Swimming education in Germany is highly standardized. The "Bundesverband zur Förderung der Schwimmausbildung" (federal association in furtherance of swimming education) consists of different lifesaving and sports organizations and has recently published new examination regulations which highered the standards for swimming badges.
All swimmming instructors in those organizations will tell you that you should permanently keep an eye on your kids and don't let them go to the pool alone until they complete the bronze badge which requires you to swim for fifteen minutes, dive down to two meters and jump into the water. Only after you complete this test you are considered a "safe swimmer".
I volunteer for a lifesaving organization in Germany and the bowline is one of the most important knots there. One example is diving, where the diver is secured by a bowline around his hip.
Interesting... Around here if divers are working off a line, they're tagged in with a short lead to the mainline. The lead will have carabiners on either end that are either factory stitched in place, or clipped into a figure-eight. Those aren't meant to be under any tension though, they're just for maintaining orientation.
If a diver is attached to an actual haul line (not common, but happens in swift-water recuse scenarios), then they're going to be clipped in via a carabiner, which is tied on with a double-loop figure-eight. The double-loop figure-eight is the standard "if your life is gonna depend on it" knot around here.
(I am not a rescue diver, but do support dive operations from time to time)
the biggest barrier, in my opinion, is the ugly punycode links. most browsers still do not render them properly, and if they did, it would have false positives. (i.e. there is no way to tell if a string is intended to be punycode or not)
It's not as much a matter of "still not rendering them properly", but more that they are doing it on purpose to avoid homoglyph attacks. Earlier browsers more OFTEN used to render them "properly", I believe.
Of course, this only helps against foreign letters, you still have people squatting or putting phishing on common typos of pure asci urls with basically the same result.
Meanwhile, almost all of humanity still can't get decent urls in their native language :(
> Meanwhile, almost all of humanity still can't get decent urls in their native language :(
Why not?
For example, http://xn--h1alffa9f.xn--p1ai/ renders the URL in Russian for me in the URL bar in all of Chrome, Firefox, and Safari (though Chrome converts to punycode if I copy the URL from the URL bar, unfortunately). [Edit: Also, it looks like HN's linkifier converts to punycode; what I wrote there is "россия.рф" and that's what HN has stored if I edit this comment.]
In more detail, for Firefox (where I can find this sort of thing quickly in the code), there are the following things affecting the display:
1) The "network.IDN_show_punycode" preference. This defaults to false, so punycode is not forced across the board.
2) There is a bunch of preferences for what toplevel domains are "safe" for use with non-ASCII chars by default no matter what. That option currently defaults to "false" as far as I can tell.
All swimmming instructors in those organizations will tell you that you should permanently keep an eye on your kids and don't let them go to the pool alone until they complete the bronze badge which requires you to swim for fifteen minutes, dive down to two meters and jump into the water. Only after you complete this test you are considered a "safe swimmer".