Not sure that’s a sufficient explanation. So I will elaborate for the OP:

Some designs are called a “wet floor”, which means the whole bathroom floor is sloped toward a drain even outside the shower and beyond the showerpan. It’s seems to be a design in cheaper establishments, like cheap hostels. It works but it can be annoying when the floor is still wet when later entering the bathroom in socks or something.

Some designs are more luxury, and have a really big shower pan. A big area is sloped within the shower as an elegant “curbless” design which is great for elderly and handicapped people who might struggle to step over a shower curb. The shower pan is big enough that if the drain is slow or clogged, a fair amount of water can build up without overspilling into the rest of the bathroom.

I’m not sure what you want a source for. You mean a vendor who will sell one? XO-4 Touch was apparently the last model. I just had a look at laptop.org and the site looks useless now. It used to be full of wikis with copious details about the hardware and software of the OLPC.

There are (or were) a variety of NGOs who worked on getting OLPCs into impoverished schools. One of them was https://unleashkids.org/. They are not in the business of selling them but ~15 yrs ago they were kind enough to sell some. The idea was that teachers and developers would need them to help support the OLPC project. I suggest touching base with them and see what they say, since they seem to still be around.

The XO-4 Touch came with “Sugar”, a foss OS just for kids. It was easy to make it boot into Gnome instead (underpinned by RedHat). And someone made an Android OS that could be flashed onto an SD card and booted in the OLPC. I should mention that the OLPC was never 100% FOSS. The usual shit-show of blobs for some of the hardware drivers. I mainly just used it as an e-reader on Gnome.

I’ve always been baffled that these FOSS e-ink laptops did not make it onto the general marketplace, while at the same time there were no commercial makers of anything like it. There was a “Pixel QI” dual-mode screen that could be bought bare and installed in Thinkpads and other machines, but for some reason that never took off either.

OLPC (one-laptop-per-child) is a FOSS e-ink laptop (but small enough to function as an e-reader). Though I think they are no longer made and they were always hard to get.

Here is a way to use open data law to take individual action:

https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/48016373

From the PDF, one of the EU’s concerns is:

However, much of the value generated by open-source projects is exploited outside the EU, often benefiting tech giants.

When tech giants use FOSS, it’s a shame they can extract wealth without compensating the contributors. OTOH, if the baddies become dependent on FOSS, that’s favorable anyway. It means they might contribute code to the projects which otherwise would not happen.

The PDF does not cover public schools specifically. They need to be told that public schools are the most important place to deploy FOSS. Consider a university in Denmark pushes commercial software on students (sadly, they provide that software on a campus webpage improperly titled “Free Software” b/c it is gratis for students). The damage is of course that Denmark educates people to be dependent or clung-onto closed-source software like MATLAB, not GNU Octave. That negative training means the young generations are being conditioned to favor non-free software.

FSFE does not know about this?

The FSFE has a newsletter for “public money → public code”. They have not mentioned this /have your say/ page. Strange.

Downvotes?

I get why the OP was downvoted here… this is a bit off-topic for BuyFromEU. But [email protected] has 4 silent down votes. WTF? I’ve seen that before. ETS seems to be heavily read by opponents of ETS.

The petitions are again something else.

I was indeed alienated by the mention of petitions because in English it usually means asking lawmakers to change policy. I wondered if it meant something different in Germany. And if it means the same thing, it’s apparently wrong for the EU to list that agency as an ombudsman.

I am normally happy to use courts. But I don’t live in Germany, don’t speak German, and financing a lawyer would be a non-starter. I suppose I could try to find a German NGO who would support my case.

Yeah I’m not surprised there are subject matter-specific ombuds offices. I was hoping for one at the top of the tree for when those fail. I just found this page where the EU lists them for each member state:

https://www.ombudsman.europa.eu/en/european-network-of-ombudsmen/members/all-members

And for Germany, this office is given:

https://epetitionen.bundestag.de/epet/peteinreichen.html

The complexity in the description on the EU’s page indeed gives cause for concern.

Nonsense. This is like comparing the price of rice in China to potatoes in Ireland. Process serving is a legal process with liability. Process serving does not allow for dropping a slip in a box and waiting for the served to come to your office and stand in line at the convenience of the process server. Process servers must be resilient to track down a human, who may rarely be home. There is no lax rule of just waiting 2 weeks for the served person to appear and sending it back.

(edit) A registered letter can also be refused. Which amounts to a simple tickbox and returned letter.

BTW, this is not to say process serving is not also overpriced. But process serving /should/ cost much more than registered letter.

(edit 2) Process serving can turn into a man hunt. I’ve seen process servers dig around like private investigators to find out where someone hangs out, in order to track them down and get papers in front of them. And when it all fails, a process server has to publish the circumstance in a local newspaper to then be able to argue in court that the served had an opportunity to become informed that way.

Email delivery has never been designed to be reliable.

Indeed, not inherently. Though it /can/ be reliable only if sent a certain way. Sender emails a “digital notary” service and puts the ultimate destination in a separate header. The digital notary forwards the msg, timestamps it, signs it, and includes the sig of the previously sent transmission (to create a verfiable chain). A service called the UK Timestamper demonstrates this. It proves posting but not reception. There is a RFC (documented open standard) for read receipts whereby the recipient sends a signal when they open the msg. Of course it’s voluntary and relies on a willing recipient.

In the end, Belgium simply declares that a simple email serves as a registered letter.

Your situation, of course, is one you have created entirely by your choice and typically email delivery is very reliable - but the technological underpinnings absolutely are not.

My situation proves how catastrophic it is to presume reliability. I conciously traded off reliability in exchange for privacy (of a certain kind), control, and malice detection. Though I have no way of knowing how much reliability I am trading. Blackholing is borne out of incompetent design. Delivery cannot be guaranteed but a delivery failure should be signaled to one party or the other.

€10 for a registered mail is not extortionate. It is a reasonable price for the service, which also serves the necessary low barrier that prevents abuse.

It’s absurdly extortionate. It first requires prior class. Prior class within Belgium is more than sending prior from Germany to anywhere in the EU. Then they are charging an additional ~€7 just to collect a sig. The postal workers are quick to insert a slip into the mailbox that forces the recipient to go to the post office and wait in line. It’s very streamlined and convenient (for them, not us). In some cases they don’t even bother buzz the doorbell… just drop off the slip with the rest of the mail.

If DIGI comes around to drill into your façade to add another cable, you then have a legal obligation to send DIGI a registered letter every time you renovate your facade in the area of the cables. If you have 8 cables attached to your house, that’s a cost of ~€80.

There is an easy opportunity here for a company like Deliveroo to expand and undercut them.

The ministry of privacy website uses Sucuri to block Tor. So they have a hypocrisy problem. But I’ll have a look anyway. Just because the web admin isn’t on par with their mission doesn’t mean they aren´t useful.

The cheque circulaire isn’t offered since 2010, that’s explained at the bottom of the current fees.

Circular cheques are still being used. I just received one. The articles you link say that the circular cheques will remain when the postal orders are eliminated.

Your links were quite helpful. This looks like the most relevant bit for answering my question (from this article):

(en translation)

…According to the office of the Minister of Public Action and Modernization, Vanessa Matz was able, via the circular cheque, to guarantee a concrete and free cash alternative for the most vulnerable. In particular, this measure concerns those who do not have access to banking services or who are isolated. Neither circular cheques nor prepaid cards will be billed to beneficiaries, says the firm on Tuesday.

(fr original)

…Selon le cabinet de la ministre l’Action et de la Modernisation publiques, Vanessa Matz a pu, via le chèque circulaire, garantir une alternative cash concrète et gratuite pour les plus vulnérables. Cette mesure concerne en particulier ceux qui n’ont pas accès aux services bancaires ou qui sont isolés. Ni les chèques circulaires ni les cartes prépayées ne seront facturés aux bénéficiaires, précise le cabinet mardi.

That seems to explain what I was misunderstanding. I thought if the fee for cheque cashing is going away, perhaps so are the cheques. That would be very disturbing but that’s not the case. Apparently the 4€ fee is going away.🎉 I believe that fee was always illegal. Glad something was done about it.

Remaining question: how does a postal order differ from a circular cheque? What do we lose when postal orders go away? AFAICT, they function the same. This article seems to say circular cheques require movement – going to a bank or post office to cash it, which is a problem for some handicaps. But I don’t get why that would not be the case with a postal order as well. How does a postal order get converted to cash? Is it perhaps about showing ID? Is it a case where a family member could cash a postal order for their grandparent, but not a cheque?

The place to complain – only if you are willing to solve CAPTCHAs:

https://survey.alchemer.eu/s3/90510992/en

I don’t do CAPTCHAs.

It was hard to get used to. I write a polite request for something and the machine translation looks as if I am rudely demanding something.

I wonder if your reversal is accurate:

🇫🇷 demander : 🇬🇧 to ask

To ask could be to ask a question, so I would say “to request” or “to place an order” would seem more accurate.

EU Directive 2014⧸92 was /supposed/ to make it easier. It at least shifts the effort onto the banks as far as moving all the mandates/domiciliations from one bank to another. But indeed the switching law has limited utility in situations where you are trapped in a bundled mortgage+insurance relationship scheme.

I wonder if you can use the “switching” mechanism without taking the final step of closing the original acct. So e.g. you move most of your money into NEW BANK as well as all standing orders except the mortgage & insurance. Then you setup a monthly standing order to feed the old acct just enough to cover the mortgage and insurance. The old bank earns less when the bulk of your money is elsewhere.

Indeed that’s another reason to avoid them. But bPost has their own ATMs and BNP Parabas does not. BNPP tries to direct their own customers to Batopin ATMs, which is bizarre if BNPP actually owns the bPost ATMs.

Indeed, you lose the convenience of a realtime chat. Which means the conversation will be slow because when they respond in writing it may trigger more questions.

In Brussels we have social interpretters. I’m not sure if they are paid or if they volunteer, but at no cost they send an interpretter to wherever they are needed. They do this for anyone, not just poor people. But there’s a limitation: they are not certified interpretters thus cannot be used in court.

I mention this because perhaps Berlin has something comparable. OTOH, if the legal advice /must/ be in German, it stands to reason that they would also reject non-certified interpretters. Otherwise I don’t understand the purpose of the law. If they would even theoretically allow a friend or anyone arbitrary to help you, it would somewhat defeat the point.

I can understand that a transposition of a directive might be flexible. But in the case at hand, I believe the German translation of the directive was not even true to the intended directive. So it seems some intent was lost before the German transposition was even drafted.

Whenever I have to deal with a French-only gov agency, I give them a bilingual letter with my original English directly next to machine translated French. The machine translation for French is good enough, which is likely the same for German. So the machine translation serves to get the letter past the 1st tier staff who just look for trivial reasons to reject a case. Then having the original English next to it enables the case worker to potentially have a chance at understanding what you mean whenever the machine translation is rough.

Not sure about Germany specifically but worth a try.

Reading it in the original German, it appears that this refers to when a receipt is given, but does not seem to behold owners of ATMs, or the service providers, to provide a receipt from an automated transaction.

That’s interesting. I assume you are referring to the directive in German and not the German transposition into German law. If so, then the translation of the directive is bad - so the transposition has little hope of being correct. I wonder what happens in that case. In the English version of the directive, the word “receipt” in that context means “upon receiving your cash” (receipt of cash, not printed receipt). But then the obligation is to provide the information after receipt of the cash. But they were sloppy and did not state whether the info had to be on paper.

(update)

It seems all the *.europa.eu sites are blocking Tor across the board now. Even this page is unreachable to Tor users:

https://have-your-say.ec.europa.eu/index_en

It’s a bit embarrassing at the EU level. You might expect a mom/pop shop to be unable to handle Tor users, but the EU (a government of nation states) should have their infosec shit together and have the security competency to serve Tor users.