... there are certain laws that Uber is required to comply with if it wishes to hire workers, whether they be contractors or actual employees ... they should not be able to require private arbitration against drivers who are trying to force Uber to live up to their legal obligations as an employer ... I believe that binding arbitration clauses are decidedly unfair and biased in favor of the company demanding the contract at the expense of the person who is forced to accept that contract

I don't doubt that you believe that the arbitration clause is unfair and biased -- but what you (or I) believe is irrelevant here, since it is the drivers who signed the contract. They evidently didn't believe the clause was unfair or biased -- after all they signed a the contract. We should respect their judgement.

As far as I know, drivers aren't forced (by operation of law or against the law) to drive for Uber. Anyone who drivers for Uber has freely signed the contract, judging that the benefits of driving for Uber outweighed the costs -- including all the obligations imposed by the contract such as the arbitration clause.

If the drivers didn't like the terms of the contract, they had a simple remedy: they could have found a different job. We should respect their choice.

More so if it is us (society at large and the legal system) who think that the drivers made a bad bargain, in that we believe giving up access to the courts isn't worth the money you get by driving for Uber. Then our solution is to speak out and convince the drivers to quit -- it's not to retroactively negate the free choice the drivers made.

We have a fundamental problem: our brains tend to confuse the availability and prevalence of information about something with the prevalence of the underlying event.

Here, the news is reporting on every serious Tesla crash, creating the false impression that these are dangerous cars -- we aren't seeing a report on every Corolla crash, say.

I think the same bias plays into current panic over child abductions, which is distorting evaluation of common parenting strategies like letting kids play by themselves: it's not that abductions today are more common in the past, but that today's media is much better equipped to discover and wildly and rapidly disseminate information about them.

The EULA that comes with Windows specifically allows customers to return it for a refund

NO. The EULA specifically refers customers to the OEM to get a refund based on the OEM's return/refund policy. That policy could be that they can get a separate refund for Windows but keep the device, but it doesn't have to be. Here Sony's refund policy is that you can return the whole device and get all of your money back.

Just because you may want the company to offer different products, doesn't mean they have to. My electric razor came with all kinds of useless attachments, but it would be silly to ask for a refund for those I don't use. The seller offers the product for sale, the buyer decides whether to buy it, they negotiate the price, and if both are satisfied the sale takes place.

Asking about "the price of each piece of preinstalled software" is even worse nonsense. We don't obliged sellers to disclose their costs of assembling their products (that's their private information!). And the retail price of the components is utterly irrelevant.

In the specific case of MS-Windows on laptops there is a question of abuse of monopoly power (the ruling does have an exception for when the bundling distorts the market) -- but as long as Sony's policy of not offering component refunds is due to Sony (rather than a contractual obligation between Sony and Microsoft) I don't see how that could be a cause for complaint either. I remember situations where MS insisted that to get an OEM license vendors had to promise to only sell machines with preinstalled OS -- but even then I don't think it had to be MS-Windows that was preinstalled, and this is not similar to what's in the complaint.

I feel confident that if the defendant had had a competent expert to rebut the Malibu phony experts, defendant would have won.

The real story is that defendant didn't have his own expert to counter Patzer's BS

As far as I know the documentation and the system in operation both clearly indicate to the user that they must be alert and in control of the vehicle at all times. If the users fails to do that the fault is entirely their own.

The problem is not newly-bought consumer electronics or legacy software. The problem is legacy hardware. I'm still using the Thinkpad I bought in 2006 (4:3 aspect ratio display). Luckily it's a 64-bit processor, but others have older 32-bit machines.

It's also not about the kernel -- Linux itself will support 32-bit architecture for a long while more, and most software will compile correctly on both 32-bit and 64-bit, though it will be less and less true as distributions stop their QA and you are left with only the upstream development team.

Of course, these old machines are pretty few, so it probably does make sense for Ubuntu to drop 32-bit packages. Other more enthusiast-targeted distributions will probably keep 32-bit support. In particular Gentoo compiles everything locally.

Yes, I've never seen the point of GNOME, especially since Fedora includes fvwm which is much better. Frankly, I'd rather return to my previous choice of tvtwm than go with GNOME.

Grab a torrent now and help your peers!

Actually whoever the new guy is, I don't find the site to be "improved" at all; seems a little crummy. The story was butchered and incorrectly interpreted, and the all important software for interaction seems less interactive.

But what do I know?

As to my absence I've been a bit overwhelmed by work stuff, sorry about that, it's no excuse :)

The story as published implies that the ruling overruled the lower court on the 3 issues. In fact, it was agreeing with the trial court on the third issue -- that the sporadic instances of Vimeo employees making light of copyright law did not amount to adopting a "policy of willful blindness".