We’ve been looking for a new apartment for some months here, and it’s quite a different predicament than it is in the US. Here’s my experience and a little bit of commentary on what its like being a foreigner looking for an apartment in Germany.
Congress passed a bill outlawing the use of a camcorder in movie theaters (you can read the actual bill right here). Well, whats so bad about that? It should be illegal, right?
Sure. And so is stealing a DVD from Walmart. But you don’t necessarily go to jail for 3 to 10 years for it. An obviously bought law.
…is a pain in the ass. Really. I mean, it could be easy if I were from the properly selected state of the US (like Delaware), but I’m unfortunately from the taxing state of Maryland where the driving standards are SO different than its neighbor state that I have to jump through hoops and bonfires to get the stupid thing. Really, its bad enough to complain. In fact, when its all said and done, I’m going to publish an article that really tells you what its like to get a license here. However, some points to note that will be important:
- Learn British English terms
- Learn British English terms
- Save up your money up beforehand
- Get a drivers license from Delaware to make your life easier before coming
- Memorize, memorize, memorize! (the answers, not the concepts)
- Be prepared to pay for things that don’t seem to have any tangible purpose other than shifting the money from your pocket to theirs.
Here is a way I found to do a byte swap on a floating point number. For those who dont know what that is, it is a method that I use for converting data so that machines with different architectures can share data. Intel machines, for example, are “little endian”, whereas Sun boxed are “big endian”. Anyone else have another way to do the same thing? Keep reading for my method…
If you’ve ever flown in a commercial plane, you’ve probably been told to turn off your cell phone during the flight. Now, you have also probably been led to believe that the use of a cell phone could interfere with the operation of the aircraft. Well, I never believed that using a cell phone could have any effect on a commercial plane – and I have asked pilots in the past about it, and they agree (and here is a link to someone else that thinks similarly). So where does this “rule” come from? Could using a cell phone “bring down a plane”? If there really is a threat, wouldn’t it make sense to at least have some way of detecting such devices, for the safety of the passengers?