Waymo’s lawsuit against Uber is going to trial, judge rules
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
"The decision hints that Alsup’s pending decision on a preliminary injunction might not be favorable to Uber. . . it could effectively halt Uber’s self driving development plans entirely while the trial plays out."
In context of Travis' view "What would happen if we weren't a part of that future? If we weren't part of the autonomy thing? Then the future passes us by basically, in a very expeditious and efficient way," he said." (1)
(1) https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.businessinsider.com/travis-...
[1]https://www.recode.net/2015/12/6/11621176/google-ventures-ow...
read up on Sergey Aleynikov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergey_Aleynikov and there was no malice in that one.
Elon Musk publicly said Tesla is 2 years away from full autonomy (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIwLWfaAg-8).
Chris Urmson (who was CTO of self-driving cars at google in 2009-2016) said it's 5 years (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtgBySRrN0Q).
Personally I think we're 1-2 years aways from initial commercial rollout and it'll grow very quickly from there.
Thinking specifically about: Weather, Supply shocks (morning/evening rush hour, concerts, professional sports games, parades)
Running water is very reliable. AWS can't keep a reliability zone working that reliably, and that's a rather easier problem than transportation.
I think you're very optimistic. Bear in mind that Musk often over-promises on timelines (for instance, he said the new in-house autopilot in the Model S would have parity with the old outsourced one by the end of 2016, it still doesn't), and it will take sometime to regulate and legislate a whole new set of laws and structures around self driving (especially around matters of liability in the case of accidents).
I can imagine in 2 years we see more complex and intelligent implementations available for the general public that can manage route mapping and full autonomy in an ideal situation (you'd better hope its not snowing), but where drivers are still required to be present and have their hands on or near the wheel at all times.
* Auto-dimming touchscreen
* Automatic windshield wipers
* Autopark - perpendicular
* Display cars in other lanes
* Side collision avoidance
* Side collision warning
* Sign recognition
It's also still steering itself off the road in places AP1 worked fine. There are videos over at r/teslamotors on Reddit or the TMC forum.
That seems crazy that automatic windshield wipers aren't enabled... my 2008 Honda Civic has those!
Didn't check /r/Tesla and /r/SpaceX lately so I don't know what the current value is, but Elon Time coefficient used to be something around 1.7 or 1.8 ;).
1. Some people just enjoy driving their cars, tinkering with them from an automotive perspective and the like, self-driving cars will inhibit that due to their heavier reliance on software, design differences and lack of modification abilities as opposed to today's vehicles, self-driving cars won't gain acceptance from that crowd for a while.
2. The first accident that is caused by a self-driving car will cause a major set-back in the eye of the public, airplanes are over-engineered for the sake of redundancy and safety and I don't believe that level of detail will be applied to self-driving vehicles, honestly. Government standards will be met and companies will achieve the best safety ratings they can because it just doesn't hurt your product to have that as a selling point(I purchased my last vehicle for my family almost solely on it's high safety ratings) but sooner or later a self-driving vehicle will cause a casualty or injury.
3. Control and change, it is a complete paradigm shift for transportation as a whole and it will take a while some people to want to adapt or change with the times, a lot of cars are driven for sentimental reasons, the self-driving car tends to pull away from the romantic image of a vehicle(road trips come to mind as an example).
4.Cost, Self-driving cars bring a whole new level of technology to the consumer, how will that be handled from a financial perspective? Car dealers aren't known to be consumer friendly. Will there be economy models available? What about the individuals who just can't afford a self-driving car and are fine with a non-self-driving vehicle, individuals who can't afford to purchase a new car at all?
In New York City, a taxi driver takes home maybe 50% of the money collected in fares after costs (whether depreciation on their own car, renting a taxi by the day or week, gas, etc.) That may be high but it's a nice round number.
If we take this as a general rule of thumb (and NYC cabbies make more than the average), that means you could but cab fares by roughly 50% by eliminating the driver. Maybe that forces a behavioral change on the part of some urbanites. But I can pretty much guarantee you that cutting cab prices by 50% will minimally affect behaviors in most places.
And that's not even counting the many places where having the most rudimentary cab services is barely a cost-effective business today.
Sure, you can speculate about optimized taxi designs (which aren't especially relevant to non-core urban areas with high car ownership today) but small electric vehicles could exist without self-driving too.
IMO this is an academic exercise for at least a couple of decades in any case but it's an interesting thought experiment.
Snow, of course. I live in Salt Lake, and I think it's going to be hard to automate a car to drive as well as a good, experienced snow driver.
I've hydroplaned once.
I've had a malfunctioning traffic light that gave me a green left turn arrow across oncoming traffic that also had a green.
I've seen an unattended baby stroller go coasting across a crosswalk just as the light turned green.
I somewhat often take my car onto dirt roads. Sometimes I have to be rather conscious of the clearance and where the rocks are so that I don't rip the bottom out of my oilpan. I also have to think carefully about how I approach the sandy patches so I don't get stuck.
My brother in law had his front brake lock up on one side while driving at freeway speed.
I've had the vehicle in front of me break an axle and drop a rolling tire on the road in front of me, while it went down the road dragging the brakeshoes on the ground. That happened on a cloverleaf; the driver of that vehicle did well not to roll it.
Maybe the worst I've seen: A pickup dropped an extension ladder in the middle of the freeway. It was rotating, and as it rotated, it grew in length. A bunch of cars were having to dodge it, plus dodge the cars that were dodging it.
There are a lot of crazy things that can be thrown at you while you're driving. Programming a computer to be able to handle all of them as well as a human is really hard - you first have to think of all of them.
I dunno, maybe some kind of wheel in front of the human, which they could turn left or right to command the car to change direction ;-P
The impression I got from your statement was that you consider fully autonomous vehicles not far off. I disagree.
The point I was making was that the vehicles you see driving around are literally fair-weather vehicles.
A vehicle which can navigate autonomously 95% of the time might not be that far off (I still call it a decade though), but those last 5% (thus, no steering wheel at all) are going to be way harder. To give but a few examples: humans are taxed by navigating roads in snowy weather at night, but they usually pull it off. Or intersections controlled by traffic police. Or intersections with undisciplined drivers pushing in. I'll be interested to see an autonomous system deal with such situations gracefully.
I agree that there are difficult regulatory issues to figure out, but don't underestimate the technical hurdles.
Even if it can only navigate between SFO and Mountain View, that's ready to deploy as a commercial venture. There will be an adoption ramp anyway. It will just follow the driving difficulty gradient.
In practical terms, it's ready now. Driving people home from the ski area in a blizzard will be the final task, but it doesn't need to be solved to put both Uber and GM out of business.
I (and others, I believe) were arguing when a car we would want to buy could forgo a steering wheel.
You're right that e.g. Uber could have a steering-wheel-less fleet that they simply retire in adverse conditions, sooner than that.
I wasn't aware I did that.
> but those sorts of cars are imminent for at least early adopters
without steering wheels? Dear God I hope not.
I use driving assistants in my car, but I'm painfully aware of their limitations. These days we absolutely still need a steering wheel. In my car for mundane situations, in Elon's miracle machines maybe only to park in an utterly unmarked field at a festival or whatever.
You got what I was aiming for, yes.
That plus difficulty in understanding streets obscured by a cover of snow, etc.
> Less prone to be overconfident in their stopping/steering abilities.
Very true. Computers have weaknesses, but vanity is not one of them :-)
> I'd probably trust a computer in the snow vs. most humans.
I have a car (2016 model) with several fancy assistants.
The lane-following assistant (which only works in very limited, benign conditions anyway) is regularly confused by shadows on pleasant days. Or by puddles on less pleasant days.
The car-following cruise control has missed a 40t semitrailer and would have merrily accelerated right into it.
The car-following cruise control regularly panics because it suddenly interprets guardrails or street signs as cars. On an empty road. This is not nice, because it has braking authority.
The computer in my car, at least, can absolutely not be trusted.
And my point still stands. How do you define a "fully autonomous vehicle" is an important question. Consider the following three possibilities:
- Drives better than the median human driver in average weather conditions on half of the roads in the US (alternatively, for harder goals, replace with US+Europe or World) - Drives better than 95% of people in 95% of weather conditions on 95% of roads in the US - Drives better than any human in any weather conditions on any road in the US
I'd argue we're almost certainly past the first milestone, and probably at or approaching the second, and the third will never be reached, but that doesn't matter.
>A vehicle which can navigate autonomously 95% of the time might not be that far off (I still call it a decade though), but those last 5% (thus, no steering wheel at all) are going to be way harder. To give but a few examples: humans are taxed by navigating roads in snowy weather at night, but they usually pull it off. Or intersections controlled by traffic police. Or intersections with undisciplined drivers pushing in. I'll be interested to see an autonomous system deal with such situations gracefully.
Fwiw, I'm fairly confident that waymo's vehicles can handle flagmen and have more experience driving in the snow than I do. And I'm sure they can handle aggressive or undisciplined drivers.
Conversely, there are situations that AVs will handle much much better than humans already (a neighborhood with a lot of kids running around and shrubs occluding them for example).
For context, we know that the first goal (better than average driver in half of road conditions) is now achievable by teams of 1-3 people on a tight budget in O(months) (and really, maybe weeks), since people have done that and posted it on the internet.
> I'd argue we're almost certainly past the first milestone, and probably at or approaching the second, and the third will never be reached, but that doesn't matter.
I agree on the first and third milestones. Or kinda -- perhaps the first milestone is only reached for California, or for US highways yet.
I think you underestimate how difficult the second milestone is. The variation is tremendous, even merely within the US, to say nothing about the rest of the world.
> Fwiw, I'm fairly confident that waymo's vehicles can handle flagmen and
I'm sceptical. I think there will be so much ambiguity, both through road situation and through human interaction which we interpret with comparable ease, that the car may be stumped. And we set the high hurdle of forgoing steering wheels, so we need some other, yet to be devised way to give the car hints safely and efficiently.
> have more experience driving in the snow than I do.
I wasn't thinking about handling the car (I can easily believe that a computer does a better job of that), but rather about decreased visibility, no visible road markings, etc.
> And I'm sure they can handle aggressive or
Fairly easy I guess. Just be defensive, put a bit of distance between you and them.
> undisciplined drivers.
Much harder. Not from a safety perspective (again, just be defensive), but from a I'd-like-to-arrive-at-some-point perspective. Because then again it becomes about human interaction (being assertive without being an asshole, muddling your way through this blocked intersection through essentially non-verbal communication with the drivers around you), and computers will (inherently, perhaps) be worse at that than humans.
> Conversely, there are situations that AVs will handle much much better than humans already (a neighborhood with a lot of kids running around and shrubs occluding them for example).
Except, again, that humans will be able to judge body language or the rules of a game the children are playing, and anticipate instead of being confined to reacting (which the computer will indeed be better at, I agree).
Perhaps my pessimism also stems from the fact that the oh-so-smart driving assistants in my car are so shitty (read my other posts if you're interested) :-)
EDIT: Thanks for the interesting discussion so far.
That's one of the things that most strikes me about driving in Manhattan. In large areas of Manhattan, at least at certain times of day, you have to be almost insanely aggressive from the perspective of tooling around Mountain View on the average day. Otherwise, you're not going anywhere and are going to have everyone blaring their horns at you. (Plus, pretty much every pedestrian will take advantage of your timid driving to cross the street in front of you while you're hesitating.)
My anecdotal experience shows that there exist vehicles capable of tooling around on highways and city streets without the need for human interaction.
>but from a I'd-like-to-arrive-at-some-point perspective. Because then again it becomes about human interaction (being assertive without being an asshole, muddling your way through this blocked intersection through essentially non-verbal communication with the drivers around you), and computers will (inherently, perhaps) be worse at that than humans.
There's a good video I've seen about how the Google cars can increase their assertiveness until they can go.
>Except, again, that humans will be able to judge body language or the rules of a game the children are playing, and anticipate instead of being confined to reacting
Not if they can't see the children because, as I said, they're behind trees.
>Perhaps my pessimism also stems from the fact that the oh-so-smart driving assistants in my car are so shitty
Indeed, that's why I clarify that Adaptive Cruise Control isn't the same thing as an autonomous vehicle and you shouldn't use one to judge the other.
I think it will be easy to get to the 80-90% but the last bits are going to kill this. Bad weather conditions, night, extreme situations, etc. Self driving cars have to drive better than the median, because the median includes drunk and elderly drivers dragging it down. I'm sure a self driving car will drive better than a drunk but that's not the goalpost, the goalpost is you and me, intelligent rational drivers who basically never have accidents (that are our fault). This is going to be very difficult as the situations that arise often times require an intelligent decision, intelligent prediction. I just don't see all those machine learning dumb systems getting there, not removing the wheel. And until the wheel is removed its useless. A car that drives but requires me to be aware enough I can take over on a split second is not self driving, so the bar is very high.
It looks to me like Uber could take another PR hit, burn a $billion or more on the fallout, raise more billions, and keep on going. Have ethically motivated boycotts ever worked out, historically?
The very worst worst case scenario is that Uber would be barred from using rotating, parabolic, Lidars.
But there are a lot of other ways of making self driving cars that don't use this specific method of sensor technology.
Uber could even just come to an agreement with Google, and license the technology.
Have ethically motivated boycotts ever worked out, historically?
organizing works!
for anyone interested in more modern day wins, check out "when we fight we win" by greg jobin-leeds and agiarte.
On the other hand, not all of Chavez's boycotts were successful. That includes his final effort, a hunger strike which ultimately killed him (aside from his own death, it was not a particularly successful boycott otherwise either).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_Immokalee_Workers
What matters is whether Uber will receive an injection on their self driving car project.
The autonomous vehicle war is going to be over in under 5 years. Uber is all in on that, and they cannot afford to be delayed by any amount of time that is measured in years.
And maybe not by a matter of time measured in months. But how long do court cases take? Years, not months (especially if Google decided to try to make it take longer).
What about misappropriated code? Patents seem like it would be a much more simple situation.
I'm far from an expert on the self driving car race, but I think even if Uber had to abandon LiDAR altogether it wouldn't mean it would be impossible to approach the problem in a different way. And it isn't clear that if the injunction were granted they'd have to abandon LiDAR altogether -- it may be that they could try a slightly different approach and/or develop a second firewalled team from the one tainted by Lewandowski.
It would surely be painful but I don't see why it would mean shutting down the self driving car project.
Imagine being able to see heat signatures at night, or through obstructions.
The parent's point was that, for driving, the "natural" human way is still better along one relevant dimension [1]: how much sensory data is required (SDCs need a lot more).
SDC engineers would regard it as an improvement if they could get SDCs to work using only the sensory data that a human would get. The parent was saying that Uber could show superiority by similarly doing more with less.
[1] Humans also drive with coarser control over the car i.e. no direct computer interface, just gripping the wheel and pushing the pedals.
Passive sensing lets your eyes see stars and comets: long range, power efficient, avoids sensor conflicts with other objects.
This is the kicker. Lidar allows companies to make up for a lot of the current shortcomings of state-of-the-art computer vision.
As to how easily Uber could advance state-of-the-art computer vision, CV is an academic field with decades of research efforts built up already. To be fair, CNNs are still young-ish in terms of producing results, but Google, FB, etc all have better teams than Uber in this area. The fact that every major self-driving car project except Tesla is using lidar says a lot about how insiders see the first-to-market strategy playing out. Relying on pure CV at this point is kneecapping yourself.
If Uber loses this they probably won't be able to hire from Google, they will have to do "clean room" implementations, and this will all have to be done on the up and up with documentation and proof that whatever product they come up with was entirely started after the ruling with no use of anything that could have come from Google or Waymo. Not only will that all be a huge expense, it will be practically impossible to compete with those barriers constantly looming over the R&D team, not to mention all the extra legal red tape.
That is the crushing blow, not that they can't use LiDAR
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-qa-moore-20170511-html...
> Update: Judge Alsup has also referred the case to the U.S. Attorney for a possible criminal investigation.
(https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/11/waymos-claims-of-trade-sec...)
A new entry on the docket for the case notes that Waymo’s motion for a preliminary injunction has been partially granted and partially denied, but it’s not clear yet which of Waymo’s requests the judge will honor.
...as Uber has argued that it can’t release documents related to its acquisition of Otto without violating its employee’s 5th Amendment rights.
I'm certainly not a lawyer, but that's not at all how I thought the 5th Amendment works.
http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2897
There was no "question" asked. Unless the government said "Would you pretty please perhaps give us those documents?" which I'm assuming they didn't.
Judge Alsup: "Even though he is not a defendant here, moreover, Levandowski’s assertion of his Fifth Amendment privilege has obstructed and continues to obstruct both discovery and defendants’ ability to construct a complete narrative as to the fate of Waymo’s purloined files. As a practical matter, it is hard to imagine how consolidating proceedings as to Levandowski and defendants, whether here or in arbitration, could alleviate these difficulties."
The judge raises this to show that Levandowski's interests and Uber's interests are not aligned. Thus, consolidating Waymo vs. Levandowski (which doesn't exist) with Waymo vs. Uber is not an option. Thus, Uber can't claim that Levandowski's arbitration contract with Waymo covers Uber's problems. Therefore, Waymo can insist their case against Uber go to trial.
It's not like Uber is married to Levandowski and has spousal privilege against testifying against him (although Uber sure is acting like they're married!). Can't they simply release the documents because they choose to?
I don't see how Uber choosing to release documents that they have access to (which is not even testifying, by the way - it's just complying with discovery) can possibly violate someone else's fifth amendment rights against self-incrimination. Perhaps a lawyer could speculate on whether a claim like this can have any merit.
I thought I remembered one item that had Judge Alsup noting that Uber could require Levandowski to testify as a condition of employment. If Levandowski refuses to testify, it is then up to Uber to fire him. Uber doesn't get a 5th amendment protection. If one of Uber's employees refuses to comply in a civil suit against Uber, Uber then has the choice of not complying with the court or firing the employee and telling the court that it no longer controls the employee. The employee likewise has the option to testify or be terminated.
Ultimately, Uber would prefer to keep the documents secret. As a legal strategy, it makes sense to try anything that might keep the documents secret. If your back is against the wall, you push on any avenue that might get a judge to decide that you don't need to show something damaging - even if it's a long shot.
There is something unnerving about being required to incriminate yourself OR go bankrupt. Let's say that Google had sued Levandowski rather than Uber and Levandowski had to either 1) produce the documents that would incriminate him or 2) let Google win a billion dollar lawsuit against him without contesting it. At that point, is there really a meaningful 5th amendment protection if an opponent can just sue you in court and win either by forcing you to waive it or by default?
But the 5th amendment isn't meant to protect a person in a civil case. It's all about what the government can do in a criminal case. So in your example, there aren't just two options (incriminate yourself OR go bankrupt). There is the potential for a third option: go to prison. Most would say that avoiding the third option is the main goal here. So if you go bankrupt during a civil case because you don't want to self-incriminate, then that's the cost for asserting your 5th amendment rights. The 5th amendment isn't about your protecting assets.
This is generally correct. The privilege is personal, you cannot assert it on behalf of other people.
(not to mention you can't assert it to prevent someone else from incriminating you. IE you can't assert it to prevent your friend from giving evidence against you, even about something you said :P)
You can only assert your Fifth Amendment rights on your own behalf, not on someone else's behalf. And you can only assert your rights to prevent yourself from incriminating you, not to prevent someone else from incriminating you. (The lawcomic previously linked to has a section on that at http://lawcomic.net/guide/?p=2545)
And even though that is rudimentary Fifth Amendment law, that is nevertheless the argument Levandowski's lawyers made.
If you ask me, Levandowski's lawyers really screwed up here. He's not a party to the case, but on April 4 they filed that motion, saying UBER couldn't disclose facts because they could later be used to convict HIM. It's a stupid argument, and they spent 15 pages on it, alternating between the trite and the absurd. That's a good way to piss off a smart judge. The argument was so incoherent, it was hard for the judge to even figure out what they were asking. Another way to piss off a smart judge. And the argument was disingenuous at best, or deceitful at worst, as it flatly mis-stated the holding of the main case it relied on, which actually said this specific argument is wrong. Amazing way to piss off a judge.
Their argument boiled down to "Uber and Levandowski have a joint defense agreement, so Uber's lawyers can't disclose what Levandowski's lawyers can't disclose." That's not how a JDL works. All a JDL does is let co-defendants' lawyers share info without popping the attorney-client privilege. It has nothing to do with the Fifth Amendment. And it doesn't make Uber's lawyers Levandowski's. Stupid.
But as you read that argument, what they're REALLY saying is "Uber and Levandowski colluded ahead of time, with the awareness that this was some shady shit, to make sure none of this evidence gets disclosed to the court." Or put another way, "Dear Judge: We have an agreement to defraud the court. If we did what you ask, we'd be violating an agreement!" The judge got that message loud and clear.
And the very first words of that motion? That the judge had to read over and over again because it was so hard to understand? They practically INVITE a criminal investigation of Levandowski.
So, after ruling against them on April 10 (https://www.courttrax.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/USDC-CA...), and STILL getting nowhere with Uber and Levandowski, the judge has now very politely obliged.
Criminal Referral: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3719176-Alsup-Levand...
Arbitration Denial: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/3719100-Alsup-Denies...
The idea of forcing people into arbitration has crept into every agreement and contract that Americans enter, and it's out of control. Congress needs to pass a law forbidding contracts from forcing individuals into arbitration.
Hold on there. Let's not dismiss it out of hand - bypassing the court system and getting things resolved quickly has benefits. And I suspect the arbitration system is itself a response to some judicial excesses and the insane American lawsuit-happy culture.
I'm not saying there aren't problems, and the judicial system should be there, but it's not bad if people solve their own problems without government involvement.
Unlike a judge, an arbiter who finds against a company will not get their repeat business; that's an inherent conflict of interest.
the majority of people has a problem with rape going unpunished. but criminal justice is a bit fickle, because you cant just make it easier to convict people without having the false conviction rate shoot through the roof. and in a free society, youd rather err a bit on the side of letting some people who did commit crimes go.
Because it was binding arbitration and not traditional court proceedings, this judgment is not appealable. This compressed what would have been a 10-year drawn out and extremely costly process into five days. That's it!
There are more arguments against binding arbitration when it's an individual against a conglomerate - you get a biased arbitrator and you're sunk with no means of redress.
1) You can appeal arbitration rulings to the court system for a subset of situations (like misconduct or fraud by the arbiters)[1].
[0] http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:VjU7-9v...
[1] https://apps.americanbar.org/litigation/committees/adr/artic...
Congress, unfortunately, passed almost exactly the opposite law. The American courts traditionally disfavored binding arbitration, viewing it as a kind of illegitimate private court usurping the power of the proper courts. The Federal Arbitration Act (1925) overturned that norm with regard to federal-court cases, and the Supreme Court controversially ruled in 1984 [1] that the FAA preempted state anti-arbitration laws as well, which is when binding arbitration really began to take off.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southland_Corp._v._Keating
Here's to hoping that more people start using competitors so that it's easier for me to find a Lyft as quickly as I can find an uber.
But...if Uber truly is a bunch of scumbags, they deserve to burn.
This depends on where the 700 billion dollar from the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 ended up.
You do realize Lyft has raised 4+ billion in funding and they aren't profitable either. Their ride prices are Coke and Pepsi similar to Uber in most major US markets. Do the math.
Where does the profit come from, and does it go to the VC investors?
Probably not. The main reason Uber got so much VC funding is because they promised investors that they would be treated as a technology services company, which would allow them to ignore various laws and regulations taxi companies are subject to and eventually drive them out of business to become a monopoly.
If Uber fails at executing this business model, it's not clear why investors would take a second chance with another company of the same type.
>“If we are not tied for first, then the person who is in first, or the enemy that’s in first, then rolls out a ride-sharing network that is far cheaper or far higher quality than Uber’s, then Uber is no longer a thing,” Kalanick said.
>“It starts with understanding that the world is going to go self-driving and autonomous,” he told Business Insider in an interview. “So if that’s happening, what would happen if we weren’t a part of that future? If we weren’t part of the autonomy thing? Then the future passes us by basically, in a very expeditious and efficient way.”
Waze is spectacularly terrible at everything. The algorithm is designed to take you out of your way to run up the meter, it encourages unsafe turns, and it's literally unable to navigate to where I live, so I straight-up refuse to ride in any car with Waze running. And yet Lyft recommends it to new drivers. It's not uncommon for me to walk out of cars because the driver pitched a hissy fit when I said "Please don't use Waze", and even when I don't walk out of the car I usually end up having to navigate the driver manually because Waze is the only thing they have installed.
Using Lyft has become a thoroughly unpleasant experience, but I'm not comfortable using Uber either for ethical reasons. I'm considering looking into what it would cost to straight-up hire a private driver as an on-call employee.
Sure, competitors will start to gain more traction, but they're already in a lot of markets and competitors can't afford to have the same coverage as Uber. So while they'll lose a lot of people that are only local (see Austin for an example of this happening in a more complete way), I think they will retain pretty much all international/business travel type business, which is a pretty big moneymaker, just due to the convenience of "one app".
e.g. when I fly from London to the states, I take an Uber to the airport in London and take an Uber from the airport wherever I land (assuming they have Uber). One app, one linked credit card, etc.
I don't want a different on-demand car app for each city I happen to visit, which is where Uber will win out for the foreseeable future.
Did Apple vs Samsung seem as clear cut as Uber vs Google does now?
Only the jury trial in Silicon Valley ended favorably for Apple. And that with a jury foreman who had a very questionable patent himself. After the trial he was saying stuff in interviews that showed he had a pretty strong bias for Apple for a few days, and than he went silent suddenly. Some suggested Apple or someone asked him to keep quiet. But who knows.
The legal battle between Apple and Samsung was literally fought on more continents than WW2. WW2 wasn't fought in US but Apple-Samsung battle did take place in US.
North America (Pearl Harbor, Fort Stevens)
Europe
Asia
Africa
Australia ( Darwin, Sydney, battle of Brisbane )
Uber might even be able to pay them with stock...
For strategic reasons they might have chosen to go after Uber first
Um... Lewandowski is going to jail.
Not if I already had $120 mil like he had, of course.
That'll be interesting. He has "buy your way into non-extradition country" level funds. He can move in with Snowden maybe, and launch the Russian Uber?
-- Um, OK let me see...( Hello, FBI /Secret Service /FINCERN)
I have a feeling he's being watched, unless he planned it years ago. FBI can probably charge him within hours and freeze everything. Also non-extradition isn't it for citizens of that country? Never underestimate the pressure USA can put on countries, especially for run-of-the-mill-crimes.
That's what I meant by He has "buy your way into non-extradition country" level funds. 100's of millions buys special treatment.
As for his funds, he isn't currently charged with a crime.
That being said, I was a bit surprised by his decision. I was one of the attorneys for the prevailing defendant in the Torbit v. Datanyze case that Judge Alsup heavily cites (but disagrees with). Judge Alsup distinguishes that case, in part, on the basis that California state law does not support its holding. But the California Court of Appeals just expressly adopted the holding in Torbit in a case a few weeks ago.
Imagine if that was legally correct. Suppose a fellow worked at 5 companies in the course of 10 years, and with each company his contract included an arbitration clause and other interesting items.
Then company #5 would have to honor everything relevant in the previous 4 contracts. What a mess that would be. Alsup was right to reject Uber's claim.
This is common among subsidiaries of large companies. If you look at the contracts you sign with your mobile phone provider or rental car agency, you'll probably see that you're contracting with a local subsidiary LLC.
I won't speculate on what the outcome of such a lawsuit might be, though.
Would be a shame if this is the end of the road for Uber. For all of their scandals, they've been really bullish on innovation and pushed the envelope on moving the Industry forward. I hope only the guilty are charged instead of Uber as a company having to suffer due to the wrongdoing of a few individuals.
Why should the whole company not suffer if their top management is engaged in terrible practices?
Uber has definitely provided quite a lot of people with a source of income and a cheaper/better alternative for those communting without their own vehicles.
Public transportation is still shitty in many cities across the US. We can't neglect the positive impact Uber has had on the market. It was a game changer which led to it being funded as much as it has been.
About that - the law doesn't agree with you as both groups are part of the same legal entity called Uber. A lot of people at Enron where doing a great job.
Uber did nothing for public transportation. They gave another way for people with money to disregard public transportation. It's just another "innovation" that provides another service to the rich at the expense of the common good.
If I wait for the bus (which is hourly) I tend to lose more than I'd gain by going in to work on an Uber, at only $4 more.
They absolutely have not. From the way they treat their employees, to the way they treat their competitors, to the way they treat their drivers, nearly everything Uber has done is a demonstration of the worst parts of the industry and an example of what not to do; things that we should hope will never happen in the industry.