100 miles is a pretty long way to be commuting to work every workday.
That's more than 2 hours per day commuting assuming it's mostly interstate at 80 mph.
Why would anyone do that to themselves?

Because working a second-job for that 2-hours every day, wouldn't ever hope to pay for the difference between a $100,000 house with a long commute, and a (smaller) $1mil house with only a short commute.

I thought of it another way. You go to the store and everything the kids touches goes on your credit card. Remember, most of what occurs in the apps has no real world equivalent. You can't go and return it, or even complain it was faulty or did not meet expectation. At least a theme park if there is bug in the ice cream you might get another one.

In any case,Apple is absolutely wrong here. If this were a convenience feature it would be easy to add in a setting like they do with so many other features. For instance cellular data roaming can be turned off. To make sure that Apps still have an opportunity to waste bandwidth there is an annoying reminder to turn the cellular data back on when accidentally using the App. If Apple wanted go, it could allow users to set the time interval anywhere from zero to 15, or more, and then allow the App to be as annoying as it wanted to get you to turn back to 15. As it is, the protocol is clearly meant to maximize unintentional in App purchases.

So living 90 miles away from work is the norm in California?

It is quite common, yes.

Anything more than 20 miles from city center is considered hillbilly territory

Nonsense. The most desirable areas shift every decade or so. And you clearly have no idea just how sprawling California cities are.

Anywhere along the coast is high-rent. In SoCal, you could live in nice and expensive parts of San Diego, and commute to Burbank, without ever even driving through an area where condos cost less than half a mil.

In NorCal, going between the coast and Sacramento is common. 'cisco to San Jose is about 60 miles of high-rent areas, and you can't get a cheap house anywhere along the route.

World's largest *unclassified* tunnel boring machine.

At 14 MPG, that's 42,000 miles/yr.

The average vehicle is only driven 12,000 miles/yr, the average commute vehicle about 15,000 miles/yr. If your gas cost is accurate, your use case is just so far outside the norm that your anecdote is probably only applicable to about 0.01% of the population.

Nobody drives an "average" vehicle. Either you pay a ton of money (often over 1mil) for housing in high-demand areas and barely need to drive, or you drive yourself a hell of a long way from your nice cheap home with a big yard, to work and back again, every day.

42,000 miles/year is just a medium commute here in California, and complaining about it will bring ridicule down on you, from those who do (or have) commute much further.

There's no way it can be cheaper than driving your own car

Sure it could... All those car payments, maintenance, license, insurance, parking, etc., can be effectively pooled by one driver, spreading the maintenance costs across dozens of people. In addition, the Uber driver could have a 50MPG Prius, instead of a 14MPG SUV, dropping the fuel costs by a factor of 3.5X, and pocketing some of the cash.

GP is probably playing very fast and loose with the numbers, but there's definitely a savings to be had by pooling/sharing resources such as vehicles.

"TSE costs $45. And if you are ok with that huge flaw, then by all means..."

Huh?

Being windows only (WINE works but I dont want to have to rely on it,) and closed source are drawbacks I care about, and why I am not using it. The $45 is nothing for a quality tool. I bet you've paid more than that for games that you did not even play through once.

Information implies past data and perfect information implies absolute security and verification. This is more possible through the medalian system as carry a large cost and can be removed if people are very unreliable or dangerous. Of course the system is not perfect, but utilizes the time tested method of excessive punishment for certain acts, as well as background checks. Look at it like cleaning staff in a hotel. They have oppotunity to steal, but there is likely no due process if an accusation arises so there is less incentive to steal.

In the current system, information may be collected, and may be reliable, but it is not verified or acted upon. One can imagine where a driver gets a bad review, then creates a new account with a friends credentials. One can imagine a case where cars are not well maintained and cause an accident.

In fact the solution to this is very simple and should not raise the prices much if the profits of the service are moderated. Require each driver to carry commercial insurance and have a commercial drivers license. My father had one, so I know they are not difficult to get. The service could contract with an insurance company to provide a customized package. I think it is important for each driver to contract with an insurance company, not the service, because the insurance company will have additional checks and verifications. The policy can then be linked to the profile to insure that a driver is more likely to be who he or she says it is.

Right now these services are simply trading security for costs. For some this is a good tradeoff. But if the system of regulated cabs is dismantled without something equally secure we will simply see a period where people have no choice but to be insecure and then an expensive process where regulation, probably worse regulations, are implemented.

Is this where we set the bar of government interference in our private lives?

Commerce is not your "private life". It is the transfer of "property", something created by government fiat and enforced by government guns. And it in most cases is it the transfer of "property" to or from a corporation, an entity created by government fiat.

If it doesn't directly involve government issued land and resource deeds (the root of all physical property), copyright and patents and trademarks (the root of all so-called "intellectual property"), or corporate charters, and doesn't involve government-enforced contracts, then you can maybe complain about government interference in your "private life".

It's right on!

This link puts a little meat on the bones, though the story is still sketchy. Seems the law was aimed at 5 or 6 specific bloggers, though probably upwards of 500 could wind up being covered. ISPs not happy with it. Law purports to regulate Russian-language blogging, not limited by geography or physical placement. So a foreigner could theoretically run afoul of it if they publish in Russian (and become popular doing so) while a Russian could write anything they want without worry as long as they do it in another language?

"Emacs is a great operating system, if only it had a decent text editor!"

Nice dig but quite out of date. Check out EVIL.

Absolutely. For simple text file editing, it really cant be beat. No wasted time, you type what you want and it does it, end of story. You can even use it in scripts! The ideal tool for many, many jobs.

Notepad++ is windows-only. And if you are ok with that huge flaw, you should really try TSE. By far the best windows editor.

"That's one of the reason I stopped using Google anything. Until they do the right thing and give us back our YouTube accounts, they can go fuck themselves."

Hear hear!

That was really an act of astonishing rudeness and arrogance. A formal apology and the firing of the person responsible would not be uncalled for.

The key point I was trying to make is that the current war does not depend on conscription. We have enough incentive in terms of pay and benifit and enough people with no other skills that we do not need conscription, so the kids have no reason to protest like the did in Vietnam. The other point is, and I am amused that some silly person spent an hour trying to retcon history(like Boehner is trying to do with the government shut down and the impeachment threats(so sarah palin never suggested that we impech obama, only those in the administration) is that those who were directly impacted by his action or indirectly impacted by those who were supporters did not have any recourse. It is like the no fly list now, except the no fly list is secret and does not seem to focus on certain famous US citizens whom the McCarthy type people did like. As far as the various wars of the Veitnam era an the various wars of current Iraq era, they were political, religious, and economic factors in both. Obviously the former was a religious type fanaticism against communism, while the later is a political fanaticism against Islam. The former was to protect us against a Russian aggression through Cuba, while the later to protect us against a radical 'Muslim' aggression through terrorism. In both cases free exploitation of resources, including oil, was a proximate factor. In either case proxy wars are fought. Vietnam instead of China, Iraq instead of Afghanistan(I know we are now in Afghanistan, but the horses were already out, so to speak).