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 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."

-Neal Stephenson The Diamond Age

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.

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.

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

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.

"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.

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.