The point isn't to be hard to circumvent(in a technical sense),
it doesn't need to be hard to circumvent the filters to prevent people from doing it. It just needs to be illegal.
it's the same as hacking into a site. The law doesn't stop you from being prosecuted if the site had lousy security - the "But M'Lud, it wasn't burglary the door had an easy lock" defence is a myth. If the law is drafted so that intent to circumvent is illegal then the strength of the lock-out doesn't matter.
And if ISPs know which sites are banned for the opt-in's it will know which of it's opt-in'd users are trying to access them. If there is then some traffic flow from that banned site the only question is whether the ISP has a duty to report it. Until the law is written we will have no idea just how draconian it will be.
This is essentially a satellite grabber. It can "dock" with a satellite, attach things to it (presumably drill holes in it, too) and make the satellite do things - either things it used to be able to do, or things you'd like it to be able to do.
One thing that would be nice to do would be to deorbit large, useless satellites that are occupying prime orbital slots. Or to add controlled destruction to satellites that failed and are out of control (though I'd be surprised if this thing could stop a tumbling satellite).
The trick is, that all of these maintenance operations are only "good" when performed with remedial intent, on your own hardware or hardware of a space-faring nation who's asked for your help. The same technology can also be used to wreck the satellites of nations you don't like. The trick is to make sure nobody sees you doing the dirty deed.
Since most satellites don't have proximity detectors, or security cameras build into them, they won't see an approaching wrecker. All that will happen is your spy-sat suddenly goes dead. If you're lucky a groundstation from an independent country might have tracked the approach of a satellite wrecker and get you some sympathy after the fact. However once the wrecker satellites become non-reflective, impose radio silence and become covered in radar absorbent material, there will be no way to tell if your "reconnaissance" bird fell silent for technical reasons or if someone else helped it die.
The United States constantly declares war. There's been the "War on Drugs", the "War on Terror" - not to mention the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and undeclared wars in places like Somalia and Yemen - where military actions (or drone-bourne assasinations) take place regularly.
The thing is, wars are wonderful devices for a democratically elected government. They allow a "wartime" footing to be established where a lot of peacetime protections, rights and restrictions can simply be tossed aside. War is as much a state of mind as a military action. If a country considers itself at war, a lot of the things that its citizens would be permitted to do become criminalised, or at least subject to official scrutiny.
This is exactly what's happened since 2001. The problem is that now we have governments all over the world - previously responsible, western governments that were considered "enlightened" are now viewing all their citizens as potential enemies, criminals or terrorists - and are treating them according to that suspicion.
If you think that cyberspace is too abstract a place to have a war, just look out for all the critical infrastructure that is accessible on the internet. Facilities that any government would be mad to let people walk into unchallenged can (I'm told) be hacked. Whether it's by a script-kiddie or a Stuxnet wielding super-power is immaterial. It's a state of conflict and peoples' rights are being squashed in order to counter it. That sure sounds like a war - even if the enemy is us.
'In terms of robotics we’re probably where the world of PCs were in the early 1970s
if the development of mobile, intelligent devices comes anywhere close to the history of personal computers I would not want one with 10 miles of me. Just think what a Stuxnet could do with an army of household robots - ones that know where the sharp knives are kept. No foreigh power would ever need to invade, it would merely need to upload the right virus into everyone's "home help" and we'd all wake up to find ourselves either dead or subjugated.
In fact it doesn't even need to be malevolent. There are so many bugs and basic mistakes floating around in home computers that the chances of getting a household robot that would do the things we wish are extremely small. Even something like Siri is so bad as to be useless, unless you are one of the tiny minority who's accent it understands.
Since we can't even develop home computers that are secure (actually, developing secure PCs is easy - stopping idiots from subverting all that security in the name of convenience is impossible) and reliable, we are nowhere near responsible enough to give up control to the machines.
The bank won't ever say what the problem is/was. The reasons are that they think their customers are stupid so wouldn't understand - but they also probably don't actually know, themselves. That is also the reason they wouldn't issue a time-to-fix estimate. Their only IT people are outsourced, cheap staff in a foreign country and it's not likely that they have enough understanding of the systems to do much more than try undoing the last thing that happened before it all went wrong.
Natwest are not alone, another british bank (Barclays) has often been reported as having Monday-morning outages, which sounds a lot like a weekend update that went wrong.
As it is, having a single account is like having a single credit-card, no spare car key or only one kidney. You can get by until something goes wrong, but in an ideal world you'd have at least one spare.
TVs "speak" in the same way that computers "speak". They only produce words or text that has been programmed in to them. The question is rather less relevant than asking if a parrot has the right to free speech.
I think you're responding to a different post. The point I was making is that although in theory open source software is hackable, to most people that theory doesn't apply as they have no software skills, or free time that permits it. The point was not about free software - stuff yo udon't have to pay for: OSS or not. It was about the false assertion that just because a program has its source code available that (somehow) it means anyone who wants to, can change it - they can't.
So unless these "markets" (wow, a term I've never heard of before ) use fresh air or leaves as a unit of transaction, you might as well just go out and buy a commercial package. I know there's a difference between OSS and zero-price (different again from zero-cost - everything has a cost), but once you're in hock to a third party to support your customisations and fix whatever bugs they introduced - now and for every new version, you may as well reduce the commercial risk and just buy an OTS solution.
"The advantage of OSS is you can modify it to suit your own requirements"
That's all very well for the small number of elite programmers who have the free-time, skills and learning ability to just knock out a complete recompile of GNOME (say), or Open Office. For everyone else it makes no difference whether some of the major packages they use are open / closed / free / restricted or written in a foreign language. The number of people who HAVE decided to make customisations to anything is small (n.b. If you're thinking or replying "I have and do so on a regular basis", you're a Slashdot reader, so you're implicitly excluded from the ranks of "ordinary people")
Even for moderately experienced programmers, the complexities of pulling all the needed source, dev. tools and change management packages that any particular piece of OSS might have decided to use, learning whatever language(s) the authors chose, chasing down all the dependencies to get them to work on YOUR personal platform and THEN hacking through over/under/poorly/out-of-date/non-existent or just plain wrong code documentation and build instructions makes the task a monumental effort in futility if all you want to do is alter it "to suit your personal requirements". Much better to just toss an unsuitable package and find another that's better - or just to change your needs to match what software is available.
In the 80s (or was it the 70s) there was a craze to get people cooking with chinese woks. Basically, they were just frying pans and were promoted for making stir-fry food (other uses are available: satellite dish, giant saucer).
Because of the publicity and cheap prices they were popular for a time. Lots of people bought one - or were given one. There were books published on the back of that popularity. However, after a brief trial most woks ended up in the graveyard of kitchen gadgets; the cupboard under the sink.
The Pi is going through the same phase. It's received massive (in the geek world, at least) publicity - enhanced by its scarcity: an accidental piece of marketing genius, given that many better alternatives exist. The "buzz" around it is truly amazing and lots of people either have bought one or are waiting to order one. However, I haven't actually seen anything that anyone has made using a Pi.
Mine arrived a few days ago and it's like going back to the 1990's so far as having to futz around to get it to do anything useful. The Linux implementations for it are poorly documented, incomplete and lack features. I'm sure that most people, once they get past the novelty of connecting a naked circuit-board to their TVs and realising it's too slow to play videos, too limited to surf the internet and too lacking for games, flash and anything else except terminal-level programming that it, too will end up in the cupboard under the sink, next to the wok.
And all the pollutants created in the USA gets dispersed on the wind to other places - as does the pollution from Europe and everywhere else on the planet. It's not that america is therefore suffering unduly - it's just that we should recgonise the world is a closed system and it's not a good idea to crap on each others doorsteps.
That would bring the total number of specialist Computer Science teachers in the UK to...100.
No, it would leave it at zero. As soon as the teachers become qualified in an IT topic that's in demand they'll be off into a "proper" job (you know: desk, phone, work-colleagues they can chat to, coffee when they please, unlimited surfing and a spot of working, too) that doesn't involve being in a room with a bunch of angry/hostile/bored/demotivated/sociopathic children - and the kids in the classes are even worse that the ones in the staff room.
... is getting it all back OFF again when you want to switch service providers.
The one thing you want never to happen is that you get locked in to a single cloud service. They might go bust, they might become uncompetitive. They may become politically "unfriendly" or tainted with customers you have no desire to be associated with - or any of a number of other reasons to say "adios".
Just like with disaster planning, all the processes and procedures, agreements and SLAs are worthless until you've actually PERFORMED the operation and done so without a major service interruption. How many cloud users have gone that far - and how many are locked in but don't know it?
Rather than "tune" the wallpaper to block or allow certain frequency bands, surely it's simpler to block the whole lot and then install hardware inside the screened room to retransmit the sorts of signals (not just their frequencies) that you wish to allow.
That way, as technology changes, you can easily reconfigure the system to accommodate new requirements.
I'd guess that's what most people do anyway - since this wallpaper has taken so ong to be developed.
And not the "modern" IBM - the old, 1960s IBM. The one where the users never actually owned the machine, could only run approved programs and could only get spares, upgrades and addons that were allowed.
Then they went and spoiled it all by inventing an open PC architecture.
Can't see Apple making that mistake!
Maybe so, but that "cost" is misleading. You can't go from nothing to a "credit-card sized computer" for 35USD. If you were in fact starting with nothing, or if you were planning to deploy (say) 50 CCSC's in a teaching lab you'd need to provide all the power supplies, keyboards, mice, cases and screens for the students to use. So reckon on at least an extra 200USD for all the ancillaries.
In that case, it doesn't matter much whether the motherboard (for that's all a Pi is) was $35 or $100, in comparison with the cost of the extra bits.
My personal intention for mine when they arrive (hopefully before christmas) is to use them as embedded machines, as this is obviously all they are in their delivered state.
Desktop Linux is what a popular free software product looks like. Albeit one that has had next to no marketing, advertising or commercial promotion. One that has been pitched exclusively at "geeks" and makes it hard for ordinary people to know how to install, use or discover what they can do with it.
The big lesson must about the power of marketing. Make sure that before a product is released, your potential customers (as Linux is not and never has been free - it has always needed a considerable expenditure of time, if not money, to learn) have a clear understanding of what it is, why it's better and what benefits they'll get from using it.
Linux has never done any of those things. At best it's provided a dense, arcane and occasionally accurate list of "features" (not benefits) and expected people to recognise their worth, be able to understand the small amount of "help" and then to put up with some generally poorly designed UIs.
Although the price-cost is quite low, sometimes zero, the time-cost of installing and using Linux is extremely high - much higher than the competition's. In these days when everyone is complaining about how busy they are, time is a precious commodity and the risk of spending a lot of time trying to get Linux to work, on your PC with all your specific hardware - and then failing is more than most people are prepared to gamble.
Finally, Linux has never really understood that for most people, Windows is "free". it comes pre-installed in their machines and is not an itemised (or optional) component. As a consequence, they'll use what they've already got - rather than throw it away and try something new. After all, the O/S is irrelevant - it's what applications you can run, to achieve the things you want to do, that is the only thing which matters.
Given all these basic promotional points that have been missed, ignored or done wrong, it's amazing that Linux has managed to stay around for as long as it has - and that it's achieved the penetration it currently enjoys.
There are lots of embeddable PCs available now. Most of them are in the $100 upwards price range provided you buy enough of them. This puppy doesn't sound much different from what's already available. Though if it's power requirements are so high that it needs a fan, I have to think it's rather missed the point of embeddable or single board computers meant to be part of a larger device.
Apparently, it's not possible, or practical to just look and see what the driver is doing. It takes
a big effort to look across to the other side of the flight deck, which is not easy
Now, it's a long time since I've been on a flight deck, but they weren't that big. What's changed so much that it's such a huge imposition for someone to look at the guy in the other seat and see "oh yes, he's pulling back on the stick" and then maybe slap him around the head until he stops.
If one guy won't sign an NDA, there are thousands of other who will. Just pick another programmer.
I wonder if the guy is happy to accept IOUs from strangers, too.
Sit around trying to make sense of the requirement
Write some code that they think does what the requester really meant
Spend most of their time fighting the code management system and getting it to build cleanly
Pull an all-nighter just before the deadline so it doesn't crash when fed correct input
Toss it "over the wall" to the integration team
Refuse to answer any questions about it as they're not "too busy" on the next project
Have a nice feeling of satisfaction that they never have to do support on old code, as none of it ever gets into a production system
Get promoted frequently for meeting their targets on productivity and delivery times
Although the ARM chip was (past tense: the version in the RPi is quite an old generation) designed in GB, it is manufactured in foreign parts - just like the 6502 was never manufactured in GB.
If you wanted a through-and-through british design, development and manufacture you'd have to look at something like a transputer which WAS built in Britain during the mid 80s and would have wiped the floor with an 6502 based machine. Sadly it went the way of most british innovation and withered on the branch.
Slashdot Mirror
The point isn't to be hard to circumvent(in a technical sense),
it doesn't need to be hard to circumvent the filters to prevent people from doing it. It just needs to be illegal.
it's the same as hacking into a site. The law doesn't stop you from being prosecuted if the site had lousy security - the "But M'Lud, it wasn't burglary the door had an easy lock" defence is a myth. If the law is drafted so that intent to circumvent is illegal then the strength of the lock-out doesn't matter.
And if ISPs know which sites are banned for the opt-in's it will know which of it's opt-in'd users are trying to access them. If there is then some traffic flow from that banned site the only question is whether the ISP has a duty to report it. Until the law is written we will have no idea just how draconian it will be.
This is essentially a satellite grabber. It can "dock" with a satellite, attach things to it (presumably drill holes in it, too) and make the satellite do things - either things it used to be able to do, or things you'd like it to be able to do.
One thing that would be nice to do would be to deorbit large, useless satellites that are occupying prime orbital slots. Or to add controlled destruction to satellites that failed and are out of control (though I'd be surprised if this thing could stop a tumbling satellite).
The trick is, that all of these maintenance operations are only "good" when performed with remedial intent, on your own hardware or hardware of a space-faring nation who's asked for your help. The same technology can also be used to wreck the satellites of nations you don't like. The trick is to make sure nobody sees you doing the dirty deed.
Since most satellites don't have proximity detectors, or security cameras build into them, they won't see an approaching wrecker. All that will happen is your spy-sat suddenly goes dead. If you're lucky a groundstation from an independent country might have tracked the approach of a satellite wrecker and get you some sympathy after the fact. However once the wrecker satellites become non-reflective, impose radio silence and become covered in radar absorbent material, there will be no way to tell if your "reconnaissance" bird fell silent for technical reasons or if someone else helped it die.
The United States constantly declares war. There's been the "War on Drugs", the "War on Terror" - not to mention the wars against Iraq and Afghanistan and undeclared wars in places like Somalia and Yemen - where military actions (or drone-bourne assasinations) take place regularly.
The thing is, wars are wonderful devices for a democratically elected government. They allow a "wartime" footing to be established where a lot of peacetime protections, rights and restrictions can simply be tossed aside. War is as much a state of mind as a military action. If a country considers itself at war, a lot of the things that its citizens would be permitted to do become criminalised, or at least subject to official scrutiny.
This is exactly what's happened since 2001. The problem is that now we have governments all over the world - previously responsible, western governments that were considered "enlightened" are now viewing all their citizens as potential enemies, criminals or terrorists - and are treating them according to that suspicion.
If you think that cyberspace is too abstract a place to have a war, just look out for all the critical infrastructure that is accessible on the internet. Facilities that any government would be mad to let people walk into unchallenged can (I'm told) be hacked. Whether it's by a script-kiddie or a Stuxnet wielding super-power is immaterial. It's a state of conflict and peoples' rights are being squashed in order to counter it. That sure sounds like a war - even if the enemy is us.
Precision in climate modelling? Who knew meteorologists had a sense of humour?
'In terms of robotics we’re probably where the world of PCs were in the early 1970s
if the development of mobile, intelligent devices comes anywhere close to the history of personal computers I would not want one with 10 miles of me. Just think what a Stuxnet could do with an army of household robots - ones that know where the sharp knives are kept. No foreigh power would ever need to invade, it would merely need to upload the right virus into everyone's "home help" and we'd all wake up to find ourselves either dead or subjugated.
In fact it doesn't even need to be malevolent. There are so many bugs and basic mistakes floating around in home computers that the chances of getting a household robot that would do the things we wish are extremely small. Even something like Siri is so bad as to be useless, unless you are one of the tiny minority who's accent it understands.
Since we can't even develop home computers that are secure (actually, developing secure PCs is easy - stopping idiots from subverting all that security in the name of convenience is impossible) and reliable, we are nowhere near responsible enough to give up control to the machines.
Natwest are not alone, another british bank (Barclays) has often been reported as having Monday-morning outages, which sounds a lot like a weekend update that went wrong.
As it is, having a single account is like having a single credit-card, no spare car key or only one kidney. You can get by until something goes wrong, but in an ideal world you'd have at least one spare.
I've got a nice bridge for sale.
ahh, so you're the guy who bought it! Big of you to own up.
TVs "speak" in the same way that computers "speak". They only produce words or text that has been programmed in to them. The question is rather less relevant than asking if a parrot has the right to free speech.
I think you're responding to a different post. The point I was making is that although in theory open source software is hackable, to most people that theory doesn't apply as they have no software skills, or free time that permits it. The point was not about free software - stuff yo udon't have to pay for: OSS or not. It was about the false assertion that just because a program has its source code available that (somehow) it means anyone who wants to, can change it - they can't.
So unless these "markets" (wow, a term I've never heard of before ) use fresh air or leaves as a unit of transaction, you might as well just go out and buy a commercial package. I know there's a difference between OSS and zero-price (different again from zero-cost - everything has a cost), but once you're in hock to a third party to support your customisations and fix whatever bugs they introduced - now and for every new version, you may as well reduce the commercial risk and just buy an OTS solution.
That's all very well for the small number of elite programmers who have the free-time, skills and learning ability to just knock out a complete recompile of GNOME (say), or Open Office. For everyone else it makes no difference whether some of the major packages they use are open / closed / free / restricted or written in a foreign language. The number of people who HAVE decided to make customisations to anything is small (n.b. If you're thinking or replying "I have and do so on a regular basis", you're a Slashdot reader, so you're implicitly excluded from the ranks of "ordinary people")
Even for moderately experienced programmers, the complexities of pulling all the needed source, dev. tools and change management packages that any particular piece of OSS might have decided to use, learning whatever language(s) the authors chose, chasing down all the dependencies to get them to work on YOUR personal platform and THEN hacking through over/under/poorly/out-of-date/non-existent or just plain wrong code documentation and build instructions makes the task a monumental effort in futility if all you want to do is alter it "to suit your personal requirements". Much better to just toss an unsuitable package and find another that's better - or just to change your needs to match what software is available.
Anything but trying to alter a major piece of OSS
In the 80s (or was it the 70s) there was a craze to get people cooking with chinese woks. Basically, they were just frying pans and were promoted for making stir-fry food (other uses are available: satellite dish, giant saucer).
Because of the publicity and cheap prices they were popular for a time. Lots of people bought one - or were given one. There were books published on the back of that popularity. However, after a brief trial most woks ended up in the graveyard of kitchen gadgets; the cupboard under the sink.
The Pi is going through the same phase. It's received massive (in the geek world, at least) publicity - enhanced by its scarcity: an accidental piece of marketing genius, given that many better alternatives exist. The "buzz" around it is truly amazing and lots of people either have bought one or are waiting to order one. However, I haven't actually seen anything that anyone has made using a Pi.
Mine arrived a few days ago and it's like going back to the 1990's so far as having to futz around to get it to do anything useful. The Linux implementations for it are poorly documented, incomplete and lack features. I'm sure that most people, once they get past the novelty of connecting a naked circuit-board to their TVs and realising it's too slow to play videos, too limited to surf the internet and too lacking for games, flash and anything else except terminal-level programming that it, too will end up in the cupboard under the sink, next to the wok.
And all the pollutants created in the USA gets dispersed on the wind to other places - as does the pollution from Europe and everywhere else on the planet. It's not that america is therefore suffering unduly - it's just that we should recgonise the world is a closed system and it's not a good idea to crap on each others doorsteps.
That would bring the total number of specialist Computer Science teachers in the UK to...100.
No, it would leave it at zero. As soon as the teachers become qualified in an IT topic that's in demand they'll be off into a "proper" job (you know: desk, phone, work-colleagues they can chat to, coffee when they please, unlimited surfing and a spot of working, too) that doesn't involve being in a room with a bunch of angry/hostile/bored/demotivated/sociopathic children - and the kids in the classes are even worse that the ones in the staff room.
... is getting it all back OFF again when you want to switch service providers.
The one thing you want never to happen is that you get locked in to a single cloud service. They might go bust, they might become uncompetitive. They may become politically "unfriendly" or tainted with customers you have no desire to be associated with - or any of a number of other reasons to say "adios".
Just like with disaster planning, all the processes and procedures, agreements and SLAs are worthless until you've actually PERFORMED the operation and done so without a major service interruption. How many cloud users have gone that far - and how many are locked in but don't know it?
Whatever solution you end up with, make sure the screen can withstand a direct hit from the child's heaviest toy.
That way, as technology changes, you can easily reconfigure the system to accommodate new requirements.
I'd guess that's what most people do anyway - since this wallpaper has taken so ong to be developed.
And not the "modern" IBM - the old, 1960s IBM. The one where the users never actually owned the machine, could only run approved programs and could only get spares, upgrades and addons that were allowed.
Then they went and spoiled it all by inventing an open PC architecture.
Can't see Apple making that mistake!
Maybe so, but that "cost" is misleading. You can't go from nothing to a "credit-card sized computer" for 35USD. If you were in fact starting with nothing, or if you were planning to deploy (say) 50 CCSC's in a teaching lab you'd need to provide all the power supplies, keyboards, mice, cases and screens for the students to use. So reckon on at least an extra 200USD for all the ancillaries.
In that case, it doesn't matter much whether the motherboard (for that's all a Pi is) was $35 or $100, in comparison with the cost of the extra bits.
My personal intention for mine when they arrive (hopefully before christmas) is to use them as embedded machines, as this is obviously all they are in their delivered state.
Desktop Linux is what a popular free software product looks like. Albeit one that has had next to no marketing, advertising or commercial promotion. One that has been pitched exclusively at "geeks" and makes it hard for ordinary people to know how to install, use or discover what they can do with it.
The big lesson must about the power of marketing. Make sure that before a product is released, your potential customers (as Linux is not and never has been free - it has always needed a considerable expenditure of time, if not money, to learn) have a clear understanding of what it is, why it's better and what benefits they'll get from using it.
Linux has never done any of those things. At best it's provided a dense, arcane and occasionally accurate list of "features" (not benefits) and expected people to recognise their worth, be able to understand the small amount of "help" and then to put up with some generally poorly designed UIs.
Although the price-cost is quite low, sometimes zero, the time-cost of installing and using Linux is extremely high - much higher than the competition's. In these days when everyone is complaining about how busy they are, time is a precious commodity and the risk of spending a lot of time trying to get Linux to work, on your PC with all your specific hardware - and then failing is more than most people are prepared to gamble.
Finally, Linux has never really understood that for most people, Windows is "free". it comes pre-installed in their machines and is not an itemised (or optional) component. As a consequence, they'll use what they've already got - rather than throw it away and try something new. After all, the O/S is irrelevant - it's what applications you can run, to achieve the things you want to do, that is the only thing which matters.
Given all these basic promotional points that have been missed, ignored or done wrong, it's amazing that Linux has managed to stay around for as long as it has - and that it's achieved the penetration it currently enjoys.
There are lots of embeddable PCs available now. Most of them are in the $100 upwards price range provided you buy enough of them. This puppy doesn't sound much different from what's already available. Though if it's power requirements are so high that it needs a fan, I have to think it's rather missed the point of embeddable or single board computers meant to be part of a larger device.
a big effort to look across to the other side of the flight deck, which is not easy
Now, it's a long time since I've been on a flight deck, but they weren't that big. What's changed so much that it's such a huge imposition for someone to look at the guy in the other seat and see "oh yes, he's pulling back on the stick" and then maybe slap him around the head until he stops.
If one guy won't sign an NDA, there are thousands of other who will. Just pick another programmer.
I wonder if the guy is happy to accept IOUs from strangers, too.
Sit around trying to make sense of the requirement
Write some code that they think does what the requester really meant
Spend most of their time fighting the code management system and getting it to build cleanly
Pull an all-nighter just before the deadline so it doesn't crash when fed correct input
Toss it "over the wall" to the integration team
Refuse to answer any questions about it as they're not "too busy" on the next project
Have a nice feeling of satisfaction that they never have to do support on old code, as none of it ever gets into a production system
Get promoted frequently for meeting their targets on productivity and delivery times
If you wanted a through-and-through british design, development and manufacture you'd have to look at something like a transputer which WAS built in Britain during the mid 80s and would have wiped the floor with an 6502 based machine. Sadly it went the way of most british innovation and withered on the branch.