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(credit: André-Pierre du Plessis)

On Thursday, Visa and PayPal announced a new partnership designed to push Visa cardholders to link their credit and debit cards to their PayPal and Venmo accounts, eschewing the bank-owned Automated Clearing House (ACH) network that PayPal has long preferred to work with.

PayPal makes more money off ACH-based transactions because it doesn’t have to pay a cut of any transaction fees to a card network like Visa. But two months ago, Visa CEO Charlie Scharf expressed his displeasure with getting cut out of the payments process and vowed to “go full steam and compete with [PayPal] in ways that people have never seen before” if the digital payment platform didn’t start playing nice.

In today's partnership announcement, the two companies said that when a customer goes to sign up with PayPal or make a payment through the platform, Visa-network cards will be presented as “a clear and equal payment option” with ACH. In addition, PayPal said it promises not to “encourage Visa cardholders to link to a bank account via ACH,” and the company vowed to help Visa identify customers that could potentially change their current PayPal setup to route payments over Visa’s network.

For a while now, a certain subset of authenticity-obsessed nostalgic NES player has been disappointed with noticeable color-matching issues and blurriness evident in Nintendo's official Virtual Console NES re-releases on the Wii, Wii U, and 3DS. That problem led many to worry that the recently announced NES Classic Edition mini-console would suffer from the same issues.

Today, though, Nintendo released an online trailer for the $60 plug-and-play system. Amid a lot of '80s style marketing glitz, the video briefly showed some NES Classic Edition games in action, displaying what seems to be much crisper and more accurate HD emulation of the NES cartridges you remember.

You can see the improvements directly in the above gallery, with the NES Classic version on the left and the Wii U Virtual Console version on the right (images were sourced from official Nintendo trailers whenever possible to avoid issues with capture fidelity). As you can see, the NES Classic Edition versions are altogether brighter and crisper, with solid colors and well defined corners on the square pixels. It's the kind of high-fidelity ROM recreation that players on PC-based emulators are already used to, but Virtual Console players may be surprised by it (especially if they last played these games through the low-definition output of the Wii).

This is the July 2015 "Flying Gun" video. (credit: Hogwit)

A federal judge in Connecticut has ruled against a young drone operator and his father. They will now have to turn over a slew of documents and materials as part of a Federal Aviation Administration investigation.

The two men and their legal team argued that the FAA lacks authority to regulate drones, but the FAA clearly disagrees with this assessment.

As Ars reported previously, the case dates back to July 2015. The pilot, Austin Haughwout, posted a video of his drone rigged up with a handgun. By early November 2015, the Federal Aviation Administration sent the two Haughwouts an administrative subpoena seeking a substantial amount of records, including purchase records and an accounting of what monies, if any, were gained from the "Flying Gun" YouTube video.