Bingo!

You can't make promises or covenants of this nature with the intent of even remotely considering to revoke them. Your successors are also bound to them. Typically someone will bring up Promissory Estoppel and then raise Bad Faith- and then move to dismiss the case you brought against them...and most typically get it.

That falls into statistically normal usage. Being a commercial driver absolutely does not. Statistically, a commercial driver drives way more than a noncommercial driver, and they're much more likely to be sued, and for more money. It's absurd to argue that they should be able to drive on insurance rates calculated for statistical norms of noncommercial drivers. If you allow that sort of ignoring of statistics then you might as well get rid of all statistical tables period and charge every last person the same rate for all types of insurance.

Why, exactly, should Uber drivers get to drive passengers using regular non-commercial drivers' insurance? Commercial insurance costs more because people who drive people around for a living are much more likely to cost the insurance companies more money. If you're letting them drive on non-commercial licenses than that means that regular drivers are subsidizing Uber-drivers.

Svavar Knútur is great... the music's really pretty, but between songs he's a standup comedian. ;) That said, some of his songs are funny too... one of his songs (in Icelandic) is about a guy on his way to propose to his girlfriend when he gets bitten by a zombie, and he meets up with her and is trying to propose while slowly turning into a zombie and increasingly wanting to eat her instead... but it turns out that she was bitten by a zombie too, so they end up living happily ever after ;) Oh, and then there's this song.

If Earth becomes Venus-like then those with innovation and drive will innovate a way to protect themselves, while those that don't will eventally adapt, growing a hard, rocky skin and blood based on liquid metals rather than water. The climate has changed in Earth's past and life survived; if our future is to be a tribe of hideous rock monsters ruled by clever, pitiless human overlords in protective bubbles, then bring it on. It's not a reason to hinder economic growth.

--
Vote freedom. Vote prosperity. Vote Reanimated Corpse Of Ayn Rand in 2016.

I more prefer my apocalypse-themed music to be romantic and slightly nerdy ;)

You forgot cheapest! More proof that nuclear power is the cheapest low-carbon power source, not a tech more popular on K street than Wall Street that gets by via being absolved of all potential liability for major accidents, getting huge loan guarantees, and being allowed to pass off cost overruns to consumers at-will and even still has trouble finding investors. Nuclear power has always been more popular on K-Street than Wall Street.

How did that "nuclear renaissance" work out for you all? Yeah, that sure bombed out fast. Gotta love an industry with a negative learning curve, where costs continually rise with time and scale rather than dropping (aka, learning of new potential problems and risks faster than refining the technology to lower costs).

Nuclear scares the public a lot more than it actually poses a risk to their health or life. But you know who it scares even more? Investors. Given the race out the door today, can you imagine what it'd be like if the industry wasn't let off the hook for potential damages over a maximum in the event of a major accident? No insurance company would touch the industry with a 10 foot pole. Nuclear accidents may not be good at killing people, but there's one thing that they're damned good at and that's costing a bloody fortune to remedy.

"...and change the combination on my luggage!!"

Headupassians don't typically care about those things...

Heh...it does fit the bill well, doesn't it?

The biggest problem, though, with all of this is that the dysfunctional pile (of sh.. if you must know...) sitting there has a massive network effect that you're going to have to counter. The network effect there with Android is going to work massively against you unless you can come out with something compelling. MeeGo could've been it...had they not been dysfunctional in their own way. Tizen...heh...I don't see that going well. I could be wrong. But I suspect I won't be.

As for cross-platform in the sense others talk to...it's a fail. WinCE had that in it's beginnings. Shortly thereafter, even though you could make for SH4, MIPS, and ARM, the pain and hassle of maintaining code for all three ended up with the software vendors working off a similar kind of network effect. Which class of arch was the most popular SoC's on the most popular WinCE devices? ARM. So you ended up with ARM only binaries for a *LOT* of the apps. At some point, it became more moot because everybody and his dog started doing nothing but ARM WinCE devices. This is why I think all these X86 Android devices popping up are silly. It's just Intel buying their way into relevance in this space. Much like the recent push for Edisons, etc. in the space that ARM devices like the BeagleBone Black reign.

If Intel can make something honestly compelling instead of the smoke and mirrors they've got going right now...great. Otherwise, you're fighting a network effect you're just not going to win playing against.

That's part of where the thinking about Tizen being all but a never-ran comes into play.

Tizen currently makes some small sense on something like a Smart TV (which could use Android, but could go with something else since you can live with "less apps") or a GPS system where it, too, doesn't "need" apps to make it worthwhile as an OS, UI, and target application.

But then, you could go with Android. The developer space is already there and the network effect for it is compelling.

In order to counter that network effect and have a chance, you'll need apps. LOTS of apps. Maybe not as many as Android or IOS have for them- but quite a few. Perhaps as many as half of what is in the Play market to start with.

I, personally, don't see that happening. Not with some HTML5 driven frameworks like Sailfish, FirefoxOS, or Tizen. You'll have to make it compelling enough to make a tectonic shift in the developer marketplace. Almost immediately. It's doable. Just not with this stuff we're talking about.

That's because Chipzilla's involved with it. They've been flailing around with all sorts of crap, muddying up the whole picture with MeeGo, Tizen, now Edison and Tesla. They want to have it all for themselves. An admirable business notion, but unaccomplishable in the manners unto which they've been fucking things up with in this space.

The only thing that's common between the two is the OS core...which has now drifted since Tizen's formation both on Sailfish and Tizen.

It will be just an other obscure mobile OS - But If Samsung actually start to manufacture Tizen devices over Android. They will loose the market just like NOKIA did a few years before.

Ahem.

There's a little unspoken benefit about what a true, affordable, universal-coverage broadband system could provide for: drones. Envision drones that can provide high quality real-time streaming (commands to the drone, imagery back) without requiring line of sight or effective cellular service.

Individuals and companies could get the sort of drone communication that today only exists for militaries. Buoyant drones (hydrogen, helium) could stay aloft for long periods and go anywhere. Conceivably a hydrogen-powered drone could stay aloft until its electronics failed, via condensing atmospheric moisture via a hygroscopic material and electrolysing it to replace the slow rate of leakage (using solar power). So picture a world where, say, anyone could buy a mass-produced mini spy drone and send anywhere, even a war zone with no infrastructure, and have it fly at a height where it would be almost impossible to spot. It would in most cases cost significantly more to take down than it costs to build (barring "drone killer" drones, but then you get to needing to maintain a large distributed inventory of them and a sensitive nationwide detection system that works at all altitudes, and you're just inviting people to come up with countermeasures). It would make it increasingly difficult to lie about human rights abuses, war crimes, armed incursions, etc.

I once looked into what it would take to make such a drone previously but quickly realized that the bandwidth costs alone via today's satellite internet services would get pretty astronomical quite fast, turning a "cheap drone" into a prohibitively expensive one. But this could change the picture. If satellite internet is cheap and widespread, not only will your bandwidth be cheap, but it also means that your connectivity hardware will also be widespread and cheap.

On the home front, one of the big concerns by regulatory bodies for all of these drone-based services companies are eager to launch is of course loss of connectivity - which is one reason why, for example, the FAA has been resisting them in the US. But if satellite service to a drone is much less likely to suffer from the reception irregularty that plagues cell phone towers. And you always have cell phone connectivity as a backup. You're greatly improving the overall reliability of your drone communications, which should make it easier to start getting commercial drone services approved by regulators.