pm3003

The EU law applies, but companies get out of it by:

- encouraging you to take multiple tickets (so you can't claim compensation on the whole trip and becaise of missed transfers).

- saying it's not their doing (DB specialty).

- in some cases accepting an "alternate schedule" (typically by changing your ticket at the company's suggestion) will void any claims.

In some cases you have better chances hiring a taxi for 2000km and forcing the company to pay.

On the opposite, on (very expensive) French TGVs you get compensation starting at 30 minutes delay (connections counted) whatever the reason and SNCF will do their utmost to bring you to destination or ensure you get accomodation.

Same, I was luckily just above the 1500 km threshold and got 400€, 3 hotel nights reimbursed (3 stars but 4 stars might have been ok), restaurants bills paid (beer included), a free replacement ticket , made new friends and visited museums. Lovely!

My boss and colleagues weren't delighted though...

Agree. Cologne/NRW is the worst. Anything going to or through Neumünster also used to be an almost-guaranteed nightmare, but I've heard it's better now.

That said, last time I was there DB was on strike and I lost hours.

I used to complain about the French SNCF, then I discovered DB and stopped complaining. I've been a Bahncard 1. Klasse holder for a few years.

Last time I took the train in Germany I was 30h late and had to spend a sunday between Cologne and Karlsruhe (not that I was really surprised).

The punctuality is a joke, ICEs are unpractical, train management comically incompetent (remember when the ICEs cars would never come in the announced order and there was luggage room for maybe 15% of passengers?).

The cars are very dirty, especially in 1st class where eating a full meal at your seat is encouraged but the cars are cleaned once every two days.

However, the train attendants are usually very arranging for every aspect of the trip on board.

Cheap tickets are cool, but have been there for so long (the regional ones) Germans take them for granted.

Almost had this somewhere in Northern Germany in early december.

The train stopped at "Kuhdorf", as the author says, at 10:30pm. The driver told us he couldn't continue because "the track was wet" (in Northern Germany in december, how unlucky!) and to wait for "replacement circulation" (usually buses or trains).

The driver then left the train. In fact he had reached his hometown and exceeded his work quota because of the delays.

Like the fabled German roadworker and the (more frequently observed) Krampus, the DB replacement bus is a fairy tale creature.

The passengers got out and forced the driver back into the train and he drove us to the terminus then took a taxi back to said Kuhdorf.

On the nightbus home a class of French highschool girls elected me the best-looking man in the bus (they thought I didn't understand) so I went back home with a smile.

The Munich S-Bahn is usually a delight compared to the Paris suburbian RER.

I've seen this in the same region, possibly on this exact line last year. I was going from Paris to Copenhagen, managed to have only 5 hours of delay. The return journey took 30 hours more and I could only get one hotel night reimbursed.

I changed my ticket to get a French train as soon as possible.

Other survival story: I lived in Northern Germany in the late 2000s as a young exchange student. Almost all the DB lines in the region would go through a particular railway node where, almost every Friday, someone (probably an evil reincarnator) would commit suicide, blocking the whole region.

My reflex: so as soon as the train would stop, I'd get out, get a taxi, then convince 4 other people to go to Hamburg or even Hannover with me, sharing the cost.

Never regretted.

- Emperor of Rome by Mary Beard, very entertaining.

- Lolita, it's mostly what you've read about it.

- a few short stories by Heinrich von Kleist.

sudo pacman -Syu. -> Secure boot config broken, OS won't boot (Manjaro this summer with some Intel firmware update). No HDMI sound on nvidia for some distros until recently. Getting the Wifi to work ootb on Mint is not always easy..

Le Monde Diplomatique is a far-left (but rather intellectual) newspaper, completely separate from Le Monde.

Pierre Fabre (big pharma) associated with the Dassault family used to have a big share in Valmonde, the owner of Valeurs Actuelles, and Olivier Dassault was for a time the lead editorialist (lead op-ed writer). Valeurs Actuelles used to be very traditionally conservative (vaguely associated with a conservative rural party) in the 1970s, then moderate right-of-center.

Olivier Dassault turned it into one of the main supports of Nicolas Sarkozy starting 2005 or 2006 for his successful presidency campaign in 2007 until 2014.

After the Sarkozy and Hollande eras Valeurs Actuelles turned far-right. Eric Zemmour, a publicist-turned-politician, used to write for Valeurs Actuelles. It is financially in the hands of the French-Lebanese Safa family.

I used to read their monthly magazine "Le Spectacle du Monde" which was at the time much less political. It is now independent, headed by an elderly diplomat and collaborator to former president Jacques Chirac.

Ragrding Sarkozy, you also forgot his close relationships with the late Lagardère father (biggest French media mogul in the 1990s) and with André Bettencourt and his window (L'Oréal, richest person in France in the 2000s). Despite his being in jail, Sarkozy remains administrator of the Lagardère trust.

"Italian" (and Egyptian) water buffaloes are not really bigger than regular cows. They are said to have come to the Middle East then to Italy through gifts from the Arabs or by Crusaders I believe.

Matrix comes to mind (Synapse server and whichever client you choose). It has good encryption and can be federated. Downside is that it gets heavy for old devices when you're in a lot of encrypted group chats.

XMPP is very efficient and delightfully simple to use and administrate. I never tried E2EC with it, but there are options on the clients, like OMEMO. It has limited federation.

The simplest server IMO is Openfire, but offers range from Lua-written Prosody to the extremely expensive Isode servers that can do complete federation, HF radio XMPP and probably coffee and pizzas too.

a browser and a long-running podcast.

I feel like there should be an easy and common file transfer protocol, like a more straightforward bittorrent,FTP,MTP to exchange with these devices.

That's great! I've been looking for something for a while. Great features from my point of view:

- email newsletters, especially with offline mails (no remote images) since theya can go easily through workplace gateyways for those of us who work in secure areas. Didn't see yet if yours were.

- sync and integrate with everything, e-readers, nextcloud, browsers...

- PWA

Good luck!

I just spent 10 minutes in the Grimm dictionary checking if there was ever a case where wegen would be followed by accusative....

Interestingly, they tend to say wegen comes from "von wegen" with the meaning of "by ways of" making genitive more evident.

To me Ghibli often seems closer to the medieval / early modern narrative of the knight's adventure, which is a variant of the classical Western arc (initial stable situation, incident, helping figure, self-doscovery, resolution), even without considering the "Princess in the Castle" aspect (which can also be considered the female narrative counterpart).

Armies had a lot of more or less professional infantrymen, be they in the retinue of a lord or knight (and they could be peasants even if a peasant would generally have no reason to go to war, and the lords would have few motivations/legal means to constrain serfs to go), mercenaries (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_company), or common-law prisoners (a bit as the Russians did in Ukraine).

Free families would often have to send someone to war if the local lord called.

There are some examples in the American War of Independence (or maybe War of 1812), where militias would lie down to reload and break the discipline of the overall force.

Another practical aspect is sound / smoke. Letting the force fire at will would probably mean the officers could no longer really be heard. The problem certainly didn't exist with bows.

At some point they offered a free Cygnet if you bought one of their other models.

The first gear that Bell made was clearly a copy of Eurocopter's, though they claimed otherwise, and because of this they couldn't / didn't want to move on with certification and production. A lot of this can be considered as not being patent infrigement (development and experimentation, prior art claims...).

They slightly modified the gear on the production models. Eurocopter claimed the slightly modified gear is essentially the same (likely true) and thus still infringes on the patent (the court ruled otherwise).

The judge said the new modified gear is okay but ordered the old ones to be destroyed.

A Pyrrhic tactical victory for Eurocopter (kept their patent at great cost) and a strategic defeat (as Bell is essentially still selling their tech).

I read in Friedrich Hund's Wikipedia biography that while he was in Jena in after WWII in East Germany, the head of the Thuringen state government awarded him in 1949.... a voucher for a pair of shoes (a copy of the letter is on Wikipedia) as recognition of his academic merits.

He ended up emigrating to the West in 1951, and thus avoided the bloody 1953 Soviet repression of unions demands in Jena. Question to Germans: Was the shoe voucher a more or less hidden message, or just typical postwar East German socialism?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cb/Brief_Eg...

Living among Muslim and Catholic people in a time of simultaneous Lent and Ramadan, I first read "How the Fast Days are getting longer" and thought "How true, how true".

As a young man I travelled a lot (US only twice, Canada once) in democracies and authoritarian regimes and quickly took the habit of always having some sort of paper on me (passport, copy of the visa and passport, city/tax registration...) depending on the place.

I was controlled countless times, I thought at the time I didn't stand out much but I probably did. I was always unlikely to be detained, but vehicle / luggage searches, questions etc can be a huge waste of time so better show some paperwork that will cut the questioning short and not risk missing your bus/flight/train/meeting etc. It sometimes even helped to get into nightclubs...

So she probably was alright with the law (short stay) but not with the system if I understand correctly. Still, wouldn't her detention be arbitrary and thus fall foul of habeas corpus principles which I have no doubt are in the US law?

Consulates can sometimes provide emergency lawyer services. Assuming you're from a first-world country.

They just glue them together I guess.

SIP providers. I used Ippi before 2015, but then EU regulations made it illegal to bill more for EU calls than for domestic calls, so I had almost no more use for it.