I think there was a strong political consensus to restrict low-skilled immigration and a general relaxation about high-skilled immigration; indeed for non-EU controlled immigration (including immigration of non-EU spouses of British citizens) strong restrictions on low-skilled immigration have been government policy under Labour, coalition and Conservative majority and minority governments. High-skilled immigration is not politically controversial. That's why the "Australian style points system" was such a vote-winner, even though it arguably would have resulted in higher total numbers.

Which is one of the reasons why the UK as a whole will never wish to go back in my view.

The EU as it exists today is not really the same organisation as the European Communities/Common Market which existed before the Single European Act and Maastricht Treaties. That was much more of a trade block based on mutual recognition of differing national standards and a customs union with a common commercial policy which retained internal border infrastructure (including duty free zones in between countries, for example). As a trade block, it was a creature of its time, when tariffs and quotas were the biggest barriers to trade before the last few GATT rounds which rather dramatically reduced tariffs in goods on a global basis.

I don't think it would be unfair to call the UK a founder member of the "modern" EU as in particular it was instrumental in pushing for the Single Market (under Thatcher) which is the defining trade relationship within the EU (and since the mid 90s the EEA) and which did much to reduce non-tariff barriers to trade (although the Single Market rules also act as a hugely protectionist barrier against those outside the bloc). The UK has never been an enthusiastic member of the political institutions however, or of Jacques Delors's "Social Europe" vision - indeed both of these have consistently been raised as concerns about membership since their beginnings. If we had not been part of these then I doubt we'd have voted to leave.

Yes. I had assumed until now that it was reserved for the institutions of the EU itself as those are the only domains I've ever seen using it. I suspect a very very large number of the 300,000 are domain squatters who registered the ".eu" version of a ".com" etc. with the hope of selling it to the owners of the .com.

i.e. the EEA states. Odd that the domain is ".eu" and not ".eea" therefore. Also why didn't they just say "EEA"?

It's different because most companies realise this and try to underpromise and overdeliver publicly. Tesla has a track record of doing the opposite. And the stakes are also a lot higher than usual - the company's survival could depend on this single product.

Sorry, that should have said falsely calling 911 would not usually be classed as a "dangerous felony", not just a "felony".

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.

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.

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 Drachma etc would have been strong in the pre-crisis years because the official statistics looked good. There was a combination of lack of transparency, outright manipulation and lack of clear understanding by the market on how much inflation there really was in those economies and I don't think currency had much to do with that. BUT, when the bust inevitably came, Eurozone membership became a millstone around their necks because it constrained their options to deal with it effectively.