True I would say places in the U.S. like NYC, SF, and Miami have especially bad cab drivers.

But I did not have good experiences in Rome, Belgum (also Brussels), and in fact in Germany also (Berlin).

I will agree the black cabs in London are very good, and actually I did have a great cab driver also in Turkey now that I think about it so I do feel a bit sorry for maligning them all in a blanket statement.

But I still stand by the statement that on average the Uber drivers have been much nicer, the cars in much better repair (even the taxi drivers that were friendly in Turkey still had pretty beat up cars).

The Uber drivers I have used have all been great. Complaints I've seen have all been about Uber the company, not the drivers... the drivers are just normal people trying to earn a living by making use of what they have.

Most taxi drivers I have encountered on the other hand, have ranged from standoffish to incredibly rude and sometimes hostile, frequently lying about fares to get more money. Taxi drivers can be that way in most places because they have no competition, no reason to provide anything like good service at all - and it doesn't hurt that in a number of areas they are tied to organized crime.

uhm, actually plist files are xml

ACTUALLY plist files can be either textual or binary, which is very much not XML

I should have said not necessarily though, instead of just "not"... but it was kind of irrelevant to the main point.

They certainly aren't very compact as far as formats go, even on the watch.

Sigh, didn't read much of that original message, did you?

They don't NEED TO BE EXTREMELY COMPACT because they are sent over only once, when the app is loaded on the watch - that said, it is in the binary format which is much more compact than the textual format.

In use the watch pulls files from that bundle at runtime. And if you were any kind of programmer you'd know there is a tradeoff between compression and computation (which the watch has little of) in terms of file formats, so a fairly but not maximally compact file format is better for performance than whatever you are thinking of.

The UI definition is held in a Plist format (like, but not, XML) but that's not what the device gets. It gets a very compact binary form of your UI, that is loaded onto the watch before the user even opens your application.

The Apple Watch API is actually EXTREMELY conservative with what gets sent over to the watch, to the extent that even attempting to set the same label value twice in a row is rejected with a warning. and UI elements on the screen are wits-only (you cannot query the watch see what currently displayed values are).

There are lots of porn stars on Facebook.

And if you think you can't find racism on Facebook, you are an idiot.

Facebook does sensor SOME things, but not all the things. Like I said you can find any ideology on there you like.

Would have been much easier and less obvious for the pilot to drive 30lbs of C4 into position in a vehicle or a backpack or bag

You aren't going to be able to get close enough for the explosion to do anything on foot or in a vehicle. All of the major government structures now have very imposing anti-vehicular barricades there is no way around. On foot you are going to be challenged long before you reach your target, you are limited to what you can carry, AND you are only at ground level even if you do get close.

Someone in an auto-gyro could for example take out the dome above the chambers where everyone sits when Congress is in session, instead of not getting anywhere near that chamber on foot or in a car. Or they could fly right up to the window that the Oval Office looks out on...

Step 1) Call/email ahead and say you are totally harmless.
Step 2) Fly/Drive/Swim vehicle packed to the gill with explosives right into your target without bother.
Step 3) Prophet!

So instead of there being a helicopter in the air with a human at controls

What about an auto-gyro with 30 lbs or so of C4? Do you still want the "human at the controls"? You don't know what the intentions are, you just know it's very illegal to be there yet there he is.

At this point you'd have to be an idiot to be a terrorist and not try to pilot a small explosive laden gyro into some major target, since it's obviously so easy.

I can't believe the "no fly zone" over Washington is such a total sham with not even a monitoring aircraft on top of him. Just like the Pirate Code, the No Fly Zone appears to be more of what you would call guidelines than an actual rule...

It's gotta come from the right clearance to get there.

Come on, he had AT LEAST 100 feet of clearance. If that's not enough I don't know what is.

Advertisers value people, period. Even those with very little money... it's a different demographic, is all. The thing is people using free internet connections are not going to have that much money period so it simply does not match with your thought the advertisers on such a service will be expecting rich people on a limited free service.

Anyone who prefers to view the internet as a wealth-enabling resource

I do, which is why I'd prefer as many people to have internet access as possible - not hold it back from the poor in some ideologically misguied desire to "protect" them.

No internet is more censorship than some internet, no matter how you gate it. And people will always figure out some way to get to what they want even on a "limited" network connection...

In the ACTUAL example here, Facebook is part of this and you can find any viewpoint you like on Facebook.

Musk's claim is that the barge didn't sustain any serious damage.

Screw self-landing boosters. What I want is a house made out of whatever the barge is made of, easily shrugging off what are essentially two direct rocket hits complete with massive explosion.

There are lots of people in India too poor to pay for internet, that this system could link them in.

Is it really worse for them to have a gated internet than no internet at all?

So what if "normal" internet becomes a little more expensive, that's fine when anyone can get limited access to the internet for free.

I would love to see an organized protest (of anything) that involved a fleet of hundreds of quad-copters converging on the capital...

Have you seen what most chess players look like? Left out the "naked' on purpose.