However, the protest seems to have massively backfired, with Uber reporting a colossal 850 per cent rise in the number of people who had downloaded the company's app in wake of the protest.
I wonder how much of this is attributable to the Streisand Effect. I expect that with the generic name Uber it didn't stand out as meaning anything to most non-tech consumers (or even many tech-types for that matter) but the protests made the news and made taxi service harder to come by, planting the name in consumers' minds and giving them a reason to use it.
The smartest thing that the cabbies could have done was to step up their game as far as their service, doing as good a job as possible to show why they're professionals and deserve to be paid as such, compared to any-random-driver that Uber could deliver. Unfortunately hindsight is 20/20...
Well, his bike is also a kludged-together e-bike with motors, fenders, and above all else, speed. He's able to keep up with traffic on small neighborhood streets and if he pedals (and based on how it's geared pedalling would actually contribute something) he can almost keep up with the speed limit on some of the slower arteries.
So in his instance the bicycle is bigger than normal and going faster than normal too.
You know what apparently does work, based on a friend's experiences?
Putting a pair of amber lights out to the sides of your red center light, and having a sufficiently bright headlamp in front that illuminates a good chunk of road.
Those work because drivers assume that you're a motorcycle, and if you're a motorcycle then you're a lot heavier, and more likely to cause damage to their car.
With modern battery technology and modern, super-efficient lighting, it should be easy to fake a bicycle to light up like a motorcycle well enough to fool drivers at night.
While I also doubt that this is possible today, I am sure the NSA is looking at placing the respective sensors. Then we will have to do "analog routing" and mix in mains hum form several places to obscure where and when things have been recorded. Maybe we should start to offer recordings of local grid noise. Would not be that difficult to do.
It's not even that complicated.
Many power lines have optical fiber strung in the middle of them, it's called optical power ground wire (OPGW) (scroll down a bit). That fiber is used as Internet backbone, as telecom voice, and as diagnostic for when there are power grid problems. If a line goes down then they can use an OTDR to determine the distance to the break instead of having to hunt for it.
All that they'd have to do would be to put devices at termination points and use dark strands. Sure, the equipment to transceive on single-mode fiber at those distances would be pricey, but it's completely within the technology that we have right now.
Now, it's unfortunately common that participating in thug culture is interpreted as "being black". If someone is aspiring to thug culture in their mannerisms and how they attire and adorn themselves then yes, they will be judged based on their appearance, even if they've never committed a crime, and they will be scrutinized.
Every racial group has their own form of thug culture, and sometimes they overlap in style, or someone of a different ethnicity will participate in a different group's thug culture entirely, with varying degrees of success.
No, because payphones started out being used for general-purpose.
If Irridium or any of the then-new satellite phone systems had been adopted by primarily a criminal or terrorist user base then they probably would be shut down or heavily modified to make it more difficult to use such a service in those circumstances for very long.
The United States discontinued the regular thousand dollar bill with that exact reasoning. There are a few large-denomination bills, but they're not for regular transactions and probably couldn't be redeemed at printed value for smaller bills without going through official channels, making them close to useless if you're not part of the Federal Reserve system.
It'll come down to an opinion as to whether or not the use of Tor implies an intent to allow others to break the law. While an anonymizer service itself can be used for both legal and illegal purposes, if the court later finds that its use is far more illegitimate than it is legitimate, then that will dictate how they rule on the matter.
That's the biggest difference compared to the car analogy, in that the demonstrated legitimate use of cars far, far outweighs the illegitimate use of cars. Using cars is the norm. Using Tor is not the norm, and so then it becomes a matter of scrutinizing what it does, who uses it, and for what purposes.
Same issues held true for networks like Napster and MegaUpload, and holds true for bit torrent.
I expect that simply moving and positioning a printer large enough to make a building would negate any cost savings over going and buying some cheap lumber, cutting it to shape it into moulds, and paying the concrete trucks to bring the materials.
There's a construction technique called "tilt-up" where one pours the concrete for a wall on the ground or on a mould, flat on the ground, then after it's cured, rotate it up 90 degrees. Unfortunately it became common in the sixties to do this with really *ahem* avant-garde textures, and the whole method fell out of fashion. It would be just as possible to design a mould to be assembled with cheap or scrap wood to get the same sort of honeycomb cell structure. That sort of thing is already used when pouring multiple floors in some concrete buildings.
I've had a couple years where I flew six trips per year. My wife had a couple of years where she flew probably fifteen trips. The harried sales type was common on my flights and she's commented on such too. Usually agitated because something in a sales presentation wasn't ready or something.
I still don't get how it's supposed to be more efficient than setting up prefabricated moulds, hanging the conduits and placing the rebar, then pouring concrete from trucks... Yes, the moulds have to be taken off after waiting for the walls to cure enough to support themselves, but typically mass-construction of even identical buildings will see staggered stages including rough ground prep, survey for foundation positioning and marking that, installing the in-ground utilities/services/piping, pouring the foundation and slab, finishing off the stub-ups through the slab, building the load-bearing walls, building the roof, roughing-in the interior wall studs, putting in electrical/plumbing/etc, then finishing the interior walls and exterior of the building.
That process can be staggered across several buildings so that the time to build ten buildings in-tandem isn't a lot worse than if two buildings were built, each start-to-finish before the next. I don't see how using a 3d printer really helps. 3d printers are great for prototyping and small-batch work, but it's almost always more cost effective to build special-purpose to make things in volume if the volume is enough to pay for the machines. 3d printing would work great at home or in a boutique shop, but I don't see it being a major factory process for finished goods.
No airline will ban phones being used for calls, and even if they do make such a ban, if there's no law against it then that won't stop passengers from doing it despite such a ban as there won't be much recourse.
The abusers will be the business/sales frequent fliers, and worse, they'll be just as angry or harried or aggressive on the phone during the flight as they are before the cabin door is closed and as soon as the aircraft touches down. And since those are the passengers that earn the airlines the most consistent revenue stream through their frequent patronage they'll be allowed to get away with it.
It's not quite that straightforward though. It's a reluctance to make a fundamental change even when the need has already smacked you between the eyes. The "Electronic Lean Burn" ignition system in one of my late seventies cars, along with the shoddy engine design that accompanied it is proof of that. Rather than fundamentally improve the engines to meet new emissions standards they hobbled them. They lowered the compression, they reduced the duration and lift on the cam, they added a pseudo-computerized feedback system to attempt to advance spark with more consideration than the old systems, but they didn't go so far as they should have. They should have introduced TBI fuel injection in the seventies and then EFI and SMFI in the early and mid eighties respectively, but they refused to let go of carburetors even after it was shown that fuel injection made more sense.
I expect that many of the regulations that apply to existing livery vehicles will be applied to uber services if the drivers or cars are used for more than a certain number of paid trips per year, or miles per day, or hours operating per day.
Many laws covering livery vehicles exist for important reasons. Too many vehicles on the road congesting the streets. Extra danger from drivers that aren't even recorded as providing livery service making followup after-the-fact difficult to impossible. Vehicles that are unsafe due to poor design or poor maintenance. Vehicles that have reliability problems.
A central system to purchase rides is not a bad idea, especially if the passenger either doesn't care who provides the service so long as the prices are competitive, or if the passenger is specifically looking for the lowest fare and can see such. I could see taxi services going from renting the cars to the drivers, providing radio dispatch, etc, to simply renting the cars and letting the drivers use the service to find fares, but I don't see many of the 'lessons learned' laws governing private paid transportation going away simply because someone offers another method to find a ride.
Then perhaps they should make a concerted effort to get such systems up and working themselves, before they're forced through future government regulation to take someone else's system that they don't care for and use it because they lack one.
Automakers don't do anything unless they are forced to. This is the big difference between them and tech companies; automakers change only when either their products don't sell, or when the law requires changes. We wouldn't have new fuel economy standards, strong emissions standards, and strong safety standards if the automakers weren't compelled to change through outside pressure.
And I agree, automotive interfaces SUCK. They should NEVER require sight to use them, with the exception of the backup camera, and possibly with the view of the map in certain circumstances. The interface should be entirely tactile and easy to learn or intuitive to use. Taking one's eyes off the road to do a basic thing like turning down the volume on the stereo is ridiculous.
NASA has had their hand in lots and lots of aeronautics projects over the years, and really has pushed what they can do for terrestrial and near-earth transportation to the limit. NASA shouldn't be focused on these areas anymore, as the companies-of-old that built their LEO launchers and the companies now building LEO launchers have things well in hand.
NASA is focusing on what they should, which is finding an area in space exploration that is deficient or has run into a limit, and to find a way around that. The parachute systems used to land on Mars date back to the Viking missions of the seventies and do not provide enough drag for future heavier payloads, they're literally at their design limits. If we want to land more than small rovers on Mars then we need a means to slow that payload down. NASA is attempting develop that means.
No, it took $150,000,000 to design a parachute for literally otherworldly conditions, to determine terrestrial conditions that could be used to test the parachute, to design a mission to reach those terrestrial conditions, to design a craft to reach those conditions (ie, the vehicle, the spin-stabilizing motors, the launch motor, and the controls), and to pay for the staffing and research time needed to get the craft to PMRF, to assemble it, and to monitor weather conditions until they permit a launch, then to recover everything afterward out of the Pacific.
If they decide to do more tests with this kind of platform those future tests will cost less, as the platform, the mission, and the conditions are known. Even if they had to build more platforms it's still cheaper for future attempts, probably on orders-of-magnitude.
Let them take it, then sue the crap out of them. If you argue or fight against it, they'll slap you with "Resisting" something or the other, and you'll be screwed anyways.
The way this was phrased might make one disinclined to follow it, but the basic point is fairly sound. The important part is to clearly state that you do not consent to the search before they take it. It'll be up to your lawyer then, but if you say nothing then the prosecution might try to argue that you consented through your silence instead of raising an objection. If the officers choose to search despite your objection then what they find on the phone and everything found as a result of that initial finding could be thrown-out, and if an entire case is built on that initial phone evidence then the case could be dismissed entirely.
At least, that is how I understand it. I am not a lawyer though.
In all honesty, based on what lawyers have published on the Internet, many of the defendants that could have benefited by not consenting to a search in the various ways police do search have done themselves in through their own words. The best advice is to not speak to the police beyond the incidentals necessary by law (ie, states with ID laws, minimal discussion at traffic stops, etc).
Yes, I understand what Dragon is for, and what they're contracted to do for NASA.
They themselves have the goal of going beyond that. Dragon, Falcon, and the other low-earth projects are stepping stones toward proving technologies needed for going further. Sure, there's a lot of tech that they'd need that won't be developed by Dragon/Falcon, but a whole lot of support and control systems can be tested where there's low risk (ie, unmanned missions or once manned, where actually occupied for only a short time) and once those are firmly reliable then they can apply those to other uses.
SpaceX might not make their goals, but so far they've come a hell of a lot further than any other non-public-sector project has.
Bear in mind that Musk's goal is long-duration deep space travel, so it still may be possible that SpaceX will still get there before Orion gets off the ground, especially if his successes in Earth orbit make it easier to continue development past it.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder how much of this is attributable to the Streisand Effect. I expect that with the generic name Uber it didn't stand out as meaning anything to most non-tech consumers (or even many tech-types for that matter) but the protests made the news and made taxi service harder to come by, planting the name in consumers' minds and giving them a reason to use it.
The smartest thing that the cabbies could have done was to step up their game as far as their service, doing as good a job as possible to show why they're professionals and deserve to be paid as such, compared to any-random-driver that Uber could deliver. Unfortunately hindsight is 20/20...
Well, his bike is also a kludged-together e-bike with motors, fenders, and above all else, speed. He's able to keep up with traffic on small neighborhood streets and if he pedals (and based on how it's geared pedalling would actually contribute something) he can almost keep up with the speed limit on some of the slower arteries.
So in his instance the bicycle is bigger than normal and going faster than normal too.
You know what apparently does work, based on a friend's experiences?
Putting a pair of amber lights out to the sides of your red center light, and having a sufficiently bright headlamp in front that illuminates a good chunk of road.
Those work because drivers assume that you're a motorcycle, and if you're a motorcycle then you're a lot heavier, and more likely to cause damage to their car.
With modern battery technology and modern, super-efficient lighting, it should be easy to fake a bicycle to light up like a motorcycle well enough to fool drivers at night.
Don't see how something that communicates with you via LEDs is so good if you are blind...
It's not even that complicated.
Many power lines have optical fiber strung in the middle of them, it's called optical power ground wire (OPGW) (scroll down a bit). That fiber is used as Internet backbone, as telecom voice, and as diagnostic for when there are power grid problems. If a line goes down then they can use an OTDR to determine the distance to the break instead of having to hunt for it.
All that they'd have to do would be to put devices at termination points and use dark strands. Sure, the equipment to transceive on single-mode fiber at those distances would be pricey, but it's completely within the technology that we have right now.
Being black is what one is, not what one does.
Now, it's unfortunately common that participating in thug culture is interpreted as "being black". If someone is aspiring to thug culture in their mannerisms and how they attire and adorn themselves then yes, they will be judged based on their appearance, even if they've never committed a crime, and they will be scrutinized.
Every racial group has their own form of thug culture, and sometimes they overlap in style, or someone of a different ethnicity will participate in a different group's thug culture entirely, with varying degrees of success.
No, because payphones started out being used for general-purpose.
If Irridium or any of the then-new satellite phone systems had been adopted by primarily a criminal or terrorist user base then they probably would be shut down or heavily modified to make it more difficult to use such a service in those circumstances for very long.
The United States discontinued the regular thousand dollar bill with that exact reasoning. There are a few large-denomination bills, but they're not for regular transactions and probably couldn't be redeemed at printed value for smaller bills without going through official channels, making them close to useless if you're not part of the Federal Reserve system.
You're using too new of a definition of network. Think of the "network of associates" concept, not a physical topology of computing devices.
It'll come down to an opinion as to whether or not the use of Tor implies an intent to allow others to break the law. While an anonymizer service itself can be used for both legal and illegal purposes, if the court later finds that its use is far more illegitimate than it is legitimate, then that will dictate how they rule on the matter.
That's the biggest difference compared to the car analogy, in that the demonstrated legitimate use of cars far, far outweighs the illegitimate use of cars. Using cars is the norm. Using Tor is not the norm, and so then it becomes a matter of scrutinizing what it does, who uses it, and for what purposes.
Same issues held true for networks like Napster and MegaUpload, and holds true for bit torrent.
I expect that simply moving and positioning a printer large enough to make a building would negate any cost savings over going and buying some cheap lumber, cutting it to shape it into moulds, and paying the concrete trucks to bring the materials.
There's a construction technique called "tilt-up" where one pours the concrete for a wall on the ground or on a mould, flat on the ground, then after it's cured, rotate it up 90 degrees. Unfortunately it became common in the sixties to do this with really *ahem* avant-garde textures, and the whole method fell out of fashion. It would be just as possible to design a mould to be assembled with cheap or scrap wood to get the same sort of honeycomb cell structure. That sort of thing is already used when pouring multiple floors in some concrete buildings.
I've had a couple years where I flew six trips per year. My wife had a couple of years where she flew probably fifteen trips. The harried sales type was common on my flights and she's commented on such too. Usually agitated because something in a sales presentation wasn't ready or something.
I still don't get how it's supposed to be more efficient than setting up prefabricated moulds, hanging the conduits and placing the rebar, then pouring concrete from trucks... Yes, the moulds have to be taken off after waiting for the walls to cure enough to support themselves, but typically mass-construction of even identical buildings will see staggered stages including rough ground prep, survey for foundation positioning and marking that, installing the in-ground utilities/services/piping, pouring the foundation and slab, finishing off the stub-ups through the slab, building the load-bearing walls, building the roof, roughing-in the interior wall studs, putting in electrical/plumbing/etc, then finishing the interior walls and exterior of the building.
That process can be staggered across several buildings so that the time to build ten buildings in-tandem isn't a lot worse than if two buildings were built, each start-to-finish before the next. I don't see how using a 3d printer really helps. 3d printers are great for prototyping and small-batch work, but it's almost always more cost effective to build special-purpose to make things in volume if the volume is enough to pay for the machines. 3d printing would work great at home or in a boutique shop, but I don't see it being a major factory process for finished goods.
No airline will ban phones being used for calls, and even if they do make such a ban, if there's no law against it then that won't stop passengers from doing it despite such a ban as there won't be much recourse.
The abusers will be the business/sales frequent fliers, and worse, they'll be just as angry or harried or aggressive on the phone during the flight as they are before the cabin door is closed and as soon as the aircraft touches down. And since those are the passengers that earn the airlines the most consistent revenue stream through their frequent patronage they'll be allowed to get away with it.
I donno, I guess they gambled on us finding this story appropriate. A throw of the Dice if you will...
It's not quite that straightforward though. It's a reluctance to make a fundamental change even when the need has already smacked you between the eyes. The "Electronic Lean Burn" ignition system in one of my late seventies cars, along with the shoddy engine design that accompanied it is proof of that. Rather than fundamentally improve the engines to meet new emissions standards they hobbled them. They lowered the compression, they reduced the duration and lift on the cam, they added a pseudo-computerized feedback system to attempt to advance spark with more consideration than the old systems, but they didn't go so far as they should have. They should have introduced TBI fuel injection in the seventies and then EFI and SMFI in the early and mid eighties respectively, but they refused to let go of carburetors even after it was shown that fuel injection made more sense.
I expect that many of the regulations that apply to existing livery vehicles will be applied to uber services if the drivers or cars are used for more than a certain number of paid trips per year, or miles per day, or hours operating per day.
Many laws covering livery vehicles exist for important reasons. Too many vehicles on the road congesting the streets. Extra danger from drivers that aren't even recorded as providing livery service making followup after-the-fact difficult to impossible. Vehicles that are unsafe due to poor design or poor maintenance. Vehicles that have reliability problems.
A central system to purchase rides is not a bad idea, especially if the passenger either doesn't care who provides the service so long as the prices are competitive, or if the passenger is specifically looking for the lowest fare and can see such. I could see taxi services going from renting the cars to the drivers, providing radio dispatch, etc, to simply renting the cars and letting the drivers use the service to find fares, but I don't see many of the 'lessons learned' laws governing private paid transportation going away simply because someone offers another method to find a ride.
Then perhaps they should make a concerted effort to get such systems up and working themselves, before they're forced through future government regulation to take someone else's system that they don't care for and use it because they lack one.
Automakers don't do anything unless they are forced to. This is the big difference between them and tech companies; automakers change only when either their products don't sell, or when the law requires changes. We wouldn't have new fuel economy standards, strong emissions standards, and strong safety standards if the automakers weren't compelled to change through outside pressure.
And I agree, automotive interfaces SUCK. They should NEVER require sight to use them, with the exception of the backup camera, and possibly with the view of the map in certain circumstances. The interface should be entirely tactile and easy to learn or intuitive to use. Taking one's eyes off the road to do a basic thing like turning down the volume on the stereo is ridiculous.
More like, "what begins as a farce has jumped the shark."
?
NASA has had their hand in lots and lots of aeronautics projects over the years, and really has pushed what they can do for terrestrial and near-earth transportation to the limit. NASA shouldn't be focused on these areas anymore, as the companies-of-old that built their LEO launchers and the companies now building LEO launchers have things well in hand.
NASA is focusing on what they should, which is finding an area in space exploration that is deficient or has run into a limit, and to find a way around that. The parachute systems used to land on Mars date back to the Viking missions of the seventies and do not provide enough drag for future heavier payloads, they're literally at their design limits. If we want to land more than small rovers on Mars then we need a means to slow that payload down. NASA is attempting develop that means.
No, it took $150,000,000 to design a parachute for literally otherworldly conditions, to determine terrestrial conditions that could be used to test the parachute, to design a mission to reach those terrestrial conditions, to design a craft to reach those conditions (ie, the vehicle, the spin-stabilizing motors, the launch motor, and the controls), and to pay for the staffing and research time needed to get the craft to PMRF, to assemble it, and to monitor weather conditions until they permit a launch, then to recover everything afterward out of the Pacific.
If they decide to do more tests with this kind of platform those future tests will cost less, as the platform, the mission, and the conditions are known. Even if they had to build more platforms it's still cheaper for future attempts, probably on orders-of-magnitude.
The way this was phrased might make one disinclined to follow it, but the basic point is fairly sound. The important part is to clearly state that you do not consent to the search before they take it. It'll be up to your lawyer then, but if you say nothing then the prosecution might try to argue that you consented through your silence instead of raising an objection. If the officers choose to search despite your objection then what they find on the phone and everything found as a result of that initial finding could be thrown-out, and if an entire case is built on that initial phone evidence then the case could be dismissed entirely.
At least, that is how I understand it. I am not a lawyer though.
In all honesty, based on what lawyers have published on the Internet, many of the defendants that could have benefited by not consenting to a search in the various ways police do search have done themselves in through their own words. The best advice is to not speak to the police beyond the incidentals necessary by law (ie, states with ID laws, minimal discussion at traffic stops, etc).
Yes, I understand what Dragon is for, and what they're contracted to do for NASA.
They themselves have the goal of going beyond that. Dragon, Falcon, and the other low-earth projects are stepping stones toward proving technologies needed for going further. Sure, there's a lot of tech that they'd need that won't be developed by Dragon/Falcon, but a whole lot of support and control systems can be tested where there's low risk (ie, unmanned missions or once manned, where actually occupied for only a short time) and once those are firmly reliable then they can apply those to other uses.
SpaceX might not make their goals, but so far they've come a hell of a lot further than any other non-public-sector project has.
Bear in mind that Musk's goal is long-duration deep space travel, so it still may be possible that SpaceX will still get there before Orion gets off the ground, especially if his successes in Earth orbit make it easier to continue development past it.