Your observations in no way contradict Uber being rent seeking
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
They put almost all the financial burden and risk to give you a good service on the drivers
Which is exactly why Uber drivers are better than taxi drivers, thus clearly contradicting your original claim (assuming you're the GP). Uber drivers have direct financial incentives to provide good service. These incentives are stronger than the similar incentives for taxi drivers, even though taxi drivers are tipped and Uber drivers aren't.
don't let the bluring of lines Uber does to the general public lead you to false conclusions.
What blurring is that? It all seems very clear to me: Uber is just the service that connects drivers and riders, facilitating payments, doing a bit of quality control, and taking a cut of the transaction. To the degree that Uber does a good job, they'll attract more riders and more drivers, and get to take the cut of more transactions. If they don't do it as well... the competition is only an app download away, for both drivers and riders.
There is exactly no point in Uber's business model where the drivers are any better than the average taxi driver.
Have you ever been in a taxi? Or an Uber car?
I could debate the theoretical ins and outs of the business models and how they might affect quality, but there's really no need because simple observation demonstrates that you're wrong. I have occasionally encountered a taxi that was clean and in good condition, with a driver who is polite and friendly. I have also encountered many cabs that were old, dirty, smelly and with a driver who was rude and ornery. I've yet to find an Uber car or driver that wasn't very pleasant.
Last weekend I took an Uber from my hotel in London to Heathrow, and took the opportunity to ask the driver about his background and his motivation for driving for Uber. It was really interesting. He was a well-spoken, neat, polite black man with five children, and a bachelor's degree in some sort of I/T (I didn't ask for details). He was originally from Somalia, but had left to escape the turmoil when he was 17, moving first to Dubai and then to London, where he's been living for 15 years. He drove for various minicab services until he got his degree, then went to work doing tech support. He liked the tech support job, but found he didn't make as much money as when he was driving a cab, so he decided to try Uber. He loves driving for Uber. He makes roughly as much money as when he was driving a cab, but loves the flexibility that Uber gives him. If he wants to go do something with his kids, he just logs off and does it. If he needs a little more cash, he works a little more, and makes sure to be working during surge times.
He still does tech support from time to time, but only on a short-term contract basis, which he says pays better than the full-time job he once had but doesn't provide a stable income. Uber provides him with a flexible alternative work option that makes it possible for him to do the intermittent contract work. He likes the variety, though his family prefers the times when he's driving, because they see more of him then.
His goal is to build up a nest egg of about $200K US and then move back to Somalia and open a retail business focused on selling imported goods. He says he took a lot of business classes while doing his degree and feels confident that he can be successful. I think he will.
All in all, he was a pretty impressive guy. Definitely not the sort I've found typically driving cabs.
Thank you. That's a specific law. Not one that applies to Cisco, though.
And that's just the "legitimate" legal part.
Which is the only relevant part for this thread. The GP's claim was that the law required Cisco to let the NSA in. It doesn't. Extra-legal actions the NSA make take are a different story; those Cisco is allowed to resist (though how successful they might be is an open question).
I'm actually curious how the illegal fiber-splitter-copies-everything-into-the-NSA-room part will continue to work when next-generation multi-core multi-mode fibers are deployed. Splicing a partial mirror into a single-core fiber is one thing, somehow stealing signal from 36 cores each bearing hundreds of carriers without breaking signal integrity is a little more physically... difficult. As will be processing hundreds of TB per second of data from them, but Moore's Law will magically fix that, right?
Well, by definition there won't be more data than the equipment owned by the legitimate users of the cable can process, so data volume growth will be constrained by processing capacities. Doesn't mean it'll be easy, or cheap, though.
How can they convince anyone that they can keep the NSA out when the Law says they have to let the NSA in?
Which law is that, exactly?
People on/. (and elsewhere) make a lot of invalid assumptions about what the law allows the government to do. National Security Letters, for example, are assumed to be able to compel anyone to do anything and keep their mouths shut about it. In fact, the law says that NSLs can only require the recipient to provide data already in possession (not set up long-lived back doors) and further can only demand metadata, not content. NSLs are only one legal vehicle for requests, but as far as I can tell there is no law that could compel Cisco to provide the NSA with built-in back doors.
Of course, the NSA can also potentially insert moles into companies and get them to add back doors, but Cisco actually may be able to convince people that that hasn't happened. It will be hard. Especially since the parent's incorrect view is very widespread, but AFAICT, there's no legal restriction making it impossible.
Beside your point about OS-level support for automatic migration, it should also be pointed out that Chrome -- and probably other browsers -- will automatically install all of your previously-installed extensions for you.
However, although people are creatures of habit, people are also lazy, and it seems likely that most people will, at some point in time, encounter a situation where they have to go out of their way to install an ad blocker, and if ads are no longer bothersome they may well not do it. In addition, my preferred ad-blocker (Ad Block Plus) by default doesn't block "acceptable" advertising, meaning ads that are small, motionless and unobtrusive. I've never felt a need to change that default, and in fact I feel like I'm doing a good thing in leaving it as-is. I do prefer the ad-supported web over a paid model, and I do want to help in a small way to fund the sites that I use. I think many people who aren't in the "on principle" camp feel the same.
$229 is for the Chromebox only, from Google. You can actually get the same thing for $150 or so at Newegg, and elsewhere. The meetings package also includes speaker, microphone, camera and a remote control. I'm not sure why that stuff adds over $700 to the price. I expect you could buy the parts yourself and configure it for considerably less. I'd guess the package price is set based on comparing with competitive options, rather than on the cost of the components. Most companies wouldn't blink at $999 to equip a conference room.
The ability to add a USB webcam and USB Microphone. This device would be the PERFECT way to get Google Hangouts into the corperate world of small "Huddle" type meeting rooms.
Perfect? I doubt it. It's kind of low-powered for that application. You can add the webcam and microphone, but I doubt the result would be particularly outstanding.
Why is it that Apple and Google never ever thinks of the corporate and company uses for their products?
You mean like Chromebox for Meetings? I have this setup in my home office. Audio and video quality is excellent, automatic integration with Google calendaring is slick, it's very nice. The background photos when not in use are a nice bonus. If you take a look at the photo I linked, you'll notice the on-screen keyboard. That's there only because I popped it up to hide some meeting names; I hardly ever use it. Mostly I just schedule meetings on my calendar and the Hangouts display notifies me when one is coming and I tap the meeting description to join. I can also type meeting names if they're not on my calendar, or I can make phone calls. On the rare occasion I do an audio-only teleconference, I still use the Chromebox system because it's convenient and very high quality.
It could be done with a Chromebit rather than a Chromebox, but it wouldn't be much cheaper ($85 vs $229; not a substantial difference in the corporate world), and I doubt performance would be as good.
Antarctic ice core records confirm the Greenland results. Yeah, just two points, but points rather far apart, so it at least not a localized phenomenon.
Anyway, what is it that you're trying to argue? That rapid climate change cannot possibly happen without human intervention? Please see my second point, about why anthropogenesis or the lack thereof is irrelevant.
Climate change is occurring. We don't want it do. We must do something about it. The cause of the change really doesn't matter, except insofar as it might point us towards a potential solution... but it's obvious that merely reducing carbon output is *not* going to be enough, so the solution to which it points us is insufficient. We must do more.
Not the point.
Point: it's never changed this fast, and it's our fault.
Actually, your point is half false, and half irrelevant.
Greenland ice core records show that the planet has, in relatively recent history (geologically), seen much faster temperature changes. Up to a 7C rise in 40 years, IIRC, and without any obvious cause. That's the false part.
The irrelevant part is whether or not it's our fault. Suppose we had exactly the same temperature rise, with potentially exactly the same impacts on human life, but that it happened due to some sequence of events that we did not cause. Would that mean that we should sit back and do nothing about it?
Of course not. If your house is burning down, it doesn't matter whether you started it or not, you put out the damned fire.
In this case, we need to understand that the planet's climate is not and has never been stable. We have compelling evidence that it not only has been dramatically hotter and colder, but also that human-affecting changes can happen on human time scales. This means that we must either learn to stabilize the climate, or accept that we're going to have to live with whatever chance brings us, or some combination of the two.
Now is a really good time to start learning to actively manage the climate. We've proven that we can affect it, the next step is to work on affecting it in ways that benefit us, rather than harm us.
This. Because once you have an ad blocker installed, it doesn't matter if the ad industry changes for something more reasonable again. You'll simply not see it, so you won't uninstall.
Until you get a new computer. Then it's not a question of whether you'll uninstall, but whether you'll re-install.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, the ad industry could do would even remotely get those people to move their asses again to uninstall that ad blocker.
True, but not particularly relevant.
They don't need to get people to uninstall the ad blocker, they just need to make ads sufficiently non-annoying that when people get a new device they aren't motivated to re-install the ad blocker.
The settings for takeoff should be known before you try it. You would want to know if the airplane was capable of taking off before you start to roll down the runway.
Sure, but it still seems like measuring thrust vs acceleration as you start accelerating down the runway is a really easy way to double-check weight and if it's too far out of plan, automatically abort the takeoff. It seems like this should be possible long before the plane is moving too fast to cut thrust and brake safely to a stop.
So in other words, you were talking out your bottom end and can't back it up with anything.
Got it...
Dude, you didn't provide a shred of support for your claim that police can require women to remove their niqab, either. You just said "I'm not aware of anywhere in the US where a police officer cannot ask...", but your lack of knowledge isn't evidence of anything.
Googling a bit seems to show that it's not really well-settled. I can find comments from police officers who say that they aren't sure if they could ask a woman to remove a face covering, and that they'd refer it to their supervisors, or if absolutely necessary get a female officer to handle it in a private location. I can't find anyone saying "sure, I'd tell her to take it off". After being sued by a woman who was required by a male officer to remove her hijab (which doesn't cover the face), Detroit instituted a policy that officers may not require the hijab to be removed, but that's quite different from a niqab.
There's also the story of Sultaana Freeman, who was required by a Florida judge to remove her niqab to be photographed for her DL, but with a female photographer in a private location. The question of what would be done in a traffic stop seems not to have come up, but it seems consistent with the ruling that she could not be required to remove her face covering in public or in front of a male police officer.
There are a handful of other states that have explicit policies permitting photo-less DLs for people who have religious objections to having their faces photographed.
It appears to me that this is an open question, which hasn't really come to a head yet because not many niqab-wearing women drive. When it does, though, I'd expect police to make allow reasonable allowances, which would just require getting a female officer to check the woman's identity.
Gun license has no such requirement, since it is opposed by the NRA.
What's a "gun license"?
If you're referring to a concealed weapon permit (authorizing the bearer to carry a gun, and to hide it), AFAIK every single state that issues such permits puts photos on them. Every state except Vermont issues such permits (in Vermont no permit is required). If you're referring to some document giving permission to own a gun, there is no such thing.
I've gotten updates for Netgear, Linksys, Belkin and Asus routers. On my current Asus it pops up a notice when I log into the admin console whenever there's new firmware (maybe twice per year? I don't pay close attention). On the other routers I've had to go look on the manufacturer's site, but they've all gotten updates.
This would be a nightmare for users. When finding a ride using Uber, it is easy to decide if you accept the price. With phone/data surge pricing you will have to constantly check the rate every time you use the phone for something.
The phone could notify you when surge pricing is in effect. A simple icon in the status bar at the top would work well. Pull your phone out, notice that data currently costs 3X what it normally does, then decide you'll send a text tweet about your meal, and send the video later after surge pricing ends. The services that consume the most bandwidth are, by and large, the least critical, and a simple indicator would make it easy to decide to avoid heavy bandwidth usage during peak usage times. Services on your phone could automatically adjust their bandwidth consumption as well, similar to the way many defer heavy operations until Wifi is available, but more nuanced.
Although we'd all rather just have totally unlimited data and never have to think about it, assuming a reasonably efficient market[*] surge data pricing would drive total costs down. Cost-conscious consumers in particular would be better off, because bandwidth during off-peak times would likely end up being practically free, since nearly all of the bandwidth cost is involved in building out capacity for peak times.
[*] Note that "an efficient market" is not what we have in the US, with respect to mobile data. Carriers have managed, through various mechanisms, to introduce very high barriers to switching, allowing them to avoid competing too directly.
The point of state funded healthcare is that it is in the nations interest for you to be healthy, and therefore productive.
Up until you're no longer productive, at which point it's in the nation's best interest for you to die quickly and cheaply. And if ever need expensive treatment that exceeds your future productivity (or, more precisely, the tax revenues that will be generated by your productivity and its transitive effects), then likewise it's in the nation's best interest for you to die.
These negative (from your perspective) incentives of the nation are somewhat mitigated by the nation's interest in making other (productive) citizens feel supported. This means the nation at least needs to try to hide them.
They can just grind the remaining prescriptions for homeopathic remedies into dust, and present a grain of that dust to the pharmacist, who then gives them a glass of water.
But that would put them at risk of an overdose, as more diluted substances have higher potency !
Distilled water is the most dangerous stuff on Earth. If you don't keep it absolutely pure, if it gets some tiny trace of something in it, instant massive overdose.
In generating random keys, a mechanical HDD (not sure about SSDs) is perhaps ideal for generating randomness (there are patents on this). It can quickly generate true random keys without worrying about seeding entropy to generate pseudo-random keys.
There's no point in random keys for this application, in fact they're a bad idea unless you have some sort of tamper-resistant hardware in which to store them, and even then it's questionable. If you generate random keys, they have to be stored in the drive firmware, which makes them accessible to an attacker who has physical possession of the drive.
In this application, the keys should be derived from a user-provided password which must be entered at boot. The drive's firmware should use a good password-based key derivation function to make brute force harder, and it must not store either a copy of the plaintext key anywhere, or even anything easily derived from the key. If the drive wants a quick way to check if the password is correct, it should store a secure hash of the derived key.
If your computer is stolen, the lesson here is to assume it's compromised because physical access trumps all.
If your computer is stolen while the drive is in an unlocked state. If you steal my encrypted drive when it's powered down, and you don't have my password, and my password is good, and the implementation of the key derivation function doesn't suck, you're out of luck even with complete physical control.
Yes, there are a lot of ifs there. Defeating an attacker with physical possession is not easy. It's not impossible, though.
They will be prosecuted, I'm assuming. Too many municipalities where there are clear restrictions for taxi services.
They can only be prosecuted if Uber actually meets the definition of a taxi service. Not the generic notion of what we think taxi services are, but the specific legal definition. This is why Uber is legal in many areas where taxis are regulated, because the legal definition of "taxi" includes things like street hailing, etc., that Uber doesn't do. This issue has been gestating long enough that I suspect Uber has already been shut down everywhere it's actually illegal.
From my perspective, of course, I hope the locales with regulations that prohibit Uber fix their laws to make it legal. I hugely prefer Uber over traditional taxi services. It's so much more convenient and pleasant. And cheaper. My wife has also been thinking about driving for extra money, though we need to make sure the insurance coverage is adequate.
Slashdot Mirror
Your observations in no way contradict Uber being rent seeking
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
They put almost all the financial burden and risk to give you a good service on the drivers
Which is exactly why Uber drivers are better than taxi drivers, thus clearly contradicting your original claim (assuming you're the GP). Uber drivers have direct financial incentives to provide good service. These incentives are stronger than the similar incentives for taxi drivers, even though taxi drivers are tipped and Uber drivers aren't.
don't let the bluring of lines Uber does to the general public lead you to false conclusions.
What blurring is that? It all seems very clear to me: Uber is just the service that connects drivers and riders, facilitating payments, doing a bit of quality control, and taking a cut of the transaction. To the degree that Uber does a good job, they'll attract more riders and more drivers, and get to take the cut of more transactions. If they don't do it as well... the competition is only an app download away, for both drivers and riders.
There is exactly no point in Uber's business model where the drivers are any better than the average taxi driver.
Have you ever been in a taxi? Or an Uber car?
I could debate the theoretical ins and outs of the business models and how they might affect quality, but there's really no need because simple observation demonstrates that you're wrong. I have occasionally encountered a taxi that was clean and in good condition, with a driver who is polite and friendly. I have also encountered many cabs that were old, dirty, smelly and with a driver who was rude and ornery. I've yet to find an Uber car or driver that wasn't very pleasant.
Last weekend I took an Uber from my hotel in London to Heathrow, and took the opportunity to ask the driver about his background and his motivation for driving for Uber. It was really interesting. He was a well-spoken, neat, polite black man with five children, and a bachelor's degree in some sort of I/T (I didn't ask for details). He was originally from Somalia, but had left to escape the turmoil when he was 17, moving first to Dubai and then to London, where he's been living for 15 years. He drove for various minicab services until he got his degree, then went to work doing tech support. He liked the tech support job, but found he didn't make as much money as when he was driving a cab, so he decided to try Uber. He loves driving for Uber. He makes roughly as much money as when he was driving a cab, but loves the flexibility that Uber gives him. If he wants to go do something with his kids, he just logs off and does it. If he needs a little more cash, he works a little more, and makes sure to be working during surge times.
He still does tech support from time to time, but only on a short-term contract basis, which he says pays better than the full-time job he once had but doesn't provide a stable income. Uber provides him with a flexible alternative work option that makes it possible for him to do the intermittent contract work. He likes the variety, though his family prefers the times when he's driving, because they see more of him then.
His goal is to build up a nest egg of about $200K US and then move back to Somalia and open a retail business focused on selling imported goods. He says he took a lot of business classes while doing his degree and feels confident that he can be successful. I think he will.
All in all, he was a pretty impressive guy. Definitely not the sort I've found typically driving cabs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Assistance_for_Law_Enforcement_Act
Thank you. That's a specific law. Not one that applies to Cisco, though.
And that's just the "legitimate" legal part.
Which is the only relevant part for this thread. The GP's claim was that the law required Cisco to let the NSA in. It doesn't. Extra-legal actions the NSA make take are a different story; those Cisco is allowed to resist (though how successful they might be is an open question).
I'm actually curious how the illegal fiber-splitter-copies-everything-into-the-NSA-room part will continue to work when next-generation multi-core multi-mode fibers are deployed. Splicing a partial mirror into a single-core fiber is one thing, somehow stealing signal from 36 cores each bearing hundreds of carriers without breaking signal integrity is a little more physically... difficult. As will be processing hundreds of TB per second of data from them, but Moore's Law will magically fix that, right?
Well, by definition there won't be more data than the equipment owned by the legitimate users of the cable can process, so data volume growth will be constrained by processing capacities. Doesn't mean it'll be easy, or cheap, though.
How can they convince anyone that they can keep the NSA out when the Law says they have to let the NSA in?
Which law is that, exactly?
People on /. (and elsewhere) make a lot of invalid assumptions about what the law allows the government to do. National Security Letters, for example, are assumed to be able to compel anyone to do anything and keep their mouths shut about it. In fact, the law says that NSLs can only require the recipient to provide data already in possession (not set up long-lived back doors) and further can only demand metadata, not content. NSLs are only one legal vehicle for requests, but as far as I can tell there is no law that could compel Cisco to provide the NSA with built-in back doors.
Of course, the NSA can also potentially insert moles into companies and get them to add back doors, but Cisco actually may be able to convince people that that hasn't happened. It will be hard. Especially since the parent's incorrect view is very widespread, but AFAICT, there's no legal restriction making it impossible.
Beside your point about OS-level support for automatic migration, it should also be pointed out that Chrome -- and probably other browsers -- will automatically install all of your previously-installed extensions for you.
However, although people are creatures of habit, people are also lazy, and it seems likely that most people will, at some point in time, encounter a situation where they have to go out of their way to install an ad blocker, and if ads are no longer bothersome they may well not do it. In addition, my preferred ad-blocker (Ad Block Plus) by default doesn't block "acceptable" advertising, meaning ads that are small, motionless and unobtrusive. I've never felt a need to change that default, and in fact I feel like I'm doing a good thing in leaving it as-is. I do prefer the ad-supported web over a paid model, and I do want to help in a small way to fund the sites that I use. I think many people who aren't in the "on principle" camp feel the same.
$229 is for the Chromebox only, from Google. You can actually get the same thing for $150 or so at Newegg, and elsewhere. The meetings package also includes speaker, microphone, camera and a remote control. I'm not sure why that stuff adds over $700 to the price. I expect you could buy the parts yourself and configure it for considerably less. I'd guess the package price is set based on comparing with competitive options, rather than on the cost of the components. Most companies wouldn't blink at $999 to equip a conference room.
The ability to add a USB webcam and USB Microphone. This device would be the PERFECT way to get Google Hangouts into the corperate world of small "Huddle" type meeting rooms.
Perfect? I doubt it. It's kind of low-powered for that application. You can add the webcam and microphone, but I doubt the result would be particularly outstanding.
Why is it that Apple and Google never ever thinks of the corporate and company uses for their products?
You mean like Chromebox for Meetings? I have this setup in my home office. Audio and video quality is excellent, automatic integration with Google calendaring is slick, it's very nice. The background photos when not in use are a nice bonus. If you take a look at the photo I linked, you'll notice the on-screen keyboard. That's there only because I popped it up to hide some meeting names; I hardly ever use it. Mostly I just schedule meetings on my calendar and the Hangouts display notifies me when one is coming and I tap the meeting description to join. I can also type meeting names if they're not on my calendar, or I can make phone calls. On the rare occasion I do an audio-only teleconference, I still use the Chromebox system because it's convenient and very high quality.
It could be done with a Chromebit rather than a Chromebox, but it wouldn't be much cheaper ($85 vs $229; not a substantial difference in the corporate world), and I doubt performance would be as good.
Antarctic ice core records confirm the Greenland results. Yeah, just two points, but points rather far apart, so it at least not a localized phenomenon.
Anyway, what is it that you're trying to argue? That rapid climate change cannot possibly happen without human intervention? Please see my second point, about why anthropogenesis or the lack thereof is irrelevant.
Climate change is occurring. We don't want it do. We must do something about it. The cause of the change really doesn't matter, except insofar as it might point us towards a potential solution... but it's obvious that merely reducing carbon output is *not* going to be enough, so the solution to which it points us is insufficient. We must do more.
Not the point. Point: it's never changed this fast, and it's our fault.
Actually, your point is half false, and half irrelevant.
Greenland ice core records show that the planet has, in relatively recent history (geologically), seen much faster temperature changes. Up to a 7C rise in 40 years, IIRC, and without any obvious cause. That's the false part.
The irrelevant part is whether or not it's our fault. Suppose we had exactly the same temperature rise, with potentially exactly the same impacts on human life, but that it happened due to some sequence of events that we did not cause. Would that mean that we should sit back and do nothing about it?
Of course not. If your house is burning down, it doesn't matter whether you started it or not, you put out the damned fire.
In this case, we need to understand that the planet's climate is not and has never been stable. We have compelling evidence that it not only has been dramatically hotter and colder, but also that human-affecting changes can happen on human time scales. This means that we must either learn to stabilize the climate, or accept that we're going to have to live with whatever chance brings us, or some combination of the two.
Now is a really good time to start learning to actively manage the climate. We've proven that we can affect it, the next step is to work on affecting it in ways that benefit us, rather than harm us.
And there is no way back.
This. Because once you have an ad blocker installed, it doesn't matter if the ad industry changes for something more reasonable again. You'll simply not see it, so you won't uninstall.
Until you get a new computer. Then it's not a question of whether you'll uninstall, but whether you'll re-install.
Nothing, absolutely nothing, the ad industry could do would even remotely get those people to move their asses again to uninstall that ad blocker.
True, but not particularly relevant.
They don't need to get people to uninstall the ad blocker, they just need to make ads sufficiently non-annoying that when people get a new device they aren't motivated to re-install the ad blocker.
+1
You failed to read the last sentence of my post.
The settings for takeoff should be known before you try it. You would want to know if the airplane was capable of taking off before you start to roll down the runway.
Sure, but it still seems like measuring thrust vs acceleration as you start accelerating down the runway is a really easy way to double-check weight and if it's too far out of plan, automatically abort the takeoff. It seems like this should be possible long before the plane is moving too fast to cut thrust and brake safely to a stop.
So in other words, you were talking out your bottom end and can't back it up with anything.
Got it...
Dude, you didn't provide a shred of support for your claim that police can require women to remove their niqab, either. You just said "I'm not aware of anywhere in the US where a police officer cannot ask...", but your lack of knowledge isn't evidence of anything.
Googling a bit seems to show that it's not really well-settled. I can find comments from police officers who say that they aren't sure if they could ask a woman to remove a face covering, and that they'd refer it to their supervisors, or if absolutely necessary get a female officer to handle it in a private location. I can't find anyone saying "sure, I'd tell her to take it off". After being sued by a woman who was required by a male officer to remove her hijab (which doesn't cover the face), Detroit instituted a policy that officers may not require the hijab to be removed, but that's quite different from a niqab.
There's also the story of Sultaana Freeman, who was required by a Florida judge to remove her niqab to be photographed for her DL, but with a female photographer in a private location. The question of what would be done in a traffic stop seems not to have come up, but it seems consistent with the ruling that she could not be required to remove her face covering in public or in front of a male police officer.
There are a handful of other states that have explicit policies permitting photo-less DLs for people who have religious objections to having their faces photographed.
It appears to me that this is an open question, which hasn't really come to a head yet because not many niqab-wearing women drive. When it does, though, I'd expect police to make allow reasonable allowances, which would just require getting a female officer to check the woman's identity.
Gun license has no such requirement, since it is opposed by the NRA.
What's a "gun license"?
If you're referring to a concealed weapon permit (authorizing the bearer to carry a gun, and to hide it), AFAIK every single state that issues such permits puts photos on them. Every state except Vermont issues such permits (in Vermont no permit is required). If you're referring to some document giving permission to own a gun, there is no such thing.
I've gotten updates for Netgear, Linksys, Belkin and Asus routers. On my current Asus it pops up a notice when I log into the admin console whenever there's new firmware (maybe twice per year? I don't pay close attention). On the other routers I've had to go look on the manufacturer's site, but they've all gotten updates.
This would be a nightmare for users. When finding a ride using Uber, it is easy to decide if you accept the price. With phone/data surge pricing you will have to constantly check the rate every time you use the phone for something.
The phone could notify you when surge pricing is in effect. A simple icon in the status bar at the top would work well. Pull your phone out, notice that data currently costs 3X what it normally does, then decide you'll send a text tweet about your meal, and send the video later after surge pricing ends. The services that consume the most bandwidth are, by and large, the least critical, and a simple indicator would make it easy to decide to avoid heavy bandwidth usage during peak usage times. Services on your phone could automatically adjust their bandwidth consumption as well, similar to the way many defer heavy operations until Wifi is available, but more nuanced.
Although we'd all rather just have totally unlimited data and never have to think about it, assuming a reasonably efficient market[*] surge data pricing would drive total costs down. Cost-conscious consumers in particular would be better off, because bandwidth during off-peak times would likely end up being practically free, since nearly all of the bandwidth cost is involved in building out capacity for peak times.
[*] Note that "an efficient market" is not what we have in the US, with respect to mobile data. Carriers have managed, through various mechanisms, to introduce very high barriers to switching, allowing them to avoid competing too directly.
here's no "Decline forever" option.
You can disable it. See 'Turn app verification on or off' on https://support.google.com/acc...
Note that this is a bad idea, unless you're really careful about the apps you install.
The point of state funded healthcare is that it is in the nations interest for you to be healthy, and therefore productive.
Up until you're no longer productive, at which point it's in the nation's best interest for you to die quickly and cheaply. And if ever need expensive treatment that exceeds your future productivity (or, more precisely, the tax revenues that will be generated by your productivity and its transitive effects), then likewise it's in the nation's best interest for you to die.
These negative (from your perspective) incentives of the nation are somewhat mitigated by the nation's interest in making other (productive) citizens feel supported. This means the nation at least needs to try to hide them.
They can just grind the remaining prescriptions for homeopathic remedies into dust, and present a grain of that dust to the pharmacist, who then gives them a glass of water.
But that would put them at risk of an overdose, as more diluted substances have higher potency !
Distilled water is the most dangerous stuff on Earth. If you don't keep it absolutely pure, if it gets some tiny trace of something in it, instant massive overdose.
Be careful out there.
What if you rig it so that you send XON/XOFF signals when you cough?
CTS/DTR is much more reliable. Software flow control is fragile.
In generating random keys, a mechanical HDD (not sure about SSDs) is perhaps ideal for generating randomness (there are patents on this). It can quickly generate true random keys without worrying about seeding entropy to generate pseudo-random keys.
There's no point in random keys for this application, in fact they're a bad idea unless you have some sort of tamper-resistant hardware in which to store them, and even then it's questionable. If you generate random keys, they have to be stored in the drive firmware, which makes them accessible to an attacker who has physical possession of the drive.
In this application, the keys should be derived from a user-provided password which must be entered at boot. The drive's firmware should use a good password-based key derivation function to make brute force harder, and it must not store either a copy of the plaintext key anywhere, or even anything easily derived from the key. If the drive wants a quick way to check if the password is correct, it should store a secure hash of the derived key.
If your computer is stolen, the lesson here is to assume it's compromised because physical access trumps all.
If your computer is stolen while the drive is in an unlocked state. If you steal my encrypted drive when it's powered down, and you don't have my password, and my password is good, and the implementation of the key derivation function doesn't suck, you're out of luck even with complete physical control.
Yes, there are a lot of ifs there. Defeating an attacker with physical possession is not easy. It's not impossible, though.
They will be prosecuted, I'm assuming. Too many municipalities where there are clear restrictions for taxi services.
They can only be prosecuted if Uber actually meets the definition of a taxi service. Not the generic notion of what we think taxi services are, but the specific legal definition. This is why Uber is legal in many areas where taxis are regulated, because the legal definition of "taxi" includes things like street hailing, etc., that Uber doesn't do. This issue has been gestating long enough that I suspect Uber has already been shut down everywhere it's actually illegal.
From my perspective, of course, I hope the locales with regulations that prohibit Uber fix their laws to make it legal. I hugely prefer Uber over traditional taxi services. It's so much more convenient and pleasant. And cheaper. My wife has also been thinking about driving for extra money, though we need to make sure the insurance coverage is adequate.