chrisstu

I base the Muji prediction on their hopeless online presence, frequently changing stock items, the lack of customers in the clothing section and my experience with other UK retailers. I hope I'm wrong.

I've tried UniQlo but so far have been unable to find an item I want to buy in there. I seem to recall on a recent visit that their winter coats have goose down, which I avoid.

Ah, a fellow Islington local! I agree Muji is popular, but call it my retail 6th sense. Nice places like that just don't seem to survive in the UK. The retail market seems quite segmented into dirt cheap rubbish and ultra high end. The middle ground has been decimated, Gap being another example.

I'd say things have been heading south for Gap UK shops for the last 10 years and accelerated recently. They have been on a downward quality path for a long time with no apparent strategy. Every time you go back, they have different ranges, so no repeat purchases are even possible. Found something you like and want to buy again? Tough. And the quality got progressively worse. For basics like jeans and t-shirts, I switched to H&M and Muji about 5 years ago. I suspect we will lose Muji soon as well though.

I can't help wondering just how small the market is for a 13.3" panel at 900 Euros. I would guess there are less than 100 customers.

I think there’s a bigger issue with passive inversing. Once an equity is in a cap weighted index like the S&P 500 with a high weighting, like Apple, can’t we end up in a situation where the individual company performance is irrelevant? Nobody will sell Apple because they just own it through their SP500 fund. As long as they are buying and holding the index fund, Apple remains at a high valuation. The only thing that differentiates individual stocks is active investors. And as they make up a smaller and smaller fraction of over investment, they become less relevant.

Plausible deniability for any future discoveries on her office computer. Very clever.

Boeing will be overjoyed at that news being publicised. All its customers will be asking for a $3m discount on their orders now.

The infuriating this is that whenever this happens at BT, they say nothing about the cause and nothing about how they will prevent recurrence. As a BT Infinity customer, I've had a total loss of internet several times over the last couple of years and never any feedback from BT afterwards.

Excellent article and a nice balance between discussing the technology and the ethical implications. As a technologist I find it frustrating that the media almost always focuses on the ethics.

While the politicians in certain locations might seek to constrain this type of research, often on religious grounds, it will simply move offshore to more liberal regimes. As the technology progresses, the wealthy will utilise it to engineer "designer babies". The politicians and ethicists may as well accept that this research and development is going to happen; they can simply choose whether they want to control and benefit from it or give away the lead.

The BBC is one of the great things about the UK. Unfortunately, it's constantly being attacked, especially by the right wing media and Tory politicians. The reality is that some things have to go, if only to placate them. If it's BBC3 and a few bits of the website, then so be it. As long as BBC2, BBC4, R3, R4 and the World Service remain, it's not the end of the world.

To me it just feels rather curt. I suppose it saves the effort of trying to write something meaningful.

The black bar is nice and geeky but totally inappropriate to mark the passing of a human being.

It's probably down to Bloomberg hiring this guy: http://www.businessinsider.com/bloomberg-hires-bi-executive-...

The new site is a visual abomination with articles having titles designed as link-bait, similar in style to Business Insider.

Content-free, advert laden linkbait.

Looking at that DDJ page epitomises an awful web page layout. Garish ads, links, blocks of text all over the place. It's painful and actually makes it difficult to read the article content. It's amazing what people will put up with.