As crap as call centre customer service so often is, it doesn't make this a waste of money. Even if the company was perfect and never did anything wrong, they would from time to time receive calls from customers who are angry/touchy/rude, and giving staff good training in how to keep those interactions relatively positive is useful.

$5 per month would be perfect, IMHO. Worth getting rid of the ads...

Free without ads would be 'perfect' but it doesn't mean it is a viable business model.

If they roughly half the cost, then they would need to more than double the number of paying customers just to stay where they are. I'm sure if they thought they could make more money by lowering the price they would.

And you got a couple of clear answers, which you somehow failed to understand, and then went to to claim that the people responding were confused. Perhaps if you're country would do as poor a job of public healthcare as it seems to do of public education it's for the best that your healthcare is private.

It would be better if they played along and actually tried to hide as best as they could so they could IMPROVE on being incognito.

Arguably that's the worst thing they could do: Provide insights into how they try and remain undetected when amongst people who are trying to develop strategies and insights to detect them when there's nothing of value to gain. They'd be better off intentionally fitting stereotypes and doing a poor job of hiding at DefCon, then it might lure people into a false sense of security.

To use your own phrase "I know this is hard to grasp for people like you" but orders are speech; thus to criminalise orders is to criminalise speech.

If your flawed rant about civil justice had any validity, it would still fail to explain why harm caused by physical violence should be 'criminal' but harm caused by threats or verbal abuse should be covered by 'civil' law.

Uber lets customers easily leave feedback on individual drivers, which is communicated out to the client base, unlike any government model.

There's nothing to stop a taxi firm from accepting feedback from customers on individual drivers, the government is simply requiring that they do background checks prior to sending them to pick up members of the public.

Normal car insurances in Europe cover commercial use.

Not in either of the EU nations I've had insurance in. In both cases it was normal to be able to choose from personal, personal & commuting, and personal & business. Some companies would automatically allow commuting within personal, but certainly not all. Additionally business cover is very restrictive in terms of what is covered; delivering pizza is likely to be fine (I am not a lawyer or expert) but carrying people, anything hazardous or high value etc would certainly not be covered by standard insurance.

No they don't. Uber likes to say that a vehicle is only in commercial use when it is carrying a passenger, but that doesn't make it so. If I'm driving from my current location to the location of the customer it is commercial use (I wouldn't be doing it if wasn't working). Uber's position would be exactly like claiming that Chefs aren't at work unless they are actively producing a dish for a customer at that moment in time, if they were checking ingredients or turning on ovens etc "UberChef" would want it considered non-commercial.

At least in my mind, there's a huge difference between "this person has an infection, or cancer, or heart disease" versus "this person was hurt because a drunk driver ran straight through a stop sign and crashed into them". Does your law make such a distinction?

There is, but we don't consider it when deciding whether to provide medical treatment or not. We punish illegal activity in court not in hospital.

the laws themselves are out of place and incompatible with the future as they cling to the past.

What exactly about asking pseudo-taxi drivers to have a background check and insurance is out of place and incompatible with the future? Because those are exactly the things that Kansas is requiring here...

Just because the rules Uber happily ignore are often are antiquated certainly doesn't mean they all are.

The resistance to fracking in the UK isn't about wells specifically, if at all, it's about pollution and contamination in general. You can argue all you like that this contamination is harmless and/or could be easily worked around, but the more fundamental issue is that this kind of contamination is exactly the kind of thing that the public were told categorically and unequivocally couldn't happen. What other unexpected contamination will there be, and what unforeseen (or suppressed) consequences are there?

Why is slapping someone a crime, but telling an angry mob that the resident of a certain house is a pedophile, leading to them burning the house down and killing him, fine because it's just speech.

How many people do you think Stalin or Hitler killed with their own hands? Other than thought crimes, hate crimes, or word crimes exactly what crimes did they commit?

So it would not be a criminal act to shoot at someone and miss? To attempt to rob someone but to flea instead when spotted?

It takes a staggering degree of naivety to support such nonsense and the belief society could function around it.

Way to entirely miss the point, and go off on a retarded straw-man tangent.

it is evident to anyone with enough brain cells that they might occasionally message each other that criminalizing, for example, making claims that you have planted a bomb in a school isn't asking people to turn their life upside down.

When the IRA used to phone bomb warnings through to the British police, if the British police had used your idiotic logic and asked for proof before acting instead of evacuating the area then hundreds of people would have died.

A threat by itself shouldn't be illegal, but it may subject you to scrutiny.

Yes it should, with certain limitations. If making threats was always entirely legal, then it would be trivial for an individual, or small group, to shut down things like air travel nationwide, the school network of a major city indefinitely etc. For example, I could say that I have planted a timed release device containing a neurotoxin in a water source somewhere in New York state. I could even drive around near various locations, park up, leave some weird equipment around etc to ensure it is a credible enough threat (perhaps even plan to get caught looking like I was about to break into a site). I could refuse to cooperate with the investigation. How long would it take to ensure that I hadn't done it, how much would it cost, and how many thousands of peoples would be inconvenienced by it? Then after it all, when they finally feel confident in saying that I hadn't actually done it, there's no consequences what so ever for me.