I am not convinced by the wind turbine syndrome but some are and they seem have dug their heels in. If the only two options are putting one of these in or not putting in any wind turbines at all due to community resistance, then their advantage is quite significant.

I was about to say that he should tell his story on reddit so that they'll give him some money.

From what I have observed of Slashdot, everyone here made their lives for themselves with no help from anyone while working 40 hours a week going through University and then onto a graduate program. Not sure what this guys gripe is because he gave his mom a little money.

I have an ssh honeypot analyzer at longtail.it.marist.edu at Marist College and it shows that the second most popular account after root is "admin", and that the most common account/password tried is ubnt/ubnt.

Anybody who's been paying attention knows that default passwords on home routers are high on the bad guy's list of accounts to hack.

Anything protected directly by user entry into a smart phone is bound to have no usable entropy by itself anyway.

Modern phones don't actually turn the PIN or pattern directly into an encryption key. Older phones do (and by "older" in the case of Android I mean, "actually quite recent but not latest gen"), but modern phones feed the PIN to a dedicated secure chip that only divulges the actual secret key when the PIN matches, along with keeping track of attempts etc. To break it you need to break the secure chip, which means either finding an exploit, or grabbing your local scanning electron microscope and beating the chips tamper resistance measures (wire mesh etc).

They already got a large commercial insurance policy for their drivers. Insurance companies care about money and risk, they aren't denying insurance for the period when the driver is alone but with the app switched on because of some specific high minded ideal, it's a commercial decision.

Yes, but that's a risk that the driver takes not the Uber customer. And coverage when the app is on but not being used is a relatively minor detail of insurance - it will get worked out in one way or another.

Uber isn't even cheaper than a regular taxi in many places. It can be more expensive. When I was last in SF there was never a time without surge pricing. Seems it doesn't hurt them though. Lots of people seem to prefer the Uber experience regardless of price.

Here we have an app that is putting the entire taxi industry out of work, while the apps creators become billionaires

As opposed to the owners of New York taxi medallions, who do no work at all whilst still getting rich?

Disruptive capitalism at its finest. Sure uber is cheaper for the consumer, but is it better for society? The money is feeding fewer people, and making a tiny number of silicon valley elite uber-rich.

Eh? Uber, at most, replaces the taxi cab dispatchers at the other end of the phone line. The cars still need drivers. If anything they're creating more jobs by making it easier to go everywhere by cab, so increasing the demand for the labour intensive service of driving.

Now when Uber start to phase out drivers entirely in favour of robots, then you'll have a point. But it'll be another round of the same debate that's been rolling for centuries.

As a Canadian, my taxi money isn't even staying in the country! Do taxis really need to be colonialist?

What, you only get driven by immigrants who cross the border each morning? I think you'll find plenty of the money goes to the driver and some gets kept by Uber. Well, why not use the Canadian competitor to Uber then? It's not like they have any kind of cutting edge technological advantage. It's just a mobile app and some databases.

Uh... what other governments in supposedly non-corrupt jurisdictions respond to "Freedom Of Information Act" requests with ... actual information?

Eh? Perhaps I'm mis-reading your sentence, but FOIAs are quite commonplace throughout the developed world. And yes they often return useful information.

Try getting information on e.g. "Pussy Riot" out of the Putin government.

Try doing a FOIA for info on Anwar al-Awlaki, notorious freedom of speech abuser up until the point he got drone striked. See how far you get.

Haha, neat .... but ....

Java developers seem to have the most trouble getting their code to work: https://github.com/search?utf8... [github.com]

..... that search is almost entirely results of the form:

try {
} finally {
    working = true;
}

So no, I don't think it shows anything about Java. If you want to get a similar string for Java I'd suggest variants on "TODO: Refactor this". Java has very powerful refactoring IDEs and the corporate world has more of an emphasis on constantly refactoring stuff (hey, it's less effort than debugging some stupid bug reported by marketing, right?).

I'll never understand the hate for Uber.

You may not agree with it, but surely you must understand it? For what it's worth I am ambivalent about Uber and I am a Bitcoin developer, so I'm hardly someone to have kneejerk reactions against libertarian positions. But I do fully understand why Uber makes people uncomfortable.

The basic issue here is we are all raised in a social environment where it is assumed that law and morality are the same thing. Children aren't exposed to the difference at all - if a child asks their parents "why can't I do this thing?" and get an answer like "because it's against the law honey" then they aren't likely to enquire any further, and if they did, it's unlikely their parents will launch into a deep discussion of the history and theory of state power. It's just something you don't do because it's against the law.

In parallel children observe something else - things that are illegal are very often bad, and things that are bad are very often illegal. If a kid doesn't like it when her older brother steals her toys, and then her parents tell her that (a) stealing is wrong and (b) stealing is against the law, the link between law and morality is reinforced. Keep doing this over and over and the two notions develop as one.

Eventually, when we're much much older, we may start reading in the newspapers about miscarriages of justice. We realise the system is flawed. We may encounter laws or regulations that don't make much sense. We may decide that laws in other countries are unjust. But the notion that breaking the law is inherently immoral is ingrained very deep and is very hard to discard. Does English even have a word for an act which is illegal yet moral? I can't think of one. The closest is the concept of civil disobedience, but somewhere along the line that notion got linked with the idea that you have to put yourself up for arbitrary punishment as part of the "protest". So all governments have to do is make the punishments incredibly severe and hey, now there's no civil disobedience anymore, thus all law must be moral, right?

Laws are especially important because they are intended to give people stability, certainty and the ability to make long term plans. Some philosophers argue that the entire purpose of the state is to give people the ability to make long term plans. Certainly, stability is how regimes like the PRC justify their existence. The ideal body of law is precise, easy to understand, minimal, just and yet robustly enforced - thus everyone knows where the line is drawn and everyone can stay on the right side of it. Of course, real law falls short of this ideal quite often.

Now throw technological change in the mix. Larry Page once observed that it seems every time someone invents something new it starts out by being illegal. I can't quite remember where he said this unfortunately, so I can't give a citation. It might even have been some internal Google event. But he's said very similar things in the past in public.

So, enter companies like Uber. Or Lyft, or AirBnB, or even PayPal (it had a world of legal pain in the early years). Does anyone seriously think it'd be possible to build a service like Uber in the legal way? Bear in mind that many of the taxi regulations that governments want to mindlessly enforce specify details of things like how CB Radio is to be used (irrelevant with smartphones), how to print license information in the vehicle (irrelevant with smartphones), that the vehicle should be bright yellow so it can be spotted from the street (irrelevant with smartphones) .... in India they even specify that you must have a minimum of 12 phone lines going to your New Delhi based HQ! And you can forget about just asking nicely for change. Taxi regulators appear to be pretty much the opposite of dynamism, and taxi regulations are so boring that no parliament or local council is going to radically overhaul them for a company that hasn't got any customers yet, against the interests of the incumbents.

In a few parts of the world, it might have been possible to launch something a bit like Uber without any serious changes and with a cooperative partnership with the local taxi regulators. But it seems from practical experience that this would exclude vast chunks of the worlds population. And without economies of scale, perhaps Uber wouldn't be anything like what it is. So we have a case where to make progress, technologically, the law must be broken on a massive scale. But of course if the law ceases to be respected ..... where do you draw the line? Suddenly, there is no certainty any more. That stability the law exists to create is gone.

Therefore whether you approve or disapprove of Uber specifically has little to do with taxis or the details of these regulations. It's more of a proxy debate for a much deeper issue: which do you value more? Technological progress, or stability?

I have seen no surveys. But I'd be willing to bet that support for or against Uber has some kind of slight age bias to it.

By the same argument, if the government changes the income tax to 95% from next year, I have no recourse other than paying it

Actually, no, you could leave. And people do leave, look at France's 75% top rate. So can businesses. When a business leaves it tends to have more impact than when a single person does though.

Changing any law at any time is the right of the government. If it adversely affects you, tough luck

Yes, it is, you are correct. But not doing so is a big part of the difference between, say, Europe and Africa. In one place businesses and people can make long term plans. In other parts of the world, not so much. How you dish out the "tough luck" is a big part of how you make a successful country.

So sure - go ahead and hate on ISDS and anything that levels the playing field a bit between governments and businesses. Just don't cry when your economy is left behind.

Dear EU,

Please fix your shiny new VAT laws that require people to fill out 70+ tax returns to sell across Europe first. Then maybe you can lecture the internet on how to build single markets.