While I don't disagree there's no benefit to the company, I fail to see a significant reason why four people who share a surname, four possibly-unrelated people who live in the same house, four people in the same unit block and four people in the same street should need to be charged differently for listening to music.

If the family plan is profitable for them across six people (and you'd have to assume it is, or they'd be raising prices) there's no reason obvious to me that four friends wouldn't result in the same or better profit margin. On that basis, this appears to be deliberate market segmentation for profit, and I don't see why we all have to agree to allow it.

Only until Mozilla unilaterally decides not to support that any more (it's in the linked blog article).

Has to? No. Will if they think the returns outweigh the interest? Of course they will.They get cheap loans because it seems obvious they can repay them (i.e "zero risk"), then make profits by using the cheap funds to do something else. Or to put it another way - if you could make $100 by having $1000, would you rather use $1000 of your own money or pay someone $30 to use theirs, pocket the $70 difference, and keep your own $1000 for something different?

Only if the data isn't locked away too. I can think of several schemes that would let companies screw over their customers and lock them in, and I don't want to describe them in case they try it. But to stoke the fires of your creativity, what if you can't open your AppA documents in AppB because the vendor of AppA has been unscrupulous in some way?

No, the rental payment hasn't gone through, so the bed dematerialised. But hey, rent everything own nothing, right?

Didn't we used to call people who weren't allowed to own things slaves and serfs?

Something like Office 365 is better value sometimes, but only if you actually want the extra bits they're selling. You have to compare the pricing of the things you want or need, not the things you get.

I can't think offhand of a scenario where you're going to want to run your own personal Office license on someone else's PC, for example. Most people don't have more than one PC at home on which they'd need Office anyway, and in the cases you "suddenly" need it somewhere it's not like it's magically there in five seconds anyway.

It's the same with Exchange Online (Office 365 Exchange) and comparing to on-premise deployment. A small business is probably going to be "happy" with one non-redundant Exchange server. But Office 365 comparisons assume that you desperately want a multi-datacenter environment and price the on-premise world accordingly - which is ridiculous for a one-site organisation with 60 people. To give you some idea - Exchange Standard + standard CALs for 60 people is something like $1000 + 60 x $140. Office H+B comes with the PC for about $290. One-off price including an OS license for a VM/small server totals about $10K. Office 365 BP for those same 60 users is about $1200. A month. Break-even, even considering hardware, backup and services is about 16 months.

Yes, O365 Business Premium gives you a TB of shared storage (one customer I'm thinking of has a custom application with all data in SQL, no or minimal NAS data). You get Teams (but they're not interested - we've asked! - they're mostly office- and desk- bound anyway and work getting customers, rarely with each other). You get Office Web apps ... to run on the desktop they use every day. The extras are there, but they don't provide value.

Or take a car analogy. You can pay $5K for a car that will get you from A to B. You can pay $1000 a month, and they throw in fuel, a garage in Walthamstow, where you can store all your spare tyres and fuel cans. You get a race helmet, race suit and installable rollcage. They provide a race engineer for you. But if all you want to do is get from home to the train, that's not valuable.

That wasn't stated in the post. It's listed as one server, presumably a file server. It's going to be extremely annoying for users to use a file server if they can't actually read or write files on it. Security is only part of the story, functionality has to be included in the evaluation.

From where would you like it to download? You're running right up against the "Windows is tracking everything you do OMG" crew there. You can't have it both ways.

Lucky you. The target for my employer was 50% desks to butts, and no group moving from traditional cube workspaces to "Future Ways Of Working" was permitted to request more than 75% desks to asses.

Now, if you have a lot of people working remotely (e.g. with customers/onsite) that's OK - until everyone wants their team meetings each week to be "in person in the office". And 90% of them are Tuesday and Wednesday. Most of the time I'm in the office there are no available desks on any of the three floors I can use, the 9 person team is on all three floors and in random corners of the building.

However, being in the office with a 2 hour commute each way somehow "promotes teamwork" because everyone running con calls and customer calls will be far more productive with the background racket than with the quieter workspaces at home or working in the same room.

Apart from that though, it really reduced our commitment to the company, so we've got that going for us (unsurprisingly, for exactly the reasons noted in the article too).

They have to surrender registration of "Cat and Cloud" because it contains the word Cat, which is an abbreviation of their company name Caterpillar. They appear to own trademarks on CAT in certain styles and fonts. Other commenters have pointed out below how this has been analysed by people with some legal expertise, as opposed to the zero expertise I (and presumably you) have.

Does it even sound reasonable to you? If a company managed to get its name recognised as a single letter in a blocky sans-serif font, would you be happy to accept that they then can demand no-one ever own registration of a trademark including their letter in any other style? (I realise it's a variation of slippery slope, but I'm illustrating the point here).

If your measure for quality is the amount spent to design it and the number of customers, you must love Windows 10.

Yet somehow being "forced" to pay for carpet in a car instead of choosing linoleum, or internal solid doors in a house instead of cardboard, or any other number of parts to things that are useful to many but potentially not to *you* (and which provide profit to companies you don't care about), isn't a concern. But sure, get out the pitchforks because you want a company to spend extra money for you to somehow get a product cheaper. Sorry, but that's not how it works. That's not how any of it works!

Well that explains why I've not seen my P2 turning on Battery Saver (I'd configured 25% both initially and after the Google screwup). Like others it had been switched on at 99% and I thought I'd done it somehow - random touches or something. Could they not think of maybe popping up a notification on the affected device? They seem to be happy to pop up 230987 others for useless crap, I don't see how a "Hey, Battery Saver has been turned off by Google due to a system fault, click to change your settings" wouldn't have been reasonable (actually I do, that would be admitting fault without backlash and prodding, which is impossible for any company nowadays it seems).

Not sure which video you're watching. I see the first signs of the shoes at somewhere in the 2s range - and what I thought was a flash at 1s doesn't appear to be her. Then the impact is within the 4s range. I timed with a stopwatch and got between 0.9 and 1.7 seconds - admittedly imperfect, but a long way from the claimed 5 seconds. Yes, dark camera vs human eye, distracted, etc. But I'm trying to concentrate on what I can measure and see.

If other commenters are accurate and it's 10m (30ft) between lane markings it appears to be about 45-50ft of roadway between detection and impact. At 35-38mph (55-60 km/h) that 15m is covered in 1 sec - so those two different estimates line up (approximately).

Good luck reacting and resolving that in the available time and distance. It's not easy even if you're expecting it.

Suggest you'll find that the second clause

or when a pedestrian is approaching closely enough from the opposite side of the roadway to constitute a danger.

is about giving way to pedestrians on the half of the crosswalk on the opposite side of the road, when they're walking towards your side.