Uber is an app. An app that's already written and finished. How the HELL do they burn through so much money? I know that most of the dot-coms are just robbing the dumb investors, but to lose this amount of money is truly astonishing.
Uber isn't an app, that's just the public facing part. Tip of the iceberg so to speak.
Uber is a business process which relies on ignoring laws and undercutting legitimate competition. There's no profit in a race to the bottom and Uber seems completely unaware of this (either that or its a scam where the owners of the company intend to get out with as much VC money as possible and live in a country with no extradition treaty al a Skase).
Isn't ride sharing where one is already going to a specific location and someone asks if they can come along, maybe picking up the cost of tolls for the ride? Or has the definition of ride sharing changed to mean directly contacting someone to have them pick you up at a specific location so you can be driven to a location where the person was not otherwise going and you pay them a fee and maybe give them a tip for their work?
At least the scheme part is right.
Its "ride sharing" in the same way that me selling beer from a carton on the street is "drink sharing" or a lady who offers sex for money is just "body sharing".
This impression was very, very wrong. The German government at the time was very scientifically advanced, had a similar structure to what the US has today, and allowed a fair and open election that elected the megalomaniac into office.
This isn't strictly true.
Hitler was not elected fairly per se, during elections in the late 20's the Sturmabteilung (SA or Brown Shirts) stood over elections in many parts of Germany to ensure enough votes were cast for the Nazi party. This was enough to make the Nazi's the second largest party in parliament, giving them enough numbers to cripple it with repeated walkouts until Hitler was given what he wanted by the president, Paul Von Hindenburg. What Hitler wanted was to be given the position or Reich Chancellor. After being given the Chancellors position in 1933 Hitler dissolved the Reichstag (the lower house, similar to the US Congress) and forced general elections. During this time the SA standover men were everywhere in Germany. Hitler also passed laws limiting the freedom of the press at this time. After the Reichstag Fire Decree, civil liberties were severely curtailed.
After this, the Nazi's stormtroopers, the Sturmabteilung were openly operating in Germany virtually unopposed, enforcing boycots against Jewish business and the like. When Paul Von Hindenburg died in office in 1934, Hitler organised a plebiscite to combine the office of the Chancellor with the office of the President, this passed with a 90% yes vote but this is mainly due to the standover tactics employed by the SA and the Nazis. Hitlers rise to power was a very long and often violent subversion of democracy. Its a bit of a misnomer to say he was legitimately elected.
As several bills had passed the Reichstag in 1933, laws were able to be made by the Reich Chancellor without the involvement of the Reichstag, Hitler who was now both president and chancellor held absolute power. At this point Hitler also had control of the limited army in Weimar Germany, so a military coup was also out of the question. He began the process of folding the SA into the army (culminating with the assassination of Ernst Rohm, leader of the SA).
I hope people appreciate the irony here that I was modded down for not agreeing with the "PC haz gones Maddd" crowd.
It seems they aren't rallying against Political Correctness as much as trying to enforce a form of "Political Correctness" of their own where they're free to be insulting and rude but don't want anyone to do the same to them.
All the mods have done here is demonstrate their hypocrisy.
Well this is a whole new breed of cunt. The previous generation of cunts would call you dirty names and shit, however the new generation of cunts call themselves "politically correct" and will use clean sounding but still inappropriately placed words like "racist" "bigot" "misogynist" "homophobe" or label you as one who uses "hate speech", even when none of these terms apply to you in any way possible. In other words, the old cunts were hecklers, the new cunts are self-righteous assholes.
Sorry, but the true cunts are the ones who are "racist", "homophobic", "misogynistic\misandirstic" or any other form of bigotry. These people like to claim the world is "politically correct" when someone calls them out on their fucktardery because they like to think that the "ERMARGERD, Teh PC's are gon madz" is a good way to shut down anyone pointing out that they're an absolute arsehole that should not be allowed out in public without an armed escort and ball gag. Real cunts are the ones using made up terms like "SJW" and "White Knight" to label anyone who points out that their biggotry is bullshit and they really dont want to hear it, apparently the right not to have to put up with cunts, arseholes and wankers is one we no longer have because "teh PC'zzzz".
If you are told to shut up because you're racist, homophobic, sexist or whatever, it's not the Political Correctness lords trying to silence you. It's because you sound like a complete twat and people are sick of you.
Also in case you didn't get the point, people who use "PC", "SJW", "White Knight" and the like are almost always full of shit. So it's a safe bet to call them on it.
If you need a video, just look at how the likes of the EDL or Reclaim Australia act. Frankly I choose not to watch that bullshit.
It has been a very long time since Linux has not worked out of the box, in fact in the last two Linux Mint installs I did it worked perfectly out of the box. It was more trouble to reinstall Windows because the laptop I had used NVidia Optimus (a 600 series chip in combination with an Intel HD chip). It was a pain in the arse because the drivers for both graphics chips needed to be installed and then an additional driver from the laptop manufacturer to get it to switch between the two chips.
I dual boot Win 7 and Linux Mint 17.1. I have far less trouble with Linux Mint.
I love how people like to deride Linux for having problems but then give Windows a free pass. Up to a few months ago, I was having a continual problem with my mouse in Windows. It would spontaneously uninstall itself (which caused the hardware to stop) and then re-install itself. I tried every trick under the sun to get it to work. In the end do you want to know how I fixed it... I reinstalled Windows. Yep, with Linux you may have to muck about with a config file or two, but at least you can fix a live system where as with Windows you need to do a complete reinstall to fix many common issues.
This is to say nothing of Win Rot, which is alive and well despite the protestations of Microsoft's fanbase.
Good. And, more specifically, the right to pay for things anonymously, much like you have the right to speak anonymously.
It isn't about thwarting justice. It is about forbidding government the tools of tyranny, including the ability to filch through your stuff and activities at will until they find something they can tag you, uppity person, with.
For me, paying cash is about reducing the amount of money I have to pay for things. When I pay in cash instead of credit, I reduce the costs the merchant has to pay their bank by between 2 and 6% That means a merchant can charge me less and make more of a profit in the mean time. It's a win-win.
For small amounts, cash. For large amounts (I.E. $2,500 to my mechanic) I will do a bank transfer or direct debit. Having run my own business and experienced the sheer joy of being bent over sans lube for accepting credit cards, I know that cash, transfer or direct debit are the preferred way of paying for things.
This is why credit card companies have to keep offering end users pithy rewards for using credit. They might give you 1% cash back, but they're charging the merchant 3% for the privileged and the merchant is passing the cost back to you in the form of higher prices. The irony is, the credit addled will defend this and will remain wilfully ignorant of the fact they're ripping themselves off (no-one likes admitting they've had their pants pulled over their head, especially when they've already spent time and effort defending the people who did it). You almost have to admire the Machiavellian brilliance of the banks here.
Not to mention, their kids don't want to be caught dead at their dad's former homeland.
Or the wife and kids don't want the guy to return home from the US because they're too busy living off the money he sends back home. I knew a guy from the Philippines who got caught in that situation. After working 20 years in the US, he went back home unannounced and told his family that he retired from working. His family hated him and the village vilified him for being a lazy bastard for cutting off the cash flow. Last I heard he got divorced and bought a fishing boat to live on.
Odd, divorces aren't permitted for marriages registered in the Phillippines. You have to get an annulment there.
This is, gentlemen, why if you choose to marry a Filipina you marry in another place (like Hong Kong) which permits divorce and live in the Philippines (Marriages where you bring the girl to your country rarely works for far too many reasons to list here).
Silicon Valley has the highest H-1B use in the US, and they're primarily left-wingers out there.
I think you need to stop watching Fox News.
Most business owners are hard right. The thing is, they're also pragmatic which is why they donate to both parties.
This is why almost all successful economies are mixed economies.
Running a pure capitalist economy is doomed to failure for the same reasons running a pure socialist state. People have different wants and needs, pure capitalist/socialist philosophies are too rigid and because of this, need to be enforced by violence. Without Stalin's iron fisted rule the Soviet union would have fallen in a heap much, much earlier than it did. Successful economies allow a mix of socialist and capitalist policies to be applied where appropriate and generally do not go too far towards either extreme.
Although it should be noted, whilst communism has been tried and failed, a pure capitalist state has never gotten off the ground. The closest we've had is Fascism and even that didn't last.
Or as Americans might say, the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law.
Justice Nye Perram was forced to agree with DBC LLC over the matter of copyright infringement, so they won on that case. However the Justice was also aware of what happened in the US when the studio's lawyers were permitted to go on a fishing expedition through the ISP's customer records then send them what amounted to extortion notices threatening an expensive law suit if they didn't immediately pay a sum of money. So called "speculative invoicing".
To prevent this, the justice made DBC LLC pay a bond of about A$600,000 which would be forfeited if they tried speculative invoicing. The agreement meant any communications with the ISP's customers had to be vetted by the courts. After having repeated attempts rejected because they asked for far too much info and were pretty much a prelude to speculative invoicing it became clear to DBC LLC that they would never make a profit on this and simply cut their losses.
I think I'm pretty safe in saying that the reason DBC LLC has withdrawn their case is just to get their bond back. Dallas Buyers Club was technically in the right, but did everything in the wrong way. That being said, I doubt the Justice was ever going to let them profit on it, setting a precident that you shouldn't go after end users in Australia, even if you are technically right.
I glance down at my map about as often as a glance down at my speedometer - when I'm sufficiently unsure of the result. Both are about the same level of distraction.
So once every 10 or 15 seconds for a fraction of a second.
So, you are saying we are better off taking the eyes off the road to look down on a map while doing 70 mph?
If you're unable to remember where you're going, you're better off pulling over and reading the map.
If I have to tell you this, chances are you're the kind of person who will follow GPS directions blindly off a cliff.
But how many deaths have been prevented by GPS because drivers were not distracted trying to figure out where to go?
I'm going to say none. You cant save people from their own stupidity.
BTW, you should be regularly taking your eyes off the road. You need to check your mirrors and binnacle and driving in such a manner that a momentary lapse in concentration does not put you into a dangerous situation. The drivers who sit there with their blinkers on never looking anywhere but forwards are amongst the worst drivers because they're completely oblivious to what happens around them.
Could society's embrace of GPS be eroding our cognitive maps?
I delivered pizza for a few years, before GPS, and a few hours of taking orders will disabuse you of this naive notion that most people have "cognitive maps". Most people do not know where they live! They can't tell you the nearest major intersection. What they know is a sequence of steps to follow to get to their house.
"Turn left at the big tree. Turn right where the church was before it burned down. Turn left where Johnny was hit by that drunk drive last year. Look for the red house."
I'm only slightly exaggerating. I really do encourage everyone to use maps, to learn to change your "pathing" dynamically when conditions change, to know where you are not just the steps you took to get there. To quote the REM song: "Stand in the place where you work. Now face north. Think about direction; wonder why you haven't before ". Can you do it without looking anything up?
This,
I absolutely hate people who give me left-right directions.
Now you take a right when you see farmer Bumfuck's field, go to past the barn and take a right, not too far, if you reach the windmill you've gone too far and you need to turn around and find the old sign with three bullet holes in it and take a left. From there you need to head past the old firehouse and turn towards the new firehouse and take a right when you reach the garage and then travel for about 10 minutes until another left turn where you drive for another 10 minutes and take the third right.
I've learned just to say "give me your address, my phone navigates better than you ever could". The problem with left-right directions is that people always assume you use the same landmarks and make the same mistakes as they do, so you end up with a shitload of superfluous information. Its the same with asking for directions, when I'm on holiday the first thing I do is buy a local SIM card so I can use Google Maps because asking someone where the nearest metro/subway/bus is gets you going down three flights of stairs, two blocks, 17 left hand turns and its "right there". Its almost as if no-one knows about these little signs above every street corner that tells you their name.
This smells like the kind of thing you might leave behind if you were departing Amazon, perhaps not on the best of terms.
It's also possible the employee responsible for the Zombie Inclusion was so bored to tears writing these terms of service he decided to include a gaffe just to see if anyone noticed.
This.
I've had to write policies and procedures that were so mind numbingly boring that I knew no-one would ever read (like Acceptable Use Agreements), so I've snuck in things like "and failure to take note of these restrictions will result in the user being fed to lions". I've only been caught out once and that was 10 months after I'd finished working there (the boss had a sense of humour about it though).
On dark nights with heavy rain, the white lines are invaluable for knowing where exactly the road is, and making an unexpected departure from the regular route.
I read that, seeing as you haven't linked to a single study, let alone the plethora of peer reviewed studies required to reasonably prove your point, I noted it down as bullshit.
They point to reduced speeds due to drivers being unsure of lanes. Repeat: UNSURE of the road. They treat this like speed reduction is an end in itself rather than the primary goal of safety. Driver confusion rarely is a good thing.
The problem is that it only slows down good drivers. People who are good enough to recognise that no lines on the road represent additional hazards, most notably from those who mistakenly believe they are good at driving and dont slow down.
From the article
A report by TfL on the trial in London suggested white lines gave drivers a "psychological sense of confidence".
This wont affect people who are already driving dangerously because their "psychological sense of confidence" comes from the Dunning-Kruger effect (unskilled and completely unaware of it), many have so much false confidence that they're unsafe at any speed, so removing the white lines wont make them think of slowing down because they think they're perfectly safe doing what they're doing and anything that goes wrong is someone else's fault because they're gods gift to driving.
This is being driven by politicians at the council of Norfolk, however motoring association, the AA has said the idea is
"absurd, barmy and crazy".
I tend to agree with the AA as unlike the council of Norfolk they put out a lot of helpful videos about how to take care of your car... so I think they might know a thing or two about driving as well.
If you're the type of person that buys a 3500 pound object that can go 100+ MPH and fail to read the manual which results in the injury of another individual, you're an idiot.
Erm... the thing is, in order to drive a 2T object that can go 160 KPH (so we clearly cant be talking about Jeeps here) you need to be able to demonstrate you're capable of using it without having to read a manual. When you've demonstrated this they give you a piece of plastic with the word "license" on it.
The problem here is that FCA not only changed a standardised design, they made parts of it non-functional. So expected functions were not there.
When you engineer something for the mass market, you need to engineer it for the dumbest possible users. Its no good saying "well you should have RTFM'd", this attitude is what has kept Linux out of the hands of the masses. You need to engineer it to prevent as much stupidity as possible. People are ignorant, lazy, slovenly morons that think if they can save 0.5 seconds and 20 KJ by not using the handbrake they should do it. This is why almost all automatic transmissions force you to be in park to take the key out (not an issue for us superior manual drivers, but we're superior for a reason).
I have read about people neglecting their kids to play farmville, I have even done a few nasty binges where I would swear to "stop by midnight" only to look outside and see that it was dawn.
The big kerfuffle in the 90's wasn't that games were addictive, it was that they were violent and that we were going to turn into desensitized savages who want to dismember people. Basically this article is about kids that grew up on Mortal Kombat.
This.
And it is the same nonsense that was spouted about Metal, Comics, TV, Movies and Books (that weren't the bible) in the past. Same shit, different target.
A little OT: This reminds me though of how Bank Robbers always shared this mythical celebrity status with a big portion of the population. In the 20's people blamed banks for everything and were happy to see them suffer. In 2016 the banks are still screwing the population over at a much faster rate, yet you never hear of hackers being heroes to any but a select few.
Banks these days aren't distrusted and despised like they used to be in the 20's.
People will actually defend banks ripping them off these days because banks do it indirectly and give a pittance to the end user to buy their loyalties. Cashback, rewards, frequent flyer points and what not to get the end user sucked into using credit then they charge the merchant for accepting credit. The merchant is not in a position to say no because they have literally addicted (via gamification) the end user into using credit and nothing is harder for a store owner to deal with than an addict who is denied their fix. So merchants just raise prices to compensate which ironically means the credit addict is paying for their habit, whilst defending their habit.
You almost have to admire the Machiavellian brilliance of the banks here. They've got the end user thinking the bank is their best friend whilst robbing them blind.
Slashdot Mirror
Uber is an app. An app that's already written and finished. How the HELL do they burn through so much money? I know that most of the dot-coms are just robbing the dumb investors, but to lose this amount of money is truly astonishing.
Uber isn't an app, that's just the public facing part. Tip of the iceberg so to speak.
Uber is a business process which relies on ignoring laws and undercutting legitimate competition. There's no profit in a race to the bottom and Uber seems completely unaware of this (either that or its a scam where the owners of the company intend to get out with as much VC money as possible and live in a country with no extradition treaty al a Skase).
the development of ride-share schemes in China.
Isn't ride sharing where one is already going to a specific location and someone asks if they can come along, maybe picking up the cost of tolls for the ride? Or has the definition of ride sharing changed to mean directly contacting someone to have them pick you up at a specific location so you can be driven to a location where the person was not otherwise going and you pay them a fee and maybe give them a tip for their work?
At least the scheme part is right.
Its "ride sharing" in the same way that me selling beer from a carton on the street is "drink sharing" or a lady who offers sex for money is just "body sharing".
This impression was very, very wrong. The German government at the time was very scientifically advanced, had a similar structure to what the US has today, and allowed a fair and open election that elected the megalomaniac into office.
This isn't strictly true.
Hitler was not elected fairly per se, during elections in the late 20's the Sturmabteilung (SA or Brown Shirts) stood over elections in many parts of Germany to ensure enough votes were cast for the Nazi party. This was enough to make the Nazi's the second largest party in parliament, giving them enough numbers to cripple it with repeated walkouts until Hitler was given what he wanted by the president, Paul Von Hindenburg. What Hitler wanted was to be given the position or Reich Chancellor. After being given the Chancellors position in 1933 Hitler dissolved the Reichstag (the lower house, similar to the US Congress) and forced general elections. During this time the SA standover men were everywhere in Germany. Hitler also passed laws limiting the freedom of the press at this time. After the Reichstag Fire Decree, civil liberties were severely curtailed.
After this, the Nazi's stormtroopers, the Sturmabteilung were openly operating in Germany virtually unopposed, enforcing boycots against Jewish business and the like. When Paul Von Hindenburg died in office in 1934, Hitler organised a plebiscite to combine the office of the Chancellor with the office of the President, this passed with a 90% yes vote but this is mainly due to the standover tactics employed by the SA and the Nazis. Hitlers rise to power was a very long and often violent subversion of democracy. Its a bit of a misnomer to say he was legitimately elected.
As several bills had passed the Reichstag in 1933, laws were able to be made by the Reich Chancellor without the involvement of the Reichstag, Hitler who was now both president and chancellor held absolute power. At this point Hitler also had control of the limited army in Weimar Germany, so a military coup was also out of the question. He began the process of folding the SA into the army (culminating with the assassination of Ernst Rohm, leader of the SA).
I dont think the US is at this level just yet.
I hope people appreciate the irony here that I was modded down for not agreeing with the "PC haz gones Maddd" crowd.
It seems they aren't rallying against Political Correctness as much as trying to enforce a form of "Political Correctness" of their own where they're free to be insulting and rude but don't want anyone to do the same to them.
All the mods have done here is demonstrate their hypocrisy.
Well this is a whole new breed of cunt. The previous generation of cunts would call you dirty names and shit, however the new generation of cunts call themselves "politically correct" and will use clean sounding but still inappropriately placed words like "racist" "bigot" "misogynist" "homophobe" or label you as one who uses "hate speech", even when none of these terms apply to you in any way possible. In other words, the old cunts were hecklers, the new cunts are self-righteous assholes.
Sorry, but the true cunts are the ones who are "racist", "homophobic", "misogynistic\misandirstic" or any other form of bigotry. These people like to claim the world is "politically correct" when someone calls them out on their fucktardery because they like to think that the "ERMARGERD, Teh PC's are gon madz" is a good way to shut down anyone pointing out that they're an absolute arsehole that should not be allowed out in public without an armed escort and ball gag. Real cunts are the ones using made up terms like "SJW" and "White Knight" to label anyone who points out that their biggotry is bullshit and they really dont want to hear it, apparently the right not to have to put up with cunts, arseholes and wankers is one we no longer have because "teh PC'zzzz".
If you are told to shut up because you're racist, homophobic, sexist or whatever, it's not the Political Correctness lords trying to silence you. It's because you sound like a complete twat and people are sick of you.
Also in case you didn't get the point, people who use "PC", "SJW", "White Knight" and the like are almost always full of shit. So it's a safe bet to call them on it.
If you need a video, just look at how the likes of the EDL or Reclaim Australia act. Frankly I choose not to watch that bullshit.
It has been a very long time since Linux has not worked out of the box, in fact in the last two Linux Mint installs I did it worked perfectly out of the box. It was more trouble to reinstall Windows because the laptop I had used NVidia Optimus (a 600 series chip in combination with an Intel HD chip). It was a pain in the arse because the drivers for both graphics chips needed to be installed and then an additional driver from the laptop manufacturer to get it to switch between the two chips.
I dual boot Win 7 and Linux Mint 17.1. I have far less trouble with Linux Mint.
I love how people like to deride Linux for having problems but then give Windows a free pass. Up to a few months ago, I was having a continual problem with my mouse in Windows. It would spontaneously uninstall itself (which caused the hardware to stop) and then re-install itself. I tried every trick under the sun to get it to work. In the end do you want to know how I fixed it... I reinstalled Windows. Yep, with Linux you may have to muck about with a config file or two, but at least you can fix a live system where as with Windows you need to do a complete reinstall to fix many common issues.
This is to say nothing of Win Rot, which is alive and well despite the protestations of Microsoft's fanbase.
Good. And, more specifically, the right to pay for things anonymously, much like you have the right to speak anonymously.
It isn't about thwarting justice. It is about forbidding government the tools of tyranny, including the ability to filch through your stuff and activities at will until they find something they can tag you, uppity person, with.
For me, paying cash is about reducing the amount of money I have to pay for things. When I pay in cash instead of credit, I reduce the costs the merchant has to pay their bank by between 2 and 6% That means a merchant can charge me less and make more of a profit in the mean time. It's a win-win.
For small amounts, cash. For large amounts (I.E. $2,500 to my mechanic) I will do a bank transfer or direct debit. Having run my own business and experienced the sheer joy of being bent over sans lube for accepting credit cards, I know that cash, transfer or direct debit are the preferred way of paying for things.
This is why credit card companies have to keep offering end users pithy rewards for using credit. They might give you 1% cash back, but they're charging the merchant 3% for the privileged and the merchant is passing the cost back to you in the form of higher prices. The irony is, the credit addled will defend this and will remain wilfully ignorant of the fact they're ripping themselves off (no-one likes admitting they've had their pants pulled over their head, especially when they've already spent time and effort defending the people who did it). You almost have to admire the Machiavellian brilliance of the banks here.
Not to mention, their kids don't want to be caught dead at their dad's former homeland.
Or the wife and kids don't want the guy to return home from the US because they're too busy living off the money he sends back home. I knew a guy from the Philippines who got caught in that situation. After working 20 years in the US, he went back home unannounced and told his family that he retired from working. His family hated him and the village vilified him for being a lazy bastard for cutting off the cash flow. Last I heard he got divorced and bought a fishing boat to live on.
Odd, divorces aren't permitted for marriages registered in the Phillippines. You have to get an annulment there.
This is, gentlemen, why if you choose to marry a Filipina you marry in another place (like Hong Kong) which permits divorce and live in the Philippines (Marriages where you bring the girl to your country rarely works for far too many reasons to list here).
I think you need to stop watching Fox News. Most business owners are hard right. The thing is, they're also pragmatic which is why they donate to both parties.
This is why almost all successful economies are mixed economies.
Running a pure capitalist economy is doomed to failure for the same reasons running a pure socialist state. People have different wants and needs, pure capitalist/socialist philosophies are too rigid and because of this, need to be enforced by violence. Without Stalin's iron fisted rule the Soviet union would have fallen in a heap much, much earlier than it did. Successful economies allow a mix of socialist and capitalist policies to be applied where appropriate and generally do not go too far towards either extreme.
Although it should be noted, whilst communism has been tried and failed, a pure capitalist state has never gotten off the ground. The closest we've had is Fascism and even that didn't last.
Just in time, researchers invented the high-maintenance sex robot. And womanhood was saved!
I dont think so.
A lot of men have a lot of mechanical sympathy, so maintenance levels are not an issue.
Any man who doesn't regularly check the oil and coolant in their sexbot deserves what happens to it.
Or as Americans might say, the letter of the law, not the spirit of the law.
Justice Nye Perram was forced to agree with DBC LLC over the matter of copyright infringement, so they won on that case. However the Justice was also aware of what happened in the US when the studio's lawyers were permitted to go on a fishing expedition through the ISP's customer records then send them what amounted to extortion notices threatening an expensive law suit if they didn't immediately pay a sum of money. So called "speculative invoicing".
To prevent this, the justice made DBC LLC pay a bond of about A$600,000 which would be forfeited if they tried speculative invoicing. The agreement meant any communications with the ISP's customers had to be vetted by the courts. After having repeated attempts rejected because they asked for far too much info and were pretty much a prelude to speculative invoicing it became clear to DBC LLC that they would never make a profit on this and simply cut their losses.
I think I'm pretty safe in saying that the reason DBC LLC has withdrawn their case is just to get their bond back. Dallas Buyers Club was technically in the right, but did everything in the wrong way. That being said, I doubt the Justice was ever going to let them profit on it, setting a precident that you shouldn't go after end users in Australia, even if you are technically right.
I hope ya Chooks turn into Emus and kick ya dunny down.
Ya Wankers.
Signed,
Australia.
I glance down at my map about as often as a glance down at my speedometer - when I'm sufficiently unsure of the result. Both are about the same level of distraction.
So once every 10 or 15 seconds for a fraction of a second.
So, you are saying we are better off taking the eyes off the road to look down on a map while doing 70 mph?
If you're unable to remember where you're going, you're better off pulling over and reading the map.
If I have to tell you this, chances are you're the kind of person who will follow GPS directions blindly off a cliff.
But how many deaths have been prevented by GPS because drivers were not distracted trying to figure out where to go?
I'm going to say none. You cant save people from their own stupidity.
BTW, you should be regularly taking your eyes off the road. You need to check your mirrors and binnacle and driving in such a manner that a momentary lapse in concentration does not put you into a dangerous situation. The drivers who sit there with their blinkers on never looking anywhere but forwards are amongst the worst drivers because they're completely oblivious to what happens around them.
TFS said
Could society's embrace of GPS be eroding our cognitive maps?
I delivered pizza for a few years, before GPS, and a few hours of taking orders will disabuse you of this naive notion that most people have "cognitive maps". Most people do not know where they live! They can't tell you the nearest major intersection. What they know is a sequence of steps to follow to get to their house.
"Turn left at the big tree. Turn right where the church was before it burned down. Turn left where Johnny was hit by that drunk drive last year. Look for the red house."
I'm only slightly exaggerating. I really do encourage everyone to use maps, to learn to change your "pathing" dynamically when conditions change, to know where you are not just the steps you took to get there. To quote the REM song: "Stand in the place where you work. Now face north. Think about direction; wonder why you haven't before ". Can you do it without looking anything up?
This,
I absolutely hate people who give me left-right directions.
Now you take a right when you see farmer Bumfuck's field, go to past the barn and take a right, not too far, if you reach the windmill you've gone too far and you need to turn around and find the old sign with three bullet holes in it and take a left. From there you need to head past the old firehouse and turn towards the new firehouse and take a right when you reach the garage and then travel for about 10 minutes until another left turn where you drive for another 10 minutes and take the third right.
I've learned just to say "give me your address, my phone navigates better than you ever could". The problem with left-right directions is that people always assume you use the same landmarks and make the same mistakes as they do, so you end up with a shitload of superfluous information. Its the same with asking for directions, when I'm on holiday the first thing I do is buy a local SIM card so I can use Google Maps because asking someone where the nearest metro/subway/bus is gets you going down three flights of stairs, two blocks, 17 left hand turns and its "right there". Its almost as if no-one knows about these little signs above every street corner that tells you their name.
Not surprised to see this come out of Australia, we're a people that regularly use the phrase "yeah, nah".
I thought you couldn't ship Apple stuff (Mac, iPhone , etc) to North Korea, so they must have smuggled it in from South Korea or China.
I be he's raffing at your silly restrictions as we speak.
Right after he finished the Lobster Thermidor with French Champaign served to him by a starving farm girl.
This smells like the kind of thing you might leave behind if you were departing Amazon, perhaps not on the best of terms.
It's also possible the employee responsible for the Zombie Inclusion was so bored to tears writing these terms of service he decided to include a gaffe just to see if anyone noticed.
This.
I've had to write policies and procedures that were so mind numbingly boring that I knew no-one would ever read (like Acceptable Use Agreements), so I've snuck in things like "and failure to take note of these restrictions will result in the user being fed to lions". I've only been caught out once and that was 10 months after I'd finished working there (the boss had a sense of humour about it though).
On dark nights with heavy rain, the white lines are invaluable for knowing where exactly the road is, and making an unexpected departure from the regular route.
Thats OK because it never rains in London.
I read that, seeing as you haven't linked to a single study, let alone the plethora of peer reviewed studies required to reasonably prove your point, I noted it down as bullshit.
They point to reduced speeds due to drivers being unsure of lanes. Repeat: UNSURE of the road. They treat this like speed reduction is an end in itself rather than the primary goal of safety. Driver confusion rarely is a good thing.
The problem is that it only slows down good drivers. People who are good enough to recognise that no lines on the road represent additional hazards, most notably from those who mistakenly believe they are good at driving and dont slow down.
From the article
A report by TfL on the trial in London suggested white lines gave drivers a "psychological sense of confidence".
This wont affect people who are already driving dangerously because their "psychological sense of confidence" comes from the Dunning-Kruger effect (unskilled and completely unaware of it), many have so much false confidence that they're unsafe at any speed, so removing the white lines wont make them think of slowing down because they think they're perfectly safe doing what they're doing and anything that goes wrong is someone else's fault because they're gods gift to driving.
This is being driven by politicians at the council of Norfolk, however motoring association, the AA has said the idea is
"absurd, barmy and crazy".
I tend to agree with the AA as unlike the council of Norfolk they put out a lot of helpful videos about how to take care of your car... so I think they might know a thing or two about driving as well.
If you're the type of person that buys a 3500 pound object that can go 100+ MPH and fail to read the manual which results in the injury of another individual, you're an idiot.
Erm... the thing is, in order to drive a 2T object that can go 160 KPH (so we clearly cant be talking about Jeeps here) you need to be able to demonstrate you're capable of using it without having to read a manual. When you've demonstrated this they give you a piece of plastic with the word "license" on it.
The problem here is that FCA not only changed a standardised design, they made parts of it non-functional. So expected functions were not there.
When you engineer something for the mass market, you need to engineer it for the dumbest possible users. Its no good saying "well you should have RTFM'd", this attitude is what has kept Linux out of the hands of the masses. You need to engineer it to prevent as much stupidity as possible. People are ignorant, lazy, slovenly morons that think if they can save 0.5 seconds and 20 KJ by not using the handbrake they should do it. This is why almost all automatic transmissions force you to be in park to take the key out (not an issue for us superior manual drivers, but we're superior for a reason).
I have read about people neglecting their kids to play farmville, I have even done a few nasty binges where I would swear to "stop by midnight" only to look outside and see that it was dawn.
The big kerfuffle in the 90's wasn't that games were addictive, it was that they were violent and that we were going to turn into desensitized savages who want to dismember people. Basically this article is about kids that grew up on Mortal Kombat.
This.
And it is the same nonsense that was spouted about Metal, Comics, TV, Movies and Books (that weren't the bible) in the past. Same shit, different target.
A little OT: This reminds me though of how Bank Robbers always shared this mythical celebrity status with a big portion of the population. In the 20's people blamed banks for everything and were happy to see them suffer. In 2016 the banks are still screwing the population over at a much faster rate, yet you never hear of hackers being heroes to any but a select few.
Banks these days aren't distrusted and despised like they used to be in the 20's.
People will actually defend banks ripping them off these days because banks do it indirectly and give a pittance to the end user to buy their loyalties. Cashback, rewards, frequent flyer points and what not to get the end user sucked into using credit then they charge the merchant for accepting credit. The merchant is not in a position to say no because they have literally addicted (via gamification) the end user into using credit and nothing is harder for a store owner to deal with than an addict who is denied their fix. So merchants just raise prices to compensate which ironically means the credit addict is paying for their habit, whilst defending their habit.
You almost have to admire the Machiavellian brilliance of the banks here. They've got the end user thinking the bank is their best friend whilst robbing them blind.