The tests were conducted between 10,000 and 30,000 feet according to the article. Hardly low altitude.

Uber operates outside the bounds of the law in France. This is well documented. There are two sets of law that they do not obey. The first is one regulating car drivers that are not taxis. It is legal in France to operate a car service to drive people from A to B but you need to abide by some restrictions. The car cannot be hailed, only booked. The driver must have some qualification, etc. Uber does not abide by these laws. The second set of law protects the consumer. In particular, data must be viewable and deletable by the consumer, and they cannot be retained indefinitely. Again Uber does not follow the law.

Recently the french equivalent to state department pointed out to Uber that they needed to change some things, so what did they do? They opened service in 5 new cities with no change. This was seen as provocation, and so obviously the top executives were brought in for questioning. The french cannot state on the one hand that something is illegal and on the other let it happen. They had to act.

Now maybe the law needs to change, this is an important debate. In the meantime in a law-based country the law needs to be upheld.

It is a gesture. However there is a set of laws in France regulating cars with drivers that are not taxis. Uber does not seem to abide by this.

The problem with Greece is not over-regulation, the problem is endemic corruption. Have you ever been to Greece? It is even next to impossible to get a receipt in a restaurant.

This is rewriting history. In december 2008 SpaceX was at the end of its tether. Musk himself wrote that they had virtually no money left in the bank when they finally got the NASA contract in the nick of time. So it was rather a close thing:

Balls of steel but also tremendous luck.

or the telemetry is not transmitting, or the data is corrupted, or the computers on board hit a bug. This space exploration thing is not so easy.

clearly lim x->0 x^2/x = 0

To nitpick, that would have been +140%

No you don't. Employees do have more protections than in the USA, but severance payout is dependent on how long the employee has been with the company, if they were at fault or not, in which way the severance is handled (carefully and legally vs arrogantly and carelessly) and so on. There does exist a court where employment disputes are settled and employees do not typically win, by a long shot.

Just in case anyone wasn't paying attention, we are consumers, nothing else. Consume, or else.

Not so difficult when you live atop one of the largest petroleum reserves in the world. Oil and its derivatives make up 59% of Norway's exports. I agree that Norway has been investing its petroleum manna pretty wisely though.

A pretty remarkable woman by all accounts. She stood by him (even though they divorced) through the dark decades of his illness and remarried after.

This is a terrible irony. His death is most untimely indeed. Here is a high-level description of Nash's work on PDEs by C. Villani.

Here is another description from the Abel Prize page.

The paper is here.

Remember Ernest Rutherford, the arrogant physicist who was saying that all of science is either physics or stamp collecting?. Here on Slashdot, because many of us are self or well-employed developers and computer scientists, we think that we can easily figure out even the most vexing problems relating to the economy. In particular minimum wages are of course for slackers, never mind that first summer job we got ages ago.

How about some interesting myth busters?.

I am an employer and I actually like my employees a lot. They are smart, they work hard, coming to the office every day is basically a joy. I try to make their life as easy and as productive as possible, and I pay them as much as I can. They know this, and this works pretty well.

I believe that if every employer actually saw their employees as human beings who are doing the best they can, and treat them accordingly, the world would be a much better place.