I'd fully support removing any barriers to that. They'll surely get charged out the nose, but it's a reasonable proposal. What's not reasonable is having regular drivers subsidize Uber drivers by letting Uber drivers do commercial work on non-commercial insurance.

Haha, yeah, I remember back when all that was on fark.com was a picture of that squirrel with the oversized genitals. Heck, I knew him before Fark.com, when he was the wizard Cletus on the mud Three Kingdoms.

God I feel old...

That falls into statistically normal usage. Being a commercial driver absolutely does not. Statistically, a commercial driver drives way more than a noncommercial driver, and they're much more likely to be sued, and for more money. It's absurd to argue that they should be able to drive on insurance rates calculated for statistical norms of noncommercial drivers. If you allow that sort of ignoring of statistics then you might as well get rid of all statistical tables period and charge every last person the same rate for all types of insurance.

Why, exactly, should Uber drivers get to drive passengers using regular non-commercial drivers' insurance? Commercial insurance costs more because people who drive people around for a living are much more likely to cost the insurance companies more money. If you're letting them drive on non-commercial licenses than that means that regular drivers are subsidizing Uber-drivers.

Gotta agree. I like Star Wars and Star Trek fine but I think what Abrams brought to Trek will be far more suitable to SW. Except the lens flare, that is.

Not really. What you are talking about is capabilities provided by the Dalvik VM whereas what was being discussed was unix-style filesystem permissions.

Agreed.

These were typically "this year's model" mid-size cars from the Emerald Aisle at National.

Wind noise alone is enough to damage hearing. As poster below mentions, earplugs are the answer.

And "It's a Small World" to cyclists.

Wow, either you're a terrible driver or you have no idea of the length of a second.

I have never so far met an automatic gearbox that shifts as quickly as I do (and I'm not even using a short-shifter or anything), met quite a few that lag terribly and met none at all that were able to select the gear I needed ahead of time.

That's not to say fast shifting automatics don't exist but they're on better cars than I have driven. DSG does sound interesting and will likely be on my next car (VW have apparently abandoned the manual gearbox in the US). I have driven a regular automatic VW or two and they are no better (or worse) than others.

Svavar Knútur is great... the music's really pretty, but between songs he's a standup comedian. ;) That said, some of his songs are funny too... one of his songs (in Icelandic) is about a guy on his way to propose to his girlfriend when he gets bitten by a zombie, and he meets up with her and is trying to propose while slowly turning into a zombie and increasingly wanting to eat her instead... but it turns out that she was bitten by a zombie too, so they end up living happily ever after ;) Oh, and then there's this song.

The hardest lesson to learn as a programmer is that "not invented here" is code for "I am too arrogant to use someone else's solution."

Well sure. No one should ever invent anything without written permission from the Flying Spaghetti Monster, countersigned by Bill Gates, His Holiness the Pope and the ghost of Alan Turing. I mean everyone knows that!

Seriously, I quite agree with Dutch Gun's point that we all build on the work of others. I just think that blindly accepting third party solutions can be just as bad as blindly rejecting them. And if no-one ever reinvented the wheel, we'd probably still be coding in COBOL

If Earth becomes Venus-like then those with innovation and drive will innovate a way to protect themselves, while those that don't will eventally adapt, growing a hard, rocky skin and blood based on liquid metals rather than water. The climate has changed in Earth's past and life survived; if our future is to be a tribe of hideous rock monsters ruled by clever, pitiless human overlords in protective bubbles, then bring it on. It's not a reason to hinder economic growth.

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Vote freedom. Vote prosperity. Vote Reanimated Corpse Of Ayn Rand in 2016.

I more prefer my apocalypse-themed music to be romantic and slightly nerdy ;)