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Submission + - SPAM: Honk Kong Protesters And Mainland Chinese Square Off Inside GTA5 Online

dryriver writes: CNN reports: Popular online video game "Grand Theft Auto V" has become a battleground between protesters in the semi-autonomous Chinese city and their rival players in mainland China. ( [spam URL stripped]... ) The online duel began after Hong Kong players discovered that their in-game avatars could dress like protesters, wearing black clothing, gas masks and yellow safety helmets. They shared the discovery last week on LIHKG, a social media platform and discussion forum similar to Reddit that is popular in Hong Kong. Mainland Chinese gamers were quick to notice, and several of them subsequently took to the Twitter-like social media platform Weibo to call on other players to defeat their Hong Kong rivals. Using a derogatory term adopted by some police officers to refer to protesters, one Weibo user posted: "Cockroaches expressed their desire to kill GTA and beat us, the war in this game may become more fierce and fierce. Are you ready?" Other Weibo users responded by posting screenshots of their characters dressed as riot police and wielding guns, with the posts captioned: "Ready!" Several intense battles played out simultaneously, according to Hong Kong gamer Mickey Chang, who is in his 20s and plays games that are live-streamed on the YouTube channel Minilife HK. Protester avatars threw petrol bombs at riot police controlled by mainland gamers, who responded with water cannons and tear gas. In the end, the mainlanders emerged victorious as they overwhelmed the Hong Kong protesters through sheer numbers, Chang told CNN Business.
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Submission + - SPAM: Ask Slashdot: How Do You See The World In The 2020s ? 1

dryriver writes: The 2010s were not necessarily the greatest decade to live through. AAA computer games were not only DRMd and Internet tethered to death but became increasingly formulaic and pay-to-win driven, and poor quality console ports pissed off PC gamers. Forced software subscriptions for major software products you could previously buy became a thing. Personal privacy went out the window in ways too numerous to list, with lawmakers failing on many levels to regulate the tech, data mining and internet advertising companies in any meaningful way. Severe security vulnerabilities were found in hundreds of different tech products, from Intel CPUs to baby monitors and Internet connected doorbells. Thousands of tech products shipped with microphones, cameras and internet connectivity integrated that couldn't be switched off with an actual hardware switch. Many electronics products became harder or impossible to repair yourself. Printed manuals coming with tech products became almost non-existent. Hackers, scammers, ransomwarers and identity thieves caused more mayhem than ever before. Trollfarms, Clickfarms and fake news factories damaged the integrity of the Internet as an information source. Tech companies and media companies became afraid of pissing off the Chinese government. Windows turned into a big piece of spyware. Intel couldn't be bothered to innovate until AMD Ryzen came along. Nvidia somehow took a full decade to make really basic realtime raytracing happen, even though smaller GPU maker Imagination with a fraction of the budget had done it years earlier, and in a mobile GPU to boot. Top of the line smartphones became seriously expensive. Censorship and shadow banning on the once more open Internet became a thing. Easily triggered people trying to muzzle other people on social media became a thing. The quality of popular music and music videos went steadily downhill. Star Wars went to shit after Disney bought it, as did the Star Trek films. And mainstream cinema turned into an endless VFX heavy comic book movies, remakes/reboots and horror movies fest. In many ways, Television was the biggest winner of the 2010s, with many new TV shows with film-like production values being made. The second winner may be computer hardware that delivered more storage/memory/performance per Dollar than ever before. To the question: What, dear Slashdotters, will the 2020s bring us? Will things get better in tech and other things relevant to nerds, or will they get worse?

Submission + - SPAM: Jordan Peterson Explains Bluntly Why Your Creative Ideas Probably Won't Make It

dryriver writes: In a short lecture titled "The Curse Of Creativity" that has made it onto Youtube ( [spam URL stripped]?... ), well known psychologist Jordan Peterson explains surprisingly candidly why your creativity and creative ideas will likely make you neither rich, nor famous, nor happy, nor successful. A lot of times people are told "Follow your dreams. If you can work hard enough and intelligently enough and be determined enough, you can make it." Jordan Peterson tells a completely different story based on his experience as a clinical psychologist. Peterson says that getting a creative idea, like a completely new product or invention, or even a new category of invention, onto the world market and making actual money from it is incredibly difficult. "You will very likely fail and be miserable, like most other people who tried before you", Peterson says. According to Peterson, the real world rejects creative ideas and innovations routinely, many consumers don't understand at all what they are looking at when they see a completely new product or innovation or why they would need it, and the widely popularized idea that venture capitalists or angel inventors will benevolently help you become rich and successful is a complete myth as well. Peterson say that even IF you get your idea working and looked at and someone with deep pockets wants to commercialize it, you will likely lose CONTROL of your invention — the money people and marketers don't need YOU to market the product or invention, and will try their darnest to cut you out of the process and make your product or innovation THEIRS. Peterson says that venture capitalists will not honor your idealist vision of what your creative idea should be like in the real world. They will try to impose a "guaranteed return on investment" model onto your original vision, and you can either take the money and shut up, or the venture capitalist wanders off to look at hundreds of other new ideas that may also make money. Peterson calls trying to make a living based on creative output a "high risk high return strategy". He says that you will very likely fail to make it at all, just like thousands of other people who tried before and got nowhere. He says that you will likely be miserably unhappy and financially insecure if you go down the creative route. The only ray of light mentioned by Peterson? If you DO manage to beat the terrible odds and become one of the handful of people who actually succeed, which isn't likely, the financial reward can be staggering.
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Submission + - SPAM: Ask Slashdot: Will Future TVs Be Able To DeepFake Actor Faces In Realtime? 1

dryriver writes: We've all seen the DeepFake videos on Youtube, where a different actor's face from the original is digitally inserted into a film scene. Some of these DeepFakes are actually quite convincing. DeepFakes are currently computationally intensive, but may one day happen in realtime on hardware custom made to accelerate the process. Now to the question: Will this "digital face swapping" be a realtime feature in future TVs some day? Will people be able to say to their TV "I don't like this actor/actress. Replace him/her with _actorname_ please"? Or watch a 100 Million Dollar movie with their own face on an actor's body, essentially making the TV owner the star of the movie playing? Will this perhaps become so normal some day that people in the future look back at our era and say "In those days, you couldn't choose which actors to watch any given piece of content with. Technology wasn't as advanced as it is today back then."?

Comment Company Mistreats Worker, News At 10 (Score 1, Insightful) 31

Britain runs on a very extreme form of capitalism, and British courts rarely punish British businesses for missteps. This is obvious from the word "perceived" in the ruling - "This was a revenge attack for a _perceived_ slight you had suffered." In other words, the company probably DID treat this man like shit - maybe a superior shouted abuse at him over some little thing - and the man, pissed by how he was treated, wanted to get the company back. Again, British courts rarely rule against British companies that engage in wrongdoing. As long as you make money for Britain's economy, you are a "good old chap just doing what business requires".

Submission + - SPAM: Ask Slashdot: Precisely What Is The Deal With Magnet Motors?

dryriver writes: PESwiki.com ( [spam URL stripped]:... ) maintains a pages long directory of news about inventors publicizing claimed "working magnet motors" — mechanical devices that use various properties of magnets to achieve rotation and generate electrical power. In each case there is the name of the inventor/company, a basic description of how the device works, a date of publication, and then "will be coming to market soon... bla bla bla...". No working Magnet Motor has ever made it to market as the site itself points out. Some people think this is because Magnet Motors cannot work due to Physics and the people building them are scammers, and some people believe that these inventors/companies are essentially grabbed by the throat before they can go to market with a working device and told to "shut down the project before something happens to you". What is the truth about these mythical devices that inventor after inventor claims to be working on in dozens of countries around the world? Are Magnet Motors physically impossible to make? Or are they "not allowed" because these relatively inexpensive electricity generating devices would wreak havoc with the stability of the Petrodollar economy that governs the world?
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Comment Bullets don't ricochet in games (Score 2) 92

As far as the modeling of the guns goes, its a simple bunch of variables, timers and maybe the odd physics or virtual spring formula that determines how the "gun" behaves. You can even use a virtual physics 3D cube constrained by virtual physics springs to model things like gun recoil or shake. Not difficult. The physics engine (e.g. Havok, PhysX) will do it for you in realtime. All realtime 3D game engines made in the last 20 years can also shoot virtual "rays" into the 3D scene at any angle you want with a single line of code, and report back where and at what angle collision with a 3D object occurred. That is how the game calculates where the bullet goes and what it hits, often placing a bullet hole decal - a simple texture with alpha channel - to make bullet holes. It models a straight line with maybe a "bullet falling due to gravity over distance" offset parameter. If you want to get fancy, any game physics engine worth 2 pennies can also model the flight behavior of a bullet using a simple 3D cube with mass. You don't have to use completely straight rays, but rather fire a simulated physics rigidbody into the 3D scene. An interesting aspect is that in almost no games, bullets ricochet off stones or metal items, which can also be modeled very easily with "rays". You shoot a 1st ray into the scene, it hits something, then you shoot a 2nd ray at an angle from the impact point, and you've got ricochet behavior modeled. But COD, Battlefield and so on don't do this the last time I checked, even though its dead easy to implement. What would it do to gameplay? When you fight someone in a tunnel or hall or other interior, you wouldn't have to aim right at your adversary. Bullets could ricochet off the walls/ceilings and still hit an adversary. No idea why game companies like EA can't be bothered to implement this, as it is dead simple. Just take the code or physics mechanism that takes the bullet from gun barrel to target, and "re-shoot" the bullet from the impact point at an angle. Online play would actually be more interesting with this mechanic, and things like grenades already bounce of walls - if they can do that, they can do bullet ricochets as well.

Submission + - SPAM: The 1968 Sci-Fi By John Brunner That Spookily Predicted Today

dryriver writes: BBC Culture has the story of financially struggling Sci-Fi author John Brunner, known for "Stand On Zanzibar" amongst other works, who accurately predicted the world we would live in in the 2010s back in the 1960s. Brunner got hooked by Sci-Fi aged only 6, when he read his grandfather's rare first edition copy of HG Wells’ The War of the Worlds. By age 9 he was writing stories about a Martian named Gloop. He got his first Sci-Fi story printed and widely read aged 17. Brunner was eerily accurate in predicting the world as it would be decades from when he was writing. In his 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, for instance, he peers ahead to imagine life in 2010, correctly forecasting wearable technology, Viagra, video calls, same-sex marriage, the legalisation of cannabis, and the proliferation of mass shootings. It features an organisation very similar to the European Union; it casts China as America’s greatest rival; its phones have connections to a Wikipedia-style encyclopaedia; people casually pop Xanax-style ‘tranks’; documents are run off on laser printers; and Detroit has become a shuttered ghost town and incubator of a new kind of music oddly similar to the actual Detroit techno movement of the 1990s. In his 1962 novella Listen! The Stars! he conjured up the ‘stardropper’, an addictive portable-media-player-like gizmo. In 1972, he published one of his most pessimistic novels, The Sheep Look Up, which prophesies a future blighted by extreme pollution and environmental catastrophe. And his 1975 novel, The Shockwave Rider, created a computer hacker hero before the world knew what one was. It also envisaged the emergence of computer viruses, something that early computer scientists dismissed as impossible. He even coined the use of the word ‘worm’ to describe them. So how did Brunner do it? To start with, he spent nearly three years reading up on topics from the role of genetic inheritance in disease to links between population spurts and urban violence. He also spent a month in the US in 1966, visiting Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York. Then, breaking with his usual work routine, instead of outlining his plot, he filled 60 pages with thoughts before hammering out a first draft. As he went, he devised a series of ‘parallel thought exercises’ to generate ideas. As Smith describes it, he imagined a Victorian time-traveller pitching up in the 1960s, and then pondered how he’d go about explaining to them everything from the telephone to the sexual revolution. The first was relatively simple, but accounting for the vast differences in cultural mores required him to examine countless cultural assumptions. “Then, he reversed the process, asking himself what those assumptions might mean for the future, how present environments might already be making us aware of those to come”, Smith explains. For instance, the ‘hobby-type saboteurs’ that pop up throughout the novel, getting their kicks through recreational violence, came to Brunner after he clocked the prevalence of Peter Pan syndrome on both sides of the Atlantic, and then read about kids vandalising public transport for fun.
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Comment The Elites Must Be Really Scared Of Us... (Score 1) 101

Surveillance, surveillance everywhere. Every move we make tracked. Who pushes and simultaneously escapes this surveillance? The 1% of the top 1% of earners. I hate to play conspiracy theorist, but maybe this finally is the "New World Order" these inbreds have wanted to push on humanity for decades. The elites are unsurveilled and powerful. We plebs are watched 24/7. Information is Power.

Comment Complete Nonsense (Score 1) 60

If you show an AI trained on Apples and Bananas an "unknown" Pineapple, all it has to do is do is do a reverse image search using that image - Tineye, Google image search can do that. That more often than not identifies the image as a "Pineapple", and leads to millions of other images of pineapples the AI can train on. How do difficult is "IF NOT APPLE OR BANANA OR UNSURE THEN DO REVERSE IMAGE SEARCH"? Is the AI locked in a steel box with no internet connection?

Submission + - SPAM: The BBC's 1992 TV Show About VR, 3D TVs With Glasses and Holographic 3D Screens 1

dryriver writes: 27 years ago, the BBC's "Tomorrow's World" show broadcast this little gem of a program — [spam URL stripped]?... . After showing old Red-Cyan Anaglyph movies, Victorian Stereoscopes, lenticular printed holograms and a monochrome laser hologram projected into a sheet of glass, the presenter shows off a stereoscopic 3D CRT computer display with active shutter glassses. The program then takes us to a laboratory at Masachussetts Institute Of Technology, where a supercomputer is feeding 3D wireframe graphics into the world's first glasses-free holographic 3D display prototype using a Tellurium Dioxide crystal. One of the researchers at the lab predicts that "years from now, advances in LCD technology may make this kind of display cheap enough to use in the home". A presenter then shows a bulky plastic VR headset larger than an Occulus Rift and explains how VR will let you experience completely computer generated worlds as if you are there. The presenter notes that 1992 VR headsets may be "too bulky" for the average user, and shows a mockup of much smaller VR glasses about the size of Magic Leap's AR glasses, noting that "these are already in development". What is astonishing about watching this 27 year old TV broadcast is a) the realization that much of today's stereo stereo 3D tech was already around in some form or the other in the early 1990s, b) VR headsets took an incredibly long time to reach the consumer and are still too bulky, and that c) almost 3 decades later, MIT's prototype holographic glasses-free 3D display technology never made its way into consumer hands or households.
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Comment If Microsoft Had Laid Off The Telemmetry In W10... (Score 4, Interesting) 93

... people would happily be using Win 10. Instead they turned it into a giant spyware turd that nobody trusts, so now everybody who has the means will be looking into creating their own national "secure" OS. This also means that most new commercial software will need to be far more portable than Windows software was. Just like state-of-the-art game engines can currently compile games to 4 or 5 different OSs, this new software will be Write Once Compile To Many. Or taking things even further, an open standard may emerge where software coded to that standard runs natively on just about any OS that supports it. Is this a good thing? For the end user, yes. For companies like Microsoft on the other hand it is the END of their closed OS tethered ecosystem. Who in their right mind will run Windows as their main OS if/when even 3D games are cross platform? That is Win 10's sole advantage right now - it can run productivity tools that you can find on other OSs, but the PC games ONLY run on Windows. Once that obstacle is gone, I suspect that few people will stay with Windows. The OS just has no tangible advantages that other OSs like Linux don't have. The new generations will probably prefer Android or iOS based PCs over MS's crapware in the first place. So this is probably the beginning of the end of Windows, save maybe for business that NEED to run Windows legacy software.

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