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Comment Re:Time for Faraday shielding and spectrum analyze (Score 5, Interesting) 84

Cheating between grandmasters in an over-the-board game doesn't really need a system requiring electronics. Kasparov once said many years ago, that all he would need to get an edge is to know that there is a devastating move to find. Once you know that such a move exists, you can concentrate your time (chess at this level is really a game of time management) on the key move. The grandmaster can find the solution themselves from there. Communicating that type of information is very cheap and easy. It's just one bit of information - normal move vs critical move. It could be done very effectively by someone sat in the audience holding a water bottle. Hold it in the left hand normally, and then hold it in the right hand to indicate the critical move. It sounds ridiculous but this is something that has worried grandmasters for decades. In the 1978 World Championship, Korchnoi objected to tubs of yogurt being bought out for his opponent Karpov. It was eventually agreed that he could have the same flavoured yogurt bought out at the same time every match, thereby eliminating any information being transmitted by flavour or time. Once you realise the possibilities of signalling in this way, it's very easy to see how a player can be driven to distraction or paranoia; and I suppose in extreme cases, madness. "If it's not the tub of yogurt or the bottle of water, maybe it's the flicking of the lights, or the cough in the background or the sound of aeroplanes flying overhead..." The possibilities are almost endless. So while there's no evidence of it happening in Niemann vs Carlsen, cheating (for a limited definition of cheating) in live events is not as difficult as it first appears. My own opinion is that Carlsen is simply paranoid but given Niemann's admitted history, it's not completely unjustified.

Comment Old version of Go (Score 3, Informative) 256

This is quite an old article.

Discord were using Go v1.9.2 which was two years old at the time of this post (Feb 2020). So they were comparing an old version of a language with the bleeding edge of another language.

All power to them, Rust is a fine language, but it seems strange to me that they never bothered trying the latest version of Go before putting the effort into porting to a new language.

FWIW, Go's performance since v1.9 has improved dramatically. And there are performance improvements which will hopefully be added in the next version later this year (register based arguments and return values, as opposed to stack based)

Comment Re:People are speculating it's these shit stains (Score 3, Insightful) 92

Without knowing more details, I think your analysis sounds correct.

What I want to know is, why isn't this information encrypted apart from the SSL connection? There should be a public-private key pair for every customer managed by the Steam infrastructure and which is used to encrypt these sensitive details. In other words, personal information is encrypted long before it gets anywhere near the caches. That way, if there is a caching problem, the problem is minimal.

I don't like the idea of relying on SSL to protect this information.

Shrugs. I don't know (none of us do at this point) but I'll be very interested to hear what the cause of all this is.

Comment Are custom engines dead for 'normal' developers? (Score 2) 727

More and more developers seem to be using the existing engines (i know you used Unreal 3 for Rev 60, Unity, UbiArt, etc) which makes sense given the huge number of features they provide with little initial development cost and common tool sets/plugins used by other developers. Do you think there is much future in developers using custom engines for games (both indie and non-AAA) or do you think it will continue to become more uncommon for common genre games as you start at a larger and larger feature 'deficit' by having to redevelop the features on your custom engine, let alone porting issues, leaving only vert large/profitable houses (Naughty Dog, Insomniac, EA, etc) to be able to bear the time/$ costs?

Comment Re:Doesn't Amazon provide what the OP wants? (Score 1) 212

Recently they added the ability to also buy the audiobook version and the app *syncs your place* so you can switch between the two formats. That's a pretty amazing idea.

But the app doesn't help the author. He said he had a Nook. Thanks to the recent firmware update people with a Nook Color or Nook HD can get then app, but if you have the eInk based "normal" Nook, you're just out of luck.

As DRM goes, Amazon has done an excellent job of reducing annoyance. They don't try that "you can only read this book on 2 devices, ever." stuff that we've seen elsewhere. But I get the feeling the only reason Amazon's DRM is so unobtrusive is they were so overwhelmingly powerful they could force publishers into a relatively consumer friendly system. We're lucky Amazon cares more about selling books than trying to wring money out of Kindle hardware sales, or the DRM would have been a lot worse.

Comment Re:Wind (Score 1) 551

The video says that the wind is manually entered by the operator. I find it odd that it shows the temperature and barometric pressure. Is that really useful information when you're lining up a shot?

After watching their little YouTube clip, I wonder how useful this is. Placing the aiming dot seems really similar to aiming in the first place, I guess the only difference is you don't have to compensate for gravity/etc. I found it conspicuous that they didn't show their simulated target moving in the video. Can this only help with a stationary target? It seems like it would screw up your aiming if half the time you had to do it manually (compensating for everything) and half the time the system handled it.

Submission + - Linode hacked, CCs and passwords leaked 6

An anonymous reader writes: On Friday Linode announced a precautionary password reset due to an attack despite claiming that they were not compromised. The attacker has claimed otherwise, claiming to have obtained card numbers and password hashes. Password hashes, source code fragments and directory listings have been released as proof. Linode has yet to comment on or deny these claims.
Government

Submission + - Fighting TSA Harassment of Disabled Travelers (saizai.com)

An anonymous reader writes: A man with a neurological disorder is currently pushing the TSA to release a full list of its policies and procedures after a series of incidents in which he was harassed while trying to fly. His condition requires medical liquids and causes episodic muteness, and the TSA makes his encounters very difficult. From January: 'Boston Logan TSA conducted an illegal search of my xray-cleared documents (probably motivated either by my opting out or by my use of sign language to communicate). They refused to give me access to the pen and paper that I needed to communicate. Eventually they gave it to me, but then they took it away in direct retaliation for my using it to quote US v Davis and protest their illegal search (thereby literally depriving me of speech). They illegally detained me for about an hour on spurious, law enforcement motivated grounds (illegal under Davis, Aukai, Fofana, Bierfeldt, etc). ... TSA has refused to comply with the ADA grievance process; they are over a month beyond the statutory mandate for issuing a written determination.'

Comment Re:Hmm... (Score 2) 70

1451 is really pretty cool. It runs like a dog in Safari (0.5 FPS if lucky), but ran great for me in Chrome (probably closer to 20). It's very impressive.

I agree about the minecart. They did a fantastic job with that one as well.

Submission + - USPS discriminates against "Athiest" merchandise (atheistberlin.com) 3

fish waffle writes: Suspecting that their strongly branded "Athiest" products may be treated differently by more religiously-oriented postal regions, Kickstarter success Athiest Shoes conducted an experiment. They sent 178 envelopes to 89 people in different parts of the US, each person receiving one envelope prominently branded as "Athiest" merchandise, and one not. The results: packages with the athiest label were nearly 10 times more likely to never be received, and took on average 3 days longer to show up when they did. Control experiments were also done in Europe and Germany---it's definitely a USPS problem.

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