Month: July 2016

Ars Technica tests Tabletop Simulator VR. Edited by Jennifer Hahn (video link)

You may have spent your youth dreaming of a future with flying cars, two-way video wristwatches, and robotic overlords, but my earliest high-tech dreams went in a different direction. Since I first hatched from my nerd egg, I have hoped for a fully functional, long-distance version of Dungeons & Dragons—one in which friends from all over the world can gather in a single, virtual hub, be bossed around by a game-running "dungeon master," and dork out with dice rolls and detailed mini-figurines.

That game's handlers, Wizards of the Coast, have resisted the modern era for far too long, leaving open-source developers to fill the gap with a mix of webcams and simple character-sheet interfaces. But now we're in the virtual reality era, which seems ripe for something a little cooler. Enter the delightfully weird sandbox experience that is Tabletop Simulator VR.

Blizzard has always taken an uncompromising attitude towards cheats in its games; it has already issued lifetime bans to thousands of players caught using hacks within weeks of the release of its new shooter Overwatch—even if they make new accounts or buy new copies of the game—and now it's going after the company that makes those cheats possible.

Blizzard has filed a lawsuit in California against Bossland GMBH, the German company behind Watchover Tyrant, a programme which allows all sorts of unpleasant and unsporting cheating shenanigans. Those include a radar that shows where enemies are, and aiming assistance. Bossland has made cheat programmes for most of Blizzard's other games, and the American firm is accusing its longtime rival of copyright infringement, unfair competition, and violation of the DMCA's anti-circumvention provision.

Blizzard's suit reads:

Valentina Palladino

The Sony Xperia X Performance.

13 more images in gallery

Sony is switching gears when it comes to smartphones and that shift is embodied in the new X line of handsets. There's the Xperia XA Ultra, a "selfie" smartphone with a 16-megapixel front-facing camera, the middle-of-the-road Xperia X equipped with a Snapdragon 650 processor, and then there's the Xperia X Performance. This device is the "flagship" of sorts for the new line, sporting a 5-inch FHD display, a Snapdragon 820 processor, and 3GB of RAM.

New letter aside, some of these X phones pick up right where the Z series left off, which means that in some ways they feel just a step behind the rest of the competition. The X Performance's biggest problem isn't that it's a bad phone but that it's a $700 phone that often feels inferior to $400 phones.

Look and feel

All of Sony's new Xperia X smartphones look quite similar, and the Xperia X Performance looks nearly identical to the standard Xperia X. Thanks to a better processor and a larger battery, the X Performance is just about a millimeter thicker and a few grams heavier than the Xperia X. While the lower-powered handset resembles a more rigid iPhone 6s, the X Performance emphasizes its blockiness with the additional thickness and weight.

Robert Heath claimed to have cured homosexuality by implanting electrodes into the pleasure centre of the brain. Robert Colvile reports on one of the forgotten stories of neuroscience for Mosaic.

For the first hour, they just talked. He was nervous; he’d never done this before. She was understanding, reassuring: let’s just lie down on the bed together, she said, and see what happens. Soon, events took their course: they were enjoying themselves so much they could almost forget about the wires leading out of his skull.

The year was 1970, and the man was a 24-year-old psychiatric patient. The woman, 21, was a prostitute from the French Quarter of New Orleans, hired by special permission of the attorney general of Louisiana. And they had just become part of one of the strangest experiments in scientific history: an attempt to use pleasure conditioning to turn a gay man straight.