It is interesting to note that in France it was to other way around. Independent could not compete with Amazon because book price is fixed by law. The "protection" is closing a loophole that allow shop like Amazon and other to offer a discount price and free delivery on top.

France has done nothing to protect the bookstores from the e-book.

Tesla has a lot more surface with batteries so the risk is likely higher. With only few reports it is difficult to say, but apparently the batteries of the Tesla seem to take fire more easily than a regular tank. On the other hand, gazoline cars, when on fire, behave worse than the Tesla.

In any case, worth investigating. Tesla is a unique design, it is bound to have various design issues and that's really no big deal at this stage. After all, that's a high end car, and all high end cars have their own quirks. The stock taking a tumble is quite welcome too. Right now Tesla is valued as if it was ready to take over the world in the next 6 months.

It is sad what Agile has become since becoming mainstrean. It used to be a way to give back the requirement BACK to the domain expert instead of either the developer (bad) or some unrelated department (worse).

It used to give the planning and estimation back to the people actually doing the work, the developer. Now I see job offers for "Project Manager (Scrum Master)" to run an agile team. Sad, very sad.

The "control everything" (or in a positive light "integration"), is what Apple is selling and what they are good at. Apple cannot compete head to head with Android, history taught them that - they failed until Jobs came back and started to focus on their niche. After a decade of restructuring, Apple is simply not ready to compete on many fronts, like Samsung is for example.

That is what is amazing with Apple this time. They had the whole smartphone market by the balls, but they let it go to stay focused on a smaller number of products.

The real big big difference is that this time there are other players competing in Apple's traditional niche instead of being left alone. If Apple eventually fails, it is this time not because of a strategic problem, just because the competition was good. ( and that's a good thing no ? )

Yeah, well. I work on the sort of application that require lot of customisation on top of a core product. Our sales generally "wow" the client and get them to sign by showing the UI. One of the first client customisation though, is hooking to their system so that they don't have to use our UI.

In some cases, it is all about checkboxes. With large companies you sell your software to one strategic group but that's a totally separate operational group that get to use the software.

So sure those companies should go under for such inefficiencies, but apparently they post billion dollar profit every quarter and received government bailouts the one year they failed.

As someone going through the process right now. Most of the talk is balanced in the same way that teaching intelligent design together with evolution is teaching a balanced view on current "evolution theories". In NHS view, everything is good and giving good result, that's purely your choice. At most they will recommend something like "Vitamin K" to the baby at birth, or give you statistic like 90% of women have a peridurale, but otherwise, it is up to you to document yourself or ask precise questions because balanced means all option will have equal talk time focused entirely on the positive aspect of it or mandatory disclaimer of objective nature only (i.e. never "it can hurt", but stuff like "it can affect your bladder in that fashion")

For example, they will tell you how great Home Birth is and how great the birthcenter at the hospital is, but they will not check if your specific Home is actually superior or not to Hospital Birth. That's up to you to do the assessment yourself. based on what you read on the internet, not what they tell you. They will talk to you about all the mandatory problem that could happen with epidural, they will not tell you to do anything but will conclude with "women with epidural do great, but so do women without epidural". They will also share personal experience of women going through labour with a few paracetamols just in case they thought they pushed you toward epidural too much. Again you need to make up your mind based on the information that is available to you, not on what they tell you.

BTW, we had a midwife recommending us to take document ourself before chosing for our kid to have the MMR vaccine because there are pro and con and the risk is to get one of MMR is actually very small. She didn't say the risk is small because of all the others that get vaccinated. (disclaimer: that midwife was an all natural as god intended type of person. So most likely her view were different than the NHS view. Still, she was allowed to express this balanced view of things)

And in any case, they won't merge today's mac with today's iPhone. Who know where technology is going. The increase in performance between generation of tablet/phone is very big. On the computer side, no so much. Graphical work still need fantasy power, and the rest of creative work has not really improved much since the SSD became mainstream.

If /. reader where 20 years older they would probably claim that making a server OS for those rubbish Personal Computer is stupid when real men run an IBM Mainframe.

Well it seems that Samsung finally managed to copy Apple Reality Distortion field.

A screen, curved like my hands, I need one now.

It would have help in seeing the shitstorm sooner, to some extend, but what were really their options ? It is nice to see that you are in a bubble but you still need to live somewhere and you need to pay market price. The housing bubble has lasted 2 decades - or the time it takes to get out of school, have girlfriend, marry, have kids and see them enter university.

Even if you are a pacifist, when your country is going to war you can get caught in the crossfire.

Most companies cannot really evaluate people. They don't know the value of the people they employ. Bonus are given based on the success of the project you are working on and external sign of failure of you direct colleague. Deep down, bean counter know that. They know that if they are going to cherry-pick people, at best they will fire random people.

Also, when you pay executive hundred of times the salary of regular employee, at some point you start to believe they are worth it. With a team of rockstars like that, why would you care about relative performance of cheapo employee ?

For once that will be very easy to check. We are not talking about prediction but daily reality: people are losing their job now, so it won't take long to see who is right and who is wrong.

That said both the examples in the article "Luddites are wrong" and the "industrial revolution" were successful technological revolution. However, there is a huge difference. In "Luddite are wrong", there is a smooth transition from old job to new job. Not such much with the industrial one. Although it will prove to be a long term good for humanity, it has been a (long) period of intense misery for the majority of the population.

Considering that is a scenario people look up too, I don't want to imagine the pain society will be in if the luddite are not wrong.

You are spinning it the other way. Regulation are also costing them. I'm sure lot of hotel would be fine just not having those pesky regulation getting in the way (like you know fire protection, hygiene, using legit employees, insurances, ...)