Kieskompas, and related sites, have been available for the past 10 years or so, and getting more important as time went on (the News on the national public TV had an english one for the US elections, interestingly, which was even visited by people from the US itself).
Elections here are usually for one type of thing at a time -- water boards, EU parliament, provincial states (which indirectly elect the first chamber along with their own responsibilities), local (municipal), and national (the second chamber). For each big election, there are typically about two dozen parties represented, with about 2 to 4 big ones, 8 or so small ones, and the rest no-hopers not likely to get a seat. Each party can have up to 60+ candidates, although there's generally a fair proportion between "expected seats" and the number of candidates.
Given the ballot paper, which can thus have several hundred options for your one single vote (when you're voting for the second chamber, that's 150 seats, and if you're not on the ballot you don't get in under any circumstances, so there's a lot more than 150 candidates), it's no wonder that help-with-voting sites spring up.
Of course, almost everyone votes for the front runner of one party or another (the votes trickle down to lower-placed party members, so generally the first n cvandidates on the list get in), or sometimes the number 2 or 3 (my mother, for example, always votes for the first woman on the list for the party she wants in). Very occasionally a low-placed candidate will get enough preferential votes to get in even if s/he's low enough on the list to otherwise not get in, but this is News if it happens. This means the actual choice is only between the 10 or so parties.
The Running Man is rarely shown because it's a deeply crap movie even by the standards of Schwarzenegger movies.
That said, it was on NL TV twice in the last month.
I can't believe nobody mentioned Auel yet.
And it's still unfinished.
Bumping is a logical thing. If you can force an object past the tumblers the lock will turn. That's any object. Using a blank key is okay, but why bother when a slim pair of scissors will work too.
This only works in the cheapest of low-security locks, where the tumblers are there to stop you inserting a key into the rearmost bit, and the reamost bit is the active bit. Car locks, especially on cheap and/or older cars, sure. Bike locks, sure. On house locks, not so much. They work by preventing the cylinder from turning if the key doesn't raise the sets of tumblers so that the breakline of each tumbler set is at or very near the border between the cylinder and the surround. Cylinder/surround typically does not wear down over a house lock's life, certainly not enough to become 'stick a screwdriver in' openable, especially not without damage. Leastways not before they've loooong turned into being unopenable in the first place. My grandmother's house has had the same lock (AFAIK) since 1955, and while it's getting to the point that it's occasionally hard to open without jiggling, it's nowhere near to opening on its own.
Standard european locks can be removed in not much more time than it takes to bumpkey it open simply by the application of overwhelming force. Also known as "no matter how convoluted the key, if your door's made of glass who cares?"
Incidentally, one of the videos on the toool website told me that 80-90% of American front door locks are all by 2 or 3 major brands, which makes it an awful lot easier to be proficient in getting them open than it is in europe, where there are many different manufacturers of standardised cylinders.
Also: Lockpicking *does* leave marks. Even if you're good. Not on the outside of the lock around the keyway, but on the inside, on the tumblers. The picks will hit them in different places than a key would and brass scratches easily.
The terrrists probably do toss the cellphones as well, if they're smart. Phone numbers are just related to the SIM, but the phones themselves have a unique identifying number called an IMEI which the phone network reads, and it's at least technically possible to track the IMEI.
Some phones, however, you can rewrite enough of the firmware with a laptop and appropriate cables that you can change the (software) IMEI at will, so they could be using that. However, I suspect getting a new $50-100 cell with PAYG plan is easier, cheaper, and less prone to tracking.
It would seem to me that "fees nonrefundable in the event of rejection" would be an easy pass -- the legislature can't have a problem with simply getting more money, it'll reduce a lot of the frivolous patent filers (swinging on a swing -- you can't tell me he *planned* that to pass..), the PTO can hire many more examiners, and the incentive to pass everything goes way, way down. Why are they faffing around with first-to-file versus first-to-invent when there's a much bigger and more beneficial change that can easily be made?
Being squeamish doesn't make you a bad first aider. Worst comes to worst, you can tell someone else what to do. Being a drama queen might qualify you as a bad first aider, especially if it involves not giving over control of the situation to truly competent authorities like the paramedics. Even then, a scalp wound is not a life threatening injury, even if it bleeds a lot. He might have been less of an ass if it was serious.
hrc, thank you for your vote of confidence in the Dutch - I'm Dutch and happy to hear that our reputation in this field is this good.
The Dutch news was showing today that the big-mouth CNN reporter (both literally and figuratively) was making a report on us in pretty much that vein, with various of the delta works (particularly the Nieuwe Waterweg kering, which is mighty impressive -- I've said before that I think it's the most imposing piece of engineering I've seen in person, and I stand by that) as background.
The 17th street breach even looked pathetically small to my (admittedly untrained) eyes.
Well, they appear to be the same sort of size as the 1953 breaches, and a bit larger in scale than the breech/subsidence or two that we've had in the last decade around various rivers and canals. The real problem is that it's *really* hard to stop a full-on breech before the water levels are approximately equal, and once the situation's there, it becomes fairly trivial to plug the gap but there's an absolute *shitload* of water that has to be pumped out, and your pumps are designed for a lot of rain plus a little seepage, not to pump out billions of litres of water in any timeframe approaching 'fast'.
If the feds plan on using eminent domain to buy out NO neighbourhoods wholesale, what compensation should the homeowners get? The value of the property *before* the hurricane it? Or is it legally only necessary to pay them for the value of a plot of land under 6 feet of water with something on it that was once a house, but is now mainly highly contaminated soil under the swimming pool? (ie, a value of approximately jack and shit)?
Also, emergency generators (especially ones big enough to feed whole hospitals, and with enough electronics and battery power for seamless switchover) tend to be big freaking heavy things. Where do you put heavy, smelly, nasty things? Right, in the basement. When the water level is up over the floor of the first floor.
Not so far back is Isembard Brunel, who built the first transatlantic steamship.
So are you descended from another child of Marc Isambard Brunel, a sibling of Isambard Kingdom Brunel? Google won't cough up if Marc Isambard had any other children besides Isambard Kingdom. Either way, very cool ancestry.
Jasper: You're descended from the Admiral De Ruyter who burnt the Thames shipping and shelled London? Cool!
Against his better judgement, by the way. The plan was conceived by the politicians, and had some serious military problems. He still did it, and successfully, though.
But yes, apparently related to him, although this is more of a factoid than actual knowledge for me. I think there was something with the aunt of my maternal grandmother -- maybe she was the one who did the research. I even seem to remember that it was a direct male line until at least the 19th century.
He's a pretty interesting character, really, at least if all of the following is actually true and not just legends grown around the man. Son of a beer porter, employed as a boy in a rope-manufacturing thingy, dismissed from there and school for misbehaving, went to sea at age 11 as bosun's boy (if I translate that correctly), allegedly got captured by the Spanish at age 15, then escaped and came back to the Netherlands.
More realistically, perhaps, between him taking ship at age 11 and him taking command of a Corporate-owned warship at age 30 against the Dunkirk Pirates. From age 37 he owned his own trading ship and made multiple extremely profitable journeys to "the West" (ie, the Americas), earning enough to retire 5 years later.
Only then did his naval career start -- starting with a stint as second in command under Witte de With, and only senior witness to the death of Maarten Tromp (two of the other three well-known admirals we had in those days), and as commander in chief of the Dutch Navy (when the Dutch Navy actually meant something) against the British and the French for over 20 years.
The mid-19th-century children's folk song about him that starts 'in a blue checked overall, he spun the giant wheel, all day,', which refers to his job at the rope manufactury (and which is probably not even apocryphal), still gets sung on occasion.
It's interesting to see y'all's answers to my question -- clearly the US has both more migration than I thought and apparently also less mixing between social groups.
Out of curiosity, how many Americans cannot, with enough genealogy, trace at least one ancestral line back to an early boat? I am apparently a descendant on my mother's side of Michiel De Ruyter (Our most famous admiral ever, from the late 17th century), and most people I know who go in for genealogy can trace a direct line to Charlemagne (once you're into any nobility, that's trivial). I suppose the main thing is that your family has to have been important enough during all that time to show up in genealogical records.
Which is highly ironic
As the LA Times explains in excruciating detail for this particular case, going so far afterwards as to mention both snopes and stellaawards.com.
When a business can simply say "Look, we'll make $X more paying off the survivors than putting in the safety switch," they're much happier.
Since there are memos from inside Ford that suggest that exactly that was in fact considered, I don't see what the difference would be. Well, except that then they'd actually be *right*.
So are you saying the Hugos are not usually that brilliant? I sure had fun, but I have nothing to compare this one to. Even at 90 minutes, though, there were a few points where it could have been shorter, I think. Maybe shorter or just less video fragments for the DP awards.
That's what we in the Netherlands call (literally translated) "Bearclaw" (presumably more for its effects than its looks). Interestingly, at least one person here makes didgeridoos out of the dried stems. Only native plant he could find, here, that was suitable. It seems to work.
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