Especially in this case since the real innovations that Uber brings in terms of ride allocation are not incompatible with paying taxes and insurance. Rather, the technical innovations of Uber appear to in themselves not be enough to actually compete with existing taxis, hence why the second innovation of actually breaking the law under the guise of technology is so important.

Uber has clearly pivoted into a taxi service, and as such it must compete on price, but somehow the fact they have an app for hailing cabs means they can be a taxi company that doesn't employ their drivers? How does that argument really work?

"Actually compete with existing taxis"

They are competing, Uber is doing 3-5x more rides in SF than the taxis as a whole were doing before Uber. That's without including Lyft. So they're expanding the market, meaning more people can afford to pay for transportation.

Given that they had the choice between acting and probably-illegally, I can find no reason to act questionably except profit expectations. This in turn means that Uber can reasonable be expected to have come to the conclusion that their technological innovations alone do not provide sustainable growth in the taxi market.

The SF market is proof that they are not only obliterating the former taxi market, their service is so superior that it's expanding the market 5 times.

A couple of examples:

- some things that come with licenses are plausibly desirable (commercial insurance, say) and have no other mechanism. Yes this argues for a different solution.

- adding vehicles to road networks at or near capacity (e.g. dense metro areas) can lead to systemic inefficiencies that are plausibly much worse that the positives from a putative increase in taxi efficiency.

- etc.

This at least deserves a broader policy discussion, and it may well turn out that in some areas there is a public policy advantage to constraining this market.

You would argue that more and more ubers would come. But uber drivers would see they wouldn't be making enough money so they wouldn't do that.

That's a pretty strong claim - where I've see uber operate the vast majority of fares seem to be people who were taking taxis anyway, they just prefer uber. Do you have evidence that uber is actually eating into private car usage in any significant way in a dense metro area?

Prohibition didn't end because people missed the taste of alcohol; it was because people kept on drinking (and the illicit nature brought with it the trappings of criminality - corruption, violence, and murder).

Gay marriage bans were hard to "ignore" because it requires cooperation with the government, but anti-sodomy laws were generally ignored until it became comical they were still on the books.

And in general, these kinds of things are the way change happens. The first people at my work switched to git on their own discretion and against the "rules", but it caught on and was productive/popular enough that it's now common practice and no managers ruffle their feathers at the thought.

The phrase is something like - "It's better to ask for forgiveness than for permission". That's because it's easy to say no when asked for permission ("The rules are there for a reason! Tradition!"); if someone has to think about why what you did was wrong, they may come to the conclusion that you were right.

Though the only comparison I think fits the most with Uber is prohibition (since alcohol can be considered as a luxury, while marriage is a legal right). Don't forget though, with prohibition there was a complex underground bootlegging market funding organized crime. Also there's the whole Great Depression thing which put the whole country in need of additional revenue streams...

When you get to that point, it's obvious that the regulation is backwards, and it's nobody but taxi drivers that made it this way: they got licenses for free, then fought for their right to transfer them for money, then they fought to limit new licensing. Basically they lobbied for free money and screwing customers.

Not disagreeing here. However, fines are put in place as a deterrent. In this instance, their purpose is a punishment for breaking a law. Uber is treating them like a tax and the government appears to disagree with that interpretation. If this were a case of a chemical company continuing to improperly dispose of waste, i'm sure at some point you'd want the government to step in over continued violations (i.e., stop them when they are clearly not acting in 'good faith').

Do you honestly think Uber can be compared to the civil rights movement?

This sounds like an American problem. Part of being a licensed taxi driver in Europe is that you can't refuse service in certain parts of town. Same for taxi hours. I have never not gotten a taxi by phone in Vienna.

People are good with dealing with a small number of simple things that can be stacked together. Throw in a human-readable data stream, and you're set to understand and use a stack of simple programs.

People are not good with dealing with a single monstrous object of unfathomable proportions, they will try to break it down in things they understand. If the thing is too complex, with too many inputs, too many outputs and too many states, this is a recipe for confusion. This is why overly complicated things always fail in face of simple things.

One could argue that FTP/SFTP was just as good as transferring bytes over network, but HTTP/1.0 won because it was simpler.

HTTP/2 was written to tickle the egos of its developers, following the principle - it is hard to write, it is hard to read. And its downfall is going to come from this problem.

I've written parsers and generators for plenty of binary protocols. It's actually really not that bad - you just need slightly different tooling. Yes, if somebody else hasn't written those it takes a bit longer because you have to do that yourself, but you save a lot of time because it's far easier to parse than text. And guess what - people have already written plenty of tooling for HTTP/2 already... And HTTP/2 is fairly straightforward as protocols go (you wouldn't believe the crazy proprietary control protocols around the place - trust me, HTTP/2 is not at all bad)

The 'downfall' of HTTP/2 is also a real long shot - most people are already browsing in browsers that support it, and for many web site owners, using it is literally adding two lines to an nginx configuration file...

Not true! Text parsing is a pain in the ass; give me a well-documented binary protocol any day. On the upside, binary protocols tend to force good documentation. HTTP/1.1 is far from simple; every browser supports a slightly different implementation and the server is expected to serve to all of them. But a binary protocol is not any more difficult than a text-based protocol for someone with a decent knowledge of CS. If you don't have a decent knowledge of CS, you probably shouldn't be writing code at the protocol level.

Besides, who in their right mind outputs directly to ANY protocol these days? Unless you're building a web server, you should be doing it through an abstraction layer because it's a proper architecture practice. Once abstraction layers are built for all of the major languages (which I'm willing to bet has already happened) it will become a non-issue.

Next thing you know, the government is going to tell me who to vote in and out the office.

That's a lot more sites than you might think.

But I'm not surprised it's already on the cards - this has been coming since the early 00s (e.g. the "usenet is CHILD PORN!!!!1!!" newspaper outrages, the Sexual Offences Act 2003, etc.)

A fit analogy - replace "Uber" in your retoric with "low cost airline", and see how happy would you be to fly an airline unregulated by FAA.

The same crowd here, that roots for Uber, screams for net neutrality and want to have the ISPs regulated as common carriers. The cognitive dissonance astounds me.

Next, we'll be down to having respect for colleagues and maintain civility in all cases.

This does not mean you run around screaming at people, usually, that gets you fired.

However, these folks have formed their own community, and set the rules of conduct for it. If she wants to try to change those, great. But this should be a discussion for members of that community, not one of trying to get the world writ large to come down on them. (At least from where I sit, she is trying to do the latter, rather than the former. Maybe i'm misreading it though)

Essentially, she wants the community to change not because the community wants to, but because everyone else outside the community wants them to.

This seems, without thinking very hard, quite wrong.

She always retains the option of starting her own community, etc.

Note that even the law recognizes the issues here in the US. Generally, small non-governmental groups can't be forced to open up membership or to avoid discrimination. So the local old boys club generally can't be forced to accept women, for example.

That's still a strawman, and not a valid response to anything she actually said.

But this should be a discussion for members of that community, not one of trying to get the world writ large to come down on them. (At least from where I sit, she is trying to do the latter, rather than the former. Maybe i'm misreading it though)

Have you read the actual mailing list discussion? She's rather patient, polite and constructive, while Linus spouts mostly BS like the above strawman. So how do you come up with that "agenda" of hers?

If you can't talk with some people, the next best thing is to find people with brains to talk about those people. There is nothing wrong with that, it should be encouraged.

Essentially, she wants the community to change not because the community wants to, but because everyone else outside the community wants them to.

This seems, without thinking very hard, quite wrong.

Then try thinking, it could go a little something like this: maybe, just maybe, she's the first mentally grown up person to stroll deep enough into that mailing list to ever raise the point. This is not wrong, just awkward, and "that's just the way I am" is a response fit for a 5 year old.

Actually, this was Linus's response to what she said, and as I said, he's not wrong. She wanted people to stop spouting verbal abuse and treat everyone civilly. Linus's response was that this is essentially fake civility and fake professionalism, and as I said, he's not wrong.

"Have you read the actual mailing list discussion? She's rather patient, polite and constructive, while Linus spouts mostly BS like the above strawman. So how do you come up with that "agenda" of hers?"

1. Yes, I have.

2. Because she posted on G+ asking for the support of others outside of the community to support her?

The very first line of the post says:

  Please speak up, either here on Google+ by resharing this 
  post, or commenting on this post with words of support.  If 
  you dare, you can also reply to my lkml email.

"Then try thinking, it could go a little something like this: maybe, just maybe, she's the first mentally grown up person to stroll deep enough into that mailing list to ever raise the point. This is not wrong, just awkward, and "that's just the way I am" is a response fit for a 5 year old."

No, actually, she isn't. I've been on various versions of LKML since 1998, and she is definitely not the first mentally grown up person to complain. Posting to G+ to get the general support of others not on LKML to go yell at LKML seems, as I said, quite wrong.

Maybe you'd care to explain why you believe Linus is wrong, rather than saying it's a response for a 5 year old? People have the right to build and associate with the communities they like. She doesn't like his community. How is trying to get random people on G+ to complain about it anything but the response of a 5 year old?

BTW, your tone does not come across as very civil or professional.

As I said, after she tried to reason with them, on that list. You know, opposed to copying and pasting lots of flamewars she just came across and blogging about it.

No, actually, she isn't. I've been on various versions of LKML since 1998, and she is definitely not the first mentally grown up person to complain.

That just makes it worse, you know. So they're a lost cause then.

Maybe you'd care to explain why you believe Linus is wrong, rather than saying it's a response for a 5 year old?

"That's just how I am" is shallow unreflected bullshit no matter the context. In context, he's deluded if he thinks he couldn't be just as blunt and firm without making such an ass of himself. He talks about "playing the victim card" right after playing the "that's just how I am card", I'm sorry, but this is so fucking stupid that I'd rather just laugh at it, and anyone defending it. You can make up your narrative for that and think it proves whatever; I just can't be arsed.

BTW, your tone does not come across as very civil or professional.

Because I implied brainlessness? Aww. Well, that last line comes across as passive-aggressive and vague, and I suggest if you want to say something or think you have a point there, just make it. Did I claim I am better? To the contrary, that's why I don't buy the antics of Linus. Even if I did claim I was very civil and professional while not actually being that, it would detract zero from what I said.

This doesn't really change my point that it's honestly, nobody else's business what a given community decides to set for it's rules, unless that community is somehow impinging on other people's rights.

Here, it isn't. They keep to themselves. So yes, in some sense, if she can't get people in the community to agree, she should take her ball and go home. Appealing to mass authority in an attempt to generate pressure is not cool.

If i want to form a group of assholes that write software, that's on me. If you want to participate in my group of assholes, that's on you.

Asking random people on G+ to whine at me for being an asshole in that group is just childish.

Lack of exploit code doesn't imply a lack of vulnerability :)

I may be wrong though, as I didn't scan through all the affected code.

IGjDf1e4eQxWyBFArYM8HgvCuns6p+GbfHoE3SPxYV59kXnA12BWdMr6D5eAAFgtBSX+/Yi+vLxMmEiszkwHLCA=

On the other hand, increasing noise will lead to even more sophisticated attacks and increasingly cunning attackers - evolutionary pressure in action.

What to do ?