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Those proprietary cards in most of the European countries have definitely advantages, but are also a big problem: In lots of European countries merchants often only accept the country's own proprietary debit card, but no debit/credit cards from other European countries.

For example in Denmark: "Due to the higher fees charged by banks for the use of non-Danish issued cards (that consist of foreign card network interchange fees plus Danish banks own fees), many Danish merchants only accept Dankort and Danish-issued credit cards, but not foreign cards." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dankort)

I really hope that the EU adds some regulation that forces merchants to accept debit/card cards from other EU member states on an equal basis. Especially in combination with the fact that in some cases only electronic payments are accepted, which makes it pretty much impossible for anyone to pay without a national bank account.

The EU already solved (or at least mitigated) the issues with roaming in mobile networks. Doing the same for payments is the next logical step.

Turns out that lots of dishwasher manufacturers provide a free warranty with the purchase of a dishwasher. And as a customer I have the choice to decide if I get a cheap dishwasher (from a cheap manufacturer) without warranty or a more expensive dishwasher (from a better manufacturer) with warranty.

> True, but the problem is the final price doesn't include the cost of recycling and environmental impact (extremely hard to price it correctly).

At least for recycling Apple charges a $5 (for 13") or $6 (for 15") recycling fee when buying a MacBook in California. Not sure about other states.

That's probably one of the reasons why the top spec 13" model (Touch Bar and Touch ID 2.3GHz Quad-Core Processor 512GB Storage) costs kr 22 190,00 = $2581 in Norway, while I get the same model for $1999 in the United States.

I'd rather have the choice to decide myself if and how much I want to spend for warranty (e.g., AppleCare) than having the government force me to indirectly pay for a warranty that I might not need or want.

They fixed the import in March or April. I tried importing earlier and just got the error message that the import functionality is not available yet. Here's a thread about that issue: https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=210511

I understand that I could have waited a little bit longer with filing my taxes. But the fact that key functionality is missing from a product doesn't give a lot of confidence in that they have enough resources to handle their job.

The only feature from TaxAct that I'm missing from the online version of TurboTax is attaching PDF files for transactions. With TaxAct I can report aggregated transaction data and just attach the PDF from my broker which is then automatically included with the efiled return. With TurboTax that's not possible yet and I'd need either list transactions individually (which is easy due to electronic import) or send the itemized broker statement by mail.

That's a good point!

Most of the data already known to the IRS is available in an electronic format anyway. I fire up TurboTax, electronically import my W-2, the tax statements from my bank, etc. and I'm 90% done.

And the remaining items (various deductions, reporting my foreign bank accounts, etc.) are things that the IRS itself probably also wouldn't know right at the beginning of the year.

What are the better alternatives?

Last year I tried out all the major offerings, and TurboTax was the only one that worked without any issues. TaxAct didn't even manage to fix their broken electronic import of broker data until some point in March or April.

More personalized ads seem to be a win-win situation. If I'm already seeing credit card ads I'd like to at least see ones that are relevant for me.

After logging in to TurboTax (for the first time in a tax year) it asks you if it can share your data with its parent company (Intuit). Declining works and doesn't have any impact on TurboTax. However, based on how the UI for that looks like it might not be obvious for some people that data-sharing is optional.

Regular thermal throttling is fine. The Thinkpad issue that I mentioned is a software bug in the firmware that throttles the CPU way too early/often.

I've used Linux since the early 1.x kernel versions, but for my next laptop I'm thinking about switching to a MacBook. Not because of the software (I prefer Linux to macOS), but because of the hardware.

Apple seems to be the only manufacturer that so far escaped the race to the bottom and which still produces somewhat premium hardware. I want: a hidpi screen with lots of nits and a good contrast, a trackpoint or a huge touchpad, good battery life and somewhat light weight.

In the past Thinkpads worked really well for that, but recently I had multiple issues with Lenovo hardware. I'm currently using a X1C3 and originally considered upgrading to a X1C6 or T480s, but given there are known issues such as the throttling bug (https://github.com/erpalma/throttled) that Lenovo hasn't fixed in over half a year I'm very close to giving up on Thinkpads.

That's one of the reasons why the makers of the Librem 5 phone decided to use an internal USB bus which isolates the baseband from the SoC:

> To isolate the cellular modem from the SoC, we will be placing the modem on the (remarkably fast) USB bus and have the phone interact with the cellular modem through USB instead of on the main RAM bus. This will separate the cellular modem on its own bus without seeing any other data.

(https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-2018-09-hardware-report/)

The operator knows your phone's IMEI which allows to determine the brand/model.

Kademlia is still in widespread use today. For example Bittorrent uses it to resolve magnet links.

Is hashcash still feasible today? With botnets it shouldn't be a major problem to generate a large number of hashcash stamps. In addition, the current hashcash approach uses SHA-1 which would be trivial to speed up with GPUs or FPGAs (similar to how Bitcoin mining works). At the same time it wouldn't be possible to increase the required "price" of hashcash stamps as this would lock out users who can only use CPUs to calculate the stamp.

Last time I checked (more than a year ago) most of the websites didn't care about the counter value.

(If you use a Ledger device for U2F and subsequently restore a new (or a reset) device from your private seed the counter will be reset. Trezor has the same issue but allows you to manually set the counter to work around it.)

Most phones nowadays support NFC so this shouldn't be an issue. Just use your NFC key to log into the phone. Alternatively you can also use a Bluetooth U2F key instead of a NFC key. Both of those keys have a regular USB port in addition to NFC/Bluetooth so you can set them up on your laptop and then use them with your phone.

10-15% sounds reasonable. For example currently Bitcoin trades at $6325 on Coinbase, while cash offers on LocalBitcoins are at around $7000 per BTC.

Given that most newer laptops (and phones) support charging via the same USB-PD standard (via USB-C) I don't see the reason for including yet another power adapter in the box when the average user probably already has enough of them at home.

I charge all my laptops (Macbook Pro and a Thinkpad) and my phone (Pixel XL) via the same Apple USB-C charger. I'd rather not have yet-another-charger that I'm not going to use included in the box of my next laptop/phone.

The offer isn't available anymore (last day was Nov 1st IIRC).

> Lots of other phones do let you do it, usually in pro or manual setting. It requires a pre-requisite of good OIS (which paradoxically the Pixel 1 didn't have, claiming that it wasn't necessary -- because of some magic AI sauce or something -- and seeing that noise repeated across the tubs.

Night Sight works perfectly fine on the Pixel 1.

> Why? Because 99.9999% of smartphone photos in real use (e.g. not in a review), give or take 100%, are of people. People move. Long exposures just lead to bad outcomes and blurred people.

I tested Night Sight with pictures of people and it also works fine in those cases. Even pictures takes with the front camera (without a tripod, etc.) look great.

The Android One phones (https://www.android.com/one/) are running stock Android and provide 2 years of Android OS updates and 3 year of security updates.

> All this action does is remove options for those of us who do wanna fix their own machines.

I don't see how this removes any choices. It's still possible to buy other non-Apple hardware that doesn't have those restrictions.

> Throttling video speeds may very well be a good thing for many (most?) users who have a fixed data cap.

I would assume that most users with recent contracts are going to have an "unlimited" amount of included data, given that most (all?) major US providers sell unlimited data by default.

I've used _lots_ of different Android devices since I purchased the original Android G1 device in 2009 and I never had a problem with chargers (although I don't use the original chargers most of the time).

How do consumer-level hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles solve this issue? Does this mean you can't store them in a garage, because the leaking hydrogen could cause an explosion?

> However, an iOS device is also the property of its owner and the owner should be allowed (morally) to install software outside the app store. Even if that comes with potential security problems. Android already permits this.

The owner has the choice between iOS and Android. Why should Apple change their policies (and lose revenue) if the majority of users appear to be sufficiently happy with those restrictions (otherwise they wouldn't buy iOS devices)?

For their N97 promo video Nokia faked the whole UI of the phone: https://youtu.be/vJpEuMidcSU

I'm citizen of Austria and resident of the United States.

Austrian tax returns are much simpler because in the majority of cases they don't exist: Your employer and your banks automatically withhold the correct amount of taxes (capital gains are taxed at a flat rate and don't influence regular income taxes). Marriage status doesn't matter for income tax as the same tax brackets apply to everyone. Deductions are much less common but if you have any deductions you can let the government know and they'll automatically refund your tax within a week or so.

One reason why Austrian taxes are so much simpler is because there are much fewer special cases: The US has all those different credits and deductions that lower the taxes in certain situations, e.g., the "First-time homebuyer credit repayment". Meanwhile in Austria all those subsidies for, e.g., lower income people aren't included in the tax system, but are available via completely separate programs (e.g., if your income is very low the government pays parts of your rent and helps you with heating costs in the winter, but you have to submit a separate application for that).

Not sure which system is better. One thing I noticed is that in Austria I never applied for any subsidies even while being a low-income student (why would I apply for social services if I don't really need them?). Meanwhile in the US my tax advisor makes sure that I get all the credits and deductions that I'm eligible for.

Several years ago someone tried to climb into our apartment window in Amsterdam (with another guy waiting with a motorbike as getaway vehicle on the street). He was standing on the windowsill and tried to break open the window (it was open but we had one of those locks that limits how far the window opens, so he didn't fit through the gap). They fled once we noticed them.

When we tried to report that incident to the police their first question was: Did they manage to get into the apartment? When we said no they told us there's nothing that they can do as the people who tried to break into our apartment weren't doing anything illegal.