derda

Why didn't you rent from a conventional rental company that month?

I'd love to see pictures like that for the whole of Dubai. These only show about maybe 1/3 of the actual city. But still impressive. I went there a few months ago and the only thing I can describe it with is "Playing Sim City with money cheat".

I know people who have worked with the Intel 48-Core SCC (Single-Chip Cloud Computer). While I don't remember technical details it was very hard for them to build software that actually benefits from that many cores. If I remember correctly sharing data between the cores was a big bottleneck.

Via email. Not very hard to hack.

For Packstation they had some serious problems with phishing. At first you only needed your Packstation User Number and the PIN. They then disallowed logins with user number and required the membership card. But it seems they started skimming those, so starting from last month they send you a TAN to your cellphone when the package arrives and you need card+TAN.

From what I see Bufferbox right now only has a few locations, for Packstation its over 2500 locations and a wide userbase, as with software: the wider the user-base the bigger the profit for bad guys.

Well because of anti money laundering laws they still need an ID-check before they can open the account.

The good news is that germany started issuing ID-cards with RFID, that can be loaded with a certificate, that will enable you to digitally sign contracts and identify yourself, so the trip to the post-office will no longer be necessary.

On your Project: With upcoming SEPA payments it will not matter anymore where your bank is registered, since transaction times and fees will be the same for all transactions within europe. So just register yourself as/partner with a bank in a european country that offers the most favorable banking-laws/ banking infrastructure/ whatever. In regard of germans, they really want to know that their money is "safe". Especially now in the euro-crisis, so make sure that the depot insurance of the country of your choice is of a comparable quality to the german system. (And maybe dont settle for a PIIGS state, as germans have a strong distrust in banks and politicians in those countries)

A few things:

- Opening a bank account isn't pain and its free. If you do it locally at your bank, you can start using you account right away, you may have to wait a week or so for you credit/debit card and your online-banking pin, since they are send via mail. If you open an account with an online bank. You fill out the form, print it out, sign it, go to the post office with your ID, the post-person will check if your ID matches the form and send it to the bank. Few days later you will get your cards and passwords and are ready to go.

- Yes there are delays between banks. But there are some EU directives on the way, which seek to minimize the delay between banks in all of europe.

- I have no idea what your app is supposed to do. Is it some kind of fancy online-banking interface? With integrated accounting? For multiple accounts? The main-site (holvi.com) doesn't really help me with that.

I dont know if its common in the anywhere else but in my town here in germany the stealing of bike-PARTS has become very popular. I guess the owners of high-value bikes use better locks, that are actually hard to break ( like those: http://ebay.muskelkater-sport.de/fahrrad/schloesser/bordo-gr... ). But for Parts the risk is even lower and a good break or light system can yield a few bucks.

I personally use a cheap ( 50€ ) used bike as a daily driver, in combination with a 30€ lock, there will mostly be an easier/better target for the thief and if it ever gets stolen, its just 50 (80) bucks and not 1000€.

Well I think this question keeps many companies (not only startups) from moving into the US-market. Everyone is afraid, that one lawsuit can financially destroy the whole company.

In Germany for example there are insurances, that will cover your costs of lawsuits etc. when you accidentally infringe IP / patents. They will also cover if a client sues you for lost business because your product somehow failed in a bad way. Some of them will offer worldwide coverage, but every policy will exclude US lawsuits.

Alarm-Buttons and panic rooms are not so uncommon and often installed in houses of much-more low-key persons then Kim Schmitz. A family friend purchased a house (not a mansion, just a bigger house in a suburban neighborhood) here in germany that was formally owned by a CEO of a mid-sized tech company. And there is a panic button in every room, as well as a hidden room. Why should such a system be uncommon in, from what I remember, the biggest mansion in NZ? I guess it was already there when he bought the place.

It amazes me everytime, that in the US day-to-day banking still consists mostly of writing, sending and cashing cheques.

In germany (I dont know about the rest of Europe, but I guess the situation is similar), cheques are virtually non existent. You can still get and cash them, but you will get weird looks from the person behind the bank counter, most of the time there will be a hefty fee associated with it(I once cashed a cheque from an US-bases affiliate program and my bank charged me a ridiculous amount for the process).

One problem for consumer goods production in europe / US is component sourcing. You will need a PCB-Fab, ICs, injection molding, ... . While you can get most (some things just arent built statesside anymore) of those things in the states, they will be more expensive and maybe not built to capacity (since they specialized on really small batches for example). In china you will have all of the suppliers down the road and pretty cheap.

From someone who worked for a large automotive supplier, which does a lot of manufacturing here in germany, that wanted to release a consumer device I heard that you can get the whole product finished in china for the price of sourcing the components in europe.

Just two wild guesses from my side, as I don't think that the whole database got compromised:

1. Some Accounts got compromised (phishing, trojan, whatever). In those account a list of all referral email-addresses can be seen. Those addresses have been targeted.

2. The Dropbox Application stores information about the email-addresses of people you have a shared folder with somewhere on your machine. This data got accessed by some kind of malware. Maybe this information could also be accessed trough the webinterface of compromised accounts (I am not sure about that).

Even a small-ish number of compromised accounts could lead to many addresses being leaked. I for example have about 15 referals and share folders with about 50 people.

Cables and switching infrastructure weight a lot. mSata SSDs weight as less as 7g. So the total weight of the SSDs is 1778g. I guess you can save more then 2kgs when you buy lower capacity switches and share some cables. I also think that they might have needed another central server for serving all the clients.

If you want to avoid that do a UG & co. KG. Costs a bit more, since it technically is two companies but you dont have to build up the capital and you are also exempt from "Körperschaftssteuer"-tax.

I think the regal battle started on german soil since the company, that oracle was trying keep from selling the used licenses, was a german one. The case got quite some media attention over here, even the radio-news mentioned it.

Sadly I dont remember the details anymore. I can just remember that the system was by a german company and judging by how it behaved was still in a kind of beta-stadium.

It is also possible, that they show you a cached price first and one step before the confirmation they check back with the airline if they price really is the same. In your case the airline might have increased the fare, for whatever reason, shortly before you started your booking process.

I saw a similar safety-system at Hanover industrial fair a few months ago. So they are already being sold.

96 mpg (imperial) = 2,94 l / 100km

German actually.

They went a sunny-route through the panama-channel and not the route trough Kap Horn and the Kap of good hope, which is normally taken by round the world sailors. These routes have a high chance of storms, which come with clouds. 3 days of clouds would have rendered the boat unmanoeuvrable.

Nice experiment but solar powered boats are absolutely useless on high seas and better, cheaper and a lot more ecological (a lot of energy goes in the production of solar panels and batteries) alternatives (sailboats) have been around for ages.

There you go: http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=CELEX:...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive

Also check the german wikipedia article, for more references.

Its worse than that. Google "democratic deficit european commission" it will give you a lot of material on the problem. For the lawmakers (big parties) in the member states it is not a bug, its a feature. It is much easier to pass a controversial law, like this one, if its made away from the public somewhere in Brussels. And when there is critique, you can blame it on the EU, and that the country would face sanctions if they dont implement it.

Its a EU thing that is pushed from the commission to the individual countries. Germany implemented this a while ago but it was ruled unconstitutional by our constitutional court, so the law was repealed and all collected data was deleted (at least thats what they say). Now the government is facing fines from the EU for not implementing the law.

Its awful that an institution of questionable democratic legitimation (EU commission) is forcing a democratic government to implement laws, that are against their constitution. The worst thing is, that the big political parties dont see anything wrong in this.

Maybe these numbers include search requests from browser-search fields and similar. Otherwise I would be very interested in those sources, too.

I am wondering, why they haven't thought about those problems before. CE certification, EMC testing, WEEE (european electronic waste regulations) are a big part of why hardware is hard. I don't know about specific regulations in the UK, but I guess they are similar to those here in germany.

You can get around those regulations if your product is for use by professionals and/or for development purposes, that means there is some professional knowledge needed to make the product work (soldering, programming,...). For the rPI you only need a power adapter and a downloadable image on a SD card, thats not really professional knowledge.

For CE certification, you can however put a CE badge on anything you want, and refer to some regulation (I don't have the paragraph at hand atm). This basically means "We think it will be alright". A frightening number of Chinese imports do this. This is absolutely legal, the problem comes when something bad happens, e.g. your product causes a pacemaker to fail, then you have to prove that you took all necessary precautions to prevent this, which is basically impossible if you haven't done proper EMC testing and such.

Designing complex circuits (like the rPI) that do not make any EMC problems is extremely hard. I don't think most computer hardware would go through testing/certification without problems, thats why your mainboard sits in a metal case. My worst case guess is that they have to ship the boards in cases or with some shields.

Disclaimer: I am a ECE student. My father is a consultant in the CE/WEEE field. Statements above are based on memorys of conversations with him, when I told him I had an idea for some hardware product (and he told me to forget it unless I want to spent a lot of money on regulatory stuff)

The article is kind of incomplete and concentrating more on the circumstances (nazis, war, ..) then his actual inventions.

- He invented the first turing complete computer the Z3 which was finished in 1941, the Z4 (which was based on the Z3 was the first commercial computer)

- He is also responsible for the first high level computing language - Planalkül

The wikipedia article on him has some better information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse

A friend of mine started to reverse engineer the API, that the DB-Navigator App uses, as it covers pretty much every public transport in Germany and at least trains (and sometimes trams and buses) in all of Europe. It can even give you a route to Pjönyang, North Korea. I don't know how successful he has, though.