TwinIon

The Verge has more. Don't like those big evil banks controlling your money? Great! Just let an association made up of trustworthy tech companies like Uber, Lyft, Ebay, Paypal, Facebook, financial service companies, and venture capitalists handle your cash instead. Want to embrace crypto to get out from under the heel of burdensome regulations? Great, just put your financial transactions in the hands of a merciless megacorp with no particular need to service you as a customer and no system of recourse should anything go wrong. Think middlemen companies like Visa and Mastercard provide no value and are just sucking money out of the system? Don't worry, they're already partners leading the charge. Don't trust Facebook? Great, they really promise to keep your transaction history separate from your advertising profile. Their word is their bond! The thing is, there is a real need for a lot of unbanked people to be able to safely secure and transfer money, and mobile based system makes a lot of sense. It's why things like M-Pesa have been so successful in places like Kenya. At the same time, I have a hard time imagining that's where Facebook's real intentions lay. They're looking for the "meaningful side effects" of billions of people transacting directly over Facebook. I doubt their real driving incentives have to do with helping out the unbanked African folks move around a couple bucks. If they're able to provide a useful service to that population, great. (and I mean that sincerely) There's also a potential use case for a solid digital currency to move money across countries regularly. If you're living in the states and sending money back to your family elsewhere, something like this could be safe, stable, and easy enough to be useful. I'd still tell such a person to be wary and not store money there if at all possible, but there is a real need there that could genuinely help a vulnerable population. For everyone else that already has access to any kind of banking infrastructure, the people that I think Facebook actually wants to make money from, I wouldn't touch this with a ten foot pole. The potential consequences of giving Facebook even nominal control over financial transactions is mildly horrifying, and nothing about their incentive structure makes me think much good can come from this.

That's kinda funny, since the GOP party platform says: It doesn't support Statehood for DC.

To a PC, or a Steam link (which I do own). Steam link for iOS only just launched, so I haven't had a chance to try it. What I'm most interested in is having games be more like movies in that basically every screen I own can play that content. Almost every screen or device can play Netflix, Amazon, Vudu, etc. That is far from the case with games, though steam link is getting closer now that it works on iOS.

I'm certainly interested in streaming games, even if I'm unlikely to use Stadia or similar products anytime soon. The thing that interests me most about streaming is the portability of the experience, even just in my own home. I've got a decent home theater setup where I can watch movies from 4K Blu Rays, but I still watch Netflix in the kitchen or in my office, or stream a football game to my iPad if I'm only half paying attention to it. I like having that flexibility to watch almost everything everywhere, even if I have a "premium" experience available to me. That's what I want from game streaming. I want to be able to play a couple missions downstairs while my wife has friends over to watch Drag Race. From what it sounds like, Xbox local streaming might be all I need for that kind of thing, but if games ever had a "digital copy" model like movies do, I'd use it from time to time. I imagine the best experience will be locally rendered for some time, but if the overall experience can improve and I can get that ability to play anywhere, I'll be interested.

Another brutal BO showing. John Wick 3's performance is even more impressive in retrospect.

On the bright side, at least the LCS will only cost $13B instead of the $400B we've spent on the 35, and they're already much closer to selecting a successor. Far as I can tell the sixth gen fighters are pretty far out.

Here's a nice early look into iPadOS that has me pretty hopeful about the update. I'm also hopeful that Apple requiring apps to support the windowing system will help. It's really annoying to use an app like Google Hangouts and not be able to slide it over.

Odd, since I got it from the Times. I agree it's not completely a kids table, but I'm also not too worried about Warren standing out until the field narrows a bit.

Here are the lineups for the debates: Night One: June 26 Cory Booker, senator from New Jersey Julián Castro, former housing secretary Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York John Delaney, former representative from Maryland Tulsi Gabbard, representative from Hawaii Jay Inslee, governor of Washington Amy Klobuchar, senator from Minnesota Beto O’Rourke, former representative from Texas Tim Ryan, representative from Ohio Elizabeth Warren, senator from Massachusetts Night Two: June 27 Michael Bennet, senator from Colorado Joseph R. Biden Jr., former vice president Pete Buttigieg, mayor of South Bend, Ind. Kirsten Gillibrand, senator from New York Kamala Harris, senator from California John Hickenlooper, former governor of Colorado Bernie Sanders, senator from Vermont Eric Swalwell, representative from California Marianne Williamson, self-help author Andrew Yang, former tech executive Kind of annoying that Warren is separated from the rest of the top 5.

I don't know all of it, but I think of the Littoral combat ship as being kinda like the boat version of an F-35. Maybe they're not quite as broken, but they're supposed to be a do it all kinda thing and haven't been able to do much of anything, at an enormous cost. The fact that they're not using them here emphasizes their uselessness.

It's bizarre that the White house feels the need to contradict the owners. The Japanese aren't even saying Iran didn't do it, just contradicting the story of how it happened. It just makes it feel like you're making up who did it when you can't even agree on what happened in the first place.

The critics I follow keep describing it as "weird," and everyone seems to uniformly love Forky. I didn't need any incentives to see this, but a little weirdness sounds good to me.

Thanks to Gamepass I'm checking out some games that I never bothered to pick up, so I gave FH4 a shot last night for a couple hours. As a brief preface, I don't think I've put any real time into a "pure" racing game since Gran Turismo on the PS3, and even that one I didn't get too into. I played some of the OG Forza on the Xbox, and while I might have played some of the sequel, it wasn't for long. Given that, I was freaking blown away by FH4. The graphics look great in 4K HDR on the One X (I haven't tried the performance option yet), but I really loved how it just gets to it. The opening sequence is amazing, and it wastes no time in showing you what the game can be. Having an open world instead of a horrific menu system is great fun, and the variety of driving opportunities in the first hours is wonderful. I also really love the rewind feature. I obviously want to get good enough to not need it much, but it's such a good learning tool. This is the first racing game I've played since I've actually driven on a race course (only for a few days in a 15' vette) and the first racing game since I started following motorsports (F1 mostly), so I'm trying to play in the cockpit view and I turned off traction control and ABS, though I'm leaving the racing line on. The instant rewind is so great at allowing me to be competitive while still very much learning how to drive in this game. It has me wanting a steering wheel after only a couple hours. I know most of my impressions are from having missed the boat for so long, but it was quite amazing to jump right into such a brilliant game. I have no freaking clue what half the systems in the game are, but I'm glad the game doesn't make you learn all about them before just letting you play. The game just so desperately wants you to love cars and race as much as possible, it's wonderful.

They need to pad out their catalog for their inevitable subscription service. Once it transitions to a streaming service, it'll save them a lot of money if you're streaming SNES games for $15 a month.

I can't seem to get it to work on the PC. I'm certain that I'm signed up to Gamepass, as I've been able to download games on the Xbox. I've updated windows and downloaded the beta Xbox app, but when I click to "play a game with gamepass" it just asks me to sign up.

Sometimes I wonder if Xi is sufficiently annoyed with the tariff nonsense that he'd work against Trump. Putin is easily getting his money's worth, but I don't know if Xi is quite as happy. Then again, maybe Xi would probably take the tariffs in exchange for an incompetent running the US every day of the week.

This is a very odd and completely pointless list. Many of these things, like paper maps, CDs, Music players, landline phones, and DVDs, are already long since obsolete. It'll be a while before all of these things go extinct, but obsolescence is long since past.

It's going to get some push back just because it's not using the actors and designs from the MCU, but those character models just don't look good. I also kinda hate these trailers that want to just hint at what gameplay could be, but aren't actually ready to show it.

This was a dumb argument and served no purpose the first time around, we really don't need to rehash it.

Because it was running at 720p over a wired connection. The ability to stream games at 720p in an ideal scenario isn't particularly impressive. Stadia is promising 4K60 with HDR and surround sound, and I doubt they'll be alone in that. Maybe this is the demo they knew they could get to work on the floor at E3, but it's not the kind of thing that sells me on the tech.

I never played it. Maybe I'll try the remaster.

Hard to tell how fun or interesting the combat is from a video, but it looks like it has potential. As far as the episodic nature of the game, if they make each episode worth full price, it's fine by me. If it's clearly one game split into multiple pieces, that's a problem.

In a not particularly impressive demo, Engadget says that it seems to work well enough playing Halo 5 at 720p60. Of course, the real kicker is that they were playing on a phone wired to ethernet.

I find it so odd that this same discussion comes up every time a console launches. It doesn't matter how powerful a console is, 60 fps is never going to be guaranteed, and might never even be standard. Quadruple the horsepower that devs have, and most will still opt to put more resources into everything but the frame rate. No matter how powerful a device is, it still has limited resources. No matter how powerful a device is, it still takes more resources to render a scene at a higher frame rate. If a game like Halo or Forza prioritizes frame rate over other effects, there is nothing keeping them from doing so in current hardware, and indeed we see that. If a game like HZD or GoW prioritizes visual fidelity (or anything else) over frame rate, it doesn't matter how much horsepower there is behind the scenes, they'll use it. The biggest reason for this is and always has been, very simple: 30 fps is good enough, and most people don't notice or care about any increase. As long as that remains the case, devs will almost always be incentivized to put horsepower towards towards everything other than extra frames. More physics, more effects, more resolution, more whatever, as long as you hit a solid 30fps. I have no doubt that Scarlet and the PS5 will be capable of putting out everything we get now at higher resolutions and higher frame rates. That doesn't at all mean that developers will suddenly change their minds to prioritize frame rates over anything else they could be doing with the hardware at their disposal.

That doesn't look very good.