Your consumer protection laws are weak. You should lobby your elected officials to strengthen them.

For example in the UK you could complain to the Financial Services Ombudsman. That instantly costs the bank money so they ate keen to avoid you doing that. The FSO then makes an impartial decision based on the rules. In your case it's hard to see how you could have lost. Costs you nothing beyond the time you spent writing letters anyway, and the FSO will accept email as well.

Apple Pay requires you to put your card details into the phone, an insecure environment which leaked NSA slides claim to have full access to. With the recent celebrity hacking and the absolute facepalm of allowing remote dictionary attacks against iCloud they need to earn trust, not simply claim they are secure.

I prefer stored value cards and eWallet systems. In the former case you buy the card with cash and it's basically anonymous, beyond the fact that purchases can be linked. Simply return the card and get a new one periodically to limit that. The eWallet systems make the charges appear on your phone bill, so they don't store and credit card details on the phone itself and the per transaction limit is low.

The web of trust model can be infiltrated by the NSA/GCHQ, and with things like national security letters they can force people you trust to betray you.

It's still the best system we have for when you need to trust random web sites, but I'd like to see exchanging public keys on person become common place. We all have phones with NFC and QR code reading capability. Banks should put verification codes in their branches, individuals should put them on their business cards.

Those cheap 4k TVs aren't really worth it though. They use panels that fail on things like colour quality and uniformity. You would be better off getting a 2k TV with good panel and processor.

Click to play on all media plugins. No more auto play ads, without blocking the static ones.

The assumption underlying your argument is that the HE technology is inherently less reliable. That doesn't seem to be true though. Japanese brands are incredibly efficient but also last a long time. It seems more likely that the manufacturer just saw an opportunity to build in some obsolescence and blame it on the government.

I'm sad to say that a lot of US and v European brands have gone to shit like this. With US brands they seem to get bought for their good name and then used to sell crap, and with European brands they just re-badge stuff or whore their name out willingly.

That doesn't sound like a bad thing at all. You had a problem, not enough water available. You took steps to address it. The overall cost to the consumer remained the same, the environment was improved, the problem solved and quality of life maintained.

Get ones that come with a good warranty. I buy the fairly cheap Osram ones, which I think are sold as Sylvania or something like that in the US. They come with a five year warranty so at the price I pay are guaranteed to work out.

Other brands that offer reasonable warranties are Verbatim (Mitsubishi), Philips and Panasonic.

To be fair, he is saying that even with a warrant of the device is encrypted and you refuse to give up the password they are boned.

Anonymous Coward owes me a keyboard because I just blew coffee all over mine.

The only problem with old cars is that they need maintenance. It's fine if you can do it yourself, but not so good if you can't. Some people like leasing because then they don't have to maintain the car themselves, even if it costs more.

OT but here is a little tip for buying expensive things like cars. In the UK if you pay for anything on credit card worth over £100 you get full protection from the bank. It's legally as if they sold you the product. They are jointly liable for any issues with it. Maybe in the US there is some similar way you can make them liable.

A few years back a guy bought a £27k car and paid the first £100 on credit card, the rest in cash. The dealer went bust and he didn't get his car. The bank was jointly liable though so had to pay him back the full £27k.

Some cars stop the engine when idling at the lights to save fuel. It sounds like the cut off device can't tell the difference between that and turning the key to the off position.

As for the highway stuff, I expect development was farmed out to the lowest bidder and they didn't bother with extensive testing, so it's not hard to believe.

Of course you blame the people who put the clamp (boot) on. Look, parking in the wrong place is bad, but making the car impossible to drive is going way too far. It's also counter productive since now it can't be moved from the space except by tow truck.

A fine is one thing. People make mistakes, they are under a lot of stress (in the example the woman's daughter had a life threatening disease and she was probably in debt from paying for treatment) and this sort of thing just makes it worse.

People keep saying this but never present any evidence. At best you get a few pathetic links to YouTube videos that don't offer any sources, or are told to "just google it" but when you do it's all stupid blog posts and bullshit.