I am French and there are rumors that some people inside the police forces are earning side money by funneling information from the police files to former police officer working as private investigators (with the advantage of having insider access to police data).
I always assumed that this practice was widespread. That is just an extension of the traditional practice of "tricoche" (police officers performing investigations for private customers).
It is obvious that former police officer working as private have their relation network. This makes former police officer so valuable. Active officers trust them and want them to succeed (they may need to go private themself one day). I have not heard about money transfer. This may happen sometimes at small scale, but corruption is a very sensible subject in police. People do not want to be caught as corrupt. This is very damaging to reputation.
Only thing I could find about Softbank and paradise papers is a few lines in a NHK world article [1]:
> Telecom giant Softbank Group set up a business entity based in the Cayman Islands to operate an investment fund four years ago. The name of the company's CEO, Masayoshi Son, was mentioned in one of the documents.
> Softbank says it registered the investment fund there to avoid dual taxation for its investors.
While suspicious, this seems like too little evidence to support a broad statement such as "softbank is the acceptable face of dodgy money".
It seems strange to use the present tense ("moves to GSuite", "ditches Microsoft") for a change that should take (at least) 5 to 10 years to implement.
Also, the change should be to move away from Microsoft Office in favor of tools suited for the tasks at hand (databases, project-management applications, bug trackers, requirement management tools...) and only migrate to GSuite for the subset of tasks where having an office suite makes sense.
There is 'should' and there is 'does' :-) When IBM acquired Blekko they were moving people over to the web based version of Lotus notes at 1,000 employees a month (give or take) and with 450K employees that was a 30+ year timeline (it got faster as they worked out transition kinks but still) the point is that at certain scales these things are a lot more difficult for enterprises than you might expect.
The biggest challenge (as I saw it) was making sure that everyone could email everyone else all through the transition because if email stops, the company stops in that portion.
All of that to say that even though Airbus is one less than a third that many employees (133K vs 450k) its organization complexity is up there. And keeping complex organizations functional and efficient as possible during a large transition is often addressed by keeping the rate of change manageable (aka slower than you would expect).
People need to be trained, documents moved and converted, business processes adapted, ... In addition, solutions will have to be found for documents that exceed GSuite’s capabilities. 10 years? No, but 2-3 years for sure.
> “We expect it to take up to 18 months to reach every one of our 130,000 employees but our teams are already starting to work on a plan which will involve you and of course our social partners,” said Enders.
By the time announcements like this are made, there have already been lengthy successful IT pilots with much change management planning already conducted, partners engaged, etc. If they say 12-18mo, they may slip to 18-24mo, but definitely not multiple years.
That said, the other commenter is also accurate: a "full" roll-out will not mean 100% replacement. Things would break and it would be an irresponsible management decision to force some things that shouldn't be forced.
Source: I led a large MSO-->G Suite migration in a previous role.
The 16 Bi$ figure is for 36 aircrafts (including the 16 options) and means a price per unit of 445 Mi$. This is exactly the unit cost listed on Wikipedia. So we can assume the real price for the contract is lower.
> So we can assume the real price for the contract is lower
Very much so. Common discounts for airframes can be 40-50%. Given the circumstances I'd assume Emirates got somewhere near 50; who knows. But both parties needed this deal and as other comments correctly point out the unusually public manoeuvring has been going on for months.
Of course, no-one in the media has any idea about this very closely guarded commercial information and so they simply go by the list price.
I am French and switch operators every year (because they have those stupid offers with significantly cheaper subscription that only last 12 months and it only takes a couple of minutes to subscribe to a new one) and I have used tethering frequently with Free, Numericable, Bouygues and SFR without getting any warning or noticing any oddity in the content served.
Also, Orange has a bit more inertia than the others (it used to be the French public phone company France Telecom), but their support page says that tethering is part of the regular mobile subscriptions.
Rich people store art in freeports (along with gold bars, like in the Geneva Freeport) to secure their assets while avoiding paying taxes. And from times to times, they lend some of their art pieces to museums in countries where they want to further reduce their taxes.
According to an article in The Economist[1] in 2013: "Because of the confidentiality, the value of goods stashed in freeports is unknowable. It is thought to be in the hundreds of billions of dollars, and rising."
> This could change if they keep trying to make more "interactive" the newer models though.
The airline wants to transfer equipment health data as soon as possible to its headquarters using air/ground communication systems (satcom, cellular, airport wifi...) to plan for maintenance and delays.
Pilots want to use their iPad to browse their mail and the logbook listing the history of system failures and displaying the current state of the aircraft to know if it is flyable.
The centralized maintenance system that provides these information to the airline and the pilots has to be connected to all avionic equipments to collect health data.
True, I didn't remember the telemetry system. We have no information about it, as far as I know it could be using the same satcom uplink, as it only sends limited error codes, not a complete status of the plane.
Current systems can not be updated remotely, just send information.
I am in France and it seems Visa Premier and Mastercard Gold with payments deferred to the end of month - with zero interest - are now considered "credit cards" (because they can be regarded as a limited form of credit, I suppose).
I have a small "CREDIT" label next to the chip of my new card and airlines (EasyJet, Ryanair...) now reject my card if I select the cheaper "Debit card" payment option.
I always assumed that this practice was widespread. That is just an extension of the traditional practice of "tricoche" (police officers performing investigations for private customers).