Viewing profile — zipwitch

"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 periph…

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…

"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." Here's a piece on the origin of the quote: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2011/08/09/remain-solvent/

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 distribut…

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 …

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 enth…

That's before taking into account enemy attempts to jam, spoof, or otherwise disrupt your control link.

"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 -…

>Every decent chemist can produce that stuff. After reading, "Novichok agents: a historical, current, and toxicological perspective"[1] it looks like the only places to have produc…

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…

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 ass…

"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 Wrig…

Here's a small piece on a few of Scott Adams' predictions, discussing how they weren't anything special: http://helvegr.com/2018/09/29/lets-score-the-accuracy-of-sco... Before he p…

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.

That lost legion probably is. The ones Publius Quinctilius Varus lost (along with his head) are quite well documented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Teutoburg_Forest

The median age in Afghanistan is ninteen .[1] When the Soviet-Afghan War started in 1979, the population of Afghanistan was 13.41 million. Current population is 38.93 million.[2] A…

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…

Mentioning cryptography and magic makes me think of Steganographia written in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganographia "Trithemius' most famous wor…

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 …

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-voc…

In SF author Neal Stephenson's latest book, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell there is a hoax to convince people that Moab, Utah has been destroyed by a nuclear weapon. A cyberattack takes t…

Possibly politically motivated? Especially if the real motivation is not the BTC scam, but the access to who knows how many DMs for possibly blackmail/propaganda down the line. (An…

From an 1841 speech to the British House of Commons on the dangers of increased copyright times: At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who in…

As an American from birth, and speaking for myself, it's not hating my country. It's frustration and sometimes anger at our failure to do better. I believe that doing better than w…