But you have a passenger in the back... Just a friend of mine, giving him a lift. It's on the way.
Wouldn't it be pretty easy for police to disprove this claim by subpoenaing Uber's records? If a car is carrying an Uber passenger, Uber has that information, timestamped and with the driver's name and a log of GPS coordinates, all stored in the trip record.
Interesting, that seems pretty recent. From some googling around, it looks like they introduced it a few months ago. I definitely remember some interviews with their CEO last year where he was strongly insisting that they had no obligation to offer such insurance. Perhaps his lawyers overruled him?
Isn't it already standard to have your license at least suspended if you're caught driving uninsured? I don't think I'm proposing some kind of new policy, just enforcing the existing one.
If old stuff was always reissued in a new format, that might be viable (apart from paying for it over and over). But frequently it isn't. Most books are out of print, including many things I check out of libraries. A large number of VHS film releases were never released on DVD. Some were only released in certain DVD regions, due to licensing problems surrounding the reissue. Even some quite high-profile ones took many years to be released on DVD. When I first looked for La Jetée in the mid-2000s, I had to buy a VHS copy off eBay, because it was not available in DVD region 1 (only region 2).
That's probably true for me as well, to be honest. My MP3 and FLAC collection is much more extensive and lovingly curated/tagged/sorted/etc. than my physical music collection is. But I get the impression that's a pretty niche hobby.
There is definitely an aspect of obsessive collectors liking physical media, yes: they're more tangible, sometimes look nice (especially in fancy limited editions), etc.. But even people who are not really that big into collecting have a pretty big reason to still prefer physical media: you have some chance of actually keeping it. Your purchase of a book or CD will probably not be remotely "revoked" by the manufacturer, which is more than can be said for the currently popular methods of digital delivery.
Sweden is pretty capitalist really, in the sense of being very big on using markets as mechanisms. They're just capitalists who also have a strong social safety net (aka welfare state).
Another transportation-related segment where they are more market-oriented than in the U.S. is in public transit. They have a large public transit system paid for by taxes. But, it is operated by private contractors, through an open bidding process. As a result, unlike in most American cities, Swedish bus and train drivers are not government employees.
In economics, a "deregulated" market does not mean "anarchy with no laws". It's a specific term meaning taking a market that traditionally has government-fixed prices and monopoly operators, and opening it up to a market that any entrant willing to meet some basic requirements can compete in.
For example, when Texas deregulated its electricity-supply market, this meant that the former utility-pricing model was replaced by a market model, in which consumers shop around and sign contracts with power-plant operators, who can choose to differentiate themselves on various grounds (price, customer service, "greenness", etc.). It does not mean that Texas has abolished all laws relating to power-generation: a "deregulated" electricity market does not mean that you no longer have to follow engineering standards or safety regulations.
Perhaps if cabs were magically completely free, yes. Oh, and these completely free cabs would have to be ubiquitous and orderable on demand to any location, and not become scarce despite being free. While we're talking nutty hypotheticals, people might also drink-and-drive less if the U.S. has more compact cities, less sprawl and suburban bars, and better public transit.
But back in the case of reality, what price-sensitivity means is more like: if cabs were 15% cheaper, would it eradicate DUIs? I suspect it would have virtually no impact on them.
I use Google Product Search now and then, but I find it's a lot higher-effort. They don't really do any vetting on whether the stores they include are legit, so you have to look up reviews and try to figure out whether the company is the kind that's going to ship you defective merchandise and then claim they didn't. Particularly around electronics and cameras, the search results are full of fly-by-night online stores.
Most incumbents get reelected even when Congress's approval ratings overall are low, however, because people's approval ratings of their own Congresspeople are almost always considerably higher. People generally think Congress sucks, but they usually blame it on everyone else's Representatives.
It's a Republican district, but nowhere near as strongly as SF is a Democratic district. Cantor's district (VA 7th) is R+10, while downtown SF (CA 12th) is D+34. An example of a D+10 district is northwest Indiana (IN 1st).
It's entirely possible that Brat doesn't personally have particularly strong anti-immigration opinions, and is just reading the populist winds correctly.
It's generally riskier for the insurance company. People who offer transportation services for a fee have heightened liability to passengers (which is passed on to the insurance) than people who are driving friends/family. They also typically have a higher risk of incurring a payout in a given year.
Vehicle insurance is a fairly competitive market, and most of the rates are set pretty straightforwardly by actuaries.
If people start losing their driver's licenses when they're caught doing commercial driving without being properly insured, I would guess fewer of them will take the risk.
In Europe that isn't even usually the case. In Sweden, one of the countries where Uber is whining about "regulation", the taxi market is deregulated. Anyone can offer taxi services, at any price, providing they meet four basic consumer-protection requirements:
1. They have a commercial driver's license
2. They have commercial vehicle insurance
3. They post their rates openly and visibly
4. They have a functioning meter, which is inspected occasionally to ensure that it is billing the same amount as the posted rates
If Uber were really offering legitimate competition, I would be more sympathetic. But they're partly undercutting existing taxis through ridiculous things like using drivers who lack commercial vehicle insurance, which is rather irresponsible.
Hah, that could be. My own experience with "stability" in the sense I'm explaining above is actually almost all with Debian stable, rather than Red Hat. And Debian is actually pretty good at keeping breaking changes out of point releases. It sounds like Red Hat is not as disciplined on that?
Red Hat aims not only for stability in the sense of "not crashing", but in the sense of "doesn't change a lot within a major release", especially in the core libraries and language runtimes. Companies often like that kind of stability, because they have miscellaneous in-house or commercial software running on top of the base system, which has a habit of breaking when anything is upgraded under it. So within a major version, Red Hat carefully rolls out only non-ABI-breaking changes, e.g. by backporting bugfixes to previous major versions of libraries.
Restricted Turing tests, which test only indistinguishability from humans in a more limited range of tasks, can sometimes be useful research benchmarks as well, so limiting them isn't entirely illegitimate. For example, an annual AI conference has a "Mario AI Turing test" where the goal is to enter a bot that tries to play levels in a "human-like" way so that judges can't distinguish its play from humans' play, which is a harder task than just beating them (speedrunning a Mario level can be done with standard A* search, so isn't that interesting as an AI benchmark). This is useful as a benchmark for things like algorithms that try to mimic action styles in general (whether in games or elsewhere).
However it would definitely be misleading to claim passing these kinds of restricted Turing tests constitutes passing the Turing test in the sense that Turing had in mind: obviously playing Mario levels in a human-like way is not equivalent to full general intelligence, and serious researchers wouldn't claim that.
That's a good question, but first I'd need to know on what operating system you plan to take notes. Do Slashdotters recommend Windows, Mac OS X, or FreeBSD for this purpose?
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But you have a passenger in the back... Just a friend of mine, giving him a lift. It's on the way.
Wouldn't it be pretty easy for police to disprove this claim by subpoenaing Uber's records? If a car is carrying an Uber passenger, Uber has that information, timestamped and with the driver's name and a log of GPS coordinates, all stored in the trip record.
Interesting, that seems pretty recent. From some googling around, it looks like they introduced it a few months ago. I definitely remember some interviews with their CEO last year where he was strongly insisting that they had no obligation to offer such insurance. Perhaps his lawyers overruled him?
Isn't it already standard to have your license at least suspended if you're caught driving uninsured? I don't think I'm proposing some kind of new policy, just enforcing the existing one.
If old stuff was always reissued in a new format, that might be viable (apart from paying for it over and over). But frequently it isn't. Most books are out of print, including many things I check out of libraries. A large number of VHS film releases were never released on DVD. Some were only released in certain DVD regions, due to licensing problems surrounding the reissue. Even some quite high-profile ones took many years to be released on DVD. When I first looked for La Jetée in the mid-2000s, I had to buy a VHS copy off eBay, because it was not available in DVD region 1 (only region 2).
That's probably true for me as well, to be honest. My MP3 and FLAC collection is much more extensive and lovingly curated/tagged/sorted/etc. than my physical music collection is. But I get the impression that's a pretty niche hobby.
There is definitely an aspect of obsessive collectors liking physical media, yes: they're more tangible, sometimes look nice (especially in fancy limited editions), etc.. But even people who are not really that big into collecting have a pretty big reason to still prefer physical media: you have some chance of actually keeping it. Your purchase of a book or CD will probably not be remotely "revoked" by the manufacturer, which is more than can be said for the currently popular methods of digital delivery.
Sweden is pretty capitalist really, in the sense of being very big on using markets as mechanisms. They're just capitalists who also have a strong social safety net (aka welfare state).
Another transportation-related segment where they are more market-oriented than in the U.S. is in public transit. They have a large public transit system paid for by taxes. But, it is operated by private contractors, through an open bidding process. As a result, unlike in most American cities, Swedish bus and train drivers are not government employees.
In economics, a "deregulated" market does not mean "anarchy with no laws". It's a specific term meaning taking a market that traditionally has government-fixed prices and monopoly operators, and opening it up to a market that any entrant willing to meet some basic requirements can compete in.
For example, when Texas deregulated its electricity-supply market, this meant that the former utility-pricing model was replaced by a market model, in which consumers shop around and sign contracts with power-plant operators, who can choose to differentiate themselves on various grounds (price, customer service, "greenness", etc.). It does not mean that Texas has abolished all laws relating to power-generation: a "deregulated" electricity market does not mean that you no longer have to follow engineering standards or safety regulations.
Perhaps if cabs were magically completely free, yes. Oh, and these completely free cabs would have to be ubiquitous and orderable on demand to any location, and not become scarce despite being free. While we're talking nutty hypotheticals, people might also drink-and-drive less if the U.S. has more compact cities, less sprawl and suburban bars, and better public transit.
But back in the case of reality, what price-sensitivity means is more like: if cabs were 15% cheaper, would it eradicate DUIs? I suspect it would have virtually no impact on them.
I use Google Product Search now and then, but I find it's a lot higher-effort. They don't really do any vetting on whether the stores they include are legit, so you have to look up reviews and try to figure out whether the company is the kind that's going to ship you defective merchandise and then claim they didn't. Particularly around electronics and cameras, the search results are full of fly-by-night online stores.
Most incumbents get reelected even when Congress's approval ratings overall are low, however, because people's approval ratings of their own Congresspeople are almost always considerably higher. People generally think Congress sucks, but they usually blame it on everyone else's Representatives.
It's a Republican district, but nowhere near as strongly as SF is a Democratic district. Cantor's district (VA 7th) is R+10, while downtown SF (CA 12th) is D+34. An example of a D+10 district is northwest Indiana (IN 1st).
It's entirely possible that Brat doesn't personally have particularly strong anti-immigration opinions, and is just reading the populist winds correctly.
Price-sensitivity to cabs is not actually a big reason people drink and drive.
It's generally riskier for the insurance company. People who offer transportation services for a fee have heightened liability to passengers (which is passed on to the insurance) than people who are driving friends/family. They also typically have a higher risk of incurring a payout in a given year.
Vehicle insurance is a fairly competitive market, and most of the rates are set pretty straightforwardly by actuaries.
If people start losing their driver's licenses when they're caught doing commercial driving without being properly insured, I would guess fewer of them will take the risk.
In Europe that isn't even usually the case. In Sweden, one of the countries where Uber is whining about "regulation", the taxi market is deregulated. Anyone can offer taxi services, at any price, providing they meet four basic consumer-protection requirements:
1. They have a commercial driver's license
2. They have commercial vehicle insurance
3. They post their rates openly and visibly
4. They have a functioning meter, which is inspected occasionally to ensure that it is billing the same amount as the posted rates
If Uber were really offering legitimate competition, I would be more sympathetic. But they're partly undercutting existing taxis through ridiculous things like using drivers who lack commercial vehicle insurance, which is rather irresponsible.
Hah, that could be. My own experience with "stability" in the sense I'm explaining above is actually almost all with Debian stable, rather than Red Hat. And Debian is actually pretty good at keeping breaking changes out of point releases. It sounds like Red Hat is not as disciplined on that?
Red Hat aims not only for stability in the sense of "not crashing", but in the sense of "doesn't change a lot within a major release", especially in the core libraries and language runtimes. Companies often like that kind of stability, because they have miscellaneous in-house or commercial software running on top of the base system, which has a habit of breaking when anything is upgraded under it. So within a major version, Red Hat carefully rolls out only non-ABI-breaking changes, e.g. by backporting bugfixes to previous major versions of libraries.
Or a therapist, for that matter...
Restricted Turing tests, which test only indistinguishability from humans in a more limited range of tasks, can sometimes be useful research benchmarks as well, so limiting them isn't entirely illegitimate. For example, an annual AI conference has a "Mario AI Turing test" where the goal is to enter a bot that tries to play levels in a "human-like" way so that judges can't distinguish its play from humans' play, which is a harder task than just beating them (speedrunning a Mario level can be done with standard A* search, so isn't that interesting as an AI benchmark). This is useful as a benchmark for things like algorithms that try to mimic action styles in general (whether in games or elsewhere).
However it would definitely be misleading to claim passing these kinds of restricted Turing tests constitutes passing the Turing test in the sense that Turing had in mind: obviously playing Mario levels in a human-like way is not equivalent to full general intelligence, and serious researchers wouldn't claim that.
An IPO that, even if successful, would cover only 6 months of their burn rate?
That's a good question, but first I'd need to know on what operating system you plan to take notes. Do Slashdotters recommend Windows, Mac OS X, or FreeBSD for this purpose?
Is there any evidence at all that he had contact with Russia prior to ending up there? As far as I know, there isn't.