U.S. Army, Uber sign research agreement

Or would it be time to give up on Uber and finally admit that they're neither a technology company nor anything else "groundbreaking" that Valley thinks they are.

"Technology" for the company has been coming up with a mobile app to connect drivers and potential customers - something hardly groundbreaking. Probably the most groundbreaking technological thing coming from these guys has been the multiple evasion software etc which at the end of the day are not only just sketchy to begin with but also not really anything worth their company valuation, even on the defense contracting etc where such applications could become worth something if you have slick enough lobbying/sales people.

And while their efforts to "disrupt" the taxi economy have been "great" in all honesty they've only created room for their competition to benefit on this - Uber has simply managed to take a business (taxis) and run it to chaos while what would've been the logical step was to run a similar application by the taxi companies for ride hailing.

The US defense collaboration we can only speculate on but presumably this is either government wanting to get their hands on the Uber spying software or taking their bet that if these dimwits ever come up with anything technological they can always call for it - why spend billions upon billions on R&D when you can get a bunch of small contracts for which you can negotiate exclusive rights for upcoming R&D by the companies.

My question simply is - why do you care of anything Uber anymore? After everything this company has proven to be from the law enforcement evasion to sexual harassment scandals and borderline impossible "innovations" (like seriously, who seriously thought these guys can figure out the self-driving cars etc when the 2 of the biggest technology corporations with virtually unlimited experience, know-how, funding and partnerships haven't done so yet?).

At best this would be proper honest R&D but in my honest opinion there's no way Uber is that far with the tech and no way US Army is doing R&D for civil purposes, you take into account the miniscule contract value etc and it's rather clear that this is either publicity stunt by Uber to save their sinking ship or direct tech takeover from government. In either case there's hardly anything news worthy and even less anything worth of spending time - let is sink and someone will build a better, functioning ship to take people across the busy streets of New York in some vehicle whether it's flying or on the ground.

Good questions, even better question would be how did we figure out quantum theory etc but couldn't figure that twice the vertical lift from 2 rotors is more than lift single rotor? How's this something credited to Uber? Dunno.

Most probably from government side this is purely a bold "In case these guys manage to do it we don't want the tech to fall to hands of so let's get contract on their R&D now and keep eye on it. If they succeed we'll push for exclusivity and if they fail, well it's a million, who cares. We're already some 20 trillion in debt so pish posh."

> "Google's engineers are mass protesting"

~12 Google employees resigned. Out of ~4,000 signers to the petition. Out of ~74,000 total employees. A drop in the bucket. Clearly the vast majority of google employees don't care, rationalize away, or excuse the fact that they work for the military industrial complex.

5.6% of staff signed a petition and 1.6% resigned.

In comparison, the largest petition in the US was 4.6 million signatures, a mere 1.8% of the working age population.