I'd call that good riddance.

Didn't those cars have license plates attached to them for easy identification?

I'm used to such numbers being inside the passenger compartment, under the rug - rather concealed places like that.

If the police would want to check on it (never heard they do), I'd have a hard time finding it. It'd require me to read the car manual to check on the location of it.

In case of the challenge/response, the car knows what response to expect on the challenge it sent out. So the car and the key basically do the same calculation.

The lost key situation is very simple: reprogram not only the key, but also the car. The car can be reprogrammed after gaining entry with a physical key - this may be a traditional key, or a smart key, or whatever. Just a second key, that the owner receives with his car and which can only be used for gaining access for reprogramming purposes.

Now what if you lose that reprogramming key as well? Then the car owner will have to pay for a new window in his car, as the dealer will have to use brute force to access the reprogramming hub.

Now theft becomes a bit of an issue (thief steals reprogramming equipment, gains access to the car, reprograms it to match the thief's key), however this again can be mitigated by having the car lock up for some time (a few hours should be enough to deter thieves) upon reprogramming without reprogramming key.

The only issue may be that all the existing keys to the car (many people will have more than one key) have to be replaced.

A web site on the Internet is quite arguably the cyberspace equivalent to a public place.

The display of a YouTube video on a screen in your shop, streaming from YouTube, is quite arguably the same as embedding it in your web site.

A lot will depend on the copyright license of the material in question. You're certainly allowed to play music in your store if you get explicit permission from the copyright owner of this music to use their material in your shop. Maybe they even come and play live in your shop. If you put a video out on the Internet, and explicitly add "only link, do not embed this video in any other site", and someone does embed it after all, you may still be able to claim copyright infringement as it's explicitly stated you don't want this.

Now such a comment shows you have a serious problem - one with not thinking through the problem, and showing a thorough lack of understanding of even the basics of the concept of copyright. Note that every video, every work out there is copyrighted. Also your home videos. The whole notion of those anti-copying groups that say "don't share copyrighted material" is stupid - whether you can share copyrighted material with third parties depends on whether the copyright owner has given permission or not. Simply uploading to YouTube may very well arguably include an implicit permission to share, unless explicitly stated otherwise.

There is a general agreement that linking to material is OK, however this is much more than just linking - this is embedding. Linking is easier: it basically tells "look, over there you can find this or that, you may go have a look". Nothing from the original content is visible in your web site, clearly no copyright infringement.

Embedding a video goes a lot further than that. It is getting quite close to renting a video and showing it to all your friends and all other people that ask. Whether that is legal, generally depends on the copyright license of the rights holder.

If no restrictions on this, you could take all the content of your local newspaper's site, embed it in your web site (using frames or so, so you're not actually copying the news articles to your own web site), and you got your own news web site. I'm pulling it a bit more to an extreme, but it's basically the same: it's embedding. However now you must see the issues this may have.

As I understand it, YouTube has an option to indicate whether you allow your video to be embedded in another web site. If you allow this, there's no issue of course.

A complicating factor in this case will certainly be the fact that the uploader of the video is not the copyright holder of the original material... and that when I see videos from YouTube broadcast as part of a TV show, it very often says (C) YouTube - also something that I have bad feelings about, whether it is true or not.

You're a few years behind the times.

While for sure they're not on par with the Americans, I wouldn't call BeiDou a "PR stunt". There are already mobile phones on the market that use it, in conjunction with the American GPS and the Russian GLONASS. They also have a growing number of more and more advanced military satellites circling around the earth already, and have managed to reach Mars.

There is for sure a lot of PR involved, and that should tip you off for the future. They will sooner or later leapfrog the US, just because of that, because it's the exact same motivation the US had to put a man on the moon.

When the Americans decided to put a man on the moon, they did it within ten years. In an era where manned space flight was in its infancy

We're now in an era where manned space flight is more or less routine, and where rocket technology and other space technologies have vastly improved.

I'm quite positive it's possible to put a man on Mars within ten years, if only we really want to. If the US would put only a quarter of the money that now goes towards destruction of other people (i.e. the military) towards this mission, it can be done - the amount that goes to their military is so huge, a space mission will look cheap in comparison. It'll need a multiple of spacecraft, one for the crew (with life support for the duration of the trip and a while on Mars), several robotic freighters to carry further supplies needed to set up a permanent base. Indeed it'd be a one-way mission, until the Mars colonists produce the fuel needed for the return trip.

What's missing is the political will. The Americans got to the moon as they thought they were being outcompeted by the Russians, and that this was the only non-selfdestructive way to show the Russians their might (invading Russia would've amounted to suicide of course). This political will, this competition is missing now.

So that indeed gets us back to China. Russia has lost most of it's capabilities, and won't be back on track soon. The Chinese however develop quickly, and start to seriously catch up with the Americans. The moment the Chinese take over and say "we're going to put a man on Mars, just to show the world how great we are", the Americans will say "we're going to be there first!". As soon as that happens, less than a decade later, there will be people on the moon.

LOL

The best part of your comment may be that it's modded "+4, interesting" instead of "+4, funny" and that so far you only got serious replies to it!

Leaving them off may not be such a good idea if those patents are your personal selling point - showing your capabilities, and why they should hire you and not someone else.

Also later if you get the job, those patents will probably get in the way. I expect those patents to be right in the main field of expertise of the applicant - which is probably exactly the expertise the prospective employer wants to hire him for. It is going to be hard to use your expertise, when a key part of that expertise can not be used as you have patented it yourself.

So somehow I think the patents should be at least part of the interview process (show of expertise/experience if nothing else), and if the content of those patents is indeed related to the job at hand they will have to be licensed by the hiring company as well in one way or another - preferably in a way to prevent lock-in and conflict of interest from both sides. I've no idea how that could be done specifically, but I'm sure a way can be found.

Just leaving it out of the interview may come to haunt you later. Hired for the job, then you want to implement something for the company that needs your patented technology, and suddenly you have to ask more from the company (a patent license) just to do your job. That's bound to give problems at best, and in worse case dismissal.

There's nothing requiring you to go to registered doctors or official hospitals.

When getting sick, why don't you fly over to Africa (the plane tickets cost you about as much as a night in hospital in the US), and ask some witch doctor to treat you (his fees for a full treatment may be less than what your regular doctor will charge you for a consult)? Maybe it's because you hope to get a proper treatment at your registered doctor, who you know has finished a rigorous training, and that the hospitals you're treated are maintained to high standards?

There are good reasons for the licensing and registration systems that are in place for not only medical personnel, but also commercial transport services such as taxis. There may be room for improvement on the existing systems, but abolishing is certainly not going to be an improvement.

Not knowing the intricacies of UK rules, what you mention still means that not just anyone who happens to own a car may start offering rides for pay.

The key is "Licensed Hire Vehicles" - they're licensed, so there must be some requirements for those that do not apply for normal private cars. Probably extra driving course and insurance, that kind of things. And as soon as they're licensed, they're legal to drive people around.

The problem of most Uber drivers is that they are not licensed to carry paid passengers.

The problem if the randomness of the third party is that you don't know who it is - for many random third parties it indeed won't matter, but not for all random third parties. You never know where the image ends up.

Stroke order is indeed essential for proper software recognition.

Never seen pinyin in great use: too many homophones for that to work well. There are much better methods than pinyin.

However those methods only work well with a keyboard, while handwriting works better on small screens like mobile phones. Looking around me on the MTR I see most people use handwriting, some use other methods (such as "nine stroke" which basically uses the numerical phone keyboard for character input, advantage is that the soft keys on the screen are of reasonable size).