gst

Venmo only works in the United States as US resident and with a US bank account. Swish only works in Sweden if you have a Swedish bank account, Bluecode only works in Germany and Austria.

That fragmentation doesn't matter too much if you're a resident of one country and don't travel too much, but it becomes a real issue if you travel or for some other reason reside in another country. For example, Sweden is mostly cashless and people use Swish to pay each other or to pay for goods at smaller merchants. Without a Swish account (that requires a Swedish bank account) you're locked out and can't pay anyone or receive payments.

For Europa EMPSA (https://empsa.org/) will hopefully make that situation a little bit better, as it would enable mobile cross-border payments within the European Union. But that project is still in the early stages and a platform like WhatsApp that's able to provide frictionless, cheap, cross-border payments looks definitely like something that could be successful.

> So by late 2016 we've got two different branches of the central bank, one controlled by the rebels and the other by the internationally-recognized government.

This sounds a lot like the Bitcoin vs. Bitcoin Cash hardfork. The pre-fork UTXOs were recognized by both parties, while post-fork UTXOs are only recognized on one side of the fork.

> I'm confused, because I use termux on android-10 (on a pixel2) without any problem.

It's only an issue if applications target Android 10 APIs. Termux still targets an older API version and is thus not yet affected by this issue. Eventually they'll need to target a newer version because the Google Play store specifies a minimum API version that applications need to use.

The numbers that are quoted for Austria (which has the listed IFR of 1.66% in the document) weren't obtained via antibody tests, but via PCR tests. Here's a better source than the one linked in the document: https://www.sora.at/uploads/media/Austria_COVID-19_Prevalenc...

Most of those tests were done on April 4th and 5th which was 3 weeks after Austria started relatively strict lockdown measures, which also impacts that number, as this will result in the test to find an even lower number of positive people.

> FEMA projects that nearly thirteen thousand people will die in the Cascadia earthquake and tsunami.

Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/07/20/the-really-big...

> For 2016 specifically, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) data shows 37,461 people were killed in 34,436 motor vehicle crashes, an average of 102 per day.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

The consequences of that earthquake don't sound too bad in comparison to other risks.

Doesn't the GDPR currently require companies to notify users about such attacks (does "personal data breach" also apply to client-side stored data)?

> When the personal data breach is likely to result in a high risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons, the controller shall communicate the personal data breach to the data subject without undue delay.

(Source: https://gdpr-info.eu/art-34-gdpr/)

> Given those things, what are the remaining biggest reasons I might prefer Firefox?

Iridium seems to be quite outdated - the latest release that's listed on the website is from April. Given that there have been multiple critical security issues fixed since then - with some of them allowing for arbitrary code execution (https://www.cisecurity.org/advisory/multiple-vulnerabilities...) - I personally would consider using Iridium too risky.

> Institutions don't have that luxury - the government doesn't insure large amounts of cash. If they keep it in a bank and the bank goes under, they lose their money. So they keep their money in national governments, which are far safer than banks.

Due to the low interest rates German insurance companies are already considering to store cash in their own vaults instead of buying bonds: https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=&sl=de&tl=en&u=htt...

Slightly negative interest rates work because physically storing cash is going to be more expensive than buying bonds (especially if you factor in costs for security, insurance, etc.). But if interest rates decreases further it's soon going to be cheaper to store cash, which is going to create a lower bound for the interest rate (assuming the government doesn't prohibit storing large amounts of cash).

> Compare that to retail banks which charge upwards of $35 for a "next-day ACH".

Is that still common? None of my banks / credit unions charges for incoming or outgoing ACH transfers.

Both companies already offer real-time payment services:

Visa: https://developer.visa.com/capabilities/visa_direct Mastercard: https://www.mastercard.us/en-us/issuers/products-and-solutio...

According to https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomgroenfeldt/2019/03/15/visa-d... >50% of Uber/Lyft drivers opt to pay a 50 cent fee to get paid in real-time instead of via ACH.

> Transactions equal to, or in excess of this amount would need to be made using the electronic payment system or by cheque.

Does Australia have a law that guarantees access to a bank account? Or would this proposed limitation imply that people who can't get a bank account for various reasons aren't allowed to transact anymore?

PayPal is not available in a lot of countries (Turkey would be one example). Western Union might work, but the fees are high and there's much more friction. In case you're based in the United States: Would you use Western Union over Venmo / Square Cash. If you're based in Europe: Would you use Western Union over SEPA? Libra has the potential to provide a low friction environment (like Venmo) supported by local companies that's available globally.

And while Libra definitely isn't perfect I think the set of trade-offs they chose are pretty reasonable. Another advantage over Venmo, Western Union, etc. is that the Libra will be run by a multiple independent companies, instead of locking you into a single company which is the case with the currently existing solutions (with the exception of SEPA).

Direct peer-to-peer payments: Those are currently a nightmare when you regularly travel. US: Venmo, Europe: SEPA, China: Wechat, etc. If Facebook manages to sign up enough stakeholders from different countries (that provide gateways between Libra and traditional bank accounts in their respective countries) Libra would provide a viable global alternative to the currently very fragmented market.

Does privacy.com still require users to provide the username and password that they use for their bank account? That's an absolute no-go for me.

For a no AF 2% card the PenFed card not on the list (https://www.penfed.org/credit-cards/power-cash-rewards) looks better than Double Cash as it doesn't have foreign transaction fees. To receive the full 2% cashback a PenFed checking account is required, but there's no annual fee on that account either.

> The logic is sound - unbanked people exist, including in San Francisco, and without a bank account these stores are inaccessible.

Wouldn't it be better to solve the root cause instead of the symptoms?

Give residents a legal right to open a bank account - as it's for example the case in some European countries (e.g., in Austria banks are required by law to provide at least a "basic" bank account to people that don't have any other bank account at another bank).

With this approach the stores would still be inaccessible to unbanked people - but everyone would have the choice to become "banked", even if they have a bad credit history, etc.

> Google just recently abandoned Android and pushed ChromeOS for tablets. Now this, there is just no continuity with Google.

It's GTalk/Hangouts/Allo/etc. all over again, just this time with Android and ChromeOS. I wouldn't be surprised if they announce that they're going to abandon ChromeOS and that they're going to only use Android instead. How can the different product teams at a company be so completely disconnected from each other?

Almost all of the US banks allow you to add other ACH accounts that you control. Just confirm the two trial deposits and you can push or pull money from that account.

A few banks also allow to send ACH transfers to third-party accounts that you don't control - for example with USAA that's possible. This still doesn't 100% match how transfers work in Europe (you first need to add the account, then wait 1-2 days, then you can send funds to it), but it's definitely better than "signing a bunch of forms".

An ACH transaction between two North American banks usually arrives on the next business day (if you place it before the cut-off time). In fact, ACH supports multiple settlements per day now so if that feature is supported by your bank ACH transfers can even arrive on the same business day. There are a few banks that are slower, but that's not the fault of ACH - don't use slow banks and you're not running into that issue.

That's very similar to SEPA transactions, with the exception that some European banks support real-time settlements for SEPA. For banks that don't support this yet funds usually arrive on the next business day.

Transfers between the US banking system and the European system are usually slow and expensive as those two systems aren't directly linked to each other. So you your bank needs to send the funds to a correspondent bank which forwards the funds to the final destination. But if you use 3rd party services such as TransferWise those transfers are significantly faster and cheaper. My last transfer from my US bank account to my European account (via TransferWise) arrived on the next business day and cost something like 0.36% on top of the mid-market rate.

On iOS macOS the kernel version isn't an issue as Apple ships OS updates with the latest version of Darwin.

On Chromebooks the kernel version doesn't matter if you only use basic features. But for more advanced features the kernel version determines which features are available. For example, Linux app support for Chrome OS isn't available on kernel 3.14 and older.

Chrome OS devices usually ship with a certain kernel version which isn't updated later on. So you could have a device where the hardware would be perfectly capable to support a given feature, just to not be able to use it because the vendor refuses to update one of the core components of your system.

> What's the situation like if you have two chunks of data (perhaps at two separate locations on the blockchain) and only if you XOR them you get the illegal image?

That's an interesting legal question and there's also already a content publishing system (Publius) that afaik uses a similar approach: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publius_(publishing_system)

Let's assume person A publishes 1 MiB of random data on their web server. Afterwards person B XORs illegal content against that data and publishes the result on their own web server (which to an outsider looks like random data). A's file XORed to B's file re-creates that illegal content.

Let's assume that at a later point it's not possible anymore to determine who published their file first. Who is liable for the illegal content? And who needs to remove that data from their server? Neither of them? Both of them? The first variant definitely sounds wrong, but the second variant implies that you can get in trouble for publishing perfectly random data.

Lenovo even has official videos on YouTube that describe how to do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k7FI_y4FXdA

There are already lots of non-Oracle distributions of OpenJDK: Azul's Zulu, AdoptOpenJDK, Amazon's Corretto and I'm not aware of any aggression towards those projects. The lawsuit against Google targets an implementation that didn't derive from OpenJDK and is thus not covered by any of the patent grants.

Furthermore, OpenJDK is licensed under the GPL. Even if Oracle stopped contributing to OpenJDK the GPL license would ensure that OpenJDK and all derivative works can still be freely distributed and are still subject to Oracle's original implicit patent grant.

> Oracle has also demonstrated in court that the Java API is their intellectual property, and that they are willing to go after people for reimplementing them. OpenJDK might be blessed, but I'd still be afraid of having anything to do with their intellectual property. That's also one of the primary reasons I'm not very excited about ZFS.

If you use OpenJDK you get an implicit patent grant to run OpenJDK (as it's licensed under the GPL).

If you use any other non-OpenJDK runtime you might still violate some of Oracle's patents, but you don't get any patent grant.

So if you're concerned about patents then using OpenJDK (instead of not using it) would actually be the safer way to go.

I actually think that is the best long-term approach for all of the parties involved:

In the past OpenJDK was missing critical features so that companies often used the commercial closed-source Oracle JDK. At the same time even then Oracle JDK was somewhat of a trap when it comes to licensing, as it included features not covered by the free licence that might be accidentally used by developers.

With Java 11 there is finally feature parity: Oracle contributed missing features to OpenJDK. Features that couldn't be contributed (due to licensing issues) were removed from the commercial Oracle JDK. So starting with Java 11 those two versions of the JDK are pretty much equal.

With Java 11 there's no reason to use the commercial Oracle JDK. Most of the companies that used the Oracle JDK before are better served by using one of the open-source OpenJDK builds: Either Oracle's OpenJDK build (which is only going to provide support for 6 months after each release), or one of the third-party builds that most likely are also going to track LTS releases such as Azul's Zulu or AdoptOpenJDK.

Oracle is very upfront about those changes: When you try to download Java 11+ from Oracle's website there's a huge yellow box with a warning about the license changes. In addition, that box also links to the GPL-licensed OpenJDK version.

As a Java developer I'm very happy about that new approach: With the feature parity between OpenJDK and the commercial release it's finally possible to develop and run Java applications on a 100% open-source stack, which is something that was much harder to do with earlier OpenJDK releases.

I would really love to buy a Pixelbook (or another Chromebook) because I really like the software stack. But the fact that Google never updates the kernel on those things (you're stuck with whatever kernel version was on it when you initially purchased it) is a major reason for me to not get one.

On my Linux laptop I can always run the latest software. On my Macbook Apple will stop to provide software updates at some point, but in practice the hardware is probably going to die before that anyway. On a Chromebook parts of the software stack are never going to be updated. And while most of the users probably don't care about the kernel version itself, a lot of Chrome OS features are dependent on the kernel version: with an older version you're going to miss some features (such as being able to run Linux apps), although the hardware itself would be capable of supporting them.

And even if the keyboard breaks at some point on a Thinkpad it's easy to replace it. A new replacement keyboard for the T480s currently costs $50 on eBay and it doesn't take longer than a few minutes to install it.

On my Pixel 3: Settings / Apps & Notifications / Advanced / Special app access. From there you can whitelist, e.g., Chrome to allow the installation of 3rd party apps.

IIRC Chrome even asks you if you want to enable that setting once you download an APK file.

Is it in maintenance mode? Chris Mason (the main btrfs developer) works for Facebook now and Facebook uses btrfs on "millions of servers" (source: https://code.fb.com/open-source/linux/).