Elrond says in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings - The Fellowship of the Ring, "I was there Gandalf, I was there 3000 years ago when the strength of men failed". Just like Elrond, I was there when Jagex first introduced microtransactions into the live game.

I have been playing RuneScape for over 10 years now and never have I seen a community more fired up and worried at the same time then when Jagex first introduced microtransactions into their game. Ultimately, this plus the introduction of Evolution of Combat killed RuneScape, and resulted in the company polling their players opinions on re-rolling the servers back to 2007scape, which is what we now know as Old School RuneScape today.

At first the microtransactions weren't that big of deal because they weren't worth the real-world money for the in-game items or chance through the Sequel of Fortune. That later changed when Jagex started leaning much more towards promotions for the Sequel of Fortune (basically an in-game slot machine) and rewarded players exponentially with experience boosters, gear etc etc. This caused the community to be outraged as players who had extra real-world money to spend had a clear and unsettling advantage over players who just put the time into reaching their set goals.

A massive part of the push for the ever-growing technology industry is undoubtedly the want for the most convenience possible. So how about some wireless earbuds that can unlock your phone via reading your ear canal.

A team out of the University at Buffalo noticed that most of youth that was walking around campus started adopting wireless headphones, which made them wonder what else could be done with this technology. Computer scientist Zhanpeng Jin who is an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering in the UB School of Engineering and Applied Sciences said "We have so many students walking around with speakers in their ears. It led me to wonder what else we could do with them."

So Jin and his team took the earbuds and came up with something that has been called EarEcho. EarEcho is a biometric tool that uses modified wireless earbuds to authenticate users' smartphones, which is done through the reading of the users unique geometrical ear canal. According to this month's Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies journal, the prototype EarEcho had a roughly 95% success rate on the users it was tested on.

With NASA in full swing towards meeting their White House imposed goal of landing back on the Moon by 2024, one of the companies heads has actually doubted the projects success.

Kenneth Bowersox, who is an acting associate administrator for human exploration spoke to a Congressional subcommittee, saying that "I wouldn't bet my oldest child's upcoming birthday present or anything like that." For those that don't know, the Trump administration urged NASA back in March to speed up its Moon-landing plans by four years, solidifying the now 2024 landing date.

Bowersox continued and said that even though he doubts that NASA will be able to achieve the goal of landing back on the Moon by 2024, its still good that the space exploration company has a "aggressive goal." Speaking to U.S Rep. Bill Posey, R-Florida, Bowersox said "There's a lot of risk in making the date, but we want to try to do it."

A new technology is being trialed by police departments in the United States with a Spider-Man-style device that shoots out a tether, which fires out fast and entangles and restrains the suspect -- all without harm.

Tasers killed 49 people in 2018 so it makes sense to use a harmless method to subdue people, with the new 'BolaWrap' portable device firing an 8-foot (2.4m) bola-style tether that entangles a suspect at the waist, or around the legs.

Wrap Industries is behind the BolaWrap with company president Tom Smith explaining: "Whether it is a Taser, pepper spray, baton ... there's been this gap created by the courts requiring that a higher level of force be used at the appropriate time. This tool fits perfectly into that gap giving the officers another option to use before having to use that high level of force to end that conversation very early, very safely".

Intel is preparing its next-gen Cascade Lake-X family of CPUs with the new flagship Core i9-10980XE being leaked and detailed in some new juicy benchmarks.

Intel's upcoming Core i9-10980XE will be a beast CPU with 18C/36T of power with boost CPU clocks of up to 4.8GHz, as well as what we should expect to see as 24.75MB of L3 cache, and 18MB of L2 cache.

The new Core i9-10980XE leaked benchmark is courtesy of Momomo_Us, who teases the beasty 18C/36T chip with some Geekbench results. The Core i9-10980XE utterly destroys the AMD Threadripper 2950X in Geekbench v4.2.2 single- and multi-threaded benchmarks.

Huawei has unveiled its new Mate 30 and Mate 30 Pro smartphones with some special sauce camera technology: it can shoot slow-motion video at a I-had-to-triple-check-this-info 7680FPS.

The new camera will have to drop the resolution down to 1280 x 720 to shoot at 7680FPS... but that is still absolutely insane. The new camera can also shoot 12-hour long 4K timelapses (!!!), 960FPS slow-mo video at 1080p, 4K video at 60FPS, and has the ability to add real-time bokeh effects to video.

Huawei is including a 40MP "SuperSensing" camera, a 40MP Ultra-Wide camera, and an 8MP 3x telephoto camera on the regular Mate 30 smartphone, while the higher-end Huawei Mate 30 Pro handset will have even better camera chops. The Mate 30 Pro adds an additional 40MP "Cine Camera" which supports real-time bokeh adjustment and the super-slow-mo 7680FPS.

Respawn Entertainment has confirmed that Season 3 of Apex Legends will kick off on October 1, with its latest hero Crypto joining the fray.

The developer celebrated the S3 announcement of Apex Legends with a new animated character short titled 'Forever Family'. Respawn is already preparing the world of Apex Legends for the arrival of Crypto, with the details on Crypto's backstory and already teasing his arrival into the game.

Season 3 of Apex Legends begins on October 1 and will not just include Crypto but a new charge rifle weapon, tweaked ranked mode, and over 100 new in-game items to collect.

Here we go... just as the hype train takes off for Terminator: Dark Fate we have a new Terminator game coming and it looks, well -- judge for yourself:

Terminator: Resistance is set in the world 30 years after Judgement Day, where you will play Private Jacob Rivers who is a soldier in the Resistance Pacific Division. The team developing the game are Teyon, who handled the Rambo game from 2014 (yeah, I didn't even know about it, it must be that good) while Reef Entertainment acts as the publisher.

The new game will release after Terminator: Dark Fate releases, but only focuses on the original James Cameron-directed Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.

GIGABYTE has officially launched its new AORUS Gen4 AIC, a new quad-SSD PCIe 4.0 adapter that can take up to 4 x NVMe SSDs and offer up to a huge 15GB/sec of throughput.

The new AORUS Gen4 AIC SSD 8TB uses a full PCIe 4.0 x16 slot and has 4 x 2TB M.2-2280 SSDs that are powered by the Phison PS5016-E16 controller. GIGABYTE is using a heat sink and active fan to keep the AORUS Gen4 AIC operating cool, too.

As you can see, it feature a huge 5.5mm pure copper heat sink, two ball bearing blower fan, a baseplate, and even 8 thermal sensors that keep everything monitored. AORUS Storage Manager software will let you keep tabs on your AORUS Gen4 AIC and you'll be able to tweak the cooling to your liking with 3 modes: Silent, Balance, or Performance.

GVGMall's Autumn Sale has just started and you can pick up a genuine and permanent Windows 10 Pro OEM key for under $13. $12.26, in fact, after applying the 20% off discount code: MS20%

Compared to the cheapest we could find Windows 10 on Amazon, GVGMall's deal comes in almost $60 cheaper, and that's the price for Windows 10 Home OEM and not the Pro version.

Windows 10 is a personal computer operating system developed and released by Microsoft as part of the Windows NT family of operating systems. It was released on July 29,2015.It is the first version of Windows that receives ongoing feature updates.

Windows 10 is designed to be compatible with the hardware, software, and peripherals you already own. And always-enabled updates help you stay current on features and security for the supported lifetime of your device.Windows 10 gives you absolutely the best experience for doing what you do. Stay focused with easy ways to snap apps in place and optimize your screen space for getting things done. See your open tasks in a single view and create virtual desktops to gain space or group things by project, like Office apps for work and games for play.