On this note, I have always wondered why new-towns aren't like this.
Every time you run a road, stick a tunnel underneath, or beside it. Or one tunnel each side.
You have to run, presumably, at least sewers, electricity, gas, water, street lighting, traffic control, telephone, Internet etc. already so why not build it all in and put a tunnel through it too.
Done properly, you'd never have to dig up a road to get to the services you require and all maintenance can take place underneath the road.
Sure, it adds to the cost initially but it MUST save on cost within just a year or two.
And you instantly know that if you are on or near that road, it's trivial to hook in to any known service.
If we ever "started over", and I were in charge, I would enforce it. You build a road, path or other highway designated as public? Then you have to put in a large service tunnel, all the utilities (or capacity for them without disturbing the road) for the entire length of anything classed as "public highway" (i.e. a serviced street of any size).
Then your Internet connections are as redundant and routeable as your transport links, telecoms network, power distribution, etc. And just as you could "go around the block" if there was one particular road out, you could re-route all the other utilities (maybe not every time, because of capacity etc. but the majority of time surely?). And you'd not have to dig up a road except to MAINTAIN that road. Not every utility, service, pipe, duct or cable that might happen to be under it. And if you built the service tunnel properly and laid rail in it, there's nothing stopping you running a piggy-back service on your service routes to take the occasional train of parcels or whatever with you.
The Romans knew the road system was their best weapon - everywhere they went, they built roads, every time the road was too small to cope with traffic, they expanded it. No more different to how ants lay down scent and route to places. Why should we be having multiple, different, overlapping service networks at all? Stick them all together and then you know you can always put a box by the side of the road, don't have to dig up the countryside just to run a bit of power (if you do HAVE to, you certainly also need all the other services and a road that way too anyway!). And in the same way that roads join industrial, commercial, and residential, you can site your ugly equipment away from people's houses but still service those same houses.
I never got why we ever had one cable crossing over a street or not following the existing road network.
And I have to say, the most relevant line on Wikipedia is this:
"Royal Mail had earlier stated that using the railway was five times more expensive than using road transport for the same task. The Communication Workers Union claimed the actual figure was closer to three times more expensive but argued that this was the result of a deliberate policy of running the railway down and using it at only one-third of its capacity"
If even the unions are saying it's three times more expensive, there's a problem.
And, to be honest, I really don't want my post subject to both postal AND train-driver strikes, thanks very much. They already have had several months off for the past few years just by striking over pay while they earn more than I can ever hope to earn.
The beauty of Amazon was that they hired random people to deliver Amazon parcels in their cars late at night and thus avoided the whole Post Office "We tried to deliver your parcel at 9am but, strangely, you weren't home.... you can collect it from the post office 20 miles from you or your workplace at any time between 9-5 Mon-Fri".
This isn't new. London, espcially Central London (as opposed to Greater London which is about 30 miles in radius), is crawling with tunnels dug for underground lines that were then abandoned, or repurposed - and some of them were operated by the Post Office for exactly this purpose.
Strange how the old gets reinvented as "new".
The problem you have is that London is only a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of what you have to deal with in the UK. And it's already well-catered for in transport, post offices, courier firms, etc. precisely because it's so dense.
Come even a couple of miles outside of central London though and you still need a hundred guys in vans driving around and dropping parcels over fences. There's no escaping it.
If the Post Office tunnels were so useful, they wouldn't have been abandoned - it's not like delivery of post to/from London has ever stopped since we introduced the first ever postage stamp.
You know that little screen they put in the back of the seats? Do you think they're stupid enough to cable that into the engine management?
The air-phones? Do you think they're stupid enough to just tie that into the cockpit comms?
When you're talking life-dependent systems (which pretty much no-one here will ever have to deal with and certify, which is why all your electronics ALL say that it's not to be used in life-support devices etc.) like airbag deployment and plane avionics, it's heavily regulated, heavily specified, heavily tested and heavily scrutinised. Rarely does a aircraft system specified on the "jumbo jet" level do anything more than exactly what it's designed to do. Plane crashes are caused by outside influences, human input overriding the computer and by DESIGN decisions, not software failure because someone forgot to renew the licence of two DHCP servers fought over who assigned IP's to the engines.
It's an entirely different class of system that you want to hope that you never have to deal with. That's WHY large planes cost HUNDREDS of millions of dollars and you have to train for decades to be allowed near the switches - even if you're servicing them.
And, no, VLAN's would never operate in a system like that and if they did they'd be proven-safe mathematically and, hell, even my cheap commodity switches only respond to management requests on the management VLAN and no other.
They is why the guy responding is so clear on this. It's just not done. Ever. If you change a cable, or a panel, or redesign a bit of hatchway, or push out a software upgrade for a commercial airliner, it takes hundreds of people checking it, re-certification of the end-result, testing and all sorts.
In actuality, I'd expect disparate, unconnected systems possibly even running in separated VLANs and subnets with IPS on the avionics controls JUST IN CASE.
Given that avionics are used to dealing with highly technological and highly critical systems, I think I could trust them to not mess it up. Especially if it in any way could even theoretically allow a possibility for an attacker to affect a flight path.
Airport security, the guy loading my luggage, or the guest wifi in the lounge? Yeah, separate problem with trust in question. But on-board wifi? I'd be damned if you could send a single packet from the wifi to the avionics even in theory.
The kernel shouldn't be peering into packets for data. It should (just/only) deal with the TCP packet information (and in a strictly confined way so you don't get things like the age-old flag attacks on TCP packets) and route accordingly.
It shouldn't ever be peering down into the HTTP packet itself and acting upon it as the attack surface is SO MUCH larger on a complicated application protocol.
P.S. What happens if SPDY becomes a standard? How does Microsoft migrate to HTTP/2 etc.? We're talking a KERNEL upgrade for an ever-evolving protocol, and that's just stupid.
But it's a good way to obsolete old OS, no doubt. Sorry, but Server 2008 can't handle HTTP/2 so we're just abandoning it - unless of course you want to turn off kernel-level IIS and run some dog-slow configuration, etc.
Putting something into the kernel just because it could mean less context switches in a particular application is a poor excuse and just shows bad respect for kernel-space.
"Think of them as a small sensor package combined with a data logger and some basic smartphone features"
Like... the smartphone that's in my pocket.
The use case is in combination with a smartphone, which it duplicates the features of, or in replacement for a smartphone, which we pretty much all have anyway.
I wear a cheap, waterproof, digital, rubberised, lasts-forever watch that costs an absolute pittance. It shows time and date on the front screen, which is my biggest buying point of them.
It gets in the way whenever I'm digging into a PC, so I take it off.
My ex and my girlfriend tried, when they first met me, to buy me "nice" watches as expensive presents. I never wore either, but I did at least explain why.
Sorry, a fancy watch is an old status-symbol. And whenever I do forget my watch, I just use my phone. I'd be a million times more lost without my phone than without my watch. Why I'd want my watch to talk to my phone, I can't fathom.
There are fancy microwaves and ovens galore, with all kinds of flashiness on them.
I buy the one with the lowest number of dials and without any electronics, if at all possible.
Microwave: One dial power, other dial time. Oven: One dial for each component for temperature. One dial for On/Off/Lights/etc.
I know IoT is "the big thing" this week, but I can't see what advantage I gain. I still have to have the ingredients, I have to go through a check-in/check-out process for every ingredient, I have to buy expensive appliances and hook them all up to the Internet somehow (even on wireless, they're just sucking up my wireless bandwidth), and then I have to find the app recipe, press lots of buttons and - hopefully - it'll put the oven on 220 degrees as specified in the recipe.
Or I could just turn the dial to 220 as I read the recipe. And just because something is in the fridge doesn't mean that I want to use it, so I end up using up the last of the butter that I need for the NEXT recipe I was going to do, because the fridge told me I had enough, etc.
There are some things in life which shouldn't be over-complicated and, if you are bothering to cook from ingredients, enjoy doing so. Don't let the app rule the experience.
And it will all go wrong that day you press "Cook" on the train on the way home and the oven sets fire to that turkey you forgot you left in there last night and you come home to a pile of ashes.
Some things technology can benefit, and it's usually the stuff that's NOT lauded about as features until we're all already using them that way (e.g. SMS). The "big name features" tend to be gimmicks and fads.
Honestly, I don't WANT to manage my kitchen from an electronic device. If I don't want to bother to cook myself, I'll get takeaway or someone to do it for me. The day I have to wire the kitchen for Internet will remind me of the day I was required to install a specific driver to get a monitor to display things... I'll be reeling in horror and desperately hoping technology will backtrack before I'm forced to catch up.
And this is from a guy with RFID entry to his side-gate, dashcams and GPS-tracker in his car, etc. ffs.
Don't try to survive a fire. Your data won't. And if it does, you probably won't be allowed near it for a long time, and others might well come along and try to pillage things from the ashes if you live anywhere populated.
Avoid one fire/disaster from affecting your data completely instead.
I swap a disk with my brother every time we meet. If you didn't trust them not to read it (then why are you relying on them to store it?), you could just encrypt it.
Problem solved.
Hell, just rent a storage box somewhere and put an encrypted set of backups into it once every so often.
Though the chance of you surviving a fire is pretty low, the chances of two storage locations having simultaneous disasters such that you can't retrieve the second in time when the first has gone down, is even more miniscule. The more storage locations you add, the tinier the chances of absolute loss are.
It's a RAID. Think of it as a family-and-friends RAID if you must. And ensuring the chances of X simultaneous failures is so low that it's completely improbably is a damn sight better than trying to make a single fireproof disk.
All you need is an integrity check, and the packages are all signed with the key which is included in the initial distro image (which is itself signed, available over HTTPS and has publicly published checksums).
Encryption is not necessary here. To believe it is is to completely misunderstand the purpose of encryption.
Now consider the average casino game, however, where up to seven packs are shuffled together.
The game rules determine the actual complexity, yes, but the point was that complexity is an inherently difficult and counter-intuitive thing to estimate, let alone calculate.
A simple pack of cards holds so many possibilities. And chess is approximately that complex (give or take a few orders of magnitude).
How often do you edit multiple document without closing the word-processor in-between or loading up other application?
Because the user that logs in, runs Word, Excel, etc. and then doesn't close any of them until they shut down is a rare beast.
And let's not even get into the swap usage of doing something like that.
Disk performance affects everything you do on a modern machine, which is why SSD's are such a boon to any desktop. Hell, even things like event logs etc. are CONSTANTLY writing to disk in the background, even if the writes are cached.
And I think you'll find that the first thing that a lot of modern word-processors do is make a temporary disk copy of your document when you first open it, so you can edit without disturbing the original. That's how it's able to "recover" your unsaved work.
Disk access is a critical part. Not every single application will need it 100% of the time, but when disk access hits as the bottleneck, you will know about it.
I'm seriously considering scrapping planned RAM/CPU upgrades at my workplace this year and just dropping in cheap SSD's as they'll make TWICE the difference that even a bit more RAM would to the average desktop user's experience.
Although the opening may seem like that, the complexity of chess is such that it's unlikely that every board position has been played.
However, this is incredibly counter-intuitive because of the numbers involved.
Do you know how many combinations there are of a standard 52-card pack of cards? 52! (factorial) = 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000.
It would take - on average - billions of years of billions of people each shuffling billions of deck a second to end up with the exact same deck twice.
Chess's complexity provides slightly less more possible states than that but potentially much larger (over twice as complex, so billions of billions of billions of billions of....) actual viable game trees. However, Go's complexity is greater even on a 9x9 board. On the standard 19x19 board it's UNBELIEVABLY more complex.
And the complexity is (over a dozen?) orders of magnitude greater. And for which a decent amateur human still stands a pretty good chance against an average computer program.
Just because you don't use it in that sense, doesn't mean others can't.
What bothers me about American English speakers is not that they've never heard these words - that's fair enough - but that they can't infer their meaning from the context and from the potential meaning of the words.
Pavement. Yeah, it's an odd word. But it's obviously something that's paved. Paving. Words that you have in your "dialect" too. The inference, however, never seems to be made.
And yet, when Americans/Canadians use words oddly, we're required to understand what they mean.
You don't need to be spot-on, but sometimes just a brief stint in etymology or even thinking of similar-sounding word-roots would help immensely in your understanding of "our" language.
I base my purchases on the RESPONSE to the reviews. Sellers have the ability to respond to any buyer's reviews, manufacturer's appear to have the ability to respond to product reviews (I have recently seen a particular product for solar panels where the producing company was responding to the FAQ and product reviews with corrections), and other product reviewers will often correct misconceptions about the product propagated by users (e.g. the reviews of the Samsung 850 SSD's etc.).
Nobody cares about a product, hotel, travel operator or whatever getting zero bad reviews - it just looks fake and suspicious, in fact. What we care about is how they responded to that.
The most enlightening responses I've seen are from companies with top customer service. And they even respond with comments like "Actually, we have no record of your stay whatsoever, reviewer. Would you care to give us a booking number so we can trace your problem?", etc. for the fake reviews. The responses are much more useful and indicative of good service than the occasional idiot that marks an Amazon product as "1-star" because some third-party seller sent it to the wrong address, etc.
Yes, if you're a pillock that's configured your backup drive in such a way that you allow authenticated remote access to it from the Internet and it has FTP or HTTP protocols enabled.
"Has Google Indexed Your Naked Pictures Of Your Wife?"
Slashdot Mirror
On this note, I have always wondered why new-towns aren't like this.
Every time you run a road, stick a tunnel underneath, or beside it. Or one tunnel each side.
You have to run, presumably, at least sewers, electricity, gas, water, street lighting, traffic control, telephone, Internet etc. already so why not build it all in and put a tunnel through it too.
Done properly, you'd never have to dig up a road to get to the services you require and all maintenance can take place underneath the road.
Sure, it adds to the cost initially but it MUST save on cost within just a year or two.
And you instantly know that if you are on or near that road, it's trivial to hook in to any known service.
If we ever "started over", and I were in charge, I would enforce it. You build a road, path or other highway designated as public? Then you have to put in a large service tunnel, all the utilities (or capacity for them without disturbing the road) for the entire length of anything classed as "public highway" (i.e. a serviced street of any size).
Then your Internet connections are as redundant and routeable as your transport links, telecoms network, power distribution, etc. And just as you could "go around the block" if there was one particular road out, you could re-route all the other utilities (maybe not every time, because of capacity etc. but the majority of time surely?). And you'd not have to dig up a road except to MAINTAIN that road. Not every utility, service, pipe, duct or cable that might happen to be under it. And if you built the service tunnel properly and laid rail in it, there's nothing stopping you running a piggy-back service on your service routes to take the occasional train of parcels or whatever with you.
The Romans knew the road system was their best weapon - everywhere they went, they built roads, every time the road was too small to cope with traffic, they expanded it. No more different to how ants lay down scent and route to places. Why should we be having multiple, different, overlapping service networks at all? Stick them all together and then you know you can always put a box by the side of the road, don't have to dig up the countryside just to run a bit of power (if you do HAVE to, you certainly also need all the other services and a road that way too anyway!). And in the same way that roads join industrial, commercial, and residential, you can site your ugly equipment away from people's houses but still service those same houses.
I never got why we ever had one cable crossing over a street or not following the existing road network.
And I have to say, the most relevant line on Wikipedia is this:
"Royal Mail had earlier stated that using the railway was five times more expensive than using road transport for the same task. The Communication Workers Union claimed the actual figure was closer to three times more expensive but argued that this was the result of a deliberate policy of running the railway down and using it at only one-third of its capacity"
If even the unions are saying it's three times more expensive, there's a problem.
And, to be honest, I really don't want my post subject to both postal AND train-driver strikes, thanks very much. They already have had several months off for the past few years just by striking over pay while they earn more than I can ever hope to earn.
The beauty of Amazon was that they hired random people to deliver Amazon parcels in their cars late at night and thus avoided the whole Post Office "We tried to deliver your parcel at 9am but, strangely, you weren't home.... you can collect it from the post office 20 miles from you or your workplace at any time between 9-5 Mon-Fri".
Was going to say the same thing.
This isn't new. London, espcially Central London (as opposed to Greater London which is about 30 miles in radius), is crawling with tunnels dug for underground lines that were then abandoned, or repurposed - and some of them were operated by the Post Office for exactly this purpose.
Strange how the old gets reinvented as "new".
The problem you have is that London is only a tiny, tiny, tiny portion of what you have to deal with in the UK. And it's already well-catered for in transport, post offices, courier firms, etc. precisely because it's so dense.
Come even a couple of miles outside of central London though and you still need a hundred guys in vans driving around and dropping parcels over fences. There's no escaping it.
If the Post Office tunnels were so useful, they wouldn't have been abandoned - it's not like delivery of post to/from London has ever stopped since we introduced the first ever postage stamp.
You know that little screen they put in the back of the seats? Do you think they're stupid enough to cable that into the engine management?
The air-phones? Do you think they're stupid enough to just tie that into the cockpit comms?
When you're talking life-dependent systems (which pretty much no-one here will ever have to deal with and certify, which is why all your electronics ALL say that it's not to be used in life-support devices etc.) like airbag deployment and plane avionics, it's heavily regulated, heavily specified, heavily tested and heavily scrutinised. Rarely does a aircraft system specified on the "jumbo jet" level do anything more than exactly what it's designed to do. Plane crashes are caused by outside influences, human input overriding the computer and by DESIGN decisions, not software failure because someone forgot to renew the licence of two DHCP servers fought over who assigned IP's to the engines.
It's an entirely different class of system that you want to hope that you never have to deal with. That's WHY large planes cost HUNDREDS of millions of dollars and you have to train for decades to be allowed near the switches - even if you're servicing them.
And, no, VLAN's would never operate in a system like that and if they did they'd be proven-safe mathematically and, hell, even my cheap commodity switches only respond to management requests on the management VLAN and no other.
They is why the guy responding is so clear on this. It's just not done. Ever. If you change a cable, or a panel, or redesign a bit of hatchway, or push out a software upgrade for a commercial airliner, it takes hundreds of people checking it, re-certification of the end-result, testing and all sorts.
At the very least, I'd expect a VLAN.
In actuality, I'd expect disparate, unconnected systems possibly even running in separated VLANs and subnets with IPS on the avionics controls JUST IN CASE.
Given that avionics are used to dealing with highly technological and highly critical systems, I think I could trust them to not mess it up. Especially if it in any way could even theoretically allow a possibility for an attacker to affect a flight path.
Airport security, the guy loading my luggage, or the guest wifi in the lounge? Yeah, separate problem with trust in question. But on-board wifi? I'd be damned if you could send a single packet from the wifi to the avionics even in theory.
I have never ticked that box.
Yet my servers have it on.
I'm not saying you're lying, but something, somewhere turned that on and it wasn't me.
Don't Intel models just fail without warning and die on you?
Your turn.
It's fun this "let's pick a random complaint against a manufacturer based on one affected product over many years out of dozens that work just fine".
OSI layering model?
The kernel shouldn't be peering into packets for data. It should (just/only) deal with the TCP packet information (and in a strictly confined way so you don't get things like the age-old flag attacks on TCP packets) and route accordingly.
It shouldn't ever be peering down into the HTTP packet itself and acting upon it as the attack surface is SO MUCH larger on a complicated application protocol.
P.S. What happens if SPDY becomes a standard? How does Microsoft migrate to HTTP/2 etc.? We're talking a KERNEL upgrade for an ever-evolving protocol, and that's just stupid.
But it's a good way to obsolete old OS, no doubt. Sorry, but Server 2008 can't handle HTTP/2 so we're just abandoning it - unless of course you want to turn off kernel-level IIS and run some dog-slow configuration, etc.
Putting something into the kernel just because it could mean less context switches in a particular application is a poor excuse and just shows bad respect for kernel-space.
Having it on by default is suicide.
And the problem is - that's a well-documented problem with other web servers historically and quite simple bounds-checking at fault there.
Seriously,MS, audit your damn basics occasionally.
I always shudder when I think of the MS software operating on the frontline of a businesses Internet connection.
Internet-facing service running as SYSTEM.
"Think of them as a small sensor package combined with a data logger and some basic smartphone features"
Like... the smartphone that's in my pocket.
The use case is in combination with a smartphone, which it duplicates the features of, or in replacement for a smartphone, which we pretty much all have anyway.
I wear a cheap, waterproof, digital, rubberised, lasts-forever watch that costs an absolute pittance. It shows time and date on the front screen, which is my biggest buying point of them.
It gets in the way whenever I'm digging into a PC, so I take it off.
My ex and my girlfriend tried, when they first met me, to buy me "nice" watches as expensive presents. I never wore either, but I did at least explain why.
Sorry, a fancy watch is an old status-symbol. And whenever I do forget my watch, I just use my phone. I'd be a million times more lost without my phone than without my watch. Why I'd want my watch to talk to my phone, I can't fathom.
There are fancy microwaves and ovens galore, with all kinds of flashiness on them.
I buy the one with the lowest number of dials and without any electronics, if at all possible.
Microwave: One dial power, other dial time.
Oven: One dial for each component for temperature. One dial for On/Off/Lights/etc.
I know IoT is "the big thing" this week, but I can't see what advantage I gain. I still have to have the ingredients, I have to go through a check-in /check-out process for every ingredient, I have to buy expensive appliances and hook them all up to the Internet somehow (even on wireless, they're just sucking up my wireless bandwidth), and then I have to find the app recipe, press lots of buttons and - hopefully - it'll put the oven on 220 degrees as specified in the recipe.
Or I could just turn the dial to 220 as I read the recipe. And just because something is in the fridge doesn't mean that I want to use it, so I end up using up the last of the butter that I need for the NEXT recipe I was going to do, because the fridge told me I had enough, etc.
There are some things in life which shouldn't be over-complicated and, if you are bothering to cook from ingredients, enjoy doing so. Don't let the app rule the experience.
And it will all go wrong that day you press "Cook" on the train on the way home and the oven sets fire to that turkey you forgot you left in there last night and you come home to a pile of ashes.
Some things technology can benefit, and it's usually the stuff that's NOT lauded about as features until we're all already using them that way (e.g. SMS). The "big name features" tend to be gimmicks and fads.
Honestly, I don't WANT to manage my kitchen from an electronic device. If I don't want to bother to cook myself, I'll get takeaway or someone to do it for me. The day I have to wire the kitchen for Internet will remind me of the day I was required to install a specific driver to get a monitor to display things... I'll be reeling in horror and desperately hoping technology will backtrack before I'm forced to catch up.
And this is from a guy with RFID entry to his side-gate, dashcams and GPS-tracker in his car, etc. ffs.
Don't try to survive a fire. Your data won't. And if it does, you probably won't be allowed near it for a long time, and others might well come along and try to pillage things from the ashes if you live anywhere populated.
Avoid one fire/disaster from affecting your data completely instead.
I swap a disk with my brother every time we meet. If you didn't trust them not to read it (then why are you relying on them to store it?), you could just encrypt it.
Problem solved.
Hell, just rent a storage box somewhere and put an encrypted set of backups into it once every so often.
Though the chance of you surviving a fire is pretty low, the chances of two storage locations having simultaneous disasters such that you can't retrieve the second in time when the first has gone down, is even more miniscule. The more storage locations you add, the tinier the chances of absolute loss are.
It's a RAID. Think of it as a family-and-friends RAID if you must. And ensuring the chances of X simultaneous failures is so low that it's completely improbably is a damn sight better than trying to make a single fireproof disk.
Why does it need to be secret?
All you need is an integrity check, and the packages are all signed with the key which is included in the initial distro image (which is itself signed, available over HTTPS and has publicly published checksums).
Encryption is not necessary here. To believe it is is to completely misunderstand the purpose of encryption.
Agreed.
Now consider the average casino game, however, where up to seven packs are shuffled together.
The game rules determine the actual complexity, yes, but the point was that complexity is an inherently difficult and counter-intuitive thing to estimate, let alone calculate.
A simple pack of cards holds so many possibilities. And chess is approximately that complex (give or take a few orders of magnitude).
How often do you edit multiple document without closing the word-processor in-between or loading up other application?
Because the user that logs in, runs Word, Excel, etc. and then doesn't close any of them until they shut down is a rare beast.
And let's not even get into the swap usage of doing something like that.
Disk performance affects everything you do on a modern machine, which is why SSD's are such a boon to any desktop. Hell, even things like event logs etc. are CONSTANTLY writing to disk in the background, even if the writes are cached.
And I think you'll find that the first thing that a lot of modern word-processors do is make a temporary disk copy of your document when you first open it, so you can edit without disturbing the original. That's how it's able to "recover" your unsaved work.
Disk access is a critical part. Not every single application will need it 100% of the time, but when disk access hits as the bottleneck, you will know about it.
I'm seriously considering scrapping planned RAM/CPU upgrades at my workplace this year and just dropping in cheap SSD's as they'll make TWICE the difference that even a bit more RAM would to the average desktop user's experience.
Although the opening may seem like that, the complexity of chess is such that it's unlikely that every board position has been played.
However, this is incredibly counter-intuitive because of the numbers involved.
Do you know how many combinations there are of a standard 52-card pack of cards? 52! (factorial) = 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000.
It would take - on average - billions of years of billions of people each shuffling billions of deck a second to end up with the exact same deck twice.
Chess's complexity provides slightly less more possible states than that but potentially much larger (over twice as complex, so billions of billions of billions of billions of....) actual viable game trees. However, Go's complexity is greater even on a 9x9 board. On the standard 19x19 board it's UNBELIEVABLY more complex.
Feudal's complexity doesn't even come close.
And the complexity is (over a dozen?) orders of magnitude greater. And for which a decent amateur human still stands a pretty good chance against an average computer program.
For a second there, I was about to agree. Then I realised that you said "Chinese" and not "US".
And, on another note, stop using everything as a verb.
(You will "ace" the test, etc.)
I see the word: Revise.
I think: To look again. To revisit.
Just because you don't use it in that sense, doesn't mean others can't.
What bothers me about American English speakers is not that they've never heard these words - that's fair enough - but that they can't infer their meaning from the context and from the potential meaning of the words.
Pavement. Yeah, it's an odd word. But it's obviously something that's paved. Paving. Words that you have in your "dialect" too. The inference, however, never seems to be made.
And yet, when Americans/Canadians use words oddly, we're required to understand what they mean.
You don't need to be spot-on, but sometimes just a brief stint in etymology or even thinking of similar-sounding word-roots would help immensely in your understanding of "our" language.
I base my purchases on the RESPONSE to the reviews. Sellers have the ability to respond to any buyer's reviews, manufacturer's appear to have the ability to respond to product reviews (I have recently seen a particular product for solar panels where the producing company was responding to the FAQ and product reviews with corrections), and other product reviewers will often correct misconceptions about the product propagated by users (e.g. the reviews of the Samsung 850 SSD's etc.).
Nobody cares about a product, hotel, travel operator or whatever getting zero bad reviews - it just looks fake and suspicious, in fact. What we care about is how they responded to that.
The most enlightening responses I've seen are from companies with top customer service. And they even respond with comments like "Actually, we have no record of your stay whatsoever, reviewer. Would you care to give us a booking number so we can trace your problem?", etc. for the fake reviews. The responses are much more useful and indicative of good service than the occasional idiot that marks an Amazon product as "1-star" because some third-party seller sent it to the wrong address, etc.
"unauthenticated" that should be, obviously.
"Has Google Indexed Your Backup Drive?"
Yes, if you're a pillock that's configured your backup drive in such a way that you allow authenticated remote access to it from the Internet and it has FTP or HTTP protocols enabled.
"Has Google Indexed Your Naked Pictures Of Your Wife?"
Similar answer.