You think taxis suck as a customer, you should try driving one, you probably couldn't even handle that job for a day.
They are not universally hated, and that enmity evident in behaviour, for no reason. Not showing up at the agreed upon time is only one of a myriad of really negative things about taxis. If I absolutely cannot miss a flight, I use airport parking or an "Airporter" shuttle.
I would feel worse about how taxi drivers feel, if they gave a single shit about me, but since they don't: I don't.
This won't work. First, it won't work because green lasers are right in the middle of the visual spectrum, and a bandstop filter for this would not only be really hard, it would distort vision in general.
Old news. Dr. Nicholas Perricone already solved this problem. The glasses cost $400 a pair.
I can also think of about three ways to stop the coherent light with coatings and geometry, while letting non-coherent light through (but I've been thinking about these things since 1976, since I first suggested to the U.S. Air Force that lasers would make a great aerial active denial system, and did a test implementation.
The conversation started like this (with an Air Force bird colonel):
Me: "What's the most vulnerable part of any military aircraft?" Him: "That would be the control surfaces." Me: "Nope. It's the pilot's eyes."
The damage has already been done so prosecution may not help the victims.
Prosecution is -- and should never be -- to benefit the victims. Prosecution exists to deter future crimes, not for vengeance. And generally, future crimes by new criminals, not future crimes by the criminals being prosecuted.
Gee, sorry. I thought it was about making money by competing against existing taxi businesses while playing under a different set of rules.
That's because you believe it is Uber doing the competing, rather than the contractors who consume Ubers services.
The contractors are the ones competing with the taxis, and they are not even competing in the whole market, since they only compete in the called-car market, rather than in the street pickup market, which taxis still own completely.
This will change, if Uber ever gets its own fleet of self-driving cars, since at that point, owning the infrastructure, they *would* be a car service (minimally), or a taxi service, if they were willing to pick up random flag-downs.
I suspect, however, that Uber will not be that stupid, since it would mean voluntarily putting themselves under the bad regulatory structure that is the current taxi industry; instead, I expect that they will still use people's personal vehicles, and the choice of whether or not a contractor has to be in the vehicle or not will be up to what the vehicle owner decides.
In terms of autonomous vehicles: how do you fingerprint a computer? The DOT has ruled that they count as "drivers" under the law, so this rule in Austin is already going to have problems when it runs up against the technology barrier, even if Uber is long gone by then.
What you're supporting is completely contrary to the intent of Slashdot's moderation.
I'm not supporting it, I'm just stating facts.
My personally belief is that a lot of AC's post trolls simply to try to force Slashdot to adopt a system without the ability to post anonymous comments. I will leave it to the tinfoil hat crowd to pick their favorite bogeyman du jour (NSA, ISIS, RIAA, ambulance chasers, SJW's Gamergater's, etc.), but I suspect that there is a hard drive to try and eliminate Internet anonymity as much as possible.
I personally read at -1 when I get mod points, and generally read at 0 otherwise, unless something's getting too noisy, and the liberals and conservatives are going at each other by restating talking points so repetitively that it drowns out content.
In point of fact, while Rob Malda did encourage moderators reading at -1, it is not a requirement -- nor should it be.
Your posting history is, to me, very valuable in determining whether or not you are honestly holding a point of view, or whether you are trolling. You friend "mi" is a great example of this: if I think something might be a troll, I check the posting history. Someone with what appears to be an honest but contrary opinion is more likely to get moderated up by me, whereas an AC posting the same thing, particularly if it contains inflammatory rhetoric, is more likely to be moderated down.
Yes, this means I down-mod AC's more than I do right (or left) wing nut-jobs.
The GGGP's posting is "languishing" because they made valid points below the level at which some moderators read, and if they had posted with a default Score of 1, those moderators might very well have up-modded it. So, I would say that it no so much "languishing" as it is "hiding from moderators sick of blatant racism, cow, and hosts file trolls".
I'm currently studying what kind of organization is qualified to study what sort of person is best suited for Mars, and I've already disqualified NASA, since they had no real plans to *actually* go there, until they were shamed into it by a private company.
Uber/Lyft have very little to do with tech (but they have SERVERS!) and the whole gig economy which they represent is poison to tech workers.
Incorrect. Uber and Lyft are predominantly peer-to-peer information brokerages, which has a hell of lot to do with technology. And a hell of a lot to do with whether or not some new startup in some other area of peer-to-peer transaction brokering works out (or not).
Make no mistake: this is about establishing new, viable Schelling Points, as artificial constructs, rather than using existing ones, such as "Yelp" (which many feel is corrupts) or telephone directories.
Sad that this post languishes at 0 and a post from blatant Taxi shills and Government apologists currently enjoy a 5.
Not really. Most moderators do not moderate AC's, unless it's to moderate them as trolls, since there is no accountability or long term effect from statements, nor is it possible to determine if this is ones firmly held position, by examining posting history, vs. "just a troll". So ACs are less likely to be moderated up.
If the existing taxi drivers are required to have the fingerprints and background checks, Uber and Lyft drivers should have them, too.
If the existing taxi drivers are NOT required to have the checks, then making Uber and Lyft drivers do it is discriminatory.
So should anyone who drives a car pool, and every soccer mom who drives a van, right?
Because, just like Uber and Lyft, these people drive people with whom they are not very familiar, and vice versa, and, just like Uber and Lyft, they are not taxi cabs.
It doesn't. You can't easily use this metric alone to estimate piracy effects.
Correct. If someone pirates something without buying it, they may discover it sucks before RIAA has their money in pocket.
The effects are most often felt by people who make music which sucks, and by companies that suck at picking winners, and RIAA, which used to win either way, but now has a lower income from music which sucks being sold.
Think how much the software industry would suffer, were we to effectively eliminate "shrink wrap licenses", the same way piracy eliminates them for music which sucks...
There are a lot of reasons one is rich, the vast majority of which have nothing to do with actually being an accomplished thinker.
I'm willing to accept that as the cost of having a rich minority who are accomplished thinkers.
Andrew Carnegie established free lending libraries, when the government was doing nothing to address the availability of educational materials to people who were unable to pay "library subscription fees".
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is paying for vaccinations in poor regions where their government cares more about shipping conflict resources on the backs of slave labor to enrich themselves, than they do about their people.
The MacArthur Foundation deals with issues such as over-incarceration, global climate change, nuclear risk, and significantly increasing capital for the social sector.
I'm willing to accept the overhead of what you are calling "the vast majority of rich people", in order to obtain these social benefits, which the government is either unable or unwilling to provide, because it is predominantly an oligarchy.
Sometimes, all it takes is one good person with the ability to wield a large chunk of societies resources -- however they acquired them -- on behalf of society, to overcome governmental entrenchment of the social order.
And yes, I think there are a lot of people in power in India who benefit from the entrenched social order.
That access would be funneled, fairly forcibly, through the Facebook portal. That would help Facebook "monetize" that traffic for destinations other than the Facebook portal itself.
Yes. And if people paid for the data service themselves, while still using the Facebook supplied device, they would be able to avoid the "funneling".
So your fear comes down to people not finding such funneling to be onerous enough that they would pay, and that in that case, the funneling would damage your economic interests.
Obviously: you are free to either partner with Facebook, and avoid this for just your economic interests, or pay the $1/month for the unrestricted access for the people who are being funneled, and give them access to "the whole internet".
I do not see you stepping up to the plate and providing an unrestricted service.
That is a bit of a revisionist history summary there... AOL was not an internet service provider or even "AOL" in 1983, it was platform attempting to sell a select set of products. And it did not call itself "the internet", for all intents and purposes "the internet" didn;t really exist before the very late 80's/early 90's outside of a very small community.
Why do you think Facebook calls it "Free Basics" insteac of calling it "The Internet" or "Your Facebook ISP"?
To quote Facebook:
"Free Basics makes the internet accessible to more people by providing them access to a range of free basic services like news, maternal health, travel, local jobs..."
You want more than basic services? You pay for them.
Because apparently none-is-preferrable-to-some-which-is-not-all.
Because Facebook's intent was to distort the market in ways that may take away that $1/month option and force many more people to rely on only those sites that Facebook approves.
Be realistic: do you really think that Zuckerberg really does anything from a purely altruistic motivation?
They wanted to keep that option, of the people paying extra. In no documentation, literature, or description of the plan is there ever any intent to take away the option to start paying for the otherwise free OTA service in order to get access to the full Internet.
And no, I don't think that Zuckerberg suffers from an overabundance of altruistic motivation...
Why does India believe that he should, and pay for full Internet access for everyone? We don't even have universal Internet access in the U.S..
Because AOL was never a captive portal site. AOL was a portal site and used/sold "Keywords" on the portal page as a type of search engine to direct users to prefered endpoints. But there is/was nothing that prevented users from using Yahoo, AltaVista, Jeeves, or any other search engine, or typing destinations URLs in directly.
Nothing?
How about:
(1) AOL was founded in 1983
(2) AOL didn't offer Internet access until 1993, a couple of months after it started to offer Usenet access It spent a decade as a captive portal.
AOL was just like Prodigy, CompuServe, GEnie, and other services of it's day: You connected to a service through the public telephone network, and it was a subset of the information available, compared to what you'd get from an ISP, and advertisers had to pay for keywords.
Given that for about $1/month, an Indian person could convert their "captive portal" experience to a "the full Internet" experience, I'm not seeing a large difference here.
The only thing I'm seeing is not-quite-poor people in India posting online in a way that the actually-poor in India can not possibly post online, as to why all the actually-poor people in India shouldn't have *some* access to the Internet.
Because apparently none-is-preferrable-to-some-which-is-not-all.
Microsoft has laid off US workers by the thousands, while simultaneous sitting before congress and insisting more offshore visa workers were needed to make up for "sever shortages" of QUALIFIED US workers.
FTFY. The workers they laid off were not qualified. The positions they were hiring for required different qualifications than those they laid off.
That said, IBM India will have a position for "IT Support Technician" and it will be filled by someone in India who will be moved over here to perform the same task that the former Hertz-employed IT Technician would have done.
No. they will be expected to stay in India.
This isn't an H1-B story, it's an offshoring story.
Too bad the anti-H1-B people got their licks in before the anti-offshoring people, or we'd be talking about the evils of offshoring, rather than the evils of H1-B.
Slashdot Mirror
Uber and Lyft are fucking taxi services
Good. Someone *SHOULD* fuck taxi services.
You think taxis suck as a customer, you should try driving one, you probably couldn't even handle that job for a day.
They are not universally hated, and that enmity evident in behaviour, for no reason. Not showing up at the agreed upon time is only one of a myriad of really negative things about taxis. If I absolutely cannot miss a flight, I use airport parking or an "Airporter" shuttle.
I would feel worse about how taxi drivers feel, if they gave a single shit about me, but since they don't: I don't.
This won't work. First, it won't work because green lasers are right in the middle of the visual spectrum, and a bandstop filter for this would not only be really hard, it would distort vision in general.
Old news. Dr. Nicholas Perricone already solved this problem. The glasses cost $400 a pair.
I can also think of about three ways to stop the coherent light with coatings and geometry, while letting non-coherent light through (but I've been thinking about these things since 1976, since I first suggested to the U.S. Air Force that lasers would make a great aerial active denial system, and did a test implementation.
The conversation started like this (with an Air Force bird colonel):
Me: "What's the most vulnerable part of any military aircraft?"
Him: "That would be the control surfaces."
Me: "Nope. It's the pilot's eyes."
I got a lot of visits after that.
The damage has already been done so prosecution may not help the victims.
Prosecution is -- and should never be -- to benefit the victims. Prosecution exists to deter future crimes, not for vengeance. And generally, future crimes by new criminals, not future crimes by the criminals being prosecuted.
Gee, sorry. I thought it was about making money by competing against existing taxi businesses while playing under a different set of rules.
That's because you believe it is Uber doing the competing, rather than the contractors who consume Ubers services.
The contractors are the ones competing with the taxis, and they are not even competing in the whole market, since they only compete in the called-car market, rather than in the street pickup market, which taxis still own completely.
This will change, if Uber ever gets its own fleet of self-driving cars, since at that point, owning the infrastructure, they *would* be a car service (minimally), or a taxi service, if they were willing to pick up random flag-downs.
I suspect, however, that Uber will not be that stupid, since it would mean voluntarily putting themselves under the bad regulatory structure that is the current taxi industry; instead, I expect that they will still use people's personal vehicles, and the choice of whether or not a contractor has to be in the vehicle or not will be up to what the vehicle owner decides.
In terms of autonomous vehicles: how do you fingerprint a computer? The DOT has ruled that they count as "drivers" under the law, so this rule in Austin is already going to have problems when it runs up against the technology barrier, even if Uber is long gone by then.
What you're supporting is completely contrary to the intent of Slashdot's moderation.
I'm not supporting it, I'm just stating facts.
My personally belief is that a lot of AC's post trolls simply to try to force Slashdot to adopt a system without the ability to post anonymous comments. I will leave it to the tinfoil hat crowd to pick their favorite bogeyman du jour (NSA, ISIS, RIAA, ambulance chasers, SJW's Gamergater's, etc.), but I suspect that there is a hard drive to try and eliminate Internet anonymity as much as possible.
I personally read at -1 when I get mod points, and generally read at 0 otherwise, unless something's getting too noisy, and the liberals and conservatives are going at each other by restating talking points so repetitively that it drowns out content.
In point of fact, while Rob Malda did encourage moderators reading at -1, it is not a requirement -- nor should it be.
Your posting history is, to me, very valuable in determining whether or not you are honestly holding a point of view, or whether you are trolling. You friend "mi" is a great example of this: if I think something might be a troll, I check the posting history. Someone with what appears to be an honest but contrary opinion is more likely to get moderated up by me, whereas an AC posting the same thing, particularly if it contains inflammatory rhetoric, is more likely to be moderated down.
Yes, this means I down-mod AC's more than I do right (or left) wing nut-jobs.
The GGGP's posting is "languishing" because they made valid points below the level at which some moderators read, and if they had posted with a default Score of 1, those moderators might very well have up-modded it. So, I would say that it no so much "languishing" as it is "hiding from moderators sick of blatant racism, cow, and hosts file trolls".
It's a choice. On the part of the poster.
That's an amazing coincidence!
I'm currently studying what kind of organization is qualified to study what sort of person is best suited for Mars, and I've already disqualified NASA, since they had no real plans to *actually* go there, until they were shamed into it by a private company.
Uber/Lyft have very little to do with tech (but they have SERVERS!) and the whole gig economy which they represent is poison to tech workers.
Incorrect. Uber and Lyft are predominantly peer-to-peer information brokerages, which has a hell of lot to do with technology. And a hell of a lot to do with whether or not some new startup in some other area of peer-to-peer transaction brokering works out (or not).
Make no mistake: this is about establishing new, viable Schelling Points, as artificial constructs, rather than using existing ones, such as "Yelp" (which many feel is corrupts) or telephone directories.
Sad that this post languishes at 0 and a post from blatant Taxi shills and Government apologists currently enjoy a 5.
Not really. Most moderators do not moderate AC's, unless it's to moderate them as trolls, since there is no accountability or long term effect from statements, nor is it possible to determine if this is ones firmly held position, by examining posting history, vs. "just a troll". So ACs are less likely to be moderated up.
So I have no idea how these things work in the US.
Is this because you live in a European country with a "right to be forgotten"?
Uber and Lyft are fucking taxi services
Good. Someone *SHOULD* fuck taxi services.
If the existing taxi drivers are required to have the fingerprints and background checks, Uber and Lyft drivers should have them, too.
If the existing taxi drivers are NOT required to have the checks, then making Uber and Lyft drivers do it is discriminatory.
So should anyone who drives a car pool, and every soccer mom who drives a van, right?
Because, just like Uber and Lyft, these people drive people with whom they are not very familiar, and vice versa, and, just like Uber and Lyft, they are not taxi cabs.
Fingerprinting is a minor, one-time upfront cost, so it isn't an unreasonable regulation.
The cost is hidden.
Unless they destroy the collected fingerprints when the answer is "no", instead of databasing them.
Otherwise, they should just do a DNA swab, and compare it to both solved and unsolved cases, right?
But what's the harm in checking the driver's fingerprints to see if he's a rapist or a mugger?
I totally agree.
We should also check everyone who goes to a restaurant, theater, sporting event, or mens clothing store.
It doesn't. You can't easily use this metric alone to estimate piracy effects.
Correct. If someone pirates something without buying it, they may discover it sucks before RIAA has their money in pocket.
The effects are most often felt by people who make music which sucks, and by companies that suck at picking winners, and RIAA, which used to win either way, but now has a lower income from music which sucks being sold.
Think how much the software industry would suffer, were we to effectively eliminate "shrink wrap licenses", the same way piracy eliminates them for music which sucks...
Medical applications?
"How did the poor bastard die?"
"He was out skiing, and his artificial kidney reverted to its original shape, a spiky brick."
There are a lot of reasons one is rich, the vast majority of which have nothing to do with actually being an accomplished thinker.
I'm willing to accept that as the cost of having a rich minority who are accomplished thinkers.
Andrew Carnegie established free lending libraries, when the government was doing nothing to address the availability of educational materials to people who were unable to pay "library subscription fees".
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is paying for vaccinations in poor regions where their government cares more about shipping conflict resources on the backs of slave labor to enrich themselves, than they do about their people.
The MacArthur Foundation deals with issues such as over-incarceration, global climate change, nuclear risk, and significantly increasing capital for the social sector.
I'm willing to accept the overhead of what you are calling "the vast majority of rich people", in order to obtain these social benefits, which the government is either unable or unwilling to provide, because it is predominantly an oligarchy.
Sometimes, all it takes is one good person with the ability to wield a large chunk of societies resources -- however they acquired them -- on behalf of society, to overcome governmental entrenchment of the social order.
And yes, I think there are a lot of people in power in India who benefit from the entrenched social order.
That access would be funneled, fairly forcibly, through the Facebook portal. That would help Facebook "monetize" that traffic for destinations other than the Facebook portal itself.
Yes. And if people paid for the data service themselves, while still using the Facebook supplied device, they would be able to avoid the "funneling".
So your fear comes down to people not finding such funneling to be onerous enough that they would pay, and that in that case, the funneling would damage your economic interests.
Obviously: you are free to either partner with Facebook, and avoid this for just your economic interests, or pay the $1/month for the unrestricted access for the people who are being funneled, and give them access to "the whole internet".
I do not see you stepping up to the plate and providing an unrestricted service.
That is a bit of a revisionist history summary there... AOL was not an internet service provider or even "AOL" in 1983, it was platform attempting to sell a select set of products. And it did not call itself "the internet", for all intents and purposes "the internet" didn;t really exist before the very late 80's/early 90's outside of a very small community.
Why do you think Facebook calls it "Free Basics" insteac of calling it "The Internet" or "Your Facebook ISP"?
To quote Facebook:
"Free Basics makes the internet accessible to more people by providing them access to a range of free basic services like news, maternal health, travel, local jobs ..."
You want more than basic services? You pay for them.
Because Facebook's intent was to distort the market in ways that may take away that $1/month option and force many more people to rely on only those sites that Facebook approves.
Be realistic: do you really think that Zuckerberg really does anything from a purely altruistic motivation?
They wanted to keep that option, of the people paying extra. In no documentation, literature, or description of the plan is there ever any intent to take away the option to start paying for the otherwise free OTA service in order to get access to the full Internet.
And no, I don't think that Zuckerberg suffers from an overabundance of altruistic motivation...
Why does India believe that he should, and pay for full Internet access for everyone? We don't even have universal Internet access in the U.S..
Why is Zuckerberg taken seriously?
There are about 46 billion reasons...
How is a captive portal site different from AOL?
Because AOL was never a captive portal site. AOL was a portal site and used/sold "Keywords" on the portal page as a type of search engine to direct users to prefered endpoints. But there is/was nothing that prevented users from using Yahoo, AltaVista, Jeeves, or any other search engine, or typing destinations URLs in directly.
Nothing?
How about:
(1) AOL was founded in 1983
(2) AOL didn't offer Internet access until 1993, a couple of months after it started to offer Usenet access It spent a decade as a captive portal.
AOL was just like Prodigy, CompuServe, GEnie, and other services of it's day: You connected to a service through the public telephone network, and it was a subset of the information available, compared to what you'd get from an ISP, and advertisers had to pay for keywords.
Given that for about $1/month, an Indian person could convert their "captive portal" experience to a "the full Internet" experience, I'm not seeing a large difference here.
The only thing I'm seeing is not-quite-poor people in India posting online in a way that the actually-poor in India can not possibly post online, as to why all the actually-poor people in India shouldn't have *some* access to the Internet.
Because apparently none-is-preferrable-to-some-which-is-not-all.
How is a captive portal site different from AOL?
How, in any way, is a captive portal service in India, any different than America On Line or Compuserve was as captive portals in the U.S.?
They allowed the "Me Too!"'s onto the Internet in the first place, which later expanded to general access.
Why isn't Fossil in the news. I had lots of friends lose jobs to Infosys., after training their replacements, etc...
Newspaper article link to a report in a centrist paper, or it didn't happen.
Microsoft has laid off US workers by the thousands, while simultaneous sitting before congress and insisting more offshore visa workers were needed to make up for "sever shortages" of QUALIFIED US workers.
FTFY. The workers they laid off were not qualified. The positions they were hiring for required different qualifications than those they laid off.
That said, IBM India will have a position for "IT Support Technician" and it will be filled by someone in India who will be moved over here to perform the same task that the former Hertz-employed IT Technician would have done.
No. they will be expected to stay in India.
This isn't an H1-B story, it's an offshoring story.
Too bad the anti-H1-B people got their licks in before the anti-offshoring people, or we'd be talking about the evils of offshoring, rather than the evils of H1-B.