It seems to me that the distinctive thing is that this is pre-arranged and negotiated with a specific driver.

If I hail a taxi on the street, I don't know the driver, and I don't want to haggle over the fare. So it is reasonable for the government to regulate that, and set standard fares.

If I arrange for a ride over the internet, I can independently check out the driver's reputation and negotiate the fare in the comfort of my home. So there is no need for government involvement.

On a few occasions I have met taxi drivers that were especially helpful and friendly, and I negotiated special "meter-off" trips over the next few days. My family and I had a great tour of London a few years ago. Nobody knows London like a cabbie.

Wouldn't it be easier to just pay the service provider in cash?

Then it is already relevant to some people. I employ a graphic artist that lives in Karachi, Pakistan. Paypal doesn't work in Pakistan. I used to pay her with a quarterly wire transfer, but that ate up about 5% of her salary in fees. So now I pay her in bitcoins, and the transaction fees are less than 1%.

Why worry about it? In 100,000 years the waste will hardly be more radioactive than natural uranium ore. The entire premise of this concern seems silly to me. What is the chance than 100,000 years from now, our ancestors have the ability to do deep hard rock mining, and have found a use for ores that are worthless to us (that is why we dumped the waste there), yet have no understanding of radioactivity? If that is the case, far more of their miners will die from naturally occurring radon (which they are presumably too ignorant to ventilate) , then nuclear waste.

If there are "too many examples" then how come nobody is able to site a single example? Go ahead: name a single media that is unreadable today.

Everyone. The drives are available on EBay, and there are business where you can mail an 8" floppy, (or a tape, or whatever) and get the contents back on an SD card or CD-R, or just emailed back to you. To the best of my knowledge, no hardware format has ever become unreadable, and these old formats were far less ubiquitous than modern media, like CDROMs or SD cards.

Thus giving him less money to reinvest in his business, so the non-union shop next door grows, and eventually out-competes your company and you lose your job. Or your boss replaces you with a machine that wouldn't be cost effective if you had a more reasonable wage.

If you artificially push your wages above a fair market value, don't be surprised if the market finds a solution that doesn't involve you being employed.

Did it? The Muslim Brotherhood didn't win either a majority or a plurality in the last election. The Salfists got the most votes by supporting a more extreme islamist view. Morsi was actually a moderate compromise president. The protests against him were largely confined to urban areas, which didn't vote for him in the first place. There were large pro-Morsi protests in rural areas and second-tier cities.

I am pessimistic that there is going to be a peaceful outcome to all of this. The Salfists were barely willing to allow Morsi to rule, because of his moderate (in their view) policies. The secularists and minorities such as the Copts, are never going to accept Sharia being rammed down their throats. So where is the middle ground?

Does it really make sense for even the USPS to be doing that? If you live in a dense area, it is moot because they are going past anyway. But if you live in a remote area, I think it would be reasonable for the USPS (or whoever) to require a text message, or a click on a website, to confirm that a pickup is required. That would save both gas and time.

Another example is the Palm vs the Newton. The Newton tried to learn to recognize the user's handwriting. The Palm trained the user to produce handwriting that it could recognize. The Palm required more up-front effort to use, but once you were past that initial learning phase, it was actually very usable. The Newton failed, while the Palm succeeded.

It is illegal for UPS, FedEx and DSL to deliver most mail, including bulk and first class letters. So how do you know they can't do it cheaper if it illegal for them to even try? For the comparable services where they are allowed to compete (express document and packages) they are cheaper in most cases.

If they don't want to do it, then why do we have laws forbidding them from doing so?

Maybe the government shouldn't be in the letter/package delivery business. Just because something made sense in 1789, doesn't mean it still makes sense today.

You can see it a lot better at 1600. I pay my devs an average of $80k/year. Buying a better monitor makes sense even if they are only 0.1% more productive. Some studies have shown 10-20% productivity for doubling the available pixels. So buying better monitors is a total no-brainer.

You haven't been shopping lately. They are about $600 on Amazon. I pay a good dev that much in two days.

For software development your screen(s) needs to horizontally span three pages: One page for docs, one page for your editor, and one page for testing/debugger. You want a vertical resolution to display at least a full page of documentation. If you are going to do all that on a single monitor, then 2560x1600 is common and cheap enough, so I don't see why anyone would settle for the 2560x1080 in TFA. 1080 is insufficient vertical res.

They didn't.

They didn't do this either. The rules of the naming vote were quite clear: the results would be considered, but would be non-binding.

If you don't like the names they chose, then don't use them. You and your friends are free to call the moons anything you like.

It is not pointless. A deployed warhead is more likely to be stolen by Al Queda, more likely to be involved in an accident, more likely to be launched by a rouge commander, and more likely to be used in a first strike. The first strike capability is particularly destabilizing, because our "enemies" then need to keep their own nukes on hair trigger alert, or build enough of them to ride out a first strike and still retaliate.