Did this change recently? iPlayer to watch catch up programs never used to require a license.
Besides all this, the answer is fairly simple. If they want to enforce license status, iPlayer should just require a login with an account the BBC can use to very status.
No to the first question. Since it follows a set track, I imagine they lay track wherever it can go. To the third question, the answer is yes, if the track makes a right-hand turn. One of the videos showed that, though it's not clear to me the mechanism that makes the bus flexible like a tram, especially being so wide.
Yes, that's true. And conventional ag is going down this route. I mentioned precision planters. A lot of research right now is going into various forms of mechanical weed control, and also very precise weed control, like computer vision driving herbicide application. And variable-rate irrigation (using pivots that are suspended water wipes that drive around on wheels!) is starting to become a focus as well. Remote sensing can help decide how much water should go on and where, greatly increasing efficiency of water use. I'd be using variable rate irrigation right now if the cost weren't so prohibitive right now. The electronic valves on each and every sprinkler drop are costly and complex. But it's slowly happening. Variable rate irrigation also opens up the possibility of less monoculture as it would be easy to irrigate vary small plots of many different crops under the same pivot, whereas right now that's just not so easy.
Not at all. The ideas behind farmbot include precision planting, precision watering, and the ability to more easily weed since you know exactly where the plants are. All of these things are increasingly important in agriculture. why are they important? Well precision planting allows mechanical weed control, and it also means water need not be wasted where there is no plant planted. Think of it as drip irrigation without the hoses and a lot more precise.
When it comes to precision planting, that's actually possible on a large scale right now, almost to the same precision the farmbot can do. I've seen 40' wide corn planters that can place a seed to within an inch of the same spot year after year (if that's what you really wanted to do). Rows of corn are perfectly spaced so that the plants are exactly the same distance apart. Automatic section control means there is absolutely no overlap even when driving back across already-planted soil. It's pretty remarkable!
The farmbot idea is very interesting and I'm following it as it progresses. At present I cannot see it scaling beyond small garden plots. And even if you just scale it by putting in lots of small plots, there is an energy cost there to running these robots. There's an energy cost to conventional farming of course, but the carbon cost of mechanically removing all the weeds at a large scale is often far more than using herbicide.
That said, the farmbot is very cool and I think it will turn out to be really productive for some kinds of food growing, such as your garden. You joke about being too lazy, but the fact is, most people simply don't have time to properly tend a garden so most don't, even those that would kind of like to. This would allow folks to grow their own food. That alone is a good and educational experience to have. I've often thought agriculture (even gardening) and computer nerds are a good fit. Technology really can help us get a little bit back to nature and having our own fresh food from time to time. Of course then people would have to relearn how to cook again.
As I understand it, this is not the point of the chip and signature system. The point of the chip is to make it much much harder to clone the card. With the old non-chip system, all someone needs is your CC number. They can program that into the magnetic strip and start using it. Many places like fast food never even required signatures. Gas stations only required zip codes, and then only sometimes.
My biggest problem with chip and pin is that banks disclaim themselves of all liability for transactions that go through with a valid PIN, as they feel the chip is secure enough to prove that the card must have been real and if the pin was used, that's because you intended to do it. Nevermind that cards can still be cloned and pin numbers skimmed. This is also a problem if someone steels your card and knows your pin, you're on the hook for everything. Happened to a guy here in Canada when his ex girlfriend stole his card. Back when they were dating he shared his pin with her (big mistake... but what about marriages that end in divorce?).
Sorry but your comment doesn't makes sense. All you need is the play store and play services. Everything else is available on the play store itself. Why would you want Hangouts Gmail, Chrome, Drive, etc all bundled with the firmware? Bundled apps get installed in system space and then when the play store updates them in two weeks they go to the non-system part of your phone's memory, meaning all that space used up in/system is just a waste now. Google started moving away from bundling all the apps a long time ago. You just install them now from play store like other apps. That's the way to go.
To those thinking the EPA should just drive the cars, even that won't actually get very accurate results. Real-world fuel efficiency depends on so many factors that it would be impossible to reliably and accurately measure them all. For example, so-called hyper-miler enthusiast employ driving techniques to maximize their fuel efficiency. Conversely an aggressive driver could easily drop fuel economy in half. Then we have differences in temperatures, altitude, and terrain across the country.
So with that in mind, I think the current, 40-year old testing regime is probably still our best bet. It may not tell you how much fuel economy *you* will get, but since it's done under very controlled and consistent circumstances, it can give an indication to you how it will do relative to other cars. Honestly that's the best we should expect.
I fear we're going to meet the same problem with "real-world" emissions testing. I don't know of any car out there that can meet standards all the time. Take the cleanest car and get it to accelerate up a grade and it will dump pollutants. Or punch it off the light and you'll dump a lot more NOx and particulates than if you accelerate at a more reasonable rate.
In short, "real-world testing" is fairly meaningless. The only way to actually accomplish this is to have sensors and recorders on every car all the time and measure it and average it over time (and after the fact).
And if there's any power in excess of demand, use it to convert carbon dioxide into methanol. Which can then be stored or burned for fuel.
-- BAD IDEA
one step forward and two step back?
Why is that? Chemical storage is very high density and it's still carbon neutral. There will be efficiency losses, but I don't see it as a bad idea or a step backwards. Why do you say it is?
For those that sell software, copyright guarantees (or so they think) a potential revenue stream through licensing. As to open source software, copyright becomes the vehicle for keeping the software free and open, and prevents it (theoretically) from being stolen by companies who want to make money off of it. At the same time, it does allow the copyright holders of the open source (GPL'd, etc) software to be able to sell their work if they choose under proprietary terms. This is one reason I select the GPL for my personal projects. It gives me the freedom to sell proprietary licenses if the code ever was interesting enough to catch a commercial vendor's attention.
In any case, the OP's point still stands, and I think he was making the point from the POV of the music industry first and foremost. They see copyright as a rent-seeking mechanism, not one for innovation.
Israeli vehicles are all equipped with a numeric keypad that enables the ignition and fuel systems. You have to enter in the code before starting the vehicle. Otherwise you can crank and crank and it won't ever run. Now I'm sure this is just as hackable as hot-wiring. But passcode systems for ignition do exist in parts of the world and are heavily used. I'm not really sure if they prevent vehicle theft or not, though.
As for a lock on the diagnostic port, that's a good idea, but a physical key to block access to that seems a bit funny and circular. Physical locks can be compromised, so we'll protect them with digital locks which can be compromised by hackers, so we'll protect that with another physical lock. And so on and so forth! I guess it's all about layers.
But in embedded space 64-bit has no real advantage, and may even be a very slight disadvantage in terms of memory consumption (64-bit pointers, etc).
The Raspberry Pi 3 is based on a 64-bit Arm processor, but all the distros available for it are all 32-bit right now. This might have to do with the lack of information from Broadcom. There's no data sheet available without signing an NDA about that chip, so it's hard for open source developers to support the more advanced features. In fact, even the exact electrical specifications of the gpio pins aren't really known.
There is some amazing content being put on Youtube these days. Watching various makers and machinists on youtube is fascinating stuff for some of us. Or the guy building a 74-foot steel chinese junk in Oklahoma! Between them and the science channels I track, I watch about 30 minutes of youtube each evening.
I also often watch episodes of classic TV shows in the evening, British and American, often from various internet sources.
That does add up, though. Maybe 30-60 minutes a day. Not sure what people are watching to get 4.5 hours a day though! What's actually on TV these days?
I take it you don't listen to podcasts at all. Almost all pod cast listeners listen at 1.2 to 1.5x playback speed. And no, there's no chipmunk effect these days!
Also, most youtube videos let you speed up playback in the browser the same way, though I always watch youtube with mpv and speed it up with the "]" key.
I really hate it when articles go on and on about how certain malware was found in unspecified apps on the play store. I assume that Google took them down as soon as they were notified. But let's name the apps and the publishers, please. What specific apps contained this malware?
No doubt nothing would have happened had this story not gone public and they started getting media queries. Now all of a sudden they discover the error and correct it! Really makes me angry. They should have done all this even if there was no publicity. It's rank dishonesty. Sadly dishonesty pays well these days. In spades. For them.
There's a big difference between replacing a simple, ubiquitous, general purpose, analog headphone jack and replacing the special-purpose PS/2 with USB. The PS/2 port had one function, whereas the headphone jack can interconnect nearly any audio device going back 40 years.
The headphone jack is small and simple, and compatible with just about everything out there. Headphones aren't magically obsolete just because they are 10 or 20 years old. (Dropping the jack to make the phone even thinner is just silly.
Do people really want their phones even thinner than they are now? Judging by the bulky cases people buy for their phones, I am not so sure. Pretty soon we'll have phones as thin as a sheet of paper and we'll keep them in our wallets or pocket, and then they'll provide a bluetooth headset that looks like an old nokia candy bar phone to keep it useable and we'll have come full circle.
Sounds good in theory. When implemented as a mandatory policy, not so much. In my experience, forcing users to change a password often and not allow repeats (something a lot of places like Banks are requiring) does not help with security. Users typically end up making superficial changes to their password to get it to be accepted, and then they have to write them down since they can't remember which password they are on that month.
It's a tough issue to solve. If a password is very strong (which most bank sites don't actually allow), then wouldn't it be most secure to allow this password to exist for a long time, provided the user keeps it secret? If we're worried about password interception somehow, then even changing passwords regularly isn't necessarily going to protect us from that threat.
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
No, most Youtube videos (that use the normal youtube player) are not encrypted and you can download and convert them with youtube-dl to your heart's content. In fact youtube uses html5, not rtp. Some content is hosted on youtube but uses an rtp with an encrypted stream and authorized player, such as Crackle. But in general, no youtube streams are not encrypted and there is no DRM.
And my point is the cutout and the required fingernail is the reason things are too thin to be usable. I much prefer my thicker Thinkpad that I can open with just a thumb against the screen. I very much agree with the earlier comment that thinness is overrated but weight is not. Thicker and lighter is far better than thinner and lighter for my purposes.
And yes the keyboards are starting to really suck on those thin laptops. That was the first thing my parents noticed with their new Macbook Air a few months back. Their solution is to plug a keyboard into it. I'm still using a 6 year old thinkpad because it has a nice real keyboard.
I sometimes wonder if technology design is just going to implode under its own weight someday. Someday these young ADD engineers are going to find that they are no longer able to use their own creations.
Still has the cutout, thank goodness. But still sometimes is a bit of a challenge for those with less dexterity to open. I use my fingernail in that cutout.
Personally I think laptops are thin enough, maybe too thin. I like the slightly thicker laptops because I find them easier to handle, plunk down, and open the lid. The macbook air amost requires a fingernail to open. Why not make the laptop 1/2" thick and stick a bigger battery in it? Thinness seems to be the latest trend in ADD fashion.
I also don't want my phones to get any thinner. I always buy a case for my phones these days not because I need to protect the phone, but I want to make it a bit thicker so it's easier to handle and use.
Elon Musk has stated that their design goal is 100 uses. That's pretty ambitious and time will tell if this is feasible or not. I'm sure when they do reuse the stage for the first dozen times they will be doing a lot of structural analysis and look for cracks with x-rays until they completely understand the stage's failure modes.
Slashdot Mirror
Did this change recently? iPlayer to watch catch up programs never used to require a license.
Besides all this, the answer is fairly simple. If they want to enforce license status, iPlayer should just require a login with an account the BBC can use to very status.
No to the first question. Since it follows a set track, I imagine they lay track wherever it can go. To the third question, the answer is yes, if the track makes a right-hand turn. One of the videos showed that, though it's not clear to me the mechanism that makes the bus flexible like a tram, especially being so wide.
Yes, that's true. And conventional ag is going down this route. I mentioned precision planters. A lot of research right now is going into various forms of mechanical weed control, and also very precise weed control, like computer vision driving herbicide application. And variable-rate irrigation (using pivots that are suspended water wipes that drive around on wheels!) is starting to become a focus as well. Remote sensing can help decide how much water should go on and where, greatly increasing efficiency of water use. I'd be using variable rate irrigation right now if the cost weren't so prohibitive right now. The electronic valves on each and every sprinkler drop are costly and complex. But it's slowly happening. Variable rate irrigation also opens up the possibility of less monoculture as it would be easy to irrigate vary small plots of many different crops under the same pivot, whereas right now that's just not so easy.
Not at all. The ideas behind farmbot include precision planting, precision watering, and the ability to more easily weed since you know exactly where the plants are. All of these things are increasingly important in agriculture. why are they important? Well precision planting allows mechanical weed control, and it also means water need not be wasted where there is no plant planted. Think of it as drip irrigation without the hoses and a lot more precise.
When it comes to precision planting, that's actually possible on a large scale right now, almost to the same precision the farmbot can do. I've seen 40' wide corn planters that can place a seed to within an inch of the same spot year after year (if that's what you really wanted to do). Rows of corn are perfectly spaced so that the plants are exactly the same distance apart. Automatic section control means there is absolutely no overlap even when driving back across already-planted soil. It's pretty remarkable!
The farmbot idea is very interesting and I'm following it as it progresses. At present I cannot see it scaling beyond small garden plots. And even if you just scale it by putting in lots of small plots, there is an energy cost there to running these robots. There's an energy cost to conventional farming of course, but the carbon cost of mechanically removing all the weeds at a large scale is often far more than using herbicide.
That said, the farmbot is very cool and I think it will turn out to be really productive for some kinds of food growing, such as your garden. You joke about being too lazy, but the fact is, most people simply don't have time to properly tend a garden so most don't, even those that would kind of like to. This would allow folks to grow their own food. That alone is a good and educational experience to have. I've often thought agriculture (even gardening) and computer nerds are a good fit. Technology really can help us get a little bit back to nature and having our own fresh food from time to time. Of course then people would have to relearn how to cook again.
As I understand it, this is not the point of the chip and signature system. The point of the chip is to make it much much harder to clone the card. With the old non-chip system, all someone needs is your CC number. They can program that into the magnetic strip and start using it. Many places like fast food never even required signatures. Gas stations only required zip codes, and then only sometimes.
My biggest problem with chip and pin is that banks disclaim themselves of all liability for transactions that go through with a valid PIN, as they feel the chip is secure enough to prove that the card must have been real and if the pin was used, that's because you intended to do it. Nevermind that cards can still be cloned and pin numbers skimmed. This is also a problem if someone steels your card and knows your pin, you're on the hook for everything. Happened to a guy here in Canada when his ex girlfriend stole his card. Back when they were dating he shared his pin with her (big mistake... but what about marriages that end in divorce?).
Sorry but your comment doesn't makes sense. All you need is the play store and play services. Everything else is available on the play store itself. Why would you want Hangouts Gmail, Chrome, Drive, etc all bundled with the firmware? Bundled apps get installed in system space and then when the play store updates them in two weeks they go to the non-system part of your phone's memory, meaning all that space used up in /system is just a waste now. Google started moving away from bundling all the apps a long time ago. You just install them now from play store like other apps. That's the way to go.
To those thinking the EPA should just drive the cars, even that won't actually get very accurate results. Real-world fuel efficiency depends on so many factors that it would be impossible to reliably and accurately measure them all. For example, so-called hyper-miler enthusiast employ driving techniques to maximize their fuel efficiency. Conversely an aggressive driver could easily drop fuel economy in half. Then we have differences in temperatures, altitude, and terrain across the country.
So with that in mind, I think the current, 40-year old testing regime is probably still our best bet. It may not tell you how much fuel economy *you* will get, but since it's done under very controlled and consistent circumstances, it can give an indication to you how it will do relative to other cars. Honestly that's the best we should expect.
I fear we're going to meet the same problem with "real-world" emissions testing. I don't know of any car out there that can meet standards all the time. Take the cleanest car and get it to accelerate up a grade and it will dump pollutants. Or punch it off the light and you'll dump a lot more NOx and particulates than if you accelerate at a more reasonable rate.
In short, "real-world testing" is fairly meaningless. The only way to actually accomplish this is to have sensors and recorders on every car all the time and measure it and average it over time (and after the fact).
Why is that? Chemical storage is very high density and it's still carbon neutral. There will be efficiency losses, but I don't see it as a bad idea or a step backwards. Why do you say it is?
For those that sell software, copyright guarantees (or so they think) a potential revenue stream through licensing. As to open source software, copyright becomes the vehicle for keeping the software free and open, and prevents it (theoretically) from being stolen by companies who want to make money off of it. At the same time, it does allow the copyright holders of the open source (GPL'd, etc) software to be able to sell their work if they choose under proprietary terms. This is one reason I select the GPL for my personal projects. It gives me the freedom to sell proprietary licenses if the code ever was interesting enough to catch a commercial vendor's attention.
In any case, the OP's point still stands, and I think he was making the point from the POV of the music industry first and foremost. They see copyright as a rent-seeking mechanism, not one for innovation.
Israeli vehicles are all equipped with a numeric keypad that enables the ignition and fuel systems. You have to enter in the code before starting the vehicle. Otherwise you can crank and crank and it won't ever run. Now I'm sure this is just as hackable as hot-wiring. But passcode systems for ignition do exist in parts of the world and are heavily used. I'm not really sure if they prevent vehicle theft or not, though.
As for a lock on the diagnostic port, that's a good idea, but a physical key to block access to that seems a bit funny and circular. Physical locks can be compromised, so we'll protect them with digital locks which can be compromised by hackers, so we'll protect that with another physical lock. And so on and so forth! I guess it's all about layers.
But in embedded space 64-bit has no real advantage, and may even be a very slight disadvantage in terms of memory consumption (64-bit pointers, etc).
The Raspberry Pi 3 is based on a 64-bit Arm processor, but all the distros available for it are all 32-bit right now. This might have to do with the lack of information from Broadcom. There's no data sheet available without signing an NDA about that chip, so it's hard for open source developers to support the more advanced features. In fact, even the exact electrical specifications of the gpio pins aren't really known.
There is some amazing content being put on Youtube these days. Watching various makers and machinists on youtube is fascinating stuff for some of us. Or the guy building a 74-foot steel chinese junk in Oklahoma! Between them and the science channels I track, I watch about 30 minutes of youtube each evening.
I also often watch episodes of classic TV shows in the evening, British and American, often from various internet sources.
That does add up, though. Maybe 30-60 minutes a day. Not sure what people are watching to get 4.5 hours a day though! What's actually on TV these days?
I take it you don't listen to podcasts at all. Almost all pod cast listeners listen at 1.2 to 1.5x playback speed. And no, there's no chipmunk effect these days!
Also, most youtube videos let you speed up playback in the browser the same way, though I always watch youtube with mpv and speed it up with the "]" key.
I really hate it when articles go on and on about how certain malware was found in unspecified apps on the play store. I assume that Google took them down as soon as they were notified. But let's name the apps and the publishers, please. What specific apps contained this malware?
No doubt nothing would have happened had this story not gone public and they started getting media queries. Now all of a sudden they discover the error and correct it! Really makes me angry. They should have done all this even if there was no publicity. It's rank dishonesty. Sadly dishonesty pays well these days. In spades. For them.
There's a big difference between replacing a simple, ubiquitous, general purpose, analog headphone jack and replacing the special-purpose PS/2 with USB. The PS/2 port had one function, whereas the headphone jack can interconnect nearly any audio device going back 40 years.
The headphone jack is small and simple, and compatible with just about everything out there. Headphones aren't magically obsolete just because they are 10 or 20 years old. (Dropping the jack to make the phone even thinner is just silly.
Do people really want their phones even thinner than they are now? Judging by the bulky cases people buy for their phones, I am not so sure. Pretty soon we'll have phones as thin as a sheet of paper and we'll keep them in our wallets or pocket, and then they'll provide a bluetooth headset that looks like an old nokia candy bar phone to keep it useable and we'll have come full circle.
Chrome is becoming a lot like emacs. It'd be a fine operating system if it just had a decent web browser.
I think earthquakes would be a danger. That much water pressure carrying a shock wave could be very destructive.
Personally I doubt they will ever build it, so it probably would not matter.
Sounds good in theory. When implemented as a mandatory policy, not so much. In my experience, forcing users to change a password often and not allow repeats (something a lot of places like Banks are requiring) does not help with security. Users typically end up making superficial changes to their password to get it to be accepted, and then they have to write them down since they can't remember which password they are on that month.
It's a tough issue to solve. If a password is very strong (which most bank sites don't actually allow), then wouldn't it be most secure to allow this password to exist for a long time, provided the user keeps it secret? If we're worried about password interception somehow, then even changing passwords regularly isn't necessarily going to protect us from that threat.
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 21st century?"
Fry: Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
No, most Youtube videos (that use the normal youtube player) are not encrypted and you can download and convert them with youtube-dl to your heart's content. In fact youtube uses html5, not rtp. Some content is hosted on youtube but uses an rtp with an encrypted stream and authorized player, such as Crackle. But in general, no youtube streams are not encrypted and there is no DRM.
And my point is the cutout and the required fingernail is the reason things are too thin to be usable. I much prefer my thicker Thinkpad that I can open with just a thumb against the screen. I very much agree with the earlier comment that thinness is overrated but weight is not. Thicker and lighter is far better than thinner and lighter for my purposes.
And yes the keyboards are starting to really suck on those thin laptops. That was the first thing my parents noticed with their new Macbook Air a few months back. Their solution is to plug a keyboard into it. I'm still using a 6 year old thinkpad because it has a nice real keyboard.
I sometimes wonder if technology design is just going to implode under its own weight someday. Someday these young ADD engineers are going to find that they are no longer able to use their own creations.
Still has the cutout, thank goodness. But still sometimes is a bit of a challenge for those with less dexterity to open. I use my fingernail in that cutout.
Personally I think laptops are thin enough, maybe too thin. I like the slightly thicker laptops because I find them easier to handle, plunk down, and open the lid. The macbook air amost requires a fingernail to open. Why not make the laptop 1/2" thick and stick a bigger battery in it? Thinness seems to be the latest trend in ADD fashion.
I also don't want my phones to get any thinner. I always buy a case for my phones these days not because I need to protect the phone, but I want to make it a bit thicker so it's easier to handle and use.
Elon Musk has stated that their design goal is 100 uses. That's pretty ambitious and time will tell if this is feasible or not. I'm sure when they do reuse the stage for the first dozen times they will be doing a lot of structural analysis and look for cracks with x-rays until they completely understand the stage's failure modes.