As someone who's on the opposite coast, Valley and San Francisco both are one and the same to me. So, oops.

I'm also a fan of the ride sharing concept. When I flew out of Laguardia last week, I took an Uber from the Roosevelt Ave/Jackson Heights station to LGA and the process was smooth and simple(Also I had Uber credit so, might as well).

I just don't like Uber as a company.

Lyft seems like it's doing the right thing by complying with NYC taxi regulations though. So I'm going to have to look into that.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/go...

speaking of screwing up...

Stupid forbes capture page.

http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welc...

If a taxi company screws with me in New York I can get redress because our regulators aren't idiots.

Apparently not. But I am American, and I understand the problem here.

What bothers me isn't the lack of an understanding of history but rather a lack of understanding about civics.

Regulations can suck, but they don't -have- to.

If the regulation sucks, reform the regulations. Don't throw a huge hissy fit and shit the bed out of spite.

There's so much entitled Valley logic in the business model at Uber that it's hideously disturbing,

(Not to mention the whole "let's get a PI on a journalist who didn't like us" thing)

Actually it'd have to go through the Tropicana, and/or swerve around several blocks because the side of the airport that faces the strip is the runways. Getting the monorail out there would be a clusterfuck to say the least.

In an ideal libertarian world, what stops the mega-wealthy from exploiting the people? Is there any room for labor laws? OSHA? EPA? Regulations of any kind? FCC?

How does any of that square with extremely limited governance?

What does Libertarianism mean to you?

From what I've been told by libertarians is that the government needs to be smaller, less rules, less regulations, less interference. Individuals and market forces and rational common interest will benefit us all.

I don't buy it myself, but...

The problems you're describing where the hyper wealthy are colluding in an oligarchy to oppress the people and keep them consuming isn't solved by being more libertarian. Being hands off, having less regulations and rules doesn't solve that problem.

That problem's solved by *more* rules, specifically the rules to reform election laws to keep money out of politics.

The implicit theoretical side effect of libertarianism is that the wealthy, those with the means and resources, would do every well and those with out wouldn't. If you don't have people paying taxes for schools, libraries, roads, etc. How do things get better? When you've got concentrated wealth, what's stopping the wealthy from taking over?

Violent insurrection is a fine idea in that case, but, I wouldn't bet on it.

Of course SHIELD runs Android, how else could they have gotten Ultron?

I don't think Ultron's too keen on sweets though. Must be a proprietary fork.

"Conjoined?" Good.

TBF, given globalization, part of it, even marginally, was probably actually built in Siam. So it wouldn't be a stretch to call it Siamese...

I'm not saying exactly "we're not fucked YET" I'm saying, "We're fucked for a lot of other reasons and it's no shock that this isn't on the radar."

If you think this is the biggest problem we face, you are extremely privileged.

Getting the Half Life 2 Episodes is just heartbreaking.

It's like somehow the double reverse inverse(or something) of the Star Wars prequels. They're really REALLY good... but leave you hanging. You're actually better off acting like the Star Wars prequels and just pretend they don't exist.

Quite frankly, government surveillance isn't this Orwellian nightmare(not yet; and I support moves to curtail this) the hacker crowd thinks it is.

Quite frankly, we have serious problems with the environment, economy, human and civil rights, labor, etc. that the actual day to day impact of PRISM just isn't a big deal to most people. If it were, Facebook would be a ghost town and everyone would be afraid to use the Internet.

As I said above, this is just isn't a problem yet. People aren't being jailed for associating with known dissidents. No one's curb stomping the press for associating with undesirables.

I can imagine it happening, and happening slowly and gradually that no one even notices. But let's be honest here. What's more important and relatable, tax reform or NSA reform? When you're making 30k a year, and you're struggling to get by, what's more important, PRISM or making sure unemployment and social security are still a thing in the future?

I was thinking Toph, from Avatar: The Last Airbender.

Toph is awesome.

The professor had surprised us then told us to write out on paper what the algorithm actually did and why.

There were a few people missing the next class.

Yes. When you're talking about solving problems for the first time, you have to do the grunt work and know what you're doing. My CS135 class had the same problem with people cheating on a parsing roman numerals problem.

When you're in a work environment, no one's going to expect you to implement, say, quick sort or whatever algorithm that's non-trivial but basically grunt work, by hand. The work is going to be way more in-depth than just "this solves this specific problem." however, knowing how these things actually work is another thing.