You're posting this anonymously, leading many to believe that you're a corporate plant. But anyway, so what if it's a taxi company? If they can provide a valuable service and cooperate with local municipalities, good for them.

As someone who lives in Austin, I can confirm the bombardment in advertising. Over the last few weeks I got between one and four pro-Prop 1 mailers per day. My wife and I didn't get texts, and we don't answer unknown numbers so we don't know if they actually called us or not. They did call my mother-in-law twice. The first time, they deliberately lied to her. "They" never identified themselves, but I'm assuming it was Rideshare Works for Austin (the Uber/Lyft PAC).

RWA: Which way are you planning on voting on Prop 1?
MIL: I'm FOR fingerprinting.
RWA: Then you want to vote FOR Prop 1.
MIL: Are you sure? I thought I'm supposed supposed to vote against.
RWA: Nope, you're supposed to vote FOR it if you're in favor of fingerprinting.

We got at least four canvassers. The first guy asked us how we were planning on voting for Prop 1, and my wife replied that she was for fingerprinting. He tried to argue that fingerprinting wasn't necessary, so he was pro-Prop 1. I answered the door to another canvasser who was anti-Prop 1. My wife ignored the last two when she saw that they were carrying clipboards.

I ran into a pro-Prop 1 canvasser while out jogging with my neighbors. The canvasser got lost in our neighborhood, so we walked with her for a block. She tried to use some of the pro-Prop 1 talking points, but she admitted that she didn't really care about it, so she was probably paid.

On top of that, the internet was on fire. Here and here are two reddit posts just about the phone calls. Nextdoor threads were epic.

What difference would it make if the WH suggested this to Congress or not? The House isn't going to do anything. Why is it the WH that's punting on this issue?

Group texts (in iMessage) are MMS, and the less tech savvy people don't realize that. And people have sent me texts with images, which I wouldn't have known about unless someone told me that they sent them.

One thing the article nailed:
"MMS messages not only don't come through, there's no notice that someone tried to send something."

Most users don't know the difference between SMS and MMS (and why should they?), so it requires explaining to other people why you only get some texts and not others.

I do like the spam number blocking feature, though, and I'm afraid that once I port it over to a real phone I'll get more telemarketer calls than useful ones.

Some third party Google Voice apps do support VoIP (like GV Mobile+), but yeah, it would be nice for it to be in the official app.

Yeah, you beat me to this. No one will probably read this, but... If Superfreakonomics is even remotely objective on this topic, then it seems like IV is an engineer's dream. You get to build cool things and find solutions to big problems (reducing hurricane strength, climate change, yadda yadda), and they make money through patent licensing. But that's feeling I came away with after reading the book, and I'm giving the authors the benefit of the doubt.

At least with the general purpose registers, AMD wanted to go to 32, but couldn't do it without changing the instruction set. I'd assume the same thing applies to the SSE registers.

How so? Unless I'm missing something here, I think the only cost is in the size of the register file and rename register set, but nothing ISA-related.