It's not correct for Germany, but it is for Austria. Austria was driving on the left side of the road until the Anschluss, but switched over to right side drive to harmonize with Germany.

I wounder if AmoredDragon can come up with a similar slur to Douchelanders for Austria.

Foreign students need a student's visa, or to be more specific, an F-1 visa for colleges and university. And before they get that, they have to bring equivalent documentation to the U.S. embassy in their home country or country of residence.

There is M-x vi-mode. So you are wrong.

I don't know if you're a russian bot or some deluded idiot, but it amuses me to do a breakdown of your post.

NATO turned what was originally intended to be a mostly peaceful show of force like the temporary invasion of Georgia into a war of attrition.

First of all the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Georgia involved a few hundred dead in the first two days, and another 5000+ civilians killed in the ethnic cleansing after that, all for a land-grab to seize control of territory covering half of Georgia's coastline that Putin wanted.

Secondly, the "peaceful show of force" "temporary" invasion of Ukraine involved hundreds dead, ballistic and cruise missile attacks on all of Ukraine's largest cities, and Putin publicly admitting the goal of overthrowing the Ukrainian government... and that's just within the first 36 hours. Within two and a half months Russian officials began admitting the intent to permanently annex parts of Ukraine, proceeding with a constitutional amendment a few months later claiming to annex vast territories that Russian had not remotely taken control of, and which Russia is not remotely capable of capturing. Donetsk alone has a population of over a million, two million if you include the metro-area. Russia spent months and many thousand of lives to capture, and later lose, villages in the range of low tens of thousands.

Remember WWI when the lines were pretty much static for years and then suddenly it was all over?

Yes, I remember. As I recall it wasn't exactly "sudden". As I recall... Russian casualties were around five million killed, wounded, or captured, the Russian economy was collapsing, Russia was running out of food, and Russian literally lost it's own capital to civilian rebellion. A few months later the Russian government collapsed and surrendered vast territories including Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, parts of Poland and Ukraine to Germany and its allies (known as the Central Powers). Right about that point the U.S. joined the war reinvigorating the Allied Powers. Germany&friends knew they couldn't win a protracted war. They attempted a quick win, and, in short, they failed. The Allied powers steadily beat them down, with the allies eventually breaking through the lines and progressively liberating territory. With the Allies steadily advancing and the war obviously lost, German forces began rebelling and Germany surrendered.

That's what's happening here. Russia has most of Donbas plus a buffer zone in some other regions that directly border Russia. Ukraine is throwing men at the front lines for Russia to kill but is running out. Territory held is largely irrelevant compared to the number of men killed and weapons destroyed.

So much to unpack there, but it's amusing how you cite "territory held is largely irrelevant" given that the tide has turned and Ukrainians are now the ones breaking through lines and liberating territory from Russian occupation. It's not much yet, but all the map trackers show the reversal. Russia is now officially loosing more territory than they gain. Russia WAS slowly gaining small bits of land, largely through sending meat waves of untrained ill equipped soldiers at Ukrainian lines until the Ukrainians ran out of ammo and had to fall back. However now 7 out of 10 Russians killed are killed by drones. The "no man's land" between the two sides is now many kilometers wide. Any Russian trying to advance gets hit by a drone. Russia has also losing on average 1 air defense system every day, and rapidly depleting. Russian supply lines are getting pummeled by drones. Russian refineries are getting pummeled by drones, with progressively worsening fuel shortages for both the military and for the increasingly rebellious population. Cheap advanced Ukrainian drones are taking out expensive crappy Russian drones, including Russian's new jet-drones. Practically every country on earth is asking Ukraine for their military drone tech, the Russians can't remotely match it. Russian's economy is also fucked, but that topic pretty needs a separate book to cover.

Interesting side notes on weapons destroyed. Russia is destroying it's aircraft almost as fast as Ukraine is, between incompetence and maintenance failures and friendly fire shooting down their own aircraft. Also the nation that is the biggest donor of tanks to Ukraine is... Russia. Ukraine captured countless Russian tanks intact because the Russian military is so abysmal incompetent and corrupt. And as I mentioned, Russian air defense units are depleting. The war is now approaching 5 years, longer than the entirety of WW1. Ukraine is a small fraction of Russia's size, and Russian is literally losing and headed towards another soviet-union-style collapse. The biggest shock to the world of this entire war is just how worthless Putin has made Russian military, through systemic corruption and systemic incompetence.

Polls show the Ukrainian population isn't interested in surrendering. They are defending their homes. It's simple, the war will end when all the soldiers go home. When Russian soldiers go back to their homes in Russia, and when Ukrainian soldiers go back to their homes in the currently occupied parts of Ukraine. Although that's not likely to happen until Putin either expires or is overthrown. Not only is he fanatical enough to drive his country to collapse in the attempt, he knows if he did end the war in failure he'd get killed or overthrown for it.

Anyway, pointless reply to a bot or a useful idiot. But maybe some random passer-by will find some bits interesting. I don't know about the rest of the world, but mainstream US news rarely mentions the Ukraine war anymore, and certainly not in any detail.

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If they can be simpler, why not scale them to the size of a current reactor and reap all the benefits? What's in them that necessarily only works at the small scale?

SMRs are not simpler. They are reactors, the same as the large ones. They have all the same features. They are safer only in the sense that if they go bonkers, there is less to actually go defective. They are scalable in the same sense than larger reactors are. Most of the large ones are in plants with several of them, which means they were scaled. And the last one is unproven, as they are neither built nor deployed yet.

On the other hand, they have more surface which can catch stray neutrons for the same amount of power, because they are smaller, and you need more of them. That means more material gets contaminated and has to regularly get replaced because it degrades over time. If they operate at the same pressure, you need the same thickness of the walls, but with smaller diameter, you need more material per volume. They need the same amount of shielding per nuclear source to get the same protection level, but you need more of them, because you have more but smaller nuclear sources.

I've been to something which could be called an SMR. It was a scaled down nuclear reactor built in the 1970ies for studies and reactor experiments. It was 25 meters high, and it had a diameter of 6 meters. And its power output was 2 Watts. No. Not 2 kW or even 2 MW. 2 Watts. Enough to light a single LED lamp. Actually, it was designed to withstand 1000 Watts of power output, because that was the theoretical maximum the uranium-vinyl-pellets to feed the reactor could create when going critical. But even then... a 1 kW engine the size of a large grain silo.

This is the most important part. Right now, X-Energy is pure vaporware. And yes, I know, all reactor designs are essentially vaporware, because their task is to heat water to turn it into vapor. But this is vapor-vapor. The time line calls for 12 small reactors to be ready by 2039, each rated 80 MW. And the previous project, as mentioned, was already set up 2 years ago, and not a single foundation has been poured yet.

This is one of those incubator projects. Amazon is investing and probably betting on a 30% chance that this will ever bear fruit. Or a 10% chance. I don't know Amazon's calculation. But this project does not mean that any of those 16 reactors (4 previously, 12 now) will ever come into existence. But if they would, Amazon had an edge on powering data centers. So they think it's worth the risk.

Actually, Yandex just had to update their contracts to make bombardment a Force Majeure. Until the first data center was hit, Yandex did not expect to be a target in a war, despite Russia starting to bombard data centers in Ukraine.

After 1986? Seven. Ignalina 2, 3 and 4, Smolensk 3 and 4 and Kursk 3 and 4. You were saying?

Who does that? A person dishing out abuse to an app that is designed to be helpful has some serious issues that surely carry over to their interactions with humans.

Does not matter in this case, if they don't host an online version of it. My impression is that Siemens wants to shut down the project completely.

If Siemens does not re-distribute them, then Siemens does not violate any copyrights on them. Only if Siemens would continue to distribute binaries of OpenRadiuss to customers, they would be in violation.

Or: We eliminated the positions necessary to merge the changes coming from the outside, and we will support the customers in house, if there are any paying customers at all. After that, we will close the project for good.

While in general, I agree with your sentiment, you mentioning the Dunning-Kruger effect is not appropriate here. Dunning and Kruger (1999) does not claim incompetent people would consider themselves above the experts. It's just that incompetent people do no consider themselves as incompetent as they really are, and competent people don't understand how far above the laymen their knowledge is. But both would agree, that the expert knows more about the topic than the layman, and both would sort themselves in the right categories.

You could consider the effect of Dunning and Kruger (1999) as a "mental regression to the mean".

When I am looking at the contracts my company has for our company phones, I doubt your promise. As an American company, it has decided that providing company phones to its employees is not a core competency of the company. So it outsourced the task to the lowest bidder, and the lowest bidder has bought data plans for our phones which abruptly switch off everything above EDGE, as soon as the data allocation for the period has been exhausted. No warning. No graceful change. Just a hard cut-off. For everyone, including Field Service, who needs to have mobile internet connectivity to get and update trouble tickets.