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Saudi Arabia, currently the world's biggest oil producer, has some very interesting plans - they want to be 100% powered by renewable and low-carbon forms of energy. This process would most likely take decades, but just the hint of it is quite powerful, and interesting.

You're probably thinking 'what does this have to do with tech?', but what is the one thing tech uses above all else? Energy. If the world turned from oil, to renewable sources to somewhere over 50-75% in the next decade, we would be looking at not only an entirely new world of technology, but an entire new way of living.

The news comes from Prince Tuki Al Faisal Al Saud, who is the founder of the King Faisal Foundation, where he told the Global Economic Symposium in Brazil that he hoped the kingdom could one day be powered entirely from low-carbon energy within his lifetime. At 67 years old, this would be much sooner, rather than later.

I'm an old school PC gamer, and enjoyed the days of Quake, Total Annihilation and System Shock 2. BioShock is a spiritual kind of successor, and was a great game - not as good as SS2, but for today's Call of Duty clones, it was great.

BioShock 2 felt like a let down, but BioShock Infinite... well, it's shaping up to look quite delicious indeed. The latest trailer for the Irrational Games-made first-person shooter is here, and shows off some great in-game footage.

There's a bunch of swinging in the air with your Sky-Hook, rescuing your lady friend, and a show of that huge city in the sky, Columbia. BioShock Infinite is set to hit the PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 on February 26, 2013.

Well, HTC is about to get a whole lot more awesome with the release of their "DLX" smartphone, which is headed to Verizon. We heard about this last week as the J Butterfly which is headed to the Japanese market.

HTC's DLX is the company's 5-inch smartphone, which sports a 1080p display. Along with its awesome high-res display, we're pleasured to see Qualcomm's Snapdragon S4 quad-core processor clocked at 1.5GHz, 1.5GB of RAM, 1.5GB of internal storage, a 12-megapixel rear-facing camera, and 2,500mAh battery.

Software wise, something else great to see is that the DLX will come with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean out of the box. The above specs are according to the smartphone's spec sheet, but the pictures from today's report point to 2GB of RAM, which could spice things up just a bit. DLX is also 4G LTE-capable, and should be on Verizon in the near future.

BioWare Montreal producer, Fabrice Condominas, sat down for a chat with VG247 where he discussed that the studio feels Commander Shepard has had his time to shine in Mass Effect, and that it's now time for another character to take the lead in Mass Effect 4. He says:

In a response to a question of what features the fourth outing in the Mass Effect world would include, Condominas replied with:

Rockstar wants your help with their upcoming sure-to-sell-millions, Grand Theft Auto V. GTA V is set to use the new Crews which popped its head up with Max Payne 3. Crews are groups of Rockstar Social Club members who form persistent teams and compete online together.

Rockstar doesn't consider Crews a finished product, and they want your help with it. Rockstar have said:

Not only have we seen the usually invincible Apple, but Google, Microsoft and more have been posting losses not just in the last 24 hours, but over the last month or so. Tech doesn't seem to be doing too well in the market lately, and AMD is yet another victim.

We reported that there would be 10-15% layoffs in the near future, with the chipmaker confirming this after their Q3 financial results. AMD recorded a net loss of $157 million on a revenue of $1.27 billion. These numbers are worse than they were in the previous quarter, as well as Q3 2011. Revenue decline was cited for both its Computing Solutions and Graphics divisions.

AMD's gross margins were 31% which is a big drop from the 45% they were enjoying last quarter, and Q3 2011. A $100 million inventory write-down was noted, which mainly consisted of Llano-based A-Series APUs, but cited lowering demand for its CPUs as a problem. Looking into the future AMD are likely to axe 15% of their workforce in hopes of lowering costs. AMD projects the cuts will lead to a savings of $20 million for Q4 and $190 million for the entire of 2013.

Google didn't have the day they wanted to yesterday, seeing their shares drop around 10% within under an hour of their earnings report hitting the market. But, during the Mountain View-based company's Q3 2012 earnings call, CEO Larry Page plugged their recently-announced Chromebook, as well as the Nexus 7.

Page told the assembled investors, press and analysts on the call that they should "all run out and buy the Nexus 7 for $199". Page stated:

Just before the Windows 8 bell rings next week, it looks like big Australian retailers in Dick Smiths and JB Hi-Fi are having mammoth sales. These two sales will be two of the best we'll see this year for electronics, as they pave the way for new hardware in the coming weeks.

Dick Smith's XXXL Sale, and JB Hi-Fi's Stocktake Sale details are below.

Dick Smith's XXXL Sale:

With The Pirate Bay floating into the clouds to evade the incoming lawsuits and attacks, it looks like MegaUpload founder Kim Dotcom is now touting the same thing. Dotcom and his business partner Mathias Ortmann revealed plans for MegaUpload's success, dubbed 'Mega' to Wired magazine a day before the news of TPB moving into the clouds broke out.

Mega will see users encrypt data using an AES algoritm before it gets uploaded to the site, Mega will then provide the user a unique decryption key that will be required to upload the data. Encryption will hopefully keep users' data safe, with Mega being completely oblivious to what the user is uploading to their servers making them much safer to legal action than previously.

Mega also plans to operate servers in several different countries, mirroring the data from other locations - meaning that in the event that a bunch of servers go offline due to legal intervention, files will still be available to users from another location. Mega aren't expecting legal issues, but it looks like they're just trying to plan this from all angles, keeping the users data the most important thing at all times - which is how it should be.

Intel's next-gen Atom currently slides along with the name of "Avoton", and is the chipmakers upcoming system-on-a-chip (SoC). Avoton will be based on 22nm Silvermont architecture and will reportedly sport 8 cores sharing 4MB of L2 cache (1MB per core).

Avoton's eight-core processors will feature clock speeds of between 1.6GHz and 2.4GHz, while including OOE (out-of-order execution) as well as Turbo Boost. Current Centerton-based Atom processors should be left behind performance wise by these new Edisonville platform-based Atom processors.

Turbo Boost will see the clock speeds reach around 2.7GHz which is quite good considering these new SoC will only come with a TDP of 6 to 8.5W. The Avoton SoC will have a TDP of somewhere between 6 and 20W. Avoton will improve upon Centerton's formula by throwing more features on-die, which will include gigabit ethernet, USB 2.0 and USB 3.0.

Today has been a busy day for financial reporting. Microsoft adds to our boring financial news day with their own earnings report, which is also less than spectacular. The third quarter (Microsoft's Q1 2014) has not been nice to companies, with many missing expectations due to slumping sales and other issues.

For Microsoft's Q1 2014, the company posted revenues of $16.01 billion and earnings per share of $0.53. Revenue is down from last quarter's $18.06 billion, but earnings are up from last quarters loss per share of $0.06. It's important to remember that Microsoft took a $6.19 billion writedown last quarter because of the failed aQuantive acquisition.

"The launch of Windows 8 is the beginning of a new era at Microsoft," said Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer at Microsoft, in a canned statement today. "Investments we've made over a number of years are now coming together to create a future of exceptional devices and services, with tremendous opportunity for our customers, developers, and partners."

Major ISPs have agreed to the Copyright Alert System and will begin to roll it out in the "coming weeks." The system doesn't exactly have any real force behind it, but it's more akin to the nag-ware software, such as WinRAR, where they will complain to you if you are pirating, but they never shut you down.

The Copyright Alert System allows content owners to lodge a complaint against an IP and the ISP will then send out a letter to the customer. The content owner never gets any customer information. The letter, at least the first one, is just of the purely informational variety. Subsequent letters may not be so nice.

Repeat offenders can have additional action taken by the ISP, such as throttling data speeds or forcing the subscriber to review "educational material." The CAS does not provide for cancellations, though the ISP can terminate a user's account at their own discretion. If a customer believes he is falsely accused, he can pay $35 for an independent review of his network behavior.

It's that time of year. No, not Christmas. Companies are reporting their third quarter results, some with positive results, and some with negative. Unfortunately, Nokia falls into the latter category. For the third quarter, Nokia posted a massive $754 million loss, which is actually an improvement from previous quarters.

This loss marks the six consecutive quarter than Nokia has lost money. That's not a good thing for a company to be doing quarter after quarter, however, Nokia doesn't have much choice in the matter. Stephen Elop took over as CEO in early 2011 and has seemingly been doing a good job turning the company around as this loss is less than previous.

In Q4 2011, Nokia lost $1.3 billion, which is a massive amount of money. However, that was easily eclipsed in Q1 2012 when Nokia reported losses of $1.6 billion. Q2 2012 saw losses of just $1.1 billion, and Q3, in other words, this quarter, saw losses of just $754 million, a marked improvement.

An update is coming to Yelp which should help deter businesses from purchasing fake reviews. Businesses who are caught doing underhanded transactions will be labeled with a notice alerting customers for 90 days. And if the business is caught doing it again within those 90 days, it will stay even longer.

The warning that will be shown can be seen above. It offers a bit of information on why it is there and why its bad that businesses purchase positive reviews. It also gives the option to show the reviews that have been flagged as purchased, which reportedly are flagged by an automatic system.

"We want to make sure consumers are making informed decisions," Yelp said in a blog post Thursday announcing the consumer alert labels. "Yelp's automated review filter is working around the clock to flag these types of biased reviews, and we believe that you deserve the right to know when this type of activity is taking place behind the scenes."

I definitely got a laugh when I saw this, I think you just might as well. We all know we live in a digital age where people seem to be more connected to their devices than the people around them. Well, author of Goodnight iPad, a parody of the well-known Goodnight Moon, has chronicled one man's love for Siri in his new book called Siri & Me: A Modern Love Story.

As you can see in the video above, it definitely looks like it will be a humors book. He pokes fun at her ability to understand several times: "I love you, Siri," Dave says. "I'll bet you say that to all of your gadgets..." Siri responds.

"The concept to do something about Siri came from my publisher when we had a meeting after the iPad book, but it really resonates with me and I'm completely fascinated by technology," Milgrim told Mashable. "It boggles my mind how much we live digitally now."

What could ultimately turn into the best form of punishment for losers of lawsuits, Apple is forced to run ads in the UK stating that Samsung did not copy the iPad design. This comes after they lost the original court battle and a subsequent appeal. At the time, the judge ruled that they weren't as "cool" as the iPad.

The judge in the original court battle made the original ruling that a notice would have to be placed upon Apple's website for one month, along with adverts in the Daily Mail, Financial Times, T3 Magazine and other publications to "correct the damaging impression" that Samsung was a copycat.

The appeals court decided not to overturn this part of the original ruling. "The acknowledgment must come from the horse's mouth," they said. "Nothing short of that will be sure to do the job completely." Of course, Samsung has to be happy with the ruling. Not only were they found to be not infringing, Apple has to publicly humiliate themselves.

When it comes to engineer salaries, it looks as though Google are the leaders in yet another category. With increased competition such as Facebook, the Mountain View-based company want to continue being one of the best places to work, offering above-average salaries for engineers according to a new study from job listings and information site, Glassdoor, reports the Wall Street Journal.

The study shows that Google's software engineers earn an average base salary of $128,336 compared to Facebook's $123,626, Apple's $114,413 and eBay and Zynga with $108,809 and $105,568, respectively. Facebook and Zynga have noticed the value of employee equity stakes drop following their IPO launches, where base salary makes a more important stance in terms of overall compensation.

Google on the other hand make the base salary a key selling point, where across-the-board last year the search giant gave all employees a 10% pay rise. Glassdoor found that the national average for a software engineer's base salary was around $92,648.

The first image of the upcoming expansion to Battlefield 3 "Aftermath" has hit Reddit, as a timed exclusive. You can see in the photo that one of the guys is holding a crossbow, which is going to be very, very interesting in-game.

"crash7800" which is Battlefield 3's Community Manager on Reddit, pointed out the crossbow, stating in a post "quake environment, survivors are modifying weapons what they get their hands on to work. The crossbow is one example, but vehicles will see more of this kind of treatment as well... :D".

Using the great words of Jim Carrey, alllllrighty then! This is going to be great if DICE can pull this off - the management of weapons in-game, would make the first-person shooter feel much more like Team Fortress 2, and that can only be a good thing. Now, if only my Origin account wasn't hacked, with EA not returning any of my messages about it, I'd be playing Battlefield 3 more. For now, I'll just salivate over this image of Aftermath.

Samsung Galaxy S III owners in the US have probably been wondering when their flagship smartphone would be getting the amazing Android 4.1 Jelly Bean OS, but there's some good news and unfortunately, some bad news.

The good news is that it's on its way and will arrive in the coming months, the bad news is that you'll still have to wait for those "coming months". Samsung would most likely be trapped from releasing it by the carriers, where they'll each have to finalize the update before shipping it to the public.

The update to the US Galaxy S III will bring over the usual Jelly Bean goodness like Project Butter and Google Now, and some new TouchWiz-based enhancements such as Blocking Mode, Easy Mode and a few new camera settings.

The Pirate Bay is looking to say good-bye to downtime and police raids by moving its hosting into the cloud. With this move, the data will be replicated around the world, across multiple servers and countries, basically making it invulnerable to any sort of police action in a single country.

Since clouds span multiple countries and multiple servers, usage should be snappier and there should be better up time, due to it being in the cloud, and due to its perceived safety from police raids. "Moving to the cloud lets TPB move from country to country, crossing borders seamlessly without downtime. All the servers don't even have to be hosted with the same provider, or even on the same continent," The Pirate Bay told TorrentFreak.

"Running on VMs cuts down operation costs and complexity. For example, we never need anyone to do hands-on work like earlier this month when we were down for two days because someone had to fix a broken power distribution unit," The Pirate Bay says. Using VMs is a great way to allow The Pirate Bay to quickly move to a new provider.