Netflix is going live for the first time. From a report: Deadline understands that the streamer is exploring the launch of live streaming. It plans to roll out the capability, which Netflix confirmed was in the early stages of development, for its swathe of unscripted shows and stand-up specials. It would mean that Netflix would be able to use it for live voting for competition series and talent contests such as its upcoming dance competition series Dance 100 from The Circle producer Studio Lambert. Similarly, it could use it if it decides to bring back its Netflix Is A Joke festival. The live comedy event featured around 300 stand-up performances across LA including Dave Chappelle, Larry David and Pete Davidson. Many of the shows were being filmed with plans to air around 12 of them on the service. In future, it could potentially air shows live, albeit with a few seconds delay in case things get saucy.

Uber on Monday said it launched pilot food delivery services with autonomous vehicles in two California cities, and said it was adding electric vehicle charging stations into its global driver app. From a report: The announcements are part of Uber's annual product event where the ride-hail and food delivery company showcases the latest updates to its app. Uber announced one food delivery service using autonomous cars, and a separate pilot using sidewalk robots. Both services are available to Uber Eats users in Santa Monica and West Hollywood in California, and consumers will have the ability to opt out of the programs. The autonomous car pilot is in collaboration with Motional, the self-driving joint venture of Hyundai and Aptiv, and was initially announced in December. read more It launched on Monday, Uber and Motional said. Uber said the sidewalk robots are provided by Serve Robotics, a spin-off of delivery company Postmates, which Uber acquired in 2020.

Spotify is testing a way for artists to display their non-fungible token (NFT) collections. From a report: The music streaming platform has rolled out the test for some users on Android in the US and currently includes NFT previews for artists like Steve Aoki and The Wombats. "Spotify is running a test in which it will help a small group of artists promote their existing third-party NFT offerings via their artist profiles," a Spotify spokesperson said in a statement to Music Ally. "We routinely conduct a number of tests in an effort to improve artist and fan experiences. Some of those tests end up paving the way for a broader experience and others serve only as an important learning." More companies are trying to catch the NFT wave, but it looks like that initial surge could be petering out (at least for the time being). According to The Wall Street Journal, daily NFT sales have dipped 92 percent from 225,000 in September of last year to just 19,000 as of May 3rd. The number of active NFT wallets is also on the decline, from about 119,000 in November to 14,000 toward the end of April.

Bitcoin has no future as a payments network because of its inefficiency and high environmental costs, according to one of crypto's most influential chief executives. From a report: Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the digital asset exchange FTX, said the proof of work system of validating blockchain transactions, which underpins bitcoin, was not capable of scaling up to cope with the millions of transactions that would be needed to make the cryptocurrency an effective means of payment. "The bitcoin network is not a payments network and it is not a scaling network," said Bankman-Fried. His comments came as the fast-growing cryptocurrency market was hit by a punishing sell-off that left bitcoin down by more than 35 per cent since January, at its lowest level since late 2020.

Bitcoin is still seen by some crypto enthusiasts as a way to conduct everyday transactions. Countries such as El Salvador and the Central African Republic have adopted Bitcoin as a legal tender. But recent research by academics in the US found that Bitcoin has scarcely been used for daily payments in El Salvador, despite the rollout of bitcoin ATMs and other measures to encourage its use. The 30-year-old billionaire, who has expanded FTX into one of the world's largest virtual asset exchanges, said an alternative type of blockchain known as proof of stake, or other technological innovations, would be required to create a functional crypto payments network. In a Twitter thread, Bankman-Fried clarified: "To be clear I also said that it does have potential as a store of value. The BTC network can't sustain thousands/millions of TPS, although BTC can be xfered on lightning/L2s/etc."

Task and Purpose reports on "a new and somewhat unnerving recruiting pitch from the U.S. Army's 4th Psychological Operations Group" that asks viewers one simple question: "Have you ever wondered who's pulling the strings?" The three-and-a-half minute, movie trailer-esque video was released by the 4th PSYOP Group on Youtube on May 2. Since then it's brought in 329,396 views, and it's not hard to see why: This is not your father's recruiting commercial. Complete with eerie whistling in the background and suspenseful music, the video is far from the sometimes-cheesy Army recruiting commercials we often see on television. It's dark and palpably tense, the clips of old cartoons and radio segments from world events combining perfectly to create something that is both intriguing and unsettling.

It accomplishes exactly what psychological operations soldiers set out to do: Influence an audience. As one commenter on Youtube pointed out: "Everything is a weapon. Even this video." Col. Chris Stangle, commander of 4th PSYOP Group, told Task & Purpose on Friday that the video was created in-house, both as a recruitment effort but also to literally show people what they can do — part of psychological operations is creating persuasive media.... Throughout the world, Stangle said, psychological operations are occurring "literally everywhere, every day, in every component of our lives." We're seeing it play out in real-time in eastern Europe, where Ukraine is proving much more successful in the information war than the Russians.

That's no coincidence. Stangle said after the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the U.S. PSYOP community, along with other NATO allies and special operations communities around the world, got to work helping Ukraine build their own abilities.... "We've helped through [military-to-military] partnerships, us as well as more than 12 allies and partners. And what we've been able to do is just sit and watch how amazing their arguments are ... Ukraine has done a masterful job, they've taken the training and the work we've done with them, as well as their own inherent skill, and have just really blown it up...."

U.S. Army PSYOP soldiers are working daily with over 40 countries around the globe, according to Stangle. And those partnerships will be critical to success both in preventing future conflicts, and in future conflicts as they unfold.

As the video says: "Warfare is evolving, and all the world's a stage."
Thanks to Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the link!

Hyundai is expected to announce that it's building "a massive electric vehicle plant near Savannah, Georgia," reports the Associated Press, citing a U.S. official "familiar with the anticipated announcement."

The plant is expected to bring thousands of new jobs to Georgia. The plant could grow to include 8,500 employees and would be built on a 2,200-acre (890-hectare) site that state and local governments own near the hamlet of Ellabell, Georgia, said two people familiar with Georgia's talks with Hyundai.... The second person said Hyundai would invest more than $7 billion and could also build some cars powered by gasoline engines at the site, with an announcement in Georgia set for May 20...

It would be the second massive electric vehicle plant announced in Georgia in less than a year. Rivian Automotive in December announced it would build a $5 billion, 7,500-job electric truck plant about 45 miles (70 kilometers) east of Atlanta.

An anonymous reader quotes Business Insider: Wrecked Russian fighter jets are being found with rudimentary GPS receivers "taped to the dashboards" in Ukraine because their inbuilt navigation systems are so bad, the UK's defense secretary, Ben Wallace, said.... "[W]hilst Russia has large amounts of artillery and armor that they like parading, they are unable to leverage them for combined arms maneuver and just resort to mass indiscriminate barrages," he added....

Last month, Ukrainian troops paraded what they said was a Russian drone that had been covered in duct tape and fitted with a generic plastic bottle top for a fuel cap. In March, Ukrainian troops found what appeared to be Russian army bandages dating to 1978 discarded on a battlefield. In his Monday speech, Wallace said Russian vehicles "are frequently found with 1980s paper maps of Ukraine in them" and that soldiers were using "pine logs as makeshift protection on logistical trucks" and attaching "overhead 'cope cages' to their tanks."

Slashdot reader Hmmmmmm shared this report from Hot Hardware: When Nvidia launched its Ampere Lite Hash Rate (LHR) graphics card with the feared Ethereum anti-mining limiter, the world knew it was only a matter of time before someone or a team cracked it. NiceHash, the company that designed the QuickMiner software and Excavator miner, has finally broken Nvidia's algorithm, restoring LHR graphics cards to their 100% Ethereum mining performance....

Graphics card pricing has been plummeting, and we're starting to see better availability at retailers, with some GPUs selling at or below Manufacturer Suggested Retail Price. So QuickMiner's arrival shouldn't influence the current state of the graphics market unless big corporations want to buy out everything in sight for the last push before Ethereum's transition to Proof-of-Stake (PoS), often referred to as "The Merge," is complete. We see that as unlikely, considering current profitability even on a 3080 Ti sits at around $3.50 per day and would still need nearly a year to break even at current rates. Initially scheduled for June, The Merge won't finalize until "the few months after," as Ethereum developer Tim Beiko has expressed on Twitter.

It will be interesting to see if Nvidia responds to this with updated drivers or implements LHRv3 in the remaining GPUs. However, it's perhaps not worth the effort at this point, and all existing LHRv2 and earlier cards can just stay on current drivers for optimized mining performance.

"Ukraine is using facial recognition technology to identify bodies of Russian soldiers killed in war," reads the chyron on CNN's latest video report. It explains how Ukraine is using the technology "both to help with this difficult task and help advance their aims in the propaganda war with Moscow." And it may even help identify suspected war criminals.

But first Ukraine's chief civil-military liaison officer tells CNN that Geneva Convention rules mandate storing the bodies of the enemy (to be exchanged after the end of active combat) -- but also that they make an attempt to first identify the dead.

From CNN's report: This is where the Ministry of Digital Transformation comes in. "We have identified about 300 cases," says Mykhailo Fedorov [Ukraine's vice prime minister and Minister of Digital Transformation]. They do it by using a myriad of techniques, but the most effective has been facial recognition technology. They upload a picture of a face, the technology scrubs all the social networks... Once they have a match, they go one step further. "We send messages to their friends and relatives."


CNN: These are often gruesome photos of dead soldiers. Why do you send them to the families in Russia?

Fedorov: There are two goals. One is to show the Russians there's a real war going on here, to fight against the Russian propaganda, to show them they're not as strong as shown on TV, and Russians really are dying here. The second goal is to give them an opportunity to pick up the bodies in Ukraine.


They do get responses from Russian families.


CNN: They're responding with, basically saying "You will be killed. I will come and I will also take part in this war."

Fedorov: 80% of the familes' answers are, We'll come to Ukraine ourselves and kill you, and you deserve what's happening to you.

CNN: What about the other 20%?

Fedorov: Some of them say they're grateful, and they know about the situation. And some would like to come and pick up the body.


The technology is not just being used on the dead. It is also being used to identify Russian soldiers who are alive, some of whom are being accused of war crimes.


Ukraine chief regional prosecutor Ruslan Kravchenko: We have established the identity of one military man.


"We have a lot of materials - irreputable evidence," this prosecutor says. [Kravchenko] says he was caught on video in Belarus trying to sell items he had looted from Ukrainian homes. But his alleged crimes go far beyond that. The soldier is accused of taking part in the execution of four Ukrainian men, with their hands bound behind their backs.... Prosecutors say the soldier was first identified by the technology, and then by a Ukrainian citizen who said the soldier tortured him after entering his home.


Kravchenko: We showed these photos to the witnesses and victims.


They identified the specific person who was among other Russian military personnel who killed four people in this particular place, the prosecutor said. The end result of all their investigations, they hope, will be a full record of what happened in Ukraine. And the proof they need to prosecute those who committed crimes against its pepole.

"I first heard about Google here on Slashdot," writes Captain Chad (Slashdot reader #102,831).

"At the time I was using AltaVista for web searches, but Google immediately proved its superiority." Now 20+ years later I struggle with Google's latest system. It appears to be interpreting the perceived intent of my search request instead of using the very specific keywords I provide. I'm often getting results that aren't on the same topic as what I'm looking for, and adding more keywords seems to make it worse. Even using double quotes doesn't help much any more. Google Search has become too "intelligent" for me to use effectively.

So I'm looking for a replacement search engine, one that searches for what I tell it to search for, like Google used to do. With that in mind, what search engine(s) do you recommend?
The question's already drawn several responses. Khopesh (Slashdot reader #112,447) points out that ironically "Doing a Google search for "google alternatives" comes up with a pretty decent list, including DuckDuckGo (powered mostly by Bing) and Brave Search (powered by its own crawler), which are both privacy-first items that do not customize queries to the individual.

Also consider Startpage (powered by anonymized Google queries, see their Wikipedia article).
Other readers shared their own complaints. "Even if no one has a good alternative can someone tell me why pretty much all internet search has become crapified?" asks Slashdot reader Iamthecheese.

My biggest gripe is how Google's search results are technically all referrer URLs -- so if you right-click to copy the link, it's never what you expect. (And that when I search for something that sounds like a product, several rows of the top results are always ads.)

Anyone else? Share your thoughts and opinions in the comments.

And what's best alternative to Google's search results?

Flying cars — or even electric flying taxis — are the dream of several well-funded manufacturers building "electric vertical-takeoff and landing aircraft" (or eVTOLs).

But will they face stricter government regulations than anticipated? Long-time Slashdot reader wired_parrot reports that America's Federal Aviation Administration has shifted gears — "revising it certification requirements for eVTOLS from small aircraft to a powered-lift category." (The original submission cites a "growing number" of issues for the industry to resolve — and asks whether this raises concerns about the viability of the whole potential eVTOL market.)

Meanwhile, AVWeb reports: According to a Reuters report, the impetus for the shift came from an ongoing audit by the U.S. Department of Transportation's Office of the Inspector General. The IG said so-called Urban Air Mobility vehicles present the FAA with "new and complex safety challenges...."

In a written response to a request for clarification, an FAA spokesperson told AVweb:

"The FAA's top priority is to make sure the flying public is safe. This obligation includes our oversight of the emerging generation of eVTOL vehicles. The agency is pursuing a predictable framework that will better accommodate the need to train and certify the pilots who will operate these novel aircraft.

"Our process for certifying the aircraft themselves remains unchanged. All of the development work done by current applicants remains valid and the changes in our regulatory approach should not delay their projects. As this segment of the industry continues to grow, we look forward to certifying innovative new technologies that meet the safety standards that the public expects and deserves."

The Washington Post reports on the "My Friends My Data" coalition, a group of start-up founders "working to push tech giants to adopt a new industry-wide standard that would allow users to transfer their followings from one app to another, thereby creating more competition between platforms." "Large social media companies are intentionally holding our personal contact information hostage," said Daniel Liss, founder and CEO of Dispo, a photography-based social network. "This limits consumer choice, stymies competition and inhibits free speech. We are committed to giving our community members control of their friend data...."

MFMD's founding members include a who's who of buzzy social apps like Dispo, Itsme, Clash App, Muze, Spam app and Collage, which together have received more than $100 million in venture funding and amassed tens of millions of downloads. The group has issued letters to Meta, TikTok, Snap, Twitter and other large social platforms calling on them to join their crusade. As the start-ups have found, competing with tech giants like Meta or YouTube is difficult when the top talent on the Internet is essentially locked in to specific platforms because of their inability to take followers elsewhere.

Many creators are already on board with MFMD's initiative. Some learned lessons about ownership the hard way after the fall of Vine. Many top Vine stars were overleveraged, investing all their energy in building out their following on the short-form video platform. When the app shuttered in 2016 those who hadn't used Vine to springboard to other apps like YouTube were left without access to the massive fandoms they had built....

[Liss] said that in addition to putting public pressure on the tech giants he hopes the MFMD can be a political force as well. "I'm very comfortable engaging in the political process on behalf of what we think is right," Liss said. "Not just for our companies but also for the next generation of consumer start-ups."
Eugene Park, a gaming Twitch streamer in Los Angeles with 300,000 followers, likes the idea of making followers transferrable to other services, telling the Post it "would be taking power from the tech companies and putting it in the hands of creators who really make up these giant platforms."

In the meantime, the article points out, TikTok users "have taken to referring to other apps like Instagram and YouTube using 'algospeak' pseudonyms, because they say even uttering the name of a competitor can downrank your content."

Whatever happened to those two pilots who attempted to swap planes in mid-air — skydiving from one to the other while the planes slowly tumbled toward the desert 65 miles southeast of Phoenix?

One pilot successfully reached the other plane — but the other pilot didn't, parachuting safely to the ground instead. "All of our safety protocols worked," the first pilot said triumphantly in a documentary streamed on Hulu. Er, but what about that second plane, slowly tumbling toward the ground without a pilot? It fell 14,000 feet, landing "nose first" (according to footage from a local newscast) — though its descent was also slowed by a parchute. (Both planes also had a specially-engineered braking system to slow their fall so the skydiving pilots could overtake them.) The stunt was sponsored by Red Bull.

Both pilots had previously conducted more than 20,000 skydives — "but there's a problem," that local newscast pointed out. "The FAA says it had denied Red Bull permission to attempt the plane swap because it would not be in the public's interest." So now both pilots — who'd had "commercial pilot certificates" from America's Federal Aviation Administration — have had their certificates revoked.

The Associated Press reports: In a May 10 emergency order, the FAA cites the two pilots, Luke Aikins and Andrew Farrington, and describes their actions as "careless and reckless." Aikins also faces a proposed $4,932 fine from the agency....

Aikins had petitioned for an exemption from the rule that pilots must be at the helm with safety belts fastened at all times. He argued the stunt would "be in the public interest because it would promote aviation in science, technology, engineering and math."

While both pilots must surrender their certificates immediately, there is an appeal process.
Aikins had shared a statement on Instagram after the stunt, saying he made the "personal decision to move forward with the plane swap" despite the lack of the FAA exemption.

"I regret not sharing this information with my team and those who supported me."

"I am now turning my attention to cooperatively working transparently with the regulatory authorities as we review the planning and execution."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Securing the open-source software supply chain is a huge deal. Last year, the Biden administration issued an executive order to improve software supply chain security. This came after the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack shut down gas and oil deliveries throughout the southeast and the SolarWinds software supply chain attack. Securing software became a top priority. In response, The Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) and Linux Foundation rose to this security challenge. Now, they're calling for $150 million in funding over two years to fix ten major open-source security problems.

The government will not be paying the freight for these changes. $30 million has already been pledged by Amazon, Ericsson, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and VMWare. More is already on the way. Amazon Web Services (AWS) has already pledged an additional $10 million. At the White House press conference, OpenSSF general manager Brian Behlendorf said, "I want to be clear: We're not here to fundraise from the government. We did not anticipate needing to go directly to the government to get funding for anyone to be successful."

Here are the ten goals the open-source industry is committed to meeting:

1. Security Education: Deliver baseline secure software development education and certification to all.
2. Risk Assessment: Establish a public, vendor-neutral, objective-metrics-based risk assessment dashboard for the top 10,000 (or more) OSS components.
3. Digital Signatures: Accelerate the adoption of digital signatures on software releases.
4. Memory Safety: Eliminate root causes of many vulnerabilities through the replacement of non-memory-safe languages.
5. Incident Response: Establish the OpenSSF Open Source Security Incident Response Team, security experts who can step in to assist open source projects during critical times when responding to a vulnerability.
6. Better Scanning: Accelerate the discovery of new vulnerabilities by maintainers and experts through advanced security tools and expert guidance.
7. Code Audits: Conduct third-party code reviews (and any necessary remediation work) of up to 200 of the most-critical OSS components once per year.
8. Data Sharing: Coordinate industry-wide data sharing to improve the research that helps determine the most critical OSS components.
9. Software Bill of Materials (SBOMs): Everywhere Improve SBOM tooling and training to drive adoption.
10. Improved Supply Chains: Enhance the 10 most critical open-source software build systems, package managers, and distribution systems with better supply chain security tools and best practices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Today, researchers at security service edge provider, Netskope, published the Netskope Cloud and Threat Report: Global Cloud and Malware Trends, which found that phishing downloads rose 450% over the past 12 months, and highlighted that attackers are using search engine optimization (SEO) to rank malicious PDF files on search engines. The report's findings show that phishing attempts are constantly evolving, and attackers aren't just targeting employees through their email inboxes; they're also using popular search engines like Google and Bing. The increase in phishing attacks and the growing popularity of SEO techniques among cybercriminals highlights the need for enterprises to provide their employees with security awareness training so they're prepared to spot threats and not at risk of handing over sensitive information.

When it comes to defending against these SEO-driven attacks, [Ray Canzanese, director of Netskope's Threat Labs] highlights several methods that security teams can use to protect employees. One of the most effective is to use a solution that can decrypt and scan web traffic for malicious content. At the same time, security teams should encourage users to inspect all links they click on, and to exercise caution if the link takes them to an unfamiliar website. In the event an employee does click on a malicious PDF, they can expect to see a fake captcha at the top of the first page, followed by text on other pages. In these scenarios, users should close the file, delete it from the device and report it to the security team ASAP. Canzanese also notes that it's important for users to report malicious URLs that feature on popular search engines to help the provider unlist them from the site and prevent other users from falling victim to a scam.

BeerFartMoron shares a report from Motherboard: For the last five years, driverless car companies have been testing their vehicles on public roads. These vehicles constantly roam neighborhoods while laden with a variety of sensors including video cameras capturing everything going on around them in order to operate safely and analyze instances where they don't. While the companies themselves, such as Alphabet's Waymo and General Motors' Cruise, tout the potential transportation benefits their services may one day offer, they don't publicize another use case, one that is far less hypothetical: Mobile surveillance cameras for police departments.

"Autonomous vehicles are recording their surroundings continuously and have the potential to help with investigative leads," says a San Francisco Police department training document obtained by Motherboard via a public records request. "Investigations has already done this several times."

Privacy advocates say the revelation that police are actively using AV footage is cause for alarm. "This is very concerning," Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) senior staff attorney Adam Schwartz told Motherboard. He said cars in general are troves of personal consumer data, but autonomous vehicles will have even more of that data from capturing the details of the world around them. "So when we see any police department identify AVs as a new source of evidence, that's very concerning."

As companies continue to make public roadways their testing grounds for these vehicles, everyone should understand them for what they are -- rolling surveillance devices that expand existing widespread spying technologies," said Chris Gilliard, Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School Shorenstein Center. "Law enforcement agencies already have access to automated license plate readers, geofence warrants, Ring Doorbell footage, as well as the ability to purchase location data. This practice will extend the reach of an already pervasive web of surveillance."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from XDA Developers: Google created Flutter a number of years ago, with the aim to make a cross-platform software framework. Flutter's biggest strength is that it can be used to build applications for Android, iOS, Linux, Windows, macOS, and even the web, and all from the same shared codebase. While building apps for Windows received stable support back in February, both macOS and Linux were still only in beta. Now that's changing, as Google has announced Flutter 3 at this year's Google I/O, complete with stable support for building apps for macOS and Linux.

Of course, cross-platform support for both of these new platforms requires more than just programs being able to run. They need to fit in with the rest of the experience, and they need to support specific features that may be unique, as well. That's why Google is highlighting two things: the first is that Linux support helped by Canonical (the publisher of Ubuntu) and Google collaborating in order to "offer a highly-integrated, best-of-breed option for development."

As Google puts it, Canonical is already developing with "Flutter for key shell experiences including installation and firmware updates." What's more, their Linux-specific packages "provide an idiomatic API for core operating system services including dbus, gsettings, networkmanager, Bluetooth and desktop notifications, as well as a comprehensive theme and widget set for Yaru, the Ubuntu look and feel." As for macOS, Google invested in supporting both Intel and Apple Silicon devices, with Universal Binary support that allows apps to package executables that run natively on both architectures. Tim Sneath, Director of Product and UX for Flutter & Dart, highlights all the new improvements in a Medium post.

Today at the Open Source Software Security Summit II in Washington, D.C., OpenSSF announced an ambitious, multipronged plan with 10 key goals to better secure the entire open-source software ecosystem. From a report: While open-source software itself can sometimes be freely available, securing it will have a price. OpenSSF has estimated that its plan will require $147.9 million in funding over a two-year period. In a press conference held after the summit, Brian Behlendorf, general manager of OpenSSF, said that $30 million has already been pledged by OpenSSF members including Amazon, Intel, VMware, Ericsson, Google and Microsoft.

Facebook-owner Meta Platforms is preparing cutbacks in its Reality Labs division, a unit at the center of the company's strategy to refocus on hardware products and the "metaverse," a spokesperson confirmed to Reuters on Wednesday. From a report: Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth told Reality Labs staffers during a weekly Q&A session on Tuesday to expect the changes to be announced within a week, according to a summary of his comments viewed by Reuters. The Meta spokesperson confirmed that Bosworth told staffers the division could not afford to do some projects anymore and would have to postpone others, without specifying which projects would be affected. She said Meta was not planning layoffs as part of the changes.

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you've ever looked at a 360 Hz monitor and thought, "This isn't fast enough," here's something to look forward to. While we've seen monitor prototypes surpass 360 Hz, the highest native refresh rate you'll find on a PC display these days, it seems that AU Optronics (AUO) is working on panels that'll be available with an even snappier 480 Hz refresh rate. Of course, not many would look at a screen updating with new information 360 times every second as lagging. But for very fast-paced action -- like in a competitive game where words and items whizz by in an instant or where a few milliseconds of a delay could be the difference between a win or a loss -- more speed may be imperative.