Viewing profile — woe

Every year when April 15 rolls around I find myself wondering if this is going to be the time when I finally get fed up and renounce my US citizenship. I'm a natural-born US citize…

This is absolutely untrue. The IRS treats citizens and green card holders ("resident aliens") exactly alike for tax purposes. Every single piece of relevant IRS documentation refer…

You're talking about the SkyDrive integration in Microsoft Office, a slightly different matter. Windows 8.1 has a "Prevent the use of SkyDrive for file storage" policy setting.

This behavior depends on a user preference, "Save documents to SkyDrive by default". I don't remember whether this is enabled by default. (I've since overwritten my Windows 8.1 ins…

I bicycled over a large bump, my Lumia 920 jumped out of my shirt pocket and fell onto asphalt from a height of about four feet at a speed of about 25 mph. It bounced a few times a…

Why is .co.uk any more meaningless than .com? They're both arbitrary character strings. If anything, .com is less meaningful than .co.uk: .co.uk conveys a larger quantum of meaning…

You're not exactly nailing the history there yourself. The very first specification of TLDs listed five of what we now call gTLDs (.com, .edu, .gov, .mil, .org) and also stipulated…

FastMail is a fantastic IMAP email service and a very good webmail service, but it's a very poor mobile email service - for access from smartphones and tablets (including contacts …

Not the same as every other cloud provider. Not every other cloud provider makes it a point of pride to deliberately make it quite impossible to ever reach any sort of customer ser…

Your domain name isn't your identity, it's your identifier. So is your telephone number, and you pay for that.

> and you gotta go where the majority goes ... which is why we all still use Internet Explorer.

You need to check again, then. Hotmail no longer exists.

Really? Yes. It is better. Absolutely. Unquestionably. But if you can't see that creating an unwanted, unused piece of stuff is obviously, necessarily worse than not wasting the ra…

The evidence against cereals (and most especially wheat) seems in general to be much more widely accepted than that against legumes; take that as you will. (Or to put it another wa…

As depicted in the review, the argument boils down to "a lot can change in 10,000 years". I'm happy to agree that this is true, but it doesn't mean that a lot must change in 10,000…

Don't be absurd. Of course it's different than having Google as default search engine. The provision of a default search engine is an absolute requirement for providing "search the…

I'm quite receptive to arguments about why San Francisco is horrible - after ten years in the place, naturally I like to see my decision to leave validated - but this is really a l…

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money. - Samuel Johnson

Actually, you can. You can change the country of your iTunes account at will ( ), provided you have valid billing details for the 'new' country. This is one of the few good things …

... and John has always come across as one of the Internet's premier jackasses. (I'm tempted to add "I am genuinely sad to see this happen to him" but that would overstate how much…

If you're older than 37 you're probably out of luck, since before 1975 Germany operated a lovely double standard: citizenship was transmitted based on the father, not the mother. H…

Ah, OK. Germany has always been a "jus sanguinis" country, meaning that the basic principle of its nationality law is blood descent. This stands in contrast with "jus soli" countri…

Germany has a very restrictive dual nationality policy. Though technically their rules do permit an immigrant to apply to be permitted to keep his original nationality, this is not…

US tax practice incents every permanent expatriate to drop their citizenship, regardless of net worth. Every year around this time I stare at a stack of tax paperwork and contempla…

Even if we accept that this is undesirable, surely it is within the ken of mankind to devise a system that hits these wealthy tax evaders without placing unreasonable burdens on ev…