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Daredevil Dave is a funny, quirky, stunt-based arcade game that offers limited gameplay but lots of heart.

The game's personality and humor--surely inspired by premillennial celebrity weirdo Super Dave Osborne--is evident from the main menu and the tutorial, as you play a self-absorbed and proudly reckless (but still somehow lovable) motorcycle daredevil, portrayed with pop-up cartoons and hyperbolic voice-over.

The game has 18 levels in all, ranging from more-conventional stunts involving trucks and flaming hoops to utterly ridiculous situations with lava, sharks, helicopters, and bombs. In each stunt, your goal is to hit the landing ramp as precisely as … Read more

General Motors today announced the company has made its final payment of $5.8 billion to the U.S. Treasury and Export Development Canada, paying back its government loans in full, ahead of schedule.

Company Chairman and CEO Ed Whitacre made the announcement at GM's Fairfax, Kansas facility.

"GM is able to repay the taxpayers in full, with interest, ahead of schedule, because more customers are buying vehicles like the Chevrolet Malibu and Buick LaCrosse and Buick LaCrosse we build here in Fairfax," said Whitacre. "We are now building some of the best cars, trucks, and … Read more

Microsoft will plug a hole in a built-in filter in Internet Explorer 8 that can be used to launch the very types of attacks on Web sites it was designed to help prevent, the company said on Tuesday.

The company will update the IE cross-site scripting (XSS) filter in June to fix a hole that researchers warned about at the Black Hat Europe conference in Barcelona last week. The researchers showed how problems with the filter could be used to inject malicious code onto sites including Google, Microsoft's Bing search site, and Twitter.

"A June release is what'… Read more

Perhaps retirement doesn't suit former Sun Microsystems CEO Jonathan Schwartz.

Just weeks into his post-Sun life, Schwartz offers some delicious anecdotes in a blog post, summarizing Apple's and Microsoft's threats to sue Sun for patent infringement as more about bluster than substance.

But that's not the lesson I learn from Schwartz's commentary.

Instead, what is immediately obvious to me is that a) the technology industry is a morass of conflicting patent claims, b) since there's really no way to completely avoid others' patents the best defense is to have a hefty counterbalancing patent portfolio … Read more

Microsoft and Amazon announced on Monday that the two have entered into a patent cross-licensing deal.

As part of the pact, Amazon will pay Microsoft an undisclosed amount of money, though the two sides did not disclose more details.

The deal covers both Amazon's Kindle product as well as the company's use of Linux-based servers. Microsoft has maintained that many implementations of Linux infringe on its patents and has signed numerous licensing deals that cover Linux with both companies that sell Linux-based software and those that use the operating system in their hardware.

Microsoft, which started an intellectual property licensing push … Read more

VANCOUVER/WHISTLER, British Columbia--There are a lot of hassles to running one's own business, but for Norman Tu of Fremont, Calif., the benefit is that he never has to miss the Olympics.

Tu, who runs DCL, a warehouse logistics company, said he is now at his seventh Olympic games, having previously attended the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games as well as summer installments in Los Angeles, Barcelona, Atlanta, Sydney, and Beijing.

"L.A. is where I got hooked," said Tu, whose company helps companies like Symantec and Jawbone store inventory and handle online orders. Sydney was … Read more

Chrysler plans to auction off a 300C at the end of the month. The proceeds will go to the American Red Cross relief effort in Haiti.

Chrysler Brand President and CEO Olivier Francois talks about the auction in this Web video. The donated Chrysler 300C has been signed by about 300 celebrities. It will be auctioned on February 20 by Leake Car Auctions in Oklahoma City.

This week: charity in a connected world. The January 12 earthquake and humanitarian disaster in Haiti had an important technological component: Through the text message giving program, the Red Cross raised $26 million in funds in just nine days. That's not just a large amount of money to be raised in a short time, it's an unprecedented level of participation. Was this a one-time outpouring of goodwill, or the beginning of a trend in global humanitarianism made possible by technology?

To talk about this and related issues on the Roundtable, I'm joined by Caroline McCarthy from our New York office. Caroline has been covering the online giving program for CNET. And from the Red Cross itself, we have Jonathan Aiken, director of media relations. Before joining the Red Cross, Aiken was a Washington correspondent and an anchor for CNN.