I love some of the games Blizzard has produced. Overwatch’s PVP focus isn’t for me, but the gameplay would be fun with a PVE focus… The Diablo family is the perfect representation of the genre it birthed, where no other entry really matches the chemistry of the originals… Starcraft and Warcraft are some of the most fun RTS gameplay in their genre… And WoW’s siren call is amplified by the fact that it’s one of the first big games to make an M1 native version a priority.
All that being said, no matter how much I love the games, I can’t give a cent to the company that also breeds these stories:
At one point Activision Blizzard is described as a “frat house”, but that doesn’t begin to capture the scale and gravity of the allegations. Women punished for becoming pregnant. Women kicked out of lactation rooms. Women punished for leaving the office. African American women denied full employment and subjected to unique requirements. A woman committed suicide on a business trip with a male colleague who brought along lube and butt plugs.
In the office, women are subjected to “cube crawls” in which male employees drink copious [amounts] of alcohol as they “crawl” their way through various cubicles in the office and often engage in inappropriate behavior toward female employees. Male employees proudly come into work hungover, play video games for long periods of time during work while delegating their responsibilities to female employees, engage in banter about their sexual encounters, talk openly about female bodies and joke about rape.
Female employees are subjected to constant sexual harassment, including having to continually fend off unwanted sexual comments and advances by their male co-workers and supervisors and being groped at the “cube crawls” and other company events. High-ranking executives and creators engaged in blatant sexual harassment without repercussions.
In a particularly tragic example, a female employee committed suicide during a business trip with a male supervisor who had brought butt plugs and lubricant with him on the trip.
Its response to this lawsuit is libertarian dogma about “irresponsible behavior from unaccountable State bureaucrats that are driving many of the State’s best businesses out of California.”
Activision Blizzard attorney told the SEC in January, “While the Company has implemented a Rooney Rule policy as envisioned [for director and CEO nominees], implementing a policy that would extend such an approach to all hiring decisions amounts to an unworkable encroachment on the Company’s ability to run its business and compete for talent in a highly competitive, fast-moving market.”
Activision Blizzard’s attorney further said the proposal was micromanaging in nature, and “leaves no room for the Company’s management or Board of Directors to exercise discretion in how new hire decisions are structured.”
With Activision focussing on larger titles, such as Overwatch 2, and laying off 800 of its workforce in 2019, Classic Games would never receive the full support required to recapture Warcraft 3. Nevertheless, they plowed on, and even started taking pre-orders for the game. That left the team committed to releasing the title. A Blizzard spokesman told Bloomberg: “In hindsight, we should have taken more time to get it right, even if it meant returning pre-orders.”
Despite getting help from other Blizzard departments during the final development push, it was too late. The game was so poorly received that demands for refunds were upheld. Even now, 18 months on, the game is missing much of the promised content that it was sold on.
Actually building an EV is still a little more carbon-intensive than building a traditional vehicle. Recycling EV batteries could eventually bring that carbon intensity down. But for now, EV drivers start to reap the climate benefits after driving their car for a year or so, according to Bieker. That’s when the car passes the threshold when the emissions that it saves by running on cleaner electricity make it a better option for the climate than a traditional car.
The 2021 Common Weakness Enumeration (CWE™) Top 25 Most Dangerous Software Weaknesses (CWE Top 25) is a demonstrative list of the most common and impactful issues experienced over the previous two calendar years. These weaknesses are dangerous because they are often easy to find, exploit, and can allow adversaries to completely take over a system, steal data, or prevent an application from working. The CWE Top 25 is a valuable community resource that can help developers, testers, and users — as well as project managers, security researchers, and educators — provide insight into the most severe and current security weaknesses.
To create the 2021 list, the CWE Team leveraged Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE®) data found within the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) National Vulnerability Database (NVD), as well as the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) scores associated with each CVE record. A formula was applied to the data to score each weakness based on prevalence and severity.
Dr. Brytney Cobia said Monday that all but one of her COVID
patients in Alabama did not receive the vaccine. The vaccinated
patient, she said, just needed a little oxygen and is expected to
fully recover. Some of the others are dying.
“I’m admitting young healthy people to the hospital with very
serious COVID infections,” wrote Cobia, a hospitalist at Grandview
Medical Center in Birmingham, in an emotional Facebook post
Sunday. “One of the last things they do before they’re
intubated is beg me for the vaccine. I hold their hand and tell
them that I’m sorry, but it’s too late.”
Good link to spread. Fox News should put this doctor on the air in prime time. (Via Dave Winer.)
Swimmer Becca Meyers says she's skipping the Tokyo Paralympics because she wouldn't be able to have a personal care assistant with her. The 2016 gold medalist is seen here at an event in 2017.
Nicholas Hunt/Getty Images for Women's Sports Foundation
Becca Meyers, a swimmer seen as a favorite to bring gold home from Tokyo, has canceled plans to compete in the Paralympics after being told she can't bring a personal care assistant to Japan. Meyers is deaf and blind. U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC) officials say they don't have space for her to bring an aide because of coronavirus restrictions on athletic delegations.
"I've had to make the gut-wrenching decision to withdraw from the Tokyo 2020 Paralympics," Meyers said Tuesday in a statement posted on her Facebook page. "I'm angry, I'm disappointed, but most of all, I'm sad to not be representing my country."
Meyers, 26, says officials have not taken her and other athletes' needs into account. She won three gold medals at the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Paralympics — but the experience also left her deeply shaken. In strange new surroundings, she struggled to accomplish essential tasks on her own, such as finding the athletes' dining hall.
Since then, her mother, Maria, has accompanied her at competitions as a personal care assistant. But after being told her mother can't join her in Tokyo, Meyers opted out.
"I would love to go to Tokyo," Meyers told The Washington Post, which first reported her withdrawal. "Swimming has given me my identity as a person. I've always been Becca the Swimmer Girl. I haven't taken this lightly. This has been very difficult for me. [But] I need to say something to effect change, because this can't go on any longer."
All signs had been pointing to Meyers turning in a special performance in Tokyo. She has set new world records in recent years. Last month, she was celebrating dominance at the Paralympic trials, where she secured a spot on Team USA. Tokyo was set to be her third Paralympics.
Meyers, who was born with Usher syndrome, has thrived at sport's elite level. Because of the genetic disorder, she is deaf (and is aided by cochlear implants). She often relies on lip-reading, but her eyesight continues to deteriorate — and because everyone in Tokyo will be wearing masks, her ability to understand others would be hampered.
Rick Adams, the USOPC's chief of sport performance and national governing body services, has told the Meyerses that while he empathizes with them, Tokyo organizers have limited delegations to athletes and essential staff.
The USOPC told Meyers that the 34 athletes on the Paralympic swim team would be supported by one dedicated personal care assistant (PCA), along with six coaches. Nearly a third of the swimmers are visually impaired, according to Meyers.
The Meyers family says the situation is untenable and must change. They also believe the USOPC has held firm on its position to avoid a rush of athletes attempting to add their own PCAs to the delegation.
Meyers, who lives in a suburb between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., has been training with the Nation's Capital Swim Club, which launched the Olympic careers of stars such as Katie Ledecky and Tom Dolan. There, Meyers has trained under famed coach Bruce Gemmell.
"Your heart just breaks for her," Gemmell told the Post. "It seems to me if our focus is athletes first, which it should be but which it isn't always — if athletes first is what we're doing, then we as a USOPC, we need to do better. We must do better."
The Tokyo Paralympics will start on Aug. 24 and run through Sept. 5.
So there it is: if you play games, it’s likely Tencent owns at least a small part of the developer or publisher that made something you like. It’s such a huge number of companies to go through, it’s entirely possible I’ve missed one or two as well.
At the end of it all, here’s your frequent reminder that games industry consolidation is something we shouldn’t ignore. It took me a long time to put this list together, and that’s pretty concerning.
Norway’s Minister for Culture and Sports, Abid Raja, tweeted after Monday’s ruling: “It’s completely ridiculous – a change of attitude is needed in the macho and conservative international world of sport.”
That last quote could apply to nearly every sport, in one way or another.
In other words, “How can I make sure my kids don’t turn into selfish boors?” In her new book How to Raise Kids Who Aren’t Assholes (G. P. Putnam’s Sons), coming out on July 20, Moyer probes the research on how to encourage kids to be generous, honest, helpful and kind. She reviews studies on how to instill egalitarian beliefs and make sure kids know how to stand up against racism and sexism. And she talks to scientists about perennial parental struggles such as sibling rivalry, teaching safe sex and moderating screen time. Scientific American spoke to Moyer about science-based strategies for raising good citizens.
Misinformation about COVID-19 vaccines can appear almost anywhere: From an uncle’s social media post to a well-trusted news commentator. But where does it come from and why do some myths spread further than others?
With the help of the Internet research firm Graphika, NPR analyzed the rise of one persistent set of lies about COVID-19 vaccines:
USB-C was supposed to be the answer to the chaos that is charge and data cable compatibility. And to an extent it was. It unified ports and reduced the amount of cables and chargers I need to travel with. The cables themselves, however, turned out to be a mess. They come in many varieties with obtuse names, confusing markers, and unclear compatibility rules. Yet they all look exactly the same.
Pocket Realities 