Microsoft are having to go into some serious damage control post-E3 2013, as the Xbox One is really losing steam with gamers. Xbox Live director of programming, Major Nelson, took to Reddit in r/games and during an interview answered the following question:

After the Xbox One servers are shut down at the end of the new generation, will Xbox One games still be playable?

Interesting question, which should have an interesting answer, right? Well, Nelson answered with:

Intel have just launched their Haswell processors, or fourth-generation Core processor, but they will never stop. The 2014 platform known as Haswell-E will launch as an 8-core processor, oh baby, yeah.

Intel's Haswell-E platform will launch in 2014 and will be their enthusiast platform, we're going to get into some specs now so you'd better put a book on your lap or something. Haswell-E is set to debut in the second half of next year and will be Intel's first 8-core desktop CPU, so expect some serious CPU performance. We should see an offer of between 6- and 8-core CPUs with up to an amazing 20MB of L3 cache.

But, wait, there's more! 8 physical CPU cores means we're still greeted with Hyper-Threading, meaning 16 logical cores. Maximum TDP for Haswell-E should sit at around 130-140W with the processor itself sitting on the 22nm second-generation Hi-k process. Performance-wise, with the additional two physical CPU cores and the usual improvements in the architecture, we should expect a 33-50% performance increase over the 2014 platform.

I think mainstream science has been suppressed for a very long time now, and it's about time that we find out, as a human race, what the reality of our existence really is. The first steps in this, are reversing the mainstream points of science. It looks like NASA could do something good here, with their latest field test that could prove that there is a possibility of faster-than-light travel.

Harold White and his team at NASA have been working on something called the Alcubierre Drive. This new method could use a solution which would see a craft placed within a space that is moving faster than the speed of light. This means that the craft itself isn't moving at the speed of light, meaning the craft itself doesn't need a propulsion system capable of travelling at that speed. This is where things get a little confusing, so grab your white lab coat and come on a walk with me.

The Alcubierre Drive is based on Einstein's field equations, which suggest that a spacecraft could indeed travel faster than the speed of light. But, instead of the craft itself pushing past the speed of light, it would do so by contracting space from in front of it, and expanding the space behind it - a nice trick. It's this type of science that I love reading about, and I think this is the future of space travel - thinking outside the box, which this kind of is.

Google's super-secretive but super-cool Google X labs have designed some amazing things so far, such as Google Glass and the self-driving cars from Google. Google X have just outdone themselves today by announcing Project Loon, which would see balloon-powered Internet access to parts of the world where Internet access is hard, or impossible to come by.

Google even started testing this new initiative during the week, which would provide users with 3G-like speeds using balloons blasting Internet down to the people below in New Zealand. Google have said that they've found a way to let these balloons "sail freely in the winds" and would steer them by moving them up or down to catch the right winds. Of course, this means that Google still have some work to do, which I can see them creating the technology to at least automate this process.

The Mountain View-based search giant have said that they're solving this problem "with some complex algorithms and lots of computing power." Google would be using wind data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to give the balloons their flight paths. The search giant are currently using 30 balloons to test the project with around 50 tests in New Zealand who are using the service on the ground.

E3 2013 - At this year's E3, Popcap announced a new version of their popular Plants vs Zombies franchise. Known as Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare, the new game takes a twist on the older tower defense game. The new game makes use of the Frostbite 3 engine, which allows for excellent graphics. The trailer is embedded below, and I suggest you watch it before moving on in this piece:

In all reality, Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare is probably my official highlight from the 2013 E3 show. The graphics look great, the gameplay looks interesting, and it was probably one of the biggest surprises at the show. Everyone expected most of the other games, but I hadn't heard of this until EA's press conference on Monday.

EA and Popcap tried to merge the best of the FPS world while still keeping what people loved from the original: EA took "everything you love about action games and matched it with everything our fans love about Plants vs Zombies."

This is something that could be like pulling a thread from a very large ball of wool, but defense lawyers for Terrance Brown, who is a south Florida man currently facing bank robbery charges, have requested the NSA to provide them with Brown's mobile phone surveillance records to support his claim that he wasn't anywhere near the bank at the time of the robbery.

The reason this request has been done is that we now know that the NSA requires all American phone companies to hand over the complete records of all of their clients' calls, including the GPS location data of the calls themselves.

The prosecution had told defense attorneys that they were unable to obtain Brown's cellphone records from the period before September 2010 because his carrier, MetroPCS, had not held on to them.

E3 2013 - TweakTown got a chance to capture some extended in-game action of the upcoming FPS Battlefield 4 at E3 2013. Before watching the video, let me add a disclaimer that I am not much of a Battlefield player, preferring the older classic Unreal Tournament 2004. The graphics and "levelution" make Battlefield 4 an excellent game, and I will soon become a seasoned veteran because of those features.

With that said, this is still an early build. I noticed various graphical glitches throughout the game that should end up being fixed by the time BF4 launches in October. I didn't get a good chance to experience the Commander mode, but it does look to be a nice addition to the game, especially since it allows the Battlefield 4 experience to be taken to tablets and mobile devices.

Planetary Annihilation is something I've been keeping my eye on, which went live on Steam this week. The problem is, you can buy it and play it now all ahead of the full launch, but it'll set you back an insane $90 for the privilege.

The $90 does also give you entry to the Planetary Annihilation beta as well as the finished and polished version which is due in December. The final game won't cost $90, which is a sigh of relief. So alpha players are kind of funding the game on top of its Kickstarter funding, which isn't cool of the developers. Some gamers are up in arms over it, with some messages from the Steam boards as proof:

There should be actual benefits for investing time and money into an alpha game (and is released on Steam, this is not on Kickstarter), not get financially slapped in thn the face for actually supporting a niche game from an unknown indie developer.

MSI has just launched what could very well be the perfect combination of alterable portability combined with deadly gaming capability. The GE40 comes armed with state-of-the-art components including an Intel Haswell Core i7 processor and a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760M GPU.

The GE40 is able to take full advantage of the GTX 760M by adding a Matrix display that allows users output to up to three displays simultaneously. The laptop also features Sound Blaster Cinema and Audio Boost technologies that pack one hell of an aural punch.

Possibly the coolest feature is the all aluminum body that displays hidden backlit dragon eyes on the top cover. The GE40 is available in two storage configurations a 750GB hard drive or 125GB mSATA SSD paired with a 750GB hard drive for increased performance. Both models feature 8 GB of DDR three, a gigabit LAN adapter, two USB 3.0 ports, and one USB 2.0 port.

Pretty much everyone was surprised this week when Microsoft announced a new redesigned Xbox 360 even though it planned to launch the next generation Xbox one just a few months from now. Not wasting any time, repair manual website iFixit, has just posted the world's first teardown of the Xbox 360 Model E.

IFixit notes that apart from a model name change, and cosmetic case updates, there is very little difference between the original Xbox 360 and the 360 E. It appears that the cosmetic changes were implemented to save on the cost of manufacturing the machine.

The costs saving measures include a redesign rear port area which cuts the A/V and S/PDIF ports from existence. Additionally Microsoft has removed one USB port from the back panel cutting the numbers down to just four. It appears that Microsoft used the exact same heat sink and cooling fan as the previous model which makes sense because they solve the RRoD issues with the S. Additionally the hard drive is easier to remove, but comes hermetically sealed inside a plastic case.