* Posts by Melo

3 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Apr 2016

Dell slips into a slimmer red dress after sales diet

Melo

What quarterly numbers are you talking about? What shareholder pressure??

The only shareholders are MS, Silverlake, and Dell the man himself.

Dell is private now, remember?

You seem to be writing about a completely different company, suffering under the yoke of public investors.

Lyft, Uber throw Texas-sized tantrum over Austin driver law

Melo
Thumb Down

Competition seen off? Urmm...what?

"Result: Victory. Well victory for the taxi drivers anyway. Competition seen off. "

Very inaccurate. We still have GetMe in Austin.

http://austin.curbed.com/2016/5/9/11641390/austin-uber-lyft-vote-getme-wingz

And we can also walk up to a Smartcar, swipe a credit card, and simply drive that.

https://www.car2go.com/en/austin/

There's even a free shuttle service, should you be too drunk to drive after a night partying on 6th.

For students:

http://www.utexas.edu/parking/transportation/uride/safe_ride.html

For non Students:

https://tipsytaxiaustin.wordpress.com/

We have competition and options here.

Also, traffic is bad in Austin, and getting worse due to growth; the fewer cars on the road idling about waiting for a customer to flag them down, the better. You also don't see a whole lot of cabs on the road here either; a good amount of people prefer to take the bus/rail, or simply take a bike to where they need to go. This is a college town after all, with most things being within short travelling distance. You only really need a car if you're headed out to the suburbs or beyond.

US congresscritter's iPhone hacked (with, er, the cell networks' help)

Melo

Re: within the grasp of powerful crime gangs and government agents

Your individualistic moral high ground has been determined to be very rare quite a bit ago. Government jobs in either civilian or military settings put you in an environment rife with authority figures, and who is to say that their methods are evil/unjustified without having the same level of information as those authority figures? Only someone with more access than they do would have the perspective and information to determine that accurately; the higher you go, the more you have to hope that the person giving the orders is not morally bankrupt, and is providing orders to foster the "greater good".

"The Milgram experiment on obedience to authority figures was a series of social psychology experiments conducted by Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram. They measured the willingness of study participants, men from a diverse range of occupations with varying levels of education, to obey an authority figure who instructed them to perform acts conflicting with their personal conscience; the experiment found, unexpectedly, that a very high proportion of people were prepared to obey, albeit unwillingly, even if apparently causing serious injury and distress."

"Stark authority was pitted against the subjects' [participants'] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects' [participants'] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation."