Video Games Live have posted up the PBS broadcast schedule of this summer's concert event.

Sadly, a lot of cities are not on the list. If yours isn't - send an email to your local PBS people!

According to Apple Insider, the US Government is announcing new rules to specifically hit mobile devices and make things like iPhone jailbreaking unquestionably legal:

The report noted that every three years, the Library of Congress' Copyright Office authorizes exemptions to ensure existing law does not prevent non-infringing use of copyrighted material.

In addition, another exemption was approved that would allow all cell phone users to unlock their device for use on an unapproved carrier. Currently, Apple's iPhone is available exclusively through AT&T, but unlocking it can allow for voice calls and EDGE data speeds on rival carrier T-Mobile.

Other exemptions announced Monday allow people to break protections on video games to investigate or correct security flaws; allow college professors, film students and documentary filmmakers to break copy protection measures on DVDs to embed clips for educational purposes, criticism, commentary and noncommercial videos; and allow computer owners to bypass the need for external security devices (dongles) if the hardware no longer works and cannot be replaced.

We'd still do better to kill the DMCA altogether.

Lyle Lovett has some pretty pointed things to say about the music industry - echoing what's been said by others before.

Techdirt had a previous article over here going into detail as well.

The management would like to point out yet another instance of "copyright law" gone ridiculously stupid.

The 10-year-old budding actress' effort to raise money for a U.K. children's hospice through a homemade video has been dealt a setback by a copyright dispute with a New York-based publishing company that owns the rights to a song from a Charlie Chaplin movie.

It all started innocently enough last year when Bethany decided to make a Chaplin-style film using money she earned as an extra on the critically acclaimed British soap opera "Emmerdale." She dressed up like the legendary silent-movie comic to star in her own video tribute.

The homemade film features Bethany singing the song "Smile," the theme from Chaplin's 1936 classic "Modern Times." (Lyrics were added to "Smile" in 1954 and it was originally sung by Nat King Cole.) The video was posted on the JustGiving website to raise money for Martin House, a children's hospice in Wetherby, West Yorkshire, England.

If anyone asks - Bourne Music Publishing are a bunch of heartless dicks. Feel free to write them emails reminding them so.

The Xbox engineering blog has a nice article up on what exactly goes into making the "achievement" system work:

One hot topic that came up in that meeting was that profiles must be available offline. That meant that a player didn’t have to be connected to Xbox LIVE in order to access his or her achievements or profile settings. The impassioned statement was, “I have to be able to take my Xbox to Whistler for a ski weekend, and have all the achievements I earn there show up online when I plug in at home Monday morning!” Life would have been a lot easier if hotels in Whistler offered free Internet access but, instead, offline access became a big part of the profile story. Not only could you go away for the weekend, but you didn’t have to worry if you lost your Internet connection before reaching a critical milestone. Or you could play without ever connecting to Xbox LIVE, earn a pile of achievements, and have them show up in the cloud the first time you got connected. Offline access made for some late nights for the development team, but we knew it was the right thing to do and that was enough to justify the overtime.

Read the whole thing - if you've ever wondered why certain things work a certain way, the descriptions of the discussions show they really did put a decent amount of thought into the system.

Back from a long, long conventiongoing weekend. So many fun times, so much good food in the City of New Orleans.

Back here at HQ - Castle Crashers has survived two (maybe 3?) major updates, which radically changed how the game was played. Survey says... most of the changes were good (bugfixes and exploit-kills), some not so great (inability to hold an "air-juggle" as long making certain character builds less viable).

Transformers: War for Cybertron. Nice idea for a game, and I can see how it may work for the online portion, but I'm less than enthusiastic about the storyline missions and maps. They're so visually busy that finding item drops, and sometimes even enemies, is next to impossible. Also, the fact that co-op mode requires each person to have their own console? BOO.

Techdirt takes on how the RIAA members defraud musicians, in an ongoing series that previously showed how movie theaters fraudulently claim to lose money on even the most powerful summer blockbusters.

Of course, it's actually even more ridiculous than this report makes it out to be. Going back ten years ago, Courtney Love famously laid out the details of recording economics, where the label can make $11 million... and the actual artists make absolutely nothing. It starts off with a band getting a massive $1 million advance, and then you follow the money:

Read all the way through, to understand why the music industry is so messed up.

Ultima VI's fan-done remake has been officially released!

Enjoy the free game and have fun!

Behold the bionic cat. One day, we may be doing this sort of thing for humans.

Documentary video available on Youtube.

The inventor of the Pixel has something to say:

“Squares was the logical thing to do,” Kirsch says. “Of course, the logical thing was not the only possibility … but we used squares. It was something very foolish that everyone in the world has been suffering from ever since.”

Now retired and living in Portland, Oregon, Kirsch recently set out to make amends. Inspired by the mosaic builders of antiquity who constructed scenes of stunning detail with bits of tile, Kirsch has written a program that turns the chunky, clunky squares of a digital image into a smoother picture made of variably shaped pixels.

Intriguing, though it still has to pass through a square-pixel monitor.