Maybe most people where *you* live use them twice a year.

You clearly don't live in Paris where this article is from. You probably don't live in NYC, Chicago, or SF (the actual cities, not their suburbs) either. I probably take taxis/ubers twice a week or more. Having UberX as a significantly cheaper (and usually cleaner and friendlier) option has greatly increased my taxi use. Taxis are just one component of a public transit system. They are the piece that lets you get to/from under-served areas of the city, or that let you make a direct trip when you don't have time for a bus or train.

Part of why uber works, is that they are better able to meet demand. A lot of the UberX drivers do it part time. They finish work at 5, and sign on to uber for a couple of hours (maybe until a fare takes them close to home). Because most big cities have a limited number of taxi medallions to the point where every taxi in the city is basically in operation 24/7, trying to catch a cab at 5:30 on a rainy day used to be almost impossible in busy areas. UberX drivers being able to fill in the gaps have made that much less of an issue. Even if you don't want to pay surge pricing (In my town, I think you have to be above 1.75X to be more expensive than a cab)...every person who is willing to pay surge pricing is one less person getting into a yellow cab, leaving them open for you.

Sometimes I just use the Uber app to hail regular cabs (especially since they don't surge). It means payment is handled automatically--no arguments over whether or not the CC machine is broken--and the drivers have been reviewed. Most of the regular "yellow" cabs that use uber are cleaner and friendlier than average. The drivers don't drive like assholes because if they get a bunch of bad reviews, they will lose their Uber privileges. Sure, they will still be able to pick up people on the street in their cab, but they lose automated hailing from customers who never have trouble paying and always tip (since it is built in to Uber). And the uber app doesn't discriminate between independent cabbies and different companies....ANYONE can sign up. Some of the cab companies in my town have started trying to make their own apps, but who wants to be locked into one? Why would I want an XYZ Cab that is 10 minutes away, if ASD Cab is just around the corner?

Interesting, I didn't know that. Looks like as of Win7, they don't even have to be the same resolution.

Unfortunately for me, I omitted some detail. I actually have to open a full-screen citrix session before starting remote desktop. While you can get citrix to span multiple monitors, it seems like it treats it all as one big montior (if you hit maximize, it covers both screens, even though they are mismatched resolutions). The documentation says it should work like normal...but that is not what I am observing with my particular citrix setup.

Yup. And the current trend towards 16:9 ratios leaves you with monitors that are too skinny in portrait mode.

No need to go portrait when you can get a screen that is as tall as a portrait screen from a few years ago. 16:9 sucks for viewing websites because it is super wide without much height (and most websites exclusively scroll up and down). But a browser window docked to 1/2 of the screen is pretty much the perfect width for reading, and on a big monitor, has plenty of height. 16:10 is a little better, In portrait, it feels a little more like a piece of paper...but again, side by side windows on a big 16:10 are better than a single window on a smaller portrait 16:10. 4:3 works pretty well sideways (or its LCD cousin 5:4), although at that point you have a lot of height and may not need to go portrait.

At home, I just use a 27" screen and half-screen dock everything. cleaner than a dual-monitor setup and almost as functional. The only think it can't do that my dual-setup used to do is that I can't have a full-screen game open on the primary monitor, and a browser open to some reference page on the secondary monitor. When I remote desktop into the office, it is actually better than dual monitors...remote desktop doesn't support dual-monitors, but it is perfectly happy doing split-screen docking on a giant single screen.

What I find even more interesting is that in NYC, UberX actually costs more than a taxi. Here in chicago, I use uberx and lyft a lot (often when I might have otherwise not even bothered with a cab)...because they are significantly cheaper. It helps that they are usually clean, smell normal, and have a friendly driver who isn't muttering away on the phone...but I mostly take them because they are cheaper.

But taking taxis in NYC can apparently sometimes suck so much that people will pay extra to ride around in some random dude's car. They aren't even undercutting the competition on price. They are purely succeeding on quality of service (and availability).

Well, some cities have figured out how to fix these things without simply banning anything that would compete with the shitty services the regular cab companies provide.

I believe NYC requires UberX drivers to get a commercial license, and I think Chicago has asked for taxes/surchages (as well as specifying insurance and background check requirements for Uber).

Yup, and these regulations are all coming thanks to local politicians. Average people don't even know the names of their state representatives...and those representatives all won their seats thanks to money from people like the local Taxi Company owners (or influence from people with large groups/unions that they can cajole into voting in local elections). It doesn't take a lot of money to influence a local politician, and there is not a lot of visibility to prevent it.

Why can't you cache facebook?

Sure, nothing on there is a static page, but if a million people are sharing the same 1MB image, you can still cache that. The text after "So and So shared..." will change, and the comments/likes will change, but somewhere there is a jpeg that keeps getting reused. Not everything makes sense to cache, but for things like images shared by George Takei, caching them once at the ISP or corporate network level could stop many gigabytes of external transfer.

Why not get a free phone? I don't know about this lollipop business, but my 2013 Moto X has been an absolutely excellent phone running android 4 (the 1st gen Moto X is optimized for user experience rather than raw power...and it isn't as huge as the new Moto X). Big improvement over my old android 2 phone and I believe they are available for free on a contract right now.

Before anyone jumps on my neck about "on a contract does not equal free", you've been paying for your current phone service since 2009. If you had gotten a free phone back in 2012, that contract would have expired by now and you'd be in exactly the same situation as you are currently in, except you would have a new phone. T-mobile I believe is the only big carrier who offers a discount for owning your own phone, so unless you really plan to switch carriers all of the time, it is silly to keep paying the same rate and *not* take advantage of the phone subsidy.

and FWIW, you should be able to keep your old contract terms. Until last week I was on some ancient grandfathered texting plans and another family member was still on unlimited data despite updating our phones multiple times. Discovered last week, that the whole family plan could be ~$30 a month cheaper if we went to shared data between the phones (with a cap greater than our combined usage), and we got switched from limited minutes/texting to unlimited talk/text.

Was yours a 2013 or a 2012? I haven't updated mine yet (was trying to figure out if it was safe to accept the OTA update if I had rooted it with Towelroot...and I lost my train of thought and the notification disappeared), but now you have me worried.

Are you sure? They have had quite a lot of advertising across many forms. I distinctly remember a bunch of ads involving some woman's talking pillow who was kind of an asshole.

My guess is that even with that advertising, they aren't getting enough women to sign up (because what's going to attract women better than an angry pillow berating them for spending an evening at home instead of on a date) so they resort to stuff like this to make their male customers think they actually have real people to talk to.

While I agree with you (even fancy things like a Phantom DJI aren't really drones...they can return to you automatically, but they are still just remote control quadcoptors), this is a university doing it.

Odds are that many of the people making use of this pavilion will actually be working on things that can be called drones. Seems like a perfect place to experiment with completely autonomous flight since you don't yet have to handle weather and you don't have to worry about bystanders.

Serious question. What does walmart think about shipping costs?

They are now closing the loophole to block matching to 3rd party sellers (which is probably fair), but what if the $80 PS4 were legitimate? An $80 PS4 with $350 shipping. The original $80 price was either taken down quickly, or someone tried to buy it (and then had it declared out of stock by the 3rd party seller), but if you sold it for $80 plus a shipping cost to make up the legitimate cost of the unit like many ebay sellers used to do, would walmart honor it or would they try to calculate shipping?

Granted, there have probably been a lot of improvements since 1997, but at that point they already had 40 years of engineering improvements and they decided "Dangling men with squeegees over the side of the building" was still a better option than trying to find a new rotating solution.

I think robots will be the answer. Trying to build some kind of mechanism into every single window becomes astronomically expensive...especially if that mechanism is only going to be used once a month or less. Having a couple of robots that can do a whole building (or a whole block) every month is going to be a lot more efficient. But since statistically, window washers are not anywhere near being one of the most dangerous occupations, it won't happen until the robots are both cheaper and better than the human window washers.

Except right now, this kind of works.

The people going to those bootcamps already have college degrees and may have worked for years in unrelated industries (or non-coding functions in related industries). So when you hire someone out of one of the bootcamps, you may only be hiring someone with "Junior Developer" level coding skills, but they aren't going to behave the same way as the 22 year old brogrammer you are also interviewing for the same position. They have experience working in a business environment, collaborating with others on multi-year projects, interacting with people outside of +/- 3 years of their own age, possibly in managing employees. Since many are coming from lower paying fields, they probably have similar salary expectations to what the 22 year old is looking for. l

As a catalyst for a career transition, the boot camps aren't a bad thing. But if you step away from college grads with work experience (and the few exceptional kids who went for a boot camp instead, but probably would have been successful either way), I think it starts to break down. Other posters have mentioned the growing market for the "auto mechanics" of programming (or even the "quick lube techs")...but even if that were true and it had potential to be a long term career (without having to eventually go to college anyways to step up from the trenches), I don't know that the boot camps are appropriate--they aren't an equivalent to vocational schools. I know it is harsh to say, but many of the people who become mechanics instead of engineers are not going to thrive in the intense environment of a 19 week boot camp. The people I know who have done them worked hard. They found the programs challenging despite being college graduates from good schools. So even if your goal is to just produce code-monkeys...you aren't going to get anything good from pushing boot camps on high school kids.

That has been tried. One Prudential Plaza had rotating windows. Normally held in place by inflatable moldings, they could be deflated to allow the windows to rotate for easier washing.

Must not have been all that great though...because after 40 years, they decided to replace them all with conventional windows and start using window washers.