Free speech applies to your interactions with the government - it does not apply to a private company. If Google did not wish to publish an ad that may damage their brand and business, that would be their own decision to make. Print publications already have policies on what is acceptable advertising, and will readily reject any ads seen as offensive and racist. Ad space is always limited - there is no reason they have to publish this ad over another less offensive ad.

When faced with incredible claims of medical cure, the Catholic Church has rigorous processes in place to verify that claim, which includes the testimonial of medical experts and independent confirmation.

When a medieval religious institution can be considered a model of fact-checking and skepticism compared to the media, the state of current journalism is in deep trouble.

They wouldn't have needed to go through her medical records to expose her claims. As soon as they called the doctors and hospitals she claimed to have been treated at, and had been told that they had no records of such a patient, that should have been their first obvious clue. Had the media that hyped her story bothered to place a single call her story would've been easily exposed as an obvious sham. This wasn't an elaborate lie - it was full of inconsistencies, contradictions, and the most fundamental facts about it were unsupported by any evidence whatsoever.

That there are people who are willing to lie, even if their lies cause suffering to others, does not surprise me in the list.

What concerns me is the media's role in all this, who for the most part accepted her story without any questions or fact checking. There were so many inconsistencies in her story that even the most basic background check should have exposed her. I'm shocked that no one tried to even talk to her doctors to follow up on her medical claims, for example. Or a quick phone call to the charities she claimed to be supporting would have also exposed her charitable claims.

Her claims should never have been allowed to stand as long they did.

Writing a strongly worded email may feel good, but it will just get re-directed to a spam filter and deleted. Plus, mountains of emails are mostly invisible to the national media.

If Americans really believe in this issue and want things to change, you need more than armchair protesting by letter-writing. You need large-scale protests in the street. Get a million people out in the streets of major cities, and those types of crowds won't be able to be ignored by the media or your elected representatives.

It's not about the can tabs per se. The can tabs have changed often enough in design that the can tab design can be used to date sites from recent history. Their historical artifact status also makes them a useful proxy to protect sites like campgrounds or festival sites that otherwise have little in the way of artifacts. Both of these properties make them useful in dealing with recent historical sites from the last 50 years in both North America and Europe.

The problem is, as the article noted, is that the surge pricing is fluctuating too much for it to be predictable and for drivers to adapt their habits accordingly. When the surge price is fluctuating from 1x to 2.5x the price and back to 1x in the span of a few minutes, as noted in the article, it's not predictable enough for one to add more cars to the road. The best one can do as a driver is take advantage of those surges by taking the most expensive fares possible - which means those with short routes and inexpensive fares are actually seeing their wait time increase despite an increase in surge pricing.

If Uber tweaked its algorithm so that the surge pricing was based less on instantaneous demand, and more on long term trends - so that for example at rush hour prices reliably rose every week - then you might see more drivers getting to the road at those times to take advantage of it.

As the article and the summary itself notes:

His analysis shows that the surge pricing is not increasing the number of drivers working, it is only shifting drivers from one neighbourhood to another. This means that the unexpected side-effect noted in the article is that in some neighbourhoods the wait time actually increases along with the surge price increase.

I'm not against a market-oriented approach of surge-pricing to solve a supply need, but the way it is implemented by Uber the prices are changing too fast to serve as a meaningful incentive, so without an increase in drivers you're only shifting drivers from one neighbourhood to another and aggravating the problem in certain places.

And if you read about the 1980 Pennsylvania Lottery scandal, you'll see that it failed because for it to be pulled off it required a half-dozen people to be involved in the conspiracy, which made it very likely that someone would be careless and talk. There were multiple security precautions, and overcoming them all involved multiple people and left a very easily traceable chain of evidence back to the perpetrator.

With the computer RNG, there was a single point of failure that could be overcome by a single well connected person, without any physical record except circumstantial evidence. I'd say the 1980 case, if anything proved how difficult it is to tamper with the spinning ball system without getting caught.

And the main reason flight 1549 landed perfectly in the Hudson river was due to the A320's fly-by-wire system, which allowed the pilot to maintain aircraft nose up and as low a speed as possible for landing without stalling. He had to maintain a fine line between gliding in slow enough to avoid injuries and not stalling, and without the onboard computer this would have been a difficult maneuver for a human pilot to accomplish with his workload.