"it was rumored that hackers for big media companies had figured out a way to get through the defenses that were built into such systems, and run junk advertisements in your peripheral vision (or even spang in the ... middle all the time - even when your eyes were closed. Bud knew a guy like that who's somehow gotten infected with a meme that ran advertisements for roach motels, in Hindi, superimposed on the bottom right-hand corner of his visual field, twenty-four hours a day, until the guy whacked himself."
Want this job? Even if it doesn't get to the level of "all employees need to be running OurCorp Headware (tm)", being required to be running Microsoft Headwindows in order to get a job with medical benefits seems ominously plausible.
As the wikipedia article states, the WISE survey[1] results would have turned up Nemesis or anything like it, and did not. Currently most likely theory for the improbable distribution of objects beyond the Kuiper Cliff is Planet Nine.[2]
Yep. Vanilla had a few little bits of actual RPG peeking out here and there. They have long since been buffed out. Cash-extracting skinner box inside a pretty show, with a dash of e-sport and lobby game on the side seems to be a state WoW's owners are quite satisfied with.
As someone with a pair of nieces who are Roblox junkies and who did dabble with MUDs back in the day, I can assure you that Roblox has a ton of content that is put together by enthusiastic amateurs. And while it often has heart, soul, and seems fun for those playing, it definitely doesn't have excess polish. If anything, I'd say Minecraft content tends to be far more polished than Roblox content, even after allowing for relative graphics differences.
"Orbit War was a magazine game published by Steve Jackson Games in Space Gamer (Issue 66 - Nov 1983). This release was followed by an expansion published in Space Gamer (Issue 67 - Jan 1984) and later by the boxed edition.
It is a simulation of satellite warfare in low Earth orbit. The players are the USA and the APU (Asian-Polish Union). The object is of course to destroy your opponent's satellites and such..."
After reading, "Novichok agents: a historical, current, and toxicological perspective"[1] it looks like the only places to have produced such agents are Russian chemical weapon labs and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons Central Analytical Database.
Maybe someone who works in the field can provide some more evidence either way?
I find it interesting that everyone is presuming this is an accident.
If something like this were to happen in cyberpunk RPG the players would assume that with a billion dollars on the line the hedge fund had either hired a hacker or suborned a Citibank employee in order to make certain they got paid. (As a hedge fund, lawyering up to hang onto the money once you have it is comparatively cheap.
Which is a far more convincing argument when someone can point to a well-documented set of predictions, than when they claim "I'm right a lot" and try to get you to fall for an association fallacy.
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.” - Carl Sagan
If you want to see what someone who is credibly trying to predict events look at the work of Nate Silver or Nassim Taleb. When you obsess over one prediction by person most known for comedy and questionable personal statements, it's neither difficult nor inappropriate to put them in the clown category.
If Adams himself wants to build his reputation as a prognosticator, he can easily create a publicly-verifiable record of them and any questions of his ability will answer itself in short order. That he has not (to the best of my knowledge) done so makes him look like a huckster.
Before he pegged my personal BS meter and I just started ignoring anything from him that I happened across, I noticed that Adams seemd fond of a lot of "cold-reader" type tricks: vagueness that can be turned into specifics after the fact, ignoring their own failures while hyping their successes, that kind of thing.
If you want to see what actual serious prediction attempts look like, search for Nate Silver or Nassim Taleb.
I guess I'm out of sync with the times. For some reason, my first thought on seeing the title was that it would be about some clever new tricks with the ANSI ATM standard.
When the Soviet-Afghan War started in 1979, the population of Afghanistan was 13.41 million. Current population is 38.93 million.[2] Afghans who were 14 or older when that war started make up less than 7% of the population.[1]
While I don't doubt that many Afghans would like a more stable country, I'm skeptical that a large portion of them have any real idea of what their country was once like. (Nor do I know how accurate and the Westernized portrayals I've seen really were.)
SF author and marine biologist Peter Watts has a trilogy on a very similar premise, where an early "fork" of life (that is actually more efficient than our entire tree of life) got stuck down in the ocean depths at the dawn of time, until we accidentally bring it up.
"Trithemius' most famous work, Steganographia (written c. 1499; published Frankfurt, 1606), was placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1609 and removed in 1900. This book is in three volumes, and appears to be about magic—specifically, about using spirits to communicate over long distances. However, since the publication of a decryption key to the first two volumes in 1606, they have been known to be actually concerned with cryptography and steganography. Until recently, the third volume was widely still believed to be solely about magic, but the "magical" formulae have now been shown to be covertexts for yet more cryptographic content."
The Girardoni air rifle was used in military service from the late 18th through early 19th centuries, and saw civilian use for some time after that. It was a very high-tech weapon for the time, and while finicky and expensive offered some unique advantages and was quite deadly. The Lewis & Clark expedition famously used a couple.
Perhaps not less intelligent, but just possessed of a mental framework that was less capable.
From a paper describing "the Romulus and Remus hypothesis"[1],
"the leap from rich-vocabulary non-recursive communication system to recursive language 70,000 years ago was associated with acquisition of a novel component of imagination, called Prefrontal Synthesis, enabled by a mutation that slowed down the prefrontal cortex maturation simultaneously in two or more children"
-Neal Stephenson The Diamond Age