Chips are called chips, and look like this - http://www.mccain.co.uk/Global/Images/Products/Product%20Category/Healthy/oven%20chips%20sc%20large.jpg
Crisps are called crisps and look like this - http://images2.mysupermarket.co.uk/Products_1000/37/174137.jpg?v=2

In Europe, and most of the rest of the world, we use smart-chips when we aren't using contactless. There is a magnetic stripe on the card, that that is only so that the card can be used in the USA and other similarly backward countries.

I'm not sure about those two stores, but in a lot of stores, especially ones owned by smaller companies, the credit card terminal is not linked to point of sale system. The checkout operator presses the button on the till for card or cash, nobody takes cheques any more, then if it is card, they enter the total amount into the card terminal, process the payment, and usually put the store copy of the card receipt in the till. It may well be that they thought the card terminal wasn't working, and put the payment through again.

There are accounts where you have to register with an email address and password to access content. For those sorts of accounts, I don't care if someone else finds the password and uses it to read the stuff on the site. I have a spamcatcher webmail account, password the same as the username, and the username and password on the sites I register using it are the same as the webmail ones. The name and address details are completely made up based on a fictional character. Completely insecure, but I do not care. If someone else gets in, they are welcome to have a look round.

There is a case in Europe of people getting into bank accounts by compromising their cellphone. They sent a phishing message puportedly from their bank telling them they needed to install some security software on their phone, with instructions on how to do it for iPhone, Android and Blackberry.

Then, having got the login details for the bank account, they log in, do a transfer instruction, and when the bank sends a code to the phone to authenticate it, the malware on the phone intercepts the message, and sends it to them, so they can complete the transaction,

If a company's entire business model is enforcing copyright, then they ought to be very careful when respecting other peoples' copyright.

Suspicious activity in this case will mean buying drugs on Silk Road. They are under pressure to "shut it down". They can't obviously because it is on Tor, but they can try to stop drug buyers from buying bitcoins with dollars, and drug sellers from selling bitcoins for dollars.

The courts consider downloading and streaming to be two different things.

Downloading means receiving the transmission from their server and recording it on non-volatile storage.

Streaming means receiving the transmission and storing it only as required for processing to send it to the screen / speakers, and for buffering to deal with speed variations in the transmission.

There is also basic copyright law. The courts seem to consider streaming and downloading to be two completely different things for copyright purposes. If Google has authorised streaming, but not downloading of their content, then this YouTube app could be considered a tool that enables and encourages copyright infringement.

I suppose you could use rsync for that, but I don't think it would be a very good solution. Firstly, rsync doesn't support "push" syncronisation. You would need to have rsync constantly poll the server for any changes which would use a lot of data and battery even when nothing is happening whereas activesync will open a connection to the server and only receives data if there is actually a change on the server (or sends it if there is a change on the client). Secondly, activesync doesn't maintain an idential copy of the data on the device, just a user specified subset of it. I have mail and calendar entries on my Exchange server going back to 1996 when I started using a computer rather than a filofax to organise my life. It takes up about 3GB on the server which is nothing when you consider the storage capacity of a server, desktop or laptop, but quite a lot for a mobile device, so I only sync the last 6 months and all future calendar entries, and the most recent 1000 emails up to a maximum of 10kb, with no attachments unless I specifically choose to download them. I use rsync to synchronise some files on my FreeBSD server with my MacBook, though I'm currently evaluating alternative solutions for that.

That is a different ActiveSync to the one I was refering to that Android uses, and yes that one is pretty rubbish. Exchange Activesync works over the air, and it makes no difference how many other devices are connected to the same computer, or even if it is connected to one at all.

rsync and activesync are two completely different things. One is for transferring files, the other is for delivering emails, calendar, contacts etc to mobile devices.

ActiveSync is for receiving email from Exchange or other compatible email servers and syncronising calendar, contact etc items. The alternatives are things like IMAP IDLE, but they generally use more data bandwidth and more battery power than ActiveSync.

The main ones are long filenames in FAT, ex-FAT for > 32GB SD cards, and ActiveSync.

There are alternatives for all of these, but in the case of Activesync alternatives, they are not as good, and in the case of FAT, it means getting the same filesystem drivers onto other computers and devices.

Skype and SIP work on my cellphone, and all the mobile networks in this country operate carrier grade NAT.