Comment Re:Spotty Collateral Damage (Score 1) 27
Apparently it is an API tightening, and not a ban.
That's encouraging news
Apparently it is an API tightening, and not a ban.
That's encouraging news
The Spotty plugin for Lyrion Music Server, formerly Logitech Media Server, formerly Slimserver - one of the best, if not the best open source music player ecosystem out there appears to be a casualty of this. Looks like after "the big scrape", Spotify has tightened down their APIs and have for the time being locked out 3rd party players of Spotify music. Lyrion itself of course still works fine, but you can no longer stream Spotify via it. This sucks because while I can use the Spotify app on my phone or computer, if I want to have music playing throughout the house, there isn't a good way to synchronize multiple Spotify players. Lyrion has been able to synchronize players for multi-room playback way back to the Slimserver days (and way before Sonos was a thing.)
If the Spotty developer can't get it working again, I will likely drop my paid Spotify subscription and have to get my streaming music elsewhere, as the only reason I pay for Spotify is that it has been easy to stream through Lyrion. I suppose I can start downloading from Anna's...
Absolutely no beef here against the Spotty developer, they had the API rug pulled out from under them, and it's not yet clear if there will be a technical solution.
Dropping API support for paid customers is a great way to drive those customers to piracy.
But maybe we can make potentially crash inducing actions in the cockpit of a plane (like shutting off fuel to engines) something that requires input from two pilots.
One of the reasons we have two pilots is for redundancy in the case that a single pilot becomes incapacitated (or during emergencies, overloaded). How would a technology enforced rule that requires two pilots to agree on something work if one of them is incapacitated? Sure, you could have some system where a single pilot could override that rule, but then you are back to a single pilot making the decision. You could have additional monitoring so that if one pilot does something weird, the other is alerted, but in this case the other pilot noticed immediately (the voice recorder caught one pilot asking the other, "why did you do that"?), so additional monitoring would not have helped.
As others have noted, ultimately you have to trust the pilots as there are lots of ways a pilot desiring to do so could crash a plane.
Cursive is shit though and people should stop using it. If we're only keeping it around for signatures we should just learn to accept doing them without. They can learn fine motor skills in an art class.
That would be fine if we were willing to require art classes. Shop classes could also train for fine motor skills as long as the projects included some precision work. I believe the requirements should include *some* form of fine motor skill development.
Depending on your opinion of if the goal of primary school should be to train free thinking or train compliance (I think schools should do a bit of both), training cursive teaches kids to follow instructions and achieve a specific result (well formed cursive letters that others can unambiguously identify) whereas art is generally a more free form effort (one kids drawing of a horse may be very different than another's, and all don't need to agree that it is a horse). If you want to train compliance and prepare people for the workforce and general societal interaction, shop classes might be a better cursive alternative than art classes. Of course art has value to society as well.
Seems to me the way to fix this, and by this I mean bad driving behavior by self driving vehicles, is to make C-Level executives personally responsible for the actions of the driving software. Find a way to "pierce the corporate veil" and issue the traffic infractions to specific high level people in corporations.
Yeah, it's a pipe dream as corporations won't stand for it and kind of own congress, but hey we can dream right?
If computers take over (which seems to be their natural tendency), it will serve us right. -- Alistair Cooke