That's not really true. Especially in the more touristy places, credit cards are generally accepted and it'd be unusual for it not to be. If you're out in a village in, I dunno, Brabant, then sure. But the places that visitors are likely to be I'd expect cards to work.
I think even AH accepts credit cards these days, though I haven't tried it myself.
> My colleague took a train regularly in the Netherlands a few years back that was cash only.
I don't know what a few years back was, but I can't believe there was a train in NL that was cash at all for quite some time. In the past over 10 years it's always been an OV-chipkaart, and you can get an anonymous one that you pre-load with money. I'm not even sure if you can pay with cash, short of buying a ticket/loading the card from a person at a desk.
> Dutch websites also have to offer whatever the Dutch payment provider is (I forget).
iDeal, which Wero is based on.
About the only thing I use cash for in NL is paying for my barber as he doesn't take any card, and I'm pretty sure that's black money.
Germany has always had a bit of a relationship with cash, I'd always keep €1-200 in my pocket when I went there, though this is changing now.
> I think we will manage without Visa just fine.
There is also Cirrus and Maestro which are run by Visa and Mastercard, which appears on a lot of debit cards around the world, though I don't know exactly how it works (i.e. do the cards tend to use the local network within the country and only go to the cirrus etc. networks when international, or do they do it always?)
I'm pretty sure Turbo Pascal/C/etc and perhaps vim had syntax highlighting (though perhaps not the other bits) before the first VS release, I'm surprised they hadn't encountered it already.
It wasn't that it was "new" (you're correct, it wasn't). The complaint was that Microsoft engineers were going to use it "as a crutch".
Also, VS (codename Boston) was used as the de-facto internal development IDE for a few years before it we released it to the public. There were also arguments about shipping those types of features publicly.
I've been on the other side of that (not google), taking people to lunch who are interviewing. Usually you're picked because they're from the same country as you or something like that. At least where I work it's not like those messages. Instead it's lunch because food is good to have, and if you were lunching with them you weren't involved in the interview process at all, and it gave them a person to ask questions of and get an unbiased-as-reasonable response. If there were real red flags I'd probably raise it, but otherwise I had no contact with anyone in the hiring process regarding that person at all.
I don't know what percentage of companies use the lunch in an on-site interview for evaluation, but definitely some do. Either with express feedback into the process, or because it's the hiring manager taking the person to lunch, and this is shaping their opinion.
I suppose some could also use it as a refresher break, from their battery of antagonistic one-way LeetCode hazings, or a chance to give the person a more comfortable feeling about the company (not otherwise permitted by their hazing process).
In NZ there are restrictions on what you can't name a child (titles that represent royalty e.g. "king" or certain positions, e.g. "justice", or ones that can lead to excessive mockery, e.g. "sex fruit"), but the line seems to be hazy as "Number 16 Bus Shelter" was apparently permitted.
As for legally renaming yourself, I really don't know if the same rules apply. Probably the title-related ones, or ones that could be offensive, but I'd expect that's about it.
But just getting called whatever you like isn't a problem. I know quite a few people who don't go by their legal first name.
In NZ someone I know has a single name. Due to the constraints of the system, effectively he has no first name and only a surname. In things where a first and last name are required (I think the drivers licence system needed it), he uses "citizen" as a filler.
I used to work for a university in Australia, our solution to mononymous students was to put their single name in both first name and surname fields. So if your name was just Mayawati, we'd put you down as Mayawati Mayawati.
Some US bureaucrats seem to like FNU (First Name Unknown) or LNU (Last Name Unknown). So one encounters mononymous Americans whose first name is Fnu or last name is Lnu. A while back I had a coworker whose surname was Fnu – I believe her legal paperwork had Fnu as her first name, but she got IT to swap her firstname and lastname in our corporate systems, because she didn't want people addressing her as Fnu.
It's a minor point, but it's interesting that they used having AC as a proxy for mechanical ventilation and conclude that it's rare in Europe. At least where I live (NL), mechanical ventilation is common - I think required in some situations - even though AC isn't. It's basically a fancy extractor fan that pumps air outside, so bringing fresh air in. That said, you'd need to reverse that flow to add filters.
Yes, few people have AC but almost everyone living in a semi recent place has mechanical ventilation in, at the very least, kitchen and bathroom, which thanks to physics renew the air of the entire falt/house.
I was not aware there was an RFC for CSV, but the concept of "simple comma-separated UTF-8 CSV" is, in my experience, not something that exists. In a previous job, a chunk of my work was taking CSV files that were given to us and writing tooling to process them into a structured form for import elsewhere (typically we'd do a few test runs, and finally do a cut-over with final data, so it had to be scripted.)
During this I saw just about every variant of CSV and character encoding known to man, often inside the same file. Once I had a file that had UTF-8, MARC-8, Latin1, and (yes really) VT100 control codes. All in one file.
All in all, I'd prefer something that actually could be validated for some sort of correctness (this said, another time I got an XML export from some software that was invalid XML, so...)
It depends on the region and specific needs, but a common reason for not encrypting is that it adds complexity in an emergency (where, e.g., people might need to communicate from other regions nearby, or ambulance needs to talk to fire, maybe civil defence or AREC needs to be involved.) The simplicity of plain unencrypted radio can outweigh the benefits of secrecy.
This said, different places weigh factors differently, there's no one-size-fits-all answer.
I think even AH accepts credit cards these days, though I haven't tried it myself.