Jeff Green used to work at Games For Windows magazine before taking a sweet gig at EA , but that little fact won’t silence his criticism of the DRM found in Command and Conquer 4 . He tweeted white-hot rage when, as everyone on the Internet predicted, this “always-on” nonsense worked as intended, and prevented a law-abiding citizen from playing his game. Here are the tweets, hombres: It’s safe to say we’ve been fairly clear in, well, hating all this DRM. It’s very easy to say, “It’s 2010, who doesn’t have their computer constantly connected to the Internet?” You’d be correct, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that people’s Internet connections aren’t reliable enough to require gamers to be 100 percent online for the duration of a gaming session. Your Wi-Fi could go down. (Mine goes down like five times per day. Thanks, D-Link.) You could have Comcast . There could be cosmic rays . The point is, your Internet connection isn’t stable enough to work well with this particular form of DRM. Now, what Mr. Green brings up, that perhaps if we didn’t look at C&C 4 (or Assassin’s Creed II or whatever) as a “single-player game” we wouldn’t not expect to be online. After all, World of Warcraft is an online game, and the second you’re disconnected, you’re booted from the game. No one flips out over that, right? But the very idea that a fairly prominent EA man has publicly questioned the integrity of this type of DRM means all of our complaining is affecting the right people. Keep it up!

Original post:
EA fellow bitten by his company’s own DRM in Command and Conquer 4, questions the sense of it all

Harmonix has officially announced that Green Day: Rock Band will hit retail on June 8th of this year. Interestingly enough, Green Day frontman Billy Joe Armstrong confirmed that the band was working on the game in a radio interview back on June 8th of last year . Mind? Blown. The game will be priced at $60 on PS3 and Xbox 360, $50 on Wii, and there will also be a $70 special edition game for PS3/Xbox 360 that “Includes special packaging, export and six Green Day DLC tracks ($22 total value),” according to the press release . You’ll have 47 tracks to play with, all of which will be exportable to Rock Band, Rock Band 2, and Rock Band 3 when it’s released. The game also features “the three-part vocal harmony technology Harmonix introduced with the award-winning The Beatles: Rock Band .” Coming Soon: Green Day: Rock Band [RockBand.com]

View original post here:
Green Day: Rock Band launching June 8

Amazon is selling Futurama: The Complete Collection on DVD for $85, today only. The box set features 18 discs and over 33 hours of content. All your favorite characters are there: Bender, Fry, one-eyed Peg Bundy, you name it. Aside from all the episodes, you’ll get some other goodies as well. According to the product description: “Comic Con Exclusive includes all four volumes of Futurama, as well as 4 feature-length adventures: Bender’s Big Score, The Beast With A Billion Backs, Bender’s Game, Into the Wild Green Yonder all contained in a limited edition collectible Bender Head with a numbered letter from Matt Groening and David X. Cohen.” The collection normally sells on Amazon for $120 and, again, the deal’s good today only. Futurama: The Complete Collection [Amazon.com]

See the original post here:
CrunchDeals: Futurama: The Complete Collection on DVD for $85

Last year, I wrote that Bill had this (let’s be honest) evil-genius style plan to weaken hurricanes before they make landfall. Sounded a bit fantastical at the time, but as it turns out, there are real scientists ready to rock and roll with these things. They’re so serious they even put together a video . The idea is really pretty simple: by pumping warm surface water to the cool depths of the ocean, the temperature at the surface can be reduced by a few degrees, which is apparently all it takes to weaken a hurricane. [via Gizmodo ]

Go here to see the original:
Bill Gates’ hurricane-busting tubeships are real, people

You guys, I’m freaking out about how cool these things could be. A recent skyscraper concept competition yielded some really interesting designs , among them this utterly amazing concept , which they inexplicably call a “water-scraper” instead of the decidedly more euphonious “seascraper,” as I have dubbed it. Think of it: a partially self-contained structure floating in calm seas, growing food, harvesting wave energy, and providing a home for… well, not that many people, but more than a few. Wrap your mind around it! It’s glorious! It’s beautiful! It’s quite possibly green! And once you got your sea-legs, it’d be just like living in any other arcology . Oh, there aren’t any yet? Well maybe that’s because they didn’t think to build them at sea! Clearly these are idealized, and likely fail to account for a number of factors like storage space for food and products, waste management, and that sort of thing, but I see no reason why there shouldn’t be a cluster of these things (as they indeed suggest), each one specializing in this or that. Really at this point I’m just laying the foundation for the sci-fi novella I’m going to have to write on account of all the imagineering going on in my head following this post. Want so bad. [via Inhabitat ]

See more here:
Inverted, ocean-bound “seascrapers”: aqua-communes for the future?

Greenpeace now officially hates Samsung . The environmental organization has taken issue with Samsung’s inability to remove Brominated Flame Retardants , or BFRs, from its products. BFRs have been linked to environmental damage, and specific types have been banned from Europe altogether because of the potential for human harm. Greenpeace singling out companies is nothing new. The last big example I can think of is when it defaced HP’s headquarters —effective at getting the word out, I suppose. That being said, Greenpeace’s new beef with Samsung is a little odd in that, back in 2004, Samsung was the first company to agree to Greenpeace’s new, BFR-free guidelines. Whether or not Greenpeace should be charged with developing this or that standard is something for a long law blog to tackle. Samsung was supposed to get its BFR-free act together by January 1, 2010, but clearly we’ve flown by that date. Hence, Greenpeace officially in freak-out mode. But don’t give up hope! Samsung says that it will, indeed, have BFR-free MP3 players and digital cameras by June, 2010, and BFR-free laptops by January 1, 2011. We’ll see, said the blind man, we’ll see.

The rest is here:
Add Samsung to Greenpeace’s hate list (for now)

In the future, when overpopulation has forced us all to live in 6