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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.

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.

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?

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.

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 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'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 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.

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.