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After selling a bumper stack of 1.5 million copies in just 48 hours, StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is officially the fastest selling strategy game of all time.

According to Blizzard, StarCraft II had already managed to rack up over a million sales in its first day alone, making it the best-selling PC game of the year in just 24 hours. Blizzard says it compiled the figures using a combination of public data, reports from distribution partners and its own internal company records.

Regulators in the United Arab Emirates said Sunday they would prohibit BlackBerry email, instant-messaging and Internet-browsing services starting in October, after what officials in the country said has been a long-running dispute with the device’s maker about how it stores electronic data.

The U.A.E. market is relatively small for Canada’s Research In Motion Ltd., which makes the BlackBerry smartphone. But the suspension comes amid unease by at least one other government, India, over the inability to monitor or review electronic communications via the device in criminal, terrorist or national-security investigations. A Saudi Arabian official said the Communications and Information Technology Commission ordered telecommunications firms to block BlackBerry messaging services later this month, according to Zawya Dow Jones.

GM's Electric Lemon

Quantifying just how much taxpayer money will have been wasted on the hastily developed Volt is no easy feat. Start with the $50 billion bailout (without which none of this would have been necessary), add $240 million in Energy Department grants doled out to G.M. last summer, $150 million in federal money to the Volt’s Korean battery supplier, up to $1.5 billion in tax breaks for purchasers and other consumer incentives, and some significant portion of the $14 billion loan G.M. got in 2008 for “retooling” its plants, and you’ve got some idea of how much taxpayer cash is built into every Volt.

This week’s charts from Gamasutra, with data taken from July 29th, 2010, find Starcraft II heading cross-platform sales in the United States and Europe.

Data comes courtesy of the public sales information on Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk, and Amazon.co.jp, with sales split out for each platform and territory, and pre-orders disregarded.

PC Sales from Gamasutra follows after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

Wired Magazine has an insightful article with Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month (i.e., you can’t always speed up an overdue software project by adding more programmers).  In it, the man behind the most successful IBM mainframe ever is asked his greatest technological achievement. His response? Enabling lowercase letters.

A woman took her ailing mom to see an American Idol concert in Massachusetts but was mistreated by employees who were less than willing to accommodate her mom’s special needs. The next day she took to Twitter, fired off a couple complaints and spurred Live Nation to make things right.

The dream of generations of comic-book fans came true as Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.), Thor (Chris Hemsworth), Captain America (Chris Evans), Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and the Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) gathered together on the stage along with writer/director Joss Whedon. The Avengers, assembled at last!

The original games were incredibly popular in the 1980s and early 1990s, combining the traditional text adventure format with basic graphics and music. Created by fans who had the intention of giving the game away for free, The Silver Lining caught the attention of Activision’s legal team who issued the developers with a cease and desist order. After negotiations, the C&D [cease and desist] has been officially rescinded, and Phoenix Online has been granted a non-commercial license to release The Silver Lining!

HDMI’s short-lived reign over the TV cable racks could soon be over, thanks to a new usurper that combines several connections into a single, standard network cable. Designed by a coalition of consumer electronics manufacturers, including Sony, Samsung, LG and Valens, HDBaseT promises to not only carry video and audio signals, but also provide a network connection, a USB signal and even electricity using a single cable.

From the Brownsville Herald:

Despite a possible hurricane bearing down, Brownsville residents wanting a fix of vampires and werewolves lined up at the Cinemark Theater Tuesday for tickets to “The Twilight Saga: Eclipse,” which premiered at midnight.
Carolina Ayala, 22, brushed off concerns about Alex, the season’s first named storm, coming ashore with a vengeance.

“I can die happy if I saw the movie,” she said.