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Is Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 just another 'lazy' addition to the franchise?

The Guardian

In early August, just days before a major Black Ops 7 preview event in Los Angeles, former Blizzard president and Microsoft executive Mike Ybarra called the Call of Duty franchise "lazy". Posting on X, the veteran exec wrote that EA's upcoming Battlefield 6 would "boot stomp" CoD this year and force the team to make "better FPS games". And with Splitgate 2 head Ian Proulx mocking Call of Duty in his Summer Game Fest presentation just two months ago, it seems the blockbuster series has become the butt of an industry joke about endless franchises. It's not the only flak the 20-year-old brand has drawn. Though it sells millions of copies with each new release (Black Ops 6 was the bestselling game of 2024), accusations of predatory monetisation, pay-to-win skins, swarms of in-game bugs, and the recent use of AI to create in-game, paid-for content have understandably irked many players.






DAN GAINOR: Leftist MSNBC changes its name, but it's still the same embarrassment

FOX News

MSNBC's "Morning Joe" reacted to the networks upcoming name change, "My Source News Opinion World," or MS NOW, on Monday. But don't shed a tear (not that you would, anyway), it's turning into MS NOW. Or, as the New York Times put it, "Goodbye, MSNBC. The far-left network lost its tie to the newsy term "NBC" and looks more like some feminist retread site. Or, as MSNBC President Rebecca Kutler put it, "While our name will be changing, who we are and what we do will not." So, maybe my viewership assessment is correct. Sure, the ship might have made a career of hitting icebergs, but it's got a new name. The fallout from the change was swift. The Times even took a swipe with the follow-up headline: "MSNBC's Rebrand Invites Bemusement and Ridicule." The name switch reflects marketing nonsense as part of the corporate split. It also eliminates the long-standing comparison to MSDNC. The rationalization for the new name is: "My Source for News, Opinion, and the World." CNBC is going to keep its name, according to the Wall Street Journal, but the initials mean something else – "Consumer News and Business Channel," another marketing nuance. The new company will include, "NBCUniversal's cable television networks, including USA Network, CNBC, MSNBC, Oxygen, E!, SYFY and Golf Channel" along with a few other properties, including the formerly useful Rotten Tomatoes movie site. Nobody sane wants MSNBC/MS NOW connected in any way to NBC. It's been a corporate embarrassment for years. They're OK with it looking like the rational folks at CNBC are still connected, but the lunacy of MSNBC gets rebranded. It removes the stain for NBC. The more things change, the more they remain the same. This is the same network where they repeatedly compare President Donald Trump to monsters like Hitler and Stalin. Hosts regularly throw around charges of dictatorship like we are living in 1930s Germany – although somehow they are allowed to say it. Host Tiffany Cross recently claimed the government was grabbing people and "transporting them to concentration camps." And the face of the franchise, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, told viewers, "We have a consolidating dictatorship in our country." Remember, "Morning Joe" host Joe Scarborough made the most-embarrassing quote of the entire failed Joe Biden presidency: "I've said it for years now, he's cogent.


STREETS: A Novel Camera Network Dataset for Traffic Flow

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we introduce STREETS, a novel traffic flow dataset from publicly available web cameras in the suburbs of Chicago, IL. We seek to address the limitations of existing datasets in this area. Many such datasets lack a coherent traffic network graph to describe the relationship between sensors.