tici_88

Foreigners, especially the billionaire type, can and have been setting up shell corporations through which to purchase Canadian real estate. The proposed measure will do nothing to stop this practice.

The measures proposed by the Canadian government are likely just political posturing and indented to "pull the wool over the eyes" of Canadian voters because the housing bubble/crisis has reached epic proportions and everyone is talking about it.

I completely agree, except I think trains have a much higher competitive range, possibly up to 1,000 km .

With a plane 1,000 km trip including all things you mention like arriving at the airport in advance, boarding, finding your way back to the city center, etc. would come easily to 4-5 hours when you calculate it door-to-door. This could be comparable to a train at 200-250 km/h.

Also, trains tend to be more punctual and less prone to delays compared to planes. And arriving in the city center as opposed to 40-50 kms out is a big advantage indeed.

Other countries should probably follow suit. Where I live the levels of Russian financed misinformation is intense and surreal. I don't mean just social media trolls which FB is awash with but also paid operatives working on the ground and in communities and instigating against vaccines, NATO, EU and other topics key to Kremlin backed propaganda.

Where I live (south of Europe) you can tell very easily what fruit or vegetables are in season:

1. They taste orders of magnitude better compared to when they are not in season (e.g. oranges when sourced from nearby Greece or Turkey, as opposed to ones shipped all the way from South Africa or Australia)

2. They are much cheaper to buy on local fruit and vegetable stands. Also, big chains like Lidl or Kaufland run good sales on them as well.

Maybe the goal of the Russian government was to block the Amazon and Google APIs in the first place, and they used Telegram as a convenient excuse. Just a thought.

I have a feeling the wealth distribution in the years prior to WWII was pretty similar to where we are or are headed. I wonder if there were comparable data/studies done back then.

It is not just the US. Canada in recent years signed a $15Bln contract to supply the Saudi Arabia rulers with weapons. (I was going to say 'government but 'rulers' feels more appropriate in this case).

Saudi Arabia is at war with Yemen and the war is causing the humanitarian crisis described in the above article.

Maybe this is because, as someone once put it, Americans don't see themselves as worse off. Rather, they see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires"?

It feels like the ruling is essentially stating the obvious.

Well, we can all argue one way or another about how relevant a CS degree would have been. The fact though that the profile was altered and other data deleted remains highly suspicious, if true.

There could be a basic minimum income level that is tax free. This would be very similar to what we have right now. For example, income under around 9,000 (or was it 10,000?) in Canada is not taxed federally.

The idea is to have everything taxed at the same rate: income, dividends, capital gains, whatever. So every source of 'money coming in' gets treated and taxed the same way.

By having a flat tax it doesn't make sense to shift 'money in' under different categories because all gets taxed the same rate.

So for example, income, capital gains, dividends would all be taxed at 10% or 15% or whatever.

"The problem is that no tax code can close all loop holes because you just can't foresee the creative ways people will out maneuver the tax code."

I disagree. I simple flat tax rate where everything is taxed at a single rate would close every single one of the loopholes above, if only by making it moot.

The fact that the rich can maneuver themselves into a much lower tax rate than the average person presents a significant, unfair advantage in my opinion. A flat tax rate would make things much more equitable. Plus it would asimplify the tax code tremendously.

This has probably very little to do with porn and is most likely the first step in the UK's government attempt to track more closely who is accessing what on the internet and even have the power to blacklist and make inaccessible areas of the internet they deem inappropriate or inconvenient.

The enforceability of this is hugely questionable (they have heard of VPN right?) and the societal benefit of less porn is also hard to quantify asaik. Porn is not like hard drug use, cancer or drinking-and-driving where there is a definite and significant cost to society in terms of measurable harm etc.

The UK has a lot of issues to address currently with Brexit looming, so focusing on porn could also be a 'clever; political distraction from the pending mess Brexit is shaping up to be.

The article mentions 'increased competition'. Is Boeing facing a hard time competing against rivals say Airbus? Are Boeing's latest planes less competitive or is there less orders in the pipeline all across the industry, including at Airbus? I wish the article went into more detail here, this would have been informative.

Travelling in the US or with US airlines is not looking very good right now. Not just the United incident(s) but also TSA, Trump travel restrictions, flights constantly overbooked, massively late etc.

I wonder if it will start impacting traveller and tourism numbers at some point. I think anyone who doesn't really need to be in the US and/or is planning travelling with kids is likely to have some second thoughts at this point.

Recently Canada's girl guides cancelled all trips to the US: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/03/14/canadian-girl-gui....

I wonder if this is a first step of a large trend yet to develop.

Yes, hoaxes especially like this one that end badly should be punished accordingly. At the same time the SWAT team is also responsible. After all, it was them who fired the bullets.

Note that in this case it was multiple bullets not just one as SWAT shot the innocent guy multiple times. It is not just a 'oopsie, we pulled the trigger by mistake, our bad' kind of a situation on their part either.

Back in my Econ classes we were taught that Libor was this atomic-clock-like gauge that objectively and impartially measures interest rates with absolute precision. Turns out that isn't exactly the case.

We know that some commercial banks that participated in rigging it - the article mentions about employees of Barclays who and got caught, convicted and jailed for rigging Libor. But if the Bank of England has exerted pressure one way or another on Libor the claim that it is a a 'precise' interest rate gauge determined by the 'free market' are starting to look increasingly more questionable.

I think we should let "the people" decide what is good for them, and not us doing it for them. Italy is a democratic country with a government and legal system that is upholding the laws. The court ruling appears to be in line with those laws, so i don't see a problem here.

Keep in mind, this is Europe and not the US. The argument "more car-based transportation at lower prices is good for everyone" is not necessarily something that the majority of the population in Italy or elsewhere in Europe is necessarily aspiring to. So if the government - at state and local level - is keeping the number of taxis in check by high taxes/fees while subsidizing green or mass transit, thats OK too. And the government of Italy has every right to do that. just my two cents.

The law should apply equally to everyone, regardless of how 'cool' you are considered to be.

If the law in Italy requires taxis and taxi-like services to to pay for certain operational licenses and to comply with certain government regulations, it is only fair that Uber and all other similar services should be expected to do the same. Uber does not pay or require their drivers to pay the licenses and comply with the regulations, hence the ruling.

As a side note, the term "Byzantine empire" does not reflect how people called it or thought of it at the time of its existence at all. They referred to it as the (Holy) Roman Empire of the East and they considered and called themselves Roman citizens.

In fact the city Byzantium didn't even exist during the time of what we call the "Byzantine" empire. Byzantium was an Greek then Roman city that existed right until Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) was founded within a few kilometers from Byzantium by Constantine the Great in the 4th century AD. Constantine the Great moved the capital of the Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople in large part due to the new town's strategic and uniquely defensive position. Constantinople was built fresh though - there were no prior settlements on its location.

Byzantium as a city ceased to exist in name and otherwise as everything that was worth moving over got moved over and the new capital of the Roman empire took over as the main city in the vicinity in the area.

I suspect the name "Byzantine empire" got coined to imply that the Roman empire's 'holy', 'god-given' and 'ancestral' lineage does not go East but is rather 'subsumed' by the empires in the West that ended up forming much later from the vestiges of the Rome-based Roman empire in the middle ages.

"But that's a moot point if the light isn't there in the first place."

When I said "traffic light" I meant the entire set of traffic lights of the intersection. You can't have just one lane without traffic light and all the others with. It would be highly confusing, also probably against the road laws.

The point of the traffic light taking precedence over road sign is actually part of the rules of the road. It is also required knowledge for driver exams.

The set up described in the article is actually equivalent to "come to full stop, then right turn only".

You cannot replace the light with a sign because by law traffic lights have higher precedence that traffic signs. This is for failover reasons (when traffic light is broken, no electricity etc.) So a sign on an intersection can be rendered void/meaningless if the traffic light is operational.

Having traffic lights show the same light is not that unheard of as the article makes it sound. I visited a part of Europe where right turns on intersections always showed blinking yellow light. This is equivalent to "turn right, but yield first"

I understand it can be confusing if you are coming from the US system though. The European system is highly standardized for use in all kinds of driving situations (like places with unreliable electricity), the drawback is that it can get a bit technical at times.

The article makes the mistake of talking about France and Germany and maybe Spain and then of generalizing it to mean "Europe". There are in fact lots of other countries in Europe, 30+ or so in the EU alone where the reality can be very different than France and Germany. Many European countries have flat taxes (Russia, Bulgaria, Romania, Macedonia, etc), hiring and firing is at will like in the US, low to no capital gains taxes, etc. Some provide lots of government incentives, loans and capital, Denmanrk and some of the other Scandinavian countries come to mind here.

Europe is a big continent and taking Germany and France and extrapolating it to the rest of Europe doesn't always work.

If iOS has 17% of the market, having 12-15% is not something to be ashamed of. It still represents billions upon billions of business every year.

Sometimes its better to set realistic but achievable goals than to aim for the sky and flop.

I am not sure where the scandal is here. Playbooks were selling for $499 in Q1 and Q2, and that was for the basic model. Now they get marked down to $199, so the $485M writedown represents about 1.5-1.6 million Playbooks written down by $300 a piece.

This is an inventory writedown so probably RIM ordered from the manufacturer way more Playbooks than they actually ended up selling (no news here) and whatever inventory was in the "warehouses" so to speak got written down.

This sort of advise works great until they actually do sue. One of my biggest clients got recently sued by a long term client of his - a Fortune 100 company with all kinds of legal resources. My client had to shut down his business and then scramble to protect his personal assets like house, properties, etc.

The simulator has had the ability to reload an edited and recompiled app without needing to do a full reboot. This feature has been there for about 1.5 years (if you count the beta period).

Good points on the older OS 4.6 devices. Right now we have something like 95% of all app purchases done from OS 5 and OS 6 devices, so going back to OS 4.6 has not been considered worth it for many developers for some time now. I do it just to be nice to my users but I get less than 2% OS 4.6ers coming in.

In general RIM has been really good at pushing users to upgrade their devices so in practice you would see most 8900 buyers come out with OS 5 on their device.

I know, but it has been like that since BlackBerry OS 5 which came out years ago. It is the older devices especially the ones that came out way before the iPhone did that don't have this ability.

It honestly hasn't been that much of an issue for me. Sometimes the server is down for a few minutes, an hour max but then things are back up and running quickly.

The signing server is part of RIM's security system. It basically allows RIM to control the quality of applications. For example, in any software that proves malicious will get their developer's key instantly revoked - and the server won't side that developers applicaiton. Malicious apps can be instantly revoked by ALL device simply by putting that developer's certificate on a blacklist and pushing it down to all devices.

To do security like this, you need a chain of certificate signings and a controlling server.

And enterprises love security like that.