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Comment Re:Good point, but Uber is a bad example (Score 1) 432

Where I'm from, there is no competition among the Cab companies. Each of them charges the maximum amount allowed by city law. All of the taxis are dirty, they (usually) drive like assholes, and if you want to catch a ride on a busy night you will be lucky to have one ever arrive. If they do arrive, it can take upwards of an hour. Taxi companies can complain all day long about how unfair ride-sharing is, but they've forgotten how to compete. All the sudden a new company isn't taking part of the price-fixing scheme and they're upset because the customers prefer clean, on-time, reasonably priced rides. If taxi companies could provide the same level of service, we wouldn't be having this debate. It's anti-capitalist. Let the market decide. Why do we need all these rules in place to help support a broken (taxi) system? Edit: I'm from Tennessee, and have experienced this problem in both Knoxville and Nashville.

Comment Trimming the fat (Score 2) 96

Never worked for RBS, so I'm not claiming to have any knowledge into their IT dept, but I've seen this trend in IT locally too many times. Execs don't see the need paying top dollar for IT staff and wind up getting people that do "just enough." That's when snafus like this one happen, and it costs the company more in the long run than paying top $$ for good talent.

Comment Re:Social mobility was killed, but not this way (Score 1) 1032

** Obvious exceptions: Wealthy actors, musicians, etc....

Our society doesn't value artistic expression as much as it does technological prowess, and that's really sad. At the end of the day, for all the toys we have, so many are just sad all the time. There is beauty in the liberal arts and it's a shame we don't invest more money into that field.

With that said, I totally agree that going to college just for good ole' fucks sake probably isn't the best financial decision. It's what I did, and if I hadn't pulled my head out of my ass and got an engineering degree I don't even want to think about how I would have repaid my student debt.

Comment Bare Beginners (Score 1) 302

1) Proper typing. They should be hitting 70 wpm minimum by the time they graduate high school, without looking at the keyboard.

2) Basic repair skills. How to remove a virus. How to install an antivirus. How to remove items from Windows start-up. Linux would be great here... but whether or not that is feasible is a different conversation. Basically if the computer doesn't work, they can't use it.

3) Possibly the most useful piece of information is how to search for information. I know using a search engine is 2nd nature to many of us, but for some people it is a foreign concept. An interesting exercise could be coming up with a completely random question (e.g. "On average, how many inches are the front legs of a fully grown male giraffe?"), and then tasking the students with finding the answer. They can be rated on 1) Correctness of the answer given, 2) Reliability of the source, and 3) Time it took to find the information.
Space

Dawn Spacecraft Gets a Better Look At Ceres' Bizarre 'White Spots' 78

StartsWithABang writes: Since its discovery as the first asteroid more than 200 years ago, Ceres has been one of the most poorly understood objects in the Solar System as even imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope is unable to resolve very much. But NASA's Dawn mission, since moving on from Vesta, has begun to map Ceres, constructing the highest resolution global map ever, with better data to come. The greatest mystery so far are two bright white spots at the bottom of a deep crater, brighter and more reflective than anything else on the planet's surface. Right now, three leading possibilities for the origin of these features exist, with Dawn possessing the capabilities to teach us which one (if any) is correct, hopefully by the end of the year!

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