…indicating Russia’s violation of the ongoing arms embargo.
I mean, I get that legitimacy matters and that Russia is on the UNSC and all, but every time I read about this, it feels kind of surreal. Like a lawyer triumphantly arguing that the person who is currently is burglarizing someone’s house is parked illegally outside of it.
It’s not North Korea’s behavior that’s being highlighted, but Russia’s. Russia had agreed to sanctions on North Korea at the UNSC and is breaking those sanctions. It’s not a good look to be on the UNSC and impose sanctions and then break them yourself.
North Korea can do whatever. They aren’t obliged to sanction themselves.
My point is just that, in relative terms, “I’m gonna annex my neighbor, time for glorious Russian Empire 2.0” versus “I’m gonna trade for weapons from some sanctioned country to help me do so” seem almost ludicrously out of proportion. I know that there’s political sense to bringing it up and all, but…
So, it’s obviously nothing like an across-the-board replacement, but you can make useful chips that aren’t the latest and greatest.
If you want to do performance-competitive CPUs or competitive signal-processing for radars or whatever, then it won’t work.
But let’s say that you want to make a voltage-regulator chip (something that I know we have put on sanctions lists for Russia). Power supplies need those, so you’re gonna pretty universally want them. That doesn’t need to be particularly high resolution.
Think of all the problems that automakers had due to COVID-19 chip disruption. That was mostly over old, low resolution chips…but they had to have them to ship cars. The article specifically mentions auto manufacture.
Microcontrollers do a lot of work in consumer electronics. Probably have one in your microwave oven. Not very fancy, but it lets you plonk logic in in software.
Russia can probably smuggle in some chips. But that’s expensive (because criminals are going to want a premium for their risk) and risky. Let’s say that you’re trying to buy sanctioned CPUs in Kazakhstan from sketchy parties.
Maybe one of those parties is a (comparatively) upstanding smuggler getting you the real thing and just charging you an arm and a leg.
Or maybe it’s from some enterprising party selling counterfeits, because now the original manufacturer isn’t gonna be working with you to verify that the stuff is authentic, and that knockoff doesn’t have the same testing and has some problems.
Or maybe the person you’ve run into is with the CIA and intending to poison your sanction-busting smuggled supplies of chips with backdoored or sabotaged versions.
Russia will source what it has to from the black market, but the less stuff in their supply chain that comes from the black market, the better-off they are.
No, according to the article, it sounds like the whole series has seen a bump.
Additionally, the total number of concurrent players have increased across “Fallout 76,” “Fallout Shelter,” “Fallout 4,” “Fallout 3” and “Fallout New Vegas,” while “Fallout 4” and “Fallout 76” currently sit within the top seven first-party Xbox Game Pass games by hours, along with Bethesda’s “Starfield” and “Skyrim.”
I feel like I got my money from it, and they’ve fixed it a lot since launch. But it’s not Fallout 5. If you want to play it as a purely-single player game – obviously, if you want multiplayer, it’s the only option – I’d say that it’s the weakest of the mainline series. If someone just wanted to “try Fallout”, had never done the series before, I’d probably direct them to Fallout 4 or maybe New Vegas.
It’s the newest, but graphically, not that much has changed since Fallout 4. There’s the more-organic Mire, and there are panoramas of forest. Nothing like the jump from New Vegas to Fallout 4 or Fallout 4 to Starfield.
It’s not very moddable, which is a major element for many people with Fallout 4 (and a big part of why that game has had such longevity).
At least for me, there are some minor graphical artifacts that I didn’t see with Fallout 4.
It’s got other human NPCs that have been added in over time since the release, but there are fewer human NPCs than Fallout 4 (though to be fair, I guess West Virginia isn’t as populated as Boston, and some of that is stuff like forests). There isn’t that much by way of character development for most of them. I do think that the NPCs were more-believable then Fallout 4, where every other character seemed to be downright psychotic. But they also weren’t as memorable.
Its late game is fixed (has to be, since the intent is to let players keep doing the late game as long as they want). Fallout 4 without mods ultimately had enemies turn into bullet sponges in the very late game.
I think that New Vegas was the best of the series, if you compare them at launch, but it’s also pretty old.
Never played 76, never will. Not interested in a multiplayer Fallout game. I’ve heard you can mostly play alone and adjust settings to prevent other players from griefing you, but it still doesn’t interest me.
So, I was you at one point. I didn’t want a multiplayer Fallout. In fact, I think that a lot of people are you. And…actually, I still don’t really want a multiplayer Fallout.
But I will have to say that while the multiplayer aspect did affect me negatively, it wasn’t at all in the same way that I was sure it was going in, and it was a lot less severe.
What I thought was going to be a problem was that I was going to need to deal with interacting with actual humans. Like, I wanted to just go off, explore the world, not have a bunch of random people forced down my throat. I didn’t want to be required to do cooperative quests, didn’t want to deal with people exploiting the game, didn’t want to deal with roleplaying, didn’t want any of that stuff. That…really was not a problem, to my surprise. It turns out that a lot of the Fallout 76 player base is…kind of in the same boat. Bethesda even tried to encourage people to team up by creating perks specific to teams, and what players actually did was to create the convention of creating a casual team, join, share a perk card with some other players (a benefit of being on a team is that people can share one of their perks with other players), and then completely ignore the other players.
The most-common interaction I’ve had is mostly people trying to give me items.
There are multiplayer events, but they’re basically ignorable if you really want to do so, and they don’t require much by way of coordination.
There aren’t that many players on any given server – it’s not an MMO – so by and large, the only time I really see people outside of multiplayer events is occasionally passing them in the towns.
Griefing really wasn’t an issue. There were a couple of trap CAMPs, like, people built houses with doors that opened off of cliffs that you could inadvertently walk out of or something, but even that has a really minimal impact, as death in the game has very limited impact (you drop scrap that you’re carrying, need to go pick it up). You can turn off friendly fire.
There are certain locations that you can take and hold to do some (limited, not really time-effective) automated production, and players can try and take the locations from you, but I’ve virtually never seen that happen. Maybe…twice, three times?
Most meaningful stuff is instanced…like, you and other players don’t see the same view of the world when gathering herbs in the forest, for example.
Where the multiplayer does come in for me in that it affects the game design. Like, part of Fallout for me is running around in this immersive, post-apocalyptic world. I can suspend disbelief. But when I’m getting notifications sporadically that multiplayer events – which aren’t terribly realistic, feel like a game – are starting, that kind of doesn’t go well with that. It reminds me that I’m in a video game, and that there are other players playing. When all the NPCs are wearing themed stuff but other players are wearing goofy stuff – even if I don’t see them much – that doesn’t help immersion. The thumbnail for this article is actually a great example.
You can’t mod it (or, rather, only in very limited ways). Yeah, the earlier games in the series were good games even in their vanilla form, but a lot of what makes Fallout 4 relevant in 2024 is that, as with Skyrim, a lot of people have done an incredible amount of modding to expand the world and update the game for newer computers. Bethesda’s games are some of the poster children for what modding can do for games…but modding is pretty much out of the picture for Fallout 76.
Other player CAMPs are occasionally impressive. Some are even really good additions to the game world. But a lot of them don’t “fit” with the world thematically. Breaks immersion too.
In multiplayer events, when killing enemies, players don’t kill-steal or split experience. They all get a copy of the experience as long as they did some damage to an enemy before the enemy dies (or in the case of a few bosses, as long as they do a certain minimum amount). The problem is that this means that optimal play is to “tag” an enemy by doing a little bit of damage, then ignoring it and letting as many players as possible get their damage in before it dies. This…doesn’t really feel very immersive when playing the actual events. It kind of shoves the fact that you’re in a game in your face.
The Fallout series is famous for letting the player alter the world. The decisions you make have all kinds of interesting, meaningful effects. You can do that because you can be the center of the plot. But for Fallout 76, you’re in a multiplayer world, and while a few things can be instanced, so that you can change the view of the world that you have, that’s difficult to implement in a sane way, and by-and-large that means that you can’t change the world. That’s a major element of the series that just isn’t there.
Also, I don’t find that playing the multiplayer events single-player is that exciting. I mean, yeah, okay, it’s content. And it lets you keep going with one character rather than doing a restart, as was the norm in earlier games in the series. But once you’ve played a multiplayer event twenty times, it gets kind of old. So you can keep playing a character as long as you want, but once you’ve gone through the plot and gotten most of the items, very late game is playing repetitive events to slowly grind for things.
Late game, the fastest way to obtain scrap or herbs is to know where particularly-good resources are, go there, gather them, go to a few other locations where you can very-rapidly pick up a lot of items to overflow the 255-long list of items where the game remembers your instanced “view” of the main world, hides items that you’ve picked up, then hop to another server, regenerating that particularly-ideal source of resources. This also encourages gameplay that doesn’t feel very immersive.
You can’t pause it, a problem that affects most multiplayer games. If you’re in a firefight and your kid starts screaming, you can’t just suspend the game world until you deal with whatever’s going on in real life.
Oh, and lastly…it’s a live service game. The games in the series have had tremendous longevity, partly because people can go back and play their much-beloved game and modify it. But…there will come a day when the lights will go out on the Fallout 76 servers, and then the game won’t be playable (absent Bethesda releasing the server or something like that). That kind of sucks, and is always in the back of my mind. It’s an experience that will, one day, probably go away forever.
So for me, the problem with multiplayer isn’t so much the behavior of other players or needing to deal with them, which I had expected. It’s mostly just how the fact that the game is multiplayer necessarily affects the game design and experience, which I hadn’t expected.
You can, if you get a subscription, have your own private server, twiddle its rules to a limited degree, and if someone is absolutely determined not to have other players in their world, they can do that, but I understand not wanting to get a subscription for that. I didn’t.
None of that is to say that you should get it over another game in the series. But before playing, I had the same concerns and I didn’t find that those concerns were borne out (though there were other downsides that I didn’t anticipate), so I thought that I’d mention it at least.
After watching the show, I fired up Fallout 3 and FNV on my PC, modded together with Tales of Two Wastelands.
Yeah, that’s a pretty good option too, though I don’t know if I’d recommend that for a new player on their first time…kind of affects the New Vegas experience. Definitely a good option for going back and doing a marathon through those two games, though. And (generally) lets New Vegas mods work on 3, which is neat.
I don’t play it multiplayer, but normally, my understanding is that if you’re on a team and enter an instanced area together, you see the “team leader’s view” of instanced areas. You can do quests co-op, though it’ll only advance that one player’s “view” of the world. Were you guys maybe not on a team? Or maybe you tested it by seeing if a non-leader’s view of the world had advanced?
Icelandic authorities said residents and emergency responders should be ready to evacuate Grindavík at short notice after a new and ongoing eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula.
It looks like the ban isn’t on all cell phones. Dumb phones are permitted; it’s phones capable of Internet use:
Hochul said she would launch the bill later this year and take it up in New York’s next legislative session, which begins in January 2025. If passed, schoolchildren will be allowed to carry simple phones that cannot access the internet but do have the capability to send texts, which has been a sticking point for parents. She did not offer specifics on enforcing the prohibition.
Do kids need them? I mean, they obviously don’t need them. I didn’t have a cell phone when I was in school.
And they certainly can be a distraction.
But…the flip side of that is that they can also be a pretty important tool.
I use my smartphone as a reference, to reach Wikipedia, etymonline, various dictionaries, to get translations.
I use it as a tool. I have maxima on it, an open-source computer algebra system; think Mathematica. It’s a lot more useful than something like a TI calculator. I think I touched my graphing calculator about once after school. I have a unit converter on it. I have a weather program on it. I take notes, can search through them. Those are tools that I have with me all the time in life. If kids can’t have a smartphone at school – which is a mandatory part of a lot of the youth and teenage parts of their lives – that’s stripping them of access to a lot of important stuff.
At one point, I worked at a research lab that didn’t permit devices with cameras inside, a much lesser restriction. It was a pain in the butt, and that was a long time ago, before devices were as prevalent and important as they are today. I wouldn’t wish that on kids.
Part of functioning in the modern world is living in a world that has devices like smartphones. If a student literally cannot function in the presence of a smartphone, that seems like a much larger problem to me than anything else; employers are not going to cut them off from phones. I don’t think that this solution is a reasonable approach to “student is being distracted”. Like, part of socializing people for being able to function in society has gotta be to get them in a situation where they can function later in life, and if anyone should do that, it’s the school.
I completely understand that there are people who want the smallest phone and laptop possible and will happily trade all kinds of things for that, including an obstructed display, but I definitely am not in that camp.
It sounds like – though is not explicitly stated – that this study is specific to the 2020 election. I’m not sure that this can be generalized to all misinformation.
I could easily imagine election involvement being different than, say, information about Ukraine.
Also, the criteria here was whether people linked to sites used to spread misinformation, rather than whether an individual story was true or not. So the metric here is maybe specific to ability to evaluate how sketchy an online news source is. If, for example, a friend posted some information directly, it might be that behavior would be different.
I absolutely do not want a ban on felons running for President. In some countries, that is used as a political tool to eliminate political opponents. Putin used that against Navalny.
Victoria Claflin Woodhull (born Victoria California Claflin; September 23, 1838 – June 9, 1927), later Victoria Woodhull Martin, was an American leader of the women’s suffrage movement who ran for president of the United States in the 1872 election. While many historians and authors agree that Woodhull was the first woman to run for the presidency,[2] some disagree with classifying it as a true candidacy because she was younger than the constitutionally mandated age of 35. (Woodhull’s 35th birthday was in September 1873, six months after the March inauguration.)
An activist for women’s rights and labor reforms, Woodhull was also an advocate of “free love”, by which she meant the freedom to marry, divorce and bear children without social restriction or government interference.[3] “They cannot roll back the rising tide of reform,” she often said. “The world moves.”[4]
Woodhull twice went from rags to riches, her first fortune being made on the road as a magnetic healer[5] before she joined the spiritualist movement in the 1870s.[6] Authorship of many of her articles is disputed (many of her speeches on these topics were collaborations between Woodhull, her backers, and her second husband, Colonel James Blood[7]). Together with her sister, Tennessee Claflin, she was the first woman to operate a brokerage firm on Wall Street,[8] making a second, and more reputable fortune.[9] They were among the first women to found a newspaper in the United States, Woodhull & Claflin’s Weekly, which began publication in 1870.[10]
Woodhull was politically active in the early 1870s when she was nominated as the first woman candidate for the United States presidency.[8] Woodhull was the candidate in 1872 from the Equal Rights Party, supporting women’s suffrage and equal rights; her running mate (unbeknownst to him) was abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass. Her campaign inspired at least one other woman – apart from her sister – to run for Congress.[8] A check on her activities occurred when she was arrested on obscenity charges a few days before the election. Her paper had published an account of the alleged adulterous affair between the prominent minister Henry Ward Beecher and Elizabeth Richards Tilton which had rather more detail than was considered proper at the time. However, it all added to the sensational coverage of her candidacy.[11]
Heh, and she was in trouble with the law in the runup to the election like Trump, too.
I don’t think that avoiding vaccines is a very good idea, but I only really care about it to the extent that it’s a risk to other people.
With COVID-19, there’s a major risk in that a dangerous disease is rapidly spreading and there’s a major concern that hospitals may get overwhelmed, leading to death rates spiking. Not being vaccinated was a serious risk to other people.
In this case, according to the article, only 1.4% of the people involved had been fully-vaccinated. Even if every single case was a result of an infection from someone who wasn’t vaccinated, virtually all of the people who are being hurt are either not vaccinated or only partially-vaccinated. There is no risk of hospitals being overwhelmed.
It’s not zero-impact on other people, but that impact is pretty limited in this case.
In general, my take is that people should be entitled to a warning, but if they still want to do something to themselves that is a really bad idea and the impact is pretty much on them, well…
The operations used OpenAI’s technology to generate social media posts, translate and edit articles, write headlines and debug computer programs, typically to win support for political campaigns or to swing public opinion in geopolitical conflicts.
Covert activity against other countries seems like an area where one might want to invest in one’s own automated translation tools, or at least hire a human translator.
but argued his death was “an accident that could have been avoided had Mr. Sterling simply turned himself in” before a task force was assigned to catch him.
That’s probably true. However.
It’s fine for a police officer to hit someone with a car, and it’s been done on many occasions.
But that’s also considered to be deadly force, like shooting them.
There is a threshold where an officer, or anyone else, using deadly force is acceptable in each state.
If it doesn’t meet the bar, can’t use deadly force.
This isn’t the criminal code, just the Michigan state policy, but that should be written to reflect the criminal code:
Enforcement members may only discharge a firearm at a vehicle in the following circumstances:
Self-defense or defense of another - to justify the discharge of a firearm at a vehicle there must be some overt action on the part of the driver to establish an intent to kill or severely injure, as opposed to actions taken to escape arrest.
Life-threatening felonies with the use of a firearm - weapon may be pointed and/or discharged at a vehicle when an enforcement member has probable cause to believe an occupant has committed a life-threatening felony (murder, attempted murder, armed robbery, attempted armed robbery, felony arson, attempted arson, certain kidnapping crimes and criminal sexual conduct involving a weapon).
That’s talking about firearm use, but the underlying legal code will be dealing with any use of deadly force.
Initially after the attack, the Laax had listed its destination as Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates. On Thursday, however, its listed destination instead appeared to be Bandar Khomeini, Iran.
Hmm.
Is it possible that they just diverted as a result of the attack? I mean, they got attacked and the ship was damaged. That’s not business as usual. That might have affected the delivery schedule or other things that might affect the destination. It might mean that they wanted to head to a port that could do some kind of repair work.
this really doesn’t concern me. Its capabilities are probably more like a battering ram than anything high tech.
There has been discussion recently about Russia discussing imminent deployment of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon. I don’t know if this is that, but the timing is right.
We discovered that high-altitude nuclear explosions are pretty bad news.
Starfish Prime was a high-altitude nuclear test conducted by the United States, a joint effort of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Defense Atomic Support Agency. It was launched from Johnston Atoll on July 9, 1962, and was the largest nuclear test conducted in outer space, and one of five conducted by the US in space.
Starfish Prime caused an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that was far larger than expected, so much larger that it drove much of the instrumentation off scale, causing great difficulty in getting accurate measurements. The Starfish Prime electromagnetic pulse also made those effects known to the public by causing electrical damage in Hawaii, about 900 miles (1,450 km) away from the detonation point, knocking out about 300 streetlights,: 5 setting off numerous burglar alarms, and damaging a telephone company microwave link. The EMP damage to the microwave link shut down telephone calls from Kauai to the other Hawaiian Islands.
The explosion released roughly 10^29 electrons into the Earth’s magnetosphere. While some of the energetic beta particles followed the Earth’s magnetic field and illuminated the sky, other high-energy electrons became trapped and formed radiation belts around the Earth. The added electrons increased the intensity of electrons within the natural inner Van Allen radiation belt by several orders of magnitude. There was much uncertainty and debate[by whom?] about the composition, magnitude and potential adverse effects from the trapped radiation after the detonation. The weaponeers became quite worried when three satellites in low Earth orbit were disabled. These included TRAAC and Transit 4B. The half-life of the energetic electrons was only a few days. At the time it was not known that solar and cosmic particle fluxes varied by a factor of 10, and energies could exceed 1 MeV (0.16 pJ). In the months that followed, these man-made radiation belts eventually caused six or more satellites to fail, as radiation damaged their solar arrays or electronics, including the first commercial relay communication satellite, Telstar, as well as the United Kingdom’s first satellite, Ariel 1. Detectors on Telstar, TRAAC, Injun, and Ariel 1 were used to measure distribution of the radiation produced by the tests.
In 1963, it was reported that Starfish Prime had created a belt of MeV electrons. In 1968, it was reported that some Starfish electrons had remained in the atmosphere for 5 years.
Way back then, there were few satellites in orbit. There are a lot more now.
EDIT: Okay, I take it back. It looks like the development was what was being talked about, and that the deployment was explicitly not imminent:
A senior Defense Department official told lawmakers Wednesday that Russia is developing an “indiscriminate” anti-satellite nuclear device that would pose a threat to all satellites operated by countries and companies around the world.
"The concept that we are concerned about is Russia developing and — if we are unable to convince them otherwise — to ultimately fly a nuclear weapon in space which will be an indiscriminate weapon” that would not distinguish among military, civilian or commercial satellites, John Plumb, the assistant secretary of defense for space policy, said at a House Armed Services subcommittee hearing.
He said the threat was “not imminent” but that the Pentagon and the “entire” Biden administration were concerned about the program.
So this is probably some other kind of “space weapon”.
Yeah, I have to say that when I tried them, I was very pleasantly surprised by Walmart’s delivery services. They’re well ahead of Amazon. I don’t know where Amazon is going to go with this drone delivery stuff, and maybe Amazon can pull ahead. But as things stand, Walmart makes good use of their local infrastructure to do deliveries of even stuff like refrigerated food, lets you select a time window for delivery based on demand (price varies) and gives you a one-hour delivery window, which is way better if you want to pick the stuff up without it sitting around for a long time at a doorstep.
I was particularly happy when I discovered that I could get bottles of soda (heavy, mostly water) delivered inexpensively.
But what Walmart doesn’t have is the huge inventory. For what Walmart does have, they’re great. But Amazon’s got more stuff.
Is this actually credible?? (lemm.ee)
US intelligence officials share evidence that Russia has used North Korean missiles to strike Ukraine (kyivindependent.com)
The U.S. Ministry of Defense’s Intelligence Service reported that Russia has used North Korean ballistic missiles to strike Ukraine....
Russia Says It's Assembled a Lithography Machine, Will Make 350nm Chips Soon (www.extremetech.com)
As ‘Fallout 76′ Crosses 20 Million Players Amid Success of Amazon TV Series, Bethesda Game Studios’ Todd Howard Talks Franchise’s Future (variety.com)
Iceland volcano eruption throws spectacular 160-foot-high wall of lava toward Grindavík | Live Science (www.livescience.com)
Icelandic authorities said residents and emergency responders should be ready to evacuate Grindavík at short notice after a new and ongoing eruption on the Reykjanes Peninsula.
New York governor to launch bill banning smartphones in schools (www.theguardian.com)
Framework boosts its 13-inch laptop with new CPUs, lower prices, and better screens (arstechnica.com)
Key misinformation “superspreaders” on Twitter: Older women (arstechnica.com)
LIVE UPDATES: TRUMP GUILTY ON ALL COUNTS IN HUSH-MONEY CASE (www.nytimes.com)
edit: I have changed my title to match the new NYTimes headline. Sorry about the all caps, I guess they are really excited about this lol...
Biden gives Ukraine permission to carry out limited strikes within Russia using US weapons (www.cnn.com)
More than 90% of chickenpox cases in New York City outbreak among unvaccinated people (abcnews.go.com)
Just 1.4% of cases were among people who received two vaccine doses.
OpenAI Says Russia and China Used Its A.I. in Covert Campaigns (www.nytimes.com)
Iran and an Israeli company also exploited the tools in online influence efforts, but none gained much traction, an OpenAI report said....
Michigan state trooper accused of fatally hitting a fleeing suspect with an SUV is charged with murder (www.cnn.com)
Ship attacked by Yemen's Houthi rebels was full of grain bound for Iran, the group's main benefactor (apnews.com)
US Officials: A Russian Rocket Launch Last Week Likely Deployed A Space Weapon (soylentnews.org)
NEW 2024 Framework Laptop 13 (Intel Core Ultra Series 1) (www.youtube.com)
Amazon execs may be personally liable for tricking users into Prime sign-ups (arstechnica.com)
Poland unveils details of €2.4bn fortification of eastern borders (notesfrompoland.com)