Prime Minister Theresa May has won a vote of confidence in her leadership of the Conservative Party by 200 to 117.
After securing 63% of the total vote, she is now immune from a leadership challenge for a year.
Speaking in Downing Street, she vowed to deliver the Brexit “people voted for” but said she had listened to the concerns of MPs who voted against her.
Her supporters urged the party to move on but critics said losing the support of a third of MPs was “devastating”.
Certain intervals of time we accept as givens. The earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hours; seven days make a week; a half-hour sitcom is really 22 minutes plus commercials; Apple does a big-deal iPhone launch every other year. You know: the fundamentals.
In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore identified one of these intervals in a way we still associate with his name. Thanks to miniaturization, he observed, the number of transistors that could fit onto a single microchip was doubling every year, making computers exponentially more powerful, energy-efficient, and inexpensive. In 1975, he revised Moore’s law, as it was by then known, to set the period of doubling at 24 months, where it has remained ever since.
ON TUESDAY, THE House Judiciary Committee had the opportunity to question one of the most powerful people on the planet—Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, the company that filters all the world’s information. And they blew it.
Over the course of three and a half hours, the members of the committee staked out opposite sides of a partisan battle over whether Google search and other products are biased against conservatives. Republican members largely criticized the company for burying conservative websites in search results and amplifying criticism of conservative policies—accusations that Google has repeatedly denied. Democrats only poured fuel on the fire by spending their allotted five minutes helping Pichai shoot down those trumped-up claims, which are hard to prove either way thanks to the company’s black box algorithms. The rhetorical tennis match left precious little time for committee members to explore in any detail the urgent questions around Google’s interest in building a censored search engine for China, the company’s bulk data collection practices, its recent security breaches, or issues related to competition and antitrust regulation.
The question of how self-driving cars will interact and communicate with humans is one that has come up before, but the answer is still up in the air. Google has been looking into this at least since 2012, and earlier this year, Uber filed a patent for using flashing lights and sounds to talk to pedestrians. Now, the United States Patent Office has granted Lyft with a patent for what it describes as an autonomous vehicle notification system.
Lyft’s solution entails developing a predetermined message to display on the most visible car window. In one example, each window includes a projector, a see-through screen or another display device to communicate the message.
Google will end the consumer version of its ill-fated social network Google+ in April, four months earlier than expected, after finding another security issue impacting more than 50 million people.
In a blog post Monday, Google said that a November software update caused the Google+ API to inadvertently make users’ personal information viewable to developers, even if they had opted to keep their details private. The bug was addressed after six days, and users’ passwords and financial data were not impacted, according to the company.
A lot of people want to quit their jobs at Verizon, and that’s a really good sign for the economy.
In a drive to cut costs and shift investments as it rolls out 5G service, the company announced on Monday that 10,400 management employees had accepted voluntary buyout deals, out of 44,000 who were eligible.
That might have been partially due to the fact that the terms of severance were generous, at three weeks of pay for each year of service, capped at 60 weeks.
But it’s likely there’s a larger factor at play: The unemployment rate is now 3.7%, compared to 5.8% when Verizon last offered buyouts, meaning those workers figure they have a good chance of taking the money and finding another job.
When Anne Marie Berger started ForeFront Corp. two decades ago, it was a one-woman business and she thought she’d keep it that way. But Berger soon learned that building relationships with customers and colleagues was key to running a prospering company.
Today, ForeFront Corp.—which provides data management, integration, and mapping solutions to businesses—has more than 50 employees in Fair Haven, N.J. and Berger has worked hard to make relationship building a key tenet of her company’s culture.
Here are three lessons she’s learned while building her business from a one-woman startup to a thriving global technology consultancy.
Starting a business could be your next step toward financial and personal freedom. But obviously there’s a lot to think about before in dive in.
First of all, is this the lifestyle you want to pursue? Second, do you have enough money to get started? Use the financial essentials below to help you determine whether launching a business makes financial sense for your future.
Look at Your Personal Financial State
If you’re trying to open a company, you’ve probably been setting money aside. Even if they’ve been doing this, most business owners still have to take out a loan, but your savings should substantially reduce the personal financial burden.
A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria is blending art and design in an incredibly novel way, presenting the mind-bending work of legendary 20th century artist M.C. Escher within an immersive, custom-designed space created by innovative Japanese design studio nendo.
The exhibition, entitled Escher X nendo: Between Two Worlds, was inspired by the influence Escher’s work has had on architecture and design over the past 50 years. In an attempt to transcend the conventional idea of an exhibition space, the NGV tasked nendo with creating a series of spaces that function as novel three-dimensional evocations of Escher’s work, while also pragmatically functioning as environments to display a large series of classic prints and drawings from the Dutch artist.
It is touted as a unique opportunity to build a smart city within a major city, literally from the ground up. Environmental remediation, new infrastructure, digital electrification plans, new-age mobility options — the whole shebang.
If only people would stop complaining about privacy issues.
Up in Toronto, Canada’s largest city, there’s been much ado about what will happen to all the data that the future Sidewalk Toronto project will generate. The focus of the debate has been, predictably, Alphabet (Google’s parent company) whose Sidewalk Labs is the primary partner in the project. And yet, for all the sturm und drang about personal information, not a single spade-full of dirt has been spilled yet.
Dispatches From The Front 