Young men would buy expensive custom sound/entertainment systems for mediocre cars when I was a lad, but they would stop well before 30. This was not a generational thing then and it isn't one now.

Young people (under 25) as a rule feel they should be provided quality entertainment while driving. Less young people (over 25) don't. I for instance have a 6 stack CD player full of shitty Chinese pop songs that I don't particularly like, but really I don't care.

Well, Aristophanes quoting Socrates is not so much different to Plato quoting Socrates, which is where his canonical quotes come from.

Aristophanes himself was an expert on cantankerous old people, as evinced by reading "The Wasps", an insightful critique of the classical period / Iron Age problems of increased life expectancy based on better diet and sanitation coupled with a marked decrease in violence compared to the Bronze Age leading to people living well past 40 and causing trouble for the young.

The allegory he tells, of Procleon, an old man addicted to voting and public participation to the detriment of the state rings true today, especially in countries without mandatory voting and too many elections for a working man to attend (the U.S.).

One also should consider that when Aristopanes was born, Rome was still a little discussed village in the middle of nowhere, so as far as knowing about old men, he would have you all bested.

They seem to feel "owed" by society a job, and to be treated nicely and fairly.

I'll tell you some personal anecdotes if I may. I'm right on the old end of the so called "Millenial" generation, I graduated from university in 2006. 6 months after getting my first job, the U.S. economy went to shit and the American customer for the project I was working on cancelled the project and my contract was not renewed. 8 months after getting my second job, another round of layoffs hit (based on declining U.S. sales, a failed Nasdaq IPO and the national government cancelling subsidies), with some exceptions in a last in first out pattern, until finally after a year and a half, I was the new guy again and I was actively encouraged to apply for other jobs. I tried a foreign country after that, but the company I worked for folded after 10 months.

To my knowledge I am not a pariah and for what it's worth I am well appreciated by my current employer, I would assume this is more or less typical of those who entered the workforce with me and were laid off along side me. Compared to even Generation X, who got started during the prosperous 90s and were able to keep their first jobs for long enough to make them meaningful, or the Baby Boomers who often went through their whole careers with a single employer, it is really hard to picture those who entered the workforce along side me considering having a job as anything less than an elusive state that can only be retained through long hours, office politics and luck.

Anything protected directly by user entry into a smart phone is bound to have no usable entropy by itself anyway.

Modern phones don't actually turn the PIN or pattern directly into an encryption key. Older phones do (and by "older" in the case of Android I mean, "actually quite recent but not latest gen"), but modern phones feed the PIN to a dedicated secure chip that only divulges the actual secret key when the PIN matches, along with keeping track of attempts etc. To break it you need to break the secure chip, which means either finding an exploit, or grabbing your local scanning electron microscope and beating the chips tamper resistance measures (wire mesh etc).

Too right!

They already got a large commercial insurance policy for their drivers. Insurance companies care about money and risk, they aren't denying insurance for the period when the driver is alone but with the app switched on because of some specific high minded ideal, it's a commercial decision.

Yes, but that's a risk that the driver takes not the Uber customer. And coverage when the app is on but not being used is a relatively minor detail of insurance - it will get worked out in one way or another.

Uber isn't even cheaper than a regular taxi in many places. It can be more expensive. When I was last in SF there was never a time without surge pricing. Seems it doesn't hurt them though. Lots of people seem to prefer the Uber experience regardless of price.

Here we have an app that is putting the entire taxi industry out of work, while the apps creators become billionaires

As opposed to the owners of New York taxi medallions, who do no work at all whilst still getting rich?

Disruptive capitalism at its finest. Sure uber is cheaper for the consumer, but is it better for society? The money is feeding fewer people, and making a tiny number of silicon valley elite uber-rich.

Eh? Uber, at most, replaces the taxi cab dispatchers at the other end of the phone line. The cars still need drivers. If anything they're creating more jobs by making it easier to go everywhere by cab, so increasing the demand for the labour intensive service of driving.

Now when Uber start to phase out drivers entirely in favour of robots, then you'll have a point. But it'll be another round of the same debate that's been rolling for centuries.

As a Canadian, my taxi money isn't even staying in the country! Do taxis really need to be colonialist?

What, you only get driven by immigrants who cross the border each morning? I think you'll find plenty of the money goes to the driver and some gets kept by Uber. Well, why not use the Canadian competitor to Uber then? It's not like they have any kind of cutting edge technological advantage. It's just a mobile app and some databases.

Uh... what other governments in supposedly non-corrupt jurisdictions respond to "Freedom Of Information Act" requests with ... actual information?

Eh? Perhaps I'm mis-reading your sentence, but FOIAs are quite commonplace throughout the developed world. And yes they often return useful information.

Try getting information on e.g. "Pussy Riot" out of the Putin government.

Try doing a FOIA for info on Anwar al-Awlaki, notorious freedom of speech abuser up until the point he got drone striked. See how far you get.

Haha, neat .... but ....

Java developers seem to have the most trouble getting their code to work: https://github.com/search?utf8... [github.com]

..... that search is almost entirely results of the form:

try {
} finally {
    working = true;
}

So no, I don't think it shows anything about Java. If you want to get a similar string for Java I'd suggest variants on "TODO: Refactor this". Java has very powerful refactoring IDEs and the corporate world has more of an emphasis on constantly refactoring stuff (hey, it's less effort than debugging some stupid bug reported by marketing, right?).

I'll never understand the hate for Uber.

You may not agree with it, but surely you must understand it? For what it's worth I am ambivalent about Uber and I am a Bitcoin developer, so I'm hardly someone to have kneejerk reactions against libertarian positions. But I do fully understand why Uber makes people uncomfortable.

The basic issue here is we are all raised in a social environment where it is assumed that law and morality are the same thing. Children aren't exposed to the difference at all - if a child asks their parents "why can't I do this thing?" and get an answer like "because it's against the law honey" then they aren't likely to enquire any further, and if they did, it's unlikely their parents will launch into a deep discussion of the history and theory of state power. It's just something you don't do because it's against the law.

In parallel children observe something else - things that are illegal are very often bad, and things that are bad are very often illegal. If a kid doesn't like it when her older brother steals her toys, and then her parents tell her that (a) stealing is wrong and (b) stealing is against the law, the link between law and morality is reinforced. Keep doing this over and over and the two notions develop as one.

Eventually, when we're much much older, we may start reading in the newspapers about miscarriages of justice. We realise the system is flawed. We may encounter laws or regulations that don't make much sense. We may decide that laws in other countries are unjust. But the notion that breaking the law is inherently immoral is ingrained very deep and is very hard to discard. Does English even have a word for an act which is illegal yet moral? I can't think of one. The closest is the concept of civil disobedience, but somewhere along the line that notion got linked with the idea that you have to put yourself up for arbitrary punishment as part of the "protest". So all governments have to do is make the punishments incredibly severe and hey, now there's no civil disobedience anymore, thus all law must be moral, right?

Laws are especially important because they are intended to give people stability, certainty and the ability to make long term plans. Some philosophers argue that the entire purpose of the state is to give people the ability to make long term plans. Certainly, stability is how regimes like the PRC justify their existence. The ideal body of law is precise, easy to understand, minimal, just and yet robustly enforced - thus everyone knows where the line is drawn and everyone can stay on the right side of it. Of course, real law falls short of this ideal quite often.

Now throw technological change in the mix. Larry Page once observed that it seems every time someone invents something new it starts out by being illegal. I can't quite remember where he said this unfortunately, so I can't give a citation. It might even have been some internal Google event. But he's said very similar things in the past in public.

So, enter companies like Uber. Or Lyft, or AirBnB, or even PayPal (it had a world of legal pain in the early years). Does anyone seriously think it'd be possible to build a service like Uber in the legal way? Bear in mind that many of the taxi regulations that governments want to mindlessly enforce specify details of things like how CB Radio is to be used (irrelevant with smartphones), how to print license information in the vehicle (irrelevant with smartphones), that the vehicle should be bright yellow so it can be spotted from the street (irrelevant with smartphones) .... in India they even specify that you must have a minimum of 12 phone lines going to your New Delhi based HQ! And you can forget about just asking nicely for change. Taxi regulators appear to be pretty much the opposite of dynamism, and taxi regulations are so boring that no parliament or local council is going to radically overhaul them for a company that hasn't got any customers yet, against the interests of the incumbents.

In a few parts of the world, it might have been possible to launch something a bit like Uber without any serious changes and with a cooperative partnership with the local taxi regulators. But it seems from practical experience that this would exclude vast chunks of the worlds population. And without economies of scale, perhaps Uber wouldn't be anything like what it is. So we have a case where to make progress, technologically, the law must be broken on a massive scale. But of course if the law ceases to be respected ..... where do you draw the line? Suddenly, there is no certainty any more. That stability the law exists to create is gone.

Therefore whether you approve or disapprove of Uber specifically has little to do with taxis or the details of these regulations. It's more of a proxy debate for a much deeper issue: which do you value more? Technological progress, or stability?

I have seen no surveys. But I'd be willing to bet that support for or against Uber has some kind of slight age bias to it.

By the same argument, if the government changes the income tax to 95% from next year, I have no recourse other than paying it

Actually, no, you could leave. And people do leave, look at France's 75% top rate. So can businesses. When a business leaves it tends to have more impact than when a single person does though.

Changing any law at any time is the right of the government. If it adversely affects you, tough luck

Yes, it is, you are correct. But not doing so is a big part of the difference between, say, Europe and Africa. In one place businesses and people can make long term plans. In other parts of the world, not so much. How you dish out the "tough luck" is a big part of how you make a successful country.

So sure - go ahead and hate on ISDS and anything that levels the playing field a bit between governments and businesses. Just don't cry when your economy is left behind.

Dear EU,

Please fix your shiny new VAT laws that require people to fill out 70+ tax returns to sell across Europe first. Then maybe you can lecture the internet on how to build single markets.

You hardly need to be mentally ill to reach this conclusion. Sure, it's not like there's a grand master plan nailed to a wall somewhere. But to conclude governments helped create this situation all you need to do is read about the background of the attackers. Their radicalisation started due to the US invasion of Iraq. When the attackers tried to go to Iraq to fight against the occupation they were arrested and thrown in prison, where they met a radical Islamist.

No war? Probably the chain of events that led to the attack would never have happened. Our governments will continue to be in denial about this because politicians feel they should be able to engage in arbitrary foreign "policy" (i.e. invasions, occupations, picking winners in regional conflicts) without any kind of repercussions or blowback at all. When reality refuses to go along with this notion they claim it's an outrage and the solution is to record more telephone calls.

From the article:

The Buttes-Chaumont group’s jihadi aspirations were directly linked to the second Iraq war in 2003. They would sit in apartments watching footage of the US-led invasion. “Everything I saw on TV, the torture in Abu Ghraib prison, all that, that’s what motivated me,” one of Kouachi’s friends told their trial.

But under Jacques Chirac, France had refused to intervene in the Iraq war and the young cell’s stance wasn’t really a movement against the French state. It was more a rage directed against the US. Some of the group stated that jihad wasn’t done in France. The focal point was fighting a foreign invader in Iraq.

“They were the pioneers of French jihadiism,” said Jacques Follorou, a journalist at Le Monde and author of the book Democracy under Control, the Posthumous Victory of Bin Laden, about security issues

A bit later in the same article ....

Kouachi, who scraped a living delivering for El Primo Pizza on the other side of the ring-road that serves as a moat around Paris, was arrested in January 2005 on his way to catch a flight to Damascus, believed to be ultimately heading for Iraq ..... He got a relatively light prison sentence, three years with 18 months suspended, as there was little hard evidence against him except a plane ticket for Damascus.

After his arrest while trying to fly to Damascus in 2005, Kouachi was on remand in the notorious Fleury-Mérogis prison south of Paris, a super-size decaying concrete mega-jail, which is Europe’s largest prison ..... He added that when the young men were arrested and held on remand before their case in 2008, prison gave them access to a universe never known before. “If the Butte-Chaumonts was an informal school of jihad, prison was the superior diploma.”

....

One of the prisoners involved in publicising the terrible conditions [in the prison] was Amédy Coulibaly. He was an armed robber on his third sentence, this time for robbery, receiving stolen goods and using false number plates. Coulibaly met Kouachi inside the prison and they became close during seven months on the same wing – prisoners from similar backgrounds and affinity were kept together on the same blocks, which allowed them to convene. Less than a decade later, Coulibaly joined the Kouachis in last week’s terrorist attacks .... In prison together, Kouachi and Coulibaly found not only friendship but a mentor who radicalised them

I also use Gandi but only for DNS. As far as I can tell there's not much useful that intelligence agencies could do with that, except get IPs of ISP resolvers that are looking up the names. So I will probably leave things be for now. But I wouldn't buy any other more critical services from them. Shame - seems like a good company.