This, and Finland is a country where the availability of fresh water is not an issue. Just look at the map.

Interesting to see how (and if) this affects energy prices in Finland. Google say they are doing "bring your own energy" but depending on how that turns out, there is a chance Finns could be in for a rude awakening.

Posted to undo an accidental mod. Tried to give you +1 funny but blew it, sorry.

Apparently, OpenAI is already addressing this.
https://features.slashdot.org/...

I hear what you're saying but let's be honest, Atari 2600 games had terrible, terrible graphics. Even back in the day, if your friends had something else, like a Mattel or a Colecovision, let alone a C64, you'd rather play them than your 2600. If you made Atari 2600 games today, nobody would play them. Aside from old retro geeks, the same guys who also insist on playing Mayfield's Star Trek.

But yes, the actual games were quite good and fun to play. More fun than many today.

I'm just wondering what this will do to their market value in the end. American cybersecurity companies are doing pretty well internationally; they are generally seen as highly competent, reliable (ok never mind Crowdstrike), and independent. With the U.S. government using them as an extension of the military to conduct hostile cyber operations, there's not a chance they will be considered to be independent anymore. In fact, they will be no better than Kaspersky. Will foreign companies and governments trust their security to a company that is known to be conducting U.S. government sanctioned hostile cyber operations? Worse yet, a company that could be conducting hostile cyber operations against their own country?

I'm not a prophet but as in so many recent executive decisions recently, the eventual long-term outcome could be something very different from what was expected and desired.

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...