I found it very odd when I was in Germany that this wasn't the case, Visa/Mastercard were entirely considered credit cards, and debit cards used some entirely different system. I couldn't use my debit card to pay for a Berlin subway ticket, as the machines only took German bank cards.

It doesn't surprise me that more people have used Revolut at some point, but I would still expect that Monzo has more active users.

Edit: This is in the UK, I understand Monzo isn't quite as well known elsewhere.

If people don't like junk pre-installed on their Samsung phones or by Verizon, they should probably complain to them, or stop buying those phones. There are plenty of brands with stock Android that don't come with pre-installed junk.

I can sort of understand spending $200 on really good quality, comfortable headphones, though I wouldn't myself - if only because I'll inevitably break or lose them after a few months, even more of an issue with these wireless headphones. But if they don't check either of those boxes, I can't fathom why they're so popular, aside from Apple marketing.

Online multiplayer games are the exception, for this very reason here - anti-cheat systems. Since these are designed specifically to make sure the game is running in the exact way they were built, and often are very intrusive in looking at what's running on your system, Wine is unsurprisingly seen as something "not normal". Most games with anti-cheat won't start at all or won't let you into the online servers - this is the case with EAC and BattlEye, which are the most widely used anti-cheat these days.

One thing I've not been able to work out with bash-my-aws yet was how to easily switch between regions and accounts. I noticed you can use `region` on it's own to set the current default region, but I'm often working with multiple regions, and it'd be a pain to have to run `region us-west-1` separately each time I want to use a different region. I couldn't see a way to just specify a region for a given command (eg how you'd do `aws get-instances --region us-west-1`). I guess you could do this with the environment variable `AWS_DEFAULT_REGION=us-west-1 instances` but that's a bit verbose.

Similarly with AWS accounts, I use multiple AWS accounts, which are accessed with different access keys, which are defined as profiles in my ~/.aws/config. Normally I'd use these with the AWS CLI like `aws ec2 get-instances --profile production`, I couldn't see any way in the docs to use or set this?

Not sure if that ends up being cost effective considering how cheap you can get low-end Android phones these days, and how easy it is to find Android developers, but I'm sure there are some applications along those lines that would be well suited for the equivalent of "a Raspberry Pi with a touchscreen and smaller form factor".

This isn't an entirely new idea. BT was privatised in the 1980s, and before that had been run as a government department, and later as part of the Post Office, a public company but still under the control of the Government. At that early stage, the UK had some of the best internet infrastructure in the world, and had plans to roll out FTTH. Then Thatcher became PM, privatised BT, cancelled the fibre rollout plans, and encouraged more competition in the hopes that would improve investment. Well, 30 years later and we still have < 10% FTTH coverage. (Source: https://www.techradar.com/uk/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-l...)

Internet infrastructure is in weird state here. Thanks to BT's legacy as a public/nationalised company, they still own the vast majority of infrastructure and cables. This was sort of spun out into a separate company (Openreach) to BT the ISP, but they are widely considered inefficient and disinterested in improving the infrastructure, and they're still a subsidiary of BT. In theory this move was to increase competition, but it hasn't done a lot. There's only one major ISP (Virgin) that truly competes with BT, built their own infrastructure, and ran their own cables, almost every other ISP just leases the lines from Openreach and sells their own services on top of that.

I tend to agree that nationalising Openreach (the infrastructure and cables) is a good idea, to increase internet speeds and coverage across the country - rural areas tend to have very slow speeds as it's not in the interests of BT and Virgin to improve the infrastructure for a handful of customers in that area. I'm not so convinced that providing free high speed fibre internet connections to everyone is a necessity or a good use of government money. I feel like nationalising Openreach but keeping the existing model of ISPs building services on top of the infrastructure makes sense, and public infrastructure would reducing the costs of leasing those lines, a saving that could hopefully be passed on to customers. I'm not sure how this would affect companies like Virgin who do own their own infrastructure though, would they then be competing with the government?

There's of course a privacy concern to the government owning the internet infrastructure too. While the UK government has already had some pretty draconian policies, and they can force ISPs to comply, they've struggled to implement some of their more "ambitious" censorship policies, in part due to it being difficult to get all of the ISPs to come to an agreement on how to implement them. If the government owns the infrastructure, it's easier for them to implement surveillance and censorship at a lower level, harder to circumvent with VPNs and the like. Internet surveillance and censorship are generally policies of the Conservative party, rather than the Labour party who are proposing this, so I don't think there's any malicious intent with this proposal, but if a left wing government nationalises the internet this year, what's to stop a right wing government of the future using this new found control to implement stronger surveillance/censorship in 5 years?

All in all, I'm on the fence about this policy, although I do think some steps in this direction would be positive. And if you've been paying any attention to British politics in the last few years, you'd know there's even more complexities that what I mentioned here.

It seems more like "Chrome, with some plugins" than anything else. It's a shame really, I like the concept of the BAT project, I'd be interested in using it as a plugin for Firefox, but I'm not interested enough to switch browsers and lose all the features and plugins I'm used to in Firefox.

I like fingerprint scanner as a quick way to unlock my phone, it's at least more secure than the 4 digit passcodes or patterns I used before that, and more convenient than that or face recognition. But I wouldn't want to use fingerprint to replace entering a password for making payments or accessing any secure data.

If they'd actually positioned it as a low cost SteamOS box which can run a decent amount of PC games for cheaper than most PCs, they might have at least have a niche market for it. If they some integration with SteamOS to launch an Atari emulator and they'd have some extra selling point. But it's basically just a small low-powered Linux PC that might get a few exclusive deals.

I have a Linux PC hooked up to a TV in the living room for exactly these purposes (video/streaming and light gaming), thrown together from old parts and a bit of a mess to use. So a £300 device that does the same thing holds some appeal, even moreso if it had a developer behind it pushing some games on the platform, and making a good software experience. But it's not that, it's basically the same as that clunky PC I have in the living room running Linux, capable of playing games if you launch Steam or streaming whatever works in a browser.

I'm not their target audience though, and if I was then it'd be a pretty narrow niche to target.

It's amazing how much you can get away with when you have a recognised brand. They've combined the worst of over optimistic/under prepared kickstarters, with the worst of big corporation penny pinching. And yet just because people know the name Atari, they got millions of dollars in pre-orders, and even got Walmart and Best Buy to sell their (non-existent) device.

Edit: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/10/08/atari_architect_qui... is another article I read about this which I was basing some of my comments on - they apparently are planning on just releasing it running a generic Linux distro without any sort of console UI/ games launcher, and without any particular support for streaming platforms aside from a web browser.

Is this accurate? Legally, I understand that free speech is protected in the US constitution. I'm sure it's not the only country in the world with free speech laws, but I don't know how the specifics compare.

Culturally, the US seems less tolerant of free speech than plenty of other places in the world. Obviously China is orders of magnitude worse, both culturally and legally speaking.

Switched to a Pixel 3a XL after that, which is kind of disappointing since it's a very similar phone for a higher price (and without microSD unfortunately), but there really aren't a whole lot of options for headphone jacked phones these days, especially once you start adding in other requirements like good battery and stock Android.

"Nokia"/HMD have promise, it was mostly a great phone but with some significant issues, I'll be holding out on buying another of their phones until they've improved their quality control.