The $13.25 is a calculation by Uber, not by the journalist. The journalists re-ran some of the calculations and got slightly lower figure.

"Internal Uber calculations, provided to BuzzFeed News by Uber, based on data spanning more than a million rides and covering thousands of drivers in three major U.S. markets — Denver, Detroit, and Houston — suggest that drivers in each of the three markets overall earned less than an average of $13.25 an hour after expenses."

Assuming Uber are not lying about the $13.25, that would still mean that if you worked 40 hours a week, every week of the year, you'd make $27,560 a year.

Whether this is a good or bad depends on how much ordinary taxi drivers make for a similar amount of work.

Uber has frequently talked about how much a driver's gross income will be as a way of encouraging people to join up, which is a nice bit of marketing, and standard practice for companies like Uber.

You joke, but that's actually a more coherent plan than half the "Leave" campaign can put forward for real.

The quality of the "debate" around the EU referendum has been one of the most depressing things I think I've ever seen in our political system, and that's saying something.

This idea was part of the plot of Margaret Atwood's excellent The Handmaid's Tale.

The story is about a post war world in which fertility has plummeted due to the use of chemical weapons (I think), and the US is now run by an ultra-conservative christian authoritarian government (think a Christian version of Saudi Arabia), and the limited number of fertile women are essentially "breeders" (the Handmaids of the title), slaves who bare children for the ruling elite. It's a fantastic dystopian novel.

The authoritarian regime that controls the US in the story did away with cash. Then at a later point they simply suspended women's access to any kind of payment system. Without recourse to cash they were utterly powerless. I've always felt The Handmades Tale was a far scarier book than 1984 (which is also great), because it seemed much more plausible, especially as such societies essentially already exist.

Unlike some of her other books, The Handmaid's Tale is a short and quick read, well worth an evening or two.

Genuine question, because I occasionally have to interview people: how do you interview people, and what sort of questions do you ask to try and work out if they are the right kind of person?

Being a small firm we don't hire very often, so we don't get much practice, it's good to hear how other people do it.

We will ask people to talk us through how they would solve a problem, or work with a client, but we are far more interested in their approach and how they think through the problem, and they are not abstract "invert this binary tree" type puzzles but real-world issues we've encountered.

We do ask developers to do a couple of simple programming tasks just to make sure they can actually code fluently (in any language, using any tool they like, and on a laptop not a whiteboard). As a sanity check it seems to work quite well.

Thanks for that. Where do you get your info from? I'd like to read more and try to get a better handle for wtf is going on over there. The UK media present a very simplified view of the situation.

1) Combine two things that are sort of similar but not really - e.g. EVs and hybrids or tablets and e-ink e-readers
2) Make a statistical claim about the combined group - 'People are leaving EVs and hybrids", "Tablets and E-readers bad for sleep/eyes"
3) Forget to mention one of the two in the headline - 'People dump EVs', 'E-readers bad for sleep/eyes"

By combining the two, this report doesn't really tell us anything useful. I'd love to know the different rates of people abandoning EV or hybrids, as I think they are two very different propositions.

Hybrids, at the end of the day, are simply a different way of building efficient petrol/diesel powered cars. From what I've heard that efficiency has been a lot less in real life, with milage claims for things like the Prius not really living up to the hype. With ever more efficient petrol engines on the market, and gas prices so low, the efficiency improvements have to be pretty significant to make a big difference and to offset the higher cost of buying many hybrids.

EVs on the other hand are a totally different beast, and the reasons people might give up on them are different. Are people buying EVs and then finding range is more of a problem than they thought? Did they have problems finding charing points? Was overnight, at-home charging not good enough for them? Etc, etc.

In addition, this report talks about the number of people who are trading in their EVs/Hybrids for something else. But that doesn't really tell us anything about how much people like EVs and Hybrids as it only includes people who are switching. It doesn't provide any analysis of how many people are keeping their EVs for longer.

What's most annoying is that there are genuinely interesting questions to be asking about the EV and hybrid market, but this data isn't really answering any of them well.

What a shock, a slashdot summary that misses the actual salient point of the linked article...

Here's the description of the new feature from the linked article:

If the same site was accessed in Chrome 43 -- which is beta now but should be stable in May -- the warning should vanish thanks to a browser Content Security Policy directive known as Upgrade Insecure Resources. The directive “causes Chrome to upgrade insecure resource requests to HTTPS before fetching them”, Google explained today.

Here's Google's own description of the feature from the Chromium Blog:

Upgrading legacy sites to HTTPS

Transitioning large collections of unmodifiable legacy web content to encrypted, authenticated HTTPS connections can be challenging as the content frequently includes links to insecure resources, triggering mixed content warnings. This release includes a new CSP directive, upgrade-insecure-resources, that causes Chrome to upgrade insecure resource requests to HTTPS before fetching them. This change allows developers to serve their hard-to-update legacy content via HTTPS more easily, improving security for their users.

So basically this means you don't have to worry if you accidentally miss an HTTP asset link on your site when upgrading to HTTPS, Chrome will automatically do that for you.

Hopefully the other browsers will follow suit soon, otherwise it's of limited use.

"filament-shaped LED coated in graphene"

Filament-shaped, not a filament.

I assume that just means the LED is a strand, rather than a square or circle as they often are at the moment.

That's pretty much what happens with the voice and data recorders anyway, although for longer periods. The voice recorder records two hours (at a minimum), which is going to pick the entire runup to pretty much any crash (MH370 possibly being the exception).

Recording video for the same 2 hours seems very sensible to me. It's very easy to misinterpret noises or things people say if you don't have the full context.

I honestly don't understand the objections to video recording when you already have voice recording. What aspect of the privacy of someone who has died in a crash is going to be more negatively affected by seeing them, than by hearing them?

I can kind of see what he means, although I think the comparison with the uncanny valley is a bit weak.

I've taken to using Google Now's voice commands to set timers while I'm cooking, so something like "Ok Google, set a timer for 20 minutes". I don't have to touch my phone and it works brilliantly even in the noisy environments of a kitchen.

I've gotten used to talking to it in a very naturalistic way, which is where the problems occasionally crop up, and when they do they can be quite jarring.

A good example was the last time I asked it to set a timer for "an hour and a half", which Now interpreted as 1:00:30s, i.e. an hour and a half *minute*.

The jarring effect is at this edge where we feel like the speech recognition system is understanding what we say, but really it's just trying to use lots of different rules and patterns that have been coded in. If you happen to just fall outside of one of those rules it fails completely, and it can seem very arbitrary.

The other reason is that an ICE can't generate force when at rest (unlike an electric motor), so getting going from stationary is impossible without a clutch. That's why, if you drive a manual, the engine has to be revved and the clutch gradually engaged, bleeding power into the axels while allowing the engine to run without stalling. Engage the clutch too fast and the engine will simply stall.

I believe External CEs like steam engines can generate force when at rest, so they don't need gearing.

It's one of the reasons by diesel trains (and some very large vehicals) are diesel-electric. A rail engineer I used to work with told me the gearbox and clutch needed to gear down a diesel engine to the point it could start a train would be enormous, bigger than a train car. Diesel electric trains are basically diesel generators that power electric motors, which is why they are sometimes used for emergency power.

I second this. A lot of attention gets paid (understandably) to those researchers who discover some new particle, material, species etc, but science is utterly dependent on the brilliant people who are prepared to work in the background on less "sexy" topics.

X-Ray crystallography is a brilliant example, without all the work being done by brilliant experimentors like Elspeh Garmen who have worked so hard to make other people's discoveries and inventions possible.

As the biologist Steve Jones once put it, "Science is the last refuge of the mediocre". People focus on the geniuses but it's really a massive collaborative effort by a lot of actually pretty ordinary people who just like to investigate the unknown.

The BBC Radio 4 programme The Life Scientific had a great interview with Garmen who was very humble about a career that has had a massive impact on so many areas of research - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programme...

It's a really fantastic series if you want to get an idea of what real scientists actually do, and how they got to where they are in their careers.

Part of the problem in the UK (so may not be the same in the US) is that there is additional funding and support for kids with diagnoses like ASDs so there is a big incentive for schools and parents to push for it. It's driving a whole approach of medicalising behaviour. Kids who in the past would have been simply regarded as a bit unusual and who a teacher would have had to just cope with are now being given medical diagnoses and possibly additional help.

As discussed in the article what would be interesting to see is more detail on the distribution of ASD diagnoses, in terms of where they sit on the spectrum. If there is an increase the diagnosis of severe autism (the kids who would reasonably have been diagnose as autistic 30 years ago) then that would suggest that there is some environmental factor at work. If, on the other hand it's mostly high functioning and borderline then it seems likely to be mostly down to diagnosis.

While I'm very much in favour of education being better able to deal with kids' differences, I'm not sure medicalising it is the way to go.

This submission appears to be nonsense posted by someone who hasn't read the article they linked to.

This isn't about blocking phones sold outside of Brazil, but models of phones that are not certified for use in Brazil. So you can take your Nexus 5 or iPhone, but it's probable that some no-name cheapo phones may not work.

The IMEI number contains codes for the manufacturer and model, so you can white-list those models that have certification from the Brazilian FCC.

If the court decides that mail providers cannot, on principle, be allowed to scan the content of a mail message then I don't see why it wouldn't affect content based spam filtering.

This case could have interesting ramifications for all mail providers if the court decides this violates wire-tap laws.