Generally people cheat by getting external help. Someone outside uses a computer to analyse the game and then feeds hints back to the player through a clandestine channel.

There are various countermeasures that can be taken to make such cheating harder, but they tend to have the side effect of making the tournament more expensive to run and/or less attractive for players and spectators.

Samsung announced a 30TB drive in the 2.5 inch server form factor (same footprint as a laptop drive, but thicker) a few years ago, I can't seem to find anywhere with it in stock new anymore but I did find one used on ebay, so presumablly some were made/sold.

I've seen a number of people say this and all I can say is if this is really true where you live then houses where you live must either be massive, terribly insulated or both. While most houses in the UK do have gas, there are a non-negliable number that only have resistive electric heating (usually in the form of storage heaters using cheaper night-rate electricity) and their occupants cope just fine.

It's almost unheard of to have a domestic serive larger than 100A in the UK, many are only 60A or 80A.

Network filesystems generally don't care what the underlying filesystem on the server is.

The main usecases for a NTFS driver on linux are.

1. Multiboot systems, if i'm dual-booting windows and Linux i want a way to transfer files between them, in both directions.
2. Removable media/external drives. I want my external drives to work on both my windows computers and my Linux computers. Fat32 used to be the obvious solution but as everything gets bigger the 4GB filesize limit it becomes increasingly problematic, the artificial 32GB limit for formatting fat32 drives in NT based windows is also a pain. exfat is also an option but I think it's support situation on Linux is even worse than NTFS.

It's an urban legend though, both NASA and the Russians used pencils they were problematic though.

The space pen was a private Development and was adopted by both NASA and the Russians. There seem to be contradictory accounts of how much NASA paid for the pens, NASA say $6 per pen, a Scientific american article says $2.39 either way it wasn't much.

The inventors of the space pen went on to make a bunch of money selling it to other people, it turns out that space programs aren't the only customers who want a "write anywhere" pen.

I'm not sure what you mean by "opposite end of the island to China", it looks to me like the longs sides of Taiwan is roughly paralell to the Chinese mainland coast.

When I look at the map I see the largest landing point being Tanshui which appears to be on the China-facing coast, though there also seems to be a landing in TouCheng which is facing away from mainland china.

Also aside from physical attacks there is also the possibility of economic/business attacks. It seems many of the cable systems serving Taiwan also serve mainland china. If a cable system operator is forced to choose between serving Taiwan and Serving mainland China which will they pick?

Youtube does not provide a stable public interface for downloading videos. So programs like youtube-dl periodically stop working and have to be updated.

I could well belive that there are crufty old media processing setups, that include the ability to import from youtube and similar sites and use youtube-dl to implement that functionality.

It did.

What is interesting IMO is how long it has taken. Centralised "alternative finance" systems where quickly either shut down or subverted into the regular finance system but somehow the regulators seem to have been unable to deal with Cryptocurrency. Even in cases where a cryptocurrency (Tether for example) is pegged to the USD by a single entity they seem to have been unable to do anything much.

AIUI there are at least four possible "chip" transaction types, chip only, offline chip and pin (card verifies the pin), online chip and pin (bank servers verify the pin) and chip and signature. Some cards and some terminals only support a subset.

The US has mostly gone for chip and signature as the default, Europe has mostly gone for chip and pin as the default (not sure if it's online or offline). I have heard (I can't confirm because I'm not an american) that with some banks even if you have a pin it only works for ATM/EFTPOS transactions not for EMV chip and pin transactions.

So if you bring an American card to Europe then you can have problems, if it's a manned terminal it will probablly do C+S which the terminal will handle fine, but the operator of the terminal may find confusing. If it's an unmanned terminal, then it might process the transaction as chip only or it might refuse it completely.

I don't know what other countries are like, but here in the UK the catds** always do NFC without pin and nearly always do chip with pin*. They then place limits on NFC transactions to limit the losses when a card is stolen. So you can make most of your transactions with NFC, but from time to time you will have to insert your card and type the pin either because the transaction value is high or because the cumulative value of transactions since your last C+P transaction is high.

I noticed major reliability issues in the early days of C+P but it seemed to improve markedly over the years. As C+P became more reliable retailers started refusing magstripe transactions.

* There are some vending machines for low-value things like snacks and parking ticket that do "chip only" transactions so they can dispense with the pin pad.

** There are also phone-based payment methods, which IIRC use NFC in combination with verification implemented on the phone. I don't tink these ave the limits that contactless on a card does,

Looking through the tiobe top 10 (and going by the "first appeared" dates on wikipedia).

C: 1972 (no month given)
Java: May 1995
Python: Feburary 1991
C++ 1985 (no month given)
C# 2000 (no month given)
VB 1991 (no month given
Javascript: December 1995
PHP: 1995 (no month given)
Assembly language: 1949 (no month given)
SQL: 1974 (no month given)

So we have 4 entries older than python, 1 from the same year as python (not clear whether it was earlier or later in the year) and 4 entries newer than python.

Though it's arguable whether some of the entries in the Tiobe list should actually be counted as a single language.

It's fun to blame MS and their historic binary formats wouldn't win any prizes for good format design, but I suspect this is really more down to a fundamental issue with office documents.

Running source material through a different processing engine is likely to produce different results unless extreme effort has been put into achieving identical behaviour, but with an office document it's insidious because the source is not actually shown to the user. They only see it in processed form and they implicitly assume that distributing the file is equivalent to distributing what they see. Worse, because they don't actually see the source it's often a mess, if you were working in LaTeX you would never just add more line breaks until you reached the next page but people do it in word processors all the time. So when someone sends you a word document the only way to have high confidence that you are seeing the same thing they were seeing is to load it into word, ideally the same version of word.

The switch to OOXML means we no longer need to reverse engineer the structure of the source material, but I don't think that was ever the real problem with document compatibility.

People who use computers primarily as consumption/communication devices have been moving to smartphones and smartphone-like tablets where google indeed dominates.

But people trying to actually create stuff with their (or their employer's) computers are still largely on desktops and laptops, and MS still dominates there. Google seems to have little interest in turning android into a platform for creation, indeed with the "scoped storage" stuff they introduced in recent android API levels I would say they are moving in the opposite direction.

I think a lot of PhD students start out with dreams of changing the world, but the truth is the chance of a relative novice researcher making a truely world-changing discovery are very slim. So we scratch together whatever minor novelties we can and write them up so we can get the PhD and move on.

I don't know what it's like in your country, but here in the UK few PhD students self-fund. If you can't find someone to fund your PhD you probably shouldn't be doing one.