Performance likely, because data can actually be shoveled between processes with probably greater concurrency than with a third user land context in the mix.

Security I don't see how, moving it in the kernel is an improvement. You add all the risks associated with being able to step all over systemically important data structures to a "process" that by definition has to communicate with a largish number of less trusted processes. If you limit who/what is allowed to talk to dbus with a firewall like solution you make dbus less useful as an IPC channel.

  The kernel team tends to be made up of really well qualified people and have more discipline than other OSS projects so in that sense the code quality might go up, but there are probably better ways to accomplish that than merging a project into the kernel!

The performance considerations might be a justification but I have never really seen DBUS as a high performance IPC channel anyway. Maybe I am just badly misinformed on its planned usecases. I thought it was for deriving simple short messages like "A new input device is a available" not shoveling megabytes of data between processes. We have fifo pipes and UNIX sockets for that, and if latency is an issue there is always shared memory.

I have to agree I have lived in both places where I have had Cox and other places with Comcast, Cox has been the best experience.

If there were video of Hillary physically being handed a stack of cash (right hand), cigar hung loosely from lips while strangling a kitten(left hand) from a Russian CEO over a document that said approval to process uranium; people would still apologize for her and do their best to 'splain it way. If that effort failed they'd invent some other way for her to evade accountability like 'No controlling legal authority' and the press would complicity discontinue talking about it and return focus to what sort of burrito she ordered.

Business is business, I take your point but I think the issue isn't so much insensitivity as being needlessly insulting. I am adult I understand our employee/employer relationship is supposed to be mutual beneficial. Treat me like an adult.

Tell me, "..We have to let you go, its nothing to do with your job performance, its just that your job function is no-longer aligned with our objectives" No I won't be thrilled about it but I'd much rather have an honest statement of the facts than some be euphemism about being re-mixed, right sized what have you.

I also feel that companies should be honest about up coming layoffs when possible, but recognize it isn't always possible. Sometimes they can't risk letting people know until the last moment, and there are good security justifications for getting people out the building in a mass layoff situation. Still I'd say cut the bullshit, screw the Monday "Breakfast invite", just walk out to the bullpen Friday afternoon and let people know what's what.

Beware what you have said is dangerously near to the sort of statement that bring the Social Justice Warrior types down on you. Just encase you missed the memo, we are no long allowed to chastise people for engaging in overly risky, and ignorant behavior, its not longer their failing in the form of lack of personal responsibility, but yours and mine in that we are are "victim blaming".

The sensible way would be to do what every Linux distro has been doing for 20 years now. The "APP" includes a manifest of its dependencies. When you install it from the App store (remember Apple does not make side loads easy, unless you are developer in which case you can solve deps issue by having the required packages available) it simply goes an fetches the required libraries at the same time if you don't already have them.

This is a solved problem!

Taking in one tiny step further IOS just needs to scan through all the manifests (or keep a little sqlite db or something) and remove non-core library packages anytime a user deletes the last application which depends on it. Its not 100% easy stuff, but there are plenty of working examples, out there to lift concepts and perhaps even code from.

if by advances you mean 10+ gigabyte WINSxS directories that make the OS suck balls to run visualize / backup unless you have an expensive block level de-dupe system on SAN than yes there have been advances.

But has anyone actually used a feature phone in the last 5 years?

Yes, for at least two reasons and probably others.

First unless you go out of your way searching and get something like a jitter bug or something you can't get a dump phone. Even the most basic flip cheapest/free flip phone AT&T, VZW, TMOBILE etc offer is a J2ME feature phone with some data capability. I can get e-mail via IMAP, and NOAA weather info etc with J2ME apps that are easily installed. There may not be any useful apps pre-installed but that is another matter. Its unlikely outside some very specific corner use cases calling for specialized equipment a non-smart phone user isn't using a feature phone.

Anyone who spends anytime in the wilderness hiking etc, still likes feature phones. They either have days of standby battery time, removable batters so you can prevent parasitic drain so as to be sure that lithium ion cell will be ready if you NEED it. They still tend to weigh less than even the smallest smart phones too; although the gap is shrinking. Finally these phones are cheap should they come to an unfortunate end like you slip fording a stream and everything in your pack gets soaked or you fall and crush the thing, etc no big loss and you don't have to have some insurance plan. Even if nothing bad happens to them they tend to be fairly rugged without the need for more weight in the form of protective cases etc.

I know there are smart devices target at outdoor sports folks, but for me I have yet to find a product that is a clear winner over feature phones.

Okay let me paraphrase.

Hello I am trying to raise $30B to build a pipe line, would you like to contribute? Be advised however if you choose not to contribute and I don't reach my goal I am going to spend the money lobbing instead to get government to force you to contribute via taxation under threat of prison.

By your logic we should only produce anything were all the raw input materials happen to be locally available. If we bought into that theory there are lots of things we simply could not produce.

Yes they say that so they can avoid stupid protectionist regulation that would otherwise lock them out of the market. The original reasons limiting the number 'real cab service vehicles' was to create tax revenue for big cities; and maybe to reduce the number of motor vehicles on the road. Both horses have left the barn it does not matter.

I don't see any advantage to 'real cabs'. The they know the roads argument is utter bullshit. Every cab I have been in lately the first thing the guy does it punch the address into a smart phone and let GPS take him there; hint the same thing every uber driver does.

As to out of the major routes bit, I also don't believe this is a problem, for admittedly anecdotal reasons. I have done lots of hiking on the east coast trails, AT, Long Trail, etc. That hobby has found me wanting rides along the side of lots of little rural roads outside lots of small towns. There is ALWAYS a "cab service". Why? Because the need for cabs is relatively low. Typically the folks running the local gas station, convince store, or hardware store fill this role by moon lighting. When someone calls up for a ride (rare) they just close up for a few moments and take care of it. The also know the fair is almost certain to be a good number of miles and is therefor worth their time. Uber is actually PERFECT for this business model.

"price gouging" laws almost always have an emergency component, that is the only thing that makes them remotely Constitutional. They also generally apply only to items considered necessary for survival; ie food, water, gasoline in a quantity you might be using to travel out of a disaster area, etc.

Uber probably could be prevented from using surge pricing or prosecuted for it where they to do it in the middle of hurricane or something. "The local sports team just finished playing" isn't an emergency. So its not illegal at all. I don't know what it is about Slashdot that seems to make people asume anything they don't like must be someone getting away with a crime.

Surge pricing is a good thing!

Drivers are a resource like any other. People have lives etc, and most can't just hit the road because the cost of rides has gone up. Overtime though I am sure that people who want to do Uber as more than just a hobby can and do observe when prices are highest and re-arrange their activities so they can be driving at those times. That is a process that probably happens over months though not, moments. Its just simple supply and demand and its how the market should operate. If you want a ride so bad at the same moment everyone else does you should be willing to pay! If you time is so valuable you can't hang out for a couple hours for the rush to die down, than you ought to pay someone who is trying to earn a living driving for the privilege of immediate transportation. If you are unwilling to pay that driver deserves the change to sell their services to someone who is!

People who complain about it pretty much are crying that they can no longer take advantage of livery drivers not having good information about the market and being able to revalue their services accordingly. They are just use to drivers having no choice but to set a price the market will usually support and missing the opportunity to earn more at peak times. So I say shut the fuck up if you have enough money to pay someone to drive your ass around you have enough money to pay them what it worth at that time. Otherwise wait, walk, take public transit, drive your own vehicle, etc.

There lies the rub. If you push to much of the burden out to homeowners they just might start going off the grid. A little in improvement in battery or other storage tech and it could happen.

That is a problem too because it will create a question of capital. If I have the capital resources to invest in a home energy system to go off the grid and say the payback time is 15 years. I and many other people might decide to do just that.

Where does that leave the people who don't have $30K + maintenance costs to purchase said system? It leaves them on a grid with fewer and fewer customers and probably the customers less dependable for on time payment at that. Because the grid has to go where the people are the fixed operating costs don't go down much, and I doubt the variable costs of distribution are significant. Eventually the local PUC will have to allow distribution and connection fees to go up faced with a bankrupt distributor that nobody will buy and may simply shut its doors otherwise.

The situation on the generation side too is not entirely dissimilar, although the generation business has more variable costs their are limits to how quickly it can scale down. Certainly not as fast as individual home owners can deploy domestic systems. Plants are built with 60 year anticipated service life, if you suddenly only need to generate only 30% of the power in year 20 you anticipated, it may not be efficient to operate the plant profitably at that level.

I want to EMPHASIZE STRONGLY I AM NOT ADVOCATING ANY POLICY POSITION in this post but I think its an interesting question because technology that allows middle class folks to go off grid affordably very much has the potential to result in haves and have-nots when it comes to reliable electrical power, while today even the very poor for the most part have dependable electricity in this country(USA).

Working code speak volumes in the standards process and that is okay. You take on the risk that nobody will be interested in what you have built or you may discover political opposition that you never counted on; if the resistance is strong enough you get left holding the bag having spent time and treasure on something that will never see wide use.

On the other hand if you start out with a large open consensus building process as you say its very likely you don't get anywhere, or end up with a bastardized design by committee mess, and we spend the next two decades reading on slashdot about how if only people had listened to Person about X during the design process the world would be better.

Short answer is there are problems with both approaches and neither is right or wrong, you just have to go with what makes the most sense in terms of resources and time scale for you.

Although, put out by HandSpring (with palm OS) and than later required by Palm, the Treo phones were some of the earliest of what we might consider to be modern 'smart' phones and they really were the best of their generation. Yes Blackberry might have had some more feature richness but needed a lot of propriety costly infrastructure behind it to deliver that functionality. A Treo could do IMAP etc so was actually useful to 'regular' people and businesses that were to small to justify a BES server.

I don't think HandSpring/Palm were wrong to move into the mobile phone market. I don't think they positioned themselves well. Had they gone after the consumer market and branded themselves as the Blackberry for anyone not a shyster^H^H^H^H^H^H sales professional they might have succeeded. If anything they were perhaps to early to market.