Bahnd Rollard

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 26th, 2023

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  • Most white hat pen testers apply their trade under contract for security audits. A lot of companies, especially those that work for governments, have requirements to get security audits regurally. It is not outside the realm of reason to hire a company, lay out the rules of engagment, have them assign a team to try, try to break in, detail what they did and any vulnerabilities that were found.

    The flip side is that these people are paid very very well to do this (especially people who will risk their skin on physicial security). They take a very “defense against the dark arts” methodology, the best way to teach people how to defend against attacks is to actually attack them and tell them where they messed up. For that reason, you get conventions like DEFCON where security experts from alphabet soup agencies, private sector, white, black and grey hats all meet to see what the others are doing. The presentations are a blast to watch, if you can undertand the arcane runes and rituals of the worlds best security wizards.


  • As soon as a politician attempts to do so in a serious fashion, they will have to fight the entire lobbying (see bribery) might of the insurance indistry.

    Thats why im amazed Mitt Romney (IIRC he was governer at the time) was able to do what he did in Massachusettes (state mandated healthcare with a state run insurer, along with private entities not wanting him out of office). That system threaded the political needle, the dems got their state run healthcare marketplace, and the repubs got their “this is good for business” from their handlers, and once the paint dried, he still had the clout to move to up to congress and make a run for the white house. Later, the ACA/ObamaCare was based off that system, yah kids, ObamaCare is technically a Republican invention (say that at thanksgiving and see which relatives squirm).

    Thats about the most “for the public good” model we could make at the time to make most everyone happy, and its not great. Some of the regulations like “no pre-existing condition denials” are pretty damn important now, to the point that .95 cant throw the baby out with the bathwater without pissing a lot of people off.








  • The games are a sequle, CDPR got the rights to make a game based on the IP in the early 2000s and just did their own thing.

    W1 was a bit rough, plot wise it tried to incorporate a lot of the existing world but played the amnesia card so everyone had to explain shit to Geralt (and by extension the player).

    W2 is a direct follow up to W1 and put CDPR on the world stage by being the high water mark for graphics requirements around 2010. Still a very good game, a bit on rails for modern standards, but still fantastic for how it handles branching paths.

    W3 + DLC won all the awards in their respective release years for a reason, they are magnificent and with CDPR spending 15 years in the IP they make tons of call backs to the books without the players feeling like they are missing something if you didnt read them.

    There are 2 (ok… 4) TV shows.

    The netflix shows starring Henry Cavil, king of the nerds, (who is being recast by the least hot hemsworth because netlfix pissed off the books biggest fan) and what ever that second one was that we dont talk about (There is also an anime, which is pretty good) and the Hexer, a made-for-TV low budget show that loosly follows the plot of the early books, it in polish and I dont think it was ever dubbed (I managed to find it with subtitles years ago).

    I know this is more than you asked for but, enjoy the games, enjoy the books, be aware of the fan opinions of the shows.




  • EvE expert here, in addition to this, safe spots are created by warping between two points and using the “save bookmark” feature to drop a pin mid-warp. You then turn the ship around to warp to the empty location you saved. Making multiple safe spots and warping between them will drag you away from common warp vectors and celestial object allowing for some truly remote locations. This is important for being able to run and hide until your aggression or log-off timers expire (without a cloaking device).

    Back in the day there were exploits that would allow people to throw themselves more than ~14 AU away from objects you could warp to and make safe spots. Most of these have been removed from the game but the ones that remain are golden tactical tools for Fleet Commanders and are worth a ton to keep secret.



  • Painting in broad strokes here as its been over a decade since D&D v4 and WoWs high-water mark, I think people call it that because of several factors, not all of them in the game design of v4.

    • It was the begining of the trends that we see today in 5e where the stock classes were designed to fit the archtype, not the style. If you played something out of the base books, it just had to work and character progression was boiled down, you had to try to brick your character.
    • This was also around the time when WoW was changing its mentality to “bring the player, not the class”. This still holds up today where they design content around the players being there, not what was there. Fewer class specific shortcuts or tricks, unique traits. No one single common ability is unique to a class. For example, need temporary invuln to eat one hit that causes max damage, bring a pally, mage, or hunters.
    • The migration from 3.5 to 4 left a void in class/race variety as the prestige classes took a while to convert to the new system, many were lost. Like when Disney bought Starwars and threw all the extended universe content out. D&D 3.5 had an alarmingly high number of suplimental books.
    • The increase in charts in v4 felt like they could have fit more in with a PC RPG, I do realize the irony in the success of Pathfinder 1 as it just took that “charts for days” concept and ran with it.

    D&D v4 to me will always be the MMO version because it was a product of its time, and also WotC scrapped pretty quickly, relativly speaking.