Tech

EA continues to take a hammering on all fronts over Battlefront II, and the game isn’t going to be helped by declarations from Belgium and Hawaii. Belgium, after announcing it would investigate whether Battlefront II’s use of loot crates constituted gambling, has decided that they will. “The mixing of money and addiction is gambling,” a spokesperson for the commission told Belgian news site VTM (translation via ). “It will require time, because we need to go to Europe with this. We will absolutely try to forbid it.” To date, most nations have reached opposite conclusions, on the idea that gambling is only gambling if the player is receiving something of intrinsic value.

Google’s Chrome OS-based computers debuted in 2011 with a very limited feature set, but they’ve exploded in popularity as functionality improved. There are still a few pain points for those who want to move over to Chromebooks (). For example, a lack of Microsoft Office apps on many devices. That’s not a problem anymore, though. As of now, Microsoft , , and are available on all Chromebooks. Of course, Chromebooks don’t run desktop Windows software. We’re talking about the Android versions of these apps. You can download those apps on your Android-based phone or tablet right now, but Chromebooks run Android apps as well.

Last week, we covered the ambitions of “Mad Mike” Hughes, a limo driver with dreams of proving everyone wrong about the shape of the Earth. Alternately, Mike Hughes may be an opportunist, one who converted to Flat Eartherism after discovering the Flat Earth community (with members all around the globe, natch) was willing to contribute a great deal of funding to his rocket research. But opportunist or crackpot, Mike Hughes is still determined to launch his rocket. It turns out that the BLM (Bureau of Land Management) just wasn’t as excited about his plans as he was. The BLM put a stop to Hughes’ rocket launch , cheerlessly informing the would-be rocket “scientist” that he lacked an appropriate permit to launch himself roughly 1,800 feet into the air at a distance of one mile.

It’s often a challenge for programmers and scientists to get time on high-performance supercomputers. These machines are expensive to build and maintain, but there’s no substitute for the massively parallel computing environment of a supercomputer. A new project at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s High Performance Computing Division seeks to make supercomputers more accessible . Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) is home to several of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, including Trinity. That machine cost nearly $200 million to build, and its Intel Xeon Phi CPU cores are both powerful and power-hungry. Still, scientists need that sort of power for certain applications.

If you haven’t already finished your holiday shopping, here’s your chance to wrap things up early before December rolls around. Today’s Cyber Monday sales across the web are surprisingly good – even surpassing Black Friday itself for select products. So let’s make one more big push for holiday sales, finish up the gift wrapping, and kick back until the next holiday comes around. Featured Deals (List price: $724.99). (List price: $119.99). (List price: $229.95). (Coupon code: ITUNES15 – List price: $100). (List price: $620.98). (List price: $374.99).

Uber has spent the past year mired in controversy on virtually every front, from its attempts to evade regulators to lying about driver earnings, to its alleged theft of trade secrets from Google’s self-driving car research division, Waymo. Now, on top of these charges, there’s evidence that the company suffered a cataclysmic data breach and paid hackers $100,000 to keep the news out of the media. Bloomberg that the compromised data includes names, addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers of roughly 50 million Uber users. An additional seven million drivers were also impacted, though the data stolen appears to be the same in both cases.

After a long, long wait, Black Friday itself is finally upon us. The dam has busted, and there’s a staggering number of bargains happening all at once. To help give you as many deals as humanly possible, our friends and colleagues over at have put together a massive all-in-one list for us to share with you. It’s broken down into categories for your convenience, and it’ll be updated throughout Black Friday with the newest deals. Let’s jump in! Featured Deals NEW (List price: $199). NEW (List price: $269). NEW (List price: $349.99). (List price: $199).

Most Americans will spend Saturday in varying degrees of stupor, having just consumed a month’s worth of calories and/or spent a month’s worth of income. But not Mike Hughes. Mike, a 61-year-old limo driver has spent the past few years building a homemade, steam-powered rocket. This initial rocket — which hasn’t been tested, evaluated, or designed by anyone with what you’d call expertise — is meant to fling Hughes roughly a mile at a speed of 500 mph. “If you’re not scared to death, you’re an idiot,” Hughes told the . “It’s scary as hell, but none of us are getting out of this world alive.

Uber has spent the past year mired in controversy on virtually every front, from its attempts to evade regulators to lying about driver earnings, to its alleged theft of trade secrets from Google’s self-driving car research division, Waymo. Now, on top of these charges, there’s evidence that the company suffered a cataclysmic data breach and paid hackers $100,000 to keep the news out of the media. Bloomberg that the compromised data includes names, addresses, email addresses, and telephone numbers of roughly 50 million Uber users. An additional seven million drivers were also impacted, though the data stolen appears to be the same in both cases.