It's a corporation distinct from the state government but the governor still influences major decisions, whereas the local government doesn't have any direct control.
As of 3 years ago, the WeWork at Bowling Green was also tight on bathrooms, but the private stalls automatically unlocked after 5 minutes. It seemed like a genius idea, but there was still always a line of several people (and the building was so cramped that I didn't really blame other people for wanting to get more than 3 feet away from their coworkers for a few minutes).
I'm not convinced that concentrating tech exclusively in the valley has objective network effects that outweigh the costs.
Regardless, from personal experience most of my colleagues would prefer to live in any large metro area but the South Bay (including friends in Mountain View, some of whom were told in the interview process that Google did not have availability in NYC, Chicago, or Pittsburgh). It's untenable for Google to hugely expand its Mountain View campus (http://www.mountainview.gov/depts/comdev/planning/activeproj...) while its satellite offices, where many employees would prefer to work, are at a standstill. This is driving potential employees on the east coast into Mountain View, where they don't want to be, who end up pricing out working-class families from the bay who are desperately trying to stay there.
Well you can't really consider the Bay Area housing bubble and cost of living spike without taking the tech boom into account. I think it's both the fault of NIMBYism/failure to build sufficient housing in the South Bay, and the fault of large companies, VCs, and startups for doubling down on the South Bay instead of distributing new jobs more evenly throughout the rest of the country.
I don't think it's gotten any better as far as cracking down on drivers. When I try to get picked up at NYC area airports, if the driver calls right away and asks where I'm going, I hang up, cancel and report them for violating the TOS, and request a refund (which I've always gotten).
If they're not just in it for short-term speculation, then they can rent the house out and hire someone to manage it. Make some more profit while contributing to the Vancouver economy and rental market.
Cameras seem like overkill and are a much bigger privacy concern for the purposes given in the article. Motion sensors and NFC beacons should be fine for tracking occupancy and location (for those who opt in to that).
In Manhattan, it's mostly bike couriers who go the wrong way. When I cut across one short block the wrong way because it's convenient, there have been a few pedestrians who've called me out on it. So someone who's on a bike all day should know the "right" way by now. There are also frequently bikers on some busy avenues when there's a bike lane a block over, which is also just laziness or failure to plan ahead.
I think Uber Pool only gives you 1 minute from the time the driver arrives, but I've never had a driver leave without the second passenger when they took 5 or 10 minutes to show up. Plus people never like to admit that they're at fault; if they driver leaves after 5 minutes because a passenger wasn't at their pickup point, the passenger can probably leave nasty feedback and risk the driver being banned if it happens a few times.
Source on productivity? And whether or not individual workers are more productive, French mega-corporations seem to have much less of a global reach than American or German ones. I can't think of many French products that are common in the US other than cosmetics (that's an anecdotal argument though).
I think the network effects have more to do with clueless recruiters trying to tick off a list of keywords for a position, than the actual cost to a company of an engineer ramping up on a new framework for a few weeks.
Google Play Music is the same, at least on iOS (well, the storage usage is accurate). It caches any song you listen to once or twice, until it eats up all free space. Then your only choice is to purge the entire cache, except for albums you've manually downloaded (which can only be set at an album granularity).
You can play the moral relativist all you want, but American three-letter agencies are nothing close to the Great Firewall. There's a massive difference between out-of-sight surveillance (do you think China is any better than the NSA when it comes to spying on its own citizens?), and the chilling effect on free speech caused by banning things like any mention of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
I don't think the MSM has ever been any less propaganda than it is now, either. People are only able to take a more objective look at the news now because of unrestricted access to information.
There is kind of a reasonable expectation for sites to run JS on your computer, if you don't use NoScript. I'm more inclined to believe they installed an actual rootkit, though. There are vulnerabilities in image libraries all the time, and people who are just technically proficient enough to download the Tor Browser can be tricked into downloading .exe files.
You don't need an equal sample size to determine if autonomous cars are safer. But if you're comparing to all the cars on the road today, you need quality data that matches the distribution of cars today. Google isn't going to prove that autonomous cars are safer if they only test in Palo Alto in ideal weather conditions.
There's a warning that makes it clear that you need to maintain your full attention on the road, when you enable Autopilot and every single time you take your hands off the wheel. If anything, giving users specific scenarios where Autopilot may fail would take away from that fact, and make it seem like there are other cases where it's ok to take your eyes off the road.
Huh? There is a lot more room for growth in small cities with functional tech industries, and these people can now afford to speculate on multiple properties for the price of their small Bay Area house.