Well...

"The company has moved past its pilot unit and now has a full production unit up and running, supplying vertically aligned carbon nanotubes for its ultracapacitor devices. Nawa says the electrode technology is more or less agnostic; it can be used on cylindrical cells or flat cells of all sizes."

Ultracapacitors are great and all, but it'll be a while before they start manufacturing a 12,000mAh battery for your phone...

The issue is finding a charger that will support the "correct" cable and your device.

I just bought a new Thinkpad T15 with USB C and I was quite annoyed to find that it will only charge from a 20V USB PD charger - NOT the usual 5V, 9V or 12V USB PD chargers. That means I need to be careful when buying a charger, say if I'm abroad and lose my luggage. The 20V chargers look nearly the same as the others, they're just labled with "30W" or "60W".

When USB C for laptops started becoming more common, I was expecting to be able to at least slowly charge over night from a standard phone power supply (USB A connector at 5V/1A+) - 50Wh at 5W would give you a decent chunk of charge over night if you're otherwise SOL. If they'd at least added support for 9V and 12V PD charging that would have been great - most smartphone chargers being sold right now with a USB C jack support this, so you could have said, "if the charger has a USB C port instead of USB A, you can charge laptops with it!".

Instead it seems they've opted to omit the boost converter and other additional circuitry that would have been necessary - more profit for the manufacturer, more annoyance for the customer.

Here's a source if you can read German: https://www.merkur.de/politik/...

We're currently at 40%. 50% isn't far off.

To be clear, half of this amount is covered by the employee and half by the employer.

>...great pensions starting at age 63, (even after the 2010 reductions).

Your information is pretty old. They've been steadily increasing the age at which you can retire without significant cuts of your Rente payout... last week I heard in the news (either Tagesschau or DW) that they're in talks to eather raise the age AGAIN or increase total social security costs to roughly 50% of a person's paycheck - that's in addition to taxes. I highly doubt we'll be able to convince our employers to bump up our salaries accordingly.

UBI is a decent idea worth pursuing, IMO. But I'm not sure our system can handle it when we can't even fund the Rentenkasse properly.

Do you know what a generic "robot" costs? Do you know what they require in terms of maintenance costs? Average lifespan before replacement?

If we're talking about an actual assembly line robot like we've seen in automotive plants, I'd wager using an actual person at minimum wage would be quite a bit cheaper. The robots make up for that in efficiency and accuracy, but they're not free.

>Aren't they simply saying 3rd party apps can't use other camera apps?

That was also my impression. Using separately installed camera apps as standalone apps shouldn't be an issue.

What concerns me is the way intents are used for shortcuts, such as opening the camera with a double-tap of the power button or home button, if the phone has one - or whatever solution Google has come up with for gestures in newer versions (I'm still stuck on 8.x). On my phone, I can pick which camera app to launch using the shortcut, with that same intent-triggered app picker shown in the article. I wonder if that's over and done with now...

This pretty much only applies to one situation: Non-moving camera with little to no moving subjects.

That said, I'm impressed at what Google's software is able to pull out of the 16MP Sony sensor in my old phone - the noise reduction alone through stacking bursts is a very welcome feature for static subjects, which are mainly what I use a phone camera for.

If I'm photographing people, though, I'll take a fast shutter and a big sensor (or piece of film) over any amount of computational photography.

Apparently food delivery services in the US do this too. When I first read about this a few weeks ago I was absolutely mind-boggled.

I'm not sure you'll actually be missing out... most providers here in Germany, for instance, have offered free EU roaming (calls, messaging and data) in their all-net-flatrate packages for close to a year now. I have a cheap MVNO prepaid SIM in my phone right now, and that's pretty much 20€/month for 2 gigs of data and unlimited everything else in either all of Europe or the EU (I'd have to check the fine print to discern which)...

I had assumed it was this way for most of Europe...?

I can't think of many people who are willing to lug full-sized mobile workstations just for *storage* space. If you need more than 1TB of storage permanently inside your laptop, you're likely an edge case.

Sure, it would be nice if I could have all my RAW files and all my music and my entire TV and movie collections with me at all times, but would I go back to a 3kg monster just for that? What exactly are you lugging around on your laptop?

Apple probably (rightly so, IMO) just doesn't care about the twenty potential customers worldwide that need more than a terabyte of storage in a very mobile laptop. Unfortunate, but understandable... how much money do they stand to make from you? $3000-4000 isn't even a drop in the bucket.

You can't have it both ways - either you use a smart operating system like Android and open yourself up to vulnerabilities as soon as the manufacturer stops supporting it, or you use something dumb(er) that'll last for a looooong time - like what's on the traditional Kindle devices.

As for PDFs... high-res, full-color backlit seems much more useful. It's not like tablets have problems with battery life these days.

Have you been living under a rock? DisplayPort does audio.

Many new projectors have multiple HDMI and DisplayPort connectors. However, they also have VGA. And guess which connection is picked for the cable that gets run to the lectern? VGA... always freakin VGA.

I've been seeing a rise in wireless HDMI solutions, to be fair, but they're very clunky - adds about 10 minutes of setup time to the start of every presentation I've seen...

I've just bought a Thinkpad W550s (Broadwell) instead of the upcoming T560 or P50s (Sky Lake) simply because it still has VGA. On the Sky Lake models, the VGA port is being replaced with HDMI. *shudder*

Depends really... is it a web site with static content and an app as a wrapper for mobile?

Or is it an actual application that someone turned into a webapp? Or a highly interactive site such Google Photos or Google Docs or an online image editor...

In the former case, I'll take the web site (whether it's properly formatted for mobile or not - I can view standard WXGA-formatted sites on my phone just fine, thanks) any day instead of downloading an app.

In the latter case, I'll likely prefer the native app.