When an Uber driver gets deactivated, he gets taken off the Uber platform and can't pick up any customer any longer.
And only Uber and the driver know the real underlying reason(s) for a particular deactivation. It could be that the driver is not a safe driver, or that he can't follow GPS navigation (or relies too much on GPS navigation at the cost of common sense), or that he has a dirty car, or that he's rude and smells, or that he doesn't know enough English, etc. The equivalent would be like Amazon pulling out all the books from its search results that didn't have at least five stars (which wouldn't make sense for Amazon to do, but which makes sense for Uber to do because having the wrong driver is also a safety issue).
On the other hand, customers also do get rated, and customers that don't speak a word of English usually have a rating of 4.35 stars (the lowest I've ever seen in my area), so that probably means the customer may not even be at the right pickup area (because that customer probably can't understand a single word of what the Uber app says) and a driver can anticipate all kinds of trouble trying to pick up such a person.
No, that's a 4.6 out of 5 stars. Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of passengers will just rate their drivers a 5 out of 5 stars without really thinking about it (unless the driver really did something to upset them).
It's not like they're rating a book on Amazon, where the distinction between a 5-stars book and a 4-stars book means the difference between your top most favorite book and a book that may be really good -- but that you wouldn't consider a part of your top 10 list.
Also, you have to know that Uber is incentivized to deactivate and delay the reactivation of new drivers because doing so, before the driver is able to complete his quota by the deadline, allows Uber to avoid paying the signup bonus and the referral bonus.
I'm an Uber driver and I met a Chinese former Uber driver who got deactivated in the US for not knowing enough English.
The first time he got deactivated, he had to pay for and pass an online English language quiz. Of course, he passed the test (I assume one of his family members helped him). Then, he got reactivated, but that didn't last for more than a week or two, and that second time, he got permanently deactivated, because he couldn't get his rating back up and passengers were still leaving the same comments about him not knowing enough English.
My point is that Uber has a crude rating system. For instance, an average of 4.6 stars can get you deactivated in some cities. But crude as that system may be, it does seem to be working at weeding out the worst Uber drivers (including those that may not know enough English).
And if we're talking about forcing Uber drivers in the UK to pass an English test, I would love to see some of their sample questions, to see how difficult they made the test.
A car driver losing control and injuring a pedestrian would serve more time.
It would depend on the context.
For instance, a car driver losing control and injuring a pedestrian during an illegal sideshow in a crowded street would probably serve more time, but a ninety-year-old with a valid drivers license losing control when driving to the farmers market, or someone losing control because he didn't install his tire chains during a winter morning before going to work, would probably get a more lenient sentence.
In this case, I think deterrence is the goal. This guy is likely never to do the same thing again, but many other drone owners are very likely to want to fly their drone over very large crowds. The temptation is there and it's very real. And in a way, the judge is not sending a message to the offender, he is sending that message to those other potential offenders.
Lithium batteries can act really weird after a number of years. Do not count on people replacing those batteries when they need to.
Also, many settings on a drone can be overridden, and all it takes is a stupid parent giving control to a child, or simply an adult getting intoxicated and flying the drone anyway.
Did Donald Trump just take over the PR role for Google?
With YouTube, an Alphabet/Google Company, having the cesspool of toxic comments that it has, I don't see how anyone at Google could claim with a straight face that Google's infrastructure is any good at filtering out toxic comments.
The dishonesty and cynicism here shown by allegedly reputable mainstream media outlets here is astonishing.
The mainstream media does troll people too. That's nothing new. However, it's not some grand conspiracy against small independent content producers.
Quoting things out of context and creating outrage generates traffic for them. And if they do it to another troll, that's all the better. And the fact that he was sponsored by Disney made him an easier target still. Most journalists know that Disney is super quick to drop endorsement deals on the flimsiest of reasons.
Market Research: People say that our shakes are so disgusting that they can't even finish them. Perhaps now would be the time to start using better ingredients for a few pennies more per shake?
CEO: That's none sense. If people can't finish their shake, it must because of the straw, not because of the taste. Besides, our customers are like stupid little kids. If we show them a cool new design for our straws, they'll buy the shake just to get the straw.
First, you give the boxes to the execs and the managers. When the union figures out that they're not getting heat or air conditioning when managers are out of the office, then you give those boxes to union leaders and your favorite employees. When the rest of the employees figure out that they've been excluded, even the most paranoid among them will be demanding their own box at their desk.
Now, I would take to task the editor(s) of the Indianapolis Star for printing that shit. At a certain point, morally, one would have to say "You know, maybe that doesn't need to be in our article."
Clearly, that's not how click-baiting works.
Revenue is king. An editor who says stuff like that would just get himself fired.
So you want the watch to be just a speaker phone? Oh god no! I can just imagine the results during my commute hours.
Get yourself a Bluetooth headset. You can still use your watch to answer the phone, but then please use your headset. We don't want to listen to both sides of your conversation at full volume.
Also, I use Xfinity, but one thing that happens with Xfinity service is that it shuts itself down frequently. And services like Ookla don't measure uptime. Ookla only measures speed when Xfinity is actually working.
Which means the only thing Xfinity has to do get good stats on Ookla is to shut down connections entirely when it knows it's not going to get good speeds.
I believe him. He doesn't need to be amazingly attractive. He just needs to be moderately attractive. Also, if he's from the East Coast and in SF on business, that probably means he is well dressed too. Personally, I've been propositioned a couple of times in the Bay Area, plus I've been groped by another guy once during New Years, and I'm not the most attractive guy around. That being said, I'm surprised he found it that annoying.
To me, the most annoying is the aggressive panhandling. Just yesterday night, I had to yell at a panhandler at a gas station in Berkeley just because he was so determined to wash my cars' windows (despite the fact that it was raining cats and dogs and the fact that I had already said 'no' to him). This kind of thing happens constantly in San Francisco. "Hey, I want to ask you a question!" "Yes?" "Listen to me friend. I'm going to be honest with you. [2 minutes later after a long explanation of his life's story, he finally gets to the point] I need money to get on Bart. Whatever you have? Pennies would do." And whatever you do, don't give him pennies (even if he says that's sufficient). I did that a few years ago and I just got them thrown back at my face.
Do you really want a gaming company to sell its games to an oligarch in Russia at roughly 3.7 times less the price of what they would cost in the US? Besides, it's not like a game is a vital piece of software to own. And in poorer countries, it's not like everyone owns a computer fast enough to run the latest game, or owns a computer at all.
And where it comes to non-gaming software, there are other ways a company can make sure its software goes to people who can afford it. It can create student licenses, language localized editions, versions for non-profits, nagware software, software which produces watermarked assets, web hybrid applications, open source software with various levels of support, etc. There are thousands of options, but ultimately the company making that software has to make this kind of decision for itself based on its own capabilities and based on what it thinks the market can bear.
In some countries, making payments can be so difficult as a consumer, that selling a piece of software at a fraction of the cost based on a country's gdp wouldn't necessarily work. And in other cases still, a company could easily cannibalize its own local customer base by providing competing foreign customers with cheaper software.
They're asking about access to the external sdcard (not root access to the entire phone).
Because while every app has access to internal memory, if the app deals with any large amount of data like pictures, videos, mp3s, or games with lots of graphics, it could easily fill up all the internal memory on your phone.
Can someone explain to me why this takes billions of dollars and a building full of PhDs???
If you're using UberPool, the app needs to match riders going the same way. For that, it needs to take into account distance and traffic conditions. The same thing goes when an Uber driver is trying to get home and sets the destination filter, so the Uber driver doesn't ride back in the general direction of his home without passengers.
There is also supply and demand to consider. Uber needs to predict which areas are going to have higher demand and then it needs to provide enough incentives for Uber drivers to alter their daily routines to go to those areas with higher demand. And of course, that demand will fluctuate from year to year based on different events, different weather conditions, Uber marketing, public transportation outages, and other unknown factors...
In a small town in the middle of nowhere, all this work may show no result. But in cities like San Francisco or New York, where you absolutely can not hail a taxi downtown during rush hours (even if you happen to be white and well dressed), this makes a huge difference and usually means the difference between taking your car to work and paying $60 in parking for the day, or taking a combination of public transportation and Uber to work and paying a total of $20 a day.
...not a single one of their drivers is picking up people who want to go the same direction as the driver.
Not to disagree with your main point. I actually agree with you for the most part.
But this is called a destination filter. As drivers, we're only allowed to use this feature twice a day. For a part-time driver who's only driving to work and back each day, this is ok. For a full-time driver, the idea is to use that destination filter once at the beginning of your shift and once at the end of your shift, so as to not waste gas when you're ready to go home. But in between, you don't want to move your car too much while waiting for the next fare, because as an Uber driver you're operating on razor thin margins and you'd be wasting gas if you did that.
By the way, this is one reason the taxi system is so antiquated. Some taxis from outside the suburbs of a city with hard-to-get medaillons are only allowed to drop off passengers in that city, but not pick them up. In other words, in those cities where the medallions are very expensive to get, the system forces outside taxis to do return trips without passengers in the back. This is actually super wasteful. This increases gridlock, doubles the price for those trips, and reduces the number of available taxis at a time when they're really needed. If you ask me, taxis should be only regulated at the state level, not at the city level. Taxis regularly cross city boundaries. That's a fact of our modern era.
Also, there is something called UberPool (or LyftLine if you use Lyft), which is only available in some areas. The idea is that we pick up person A at one location, pick up person B on the way, pick up person C on the way, drop off person A on the way, drop off person B on the way, and then drop off person C. This actually works extremely well. Several times, I've actually picked up three people that didn't know each other from the same exact night club, just because they were all going in the same general direction. Or I've done the reverse, and picked up three different people at different locations, only to bring them to the same exact location. Although, if person A agrees to do UberPool and we don't pick up anyone else on the way, their fare still gets a discount of 20%. And where fares are not fixed by government regulations, UberPool passengers save more money than 20% the more they can split their journey with other passengers that we've picked up on the way. This feature is especially popular with University students, young professionals, and newbies who got confused by the interface.
...despite all the money they're bilking from people, still can't turn a profit.
In any case, I do agree that the company is very deceptive with the way it compensates drivers, it basically lies to us all the freaking time, but I just wanted to set the record straight about a few things.
So they're going to spend $$$$$ for something of marginal use. Unless they can take over my USB, in which case I'm screaming bloody murder.
The student's pitch makes it sound like this is a government backed project. It is not. Right now, it's a student's project, and a potentially future startup idea, but nothing more than that. Whether this idea will be backed by the government is another matter entirely. Also, countries like Norway are already turning off analog FM broadcasting beginning this year in favor of digital FM. The UK and others will follow after that. Even if the AM band remains, this idea can not be implemented on the AM band which is designed to travel much longer distances than FM.
As to digital HD FM, I have no idea how that works. Could such a project be able to hijack digital FM signals without revisions to the current digital FM standard? Maybe yes, maybe not. Perhaps, someone who knows more about digital FM could chime in about this.
But like you said between USB music, telephone calls, 4G/3G music, satellite radio, AM analog radio, CDs, etc. Digital FM radio may constitute only a tiny portion of what people are actually listening to in their car. And one could argue that the problem with ambulances is not that drivers can't hear them/see them, it is that some drivers just act stupid when they hear/see an ambulance behind them.
Slashdot Mirror
When an Uber driver gets deactivated, he gets taken off the Uber platform and can't pick up any customer any longer.
And only Uber and the driver know the real underlying reason(s) for a particular deactivation. It could be that the driver is not a safe driver, or that he can't follow GPS navigation (or relies too much on GPS navigation at the cost of common sense), or that he has a dirty car, or that he's rude and smells, or that he doesn't know enough English, etc. The equivalent would be like Amazon pulling out all the books from its search results that didn't have at least five stars (which wouldn't make sense for Amazon to do, but which makes sense for Uber to do because having the wrong driver is also a safety issue).
On the other hand, customers also do get rated, and customers that don't speak a word of English usually have a rating of 4.35 stars (the lowest I've ever seen in my area), so that probably means the customer may not even be at the right pickup area (because that customer probably can't understand a single word of what the Uber app says) and a driver can anticipate all kinds of trouble trying to pick up such a person.
When a customer rates a driver negatively, he is forced to select/write a reason.
No, that's a 4.6 out of 5 stars. Thankfully, the overwhelming majority of passengers will just rate their drivers a 5 out of 5 stars without really thinking about it (unless the driver really did something to upset them).
It's not like they're rating a book on Amazon, where the distinction between a 5-stars book and a 4-stars book means the difference between your top most favorite book and a book that may be really good -- but that you wouldn't consider a part of your top 10 list.
Also, you have to know that Uber is incentivized to deactivate and delay the reactivation of new drivers because doing so, before the driver is able to complete his quota by the deadline, allows Uber to avoid paying the signup bonus and the referral bonus.
I'm an Uber driver and I met a Chinese former Uber driver who got deactivated in the US for not knowing enough English.
The first time he got deactivated, he had to pay for and pass an online English language quiz. Of course, he passed the test (I assume one of his family members helped him). Then, he got reactivated, but that didn't last for more than a week or two, and that second time, he got permanently deactivated, because he couldn't get his rating back up and passengers were still leaving the same comments about him not knowing enough English.
My point is that Uber has a crude rating system. For instance, an average of 4.6 stars can get you deactivated in some cities. But crude as that system may be, it does seem to be working at weeding out the worst Uber drivers (including those that may not know enough English).
And if we're talking about forcing Uber drivers in the UK to pass an English test, I would love to see some of their sample questions, to see how difficult they made the test.
A car driver losing control and injuring a pedestrian would serve more time.
It would depend on the context.
For instance, a car driver losing control and injuring a pedestrian during an illegal sideshow in a crowded street would probably serve more time, but a ninety-year-old with a valid drivers license losing control when driving to the farmers market, or someone losing control because he didn't install his tire chains during a winter morning before going to work, would probably get a more lenient sentence.
Punishment has four possible components
1. Protection
2. Deterrence
3. Rehabilitation
4. Vengeance
In this case, I think deterrence is the goal. This guy is likely never to do the same thing again, but many other drone owners are very likely to want to fly their drone over very large crowds. The temptation is there and it's very real. And in a way, the judge is not sending a message to the offender, he is sending that message to those other potential offenders.
Lithium batteries can act really weird after a number of years. Do not count on people replacing those batteries when they need to.
Also, many settings on a drone can be overridden, and all it takes is a stupid parent giving control to a child, or simply an adult getting intoxicated and flying the drone anyway.
Did Donald Trump just take over the PR role for Google?
With YouTube, an Alphabet/Google Company, having the cesspool of toxic comments that it has, I don't see how anyone at Google could claim with a straight face that Google's infrastructure is any good at filtering out toxic comments.
She says she took screenshots. There is no independent evidence beyond what she says, and her story doesn't seem credible.
According to her, there are independent witnesses who were both also sexually harassed by the same man and actively lied to by HR using the same lie.
This claim should be super easy to prove if true, and super easy to disprove if false.
Most of the time, I couldn't agree with you more. However, you didn't read her blog post.
This kind of thing started on her first day and she took screenshots.
Really, you have to read her blog post. The HR person who handled this issue needs to be sacked pronto.
The dishonesty and cynicism here shown by allegedly reputable mainstream media outlets here is astonishing.
The mainstream media does troll people too. That's nothing new. However, it's not some grand conspiracy against small independent content producers.
Quoting things out of context and creating outrage generates traffic for them. And if they do it to another troll, that's all the better. And the fact that he was sponsored by Disney made him an easier target still. Most journalists know that Disney is super quick to drop endorsement deals on the flimsiest of reasons.
I can just imagine how the conversation went:
CEO: Why is no one buying our shakes?
Market Research: People say that our shakes are so disgusting that they can't even finish them. Perhaps now would be the time to start using better ingredients for a few pennies more per shake?
CEO: That's none sense. If people can't finish their shake, it must because of the straw, not because of the taste. Besides, our customers are like stupid little kids. If we show them a cool new design for our straws, they'll buy the shake just to get the straw.
The two situations are not the same.
Whether it's the police cam or the voice mail, Mel Gibson showed his true colors.
In the case of this YouTuber, whether he's anti-semitic or not, it doesn't really matter. He's an idiot for not knowing Disney's usual take on things.
They did the deployment incorrectly.
First, you give the boxes to the execs and the managers. When the union figures out that they're not getting heat or air conditioning when managers are out of the office, then you give those boxes to union leaders and your favorite employees. When the rest of the employees figure out that they've been excluded, even the most paranoid among them will be demanding their own box at their desk.
Now, I would take to task the editor(s) of the Indianapolis Star for printing that shit. At a certain point, morally, one would have to say "You know, maybe that doesn't need to be in our article."
Clearly, that's not how click-baiting works.
Revenue is king. An editor who says stuff like that would just get himself fired.
So you want the watch to be just a speaker phone? Oh god no! I can just imagine the results during my commute hours.
Get yourself a Bluetooth headset. You can still use your watch to answer the phone, but then please use your headset. We don't want to listen to both sides of your conversation at full volume.
No, VR is alive and well.
It's just that when comparing the Oculus to the HTC Vive, the Oculus is inferior and more expensive (if you include the price of the controllers).
Also, I use Xfinity, but one thing that happens with Xfinity service is that it shuts itself down frequently. And services like Ookla don't measure uptime. Ookla only measures speed when Xfinity is actually working.
Which means the only thing Xfinity has to do get good stats on Ookla is to shut down connections entirely when it knows it's not going to get good speeds.
Do you actually use that? I know I don't. I'm pretty sure most people don't.
I believe him. He doesn't need to be amazingly attractive. He just needs to be moderately attractive. Also, if he's from the East Coast and in SF on business, that probably means he is well dressed too. Personally, I've been propositioned a couple of times in the Bay Area, plus I've been groped by another guy once during New Years, and I'm not the most attractive guy around. That being said, I'm surprised he found it that annoying.
To me, the most annoying is the aggressive panhandling. Just yesterday night, I had to yell at a panhandler at a gas station in Berkeley just because he was so determined to wash my cars' windows (despite the fact that it was raining cats and dogs and the fact that I had already said 'no' to him). This kind of thing happens constantly in San Francisco. "Hey, I want to ask you a question!" "Yes?" "Listen to me friend. I'm going to be honest with you. [2 minutes later after a long explanation of his life's story, he finally gets to the point] I need money to get on Bart. Whatever you have? Pennies would do." And whatever you do, don't give him pennies (even if he says that's sufficient). I did that a few years ago and I just got them thrown back at my face.
Do you really want a gaming company to sell its games to an oligarch in Russia at roughly 3.7 times less the price of what they would cost in the US? Besides, it's not like a game is a vital piece of software to own. And in poorer countries, it's not like everyone owns a computer fast enough to run the latest game, or owns a computer at all.
And where it comes to non-gaming software, there are other ways a company can make sure its software goes to people who can afford it. It can create student licenses, language localized editions, versions for non-profits, nagware software, software which produces watermarked assets, web hybrid applications, open source software with various levels of support, etc. There are thousands of options, but ultimately the company making that software has to make this kind of decision for itself based on its own capabilities and based on what it thinks the market can bear.
In some countries, making payments can be so difficult as a consumer, that selling a piece of software at a fraction of the cost based on a country's gdp wouldn't necessarily work. And in other cases still, a company could easily cannibalize its own local customer base by providing competing foreign customers with cheaper software.
They're asking about access to the external sdcard (not root access to the entire phone).
Because while every app has access to internal memory, if the app deals with any large amount of data like pictures, videos, mp3s, or games with lots of graphics, it could easily fill up all the internal memory on your phone.
Can someone explain to me why this takes billions of dollars and a building full of PhDs???
If you're using UberPool, the app needs to match riders going the same way. For that, it needs to take into account distance and traffic conditions. The same thing goes when an Uber driver is trying to get home and sets the destination filter, so the Uber driver doesn't ride back in the general direction of his home without passengers.
There is also supply and demand to consider. Uber needs to predict which areas are going to have higher demand and then it needs to provide enough incentives for Uber drivers to alter their daily routines to go to those areas with higher demand. And of course, that demand will fluctuate from year to year based on different events, different weather conditions, Uber marketing, public transportation outages, and other unknown factors...
In a small town in the middle of nowhere, all this work may show no result. But in cities like San Francisco or New York, where you absolutely can not hail a taxi downtown during rush hours (even if you happen to be white and well dressed), this makes a huge difference and usually means the difference between taking your car to work and paying $60 in parking for the day, or taking a combination of public transportation and Uber to work and paying a total of $20 a day.
...not a single one of their drivers is picking up people who want to go the same direction as the driver.
Not to disagree with your main point. I actually agree with you for the most part.
But this is called a destination filter. As drivers, we're only allowed to use this feature twice a day. For a part-time driver who's only driving to work and back each day, this is ok. For a full-time driver, the idea is to use that destination filter once at the beginning of your shift and once at the end of your shift, so as to not waste gas when you're ready to go home. But in between, you don't want to move your car too much while waiting for the next fare, because as an Uber driver you're operating on razor thin margins and you'd be wasting gas if you did that.
By the way, this is one reason the taxi system is so antiquated. Some taxis from outside the suburbs of a city with hard-to-get medaillons are only allowed to drop off passengers in that city, but not pick them up. In other words, in those cities where the medallions are very expensive to get, the system forces outside taxis to do return trips without passengers in the back. This is actually super wasteful. This increases gridlock, doubles the price for those trips, and reduces the number of available taxis at a time when they're really needed. If you ask me, taxis should be only regulated at the state level, not at the city level. Taxis regularly cross city boundaries. That's a fact of our modern era.
Also, there is something called UberPool (or LyftLine if you use Lyft), which is only available in some areas. The idea is that we pick up person A at one location, pick up person B on the way, pick up person C on the way, drop off person A on the way, drop off person B on the way, and then drop off person C. This actually works extremely well. Several times, I've actually picked up three people that didn't know each other from the same exact night club, just because they were all going in the same general direction. Or I've done the reverse, and picked up three different people at different locations, only to bring them to the same exact location. Although, if person A agrees to do UberPool and we don't pick up anyone else on the way, their fare still gets a discount of 20%. And where fares are not fixed by government regulations, UberPool passengers save more money than 20% the more they can split their journey with other passengers that we've picked up on the way. This feature is especially popular with University students, young professionals, and newbies who got confused by the interface.
...despite all the money they're bilking from people, still can't turn a profit.
By the way, Uber is profitable in the US. It's just not profitable worldwide.
http://www.businessinsider.com...
In any case, I do agree that the company is very deceptive with the way it compensates drivers, it basically lies to us all the freaking time, but I just wanted to set the record straight about a few things.
So they're going to spend $$$$$ for something of marginal use. Unless they can take over my USB, in which case I'm screaming bloody murder.
The student's pitch makes it sound like this is a government backed project. It is not. Right now, it's a student's project, and a potentially future startup idea, but nothing more than that. Whether this idea will be backed by the government is another matter entirely. Also, countries like Norway are already turning off analog FM broadcasting beginning this year in favor of digital FM. The UK and others will follow after that. Even if the AM band remains, this idea can not be implemented on the AM band which is designed to travel much longer distances than FM.
As to digital HD FM, I have no idea how that works. Could such a project be able to hijack digital FM signals without revisions to the current digital FM standard? Maybe yes, maybe not. Perhaps, someone who knows more about digital FM could chime in about this.
But like you said between USB music, telephone calls, 4G/3G music, satellite radio, AM analog radio, CDs, etc. Digital FM radio may constitute only a tiny portion of what people are actually listening to in their car. And one could argue that the problem with ambulances is not that drivers can't hear them/see them, it is that some drivers just act stupid when they hear/see an ambulance behind them.