Scores of women have now be raped by Uber drivers, who don't need to show any credentials, but just pretend to be someone providing a ride.
Citation needed. Beyond which I'm sure Taxis are no different. You're likely trolling, but if you're not then just look at the number of places where some of the most common scams include false/unregulated taxis.
A bigger question here is should part-time, low-paid freelancers like uber drivers be allowed to force out full-time taxi drivers by eating into their business?
It's a small, but I tend to think it important, difference but you really should look at the premise as "whether we should restrict people some from being allowed to offer the service in order to protect medallion owners and taxi drivers?". You don't need to do anything to allow something, so the question should by default be whether we should be doing anything.
As to protecting taxi drivers. Firstly I'm not entirely sure that it is Taxi drivers suffering the most, that would be medallion owners, who have shown they only care about protecting their profits not customers. Secondly, progress requires that some roles become less attractive or even cease to exist. Lamp lighters, stable hands, farm workers etc were all massive sources of employment prior to technology making them largely obsolete. Taxi driver is just one of many jobs slowly following the same path. Personally I think autonomous vehicles will almost entirely kill the field within a decade anyway, so Uber is the least of their issues.
Upgrades are not the issue, unpatched security vulnerabilities are.
If a free upgrade is available for the device which patch the security vulnerability, then it isn't an unpatched vulnerability. It might be the norm with PCs to expect the same OS version to be supported for a decade, but that clearly isn't the case with mobile OSs.
FACT Google abandons their devices less than 2 years after release.
FACT: You appear to be too dumb to tell the difference between devices and software versions. FACT: You can upgrade a 7 year old Galaxy S3 to 4.4.2 released over 6 years after the phone FOR FREE.
this is more like MS not patching Windows 2012, Windows 8, Windows 8.1 and so on. 2012 is so recently, that is scary.
No it isn't. Aside from the obvious fact that smartphones during that period have tended to have shorter active lifespans than PCs or Laptops, Google don't require you to pay for major releases. The Galaxy S3 was released in 2008 (before Windows 7 was released) yet can be upgraded to 4.4.2 (admittedly limited by carriers pushing updates out for some models) which was released a year after Windows 8.1 came out. If Microsoft was giving people free upgrades to the latest OS for 7 years then maybe you'd have something to shame Google for.
I agree with you that Charlie Hebdo is a useful, if pretty shocking by British standards, force for a better society.
The difference I was alluding to is that cartoons equivalent to the ones Charlie Hebdo publish about Muslims have been attacked for being anti-semitic when they are about Jews in Europe. People can say things about Muslims virtually without consequence in Europe (with rare tragic exceptions) that if they had been said about Jews would have gotten them fired or arrested. I'm not suggesting we all go out and insult Judaism, and call Jews greedy, but highlighting that this behavior would be at least as controversial in America or Europe as insulting Islam and calling Muslims terrorists; which the person I was originally responding to ignored when he suggested that it is only Islam that you cannot speak freely about.
No. I'm free in most of Europe you'd be absolutely free to blaspheme Jesus, Moses, the Bible, Torah, Pope etc -- but anything Islam related is off limits
Charlie Hebdo fired a cartoonist for being 'anti-Semitic' but revelled in publishing cartoons mocking Islam. Why Dieudonne is ostracised for his anti-Israel statements, shunned as anti-Semitic. Why footballers across Europe who dared to use the quenelle gesture to show support for him were banned from matches. Dieudonne has been blocked from entering the UK, but Murdoch who questions whether all Muslims aren't violent and says they are all responsible for the actions of a vanishingly small minority owns a collection of our most popular newspapers and TV channels.
Does any of that make it acceptable that a radicalised bunch of nuts threaten to, and sometimes do, attack journalists? Of course not. But only someone wilfully ignorant would think that their is only de facto censorship of Islam and not other religions.
The point is that it will always play optimally and eventually statistics will win out and you'll lose to it. Also note that although it's perfect, it's not necessarily as profitable as a human player as it won't attempt to capitalise when you make an error.
The issue is that ignoring the betting element of poker when claiming a system is perfect or optimal is nonsense. A 'perfect' poker system would need to be able to decide based on opponent behaviour etc the right amounts to bid to minimise losses and maximise winnings.
There was an interesting, short, interview about Kepler's observations of other earth like planets. One thing mentioned was that we can now analyse the atmospheres of planets reasonably close to us if we can observe the light from the star they orbit going through it. Because there are elements in our atmosphere that couldn't be their naturally, another species doing the same thing to us could tell that there was, or had been, life on our planet.
Yeah the blanket dislike for anthropomorphizing surprised me as well. The example of how discussing program behavior/structure as though it is an example of the issues this causes is useful and informative; refusing to use words like 'know', 'tries' etc when discussing programs outright, rather than keeping in mind that they can be potentially misleading abstractions, seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Almost no small sites were doing there own checkout process, those that are can use VAT MOSS in the UK (I'm sure equivalents exist in other EU countries) to avoid registering with ANY new tax authorities. Did you ignore that because it doesn't gel with your hyperbolic or did you not even know about it?
Short of setting an EU VAT rate there's not much else the EU could do. Let one country undercut others on VAT and you'll get big players like Amazon/Tesco setting up firms with 'headquarters' there to pay the lowest rate.
Better to spend your resources... on public awareness campaigns about malware (since all DDoS "attacks", and a lot of other attacks, come from compromised bystanders).
I'm sure the first thing people should think of when someone is shooting at them is that they should be putting more money into lobby educating people not to give guns to violent people!
We aren't. However airlines have made it a clear part of the terms we accept to fly with them not to intentionally do this, and have from time to time enforced them with people who do it extensively. We aren't obligated to support their model, but we aren't entitled to be immune to the consequences of breaching a contract either.
To give an example. British Airways were doing some aggressive promotions to get Scandinavian business for US flights last summer, which they route through their hub at Heathrow. I was able to get flights from Oslo to LA and back from Ontario to Copenhagen for ~$310 economy return. The same flights starting in London would have cost considerably more because they weren't discounting UK business at that time.
It'd take people 5 mins to get acquanted with any number of outdated and replaced measurements it doesn't mean that they either desire to or should. When I give monetary values on here I tend to give them in US$ rather than GBP because it's an international forum and dollars provide better context. Thoughtful people communicate in ways that help others understand...
Yes. But I also KEEP and REREAD my books. So I ammortize out the cost of the book over multiple years.
Amortising the cost doesn't decrease it, it just spreads it over a period of time. If you're spending more money buying books than on 'renting' them then it costs more regardless of how you choose to account for it. I'll keep buying physical books but not because I have delusions that it is cheaper; I've got an irrational desire to own paper books and prefer reading them to using a screen.
I read an article talking about this change and how authors were already making changes to shorten/split books. One author had written a book with 7 seperate 'examples' of a concept and he has kept it off the subscription service but put each section on there seperately. I assume that Amazon either wants to move reading to more a subscription model (it worked with Dickins after all) or it will see what's happening and vary payment based on book size.
Um, no - the more readers, the more money. It's not zero sum at all from the writers' point of view.
I think you missed his context. He was saying that in the past encouraging your own readers to check out other writers works benefited the whole market, whereas now it will dilute the fixed contribution that reader is making over more authors. I have trouble believing that a subscription model is going to bring more people into reading. If someone doesn't read are they really likely to start with a $10 subscription to an overwhelming amount of work, or buy a single book that catches their eye for less? A $10 subscription is great for readers who were already spending more than that, not so much for the authors though.
However he hasn't came up with a proof that can be tested to show that God doesn't exist or every aspect of religion is wrong.
Can you 'prove' that your thoughts aren't actually transmitted to you, via a method we haven't discovered? In Science you are expected to prove your theories not throw them out there and demand others disprove them. You can't disprove Christianity, but then you can't disprove Scientology or Pastafarianism either. There's no point in talking about religion in the terminology of science, unfortunately as you've got plenty of religious nuts trying to do that via creationism and school books full of blatant falsehoods to indoctrinate children many scientists come to see religion in general as a nuisance.
It was a dick thing to do, and he should not be surprised that this upset some people.
It isn't a dick thing to do something perfectly reasonable even though you know some completely unreasonable people will be upset by it. Everything he said was true, nothing he said was critical of Jesus/Christianity/Religion. If someone is that much of a dick that they can't appreciate that Newton was an incredibly important person born on the 25th December without seeing it as slur on Jesus then fuck them.
My wife was offended, and she's not even Christian.
Your wife was offended by a tweet celebrating Isaac Newton because it could be construed to relate to Jesus, because of a shared birthdate, even though she isn't christian? Perhaps he should of said "the only people offended are fools and religious people who don't really know anything about their religion." because that's one of the most retarded examples of someone being offended for no reason I've seen.
Yes, but how to you measure supply and demand? How do you set prices? Those are the details that define the patent.
I'd be interested to hear of a method for measuring supply (number of drivers) and demand (number of potential customers) that wouldn't be considered obvious. It is after all one of the most basic areas of economics. Setting prices will be an algorithm and they aren't eligible for patenting in a lot of countries and difficult to protect in others. Remember that patents aren't for things that are hard but for things that aren't obvious.
I hope one day you find yourself hanging from a cliff and just before the person reaches down to help you they say, agree to hand over all your assets or I will divert my resources to else where and assure you,
I hope one day you're dying of thirst somewhere, and no clean water is coming because charitable groups can't mobilise fast enough and anti-price gouging laws make it uneconomical for private enterprises to sell where you are.
Your fire brigade example is especially ignorant. If you aren't in an area where general taxes pay for the fire service it is common for fire services to either a) refuse to put out fires or b) charge eye bleedingly large amounts to put out fires, if you choose not to have a policy with them.
Perhaps you'd like to share some examples of disasters created by people intending to exploit them by price gouging? Maybe even one where the actions taken to create the disaster wouldn't be a crime anyway? Because if you can't it just looks like you're making up issues because you don't have real ones to use.
Actually it is normally called price gouging or profiteering http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org] and is normally considered illegal in most modern democracies
No it isn't. Price gouging laws almost universally are limited to disasters and to critical items. Even if you consider taxis critical the vast majority of surge pricing on Uber is for things like sporting events, rush hours etc not hurricanes.
If you have 100 taxis, and 1,000 people want one then what is the correct way to decide who gets one if it isn't price? Chance, local knowledge, friends at the taxi firm... If surge pricing has the additional benefit of encouraging more drivers to enter the market at times of need then even better.
Slashdot Mirror
Citation needed. Beyond which I'm sure Taxis are no different. You're likely trolling, but if you're not then just look at the number of places where some of the most common scams include false/unregulated taxis.
It's a small, but I tend to think it important, difference but you really should look at the premise as "whether we should restrict people some from being allowed to offer the service in order to protect medallion owners and taxi drivers?". You don't need to do anything to allow something, so the question should by default be whether we should be doing anything.
As to protecting taxi drivers. Firstly I'm not entirely sure that it is Taxi drivers suffering the most, that would be medallion owners, who have shown they only care about protecting their profits not customers. Secondly, progress requires that some roles become less attractive or even cease to exist. Lamp lighters, stable hands, farm workers etc were all massive sources of employment prior to technology making them largely obsolete. Taxi driver is just one of many jobs slowly following the same path. Personally I think autonomous vehicles will almost entirely kill the field within a decade anyway, so Uber is the least of their issues.
If a free upgrade is available for the device which patch the security vulnerability, then it isn't an unpatched vulnerability. It might be the norm with PCs to expect the same OS version to be supported for a decade, but that clearly isn't the case with mobile OSs.
FACT: You appear to be too dumb to tell the difference between devices and software versions. FACT: You can upgrade a 7 year old Galaxy S3 to 4.4.2 released over 6 years after the phone FOR FREE.
No it isn't. Aside from the obvious fact that smartphones during that period have tended to have shorter active lifespans than PCs or Laptops, Google don't require you to pay for major releases. The Galaxy S3 was released in 2008 (before Windows 7 was released) yet can be upgraded to 4.4.2 (admittedly limited by carriers pushing updates out for some models) which was released a year after Windows 8.1 came out. If Microsoft was giving people free upgrades to the latest OS for 7 years then maybe you'd have something to shame Google for.
I agree with you that Charlie Hebdo is a useful, if pretty shocking by British standards, force for a better society.
The difference I was alluding to is that cartoons equivalent to the ones Charlie Hebdo publish about Muslims have been attacked for being anti-semitic when they are about Jews in Europe. People can say things about Muslims virtually without consequence in Europe (with rare tragic exceptions) that if they had been said about Jews would have gotten them fired or arrested. I'm not suggesting we all go out and insult Judaism, and call Jews greedy, but highlighting that this behavior would be at least as controversial in America or Europe as insulting Islam and calling Muslims terrorists; which the person I was originally responding to ignored when he suggested that it is only Islam that you cannot speak freely about.
Charlie Hebdo fired a cartoonist for being 'anti-Semitic' but revelled in publishing cartoons mocking Islam. Why Dieudonne is ostracised for his anti-Israel statements, shunned as anti-Semitic. Why footballers across Europe who dared to use the quenelle gesture to show support for him were banned from matches. Dieudonne has been blocked from entering the UK, but Murdoch who questions whether all Muslims aren't violent and says they are all responsible for the actions of a vanishingly small minority owns a collection of our most popular newspapers and TV channels.
Does any of that make it acceptable that a radicalised bunch of nuts threaten to, and sometimes do, attack journalists? Of course not. But only someone wilfully ignorant would think that their is only de facto censorship of Islam and not other religions.
The issue is that ignoring the betting element of poker when claiming a system is perfect or optimal is nonsense. A 'perfect' poker system would need to be able to decide based on opponent behaviour etc the right amounts to bid to minimise losses and maximise winnings.
There was an interesting, short, interview about Kepler's observations of other earth like planets. One thing mentioned was that we can now analyse the atmospheres of planets reasonably close to us if we can observe the light from the star they orbit going through it. Because there are elements in our atmosphere that couldn't be their naturally, another species doing the same thing to us could tell that there was, or had been, life on our planet.
Yeah the blanket dislike for anthropomorphizing surprised me as well. The example of how discussing program behavior/structure as though it is an example of the issues this causes is useful and informative; refusing to use words like 'know', 'tries' etc when discussing programs outright, rather than keeping in mind that they can be potentially misleading abstractions, seems like throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Almost no small sites were doing there own checkout process, those that are can use VAT MOSS in the UK (I'm sure equivalents exist in other EU countries) to avoid registering with ANY new tax authorities. Did you ignore that because it doesn't gel with your hyperbolic or did you not even know about it?
Short of setting an EU VAT rate there's not much else the EU could do. Let one country undercut others on VAT and you'll get big players like Amazon/Tesco setting up firms with 'headquarters' there to pay the lowest rate.
I'm sure the first thing people should think of when someone is shooting at them is that they should be putting more money into lobby educating people not to give guns to violent people!
We aren't. However airlines have made it a clear part of the terms we accept to fly with them not to intentionally do this, and have from time to time enforced them with people who do it extensively. We aren't obligated to support their model, but we aren't entitled to be immune to the consequences of breaching a contract either.
To give an example. British Airways were doing some aggressive promotions to get Scandinavian business for US flights last summer, which they route through their hub at Heathrow. I was able to get flights from Oslo to LA and back from Ontario to Copenhagen for ~$310 economy return. The same flights starting in London would have cost considerably more because they weren't discounting UK business at that time.
It'd take people 5 mins to get acquanted with any number of outdated and replaced measurements it doesn't mean that they either desire to or should. When I give monetary values on here I tend to give them in US$ rather than GBP because it's an international forum and dollars provide better context. Thoughtful people communicate in ways that help others understand...
He lived in a cold house, got ill, but you think it was the fact he desired for warmt (sp) that made him sick. Yeah, that doesn't sound stupid at all
Amortising the cost doesn't decrease it, it just spreads it over a period of time. If you're spending more money buying books than on 'renting' them then it costs more regardless of how you choose to account for it. I'll keep buying physical books but not because I have delusions that it is cheaper; I've got an irrational desire to own paper books and prefer reading them to using a screen.
I read an article talking about this change and how authors were already making changes to shorten/split books. One author had written a book with 7 seperate 'examples' of a concept and he has kept it off the subscription service but put each section on there seperately. I assume that Amazon either wants to move reading to more a subscription model (it worked with Dickins after all) or it will see what's happening and vary payment based on book size.
I think you missed his context. He was saying that in the past encouraging your own readers to check out other writers works benefited the whole market, whereas now it will dilute the fixed contribution that reader is making over more authors. I have trouble believing that a subscription model is going to bring more people into reading. If someone doesn't read are they really likely to start with a $10 subscription to an overwhelming amount of work, or buy a single book that catches their eye for less? A $10 subscription is great for readers who were already spending more than that, not so much for the authors though.
Can you 'prove' that your thoughts aren't actually transmitted to you, via a method we haven't discovered? In Science you are expected to prove your theories not throw them out there and demand others disprove them. You can't disprove Christianity, but then you can't disprove Scientology or Pastafarianism either. There's no point in talking about religion in the terminology of science, unfortunately as you've got plenty of religious nuts trying to do that via creationism and school books full of blatant falsehoods to indoctrinate children many scientists come to see religion in general as a nuisance.
It isn't a dick thing to do something perfectly reasonable even though you know some completely unreasonable people will be upset by it. Everything he said was true, nothing he said was critical of Jesus/Christianity/Religion. If someone is that much of a dick that they can't appreciate that Newton was an incredibly important person born on the 25th December without seeing it as slur on Jesus then fuck them.
Your wife was offended by a tweet celebrating Isaac Newton because it could be construed to relate to Jesus, because of a shared birthdate, even though she isn't christian? Perhaps he should of said "the only people offended are fools and religious people who don't really know anything about their religion." because that's one of the most retarded examples of someone being offended for no reason I've seen.
I'd be interested to hear of a method for measuring supply (number of drivers) and demand (number of potential customers) that wouldn't be considered obvious. It is after all one of the most basic areas of economics. Setting prices will be an algorithm and they aren't eligible for patenting in a lot of countries and difficult to protect in others. Remember that patents aren't for things that are hard but for things that aren't obvious.
I hope one day you're dying of thirst somewhere, and no clean water is coming because charitable groups can't mobilise fast enough and anti-price gouging laws make it uneconomical for private enterprises to sell where you are.
Your fire brigade example is especially ignorant. If you aren't in an area where general taxes pay for the fire service it is common for fire services to either a) refuse to put out fires or b) charge eye bleedingly large amounts to put out fires, if you choose not to have a policy with them.
Perhaps you'd like to share some examples of disasters created by people intending to exploit them by price gouging? Maybe even one where the actions taken to create the disaster wouldn't be a crime anyway? Because if you can't it just looks like you're making up issues because you don't have real ones to use.
No it isn't. Price gouging laws almost universally are limited to disasters and to critical items. Even if you consider taxis critical the vast majority of surge pricing on Uber is for things like sporting events, rush hours etc not hurricanes.
If you have 100 taxis, and 1,000 people want one then what is the correct way to decide who gets one if it isn't price? Chance, local knowledge, friends at the taxi firm... If surge pricing has the additional benefit of encouraging more drivers to enter the market at times of need then even better.