How do you figure? It's unlikely insurance companies will reduce their premiums for male drivers, they'll just increase the premiums for female customers.
Let me try and explain my maths, previously the fee where £100/£50 (M/F) income of £150. So they will have to increase F fee, so it will be (£100/£100) income of £200. Due to competition someone will then lower their fee to be (£75/£75) back again to £150 income.
So in the long run, my statement stands, it will cost me less.
I think you are seriously over-estimating the level of true competition in the UK Car Insurance Market. (hint; there are almost certainly less actual distinct insurance providers than you think...)
That is why I put it in quotes. They "can but wont" which translates to "We can't because insurance for men costs more because of the statistics [showing men have more claims therefore have to pay higher premiums]". Given that rule of thumb they will increase females premiums to make them equal.
Not only have I worked for insurance companies, but if I ran one, this is exactly what I would do if I was told everyone had to be treated equally. How can I charge men less if I know that they are going to make more claims?
This has to be one of the most ridiculous rulings I've ever heard. Statistically, male drivers are more dangerous, so why should women now subsidise this behaviour? It's pure ideological lawmaking, designed to show how egalitarian the EU is by in fact foisting a law upon its citizens which is completely disconnected from reality.
In their attempt to achieve "equality" and "fairness," they've actually achieved neither - the two concepts are mutually exclusive in the insurance world. The whole concept of insurance, like life itself is predicated on inequality in the boolean algebraic sense of the word. It just proves how meddlesome the Eurocracy is becoming.
Besides, where does it end ? It's likely now that male pension annuities, up till now cheaper than female ones, due to the earlier death of the average male will increase too.
That's not "fair," is it?
It seems to me your intention here was not to point out the perceived wrongness of this particular decision, but to provide "yet another case of Brussels bureaucrats meddling in our lives". In doing that, you're purposefully confusing the lawmaking and judiciary parts of the legal system to create an imagined body which you creatively name the "Eurocracy", while this was a court decision independent of those actually making the law. In short, your intention was to rant, using this ruling as an excuse, and not to provide potentially interesting information.
As for the ruling itself, I don't see what's wrong with it. It's gender discrimination, and gender discrimination is (IMO rightly) unlawful. I have never been in a car accident, I'm a careful and relatively safe driver and I don't appreciate having to pay more just because I happen to be male.
I'm sure you can come up with statistics that show people of a certain ethnicity are more likely to be in an accident too, but insurance companies know that's a no-go. Discriminating by gender is exactly the same; it's based on something you are that you can't change, unlike driving experience and where you live which you can.
If the fact that "Statistically, male drivers are more dangerous" would mean that no matter how safe am i driving, my insurance cost will be higher than my wife's insurance would prob make me feel discriminated based my gender. I want my_insurance= f(driving_experience, incident_count, my_car, my_area, etc) not my gender.
Premiums are based on the groups to which you belong. Some of those groups are driving experience, your car, your area, your incident count, etc. Another is, of course, your gender. If a valid statistical correlation can be found between gender and revenue, they will adjust the premium to compensate.
so what about if next study will show that statistically afro-american drivers are more or less risky that others? still fine to have different rates for them???
I dont know much about how car insurance are calculated but if their formulas still have some gender discrimination - this should be banned.
That would be fine if insurance companies had the administrative manpower to tailor policies to each individual customer, but they deal in generalities so they rely on a risk profile derived from people similar to you. Also, your function is not applicable to a first time driver who has no previous experience or incident count.
"deal in generalities" should not be function of my gender(which is 1)initially not under my control 2) even unclear how to define in some "complex" cases? ).
my funtion is perfectly applicable for firsttimers. in this case some of the args are zero So first time male/female drivers in same region, age, cars, other characteristics should have similar costs for their first ins_period.
Again I dont see any troubles with this initiative, to me it makes perfect sense.
Here in Ireland we're constantly hearing about "the knowledge economy" but I think it has yet to materialise. Ever since Intel set up shop here we've managed to attract the biggest movers in technology to set up their European HQ.
So much so in fact that the bigger European countries constantly bitch about us, citing our 12.5% corporation tax rate to mask their own failure in attracting these investments. The real reason probably has to do with the fact our spoken English is the best in the world and years of "free" fees for college places have resulted in a hugely educated population.
Producing indigenous firms which don't serve niche markets is still beyond us. This is probably due to a conservative funding community with the "spend way more than you need, we'll refund it after" model, as well as university students majoring in "safe" subjects like arts, languages or business rather than mathematics and computer science.
Even for those students majoring in compsci, they gear you towards getting a job, not starting your own company.
I dunno.. I think our corporate tax does have a lot, if not close to everything, to do with companies basing their European headquarters here (eg, see Double Irish/Dutch Sandwich [1]). Our spoken English isn't as amazing as you make it out to be (its certainly not bad, but best in the world?? besides, have you ever been to Cork ;-) or certain parts of Dublin for that matter...) and while the "free" fees certainly helped our education, I still feel our education is inferior to a lot of the rest of the world. For example, computer science-related courses are still not attracting as many students as it should, even though, here in Ireland, IT jobs are much more plentiful than others [2].
Of course, regardless of how great we think we are as a startup hub, I've seen very little focus on startups here. Besides the occasional startup weekend, nubie.ie and Enterprise Ireland (which, IMHO, isn't very useful to a lot of - if not most - Internet tech startups), I see absolutely nothing here that shows any kind of innovation or advancements in the way of startups. Which is a pity, because I think that would be a great start to improving the economic situation.
university students majoring in "safe" subjects like arts, languages or business rather than mathematics and computer science
Funnily (or sadly) enough, I think the "safe" subjects are the ones that are really feeling the full force of the economic problems, while jobs in sciences, from where I stand anyway, are reasonably plentiful (well, compsci anyway, I haven't paid much attention to others since they're not relevant to me personally).
Even for those students majoring in compsci, they gear you towards getting a job, not starting your own company.
Agreed. This is definitely the case here. I think its holding back our potential, but I don't know what could be done about it really.
> Producing indigenous firms which don't serve niche markets is still beyond us.
I'm not sure about that, I've been in Havok (http://www.havok.com/) for several years now, very successful Irish startup in the Games/Entertainment space (hardly a niche), acquired by Intel three years ago ($100m+). Granted there's room to improve in terms of the number of indigenous startups, but there are success stories out there.
In my opinion, Havok is an outlier success story though. Sure, there are a few other Irish startups that achieved phenomenal global success, but they are relatively few and far between when compared to the more startup-focused places like SV.
Also, Jerry Kennelly (who sold Stockbyte), is running a seed capital program somewhat similar to YC, called the Endeavour program: http://www.endeavour.biz/ application date was yesterday. I posted a comment here the other day that we need to stop this Irish attitude of moaning about everything, and start doing stuff.
Regarding Stockbyte, I never said there wasn't any other successful Irish startups besides Havok, just that they are few. We can hope that this is improving though.
Thanks for the links, though. Very useful. Hopefully the two funding programs are better than EI and the other ones I've seen in the past. I definitely see the startup situation improving here, its just happening very slowly and I think a greater focus on startups would be good for our economy (though I don't know what more can be done to help that along).
"....though I don't know what more can be done to help that along"
Both my parents are secondary level teachers, yet I hold the controversial opinion that we should put a huge emphasis on teaching the basics of computing and programming to children at the primary school level. I remember doing some light programming in BASIC on a toy VTech "computer" when I was about ten, but I would have progressed far quicker and learned "skillz to pay teh bills" if there was someone who could've opened my eyes to the possibilities of programming at a younger age.
I agree, that would be a very beneficial thing for science and compsci in general, not just startups.
Actually, I was EXTREMELY disappointed with our second level computer education (in relation to computers). Out of my class, only one other person went on to study something computer related (and not a computer science degree). The school made little effort in trying to promote such things and instead focused on the usual (mechanical) engineering and business type things that are (or were when I was in school, anyway) so popular. Yet those are industries (as far as I see, anyway) badly affected by the recession. Schools, in my experience - I'm sure some are better than others in this respect, put much too little emphasis on computer education, even though it has become such an integral part of most peoples lives and certainly of business. I think some solid computing and programming education for primary level children would be a great advancement for our country, but honestly, second level education is so lacking in that area that I think any additional computing-related education would be beneficial.
In fact, it should be a mandatory part of education for everyone. Even if most people are disinterested and do something else, the problem solving and analysis skills would serve them well whatever they do. It would also expose people to computers and programming who would otherwise have overlooked them. For example, all this hype about getting women into computing could, in my opinion, be tackled by introducing everybody, male and female, at an early age.
I'm not suggesting that Ireland is devoid of successful startups, just they seem to be the exception rather than the rule. We have also had Baltimore, Iona etc but we should be producing way more.
Yep. If you go to some parts of South Dublin, Kildare, Cork, Galway (where the technology hubs in ireland are, incidentally) the accents are very neutral and easy to understand. Several European news stations with a spoken english bulletin use Irish presenters for this reason.
I don't know if the information being out of date matters in this case, the problems of OS version fragmentation still remain.
Android antipiracy measures are extremely brittle and rely on server-side verification, this has been circumvented by decompiling app archives, patching them and rebuilding them, which is entirely possible using apktool or your decompiler of choice. Frankly im surprised that the platform isnt crawling with malware.
I wouldn't deny that fragmentation is an issue, although from my (limited) personal experience the biggest issue has been designing for all the different screen sizes/resolutions and still having your app look okay.
And yes, any antipiracy mechanism can be circumvented. That said, 90+% of android users probably dont have the knowhow to grab the apk, decompile it, and remove the server side check. And I'm not sure on this last bit, but I know at least in the US some carriers (ATT) disable installing apps that aren't from the appstore. I haven't read about the details of the antipiracy mechanism, so I can't really say more than that.
Also, its unclear to me if you're linking the fact that theyre so easily decompiled/cracked and that you're surprised it isnt crawling with malware.
If piracy is as big a problem on Android as the article claims, the free client/paid subscription model is probably the most viable way to generate revenue. However, Android is not proprietary software-friendly - It's INSANELY easy to decompile APK archives and reverse engineer content.
Interesting. How vibrant is the dev community for Palm phones?
OTA Updates are another story on Android. Different manufacturers price OS updates differently like Samsung, who price them as feature updates whereas some other Android phone manufacturers price them as cheaper maintenance upgrades. It can be a bit of a lottery as to whether your phone will ever receive an upgrade.
I'm part of the WebOS dev community and its small but growing. I've sat on the fence for a while because I wasn't sure where Palm would be a year ago. And while I found the interface to be the best in the smartphone space (sorry iOS) the hardware it was deployed on was deplorable.
They are moving from Mojo (javascript based) to Enyo (C++ based) platform so quite a few developers are also waiting for the new SDK. Most of the apps that are currently written in Mojo will continue to work but I sense that most developers are in the same boat I am. No point in learning a framework that has one foot in the grave when the next one is right around the corner.
Enyo is NOT a C++ platform. There's a C++ "plugin development kit" that's been out for a couple months now and AFAIK that doesn't change when Enyo gets introduced. I didn't really look, not particularly interested in WebOS C++ development.
Enyo is a palm-developed js framework originally created by the Ares editor team that performs (reportedly) dramatically better on the same hardware than Mojo. I believe the difference is that Enyo uses a javascript layout system a la Sproutcore/Cappuccino instead of the html+css layout in Mojo so they're basically innerHTMLing everything instead of performing a bunch of DOM manipulations/reflows. I'd expect a number of other changes but aside from that and allowing multiple-layouts (i.e. for tablets) that's all I came away with from the developer day talk on it.
I started looking into WebOS when CES was going because I was wondering at Palm's absence. It turns out that the homebrew community is surprisingly vibrant and they have (basically) an independent market app (preware) for their apps and patches. I was most impressed by the patching. The entire interface is interpreted, so changing how things work is just a matter of modifying the appropriate javascript and rebooting the device.
All in all, I was impressed enough to get a developer account and start intermittently hacking apps. Enyo isn't out but it'll have to come out soon in order to handle tablet layouts so I'm heistant to commit to a Mojo app before the big Feb 9 event. I don't know about a webos phone (google apps+NewsRob+Kindle on android do basically everything I want to do with a phone) but I'll definitely be getting a WebOS tablet for reading/development.
Good article (apart from advocating developing for Palm??), bad title. It should be called "Why distributing your Android app sucks." No commentary on actual app development itself. My thoughts on that are that Google should develop an IDE for Android developers - Eclipse is unstable bloatware, the Android emulator sucks and supporting different screen sizes and resolutions is odious to say the least.
People often repeat that Eclipse is "unstable." I can use one Eclipse process for weeks, even months on-end with JVMs from Sun and IBM on Linux, and it never crashes or needs a restart (except if installing new plug-ins). The ADK tools don't have the polish of the core features, and I haven't used them as much as other tools, but what's causing instability?
I've had serious problems with Eclipse's autocomplete/intellisense prediction feature. It often begins listing identifiers and then just hangs indefinitely. I don't know if the fact I'm developing using the Windows build is significant - it is Java after all so it should be platform agnostic.
I seem to have bad luck with IDE's though. I develop using Visual Studio 2008 and that has some horrendous problems, though VS was never known for stability (six service packs for VS6, anyone?)
If you do not like Eclipse, don't use it (for Android application development).
There are at least two other free IDEs (IntelliJ IDEA CE and Netbeans) and you don't need one anyway. Use a text editor and you're just fine. I'd recommend building with Maven but if you really want to use ant.
