Ubisoft’s misguided and universally despised Digital Rights Management system proved itself a complete failure over the weekend, depriving rightful owners of Assassin’s Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 the ability to play the very games they paid for.  It would appear Ubisoft’s servers failed, an event everyone knew would happen sooner or later as a perfect illustrative example of DRM nonsense that harms no one but the paying customer.

Ubisoft, is all this bad press really worth these daily articles? Can you truly say you’ve sold more copes of Assassin’s Creed II and Silent Hunter 5 because of your new DRM scheme? Or have you pushed away even more customers and alienated loyal fans? It’s not too late to call the whole thing off and return to creating stable, relatively bug-free games that merit a purchase.

Over the weekend, two statements were issued from the UK Community Manager:

Ubi.Vigil (UK Community Manager): I don’t have any clear information on what the issue is since I’m not in the office, but clearly the extended downtime and lengthy login issues are unacceptable, particularly as I’ve been told these servers are constantly monitored.

I’ll do what I can to get more information on what the issue is here first thing tomorrow and push for a resolution and assurance this won’t happen in the future. I realise that’s not ideal but there’s only so much I can do on a weekend as I’m not directly involved with the server side of this system.

Ubi.Vigil (UK Community Manager): Due to exceptional demand, we are currently experiencing difficulties with the Online Service Platform. This does not affect customers who are currently playing, but customers attempting to start a game may experience difficulty in accessing our servers. We are currently working to resolve this issue and apologize for any inconvenience.

With Avatar opening in a month, many Hollywood analysts and journalists are preparing and publishing stories that focus on the bloated budget, the troubled history of 3D movies, and the likelihood that Avatar has the potential to be the biggest bomb in cinema history. Now, all of this sounds very familiar, as I heard and read all these stories when the subject was instead Titanic, which proved itself the most successful movie ever made.

Having seen the exclusive 15-minute 3D preview several months ago, I can safely say that whatever experience you’ve had with 3D in the past has no bearing on what you are about to witness on the big-screen. Judging the visual quality of the movie based on 2D trailers is futile.

Related: My 16-Minutes of Avatar: Did Cameron Deliver or Crash and Burn?

Now we have Kim Masters of The Daily Beast droning on about Hollywood concerns, going the extra mile to say that because Robert Zemeckis’ latest 3D movie, A Christmas Carol, tanked at the box office that there is great cause for concern when it comes to Avatar. How these two movies relate is beyond me. The only thing they have in common is “3D” and even there they use two completely different processes. That, and very few people give a crap about Charles Dickens or A Christmas Carol, or Robert Zemeckis’ sloppy version of a classic tale.

From The Daily Beast:

Still, she describes Avatar as “iffy.” And that may not be the adjective that executives at Fox and their partners on the film want to hear. Given that it’s taken 12 years for Cameron to produce a follow up to Titanic, and considering the immense cost of the technology, the industry and the media have been guessing at Avatar’s budget, with the Los Angeles Times recently putting it at $310 million with additional marketing costs of about $150 million. Other estimates are even higher. (Fox co-chairman Jim Gianopulos told Reuters earlier this week that rumors the movie will cost $500 million are “ridiculous,” acknowledging nonetheless that it was “quite expensive.”)

The General Accounting Office has issued an eye-opening report explaining the imminent failure of America’s GPS infrastructure unless steps are soon taken to resolve long-standing issues.

From PhysOrg:

As old satellites start to fail in 2010, the overall GPS constellation will fall below the number of satellites required to provide the level of GPS service that the U.S. government commits to. This will come to reality if the Air Force does not meet their schedule for the deployment of GPS IIIA satellites.

The latest GPS satellite program is already $870 million over budget and there are significant technical problems that could still threaten its delivery schedule.

A GAO (Government Accountability Office) report recommends that the Department of Defense appoint a single authority to direct all development of GPS systems on the ground and in space.