Now, is it a good movie? So... no. Not by a long stretch, i might add. Looks great, Harrison Ford is fantastic and it is loaded with iconic scenes... but man, the script is a poor rehash of EP IV, and ridden with glaring plot holes as well.
Actually, for a movie written for nine year olds, I thin it was a pretty good movie. They probably pulled in Pixar people as it had their feel at times.
Not bad points, but I think about half of them will be explained later and there are much worse implications of the movie. As for Finn, I bet we find out he is force sensitive also. The other stormtrooper dies in his arms and I bet he felt it. He feels what's going on around him, the big picture comes zooming into focus. Kylo Ren feels it also and seems to know, halts and looks at Finn at the end of the battle and later knows it was that particular stormtrooper before anybody tells him. The force is guiding him and that's how he ends up meeting Rey and being where he needs to be all those times.
As for the resistance, I suspect that is the covert section of the Republic. Empire breaks up, Republic forms, resistance takes up the fight behind First Order lines in a way that is not direct war between the two. Still, for a galactic empire, even for remnants of one, man power has always seemed fairly scarce. If trying to make sense of it, I suspect that the Old Republic or the Empire were made up of a few thousand relatively sparsely populated worlds. Enough that the trade federation would default to robot warriors and a million or two clone troopers would be a major force in the galactic scene of things.
I think what you really have to realize is that this movie was written for 8 year olds. It was a children's story and taken as that with child logic and plot holes, it does pretty well on the adult side. There were certainly some Pixarish type dialogue and awkward moments, but there certainly have been much worse movies for adults than this. Still, I wish it was written for more teens than pre-teens like the Harry Potter stories.
Yes. But the path of the tunnel runs through what is essentially an old land fill. So the machine should have been designed to deal with old steam boilers, scrap iron, chunks of concrete/rebar, etc.
It should have been designed so it could have been repaired in place if it broke. Currently waiting for it to break down again under some skyscraper in downtown.
Tiny vibrating strings? That explains everything! But why not tiny vibrating llamas? I bet the math would still work out, plus that would make the theory somewhat interesting.
Who's buying these? The same crowd that thinks LPs offer a superior listening experience to digital? Sigh...
From the sound of TFS, I'd guess that most are for making recordings, law offices, secretaries taking meeting notes, dictationists, etc. Could very well that there is some reason to keep using tape rather than digital. Besides that companies don't like to spend money to upgrade system just because, there could be legal reasons that would make digital records discoverable but not recorded tape.
Reusing the second stage will never be an option because it goes halfway around the world.
Ten years ago, I'd bet we'd say that recovering the first stage would never be an option. In another ten years, if everything works out, recovering the first stage is routine, and launches are as cheap as they can get, they'll start looking at recovering the second stage. Now I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually sprouts wings and flies back to its launch pad.
Ever is a pretty bold claim.
From what we know that is sufficient time to create a universe from nothing, create habitable planets in our solar system and grow life from scratch.
Well, it is an AC post so therefore, most certainly a troll. That being said, it's pretty much true for anything our generation will attempt. Even if we get around to forming an outpost, or even a temporary base on Mars, it will be at least 30+ years in the future. A colony, meaning an attempt at a permanent settlement will be centuries after that and after many other milestones. Between effective lack of atmosphere on both, plus the regrowlith on the Moon and poisonous landscape on Mars, we'll most likely see space habitats first. Any attempt at terraforming Mars will take centuries just due to the energy requirements for getting material we need to Mars.
I was just talking to a guy from India. He was born in India, but holds an Australian passport. He owns his own software company, and he's very successful. Not too long ago he landed in California. He plan: Go look around. He heard it was a great place. It was his first time to the US. At the boarder they pulled him because he couldn't tell him definite plans for his stay in the US. They questioned him for hours, denied him entry and sent him back to Australia. This is a rich guy who speaks perfect English.
I got near the same thing going from Seattle to Vancouver, Canada with my girlfriend. Had a plan, dinner and night club, then coming back or staying in a hotel if we were too tired to drive, but we didn't have $50 cash in our pockets. Apparently Canadians had never heard of credit cards. Stopped, pulled over, questioned, about to have car searched when I found an ATM statement with my checking and savings balance. Once they saw it and that I had some money, they dropped everything and let us go on our way.
I'm asking why religious belief should emerge in a world that doesn't need it.
Well, it depends on what you consider as religion and what it actually consists of. Sure, they may not come up with some 'sky father" (since atheists seem fixated on small definitions of Abrahamic religions) but I bet they will come up with a self perpetuating ideology with some form of metaphysics that will form the basis of their community and politics that some will follow blindly and persecute those that do not follow it and otherwise use it to justify all their actions.
I have a question. You know how the voyager space probes made it as far as they did and the tiny, tiny, mega super tiny force in one direction that was unknown was determined to be the equal and opposite reaction from infrared photons leaving one side of the craft? NASA noticed something that tiny and verified it with calculations. If dark matter existed, wouldn't that have had a similar pull on one of the probes? It traveled through the entire solar system and saw absolutely no gravitational interference at all from unknown mass. I'd consider that a pretty effective probe that's accidentally looking for dark matter.
It's a good questions. I would bet, especially with the that latest theories that passage of the sun and planets through the dark matter cloud would cause some high density filaments to form, like wake from the passing boat. Somebody could get the voyager data, look for deviations in expected movement, figure out the suspected location of filaments at the time, do the gravitational equations for the filaments, and see if the math fits the data. Problem one is that is all on current understanding which no doubt will need to be tweaked, but this might be the things that allows us to tweak it. So much work that doing so could probably be somebodies entire college career. Problem two, is that is a whole lot of work involving celestial mechanics, suspected behavior of dark matter in both our solar system and beyond and the gravitational fields caused by such as functions of time, distance, angular movement of planets, and motion of the sun through the galaxy. Then you have to hope the the accuracy of the measurements of the position of the probes is good enough to detect any effect. The general acceleration of the probe over its lifetime is doable because we can figure it out over long periods of time. In this case, we would need veery detailed measurements over much shorter periods of time as we're with changes on a smaller scale.
How did they find enough dark matter to build a space probe? I thought that stuff was hard to find.:)
There's lots of dark matter, 85% of the universe according to the article, and it is hard to find, which is why we have to send a probe to space to look for it. In this case, they will really be collecting data on high energy cosmic rays. Some theories about dark matter suspect that in can interact with itself or with regular matter and produce cosmic rays. The chance if it doing so is very small, but there is so much of it, it hopefully happens in detectable amounts. So, what they are probably doing is collecting data on cosmic rays that can't otherwise be explained and looking for an origin in the same location as where we suspect dark matter to be.
I don't count myself an expert in Star Wars trivia, but if the Empire is anything like the Roman empire, then economic expansion via military force is a key part of its economic growth. You conquer new lands for tribute, booty, resources, labor/slaves, and so on.
A death star is a valuable military weapon that could conceivably improve the economy by allowing the Empire to more easily (and more cheaply) conquer new systems. In terms of conventional industrial economics, it's like having a vastly superior factory.
A loss of the Death Star would both be an economic loss of the investment and much slower revenue growth because you'd have to fight harder to conquer new systems with more conventional weapons (to the extent that a Super Star Destroyer is a conventional weapon).
That is sort of like arguing that the allies in WW2 were destroying an economic investment and slowing revenue by dismantling the Nazi work camp system. Why get rid of the camps when slave labor can make so many goods for so cheap? Besides that both the Death Star and the camps aren't necessarily sustainable or that economics wasn't the main goal of either, the allies and rebels found their enemies tactics deplorable and one of the reasons they were being fought.
But then again, I suppose this is fun to an economist...
Whatever floats your boat man.
Sure. It's not like engineers and physists don't figure out the details of Sci-Fi spaceships all the time. I'm sure some computer scientists have worked out the computational power of the Matrix. I suspect that economists do gedankenexperiments on fictional economies all the time also.
Until they killed Ernst Roehm, as it was his faction that had ties with the military and was supporting the Socialist part of the party and looking to make things better for the German workers. He wouldn't drop that plank of the party line and thus was removed from power with a bullet from a gun and some propaganda. After that, the Nazis were pretty much a straight oligarchy of people with power who would use it any way they saw fit and weren't willing to share it and only used the socialist part to tell people that those who didn't support them were against the German people.
Perhaps most interesting in the discussion is how you estimate the cost of the Death Star projects and the GGP — the Galactic Gross Product of the fictional universe.
Traveller's High Guard rules would probably be the best. You'd just have to have the Referee figure out what the cost of a "Turbo Laser" is, either by assuming it's just a meson gun or something else that would be determined by percentage of ship.
I live below sea level too. Far in the midwest with dry feet.
Unless you think that Death Valley and the Salton Sea basin are in the "midwest", or you live in a hole several hundred feet below the surface-- no, you don't live below sea level in the midwest.
Back when History Channel had history, one panelist commented if Patton was active on Normandy landings, they would have been more successful (not sure how to define success, airborne troops scattered about was a disaster but it really confused the Germans to exact beachheads).
Patton had his soldiers drive till they either engaged the enemy or ran out of gas. Often exceeding their supply lines in doing so. He usually come sup not in D-Day but later when the allies finally broke through the hedge rows. Unknown to the allies, the way to Paris was wide open. One reporter managed to take his jeep, drive to Paris, have some drinks at a cafe, and drive back unmolested. By time he reported that, the Germans had regrouped and filled the gaps. The general feeling is that if Patton had been there, that reporter would have been following tanks all the way to Paris.
We don't have any hint of terra forming tech today, we won't have a functional one within a lifetime.
In 1940, the same could be said about sending a man to the Moon, but we did it in just under 30 years. Just because we don't know how to do it now doesn't mean that it's impossible, or that it will take generations to learn it.
Well, the first thing we'd need to do to terraform Mars would be to give it a livable atmosphere, say something like 60% of earths pressure at ground level. While there is CO2 and other volatiles on Mars, not enough to give it that much atmosphere even if we beam energy down and raise the temperature. The closest place to get that sort of materials in sufficient quantities would be close oort cloud comets by sending them to Mars. Last time I did the math, getting that many comets (about a thousand Haley's comets) and smashing them into Mars (assuming that without slowing down they won't really cause too much damage to the planet) in 80 years still takes an amount of energy measured in total day output energy of the Sun, about.1 at 100% efficiency. That's divided up over 80 years so we really only need to capture 3.4^-7 percent of the energy of the sun over that period. That would mean a solar panel around Mercury orbit that would be 2200 miles by 2200 miles (sorry, should be SI units) assuming 100% efficiency. Building such an engineering feat would probably be another generation in building. I think it's safe to say that even if our current tech is sufficient to do that and we wanted to, we're about two generations out from terraforming Mars if what we know about Mars is correct.
It could be that we're off on the amount of local water and ice on Mars capable of turning into a gas at higher temps by an order of magnitude. In such a case, we could, in theory, heat it up with mirrors and achieve the same effect. Once there is enough atmosphere, heat, and water on Mars to rain, then it will combine with most of the perchlorate to form brine and give off more O2. With sufficient energy, we could hopefully smelt the FO2 into building material and put out more oxygen.
But Uber is like a taxi, since the average wait time needed to book a cab is around 5 minutes, same as a taxi. Can you book a black car in 5 minutes? What if all black cars are servicing other customers (since there are only a few cars per company), not thousands like Uber or regular taxis.
As a resident of Seattle who has used the town car services (black-car) here and given some attention to it, yes, Uber and the rest operated under the same laws and rules here. Booking a black-car in Seattle is easy, and it can be done by web page with the click of a button. Although they typically only have Towncars and Limos, and in the instance I just checked online, I couldn't schedule it for sooner than an hour (which means it may still get to me before a Seattle cab) but that has typically meant at my door in that hour, but that is a restriction that the company has put on themselves, not by the law. With the advent of cell phones and computers, it became even easier to book in advance, even if only a few minutes in advance, and have a car there quickly by having a fleet of cars. The Seattle City Council altered the laws so that such fleets could not be larger than 350 as a solution. Not sure how Uber is getting around all this as they probably have more than 350 cars at any given time, but who knows?
Just FYI, they can do this with rates higher than Seattle cabs, because Seattle cabs have a well deserved reputation for being dirty, with ill tempered drivers, and often late, if they bother to show up at all. I personally gave up on cabs here long ago after the third or so time I tried to call one but they kept not showing up and when I'd call the station again, they'd tell me the driver showed up but said there was nobody there and no answer on the phone, which was a lie (probably the cabbie's). It only takes one time of standing in the cold rain waiting for more than an hour for a cab that never shows up to get a really bad impression of them, so I just drive myself everywhere now if I can't walk. Friends love Uber (and Lyft) though with their clean cars, nice drivers, and they actually show up quickly. Many cars will even have free perks like free ice cold bottled water on really hot summer days.
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Is it a movie to be seen on theaters? Absolutely.
Now, is it a good movie? So... no. Not by a long stretch, i might add. Looks great, Harrison Ford is fantastic and it is loaded with iconic scenes... but man, the script is a poor rehash of EP IV, and ridden with glaring plot holes as well.
Actually, for a movie written for nine year olds, I thin it was a pretty good movie. They probably pulled in Pixar people as it had their feel at times.
Not bad points, but I think about half of them will be explained later and there are much worse implications of the movie. As for Finn, I bet we find out he is force sensitive also. The other stormtrooper dies in his arms and I bet he felt it. He feels what's going on around him, the big picture comes zooming into focus. Kylo Ren feels it also and seems to know, halts and looks at Finn at the end of the battle and later knows it was that particular stormtrooper before anybody tells him. The force is guiding him and that's how he ends up meeting Rey and being where he needs to be all those times.
As for the resistance, I suspect that is the covert section of the Republic. Empire breaks up, Republic forms, resistance takes up the fight behind First Order lines in a way that is not direct war between the two. Still, for a galactic empire, even for remnants of one, man power has always seemed fairly scarce. If trying to make sense of it, I suspect that the Old Republic or the Empire were made up of a few thousand relatively sparsely populated worlds. Enough that the trade federation would default to robot warriors and a million or two clone troopers would be a major force in the galactic scene of things.
I think what you really have to realize is that this movie was written for 8 year olds. It was a children's story and taken as that with child logic and plot holes, it does pretty well on the adult side. There were certainly some Pixarish type dialogue and awkward moments, but there certainly have been much worse movies for adults than this. Still, I wish it was written for more teens than pre-teens like the Harry Potter stories.
Be intelligent.
Yes. Learn how to log in before posting!
Yes. But the path of the tunnel runs through what is essentially an old land fill. So the machine should have been designed to deal with old steam boilers, scrap iron, chunks of concrete/rebar, etc.
It should have been designed so it could have been repaired in place if it broke. Currently waiting for it to break down again under some skyscraper in downtown.
Tiny vibrating strings? That explains everything! But why not tiny vibrating llamas? I bet the math would still work out, plus that would make the theory somewhat interesting.
Step 1: Assume string shaped llamas.
Who's buying these? The same crowd that thinks LPs offer a superior listening experience to digital? Sigh...
From the sound of TFS, I'd guess that most are for making recordings, law offices, secretaries taking meeting notes, dictationists, etc. Could very well that there is some reason to keep using tape rather than digital. Besides that companies don't like to spend money to upgrade system just because, there could be legal reasons that would make digital records discoverable but not recorded tape.
Reusing the second stage will never be an option because it goes halfway around the world.
Ten years ago, I'd bet we'd say that recovering the first stage would never be an option. In another ten years, if everything works out, recovering the first stage is routine, and launches are as cheap as they can get, they'll start looking at recovering the second stage. Now I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually sprouts wings and flies back to its launch pad.
Don't be silly, Nazis have been there for decades
That's the moon silly!
Ever.
Ever is a pretty bold claim. From what we know that is sufficient time to create a universe from nothing, create habitable planets in our solar system and grow life from scratch.
Well, it is an AC post so therefore, most certainly a troll. That being said, it's pretty much true for anything our generation will attempt. Even if we get around to forming an outpost, or even a temporary base on Mars, it will be at least 30+ years in the future. A colony, meaning an attempt at a permanent settlement will be centuries after that and after many other milestones. Between effective lack of atmosphere on both, plus the regrowlith on the Moon and poisonous landscape on Mars, we'll most likely see space habitats first. Any attempt at terraforming Mars will take centuries just due to the energy requirements for getting material we need to Mars.
I was just talking to a guy from India. He was born in India, but holds an Australian passport. He owns his own software company, and he's very successful. Not too long ago he landed in California. He plan: Go look around. He heard it was a great place. It was his first time to the US. At the boarder they pulled him because he couldn't tell him definite plans for his stay in the US. They questioned him for hours, denied him entry and sent him back to Australia. This is a rich guy who speaks perfect English.
I got near the same thing going from Seattle to Vancouver, Canada with my girlfriend. Had a plan, dinner and night club, then coming back or staying in a hotel if we were too tired to drive, but we didn't have $50 cash in our pockets. Apparently Canadians had never heard of credit cards. Stopped, pulled over, questioned, about to have car searched when I found an ATM statement with my checking and savings balance. Once they saw it and that I had some money, they dropped everything and let us go on our way.
Facebook is the new AOL?
Very much so. I don't use it, but my wife does, ,and the chain letterish crap is just annoying .
However, that's just a function of her friends and will be with her on the internet no matter which service she uses.
I'm not claiming rational people are perfect.
I'm asking why religious belief should emerge in a world that doesn't need it.
Well, it depends on what you consider as religion and what it actually consists of. Sure, they may not come up with some 'sky father" (since atheists seem fixated on small definitions of Abrahamic religions) but I bet they will come up with a self perpetuating ideology with some form of metaphysics that will form the basis of their community and politics that some will follow blindly and persecute those that do not follow it and otherwise use it to justify all their actions.
Once it becomes self sufficient, it will rebel anyway.
Well of course, once the robots take over.
I have a question. You know how the voyager space probes made it as far as they did and the tiny, tiny, mega super tiny force in one direction that was unknown was determined to be the equal and opposite reaction from infrared photons leaving one side of the craft? NASA noticed something that tiny and verified it with calculations. If dark matter existed, wouldn't that have had a similar pull on one of the probes? It traveled through the entire solar system and saw absolutely no gravitational interference at all from unknown mass. I'd consider that a pretty effective probe that's accidentally looking for dark matter.
It's a good questions. I would bet, especially with the that latest theories that passage of the sun and planets through the dark matter cloud would cause some high density filaments to form, like wake from the passing boat. Somebody could get the voyager data, look for deviations in expected movement, figure out the suspected location of filaments at the time, do the gravitational equations for the filaments, and see if the math fits the data. Problem one is that is all on current understanding which no doubt will need to be tweaked, but this might be the things that allows us to tweak it. So much work that doing so could probably be somebodies entire college career. Problem two, is that is a whole lot of work involving celestial mechanics, suspected behavior of dark matter in both our solar system and beyond and the gravitational fields caused by such as functions of time, distance, angular movement of planets, and motion of the sun through the galaxy. Then you have to hope the the accuracy of the measurements of the position of the probes is good enough to detect any effect. The general acceleration of the probe over its lifetime is doable because we can figure it out over long periods of time. In this case, we would need veery detailed measurements over much shorter periods of time as we're with changes on a smaller scale.
How did they find enough dark matter to build a space probe? I thought that stuff was hard to find. :)
There's lots of dark matter, 85% of the universe according to the article, and it is hard to find, which is why we have to send a probe to space to look for it. In this case, they will really be collecting data on high energy cosmic rays. Some theories about dark matter suspect that in can interact with itself or with regular matter and produce cosmic rays. The chance if it doing so is very small, but there is so much of it, it hopefully happens in detectable amounts. So, what they are probably doing is collecting data on cosmic rays that can't otherwise be explained and looking for an origin in the same location as where we suspect dark matter to be.
Of having an entire planet obliterated from your economy by a Death Star?
Probably less than one two hundred billionth of your GGP. That would be equivalent to losing $17k dollars from the US GDP.
That doesn't make sense.
I don't count myself an expert in Star Wars trivia, but if the Empire is anything like the Roman empire, then economic expansion via military force is a key part of its economic growth. You conquer new lands for tribute, booty, resources, labor/slaves, and so on.
A death star is a valuable military weapon that could conceivably improve the economy by allowing the Empire to more easily (and more cheaply) conquer new systems. In terms of conventional industrial economics, it's like having a vastly superior factory.
A loss of the Death Star would both be an economic loss of the investment and much slower revenue growth because you'd have to fight harder to conquer new systems with more conventional weapons (to the extent that a Super Star Destroyer is a conventional weapon).
That is sort of like arguing that the allies in WW2 were destroying an economic investment and slowing revenue by dismantling the Nazi work camp system. Why get rid of the camps when slave labor can make so many goods for so cheap? Besides that both the Death Star and the camps aren't necessarily sustainable or that economics wasn't the main goal of either, the allies and rebels found their enemies tactics deplorable and one of the reasons they were being fought.
But then again, I suppose this is fun to an economist...
Whatever floats your boat man.
Sure. It's not like engineers and physists don't figure out the details of Sci-Fi spaceships all the time. I'm sure some computer scientists have worked out the computational power of the Matrix. I suspect that economists do gedankenexperiments on fictional economies all the time also.
They were socialists...
Until they killed Ernst Roehm, as it was his faction that had ties with the military and was supporting the Socialist part of the party and looking to make things better for the German workers. He wouldn't drop that plank of the party line and thus was removed from power with a bullet from a gun and some propaganda. After that, the Nazis were pretty much a straight oligarchy of people with power who would use it any way they saw fit and weren't willing to share it and only used the socialist part to tell people that those who didn't support them were against the German people.
Traveller's High Guard rules would probably be the best. You'd just have to have the Referee figure out what the cost of a "Turbo Laser" is, either by assuming it's just a meson gun or something else that would be determined by percentage of ship.
I live below sea level too. Far in the midwest with dry feet.
Unless you think that Death Valley and the Salton Sea basin are in the "midwest", or you live in a hole several hundred feet below the surface-- no, you don't live below sea level in the midwest.
http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2005/1...
Maybe he lived in the midwest of Jordan.
Back when History Channel had history, one panelist commented if Patton was active on Normandy landings, they would have been more successful (not sure how to define success, airborne troops scattered about was a disaster but it really confused the Germans to exact beachheads).
Patton had his soldiers drive till they either engaged the enemy or ran out of gas. Often exceeding their supply lines in doing so. He usually come sup not in D-Day but later when the allies finally broke through the hedge rows. Unknown to the allies, the way to Paris was wide open. One reporter managed to take his jeep, drive to Paris, have some drinks at a cafe, and drive back unmolested. By time he reported that, the Germans had regrouped and filled the gaps. The general feeling is that if Patton had been there, that reporter would have been following tanks all the way to Paris.
We don't have any hint of terra forming tech today, we won't have a functional one within a lifetime. In 1940, the same could be said about sending a man to the Moon, but we did it in just under 30 years. Just because we don't know how to do it now doesn't mean that it's impossible, or that it will take generations to learn it.
Well, the first thing we'd need to do to terraform Mars would be to give it a livable atmosphere, say something like 60% of earths pressure at ground level. While there is CO2 and other volatiles on Mars, not enough to give it that much atmosphere even if we beam energy down and raise the temperature. The closest place to get that sort of materials in sufficient quantities would be close oort cloud comets by sending them to Mars. Last time I did the math, getting that many comets (about a thousand Haley's comets) and smashing them into Mars (assuming that without slowing down they won't really cause too much damage to the planet) in 80 years still takes an amount of energy measured in total day output energy of the Sun, about .1 at 100% efficiency. That's divided up over 80 years so we really only need to capture 3.4^-7 percent of the energy of the sun over that period. That would mean a solar panel around Mercury orbit that would be 2200 miles by 2200 miles (sorry, should be SI units) assuming 100% efficiency. Building such an engineering feat would probably be another generation in building. I think it's safe to say that even if our current tech is sufficient to do that and we wanted to, we're about two generations out from terraforming Mars if what we know about Mars is correct.
It could be that we're off on the amount of local water and ice on Mars capable of turning into a gas at higher temps by an order of magnitude. In such a case, we could, in theory, heat it up with mirrors and achieve the same effect. Once there is enough atmosphere, heat, and water on Mars to rain, then it will combine with most of the perchlorate to form brine and give off more O2. With sufficient energy, we could hopefully smelt the FO2 into building material and put out more oxygen.
But Uber is like a taxi, since the average wait time needed to book a cab is around 5 minutes, same as a taxi. Can you book a black car in 5 minutes? What if all black cars are servicing other customers (since there are only a few cars per company), not thousands like Uber or regular taxis.
As a resident of Seattle who has used the town car services (black-car) here and given some attention to it, yes, Uber and the rest operated under the same laws and rules here. Booking a black-car in Seattle is easy, and it can be done by web page with the click of a button. Although they typically only have Towncars and Limos, and in the instance I just checked online, I couldn't schedule it for sooner than an hour (which means it may still get to me before a Seattle cab) but that has typically meant at my door in that hour, but that is a restriction that the company has put on themselves, not by the law. With the advent of cell phones and computers, it became even easier to book in advance, even if only a few minutes in advance, and have a car there quickly by having a fleet of cars. The Seattle City Council altered the laws so that such fleets could not be larger than 350 as a solution. Not sure how Uber is getting around all this as they probably have more than 350 cars at any given time, but who knows?
Just FYI, they can do this with rates higher than Seattle cabs, because Seattle cabs have a well deserved reputation for being dirty, with ill tempered drivers, and often late, if they bother to show up at all. I personally gave up on cabs here long ago after the third or so time I tried to call one but they kept not showing up and when I'd call the station again, they'd tell me the driver showed up but said there was nobody there and no answer on the phone, which was a lie (probably the cabbie's). It only takes one time of standing in the cold rain waiting for more than an hour for a cab that never shows up to get a really bad impression of them, so I just drive myself everywhere now if I can't walk. Friends love Uber (and Lyft) though with their clean cars, nice drivers, and they actually show up quickly. Many cars will even have free perks like free ice cold bottled water on really hot summer days.