Category Archives: Transhuman News

TubeMogul Soars 14% After Reporting Strong Q3 Revenue Of $27.4M, Smaller-Than-Expected Loss

With Advanced Warfare, Activision is taking the extremely successful Call of Duty mostly to places its already been, which is to say this is a game about war, shooting, explosions and guns. But its also taking a stab at some realistic futurism with the Exo suits your character gets to wear, which augment your ability to navigate your environment and deal damage to your enemies, and weapons that boast some plausibleimprovements over their counterparts of today. And of course, Kevin Spacey is all over the place.

Heres a disclaimer up front: I dont usually spend that much time playing these kinds of games. My interests favor swords, sorcery, giant rolling Katamaris and colourful characters. That said, I also cut my teeth on classics like Medal of Honor for the PC, and the early Tom Clancy Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon games. Still, Im coming to Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare with only a casual knowledge of the games in the series that precede it.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed Call of Duty: Advanced Warfares single player campaign. It struck a good balance between exposition, basic instruction and making sure you get to the action right away at the beginning, jumping you right in at the start and only then peeling back for the traditional oh heres some training simulation to refine the basics you pick up in the initial live combat opening level.

What surprised me about Advanced Warfare most mightve been how much I enjoyed its story. The plot, while both predictable and shallow, was nonetheless solidly put together, well-told and well-acted by both the animated characters (which look fantastic on the PlayStation 4, by the way) and the voice actors behind them, which include Spacey in a key role thats probably really best described as the lead, given his screen time, Troy Baker as the player character Jack Mitchell, and Gideon Emery as the creatively-named Gideon.

While the story isnt going to blow anyone away, even with its big twist (which you should be able to see coming from basically the opening cutscene) its sort of like any good big budget action movie, in that its a simple story, well-told, with a focus on action and special effects that makes up for the lack of a deep narrative. Again, Im not the most familiar with this series, but as far as action games go, this is one of the better recent entrants from a story perspective.

On the gameplay side, Call Of Duty delivers typically solid first-person shooter action. The fundamentals are all well done, as is the new arsenal of weaponry. Each gun can be found throughout the game outfitted with a number of different sights and scopes, and youll find pretty quickly that youll likely prefer one type over another. Tracking down the right weapon variant for your play style adds to the experience, and I quickly found Id become either frustrated when I couldnt find a weapon with a threat indicator, or feel a wave of relief wash over me when I could.

As for the Exos, the exoskeleton augmentation suits that soldiers wear in Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare, they do indeed offer fun gameplay tweaks, including the ability to jump much farther than you can normally in games like this, a hover break for steep descents, grappling hooks for zipping around maps and quietly taking down bad guys, and much more. Each mission has a different loadout, and pretty rigorously guides and limits your use of these new features, but in multiplayer its up to you to determine what powers you carry, and how you use them.

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Call Of Duty: Advanced Warfare Review

On Twitter Twitter this week, SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted that the company is going to be enacting a program involving advanced micro-satellites operating in large formations. The formal announcement for the project is 2-3 months away.

The fact that the announcement is months away, however, hasnt stopped quite a bit of speculating over what the satellite system is likely to entail. (Hopefully not the orbital death ray platforms that sci-fi author Warren Ellis referred to when I interviewed him last summer.)

The most likely theory is that this will be an effort to bring high-speed satellite internet to areas that dont have the infrastructure to build fiber networks. On Friday, the Wall Street Journal reported that SpaceX is forming a relationship with WorldVu Satellites, Ltd. WorldVu was founded by Greg Wyler, who also founded high-speed internet satellite company O3b Networks. O3b has eight satellites in orbit now providing high speed internet and its next four satellites are already getting prepared to launch. Wyler left O3b (though he remains a significant shareholder) and went to Google to work on satellite internet. However, he has since left Google as well.

The Wall Street Journal report indicates that the two companies would plan to cooperate on a satellite manufacturing facility, a venture the report estimates to have a cost of around $1 billion. This also partially corroborates a report from SpaceNews in September that WorldVu and SpaceX had begun some sort of relationship. And Musks tweet, which came after the WSJ report came out, may be a response to that article. (A request for comment sent to SpaceX was not returned.)

That said, while a lot of signs point to SpaceX joining forces with WorldVu for satellite internet (WorldVu has the rights to the key spectrum needed until the end of the decade), this isnt the only possibility. Microsatellites are currently being used for a number of applications, particularly Earth-based imaging satellites. Other companies are working a different angle, such as Planetary Resources, which is developing small space telescopes that could be used to find likely candidates for asteroid mining.

Its plausible that rather than looking to SpaceX to manufacture satellites, WorldVu is in talks with SpaceX to launch them. After all, with a short time period to begin using the spectrum it has rights to, its possible that WorldVu would prefer to turn to an established satellite manufacturer rather than wait for a new venture to get up and running.

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SpaceX Is Entering The Micro-Satellites Game