On the US scale you can call them right of centre as the US is so far to the right that centrist and left wing parties simply have no chance of ever being elected, even Bernie Sanders is more right wing than the biggest share of UK politicians (who are now Conservative MPs).

On an international scale both are clearly right wing although the Democrats aren't quite as much. I think that a lot of USians need to consider what being left wing actually is and how there's next to no change that a left wing party will ever gain any sort of power in the current political system.

For instance in Spain for 25€/mo I get unlimited calls, texts and 4G data.

I'm Welsh and a 'tog' to me is a pair of sports boots with metal things that point out into the soil, commonly used in rugby and football.

Bantu languages have a lot of noun classes aka genders with one having 20. Tuyuka however with around 1,000 speakers in Brazil has an estimated 50-140 noun classes.

Interesting perspective, after doing some reading on the sound it turns out that you are correct for the majority of English speaker pronunciation.

In reference to German, my English dialect pronounces the 'u' in the same way as 'e' in the standard German 'bitte' or the 'er' in a southern German pronunciation of 'oder'. Never realised that my English neighbours pronounced 'luck' differently but I will admit that an 'ah' sound can be heard in the American pronunciation of "luck".

Thanks for showing me the differences in pronunciation ;)

One of the greatest myths of second language acquisition... Personally I learnt my second language to native fluency as an adult, starting my studies at 18 years old. However I have also met previously monolingual people who have learnt that second language in their 50s and 60s and are perfectly fluent by any reasonable measure. There is no cut-off point for learning a language unless your mental state is deteriorating rapidly such as Alzheimer's or another debilitating illness.

26 can be enough with a decent system of orthography which English lacks. Welsh for instance uses 29 letters and is purely phonetic, there are no exceptions to how you read letters. Stress is the only thing which changes the sound of a letter and the stress nearly always falls on the penultimate syllable unless marked by a diacritic. For instance the word 'caniatáu' is stressed on the 'áu' rather than the -iat- as would normally be expected.

'oo' in English is a grapheme, this means that it is a letter or group of letters which express a particular sound or phoneme. Even with a purely phonological orthography graphemes can still exist. However I am a little confused as to why you think that luck should be spelt as 'lack'. Luck in my dialect at least is the 'u' sound as "huh" and not "hah". 'u' is the defacto vowel for this sound as seen in: up, huh, luck, stuck, fuck, pub, dumb, fun etc.

I fourth Linux Mint.

Linux Mint is built upon the latest Ubuntu LTS and has a nice choice of desktop environments, my favourites Cinnamon and Mate are easily installed a downloaded.

Since it is based on Ubuntu, pretty much every .deb built for Ubuntu will work on Mint, so if you are downloading proprietary software which only provides a .deb and a .exe, you can be rest assured it will work on Mint.

Here's the extract from TFA:

People spend weeks preparing for this process, afraid that the interviewer will quiz them on the one obscure algorithm they haven’t studied. “A cottage industry has emerged that reminds us uncomfortably of SAT prep,” Karla Monterroso, VP of programs for Code2040, an organization for black and Latino techies, wrote in a critique of the whiteboard interview. “An individual can spend thousands of dollars learning the cultural norms necessary to get themselves into a desk at a technology firm.”

Firstly, isn't most of this information online for free? If you have the skills necessary to work as a software engineer then it shouldn't take much time to practice and learn the skills necessary for interview. No matter which job that I apply for I have to take time to research the company, learn about their ethos, modus operandi and be able to explain to them how I'd fit in. I also have to exhibit the skills relevant to the job, which in this case is the much hated whiteboard but could equally be through presenting a portfolio, examples of past work and answering their question as they crop up. This isn't anything unique to software engineering, it applies to pretty much any professional job, whether something as low paid as an "administrative assistant" or more advanced roles as a translator or software engineer.

After reading the rest of the medium article, all that it seems to state is that the interviewing for tech roles is broken by prioritising algorithms which may not be relevant to the role posted. Again this isn't discrimination, it's a testing of unnecessary skills or are white males born with an innate ability to spew forth algorithms which they are unfamiliar with?

Have I missed something here, are interviews genuinely discriminatory?

Not every sovereign state's populace or courts are quite so friendly towards such measures taken by the NSA, recent news events from the NSA's activities has been widely discussed and there isn't much approval for it in Europe. Admittedly the UK is probably the CCTV capital of the world and we are scooped upon by our intelligence agencies probably a bit more than our EU counterparts but that doesn't mean that we have to take it lying down when this happens.

Your post is opinion, there's some pseudo-science within your post but ultimately it is a biased opinion. By following your statistical analysis above by considering only two factors: rise in gun ownership and falling violent crime figures, you are coming to a very short sighted conclusion. There are many other arguments out there which could have been a larger contributing factor than more gun ownership such as outreach programs, changes in judicial sentencing, changes in public perception to specific factors of violent crime, heck even the BBC published an article on how removing lead from petroleum/gasoline in our cars has a strong correlation with reduced figures in violent crime.

I'm not educated enough in social policy to comment on what changes in society would have had an impact on violent crime levels but you can't state that guns do not cause crime from the figures mentioned previously. Causation of crime comes in many forms, some that we understand and some we are yet to discover. For all we know other factors may have been more influential in reducing crime during that period than the impact of guns in circulation on increasing crime.

You also have to consider that many crimes wouldn't exist or wouldn't be so accessible if it weren't for gun ownership such as school shootings [1] , armed robberies [2] and homicide [3] .

I'm neither pro- nor anti- gun ownership, I live in a country without firearms and that's fine by me. I do see merit in firearm ownership when regulated properly to the extent where any person who has taken a test in firearm safety, is of a stable mind and hasn't committed a violent crime [4] in the last 5-10 years can own a firearm but this I will tolerate only with strong regulation.

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[1] How else would you go on a rampage in schools or other buildings? Sure you could use a knife, sword, axe or whatever else you choose but ultimately your attack range is gonna be a lot less allowing a lot more people to escape unharmed and a lot easier for people to overpower you if they so dare.
[2] I mean armed in the sense of being with a firearm. A quarter of robberies of commercial premises in the U.S. are committed with guns. Fatalities are three times as likely in robberies committed with guns than where other, or no, weapons are used.
[3] In the U.S. in 2011, 67% of homicide victims were killed by a gun. There is little doubt that many of these victims would have been murdered if there no were no guns about since those who have the intention to do so and have planned it will do it without firearms. However having ready access to a gun for an enraged, unstable individual wanting to harm another because of a form of dispute is definitely going to have an impact on crimes which weren't planned.
[4] Obviously murders, attempted murders, brutal assaults and the like will prevent them ever owning a firearm and the time frame can be varied depending on the severity of the crime.

As a type 1 diabetic from experience and research on the matter if by accident all the insulin in the pump was delivered, even a quarter of it could easily be enough to put somebody into a coma or kill them. It can appear that insulin acts over a few hours as this is the rate which the body reacts to it and the quantities involved relating to the glucose in the system and the insulin.

In the UK insulin injections tend to be 100 "units" per ml or 10 microlitres per unit and my insulin injections contain 3ml of insulin which are injected according to dosage. To me a unit is equal to 5 grams of carbohydrates being eaten but having such a huge amount of insulin will very negatively affect the person rendering them either unconscious or completely unable to function properly. If left like that on their own for too long then ultimately it is unlikely that they will wake up ever or they would have lost a lot of brain function, this would be a lot worse taking such a huge amount of insulin from a malfunctioning pump in their sleep.

I'd imagine that when all the glucose has been acted upon by the insulin in the system, the insulin will remain in the body as more glucose is being introduced which will be acted upon again until the insulin runs out. Luckily though if you are with someone with plenty of experience or who are trained and have fast acting glucose at hand in a high enough quantity it may be possible for it to be managed without going to hospital. There are of course other people who have "brittle diabetes" which react much more strongly to small amounts of insulin which could be deadly or people who get need less insulin per gram of carbohydrate.

The exploit used wouldn't have affected the exit nodes, at least from what is publicly known about it. The FBI planted some malicious Javascript on the servers delivering the webpages to the people trying to access them and then it would transmit the IP address of the computer which was running both Tor and Firefox 17 or 18 with Javascript activated. I'm not sure if the IP was broadcast only if they continued to use that browser when Tor was no longer running or whether it returned the IP address through looking at something like ipconfig in WinNT.

It's very true that it is the driver's responsibility to know the maximum speed limit of any road that they are using. However it is plausible that sometimes we do forget the speed limit of a road or fail to see a change in speed, in the UK for example road speed limits vary from 20 - 70 mph with usually clear indication but sometimes they are in hard to notice places or can mistakenly be forgotten.

I'm quite lucky to get to drive across the British mainland quite often, most of the time on small roads next to no trunk roads or motorways. By driving on new, unfamiliar roads often I have at times mistakenly thought that one section of the road was a 60mph zone instead of 50mph or that a zone was designated 30mph instead of 40mph. It is incredibly useful when SatNav devices such as TomTom or Garmin products are able to show the speed limit on their devices when you are driving on a road.