In that case, Starbucks UK gets taxed because there is a part of the company with a presence in the UK. And it's quite obvious to everyone that the arrangement only exists in order to dodge taxes. The profit is clearly being made in the UK.

If I send money to a company that exists entirely online, for all the difference it makes, I could be a sole trader living and working in Micronesia. If I sell online services to British companies who are they going to tax? My customers? I guess they can, but I think most people would agree that my company is genuinely and legitimately operating in Micronesia. Just the same as if I was exporting Micronesian bananas.

It is a lot easier for Google, or other online companies to operate in a different country from their operations though. Unlike Starbucks, who, at the very least need outlets in the UK to sell coffee here, Google could run everything from a single location anywhere in the world, yet still trade with any other country.

Essentially though, each of these arguments is completely independent. So if you agree with one, and accept that it's relevant, even if you dismiss all of the others then you're accepting the basic premise that the death penalty is wrong.

This video seems relevant.

Next question.

So he doesn't want to ban encryption only useful, working encryption? Not sure that really changes anything.

As far as I can tell, he's not talking about banning anything.

Logically your alternative doesn't work - if I die and the password dies with me then SS can't read the communication.

If there's nobody alive who can read the encrypted message then nobody gives a damn what's in the message. The message effectively no longer exists.

But I should point out, this is not a law. This is not a bill.It's not a manifesto promise, or a promise of any sort. It's not policy. It's not even a pledge. It's a statement of intent in a speech. That's all! Attempting to fathom out exactly what the law's full implications will be from a vague speech is pointless. There isn't a law!

He never actually said he wanted to ban encrpytion. That was the tech media taking some vague statements and running with it.

He said that he wanted to make sure that the security services could read any communication. This could just as readily be taken to mean that he believes that the high court should be able to issue a warrant forcing somneone to decrypt the message.

The fact that there already is such legislation means that he doesn't actually need to do anything and can still claim that we have such legislation.

They do seem to be making this rather more complicated by needing the robot to do laundry in an environment designed for humans.

Even if we do want the robot to pick up clothes, I think it's quite reasonable to add a laundry hopper as part of the robot and design the washing machine and robot as a pair designed to interoperate. This eliminated to difficulty of carrying the basket. The washing machine knows how much detergent to add. The washing machine will open and close its own door. Washer/dryers exist so that eliminates one machine transfer. Much of the decision making can be done with the help of RFID tags rather than labels.

So we need a machine that can read RFID tags, pick up clothes, put them into a machine, remove them from a machine, fold them and put them away.

Okay. Wasn't aware of that. Certainly think that Metro is a fantastic interface for touch devices.

I already have an android phone. It works and I'm comfortable with it. Other people already have iPhones and feel the same way about them. They'll most likely go for the same OS next time.

MS needs to come up with something that convinces people it's worth switching!

Surely that only matters if you're concerned about relative racism between white people and non-white people.

It's looking at the difference in opinion of the participants regarding white people and black people. They did one experiment. They changed a single factor (race). That affected the results.

Khronos is the organisation responsible for the OpenGL standard amongst other things.

And why should I care?

No idea. Perhaps you don't. If you're into 3D graphics then you will care. If you don't care then that's up to you. The implication here that we think you should care is a little childish. If you don't care that's fine. Find something you do care about.

Windows still has 90% market share on the desktop. I imagine D3D will keep going for a while.

Does this do tile-based rendering?

I presume you intended this as a joke, but from the OpenGL/Vulkan comparison table in the overview: "Matches architecture of modern platforms including mobile platforms with unified memory, tiled rendering"

On that point - I'm not all that sure exactly what it does to support tiling. The PowerVR blog says "A render pass consists of framebuffer state (other than actual render target addresses), and how render targets should be loaded in and out of the GPU at the start and end of each render. This structure is the key object that allows tiled architectures like PowerVR to run at extremely high efficiency." but that it's not really all that clear to me how this makes a difference.

Is this really something OpenGL didn't previously do? I remember DX8 drivers compiling to a bytecode. It was a pretty simplistic language, with a suboptimal bytecode but it still avoided at least one slow part of the process. I realise that optimisation takes the bulk of the time on non-trivial architectures but it still seems like a poinless inefficiency to expect a driver to even handle string parsing.