European data protection laws mean that data can't leave the EU to be processed in anyway that is illegal in the originating country. A few thousand GPB or Euro, depending where you are, per offence quickly adds up on the volume of customers in even a local supermarket.

A total novice can design, cut and stitch a bag to custom fit all their individual devices for £25 of material. An off the shelf bag you are talking about, created by an experienced leather worker is into the £££ range, a custom bag finished to that standard I wouldn't even be able to guess as I don't think they commonly exist unless you have a leather worker locally, and those skills are being outsourced now or guarded as they slowly age out of employment.

Being able to pop along to your local maker stocked with 10 affordable cutters rather than the 2 they may have at the moment and walk out 90 minutes later, £30 lighter for the time, with the components needed for a custom made leather bag and finish it up during a Daredevil marathon on Netflix has a certain appeal to people.

I have been a private Taxi operator when I was a student so I have a few numbers. If I owned my own car and maintained it and wanted to work within a company structure, I would have paid 40% of my fare to them, this fell to what I earned as a driver of their vehicles to I took 25% of the fare, and was made up to minimum wage if business ran slow. If I took the owner route, on a typical short run of 2 miles my taxi rate without waiting times would have been £7, with £4.20 coming into my pocket. If I was working an UBER rate, I would charge £5.60 for that run with 80% coming back to my pocket which is £4.48. Added up over a night thats a bit extra in my pocket with the customers coming straight to me. I can also spend that time sitting in the rank waiting for customers the old fashioned way, and also have my mobile phone on for phone bookings and for UBER bookings. I can mark myself as unavailable if I am on a long run or just leave it on and use it like my normal scheduler. If I do a long run, between two twos which was another common run at the begining or end of an evening, a 20 mile journey in the cab would cost the customer £42 with £25 in my pocket, the UBER route, 31.50 with the same £25 in my pocket. The system only starts going in the Taxi companies favour on airport runs which would have netted 67.50 vs £61, but that a 50mile journey, and you can pick someone up pretty much 100% of the time to come back. From my point of view it works out much as such the same, I don't have to deal with drunk people and cash.

UBER in the UK are already covered under our existing private hire car laws, they require background checks and they are required to hold a PHV Operators Licence. Insurance would also have to be as a commercial driver and as such cover public liability of passengers as part of the policy, as well as increasing the policy cost. Outside of London however there is not such a protection racket running for Taxi drivers, and private individuals have always set themselves up as operators. What UBER means for these drivers is they can piggy back on their infrastructure and let them handle payments. Sounds like a win for the private operator.

Surveyed ALL teachers, not just computing teachers, this covers 24yr old NQTs for Secondary School Computing Science to 65yr old Primary visitin Home Economics teachers. It is only the primary teachers that are panicking over teaching computing as the "IT" provision they previously provided was a joke. I have a number of friends who are Primary Teachers who should not be expected to be masters of everything. I as a Secondary School CS teacher am not expected to go down to English and lecture on the importance of Character X in Play Y, so expecting a general Primary Teacher to pass on anything other than the bare essentials of computer use is absurd. If this article actually said that 68% of specialist computing teachers were concerned the pupils knew more than them I would be seriously concerned for the subject, but that is not what it said. Also from a Scottish POV, this is all an English Shit Storm, please stop using the catch all UK, up here in Scotland our curriculum was changed a few years ago, we develop our own curriculum and testing strategies. The concept of state curriculum and standardised testing in anything other than certificated courses is pretty alien here.

The Asus has to make money on that, Google has to make money on that and the retailer has to make money on that. The only reason Google are making such a big thing about buying from their Play Store is so they can claw back a little more money.

Because they know the equations for their ridiculously complicated physics stuff, and most physicists are expected to be literate with computer programming. I have two PhD friends, both in Physics (meteorology and cosmology) who are now both hardcore coders due to their training.

I wish I hadn't used all my mod points this afternoon...

If the EU is looking to fund it's support for failing Eurozone countries with Anti-Trust fines then we're in a worse shape than I thought. Does Google have 1trillion Euro in cash?

But I don't see why a company in the VPN market can not come up with a simple consumer product that would encrypt a users traffic. There has been some proliferation of this type of idea for users of public WiFi connections, ie a one-click third party app that anonymises internet traffic. I can see a market for this type of product if enough of a buzz is made about it. Of course this just draws attention to a nice little work-around that we have, and might focus attention on combating it, but judging by how cack-handed governments are when it comes it this area, I doubt it.

I already use a lightly encrypted and anonymised VPN service to avoid traffic shaping when watching movies and playing games, and when accessing US services, all this would do is make me plug my service directly into my router, instead of just activating it when I needed it. All these laws will do is force more people to go down this road, I'm not doing anything wrong, but I also don't want Johnny Government looking over my shoulder at everything I do.

Depends if you are taking a Sociological or Anthropological view of race.

Sure they are, they share many characteristics of being a race, similar cultural background, they share a Celtic background with the Scottish, Cornish, welsh and French, shared language in Irish Gaelic, small geographic ancestry from the west of Europe, and distinct physical appearance, they are all small, red headed drunks with a perchance for green and pots of gold.