And it is the innovators that can imagine the context in the present that make the future. This idea that we might all like a computer on our desk. That radio might be supported by more interesting things than just reading out a list of prices. That a punch card might be used for more than making cloth.
BTW, I think Heinlein got it right with the waterbed.
Some people don't enjoy work and paying them more might get them to work on time or to work the whole day. Or you could just fire them and hire someone who has an understanding that they have agreed to do a job for a rate of pay.
A hovering car certainly has applications. It would require less expensive roads and would be, in principle, much more self driving than a car on wheels. It would have to be as it will likely be difficult to control purely by human means. But a flying car. We essential have those. You just need a pilots license and have begin and end locations near an airfield for takeoff and landings. Of course air fields are not nearly as prolific as they used to be.
Not sure what this has to do with anything, even though it is true. I order through amazon from independent book dealers. The books appears to come from the dealers, packed by the dealers, often with a nice note from the dealers.
The article states that the workers in the amazon warehouse are frequenting the book sellers in the area. Whether they are treated badly, these workers have the disposable income to buy a book. I am big book buyer, but there have been times in my life when I went to the library instead of a bookstore. So as badly as these employees are treated, they are paid, though probably not as much as they should be, enough to have some expendable income.
And honestly, no matter what no independent retailer can compete with the big box or online stores. I used to pay extra just to support the local book and music dealers. Ultimately there were just not enough of us and they went out business.
Although not in Seattle, from what I can see most people who do not shop from Amazon shop at Powell's. I guess they think Powell's is cooler. But here is the rub. I often order books through Amazon from other book dealers. Amazon gives these bookstores the online infrastructure and allows them to reach an audience outside of the neighborhood, and an Audience, that, like me, hasn't spent hours in a bookstore going through books, at least has not done so in a decade or so. I read the reviews, and but the books.
So it is good that the Amazon sweat shop pays enough so people can buy books and helps the economy in this way. I am sure it helps the economy in other ways. That does not mean that bookstores have any long term potential.
it simply has to do with stock. New stock is too expensive as publishers have always punished the independent bookstore with higher prices. Used stock is going to become increasingly hard to come by.
Innovation is always built on the back of others. Nothing pops out of the blue. It is only the lack of education that makes on believes otherwise. The entire affordable microcomputer industry is based on Compaq's reverse engineering(stealing) of the IBM OS. The free browser for everyone is due to MS conning a profitable firm, then giving away the browser and forcing that firm into bankruptcy. Innovation has never been about pulling a product out of you ass. A knife was not suddenly one day made. We had to figure out how to mine the melt, smelt it, and then how to make it a knife that is not brittle.
No, it's not. It is just that they can't rent hotel room to meet their hookers and keep their mistresses on staff.
How much is this really. As a comparison, our football stadium was supposed to cost $400 million in today's dollars. It actually cost closer to $600 million, also in today's dollars. About $350 million of that is paid by extorting fees from visitor to the city. I can't imagine how making visitors pay for something they have no use for makes, sense, but there it is.
This reminds me of people who complain about the $400 million cost to launch the Space Shuttle. The same amount of a high end movie. But what does a movie give us?
I would hate any municipality t waste $1500 on a such an untested device. The lack of usefulness and high price point of this product is indicated by the fact that, as far as I can tell, anyone who applies to the explorer program gets in. I sent an application a while back, just saying I was going to play with them, and I got an offer. I did not know that they cost more than my first car.
Now of course they have a "sale", where apparently anyone can buy the glasses for the low, low price of $1500.
Galileo was circa 1600. This is where, arguably, modern physics begins. Observation, rejection of common beliefs such as giants, geocentric ideas, and inherent properties such as motion, heat, and such.
Issac Newton was 1700. Not a huge step forward, but embedded physics in a mathematical base. He was able to do some things that Galileo could not because of the math.
Between 1700 and 1900, there was much refinement, many extensions, and then the ultraviolet catastrophe among other things
So 1900 saw Relativity and Quantum Mechanics which solved some real problems with the classical physics that dominated in the 18th and 19th century. It explains so much, has lead to so much, but there is so much to know.
QM and Relativity don't work well together. Black Holes are infinities in real space. In the 21st century, for the first time, we have an expatiation for mass, it is no longer just an inertial concept. I don't know if we yet know why inertial mass is the same as gravitational mass.
We thought that if we could sequence DNA we would know everything. We don't. So there is a lot to find out.
As we grow up we learn to deal with, and solve, problems. Some of these problems are technical, some are social, some are personal. For social problems we learn from various models. Video games, by and large, model the solution to social problems as violence. Yes, there can be models of teams solving social problems by violence, but for the most part it is a narcissistic and individual fantasy of absolute power and lack of normal social consequences.
This, of course, does not in any mean that these violent models imprint themselves on the player. But there is credence to the idea that if a person practices using aggression and violence to solve social problems, that she or he may use those same methods in more authentic interactions.
Android has a vast majority share in Asia. Apple tried a cheap phone and Android is still a vast part of the market share. Microsoft has enough cash to give away the Phones, but that did not seem to help with KIN or anything after or before.
As mentioned before, MS does not have a great incentive to kill Android. MS get a free chunk of money for every handset sold. Cheap phones from Nokia simply mean that MS loses money.
Have you read the Wiki pages of Google or Rush Limbagh? Clearly written by shills. Have you seen the responses when one talks negatively about Google. Personal attacks are very common. This is little new, but the solution when certain agents have money to burn to create a very crafted images, is elusive.
This was probably just a bunch of kids 'having fun.' I blame high schools and some colleges. High Schools are still focusing on bullying instead of teaching the kids that it is often assault or criminal intent. There are kids coming out school thinking that cursing out a stranger of threatening to hurt someone if they don't get their way is proper behavior. Likewise, some colleges still call borderline criminals acts 'hazing' or 'initiation', thus leading educated people to believe that getting drunk, committing crimes, and getting away with it makes everything ok.
Gentrification may also be an issue. When I was growing up one thing I noticed was the my friends who lived in more affluent or gated neighborhoods would talk about being taken home to their parents instead of arrested. They might be doing drugs, selling drugs, breaking into cars, whatever. We have seen a case where a teen has stolen beer, gotten drunk, and killed some people while driving, has gotten probation. The parents would pay reparations. So if a lot of wealthy parents are moving in, and protecting their kids, then those kids might be less motivated to not commit crime.
Suppose you owned a house, spent a lifetime paying for it, and decided that it was too big for you and you might rent it to a family who can use the space. You charge enough to cover the taxes, maintenance, residential insurance, and part of the rent for your small apartment. You find a family that is willing to pay your rates, and explain the lease. You do a background check and interviews and they seem ok. They sign the lease, thereby agreeing to your terms, and in exchange you let them live in your place.
A few months later you house has completely burned down. It turns out that they have been going to visit grandma every weekend and they have been renting out the house Friday and Saturday nights. The insurance company, who is always looking for any loophole, says that it does not cover subletting and will not cover the claims. You sue and eventually get some of the money back, but have lost everything in the process.
Where is the crime here. Of course, if you own your place, you can probably let it out for a several weekends a year and be ok. You could also negotiate with your landlord and pay additional fees so you could let it out. But doing stuff with things you don't own is not a great expectation.
I know. They must hate tourists because prostitution is illegal, and I am not going anywhere where there are a whole four hours a day when a bar must be closed. I suppose that is why so many people go to Illinois and the like for vacation.
When I was in school, the MS stuff was available for the cost of the media. I know that people say MS gives away programming tools, but really, they don't. I have tried to program with what MS gives away and it is crap in comparison with something like Eclipse or xcode.
Now, it is true that with xcode you need a Mac, so add $1000 for the programming bit. xcode is also much more complicated that it needs to be for the purpose of teaching.
There are cheap ways to teach kids to program. For way under $100 you can give a kid an Ardiuno kit, then she can use sketch of process to code it. As mentioned, python can be used for free. I suppose we need something like codeschool for kids to get them started.
Using industry estimates, i calculated that it would cost a few billion dollars to equip the next several years of commercial airplanes, not counting the current fleet. This money to prevent an expenditure 2 order of magnitudes smaller that might only occur every 10 years. It is risk assessment. And there is no way to know if it would have been any more effective than the current system. It would be just as meaningful to say that we should put a battery in the black box that lasts a year, or has a much stronger transmitter.
The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic.
In the Larry Flynt case the naked women were deemed to be adults who allowed their image be taken and printed. He likely did the paper work for releases, and photographed the women overtly and with full knowledge that the images would be published. Honestly the freedom of speech that was being protected in that case were of the women, not of Flint. A negative ruling would have meant that an adult women, or in the case of hustler many men, would no longer be able to expose herself or be penetrated for compensation.
So the cases are not really comparable. In revenge porn the images may not have taken overtly. In revenge porn the woman might not have agreed to have the images spread beyond the local area. Furthermore, it might a violation of copyright. If the victim did know that she or he was being filmed, there is no guarantee that victim was not in fact the one who made arrangement for the film to be made and in fact the person with copyright. The person who releases the film may just be an participant who did not own the camera, or set up the production, and therefore has not right to communicate the film to the public.
So to be clear if a person arranged to video themselves masturbating or having sex with partner(s) that are aware the video is going public, then stopping that would be a violation of free speech, but otherwise not. If we did accept your argument, then we would also have to accept that it would be a violation of free speech to film film young girls in a dressing room or to take covertly film women going up an escalator so we can see up their dresses. In both cases, this is not acceptable, and the former is is not only because of age issues.
There is no good streaming option, and really there is no paid digital video ownership option that is reasonable. If you buy a video, and Apple or Amazon, or whoever, does not want to support the streaming anymore, you no longer are able to use the bits that you own. Most boxes that you put on your tv are either tied to a vendor so options are limited or are not so options are limited.
Honestly a box that can hook up to the cable, steam all common formats from a personal external hard disk, and can steam most paid services still wouldn't be any good(is there box close to this, maybe TiVo?) because the cable company can pull the service at any time or streaming might change and there is no guarantee you can upgrade.
All parties are so focused on maximizing revenue, by forcing a separate $100 box for each service, by renting DVR for cable, that the entire service is writing it own doom. We have been down this road before with DVDs. The copy protection and high price and ads that could not be skipped meant I stopped buying DVDs years ago, and never will pay a blue ray. That is money they left on the table.
We also saw this with CDs. Huge prices, the exec must have thought they came when the profits rolled in, then technology meant that all the CDs could be copied, and it all fell because there was no strategy to deal with the new reality, and only legal hoopla to try to stop it.
At some point bandwidth will be fast enough, even with the obstruction of the major ISP, and enough people will be willing to take a risk, that if there is not a streaming option the video will feel the same loss of value of the audio industry.
"USAID is the lead U.S. Government agency that works to end extreme global poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realize their potential."
So things like anonymous communications that allows the citizenary to communicate without their government surveling them can be considered part of that mission. USAID is actually directed to promote democratic governements. It is like the old Radio Free America. They do not actively undermine governments, but they do put propaganda on the airwaves that tell the people of those legitimate governments to rebel.
Of course all this falls apart when we note that US is no longer recognizing anonymous and free communications as a fundamental right of the citizen. This is a bit hyperbolic, but a lot of our taxpayer money is being spent collecting open communications and attempted to minimize anonymous communication.
I would look at it differently. Sponsors who in the past have worked with show that find women who are willing to have sex with a stranger chosen by the sponsor, or a group of people fighting against each other to win an contest with no real consequences, or, at the most, skilled workers competing to create something that is not going to be technically evaluated, ie does not have to pass a machine, such as cooking.
So there are things that can be done with people who have more freedom in their process or end product. It was a failure of the sponsor to understand the process. More than likely, the sponsor has some money tied up in this process, perhaps more than any other agent. Due to the sponsor incompetence, that money has been lost.
It may be that this means any such venture in the future will be unlikely. It may be that some more competent sponsor will understand the special circumstances and manage to create a profitable venture.
What Apple can learn is to manage expectations. Pebble lost credibility because they promised a lot and then could not deliver. Even now the website has been revamps to encourage orders and development rather then detail what the watch can do for the consumer. For instance, it focuses on Apps that communicate with the pebble, but not what the Pebble can do out of the box. I don't fault Pebble for this. Pebble was crated when Apple had almost all of the market share, but Apple has never played well with third party hardware who tried to do something beyond the scope of what Apple wanted. OTOH, even Samsung has not been able to come up with a watch that plays well with it's own products.
Recall the iPhone has never worked well as a a phone. That is why it is now a mobile device that happens to let you make calls. I miss my Razr which was a great phone, but little else. I guess I don't miss it that much.
We can expect that the watch will not be that great as a watch. It is kind of like the ipod Nano, which was a good watch but could have had more faces, and was not at all stylish. We can expect something that is a passable watch. What is going to be critical is the communication with the phone. And hopefully one full day, at least 18 hours, of battery life with heavy usage of the apps. This is the one thing that is still wrong with the iPhone.
One technical problem with ST is that there is so much magic. The transporter, the universal translator,the communicators that always work, the warp engine, etc. All these are so the story does not get bogged down in what is essentially a space opera. But there is so much magic that creating suspense, or dealing with certain human situations, such as the difficulty of communication, is hard to create.
Bad segments, the The Motion Picture, do a bad job in dealing with the magic. Good segments, like Darmok, use the strength as a weakness. The society has become so dependent on the universal translator doing the brunt of communication, that they have lost the ability to interpret and comprehend. Picard had to relearn that skill in order to save the day.
It is perhaps indicative that geeks, who do not always value the process of communications, do not appreciate this episode.
the fallacy is comparing ride share services with Taxis. They are different. One is regulated service provided to make sure that public can be assured of a higher level of transportation than fixed rate public transport, the other is an ad hoc less regulated service akin to hiring a limo. I am sure no one here would make the argument that Uber is a ripoff because it costs more than a bus?
There are two problem with the ride share services. First is liability. Those who provide the service are often do not commerical insurance. Therefore any incident that occurs during commercial operation may not be covered. Likewise, companies like uber is only really responsible when a passenger is being transported, otherwise they would be open to huge liability. The limits of liability when a driver is simply logged on is minimal. To make it work, service like Uber should either require commercial insurance, or for a few provide required ad hoc insurance anytime a driver is 'on the clock'.
Second is safety. Taxi service is one of the most dangerous jobs out there. I don't know of any significant incident yet, but it is just a matter of time. At some point a driver is going to die, there is going to other lawsuits, and the model is going to be tested.
That said, there should be a new model in which taxis can vary the fee structure, compete on service, and provide to specific needs.
I find for each local field, the employees tend to come from a very universities. The reason for this, I guess, is not only chauvinism but also because graduates of a certain university speak a common language. Therefore, if the objective is not just becoming educated, but rather trying to use a degree to make more money, look at the local colleges, look at which graduates get hired.
As indicated elsewhere in the discussion, online universities appear to be best for people who already have a job but need a sheet of paper to advance. If no one in your area is hired new employees from SHNU, the time spent there will not be profitable.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, I think Heinlein got it right with the waterbed.
Some people don't enjoy work and paying them more might get them to work on time or to work the whole day. Or you could just fire them and hire someone who has an understanding that they have agreed to do a job for a rate of pay.
A hovering car certainly has applications. It would require less expensive roads and would be, in principle, much more self driving than a car on wheels. It would have to be as it will likely be difficult to control purely by human means. But a flying car. We essential have those. You just need a pilots license and have begin and end locations near an airfield for takeoff and landings. Of course air fields are not nearly as prolific as they used to be.
The article states that the workers in the amazon warehouse are frequenting the book sellers in the area. Whether they are treated badly, these workers have the disposable income to buy a book. I am big book buyer, but there have been times in my life when I went to the library instead of a bookstore. So as badly as these employees are treated, they are paid, though probably not as much as they should be, enough to have some expendable income.
And honestly, no matter what no independent retailer can compete with the big box or online stores. I used to pay extra just to support the local book and music dealers. Ultimately there were just not enough of us and they went out business.
Although not in Seattle, from what I can see most people who do not shop from Amazon shop at Powell's. I guess they think Powell's is cooler. But here is the rub. I often order books through Amazon from other book dealers. Amazon gives these bookstores the online infrastructure and allows them to reach an audience outside of the neighborhood, and an Audience, that, like me, hasn't spent hours in a bookstore going through books, at least has not done so in a decade or so. I read the reviews, and but the books. So it is good that the Amazon sweat shop pays enough so people can buy books and helps the economy in this way. I am sure it helps the economy in other ways. That does not mean that bookstores have any long term potential. it simply has to do with stock. New stock is too expensive as publishers have always punished the independent bookstore with higher prices. Used stock is going to become increasingly hard to come by.
Innovation is always built on the back of others. Nothing pops out of the blue. It is only the lack of education that makes on believes otherwise. The entire affordable microcomputer industry is based on Compaq's reverse engineering(stealing) of the IBM OS. The free browser for everyone is due to MS conning a profitable firm, then giving away the browser and forcing that firm into bankruptcy. Innovation has never been about pulling a product out of you ass. A knife was not suddenly one day made. We had to figure out how to mine the melt, smelt it, and then how to make it a knife that is not brittle.
How much is this really. As a comparison, our football stadium was supposed to cost $400 million in today's dollars. It actually cost closer to $600 million, also in today's dollars. About $350 million of that is paid by extorting fees from visitor to the city. I can't imagine how making visitors pay for something they have no use for makes, sense, but there it is.
This reminds me of people who complain about the $400 million cost to launch the Space Shuttle. The same amount of a high end movie. But what does a movie give us?
I would hate any municipality t waste $1500 on a such an untested device. The lack of usefulness and high price point of this product is indicated by the fact that, as far as I can tell, anyone who applies to the explorer program gets in. I sent an application a while back, just saying I was going to play with them, and I got an offer. I did not know that they cost more than my first car. Now of course they have a "sale", where apparently anyone can buy the glasses for the low, low price of $1500.
Issac Newton was 1700. Not a huge step forward, but embedded physics in a mathematical base. He was able to do some things that Galileo could not because of the math.
Between 1700 and 1900, there was much refinement, many extensions, and then the ultraviolet catastrophe among other things
So 1900 saw Relativity and Quantum Mechanics which solved some real problems with the classical physics that dominated in the 18th and 19th century. It explains so much, has lead to so much, but there is so much to know.
QM and Relativity don't work well together. Black Holes are infinities in real space. In the 21st century, for the first time, we have an expatiation for mass, it is no longer just an inertial concept. I don't know if we yet know why inertial mass is the same as gravitational mass.
We thought that if we could sequence DNA we would know everything. We don't. So there is a lot to find out.
This, of course, does not in any mean that these violent models imprint themselves on the player. But there is credence to the idea that if a person practices using aggression and violence to solve social problems, that she or he may use those same methods in more authentic interactions.
As mentioned before, MS does not have a great incentive to kill Android. MS get a free chunk of money for every handset sold. Cheap phones from Nokia simply mean that MS loses money.
Have you read the Wiki pages of Google or Rush Limbagh? Clearly written by shills. Have you seen the responses when one talks negatively about Google. Personal attacks are very common. This is little new, but the solution when certain agents have money to burn to create a very crafted images, is elusive.
Gentrification may also be an issue. When I was growing up one thing I noticed was the my friends who lived in more affluent or gated neighborhoods would talk about being taken home to their parents instead of arrested. They might be doing drugs, selling drugs, breaking into cars, whatever. We have seen a case where a teen has stolen beer, gotten drunk, and killed some people while driving, has gotten probation. The parents would pay reparations. So if a lot of wealthy parents are moving in, and protecting their kids, then those kids might be less motivated to not commit crime.
Suppose you owned a house, spent a lifetime paying for it, and decided that it was too big for you and you might rent it to a family who can use the space. You charge enough to cover the taxes, maintenance, residential insurance, and part of the rent for your small apartment. You find a family that is willing to pay your rates, and explain the lease. You do a background check and interviews and they seem ok. They sign the lease, thereby agreeing to your terms, and in exchange you let them live in your place. A few months later you house has completely burned down. It turns out that they have been going to visit grandma every weekend and they have been renting out the house Friday and Saturday nights. The insurance company, who is always looking for any loophole, says that it does not cover subletting and will not cover the claims. You sue and eventually get some of the money back, but have lost everything in the process. Where is the crime here. Of course, if you own your place, you can probably let it out for a several weekends a year and be ok. You could also negotiate with your landlord and pay additional fees so you could let it out. But doing stuff with things you don't own is not a great expectation.
I know. They must hate tourists because prostitution is illegal, and I am not going anywhere where there are a whole four hours a day when a bar must be closed. I suppose that is why so many people go to Illinois and the like for vacation.
Now, it is true that with xcode you need a Mac, so add $1000 for the programming bit. xcode is also much more complicated that it needs to be for the purpose of teaching.
There are cheap ways to teach kids to program. For way under $100 you can give a kid an Ardiuno kit, then she can use sketch of process to code it. As mentioned, python can be used for free. I suppose we need something like codeschool for kids to get them started.
Using industry estimates, i calculated that it would cost a few billion dollars to equip the next several years of commercial airplanes, not counting the current fleet. This money to prevent an expenditure 2 order of magnitudes smaller that might only occur every 10 years. It is risk assessment. And there is no way to know if it would have been any more effective than the current system. It would be just as meaningful to say that we should put a battery in the black box that lasts a year, or has a much stronger transmitter.
In the Larry Flynt case the naked women were deemed to be adults who allowed their image be taken and printed. He likely did the paper work for releases, and photographed the women overtly and with full knowledge that the images would be published. Honestly the freedom of speech that was being protected in that case were of the women, not of Flint. A negative ruling would have meant that an adult women, or in the case of hustler many men, would no longer be able to expose herself or be penetrated for compensation.
So the cases are not really comparable. In revenge porn the images may not have taken overtly. In revenge porn the woman might not have agreed to have the images spread beyond the local area. Furthermore, it might a violation of copyright. If the victim did know that she or he was being filmed, there is no guarantee that victim was not in fact the one who made arrangement for the film to be made and in fact the person with copyright. The person who releases the film may just be an participant who did not own the camera, or set up the production, and therefore has not right to communicate the film to the public.
So to be clear if a person arranged to video themselves masturbating or having sex with partner(s) that are aware the video is going public, then stopping that would be a violation of free speech, but otherwise not. If we did accept your argument, then we would also have to accept that it would be a violation of free speech to film film young girls in a dressing room or to take covertly film women going up an escalator so we can see up their dresses. In both cases, this is not acceptable, and the former is is not only because of age issues.
Honestly a box that can hook up to the cable, steam all common formats from a personal external hard disk, and can steam most paid services still wouldn't be any good(is there box close to this, maybe TiVo?) because the cable company can pull the service at any time or streaming might change and there is no guarantee you can upgrade.
All parties are so focused on maximizing revenue, by forcing a separate $100 box for each service, by renting DVR for cable, that the entire service is writing it own doom. We have been down this road before with DVDs. The copy protection and high price and ads that could not be skipped meant I stopped buying DVDs years ago, and never will pay a blue ray. That is money they left on the table.
We also saw this with CDs. Huge prices, the exec must have thought they came when the profits rolled in, then technology meant that all the CDs could be copied, and it all fell because there was no strategy to deal with the new reality, and only legal hoopla to try to stop it.
At some point bandwidth will be fast enough, even with the obstruction of the major ISP, and enough people will be willing to take a risk, that if there is not a streaming option the video will feel the same loss of value of the audio industry.
"USAID is the lead U.S. Government agency that works to end extreme global poverty and enable resilient, democratic societies to realize their potential."
So things like anonymous communications that allows the citizenary to communicate without their government surveling them can be considered part of that mission. USAID is actually directed to promote democratic governements. It is like the old Radio Free America. They do not actively undermine governments, but they do put propaganda on the airwaves that tell the people of those legitimate governments to rebel.
Of course all this falls apart when we note that US is no longer recognizing anonymous and free communications as a fundamental right of the citizen. This is a bit hyperbolic, but a lot of our taxpayer money is being spent collecting open communications and attempted to minimize anonymous communication.
So there are things that can be done with people who have more freedom in their process or end product. It was a failure of the sponsor to understand the process. More than likely, the sponsor has some money tied up in this process, perhaps more than any other agent. Due to the sponsor incompetence, that money has been lost.
It may be that this means any such venture in the future will be unlikely. It may be that some more competent sponsor will understand the special circumstances and manage to create a profitable venture.
Recall the iPhone has never worked well as a a phone. That is why it is now a mobile device that happens to let you make calls. I miss my Razr which was a great phone, but little else. I guess I don't miss it that much.
We can expect that the watch will not be that great as a watch. It is kind of like the ipod Nano, which was a good watch but could have had more faces, and was not at all stylish. We can expect something that is a passable watch. What is going to be critical is the communication with the phone. And hopefully one full day, at least 18 hours, of battery life with heavy usage of the apps. This is the one thing that is still wrong with the iPhone.
Bad segments, the The Motion Picture, do a bad job in dealing with the magic. Good segments, like Darmok, use the strength as a weakness. The society has become so dependent on the universal translator doing the brunt of communication, that they have lost the ability to interpret and comprehend. Picard had to relearn that skill in order to save the day.
It is perhaps indicative that geeks, who do not always value the process of communications, do not appreciate this episode.
There are two problem with the ride share services. First is liability. Those who provide the service are often do not commerical insurance. Therefore any incident that occurs during commercial operation may not be covered. Likewise, companies like uber is only really responsible when a passenger is being transported, otherwise they would be open to huge liability. The limits of liability when a driver is simply logged on is minimal. To make it work, service like Uber should either require commercial insurance, or for a few provide required ad hoc insurance anytime a driver is 'on the clock'.
Second is safety. Taxi service is one of the most dangerous jobs out there. I don't know of any significant incident yet, but it is just a matter of time. At some point a driver is going to die, there is going to other lawsuits, and the model is going to be tested.
That said, there should be a new model in which taxis can vary the fee structure, compete on service, and provide to specific needs.
As indicated elsewhere in the discussion, online universities appear to be best for people who already have a job but need a sheet of paper to advance. If no one in your area is hired new employees from SHNU, the time spent there will not be profitable.