?

If you claimed to have a religious belief that you shouldn't pay for certain types of healthcare, you would be by definition, not an atheist.

As far as your odd plan to create a religion based on this belief... well go right ahead, but be prepared to act like a religion. Courts aren't stupid, and they aren't going to let you make up your sham religion for the sole purpose of evading the law. It's an old con, and the court system is wise to it.

That's simply not the same thing. The private limo industry is NOT a taxi service. Limo services aren't point to point, they're hiring a private car for the day or night. They're also FAR more expensive, and rely on reputation of the limo company.

Taxi services are normally dispatch services, with the drivers operating independently. It's VERY different from a limo service in about every way.

Taxi services are now suffering because of a combination of historic greed and anti-competitive actions. By that, I mean the sale of medallions, which brought in revenue to cities (greed) and made it difficult or impossible for people to start a taxi business (anti-competitive).

If cities want to eliminate the medallion program, stop the sale of them, etc, that's totally fine with me. But creating an unregulated industry to compete with a regulated one is simply unfair, and frankly possibly even unconstitutional. You can't make the laws apply to one set of people and not another. Uber is clearly a taxi dispatch service. Why should the law not apply to them, but apply to everyone else?

You've missed the point. The system can't survive with a regulated and unregulated market. The regulated market will have higher costs, and have to charge higher fees. So the regulated market will become smaller and smaller, and likely more expensive. Do you really want the choice where the safe, knowledgeable driver is extremely expensive, and your only alternative is some guy in his shitmobile who barely knows the city?

only ones bitching are those who run taxis who now get slightly less profit.

I don't run a taxi service. I don't know anyone who runs a taxi service. I rarely take taxis. I'm bitching.

This isn't replacing the taxi industry with a technology, it's pitting a highly regulated industry (taxi cabs) with an unregulated variant. Taxicabs pay huge amounts of money to run a taxicab. If you want to loosen regulations on taxis, fine. But Ueber is an attempt to create an unlicensed, unregulated market where a licensed regulated one exists. It has about zero to do with technology.

without their consent

What's actually more problematic to me is that the paper explicitly claimed they asked for and received "informed consent". But their justification is that users agreed to the Facebook EULA. That is a serious misunderstanding of what constitutes informed consent in research ethics; it does not just mean that someone agreed to some fine print, possibly months ago, in a transaction unrelated to the current study.

If they want to argue that this doesn't require informed consent at all, because it's e.g. just data mining of effectively existing data, that would be less problematic imo than watering down the standard for informed consent to include EULAs.

Apparently they did actually get IRB approval, oddly enough. The study was jointly done with two universities, and from what other researchers have told me, the two universities' IRBs approved the protocol. I'm surprised myself that they would. Would be curious to see what their reasoning was.

Actually carrying around the turds everywhere seems pretty impractical, though. Wouldn't it make more sense to just store them in a warehouse, and then transfer ownership of them back and forth? So for example when you want to pay with 10 turds at the gas station, instead of unloading them right there, you simply transfer ownership of 10 of your warehoused turds to the station, perhaps using tokens that represent them.

Cant have conservative, right wing, religious, pro capitalism or anti-socialist propaganda.

Fortunately for you, there are some wiki-based online encyclopedias that are based on exactly the opposite principle! Enjoy the god-fearing, American-flag-loving truth bombs at Conservapedia.

Exposing your skin (arms and face are sufficient) to sunlight is supposed to reset your body's clock when you travel.

The major thing that regulates the sleep/wake cycle is recently discovered 3rd light receptor in your eye. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I... Sunlight will produce Vitamin D, but I know of no research that says exposing skin to sunlight will do anything for your circadian rythms. (Of course if you expose your sun, you'll also expose your eyes unless you shield them for some odd reason).

Then who erected those Lenin statutes?

That's because the U.S. makes no attempt at incentivizing energy conservation through the tax system.

As I said, ex-Soviet countries...

The average in Europe is that low mostly because of some Eastern European countries with big old Soviet power plants that sell power cheaply. The average would be considerably higher than 18,4 ct/kWh if you removed Bulgaria, Hungary, Romania, and the Baltic countries from the calculation.

In what year is it predicted that Germany will generate fewer kWh of power from coal than it did in, say, 2005? Will we have to wait until 2050 or something for this long-promised decrease?

Well my point is that the justification for the program is that there are areas of the U.S. economy where domestic workers just don't exist: you put out a call, it's alleged, and you get no qualified resumes. One response to that claim is to ask, "well, what are you offering?" If you're offering $60k, my first reaction is to be, well have you tried offering more? If no, then try that first, then if you still can't find anyone, come back and we can talk. A threshold is just a way of codifying that.