(from www.rushisaband.com)

When I was stuck in Olympia WA last week, the saving grace of our stay was our gracious host Kirk Leonnard and his girlfriend Amy, and their guest room devoted to their Xbox 360, and more specifically, Rock Band. It was there that Kirty South and I found solace, singing and plucking our depression away to the likes of the Beastie Boys, The Marshall Tucker Band and Black Sabbath. We also discussed woman-repellent music including Canadian arena rock champions, Rush. Oh! If only we had access to the tracks that will be made available tomorrow. We would have driven poor Amy completely bonkers.

From B|W|R Public Relations:

Harmonix and MTV Games announced today additional Rush tracks will be available at the Rock Band™ Music Store catalog of downloadable content. On July 8th, air drummers and guitarists will rejoice when direct from the Rush Masters Vault the exclusive Rock Band versions of “Closer To The Heart” and “Working Man (Vault Edition)” (featuring never released alternative guitar solo) are made available for $1.99 per track (160 Microsoft Points for Xbox LIVE® Marketplace for the Xbox 360® video game and entertainment system from Microsoft). Rush now have 5 songs available for Rock Band including cover versions of “Tom Sawyer,” “Limelight” and “Working Man,” almost a full-set by prog rock standards!

Also available are two amazing tracks from six-time Grammy® winning, multi-platinum funk rockers Red Hot Chili Peppers. “Snow ((Hey Oh))” and “Tell Me Baby” from their critically acclaimed ninth studio double album Stadium Arcadium will be available for $1.99 per track (160 Microsoft Points for Xbox LIVE Marketplace).

Release date: Tuesday, July 8, 2008 (Xbox LIVE Marketplace)
Thursday, July 10, 2008 (PLAYSTATION®Store)

Tracks:
From the RUSH Masters Vault:
“Closer To The Heart”
” Man (Vault Edition)”

Hot Chili Peppers
” ((Hey Oh))”
“Tell Me Baby”

(All tracks utilize the original master recordings)

Price: 1.99 (160 Microsoft Points for Xbox LIVE Marketplace) per track
Locations: LIVE Marketplace and PLAYSTATION®Network

** Dates for Rock Band game tracks are tentative and subject to change **

And I remember when I got a phone that could take pictures I was pumped.

Since 2004, a team of professors and students from the University of California, Berkeley has searched for ways to let a single human supervise a team of robot planes. Now, this Center for Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles has a new device for ordering around its drones: an iPhone.

In a video taken from this month’s Teaching & Technology conference, the Berkeley crew uses an iPhone to pick tasks for its drone squadron, input a set of coordinates for a local reconnaissance mission, and send the planes new orders while the aircraft are in the sky.

But don’t tell Steve Jobs how the Berkeley folks are using his gadget. According to the terms of the Apple Software Developer Kit agreement, “applications may not be designed or marketed for real-time route guidance; automatic or autonomous control of vehicles, aircraft, or other mechanical devices; dispatch or fleet management; or emergency or life-saving purposes.”

Yep, apparently so. I guess myself and the rest of the civilized world hadn’t really taken much notice. Well, now I guess Rhapsody is swallowing up their flimsy business in hopes of consolidating a losing venture.

Spin City:

“Our partnership with Rhapsody, the acquisition of FoxyTunes and the release of the web-based Yahoo! Media Player moves Yahoo! Music closer to our goal of enabling users to play all of the music on the Web,” said Yahoo’s vice president of video and media applications, Ian Rogers. “But, it doesn’t end there. Yahoo Music will continue to innovate and forge new ways to marry music content with the rich content of the Internet[s].”

I’m sure this has nothing to do with Microsoft’s looming shadow.

Whatever, I always thought the “all-you-can-eat” music business model was faulty. it’s like being in a book of the month club, only when you fail to renew your subscription someone comes in and takes all your books that you “bought.” BS. I still buy CDs.

Microsoft, realizing that their MSN and Hotmail services have started to look almost cool compared to the absolute garbage provided by overvalued internet dinosaur Yahoo, offered up an unexpected buyout offer of $44.6B this morning, an offer Yahoo said it will study “carefully and promptly. ” The company formed by combining Yahoo and Microsoft will be catered specifically to the 1% of internet users, mainly old people, retards and foreigners who don’t automatically use Google for everything.

Paging Philip K. Dick:

In August 2007, software giant Microsoft filed a patent application for a system that would allow it to access thoughts. The patent describes pattern-recognition techniques that can be applied to electroencephalograph (EEG) signals – a measure of electrical activity in the brain – to determine what cognitive state the subject is in.

And you thought that Zune ad we used to have on this blog was annoying…wait until those fuckers can get in your MIND, brah! It’ll be like that shitty Tom Cruise movie a few years ago, Minority Report, where the billboards talked to you and knew your name and all that. Maybe we’ll all get lucky and Apple will figure it out first. At least then shit will be tasteful. A gentle mindfuck, if you will.

Microsoft keeps patching it and hackers keep hacking it. Microsoft’s Digital Rights Management just got cracked again in the age old DRM battle (although I guess it’s not really “age old” since this hasn’t really been going on for that long). Word has it that the new version of FairUse4M (which is apparently really called FairUse4WM, v1.3 Fix 2 if you wanna get technical) even features a drag and drop interface to make things even more user friendly. No need for that XP and Windows Media Player 10 with that subscription music service - at least until they repatch it again which will probably happen by Thursday or something…
FairUse4WM works only on Windows Media DRM 10 and DRM 11 and at least according the board that states

“This program is ONLY designed and intended to enable fair-use rights to PURCHASED media.
- While I haven’t been able to support license expiration/rental detection, please don’t use this to abuse rental license
- This code does NOT allow import of KID/SID pairs to preclude its use for piracy”

So, in a nutshell the program will strip the DRM from any PlaysForSure file, whether you’ve purchased or just rented the song.