Social Hooper McFinney's RPF Bar & Grille 7.5 - "Loving the lens flare since 1977!” -!

PS4 basically steamrolled the competition which actually wasn't hard.

"The only way Microsoft could make this worse is if they had, like, a racist DRM mascot. If they had Jar Jar Binks."

 

Ah, but that's the Cunning Plan of it, and which you have missed with your gloriously superior physicist's brain I wasn't talking about PRISM looking up your PayStation profile. I meant PRISM looking up your Xbawks profiles. You think the extra hundred bucks is for superior hardware, but it's actually that the NSA subsidised Sony to price their unPRISMed product lower, leaving you to mistakenly conclude that you were getting a better product out of Microsoft just because the pricetag was higher, when in fact you're paying the NSA to monitor your gaming traffic on Cawadoody 12! Never go in against a Sicilian when PRISM is on the line!

 

PRISM makes me feel like I live in a near-future cyberpunk world where you're always connected and always monitored.

Luckily that only makes me excited for robo-legs.

 

For me, this is honestly the most exciting thing to come out at E3 so far.....

Spoiler: Reveal Trailer Spoiler Thingie

Dat classic music!

And in other news, http://www.ign.com/articles/2013/06/11/marvel-assembles-lego-variant-covers]apparently[/url] this is happening. Which is good.

 

ok... both of the major consoles this generation just look... so very, very stupid.

 

Just watched the Sony conference since I missed it due to work Honestly, its been a while since I felt like a kid again now that I can look forward to a new console and a whole bunch of sweet new games that will be coming out for it!

 

Sony dropped the mic.

No, seriously. It was awesome.

 

"Sharing games on PS4" more or less redefined the art of utter and complete ownage.

 

It's funny. People keep saying that "shots were fired" when they reference that video. Shots weren't fired.

That's more like Sony giving Microsoft a high-five.

In the face.

With a chair.

For giving them such a golden opportunity to utterly crush them at E3.

 

You are being watched.

 

All seriousness, I'm amazed how complacent people seem to be about the PRISM thing. As life moves more and more to the digital realm this will become a bigger and bigger invasion of privacy, and it is entirely clear that Microsoft and Apple et. al. are far more interested in maintaining good corporate relations with the government (understandably) than they are protecting your privacy.

 

Yeah but no one would feel violated or invaded if we didn't know about this thing. Ignorance is truly bliss.

We assume monitoring=police state but we're already monitored a ridiculous amount. I always assumed I was being watched (and really, being seven feet tall, people are always staring), so I guess I could worry about who is watching me or just get on with living my life.

 

The difference being, though, that the monitoring you have is subject to the rule of law. Generally a government authority isn't allowed to follow you around, look through your trash, read your e-mails, tap your phones, unless a court authorises it. And because the application to the court is usually in secret and you're not around to contest it, judges as a group tend to be pretty leery of allowing it unless there's pretty damn compelling evidence that says it should take place. That, I would venture, is why most people are complacent about the monitoring aspects of your lives: because either the monitoring is thought benign, or they believe the system ensures people are not monitored who don't in some way "deserve" it.

PRISM is a lot larger than that. PRISM, per the original Guardian articles, was put in place specifically because the NSA felt hamstrung by FISA warrants in particular -- i.e. a court -- for permission to do what it's doing. They said the empowering Act for FISA was "broken", but neither did they go and ask Congress to fix it, presumably because they thought Congress wouldn't do so. If I were an optimist I'd say Congress wouldn't "fix" it because the US people wouldn't let them.

So instead they simply used PRISM to take --and they are still taking -- what they want from the companies. PRISM does not seem to require them to have a warrant to reach into youtube, skype, Google, etc, etc and grab your information as suggested. They can just go in and take it. And that authority seems to be granted at law. Democrats and Republicans share the blame on this, if that's true, because they've both had the White House since 2007 and therefore both had the authority to stop this.

I don't believe Google and friends when they deny the NSA has direct access to their servers, because that's their public statement. They can afford to do nothing else but deny it and hope the whole thing blows over. The source material for PRISM comes from an internal presentation to NSA staff, and explicitly says direct access to those various servers. I'm more inclined to believe internal briefings where the public is not thought to be watching over the statements of CEOs who must be sweating bullets over this whole thing.

Also, more generally, believe me: just because you've got nothing to hide doesn't mean you have nothing to fear. That dishonest statement has been used by governments and authorities of all kinds to ground many of the political or false prosecutions throughout history. A person's less likely to ping the servers if they aren't hosting Black Panther websites and talking over fascist white regimes over e-mail, obviously; being grey and uninteresting is effective camoflague in the wild just as it is in civilisation. Just don't think that camoflague makes you safe, or make you immune. History is full of innocent people who innocently wandered into stings; Google up the ABC Trial, or the "Nuclear Triggers" case for high-profile examples in our own time. And now, especially now, be careful what your search terms are in Google. The dude at the NSA might not think that "How to make a bomb" is just you referring to the production process behind Plan 9 From Outer Space, even if you do.

 

Personally, I'd advise you all to chill out because I applied for an NSA job once and I assure you that means there was already an extensive file on everyone in the RPF.

Edit: Which would tie into my other point - I suspect the widespread complacency is due to the fact that most folks probably already figured that was the case.

 

Which reminds me, I still need to see Part One.

 

you should ramza. it was surprisingly good.

 

Trimaj is right Ramza. The first was really good, but in a different way than the LotR films. Definitely not a *bomb*. It just felt more.....personal is the best word I've got for it at the moment, rather than *bomb*bastically epic. I have a feeling the second Hobbit film won't be a *bomb* either. Especially based on what I've seen in that *bomb*-diggity trailer.

 

GAH PLAYSTATION 2 ON HIDEF SCREEN



Way, way too many cheats related to CRT specs in the graphics coding. Although I suppose if I was worried about graphics I wouldn't be playing PS2 games.

Edit: Although it turns out you can fix it significantly by turning sharpness off. Which is a hell of a reduction considering factory default is, like, 20.

 

I enjoyed the Hobbit, but it's still a messy movie and the whole trilogy idea bugs me because it's so shameless.

 

BOSTON JUST WIN IT ALREADY