Mr. Tact wrote on Sep 19, 2018, 22:34:
The "sim swap" is the scammer programming a phone with the victim's phone number? And having the phone number was sufficient to get into the Coinbase account? And they managed to break into his email? I'm guessing there have been several security failures along the way here...

HorrorScope wrote on Sep 19, 2018, 18:00:

eRe4s3r wrote on Sep 19, 2018, 03:49:
I'd not even say that PC gaming is alive currently even with crowd-funding, the amount of fresh and unique games is at an all time low.

LOL, do you shop only at EA.com? There are more unique games than ever each year. Well perhaps it has tailed off the past 3 or so. Most hate the AAA studio's anymore, but then seem to only consider their products. LOL

FWIW with the couple hours I had into it last night, I enjoyed it. This is a middle grade quality game, never thought it would be anything more, but has some old school takes to is, which was the hook.

jdreyer wrote on Sep 20, 2018, 03:21:

Mr. Tact wrote on Sep 19, 2018, 22:54:
Need an unforeseen break-thru in capacitor technology....

Why is that? Cheap sodium industrial-scale batteries could allow wind and PV solar to approach baseline. Why the need for a capacitor breakthrough? Don't cheap batteries alleviate that?

MoreLuckThanSkill wrote on Sep 19, 2018, 23:38:

Xero wrote on Sep 19, 2018, 22:30:
Can some company for the love of jeebuz acquire the rights for "Nocturne"? Was I the only one that lived when that game came out and blew me the f**k away? Who the hell else knows what I'm talking about. I never hear anyone mention of it. It was pure badass for it's time. I'd even love to buy it now with proper Win10 support.

I remember Nocturne well, the idea was great, the controls were... well it's unfair to say horrendous, because there was an autoaim option, but oh my god, talk about fighting the controls! Also I remember it being extremely buggy, at least the initial release. Still on CDs?

I don't remember playing any patched version later on, so maybe it got better.

Also, I remember it being the Crysis of its time, in that it ran at like 5-10fps on midrange computers of the day.

Two pistols John Woo style, fighting vampires and werewolves for Theodore Roosevelt, cool. Two pistols, attempted to be mapped to mouse controls in a slightly isometric 3d environment even with those weird laser sights? Made me rage. It's been awhile but I swear there was an option to map each arm to a different control set or something? Lol, basically I had issues with the controls.

It's one of those games that needs a patched up re-release on GoG, now that it can run at a real framerate for everybody.

It's cool that you love it though, Xero... reminds me of Soldiers of Anarchy for me, which about 3 people played world wide, and was crazy awesome.

Creston wrote on Sep 19, 2018, 15:02:
Beautiful game. It just seems like the Ray tracing makes most of the textures far less detailed though.

Beamer wrote on Sep 18, 2018, 17:59:
I made it through China completely undisturbed. I've spent about 3 weeks there now, no issues.

The first time, though, I was with a large group. Our group had maybe 6 blond people. When we were in Beijing, particularly the Forbidden City, 4 of those 6 were stopped constantly for photo requests. Constantly. They had what we were told was a stereotypical westerner look, so people just kept asking for photos with them. The other 2 blond people were baffled as to why they were ignored.

We went to Lijiang from there and braced for more, as its much, much more rural. No one bothered us. Turns out, The Forbidden City is a tourist trap for rural rubes, so they weren't as used to westerners. Lijiang is a tourist trap for city folk, so they didn't flinch at westerners. The rest of the trip was completely undisturbed. We were almost exclusively in cities (and some factories.) My second time there was a week split between Hong Kong, Shanghai, and more factories. Never got looked at twice.

Prez wrote on Sep 18, 2018, 08:09:
I don't doubt that there are some amazingly skilled females who could easily hold their own in e-sports competition, but given the general maturity level of the current crop of the all male competitors, I shudder to think of the shitshow that would inevitably ensue. I follow the Overwatch league closely, and even without women there is no shortage of instances of them getting themselves into trouble.

Yifes wrote on Sep 18, 2018, 21:14:

WaltC wrote on Sep 18, 2018, 20:27:
Fargo should have held on to Interplay--it was what put him on the map, after all. But, sad to say, really, that Fargo was one of the ones who lost faith in the PC side of the gaming market, and actually went around for years preaching that "the PC is dead" as a gaming platform--playing up consoles, etc.

The PC was dead for Fargo. No publisher would give him money to make the PC games that he wanted to make. It must have sucked to be turned down over and over again by publishers and have to fire people to keep his company afloat. It wasn't until Steam and Kickstarter got big that he could finally find the funding.

jdreyer wrote on Sep 17, 2018, 13:19:

I am not sure about China, but in Japan, the cramped living spaces mean people have evolved behaviors to ensure privacy. People don't look at each other on the street or on trains, for example. In cubbyhole apartments, people are never loud.

Fun fact: Japan has about the same land area as California, but with three times as many people. But only 3% of the land is habitable. Now that's some cramped living space right there.

Darks wrote on Sep 14, 2018, 21:29:
So, the big question is. Can you re-bind the keys? When this first came out on Win 10's store you could, then this new definitive version was released and they locked the keys down.

jdreyer wrote on Sep 15, 2018, 14:46:

Mr. Tact wrote on Sep 15, 2018, 13:13:
I'm not sure we could get the logistics to work, but if we could I'd be in favor of some sort of universal service. Although we probably couldn't things like infrastructure work done -- which if we could would be awesome.

Might also instill a sense of community, if you're able to mix folks of different socioeconomic backgrounds. We're a fairly divided country these days, and moving toward autocracy/oligarchy/corporatocracy. Something like this could counteract that tendency.

jdreyer wrote on Sep 14, 2018, 02:56:
Geekfight!

RedEye9 wrote on Sep 14, 2018, 20:38:
Uh, maybe get a job?

Muscular Beaver wrote on Sep 14, 2018, 09:48:

eRe4s3r wrote on Sep 13, 2018, 19:43:
In other news, Russia is full of fake news. That's what happens when your secret service controls all media.

Russia actually denied this rumor and said very clearly that we shouldnt jump to conclusions like that. Just like the Russian people on the ISS. But of course that isnt mentioned... Typical of western propaganda nowadays.

This "spreading like wildfire" is the actual fake news.
Nothing new nowadays. Some propagandist in the west sees some tabloid in Russia claim some BS and then does an article "OMG RUSSIANS CLAIMING THIS AND THAT AGAIN!". And you fall for it.
My god, divide and conquer is fucking ancient. Learn it finally!
Same with this satellite picture, which showed a Su 27 shooting down MH17. Nobody cared about that shit, everyone knew it was fake, even if some idiots claimed it was not. Yet the western media pumped it up as if it was an official picture from Putin himself, sitting in his holiday photoshop lab.

Salisbury, Starving Children and Soviet Soldiers: Disinformation Pollution in Action

Ridicule and accuse, recycle and amplify. This was the strategy behind the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign's immediate efforts when the UK released the images of the two suspects of the Salisbury nerve gas attack. Polluting the information space - and readers' thinking - by spreading clusters of contradicting and misleading messages aims at distracting the audiences from the facts. But this week it was also winning time and preparing the ground for Russia’s president Vladimir Putin’s statement that Russia has identified the suspects.

First, the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign started ridiculing the evidence provided by the UK. It claimed that the security camera footage of the two suspects arriving at Gatwick Airport on March 2, 2018, shows them in the same place at the same time. It further accused the UK of fabricating the evidence and ridiculed it stating that the UK is practicing "God-level trolling" and that the Russian Military Intelligence agents must have "learned to walk in tandem while appearing separately in two different photos".

But in fact, after passengers clear passport control and customs at Gatwick, they are obliged to walk separately through a row of identical barriers. Furthermore, the suspects were clearly filmed in different corridors.

Then it was time for detailed claims aimed at creating further confusion, like that Novichok was too toxic to be carried in a perfume bottle (debunked by the scientist who developed the substance) and that Sergei and Yulia Skripal never could have touched the poisoned door handle (debunked here). Disinformation also repeated the unsubstantiated claim that Novichok could have been manufactured in the UK. See the debunk here.

Finally, the pro-Kremlin disinformation avoided any remarks on Russia’s responsibility and spread conspiracies that it was the UK who attempted to poison the Skripals: that it was an anti-Russian provocation and hysteria by the UK secret services to distract attention from Brexit, to set the EU against Russia and to weaken Russia’s economy.

If in April Russia’s disinformation stories on the Salisbury attack managed to contaminate the information space and two out of three articles on the Skripal case shared on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Pinterest, came from Kremlin-funded media outlets, this time the immediate impact of disinformation was much more limited. Even in a brief phone poll on Russian Govorit Moskva Radio Station, over half the callers said they believe Russia was behind the nerve agent poisonings in Britain.


Who is keeping silent?

When a topic is too painful the pro-Kremlin disinformation campaign prefers to ignore it. In Russia, the local election day on September 9 was “one of the calmest in recent years”, we learned from the Russian police. At the same time, the state-controlled Russian TV channels were carefully silent about the country-wide protests and clashes between the protesters and the police with hundreds detained.

The Russian TV told its audience a different breaking news story: Two million kids starve in Britain! and it is the UK “propaganda” that “hushes up” this problem. In fact Russian TV must have learned about the so called holiday hunger from one of the many reports in the UK media.

We also saw a culmination of a disinformation story that started spreading in 2016: that Finns would have organised mass shootings of Soviet Soldiers in Sandarmokh, Karelia, during WWII. The claim is tailored to distract the attention from the thousands victims of Stalin's terror who in fact were executed and buried in Sandarmokh. The same technique has been in use before in relation to the Katyn massacre. Freshen your mind from disinformation pollution with this debunk.