The information they swap should remain confidential, so as to protect sources and (legitimate) methods.
By giving options to loyal shareholders, the government is guarding against the risk that its stake might drop below 50% should Air France swap equity with another airline in an alliance.
While it should be possible to swap out the memory card on the new iTunes phone for one with more capacity, the person who has seen the handset says the phone's software appears to artificially cap song storage at 25 songs, regardless of how much memory the phone has.
Technologies like Bluetooth which uses short-range radio should make it easier to swap information between devices, but there are going to be times, when you are down the pub, when you won't want to have every gadget you own with you.
In the past, the Shia militia has insisted that some of the thousands of Palestinians in Israeli jails should be part of a prisoner swap, but over the past three years of halting, ultra-discreet negotiations through German mediators, this demand seems to have been dropped.
The system is also made future proof by a patent-pending capability to swap out the wireless card should hardware technology change or if the user chooses a different network infrastructure in the future.
ENGADGET: ARIS 100-watt wireless speaker shipping for $499 with DLNA and Windows 8 certification
What all three have done, in differing degrees, is to swap innovation for execution, which should, in theory at least, lower risk and make it quicker to get to market.
The location (and menu details) will remain a secret until the day, and guests are requested to bring along a gift to swap with another foodie (they should make or re-gift their contribution, rather than purchasing something new).
Instead, investors should seek more timely measures of sovereign risk, preferably through price signals from competitive debt and credit default swap markets, and whenever those are unavailable, from more objective and transparent models.
Should there be a dispute in the CDS market over a Greek reprofiling, it would be resolved by the International Swap Dealers Association (ISDA), a voluntary body which governs the market.
ECONOMIST: How the credit-default market will judge a deal on Greece
应用推荐