Unfortunately, too many people have the attitude that they'll only act in a civil manner towards other people if they are being recorded or otherwise evaluated. There's no reason to not act civil when no one is looking.

You've never used Uber, have you?

In fairness, they are pretty isolated. How many Uber rides have you read about where nothing happened? One of my friends here was getting a ride and she asked her driver how her experiences have been . She once got a passenger who had her go out to an isolated area then tried to drag her out of her car and into hell, but she was able to escape (and continued driving, actually). What you're describing, people being violent towards each other, is not something unique to Uber. Believe it or not, but assaults and rapes have actually been occurring since before Uber was a thing. The fact that they still occur doesn't mean that Uber failed, it means that we still have sociopaths among us who are willing to victimize other people. And it's not as if drivers attacking passengers are limited to Uber.

But, in the case of the Uber drivers attacking people, or in the cases where passengers attack the drivers, with Uber at least you know exactly who your attacker was (unless they stole someone's phone or carjacked someones car and decided to turn on Uber) which is going to lead to an arrest, but even without violent crime or the police getting involved the rating system should (in theory) remove the abusers from the system. I don't see any flamebait or troll comments on Slashdot, for example, but that's not because they aren't here. I just have my settings configured so that the system doesn't even show me them.

A single negative review doesn't lock you out of anything. But, even so, let me know when you come across a story of an Uber driver abandoning a family of 4 in a corn field.

Right. Nevada knows this, which is why they make it so easy for consumers to report when they are getting ripped off. All you need to do is download and print a PDF. Then you need to complete the affidavit and have it notarized, then mail or fax it to the Department of Business and Industry. Which is way easier than giving your driver a rating and leaving comments on your phone. Blake Ross suggests that you pack a few items with you while you're taking a taxi:

Right, because in the 46 or so years he was alive and not president, he probably never flew coach.

I don't understand your gripe with that name in particular. It's not an obscure name, and it evokes some sense of classical grace (as well as being an extension of the Opera name in a sense). There are any number of other projects out there, both successful and otherwise, that have much more ridiculous names. Firefox is a great example. What does "Firefox" have to do with being a web browser? Or SeaMonkey, or Chrome for that matter? What about Twitter? Or Flickr? What about LibreOffice, which I have to actually spell for people who haven't heard of it? How about "The Gimp?" But you're choosing to go on a rant over the name of a classical composer, as if no one has heard of this person?

In the first place, people are obviously fine with using things with names that don't have an obvious connection to the product. In the second place, plenty of people have actually heard of Vivaldi (the man). It's not as obscure as you apparently think it is.

Apparently not.

Apparently going through the FCC is the only way to get anyone to fix anything.

https://support.t-mobile.com/t...

It's not a cop locating app, it's an app to suggest alternate routes of travel around congested areas. It just has a feature to show where police are, but that's not the purpose of it.

Is what the results of your study show, that there are a few hundred hardened criminals around?

Are you suggesting that their test results are incorrect?

I don't see any DRM-like behavior at all, it's just destructive scanning. Who says it's only limited to a single reproduction? Like you pointed out, sometimes destruction is the only way to really find out what something is, but once you've done that what's really stopping someone from then creating 100 copies of it?

I saw the same thing on one of Arizona's ballots, I can't remember if that was for gay marriage or legalized marijuana though. The question was something along the lines of "should the existing restrictions stay in place", so if you voted yes then you were voting against changing the law.

So instead of last year being the hottest, you're saying that there's a chance that it was only unusually hot. So it's either unusually hot, or the hottest.

If we're stating numbers though, we might as well make an effort to be accurate, right? NOAA claims 48% accuracy, and NASA claims 38% accuracy, with the difference being 0.04 degrees Celcius hotter than the next warmest years (2010 and 2005). Various satellite systems have also ranked 2014 at fourth or sixth place.

I'm speaking about the dark web. You cannot purchase products there with dollars.

I do it because I'm only one link in that chain. I'm not the guy with a bunch of BTCs wondering who I can sell them to, I'm just doing a single transaction that involves converting to the local currency before making my purchase. In this particular situation, using dollars isn't an option in the first place when BTC is the only currency accepted.