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It is hilarious how parochial most Slashdot posters are.

Online grocery shopping has been a major business in the UK, the world's most competitive grocery market (competitive, not lucrative or largest), for more than a decade.

Perhaps Uber would like to study up about Ocado (and Sainsburys.com and Tesco.com and Waitrose.com etc etc) before they jump into this market. Perhaps Slashdotters might want to learn a little bit about them as well, before confidently declaring that online grocery shopping can never be a thing.

Ocado's story, in particular, has many lessons to teach about platform vs exclusivity, the role of automation, the importance of new brands for online (eg Natoora), the cognitive differences in shopping decisions online vs in-store (smart lists etc).

A few articles here:
http://www.cityam.com/264588/d...

https://www.thegrocer.co.uk/ch...

Exactly this. The U.K. has been working on becoming a full police state for many years now. And every time I point this out I get downmodded here on /.

That's probably because you misunderstand completely. Our poor police are downtrodden and subject to austerity. The UK is becoming a Group 4 security state in which the only freedom the average police officer will have is to rape children and falsely accused foreign students against his will and under the supervision of an elite cabal of bullingdon boys and psychotic robots.

But guess what, the joke's on you, silly Brits. You get what you vote for.

You are assuming some kind of proper democracy where people's votes count equally. Unfortunately there's this thing called the "first past the post constituency system" which means the result doesn't have to match the voting.

The U.S. voted for a clown and got a clown. The U.K. voted for a police state, and got a police state.

Trump votes 46.4% - primary opponent 48.5%. Conservative votes 42.4% Opponents 57.6%. In neither case could the "winnner" be said to have been voted for by the nation. At least in the US you could say that it's possible Trump would have won if he had chosen to target the popular vote, whilst it's clear that would never have happened in the UK.

Definitely both countries have a bunch of voters that need to understand that what they vote for is what they might actually get, however that doesn't mean that the entire country deserves to suffer.

On the other hand... the B1 level which is required is the equivalent of "GCE AS level / lower grade A-level" ...

From their description I'd argue that it's not AS level, it's more GCSE than AS level. But then maybe exams have just gotten that much easier in my time..

...still need subtitles and a dictionary to fully understand a Guy Ritchie movie.

On the other hand... the B1 level which is required is the equivalent of "GCE AS level / lower grade A-level" which is the equivalent of a 13th-grade exam.
Which about 55% of UK students don't take.

Meaning that 55% of UK citizens, raised and educated in UK, don't qualify.
Or that they would have to fork up 200 pounds to take (and pass) an "expected for university admission" level of knowledge of English.

So how much did Putin pay you to parrot the Russian government line as opposed to anything even remotely resembling reality?

From the history of Ukraine as a nation, a sovereign state in it's modern form since at least 1919:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Through to the idea of the Ukrainian revolution being a coup, which is devoid of any reality - people protesting against a leader they're fed up with, the government voting democratically to investigate the president over the things people are fed up with, the leader resigning and fleeing the country, is not a coup. It's democratic accountability in action, or are you genuinely going to pretend Yanukovych's hidden billions he'd stolen from the public coffers don't exist? Let me guess, the CIA put them there and built Yanukovych's multi-billion dollar mansion? Come back when your coup conspiracy theory makes any kind of consistent sense. What you're arguing is that Yanukovych once elected should've been able to act as a dictator in defiance of the will of the people and in defiance of the democratic parliament of the country - you're not arguing that a coup occured, you're arguing that you wish Ukraine had become a dictatorship ruled by Yanukovych.

The people of Ukraine aren't stupid, they looked East and saw the poverty, corruption ridden mess that Russia and Belarus had become under Russian style authoritarianism, and they looked West and saw how relatively wealthy, free, open, and succesfult former soviet states such as Poland, Latvia, Estonia had become. It wasn't a hard choice, the people of Ukraine sure as hell didn't need the CIA to make it for them and if you believe they did then you're guilty of some insane kind of bigotry to believe you can magically see something you're implying the Ukrainian people were too dumb to see for themselves.

Finally there's Crimea, yeah, this one's easy, ignoring the fact objective international observers weren't allowed there, only members of Europe's far right who had received Russian funding, ignoring the fact that there was ample evidence of ballot stuffing in favour of Russia, and ignoring the fact that that tens of thousands of Russian troops stationed there were allowed the vote despite not being Crimean citizens, there's this rather important poll that just happens to predate the referendum by mere months that shows the people of Crimea had no interest in joining Russia:

http://www.cityam.com/blog/139...

If the vote was legitimate and the people of Crimea genuinely wanted to be Russian then why did the vote need to be held at gunpoint of Russian soldiers? why did Russian soldiers need to vote when not Crimean citizens? why did Russia need to carry out ballot stuffing? why were Crimean citizens prevented from voting in many cases? why were no objective and impartial international observers allowed there even from countries such as China that aren't exactly friends of the West? You have a lot of questions to answer if you want to continue to pretend there was anything legitimate about Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea, not least the fact that Putin himself admitted the little green there were Russian troops, which means he's a self-confessed war criminal, because under the Geneva convention passing off regular soldiers as civilians is a war crime as it risks putting actual civilians in harms way if they can't be differentiated from the soldiers.

So yeah, basically nothing you just said is factually accurate, it wasn't exactly hard for me to show that was it? so why are you so interested in spreading Russian propaganda that's so very demonstrably not true?

I don't like America, but this kind of absurd nonsense where people go to the extreme of parroting Russian propaganda is insane. The idea that Russia should be held up as an example of all that is good in the wo

...at gunpoint, in a non-transparent election that Putin admits the outcome of was decided before it even began.

Or in other words, no they didn't.

You seem to be confusing a pretend vote with an actual referendum. Here's some actual polling from just before Putin ran his pretend poll and held everyone in Crimea at gunpoint that shows that most people didn't actually want to be part of Russia:

http://www.cityam.com/blog/139...

I lived in Rome for 2 years (2013-2014), and house prices are close to Manhattan, people have one month paid vacation, they go to the restaurant for dinner at least once a week, people are slim and toned like hollywood actors, and while public debt is high, private debt is one of the lowest in the west, much lower than USA, France, UK and Germany: http://www.cityam.com/14115016...

The State is "poor", but families are rich. 80% of families live in a house they own, renting is not very common.

And they have one of the highest average life expectancies in the world, so obviously the median age is high too. Furthermore, I appreciate that they have kept a bloodline-based citizenship law, so they haven't turned into an african country like france.

Sky will use Telefonica UK's wireless network

Really, the one they're about to sell to Hutchinson (owners of '3'')?

No it doesn't, the separatist movement has never had popular support in east Ukraine, the argument for populist support was tenuous even in Crimea that is by far the most pro-Russian part of Ukraine.

"If you don't believe me, just look at the photos of the East Ukraine during March and April when citizens were blocking off roads to stop tanks, in some cases just like the Tiananmen Man."

If you think tens, at most hundreds of people, some of whom were themselves "rebels" aka Putin's agent provocateurs in regions of millions is a sign of popular support than I urge you to go and get a better grasp of millions of numbers. A counterpoint to yours would be the citizens of Mariupol who are currently helping the Ukrainian military dig trenches against the Russian invaders and who formed a many mile long chain of people to make the point that they don't want Putin's soldiers to take over their territory.

There are polls both before:

http://www.cityam.com/blog/139...

and after shit kicked off:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/05...

That show that the Russian made myth of support for joining Russia or being independent from Ukraine is just that, a myth.

Putin is trying to make Eastern Ukraine a buffer zone by injecting his own Russian puppet leadership there just as he did with Crimea, and just as he did with Ukraine (which is what led to this situation). It has nothing to do with what the people there want and everything to do with Putin's paranoia that Europe is somehow out to get him, rather than the actual reality - that Ukrainians would rather just join modern prosperous democratic Europe, than corrupt, poverty stricken, dictatorial Russia. That's why Putin has manufactured the myth you're parroting.

Stop propping up the propaganda of a brutal dictator, because that's what Putin is.

Nothing's proving Russia right when there's a wall of evil doings proving the counter. Snowden is one of the few things they can genuinely cling on to.

For all of the US' wrongs there's nothing changing the fact that Russia is an evil empire, well, that's a lie, it's not an empire any more thank god, it just wants to be, but it's still evil.

Let's just look at a few of the things they've done this year alone, let's start near the beginning of the year where the scene is that there is a popular uprising against Russian influenced Yanukovych, during these protests a number of key protesters were abducted by men with accents from Russia itself, some were left to die but managed to live to tell the tale:

http://www.rferl.org/content/u...

http://www.rferl.org/content/u...

Others weren't quite so lucky:

http://www.reddit.com/r/worldn...

The uprising was eventually successful, in response, Russia sent in breach of the Geneva convention soldiers into Crimea posing as civilians and annexed the territory, despite the fact that only a few weeks prior it was clear that there was nothing like majority support for joining Russia:

http://www.cityam.com/blog/139...

Coupled with the unverifiable "poll" and the followon fuckup by Russian bureaucrats in posting the actual results that show there was actually no majority support for joining Russia it became fairly obvious it was an illegal annexation of foreign territory. Of course, it didn't stop there. The Crimean Tatar population that did not want to join Russia have since been treated like Jews in Nazi Germany circa 1939 with their houses being marked:

http://www.turkishpress.com/ne...

Other Tatars have simply been disappeared by death squads:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...

The rest of them? Well, they just get silenced and beaten:

http://www.themoscowtimes.com/...

If this sort of thing doesn't send chills down your spine as to how close it is to the way the Nazis operated then there's something wrong with you.

Since then of course there's been the case of Russian separatists in Eastern Ukraine, the debate goes on about whether they're genuinely Ukrainians that want to join Russia, or whether they're simply Russian special forces, or a mix of both, but either way, what's not in dispute is the following and that Russia wholeheartedly supports them:

- They admitted having Buk and shooting down MH17 believing it was a Ukrainian military transport:

http://www.reuters.com/article...

http://www.themalaysianinsider...

- They've been abducting, torturing, and parading civilians:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

- They've admitted to carrying out summary executions:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

- And they've been preventing all males from leaving the warzones they've been part of the

"it was also taken for granted before the vote that there was a large majority for secession"

No it wasn't, the only polls from before Russia invaded showed that there was a distinct lack of support for joining Russia with the highest proportion of support being at only 41%:

http://www.cityam.com/blog/139...

There was slightly higher support for outright independence (i.e. no attachment to either country) at 51% but that can hardly be called a "large majority", it's a majority of 1%.

So these leaked figures are actually pretty reasonable - they're a more realistic swing (especially given Russia's military occupation of the place) by way of a 26% swing away from support for joining Russia, compared to Putin's claimed results which suggest a 42% swing towards joining Russia.

Sorry but whether you were there 18 months ago or not, what you say has more of a tone of the typical hipster "stick it to the man" nonsense ideology on Ukraine, rather than what Crimeans actually felt. You're parroting widely discredited nonsense, which is trivially rubbished by things such as the poll done above before shit kicked off that hence gives us a far more reasonable view of what Crimeans actually wanted - hint, it was far closer to these supposed leaked results, than it was Putin's claimed actual results.

You can try to paper over Venezuela's self-inflicted problems, but it won't be with toilet paper.

How socialism has destroyed Venezuela
" Somehow, toilet paper is now more valuable than paper money."

Venezuela Imploding Like the Soviet Union

The left has a blind spot on Venezuela.

"The majority of people in Crimea were loyal to Russia before any of this unrest began a few months ago."

Liar. Only 41% were:

http://www.cityam.com/blog/139...

"The last elected Ukranian president was a Russian loyalist."

Who got into power after having lost the previous presidential election despite his Russian friends having tried to assassinate his competitor through poisoning. The election in which his competitor was poisoned which was in itself a re-run because the prior one was deemed by the courts to be necessary because the original election was utterly full of electoral fraud in favour of Yanukovych:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

"He was a deposed by a moltov-throwing mob with west-leaning sympathies, so we support them."

No, he was deposed by people who were sick of a decade of Russian interference of their elections involving vote rigging and assassination attempts designed to get him in in the first place. The Ukrainian people have been sending a message for over a decade that they didn't want Yanukovych despite Russian attempts to defy that, and when they were finally worn down and accepted him and he proved that he was indeed the man they didn't want they reverted back to the stance that they'd had for that decade which was that they did not want a Russian puppet leader.

"But that doesn't change the feelings of the majority there."

Apparently it does, because the majority wanted to remain part of the Ukraine but with full autonomy, yet somehow they've now ended up completely Russian, at least in Russia's eyes.

Perhaps if Russia hadn't been fucking with Ukraine trying to get Yanukovych in charge of them since 2004 they'd have a better relationship between the Ukrainian people and Russia, but when you try and kill the president the people wanted, when you try and rig their votes, when you have Russian death squads in your country murdering your protest leaders it's not terribly surprising that the Ukrainian citizens including ethnic Russians in Crimea didn't all want to be part of Russia.

No side wants to be part of the Russian block, that's a key myth that Putin is desperately trying to peddle:

http://www.cityam.com/blog/139...

The whole reason Putin has troops locking down Crimea and spreading propaganda left and right is precisely because he knows he could not win the referendum there legitimately. It's a sham, a stitch up, theft of Ukranian territory against the genuine will of the people. Even with a majority of 58% of ethnic Russian origin in Crimea most of those ethnic Russians still identify their nationality as Ukrainian, even though their ethnicity is Russian.

There is no division in the Ukraine, separatists across the whole nations are an absolute minority. It's no different to Scotland and the UK in this respect - the fact that 90% of the population there are Scottish doesn't mean 90% are in favour of independence, on the contrary, polling consistently puts only about 30% in favour of independence.

There was no coup. The democratically elected Ukrainian parliament voted with a majority of 73% to oust Yanukovych. That's a democratic decision, not a coup.

There is no part of the Ukraine where a majority of people want to merge with Russia, that's why Russia is deploying troops and spreading propaganda in Crimea, because it's the only way they can rig the vote to make it look like that's the case.

See here, and stop spouting Putin's lies and propaganda for him:

http://www.cityam.com/blog/139...

Hate to break it to you but just because a majority of Crimea are ethnic Russian still doesn't mean they want to be part of Russia. 58% are ethnic Russians but many of those still identify themselves as being of Ukrainian nationality despite their ethnic origin.

If the referendum was free and fair it's almost certainly the case that Crimea would not vote to be part of Russia, in fact, a poll was done on exactly this before this shit even kicked off as it has now:

http://www.cityam.com/blog/139...

Even in Crimea, the most Russian leaning part of Ukraine support for joining Russia was at only 41% - not enough to win a referendum.

If you can't see why Russia has shut down movement in and out of Crimea, if you can't see why it's denying access to international observers, if you can't see why it has plastered billboards in pro-Russian propaganda and seized radio and TV transmitters, and if you can't see why it installed a pro-Russian administration in Crimea kicking out the previously democratically elected one then I probably can't help you understand what's going on here, but I figure it's worth trying. Russia is annexing Crimea, not because the people there want it but because Putin both wants it and wants to send a message to any other nation considering breaking away from his control that it wont be painless.

If the people of Crimea genuinely wanted to break away from the Ukraine do you not think a referendum with international observers would be sufficient? Why the propaganda campaign? why the hijacking of TV and radio to shut out information from the rest of the country? why the presence of Russian troops and the isolation of Ukrainian military to their bases so they can't communicate with the populace? Why is all this necessary if Crimeans would vote yes for independence anyway?

Russia has been playing a game in Ukraine for some time that would make even the CIA look like amateurs - even during the protests we had protesters being dragged off by kidnappings that could only be the work of state-sponsored organisation and beaten and left in the forest to die with one or two surviving against the odds to state that the people who did it spoke with actual Russian accents (yes, you've got it, Russia had death squads in the Ukraine during the protests). You had eyewitness accounts from both protesters and the police that snipers were shooting at both police AND protesters to try and provoke a bigger confrontation between the two.

So wake up and smell the coffee, Russia has been playing games for years in the Ukraine, those games are finally just coming to the light and there's no way the referendum on joining Russia can be considered the slightest bit free and fair whilst Russian troops and propaganda are controlling every bit of information in and out of the territory right now. Even if the people made up their own mind, how would you possibly prove the Russian troops aren't just changing the ballots? with no international observers confirming the fairness and legitimacy of the vote you might as well just make up the results right now and have done with it - it'll be no more or no less legitimate.

If the Democrats sent the military into Texas and blocked all communication and access in and out, took over the TV and radio transmitters there and plastered Democrat propaganda on every billboard whilst making up things about the Republicans, beat up pro-Republican journalists and so forth and then went on to win Texas with a landslide would you really, genuinely call that an acceptable outcome? a fair election? a legitimate election? That's exactly what's happening in Crimea.