Actually, Germany has some of the best bread in the world, with some of the highest variety. But if you appreciate bread, you should always cut it just before eating. Pre-sliced bread is dried out and loses much of its flavour and smell. Freshly baked bread, cut into thick slices just before you eat it, that's how you do it.

Typical american white bread doesn't even register as "bread" in Germany. In the supermarket, it is sold in a seperate shelf, because toast and sandwich is the only thing it's good for.

Says the guy who gets to profit. Follow the money - of course he'd say something like that. PR drones are paid for coming up with good reasons why their product is the best thing since sliced bread.

Actually, sliced bread is pretty awful, but that's a different story.

The market has changed quite considerably. German startups like MyTaxi are increasingly replacing the old and stupid middlemen with a nice mobile service that connects drivers and passengers directly. There's a bit of competition in that market as well. Then there are the modern car-sharing companies like Car2Go and DriveNow and some others, where you can take any of their cars wherever you find it and can drop it off wherever you go. No need to go to designated parking spots or something. They're basically like a taxi you drive yourself. In a few years, they'll probably have an autonomous car in the mix that you can call on your smartphone and it'll pick you up.

To say the market is stagnant is a bold piece of PR lies. There have never been so many options for personal transport, changing so quickly.

Uber is not as revolutionary as it makes itself out to be. But more important: They don't understand the European market, where american wild-west methods of just riding into town and taking what you think is yours by god given rights are not welcome. We have regulations and laws and rules, and we actually quite like them. They make our lives more calm and plannable. Europe has a different culture, less friendly to startups and hotshot ideas, but it also means fewer people crash and burn, and less collateral damage when they do.

If Uber gave a fuck, they could operate in Berlin. But their attitude - which was visible in other german cities like Hamburg where they also ran into problems - was basically "this is our cool business idea, go and change your laws if you don't like it". I'm not surprised that with that attitude, someone told them to fuck off and die.

No, I do mean the public comment system.

The problem is that even if the troll is always at -1 with all his trolling, you still see it as replies in your comments page. If he replies to absolutely everything you post, you're drowning in noise. And if he's a very tiny bit smart, he will reply twice or three times to some of the postings, so you can never be sure when there's a genuine comment and when it's just the troll and nobody else.

You have no idea what browsing at 4+ is like, as is very evident from your comment.

Bubble? Yeah, a bit. But this is a tech site, and I don't make my voting or life-choice decisions based on /. so I'm quite fine with living in a bubble when it comes to /. topics.

Not everything that mixes two extremes ends up in the middle.

People were capable of having informed opinions before the Internet, when newspapers was all we had. You simply had to read more than one and make up your own mind. It also heavily depends on the topic. Don't forget that /. is not a general news site - many of us here are actually experts in the topics being discussed, and when you post an article about, say, a new encryption scheme and you get comments from people who are in security, hacking or even cryptography itself, that's worthwhile.

What do you expect from an article about the Ukraine crisis on a general news site? How many of the readers could even find Ukraine on an un-labeled map? How many have been there? How many know anything at all about the political and economic situation, if you substract what they read in other news articles?

No, sir, the comments section on /. and on some news site are not comparable, and mixing them does not result in a "best of both worlds" scenario.

You browse at 2+ ? You, sir, have way too much spare time. I've been browsing at 4+ for almost a decade, and I've never once thought about lowering it.

A very, very loud minority of people is openly hostile to women/gays/atheists/muslims/mexicans/elderly/children/redheads/any-minority-of-your-choice.

The Internet as a whole - much like the real world - is openly hostile to extremists who act like dicks and think everyone who is less extreme than they are is pure evil, even if you're agreeing with them in principle. That's why feminazis get rape gifs (I'm not surprised) while thousands of other women don't - because trolls do to you what they know sets you off.

I'm not saying women don't get offensive comments. They do. But firstly so do men (of a different kind, physical violence takes the place of sexual innuendo) and secondly the problem isn't hostility to women, the problem is trolling. It just happens that for women the low hanging fruit for the trolls is their sex, just like race is if the victim is black.

Yes, but what you get isn't random at all. Firstly it suffers massively from selection bias and secondly even on very popular articles the sample size is so small that it is easy to influence it one way or the other, especially by re-posting it to some other site with a strong opinion. Re-post an article about a sexual haressment case to half a dozen feminist blogs and you're very likely to get a number of pro-conviction comments. Re-post the same article to a dozen sites sympathetic to the defendant and you'll probably get a different trend in the comments.

Sorry, if you want the public opinion, the comments section on a news article is one of the worst places you can look for it.

As someone who was trolled aggressively on /. - you are mistaken. The /. system hides the trolling from the public, but the victim still gets the full dose. It makes it very hard to participate in the site.

He is 100% correct.

When I go on a news site, I don't look for and I don't care for and I don't want random strangers commentary. I'm looking for journalistic articles, which at least in some newspapers is still a level above bloggers.

Frankly speaking, allowing the unwashed masses to add their zero-knowledge opinions to a carefully researched and fact-checked article makes it cheaper.

That said, many news sites are little more than organized multi-writer blogs these days, but I'm not talking about them. When you do real journalism, you should be ashamed to have your work displayed on the same page as Joe Doe from Montana writing "this is all nonsense, my cows love Mozart!".

When you stop using key figures as a guidance to reaching your goal and use them as goals in themselves, you've got a problem.

Frankly speaking, I don't give a fuck if a company is 5% white, 50% white or 99% white. While these numbers may be indicators of an underlying problem, they are just that - indicators. Just like running a company by consulting-think usually results in a bancrupt company, you have to go deeper than some numbers, and you should never make those numbers your actual goals. Many companies have been run into the ground by idiots who thought 4% profit margin is not enough and this consultant or that business insider says they need 5% and if it ruins the company to get that extra 1% then so be it...

What should matter is if there's any problem for anyone getting hired or promoted in Apple (or any other company) because of gender, skin colour or whatever else you want. Statistical numbers can give you a hint on where you might want to check, but in themselves, they are meaningless. They're just statistics.

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.