"Reamde"

[fiefoe]

The not-WoW:

• “So until now, this has been a technical possibility, but few people have used it on a large scale,” Wallace said, working it through. “But these fuckers have figured out a way to use T’Rain as a money-laundering system.”
• When he was finished, all Peter could say, for a minute or so, was the f-word. He said it in about a dozen different ways, like an actor searching for just the right reading.
•  Boys, he said, only want to know two things: who is in charge, and what are the rules.
• “So the name of the character is in Chinese?” Ivanov and Sokolov looked at each other as only Russians could look at each other when the Chinese came into it.
• For example, they would digitally insert fake images of guns into the video feed from an x-ray machine, frequently enough that the screeners would see false-color silhouettes of revolvers and semiautomatics and IEDs glide across their visual fields several times a day, instead of once every ten years. That, according to the research, was enough to prevent their pattern-recognition neurons from being reclaimed and repurposed by brain processes that were more fruitful, or at least more entertaining.
• The premise of APPIS, which was that real-world problems—especially problems that were difficult to solve because of hard-wired deficiencies of the human neurological system, such as the tendency to become bored when given a terrible job—could be tackled by metaphrasing them into Medieval Armed Combat scenarios, and then (here brandishing two searingly hip terms from high tech) putting them out on the cloud so that they could be crowdsourced.
• Corvallis offered to “drive,” meaning that he would operate the mouse and keyboard,
• Could it be considered normal to divert rather large amounts of obshchak funds to charter a private jet from Toronto to Seattle and thence to Xiamen in order to track down and liquidate a person—probably a kid—who had written a virus and held some files hostage for $73?

Spetsnaz

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