I can only go off the information Uber makes publicly available without signing their terms of service, but this disclaimer is prominent on their marketing materials: "Applicable tolls and surcharges may be added to your fare." Sounds like you are agreeing to unspecified surcharges, which if they abuse, your only recourse would be expensive litigation rather than protection laws of taxi services.

In both scenarios, the passenger may be fleeced. The difference is, in one, the passenger has a recourse (having the local government find the driver in violation of the law and losing his taxi license if he does it often enough) and in the other not (having only a private relationship with a non-employee of a private company, having agreed to term of service for using the App, and only being able to sue the driver on his own).

If we're going to say the regulations are bad, and hence we should throw them all out, we're going to have an anarchy.

The implication was not that medallions are only available for a million dollars, but that there are medallions for large companies that are a million dollars and medallions for smaller services which cost less.

Guaranteeing taxi-users to need a GI using recent (online) maps is a pretty bizarre requirement for good taxi service. Taxis exist to serve everyone, which includes the blind, the elderly, the religious, and the poor.

Also, an uber driver who decided to flaunt all regulation, can certainly charge a customer for taking the scenic route. They aren't licensed taxis, so are exempt from the rule that they must take the shortest route unless permitted by the customer.

There is a middle ground, grasshopper. The choice between draconian regulation serving only the interests of the wealthy establishment and anarchy were laws are meaningless words on a piece of paper is an illusion. Labeling them with ethical monikers like good and evil only furthers the false dichotomy and prevents a civil discussion about what it is we, as a society, actually want to fall on this debate.

You know, if you're a billionaire, you are almost certainly one on paper. You want a strong rule of law to protect your property. In places with weak laws, corruption runs rampant and the wealthy people are often whacked by other powers.

I see the Uber debate as being about something completely different than "COMPANIES BAD GOVERNMENTS GOOD". Some taxi regulations, as you helpfully point out, are indeed, obsolete. They can certainly use a refresh. How we handle this situation is the crux of the disagreement.

Uber wants to ignore the rules and do what makes sense. The government wants the rule of law to be meaningful. They are both right, but what we need to do is change the laws. Civil disobedience is one way to do that. Some people, the disruptive, see Uber as doing its part, but they are not.

Uber does not want the rules changed, they want profit. They're not being disobedient to better our world, they're being greedy and narcissistic.

Yes. In some jurisdictions, part of the taxi licensing requirements is vehicle inspection. Private cars don't receive similar scrutiny.

Did you now? How do we know? You have not identified yourself, yet you wish to take credit for being right? How the fuck does that work? You might be right, but you certainly can't claim credit for it unless you are credited for it.

That would be "rended". Rendered is something different: molten, melted.

All of what you stated is convention, documentation and community-agreed definition of Pythonic. One can write Python that compiles and works that you will have trouble reading. One generally doesn't because when learning the language, the community and documentation lead one to a more Pythonic path.

Yes, I'm quibbling over words, not disagreeing that the idea of Pythonic code isn't useful or cool.

That is not a feature of the language, though. That is a feature of the community.

I suppose you are right, there's some cross shopping, but saying that the ASUS is similarly-sized is still pretty wrong. 30% is a large difference in the ultra-book market. And the Surface Pro 3 with a keyboard (the configuration that best compares against other clamshell ultrabooks) is almost two-and-a-half pounds.

Why speak of CPU and RAM when the discussion is regarding build quality?

I have yet to use an ASUS machine that is as well-built as a MacBook Pro or MacBook Air.

Rather than blindly assume that Apple's build-quality is marketing varopour-ware, as you are doing, or blindly assume that Apple's build-quality is worth the extra expense, as you accuse jcr of doing, why not actually compare the two products first hand and make a choice based on that?

By that logic, why did we start using USB? At one point, no one else had used it either.