Because someone will do it, and if that someone isn't you, the competing intelligence will go after you and punish you?

see this

How many "Thick server/ thin client" <--> "Thin server/ thick client" cycles in the last 30 years of computing? Four, five, maybe six? It would be interesting to determine the frequency, so we can always be prepared for the next wave... Anyway you can absolutely trust that in less then seven years you will be on the "thick server again", so you can polish your PL/pgSQL+PL/R when you see it coming.

Remembering: thick servers are much more efficient in terms of energy, heat and per-dollar-computing, but thick clients are much more interactive. Thick servers tend to centralize the data, which leads to sloppy crypto and security, which leads to "I want to keep all my data on my cabinet/table/person/skin? at all times", which leads to "where is the last backup", which leads to "oh, I'll just trust the cloud with this, because surely Google and Amazon replicate the data and keep timely backups" etc etc etc.

And Ruby and R...

Where does that leave you?

In a corner, with the car running, waiting for the boss to cross the street and be "accidentally" snuffed. "Oh, my $DEITY! I know this guy! He happens to be my boss! Someone call 911!"

True enough. In Admin 101 we learn that when you promote everyone that is good at his job, you end up with everyone at the position they suck the most... then you tank the entire firm because of that. RAISE. If someone is good at their job, the right way of reward them is to raise their salary (you can even compute how much they contribute more to the earnings of the firm, and raise them accordingly), not to "promote" them. That is triply-true in tech companies, because middle management sucks, but BEING middle management sucks more (which probably is a reason why middle management sucks so much).

One? Try four (Bush, father and son; Harrison, grandfather and grandson; Roosevelt, fifth cousins; and Adams, father and son) The next one will be, too. Ah, and Chelsea is coming after that. :D

THIS.

DBI is stable, it just works. I have lots of headache in Every Single One of the database middleware. Except DBI.

AFAICT, Linus is perfectly Ok with DRM. "we are not crusaders"...

Well, down here (Brasil) you are actually half-wrong.

The insurance Uber cars have here is approximately the double of those the cabs have.

Yeah, the jury is still out on the whole "sharing economy" thing. I agree there is the potential to a whole lot of abuse; but I think work over-regulation is not without its maladies, too.

I couldn't parse this, care to elaborate, please?

What untraceability? You have to put a credit card number there. That, and those aren't australian companies. Good luck enforcing fines and other levvies.

Can you just enter their DMV, take some tests, survey their car, prove that they have some insurance (and no criminal record) and start driving their cab? Because if they can, you're right. If they can't (because of cab quotas), then you are totally wrong.

Step 5) Government employee is blacklisted by Uber/Lyft, can't repeat Steps 1-4 Step 6) wins whoever has more resources: Uber/Lyft or the Government That is actually awesome, I'm not even mad.

There is something else: no one would EVER use a scheme like the proposed, because if you don't keep the originating data and you anonymize properly you can always have plausible deniability and you always can say "your data is not a part of our database".

air bubbles.