Maybe the DMV should streamline the process instead of lowering the requirements?

Part of the Commercial Drivers License Test includes questions like "The phrase gross combination weight is figured by adding together what?". Is it reasonable to require you know the answer when you are just driving a person around in a passenger car?

The reason why the commercial drivers license test is way too onerous is that it's really meant for people driving trucks or other specialized vehicles. What aspect of the existing drivers license test does not cover what a person just driving a few other people around in their own car would not cover? After all, that's exactly the same as if they were simply driving friends and family around... if the test can't help you be a decent driver doing that, then improve the basic test instead of requiring you to know a truck swinging wide is called Offtracking...

Why, exactly, should Uber drivers get to drive passengers using regular non-commercial drivers' insurance?

They don't really, this is why Uber and Lyft both provide supplemental insurance for drivers.

Commercial insurance costs more because people who drive people around for a living are much more likely to cost the insurance companies more money

That's bullshit because the cost of personal insurance is partly factored in by miles driver per year, so that risk is ALREADY INCLUDED.

If you're letting them drive on non-commercial licenses than that means that regular drivers are subsidizing Uber-drivers.

No more than people who drive a lot for drives or commute already are.

There's a bunch of that in Bertrand Meyer's book. I know you don't like that book, but it has theories, metrics, and independent studies.

All the same, it would be nice if they'd given a recommended method of name mangling, because over time (a decade or more) all compilers would converge on that recommendation. But anyway, to me name-mangling's a minor issue compared to problems like calling conventions, especially with things like smartpointers. Not sure there's a way to fix that problem, but it sure can be annoying when you're trying to interface with C++.

Why, exactly, should Uber drivers get to drive passengers using regular non-commercial drivers' insurance?

I once drove some of my daughter's friends home from a birthday party. Should I have had to have a commercial driver's license?

Do remember that, theoretically, Uber/Lyft types aren't doing this full time, but more a matter of "I'm heading out to Walmart, anyone want to come along?".

And yes, I know that theory and practice aren't necessarily the same....

A "Yankee" means anybody from a place north of the Mason-Dixon Line [wikipedia.org] and south of Canada (or sometimes, to ignorant foreigners, it's a slang term for "American").

More properly, anybody from north of the Mason-Dixon line is a "damnyankee"....

one country not liking another country and manoeuvring the situation to give them an excuse for local 'peach keeping' annexation.

Peach keeping?? If that was all they wanted, we could have shipped them Georgia's (the State, not the country) entire supply rather than have to deal with a world war....

This is kind of a dishonest way for the food/chemical industry to try to push an agenda.

The food/chemical industry? This "survey" was done by a University.

Personally, I think they were trying to find out how many of the people answering the important parts of their survey were completely clueless.

There is no reason that we have to pick one and abandon work on the others. I don't see that the same resources go into solving more than one, except that the meteor and volcano problem have one solution in common - be on another planet when it happens.

The clathrate problem and nuclear war have the potential to end the human race while it is still on one planet, so we need to solve both of them ASAP.

Whoosh?

Just as an exercise, imagine the original star wars movies without the spaceships and you'll know what i mean.

Do you mean this?

A lot of people say that having seen the movies as an adult they don't hold up as well as when they saw them as kids. Does "Star Wars" affect me the same as an adult as it did when I was 12? No, but I still think it's a fine movie. However, my opinion of "Empire" has increased significantly since I first saw it with my Dad in the theater.

Lucas is a visionary. He sucks at the details. He set out to recreate the Saturday morning serials with "Star Wars" and was very successful in setting a new bar in special effects. His vision for the scope and scale of the movie, the simplicity of the characters, being mythical archetypes, perfectly fit what he was shooting for, and made for a fun and exciting movie. But he can't write dialog to save his life. Even the dialog in "Star Wars" wasn't great, and in the sequels, it was awful. He also cannot direct people, because everyone in the prequels looked like awful actors, even though they aren't.

But he's got the vision, an eye for the kind of spectacle that makes great movies, and should be recognized as such. The problem was when he was allowed to also do those things he was really awful at.