firehose

In an age when some bands are catching flack for asking fans to not use cameras at their shows, Arcade Fire is taking fan requests even further. The semi-eccentric Canadian band is asking everyone who attends shows on its upcoming tour to “please wear formal attire or costume.” To frontman Win Butler, this means “suits, dinner jackets, masks, and even full costume.” Should this not be your bag, tough shit; Butler told a crowd in London recently he’s “not sorry” if “anyone [felt] uncomfortable dressing up.”

While the request isn’t new for the band—fans were asked to dress up for the group’s entire recent run of club shows—it is causing some raised eyebrows among those who can’t be bothered to put on collared shirts. Stereogum, for instance, points out that it might be just a little insane for the band to ask “23,000 Kentuckians to dress up like ...

Sony's PlayStation 4.

Andrew Cunningham

Sony's new PlayStation 4 is selling well at its introductory price point of $399, but how much does it cost to make? Research firm IHS iSuppli, long known for its consumer electronics teardowns and cost analyses, has told AllThingsD that the components and the cost of assembly comes to roughly $381.

Two particularly expensive components are the console's AMD-designed APU and its 8GB of GDDR5 RAM, which cost about $100 and $88 respectively. Driving up the cost of the chip is its large size—Chipworks says it measures about 348mm², owing to the eight CPU cores and dedicated-class GPU that's integrated into its die. As IHS points out, the larger your chip is, the greater the chance that some part of it will have a defect on it somewhere, which drives yields down and pushes costs up. (Unlike standard CPUs and GPUs, it's not possible to recoup any of that cost by selling lower-performance versions of the chips with the defective sections disabled.) Other notable costs include the 500GB hard drive (about $37), the Blu-ray drive ($28), and the controller ($18).

What isn't factored into the teardown cost are research and development, advertising, and shipping costs associated with the console, all of which are likely more than sufficient to eat up the remaining margin. Bear in mind that this is all based on guesswork, however—IHS may be in the ballpark, but the actual cost to Sony will differ depending on the component deals the company has managed to cut.

Hayao Miyazaki can’t stop.

The 72-year-old filmmaker and artist announced plans to retire from directing at Studio Ghibli earlier this year, but that isn’t keeping him from writing and illustrating a new manga series about samurai in Japan’s Warring States era. He hasn’t even been paid for the currently unnamed work yet. Japanese TV network NHK snagged some footage of Miyazaki working on the comic, and you can take a look at some screenshots. So far, it seems as rich and detailed as anything he’s ever worked on.

Miyazaki’s final feature film through Studio Ghibli, The Wind Rises, is set for release in the United States in February 2014. No word yet on when fans — in Japan or the US — will be able to read his upcoming samurai manga.

[Via Crunchyroll]

Peter Sunde, one of the cofounders of The Pirate Bay, is one of the most politically outspoken of the site's original creators. As the former spokesperson for the torrent site, he was an early member of Sweden's Piratebyrån and is currently running for for a seat in the European Parliament as a member of Sweden's Pirate Party. It should thus come as no surprise that he is a believer in political action. In an interview with Wired UK, Sunde goes so far as to say that believing in technology without political change is "a bit disgusting."

In the interview, Sunde rails against the arrogance of those looking for technological evolution instead of political revolutions. "Sometimes," he tells Wired UK," you have to actually make sure that politics are in line with what people want." He goes on to talk about how police corruption isn't solved with file encryption. "You actually need to go somewhere and vote and make sure you don't have corrupt police," he says.

It does appear that, for Sunde, technology can serve political causes when used appropriately. He has already spoken out against the NSA's surveillance efforts, combining that with plans for an encrypted messaging app known as Hemlis. He also talks about the "imminent death" of peer-to-peer, expressing how The Pirate Bay is not where it should be to compete with services likes Spotify and Netflix — services he believes are good, but are centralized in a way that leaves them susceptible to NSA activities. You can read the full interview at Wired UK.