A lot of musicians over the years haven’t lent their music to video games. As time goes on and video games become more of a media mainstay, various musicians stopped being stubborn and realized lending their music to games only widens their potential audience. Well, video games claimed another musical soul in Billy Joel, who will be bringing ten hits to Rock Band 3 starting December 14th.

The fun thing about all this, aside from getting to play “Piano Man” on Rock Band 3′s keyboard peripheral, is that Billy Joel made the decision out of spite for Entertainment Weekly.

USA Today is reportingthat Cold War era paranoia is alive and well in today’s society (albeit modified to accommodate the more ambiguous range of threats we face today) in the form of a booming underground bunker industry. But these aren’t your average hole-in-the-desert bunkers, mind you. These are bona fide luxury comfort subterranean shelters. No joke!

Meet the Vivos network, “a nationwide group of 20 fortified, underground shelters” that you can buy into for the small price of $50,000 per person ($25,000 for each of the kids). According to USA Today, the network offers “partial ownership similar to a timeshare” in luxury styled underground bunkers (artistic rendering above). Amenities include a hospital, dental clinic, move theater, and (judging from schematics available on their website) a bank of desktop computers. Great, I’m glad to know I can check Facebook while I’m waiting out the apocalypse.

>>>Check out the TV report on this thing that actually exists at Mediaite.

Today, at Wired‘s Disruptive by Design conference, Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced that, beginning July 1st, Starbucks will offer free WiFi internet access in every one of its American stores.  No time limit, no registration required.

Right now, patrons are only allowed to surf for two hours at a time, and have to have a Starbucks card in order to get access.  By this fall, Starbucks will also be rolling out The Starbucks Digital Network, offering free access to a number of for-pay-only sites to its customers.

Read on...

You know that old South Park gag about how people who are really good at Guitar Hero tend not to be any good at playing actual guitars, and vice versa? Well, the latest confirmed changes in Rock Band 3 indicate that the game is moving closer and closer to a test of the sort of competence that we associate with real-world musicians. While you’ll still be able to noodle away on your five-button guitar and hear Megadeth or Rush songs blasting from your screen in all their glory, the two new instrument additions are a good deal more complicated: A 22-button MIDI keyboard, and a 102-button fully functional guitar for “Rock Band Pro” mode.

Japanese robots may someday build a moon base, which would be the first permanent lunar structure. But their base would still be coming after the first art museum on the moon, which may have been unknowingly founded over 40 years ago.

USA Today reported on the story to air June 21 on PBS’ History Detectives, in which through a series of covert actions, work by six prominent 1960s artists was snuck onto the Apollo 12 lunar lander, which would mean it’s still on the moon to this day. Allegedly, Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, John Chamberlain and Forrest “Frosty” Myers each contributed a sketch which was then shrunk down and fitted to a chip a half inch by three quarters of an inch. The teensy weensy art collection was then supposedly stowed onto Apollo 12 by engineer “John F.” The motivation for PBS to break the story before the show is actually to get this “John F” to come forward and confirm, since he was to orchestrate the caper’s final step and thus only he knows whether it actually succeeded. So if you’re reading this, John, come forward. Also, you’re amazing.

Kick-Ass is not doing so well in its first box office weekend, according to USA Today. The Millar-based flick expected to at least clear its production costs, but estimates put it at earning $19.8 million.

This puts it neck and neck with How To Train Your Dragon, which took in $20 million in the past two days, its fourth box office weekend.

For a little while now, the elite of the tech journalism world have been behind closed doors, testing the Apple iPad ahead of its release this Saturday. And after sitting down with the device — which Apple is trumpeting as the future of computing, while critics fear it as foretelling the coming infantilization of user interfaces — they’re actually pretty impressed! Here’s what the Important Tech Writers of Our Time have been saying: