How about we propose that anyone visiting Newt Gingrich's website should be charged with a felony? It's just as harmful.

His proposal does just as much to undermine the Constitution of the United States as any AQ or ISIS propaganda. Let's all be glad he no longer holds public office, and hope he never does again.

...the current generation of VR is going to become mainstream. Demand drives the market, after all.

The internet is for porn, and now VR is too.

The shotgun's pieces are very clearly an amalgamation of other weapon parts. Magazine, grip, fore-end, sight, upper rail, etc. have all been blatantly taken from a variety of weapons and pieced together as something new. I can't see all of the details of other assets from work, but that one is a pretty easy sell.

Even in the best case scenario (for them), Trek's integrity will be in question from here on out.

If the asset theft is relegated to only 1 in-game model, then the whole thing could be chalked up to a single employee making a very poor decision on behalf of the company (something like this would probably be explicitly prohibited in one's employment contract). They'd get to the source, correct the wrongdoing, and apologize to Activision and their customers, hopefully regaining consumer confidence in the long term.

If the case is severe, then they can't be trusted at all and are undeserving of further consumer interest and money. They'll reap what they have sown.

I dug a little deeper, into the dregs of reddit, and found some pretty compelling evidence that Trek is most likely stealing assets, chopping them up and reconfiguring them so as to mask their efforts, reskinning them (maybe), and then releasing them as their own "new" content. There are numerous side-by-side images of how in-game models have been taken from other games and incorporated into Guardians.

It's piss poor; how difficult is it to take a modern, real-world battle rifle (for example) and turn it into a futuristic looking battle rifle? Add some extra parts, change the sights, maybe put some glowing bits and a fancy muzzle adapter...and voila, brand new gun which has never been seen anywhere, ever before!

Pretty fucking scummy. Orion games are still fun, but I'm not going to willingly support stealing intellectual property.

Does "junk status" refer to its extremely low price, or is it an opinion of the quality of the games themselves?
If their junk status is regarding the price, that's just Trek's way of getting as many eyes on their projects as possible; they'd rather have 10000 copies sell at $1, than 1000 copies at $10, which I can understand. Their tactics have been successful in this respect -- about 2M copies of Prelude have sold, and over 150K copies of "Guardians of Orion" AKA "The Orion Project" (I can't tell which name they want to use...I'll just call it Guardians for brevity) have sold. Caveat: there has been at least 1 Steam Free Weekend for Prelude, and Guardians is only several months into Early Access, so we can assume it will get more front-page attention w/ sales upon release.
If junk status is about the quality of the game, then I suppose YMMV. Blasting hordes of dinosaurs, monsters, and robots with all sorts of weaponry is not for everyone,

IMO, these games are actually pretty decent for their niche. "Prelude" was very rough when it first released a few years back, but the devs stuck by their work and made continuous improvements for 2 solid years. It is a now competent game with multiple modes of play. Guardians is in early Alpha, and is pretty well playable at this point. It lacks many of the features of Prelude, but you can clearly see from where Trek has derived its sequel, and where they intend to take it. Mainly, the new game replaces the aged Unreal 3 engine with Unreal 4, which ought to give it potential for another 5-10 years.

If you like shooters, especially those team-based PvE, the Orion games are well worth a buck. Hell, it's probably worth purchasing a few copies to give to your buddies, so they don't have an excuse not to try it out. Even in the worst case, you're out what...$5?

Your mistake was that you replied to someone who doesn't feel like putting up with your attitude.

Starting your own comment chain would have avoided "whiny little gits" altogether. You like chiming in because it gives you the opportunity to call people cutesy names or thinly- or un-veiled insults, without actually providing anything substantive to the discussion.

I won't be reading any further replies here. You've already wasted too much of my time.

Cheers.

Speaking of semantic escapes...

If you didn't intend to reply to me specifically, then perhaps you should not have replied to a specific post. The button says "Reply to This", not "Use this as a jumping-off point", so I'm sure you can understand why I would think you are directing your reply to me.

Cheers.

The rant was not solely about government. After all, who creates the technology which they utilize for surveillance?

Spying is spying, regardless of whether it comes from a state entity, corporation, or NGO.

We've created a sprawling, interconnected network of immense capacity for storage and bandwidth which we use for nearly every necessary and unnecessary task in our lives. We fail to adequately encrypt the vast majority of our communications. We give our governments free rein to do with it what they please.

Is anyone actually surprised that the single greatest tool in human creation has also been the same thing which enables an extraordinary amount of basic human rights violations?

The irony is that criminal marketeers heavily utilize encryption, dark nets, etc., in order to avoid most surveillance. Law-abiding citizens are actually spied on more often than explicitly illegal organizations.

And some people think our governments should have backdoors to encryption algorithms? Get your heads out of your asses.

Indeed.

Even after this story aired, his company tried to offer their services to Facebook and were met with a resounding "No." At the time, they had barely opened their doors to non-students (or were, perhaps, just about to effect that change) and had no real concern regarding sex offenders or criminals.

An ounce of prevention, they say...

This is true, even at a technological level.

My buddy had a company in the 2000s which specialized, in part, in this type of tracking. If you recall a story from 2008 when ~29000 or so sex offenders' accounts were banned from MySpace (my, how times have changed), resulting in a number of arrests, his technology helped.

What's the over/under on the majority of these misogynistic women self-identify as "feminists"?

I would appreciate it more if the company just came out and stated what they were doing, rather than hiding behind some bullshit "anti-piracy" statements.

I can understand someone trying to sell me shit, as long as they're calling it shit. Once they try to play it off as something else, I lose any respect for them.

Well stated.

Furthermore, wouldn't it be considered discriminatory to hire a person to simply to fulfill a certain demographic quota, when there may be another, better-qualified individual applying for the same position at the same pay?

These numbers are effectively arbitrary, especially without knowing about the demographics, skills, certifications, qualifications, etc., of the applicants.

Articles such as this suggest a lot of things in a very hypocritical manner, or are at least exceedingly one-sided in scope. The author is jumping to conclusions without having any data to back it up.