I really think this is an over reaction. Basically the idea is to put a cap on the amount of picket signs and billboards people can put up based on an arbitrary dollar figure. Dollars do not win elections. Look at the John Morse campaign in Colorado...I mean they spent what, 11 times what the opposition spent? Yet they still lost. Sorry but I think the first amendment is much too important of a thing to forsake just because you don't like how much money some person spent on a campaign.
The wolf-pac proposal would also, for example, prohibit actions like those taken when SOPA was killed. (Also I like how they use made up statistics everywhere, like claiming that 96% of the country is behind them....if that was really the case, we wouldn't be having this discussion.)
In situations like the TFA describes, I think a better solution would be to force congressmen and senators to recuse themselves of voting on issues that major campaign contributors have a vested interest in. That would VERY quickly solve the problem that they're attempting to solve (lobbyists would effectively be punished for contributing campaign dollars,) and it wouldn't run afoul of any first amendment issues.
I don't think it was intended to protect the wealthy so much as it was intended to protect against mob mentality. Even in cases where it protects land you own, you didn't have to be wealthy to own land.
The most important thing was that they didn't like (and indeed just escaped from) a situation where lords and kings could just take anything you owned at any time they wanted because it was their "divine right." They certainly didn't want to replace that with a new government that was every bit as capable of doing the same thing, otherwise what the fuck was the point? Whether people voted you away from your land, or a king just demanded you relinquish it, is ultimately the same kind of injustice.
Just because "the people" want it, doesn't make it any more right. Remember that "the people" also supported slavery, indeed certain items like California Prop 8 won with a majority of voters.
I'm all too familiar with this mentality. When somebody has been in prison more than once, they often develop the mental state of "I can NOT go to jail again" and will fight tooth and nail to avoid it, even when they KNOW they deserve it. This guy clearly did - armed robbery to steal narcotics? Yeah that's going to put you away for a while, especially as a repeat offender. This decoy bottle caught him red handed, so there's not really any doubt about his guilt.
Now all the global telecommunication depends on satellites
Actually it doesn't. Maybe it did in the 70's, 80's, and 90's, but at about the turn of the millennium satellite communication is increasingly unimportant for global communications. In fact it has the disadvantages of much higher latency, lower bandwidth, and much higher cost.
What the hell are you talking about? Text message prices became cheap (or should I say unlimited at no extra charge) on the mainstream carriers a long time before imessage came out.
Text initially was practically free until it became popular and fashionable for carriers to charge money for it because people were using less of their voice minutes as a result (they did this by enticing the less affluent and younger customers into cheap plans with very few voice minutes that had high per text rates, much in the same as how less affluent customers go for phone subsidies thinking they're getting a good deal.) After voice calls reached a point where you could get a crapload of minutes for basically nothing, it followed that text prices went down again, and iphone hadn't even been out yet. Nowadays its hard to find a carrier that doesn't give you both unlimited.
I have a perfect solution to this then. Somebody outside of the EU could maintain a website that is dedicated to tracking the cases of individuals who have requested to have search engines remove their information from incidents that they're embarrassed about. The website could hold details related to the case, mugshots of the individual, and other relevant data.
Submit a request to be forgotten? Then land on the website of the "forgotten."
Call the website "Streisand's Back Yard" or something to that effect.
Try telling that to HR departments around the world. All too often I've seen jobs posted looking for LAN technicians saying they want you to have a Computer Science or related degree; a few of them pass on my resume when they see my degree is in Network Systems Administration (I'm not entirely sure if a person is doing it, because in these cases I get an email saying I don't meet the minimum requirement even though I meet ALL of their requirements listed, including their bonus/preferred requirements, just I don't have a CS degree, nor am I interested in getting one.)
We've already seen this kind of FUD from foreign governments who want authority over ICANN and IANA. Basically they argue that by these being under the US Department of Commerce, which itself is technically run by Congress, the NSA can somehow spy on the world. Complete nonsense (regardless of who holds the keys, the NSA can always do what they do.)
The real reason they want control over this is because it makes censorship a lot easier. Russia and China want to stop free speech, whereas Europe wants to kill anything they believe is "hate speech" (which technically almost anything can be called hate speech.) I distrust the feds as much as anybody, but IMO the US is the best holder of that because it doesn't do either.
I think most of the time when an ISP eliminates the competition, they don't do it through underpricing (if they did, we would see cheaper internet services.) Rather, the way they do it is through corrupt politicians and unions. That is, they get the law changed so that they are the only one who can acquire the easement rights.
And of course, many voters often support it for very stupid reasons. A common argument I see (especially in areas like SF where everybody is hypersensitive to maintaining a "traditional" appearance) is that they don't want everybody who asks to be able to run fiber lines throughout the city, saying that one link is enough. As a network engineer myself, I disagree, and even think that idea is actually stupid. Multiple redundant links is a good thing, not just for competition, but to allow for robust networks. From a technical perspective, the advantages range from higher availability to higher bandwidth. Furthermore, if you run large conduit pipes then there are no aesthetic issues other than VRAD deployment, which isn't a big deal IMO because for electricity you already have to have transformers almost every bit as distributed.
You're making my case. WIPO is irrelevant to US Law without the DMCA. If the Treaty was ratified, but the statute (DMCA) had stalled in the House WIPO wouldn't matter.
No you've got that entirely backwards. The standard procedure is to sign and adopt treaties first, and then congress writes laws to implement them. If anything, that makes my case. The Obama justified his action here because the laws that ACTA requires are already on the books in his view, so therefore he says he can skip congress and the senate. THAT was his argument, NOT the one you claimed above. And also there is no precedent for that, rather it's kind of a rule that he just made up.
However he is pulling a very fast one here: Because the Obama administration says the ACTA treaty is binding, we will be required to adopt laws to conform with it should it be determined that they are needed, and we're forbidden from repealing any laws that it requires.
Let's suppose though that ACTA is what you claim it is, and the above is wrong. If that were the case then it would fall under an executive agreement. If it is an executive agreement, then Obama actually broke the law because he didn't notify congress. This is because entire thing was hidden until he signed it himself. Namely this law:
Even if this was a sole-executive agreement, it STILL requires the approval of congress. This is both written in the laws in addition to case law (see the last sentence of page 5 of this: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/aw...)
That is why Obama didn't make the argument you are saying he made.
But that's not because the treaty wasn't valid US Law, it's because treaties can't be used to force Americans to do things.
I don't think you know as much as you think you know, because this is quite wrong, and you obviously don't pay attention to even this website very much to say what you just said. It's because of the WIPO treaty that we have the DMCA, which overrules certain first amendment protections. That's the only reason, in fact, because when a group (don't recall which one, EFF?) tried to appeal it to SCOTUS, in their ruling SCOTUS said that the DMCA was required to meet our WIPO treaty obligations, which also made the anti-circumvention clause constitutional, and keeps it a criminal offense that you can't talk about how to circumvent. People break that rule all the time, but it's still illegal nonetheless, and that is rooted in the WIPO treaty.
If the Clinton admin had the power to enforce Kyoto protocols, they probably would have, as none of those even run afoul of any constitutionally protected issues.
Which brings me to your first point last:
You're talking about international law. Everyone is, by definition, always right because everyone is (by definition) sovereign. This leads to a lot of words having multiple definitions that are not necessarily clear to the laymen.
No no no wrong. Treaties ultimately do take away sovereignty, which is one big reason why Hollywood is pushing for them. Think about Japan for example; they signed a treaty which installed Douglas MacArthur as their de-facto governor/emporer (his informal title there was Gaijin Shogun.) It was done through their normal method of signing treaties, granted they had little choice in the matter.
Dude look at what you're saying. Effectively this amounts to "well of course Obama will grant favors to those who pay, otherwise we'd have civil wars and stuff."
This is a pretty clear cut case of drinking the kool-aid.
Anyways, the system has no such requirement. Money can influence politicians, but it does very little to influence votes on a given topic. Look at that anti-recall campaign in Colorado which spent some 11 times what the opposition spent, and yet Morse and Giron got demolished in the election. (Giron lost by a 12 point spread.)
Kyoto was never made binding to the US, even the Clinton admin knew that. However the Obama admin itself says, and I quote, "ACTA is a legally binding international agreement":
Let's suppose this is the case, (and ignoring your rather hostile response) do you think the president would have signed ACTA if there was no money putting pressure towards it, especially given that SOPA was killed only a short time before?
There is no dancing around that one: This president is as corrupt as anybody else. Just weeks before SOPA was signed, Chris Dodd was going around making threats to politicians who weren't going to be tough on enacting the laws that "Hollywood" was demanding:
That doesn't make any sense. At all. Article 2 section 2 of the constitution specifically says a treaty must have 2/3rds approval from the senate. The purpose behind this is that each of the states gets a say in it. I mean look at the history of treaties in the US:
You're making a huge mistake by trying to pin an accuracy figure on economics, because it doesn't deal in accuracy, rather it deals in precision. Honestly calling economics dismal science is every bit as boneheaded as calling psychology the same thing, namely because economics deals with psychology. Even psychology is inaccurate to quite a large degree. (Guess what method psychologists use to determine the exact nature of each patient's chemical imbalance? I'll tell you: it's trial and error based. They try giving you different drugs until they get one that has marked results, and even then, no drug works perfectly.)
Economics allows you to make reasonable predictions about supply, demand, and value, and it is applicable to almost everything, even things not necessarily related to money. Let's take for example net neutrality. Without the concept of economics, you have no basis towards making any argument in any given direction about bandwidth consumption or pricing. Why? Because you have no models with which to predict how the demand for bandwidth will be affected. We don't know exactly where broadband would go either with or without net neutrality; nobody does. But we can model it, and that's where economics comes in.
Look at how ACTA was ratified. This was in the wake of SOPA where strong public reaction killed it while it was in the house. If ACTA had gone through the senate as SOPA had, those lobbying for it knew full well it would die like it already had in Europe.
I'm the last person to make conspiracy theories, but I really, really, really doubt that ACTA would have bypassed the constitutional provisions required for ratifying treaties had it not been for what happened with SOPA. Technically it's an illegal treaty, but President Obama claims that he's allowed to sign it if he wants to, constitution be damned. I mean shit, nobody except for the president himself was even allowed to see it before it was ratified.
In my experience, Google Maps is VERY good at avoiding this kind of thing. It maintains a realtime traffic density map for this exact purpose. A taxi is going to be inherently less reliable here, namely because they have to guess what the traffic is going to look like based on the time of day, day of week, holiday, time of year, and least of all practical, construction detours. Google on the other hand tracks these in real-time.
I don't think it's just a PR strategy. From a project management perspective, this is a big change that is probably too late to make. This is one of those things where you have to take several steps back in the development pipeline and change too many things, and indeed renders a lot of QA work and a number of other items effectively wasted.
This is the kind of change where, if they were forced to implement it, would be a project killer IMO, because I don't think the game is expected to make enough money to justify that cost.
This is just another classic case of "some may find it offensive." I mean shit, the USA alone is one of few places in the world where there is zero government censorship on video games. I really like it that way, to be honest. I say leave the fairness doctrine back in the 80's where it belongs, and let artists do whatever they feel they must, not what some political activist wants.
Drivers deliberately taking sub-optimal routes to run up the meter.
Apparently you've never ridden in a taxi before.
That aside, both the passenger and the driver are aware of the optimal route. The client did schedule the route on their smartphone you know, the same kind of smartphone that already has the optimal route calculated, and the source and destination are already known before the driver even picks them up, so your number 4 and 5 are completely moot, and essentially just pulled out of your ass.
Guess who does those things though? The already existing taxi drivers.
Lyft also screens both drivers and passengers, by the way (criminal and DMV) and both the driver and passenger rate one another. Regular taxis offer no such service.
Those services are no better than hitchhiking since there is no vetting of the driver. Insurance won't stop you from being taken to the woods, beaten, raped, robbed and murdered (not necessarily in that order)
Sorry but that's a load of crap. Regulated cab drivers have done all of these things.
These services offer the advantage of making that less likely to happen than with a regulated driver for a few reasons:
1) There's a pretty clear cut record of the fact that your last known activity was getting in a taxi via Lyft or Uber, regardless of payment method. 2) There's a well established identity of the person who is driving you (if they are a veteran to the service, they will have numerous ratings.) 3) Both you AND the driver are carrying smartphones that are metering how far you've gone, which means a third party is also tracking your movement and has a very good way for the authorities to trace your last steps. 4) You made your destination clear to a third party before going for a ride, and if your driver significantly strays from that destination at the time that something happened to you, then he's got some splainin' to do.
These safety features don't exist with a traditional taxi. The few that do (e.g. calling the cab company and telling them to pick you up) don't carry any kind of audit mechanism (with Lyft and Uber, there are six audit sources that should match up 100% of the time, so there's no possibility of any two parties conspiring against a third.)
Sorry but your concerns are not legitimate. It's just a tired old argument to keep an already protectionist racket in place. The city governments won't listen to any of the four points I made though because they WANT to have an oligopoly that they can suck more money from. If its tax revenue they need, then just make it a fucking tax instead of making it hell to be able to get a ride without owning your own car. It's not as if they couldn't tax these services (they already plan on regulating them out of the market, whereas simply taxing them would be a lot easier to do.)
Or they just have a lot of disposable income...which given that the statistics here work like an extreme example of Pareto, it would make sense.
Still though I'm not sure I'd identify this as being a "problem."
If your concept is really that good, just publish it yourself. Or crowdfund it. Both models have been extremely successful lately. I'd wager that the reason the big monolithic publishers are merging so much (e.g. EA buying out a bunch of other publishers) is because of this exact reason - the mid-sized publishers can't compete with the indie ones, so they either fold or get bought out.
PCs and Mobile are especially fertile ground for that, because the costs for entry are tiny. In fact, while consoles are usually the first for the big name titles (primarily a result of Sony or Microsoft paying bucks to get exclusive deals,) they're usually the last for the small but innovative concepts. (And often the console version is half-baked because they lack the flexibility of PCs - think games like Starcraft.)
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I really think this is an over reaction. Basically the idea is to put a cap on the amount of picket signs and billboards people can put up based on an arbitrary dollar figure. Dollars do not win elections. Look at the John Morse campaign in Colorado...I mean they spent what, 11 times what the opposition spent? Yet they still lost. Sorry but I think the first amendment is much too important of a thing to forsake just because you don't like how much money some person spent on a campaign.
The wolf-pac proposal would also, for example, prohibit actions like those taken when SOPA was killed. (Also I like how they use made up statistics everywhere, like claiming that 96% of the country is behind them....if that was really the case, we wouldn't be having this discussion.)
In situations like the TFA describes, I think a better solution would be to force congressmen and senators to recuse themselves of voting on issues that major campaign contributors have a vested interest in. That would VERY quickly solve the problem that they're attempting to solve (lobbyists would effectively be punished for contributing campaign dollars,) and it wouldn't run afoul of any first amendment issues.
I don't think it was intended to protect the wealthy so much as it was intended to protect against mob mentality. Even in cases where it protects land you own, you didn't have to be wealthy to own land.
The most important thing was that they didn't like (and indeed just escaped from) a situation where lords and kings could just take anything you owned at any time they wanted because it was their "divine right." They certainly didn't want to replace that with a new government that was every bit as capable of doing the same thing, otherwise what the fuck was the point? Whether people voted you away from your land, or a king just demanded you relinquish it, is ultimately the same kind of injustice.
Just because "the people" want it, doesn't make it any more right. Remember that "the people" also supported slavery, indeed certain items like California Prop 8 won with a majority of voters.
I'm all too familiar with this mentality. When somebody has been in prison more than once, they often develop the mental state of "I can NOT go to jail again" and will fight tooth and nail to avoid it, even when they KNOW they deserve it. This guy clearly did - armed robbery to steal narcotics? Yeah that's going to put you away for a while, especially as a repeat offender. This decoy bottle caught him red handed, so there's not really any doubt about his guilt.
Now all the global telecommunication depends on satellites
Actually it doesn't. Maybe it did in the 70's, 80's, and 90's, but at about the turn of the millennium satellite communication is increasingly unimportant for global communications. In fact it has the disadvantages of much higher latency, lower bandwidth, and much higher cost.
What the hell are you talking about? Text message prices became cheap (or should I say unlimited at no extra charge) on the mainstream carriers a long time before imessage came out.
Text initially was practically free until it became popular and fashionable for carriers to charge money for it because people were using less of their voice minutes as a result (they did this by enticing the less affluent and younger customers into cheap plans with very few voice minutes that had high per text rates, much in the same as how less affluent customers go for phone subsidies thinking they're getting a good deal.) After voice calls reached a point where you could get a crapload of minutes for basically nothing, it followed that text prices went down again, and iphone hadn't even been out yet. Nowadays its hard to find a carrier that doesn't give you both unlimited.
I have a perfect solution to this then. Somebody outside of the EU could maintain a website that is dedicated to tracking the cases of individuals who have requested to have search engines remove their information from incidents that they're embarrassed about. The website could hold details related to the case, mugshots of the individual, and other relevant data.
Submit a request to be forgotten? Then land on the website of the "forgotten."
Call the website "Streisand's Back Yard" or something to that effect.
Eh are you trying to tell us that the red dot that Indians have on their heads shrink and expand along with the red dot on Jupiter?
That has to be the most innovative musical instrument ever. I wonder what kind of sound it makes.
Try telling that to HR departments around the world. All too often I've seen jobs posted looking for LAN technicians saying they want you to have a Computer Science or related degree; a few of them pass on my resume when they see my degree is in Network Systems Administration (I'm not entirely sure if a person is doing it, because in these cases I get an email saying I don't meet the minimum requirement even though I meet ALL of their requirements listed, including their bonus/preferred requirements, just I don't have a CS degree, nor am I interested in getting one.)
We've already seen this kind of FUD from foreign governments who want authority over ICANN and IANA. Basically they argue that by these being under the US Department of Commerce, which itself is technically run by Congress, the NSA can somehow spy on the world. Complete nonsense (regardless of who holds the keys, the NSA can always do what they do.)
The real reason they want control over this is because it makes censorship a lot easier. Russia and China want to stop free speech, whereas Europe wants to kill anything they believe is "hate speech" (which technically almost anything can be called hate speech.) I distrust the feds as much as anybody, but IMO the US is the best holder of that because it doesn't do either.
I think most of the time when an ISP eliminates the competition, they don't do it through underpricing (if they did, we would see cheaper internet services.) Rather, the way they do it is through corrupt politicians and unions. That is, they get the law changed so that they are the only one who can acquire the easement rights.
And of course, many voters often support it for very stupid reasons. A common argument I see (especially in areas like SF where everybody is hypersensitive to maintaining a "traditional" appearance) is that they don't want everybody who asks to be able to run fiber lines throughout the city, saying that one link is enough. As a network engineer myself, I disagree, and even think that idea is actually stupid. Multiple redundant links is a good thing, not just for competition, but to allow for robust networks. From a technical perspective, the advantages range from higher availability to higher bandwidth. Furthermore, if you run large conduit pipes then there are no aesthetic issues other than VRAD deployment, which isn't a big deal IMO because for electricity you already have to have transformers almost every bit as distributed.
Sorry meant to say the Obama admin rather than "the Obama."
You're making my case. WIPO is irrelevant to US Law without the DMCA. If the Treaty was ratified, but the statute (DMCA) had stalled in the House WIPO wouldn't matter.
No you've got that entirely backwards. The standard procedure is to sign and adopt treaties first, and then congress writes laws to implement them. If anything, that makes my case. The Obama justified his action here because the laws that ACTA requires are already on the books in his view, so therefore he says he can skip congress and the senate. THAT was his argument, NOT the one you claimed above. And also there is no precedent for that, rather it's kind of a rule that he just made up.
However he is pulling a very fast one here: Because the Obama administration says the ACTA treaty is binding, we will be required to adopt laws to conform with it should it be determined that they are needed, and we're forbidden from repealing any laws that it requires.
Let's suppose though that ACTA is what you claim it is, and the above is wrong. If that were the case then it would fall under an executive agreement. If it is an executive agreement, then Obama actually broke the law because he didn't notify congress. This is because entire thing was hidden until he signed it himself. Namely this law:
http://cwx.prenhall.com/bookbi...
Even if this was a sole-executive agreement, it STILL requires the approval of congress. This is both written in the laws in addition to case law (see the last sentence of page 5 of this: http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/aw...)
That is why Obama didn't make the argument you are saying he made.
But that's not because the treaty wasn't valid US Law, it's because treaties can't be used to force Americans to do things.
I don't think you know as much as you think you know, because this is quite wrong, and you obviously don't pay attention to even this website very much to say what you just said. It's because of the WIPO treaty that we have the DMCA, which overrules certain first amendment protections. That's the only reason, in fact, because when a group (don't recall which one, EFF?) tried to appeal it to SCOTUS, in their ruling SCOTUS said that the DMCA was required to meet our WIPO treaty obligations, which also made the anti-circumvention clause constitutional, and keeps it a criminal offense that you can't talk about how to circumvent. People break that rule all the time, but it's still illegal nonetheless, and that is rooted in the WIPO treaty.
If the Clinton admin had the power to enforce Kyoto protocols, they probably would have, as none of those even run afoul of any constitutionally protected issues.
Which brings me to your first point last:
You're talking about international law. Everyone is, by definition, always right because everyone is (by definition) sovereign. This leads to a lot of words having multiple definitions that are not necessarily clear to the laymen.
No no no wrong. Treaties ultimately do take away sovereignty, which is one big reason why Hollywood is pushing for them. Think about Japan for example; they signed a treaty which installed Douglas MacArthur as their de-facto governor/emporer (his informal title there was Gaijin Shogun.) It was done through their normal method of signing treaties, granted they had little choice in the matter.
Dude look at what you're saying. Effectively this amounts to "well of course Obama will grant favors to those who pay, otherwise we'd have civil wars and stuff."
This is a pretty clear cut case of drinking the kool-aid.
Anyways, the system has no such requirement. Money can influence politicians, but it does very little to influence votes on a given topic. Look at that anti-recall campaign in Colorado which spent some 11 times what the opposition spent, and yet Morse and Giron got demolished in the election. (Giron lost by a 12 point spread.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
Kyoto was never made binding to the US, even the Clinton admin knew that. However the Obama admin itself says, and I quote, "ACTA is a legally binding international agreement":
https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
You sit there and call bullshit on me, but the man that you are cheerleading for even disagrees with you.
Let's suppose this is the case, (and ignoring your rather hostile response) do you think the president would have signed ACTA if there was no money putting pressure towards it, especially given that SOPA was killed only a short time before?
There is no dancing around that one: This president is as corrupt as anybody else. Just weeks before SOPA was signed, Chris Dodd was going around making threats to politicians who weren't going to be tough on enacting the laws that "Hollywood" was demanding:
http://boingboing.net/2012/01/...
Lo and behold, 4 days after that article was written, ACTA was signed. That is proof positive that money CAN buy presidential action.
That doesn't make any sense. At all. Article 2 section 2 of the constitution specifically says a treaty must have 2/3rds approval from the senate. The purpose behind this is that each of the states gets a say in it. I mean look at the history of treaties in the US:
https://www.senate.gov/artandh...
Every treaty in the history of the US that hasn't been given 2/3rds vote in the senate has stalled, except just the one Hollywood paid for.
You're making a huge mistake by trying to pin an accuracy figure on economics, because it doesn't deal in accuracy, rather it deals in precision. Honestly calling economics dismal science is every bit as boneheaded as calling psychology the same thing, namely because economics deals with psychology. Even psychology is inaccurate to quite a large degree. (Guess what method psychologists use to determine the exact nature of each patient's chemical imbalance? I'll tell you: it's trial and error based. They try giving you different drugs until they get one that has marked results, and even then, no drug works perfectly.)
Economics allows you to make reasonable predictions about supply, demand, and value, and it is applicable to almost everything, even things not necessarily related to money. Let's take for example net neutrality. Without the concept of economics, you have no basis towards making any argument in any given direction about bandwidth consumption or pricing. Why? Because you have no models with which to predict how the demand for bandwidth will be affected. We don't know exactly where broadband would go either with or without net neutrality; nobody does. But we can model it, and that's where economics comes in.
Think? I'd say know is more like it.
Look at how ACTA was ratified. This was in the wake of SOPA where strong public reaction killed it while it was in the house. If ACTA had gone through the senate as SOPA had, those lobbying for it knew full well it would die like it already had in Europe.
I'm the last person to make conspiracy theories, but I really, really, really doubt that ACTA would have bypassed the constitutional provisions required for ratifying treaties had it not been for what happened with SOPA. Technically it's an illegal treaty, but President Obama claims that he's allowed to sign it if he wants to, constitution be damned. I mean shit, nobody except for the president himself was even allowed to see it before it was ratified.
In my experience, Google Maps is VERY good at avoiding this kind of thing. It maintains a realtime traffic density map for this exact purpose. A taxi is going to be inherently less reliable here, namely because they have to guess what the traffic is going to look like based on the time of day, day of week, holiday, time of year, and least of all practical, construction detours. Google on the other hand tracks these in real-time.
I don't think it's just a PR strategy. From a project management perspective, this is a big change that is probably too late to make. This is one of those things where you have to take several steps back in the development pipeline and change too many things, and indeed renders a lot of QA work and a number of other items effectively wasted.
This is the kind of change where, if they were forced to implement it, would be a project killer IMO, because I don't think the game is expected to make enough money to justify that cost.
This is just another classic case of "some may find it offensive." I mean shit, the USA alone is one of few places in the world where there is zero government censorship on video games. I really like it that way, to be honest. I say leave the fairness doctrine back in the 80's where it belongs, and let artists do whatever they feel they must, not what some political activist wants.
Drivers deliberately taking sub-optimal routes to run up the meter.
Apparently you've never ridden in a taxi before.
That aside, both the passenger and the driver are aware of the optimal route. The client did schedule the route on their smartphone you know, the same kind of smartphone that already has the optimal route calculated, and the source and destination are already known before the driver even picks them up, so your number 4 and 5 are completely moot, and essentially just pulled out of your ass.
Guess who does those things though? The already existing taxi drivers.
Lyft also screens both drivers and passengers, by the way (criminal and DMV) and both the driver and passenger rate one another. Regular taxis offer no such service.
Those services are no better than hitchhiking since there is no vetting of the driver. Insurance won't stop you from being taken to the woods, beaten, raped, robbed and murdered (not necessarily in that order)
Sorry but that's a load of crap. Regulated cab drivers have done all of these things.
These services offer the advantage of making that less likely to happen than with a regulated driver for a few reasons:
1) There's a pretty clear cut record of the fact that your last known activity was getting in a taxi via Lyft or Uber, regardless of payment method.
2) There's a well established identity of the person who is driving you (if they are a veteran to the service, they will have numerous ratings.)
3) Both you AND the driver are carrying smartphones that are metering how far you've gone, which means a third party is also tracking your movement and has a very good way for the authorities to trace your last steps.
4) You made your destination clear to a third party before going for a ride, and if your driver significantly strays from that destination at the time that something happened to you, then he's got some splainin' to do.
These safety features don't exist with a traditional taxi. The few that do (e.g. calling the cab company and telling them to pick you up) don't carry any kind of audit mechanism (with Lyft and Uber, there are six audit sources that should match up 100% of the time, so there's no possibility of any two parties conspiring against a third.)
Sorry but your concerns are not legitimate. It's just a tired old argument to keep an already protectionist racket in place. The city governments won't listen to any of the four points I made though because they WANT to have an oligopoly that they can suck more money from. If its tax revenue they need, then just make it a fucking tax instead of making it hell to be able to get a ride without owning your own car. It's not as if they couldn't tax these services (they already plan on regulating them out of the market, whereas simply taxing them would be a lot easier to do.)
Or they just have a lot of disposable income...which given that the statistics here work like an extreme example of Pareto, it would make sense.
Still though I'm not sure I'd identify this as being a "problem."
If your concept is really that good, just publish it yourself. Or crowdfund it. Both models have been extremely successful lately. I'd wager that the reason the big monolithic publishers are merging so much (e.g. EA buying out a bunch of other publishers) is because of this exact reason - the mid-sized publishers can't compete with the indie ones, so they either fold or get bought out.
PCs and Mobile are especially fertile ground for that, because the costs for entry are tiny. In fact, while consoles are usually the first for the big name titles (primarily a result of Sony or Microsoft paying bucks to get exclusive deals,) they're usually the last for the small but innovative concepts. (And often the console version is half-baked because they lack the flexibility of PCs - think games like Starcraft.)