tunareter

You're completely wrong. Most diesel locomotives are in fact diesel electrics. I.e. diesel engine, generator, electric motors. Most of those cannot use external power sources (although a few can, e.g. class 73 in the UK).

Certainly in the UK: the most common locomotives such as class 66, 60, 58, 67, 47 - they're all diesel electric.

In the US, same story: for passengers the GE Genesis is pretty big, things like SD90MAC and AC6000CW are big for freight.

If laws can't be easily written and understood, that's a problem with the legal system (and the media explaining said laws and initiatives).

The CA implementation seems terrible, but in general direct democracies end up with better laws, and the populace in such democracies ends up being better than a bunch of self selected politicians (who happen to not be experts anyway). US and UK lawmaking processes are a perfect example of why you need to give citizens more control (but you still want legislative bodies to do the grunt work).

I know more developers who would laugh at the idea of going to the US than wanting to go to the US. (Mostly qol reasons.)

And rents are still far away from the likes of SF/NYC/Seattle.

EU residents, not citizens. It's an important distinction.

This doesn't have much relevance for LO. Devs there are generally welcoming. You'll still get honest feedback but they generally want your code in the codebase, and want to help you get it in a shape to land it.

Honestly: yes. LibreOffice is quite a friendly place, and there's even a list of beginner bugs that help with getting your foot in the door. They like new developers.

It might take more than a few hours (e.g. you'll need to set up a dev environment - but the builds are quite robust nowadays unlike some projects), and the codebase is complicated - but contributing to LibreOffice was fun and helped me gain real world software experience. I'd only worked on small personal projects before LO.

You definitely won't cause harm, and there are devs who will try to help you get your patch submitted. (They even employ someone to help new contributors get up to speed and to help get their patches in.) As chris_wot said, get on irc and people will generally be able to help you get set up. (IRC presence tends to vary by time and day, jfyi.)

Well, actually... There are.

LHR-LAX-AKL requires all passengers to get off but those not terminating in LAX stay in a transit area (although there's still an immigration check).

And IAH supports international transit for bags, but you as a person still need to immigrate the normal way.

Maybe your employer has offices there.

Maybe you have relatives there.

Maybe you have clients there.

Or conferences, or other professional events.

Maybe you are even resident there.

For those who aren't US citizens, the advice in that article is absolutely terrible.

Refuse to cooperate and you'll be on the next flight to whatever CBP deem is your home, and good luck ever getting an ESTA or Visa in future.