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Comment Re:Opposite of my experience (Score 1) 72

To my mind, what you experience is just confirming what the article is talking about. Logical folks with the means to use taxi services would have used their local system if it had been as convenient and affordable as uber and lyft. There is nothing unique to lyft or uber to truly differentiate themselves from taxi services in terms of reducing drunk driving, if taxi services chose to implement their features.

You are not the impaired driver this article is talking about.

This is talking about the people who have all the convenience, but STILL choose to drive themselves to avoid the hassle of not having their precious car with them.

Comment The FTC is to blame for this (Score 4, Insightful) 150

The Clayton Act made both substantive and procedural modifications to federal antitrust law. Substantively, the act seeks to capture anticompetitive practices in their incipiency by prohibiting particular types of conduct, not deemed in the best interest of a competitive market. There are 4 sections of the bill that proposed substantive changes in the antitrust laws by way of supplementing the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. In those sections, the Act thoroughly discusses the following four principles of economic trade and business:

price discrimination between different purchasers if such a discrimination substantially lessens competition or tends to create a monopoly in any line of commerce (Act Section 2, codified at 15 U.S.C. 13);
sales on the condition that (A) the buyer or lessee not deal with the competitors of the seller or lessor ("exclusive dealings") or (B) the buyer also purchase another different product ("tying") but only when these acts substantially lessen competition (Act Section 3, codified at 15 U.S.C. 14);
mergers and acquisitions where the effect may substantially lessen competition (Act Section 7, codified at 15 U.S.C. 18) or where the voting securities and assets threshold is met (Act Section 7a, codified at 15 U.S.C. 18a);
any person from being a director of two or more competing corporations, if those corporations would violate the anti-trust criteria by merging (Act Section 8; codified 1200 at 15 U.S.C. 19).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Specifically product trying (Act Section 3, codified at 15 U.S.C. 14).

Apple has been tying its products together for years:

  • OS X must be only bought with a mac computer for instance and only on their hardware. Same with iOS presumably.
  • Apple's behavior with their iphone platform, only allowing approved applications onto their service, and must get a cut of the sales. You know for your protection.
  • Obviously this current example of tying apple support with their apple products.

Really the FTC needs to step in and annihilate this behavior, if they can't play fairly, then they don't deserve to play at all.

Comment Inverse Square Law (Score 1) 159

There is not much possibility of our signals being heard due to the inverse-square law.

Most of our signals will be indistinguishable from the CMB, and if we generate a massive focused beam, we are going to have to be so precise, that it is most likely not feasible. 2 completely unrelated points traveling in 3 dimensional space, and we would somehow have to send and receive a beam (because sending one way is useless) when there is no way to guarantee where the other point will be due to all the exotic forces in the universe. Sounds like magic.

This stuff doesn't work like geostationary satellites, you can just point it in one direction and expect in a million years when you get the reply that they will be in the same spot. Honestly the radio search for ET life is pointless, you would think a bunch of scientists and mathematicians would avoid spending their careers playing the lottery.

Comment Re:Ads Backfired, I Hope (Score 2) 335

I also live in Austin and completely agree with you. Unsolicited text messages are no way to endear yourself to people. But the radio in my car was broken so at least I was spared of those ads, and I never received any physical mail either.

But my real qualm is that these companies used to be start-ups. Now that they are so huge, they have become just as stubborn to change as the Taxi companies. Nicht Gut, Uber. As this will only allow competitors to enter the market and take over.

Also I would not be surprised to see other areas adapting similar regulations on ride sharing services, as to be honest they seemed pretty reasonable. Are they going to spend $200 bucks per vote to lose again? I bet the spend even more next time, because apparently they've lost any sort of flexibility they had as a start up, so they would only see this as a problem of not having spent enough when really they should have just add the features to support it. Oh well free money to getme.com and others.

Comment Re: How do you decrypt a hash? (Score 1) 85

That is not decrypting though. Encryption and hashing are different things. Hashing functions are many to one whereas encryption functions are one-to-one. So, due to the pigeon hole principle, there will be multiple inputs that correspond to any hash. They just found the most likely input. This means you cannot decrypt a hash. The same is not true for encryption which is why the cipher can be decrypted. So to repeat: You can discover a correct input by brute forcing hashes, but that isn't decryption since multiple inputs can correspond to a hash unlike encryption where the relationship is 1:1.

Comment Safe Space to Express Yourself Freely (Score 4, Insightful) 204

These organisations, along with safety experts, academics and security researchers, will work to ensure a safe and secure platform for users to express themselves freely and safely.

So you are free express yourself, as long as you express yourself in a way approved by these organizations?

What fucking hypocritical bullshit.

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