For classical music, sheet music normally means (in ~95% of cases these days) PDFs from imslp.org. PDFs actually work quite well on Android tablets, and you can attach pedals to flip pages while playing.

You see that a lot in symphony orchestras these days, especially in amateur ones. (Professional orchestras may still prefer printed parts.)

True but a slight understatement. C64 essentially killed off VIC-20. It did everything the VIC did but so much better that there was no practical reason to cling on to a VIC-20. (Aside from being morbidly addicted to a specific game cartridge.) Everyone were upgrading the first chance they got.

64KB ought to be enough for anybody, darnit.

It was actually a bit more complicated. In many cases, the original install floppy served as your license 'token', and the software required it to be present in your floppy drive or the software wouldn't run. This was especially true for games.

Various tricks were used to make straightforward copying of the main install floppy ineffective. They usually involved nonstandard floppy disk formats, such as deliberate bad sectors, unusual data density, data outside the normal disk data range, etc. Many of these methods were used already for Commodore 64 games, and later adapted for Amiga, PC, etc., although serial number checks were sometimes used instead (esp. for business software), or even physical hardware 'dongles' that needed to be present while running the software.

But as is commonly known, the C64 years were also the golden age of binary hackers. They would invent a number of means to circumvent those devious copy protections. Low-level nibble copiers were widely circulated - mainly on floppy, and practically every C64 user had acquired one somewhere. Those copiers would make 'low-level' disk copies, ignoring the normal disk layout. Or you could 'dump' the memory image of a loaded game state where the copy protection check had already been passed. Of course real men would settle for nothing less than manually editing the game binary to work without a special disk.

Honestly, the last part was way above my meager skill but I occasionally had the privilege of watching a true artist at work. He would wade through pages and pages of hex dumps, immediately recognize the interesting calls, and then modify them...to disable copy protection, to give you infinite lives, to take you to the level/map of your choice, etc. Whatever you wanted in a game.

Needless to say, that guy went far.

Nethack has a lot of 'deep' stuff like tricks and combos for the player to discover. While you will still die arbitrarily to a random occurrence in the true roguelike fashion, knowing these tricks can greatly improve your chances of success and survival.

Sometimes those tricks can be downright unbalanced and exploits rather than features. Those of you who have wished for the PYEC, polypiled and wraith-farmed know what I'm talking about (of course those tricks have been toned down quite a bit since they were discovered). In one game I discovered an early Wand of Wishing and did all three - but still failed the endgame due to some really bad random luck. That's Nethack for you.

Just a minor consideration to add to the above.

Your bank could be legally obliged to block the transfer if the target country is on the FATF black list or grey list. Money transfers to those countries are considered to carry an increased risk of terrorist funding and/or money laundering. The list is not long, and it is updated three times a year (and yes, Ghana has been on the grey list, although not anymore, I believe).

I am sure there are perfectly valid non-criminal use cases for crypto but circumventing international restrictions on money laundering and terrorist funding might not be the best example of one.

4MB may have been to official minimum spec but in practice you needed at least 8MB or the larger levels would crash regularly to memory errors.

Which makes it all the more impressive that you squeezed the core of it into a Super Nintendo version.

It wasn't. Captain Power and The Soldiers of the Future from the 1980s got it beat by more than half a decade:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Never mind the quality of the CGI. Both series had rather crude and primitive CGI, IMO.

That said, Babylon 5 was easily my #2 favorite scifi TV show of all time. As for #1...well, nothing can possibly ever hope to beat the original 24 episodes of Battlestar Galactica, especially when you first saw them as a kid.

As long as you're not talking specifically about those ugly "phone home" E.T.s, it is pretty much a certainty that some form of extraterrestrial intelligence does exist. Mathematical probability, given the size of the universe.

However...

Whether they would ever be able to reach us or contact us is a different matter altogether. They might not even have our level of technology. And even if they did, there is the issue of insane distances, again given the size of the universe. This problem is summarily glossed over in popular scifi; in reality, travelling to the next inhabitable planet could take thousands of years. Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our sun, is over 4 light years away. Over 4 years nonstop traveling at the speed of light - which happens to be impossible given our current understanding of physics. You would need infinite energy to reach the speed of light.

But let's assume there are super-intelligent aliens that have somehow advanced beyond our laws of physics. That is no longer a mathematical probability, by the way, but let's assume it anyway for the sake of an argument.

But of course you're still assuming they would WANT to contact us.

Which reminds me of this...
https://www.reddit.com/media?u...

You mean like this?
https://www.generationbd.com/i...

Not to play the devil's advocate, but a key fact about security is that there no 100% preventative security, nor will there ever be. Even if you could somehow manage it, it would be prohibitively expensive and would probably stop your core business processes. So something will always slip through the cracks and you need to be prepared for that. In fact, this second layer of controls - how reliably you can catch anomalies and how swiftly and efficiently you can react to them - is even more important than your preventative controls. It is also something that tells people whether you are a true security professional or not.

In this case, they had obviously recognized the risk that a foreign agent might get hired since they had implemented detective and corrective controls for it. The controls worked. That's really security risk management 101: identify risks, evaluate their likelihood and impact to determine risk level, then identify and implement controls to bring the risk to an acceptable level. Judging by this story, it seems to me they actually did a pretty decent job there.

So why not implement controls to prevent the hiring of foreign agents in the first place? Point 1, it could be too expensive, laborious and difficult. Your opponents are always finding new innovative ways to target the weak points and blind spots in your business processes. The recent AI tools are only making their job that much easier. But point 2 is the much more relevant one in the corporate world. No listed company I know of has given their CSO or CISO a carte blanche to do whatever they wish and dictate how the other CxOs should conduct their business. In the real world, every CSO and CISO needs to negotiate with the other CxOs, and their security concerns and initiatives regularly get overruled by the CEO in favor of the other party since most CEOs think business first, then leave it to the CSO to secure it. It's not an easy job, it's like "Well, we decided to build a paper ship. It was really the most cost-effective choice. Now it's your task to see to that it will cross the Atlantic safely." (Been there, done that, although not literally of course.)

Oh, did I say no listed company know? Actually - I can think of one pretty well known listed company that has done exactly that, given their CSO a carte blanche to overrule any business decision. But just one company (and I'm not at liberty to name it).

I see what you did, right there in the headline. Clever.

Simply incorrect. It helps both.

There have been EDR, XDR, NDR, and SOAR solutions that leverage AI long before the current AI boom was even a thing. The more recent AI advances have made a SOC analyst's job easier and facilitated faster response times.

Personally, I am slightly baffled whenever this "yeah but human drivers make mistakes too" or "human drivers make more/worse mistakes" whataboutism pops up on /.

To me, it's a diversion tactic to draw the attention away from the issue at hand. Which is, self-driving cars make mistakes they should not be making. They cause health and safety risks, they cause injuries, even deaths. Don't compare them to human drivers, compare them other tech. Why should self-driving cars get less stringent safety requirements than other tech? Because human drivers make mistakes too? Sorry, that's not going to fly. You should introduce tech that is safe by design or get off the road. Don't use the real world (the production environment) as your test bed. Other tech developers aren't doing so or even allowed to anyway. (Microsoft being the glaring exception.)

Can a self-driving car be made safe by design? In theory, yes - but the real-world cases make me wonder. This one, the dog case a day or two before, and a number of earlier ones. I have no doubt that self-driving cars can perform excellently and even surpass most human drivers in many cases. In well-defined, by-the-book cases. The problems arise when things don't go by the book. In the real world, they seldom do. It's an open world out there and not everybody is playing by the book. Not to mention unexpected accidents, bridge collapses, natural disasters, and so on, which in turn make others around you react in unpredictable ways. Heck, people and other living things are unpredictable by their nature. It is really impossible to list every imaginable situation and tell the AI how to react in that particular situation. It is an endless list of possible scenarios and outcomes.

To react correctly in unexpected situations, you need to read the whole situation and react quickly. Humans do this instinctively - they may not always make the right call but at least their capability to analyze unexpected situations still far exceeds an AI trained on a closed set of rules and scenarios.

I am not sure the current maturity levels of AI can used to handle such unusual situations. What we read in the news doesn't suggest so.

An AGI might be needed, and that is not on today's menu.
 

...at which point, instead of parking on top of you, they first shoot you down, then park on top of you.

Can't wait!

I know you posted that tongue in cheek but the answer is no.

Or more specifically, not unless the explosion was powerful enough to throw that piece of Alderaan into our universe from a parallel one where our laws of physics don't apply (and FTL travel is possible), and parsec is a unit of time. (And events can be retroactively change to determine such pesky details as who shot first...)