What in the world makes you think a criminal background check isn't relevant? You want convicted sexual predators driving taxis around? How about people that have been convicted of fraud? You want them being responsible for operating the meter in an honest manner? There are enough issues with slimy/fraudulent practices in taxis services as it is, now you want to do away with the criminal background checks entirely? You're nuts.

Also, you seem to have completely ignored the third issue at stake here: insurance. Personal auto insurance != commercial auto insurance. The moment your insurance company finds out you were driving people around for profit at the time of your accident they will, completely legitimately, refuse to pay out any claims. While it's completely fine that you don't get paid after committing insurance fraud (which IS what you're doing when you violate your CLEARLY WRITTEN insurance contract to drive for profit) the important thing here is that anyone you've hurt (such as your fares and/or whatever/whoever you hit) are now left with no way to be compensated unless they can squeeze the money out of you. Since it's unlikely that people like Warren Buffet or Donald Trump are going to be Ubering in their Bentley, this means that those people are almost certainly screwed.

Probably for the best, Ms. Piggy is violent enough for the two of them.

Since it's a math problem instead of grammar, would that make you an an arithmetic Nazi?

Actually, it's an even worse comparison than that. Not only does it not disrupt major industries that employee large numbers of people and, more importantly, keep a large number of wealthy people wealthy but the nuclear disarmament process has provided a source of plentiful, already mostly processed, fuel for the nuclear power industry. For a while now, many US nuclear plants have been running off of fuel sold to them by the Russians and gotten from dismantled nuclear weapons stocks (though, last I heard that supply was finally running out). This means that, unlike with the global warming debate, the entrenched industry types have a good reason to actually support the process rather than work to stop it.

Rather than Ponzi scheme, the proper term for Kickstarter would probably be "confidence scheme" or "confidence trick".

There's always "Au jus"

Use MongoDB, it's web-scale. They produce kick-ass benchmarks by piping all your data to /dev/null.

If it's just genetic diversity you're worried about, why send the people themselves? It seems to me that sending that many people would be a massive over-expenditure of resources. Why not send much more manageable number of people to run the ship and build the initial settlement along with preserved genetic material for a massively larger population. Breed, predominantly, through artificial insemination for the initial generations until you are back to having the desired diversity in the actual living population.

What I want to know is what percentage of accidents involve at least one vehicle containing at least one passenger beyond the driver of that vehicle. I don't know for certain, but I'd imagine it's something up around 80%-90% or more. I think it's pretty safe to assume that if there is a passenger in the car, the driver probably spends at least some of their concentration paying attention to that person and/or talking to them. Just think of it, we could eliminate almost ALL accidents if we just outlawed the carrying of passengers... /s

AT&T can't meet their customer's demands while making the dramatically increased profits that they desire. There, fixed that for him.

"Seems to me that a better solution would be to just make it illegal to access except in a disaster, or even encrypt it with the NTSB (or other 3rd party) holding the keys."

Either of those would be an option, as would having the recording automatically deleted after a certain time period.

* Money: I can believe this as a reason. If the government didn't require the existing "black box", I'm sure the airlines wouldn't bother with it either. That's why you make it a government mandate and don't give the airlines a say in the matter.

* Privacy: This is a non-issue. The existing "black box" systems already record all the audio from the airplane's cabin.

* Efficacy: I don't see a reason why this wouldn't be extremely effective. Assuming the airlines were mandated to keep the equipment in running order at all times (as I certainly hope they are already required to do with the existing "black box" technology) I see no reason this wouldn't function, especially at the altitudes above weather that these planes almost always fly (this wouldn't have been this case with this particular flight, but would have dealt with plenty of other flights that have been lost in the past).

True, but we've had plenty of cases of either not being able to find the "black box" or having it take a very long time to do so. Heck, we've had plenty of cases of almost not being able to find the plane as a whole. My suggestion that such a system be designed so that the passengers and crew couldn't tamper with it was more of a side-note to the idea as a whole.

From my post you responded to: "We've had satellite phone technology for decades now"

Inmarsat (the company in the summary and original story is a satellite telephone/data company with coverage covering everywhere on the planet with the exception of only the poles.

Ugh, sorry, typos all over the place.