probably prohibit you from doing anything other than rebuilding your house with the insurance money.

The same goes for the life insurance you are required to have when you take a mortgage loan. (Technically, it's not a mortgage. It's a loan backed by a mortgage -> you get the money in exchange for giving the bank information and/or decision rights (the mortgage) when you use or sell the property. The bank doesn't own your house, but you do give them the right to sell it if you can't pay off the loan; they aren't fond of doing that though, because having to sell it is a huge cost and possibly risk to them too.)

I'm pretty sure I first found CnD when looking for Enlightenment themes (0.9? 0.11?). I think I even used one of his themes for a while, even though I can't find it on his site anymore; even the wayback machine doesn't go back that far. It was a light brushed metal desktop with a cutout at the top revealing a darker brushed metal background.

Some time later I found it again when it had become /. and that's when I started reading regularly. I also still remember the coverage about the F00F bug (a pair of contradicting instructions that cause some old Pentiums to deadlock in hardware), with FreeBSD having it patched in software within a couple of hours and Linux following in a day or so. Has Windows ever been patched?

*waves*

I don't know how many posts and comments eventually led to invaluable information that I still use daily (underneath the mountain of completely useless but often entertaining stuff that covered it.) Most of the knowledge I use at work didn't come from my university degree but their network did give me access to it all and /. is still a part of finding that random stuff.

The low UIDs were all gone pretty fast, I was just lucky that I noticed the post about the UID system just after it got posted. Sometimes it's an advantage to be in a completely different timezone.

So long and have fun!

Ow... I still try not to use TCWWW :)

Unfortunately not. PPPoE runs the PPP protocol over Ethernet, not over an IPv4 connection (which in turn usually runs over Ethernet)
This will probably be more useful for creating tunnels between different IPv4-connected hosts, such as for VPNs.