Here the reviews are a result of a transaction that took place and come from the parties to that transaction, not from random people who just want to vent. Every review has a grain of truth to it - if nothing else than to the state of mind the writer was at the time of reviewing it. Sure, some people get pissed by the littlest of things, and that character trait of a passenger is useful to prospective drivers, for example. So, I'd say that the review system works just fine, you just can't be a doofus when reading the reviews and taking everything at face value.

So, lack of focus and multiple shitty apps instead of one good one is somehow good? The heck?! I don't care about a call center, personally. I can type it in better than some phone jock can write it down. As for complaints - do you post each complaint publicly? Because, see, the public review systems work that way, and I'd rather have it public than hidden. There's zero transparency to your complaint resolution process. Logistical advantage, ha ha.

This is the funniest shit I've read in a while. I hope you're not serious. So, how many cab rides a day do you take, and where exactly?

It's worse than that. The regulation is totally ass-backwards. Flying anything small without FPV is hard and inaccurate, and, presumably, also less safe. I've personally looked through an FPV system installed in a plane that was flown line-of-sight by an experienced pilot doing it the old fashioned way. And all I have to say is that it was some very shitty flying. Sure, if you look at it from a distance, it looks "great". Yet when you see the VSI and the artificial horizon, you can't be but all "the fuck is the pilot on drugs or something?". Understandably, the accuracy of flying decreases with the distance, as gain in the pilot's visual feedback loop decreases with the decreasing size of the plane on the retina. It may be that the video is not quite necessary, but remote VSI and artificial horizon is a must, and those are, in one form or another, the mainstay of FPV.

In many, many places in the U.S., you really want to have a lawyer if you as much as get a speeding ticket past a certain overspeed threshold (say 20mph). The $200 you'll spend on a lawyer is way less than the insurance premium increase you'd get if you didn't get you case pleaded down. Never mind that some judges handle pro se cases with thinly veiled prejudice.

I have my own offsite storage: a few encrypted hard drives distributed among friends. Works great.

It's physically impossible because the power they need is a couple orders of magnitude larger than the power they're going to get. It's as simple as that. Passive RFID works because the power it needs is on par with available power. Again, it's just that simple.

So, as you might imagine, the devil is in the details. What they have is not passive RFID.

They were in an offsite Amazon data center - offsite from the instances running the live site. Still, they are not immutable, if you have right credentials you can erase them. So, if the data center hosting their live instances was wiped out by a tornado, the data would survive in the offsite location. Here a criminal with a password was more powerful than a natural disaster. Of course this was because they used one set of credentials for everything. They shouldn't have.

The company doesn't work for the stockholders. The company has a mission, and the stockholders who don't agree with it are simply not your stockholders in the first place. They don't bother. The founders of a company are free to set the mission as they see fit. The mission doesn't have to be 100% profit- or ROI-oriented. It's perfectly possible to have a public corporation that's after greater things than money. Just because for example Microsoft isn't set up this way doesn't mean it's a law of nature. Far from it.

CS is a subfield of mathematics. It's useful in software and computer engineering, but it's the engineering field you should be talking about, not a subfield of what is, in essence, an art. And yes, I do agree with Lockhart. Wholeheartedly.

I don't know what kind of magic sauce would allow one to have "IT in the cloud" setup. Windows clients with roaming profiles quickly get to be a drain even on a gigabit network. Even without a roaming profile, anything that isn't the boring old secretarial style work will require a decent bandwidth. Most media work or CAD work can't really be done over your typical cable internet. Those who would most benefit from an "IT in the cloud" type of a service - small businesses - really can't afford having gigabit links to their premises. Neither do I think that the bandwidth from any particular Amazon instance is where it needs to be. Does Amazon run their instances on machines/blades with 10Gbit links?

My wife's camera has a 32GB SD card, and she fills it up regularly. We have terabytes of family photos, and it's just occasional shooting, she's not much into photography, and those aren't raw files either. I don't think it's a very unique kind of a situation.

They did have offsite backups, but the credentials required to wipe those backups were the same as the credentials needed to access the live site.

I'd go farther: if you're a small business, plan on dumping Micros-anything ASAP. If you can reuse the hardware with someone else's software, great, but that's only an added benefit. Micros is now spoiled goods. Everyone and their mother is doing POS these days, I think it's time it became commoditized as an open source project.

What is it with everyone and their dog that they think U.S. laws apply to citizens only? The fuck? Are the people who think that way really that dumb? Protip: law applies to anyone present within the jurisdiction of said law, unless a given law specifically states otherwise. The only group of people that is treated specially within the U.S. Constitution are native people ("Indians").