I recently helped a shop connect their terminal to the wired connection instead of the POTS one. The time it takes for a payment to go through went from 25 seconds to 2 seconds :) Also they used to pay a few cents for each transaction...

I think there is a lot of bike theft, but people also keep this alive by buying a 3 AM Special from a junky in the center of town.

I've lived in Amsterdam for the last 9 years and the only bike I've had stolen was one that I didn't lock.... I even still have a bike sitting in a rack outside my house that has been mine for 18 years.

I'm riding a fancy looking €1000 bike daily, have been for the last four years, I lock it with just the default ring through the back wheel when I go into a shop or something, and use the chain I have to lock it to a bike rack. It's even insured if I just use the simple lock.

Thanks to some nice tax breaks (meaning you can get a bike for up to 49% off though your employer (look for 'fietsplan')) I am actually on the hunt for a new bike. :-)

> was the rest.

Your Dutch skills are shining trough :)

In the Netherlands it is similar, most information is combined for you by the government, they even introduced an app to file your taxes last year. It probably is still a lot of work for businesses though... We often hear about the advanced digital government in Estonia, must be nice to have such an open minded country.

To make things even more complicated, I have a Sony Xperia Z2 which uses a 5 point jack plug TRRRS, as far as I know the extra connection is only used to receive microphone signal from the included noise cancelling headphones.[1] (Since the noise cancelling logic is handled on the phone).

[1] https://www.sonymobile.com/global-en/products/accessories/di...

MH17 was shot down over the Ukraine, you must mean MH370.

Almost all roads in the Netherlands are made with the porous tarmac, it solves many problems, but it will not last as long as the non porous variant and is indeed more expensive...

Or being sold back to you by the thieves...

Most places where you can use a credit card in Europe require you to use the chip (usually with a PIN).

I wouldn't say "most places" -- after a recent trip to Europe (Ireland, England and France), the only place we couldn't use our "signature-only" card was a train ticket vending machine, every business we went to had a magnetic stripe reader and knew they had to use it when the card had no chip. (my wife's no-foreign-transaction-fee card had no chip, so we tried to use that one as much as possible)

In every case were I used a USA chip card (with no PIN), the card reader prompted for a signature, so it was no problem.

Though I really don't understand why USA issuers and merchants went with a chip-only system, seems like it would have been trivial to allow PIN too.

Though even Chip and PIN only fights a small portion of the fraud - every time I've experienced credit card fraud, it's been with internet purchases. Amex used to let me generate a temporary card number for each merchant, I used that all the time, but they dropped the service for some reason.

I only used a Pi (1B) (20$) 4GB SD Card (5$?) case (6$) and hdmi cable (0.5$) My TV has HDMI CEC built in which means my tv remote works with the OSMC / Kodi / etc install. This gets me to a total of 31.5$ for my full HD supporting mediacenter :) (the case is even optional since it sits on the back of my TV, out of sight)