Purely conjecture here as I'm not sure on the specifics of the rental system but surely there is some measure of accountability in operation?
I was under the impression that by scanning a qr code it registered the rental to your account, hence discouraging bad actor behaviour with the potential punishments for discarding or hoarding a bicycle that those actions would incur in fines etc.
If not, how difficult could this type of measure be to implement?
Regarding the bikes being kept for personal use, its a quirk of the way one of the bike-sharing systems worked. Ofo, one of the biggest players, didn't have any sort of GPS system on the bikes. Rather, each bike has a license plate with a numerical code, which, when put into an app, gives you a number for a padlock which will unlock the bike. Now, the number in the padlock doesn't change, so people quickly figured out that they could write down the code for the padlock, rip the license plate off the bike (or scratch off the number), and then no one else can use their bike.
I believe this company has added GPS tracking to the bikes now, but this was a pad enough product design flaw that it should have rendered this company incapable of making money. I haven't seen any numbers from them, but I would be extremely surprised to see them bringing in any significant revenue, nonetheless profits.
I haven't downloaded their app, but I've used their bikes a number of times, as they're currently littering the sidewalks of Shanghai, many with their locking mechanisms ripped off or permanently opened.
Nonetheless, this company was valued north of $1 Billion as of their last fundraising round.
Can you detect the difference between no one else renting the bike vs one person hoarding it in some way? If you can't, then it only takes a couple stories in the news of some innocent being charged fines to generate ill will.
This article was originally published on Young Australians in International Affairs blog, Insights. It is reprinted with kind permission. Link: https://goo.gl/WczzJ4
Apologies for the miss-type, the error has been corrected:
"Firstly, it is important to recall that in the entire span since the United States acquired nuclear weapons, outside the two instances in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, it has not seen fit to use them."
There are auto-voting scripts that can be installed as plugins in Chrome and Firefox to help with this. I did exactly this last night and woke to find myself in the largest of the groups. It was entirely unfulfilling.
As mentioned by some people in the comments, Assange may still be arrested due to the lack of jurisdiction of UN panel's such as this.
If that is the case, what is there that we (as supporters of Assange's plight) can do to add pressure to the UK government and forward the effort towards securing his freedom?
Why did we want Aaron Swartz to go free? He was actually charged with a felony crime.
Or maybe some times things aren't what they seem and their are political motivations, and they require politics to fight them, not just blindly following false justice
These allegations of sexual assault really should be investigated in good faith. The time is coincidental, I'll grant that, with the allegations being levied against Assange shortly after WikiLeaks published something so prominent, but non-consensual sexual activity is a horrible thing to do to a person, and the impact of such should not be mitigated.
All information might as well be completely free and open to the public for the security the practice of counter spying provides us. Additionally, the reason this level of infringement of privacy is so damning is that it completely absolves any notion of trust the German authority might have had towards the US. Attempts to form a more cohesive alliance in international politics will not be fruitful with this strategy.
Probably not but I don't see any reason why this kind of information needs to be sourced through spying rather than through a formal declaration between intelligence services. Not that that process need be transparent, just that the act of willing participation by the German administration would likely produce a more amicable friendship.
