They want to classify these folks as contractors but treat them like employees. That is not legal if you make donuts or widgets or have a not-taxi taxi service.
Hmm. The drivers provide their own vehicles, set their own hours, and pay their own fees (gas/tolls/etc). Yup, sure sound like employees to me...
One of the big ideas behind "modernization" was that, in general, people could work less and enjoy more benefits. Indeed, our per-person output has skyrocketed. The idea that we could get even more productive in the future is a conditionally great one. The big "if" is that right now, in the US, almost all of the benefit is being concentrated at the top-end of the economic spectrum. Indeed, our GDP has more than recovered from the recession even though most people are still suffering because of even more recent wealth concentration.
When normal people receive even half the benefits of modernization, its a good thing, and net job loss will be more than outpaced by work reduction.
They're registered as private "limos" (size unspecified in regulation) that are not unregulated like gypsy cabs but rather "differently regulated". For example, you can't hail a black car on the street. Uber just made it even easier to reserve one with very little notice than it is to hail a cab - that's the disruption they brought to the market.
Requiring a minimum standard of service (that might, for example, include having a card reader) is a reasonable trade for the right to provide a lucrative yet limited-availability service, since nobody can just "add one" to the number of cabs in the city to compete directly.
The drivers who I've had using Uber really are contractors - they generally work for another service or themselves and have been using Uber to "fill in the blanks" in their far more profitable direct business. They use their own equipment and their only tie to Uber is trip sourcing.
Note that this has nothing at all to do with stealing tips, which is just bad - however, Uber includes all gratuities in their pre-negotiated rate with the passengers, and presumably has a pre-negotiated rate with the drivers, so (since I didn't RTFA) I'm not sure how this could be true other than an accounting misstep.
To "fix" this you'd have to cache the contents of closed tabs, which among other things might be a security nightmare. Simply reloading the tab costs you almost no memory and doesn't chafe with people's expectations of privacy.
That happened in the past, too, and then we got sendmail - the middleman between all of them. Writing sendmail.cf by hand was a rite of passage! Over time SMTP appeared as the winner, which enabled far simpler tools to emerge on the server side and more powerful clients to send mail directly.
The problem with ignoring experts or deriding them is that sooner or later the rube consumer is going to depend on experts.
I'm sure you won't believe this, but this is an area in which Apple truly, truly excels. There are plenty of neophytes who use Apple tools to a significant percentage of their potential (probably not as much as they could, but more than enough) with no help from anyone. You have to be willing to do some things in the Apple Way, but that's no great burden for many people.
In the same way that you used to have to be at least somewhat mechanically inclined (or have a neighbor who was) to own a car, but now just get in and drive, you really can just use your iPhone, iPad, and even MacBook without any clue as to how they work... and everything's generally just fine. Really.
The issue is metaphorically: that Apple has built a walled garden that is large enough and in the right shape that most users will not actually encounter any walls during their wanderings unless they go looking for them. Contrast this with Android, where you can move the walls to wherever you want making the garden effectively unwalled but the default position is so close to the entrance that you have to move them at least once to get anywhere, and Windows RT, where the garden is more of a sandbox (basicly a walled desert) and the walls are awkwardly placed and immovable.
Very well said. Android is theoretically open but far more closed for the casual user, Apple is technically closed but is far more than "good enough" for most.
Actually, in many cases, the poor pay LESS taxes proportionate to their income due to lower income brackets mandating lower taxes.
Only if you define income taxes (as many in the US do) as excluding payroll taxes, which are in fact a tax on ~15% of the first $100K or so of payroll income - and poorer people are far more likely to be receiving payroll than, say, partnership distributions, so its a pretty valid add-on.
We already tax the hoarding of currency through inflation - there's no incentive to hold a dollar when you can invest it or pay back higher-interest debts instead.
Not quite accurate. The Fed is charged with balancing inflation and unemployment, but has chosen to keep inflation down at as close to 0% as humanly possible while letting unemployment rise.
Easy, obvious once the general pattern is known...
That's your definition of easy? And obvious? FWIW, the same approach on the OSX variant of UNIX is:
1) Plug the printer into the computer or indeed anywhere on the local network 2) Choose the printer from the list of "Nearby printers" when you go to print something 3) Very occasionally wait a few seconds while your computer communes with the internet on your behalf and installs the appropriate drivers 4) Retrieve your printout from the printer
Yeah, I read that too. Note that the claims themselves can often be several pages, and the whole "you only need to read the first part of each stack of claims" piece is silly because, as Joel pointed out correctly, the first piece is often very broad and strike-downable leaving all of the others to worry about. Silly example:
1) A system comprised of a computer connected to the internet 2) The embodiment of claim one in which the computer does something novel and unique
Just reading the "parent claim" number one is a waste of time.
You do realize that one per hour is the great exception rather than the rule, right? It probably takes over an hour to read and understand most patents well enough to determine what exactly what nuanced change is being described as novel - not because of obfuscation, but because non-obvious things are non-obvious to explain.
One reason its so nice that Apple still uses the same boring, simple text files that everyone else in the *NIX world does - but has also created little daemons and GUIs to make modifying them simple for non-expert users. And even if you're an expert computer programmer, there's no reason for you to also become skilled in administering CUPS and Postfix just to print a memo and send email.
Additionally, Apple's use of Bonjour (like many things Apple a combination of existing protocols with a little polish) lets local network printers appear as print targets with automatic configuration and driver downloads if needed. That's something that's been promised by many systems, including Windows and Linux, but again with OSX it actually just works - almost boringly well.
I intentionally stayed away from Feedly because (at the time at least) it was free. That doesn't scale terribly well, as we well know. I went over to FeedBin.me (using the Reeder app for iOS) and am very happy to pay then $20/year for a service I actually enjoy using.
How much of that is WP, and how much is the hardware itself? I ask as people often confuse the two.
Not intended as a troll-y comment, but its things like that that make me glad I keep sticking with iOS, even as a developer. The last thing I want to do with my phone is worry about crap like that, when I could just be using it. Everyone has different needs, of course, but still...
That is not always possible, there are cpu intensive applications that transcode video or maipulate images and have lots of assembly code here and there. It's not as easy as clicking on the recompile button.
To be fair, Apple also delivered CoreImage which was amazing when it came out - IIRC, Pixelmator got its start as a fairly simple wrapper of most of the built in functions.
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They want to classify these folks as contractors but treat them like employees. That is not legal if you make donuts or widgets or have a not-taxi taxi service.
Hmm. The drivers provide their own vehicles, set their own hours, and pay their own fees (gas/tolls/etc). Yup, sure sound like employees to me...
One of the big ideas behind "modernization" was that, in general, people could work less and enjoy more benefits. Indeed, our per-person output has skyrocketed. The idea that we could get even more productive in the future is a conditionally great one. The big "if" is that right now, in the US, almost all of the benefit is being concentrated at the top-end of the economic spectrum. Indeed, our GDP has more than recovered from the recession even though most people are still suffering because of even more recent wealth concentration.
When normal people receive even half the benefits of modernization, its a good thing, and net job loss will be more than outpaced by work reduction.
They're registered as private "limos" (size unspecified in regulation) that are not unregulated like gypsy cabs but rather "differently regulated". For example, you can't hail a black car on the street. Uber just made it even easier to reserve one with very little notice than it is to hail a cab - that's the disruption they brought to the market.
Requiring a minimum standard of service (that might, for example, include having a card reader) is a reasonable trade for the right to provide a lucrative yet limited-availability service, since nobody can just "add one" to the number of cabs in the city to compete directly.
The drivers who I've had using Uber really are contractors - they generally work for another service or themselves and have been using Uber to "fill in the blanks" in their far more profitable direct business. They use their own equipment and their only tie to Uber is trip sourcing.
Note that this has nothing at all to do with stealing tips, which is just bad - however, Uber includes all gratuities in their pre-negotiated rate with the passengers, and presumably has a pre-negotiated rate with the drivers, so (since I didn't RTFA) I'm not sure how this could be true other than an accounting misstep.
ObXKCD: http://xkcd.com/1129/
How about "All browsers have had keyboard shortcuts since the days of Mosaic"
Hell, for that matter lynx had nothing but keyboard shortcuts.
Prior art. The "3 finger salute" is already covered by the "blue screen of death" patent.
That's the "1 finger salute." Its subtly different.
To "fix" this you'd have to cache the contents of closed tabs, which among other things might be a security nightmare. Simply reloading the tab costs you almost no memory and doesn't chafe with people's expectations of privacy.
Less than gets strip-mined for coal. For some reason we always compare renewables to fairy-dust rather than to the actual current alternatives.
That happened in the past, too, and then we got sendmail - the middleman between all of them. Writing sendmail.cf by hand was a rite of passage! Over time SMTP appeared as the winner, which enabled far simpler tools to emerge on the server side and more powerful clients to send mail directly.
The problem with ignoring experts or deriding them is that sooner or later the rube consumer is going to depend on experts.
I'm sure you won't believe this, but this is an area in which Apple truly, truly excels. There are plenty of neophytes who use Apple tools to a significant percentage of their potential (probably not as much as they could, but more than enough) with no help from anyone. You have to be willing to do some things in the Apple Way, but that's no great burden for many people.
In the same way that you used to have to be at least somewhat mechanically inclined (or have a neighbor who was) to own a car, but now just get in and drive, you really can just use your iPhone, iPad, and even MacBook without any clue as to how they work ... and everything's generally just fine. Really.
The issue is metaphorically: that Apple has built a walled garden that is large enough and in the right shape that most users will not actually encounter any walls during their wanderings unless they go looking for them. Contrast this with Android, where you can move the walls to wherever you want making the garden effectively unwalled but the default position is so close to the entrance that you have to move them at least once to get anywhere, and Windows RT, where the garden is more of a sandbox (basicly a walled desert) and the walls are awkwardly placed and immovable.
Very well said. Android is theoretically open but far more closed for the casual user, Apple is technically closed but is far more than "good enough" for most.
Actually, in many cases, the poor pay LESS taxes proportionate to their income due to lower income brackets mandating lower taxes.
Only if you define income taxes (as many in the US do) as excluding payroll taxes, which are in fact a tax on ~15% of the first $100K or so of payroll income - and poorer people are far more likely to be receiving payroll than, say, partnership distributions, so its a pretty valid add-on.
We already tax the hoarding of currency through inflation - there's no incentive to hold a dollar when you can invest it or pay back higher-interest debts instead.
Not quite accurate. The Fed is charged with balancing inflation and unemployment, but has chosen to keep inflation down at as close to 0% as humanly possible while letting unemployment rise.
Partially agreed. Printing, including installation, should go like this on a ETIAF *NIX system:
...echo "someotherconfig = someothervalue" > "/var/spool/cups/My Document.ext.conf" ...
Easy, obvious once the general pattern is known...
That's your definition of easy? And obvious? FWIW, the same approach on the OSX variant of UNIX is:
1) Plug the printer into the computer or indeed anywhere on the local network
2) Choose the printer from the list of "Nearby printers" when you go to print something
3) Very occasionally wait a few seconds while your computer communes with the internet on your behalf and installs the appropriate drivers
4) Retrieve your printout from the printer
Why make it harder than it has to be?
Yeah, I read that too. Note that the claims themselves can often be several pages, and the whole "you only need to read the first part of each stack of claims" piece is silly because, as Joel pointed out correctly, the first piece is often very broad and strike-downable leaving all of the others to worry about. Silly example:
1) A system comprised of a computer connected to the internet
2) The embodiment of claim one in which the computer does something novel and unique
Just reading the "parent claim" number one is a waste of time.
Even if a person can only do one an hour...
You do realize that one per hour is the great exception rather than the rule, right? It probably takes over an hour to read and understand most patents well enough to determine what exactly what nuanced change is being described as novel - not because of obfuscation, but because non-obvious things are non-obvious to explain.
One reason its so nice that Apple still uses the same boring, simple text files that everyone else in the *NIX world does - but has also created little daemons and GUIs to make modifying them simple for non-expert users. And even if you're an expert computer programmer, there's no reason for you to also become skilled in administering CUPS and Postfix just to print a memo and send email.
Additionally, Apple's use of Bonjour (like many things Apple a combination of existing protocols with a little polish) lets local network printers appear as print targets with automatic configuration and driver downloads if needed. That's something that's been promised by many systems, including Windows and Linux, but again with OSX it actually just works - almost boringly well.
I intentionally stayed away from Feedly because (at the time at least) it was free. That doesn't scale terribly well, as we well know. I went over to FeedBin.me (using the Reeder app for iOS) and am very happy to pay then $20/year for a service I actually enjoy using.
Then why did you post the original as AC and this under your (possibly) actual handle?
How much of that is WP, and how much is the hardware itself? I ask as people often confuse the two.
Not intended as a troll-y comment, but its things like that that make me glad I keep sticking with iOS, even as a developer. The last thing I want to do with my phone is worry about crap like that, when I could just be using it. Everyone has different needs, of course, but still...
I'm just impressed that /. actually rendered a non-ascii character. Please, take one internet out of petty cash as a bonus.
That is not always possible, there are cpu intensive applications that transcode video or maipulate images and have lots of assembly code here and there.
It's not as easy as clicking on the recompile button.
To be fair, Apple also delivered CoreImage which was amazing when it came out - IIRC, Pixelmator got its start as a fairly simple wrapper of most of the built in functions.