Dictators and demigods are the antithesis of democracy no matter which side they claim to represent.Blaming the "left" for Stalin and Mao makes as much sense as blaming the "right" for Mussolini and Hitler, none whatsoever.

I'm pretty sure this predates Red Dwarf.

When I went for my taxi license back in the 80's it was;
1. Pee in a cup. 2. Find an address in a street directory. 3. Calculate a split fare. 4. Memorise a handful of regulations, must display license, what to do if customer refuses to pay, etc.

Shit job, shit pay, but if driving a cab doesn't teach you how to handle random arseholes, nothing will.

If you read the statistical "signs" they all say the cab driver is in far more peril than the passenger.

I drove cabs for 3yrs, never, ever, gave "quotes", I gave estimates but made it clear you were on the meter since half of what was on the meter wasn't mine to give away in the first place. Very rarely someone would give you a big bill to drive their elderly mum home, in those cases the meter wasn't switched on ;)

Do you still get your 50 cent astroturf fee when you post AC?

Boot sector attacks have been a malware vector since..well...forever, back in the DOS3.x days we had Norton disk doctor to remove them manually.

But let's be honest, most of the people outraged by this article don't know who either one is. I didn't until I read TFA.

http://tf.nist.gov/time/common...

Because NIST developed the "Common view time transfer using the GPS system"...

Because NIST has a finger in everything having to do with measurement?

Clearly, you'll never be a politician, son!

AFAIK, the most popular RDBMS by installed base is still SQLite which the authors released into the public domain many years ago. It won't keep up with oracle's performance on very large data sets but it's a hell of lot less complex to set up, and as you say most business/consumer applications simply don't need the performance (and price tag) of something like Oracle or MSSQL.

""Societies grunts" don't have jobs" - You must have a very different definition of the word "grunts"?

Long post for someone who doesn't care?

... look it up, because no matter how well that creep plays the victim, he doesn't have a leg to stand on.

Apples to Orangutans - Uber don't have "walk ups", a fair comparison would be between Uber and a booked taxi.

Do Uber have hidden mics, panic buttons, and radio code words for trouble? Taxi's in Oz had all those things when I was a driver back in the 80's, nowadays they also have cameras. Everyone talks about passenger safety, the fact is drivers are at least an order of magnitude more likely to be attacked than the passenger.

Preferential voting gets some strange results, we have it here in Oz and it is not uncommon to see someone get into the senate who had less that 5% of the primary vote. This often gives a handful of independent the balance of power, meaning when ever the two major parties disagree in the senate the only vote that counts is that of the independents. After half a century of this I'm still not sure if it's a good thing or not, independents are more often than not fringe dwellers, radicals, and religious nutters.

Compulsory voting doesn't bring good governance (as the current mod proves on a daily basis), however it does do a very good job of capturing what the whole country thinks on election day. The fines are trivial and it's very rare for them to be issued, let alone enforced, yet we always have a turnout well above 90%. Also why does the US insist on having an election on a Tuesday when everyone is at work, that's just fucking bizarre, it's like you don't want societies grunts to turn up.

The unspoken assumption behind this proposal is that yes, Obama does want the uninterested and uninformed to vote, because he assumes they will trend Democrat. Some of the Democrats' greatest strongholds are high-density urban centers where both education and income levels are low. So Obama extrapolates that out and decides that means that mandatory voting will be a big windfall for Democrats, and give them a one-party lock on government.

I suspect that the reality wouldn't be as rosy for them as they're hoping. I could see it being a boon for third parties, as people who have no interest in the two major parties are compelled to find a candidate they don't hate.