I personally have a Windows phone and I agree about that being a decent phone OS but i'm not sure what that has to do with anything here. $533 US is quite reasonable compared to many smartphones in the US and remember that electronics in Europe cost significantly more than they do in the US for whatever reason -- so if it sells for 480€ it will probably sell for closer to $400 US, assuming it even comes here. Maybe you and I wouldn't spend that much on a phone, but it's been proven time and time again that a lot of people will.

I'm sorry but I can't follow the point you're trying to make. I seriously just don't get the analogies. Who said anything about whether you could take handicapped people or not? Uber is just a marketplace; the drivers don't work for Uber. That's like saying the companies who sell things on E-Bay work for E-Bay. They don't. E-Bay is just a marketplace.

Some of the sites came up for me, looks like the fully assembled down payment is 480€. I'm not sure what that means for the full price, though.

Give him a break, he's been programming in java for 15+ years.

Yes -- You have to be clever about being clever.

Yes, I tend to agree with you on this one and am a bit surprised by the anti-ridesharing stance here on slashdot today. That said there is a line between what you described and some of what appears to actually be happening, which is basically self-employed taxi services. In the aviation world we already have a rule that takes care of this problem. With your private pilot's license, you are allowed to carry passengers. Your passengers are allowed to chip in to pay for part of the flight, however the regulation states they can't pay more than their share and also they can't influence the decision to fly nor the plan. That is -- they can ride along and pay for half the gas and they can't tell the pilot where to take them. If you want to carry passengers for a profit, you have to pursue further certification.

A regulation like this but for automobiles would take care of the problem legally. Then all you have to worry about is enforcement (and IMO that's where it really gets difficult).

You don't need to create a new one, just use DevOps!

Agile is great in theory and if you can get everyone involved to understand it then it's great in practice, too. The reason I say agile is a failing concept is because those of us in the industry understand it but are remarkably terrible at selling it to the non-technical people we need to have involved in order for our projects to be successful. What good Agile methodology really drives at is an effective amount of involvement from all parties -- customer, analyst, technical team, testers, operations, etc. Most businesses want to fire things at their IT department and then go off and do other things while the project is underway. This is clearly more conducive to the "waterfall" model (which we all know is terrible) and it prevents them from ever seeing and effective agile development implementation.

So, yes, Agile is a failing concept. Not because the idea bad, but because it's so incredibly difficult to implement fully, and it's not very valuable when partially implemented (you basically just turn it into mini-waterfalls).

I foresee DevOps ending up with a similar problem.

If the society I am part of is brought undue harm because of my actions, I fully expect that society to hang me out to dry. Freedom does not mean irresponsibility. What we see here in Texas is petty religious bickering which ended in two deaths and at least one other injury. For these people to be representing two religions that claim to value life, that seems like a pretty shitty way to conduct yourself.

Members of BOTH religions should be denouncing what happened there.

Layoffs don't get rid of low talent, they get rid of excess workers regardless of talent and skill. If you want to get rid of low talent, you fire them, or "manage them out"

It is called a train, not a huge bus. 300 people is about 6 busses.

Buses. Yes, I know it's stupid, but that's how the English language determined that the plural of "bus" is spelled.

I was about to ask how many seats you have in your butt.

You only really need one.

The southwest has tons of potential for producing solar energy, let's not shut down development there yet.

So maybe we should develop solar plants there and not almond farms. Just sayin'

My thought is: More than half of Washington is desert (or semi-desert) and they want to pipe water from that state to another state to water a different desert...? How ridiculous. Although, I was pretty sure he was going to suggest diverting from the great lakes and nearby rivers, so at least we aren't going THERE again.

Quick read if you think all of WA is as rainy as the coast: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Good point -- I was about to ask the GP where he planned to store the 20 character random passphrase that was also safe from fire or other disasters...