If you rob a 7-11 at gun point, and the clerk pulls a gun in self defense and accidently shoots a bystander, not only might you get charged with murder the clerk might not be.
The rule that allows the robber to be charged with murder in that circumstance (a version of the felony murder rule) is pretty controversial though - many have argued it is wrong as e.g. it allowed for the conviction of Ryan Holle. It is controversial enough that it has been repealed in many jurisdictions. I'm also not sure it's applicable here as I don't think falsely calling 911 would usually be classed as a felony.
"He didn't pull the trigger."
So fucking what? What's next? You'll be telling me that mafia bosses who send thugs to intimidate people aren't responsible for any injuries or deaths that result...
The problem with that logic (mafia bosses ordering killings) is that it is a different standard of intent - the mafia boss intended the victim to be killed or suffer very serious harm and should have reasonably foreseen that his instructions might be interpreted that way. Here you'd have to argue "reckless indifference" to whether the victim was killed or seriously injured. In turn that means the prosecution would have to make an argument that an innocent person dying is a "reasonably foreseeable" consequence of the police turning up anywhere (e.g. wrong house, etc etc). The defence would then presumably dig up the training the police have which includes a lot of "don't kill innocent people". And in the mean time, the government may have opened the police up to civil litigation on a grand scale as it is effectively admitting liability.
If you want to save yourself the time loading and unloading, this is an easily solved problem with no additional technology required. Certainly not 'robots'.
Buy two dishwashers and two sets of everything you use regularly in the kitchen. One fills up with dirty stuff while you use the other one like a cupboard with clean stuff in. When youve emptied the clean one, its time to run the dirty one.
If you don't have space for two fullsize ones, two slimline ones fit in the same space as one fullsize.
Taking investors' money and squandering it by trying to do what you promised but failing badly is one thing (although even that can rise to the level of criminal liability in some instances e.g. trading whilst insolvent, insider trading or Securities Act/Sarbanes-Oxley type stuff).
But deliberately pocketing the money and running (which is what GP suggested)? That's plain old fraud, been going on for centuries and it gets prosecuted successfully every week.
Pocket integration on desktop is stupid (bloat which most people don't want) but it's a lot worse on Android. The blank tab page as of 57 now fills with advertising from them. It's getting a lot of 1-star reviews on the Play Store for that.
I think I must be the only one who can't see any speed difference between 56 and 57 judging by the comments. 56 felt fast and I never had issues with it, 57 feels fast.
While MOST of my extensions are not gone, the big surprise for me is that the rewrites have real issues - especially with UI - which are clearly caused by the utterly stupid way WebExtensions work.
KeeFox -> Kee is a big downgrade, Save Page WE is significantly slower and produces much larger files than MAFF did, etc.
Of the ones I did lose, Session Manager is the biggest loss for me, and whilst others are saying "don't worry, NoScript will be back in a couple of days", it won't be at feature parity then which is basically useless for me. I used NoScript with its "Global Scripts Enabled" box on to get the other features of it and then used uMatrix/uBlock for blocking scripts as they give finer-grained control.
I guess I'll stick with ESR for now and keep checking in to see if it gets better, but if there's no improvement by the time ESR rolls over in June, I'll probably wind up switching to Chromium (patched to remove the phone-home features) - as with feature parity, I can't see a reason not to given most of the web is targeted first at Chrome these days.
I agree, calendaring is what's missing in the FOSS world.
I both agree and disagree. Calendaring integration (and nowadays chat/voice integration) is what the PHBs cannot live without.
It's also one of the most unnecessary and counterproductive applications for the majority of the workforce.
That people spend too much time in meetings and too little time "doing" is a truism, but I take issue with your suggestion that an assistant/secretary is a replacement for Outlook calendaring integration - in my experience the opposite is true, if your calendar/travel schedule is such that your assistant "owns your life" (this is basically me) then you depend even more heavily on Outlook and mobile device integration to make things work. And of course the secretaries/assistants themselves also depend heavily on it. Arranging and planning meetings is almost a core function of *email itself* for many people. Add in file sharing (via attachments) and I bet you've covered 80+% of work-related email.
Correct. "AI" is a total misnomer. What we have is basically a relatively new set of pattern recognition and heuristic techniques which can use modern computing power efficiently because they are easily parallelizable. That last part is the reason "AI" appears to be everywhere - many of the best algorithms we had heretofore were not so easy to parallelize and thus couldn't benefit from the last 15 years of Moore's law.
This is very, very far from what most people think about when they hear "Artificial Intelligence". And even then they're not *that* great... on the MNIST set of images (the *easiest* common benchmark for "AI"), my understanding at least is that even the best algorithms still can't quite beat human eyesight (despite effectively having much higher-resolution imaging data than a human because they get to use the raw image data as input).
Parents. The XC90 is the class leader by quite some way for large SUVs that you don't want to take offroad. It has consistently outperformed the BMW X5 and Audi Q7 (its two closest competitors) in the press reviews and sells very well.
Remember the most recent financial crisis in the EU has a largely to do with a few select countries basically taking the EU for granted and massively benefiting from countries that actually produce a significant GDP.
I have to say, that's quite an unfair characterisation. The eurozone crisis (which is still ongoing in many ways - Greece is still being bailed out and the EU etc still vote every so often on whether to continue doing so) was, in my view, magnified significantly by the membership of southern European countries in the Eurozone but the cause had very little, if anything, to do with those countries' membership or not of the EU and Eurozone.
The Southern countries had faced a higher rate of inflation because of much more lax regulation of credit creation leading to inflationary construction/investment booms in each of them. With a currency which wasn't fixed in exchange rate against most trading partners, this could and would have been dealt with through devaluation (either by the market if currencies floated or by central bank action if not). In the situation they found themselves, leaving the Eurozone was the devaluation option but politically it was incredibly problematic - the cost of leaving the Eurozone would have been born quite unevenly, mostly by older and middle/upper-middle class people (who have more assets but are not "globally mobile") which meant it faced immense unpopularity within those countries. It would also have attracted far more economic "punishment" than an old-fashioned devaluation of their own currencies because (a) politicians in northern Europe had far too much invested in the idea of "more Europe" being right for everyone and (b) the risk of a "domino effect" leading ultimately to an Italian sovereign default or an unorderly breakup of the Eurozone and/or EU was starting to really scare markets (where confidence is all). Such a series of events would have been orders of magnitude more complex and painful to deal with than Lehman's bankruptcy was (for example, Italy has more sovereign debt outstanding than Germany and the effects of a default in terms of losses, consequential bankruptcies, and forced selling by institutions like insurers who are unable to own defaulted bonds due to regulations could have left many debt markets unable to function in a much worse way than the financial crisis had).
So the remaining options were large-scale debt forgiveness in the countries concerned (not just government debt, but personal and corporate debt) or bailouts of the government, banks, corporates and individuals. Debt forgiveness (which is always politically unpopular when it amounts to letting the "profligate get away with it"), or its smaller-scale cousin of a combined sovereign and bank selective default was not on the table even if politically it had been possible because the rest of the European banking system was too exposed to the risk without enough risk capital buffer which would have led to a further wave of bank bailouts - which by that time had become so politically toxic that noone wanted to countenance being held responsible for that outcome.
So instead the only politically viable option left was a bailout. However, because actual wealth transfers were politically unacceptable to electorates in both northern Europe and southern Europe, this was done through the "back door" of the ECB and IMF. This meant it was done in a very sub-optimal way. This has led to a number of the structural issues (i.e. lack of competitiveness) which devolve ultimately from the "overvalued currency" becoming more entrenched and not less.
The argument that riding the inflationary boom amounted to "taking the EU for granted" is tempting (didn't the Eurozone membership mean their currency stayed overvalued?) but I think it places too much credibility in markets to have foreseen the crisis (after all, they didn't within the Eurozone, so why would they have done outside it any earlier?). My view is that in a counterfactual, the Drach
Whilst this is true and is valuable, the service which was once provided by market-makers - provision of guaranteed liquidity in certain size, especially for smaller or less traded names - is rapidly declining into obsolescence (for reasons largely unrelated to HFT) and HFT is not a replacement for it. The negative impact of it not being there is likely to be felt more by small investors than large/institutional ones. Many markets - e.g. in fixed income - which once had at least some minimal trading activity supported by market makers are now effectively zero-volume markets/trade by appointment/etc as a result of post-financial crisis changes at the broker-dealers. In turn this limits the range of suitable investments and investment strategies for smaller investors and further entrenches the large institutional investors as it broadens the range of investments that they effectively have exclusive access to.
The differences between countries in terms of how banks charge are quite varied and what you are observing is a difference in the structure of charges more than anything - in some countries banks effectively subsidise the "day-to-day" banking for individuals (in the UK to the point of it being completely free) out of other parts of the operations - usually these days by charging business customers much more for payments, account maintenance etc. There are differences in cost structure but those aren't really a huge part of most banks' overall costs.
The largest costs they have, and the ones they really worry about are (1) how much it costs them to borrow money (deposits are the cheapest source but most banks don't fund themselves exclusively with deposits and the extent to which they do varies significantly) and (2) how much they lose on bad loans. Spanish banks face significantly higher costs than Nordic banks on both of those costs, which is why you observe Spanish banking being more costly to consumers.
France doesn't follow this model - it makes it almost impossible to fire people, to the extent that moving people to a different country for a couple of years in order to fire them at the end of that is actually a money-saving strategy which is used occasionally.
The Nordics (Sweden/Norway/Denmark) come a bit closer - it's easier to hire and fire (not quite at-will but nothing like Germany or France) but with generous social benefits paid for out of general taxation (ie not by the company hiring/firing). To pay for this though, income taxes are very high (although interestingly investment/capital are taxed lightly i.e. interest, dividends, capital gains, corporate profits). All in all I think it's better than France but does push people in some sectors to leave the country which is negative for the economy.
Perhaps not, but rarely you do see something approaching that. I've seen a couple of instances where people were fired effectively on that basis ("you're getting too big for your boots") and both times it turned out very badly for the company because it was a small market and noone else who could do the job wanted to go near it after seeing how the guy who got fired was treated. The individual filling the position may have been replacable but the cost to the company of having literally noone in the post for a long time was enormous.
I wonder if the more widespread relevant use case is in pools and the sea (on vacation). Kindles in particular have been marketed as great for taking on vacation because e-ink is visible in bright sunlight (unlike LCD etc displays) and the weight and bulk saving vs paper books is significant. With typical pulp fiction/vacation reading paper books you don't need to worry about reading them in the pool due to them being low-value so this was the "last" benefit they had over Kindles etc.
Having said all that, it's interesting they don't mention it being resistant to salt water - which is notoriously much worse for electronics than fresh water.
Arbitration has a huge advantage for individuals though - the cost is very low which significantly promotes access to justice. The downside is the lack of transparency (as cases are all confidential) which means its difficult to know if you really will get a "fair" result.
A few years ago, a former employer of mine treated a group of employees in a way which was a pretty clear breach of trust. Friends of mine who were based in New York went to binding arbitration which was stipulated by their contracts of employment. They got a decision in a matter of weeks and were awarded triple damages after a short hearing. Those of us unlucky enough to be in London had to go through the Court system instead (the Employment Tribunal was not available to us). It took us four years to get a final judgment and get paid and we had to cover significant legal expenses through something like five or six hearings at different courts in the mean time. If there had not been a large enough number of us, it would have been ruinously expensive to pursue them simply in terms of the funding cost during the case. We did get back a lot of these costs when they finally gave in and decided not to appeal but we were still left out by something like 20-25% of our costs despite England and Wales being a "loser pays" system (apparently this is normal). Punitive/exemplary damages like our New York colleagues got are effectively non-existent here so we still ended the day worse off than if the employer had behaved well to start with.
The fact is that any judicial process, whether arbitration or traditional courts, has some risk attached to it. Because of this, in any system where there is a meaningful chance that the small party pays - i.e. anything except where your legal advice is being provided pro bono or covered by insurance etc - cost is far more of a limiting factor in actually exercising your rights against a much better funded opponent. To the extent that arbitration gives smaller parties at least a shot at justice, it's MUCH MUCH better than a system which you won't ever use because it's too expensive.
Ironically, if you look at the Apple phones on that list, what springs out at you is that over time the repairability scores have been getting better for them!
But what do you suppose the chances are that the leaders of these organizations magically start thinking that way?
When their auditors, audit committees, and (where relevant) regulators require them to then it will happen. There is a fair degree of lobbying going on behind the scenes to effect it via this route in the UK at least. This kind of cultural change takes some time, but there are plenty of examples of it happening - employee health and safety, corporate governance, etc
The thing is, the manufacturers aren't (in general) leaving hardware performance on the table simply so that they can upsell - because they live in a highly competitive market which wouldn't allow such tactics to persist for long. The reason this is possible is that they are making a complex trade-off between emissions, fuel efficiency and power (and to some distant extent engine longevity). Emissions and fuel efficency rules constrain their hands to a large degree and also influence what the market wants (via e.g. car tax policies) which is why it's possible to get more power by changing the software - it comes at the cost of lower fuel efficiency and worse emissions (and potentially worse longevity). As a case in point - the VW emissions "fix" for diesels lowers the power and torque output.
Oh, you thought that people bought the Tesla because of the interior?
By the same token, how many people buy a Porsche for the interior? And yet, the difference between a (modern) Porsche interior and a Tesla one is night and day. This isn't a problem for them yet but I believe it will become one quite soon - when Mercedes/BMW/Porsche/Audi/etc bring EVs to market in the next couple of years, people will cross-shop Teslas with those cars, and the interiors will lose them a lot of sales. They'll be left competing largely in the Ford/Toyota/Nissan/etc market but with a price disadvantage.
I don't think the point is to make the information inaccessible. It's another way (amongst the many legal avenues created over the last 10-15 years) to enable the authorities to find a charge they can make stick to (in their view) "deal with" people who they "know" are terrorists when they don't have any real - or at least (if you want to be more charitable) any legally admissible - proof of actual terrorist plotting.
One could argue that this is exactly the same purpose banning books/possession of information has served in many authoritarian regimes over the years, from Nazi Germany to Communist China.
Currently my employer isn't in control of the wiping of my phone, I am.
The admin can also send out the "wipe" command at any time to disallow access to any company data on your phone, with the serious collateral damage of also taking out all your own personal accounts, e-mail, photos, etc.
So maybe you are in control of wiping your phone. Until you're not.
I'm sure they can send out the command whenever they want. But it's not hard to configure a phone to ignore that command.
As an aside, newer Blackberry 10 phones come with built-in perimeters, one for personal, one for work. Connecting the work perimeter allows company to manage data (including wipe) on that side but not touch data in the personal perimeter. On the Android and Apple platforms, there are similar 3rd party solutions available to segregate and manage work partition independently.
In doing so Blackberry made their devices really painful to use for work because you can't, for example, copy a phone number from a work email and paste it into the dialer. It was a stupid idea, they should have stuck to them being "corporate-only" devices. This is a perfect illustration of why locking devices down in the wrong way is counterproductive, because when it gets in the way too much then actively work to circumvent the entire system and not just the bit which is getting in their way (at the simplest level by copying documents to USB sticks, forwarding emails to their personal accounts - I've been in workplaces where both of those were supposedly "banned" with some kind of enforcement but literally EVERYONE did it because otherwise the place would have ground to a halt).
The rather poorly-understood reality is that in a commercial context, the vast majority of information is not really sensitive or valuable. What's more, users will, in general, know which information is and isn't sensitive much better than IT admins - otherwise they wouldn't be trusted not to tell people who they might know socially working at a competitor for example! For information which is not sensitive, far and away the best policy is to be extremely permissive because this enables people to work in whichever way makes them most efficient and engenders trust by treating them like grown-ups.
For information which is sensitive, because almost all the focus is on "zero information leakage" type solutions, it is far too hard to then selectively ramp up controls around it because everyone's product is trying to solve the wrong problem ("keep work and personal information separate" for example). People do this instinctively (eg using encrypted Zip files) but technical support for doing this the "right" way should be far, far better.
No, that's not why people think the two situations are different. The hypothetical financial advisor (a) deprived people of money which they actually did have at some point, and (b) did so on a very large scale, seriously impoverishing the parents. If the financial advisor had stolen a much less meaningful amount, say $50, do you still think prison would be appropriate? I certainly don't. Even more so - if he merely deprived the parents of money they might have made but didn't by not investing quite as well as someone else could have done then I'm not even sure a fine would be an appropriate sanction (in other industries these sorts of practices are sanctioned by poor reviews/bad reputations, not through the law in any way).
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Sorry, that should have said falsely calling 911 would not usually be classed as a "dangerous felony", not just a "felony".
If you rob a 7-11 at gun point, and the clerk pulls a gun in self defense and accidently shoots a bystander, not only might you get charged with murder the clerk might not be.
The rule that allows the robber to be charged with murder in that circumstance (a version of the felony murder rule) is pretty controversial though - many have argued it is wrong as e.g. it allowed for the conviction of Ryan Holle. It is controversial enough that it has been repealed in many jurisdictions. I'm also not sure it's applicable here as I don't think falsely calling 911 would usually be classed as a felony.
"He didn't pull the trigger."
So fucking what? What's next? You'll be telling me that mafia bosses who send thugs to intimidate people aren't responsible for any injuries or deaths that result...
The problem with that logic (mafia bosses ordering killings) is that it is a different standard of intent - the mafia boss intended the victim to be killed or suffer very serious harm and should have reasonably foreseen that his instructions might be interpreted that way. Here you'd have to argue "reckless indifference" to whether the victim was killed or seriously injured. In turn that means the prosecution would have to make an argument that an innocent person dying is a "reasonably foreseeable" consequence of the police turning up anywhere (e.g. wrong house, etc etc). The defence would then presumably dig up the training the police have which includes a lot of "don't kill innocent people". And in the mean time, the government may have opened the police up to civil litigation on a grand scale as it is effectively admitting liability.
If you want to save yourself the time loading and unloading, this is an easily solved problem with no additional technology required. Certainly not 'robots'.
Buy two dishwashers and two sets of everything you use regularly in the kitchen. One fills up with dirty stuff while you use the other one like a cupboard with clean stuff in. When youve emptied the clean one, its time to run the dirty one.
If you don't have space for two fullsize ones, two slimline ones fit in the same space as one fullsize.
Taking investors' money and squandering it by trying to do what you promised but failing badly is one thing (although even that can rise to the level of criminal liability in some instances e.g. trading whilst insolvent, insider trading or Securities Act/Sarbanes-Oxley type stuff).
But deliberately pocketing the money and running (which is what GP suggested)? That's plain old fraud, been going on for centuries and it gets prosecuted successfully every week.
Pocket integration on desktop is stupid (bloat which most people don't want) but it's a lot worse on Android. The blank tab page as of 57 now fills with advertising from them. It's getting a lot of 1-star reviews on the Play Store for that.
I think I must be the only one who can't see any speed difference between 56 and 57 judging by the comments. 56 felt fast and I never had issues with it, 57 feels fast.
While MOST of my extensions are not gone, the big surprise for me is that the rewrites have real issues - especially with UI - which are clearly caused by the utterly stupid way WebExtensions work.
KeeFox -> Kee is a big downgrade, Save Page WE is significantly slower and produces much larger files than MAFF did, etc.
Of the ones I did lose, Session Manager is the biggest loss for me, and whilst others are saying "don't worry, NoScript will be back in a couple of days", it won't be at feature parity then which is basically useless for me. I used NoScript with its "Global Scripts Enabled" box on to get the other features of it and then used uMatrix/uBlock for blocking scripts as they give finer-grained control.
I guess I'll stick with ESR for now and keep checking in to see if it gets better, but if there's no improvement by the time ESR rolls over in June, I'll probably wind up switching to Chromium (patched to remove the phone-home features) - as with feature parity, I can't see a reason not to given most of the web is targeted first at Chrome these days.
I agree, calendaring is what's missing in the FOSS world.
I both agree and disagree. Calendaring integration (and nowadays chat/voice integration) is what the PHBs cannot live without.
It's also one of the most unnecessary and counterproductive applications for the majority of the workforce.
That people spend too much time in meetings and too little time "doing" is a truism, but I take issue with your suggestion that an assistant/secretary is a replacement for Outlook calendaring integration - in my experience the opposite is true, if your calendar/travel schedule is such that your assistant "owns your life" (this is basically me) then you depend even more heavily on Outlook and mobile device integration to make things work. And of course the secretaries/assistants themselves also depend heavily on it. Arranging and planning meetings is almost a core function of *email itself* for many people. Add in file sharing (via attachments) and I bet you've covered 80+% of work-related email.
Correct. "AI" is a total misnomer. What we have is basically a relatively new set of pattern recognition and heuristic techniques which can use modern computing power efficiently because they are easily parallelizable. That last part is the reason "AI" appears to be everywhere - many of the best algorithms we had heretofore were not so easy to parallelize and thus couldn't benefit from the last 15 years of Moore's law.
This is very, very far from what most people think about when they hear "Artificial Intelligence". And even then they're not *that* great... on the MNIST set of images (the *easiest* common benchmark for "AI"), my understanding at least is that even the best algorithms still can't quite beat human eyesight (despite effectively having much higher-resolution imaging data than a human because they get to use the raw image data as input).
Parents. The XC90 is the class leader by quite some way for large SUVs that you don't want to take offroad. It has consistently outperformed the BMW X5 and Audi Q7 (its two closest competitors) in the press reviews and sells very well.
I have to say, that's quite an unfair characterisation. The eurozone crisis (which is still ongoing in many ways - Greece is still being bailed out and the EU etc still vote every so often on whether to continue doing so) was, in my view, magnified significantly by the membership of southern European countries in the Eurozone but the cause had very little, if anything, to do with those countries' membership or not of the EU and Eurozone.
The Southern countries had faced a higher rate of inflation because of much more lax regulation of credit creation leading to inflationary construction/investment booms in each of them. With a currency which wasn't fixed in exchange rate against most trading partners, this could and would have been dealt with through devaluation (either by the market if currencies floated or by central bank action if not). In the situation they found themselves, leaving the Eurozone was the devaluation option but politically it was incredibly problematic - the cost of leaving the Eurozone would have been born quite unevenly, mostly by older and middle/upper-middle class people (who have more assets but are not "globally mobile") which meant it faced immense unpopularity within those countries. It would also have attracted far more economic "punishment" than an old-fashioned devaluation of their own currencies because (a) politicians in northern Europe had far too much invested in the idea of "more Europe" being right for everyone and (b) the risk of a "domino effect" leading ultimately to an Italian sovereign default or an unorderly breakup of the Eurozone and/or EU was starting to really scare markets (where confidence is all). Such a series of events would have been orders of magnitude more complex and painful to deal with than Lehman's bankruptcy was (for example, Italy has more sovereign debt outstanding than Germany and the effects of a default in terms of losses, consequential bankruptcies, and forced selling by institutions like insurers who are unable to own defaulted bonds due to regulations could have left many debt markets unable to function in a much worse way than the financial crisis had).
So the remaining options were large-scale debt forgiveness in the countries concerned (not just government debt, but personal and corporate debt) or bailouts of the government, banks, corporates and individuals. Debt forgiveness (which is always politically unpopular when it amounts to letting the "profligate get away with it"), or its smaller-scale cousin of a combined sovereign and bank selective default was not on the table even if politically it had been possible because the rest of the European banking system was too exposed to the risk without enough risk capital buffer which would have led to a further wave of bank bailouts - which by that time had become so politically toxic that noone wanted to countenance being held responsible for that outcome.
So instead the only politically viable option left was a bailout. However, because actual wealth transfers were politically unacceptable to electorates in both northern Europe and southern Europe, this was done through the "back door" of the ECB and IMF. This meant it was done in a very sub-optimal way. This has led to a number of the structural issues (i.e. lack of competitiveness) which devolve ultimately from the "overvalued currency" becoming more entrenched and not less.
The argument that riding the inflationary boom amounted to "taking the EU for granted" is tempting (didn't the Eurozone membership mean their currency stayed overvalued?) but I think it places too much credibility in markets to have foreseen the crisis (after all, they didn't within the Eurozone, so why would they have done outside it any earlier?). My view is that in a counterfactual, the Drach
Whilst this is true and is valuable, the service which was once provided by market-makers - provision of guaranteed liquidity in certain size, especially for smaller or less traded names - is rapidly declining into obsolescence (for reasons largely unrelated to HFT) and HFT is not a replacement for it. The negative impact of it not being there is likely to be felt more by small investors than large/institutional ones. Many markets - e.g. in fixed income - which once had at least some minimal trading activity supported by market makers are now effectively zero-volume markets/trade by appointment/etc as a result of post-financial crisis changes at the broker-dealers. In turn this limits the range of suitable investments and investment strategies for smaller investors and further entrenches the large institutional investors as it broadens the range of investments that they effectively have exclusive access to.
The differences between countries in terms of how banks charge are quite varied and what you are observing is a difference in the structure of charges more than anything - in some countries banks effectively subsidise the "day-to-day" banking for individuals (in the UK to the point of it being completely free) out of other parts of the operations - usually these days by charging business customers much more for payments, account maintenance etc. There are differences in cost structure but those aren't really a huge part of most banks' overall costs.
The largest costs they have, and the ones they really worry about are (1) how much it costs them to borrow money (deposits are the cheapest source but most banks don't fund themselves exclusively with deposits and the extent to which they do varies significantly) and (2) how much they lose on bad loans. Spanish banks face significantly higher costs than Nordic banks on both of those costs, which is why you observe Spanish banking being more costly to consumers.
France doesn't follow this model - it makes it almost impossible to fire people, to the extent that moving people to a different country for a couple of years in order to fire them at the end of that is actually a money-saving strategy which is used occasionally.
The Nordics (Sweden/Norway/Denmark) come a bit closer - it's easier to hire and fire (not quite at-will but nothing like Germany or France) but with generous social benefits paid for out of general taxation (ie not by the company hiring/firing). To pay for this though, income taxes are very high (although interestingly investment/capital are taxed lightly i.e. interest, dividends, capital gains, corporate profits). All in all I think it's better than France but does push people in some sectors to leave the country which is negative for the economy.
Perhaps not, but rarely you do see something approaching that. I've seen a couple of instances where people were fired effectively on that basis ("you're getting too big for your boots") and both times it turned out very badly for the company because it was a small market and noone else who could do the job wanted to go near it after seeing how the guy who got fired was treated. The individual filling the position may have been replacable but the cost to the company of having literally noone in the post for a long time was enormous.
I wonder if the more widespread relevant use case is in pools and the sea (on vacation). Kindles in particular have been marketed as great for taking on vacation because e-ink is visible in bright sunlight (unlike LCD etc displays) and the weight and bulk saving vs paper books is significant. With typical pulp fiction/vacation reading paper books you don't need to worry about reading them in the pool due to them being low-value so this was the "last" benefit they had over Kindles etc.
Having said all that, it's interesting they don't mention it being resistant to salt water - which is notoriously much worse for electronics than fresh water.
Arbitration has a huge advantage for individuals though - the cost is very low which significantly promotes access to justice. The downside is the lack of transparency (as cases are all confidential) which means its difficult to know if you really will get a "fair" result.
A few years ago, a former employer of mine treated a group of employees in a way which was a pretty clear breach of trust. Friends of mine who were based in New York went to binding arbitration which was stipulated by their contracts of employment. They got a decision in a matter of weeks and were awarded triple damages after a short hearing. Those of us unlucky enough to be in London had to go through the Court system instead (the Employment Tribunal was not available to us). It took us four years to get a final judgment and get paid and we had to cover significant legal expenses through something like five or six hearings at different courts in the mean time. If there had not been a large enough number of us, it would have been ruinously expensive to pursue them simply in terms of the funding cost during the case. We did get back a lot of these costs when they finally gave in and decided not to appeal but we were still left out by something like 20-25% of our costs despite England and Wales being a "loser pays" system (apparently this is normal). Punitive/exemplary damages like our New York colleagues got are effectively non-existent here so we still ended the day worse off than if the employer had behaved well to start with.
The fact is that any judicial process, whether arbitration or traditional courts, has some risk attached to it. Because of this, in any system where there is a meaningful chance that the small party pays - i.e. anything except where your legal advice is being provided pro bono or covered by insurance etc - cost is far more of a limiting factor in actually exercising your rights against a much better funded opponent. To the extent that arbitration gives smaller parties at least a shot at justice, it's MUCH MUCH better than a system which you won't ever use because it's too expensive.
Ironically, if you look at the Apple phones on that list, what springs out at you is that over time the repairability scores have been getting better for them!
But what do you suppose the chances are that the leaders of these organizations magically start thinking that way?
When their auditors, audit committees, and (where relevant) regulators require them to then it will happen. There is a fair degree of lobbying going on behind the scenes to effect it via this route in the UK at least. This kind of cultural change takes some time, but there are plenty of examples of it happening - employee health and safety, corporate governance, etc
The thing is, the manufacturers aren't (in general) leaving hardware performance on the table simply so that they can upsell - because they live in a highly competitive market which wouldn't allow such tactics to persist for long. The reason this is possible is that they are making a complex trade-off between emissions, fuel efficiency and power (and to some distant extent engine longevity). Emissions and fuel efficency rules constrain their hands to a large degree and also influence what the market wants (via e.g. car tax policies) which is why it's possible to get more power by changing the software - it comes at the cost of lower fuel efficiency and worse emissions (and potentially worse longevity). As a case in point - the VW emissions "fix" for diesels lowers the power and torque output.
Oh, you thought that people bought the Tesla because of the interior?
By the same token, how many people buy a Porsche for the interior? And yet, the difference between a (modern) Porsche interior and a Tesla one is night and day. This isn't a problem for them yet but I believe it will become one quite soon - when Mercedes/BMW/Porsche/Audi/etc bring EVs to market in the next couple of years, people will cross-shop Teslas with those cars, and the interiors will lose them a lot of sales. They'll be left competing largely in the Ford/Toyota/Nissan/etc market but with a price disadvantage.
I don't think the point is to make the information inaccessible. It's another way (amongst the many legal avenues created over the last 10-15 years) to enable the authorities to find a charge they can make stick to (in their view) "deal with" people who they "know" are terrorists when they don't have any real - or at least (if you want to be more charitable) any legally admissible - proof of actual terrorist plotting.
One could argue that this is exactly the same purpose banning books/possession of information has served in many authoritarian regimes over the years, from Nazi Germany to Communist China.
Currently my employer isn't in control of the wiping of my phone, I am.
The admin can also send out the "wipe" command at any time to disallow access to any company data on your phone, with the serious collateral damage of also taking out all your own personal accounts, e-mail, photos, etc.
So maybe you are in control of wiping your phone. Until you're not.
I'm sure they can send out the command whenever they want. But it's not hard to configure a phone to ignore that command.
As an aside, newer Blackberry 10 phones come with built-in perimeters, one for personal, one for work. Connecting the work perimeter allows company to manage data (including wipe) on that side but not touch data in the personal perimeter. On the Android and Apple platforms, there are similar 3rd party solutions available to segregate and manage work partition independently.
In doing so Blackberry made their devices really painful to use for work because you can't, for example, copy a phone number from a work email and paste it into the dialer. It was a stupid idea, they should have stuck to them being "corporate-only" devices. This is a perfect illustration of why locking devices down in the wrong way is counterproductive, because when it gets in the way too much then actively work to circumvent the entire system and not just the bit which is getting in their way (at the simplest level by copying documents to USB sticks, forwarding emails to their personal accounts - I've been in workplaces where both of those were supposedly "banned" with some kind of enforcement but literally EVERYONE did it because otherwise the place would have ground to a halt).
The rather poorly-understood reality is that in a commercial context, the vast majority of information is not really sensitive or valuable. What's more, users will, in general, know which information is and isn't sensitive much better than IT admins - otherwise they wouldn't be trusted not to tell people who they might know socially working at a competitor for example! For information which is not sensitive, far and away the best policy is to be extremely permissive because this enables people to work in whichever way makes them most efficient and engenders trust by treating them like grown-ups.
For information which is sensitive, because almost all the focus is on "zero information leakage" type solutions, it is far too hard to then selectively ramp up controls around it because everyone's product is trying to solve the wrong problem ("keep work and personal information separate" for example). People do this instinctively (eg using encrypted Zip files) but technical support for doing this the "right" way should be far, far better.
Yes, of course. You must be thinking of some other country where there weren't allegations of a plot against the legitimately elected Prime Minister in the 60s and 70s.
No, that's not why people think the two situations are different. The hypothetical financial advisor (a) deprived people of money which they actually did have at some point, and (b) did so on a very large scale, seriously impoverishing the parents. If the financial advisor had stolen a much less meaningful amount, say $50, do you still think prison would be appropriate? I certainly don't. Even more so - if he merely deprived the parents of money they might have made but didn't by not investing quite as well as someone else could have done then I'm not even sure a fine would be an appropriate sanction (in other industries these sorts of practices are sanctioned by poor reviews/bad reputations, not through the law in any way).
They just made this up. See this which was written by an actual lawyer, not a press office: Is viewing a video a criminal offence under terrorism law? (may be paywalled).