I was surprised at a Jysk in Spain where I used the dialect pronunciation of a Norwegian city (saying Læknes for Leknes) when buying chairs with that name, and the girl not only understood me but used close to the same pronunciation when asking someone to get them from storage
I once mentioned a street name to a Dane, who didn't understand me, and when I showed her the written name she pronounced it the same way. Maybe sometimes people have weird assumptions how foreigners are supposed to sound.
The colour on wild salmon meat depends on the diet of the salmon, in the same way as for farmed salmon. All the wild salmon I have fished, even before salmon farming was big, have had red/pink meat since krill and shrimps are a large part of their diet in my area
That brings back memories. I didn't check if it store highscore, but remember finding how to edit to highscore list in the original game to totally destroy my brothers best score
When someone need to age check me in real life they make a quick look at me and decide they don't have to check any id. On steam I had to put in my age to see the page for GTA, even when being logged in with an account that is older than 18 years. It is a reason why it is Meta and the like that lobbies the most for age controls, they want more information about everyone
Is that good or bad? Maybe a naive thought but the first I think is that check every time is to check biometrics matches with what is in the passport without storing them, checking only once mean your picture and fingerprint is stored a central place and is used in combination to later verify that the passport is yours
Before this change, my average time for EU immigration check was 10-20 min. After this change, it's 2-3 hours. Is that good or bad?
I don't care much about "verify that the passport is yours". For centuries, the person presenting the passport was supposed to be the owner of it, with their photo (aka "biometrics") as a proof. Comparing your passport picture with your face is what border controls have been doing since forever.
That is clearly bad. I was commenting based on the privacy point of it, not the user experience. On the privacy part it is also strange that fingerprints, something we leave copy off all over the place, is considered private and safe information, instead of something that is easy to copy and relatively easy to spoof
The linked article argues that our pictures and fingerprints are "our most sensitive data" and it's bad giving it to anyone, like the US Government. I tend to agree on the "sensitive" part but not sure I agree on "US Govt" part.
The fact that we leave fingerprints everywhere is hardly relevant, considering the costs of retrieving and storing them en masse are astronomical.
The licence plates on our cars are out in the open for everyone to see, and yet when a private company collects them and makes a searchable database out of it -- with locations and timestamps -- making it possible for anyone with access to build traceable paths of all of our movements since forever, it results in people getting enraged, and in my opinion justifiably so.
You are looking at it the wrong way. Driving something so large that it would require a commercial license to transport your family around is ridiculous
They don't require commercial licenses though, because they're not large enough to and don't serve a commercial purpose when transporting families / their things. Plenty of families have the need for third-row seating and the ability to haul things around.
Toyota Camry curb weight is ~3300 pounds. The minivan based on the Camry is the Sienna, curb weight ~4600 lbs. Lincoln Navigator curb weight ~5600 lbs. If the difference between the first two is marginal (~30%), the difference between the second two is less (~20%).
By comparison, actual CDL-requiring commercial trucks weigh up to 80,000 pounds.
Now look at the front end of a toyota sienna vs a lincoln navigator. One slopes down so that you might actually see what is in front of you and allows for pedestrians to impact and roll up and off. The other is effectively a brick notorious for making it difficult to see obstructions in front of you as well as creating an impact that would sooner see the pedestrian explode into a bloody mess over just rolling up and off.
Which has nothing to do with the weight of the vehicle. The Audi SQ8 E-Tron has a sloped hood and weighs more than the Navigator. There are vehicles with a square grille that weigh less than the Sienna.
Time for all of the crossover drivers to admit that they are also part of the problem. They aren't safe just because they are somewhat better than some jacked up bro truck.
The real issue is that the hood on the Sienna is basically the same height as the one on most crossovers, because that's the nature of a vehicle with tall roof (necessary for cargo capacity). The hood/windshield has to ascend quickly to reach that height unless you want the hood to be longer, but a longer hood would negatively impact the ability of the driver to see children directly in front of the vehicle.
A lot of this is also dictated by the safety requirements for vehicle collisions, because a vehicle where the front of the hood is lower than the bumper on the other vehicle (which could be a pickup truck) causes the hood to act as a ramp instead of a crumple zone, and then the occupants get hit in the head by a truck.
That's not the issue. The issue is how tall these grills are and to a lesser extent curb weight. You don't need either to have third row seating or the ability to haul things.
I'd go a step further and say the high hoods reduce utility by making the vehicles harder to work on. I'm 6' and needed a step-stool to change the battery on my uncle's Silverado. The truck manufacturers leave that inconvenient detail out of their macho ads on TV.
I remember when changing spark plugs meant flipping down the front-plate bumper step, taking one step to hop up on the fender, and putting your legs inside of the engine bay while you wrench.
There were adequate engineering solutions for towing even as far back as 2008. The high-hood trend on US passenger trucks is unique to US market vehicles and is factually cosmetic.
Not only do they not need to, they need to actively stop doing that. These are the folks who light brakes & tires on fire, which then spreads to the mountains. There are dozens of spot, brush, and outright wildfires every year from these people.
I did consider a Kobo, but the terrible website did turn me away. When trying to browse it was wait for button on tracking consent to be active so I could click reject. Then change language to what I'm fluent in instead of getting language based on IP, reject tracking, reject changing region back to IP based and the same two reject for every link clicked. Half the times pages was still shown in language based on my location instead of what I have set or what my user agent tell I want.
When a site ask about allowing tracking for every page shown I assume the company care more about selling PII than getting customers, so not a company I want to use
How did you get siding with Amazon from giving up on the Kobo website? There are more than two options, re-reading some of the dead-tree variants I have would keep me occupied for years. Hopefully a new alternative would come out before I run out of space for books
Changing gears while driving? Are you sure you where supposed to? Many old tractors are without synced drives, so you are supposed to select gear before you start driving. Of course you can change when driving, but then you have to match revs to not get the drop betwen
All-wheel drive doesn't help you at all where it is most important, and that is in braking. Having all-wheel drive only helps you get up to a dangerous speed faster when the grip is low
