True treasures consignment

Last Friday, we introduced you to Luke Ross : a modder who now makes $20,000 a month on Patreon bringing big games like Grand Theft Auto V and Red Dead Redemption 2 to virtual reality. But the publisher of those games, Take-Two Interactive, was apparently not amused — and Patreon is now threatening to suspend his account unless he plays ball with a DMCA takedown. What does Take-Two want him to do? That’s not actually clear, but it’s looking like Ross will be forced to remove his VR mods anyhow. Here’s a copy of the message Ross says he received from Patreon on Wednesday morning, as provided to The Verge : Richard (Patreon) Jul 6, 2022, 8:54 AM PDT Hello, My name is Richard, and I’m contacting you from the Patreon Trust & Safety team We recently received a copyright claim for works you are making available on Patreon. Specifically, the claim comes from Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc., parent company of Rockstar Games, Inc. and 2K Games, Inc., who owns … [Read more...] about The GTA V modder we just wrote about has been slapped with a DMCA takedown

Editor's Note: July 2022 We've started the second-half of the year, so you know what that means: all those major product announcements back in January are now hitting the store shelves, whether digitally or at local brick-and-mortar retailers, and many of the best monitors have gotten updates this year. This includes a new entry on our list, the Gigabyte M32UC, an UHD curved gaming monitor that hits a sweet spot between price, performance, and features that make it a standout choice for gamers on a budget. - John Loeffler, US Computing Editor The best monitor for you will obviously depend on what you need it to do, whether it's gaming, photo editing, or including important features like picture-in-picture or multiple input sources. Fortunately, there is a monitor for every need on the market, but unfortunately, there are a lot of monitors with opaque names that make it nearly impossible to sift through them all to find the one you want. The computing team has done a lot … [Read more...] about Best monitor 2022: the best monitors for every budget

We're firmly in the world of the best 4K monitors now, and though 1080p and 1440p monitors are hardly obsolete, a whole new generation of 4K monitors have hit the market with better speeds and responsiveness, meaning having to sacrifice refresh rates for resolution are a thing of the past. You can now have both. The best monitors with the most visual clarity, at least the ones that aren't reserved for royalty who can afford the best 5K and 8K monitors , will make your movies and video games pop off the screen, while the best monitors for photo editing and video editing don't just offer 4K resolutions, but they also have the widest possible color gamut coverage so you can feel confident that what you're editing on the screen is as close to the real thing as possible. Ultra HD resolution may not be the current standard just yet, and the best 1440p monitors still continue to hit that sweet spot between high resolution and affordability. But, 4K is what you need in order to get … [Read more...] about The best 4K Monitors 2022: top Ultra HD screens for your PC

Audio player loading… Micron has revealed that it is working on new super-fast GDDR6X video memory, which will be powering the upcoming next-generation Nvidia GPUs, including the rumored RTX 4090 . While GDDR6X has been included in the ultra-high-end RTX 3090 Ti GPU at 21Gbps, it looks like the RTX 4090, 4080, and 4070 will all use that speed of GDDR6X, with the amount and memory bus being different between models. So, rumors suggest the GeForce RTX 4070 will come with 12GB of GDDR6X at 21 Gbps, along with a 192-bit memory bus. The GeForce RTX 4080 is rumored to have 16GB of GDDR6X at 21 Gbps, and a larger 256-bit memory bus. The Flagship RTX 4090, then, could come with 24GB of GDDR6X memory at 21 Gbps and a 384-bit memory bus. These numbers alone suggest a big performance increase over the previous generation of Nvidia GPUs – but it seems that Micron is holding back its very fastest memory for a mystery Nvidia GPU instead. Analysis: What … [Read more...] about Micron’s ridiculously fast GDDR6X video memory could make the Nvidia RTX 4090 obsolete

Audio player loading… The Oculus Quest 2 is about to get a lot more expensive. Meta representatives informed us via a press release that from August 1, 2022, one of the best VR headsets out there is going to see its price jump up to $400 / £400 / AU$630 for the 128GB version (up from $299 / £299 / AU$479), and $500 / £500 / AU$790 for the 256GB model (instead of $399 / £399 / AU$639). That means if you want to grab the Oculus Quest 2 ( now officially the Meta Quest 2 ) before it sees a massive price hike you’ve only got a couple of days left. Meta has warned that the price increase will also impact the best Oculus Quest 2 accessories and refurbished units –  giving you even fewer reasons to hold off making a purchase if you've been on the fence. According to Meta, despite the incredible success its VR hardware has seen – with an estimated 15 million Quest 2 headsets being sold , and over $1 billion being spent on Meta Quest apps since launch – the … [Read more...] about Oculus Quest 2 is getting a major price hike so it’s time to bring back the 64GB model

Audio player loading… LG has just unveiled its new flagship wireless earbuds, and if they’re as good as promised they could be some of the best wireless earbuds ever made. Last year’s LG Tone Free FP8 true wireless earbuds were a solid alternative to the Apple AirPods Pro and Sony WF-1000XM4 earbuds – albeit cheaper and not quite as impressive. This year LG has seemingly kicked its game up a notch with the Tone Free T90 buds, boasting improved drivers and materials that should make its sound quality better than ever. These drivers will be put to good use, too, as the T90s can support 24-bit/96kHz high-resolution audio . This should mean the audio quality and latency are more on-par with wired headphones than other wireless earbuds, helping to create a realistic soundstage that’s full of details that would otherwise be lost in a weaker connection. To help further enhance the soundstage, the LG’s Tone Free T90 buds will be the first wireless earbuds to use … [Read more...] about Feature-packed LG Tone Free T90 wireless earbuds could put AirPods on notice

This week's edition of Science contained over a dozen articles on a subject that sounds deceptively simple: waste. Human societies produce a dizzying variety of waste purely as a byproduct of functioning, from agricultural waste or discarded electronics to excrement. In a world of finite resources and limited fossil fuels, it's obvious that we have to make better use of our waste. But doing so isn't just a challenge; it's dozens of them. Organic waste Take agricultural waste. The edible portions of most plants are generally accompanied by huge amounts of inedible material, primarily in the form of cellulose (a long string of sugars) and lignin (a chemical that links them together). Right now, if this is used at all, it's burned directly as fuel or used for feed. And, right now, efforts directed towards getting more out of it are focused largely on using it for fuel. But one of the reviews notes that, assuming we can, diverting waste to biofuels may not make economic sense. … [Read more...] about One man’s trash: the state of modern waste

President Barack Obama held his second public Google+ hangout today, taking questions from Americans from around the country the day after his State of the Union address. During the event, an issue came up that's pretty important in the tech world, but still marginal or even largely unknown to the nation at large: patent trolls, the shell companies that have no business beyond suing over patents. Mike Masnick at Techdirt captured a transcript of the exchange. Adafruit founder Limor Fried told Obama that when talking to colleagues, "what I hear is that they're afraid that if they become successful, they're going to be targeted by patent trolls." She went on to ask what the president would do "to limit the abuse of software patents?" Obama's answer indicated he clearly understood the nature of the problem, although he also nodded towards the complexity of solving it. First, he acknowledged the recently enacted patent bill hasn't solved all the problems in the system, which is … [Read more...] about Even Obama knows patent trolls are “extorting” money

In Part 1 of our four-part series on logic and argumentation, we looked at the basics of informal logic. In Part 2, we cover deduction, different types of cases, and language tricks. Jump-starting deduction We have seen that we can deduce new conditionals from old. But where do we get conditionals to start with? Fortunately, we can get conditionals from our three principles. Premise (5) in the LSAT example was shorthand for a collection of conditionals; in the same way, both non-contradiction and excluded middle provide us with several conditionals. For example, excluded middle gives us "if P is not true, then P is false" for anything we want to fill in the blank for P . In addition to conditionals, these principles get us two more induction techniques beyond simple if-then arguments. In reality, these arguments could be converted to if-then deductions if we wanted to. These additional methods are just templates that help us speed up the process a bit. Part 1: … [Read more...] about Getting to QED, part 2: deduction and arguments