I really wish people would shut up about about this. There's nothing wrong with making references to and comparisons with Nazi Germany, in fact it's a good thing because we need to learn from that experience as a society, and there's countless parallels to be made, and constant vigilance is necessary to make sure we don't repeat this portion of history, as is often done with people who don't bother to learn history. Mr. Godwin himself has said that he never intended to squelch references to the Nazis, he was only making an observation about the trajectory of internet threads.
RFID chips won't work. RFID chips don't have very good range, and they're easily blocked by aluminum foil. RFID is great for something like keeping track of warehouse goods or shipped packages, where the thing being scanned is inanimate, and the person scanning can see (or know) where the RFID chip is and just scan it, and there's no active attempts to prevent this. They don't work if you want to implant a chip in someone and then be able to track them as they walk around; it's not hard for them to put some metallic material over the chip. If *everyone* has the implant, they of course you can look to see if someone went through a scanner without the RFID being read, and nab him; but if only a subset of the people have them (i.e. citizens) and you're trying to use it to track the "undesirables" or lesser-privileged people, it won't work because they can easily make themselves look like citizens by shielding the RFID chip.
This is why secure facilities like military bases work with ID badges for privileged people: people who have access get a special pass they have to show. People without access don't get a pass. It wouldn't work the other way around, where unauthorized people have to carry a pass or declare that they're not supposed to be there, because you can't rely on honesty.
How many politicians at the local level do those jobs for their entire working careers? I certainly don't see that much; they act as Mayor for a few years, maybe a decade at the very most, then they're replaced by someone else.
Wrong. The US is not homogeneous. Yes, some cities like Seattle are doing pretty well in reining in their cops and prosecuting them for misconduct. Other places aren't. Seattle (and the entire PacNW) is **not** representative of the US as a whole, it's really quite different. It bears almost no resemblance to, say, Alabama or South Carolina, except that the same language (more or less) is spoken.
No, my position is that we should look at better ways of managing an economy than creating make-work jobs and forcing people to use far less efficient and convenient services just to keep some people employed.
Answer me: Do you really think the government should force people to eat at restaurants, instead of making their own food? Do you think people should be forced to hire maids instead of cleaning their own homes? Because if you support keeping taxi drivers employed and banning automated cars from being used as taxis, that's exactly what you're supporting. It's no different than banning cars in 1900 so buggy-whip manufacturers and their employees can keep their jobs.
That Mercedes won't be so clean 10 years from now.
So what? Uber won't let them drive a car that old.
It's not like they'll be able to sell a car, unless they lie about the fact that it was a Uber car.
First, it's their choice. I guess you're one of those people who hates it when people have freedom of choice, and wants local governments to tell them what they can and can't do.
Second, it's still a Mercedes. They have much higher resale values (even with lots of miles) than the POSes that taxi companies usually drive (except maybe Priuses, as a percentage depreciation).
>Again, no, they usually go on about vehicle safety and insurance.
Then they're morons. There's no way in hell a nearly new Mercedes is less safe than some 30-year-old piece-of-shit Crown Victoria. Crown Vics are notorious for being dangerous cars when rear-ended; a lot of cops died because of that. Why do you want to ride in shitty old unsafe cars instead of riding in new, well-engineered cars which top safety rankings?
How is anyone being forced into a McDonald's job? They're taking the job willingly. And what are you going to do when all the taxi drivers are put out of work by driverless cars anyway? Are you going to ban those because we need to preserve all those crappy jobs? What about when McDonald's figures out how to automate cooking? Are you going to ban that too, so those people don't lose their jobs? Where does it end? Are you going to ban all automation because it makes jobs obsolete? Why not ban cars, so that we can bring back all the horse-related jobs? Are you going to ban grocery stores too, because you don't want people cooking their own food and reducing the need for restaurant workers?
You sound one of the communists who wanted to establish big factories, where on one side people built wooden boxes, then sent the finished boxes to the other side of the factory, where they were disassembled so the wood could be recycled, and the reclaimed lumber was sent back to the first side of the factory to build boxes....
If you want a make-work program, bring back the WPA. Don't force people to use workers they don't want, to do jobs that robots can do better.
Hey, if you like sitting in a nasty, smelly old Crown Vic cab which likely had hundreds of arrestees bleeding and barfing in the back seat before its new life as a cab, go right ahead and knock yourself out. I'll be riding with Uber in a nice, newer Mercedes.
Well the pro-Uber people usually call the anti-Uber people "statists". There's only one group of people who use that word, and they're not on the left. The anti-Uber people usually whine about worker protections (as if taxi riders actually have any), and people concerned about those aren't on the right.
You show how stupid you are with your comment which defies reality, and then your idiotic response which doesn't even address any facts and resorts to childish name-calling without any substance.
People complain about taxi's denying riders because they are only taking short trips that aren't worth it..
Who complains about that? Shorter trips are more profitable for cabs because of the "flag drop" fee.
Red herring.
How does Uber encourage drivers to take less profitable fares? What keeps Uber drivers from flocking to an area where they make more fare and totally ignoring areas where the fare is lower?
Nothing prevents this. It's free association and supply and demand. Have you seen anyone actually complaining about Uber drivers ignoring certain areas though? I've never heard of that. The only complaints I ever hear about Uber are about them skirting the corrupt taxi laws and about them treating drivers as contractors instead of employees; I have never heard of any actual usage complaints from paying customers, unlike with taxis.
So what's the problem with that? It's allowing them to make ends meet; is that a bad thing?
When (if?) the economy improves, and the supply of drivers for Uber dries up, prices will rise so they can get more drivers. This is normal for many things when the economy improves.
...I would probably choose the regular taxi. In my country at least. In a different country I'd have to weigh whether I'd trust the country's (public) regulations on the taxi industry more than Uber's (private) 'regulations' of its drivers.
A lot of the strong feelings, on both sides, here seems to be from Americans. I'm an American and have used both; the problem here is that there is not a single taxi in this country of 310M people which is a "generally very clean, very recent Mercedes Benz", or anything close to it. At best, you might get a reasonably clean Prius in some cities, more likely you're going to get some old POS, probably a 25-year-old Ford Crown Victoria that used to be a police cruiser and which rides like shit and reeks of smoke.
"Stuffed with grease"? Do you know anything about modern cars at all? You can't add grease to steering or suspension components; zerks disappeared decades ago.
You act like cabs are specially-built vehicles. They're not (the old Checker cabs have all been removed from service); they're just regular cars painted yellow (and only in some locales) with a taximeter slapped in.
If a vehicle is falling apart, you can tell pretty quickly. Most cabs I've ridden in are like this: brakes squeal, inside is dirty, etc. In the Uber cars I've used, they're in pristine shape.
And have you never heard of a state inspection? Maybe your shitty state doesn't have them, but my state requires every car to be safety inspected every year.
Yeah, these Uber-haters are making me want to vote Republican.
Except that the Republicans are the ones pushing and defending laws to ban automakers from selling direct to customers, because they hate Tesla and love the stealerships.
It's weird how the Democrats are the statists when it comes to taxis, yet are all for the free market when it comes to electric car sales, and vice-versa for the Republicans.
Not necessarily. NYC != Manhattan; there's several other boroughs which are not nearly as dense, especially Staten Island, which is positively suburban. You're not going to get a cab there standing on the corner for 30 seconds.
Strange, I've never seen one of these in a store anywhere. If it's some special model that costs $5000, that really isn't a fair comparison. Even worse if it's some shitty thing with a slow CPU and a 0.5MP camera.
They're not going to survive getting dropped onto a pile of rocks without getting scratched up at the very least. IIRC, IP68 is just about weatherproofing. That's great, it won't get ruined if it gets a little wet, or maybe even dropped in the pool. But getting dropped onto concrete is a different matter. An Otterbox case handles that stuff.
Also, IP68 doesn't help you with battery life. There's been way too much of a trend lately towards super-slim phones. Everyone except the Apple cultists is screaming for bigger batteries, not a slimmer phone. I don't give a shit if my phone weighs 1 gram more, I want more battery life.
It doesn't make sense any more because it's only raw PCM data, with no metadata, and no compression at all. This isn't 1990 any more; there's no reason you can't use compression as far as CPU/hardware resources go, and it doesn't even cost anything since the FLAC codec is FOSS. Just include the library and you're done, there's nothing to it from a development standpoint.
I guess if you're using an 8-bit PIC to play music for some crazy reason, WAV would make sense, but for any real consumer product, it just doesn't.
Yeah, with a system that's nothing more than an embedded computer, I'm not sure why they don't just throw in all the codecs they can think of. It doesn't really cost anything, and is probably just a quick build-time option. Again I imagine it's engineers working exactly to specifications, and maybe some kind of mindset that adding anything extra is extra work (like for documentation and testing), and adding undocumented stuff is frowned upon perhaps.
I'm still surprised that a lot of systems now supported Oggs (Vorbis only of course, but most people have no idea that Ogg is a container format and not a codec). My new Mazda supports them (along with MP3, AAC, and WMA), and even mentions this in the owner's manual, however, only briefly as most places it says "MP3/AAC/WMA" only, but on one page it says "MP3/AAC/WMA/OGG", so it seems to have been added either as an afterthought or they decided it should be added for techies who care about it, and forgot to update all the parts of the manual.
I'm sorry, there's no way you'd be able to tell the difference between, say, a 320kbps Ogg Vorbis and a FLAC. Humans don't have hearing that good, and even if they did, there's so much distortion added by amplifiers and speakers and imperfect listening environments that even sitting still it's all in the noise. While driving, that's total bullshit. Volvo C30s aren't *that* quiet, no car is that quiet, but C30s especially aren't that quiet. My wife has an S40 which is the same platform and interior, and it's not all that quiet compared to the newest cars (and it likely has a softer suspension and less-sticky tires than your C30, making for a bit less road noise). You want to try a quiet car? Go test-drive a Tesla. The lack of engine noise makes a huge difference. But even there the tire noise is very significant.
As for the option being removed, I'm not really sure; probably some software engineer wrote directly to requirements and the requirements didn't specify.wav. They probably didn't think anyone used that crappy format any more anyway. Does the new models support FLAC? It's utterly stupid to use WAV any more now that FLAC is here, and it's been that way for at least a decade.
Also, if you really think your ears are that good and that you can hear artifacts, try compressing the same song in both 320k MP3 and Ogg, and compare. Get a friend to do a blind trial too. I wouldn't think you'd be able to tell a difference at that bitrate, but at lower bitrates, MP3 is infamous for having pretty bad distortion at high frequencies (IIRC), usually making cymbal crashes sound wrong, while Ogg Vorbis is well-known for being much better at the same bitrates. For kicks, try out the new Opus codec too (it's also used with the Ogg container, but files are normally called.opus to differentiate them from Vorbis audio files). Opus is by the same people who did Vorbis, but is supposedly a significant improvement.
In engineering, that's most people it seems. I'm constantly getting emails about cow-orkers from years ago, and most of them aren't even in my "friends list"; it still figures out I know them somehow and sends me an alert ("Do you know John Smith, principal engineer at XYZ Corp?").
My wife has one of those Xperias too (not sure about the sub-model). I'm not impressed. Hers has an intermittent problem where she has to use a headset or it won't work (can't talk and can't hear); it seems pretty obvious it's a malfunctioning headphone jack that thinks a headset is plugged in all the time (when this problem happens; it comes and goes). However when she's taken it to repair places to get it fixed, they take one look at those stupid "liar dots" as you call them and just tell her it has water damage and can't be fixed. WTF? Do you want to get paid or not???
I just picked up a used Samsung Galaxy S4 and this thing is great, as far as I can tell. I'm just waiting on a SIM card to come in from Ting so I can activate it. I would have liked the S5 better (since it's water-resistant and has an excellent reputation), but it was a little too expensive for me; maybe I'll upgrade to that in a year or two when the price has come down. Even though the S5 is already "obsolete" (replaced by the less-capable S6), it has a ridiculously high resale value.
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What has Christie ever done to make you think he has any sense at all? He's just a loud-mouthed moron.
(yeah, I Godwin'ed the thread),
I really wish people would shut up about about this. There's nothing wrong with making references to and comparisons with Nazi Germany, in fact it's a good thing because we need to learn from that experience as a society, and there's countless parallels to be made, and constant vigilance is necessary to make sure we don't repeat this portion of history, as is often done with people who don't bother to learn history. Mr. Godwin himself has said that he never intended to squelch references to the Nazis, he was only making an observation about the trajectory of internet threads.
RFID chips won't work. RFID chips don't have very good range, and they're easily blocked by aluminum foil. RFID is great for something like keeping track of warehouse goods or shipped packages, where the thing being scanned is inanimate, and the person scanning can see (or know) where the RFID chip is and just scan it, and there's no active attempts to prevent this. They don't work if you want to implant a chip in someone and then be able to track them as they walk around; it's not hard for them to put some metallic material over the chip. If *everyone* has the implant, they of course you can look to see if someone went through a scanner without the RFID being read, and nab him; but if only a subset of the people have them (i.e. citizens) and you're trying to use it to track the "undesirables" or lesser-privileged people, it won't work because they can easily make themselves look like citizens by shielding the RFID chip.
This is why secure facilities like military bases work with ID badges for privileged people: people who have access get a special pass they have to show. People without access don't get a pass. It wouldn't work the other way around, where unauthorized people have to carry a pass or declare that they're not supposed to be there, because you can't rely on honesty.
How many politicians at the local level do those jobs for their entire working careers? I certainly don't see that much; they act as Mayor for a few years, maybe a decade at the very most, then they're replaced by someone else.
Wrong. The US is not homogeneous. Yes, some cities like Seattle are doing pretty well in reining in their cops and prosecuting them for misconduct. Other places aren't. Seattle (and the entire PacNW) is **not** representative of the US as a whole, it's really quite different. It bears almost no resemblance to, say, Alabama or South Carolina, except that the same language (more or less) is spoken.
No, my position is that we should look at better ways of managing an economy than creating make-work jobs and forcing people to use far less efficient and convenient services just to keep some people employed.
Answer me: Do you really think the government should force people to eat at restaurants, instead of making their own food? Do you think people should be forced to hire maids instead of cleaning their own homes? Because if you support keeping taxi drivers employed and banning automated cars from being used as taxis, that's exactly what you're supporting. It's no different than banning cars in 1900 so buggy-whip manufacturers and their employees can keep their jobs.
That Mercedes won't be so clean 10 years from now.
So what? Uber won't let them drive a car that old.
It's not like they'll be able to sell a car, unless they lie about the fact that it was a Uber car.
First, it's their choice. I guess you're one of those people who hates it when people have freedom of choice, and wants local governments to tell them what they can and can't do.
Second, it's still a Mercedes. They have much higher resale values (even with lots of miles) than the POSes that taxi companies usually drive (except maybe Priuses, as a percentage depreciation).
>No they don't.
Yes, they do. I see it here all the fucking time.
>Again, no, they usually go on about vehicle safety and insurance.
Then they're morons. There's no way in hell a nearly new Mercedes is less safe than some 30-year-old piece-of-shit Crown Victoria. Crown Vics are notorious for being dangerous cars when rear-ended; a lot of cops died because of that. Why do you want to ride in shitty old unsafe cars instead of riding in new, well-engineered cars which top safety rankings?
How is anyone being forced into a McDonald's job? They're taking the job willingly. And what are you going to do when all the taxi drivers are put out of work by driverless cars anyway? Are you going to ban those because we need to preserve all those crappy jobs? What about when McDonald's figures out how to automate cooking? Are you going to ban that too, so those people don't lose their jobs? Where does it end? Are you going to ban all automation because it makes jobs obsolete? Why not ban cars, so that we can bring back all the horse-related jobs? Are you going to ban grocery stores too, because you don't want people cooking their own food and reducing the need for restaurant workers?
You sound one of the communists who wanted to establish big factories, where on one side people built wooden boxes, then sent the finished boxes to the other side of the factory, where they were disassembled so the wood could be recycled, and the reclaimed lumber was sent back to the first side of the factory to build boxes....
If you want a make-work program, bring back the WPA. Don't force people to use workers they don't want, to do jobs that robots can do better.
Hey, if you like sitting in a nasty, smelly old Crown Vic cab which likely had hundreds of arrestees bleeding and barfing in the back seat before its new life as a cab, go right ahead and knock yourself out. I'll be riding with Uber in a nice, newer Mercedes.
Well the pro-Uber people usually call the anti-Uber people "statists". There's only one group of people who use that word, and they're not on the left. The anti-Uber people usually whine about worker protections (as if taxi riders actually have any), and people concerned about those aren't on the right.
You show how stupid you are with your comment which defies reality, and then your idiotic response which doesn't even address any facts and resorts to childish name-calling without any substance.
People complain about taxi's denying riders because they are only taking short trips that aren't worth it..
Who complains about that? Shorter trips are more profitable for cabs because of the "flag drop" fee.
Red herring.
How does Uber encourage drivers to take less profitable fares? What keeps Uber drivers from flocking to an area where they make more fare and totally ignoring areas where the fare is lower?
Nothing prevents this. It's free association and supply and demand. Have you seen anyone actually complaining about Uber drivers ignoring certain areas though? I've never heard of that. The only complaints I ever hear about Uber are about them skirting the corrupt taxi laws and about them treating drivers as contractors instead of employees; I have never heard of any actual usage complaints from paying customers, unlike with taxis.
So what's the problem with that? It's allowing them to make ends meet; is that a bad thing?
When (if?) the economy improves, and the supply of drivers for Uber dries up, prices will rise so they can get more drivers. This is normal for many things when the economy improves.
What's the problem?
...I would probably choose the regular taxi. In my country at least. In a different country I'd have to weigh whether I'd trust the country's (public) regulations on the taxi industry more than Uber's (private) 'regulations' of its drivers.
A lot of the strong feelings, on both sides, here seems to be from Americans. I'm an American and have used both; the problem here is that there is not a single taxi in this country of 310M people which is a "generally very clean, very recent Mercedes Benz", or anything close to it. At best, you might get a reasonably clean Prius in some cities, more likely you're going to get some old POS, probably a 25-year-old Ford Crown Victoria that used to be a police cruiser and which rides like shit and reeks of smoke.
"Stuffed with grease"? Do you know anything about modern cars at all? You can't add grease to steering or suspension components; zerks disappeared decades ago.
You act like cabs are specially-built vehicles. They're not (the old Checker cabs have all been removed from service); they're just regular cars painted yellow (and only in some locales) with a taximeter slapped in.
If a vehicle is falling apart, you can tell pretty quickly. Most cabs I've ridden in are like this: brakes squeal, inside is dirty, etc. In the Uber cars I've used, they're in pristine shape.
And have you never heard of a state inspection? Maybe your shitty state doesn't have them, but my state requires every car to be safety inspected every year.
Yeah, these Uber-haters are making me want to vote Republican.
Except that the Republicans are the ones pushing and defending laws to ban automakers from selling direct to customers, because they hate Tesla and love the stealerships.
It's weird how the Democrats are the statists when it comes to taxis, yet are all for the free market when it comes to electric car sales, and vice-versa for the Republicans.
Not necessarily. NYC != Manhattan; there's several other boroughs which are not nearly as dense, especially Staten Island, which is positively suburban. You're not going to get a cab there standing on the corner for 30 seconds.
Strange, I've never seen one of these in a store anywhere. If it's some special model that costs $5000, that really isn't a fair comparison. Even worse if it's some shitty thing with a slow CPU and a 0.5MP camera.
They're not going to survive getting dropped onto a pile of rocks without getting scratched up at the very least. IIRC, IP68 is just about weatherproofing. That's great, it won't get ruined if it gets a little wet, or maybe even dropped in the pool. But getting dropped onto concrete is a different matter. An Otterbox case handles that stuff.
Also, IP68 doesn't help you with battery life. There's been way too much of a trend lately towards super-slim phones. Everyone except the Apple cultists is screaming for bigger batteries, not a slimmer phone. I don't give a shit if my phone weighs 1 gram more, I want more battery life.
It doesn't make sense any more because it's only raw PCM data, with no metadata, and no compression at all. This isn't 1990 any more; there's no reason you can't use compression as far as CPU/hardware resources go, and it doesn't even cost anything since the FLAC codec is FOSS. Just include the library and you're done, there's nothing to it from a development standpoint.
I guess if you're using an 8-bit PIC to play music for some crazy reason, WAV would make sense, but for any real consumer product, it just doesn't.
Yeah, with a system that's nothing more than an embedded computer, I'm not sure why they don't just throw in all the codecs they can think of. It doesn't really cost anything, and is probably just a quick build-time option. Again I imagine it's engineers working exactly to specifications, and maybe some kind of mindset that adding anything extra is extra work (like for documentation and testing), and adding undocumented stuff is frowned upon perhaps.
I'm still surprised that a lot of systems now supported Oggs (Vorbis only of course, but most people have no idea that Ogg is a container format and not a codec). My new Mazda supports them (along with MP3, AAC, and WMA), and even mentions this in the owner's manual, however, only briefly as most places it says "MP3/AAC/WMA" only, but on one page it says "MP3/AAC/WMA/OGG", so it seems to have been added either as an afterthought or they decided it should be added for techies who care about it, and forgot to update all the parts of the manual.
I'm sorry, there's no way you'd be able to tell the difference between, say, a 320kbps Ogg Vorbis and a FLAC. Humans don't have hearing that good, and even if they did, there's so much distortion added by amplifiers and speakers and imperfect listening environments that even sitting still it's all in the noise. While driving, that's total bullshit. Volvo C30s aren't *that* quiet, no car is that quiet, but C30s especially aren't that quiet. My wife has an S40 which is the same platform and interior, and it's not all that quiet compared to the newest cars (and it likely has a softer suspension and less-sticky tires than your C30, making for a bit less road noise). You want to try a quiet car? Go test-drive a Tesla. The lack of engine noise makes a huge difference. But even there the tire noise is very significant.
As for the option being removed, I'm not really sure; probably some software engineer wrote directly to requirements and the requirements didn't specify .wav. They probably didn't think anyone used that crappy format any more anyway. Does the new models support FLAC? It's utterly stupid to use WAV any more now that FLAC is here, and it's been that way for at least a decade.
Also, if you really think your ears are that good and that you can hear artifacts, try compressing the same song in both 320k MP3 and Ogg, and compare. Get a friend to do a blind trial too. I wouldn't think you'd be able to tell a difference at that bitrate, but at lower bitrates, MP3 is infamous for having pretty bad distortion at high frequencies (IIRC), usually making cymbal crashes sound wrong, while Ogg Vorbis is well-known for being much better at the same bitrates. For kicks, try out the new Opus codec too (it's also used with the Ogg container, but files are normally called .opus to differentiate them from Vorbis audio files). Opus is by the same people who did Vorbis, but is supposedly a significant improvement.
In engineering, that's most people it seems. I'm constantly getting emails about cow-orkers from years ago, and most of them aren't even in my "friends list"; it still figures out I know them somehow and sends me an alert ("Do you know John Smith, principal engineer at XYZ Corp?").
My wife has one of those Xperias too (not sure about the sub-model). I'm not impressed. Hers has an intermittent problem where she has to use a headset or it won't work (can't talk and can't hear); it seems pretty obvious it's a malfunctioning headphone jack that thinks a headset is plugged in all the time (when this problem happens; it comes and goes). However when she's taken it to repair places to get it fixed, they take one look at those stupid "liar dots" as you call them and just tell her it has water damage and can't be fixed. WTF? Do you want to get paid or not???
I just picked up a used Samsung Galaxy S4 and this thing is great, as far as I can tell. I'm just waiting on a SIM card to come in from Ting so I can activate it. I would have liked the S5 better (since it's water-resistant and has an excellent reputation), but it was a little too expensive for me; maybe I'll upgrade to that in a year or two when the price has come down. Even though the S5 is already "obsolete" (replaced by the less-capable S6), it has a ridiculously high resale value.