You know those people who like to brag about how much money they have and how many vacations and shit they can do because they have no kids? You tax the shit out of those people.
I'm actually 100% serious. You'd pay a "childfree" tax starting at age 40 until death unless you list some under-18 dependents on your tax form.
Trip time reduction is not the point! The point is that the total throughput of the road (total number of trips) increases. That means more people can get where they want or need to go - for example you can build more housing and have those people get to and from jobs in a job center like a downtown area. In the same amount of time as before, of course, because the extra capacity gets filled up. But again, trip time reduction is not the point, and it's okay that trip time remains the same because the total number of trips increases.
Using the #metoo hashtag without any further explanation means that you have had a personal experience. If you were just referencing the "#metoo movement", your comment was misleading.
In a free market, after prices rise due to high demand and limited supply, more supply enters the market in order to capture the additional revenue available from the increased prices and strong demand. In this case, that means theaters would show the movie on more screens (possibly by limiting showings of other movies), thus easing the limited seating availability. If supply is unlimited, prices will naturally settle out at the marginal cost of production. Screens obviously aren't unlimited but there is a fair degree of flexibility to add showings for an in-demand movie to avoid huge price spikes.
Of course that's obviously a very simplistic model. Producers often employ strategies to capture the additional demand-based revenue from "die hard" fans that have to have something right away. Like artificially limiting initial supply and raising prices to capture additional revenue from people that have to have it first, and then opening up the supply and lowering prices shortly after.
Recently there's all these apps and whatnot that bring market-based pricing to bear in a lot of industries where it traditionally wasn't. There are so many instances where this supply part of the equation is missing for various reasons. Like when a performer has a single show in a city and speculators buy up all the seats and resell then at 4x the price. The reason they can get 4x the prices is because no additional supply can enter the market. I've heard Garth Brooks just keeps adding days until a day doesn't sell out to address this problem.
Your post does not address my implied point. There are countless Slashdot posters who insist that unless the owner is physically deprived of something, there was no harm done or value lost, because they still have the thing.
As you stated, exclusivity of access to information is intangible, yet has value. It is what trade secrets and employment agreements protect. Just like how exclusivity of distribution rights to information is intangible yet has value, i.e. what copyright protects.
Comes up every time media copyright infringement is in the news. This guy didn't deprive Tesla of anything, so he clearly didn't steal anything, right? Information wants to be free? Let's hear all the usual tropes.
???? I don't. As I said, I'm assuming they will carry only 16 passengers because that is what TFA said.
I meant to say "Why do you think the gap between Musk's loop carts will be as large as conventional trains?" Slashdot, born in the 90s and still stuck there, does not have a comment edit feature. I replied to myself with the correct sentence but you didn't see it. You answered it below.
Actually, they do not have enormous capacity in terms of passengers per hour per width.
1800 cars per hour per lane. Heavy rail (subways) are just about the only thing that's better.
Roads have enormous flexibility, which equals lower transit times for passengers, or more flexibility in living and working locations, and usually both. Fixed guideway transit requires most popular destinations, including residential, office, commercial, to all be on the route, and usually requires transfers, and it usually still has a last-mile problem. All of which necessitate a certain city configuration which comes with lots of its own problems that urbanists have other excuses for too. Musk is sidestepping all of that.
You only care about width because the road is at-grade and so requires right-of-way acquisition, which costs money, and wide roads are ugly. Tunnels are below grade so if you need more width, just build it.
Keep imagining. The reason it is a lot different from cars is braking distance. The braking distance with steel wheels on steel rails (as I understand the Loop will be) is far more than rubber on tarmac. The Loop cars will not be programmed to travel closer together than their braking distance, just as autonomous cars will not be.
I haven't heard anything about what these carts will use for movement, so steel wheel and steel track is new information to me - I'm not saying you're wrong, but do you have a source for it?
Besides that, the design of this requires no stopping on the loop proper, only on the side spurs, so there's no reason to design for enormous stopping distances on the loop proper. I don't see why large stopping distances preclude stations from being close together. And why are you still imagining subways? People aren't going to use this to go 2 miles, they are going to use it to go 20 from their home to a destination and back.
Thirdly, individual vehicles, no matter how many there are, and even if full of 16 passengers, will mean that the line will have far less capacity (in terms of passengers per hour) than conventional trains, because the gaps between the vehicles will still need to be as large (or in fact, at 150 mph, much larger).
Why do you think Musk's loop carts will be as large as conventional trains? Roadway vehicles typically carry 1 passenger per vehicle during rush hour, but roadways still have enormous capacity because the vehicles are seconds/single-digit feet apart. I would imagine these carts will similarly be very close together. Autonomous carts merging into a high-speed lane with not much distance between vehicles is certainly a problem to be solved, but how is it much different than an autonomous car merging into a crowded freeway?
How do you think that training came into being? A human thought it up in the first place. Just because it wasn't an original thought in 2018 doesn't mean it was never an original thought.
Aside from Apple, the rest of the ARM smartphones have to support ARMv7 which requires supporting Thumb/Thumb2. ARMv7 has predication on most instructions, which is a pain for an out-of-order machine, as well as a stupid FP architectural register addressing scheme. Thumb/Thumb2 is a form of instruction compression and requires the CPU to decode 2B instructions, which means that the whole "every instruction is 4B in length and on a 4B boundary" is throw out the window. ARMv8 is pretty clean, but in order to be clean it had to be somewhat different than v7, which means that supporting it requires adding *more* stuff to the hardware, not deleting anything.
The problem isn't for a software writer - almost no one programs any of this stuff in assembly, it's all hidden by compilers, JITs, etc. It's a problem for the hardware to support it all.
ARM and other RISC machines have similar simple instruction sets.
This hasn't been true in years. The ARM instruction set that your smartphone processor supports is big, complicated, and includes almost as much crufty legacy support as a modern x86.
The performance requirements and power limitations of an embedded CPU are completely different than those of the primary processor in a general-purpose computing system. Unless you think that general-purpose computing systems are going away (I don't), then the CPUs needed for them will continue to be expensive to design and build.
Hasn't there long been an ability to build a safe that self-destructs its contents if forcibly opened?
Absolutely. Acquiring or building one was pretty difficult though, and in either case, criminals probably had ample opportunities to screw something up.
And prior to electronic communications, wiretaps weren't even possible -- you had to intercept the messenger (with risk that the interception would be known) or eavesdrop physically. Even with wiretaps, criminals have beaten in various ways -- random payphones, burner cell phones, not talking on phones at all, etc.
Sure. None of what you listed is impossible to beat, though.
I think encryption really just reverts policing back to more of a historical mean.
This is where I disagree completely. The historical mean was that these things were possible, but "human-hard" - for example, the agen had to avoid getting caught eavesdropping, you had to bring in a master lock-breaker to pick a lock or disarm a safe, etc.. You were also limited in how many police actions of this type (eavesdropping or searching) you could carry out by money and manpower. But these things did happen, and with a focused-enough effort, it was possible. And because absolute security was pretty difficult (the self-destructing safe for example), most people couldn't or wouldn't do that, so it often didn't come down to a Herculean effort to perform a legal search anyway.
Today, with enabled-by-default end-to-end strong encryption on $20 phones from Walmart, it is mathematically impossible for these types of searches to be done at all. Absolute security, without anyone having to do anything difficult, at all. That is a massive balance tip away from law enforcement being able to do their jobs.
None of your scenarios are relevant. The FBI director isn't asking for easier warrants or torture or GPS tracking (though phones do give you that). These are legal warrant-based searches, the same thing that 20 years ago would have been possible by rummaging through your little black book or your notebook and by wiretapping a particular phone line, but is no longer possible because of math and the miniaturization of computer technology.
The last few emails or text messages you sent? Again, providers will cooperate with a legitimate investigation
No, they can't, not if you're using strong end-to-end encryption, like WhatsApp or iMessage or Facebook messenger. The provider only has the encrypted data. This is the exact scenario that is of interest in this case.
While ARM CPUs are relatively ubiquitous in smartphones and tablets, those devices aren't nearly as high-value of a target as servers, where Intel CPUs dominate (well over 90% of the market).
Linus is in a unique position - he is an engineer, almost 100% focused on technical solutions, yet he is also a public facing figure and is able to make public comments. He also (to the best of my knowledge) doesn't have to worry about customers, profits, shareholders, etc., things that a for-profit, publicly-traded company does. Most of the time, the engineers aren't the ones making public comments. I haven't heard from any Intel engineers yet, only their PR department, but I would guess the Intel engineers are just as interested in fixing this as he is, but we aren't hearing about it.
The entire premise of Bitcoin is that it doesn't rely on a central authority/government to operate. But the price of that ability is incurred daily with high transaction costs, long transaction times, deflationary economics, and the resulting value volatility and susceptibility to speculation. I can't see why the general public in stable countries would accept those daily downsides to guard against a Black Swan of extreme government malfeasance.
Bitcoin is essentially solving the problem of government/bank malfeasance that occurs extremely rarely (for someone living in a stable country), using methods that requires negatives that occur very, very frequently. Stable countries have made the government/bank malfeasance problem rare via other means: voting/elections, some amount of government oversight, some amount of regulation, peaceful transfer of power, etc. I'm not saying that these things are perfect, but I don't think we need to suffer the daily consequences.
One of Apple's biggest innovations was partnering with AT&T, Verizon, etc., to sell $1000 computers (iPhones, and to a lesser extent iPads) on an installment plan. People who would never think of doing that for a $600 laptop all of a sudden were buying $900 iPhones that way.
You're making the argument that non-standard DRM is superior to standardized DRM because it will result in non-compatible implementations, and "flailing around". I can only assume that because of the lack of a standard and flailing around, that will lead to bad user experiences, and so the media companies will ultimately drop DRM which will lead to a better user experience? Is that the jist of your argument?
This line of reasoning requires you to view a DRM-free experience as superior to one with DRM. That's an ideological argument, not a practical one. End users don't care one way or the other, they only care if it works or not. And as has been evidenced, DRM does work and are used by massive number of people - HBO Go, Amazon Prime, Netflix. Second, it requires you to view the "bad experience with DRM" as not a problem because it leads to "better experience without DRM". There's a whole period in there where "bad experience with DRM" is what end users will be getting. The W3C's primary goal is not to drive ideology, but to improve the web experience via standards. Intentionally failing to standardize on DRM because of ideological concerns is what runs counter to their primary mission. Failing to standardize something that needs standardization because of ideology is what would transform them into a completely different organization, not ignoring consensus.
The one point you make that we can possibly agree on is that we may not need a DRM standard at all, and that several non-compatible implementations are just fine. If the existing stuff is working well enough, then I agree; but then you don't get your DRM-free experience either.
Consensus is not always possible for contentious issues. It's a nice ideal to strive for, but there are some issues where consensus cannot be practically reached. Compromise is likewise not always possible either. Those are the times when strong leadership is called for to make a decision, over the well-reasoned objections of some of the members of the body.
As this post nicely describes, DRM is already here, isn't going away, and this whole debate wasn't about whether or not we should have DRM at all. It was about whether or not to standardize something on the web, which is even more of a primary goal of the W3C than reaching consensus.
When demand exceeds supply and prices go up, that is supposed to induce more producers to enter the market (seeing the large profit available in that market) and provide more supply. Remember, low barriers to entry and all that other free market stuff? Well when there's only one act with a limited number of shows (most times just 1), that's impossible. So you have a fixed supply and if the demand isn't met by that fixed supply, that of course leads to prices going up.
As someone else mentioned below, the way some acts solve this problem is by announcing more shows after the first show is sold out, which puts more supply into the market. After all, if demand isn't exhausted with 1 show, more shows at the same venue on subsequent nights (which is quite low marginal cost relative to that first show) will lead to greater profit for the act, and lower prices for the consumers.
Before encrypted electronic communications, criminals and terrorists had to use things like in-person meetings or unsecure communications methods (like analog telephony) to communicate. These were obviously vulnerable to being listened to for a determined party, but that was simply how it was, there was no other option. Law enforcement could use various human-powered means to target specific individuals or organizations, like tapping a particular phone line and having a human listen to it when it went active, or maybe stake out a particular meeting place with some high-power microphones. For the general non-criminal population, while it was technically possible for the government to listen to everyone all the time, it was realistically impractical because of the vast amount of manpower it would require.
Today we're in the opposite situation. Law enforcement can now get ahold of all electronic communications through various taps, but if criminals and terrorists use the proper technology and best practices, it is *impossible* for law enforcement to know what is being said. (Yes, deep-cover operatives are still possible but are impractical for all but the absolute highest-priority things for reasons of time, risk, and the same old manpower problem).
I don't have a great answer. Anything is either too insecure or seems too vulnerable to corruption. The only thing I've come up with is third-party escrow of encryption keys, but who is the third party and how do we know they aren't corrupt?
The app is nice, but the other really big thing that Uber brings to the table is surge pricing. A surge really does what it is designed to do: gets many more drivers out on the road to match the large demand with more supply. Taxis don't have anything like that. If there aren't enough taxis, you just have to wait.
Slashdot Mirror
Who is going to pay for all of this "free" stuff?
You know those people who like to brag about how much money they have and how many vacations and shit they can do because they have no kids? You tax the shit out of those people.
I'm actually 100% serious. You'd pay a "childfree" tax starting at age 40 until death unless you list some under-18 dependents on your tax form.
Trip time reduction is not the point! The point is that the total throughput of the road (total number of trips) increases. That means more people can get where they want or need to go - for example you can build more housing and have those people get to and from jobs in a job center like a downtown area. In the same amount of time as before, of course, because the extra capacity gets filled up. But again, trip time reduction is not the point, and it's okay that trip time remains the same because the total number of trips increases.
Using the #metoo hashtag without any further explanation means that you have had a personal experience. If you were just referencing the "#metoo movement", your comment was misleading.
In a free market, after prices rise due to high demand and limited supply, more supply enters the market in order to capture the additional revenue available from the increased prices and strong demand. In this case, that means theaters would show the movie on more screens (possibly by limiting showings of other movies), thus easing the limited seating availability. If supply is unlimited, prices will naturally settle out at the marginal cost of production. Screens obviously aren't unlimited but there is a fair degree of flexibility to add showings for an in-demand movie to avoid huge price spikes.
Of course that's obviously a very simplistic model. Producers often employ strategies to capture the additional demand-based revenue from "die hard" fans that have to have something right away. Like artificially limiting initial supply and raising prices to capture additional revenue from people that have to have it first, and then opening up the supply and lowering prices shortly after.
Recently there's all these apps and whatnot that bring market-based pricing to bear in a lot of industries where it traditionally wasn't. There are so many instances where this supply part of the equation is missing for various reasons. Like when a performer has a single show in a city and speculators buy up all the seats and resell then at 4x the price. The reason they can get 4x the prices is because no additional supply can enter the market. I've heard Garth Brooks just keeps adding days until a day doesn't sell out to address this problem.
I should have been modded "Troll" probably.
Your post does not address my implied point. There are countless Slashdot posters who insist that unless the owner is physically deprived of something, there was no harm done or value lost, because they still have the thing.
As you stated, exclusivity of access to information is intangible, yet has value. It is what trade secrets and employment agreements protect. Just like how exclusivity of distribution rights to information is intangible yet has value, i.e. what copyright protects.
Comes up every time media copyright infringement is in the news. This guy didn't deprive Tesla of anything, so he clearly didn't steal anything, right? Information wants to be free? Let's hear all the usual tropes.
???? I don't. As I said, I'm assuming they will carry only 16 passengers because that is what TFA said.
I meant to say "Why do you think the gap between Musk's loop carts will be as large as conventional trains?" Slashdot, born in the 90s and still stuck there, does not have a comment edit feature. I replied to myself with the correct sentence but you didn't see it. You answered it below.
Actually, they do not have enormous capacity in terms of passengers per hour per width.
1800 cars per hour per lane. Heavy rail (subways) are just about the only thing that's better.
Roads have enormous flexibility, which equals lower transit times for passengers, or more flexibility in living and working locations, and usually both. Fixed guideway transit requires most popular destinations, including residential, office, commercial, to all be on the route, and usually requires transfers, and it usually still has a last-mile problem. All of which necessitate a certain city configuration which comes with lots of its own problems that urbanists have other excuses for too. Musk is sidestepping all of that.
You only care about width because the road is at-grade and so requires right-of-way acquisition, which costs money, and wide roads are ugly. Tunnels are below grade so if you need more width, just build it.
Keep imagining. The reason it is a lot different from cars is braking distance. The braking distance with steel wheels on steel rails (as I understand the Loop will be) is far more than rubber on tarmac. The Loop cars will not be programmed to travel closer together than their braking distance, just as autonomous cars will not be.
I haven't heard anything about what these carts will use for movement, so steel wheel and steel track is new information to me - I'm not saying you're wrong, but do you have a source for it?
Besides that, the design of this requires no stopping on the loop proper, only on the side spurs, so there's no reason to design for enormous stopping distances on the loop proper. I don't see why large stopping distances preclude stations from being close together. And why are you still imagining subways? People aren't going to use this to go 2 miles, they are going to use it to go 20 from their home to a destination and back.
Why do you think the gap between Musk's loop carts will be as large as conventional trains?
Thirdly, individual vehicles, no matter how many there are, and even if full of 16 passengers, will mean that the line will have far less capacity (in terms of passengers per hour) than conventional trains, because the gaps between the vehicles will still need to be as large (or in fact, at 150 mph, much larger).
Why do you think Musk's loop carts will be as large as conventional trains? Roadway vehicles typically carry 1 passenger per vehicle during rush hour, but roadways still have enormous capacity because the vehicles are seconds/single-digit feet apart. I would imagine these carts will similarly be very close together. Autonomous carts merging into a high-speed lane with not much distance between vehicles is certainly a problem to be solved, but how is it much different than an autonomous car merging into a crowded freeway?
How do you think that training came into being? A human thought it up in the first place. Just because it wasn't an original thought in 2018 doesn't mean it was never an original thought.
Aside from Apple, the rest of the ARM smartphones have to support ARMv7 which requires supporting Thumb/Thumb2. ARMv7 has predication on most instructions, which is a pain for an out-of-order machine, as well as a stupid FP architectural register addressing scheme. Thumb/Thumb2 is a form of instruction compression and requires the CPU to decode 2B instructions, which means that the whole "every instruction is 4B in length and on a 4B boundary" is throw out the window. ARMv8 is pretty clean, but in order to be clean it had to be somewhat different than v7, which means that supporting it requires adding *more* stuff to the hardware, not deleting anything.
The problem isn't for a software writer - almost no one programs any of this stuff in assembly, it's all hidden by compilers, JITs, etc. It's a problem for the hardware to support it all.
ARM and other RISC machines have similar simple instruction sets.
This hasn't been true in years. The ARM instruction set that your smartphone processor supports is big, complicated, and includes almost as much crufty legacy support as a modern x86.
The performance requirements and power limitations of an embedded CPU are completely different than those of the primary processor in a general-purpose computing system. Unless you think that general-purpose computing systems are going away (I don't), then the CPUs needed for them will continue to be expensive to design and build.
Hasn't there long been an ability to build a safe that self-destructs its contents if forcibly opened?
Absolutely. Acquiring or building one was pretty difficult though, and in either case, criminals probably had ample opportunities to screw something up.
And prior to electronic communications, wiretaps weren't even possible -- you had to intercept the messenger (with risk that the interception would be known) or eavesdrop physically. Even with wiretaps, criminals have beaten in various ways -- random payphones, burner cell phones, not talking on phones at all, etc.
Sure. None of what you listed is impossible to beat, though.
I think encryption really just reverts policing back to more of a historical mean.
This is where I disagree completely. The historical mean was that these things were possible, but "human-hard" - for example, the agen had to avoid getting caught eavesdropping, you had to bring in a master lock-breaker to pick a lock or disarm a safe, etc.. You were also limited in how many police actions of this type (eavesdropping or searching) you could carry out by money and manpower. But these things did happen, and with a focused-enough effort, it was possible. And because absolute security was pretty difficult (the self-destructing safe for example), most people couldn't or wouldn't do that, so it often didn't come down to a Herculean effort to perform a legal search anyway.
Today, with enabled-by-default end-to-end strong encryption on $20 phones from Walmart, it is mathematically impossible for these types of searches to be done at all. Absolute security, without anyone having to do anything difficult, at all. That is a massive balance tip away from law enforcement being able to do their jobs.
None of your scenarios are relevant. The FBI director isn't asking for easier warrants or torture or GPS tracking (though phones do give you that). These are legal warrant-based searches, the same thing that 20 years ago would have been possible by rummaging through your little black book or your notebook and by wiretapping a particular phone line, but is no longer possible because of math and the miniaturization of computer technology.
The last few emails or text messages you sent? Again, providers will cooperate with a legitimate investigation
No, they can't, not if you're using strong end-to-end encryption, like WhatsApp or iMessage or Facebook messenger. The provider only has the encrypted data. This is the exact scenario that is of interest in this case.
While ARM CPUs are relatively ubiquitous in smartphones and tablets, those devices aren't nearly as high-value of a target as servers, where Intel CPUs dominate (well over 90% of the market).
Linus is in a unique position - he is an engineer, almost 100% focused on technical solutions, yet he is also a public facing figure and is able to make public comments. He also (to the best of my knowledge) doesn't have to worry about customers, profits, shareholders, etc., things that a for-profit, publicly-traded company does. Most of the time, the engineers aren't the ones making public comments. I haven't heard from any Intel engineers yet, only their PR department, but I would guess the Intel engineers are just as interested in fixing this as he is, but we aren't hearing about it.
The entire premise of Bitcoin is that it doesn't rely on a central authority/government to operate. But the price of that ability is incurred daily with high transaction costs, long transaction times, deflationary economics, and the resulting value volatility and susceptibility to speculation. I can't see why the general public in stable countries would accept those daily downsides to guard against a Black Swan of extreme government malfeasance.
Bitcoin is essentially solving the problem of government/bank malfeasance that occurs extremely rarely (for someone living in a stable country), using methods that requires negatives that occur very, very frequently. Stable countries have made the government/bank malfeasance problem rare via other means: voting/elections, some amount of government oversight, some amount of regulation, peaceful transfer of power, etc. I'm not saying that these things are perfect, but I don't think we need to suffer the daily consequences.
One of Apple's biggest innovations was partnering with AT&T, Verizon, etc., to sell $1000 computers (iPhones, and to a lesser extent iPads) on an installment plan. People who would never think of doing that for a $600 laptop all of a sudden were buying $900 iPhones that way.
You're making the argument that non-standard DRM is superior to standardized DRM because it will result in non-compatible implementations, and "flailing around". I can only assume that because of the lack of a standard and flailing around, that will lead to bad user experiences, and so the media companies will ultimately drop DRM which will lead to a better user experience? Is that the jist of your argument?
This line of reasoning requires you to view a DRM-free experience as superior to one with DRM. That's an ideological argument, not a practical one. End users don't care one way or the other, they only care if it works or not. And as has been evidenced, DRM does work and are used by massive number of people - HBO Go, Amazon Prime, Netflix. Second, it requires you to view the "bad experience with DRM" as not a problem because it leads to "better experience without DRM". There's a whole period in there where "bad experience with DRM" is what end users will be getting. The W3C's primary goal is not to drive ideology, but to improve the web experience via standards. Intentionally failing to standardize on DRM because of ideological concerns is what runs counter to their primary mission. Failing to standardize something that needs standardization because of ideology is what would transform them into a completely different organization, not ignoring consensus.
The one point you make that we can possibly agree on is that we may not need a DRM standard at all, and that several non-compatible implementations are just fine. If the existing stuff is working well enough, then I agree; but then you don't get your DRM-free experience either.
Consensus is not always possible for contentious issues. It's a nice ideal to strive for, but there are some issues where consensus cannot be practically reached. Compromise is likewise not always possible either. Those are the times when strong leadership is called for to make a decision, over the well-reasoned objections of some of the members of the body.
As this post nicely describes, DRM is already here, isn't going away, and this whole debate wasn't about whether or not we should have DRM at all. It was about whether or not to standardize something on the web, which is even more of a primary goal of the W3C than reaching consensus.
When demand exceeds supply and prices go up, that is supposed to induce more producers to enter the market (seeing the large profit available in that market) and provide more supply. Remember, low barriers to entry and all that other free market stuff? Well when there's only one act with a limited number of shows (most times just 1), that's impossible. So you have a fixed supply and if the demand isn't met by that fixed supply, that of course leads to prices going up.
As someone else mentioned below, the way some acts solve this problem is by announcing more shows after the first show is sold out, which puts more supply into the market. After all, if demand isn't exhausted with 1 show, more shows at the same venue on subsequent nights (which is quite low marginal cost relative to that first show) will lead to greater profit for the act, and lower prices for the consumers.
Before encrypted electronic communications, criminals and terrorists had to use things like in-person meetings or unsecure communications methods (like analog telephony) to communicate. These were obviously vulnerable to being listened to for a determined party, but that was simply how it was, there was no other option. Law enforcement could use various human-powered means to target specific individuals or organizations, like tapping a particular phone line and having a human listen to it when it went active, or maybe stake out a particular meeting place with some high-power microphones. For the general non-criminal population, while it was technically possible for the government to listen to everyone all the time, it was realistically impractical because of the vast amount of manpower it would require.
Today we're in the opposite situation. Law enforcement can now get ahold of all electronic communications through various taps, but if criminals and terrorists use the proper technology and best practices, it is *impossible* for law enforcement to know what is being said. (Yes, deep-cover operatives are still possible but are impractical for all but the absolute highest-priority things for reasons of time, risk, and the same old manpower problem).
I don't have a great answer. Anything is either too insecure or seems too vulnerable to corruption. The only thing I've come up with is third-party escrow of encryption keys, but who is the third party and how do we know they aren't corrupt?
Don't forget, that's after throwing away 20-40% on advertising.
Do you have data to support your claim that the advertising money is completely useless and doesn't result in increasing sales for these companies?
The app is nice, but the other really big thing that Uber brings to the table is surge pricing. A surge really does what it is designed to do: gets many more drivers out on the road to match the large demand with more supply. Taxis don't have anything like that. If there aren't enough taxis, you just have to wait.