The BBC, or rather their "licence enforcement" divison,
used to offer a cheaper licence, if you had a Black and
White TV (although made no concessions to people who only
wanted to watch Black and White re-runs on a colour TV).

Would the same apply to watching netfilx?

Or pehaps, given this day and age, you would need prove
you were watching netflix on a low resolution device?

> Scientists have created genetically edited tomatoes, each containing as much provitamin
> D3 -- the precursor to vitamin D -- as two eggs or a tablespoon of tuna

So that's two of the ingredients of a Salad Nicose that are no longer needed?

> The best time to observe earthshine is when ...

Cf.

On certain nights
When the angles are right
And the moon is a slender crescent

It's circle shows
In a ghostly glow
Of earthly luminescence

Don't be fooled by the original announcement which, like many recent HPE
"supercomputing" annoucements, doesn't mention Cray

From the body of the article:

> HPE says that LUMI, which will be hosted at the Finnish IT Center for Science in
> Kajaani, Finland, will feature HPE Cray EX servers ...

so this is still the Shasta technology being developed by Cray, with the fully integrated
water-cooling, albiet without the seats, that just happend to be acquired and rebranded
by HPE, when they brought Cray.

It's not like this is just a few cabinets of Apollo servers and a top-of-rack, top-nutter,
Mellanox IB switch.

As regards

> ... with fancy networks cards.

well they do need to be ever so slightly fancy, because Cray people had been doing
fancy things to the networking protocols to be run through those cards, no?

You are correct, though, when you say

> ... it just cost money

as lots of money is currently being spent designing a humanoid hand enhancement,
small and steady enough to position all those transistors and atoms by hand.

Don't worry: we'll get back to the good old days of hovercraft small enough to be
thrown into a bucket of water. Look, professor: the ripples are spreading outwards.

> I'm a big fan of the BBC's independence, and
> also of the license fee to pay for it, therefore
> I would like to continue seeing the BBC funded
> by the taxpayer for the forseeable future.

Shame it isn't funded by the taxpayer then.

The licence fee has to be paid by anyone who owns receiveing equipment, regardless of whether they earn enough, or have a good enough accountant I suppose, to pay tax or not.

>If you buy a television, you're pretty likely to
> be watching tv shows on it, and therefore the
> license fee seems like a good idea.

But if you want to buy a video recorder to watch old videos on, and you happen to find that it is damn nigh impossible to but one without a TV tuner in, then you try getting the TV licensing folk to let you off the licence fee.

And if you dont have a TV, try getting the TV licensing folk to lay off the bully-boy tactics that they have to employ to earn their keep, because, dont forget, it costs a non-unsubstantial part of the licensing fee just to kep them going in collecting it in the first place.

I've even had one bloke ring me up and tell me he can "hear my TV" in the background. Love to know where they got my number from as it happens.

Cant wait for someone to ring me up and tell me they can "hear my PC" in the background - better go and check-out some low noise cooling I guess !