You can get cheap Android phones for like $15, and they each get a difficult to ban cellular IP. You also need to buy the server box to make it all work, they're about $300 on Amazon and cheaper elsewhere. So you can get 20 devices going for $600. All in all, I think it would pay for itself pretty quickly.
I imagine the data won't be very useful considering it's public knowledge the store is run by AI and most of the customers will be people specifically interested in that aspect of the business. Much like that meetup organised in Manchester, where the people who showed up were there for the novelty: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/05/ai-bot-pa...
That only counts if the unique selling proposition is that AI are better suppliers or customers than humans.
What is more likely is that people enjoy the novelty of the experiment, which is not something that will be reproducible for long.
If the transactions the AI make are thus influenced, then the study merely demonstrates people like novelty, which is already well known, and says nothing about whether AI can sustainably orchestrate a business.
While the BBC is in charge of collecting it, and it is largely (but not exclusively) spent on the BBC, the TV licence is imposed by and paid into the government's funds. The government then "grants" the money back to the BBC.
> The revenue and associated expenditure [...] are those flows of funds which are handled on behalf of the Consolidated Fund and where the BBC acts as agent rather than as principal
It is, effectively, a subscription. But it is partnered with statute law which makes it an offence to receive TV broadcast signals without paying this subscription (and now also an offence to watch iPlayer, etc.)... which is unlike most subscriptions.
It's seen as strictly better than the government providing funding from general taxation, which would mean directly controlling the state broadcaster and its purse-strings.
And generally speaking, there are very good reasons to fund your country's own film/TV industry, rather than rely on other countries supplying the funding and the media (and the opinions and the cultural sway and the power and the control).
I had to abandon it because of the memory leak, it would fill up all my memory in a matter of minutes. The devs don't seem to pay it much attention: https://github.com/anomalyco/opencode/issues/5363
> It is further ordered that all ISPs (including without limitation those set forth in Exhibit B hereto) and any other ISPs providing services in the United States shall block access to the Website at any domain address known today (including but not limited to those set forth in Exhibit A hereto) or to be used in the future by the Defendants (“Newly Detected Websites”) by any technological means available on the ISPs’ systems. The domain addresses and any Newly Detected Websites shall be channeled in such a way that users will be unable to connect and/or use the Website, and will be diverted by the ISPs’ DNS servers to a landing page operated and controlled by Plaintiffs (the “Landing Page”).
It is interesting that most of these are coming from apps outside the US including the fully developer mode lock outs. US companies seem more comfortable with the mode being enabled which explains why I've never really run into issues with having it turned on.
reply