Square's mag-stripe card reader is obsolete - it can't read chip & PIN cards, or contactless. They already have a bluetooth connected reader.

The card payment systems from Square et al that plug into the headphone socket are all obsolete. They're magnetic strip readers, and payments based off the mag-stripe are going the way of the dodo. Over in the US you guys are a bit behind the curve - mag-stripe payments have been dead in Europe for a good few years now, so none of the mag-stripe based payment solutions launched here. Many of the more forward looking payment processors like Square tackled this issue some time back with readers that would support chip and pin, some do contactless too.

A movie theatre's "2K" projector is approximately the same resolution as a "4K" TV, as they both create a picture that's very roughly 4000 pixels wide.

Your point tho is entirely correct - humans aren't equipped with eyes to tell the difference between a 1080 and 2160 (4K) picture from across a room.

Beaglebone is also over twice the price of a Raspberry Pi.

Nonsense.

England is part of the UK, and the UK remains a member of the European Union.

EU laws apply.

As for Julian Assange, he's holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy, which is Ecuadorian sovereign territory, so technically whilst he remains inside there he's not on UK (or EU) soil. As he's technically in Ecuador which doesn't have an extradition treaty, he's safe there.

I find the notion that there's "pressure to farm it out cheaply and easily to freelancers" to be ludicrous.

I'm a software developer contractor in the UK. This is a relatively new thing for me - in my 20+ year career I've only been a contractor the past two. The last couple of years have been by far the most lucrative of my career. In every gig I've had I've been paid more than twice as much as the most senior permanent developer.

$1.50 fee?

Ouch!

OK, sure, $1.50 CAD isn't much, but if you're transferring say $20 or less it's still a very significant amount. Not a sensible way to pay your buddy $5 for your share of pizza.

Such transfers are free here in the UK.

You seriously think Apple aren't capable of increasing the rate at which they update the AppleTV?

Whilst historically they've only updated about every 3 years, they have the resources to update every 6 months if they felt like it.

lol - sorry - wrong about that - it used to be a download but isn't any more.

Then it's not a problem as Apple's podcasts app isn't included on iOS. It's a download from the app store.

Very true. This is a terminal emulator issue. Plus, as it stands, the Terminal.app has preferences that let you define exactly how all the function keys get interpreted.

In my Terminal the configured behaviour of PgDn is to send the key sequence \033[6~ which for all the terminal apps I'm using gets interpreted correctly as a PgDn (e.g. 'less' will scroll down a page). The config for Shift+PgDn is "Scroll Page Down", which will scroll the window. There's a chance that sometime over the past decade I changed those settings, but I suspect they're the defaults.

You do indeed see Safari updates, however it seems to me that the majority of those updates are security fixes.

The issue here is that Safari is getting slow to adopt new web technologies, and slow at fixing problems with the technologies they have adopted.

This has been a relatively recent change, mostly since the WebKit/Blink split. Before then Apple through WebKit (and thus Safari) often led the way with new web technologies, and they were active participants in broader discussions about web standards, and much more open. It's felt as if they've closed off, and become resistant to event attempting to keep up, much less participate.

The WebKit Surfin' Safari blog shows this quite clearly. Long ago the blog used to be regularly updated. In the last year however there's been just three updates, two of those within the last three weeks.

Whilst she may be Yahoo's CEO, back in 2011 she was working at Google.

And yet Apple manages to make their iOS updates available to all compatible devices on the day of release, dealing with an order of magnitude more devices than Nexus phones and tablets.

My Nexus 10 had to wait 2 weeks for the 5.0 update to be made available to it, and my Nexus 4 took a month. The story has been the same with every single Android update - I read that an update is available, and then don't see it for weeks or months, no matter how many times I check for updates. In contrast on all my iOS devices never have any wait.

In both cases I get to choose if I want to install the update or not.

I don't buy "OTA releases are staged to avoid overwhelming networks", especially since the sales figures for Nexus devices are relatively small. As for "catch any problems", that is much more believable, but it reeks of poor QA. The implication is they have little confidence in the quality of their product.

The reality is that no matter the justification, it's poor customer service. If you loudly tell the world "Android 5 is out for your device" then you should make sure it's out.