Just couldn't wait to jump on this topic with an ignorant strawman about the plight of the "poor oppressed white person" being held to some imagined different standard. It doesn't take a genius to tell the difference between to two situations that you're too intolerant to appreciate.
Bollocks. Uber pricing is in line with or higher than Taxis in a number of cities. Even in cities where Uber is more competitively priced it isn't by enough that Taxi prices are for the 'elite' yet somehow Uber prices are ideal for the masses.
If you want transport for the masses then do something about your shit public transport (or wait for autonomous vehicles) rather than naively expecting any private driver / private car to be cheap.
Woosh. Try reading what is actually written rather than making up your own inaccurate imagined conversation.
The original comment was "A law is a law. Period". It wasn't "a just law is a law", or "a law applied to a company", or "a law applied to Uber". My point was to refute that statement, and had nothing to do with Uber's actions and my own opinion of them (which is generally negative).
In short, please try and read to the end of the sentence this time: What Uber does is often illegal, and often 'wrong', but the illegality in and of itself isn't the problem.
No, it was an excellent analogy to rebut someone's argument that "A law is a law. Period". The entire point of the Rosa Park counter is to highlight that something being a law in no way, just by that fact, justifies a position.
What Uber is doing is wrong not because it's against the law, but because the laws it breaks are laws that the population in general see as being at least acceptable. If a state made giving lifts to abortion clinics illegal then I'm sure plenty of people would be raving about their principled stand if Uber refused to stop doing it.
Can anyone justify the expense and bureaucracy of taxi medallions when passenger safety isn't an issue?
Medallions are an outdated system that may have made sense at that time. However what we're talking about here (the examples of Ubers illegal practice in this article) isn't medallions. So no I, and I doubt many others, would even try and justify the medallion system but that doesn't mean that licensing on some level can't be justified on reasons beyond passenger safety.
Some examples of things that it might be justified to control via licensing (other than passenger safety):
Driver insurance
Passenger insurance
Pedestrian safety
Emissions
Traffic Control
Availability of transport for the disabled/elderly
Availability of transport to/from less popular locations
Quality of service (especially in high tourist areas)
I'm glad services like Uber exist as they bring more competition, but that doesn't mean that I agree with Uber's desire for an unregulated free for all.
Who would stop people from buying superior transportation services on a voluntary basis?
For every example I hear of of government/'the taxi industry' trying to unfairly crush Uber there's another example of Uber blatantly ignoring safety/insurance etc laws that seem to be pretty widely supported. Maybe they'd get more sympathy when unfair things happen to them if they weren't dicks half the time.
Also, as frustrating as the occasional anti-Uber posters are they have nothing on the pro-Uber zealots who jump on anything that doesn't go exactly how Uber wants as part of some unfair global conspiracy and government interfering.
It isn't, though I don't agree with what he is doing. It does block adverts (it just won't block all adverts). A bit like a hand-sanitiser being advertised as "kills germs".
Now a company is saying -- hey, we'll give you an incentive to use unobtrusive ads -- they'll actually reach more people (including the much sought-after millennials who use adblockers the most).
There are plenty of people who would be upset about that, but that isn't what is happening here. It's one thing for an adblocker to set a threshold for acceptable advertising, it's entirely another for them both dupe paying customers and allow advertisers to buy there way around the filter.
Someone who is willing to pay $1.99 for an adblocker is showing they are willing to pay a nominal amount to avoid ads. That isn't the same thing as being able to pay enough to make up for lost revenue from advertising. The web is built on advertising revenue; I'm certainly not saying that's a good thing but it is true, and it's a hard paradigm to change it seems.
What's your point? You're using an adblocker so the site that blocked you lost no revenue, or even potential revenue, and saved themselves the bandwidth cost of your visit. Plenty of sites would be happy to lose 20% of traffic, if the 20% they are losing is a monetary black hole anyway.
Until a viable alternative way of raising revenue comes around (some form of micro-payments that works maybe) sites will be reliant on advertising for revenue. If you block advertising then losing your custom is a net gain for them.
1. You can buy a new Mac plus iPhone for half that. Replace the iPhone with an iPod Touch or iPad to save a few hundred more. Used devices also work fine.
You're missing the point: As a hobbyist or tinkerer why would you even if the cost could be halved? The point stands that if you already own an iPhone then the cost and effort of being able to develop anything for it isn't negligible. That discourages many people from even trying, and those that do not unreasonably often want to charge so they can try and make a bit of that cash back.
Because VW are going to recall hundreds of thousands of cars, stick them permanently in test mode with emission stuff switched on. There will then be a massive class action as people who bought a VW expecting x horsepower and y MPG demand compensation for getting considerably lower performance. This will cost them billions, and that's before the multi-billion dollar fine piled on top.
First off, with but an exceedingly rare exception, the restaurants have treated us as first class citizens. Groupons customers who report otherwise arrived with a chip on their shoulders which is unfortunate and ultimately not my problem.
Because anyone whose experience doesn't match your own must have some form of problem. Self-absorbed much?
It's not so much that Groupon isn't useful, what they've always failed to do is convert the coupon users into repeat customers which frequently causes their clients to operate at a loss
What Groupon does is sell heavily discounted coupons, something that attracts the kind of customers who are least likely to become repeat customers; so for that purpose it is exactly that "Groupon isn't useful". Pretty much the only use for Groupon seems to be ueful for is to churn & burn customers on artificially discounted products (likely a short-sighted use) or to cover costs when you have high fixed costs, low unit cost and low demand (for example during low season) but even those uses are often dubious.
I really wonder how it can be News that a criminal gets fined.
Given all the stories about drone misuse (real or theoretical) it certainly hits my news threshold that someone has actually been prosecuted and given a decent sized fine.
That definition really doesn't make sense, even if it sounds nice to a demographic that hates not being able to do whatever they want. By that definition any software that charges for premium functionality is malware because the restriction on functionality is for the software makers benefit not the users. Software released under many open source licenses could also be considered malware as the requirement that anyone who modifies the code has to release the changes isn't for their benefit it is for the benefit of others.
It's actually worse than that, he attacks apple for doing something that will increase profits because they don't need the profits; and then suggests that not doing what they are doing would make their customers happier and more dedicated long term... which one would assume would be useful because it drives long term profit (but wait a second... I thought he just said profit was a pointless motivation for them).
Given that pretty much the definition of a bug is doing something the user didn't intend (with a small exemption for doing things the maker didn't want, but the user did intend) that's a pretty pointless distinction.
If you define malware this ridiculously widely then it achieves nothing aside from making the term pointless.
Depends on when you were born / how rich the mogul owning your newspaper. "Genuinely left wing" = either state or worker ownership of the means of production, i.e. no capitalism, i.e. no private ownership of an organisation except by virtue of working there.
You can make up definitions all you like but it doesn't mean they'll be accepted. Left wing from a UK perspective is by definition decided by what the current population of the country believe it to mean. I think the % who would define it as no capitalism would be nominal, and the vast majority of the population would consider it as defined by the position on public services, taxation, and social care policy.
Yes, but when discussing politicians with someone from another country, then if you are an effective communicator, you would put it in context. You'd have noticed I talked about both individuals extensively in a UK context before making one in an American context if you'd stopped to think instead of instantly jumping on the opportunity to make an irrelevant point.
That's why no one should complain about phone companies keeping records of calls (and even transcripts) or the government filling the streets with cameras right?
I haven't lived in the US for the last 5 years, so all Americans should stop complaining about anything bad their government does to them. Great logic... not.
Most newspapers are describing Corbyn using terms like "leftist", "left wing extremist", etc - yet he's a fairly conventional liberal from everything I've read about him, just not pro-establishment. Can you imagine any of these newspapers - indeed, any media outside of some self-published left wing newsletters - describing Ron Paul or Donald Trump as "right wing extremists"?
Trump would certainly be considered extremely right wing by the population of the UK. From a UK perspective Corbyn is genuinely left wing. He wants state nationalisation of railways and energy, wants higher taxes on businesses and is interested in the idea of a 'maximum wage'. Given that the centre-ground in UK politics is notably more socialist than America that would almost certainly make a Corbyn extremely left wing by US standards.
Slashdot Mirror
Just couldn't wait to jump on this topic with an ignorant strawman about the plight of the "poor oppressed white person" being held to some imagined different standard. It doesn't take a genius to tell the difference between to two situations that you're too intolerant to appreciate.
Bollocks. Uber pricing is in line with or higher than Taxis in a number of cities. Even in cities where Uber is more competitively priced it isn't by enough that Taxi prices are for the 'elite' yet somehow Uber prices are ideal for the masses.
If you want transport for the masses then do something about your shit public transport (or wait for autonomous vehicles) rather than naively expecting any private driver / private car to be cheap.
Woosh. Try reading what is actually written rather than making up your own inaccurate imagined conversation.
The original comment was "A law is a law. Period". It wasn't "a just law is a law", or "a law applied to a company", or "a law applied to Uber". My point was to refute that statement, and had nothing to do with Uber's actions and my own opinion of them (which is generally negative).
In short, please try and read to the end of the sentence this time: What Uber does is often illegal, and often 'wrong', but the illegality in and of itself isn't the problem.
No, it was an excellent analogy to rebut someone's argument that "A law is a law. Period". The entire point of the Rosa Park counter is to highlight that something being a law in no way, just by that fact, justifies a position.
What Uber is doing is wrong not because it's against the law, but because the laws it breaks are laws that the population in general see as being at least acceptable. If a state made giving lifts to abortion clinics illegal then I'm sure plenty of people would be raving about their principled stand if Uber refused to stop doing it.
Medallions are an outdated system that may have made sense at that time. However what we're talking about here (the examples of Ubers illegal practice in this article) isn't medallions. So no I, and I doubt many others, would even try and justify the medallion system but that doesn't mean that licensing on some level can't be justified on reasons beyond passenger safety.
Some examples of things that it might be justified to control via licensing (other than passenger safety):
Driver insurance
Passenger insurance
Pedestrian safety
Emissions
Traffic Control
Availability of transport for the disabled/elderly
Availability of transport to/from less popular locations
Quality of service (especially in high tourist areas)
I'm glad services like Uber exist as they bring more competition, but that doesn't mean that I agree with Uber's desire for an unregulated free for all.
For every example I hear of of government/'the taxi industry' trying to unfairly crush Uber there's another example of Uber blatantly ignoring safety/insurance etc laws that seem to be pretty widely supported. Maybe they'd get more sympathy when unfair things happen to them if they weren't dicks half the time.
Also, as frustrating as the occasional anti-Uber posters are they have nothing on the pro-Uber zealots who jump on anything that doesn't go exactly how Uber wants as part of some unfair global conspiracy and government interfering.
It isn't, though I don't agree with what he is doing. It does block adverts (it just won't block all adverts). A bit like a hand-sanitiser being advertised as "kills germs".
There are plenty of people who would be upset about that, but that isn't what is happening here. It's one thing for an adblocker to set a threshold for acceptable advertising, it's entirely another for them both dupe paying customers and allow advertisers to buy there way around the filter.
Someone who is willing to pay $1.99 for an adblocker is showing they are willing to pay a nominal amount to avoid ads. That isn't the same thing as being able to pay enough to make up for lost revenue from advertising. The web is built on advertising revenue; I'm certainly not saying that's a good thing but it is true, and it's a hard paradigm to change it seems.
What's your point? You're using an adblocker so the site that blocked you lost no revenue, or even potential revenue, and saved themselves the bandwidth cost of your visit. Plenty of sites would be happy to lose 20% of traffic, if the 20% they are losing is a monetary black hole anyway.
Until a viable alternative way of raising revenue comes around (some form of micro-payments that works maybe) sites will be reliant on advertising for revenue. If you block advertising then losing your custom is a net gain for them.
You're missing the point: As a hobbyist or tinkerer why would you even if the cost could be halved? The point stands that if you already own an iPhone then the cost and effort of being able to develop anything for it isn't negligible. That discourages many people from even trying, and those that do not unreasonably often want to charge so they can try and make a bit of that cash back.
Because VW are going to recall hundreds of thousands of cars, stick them permanently in test mode with emission stuff switched on. There will then be a massive class action as people who bought a VW expecting x horsepower and y MPG demand compensation for getting considerably lower performance. This will cost them billions, and that's before the multi-billion dollar fine piled on top.
Because anyone whose experience doesn't match your own must have some form of problem. Self-absorbed much?
What Groupon does is sell heavily discounted coupons, something that attracts the kind of customers who are least likely to become repeat customers; so for that purpose it is exactly that "Groupon isn't useful". Pretty much the only use for Groupon seems to be ueful for is to churn & burn customers on artificially discounted products (likely a short-sighted use) or to cover costs when you have high fixed costs, low unit cost and low demand (for example during low season) but even those uses are often dubious.
Given all the stories about drone misuse (real or theoretical) it certainly hits my news threshold that someone has actually been prosecuted and given a decent sized fine.
That definition really doesn't make sense, even if it sounds nice to a demographic that hates not being able to do whatever they want. By that definition any software that charges for premium functionality is malware because the restriction on functionality is for the software makers benefit not the users. Software released under many open source licenses could also be considered malware as the requirement that anyone who modifies the code has to release the changes isn't for their benefit it is for the benefit of others.
I think that is a pretty good rule of thumb, and it clearly excludes software with bugs which was in the definition I was taking exception to.
It's actually worse than that, he attacks apple for doing something that will increase profits because they don't need the profits; and then suggests that not doing what they are doing would make their customers happier and more dedicated long term... which one would assume would be useful because it drives long term profit (but wait a second... I thought he just said profit was a pointless motivation for them).
Given that pretty much the definition of a bug is doing something the user didn't intend (with a small exemption for doing things the maker didn't want, but the user did intend) that's a pretty pointless distinction.
If you define malware this ridiculously widely then it achieves nothing aside from making the term pointless.
You can make up definitions all you like but it doesn't mean they'll be accepted. Left wing from a UK perspective is by definition decided by what the current population of the country believe it to mean. I think the % who would define it as no capitalism would be nominal, and the vast majority of the population would consider it as defined by the position on public services, taxation, and social care policy.
Yes, but when discussing politicians with someone from another country, then if you are an effective communicator, you would put it in context. You'd have noticed I talked about both individuals extensively in a UK context before making one in an American context if you'd stopped to think instead of instantly jumping on the opportunity to make an irrelevant point.
That's why no one should complain about phone companies keeping records of calls (and even transcripts) or the government filling the streets with cameras right?
I haven't lived in the US for the last 5 years, so all Americans should stop complaining about anything bad their government does to them. Great logic... not.
Trump would certainly be considered extremely right wing by the population of the UK. From a UK perspective Corbyn is genuinely left wing. He wants state nationalisation of railways and energy, wants higher taxes on businesses and is interested in the idea of a 'maximum wage'. Given that the centre-ground in UK politics is notably more socialist than America that would almost certainly make a Corbyn extremely left wing by US standards.