You are right. I forgot that Uber doesn't support other payment methods and that there's no such thing as stolen credit cards.

Where do you live? Here in Germany, we have MyTaxi and a couple others where you basically press a button on your smartphone, it hails a cab for you (it knows your position, if you've allowed it, so really you just press a button) and it even shows you where the taxi is, how far it's away and when it will arrive.

...and thanks to their intense, careful background checking, it is guaranteed that nobody will ever sign up with a fake name.

...or rather, the lack of it. Right now, everything I hear about Uber and such is that it's so much cheaper.

Like in security, for example, you don't see where a lot of the money goes - until you have an emergency. Then suddenly, you know what it's for. Of course, the taxi business isn't perfect, and you can easily have a crappy cab driver one day and a great Uber driver the next.

But don't forget that once something is profitable and easy, the scumbags will come in, looking for a quick buck. Once that happens, I guess we'll read different Uber stories.

In post-WW2 Germany, especially history class pretty much spends one year telling you that Germany was the bad guy and how horrible your grandparents were, to the point of inciting counter-actions by pupils because really after some months you can't hear it anymore.

Welcome to my library, take a look around. You might notice most of the books are in english. The history section is over there...

I think you've been indoctrinated a little. I've talked with people from many, many countries about politics and history, and few of them have such a bad view of Germany as, yes, the Germans do.

Trollish nonsense nonwithstanding, I've worked with DOS, Windows, Linux, Solaris, HP/UX, OpenBSD and some ancient VMS whose exact name I've forgotten. None of them worked as well and went out of my way as nicely as OS X does.

YMMV, but my experience is my experience, like it or not.

Ironically, it also means that bloggers are now treated the same as journalists - isn't that what they've wanted for years? ;-)

Nice to see that paid shills are now downvoting factual statements about the market of their paycheck issuers competitors.

Really? You've heard about this caliphate they are creating in what used to be Iraq before the US tore it to pieces?

If anything, I'd say 9/11 was a win/win for those involved.

Sad as it is, you're not far from the truth. Sharks hate and love each other in equal parts, and when they find out someone under them fooled them, they do understand he's too dangerous to be there. But firing him can be dangerous, too - if he can fool you, who knows what else he's capable of? Making him an ally (temporarily, of course, there's no such thing as friendship among predators) is the wisest course of action.

That, in a nutshell, is why the biggest assholes get promoted instead of fired - because the ones making those decisions are the exact same kind of human trash.

Nice rant, but like all hyperboles, it left reality far behind in the second sentence.

I've used DOS originally, then some Windows and hated it pretty much from the start, so I switched to Linux as soon as I heard about it, I think it was 1997 or so. Do you know why I've been a Mac users for about 10 years now? Because it simply works. I don't have to spend half of my time on just maintaining the system and searching for obscure failure cases. I love my iMac and my iPhone because they allow me to focus almost all of my time on actually doing the work that I want to do.

To most people in this world, computers are a tool. Just like cars. Most people who own a car use it to get from A to B. Some people own cars so they can tinker with them on the weekend and replace parts just because they can - but they are a tiny minority.

I love that I could get a system running from scratch, compile my own kernel and base tools and so on. I've done it and it was a great experience. At the same time, I'm very happy that I don't actually have to do it. I'm tired of tinkering with the machine, I have actual work I want to get done. I have places A and B that I want to get to.

Uh... because web browsers are certainly the most profitable software outside the app store. It's a real shame that all those multi-billion dollar browser makers cannot port their cash cows to iOS. Why does Apple not realize that thousands of jobs depend on the sales of web browsers?

The App Store doesn't give a fuck. Users reward Zynga by flocking to their copycat games while at the same time complaining that all games have become the same and there's no innovation anymore.

There are two kinds of people who run servers without firewalls: Nitwits and professionals.

Nitwits do it because they think they don't need a firewall and it gives them a bit more performance or whatever.

Professionals do it when they know the conditions are right to justify it and they've made a risk assessment that confirms they are right. For example you run a high-traffic server that does exactly one thing on one port and the server software is robust - a firewall wouldn't do you any good, it's just additional security in case you open a port you didn't want to or such.

This is why these app developers fail where Apple succeeds. They create apps for an environment they don't get. Apple is very much about this attention to detail in everything they do, and it's a huge part of why they are successful.

The "economics get tighter" argument is a strawman. Apple users are not the kind of people who drive to a different supermarket because the tomatoes are 5 cents cheaper there.

You think that people are looking for a 100% technical perfect solution that satisfies every nerd desire ever.

But non-geeks don't think like that, and politicians especially not. They live in an analog world. Where adding "murder = crime" to the lawbook does not remove all murders the same way that adding "deny from 192.168.0.2" to a firewall ruleset kills all packets from that source. They understand that their solutions are approximations and are full of holes.

To someone who understands the world as non-digital, filtering by source IP is perfectly fine even if he knows that VPNs exist. Because he also knows that 99% of the users don't use VPNs.

And especially for Google: They already do a lot of ad-related stuff based on your geolocation, so there's no technical reason why they can't show you the filtered or the unfiltered list based on that.