How many times do we have to hear "We don't need legislation, the industry will police itself" before we all acknowledge that it's never been true and never will be? Corporations lie to the public. Regularly. Always.

I will keep bothering my elected officials to ignore the corporate promises and pass laws with teeth. And if/when they ignore me, I'll vote for other politicians. I hope everyone does that so we can apply some amount of pressure that matches the corporate lobbyists, but I realize that's unlikely. But it's all I have that I, as an individual, can do.

I can't comment on the legality of this, but there's no hypocrisy (as you seem to be implying). If statistically, a particular class of shared riders are being targeted for crime, and that class finds a way to protect themselves from being targeted, it seems reasonable to me.

White customers or customers of any particular religion have yet to show that they've been targeted for crime as Uber users, so they don't need to take protective actions of any kind.

Now, if it turns out to be illegal, we have two choices: ignore the law, because it's protecting a targeted class and does more good than harm (not my recommendation), or we use this as a way to draw attention to attacks on women customers and do something about it. I prefer that second solution.

But claiming that there's something wrong with the idea that a targeted class would prefer not to be targets is just disingenuous crap. Better class of misogynists, please.

... but I kept losing it.

I thought at first that AMD unveiled it "with a new furry" and I thought, finally, an interesting Slashdot story. Maybe some kind of platypus/monkey hybrid or something. But I was disappointed.

I have yet to see any compelling argument as to why the airline, TSA, or anybody else should care who I am when I fly. I could be the worst terrorist in the world, and if their security measures are adequately indicating that I'm unarmed, it's safe to let me fly.

It's a government issue and an airline issue, where they really want to know who I am for control over tickets and control over the people. Somewhere along the way their insistence that it was for security reasons became the accepted, unchallenged truth. "For security reasons" is not and should not be an excuse for anything they want to do.

P.S. Photo ID is not required to fly. They just make it way less convenient if you don't. See the TSA's own web site for info. http://www.tsa.gov/traveler-information/acceptable-ids

And if we allowed the police to search our homes, cars, and persons on a daily basis, a whole lot more criminals would be caught. I'm glad a scumbag was caught before something worse happened, but let's not pretend that one positive outcome justifies personal tracking, stops-and-frisks, and other countless increases in violations of unreasonable search and seizure in our society.

Thought it through just fine, thank you. My plan to take over the world was a jest. My complaint about requiring a password reset after X number of tries is 100% valid. Let's walk this through:

1) Bot hits my account 10 times. Account is locked. Victory! Bot doesn't get in.

2) Eventually, I request that the account get unlocked. Company has two choices:

i. Unlock the account and let me go about my business, secure in the knowledge that I have a password that can't be guessed in 10 tries.
ii. Force me to choose another password according to whatever arbitrary rules Company has in place.

Option ii makes no sense to me. The bot may, or may not, have been hammering at my (locked) account all this time. So what? It's not like anything out there is keeping track of the 10 tries that failed, and will continue from there once I get around to asking Company to unlock the account.

Option i makes sense, and is user-friendly. Option ii makes no sense and is user-hostile, not to mention lazy because it shows that Company prefers the illusion of security than actually thinking it through.

Please, show me where I'm wrong. It's Slashdot, that's practically a hobby here.

Apple, among many, many other services, says that after a certain number of failed attempts, your account is locked and you have to reset your password to regain access.

This seems stupid to me because if the password kept someone out after X failed attempts it must be strong enough. So why force a new one?

Experiment: force enough password resets on a user's account until they've run out of strong passwords, then use "password" to get in. Profit!

There doesn't seem to be any valid security reason to show ID at all before flying, much less proving that your ID and boarding pass match, any more than there is when you take a bus, ferry, subway, or train.

If TSA (or whoever would be there if we abolished this waste of an organization) is doing its job, explosives should be stopped using existing technology (x-rays, random chemical swabs, not to mention, you know, looking for nervous behavior or the wrong answers to a few basic security questions which has always worked for El-Al), and any other weapons are limited in their usefulness now that cockpit doors are secured and passengers know that "shut up and behave" no longer results in a safe landing in Cuba.

ID, matching or otherwise, doesn't matter. Most (all?) of the 9/11 hijackers had valid ID. The No-Fly list is a bloated joke. The only thing ID does is ensure that the airlines control the tickets more carefully.

Made-up crisis averted by more expensive technology that lines the pockets of some lobbyist. Woot!

It will be revolutionary when it's released in 1991!

If people who can't sound calm are more likely to get emergency help. then over the generations they'll be more likely to survive emergencies to go on and reproduce, while the relaxed-sounding people will bleed to death in the streets. In a few generations, the overall stress level of the human race will be artificially boosted until we all sound like Gilbert Gottfried.

I don't know that the specific ratio as it stands is natural and not worth challenging, but I do know that there are some natural differences that go a long way towards explaining why that ratio -- and other ratios -- aren't 50/50, as some would seem to naively expect. And I know that those natural differences are often papered over by people who seem to be uncomfortable with the facts.

Past that, I don't see how your points in general relate to mine at all... however:

In the year since I was laid off and become a consultant, I've observed (and had confirmed to me by many) that my social skills are one my greatest assets. I'm technically as good as anyone I'm competing against, but I'm far better at customer relations than most. That seems like a distinctly female strength.

Oho, a sample size of one. I, also, am far better at customer relations than most. Is that now a male strength? Or are self-imposed inferiority complexes now a female strength? Personally, I would argue for neither.

So your comment is proof that we don't all know this already, but some of us do, thanks, and and an article about that would be much more interesting than this better-career-choice food fight fare.

Yes, there are significant biological differences between the brains of men and women... different hormones, different development, different structure. Actually, the way a man's brain works is more like the way a computer works, because there is more localized processing taking place; the way a woman's brain works is more like the way a computer network would work, because there are more connections and communication between processing centers. Two different designs, two different results, and if there were more articles about that than about this garbage, then no one would be surprised.

I'd like to see a discussion of the legal ramifications of letting your system be used as a Tor relay. Suppose I volunteer some of my home network capacity to Tor.

Putting aside the fact that it's probably a violation of my broadband provider's agreement to share my connection in this way, what if someone uses Tor for kiddie porn and happens to make the final connection to the police honeypot (so to speak) from my IP address?

If anyone can point to a good discussion of this, it would be great. I'd like to let my system be a relay for Tor, but the risk seems large.

My point was, of course, to expose the flaws in the reasoning of the original post. Yes, people have problems with Windows (and with HTML).

Also, same here, re: the clean Windows setup and use of Gentoo. :)

Cheers!