Sounds about right. I played enough tournament games to estimate I was about a 1450 player at my best, and playing Sargon II on the Apple was a pretty evenly matched game. The key to beating early chess games like that, and this is still useful for any small memory chess opponent, is to play something weird. You need to get the computer out of its opening book library as soon as possible, without making an overtly bad move. Moving a pawn a single space forward where most players would taking advantage of being able to move forward two can be enough to break you out of a small book. You could easily tell when Sargon went "off book" because the time it spent thinking about moves went up dramatically, especially on its highest difficulty setting.

I learned some ideas like this from David Levy's excellent 1983 book Computer Gamesmanship. With Sargon, I recall I would do somewhere around 5 moves from the standard opening library before inserting one aimed to go off-book. The first few moves in a chess game tend to be very similar because they work. You don't want to yield control of the middle of the board in favor of breaking out of the book on your first move; that's counterproductive.

En passant moves are Chess's Easter Egg. "Dude, check it out...if you move the pawn like this, the game just silently takes it!"

In grade-school chess it's the 9 year old girls you have to watch out for.

There are two main types of chess games. In one, someone manages to checkmate while there are still a lot of pieces on the board. You seem to only be familiar with this type of game. It's possible to prioritize for that over holding onto pieces, with strategies like "gambits" taking that idea back to the opening move.

But when both players are good enough that this doesn't happen, you get a drawn out type of game where very subtle position advantages allow picking off pawns, or exchanging a better piece for a worse one. Eventually those swaps knock out most of the pieces on the board, and then the person with an advantage in "material"--the pieces they still have--will normally win. One of the things you need to learn as a competative chess player is how to checkmate when you only have a small advantage like that. Can you win a game where you have a king and a bishop left vs. just a king? There's a whole body of research on pawnless chess endings that to this day hasn't considered every possibility yet.

So how do you tell which type of game you're playing? That's the trick--you can't until it's over. If you goof on a risky push to checkmate and it fails, you can easily end up down in material and then playing the other type of game at a disadvantage. That's where people who are good at tactics instead of memorization can really shine--no one memorizes optimal play when you're already down a piece or two. The entire risk-reward evaluation changes when you're in a position where you must do something risky to win, because being conservative will eventually result in you losing to the person with more pieces.

And if you think there are so few combinations here that it's possible for the person who memorizes more to always win, you really need to revisit just who has the "small mind" here because you don't understand Chess at all. Go is really the simpler game here because it only has the long-term strategy to worry about. Chess players have to worry about a long-term game of position and material trade-offs, but at the same time you have to guard against short-term win approaches too. Your long-term game is worthless if you get nailed by a Fools Mate.

At the vaccination research lab funded by Jenny McCarthy, all of the workers who were treated for exposure are now autistic.

Most of FIPS is a certification process oriented on testing. However, there is a checklist of things you need to support, and one of them used to be the easy to backdoor Dual_EC_DRBG.

Now that the requirement for Dual_EC_DRBG has been dropped from NIST's checklist, it would be possible to have LibreSSL meet FIPS requirements without having the troublesome component. Most of FIPS certification is about throwing money at testing vendors, as described by OpenSSL themselves. Doing that would really be incompatible with the crusade LibreSSL is on though, because the result is believed by some to be less secure than using a library that isn't bound to the FIPS process. I don't see those developers ever accepting a process that prioritizes code stability over security.

OpenSSL is used to add SSL support when compiling PostgreSQL on Windows. It's a constant headache to the developers and packagers of the database. We were all complaining about how much the OpenSSL license sucks, too, before it was cool to rag on OpenSSL.

Daikatana was about as Japanese as the Teenage Mutant Turtles.

Just seen this - hopefully you read the reply. For MAME I have a real arcade cab with an old PC inside it, so I don't use the Mac for that. For the rest of the emulation scene on the Mac though, take a look at Open Emu, which has a lot of what's useful. Other ones I use are for Commodore - Vice64 for the C64, UAE for the Amiga.

Ever played Asteroids? If you haven't played it on the original arcade machine, chances are you're missing out on a large part of the experience because it runs on a vector monitor. Those beautiful glowing bullets simply don't show up on raster hardware in close to the same way. Same can be said for Star Wars - the sit-down vector monitor game was incredible.

I'm speaking as someone who has an arcade cabinet running MAME, and who regularly uses emulators on a Mac as well. I'm not perfectionist for a lot of the standard stuff, but I do appreciate that in some cases there are material differences to the real thing.

Well, if you've already trusted your national defence, university education, ideological belief system, and popular cultural to the homeland of said foreign company, entrusting your national telecoms infrastructure is a relatively small step.

What about the Cloud? The great workaround to constitution in the digital age?

Reading between the lines here, it seems fairly probable that Truecrypt has either

a) Very serious security bugs, or
b) Had backdoors introduced by the NSA.(Does Truecrypt use elliptic curve cryptography?)

In either event the code is basically tainted and shouldn't be used for any future projects.

The vague and sometimes bizzare nature of the statements from the Truecrypt dev team, including this one, lead me to believe that they have been placed under a standard NSA gagging order and have decided to burn Truecrypt rather than see it be turned against its users. Comments like "Forking is Impossibe" appear to be an open code for communicating that they are essentially unable to communicate, but that Truecrypt is no longer a trustworthy piece of software.

Reading though the Lavabit case, it's clear that those placed under NSA gagging orders have very, very little room for legal/media maneuver, but nevertheless still retain the freedom to walk away from their projects and tell others not to use them. Such actions appear to be the last defense of cryptographers in the US, and I think that is what we're seeing with Truecrypt.

Launch the data into oputer space on a satellite, programmed to transmit the data after a set time period. For best results, send the machine on a massive period orbit to the outer solar system, or in a pinch, crash land it it on the Moon or Mars.

Governments will either have to give up, or else fund massive space project. Either way, we win.

It's about making people feel better about their car. Who cares about your outdated value-add notions like "efficiency" or "safety"? Pshhh! BTFD.