No, they haven't. If Uber was willing to themselves shoulder any liability, that would be one thing. But they claim that individual drivers are responsible for any liability that may arise in an accident, and that Uber is not responsible. Of course, conveniently enough, the average driver nowhere near enough assets to pay out any liability claim in the case where they caused an accident. That is precisely why insurance is required.

NSF has been shifting its funding away from CS research, and DARPA has been moving a bigger proportion of its funding from basic research to near-term applied research. As a result, there are more and more strings attached to research-grant money. Some kind of "dual-use" thing where you're doing the research you want to do, which DARPA also happens to be able to repurpose for its own uses, is if anything the best case. It's not that uncommon to just straight be working on whatever DARPA wants done.

If you don't like these legal mechanisms, get rid of them.

Did you read this thread? I am arguing for that explicitly, which is what started this thread! Instead of jumping onto you ideological soapbox right away, why not learn to read?

California has a problem with red tape and NIMBYism. Telsa's fear of locating in California is most likely, I am arguing, due to that. HSR is just an example that the problem is so bad that even the government itself is running into it, so no wonder Tesla is scared of building anything there. Whether HSR is good as a policy reason or not is irrelevant to this discussion. The fact that the people using red tape and NIMBYism happen to agree with you politically on this issue doesn't make them any less disgusting fucks; they're just as bad as any other NIMBY asshole.

There are plenty of legitimate reasons you could oppose the HSR system, but tying it up in red tape and NIMBY lawsuits is not one of them, and that's one of the big things it's run into. I'm just using it as an example of how the red-tape and NIMBY-lawsuit problem is so bad in California that even California's own infrastructure projects get snagged in it.

You can get academic journal articles in many libraries, which can help independent researchers, autodidacts, or even just particularly interested people. Obviously a local branch serving primarily non-researchers won't have a huge selection of journals on the shelves, but many do have access to academic library material via partnerships, if you want those materials. For individual articles, sometimes they'll even just get you a PDF scan (if local policy/law permits).

Depends on the library systems of course, but I've used two systems that are like that. The Danish public libraries have access to the entire national university system's holdings via loans and scans, and it works very nicely. Now you might think that's something that only happens in Socialist Scandinavia, but another place that does that is, oddly enough, Texas: through the TexShare program, anyone holding a public library card can visit most academic libraries in-person, or access electronic databases remotely.

Yeah, I don't know why you'd take the bus when the metro is so much faster.

Somewhat true, but the regulations really could use an overhaul in the efficiency department. I'm fine with high standards, but if the standard is met, it should be possible to get approval in a reasonable amount of time without spending an inordinate amount of money on the process, and with a reasonable degree of finality (rather than having a million different ways to reopen a court challenge). California's patchwork of regulations is kind of a mess in that department, which is even causing problems for the state itself; the high-speed rail plan has been mired in the process and lawsuits over the process that state law permits a very wide range of people to file. (Granted, it's not all CA law that's the problem in that case; there are also people trying to slow down the process using federal agencies and lawsuits.)

Quite often the project ends up with zero adoption because its not that interesting and often there's a bunch of existing projects with already built communities that are doing more or less the same thing. Or the focus is so narrow that it solves nobody's problem.

And those are the better ones! The really bad open-source dumps don't even really build or work outside the original company's complex production environment, and don't have any documentation for how to set up such an environment.

Not to worry, lots of other styles in attendance as well. Wikipedia only has one photo of attendees, and it happens to be this one.

What does it have to do with his generation (born 1983, so I guess borderline Millennial)? People have been doing similar things for at least the two generations prior to his. Did you forget the '60s?

Weird, I've never run into that.

I keep hearing that editing Wikipedia is terrible, but I edit now and then, and somehow I haven't run into it. Maybe I should edit Israel-Palestine articles or something to see a more heated area. In archaeology (which is what I mostly write about) people seem nice.

The guy who wrote the linked article (Andreas Kolbe) is legit. He contributes quite a bit to Wikipedia and I believe is interested in making it better. He's also critical of many aspects of it, but not trollishly so.

Much of the rest of Wikipediocracy is indeed filled with unsavory characters who're angry they weren't allowed to push various agendas on Wikipedia, though. What seems to have kicked it off initially, among other things, was one of its co-founders getting banned because he tried to expand his linkfarm business into Wikipedia.

Recall here that in the English Wikipedia, a company employee who registers a User:AcmeLtd. account and then proceeds to edit the Acme Ltd. article is instantaneously blocked for violating the user name policy, and politely asked to come back with another account carrying some innocuous name like RedRider12.

Although I think this policy doesn't make a lot of sense even as it is, it's not quite that strict. The English Wikipedia doesn't have a policy against company names in usernames, but against shared "corporate" usernames not run by an individual. So you can't have an official "corporate account". You can however you use corporate names in your individual username, if you want to identify both yourself and your affiliation. In that case the suggestion is to pick a username that has both the organization name and some individual identifier, like User:AcmeLtdJohn or User:John@AcmeLtd. See here. The goal seems to be to ensure that accounts are operated by individuals rather than by press offices. Although I'm not sure policing the actual name is a particularly effective a way of enforcing that.

Yes, thinking of Uber and Lyft as taxi businesses rather than tech businesses makes it a lot clearer what's going on. The taxi business has long been shady, and it still is even when the taxi company has an app.