Germany is happy with unionisation. Unions act as the negotiator between management and non-management, ensuring that employees have sufficient compensation to maintain an interest in keeping their job, updating their skills often, and keeping as productive as possible. Everybody wins.
Not everybody wins. The people without jobs don't win. Unions are only useful once you're in the union. Unions usually try to impose limits on the number of new hires. Unions also always carve out the more lucractive territories and the better schedules for its more senior members.
And in the United States at least, collective bargaining usually doesn't allow for individual bargaining, so a portion of your income goes to Union fees whether you want the Union representing yourself, or not.
He could be lying, but if that's the counterclaim, then show some evidence for it.
You're missing the OP's original point. It's difficult to prove anything if you've stopped measuring things.
May be it's just me because I'm not a great developer, but I work that much harder to find bugs within my programs because I know that QA will always try harder than me to find any bugs that I let through.
Furthermore, even if the number of bugs stays constant even without QA (which I very much doubt), without QA those bugs are going to be found many days if not weeks later than usual. And as a developer, I am so much quicker at fixing a bug I introduced 30 minutes ago or a couple of hours ago, than many days ago. After all, I am only human, and it takes time for me to re-immerse myself into a particular piece of code if it's not already fresh in my mind.
Also, Yahoo makes it sound as if they took the harder approach and now it's paying off for them. Not at all, laying off QA is the easier approach. It's just like stopping regression-testing. It's infinitely easier to do that, at least initially. QA people are not easy to deal with. Failing tests are not easy to deal with either. When confronted with either QA people or failing tests, there is also a sense of urgency about having to drop whatever you're doing and dealing with the problem at hand. Removing those QA people and removing those failing tests may give you a sense of reprieve, but it is certainly not going to help fix any of the underlying problems. If anything, it's just like an ostrich burying its head in the sand when it sees a predator coming.
Searching to see if there are more terrorists engaged in a coordinated attack? Seems like a reasonable and responsible thing to do.
Sure, why spend $8 an hour on a rent-a-cop security guard on guarding the residence of the suspects when we could be spending millions of dollars on a spy plane and violating the privacy of hundreds of thousands of US citizens instead.
It isn't about lock-in, the use case is basically a modular business dongle set. You're not locked in, because the role this device fills is that of a portable dumb-terminal to display your presentations at random times/locations.
I disagree. If it requires you to buy multiple systems of the same brand, it's a lock-in.
It applies the modular computing concept to the world of peripherals, which could be an ideal place for a set of modular products to actually make an impact in the market.
This is nothing new. Companies love to create modular products with their own proprietary connectors. Locking-in customers into their platform is the holy grail for them.
Never mind that this idea would probably gain lot more of traction if they actually made it an open standard, but of course, Lenovo is not going to do that. That's now how they think. Lenovo would prefer that this modular project falls flat on its face instead of opening it up to other manufacturers to use.
How is airbnb or many of these other startups tech companies?
Sure they use technology, but so does the grocery store down the street. Should we start labeling grocery stores as tech companies that have websites?
Grocery stores don't count as technology companies. Technology companies don't have a public hotline you can call, or if they do have a hotline, they don't have live human beings answering it (without at least charging you $120 an hour). Banks are very close to becoming technology companies, but most are not there yet. My bank for instance will still give me a live human being after 3 hours of wait time.
My bank sucks at technology. Sometimes, I wish it was more like Square, Pay Pal, or Google. Not having customer service people, and only relying on your own technology, now that's a commitment.
I tried to rent a place through Airbnb. The process went like so:
Me: I'm looking for a room for next tuesday. Airbnb: What's your Facebook login? Me: Do I look like an idiot? Airbnb: How about your G+ account? Me: I must look like an idiot.
So that was that. I haven't given them a second chance.
Not that it's necessary to "sign up" to search for a room, it's not, but you must have missed the "Sign up with Email" option.
It's not very visible, but it's below the idiot-proof Facebook button and below the idiot-proof G+ button.
It isn't about jobs or friends. Sometimes it is about trolls and criminals. If a dirtbag sends my under age daughter a dick pic, it is going to get screen capped and sent to the police. Undelete just give false sense of security.
Just make sure that the penis is attached to an at least eighteen year old dirt bag, otherwise you'd be trafficking yourself in child pornography.
It depends if your email client uses IMAP instead of POP.
The entire point of IMAP is that if you delete/read/change a message on one of your client programs, it will do the same on your other client programs. IMAP is actually quite handy for users who read their email on more than one device.
Except for the fact that most employees in the state of Georgia are "at will". Which generally means they can fire him with or without cause. Without knowing if there was an employment contract it's just speculation.
At least three mistakes were made here. Thus far, only one mistake is being addressed, and that's the cover-up made by the employee.
The vendor needs to be taken to task. The vendor has security access to the data. Supposedly, the staff of the vendor should have been trained properly. Also, even if the public agency didn't disclose the breach. The vendor should have publicly disclosed the breach. It obviously didn't either.
And finally, what's up with Secretary Kemp? Why is he sending out political party affiliations to the Georgia Department of Revenue? He should have removed that field from the file. The Georgia Department of Revenue doesn't need to know that part. That part isn't relevant, or at least it shouldn't be.
How crazy does one have to be? I'd love to hear her story behind that. Maybe she'll write a book.
Just ask and you shall receive.
Rita A. Crundwell (born January 10, 1953) was the appointed comptroller and treasurer of Dixon, Illinois, from 1983 to 2012, and the admitted operator of what is believed to be the largest municipal fraud in American history. She was fired in April 2012 after it was revealed that she had embezzled $53.7 million from the city over 22 years to support her championship American Quarter Horse breeding operation. [1][2][3][4] She pled guilty to her crimes and was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison.[1]
Crundwell's Quarter Horse operation, RC Quarter Horses, was one of the best-known Quarter Horse breeders in the country; her horses won 52 world championships and she was named the leading owner by the American Quarter Horse Association for eight consecutive years prior to her arrest.
Proceeds generated from asset sales are used to compensate victims, supplement funding for law enforcement initiatives and support community programs.
Victimless crimes are probably preferable then. Also I assume those "law enforcement initiatives" are just double-speak for big blow out parties, cable TV for the break rooms, cool military equipment, cool new cars (both marked and unmarked), and unlimited donuts.
And after Israel gets Google to censor it, that's the only thing you will have.
When Chinese soldiers shoot Tibetans like dogs. That's also censored in China, but it's not censored in the rest of the world. I suspect Google will do the same thing here.
Why civil courts? What he's doing is a criminal offense.
Since the Finnish kid was a minor at the time, it seems the criminal system used kid gloves against him (even when it was able to convict him of a crime). That's probably why civil court was suggested as a better option. That, and civil court has a lower standard of proof.
That being said, the problem seems to be much bigger than one Finnish guy. He may have incited others to hate his target, but it would seem he's not the one committing the bulk of the crimes. And that's really the main problem here that gets glossed over by the article. If the hacker friends of the Finnish guy don't reside in Finland, then it means you have to track them down and convince an entirely new set of law enforcement officials from another country to take these SWATTING incidents seriously and invest enough resources to investigate the case, to in turn SWAT the hackers themselves, confiscate their computers, and do the necessary forensic analysis work on what they find.
And this kind of work is not cheap. In this case, the kid was investigated most probably because he attacked Sony and Microsoft as well, but if he had not gone after such high profile targets, he probably would never have been prosecuted in the first place. After all, who's got time to listen to the complaints of an ordinary family halfway across the world (with a not-so-innocent hacker kid of their own)?
Private cars, not just taxis, rescued wounded strangers to take them to the hospitals. That doesn't mean Uber cars weren't part of those cars. After all, if you take on a bleeding stranger in your backseat, turning on the Uber app on your phone makes about as much sense as a taxi driver turning on his meter for the same thing.
Now granted, Uber cars may be more difficult to spot, so if you're carrying a bleeding person in your arms, and you know paramedics are going to be overwhelmed, your first impulse may be to be looking for a taxi instead, but if you can't see a taxi, you might as well try to flag down the first car you see if that's the case. Who can blame Uber for that? Uber cars are not really designed to be flagged down. If Uber cars started carrying little mini-cab placards on top of their cars like some mini-cabs do in the UK, I can bet you that the french CEO of Uber would promptly be sent back to jail.
In fact, whatever did happen to that guy? Was he ever released? Is Uber still operating in France? By your statement, you're implying that they still do.
This IS NOT TRUE in locations where Uber has pooling. Major cities like NYC, Uber drivers can and do get notices of other riders and are allowed and will take you out of the way to pickup those riders. Now you still pay the original price, but getting to your destination can take ALOT LONGER than expected. If you have not given yourself quite a lot of extra time, taking Uber to JFK from downtown Manhattan can be a big mistake!
You're right. In San Francisco, I think it's called UberPool.
That option doesn't really change my larger point. No customer gets forced into an UberPool. It's an option that the customer has to select when he's first placing the order. And for the Uber driver that picks up a customer that has selected the standard option instead of UberPool, all the things that I previously said would still apply, such a driver would not be allowed to coordinate his next fare in advance.
Uber drivers play all sorts of games with canceling fares which are too short or not "ideal" for them.
Uber drivers need to accept an offer, before it gets confirmed to the passenger. So yes, a passenger may never get picked up for all kinds of reasons, but at least, he is not mislead into believing someone will pick him up.
And Uber's real-time map is a lie, which is obvious in several places that I have tried it.
That article is interesting, but very thin on details.
My google latitude tracking information (that I give family members access to) can also be out of date. My gps may be off, or my battery may be low, thus my phone may think that I am still at the same location I was at 30 minutes ago, but that doesn't prove that I am purposefully misleading my family members.
The article then goes on to try to back up its claim by talking about a patent Uber had issued on the practice, but if you read the paragraph further, you find out that the actual patent mentioned had actually nothing to do with the main point the article was trying to make.
In any case, that is something that you can easily verify for yourself. There are $20 off promo codes floating around the internet for first-time Uber customers, so you might as well use one of those promo codes, book a $5 to $19 ride, and see if the virtual dot does follow the car coming to pick you up. For me, it did it the couple of times that I did it. For you, it may not. But if it doesn't, I'd sure like to know about it.
At least the taxi companies are regulated so there are complaint channels and potential consequences. With Uber you're relying on a sleazy company to police themselves.
You're making it sound like we're in Somalia or something.
The legal system hasn't gone anywhere. And the credit card charge back system hasn't gone anywhere either.
The US government is NOT there to help people be superstitious. You want something to be labelled? Prove a negative consequence.
And yet, it becomes that much more difficult to prove something, if you don't have labels to begin with.
For example, if you want to prove that GM salmons, that grow up more quickly, will actually have accumulated less harmful mercury than other "older" non-modified salmons from the same area. In that case, you could expect the full cooperation and perhaps even some funding from the business who engineered the salmon.
However, now try to study the longterm health effects of GM salmons on real people. Can you survey people about what they eat? Probably not. If those people don't know what they're eating, then they can't really tell you what they ate. And while it may not be completely impossible to create a study where you could control for the fact that GM salmons aren't labeled, it does make it much more difficult to do so in the end.
That is nonsense. Legally questionable, and what taxi business would allow that?
That's a very good question. What taxi business would allow that? Or a better question would be which taxi business would allow that?
Talk to your taxi drivers. Some of them use multiple dispatch centers to get referrals.
I'm not saying all of them do. Also, I am speaking specifically about San Francisco during peak hours, which is where I live. It probably won't apply to you if you're walking out of a five star hotel in San Francisco, or if you live in a city where the number of medaillons is not artificially set in stone.
I don't know much about Uber, I don't see how their model is different from a regular taxi. They both need to pick you up at your current location and then you need to tell them where to go.
I don't see how Uber knowing in advance where you want to go could change the outcome.
No, in fact it's the taxi drivers that usually have more information about rides than Uber drivers.
Once booked, an Uber car can not be flagged someone else, it can not hear about other people needing rides to other locations, and it can not make itself available for other tentative bookings. First in, first out. That's how it works. There is no inventory sitting in queues waiting midway to be processed (if you don't mind me using the metaphors of lean manufacturing).
In the case of a taxi however, even if they're using a taxi app, there is no guarantee that they're coming to pick you up, because someone else could flag them on the way, they may get a more attractive offer of someone needing a ride to the airport (instead of a five minutes ride), they may not like the color of your skin or the way you're dressed or the way you speak, and they're always trying to book their next ride before they're finished with their existing one.
In the case of Uber also, the inability to do double-booking is important, but it's not the only thing that makes the service better. Since the transaction goes through whether you're picked up or not, you better be there when the Uber driver shows up. And the Uber driver better pick you up, because otherwise he'll get a charge back on his account and he'll get a very bad customer rating on his profile (assuming the gps data from both phones do not contradict the story of the customer).
Not only that, but as a user using the Uber app, you're instantly reassured after ordering the Uber car, since you're seeing its dot immediately moving towards you. In the case of a taxi however, even if you were to pinpoint its real-time location on a map, you would probably see the dot moving away from you as it is trying to finish its last ride.
Combine that with the fact that the medaillon system is archaic and highly inflexible, it's no wonder medaillon holders are not happy. During peak hours, Uber drivers can come out of nowhere. Their marginal costs for Uber are constant. In the case of a medaillon holder however, during peak hours, he can't split his medaillon(s) in two. The most he can do is to force a rotation of drivers to use his medaillon 24 hours a day 7 days a week even during low peak hours, to make sure he squeezes out every penny that he can out of that medaillon (or medaillons) so he can try to recoup his investment. And that doesn't solve the problem, that in places like New York or San Francisco, there are not enough taxis during peak hours, so it's not even worth trying to get one during those times. So before services like Uber came along, people opted for public transportation if they could during peak hours, or they opted to bring in their own car, and paid outrageous amounts for parking.
Slashdot Mirror
So, having dismally crashed and burned in the phone marketplace, Microsoft now allows you to get to a Windows box *from* a phone?
I don't understand this.
In Windows XP or Windows millennial, I could always get to my Windows box from my Android phone/tablet.
Did Windows 10 block this somehow?
Germany is happy with unionisation. Unions act as the negotiator between management and non-management, ensuring that employees have sufficient compensation to maintain an interest in keeping their job, updating their skills often, and keeping as productive as possible. Everybody wins.
Not everybody wins. The people without jobs don't win. Unions are only useful once you're in the union. Unions usually try to impose limits on the number of new hires. Unions also always carve out the more lucractive territories and the better schedules for its more senior members.
And in the United States at least, collective bargaining usually doesn't allow for individual bargaining, so a portion of your income goes to Union fees whether you want the Union representing yourself, or not.
What would the point of making everything less secure be.
The FBI has obviously been compromised by traitors and foreign double-agents.
Their true purpose is to sabotage US technology companies in favor of foreign technology companies.
He could be lying, but if that's the counterclaim, then show some evidence for it.
You're missing the OP's original point. It's difficult to prove anything if you've stopped measuring things.
May be it's just me because I'm not a great developer, but I work that much harder to find bugs within my programs because I know that QA will always try harder than me to find any bugs that I let through.
Furthermore, even if the number of bugs stays constant even without QA (which I very much doubt), without QA those bugs are going to be found many days if not weeks later than usual. And as a developer, I am so much quicker at fixing a bug I introduced 30 minutes ago or a couple of hours ago, than many days ago. After all, I am only human, and it takes time for me to re-immerse myself into a particular piece of code if it's not already fresh in my mind.
Also, Yahoo makes it sound as if they took the harder approach and now it's paying off for them. Not at all, laying off QA is the easier approach. It's just like stopping regression-testing. It's infinitely easier to do that, at least initially. QA people are not easy to deal with. Failing tests are not easy to deal with either. When confronted with either QA people or failing tests, there is also a sense of urgency about having to drop whatever you're doing and dealing with the problem at hand. Removing those QA people and removing those failing tests may give you a sense of reprieve, but it is certainly not going to help fix any of the underlying problems. If anything, it's just like an ostrich burying its head in the sand when it sees a predator coming.
Searching to see if there are more terrorists engaged in a coordinated attack? Seems like a reasonable and responsible thing to do.
Sure, why spend $8 an hour on a rent-a-cop security guard on guarding the residence of the suspects when we could be spending millions of dollars on a spy plane and violating the privacy of hundreds of thousands of US citizens instead.
It isn't about lock-in, the use case is basically a modular business dongle set. You're not locked in, because the role this device fills is that of a portable dumb-terminal to display your presentations at random times/locations.
I disagree. If it requires you to buy multiple systems of the same brand, it's a lock-in.
It applies the modular computing concept to the world of peripherals, which could be an ideal place for a set of modular products to actually make an impact in the market.
This is nothing new. Companies love to create modular products with their own proprietary connectors. Locking-in customers into their platform is the holy grail for them.
Never mind that this idea would probably gain lot more of traction if they actually made it an open standard, but of course, Lenovo is not going to do that. That's now how they think. Lenovo would prefer that this modular project falls flat on its face instead of opening it up to other manufacturers to use.
How is airbnb or many of these other startups tech companies?
Sure they use technology, but so does the grocery store down the street. Should we start labeling grocery stores as tech companies that have websites?
Grocery stores don't count as technology companies. Technology companies don't have a public hotline you can call, or if they do have a hotline, they don't have live human beings answering it (without at least charging you $120 an hour). Banks are very close to becoming technology companies, but most are not there yet. My bank for instance will still give me a live human being after 3 hours of wait time.
My bank sucks at technology. Sometimes, I wish it was more like Square, Pay Pal, or Google. Not having customer service people, and only relying on your own technology, now that's a commitment.
I tried to rent a place through Airbnb. The process went like so:
Me: I'm looking for a room for next tuesday.
Airbnb: What's your Facebook login?
Me: Do I look like an idiot?
Airbnb: How about your G+ account?
Me: I must look like an idiot.
So that was that. I haven't given them a second chance.
Not that it's necessary to "sign up" to search for a room, it's not, but you must have missed the "Sign up with Email" option.
It's not very visible, but it's below the idiot-proof Facebook button and below the idiot-proof G+ button.
It isn't about jobs or friends. Sometimes it is about trolls and criminals. If a dirtbag sends my under age daughter a dick pic, it is going to get screen capped and sent to the police. Undelete just give false sense of security.
Just make sure that the penis is attached to an at least eighteen year old dirt bag, otherwise you'd be trafficking yourself in child pornography.
Because I don't like it when people delete incriminating/vicious things they said to em.
On a more serious note, if grandma has a yahoo email account, you guys better start explaining the new feature to her.
It would be unfortunate if she believed that a Nigerian prince can successfully predict the winning lottery number, or the outcome of horse races.
It depends if your email client uses IMAP instead of POP.
The entire point of IMAP is that if you delete/read/change a message on one of your client programs, it will do the same on your other client programs. IMAP is actually quite handy for users who read their email on more than one device.
Except for the fact that most employees in the state of Georgia are "at will". Which generally means they can fire
him with or without cause. Without knowing if there was an employment contract it's just speculation.
At least three mistakes were made here. Thus far, only one mistake is being addressed, and that's the cover-up made by the employee.
The vendor needs to be taken to task. The vendor has security access to the data. Supposedly, the staff of the vendor should have been trained properly. Also, even if the public agency didn't disclose the breach. The vendor should have publicly disclosed the breach. It obviously didn't either.
And finally, what's up with Secretary Kemp? Why is he sending out political party affiliations to the Georgia Department of Revenue? He should have removed that field from the file. The Georgia Department of Revenue doesn't need to know that part. That part isn't relevant, or at least it shouldn't be.
Check out the statues:
http://www.usmarshals.gov/asse...
How crazy does one have to be? I'd love to hear her story behind that. Maybe she'll write a book.
Just ask and you shall receive.
Rita A. Crundwell (born January 10, 1953) was the appointed comptroller and treasurer of Dixon, Illinois, from 1983 to 2012, and the admitted operator of what is believed to be the largest municipal fraud in American history. She was fired in April 2012 after it was revealed that she had embezzled $53.7 million from the city over 22 years to support her championship American Quarter Horse breeding operation. [1][2][3][4] She pled guilty to her crimes and was sentenced to nearly 20 years in prison.[1]
Crundwell's Quarter Horse operation, RC Quarter Horses, was one of the best-known Quarter Horse breeders in the country; her horses won 52 world championships and she was named the leading owner by the American Quarter Horse Association for eight consecutive years prior to her arrest.
[continued]
One year of prison for each 2.5 million dollars. That's not bad. Where do I sign up?
Where are they actually selling the horses? Those should be worth way more than the statues.
Proceeds generated from asset sales are used to compensate victims, supplement funding for law enforcement initiatives and support community programs.
Victimless crimes are probably preferable then. Also I assume those "law enforcement initiatives" are just double-speak for big blow out parties, cable TV for the break rooms, cool military equipment, cool new cars (both marked and unmarked), and unlimited donuts.
And after Israel gets Google to censor it, that's the only thing you will have.
When Chinese soldiers shoot Tibetans like dogs. That's also censored in China, but it's not censored in the rest of the world. I suspect Google will do the same thing here.
...whether they choose to take advantage of that right or not.
This part is important.
As long as I am not required to be part of a union in order to get a job, I am fine with it.
But if I'm forced to pay for a Union I want no part in, that's when I get really upset.
Why civil courts? What he's doing is a criminal offense.
Since the Finnish kid was a minor at the time, it seems the criminal system used kid gloves against him (even when it was able to convict him of a crime). That's probably why civil court was suggested as a better option. That, and civil court has a lower standard of proof.
That being said, the problem seems to be much bigger than one Finnish guy. He may have incited others to hate his target, but it would seem he's not the one committing the bulk of the crimes. And that's really the main problem here that gets glossed over by the article. If the hacker friends of the Finnish guy don't reside in Finland, then it means you have to track them down and convince an entirely new set of law enforcement officials from another country to take these SWATTING incidents seriously and invest enough resources to investigate the case, to in turn SWAT the hackers themselves, confiscate their computers, and do the necessary forensic analysis work on what they find.
And this kind of work is not cheap. In this case, the kid was investigated most probably because he attacked Sony and Microsoft as well, but if he had not gone after such high profile targets, he probably would never have been prosecuted in the first place. After all, who's got time to listen to the complaints of an ordinary family halfway across the world (with a not-so-innocent hacker kid of their own)?
Private cars, not just taxis, rescued wounded strangers to take them to the hospitals. That doesn't mean Uber cars weren't part of those cars. After all, if you take on a bleeding stranger in your backseat, turning on the Uber app on your phone makes about as much sense as a taxi driver turning on his meter for the same thing.
Now granted, Uber cars may be more difficult to spot, so if you're carrying a bleeding person in your arms, and you know paramedics are going to be overwhelmed, your first impulse may be to be looking for a taxi instead, but if you can't see a taxi, you might as well try to flag down the first car you see if that's the case. Who can blame Uber for that? Uber cars are not really designed to be flagged down. If Uber cars started carrying little mini-cab placards on top of their cars like some mini-cabs do in the UK, I can bet you that the french CEO of Uber would promptly be sent back to jail.
In fact, whatever did happen to that guy? Was he ever released? Is Uber still operating in France? By your statement, you're implying that they still do.
This IS NOT TRUE in locations where Uber has pooling. Major cities like NYC, Uber drivers can and do get notices of other riders and are allowed and will take you out of the way to pickup those riders. Now you still pay the original price, but getting to your destination can take ALOT LONGER than expected. If you have not given yourself quite a lot of extra time, taking Uber to JFK from downtown Manhattan can be a big mistake!
You're right. In San Francisco, I think it's called UberPool.
That option doesn't really change my larger point. No customer gets forced into an UberPool. It's an option that the customer has to select when he's first placing the order. And for the Uber driver that picks up a customer that has selected the standard option instead of UberPool, all the things that I previously said would still apply, such a driver would not be allowed to coordinate his next fare in advance.
Uber drivers play all sorts of games with canceling fares which are too short or not "ideal" for them.
Uber drivers need to accept an offer, before it gets confirmed to the passenger. So yes, a passenger may never get picked up for all kinds of reasons, but at least, he is not mislead into believing someone will pick him up.
And Uber's real-time map is a lie, which is obvious in several places that I have tried it.
That article is interesting, but very thin on details.
My google latitude tracking information (that I give family members access to) can also be out of date. My gps may be off, or my battery may be low, thus my phone may think that I am still at the same location I was at 30 minutes ago, but that doesn't prove that I am purposefully misleading my family members.
The article then goes on to try to back up its claim by talking about a patent Uber had issued on the practice, but if you read the paragraph further, you find out that the actual patent mentioned had actually nothing to do with the main point the article was trying to make.
In any case, that is something that you can easily verify for yourself. There are $20 off promo codes floating around the internet for first-time Uber customers, so you might as well use one of those promo codes, book a $5 to $19 ride, and see if the virtual dot does follow the car coming to pick you up. For me, it did it the couple of times that I did it. For you, it may not. But if it doesn't, I'd sure like to know about it.
At least the taxi companies are regulated so there are complaint channels and potential consequences. With Uber you're relying on a sleazy company to police themselves.
You're making it sound like we're in Somalia or something.
The legal system hasn't gone anywhere. And the credit card charge back system hasn't gone anywhere either.
The US government is NOT there to help people be superstitious. You want something to be labelled? Prove a negative consequence.
And yet, it becomes that much more difficult to prove something, if you don't have labels to begin with.
For example, if you want to prove that GM salmons, that grow up more quickly, will actually have accumulated less harmful mercury than other "older" non-modified salmons from the same area. In that case, you could expect the full cooperation and perhaps even some funding from the business who engineered the salmon.
However, now try to study the longterm health effects of GM salmons on real people. Can you survey people about what they eat? Probably not. If those people don't know what they're eating, then they can't really tell you what they ate. And while it may not be completely impossible to create a study where you could control for the fact that GM salmons aren't labeled, it does make it much more difficult to do so in the end.
Besides, everybody knows that it's the NSA that pays for this type of research, not the FBI.
Most likely, the NSA didn't want to share the core technology, so the FBI just ripped off the NSA by going after its minions.
That is nonsense. Legally questionable, and what taxi business would allow that?
That's a very good question. What taxi business would allow that? Or a better question would be which taxi business would allow that?
Talk to your taxi drivers. Some of them use multiple dispatch centers to get referrals.
I'm not saying all of them do. Also, I am speaking specifically about San Francisco during peak hours, which is where I live. It probably won't apply to you if you're walking out of a five star hotel in San Francisco, or if you live in a city where the number of medaillons is not artificially set in stone.
I don't know much about Uber, I don't see how their model is different from a regular taxi. They both need to pick you up at your current location and then you need to tell them where to go.
I don't see how Uber knowing in advance where you want to go could change the outcome.
No, in fact it's the taxi drivers that usually have more information about rides than Uber drivers.
Once booked, an Uber car can not be flagged someone else, it can not hear about other people needing rides to other locations, and it can not make itself available for other tentative bookings. First in, first out. That's how it works. There is no inventory sitting in queues waiting midway to be processed (if you don't mind me using the metaphors of lean manufacturing).
In the case of a taxi however, even if they're using a taxi app, there is no guarantee that they're coming to pick you up, because someone else could flag them on the way, they may get a more attractive offer of someone needing a ride to the airport (instead of a five minutes ride), they may not like the color of your skin or the way you're dressed or the way you speak, and they're always trying to book their next ride before they're finished with their existing one.
In the case of Uber also, the inability to do double-booking is important, but it's not the only thing that makes the service better. Since the transaction goes through whether you're picked up or not, you better be there when the Uber driver shows up. And the Uber driver better pick you up, because otherwise he'll get a charge back on his account and he'll get a very bad customer rating on his profile (assuming the gps data from both phones do not contradict the story of the customer).
Not only that, but as a user using the Uber app, you're instantly reassured after ordering the Uber car, since you're seeing its dot immediately moving towards you. In the case of a taxi however, even if you were to pinpoint its real-time location on a map, you would probably see the dot moving away from you as it is trying to finish its last ride.
Combine that with the fact that the medaillon system is archaic and highly inflexible, it's no wonder medaillon holders are not happy. During peak hours, Uber drivers can come out of nowhere. Their marginal costs for Uber are constant. In the case of a medaillon holder however, during peak hours, he can't split his medaillon(s) in two. The most he can do is to force a rotation of drivers to use his medaillon 24 hours a day 7 days a week even during low peak hours, to make sure he squeezes out every penny that he can out of that medaillon (or medaillons) so he can try to recoup his investment. And that doesn't solve the problem, that in places like New York or San Francisco, there are not enough taxis during peak hours, so it's not even worth trying to get one during those times. So before services like Uber came along, people opted for public transportation if they could during peak hours, or they opted to bring in their own car, and paid outrageous amounts for parking.