aard

and could barely speak a few basic sentences after 5 years of schooling

Thanks to events earlier last century pretty much everybody at least in Europe/Russia can speak a few basic sentences, and is often more than willing to demonstrate: "Haende hoch!" (hands up), "Nicht schiessen!" (don't shoot) and a few others.

Are you in one of those north American developments with long straight multiline roads without proper sidewalks?

If so, something like this doesn't exist here at all. The smaller roads are not really suitable for high speed driving, and there's not much traffic. The main roads all have wide foot and bike paths on both sides next to them - so only thing you need to know is how to safely cross a road.

In addition to that there are lot of small pedestrian/cycle only paths as shortcuts between parts of the city.

Currently in Finland - single family home in a town with 46k people. Originally from a 2k village in Germany.

We have two daycares, a school and a grocery store 1km from home - here that kind of stuff is integrated in the neighbourhoods where people live. Many elementary schools, some just grades 1 and 2 - by grade 3 they can already easily travel the longer distance to another school by themselves.

In Germany it's also mandatory - but learning the language at school unfortunately doesn't necessarily mean you can speak it. LucasArts adventures contributed more to my language skills than my first English teacher. I'm always shocked about the lack of English skills in a lot of Germans when I'm back visiting. Rather surprisingly one of my uncles born in the 30s spoke pretty good English, though.

We're now living in Finland - me German, wife Russian, we each speak to the kids in our native language, between each other English. So they're growing up with 4 languages.

It's quite interesting to watch them grow up in that situation. When learning about a new historical figure my daughter always asks which languages they spoke - and few weeks ago she was surprised someone only spoke two languages. So I explained that some people only speak one language - she gave me a very weird look, and it took a while to convince her that I'm not just making a bad joke.

As an American who didn't get a driver's license until I was 21 (gasp! so old)

I'm now 41, never made a license - there wasn't really much of a need until now. I can get anywhere I want with a combination of bicycle and public transport.

Physical education is usually a mandatory part of US schools through high school

In Germany the same - but swimming classes are mandated by law from grade 3 onwards, though we started going from grade 1 back then.

How big distances / population are we talking here?

I was growing up in a small village, so in elementary school we went by bus to a nearby village with 7000 inhabitants and a swimming pool.

Now we're living in a town with a population of 46000 with its own swimming pool.

In Germany a lot of people reduced the amount of cycling they did once they had a driving license - now here in Finland a lot more adults keep using bikes, and also use it in Winter. Back in Germany I always was the odd one for cycling in the snow.

Starting a camp fire is something I'm teaching my kids just because I don't want them to burn my house down - being allowed to play with fire outside along with an explanation of which are the dangerous bits took the fascination out of all the fire starting equipment in the house.

That leads to a follow up question to people from different areas: Is swimming a regular part of school sports?

I grew up in Germany with pretty much no lakes, and we had blocks of sports classes in the swimming pool from first grade - didn't make me a great swimmer, but I can go swim a bit in a lake without having to worry.

Now we're in Finland (lots of lakes here), and also swimming classes take place from first grade.

I've just been using Windows for work stuff now and then for over two decades now - so I just have the install scripted so I can just deploy it from scratch whenever I need it, and throw it away afterwards. Before we had multicore CPUs making emulation not annoying I had a sun workstation with a SunPCI card for that.

The one constant over all windows versions is it running into some driver issues for stupid reasons. Now with 11 its the signed drivers - and while you can do exceptions for development I never got unsigned graphics drivers to work.

Also, Windows on ARM is horrible - something as simple as a usb serial adapter doesn't work because there just are no ARM drivers.

Ich will grundsaetzlich dass "App fuer Banking" und "App fuer Auth fuer Banking" auf zwei unterschiedlichen Geraeten sind (oder ich eine TAN-Liste auf Papier habe, aber das darf man ja dummerweise nicht mehr). Damit faellt die neue App die beides macht raus.

War auch mein Gedanke - der naechste Depp koennte dann ja einer sein mit dem ich auf der Schule war.