TV detector van - <AUTHOR> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_detector_van <comment><USER2> I lived in a flat in England in the early 2000s which kept getting letters from the BBC saying we didn't have a TV licence. The letters were sometimes more threatening for a period, then sometimes more reconciliatory.

They were also running TV adverts at the time claiming they had detector vans about, and if you didn't have a licence you'd be caught. I did some research at the time, and it seemed that evidence from a detector van had never been submitted as evidence in court cases for those without a licence.

It didn't take long to realise in the age of databases, it's easier just to send out scary letters to all address without a registered licence and hope there will be some 'conversion rate'. The effort required to actually chase on this seemed disproportional to the benefits.

And for those wondering, I did have a licence, it's just the address the BBC had for the flat was subtly different to the one on the bit of paper. I had hoped that they would follow up with a more detailed investigation, so I could see how it worked and ask about the vans, but they never did.

<comment><USER3> The ads were hugely dystopian: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NmdUcmLFkw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NmdUcmLFkw)

I am an ex-pat and as an adult I am have become quite disillusioned with the UK and glad to have gotten out a decade ago. I miss nothing about England except my friends, and I'd feel sorry for them, but they all seem mostly happy with life.

Paying a license to have a TV (and it's assumed you must watch TV), opt in porn on the internet, CCTV everywhere, braying in parliament, not to mention the whole Brexit shit-show, I find little to admire about the UK.

<comment><USER4> I don't begrudge the TV licence too much. I used to, and then I moved to Ireland - where I pay a roughly equivalent amount for a roughly equivalent licence, which funds RTÉ (and tg4? unclear) with nowhere near the same results. And still ads.

It turns out the better half of Europe has TV licences in one form or another - but for some reason, we never hear about them. When the UK has to fund a state broadcaster, it's dystopian. When everyone else does it, it's business as usual.

( [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_licence) )

<comment><USER5> The enforcement actions and publicizing of the license in the UK seem to be the most dystopian, in Ireland it's a bit over the top as well

But you're right, it is present in multiple countries, I think Germany and France just turned it into a household fee

<comment><USER6> In Italy it has been merged into electricity bills. I kid you not. And of course, the state broadcaster (RAI) is still chock-full of ads on all its channels. This is because it's not a media organisation as much as a cash- machine for aides and cronies of the government du-jour, with each channel literally _allocated_ informally to each major party. You can imagine the average production quality.

<comment><USER7> Same for RTS in Serbia, worse even because not only do we HAVE to pay the TV license via power bill, or get sued and have power cut off (I kid you not, because of the TV license fee!) (happened to me), RTS also has 8 commercial channels that are funded from the public's money, which are only available on select cable networks.

It's RTS 1, RTS 2, RTS 3, RTS HD (which is redundant since the 3 channels are already in Full HD), and then RTS 24/7, RTS Drama, RTS Archive, RTS Music, RTS Life, RTS Kids, RTS Music 2, RTS VOD and RTS SVOD, RTS [something I can't translate] (all names are translated from Serbian).

The TV service is the only one with HD terrestrial broadcasting, and yet it's production quality is absolute garbage (I mean literally, the video quality is absolutely terrible, I'm not even talking about the topics they deal with).

Basically, a money sink and waste of time. People who have SBB (United Group) watch N1 (CNN affiliate) in Full HD (with 30 Mbps bitrate, compared to 4 Mbps for RTS 1 HD).

People who don't have SBB cable, are stuck with the low level garbage channels from our state broadcaster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> The warrant revealed that a BBC contractor had used an "optical detector" to reveal the possible presence of a TV.[10] The warrant stated that: "the optical detector in the detector van uses a large lens to collect that light and focus it on to an especially sensitive device, which converts fluctuating light signals into electrical signals, which can be electronically analysed. If a receiver is being used to watch broadcast programmes then a positive reading is returned." [10] The BBC stated that this was strong evidence that a set was "receiving a possible broadcast".

According to The Comptroller and Auditor General of the National Audit Office, "where the BBC still suspects that an occupier is watching live television but not paying for a licence, it can send a detection van to check whether this is the case. TVL detection vans can identify viewing on a non‐TV device in the same way that they can detect viewing on a television set. BBC staff were able to demonstrate this to my staff in controlled conditions sufficient for us to be confident that they could detect viewing on a range of non‐TV devices."

\---

That device description is entirely consistent with a video camera, perhaps with a telescope in front of it, used for peering through people's windows.

Does this put the BBC at risk of violating anti-peeping-Tom legislation?

<comment><USER9> No, it sounds like a telescope focusing onto a single pixel (i.e. just the back of the curtains), and then using the output from this pixel with a lock- in amplifier tied to the broadcast signal. The sensitivity would be enormous due to the lock-in.

With a CRT you would be able to do this with <microsecond resolution as the scan lines went across.

In today's LCD world, I guess something similar could be done for a whole pixel-average of a whole frame, and then look at the time-series of that to correct for lag in digital television / internet etc..

<comment><USER10> So it's using a telescope and a camera to see what's going on in your house (albeit hopefully in a very limited way)...

In the US that'd be an illegal search without a warrant.

<comment><USER11> To look in your open window, even with a telescope? I don't think that is considered illegal.

<comment><USER8> In California, Penal Code 647(j):

(1) A person who looks through a hole or opening, into, or otherwise views, by means of any instrumentality, including, but not limited to, a periscope, telescope, binoculars, camera, motion picture camera, camcorder, or mobile phone, the interior of a bedroom, bathroom, changing room, fitting room, dressing room, or tanning booth, or the interior of any other area in which the occupant has a reasonable expectation of privacy, with the intent to invade the privacy of a person or persons inside. This subdivision does not apply to those areas of a private business used to count currency or other negotiable instruments.

<comment><USER12> Attorney here! (Not providing legal advice - consult a licensed attorney in your jurisdiction.)

You're trying to leverage a "peeping Tom" law to frustrate law enforcement, and that is unlikely to succeed.

The key qualifier here is "with the intent to invade the privacy of a person or persons inside." Law enforcement activities are unlikely to satisfy this prong.

<comment><USER13> Does that mean the police are allowed to invade my privacy like that if they're just "checking for potential illegal activity"?

<comment><USER10> No, just that you cannot use a statute like the peeping tom one against Law Enforcement in the same way you'd use it against an average joe.

But also, yes, the police can do basically anything and receive "Qualified Immunity" as actors of the state. Under the current interpretation of qualified immunity unless the police know what they are specifically doing isn't allowed then they have immunity, and the court system gets SUPER specific with the facts to the point that pretty much any action gets immunity. The state itself might be in trouble but that's a whole other mess of immunity.

I'm not a lawyer though and I'm almost certainly messing up some of the nuance here.

<comment><USER12> Qualified immunity is a creature of federal Constitutional law; it exists to immunize law enforcement from civil suits alleging that they violated someone's Constitutional rights. The doctrine does not immunize officers against criminal charges, particularly crimes against the laws of the States.

"Privacy" isn't (yet) a Federal civil or constitutional right so I'm not sure that qualified immunity would apply. The intent qualifier in the Peeping Tom law is probably sufficient since the intent is not to violate someone's privacy but to follow up on some sort of reasonable suspicion of criminal activity.

Also if people can see through your window doing ordinary (non- traditionally-"private") activities, there's the "plain view" doctrine -- although that's related to admission of evidence and not a prima facie criminal law violation. Nevertheless a Court is probably going to use similar reasoning when divining intent.

<comment><USER10> Thanks for clarifying! My knowledge of the law is second-hand. Comments like this help a lot!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> I currently have no TV licence. I cancelled it over a year ago as I don't receive a TV signal in my flat. The TV is used for netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube and the Playstation.

I filled out the form to get my refund and you have to choose an option for why you don't need a TV. e.g. you are moving, you are in the military, gone blind or something etc etc. Not an option to tick "I don't watch TV".

Anyway, I got the refund and within a week I was getting threatening letters from them saying I don't have a TV licence!

Great joined up IT guys. The letters have continued at a rate of one or two a month ever since.

I could probably make them stop by calling them, but I already filled out the form, I got my refund... I don't see why I should waste more of time helping them out.

I expect at some point someone is going to come to my flat and request to see in the flat to check I'm not watching TV without a licence. If they do they won't be getting let in.

It's the tone of the letters that is most annoying, they are quite threatening and they try to be intimidating. I can laugh it off and just bin there nonsense and ignore it, but I could see some people getting upset / intimated into paying, which is sad.

<comment><USER15> I get these letters regularly. On principle I refuse to deal with Capita/BBC/TVL and would rather they waste the money trying to contact me. There is no obligation to deal with them unless they get a warrant. Only once have they visited and left a calling card but fortunately I was out.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> Watching television without a licence in the UK is actually a criminal (rather than civil) offence, and hundreds of thousands of purple are convicted each year of the offence.

[https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/24/in-court- non...](https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/sep/24/in-court-non-payment- tv-licence-television-desperate-cases)

<comment> _-___________-_ To be clear, this only applies to television that is paid for by the license (BBC etc, including streaming via iPlayer). I have a television and use it only to watch Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, and am thus not required to pay the license. Which goes to show how ridiculous these vans are, since they can't tell where you're getting the content you're watching.

<comment><USER16> This is incorrect advice that could get someone convicted.

A licence is required if you watch live TV on any channel.

See: [https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/faqs/FAQ95](https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/faqs/FAQ95)

<comment><USER17> Netflix and Amazon prime are not TV and don't require a TV licence.

[https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/faqs/FAQ104](https://www.tvlicensing.co.uk/faqs/FAQ104)

But indeed, watching any channel on TV (not just the BBC) requires a licence.

<comment><USER18> I think they make it incredibly clear in their message though:

If you're watching live TV, you need to be covered by a TV Licence:

       a. if you're watching on TV or on an online TV service
       b. for all channels, not just the BBC
       c. ...

<comment> amiga-workbench Incredibly vague, does a live stream fall afoul of that rule?

<comment><USER19> I believe it specifically refers to services that provide simulcast streams of traditional TV networks. Like Playstation Vue or Youtube TV.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> How about a small flat fee everybody pays to sustain the national broadcaster?

Whether they watch it or not is not relevant. It's a nation-wide service at their disposal.

Either it's worth it to have, like a dam or a highway system or whatever, and it's ok for people to pay for it in taxes, or it's not, and it should close.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Because now you're proposing that people be charged for something even if they don't use it and don't want it.

<comment><USER20> Yes. In many countries that's how nation-wide infrastructure, services, art programs, and so on are funded. Not on a person per person basis.

Not everywhere it's all about the individual and their whims. If the majority (well, through elected representatives) wishes to have and sustain a public good (whether a public broadcaster, or national health service, or arts grants, or whatever), individuals have no other say on the matter.

Some countries believe in public goods, and in maintaining through taxes infrastructure to make citizens more educated, informed, cultivated, etc. If someone is a brut and could not care less, they don't get to dictate to the nation not to have those services.

E.g. the German example of the tax for the national broadcaster a fellow commenter mentions:

"Any household in Germany is legally obliged to pay this quarterly fee, regardless of whether or not you watch the TV channels or listen to the radio stations covered by it. It also covers media consumption online via on-demand services such as media players, streaming services accessed online via computer or smartphone, as well as in-car audio. Shared households are only required to pay this per household, so 4 students living together for example would only be liable for paying the fee once."

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h I don't mind that for infrastructure (roads, power grid) and core services (police, fire dept), but TV is not a _requirement_. Or rather, _entertainment_ is not a requirement for life. If they want public funding for a channel for emergency broadcasts then I wouldn't object too loudly (other than questioning value vs radio and web).

<comment><USER21> By that logic though you should be able to only contribute for the specific programming you watch. As in "I agree with paying for BBC news, but not kid's programming".

In Australia we fund the ABC and SBS through tax, which have charters requiring a certain amount of locally produced programming, and serve as publicly owned news media (which I think is in the public interest so long as the government isn't exerting too much in the way of influence), as well as programming that could be considered too niche to be profitable otherwise.

When I was a teenager SBS was how I was exposed to some really good stuff I wouldn't have been able to see otherwise because it was anime or foreign language films.

<comment> yjftsjthsd-h Yes please! I 100% support unbundling and buying exactly what I actually want

Edit: It took a reread for me to realize that you were actually arguing in favor of it. I do see your point about positive externalities, but I'm still not convinced it's a good trade off overall.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> You might think these vans were crazy then, what's more crazy _today_ is how they continue to force their opt-out licensing upon everyone like it's still 1946 and they are the only broadcasters in town.

If you live in the UK and own a TV you must pay the BBC whether you want the BBC or not!

I'm one of the minority who don't own a TV in the UK and even then they make it their business to inform me every two years about all the different ways they can invade my home, fine me extortionate sums and send me to prison for the crime of being caught owning television signal receiving equipment without paying them.

Given how nasty all the smart TVs are these days, when I eventually want such luxuries I plan to eventually get a huge monitor and just play netflix or whatever on it... it would be interesting to see their response to that.

<comment><USER16> To be clear, a licence is required to watch live TV on any channel, not just the BBC.

<comment><USER22> I wonder how they define "live TV"? If i watch a live video stream over the internet does it count?

I suspect they basically mean the reception of any terrestrial RF TV signal not really caring about it being live, but due to not wanting to go to the trouble of differentiating between BBC and freeview?

<comment><USER23> It would count - the definition is deliberately broad ("by any means"):

> In this regulation, any reference to receiving a television programme > service includes a reference to receiving by any means any programme > included in that service, where that programme is received at the same time > (or virtually the same time) as it is received by members of the public by > virtue of its being broadcast or distributed as part of that service.

[http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/692/regulation/9/mad...](http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2004/692/regulation/9/made)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> While reading I thought, "for sure we will get to the part of the article where the British realized their folly and discontinued the licensing." But that part never came. Brits: is this for real, does this still exist? Do you pay a license to use your TV? Is it only for OTA programming or using the device in general?

<comment><USER25> We pay the licence fee to fund the BBC. They make some amazing documentaries (Planet Earth, Blue Planet etc). They also have radio stations, all advert free. Being advert free is rare these days.

<comment><USER26> That's fine, a well funded public broadcaster is a great idea. The question is why in the world is it done as a license fee instead of as a much simpler to implement tax or a subscription where the OTA broadcasts are encrypted and a fee is paid to maintain the ability to decrypt.

<comment><USER27> A similar system in Germany (where we are constantly amazed at how much better content the BBC produces) is not a tax to minimize government influence. The goal is to make it public, but not government controlled.

Personally I think that it should be organized like a tax nonetheless, because _if_ a public broadcaster is a benefit to society, it's a benefit to those who watch just as much as to those who don't watch, similar to how those who don't enter medical school will still enjoy the availability of doctors. A precedence exists, in Germany the Finanzamt is happily collecting a tax-like thing on behalf of the established churches from their members, without that ever having led anyone to suggest that the churches were controlled by the government. The investure controversy isn't exactly still lingering.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> This is such nonsense. In my opinion the BBC should be paid for by a proper tax, as an informed public benefits everyone, or they should just give up on calling it a license. The people going around houses just send threatening letters, and act as though they have some right to enter your home and inspect it (they don't). They go around terrorising people who don't know their rights, but don't watch TV anyway. I routinely get threatening letters from them despite not having a TV on the premises.

<comment><USER29> Swedish public service transitioned from a per-household fee (for households that held devices capable of showing RF broadcast TV) to a per citizen tax January 1st this year. Of course, they go to great lengths to avoid calling it a tax, but... well, it is a tax.

I don't really like it. There's no opt-out any longer. And the content is predictably all-consuming leftist.

<comment><USER30> Norway is doing the same thing starting next year, and I really like it, even though the content is increasingly getting predictably all-consuming right wing as each year goes by. ;)

I actually bought my very first TV (since I discovered I was able to download South Park and The Simpsons and watch it on my computer in the early 2000s) a few months ago hoping to make the cut off so I would be able to say I'd paid the old license at least once in my lifetime (the license is divided into two payments per year), but it seems like the webshop I bought it from was nice enough to not supply my address info to the licensing office in time as I haven't received any bill. Oh well.

<comment><USER31> A Norwegian friend told me this a few years back; how the licensing people can just go into your homes when they show up and check for the presence of TVs. Crazy.

<comment><USER30> Well your Norwegian friend was wrong about that. All they could do was knock on your door and ask you if you had a TV, and you could more or less politely tell them you didn't and that would be the end of it, even if you did own one and it was on and both you and the license guy was able to hear it playing in the background. :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> The interesting thing is the Operation section sounds a lot like they're using the same principal behind TEMPEST [0] and van Eck phreaking where leaked emanations from electronic devices can be used to spy on the computation being done and data being displayed. Flat panel displays can be spyed on using this method [1] so it's not completely out of bound of reality that these vans could work as detectors.

[0] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_\(codename\))

[1] [https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/pet2004-fpd.pdf](https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/pet2004-fpd.pdf)

<comment><USER32> It's very likely that those vans were used in the 1970s to capture the RF leakage from the local oscillator and other driving circuitry of the CRT TVs. But while it's still technically possible to detect RF leakage from modern LCD TVs, I'm not sure BBC has the capabilities to deploy those _and_ achieve reliable detection. Many people would say these vans became hoaxes at some point in history.

<comment><USER26> Maybe, it would be easier to detect the presence though than to read the actual contents being displayed in theory though.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> Relevant: [http://bbctvlicence.com/](http://bbctvlicence.com/)

<comment><USER34> Very relevant. To be honest I'm surprised that TV licensing haven't worked out how this fellow is and added a special exception so he doesn't receive their silly letters.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> On the upside BBC viewers don't have to fast forward through pledge drives like on PBS.

This topic reminds me of when The Simpsons had Betty White and PBS pledge enforcement chase down Homer for not paying his pledge.

</comment><comment><USER36> "...it was thought that they operated by detecting electromagnetic radiation given off by a TV. The most common suggested method was the detection of a signal from the TV's local oscillator."

This seems extremely tricky to do, and it wouldn't be very directional. Why not just look for the flickering light pattern from a TV coming out people's windows? You could correlate the brightness changes with the broadcast signals on each channel to know what people are watching.

<comment><USER37> that's exactly how it works, apparently:

"the optical detector in the detector van uses a large lens to collect that light and focus it on to an especially sensitive device, which converts fluctuating light signals into electrical signals, which can be electronically analysed"

</comment></comment><comment><USER38> In response a BBC spokeswoman rejected claims that the vans are a hoax: "Detector vans are an important part of our enforcement of the licence fee. We don't go into detail about how many there are or how they work as this information might be useful to people trying to evade the fee." AKA they do nothing other than scare people who wouldn't otherwise pay the license fee into paying it.

<comment> toby- AKA nothing. As the article mentions, a warrant goes into detail about how the vans function: [https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/statements_involving_...](https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/request/statements_involving_tv_detector)

The idea they're empty and "just to scare people" is a myth. They are functioning devices.

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> "Ministry of oooowsinge?"

"it was spelt like that on 't van!"

"what van?"

"the cat detector van."

"you _are_ a loony. "

<comment><USER40> My immediate thought too! I'm glad someone else got the reference.

<comment><USER41> I am so relieved to find this specific thread.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER42> It seems like it would be so much easier to tax the TV's.

</comment><comment><USER43> we are looking at an iceberg there is more to it:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_(codename)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempest_\(codename\))

i know this is about optical side channeling, and tempest is a US effort, but there is a method that was developed and when you can tune in to the synching signal of a TV, CRT, or even an LCD, you can translate the reflected light and reveal much more than presence of a device, You Can Actually Watch what The Suspect Is Watching!

A suffieciently motivated attacker with easily fabbed equipment and patience of a ham radio Dx er kinda guy, will know a lot more than presence and use of a "TV" display

</comment><comment><USER44> The entire concept of being charged a fee for broadcast TV, going as far as having enforcers driving around in vans seems very strange to me. But on the other hand, I am very impressed with the quality of programming the BBC puts out.

</comment><comment><USER45> >> The warrant stated that: "the optical detector in the detector van uses a large lens to collect that light and focus it on to an especially sensitive device, which converts fluctuating light signals into electrical signals, which can be electronically analysed.

This "especially sensitive device, which converts fluctuating light signals into electrical signals" sounds remarkably like the human eye.

Those signals, of course "can be electronically analysed". Emphasis on "can". Equivalently, "could".

</comment><comment><USER46> Reminds me of the cat detector van. [http://www.montypython.net/scripts/fishlic.php](http://www.montypython.net/scripts/fishlic.php)

</comment><comment><USER31> This kinda makes me thing back to scrambled channels and how companies detected the use of illegal decoder boxes. A lot of them used equipment could detect the demodulation used by a decode and checked to see if you were paying the fee.

An easy way around it was just using two VCRs, one before the decode and one after, to stabilize the RF signal.

<comment><USER47> I remember a satelite TV company put a message to call a particular number, and then filtered out the message in their official smart cards. Everyone who called the number was pirating their signal.

<comment><USER48> Satellite TV company arranges to "brick" pirate cards across the US days before the Superbowl: [https://www.latimes.com/archives/la- xpm-2001-jan-27-mn-17728...](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la- xpm-2001-jan-27-mn-17728-story.html)

[https://blog.codinghorror.com/revisiting-the-black-sunday- ha...](https://blog.codinghorror.com/revisiting-the-black-sunday-hack/)

<comment><USER31> huh .. but the Superbowl is always on a broadcast network too, so people could always just get out the ole rabbit ears (unless they had really bad signal from their local state)

<comment><USER47> Satellite is most popular where cable does not exist which also tends to be the places with access to the fewest networks.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Why drive thousands of vans around the UK, hire contractors and spend tax payers money, when the government can ask Sky and Virgin to provide them with a long list of households that are paying for cable tv (~30 million)? It makes you wonder, doesn't it?

</comment><comment><USER50> The BBC also claims to be able to detect when anyone uses their online streaming service, IPlayer, though I suspect this may be a ruse to scare people away from watching without a licence.

Curiously, the TV licence is a third of the price if you have a black and white television set.

<comment><USER51> Not so curious. When the colour licence was introduced, a colour TV was an expensive luxury, and a 12" b&w TV was standard fare for impoverished students. I think the relative differential has increased over the years as students came to rely on the portable telly being the cheap option.

At the same time as introducing the colour licence, they abolished the radio licence.

btw, as you have to sign in to view iPlayer these days - annoyingly even for radio, I am sure they can detect when people use it. It's not even a bit challenging. :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> I never paid for a license. It's insane to be forced to subscribe to a handful of channels you may or may not be interested in.

The "inspectors" have no legal right to enter your property, so you can simply tell them to fuck off.

</comment><comment><USER53> I just spend some time trying to dig up the old TV ads for the licensing fee we had in Austria where they also had some kind of detector van with antennas. Unfortunately I wasn't able to find it.

I was always curious how that might work.

<comment><USER54> AFAIK they detected the emissions from the IF strip on old televisions with a directional yagi antenna mounted on top of the van. This possibility disappeared when the IC based IF sets were developed in the 70s and 80s.

<comment><USER53> I still remember that van having an antenna like that on top. Might be the case.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> How do these work? Is a TV somehow different than a large monitor?

<comment><USER56> > The most common suggested method was the detection of a signal from the TV's > local oscillator.

See: superheterodyne receiver. Most modern radio receivers generate high- frequency signal for tuning, which leaks as radio signal (receiver becomes in some way a transmitter). However, it's not confirmed if these vans had working detectors, or were just for intimidation.

There were also stories about:

\- Radar detector detectors (in places where radar detection devices in cars were illegal)

\- Broadcast radio receivers detectors installed near roads to measure popularity of radio stations among drivers

</comment></comment><comment><USER57> interesting that England is the country where they stopped require dog licensing because people would just ignore it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_licence#United_Kingdom](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_licence#United_Kingdom)

One would think that identifying an unlicensed dog is much simpler than detecting a TV behind the walls.

</comment><comment><USER58> I hope somone can figure out how the detection is working, perhaps by making experiments and see what is found to do.

</comment><comment><USER59> The TV license reminds me of the Church Tax that some countries have. This would not fly in the US at all..

</comment><comment><USER60> Another way this could be possible is embedding inaudible-to-human-ears audio cues into the stream.

<comment><USER61> There was a story going around a while back that claimed that one of the big Silicon Valley companies was doing this: Bought TV ads that had such audio clues, then eavesdropped on you to detect them. I don't recall if it was Facebook's mobile app or Alexa that supposedly did the listening.

A very quick web search didn't uncover anything concrete, but I'm somewhat certain I didn't dream this.

<comment><USER60> You didnt. It is a real thing. Solid way to do tv ads conversion tracking.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Such an archaic thing to have when the masses have largely adopted smartphone and tablets and are subscribers of things like NowTV, Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, or even paid YouTube subscriptions (among other less popular services which I am leaving out).

<comment><USER63> I doubt cable companies would invest in such things if they weren't finding consumers abusing their services. We are not in a point where cable subscriptions are a minority so I think depending on demographic your argument is valid but for total population there are lots still paying for and watching cable.

</comment></comment><comment><USER64> Have to laugh at all the Americans saying this is crazy or nonsensical when it's legal to carry _guns_ in much of your country :-D

That aside, lest anyone think TV detector vans are all over the place, in my almost 40 years of living in the UK I've never seen or had interactions with one. They may as well be the Loch Ness monster for how mythical they are.

<comment><USER65> > Have to laugh at all the Americans saying this is crazy or nonsensical when > it's legal to carry guns in much of your country :-D

Not making the connection here, care to elaborate?

<comment><USER66> The TV license is an admittedly odd way of funding a state broadcaster, but it works well enough that nobody has bothered to change it. _One_ mass shooting on the scale of El Paso was enough to prompt a systematic overhaul of British firearms legislation; we just can't understand how so many American citizens can comfortably reconcile your extraordinarily high rate of gun violence with your exceptionally lax gun regulations.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_(Amendment)_Act_1988](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firearms_\(Amendment\)_Act_1988)

<comment><USER64> _" The TV license is an admittedly odd way of funding a state broadcaster, but it works well enough that nobody has bothered to change it."_

I think the concept of the license is rather alien to people in countries where all civic amenities are subject to the whims of democracy and the government. This is very much not true of many things in the UK (the BBC, the Army, numerous universities and schools, guilds and societies) which would formally exist even if the government were to disappear.

I know you probably know all this, so this is really for everyone else's benefit.. but the BBC's entire basis is defined by a Royal Charter which is independent of politics. If the government of the day (or, say, a Trump-esque character) hates the BBC, they can't suddenly defund or destroy it. This is why we do not pay for it in a tax (which the government could adjust) but via a license defined by Royal Charter.

I think the British way of having government merely being one more institution amongst many (rather than _the_ institution) is a rather powerful advantage.

<comment><USER67> It's a bit of legal fiction really. A government with a sufficient majority that felt like taking on one of the more respected/loved institutions in the UK could absolutely abolish the BBC if it wanted to, and can set the budget of the BBC and set the license fee. The current conservative government forced the BBC to cut its budget while taking on additional costs, e.g. the over 75s free license, and the cost of running the World Service (previously funded by the Foreign Office),

In reality Parliament cannot create any institution that it cannot also eliminate or change if it wanted to. It's why QANGO stands for "Quasi- Automimous Non Governmental Organisation", and isn't "ANGO". These sorts of arrangements are just there to put the organisation at arms length and make it clearer when the government or Parliament are exerting their authority (which they have done many times with the BBC, such as forcing out the director general).

The quasi-independent model is actually pretty common in many countries, including as someone else mentioned the German public service broadcaster.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> Now that's just silly.</comment>


Incredible Startups: Mizpee helps you easily detect public toilets - <AUTHOR> http://www.businesshackers.com/2007/07/30/incredible-startups-mizpee-helps-you-to-easily-detect-public-toilets/ Here is very nice service available for No.1 requirement for a everyone. You can imagine that you are outside for some shopping or for some important work and area is not known to you and then you got emergency call for Bathroom. <comment><USER2> Incredible?! lol</comment>


Texas Private High Speed Rail Between Houston and Dallas - <AUTHOR> https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/article/Houston-Dallas-Texas-bullet-train-construction-13427831.php <comment><AUTHOR> I think an important thought is why now, vs. waiting 20+ years when the need of the train could be voiced by more locals.

It could be useful for more high speed rail network to be built now while land prices are lower, vs. waiting until the users actually NEED the rail because the highways are too congested. This is similar to the situation in California where land is expensive, people genuinely need better transportation, and the project has gone way over budget.

Is there a downside to building rail before people realize they even need it/would benefit from it?

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Texans have been very dependent on cars, and I am happy to see this project happening. It services Houston to Dallas in 90 minutes, which is much faster than 3.5+ hours driving, or 2.5 hours(waiting + flying) by plane. Texans like myself will not have to fund the project which is very nice, and will benefit greatly from it.</comment>


Amazon increases its minimum wage to $15 - <AUTHOR> https://www.engadget.com/2018/10/02/amazon-minimum-wage-15-dollars/ <comment><AUTHOR> From the article, no mention of this applying to subcontractors, who do some of Amazon's packing and deliveries.</comment>


Flash is fine.  Dont be a Fundamentalist. - <AUTHOR> http://occupyhtml.org

<comment><USER2> I'll give everyone a great example of why I hate Flash:

So I downloaded the new Flash 11 and installed it, the 64 bit version so I can now use 64 bit IE. I have IE 9 set to not accept third party cookies. In Flash, I don't want cookies set either so I go to the global settings and make sure no sites can save anything on my computer. Now Flash doesn't work at all. No where. It should work on some sites that don't require cookies but it won't even load. I'm not sure why this is but the only solution I've found is to completely uninstall Flash, restart my computer and then reinstall it and allow every site to store Flash cookies on my computer. I've replicated the issue with Firefox and Chrome.

Strangely enough Youtube worked during these issues - because of HTML 5.

Also, there's a bug in Flash 11 in Windows 7 where for some reason the taskbar doesn't get hidden when you full screen a flash video.

Flash could've been useful, but Adobe's coders are the worst in the business. All they had to do was make it small, efficient and easy to use. Essentially they did the exact opposite and only had a business model because there were no competitors. In addition, they have security issues and all these random strange issues which should never happen.

I liken Flash to Blackberry and how RIM is allowing Android apps on it's service. It has to do that to stay relevant because no one is going to use it otherwise. Adobe Flash would be dead within 5 years if they didn't switch their tools to work with HTML 5.

Now the question is, why would developers create two versions of the videos - one for Flash and one for mobile HTML5? Why wouldn't they just create an HTML5 video that plays on both mobile and standard browsers?

</comment><comment><USER3> If only the site was Flash based .. I might have taken them seriously.

Flash is the only piece of software that has consistently taken down my computers at home and work (windows and linux). I'm jumping for joy to see it go.

Edit: I started my web career ~12 years ago using Flash .. it was magic but the browser has finally caught up .. let it die with dignity.

<comment><USER4> I see, I should uninstall Flash from my computer because you somehow have managed to have so much trouble with it. Now, I haven't had these issues but I'll go ahead and take your word for it that Flash is bad for my computer so I'll uninstall it immediately.

<comment><USER5> That's not what he said.

<comment><USER4> I know he didn't. I just get tired of seeing these statements of "this technology is obviously bad because 'I' have problems with it".

It's like people who say they'll never buy another Ford truck because they had transmission problems with one back in 1974.

<comment><USER3> I can assure you it's not just 'I' that has problems .. just about every co worker and friend, family member I know has had issues with Flash .. it's common knowledge just how bad a piece of software it is. It's not a personal poke because I couldn't install the browser plugin correctly.

But, this doesn't mean you have to ditch your Flash skills, from all accounts they are working toward production HTML5 exports .. but I could be wrong .. if so, check out: <http://www.sencha.com/products/animator/> .. I'm sure they will be more than happy to fill the void if Adobe can't be a...

<comment><USER4> I understand, I wasn't trying to personally insult your intelligence. I'm assuming you've put some effort into it. But even with your ample evidence I still don't think that's enough to qualify it as bad software. How many people out there have absolutely no problems with it at all?

If that's all it takes to label a piece of software as bad then all software with a large install base can be labelled as bad.

Just to be clear, I'm not a Flash developer. I deal more with HTML/CSS/Javascript all day so Flash going away is not a bad thing for me. I just don't agree with generic statements that Flash is bad overall based on personal experience.

The point I'm trying to make is that it isn't exactly fair to say that Flash is bad software just because you, and people you know, have had problems with it. I also disagree that it is common knowledge. It may be common knowledge among people who think like you do but again; what about the millions of people who use it constantly who never have a problem with it and therefore you never hear about their experience?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> Disliking Flash doesn't make me a fundamentalist. Flash is "fine" in much the same way IE 6 is "fine". Sure, it gets the job done, but who the hell _enjoys using it_ , user or developer?

<comment><USER7> I do. Every time I visit YouTube. Or Hulu. Or Pandora. Or Amazon Instant Video. Or Amazon Cloud Player.

<comment><USER8> I am sorry, but every time I visit those sites on my embedded linux box I don't get much joy.

Adobe held back everyone from the web to desktops. I created the Arora web browser and countless times had 3rd party people put it on embedded devices only to turn around and ask me how to get the flash plugin working. I had no answer but to send them to Adobe and pray that they were using x86 and Adobe would be even interested in helping them and that the fee for helping wouldn't bankrupt the company.

Flash helped keep all of us on x86 more than people realize. The arm port was always a second class could you even imagine ppc or mips? And the idea of some other more radical arch? Forget it, Adobe would laugh at you for even asking. How many Linux users choose 32bit x86 (this for the OS that seems to work on _everything_!) for years because they knew that flash would work?

When I heard that news about its death I celebrated. I drank a beer. I would have sung a song if I was any good. While we knew it was coming having it actually set in stone was nice. The era of the web requiring flash is coming to an end and we can start to move onto interesting solutions and interesting hardware knowing that we wont have to grovel to one company hoping they will pity us and only charge us millions for a product that kills our batteries and pegs our cpu.

Disclaimer: this is my personal opinion and not of my employer.

<comment><USER3> Hear hear!

I long for the days when I can awaken my laptop from it's peaceful sleep not to have it crash the moment I hit a youtube page in a browser tab I left paused.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For those unaware of what motivated that: <http://occupyflash.org>

</comment><comment><USER10> Ridiculous. Who upvoted this?

I don't think much more needs to be said. Adobe has thrown in the towel themselves regarding Flash on mobile devices, as they couldn't manage to develop a solid experience. How can you argue maturity in this day and age while ignoring that Flash is dead in a mobile environment? (edit: until RIM saves it!)

<comment><USER4> For desktop it is a mature technology. The website doesn't say otherwise.

</comment></comment><comment><USER11> I just don't understand all the Flash hate going on.

I can't remember the last time Flash killed my browser or OS. It's been at least 5 years, probably more.

Flash was designed to compensate for the deficiencies of the web. That's great. Now that web technologies are finally catching up, Flash is no longer as necessary as it once was. That's great.

So now we find ourselves in a transitionary period where HTML5 and friends are able to replace Flash in almost all situations. That's great. And for those remaining use cases where only Flash will do, well, it's available on all major desktop platforms. That's great. If you want to do something on mobile that HTML5 and friends don't support but Flash does, well, you're SOL thanks mostly to Steve. That's not so great. That's less innovative apps due to functionality denied.

So where does this leave us? Flash is a mature technology that has served its purpose well over the years, and has started to gradually fade into the twilight as open protocols fill the same gaps it was designed to fill. Go ahead and use HTML5 if it works for you; that's what it's designed for. But why all the hating on Flash?

<comment><USER12> I'm guessing you use Windows. Flash is kind of OK on Windows. It blows elsewhere. It drains my MacBook Pro's battery, it makes my computer uncomfortably hot, it still hangs and crashes more than all the other software on my computer put together, and it has a much higher propensity than HTML5 solutions to break standard things like Services, bookmarking, right-click and the back button.

<comment><USER11> It runs fine on my macbook pro. It drains the battery in some instances, yeah, but then again so do heavy HTML5 sites like turntable (which is currently taking 50% cpu, the most power hungry process out of EVERYTHING I'm running, all for playing music and displaying some 2-dimensional sprites and a chat room).

What I really notice is that all of these web technologies designed to improve the user experience chew through multiple orders of magnitude more CPU than a native app. 2-4x more I could understand. Hell, I'd even settle for 10x, but when it's going over 100x for poster-child quality HTML5 or Flash sites (which are not by any means impressive compared to a native app), something's definitely wrong.

<comment><USER13> On my unibody MacBook, Flash can peg the CPU pretty easily if I'm not running FlashBlock. It may be more that I leave many tabs open. I used to just use Chrome when I really needed to see a Flash-heavy site, but recent releases have much worse performance than before. For example, a video in Flash will use 200% CPU under Chrome, but < 100% under Safari or Firefox.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> If your site _needs_ Flash, develop it in Flash. But it sure doesn't seem like there are that many sites that really need it these days.

</comment><comment><USER15> I'll up vote anything promoting binaries in vm's rather then the organized mess of interpreted web-languages today.

</comment><comment><USER16> How ironic. They talk about providing the best user experience on the web, yet their site offers a sub par experience on my phone. The text doesn't scale when zooming, so basically it's unreadable on the phone.

<comment><USER17> Which is _exactly_ why HTML is not by definition better than Flash!

<comment><USER18> If the site was in Flash, my phone wouldn't be seeing anything. Like whenever I try to visit a restaurant's site and the WHOLE thing is in Flash.

<comment><USER17> On my phone Flash works fine. On a WAP phone, I wouldn't be seeing anything. Like whenever I try to visit hacker news on my nokia 7110.

Which is of course no excuse to make flash only restaurant sites... Nor is it to make canvas only, webgl only, image only...websites.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> Stop this occupy madness, even worse is upvoting it, let it die.

</comment><comment><USER20> A modern website needs to be accessible on PCs, tablets, and smartphones. While there are arguable reasons for segmenting off the last option as an outlier (though some devices offer the resolution and capabilities exceeding some desktops), it is less justifiable making a distinct version for a tablet.

So you end up making a rich "HTML 5" version for tablet and smartphones.

Why, then, would you bother with Flash for the PC? If you have a modern simile for Tablets, Flash is just completely redundant.

Flash is a sign of a derelict site. It would be hard to justify its use for greenfield development.

<comment><USER21>
         If you have a modern simile for Tablets,
         Flash is just completely redundant

I'm against Flash but this argument doesn't hold. It's like saying - if you have a modern website designed for mobile phones, than a native iOS app is redundant.

Flash is not redundant if it allows you to escape the browser's limits. Here, I'll give you an example -- try doing chat-roulette without Flash.

<comment><USER18> If HTML5 doesn't do it now, it soon will.

[http://devworks.thinkdigit.com/Internet/Native-webcam- suppor...](http://devworks.thinkdigit.com/Internet/Native-webcam-support-to- come-with-HTML5_3834.html)

Pretty soon a 'chatroulette' type app without Flash will be a reality. Plus, it will work with tablets and phones, something Flash soon won't be doing.

<comment><USER21> It was just an example -- the browser is by definition limited. This also has advantages, but experimenting with new capabilities is not one of them.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> Actually, it sucks. Don't equivocate.

</comment><comment><USER23> (Skip intro)

The best use for these CPU hungry, crash-happy little rectangles that represent portals into some pocket Universe, disjoint and separate from the web surrounding and encompassing it, is for audio and video. As that use becomes redundant Flash will have very little to justify its existence.

</comment><comment><USER24> Time for occupyoccupysites.com...</comment>


An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience - <AUTHOR> http://m.nautil.us/issue/81/maps/an-existential-crisis-in-neuroscience <comment><USER2> I am a computational cognitive neuroscientist, an have worked at many levels. I find each kind of data and model useful to some extent, but I have to admit that the least useful, are, to my mind, those at the detailed neural network level, like the ones discussing in this paper. Somewhat more useful are higher level dynamic architecture models, and, at the highest level, cognitive models, which constrain the behavioral target we are trying to explain. I personally (as one can tell from my other posts here) find the dynamics brain development models to be the most compelling as overall models, but they are not particularly explanatory at the detailed level. Brain science is trying to do the hardest thing you can imagine, that is, explain the most complex machine in the known universe. We persist, but no one entering this field should have very high expectations of near term grand successes.

<comment><USER3> As a counterpoint, I am a computational neuroscientist who transitioned form working in human cognition to fruit fly motor control. Fruit fly neuroscience in the past decade has advanced tremendously. With the latest tools, we can record activity from specific genetically labeled neurons while stimulating others. We have identified specific groups of neurons to stimulate to get the fly to groom, walk, turn, and even walk backwards. The full fly brain has been scanned with similar techniques and the connectome is beginning to be mapped out (e.g. see this very recent post from Google AI research [https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/releasing-drosophila- hemib...](https://ai.googleblog.com/2020/01/releasing-drosophila- hemibrain.html) ).

I find that as we gain new tools to study the nervous system more specifically, both data and models of how neurons are organized at the circuit level become more important. To advance on an analogy in the article, it's like trying to explore the dynamics of NYC without a map. For instance, it's hard to tell how/why people interact with central park if you don't even know where they live. The more specifically you are able to pin down people, the more it matters where exactly they live to understand.

Granted, the fly is much simpler than humans or even mice, and it will likely take decades and new tools for us to study humans in this way. However, when we get there, mapping out the brain connections will be crucial to make sense of it all.

<comment><USER4> > We have identified specific groups of neurons to stimulate to get the fly to > groom, walk, turn, and even walk backwards

This made me realize we may one day willing allow human brain controls to get us to do things we don't want - Work, Exercise, etc.

<comment><USER5> Maybe making human brain actually crave such activities would be even more... valuable.

<comment><USER6> Far easier to dump meth in the water cooler

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> What we need is a Newtonian model of the brain. A model that is incomplete and "wrong", but useful and generative. While Newtonian physics may be "wrong", is much easier to learn than quantum physics or relativity, etc.

Neuroscience usually focuses on precision details, but doesn't aim to tell big picture stories. There are a few exceptions, however, like Karl Friston's free energy reduction model.

<comment><USER8> Don't we have that in the model that describes what the parts of the brain do?

Proven to be wrong when you watch people with serious brain injuries re learn skills, but shown to have value by how it can predict what tumors or injuries will do to someone's ability.

<comment><USER9> Those models and explanations are not nearly as helpful as one might think. A lot of "neuroscience" explanations of everyday behaviour are mostly nonsense that sounds plausible and appealing ([https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3817](https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3817), [https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn_a_0075...](https://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn_a_00750)). In this context plausible doesn't even mean plausible to a neuroscientist, it means more like consistent with the nonsense a layperson has heard before.

What would be really helpful is a model that can _add_ to things we already know. Saying "studying for an exam engages the X part of the brain and uses the Y neurotransmitter" adds literally nothing to your understanding of studying (you can find out much more about studying by talking to people that are good at it and who have done a lot of studying themselves), it's just taking an everyday activity and identifying the small but still vastly complex portion of the brain that is activated more than others. Imagine being told that a particular bug in a 1-billion-lines-of-code codebase is due to some code within a 10-million-lines-of-code portion of it: that's great but how helpful is it really?

<comment><USER10> In general I'm very skeptical of much neuroscience. (If an article ever says 'emerging neuroscience shows...' you can be assured what follows is almost certainly BS.) Yet I found the senior researcher in this article quite refreshing about the limitations of their research.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> The article touched upon the C. elegans connectome. There are a few interesting projects attempting to simulate the creature.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWorm)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WormBase](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WormBase)

<comment><USER12> tbf it's debatable if there 's a lot to learn from C.elegans. Simple animals have been studied for decades from aplysia to the mouse. But those are not behaviours that are interesting when attempting to learn more about the human brain. The Allen institute's connectome project is more relevant to mammals, even if it's only a tiny volume of the mouse cortex, in order to mildly constrain models of brain function. Even if we had the whole brain, it s too large to be simulatable. These data help our understanding, and we 're lucky we have amazing tools to probe brains at this moment. But we need more and better theories to put them to good use

<comment><USER13> How do you validate your models if you can't validate a simpler one first?

<comment><USER12> c elegans has very primitive, simple behaviours. It's not really possible to get something useful out of it about either our cognitive functions or our brain disorders. The things that regard single cell pathologies (e.g. plasticity) are already studied in vitro in mammalian cells. There s probably many cognitive phenomena that only become apparent in large brain sizes, so i m not sure this method scales up.

<comment><USER13> In what situation WOULD you be able to expect to extract "something useful" about "our cognitive fucntions or our brain disorders"? It seems silly to think we could learn anything about such complex things without understanding something simpler first, hence the approach of validating models of simpler structures.

What would you recommennd?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> From the article, a quote that is enlightening: if I asked, 'Do you understand New York City?' you would probably respond, 'What do you mean?' There's all this complexity. If you can't understand New York City, it's not because you can't get access to the data. It's just there's so much going on at the same time. That's what a human brain is. It's millions of things happening simultaneously among different types of cells, neuromodulators, genetic components, things from the outside. There's no point when you can suddenly say, 'I now understand the brain,' just as you wouldn't say, 'I now get New York City.' "

<comment><USER15> True, but the equating of a brain with a city is largely specious, especially when trying to understand cognition. Yes a brain regulates many low level parasympathetic processes. But it's the decision making and memory systems that we most want to understand and replicate in silico. And the coordination of a city of mostly independent self-interested humans is a poor analogue for the biological bases for a coherent thought process, unless it's only the medulla or pons that we hope to model.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> There is a good chance that complete brain mapping will be similar to whole genome sequencing. The result will be interesting but only answer a limited subset of questions.

</comment><comment><USER17> I'm confused. This article doesn't say anything. It makes no points and has no insight. "There's a lot of data in neuroscience?" Is that the message? An unusual number of Nautilus articles frontpage HN like this one, where there doesn't seem to be any value in the article itself. What is going on?

<comment><USER18> It's that the author is undergoing a 'crisis', not that the field is. The title is clever, not descriptive.

More broadly, there is a crisis. Our statistical methods/understandings are not working out in these large N-dimensional data sets, at least for the researchers that were raised on excel and not numpy.

Aside: I'm surprised that the FAANGs haven't revolutionized statistics yet. When you have 'phase changes' where a LOT more data becomes available, you get to see very low probability events. It's happened in psych, in bio, in physics most famously, in politics, in economics, etc. We have a LOT more data now in for statistical use, but it's still just Poisson distributions and t-tests. What gives?

<comment><USER19> It might vary from field to field, but in genetics Excel is a complete nonstarter, and even numpy is not going to work on sufficiently large datasets. The project I work on, [http://hail.is](http://hail.is), was started to help deal with this.

<comment><USER20> It doesn't look like that project has been discussed on HN before. One of you should definitely post it! If you email email@example.com we can give you some tips on how to do that, and possibly also put the submission in the second-chance pool (described at [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11662380)).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> To identify what the author feels is missing in neuroscience: in order to understand something, you need to figure out how to describe two things about it (1) what its state is at any point in time, and (2) how that state evolves in time. Connectomics gives you the beginnings to solve (1), but it doesn't go the whole way. There's a fundamental misunderstanding that you can collect exabytes of data and glean understanding from it just because how much you had to sweat getting the storage and collecting it. That's not how it works, it needs to have structure too. I wish more biologists / neuroscientists understood this.

<comment><USER22> I think they understand this. This is demonstrated by there being little real understanding of ~300 neuron worm connectomes.

The point of the article is discussing how mapping the full human connectome is only going to be a small next step towards understanding what's actually going on. That doesn't mean it's not worth doing.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> I highly recommend this lecture by Jeff Lichtman, where he describes the machine they've built to slice the brain and the software they have written to visualize and make sense of this vast amount of data:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QVy0n_rdBI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2QVy0n_rdBI)

</comment><comment><USER24> Tangentially related: Could a Neuroscientist Understand a Microprocessor? [1] (short answer: not with current analytic tools)

[1] [https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...](https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005268)

<comment><USER14> This is an over-rated article by those outside the field of neuroscience. While it brings up a few good points, it fails to acknowledge the sophistication of our neuroscience and behavioral techniques, and the value of converging evidence across levels of description. Also, its relatedness to the present article is tenuous at best.

<comment><USER14> I don't care how often I get down voted for making the above comment in response to posts about this article. I am a neuroscientist and I will defend my field from overrated, simplistic criticisms that happen to appeal to the HN crowd's sensibilities.

<comment><USER25> Do you have any suggestions for what the average layperson could read to get a better understanding of contemporary neuroscience? Any articles or books you'd recommend?

<comment><USER14> That is a bit difficult because the field is very broad, and I don't tend to read popular science books. Mostly, I'd look up recent review articles on Google Scholar...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Generally too purple for its own good but a very interesting read! The Borges reference (and C. elegans conundrum) makes me as a layreader really appreciate how little we actually know about the endgame for all this data.

But there is such elegance in "rudimentary" DNN's giving us the ability to at all assemble this stuff.

</comment><comment><USER27> The author should go talk to some astrophysicists. They have a similar problem -- humans are unlikely to ever understand how the entirety of the cosmos works, but it's still interesting to learn about the small bits.

</comment><comment><USER28> "We don't understand how their interactions contribute to behavior, perception, or memory. Technology has made it easy for us to gather behemoth datasets, but I'm not sure understanding the brain has kept pace with the size of the datasets."

Exemplifies:

\- Data is not information. \- Information is not knowledge. \- Knowledge is not understanding.

We've not even left the gate of the first tier. Both exciting and intimidating, but mostly humbling. Or should be.

</comment><comment><USER29> I believe we are at the part where we think how the city works is by mapping it, but you got sewers, pipelines, everything underneath that you haven't really dug into. There is a lot more inside a neuron that can be mapped. Let's just say your map isn't detailed enough

</comment><comment><USER30> If you've seen some of the high resolution videos of neural activity captures from even simple fish, the slightest motor movements activate hundreds of thousands of cells in a chaotic pattern. Neural circuitry is not neatly laid out like a silicon chip, its a forest of inter-connectivity that resists analysis even with extremely detailed visualization and data captures.

<comment><USER31> I think it's interesting that people think we'll be able to make something that does more in a smaller space.

As if there was something other than the laws of physics preventing natural selection from testing smaller structures.

Or that there's something (other than the demands of the computation itself) constraining the architectures that were tested through natural selection.

<comment><USER32> We out design nature all the time. Evolution doesn't find perfection, it finds whats good enough.

<comment><USER15> Right. Every tool invented by humans is superior in achieving a certain end than is our inborn equivalent. We don't have to faithfully model nature to surpass it.

Likewise manmade models based in mathematics and statistics have long proved more accurate in predicting outcomes than the human mind, even though we know the mind doesn't employ math.

Human-made machines have made it possible for elephants to fly. Nature never will.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> I think they need to fully figure out how individual neurons work before they move up to larger circuits.

</comment><comment><USER29> " connectomics and whether he thinks we'll ever have a holistic understanding of the brain. His answer—"No"

As a scientist to say something you don't fully understand as impossible really pisses me off.

</comment><comment><USER34> Maybe it doesn't really matter.

</comment><comment><USER35> We'll simplify and create models, as we do in maps and all else, identifying principles and prioritizing.

</comment><comment><USER36> "If the human brain were so simple that we could understand it, we would be so simple that we couldn't."

<comment><USER37> A mind understanding itself may violate the second law, but a few minds understanding one mind should be theoretically possible!

<comment><USER38> The organization of human thought to achieve that level of understanding might be an issue. From the original article: 'the data footprint of all books ever written come out to less than 100 terabytes, or 0.005 percent of a mouse brain'

<comment><USER37> That formulation makes the goal seem remote but not implausible. We have the technology to index and analyse 10 Terrabytes certainly and even gmail apparently is an exabyte ... [0]. A mouse brain given your premise is 20 petabytes. Given even linear progress this class of problem is not insurmountable.

[0] [https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exa-](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exa-)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> Physicists don't understand gravity...neuroscientists don't understand the main...maybe the universe is a giant brain and the stars are neurons, the big bang was conception and we are bacterial growth. Better than all current theories.

</comment><comment><USER40> I am planning to solve this =) just cracked the inner workings of ANNs (future SHOW HN) and am going to read a book on computational neuroscience tomorrow.

<comment><USER41> Not to be discouraging, but if you're just starting to learn about artificial neural networks, you have a long way to go...

That said, in the few years of experience I've had with ANNs, they really do seem like an intuitive analog for human learning, at a high level. And thinking about training problems in this way, approximately "what kind of training data would I need to train a small child to do this" can be more helpful than one might have otherwise expected.

I think we're just a handful of major breakthroughs away from true AI, assuming compute and memory continue to scale. Certainly within 100 years.</comment></comment>


DataTau (hacker news for data science) domain expired - <AUTHOR> http://www.datatau.com/ <comment><AUTHOR> Looks as though it's back now. [http://www.datatau.com](http://www.datatau.com)

</comment><comment><USER2> I hope this is just a temporary thing. I love this site!</comment>


Windows 1.0. Out Soon. Radical - <AUTHOR> https://twitter.com/Windows/status/1146194088515031040 <comment><AUTHOR> And all Windows' Instagram posts are deleted and replaced: [https://www.instagram.com/windows/](https://www.instagram.com/windows/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Windows as merely a GUI on top of a Linux kernel</comment>


Clearing up about the 150M Microsoft invested in Apple in 1997 - <AUTHOR> http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-microsoft-2011-4#comment-4dbdba9249e2ae6645000000

<comment><AUTHOR> Another take : <http://www.quora.com/John-Akerson/Microsoft/answers>

</comment><comment><USER2> The funny thing is that Apple has won big in the past decade but it really wasn't at the expense of Microsoft. Microsoft still dominates the desktop and with Office. Microsoft is very profitable but they have not really been able to grow as much as the could have.</comment>


The New Ruby Code of Conduct - <AUTHOR> https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/conduct/ <comment><USER2> While I don't see why this is necessary, I admire the wording that the ruby team has chosen. If more codes of conduct looked like this I do believe there would be the amount of pushback there has been.</comment>


Ask HN: What do you do with paywalled HN articles? - <AUTHOR> I read HN everyday. There's often articles on the front page from NY Times, WSJ, Bloomberg, The Economist, etc. that are paywalled. When I get to the sites I can only read the first paragraph of the article. Sometimes incognito works but not always so I just give up and am kind of frustrated that I couldn't read it. I have a subscription to the Washington Post app that I use for everyday news but I don't want to pay a monthly subscription for every single major publication.
I tried Apple News+ but I'm not crazy about it and it's pretty walled in.
Is this a shared frustration? What do you typically do? <comment><USER2> Many can be read via [http://archive.is](http://archive.is) or [https://archive.org](https://archive.org). I usually look there, and if I find a readable version I come back here and post the link for others.

<comment> alpha-oliveira How do you read the New York Times in archive.org?

<comment><USER2> [https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...](https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/science/microscope- atom-magnetic-mri.html)

then

[https://web.archive.org/web/20190701220022/https://www.nytim...](https://web.archive.org/web/20190701220022/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/01/science/microscope- atom-magnetic-mri.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> I read the comments on HN. Usually I can glean enough of an outline of the article that I don't feel like I have to read it. If I am compelled to check it out anyway (most likely because there are few comments and the title is very baitey) I'll try incognito mode or occasionally check the web link/google cache. But if it's not easy I just move on.

</comment><comment><USER4> I hit the back button

</comment><comment><USER5> outline.com is an amazing tool. Prepend it to most URLs (e.g. outline.com/https...) and it gets you through.

(Mods - my apologies if this isn't kosher to share, feel free to remove.)

<comment><AUTHOR> Thanks! I actually just learned a bout that tool a minute a go from this medium article about how to bypass paywalls: [https://medium.com/black-edge- consulting/how-to-bypass-virtu...](https://medium.com/black-edge- consulting/how-to-bypass-virtually-every-news-paywall-705602c4c2ce) which ironically is paywalled.

There's also a firefox extension that requests the site from a different country thus getting rid of the paywall.

All this stuff is ethically and legally dubious. I wish there was like a spotify for news.

<comment><USER6> Pretty much like Apple's News+, but with more newspapers?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yeah and multi platform. Obviously Apple news+ is inherently limited to the Apple ecosystem

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I consciously refuse to consume it.

HN used to be better at avoiding paywalled articles, but it's become increasingly common in the last year (source: myself, consuming it since 2011).

</comment><comment><USER8> I'm happy to subscribe digitally to NYT and a couple other news sources (some with walls, some not).

</comment><comment><USER9> I refuse to pay for most sites since they tend to offer little value and/or use dark patterns such as barely disclosed trial periods. Even high value sites like NYT, I refuse to pay for because of their semi-deceptive trial periods but just as importantly their remarkably high pricing after the trial.

After using up the few trial articles for a given month I just don't read from that site. Maybe two or three times a year total I might go to extremes like firing up a different browser to try to load a story with a fresh session, if it's something I really want to read.

I do pay decent money for some valuable sites that offer good content. And I end up paying even in months when I don't consume their content, and I don't mind, because I like supporting the site and I can go back any time with full access (as long as I am subscribed) and get any content I missed. This tends to be more tech how-to stuff, as opposed to news. Like NSScreenCast and objc.io, which are both great in different ways. And their pricing is not insane for what they offer. It's fair.

Unlike the news sites, which have utterly crazy pricing if you do a quick calculation of how much it would cost you to subscribe to a dozen or so of them. I dip into way more than several dozen news sites that want me to pay. No way I could make the budget fit even a small subset of them, at the prices they want.

<comment><USER10> Which sites do you deem to be worth paying for?

<comment><USER9> I mentioned them already in the comment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> I pay for NYT and WaPo, so I have no issues with these.

It is frustrating though that despite many alternative sources available there seems (from my perspective) to be a really large number of low-added-value postings of Bloomberg articles.

I can usually search for the subject or some content from the first paragraph and find alternative stories about the same topic and read those instead.

<comment><USER8> I get the feeling Bloomberg just lets anyone post there....it feels like medium sometimes.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> If I cannot access it, then I will just not read it. Although sometimes there are comments that I might read and maybe also reply to, even though since I have not read the article I could not properly comment on the article itself.

</comment><comment><USER13> If the site offers 2-3 free articles to read, then I'm good. Otherwise I just back out.

If my 2-3 article trial is over, I just open on Private mode or Temporary Tab extension on Firefox.

</comment><comment><USER14> > What do you typically do?

Close the browser tab when a paywall appears.

<comment><AUTHOR> I usually give up. I just don't read the article. I read the first paragraph that's visible above the subscription CTA and then I go back to binging on whatever else is on HN

</comment></comment><comment> m-p-3 I use this: [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls- firefox](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox)

Or I send it to Outline or Pocket.

</comment><comment><USER15> I use Brave browser's script and cookie blocking abilities. In the browser, you click on the Brave logo to the right of the url input. In the menu that appears, you can block all scripts and cookies.

This is usually enough for me to see NYT, WaPo, Economist, and other articles. Only in rare cases has this strategy not worked. I consume a lot of news, so whenever I see a paywall -- boom! Scripts blocked, paywall goes down.

It seems that it remembers these settings on a site-by-site basis, as well. I encounter fewer paywalls as time goes by.

</comment><comment><USER16> Sometimes disabling JavaScript via a browser extension can help. Not always though.

</comment><comment><USER17> I hit the "web" link under the title, click the first hit on the Google search, and read it without a paywall.

</comment><comment><USER18> Most of the time there is not even a reason for a paywall, as the same report can be found in other media for free. HN should have a policy to not allow paywalls unless there is no alternative.

</comment><comment><USER19> I use a chrome extension to bypass paywalls</comment>


Establishing Trust in the Bitcoin Ecosystem - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2015/04/16/people-arent-algorithms-or-an-argument-for-establishing-trust-in-the-bitcoin-ecosystem/

<comment><USER3> The reason Bitcoin is not used for remittance is not due to trust, it's due to the fact Bitcoin doesn't have an advantage in the remittance space.

There are companies such as [https://transferwise.com/](https://transferwise.com/) that provide cheap money sending with no Bitcoin involved. Quick, simple and easy to understand.

Bitcoin has many strengths, but remittance isn't one of them.

<comment><USER4> I will have to disagree with you on that. I don't think this is the reason, I think the reason is that most companies fail to partner with other established financial institutions. Although this companies, such as transferwise and dwolla do a great job around Europe and US, most of them are not even known in the developing countries, in those countries people still rely on the old fashioned, bank transfers and western union mostly. There is a great opportunity out there for serious people to create great companies, and remittance surely is one of them.

<comment><USER5> rebit.ph is making a serious attempt at remittances to the Philippines using Bitcon, but have discovered they basically have to become a Bitcoin exchange as not enough people are buying the Bitcoins at the .ph end.

Also, the expensive bit that you're paying Western Union those fees for? Turns out to be the last mile, that a Bitcoin-based remittance company would also have to implement.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> This article is correct in stating that trust and reputation is a serious problem for Bitcoin. But I don't think the article diagnoses exactly what is causing it.

After all - there is nothing in all these negative headlines that give you a strong reason to believe that the Bitcoin ecosystem is less reliable overall than more traditional institutions. For every Bitcoin related scandal you can find an enormous number relating to the traditional financial system. The Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme alone was six times the size of the entire Bitcoin market cap at the moment. Yet every Bitcoin related scandal is interpreted by commentators as a sign of the anarchic failure of its central premise; while every scandal relating to the traditional sector does nothing at all to impede its reputation as the default way of doing business.

I presume the explanation for this bias than a deep and abiding fear of distributed consensus - not just in the authorities and institutions that would lose their power; but in the culture at large. What else could it be?

I don't know what you should do to combat that - but it's clear to me that this is the fundamental idea that needs to be targeted.

<comment><USER7> >> The Bernie Madoff ponzi scheme alone

People who invest tons of cash in schemes like this, or in fact make investments at all, should be doing a lot of due diligence. Investment is not something that Joe Average thinks about much, if he can help it. He doesn't have millions of dollars, he probably has small-scale retirement funds managed by companies he didn't even choose by himself, just some default adopted at some point. Any cash he's sitting on is managed by other people as well, and is protected and insured in a variety of ways.

Joe looks at Bitcoin and sees there have been scams and hacks by the dozen, and that when they happen there is little to no comeback, legal or otherwise. Some of the perps were the people running the services. He's probably also heard about the Silk Road. When it comes down to it he probably doesn't have a clue about computer security so there's no way in hell he's going to keep his cash on his own computer in a file he could lose with a hard-drive crash, that a hacker could steal from an infected machine. And if he's going to trust a third party with his money, why a bitcoin third party? There's no compelling reason to use bitcoin anyway when he has a credit card, and the credit card has the insurance and chargeback facilities that make Joe feel comparatively safe.

I realise that from a technology standpoint most of this stuff is not specific to bitcoin. But where money is concerned I doubt the technically-correct* standpoint is going to win.

I think the fear of distributed consensus might well be there too, but it's probably waaaay down the list of concerns, if most people even have any idea what it is.

(*the best kind of correct!)

<comment><USER6> I think you're not quite seeing my point.

I agree that something like what you wrote is likely descriptive (very roughly) of the conscious thoughts of the average punter - but what we need here is an explanation of WHY this is going through the average punter's head. And such an explanation is not necessarily going to be something that is included on their conscious list of concerns (though it might).

What you have reiterated here is just what the article has already said. We already know facts like: - Punter hears about silk road, associates Bitcoin with illegal drug markets. What we want to know is why hearing such a fact causes such an association.

Now you might think that there is no explanation here that is needed beyond how reputations are assigned generally by human societies. You might just think that - well, it's natural to associate a low reputation score to a system when you hear headlines about Silk Road style marketplaces, and so there is nothing more to say here.

I'm saying - no, there is something more going on here than just standard reputation assignment. Why? Well - as I said before - because for every negative headline that is supposed to prove Bitcoin's low reputation, we can produce a fact about the traditional system that completely trumps the negative bitcoin headline.

As another example since you mentioned Silk Road. What is the financial instrument used overwhelmingly by the world's drug dealers to exchange value? It is the U.S. 100 dollar bill. But is the reputation of the U.S. dollar impacted by this? Not at all. The even greater irony is that while the Bitcoin ecosystem overall gets branded as the province of nutbar libertarians that love drug dealers - the U.S. government is renown the world over for fighting the war on drugs. Except the U.S. has done nothing to remove the hundred dollar bills that drug dealers love to use. There is no greater single act the U.S. government could do to fight the drug cartels. It doesn't do it.

So the reputation assignments here are odd to say the least. They certainly aren't consistent. This is something that cries out for explanation.

<comment><USER8> Speaking as someone who vaguely follows bitcoin, the major success story of bitcoin seems to be only Silk Road.

I can see no personal advantage to using bitcoin for anything, except for illegal transactions. The problem is that while you can find negatives of the normal network, you can't find enough positives for bitcoin. Also, the failures seem much bigger -- when MtGox failed it was the biggest exchange, and everyone lost everything. Such a thing has (in modern times) never happened with the normal monetry system, and couldn't happen (because governments wouldn't let it).

I trust my bank to look after my money more than I trust a bitcoin exchange, or myself not to misplace a vital private key / get my wallet stolen. The idea that bitcoins are largely untraceable and unrecoverable does not to me (I'm afraid) seem like an advantage.

Further, from a technical viewpoint, it seems to me I'm just replacing one series of masters with another -- 2/3 of all bitcoins are already in circulation, so the "1%" (current users) of bitcoin are already extremely wealthy. The idea that bitcoin is uncentralised and uncontrollable seems false, when 2 or 3 (or 1?) large mining groups effectively control the bitcoin network, and can (and have) just "stopped" it for a while to sort out problems.

<comment><USER6> >> Such a thing has (in modern times) never happened with the normal monetary system, and couldn't happen (because governments wouldn't let it).

Easily trumped once again. Not only have governments let failures happen at a much greater scale - they've facilitated them.

Bear Stearns - when it collapsed was actually relatively well capitalized - <USER2> just couldn't get access to the day to day liquidity that all large institutions need access to these days because the markets were spooked. The fed could have just provided them a loan to see them through, and the NY fed were poised to give them funding - but instead at the last moment changed their mind and ordered Bear Stearns to do a deal with JP Morgan to have them bought out. JP Morgan came to the table with an offer of 2 dollars per share. It eventually went up to 10 - but this was a stock that was trading at over a hundred dollars per share not a few months before. Shareholders were effectively wiped out.

Despite this event being part of a catalyst that almost ended modern capitalism as we know it - you state that the failures of Bitcoin seem much bigger. I'm sorry - but this isn't just a matter of perception - this is just false. There were no systemic failures that happened on account of the failure of Mt Gox. People lost money. Trade moved onto the other exchanges. That was it. The fact that you can come to the conclusion that Bitcoin's failures seem bigger somehow proves everything that I've been saying about the absurdity of Bitcoin perception.

<comment><USER9> The finance system failing has nothing to do with failures of the monetary system, nor of _retail_ banking. If I wanted to point to one of those, I'd say Cyprus.

Gox failed in a remarkably traditional way: a bank run. They didn't have enough reserves to cover their liabilities. It turns out that this was due to fraud and/or insolvency.

It's always possible to say "bitcoin cannot fail, it can only _be failed_ ", because the failures are those of its support institutions. However, the support institutions are critical to actually using it and it retaining its value. They're not part of the tech but they're part of the system.

<comment><USER6> I can't tell if you agree with me or not. We're talking about the institutional systems built on top of the monetary system and our respective trust in each. You seem to say the same at the end of your comment.

But I'm not claiming that the collapse of Bear Stearns was a failure of the traditional monetary system. The fact that the fed can print money at will is the reason why essentially they had it in their power to extend an emergency loan to Bear Stearns. That they chose instead to wipe out shareholders was an institutional failure. It was an institutional failure on a colossal scale - and yet clearly water off a duck's back.

<comment><USER7> Wiping out shareholders is entirely different from wiping out depositors though, entirely different.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> The spirit of Bitcoin is to trust no one and nothing. If that can't be accomplished in practice due to things like interfacing with the real world, you might as well use Stellar and save yourself a lot of mining.

<comment><USER7> Yup, the spirit of Bitcoin, at least its original spirit, was total distrust, with no authorities needed or wanted, and it was designed specifically to fulfil this function.

The article talks about starting groups of trusted companies, setting up barriers to entry etc etc, in order to build trust. These are authorities.

Arguably Bitcoin is already dependent on trust - collusion between pool operators is entirely possible, they and the developers have already shown that they _are_ an authority (when the various forks and merges have happened).

A crypto-currency with an authority can be done in such a way that mining is unnecessary.

<comment><USER11> Collusion isn't just possible. It's already been going on for at least two years now. As was said by one pool operator (paraphrasing), "the only people mining are 12 pools".

Bitcoin isn't about distrust. It's about decentralized trust as that is the primary function of the blockchain. Bitcoin as an ecosystem hasn't been about distrust, but decentralized trust, and it has long been moving away from decentralization, which is fundamentally problematic.

<comment><USER7> It's very interesting to watch.

In microcosm it demonstrates something I've often thought about libertarian proposals for government-less societies - in fairly short order a class of barons will appear and we're back to feudalism of a sort.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> The problem with the Bitcoin "ecosystem" is simply that the people in that ecosystem are the same people who have been attracted to Bitcoin: speculators, opportunists, and wide-eyed idiots.

The biggest problem of Bitcoin is that the problem it solves is not the problem fiat currencies need solving. Bitcoin has no real competitive advantage over traditional currencies, and many drawbacks.

<comment><USER13> I would disagree that it has no competitive advantages. For people in Venezuela and other places where the state has failed to control inflation, Bitcoin allows people to escape capital controls(Think China). Of course there are still many drawbacks, but there are competitive advantages over 'some' currencies.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I think he makes a valid point on the article, however, I do think all this bad stuff that has happened to it was going to happen anyway, its impossible to stop it from happening, the traditional system does not stop it neither, this is part of human nature where there are large sums of money there will be other people trying to hack into it to benefit themselves and its peers. But the joy of the bitcoin ecosystem, and one that he fails to point out on the article, is that it rewards and encourages players to follow the rules, because in terms of cost of running enough computing power that hacks into the block-chain and a system that mines bitcoins to get the rewards associated with it, the latter is way more viable. I think that the Bitcoin Bloc-Chain is going well, with needs for some updates in the system, as any other software does, but going well so far. What really needs to be done, and the writer recognizes that in the article, is all the businesses built around it must follow best-practices, following the example of established organizations, to increase the overall trust in the ecosystem and people start to accept it more into their daily lives, this is obviously easier said than done, but I think that any serious individual who are starting a Bitcoin related company must have building trust relationship with the rest of the world at its top priority, and to do that he must follow practices that other people know and trust.</comment>