Its an old historical system. Liquor licenses work the same way, and in many areas the cities are starting to rent them out instead of selling them. Better for the city who keeps getting income pretty much as a form of tax, better for restaurants who don't need to fork tens or hundreds of thousands (I don't remember how much a license is worth in a big city) up front that they need to get a bank to finance. And if shit happens, they're not stuck with a worthless liquor license. Sure, its not as good an investment (its just a cost/tax), but restaurants take enough risk as it is when they open.

This should work the same way. Hell, cities could just stop going after Uber and make them pay a "medallion tax" and be done with it. The service may end up costing a little more instead of being shut down in some cities, and we can stop hearing about that crap in the news. Done.

Yup. Its a little like being a landlord (which is probably your example, I didn't see it).

There's statistics depending on the city, where renting out a place is always 10-15% profit over the expenses of owning and maintaining a property. Also, if you go to a bank with a reasonable income and buy a property that already has a tenant, getting financing is reasonably easy.

That basically means that theoretically, over a reasonable period of time, you could buy an infinite amount of small properties, use the money from one to fund the next, quickly make enough to hire a super to maintain the properties for you, and basically have free, infinite income.

But the world doesn't work that way, does it? Anything easy is a race to zero. Yet there's still a 10-15% profit on being a landlord (not even counting the property value going up by the time you sell) Why?

Oh right, the "work" here is the risk taking. You could be getting a tenant that doesn't pay and be stuck trying to evict them (extremely hard in some states) and foreclose on the spot. A street gang could open up shop next door and the police has trouble getting them out and your neighborhood goes to hell. A contractor could get a permit to build a high-rise across the the street. City taxes could go up faster than rent does.

And thus, I know a lot of people who tried to become landlords and ended up in financial trouble. That risk is what you accept to get an easy real estate profit.

This is the same thing. Medallions were easy profit because not everyone thought so, else they'd have been a race to zero too. And thus, the risk manifested itself.

These games are made by underpaid studios in Canada and others. They bank on all the poor peanut gallery devs who "OMG MUST WORK IN THE GAMING INDUSTRY!" in those areas. Even by Montreal standards, employees at Ubisoft Montreal are getting ripped off. Everyone knows it.

You know, the stereotype of the teenager who goes in computer science thinking he's going to make the next big game, not realizing its actually hard? Well, some of them actually make it, and they end up there. There's a few bright stars in there, but the vast majority? Not so much.

So you take a bunch of very mediocre, underpaid people who aren't even in the same country as the execs, slap a totally batshit insane schedule on it (that is often set in stone pretty quickly because of all the marketing deals in the back), and they end up having to cut scope. Once they cut everything that can be cut, what gets cut next? QA time.

Haha... I've been making a MITM proxy for debugging purpose (there's a few out there, ie: Fiddler, CharlesProxy, etc), and have been wondering for like ever why some sites seemed to handle poor certificate configuration differently than others (ie: I can MITM Google.com with a self signed certificate thats trusted, but I can't MITM account.google.com without proper SHA256 and a certificate authority chain...).

Its because of that header. I had never heard about it (hard to find something you don't know you're looking for).

I have learnt something useful on slashdot today. Holy crap.

Thats definitely the obvious conclusion, but I'm not so sure. The way I see it, people of all kind get arrested every day. You generally only hear about certain ethnic or social groups (its not just about color) getting unfairly arrested in the news, while my friends, most of which are not in those groups (statistics and all...), also complain about being arrested for no good reason all the time.

But generally, a well educated, upstanding citizen will just grind their teeth, and say "Yes sir, grrr, of course sir" and get a slap on the wrist. Many members of these other groups instead will make a ton of mistakes, incriminate themselves, do stuff that will get themselves in trouble, and then get arrested where they shouldn't have. Then they'll bitch they got profiled because the first person I described didn't get arrested and they did.

If you show them how other people act in these scenarios, they can at least also be an apple in the apple to apple comparison.

That sounds awesome. If it ever happens though, it sure as hell wont be in the US. Liability issues of what happens if there's an accident (all your expensive stuff in your private compartment that broke!") or the dick that let his kid run around in his compartment, hitting its head and suing the driver, would make this tricky at best.

They're going to blissfully type to each other on their iphone to tell each other how to get as much money from Google :)

Depends what you do though. Making a mass market customer facing e-commerce website? Yeah, IE9's probably your minimum. Maybe even IE8 for some cases.

Making an internal portal? You probably can go IE11.

Mac-only shop? You can even drop IE now and just go safari/chrome/firefox.

Not as lucky, but you have a dashboard for a marketing or HR system? You probably can mandate IE10 and up. Any company who cannot accommodate that will be stuck on SAP and Oracle anyway.

Making a desktop app with HTML5 stuff? Well, you're on node-webkit, and can use anything but the most bleeding edge.

So you have a LOT of scenarios where all the new stuff can be used.

I'm not sure what your comment has to do with development time static code analysis...Stuff that only runs on a developer's machine or build system never touch the end user's machine...

Can't possibly be cheaper anymore considering the new VS edition: "Community" is free

So's IntelliJ's community edition. But if you compare the roughly equivalent tiers above that, IntelliJ's about half the price, give or take.

Even if you're on a Mac or Linux, you have so many better options than Eclipse. Don't throw away your sanity AND self respect...

Making what is basically a fork of a platform isn't exactly the same as targeting a platform they don't control.

You'd have a point if they forked Android, tacked the Windows Phone UI on it, and added support for THAT in Visual Studio...but thats not what they're doing.

Visual Studio is definitely farther along than IntelliJ was 10 years ago. With Resharper, for obvious reasons, its almost the same thing. Even without, its not too too far behind (most of Resharper's features at this point overlap....people just don't even realize it, having used the plugin for so long and not wanting to learn different keyboard shortcuts).

Overall IntelliJ is still superior IMO (and cheaper, especially if you don't need all the languages, so you can use something more specific like WebStorm or Rubymine), but not by much.

Since they don't control Android (open source maybe, but the version that ends up on phones is vetoed by Google and fairly tightly controlled), the most they could do is submit patches to it, that could be accepted or declined. They could also bundle extra libraries...like every other Android app toolkit/framework does.

Not much evil to do there. This isn't exactly the first time Microsoft includes support for open source stuff (ie: when they started supporting jquery). They go through the same channels anyone else would.

Generally what happens in cities with poor transit, is that people stop using them. Then the transit authorities look at their statistic dashboard, see "oh, bus route XYZ is almost empty. Means we can cut it!" and things just get worse.

Happened in my hometown. There was a bus that would get me straight to the subway, and during peek hour it would come every 3 minutes (ie: the buses were often back to back). They were all jam packed, too.

They eventually made changes to the route to "optimize" things. The route was split in 2 somewhat different routes, and came half as often. They forgot that not everyone went to the subway (so going from midpoint to midpoint was no longer possible, as the routes didnt link) and that 6 minutes during peek hour was ok, but it meant 1 HOUR wait off peek time.

During peek hour, since the routes were not longer as useful unless you wanted to hit the subway, half or so of the riders just stopped and used alternatives. Off peek hour you were lucky to see 1 person in either bus.

Eventually they just cut one of the routes and the second one was only running during peek hour at 30 minutes interval for lack of riders. It became totally useless.