If it isn't right, then get the law changed.

False.

However, you simply cannot say the law doesn't matter as obviously it does or we wouldn't be having this conversation.

And you cannot say it DOES matter or we would not be having this conversation.

Obviously if a company worth many billions exists by flouting these laws, they do not matter.

and yes, they limit the number of taxis to limit competition. They do this in order to ensure the taxis are profitable enough to maintain their vehicles and stay in business.

Which we can plainly see is not necessary, therefore it only exists to drive up the cost of taxi licenses and protect unions jobs.

What isn't subject to interpretation is laws and regulations.

Yes it is, if some of he regulation only exists to prevent competition. You think the limited number of taxi licenses sold is to keep people safe? Or to keep taxi medallions expensive... in what way is that regulation one that is morally right to follow?

I would say their levels of insurance is a key way

I don't have time to respond to everything, but UberX DOES insure drivers. And the normal Uber service uses town car drivers that are already insured to drive other people too..

Companies coming in and skirting all regulation and laws that other companies have played by for years?

Regulations and laws that have been added to over the years with a strong intent to kill all competition?

Why SHOULD a company obey laws that are unethically sound. If a law is bad why is it not just as admirable for a company to engage in civil disobedience - we already treat companies as individuals to some extent, so why would there not be good along with bad as there is with everything else?

After all Uber/Lift are doing everything they can to obey the SPIRIT of regulations regarding taxis. The regulations exist to help makes things safer for drivers and passengers - and in that regard Uber and Lyft are VASTLY better than a taxi company. If things go wrong with a Uber ride there is a record of where you were picked up and where you traveled. With a taxi you can go in and just disappear from the face of the planet.

I personally would prefer an Uber ride in every regard to a taxi, any time it is possible... because they are simply a safer service that is much nicer to use. In what way are they not following regulations that actually matter?

It doesn't work to do this with a democratic government. We need a monarchy :-(

Or perhaps a font of sage wisdom? You know, like a Council? Composed of wise people, you know, like one's Elders? Something any sentient species ought to be able to figure out. Speaking of which, I feel another press release coming on...

K'Breel, Speaker for the Council, addresses the publication of the new report thusly:

"WE HAVE TRIUMPHED! Our skilled operatives from the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Propaganda; Planetary Research Council have successfully infiltrated the blueworlders' technological and informational systems. One notable document, Pathways to Exploration makes clear the disarray in which the blueworlders' long-term invasion plans lie, drawing on the history of meat-controlled spaceflight to justify future programs in organic space exploitation. Although the report promotes the invasion of our world as the horizon goal for the program, it takes into account funding levels necessary to maintain a robust tempo of execution, current research and exploration projects and the time/resources needed to continue them, and intertribal cooperation that would be required to further oppress the citizens of our fair red world."

"And its conclusion? Although the mechanized threat remains, and we salute those still fighting pitched battles with the two active land-based invaders, Pathways to Exploration makes it clear that it is not possible for the blueworlders' organic-based self-replicators to invade our world, at least not without a sustained commitment to funding at a higher level than their own tribal leaders are currently providing."

When an intern from the defense engineering board suggested that improving the capabilities of the blueworlders' EDL systems, radshielding, and propulsion and power systems were ultimately matters of engineering and not physics, and could ultimately be addressed if the tribals of the blue world ever get it into their oxygen-addled brains to work together to achieve a common goal (as, the intern suggested, the way any sentient species does), K'Breel had the intern's gelsacs addled by immersing them in a suitably-merciful quantity of liquid oxygen.

Thus spake K'Breel, Speaker for the Council of Elders, Committee on Native Spaceflight; Arenautics and Defense Engineering Board; Defense Studies Board; Division of Blueworlder Social and Physical Sciences; Committee on Gelsacular Statistics.

Oh sure, AC. We believe you.

The last two iPhones I bought over four years or so have worked fine in Canada and England (my current iPhone is from Verizon).

It's so typical of a liberal to have knowledge thats as outdated as it is plain incorrect - did MSNBC tell you recently you couldn't use a Verizon iPhone in Canda? Or perhaps it was an article on Huffington Post.

Come on, you know you read them. We all do.

In what way is it "proprietary"? I.e., in what way does Apple own it and can prevent others from using it?

Apple is driving ObjC the language, and the foundations everyone knows and makes wide use of are largely proprietary.

How many Objective-C developers today could code without UIKit or NSWindow handy? I would wager it's a vanishingly small number.

Objective-C is not proprietary.

The ObjC everyone uses is.

it's been obsolete for a long time.

That was never true, it just fell out of disfavor. It was not really any more obsolete than C++ or C or Java for that matter, all of which thrive today.

Do you know of any examples of open source iOS/OS X software that demonstrates this separation of writing the user interface in objective-c and the guts in something different (e.g., c++)?

The biggest example would be anything based on OpenCL, where you would do exactly that.

Also a number of games, use a shell of IOS framework stuff for things like game menus and leaderboards, but the actual game engines are C++ (and I'm not even talking about apps that use third party libraries like Unity).

When you drop an iPhone into a _police_ (never mind the NSA, just a local cop who thinks you were looking at his daughter wrong is enough) iPhone unlocker, it tries all 10000 possible 4 digit PINs and unlocks. Done.

And when you have the phone set to wipe after ten invalid attempts?

However, proprietary languages don't tend to fare particularly well

Except ObjC, which leads one to think Swift might do really well also.

I'm sure they know about LLDB. But it's probably not what they need, and thus they do not use it.

Whatever they NEED gdb for, they would be better off using LLDB at this point.

I was a huge fan of GDB in the past. But that time has gone.

why can't google and everyone else support public transportation?

I like public transportation to some degree, but self-driving cars are WAY more useful.

They could really get anyone from anywhere, to anywhere. With public transport you might have to arrange a few transfers, defiantly have to figure out how to get to a pickup location. And it may not go very close to where you want to go.

But a self-driving car solves all those issues. If you think longer term, you could even have self-driving public transports that took a group of people going to roughly the same place to where they wanted to go with a few stops along the way.

So getting self driving cars working helps public transport as much as private transport...

Apple itself as a company does not like leaks. To the extent they are hiring the Chinese military to clamp down on them...

The leaks/rumors industry is not Apple at all, but a whole range of third parties seeking to discern anything they can about Apple before an announcement.

The reason is of course money... for whatever reason a lot of people seem drawn to these rumor sites, and that creates a lot of advertising revenue.

I was just hoping Slashdot was above doing the same thing...