There are many legitimate reasons to limit the number of cars available for hire. Taxis drive around the city core looking for passengers, or park in the city waiting for a call. Increased competition would make this worse. In some cities, traffic is already a nightmare. I don't live in New York or any particularly dense city, but I have driven in many. Taking even a small number of cars off the road is often very desirable.

You can limit the number of delivery trucks, personal vehicles, and public/private busses on the roads only so much using financial incentives (high tolls and parking fees). At a certain point you need to use other methods to limit the number of cars, and limiting the number of taxis (and taxi-like services) is something that is easily implemented through taxi medallions. It is also reasonable because in most cities who don't license "enough" taxis, there are plenty of transportation alternatives.

Is this an argument against the parent? It seems like an argument for open I/O standards to me. All phones should be able to output HDMI video. All car entertainment systems should show up as input devices, and have sound I/O. These various I/O should be combined into 1 open standard wireless or wired connection. For wired connections, a standard input interface could be matched with a phone-specific dongle.

The problem historically has been that car stereo manufacturers have pandered to Apple, who can change their standards at any time, or have made up their own standards which they change at a whim. If a powerful group puts out an open standard with low or no licensing costs, this problem would be solved.

Personally, I'd really love to have one of chinese android head units but I can't justify spending $500 on purchasing and installing a car stereo right now.

You're equating changes in the brain with "brain damage". Many drugs enact changes within the brain, some permanent and some temporary. The term "brain damage" is a loaded and inflammatory term signifying that all changes as a result of drugs are bad. Some are not bad. Some might either be good or bad depending on who is defining what is desirable in a brain.

I struggled for years with depression, anger management, and had difficulty relating to people. After smoking weed for a few months, my depression and short temper have almost vanished completely. I can look at people now and have an inkling of what emotions they might be feeling, and I don't say so many insensitive things anymore. I also sleep much better. I get upset when I see people say that weed is a wonderdrug, and I don't mean to imply that. It has made my quality of life much better though. You might describe the effects on my brain as "increased feminine qualities", which sounds bad and is how this kind of change is often described. Maybe that's exactly what my brain needed though. Not all changes in brain chemistry are bad.

Isn't this a quirk of the nature of the Raspberry Pi product? Rasperry Pi is just a board. We assemble electronics in China because Chinese assembly is cheap. A robotic boardmaking machine costs the same everywhere. If you don't need to assemble the pieces together with a screen, battery, processor, buttons, speaker, etc, there is no advantage to making the board in China.

Or try driving any piece of heavy equipment over any kind of rough ground. I wondered why the front-end loader driver kept revving the engine. When I drove it myself, I quickly found out that rough ground + no suspension made the operator's foot bounce on the gas pedal and create a positive feedback cycle. More bump = more bouncing off the gas pedal = even more bumping around.

Also Saab tried a joystick control in one of their prototypes . Top Gear tried it out in one episode, it didn't work very well at all.

Yes but it is distasteful to me that a man who is worth somewhere between $6 and 145 million (it seems odd that the range is so large) is asking people with a lot less money to give him $1m. Even if we assume his net worth is only $6m, I really think he could manage to front 20% of his net worth to start up a business. I have a net worth of around $110k. If I was starting up a business I could float 20% of my net worth ($22k) fairly easily either through loans or taking it from investments. Rich people are rich because they find ways for other people to spend money on their behalf. The fact that his cause is "good" doesn't make this practice any better.

Then he realized that vacuums are already good enough, and people don't really need a better vacuum. So he changed tactics and spent all of his efforts on marketing and style. The business model is exactly the same as Bose. The product isn't anything special but the marketing strategy is.

Most stable countries which don't cooperate with the US are also countries in which relatively small bribes will get you into any warehouse. This would actually be worse. In the US strange people in warehouses would eventually get noticed by somebody- maybe a dockworker, inventory manager, or a forklift operator would start asking questions. In Russia, China, Venezuela, you just pay off everybody who needs paying off.

Don't forget that absolute consistency is inefficient. I could make a cruise controller that kept the speed to within 0.01miles/hour, but that wouldn't be the best controller I could make. Cruise controllers should not be so strict- it is more efficient to let speed increase a couple of mph when going down hills, and let it to drop slightly when going up hills. The best cruise controller would be aware of the upcoming terrain and calculate the most fuel-efficient throttle position to take, considering the characteristics of the engine, vehicle drag, etc.

It would likely require changes to the wing/nacelle interface. It could very well be that the existing engine mounting points can't take the weight/thrust load so a more radical change to the wing might be required. If you're going that far, you might as well redesign the whole plane. Sometimes upgrades just aren't worth the cost, despite radical advancements in technology.

You're equating terrorist organizations too much with a western-style company. Companies exist to create new products, market them, sell them, support them, and make sure existing customers become repeat customers. Most products are too complicated for a single person to make, let alone do all these other things.

Terrorists don't have to do any of these complicated things. All they have to do is acquire guns/explosives/knives and attack something. The "product" is so simple that illiterate children can do it. Spreading the message (marketing) can be done by anyone without any particular special skill. Repeatedly killing the "CEO" is a bit pointless- it may stop the franchise from creating more complex "products" (attacks) which require coordination and strategy, but in the end, (and I hate to use such a cliche) you can't kill an idea. Even worse, by killing these people from on high with missiles that often cause collateral damage, we are perpetuating and reinforcing the "idea".

I also don't own my own place, but I have found clever solutions over the years. When I lived in places with hot water heating, I would drill small holes under the radiators. These are unnoticeable if they are drilled within the safety shroud / housing of the radiator. Be extremely careful not to nick a water pipe.

Currently the place I rent has forced hot air. My router is in the basement but I have a PC on the main level. Forced air registers are fitted into appropriately-sized rectangular holes cut into the floors. However, the holes are not perfect, and are slightly oversized. I managed to sneak a CAT6 wire through this space. The space was small enough that I had to run the wire THEN crimp a connector on the end. I was prepared (but didn't need to) drill a hole directly in the air duct- when you move out, just tape it over with silver tape. Furnace maintenance people do this drill-and-tape trick commonly when they test natural gas units for CO/CO2.

Depending on the heating arrangement, this kind of solution may not be possible. However, in many cases, some creative thinking can find a non-destructive path for a temporary wire.

It is a silly rule. There's no reason that such standalone devices couldn't use bluetooth to connect to a smartphone data plan. I'm dying to get my hands on a good car stereo based on Android, but all of the chinese units have flaws or are more expensive than what I want to pay for a chinese brand with no support. Putting a cell modem into a car stereo is prohibitively expensive and dumb when most people in such a market have a smartphone anyway.

Nobody has really made a service or software where an open standard was easy to use. Case in point- video calls. There are a lot of free alternatives out there, some seem to work OK, other seem to not work so well. None of the alternatives are easy to use however, so Skype is what we use. I would prefer to use a more open platform, but I have better things to do with my time than troubleshoot such a system for hours.

Perhaps they have calculated that the first to go into that market will be the loser. Microsoft isn't really good at introducing new products anymore (were they ever?).