ROM-DOS

. . .WOW!! It's SNOWING here in Western Washington. . . .these are the biggest snowflakes I have ever seen ~ 2'' wide!! SO COOL!!

. . .what about earplugs or head/ear phones?

Quick Reply With a Quick-Reply you can use bulletin board code and smileys as you would in a normal post, but much more conveniently. [you have to activate it in your profile options]

Banking on a virtual economy Late last month, Jon Jacobs, an independent filmmaker from Miami, became the first person in the history of online gaming to spend $100,000 on a single virtual item when he bought a space station in the game "Project Entropia." Jacobs, whose avatar Neverdie is somewhat of a celebrity in the space fantasy game, is so confident of his ability to turn his hefty investment into quick riches that he pulled cash out of his real-world home to help raise the hundred grand. His certainty is based partly on the experience of David Storey, who earlier this year set the previous record for highest price paid for a virtual item when he plopped down $26,500 for Treasure Island, a private piece of "Project Entropia" land. Storey, Jacobs said, has already made his money back through revenue earned by hunters and miners who pay a tax to use his island. And though there haven't been many instances of people paying five or six figures for virtual items, the trade in such goods is big business. The value of all virtual items--swords, armor, dwellings, vehicles and the like--is measured in the hundreds of millions of dollars a year. And it is only growing. So tell me about this space station? [JJ] Well, the space station is very special because first of all it has 10 hunting grounds. I can probably attract a total of 100 hunters an hour. That could mean a gross turnover of $1,000 to $5,000 an hour (in looted goods) of which I can tax between 1 percent and 10 percent, or $100 to $500 an hour, just from hunting. There's also going to be mining opportunities, and I get 1,000 hotel rooms. On the space station, there is no public storage, which means that if you're a hunter or a miner, you can't hunt for very long and get laden with too many items before you can't move. So you're going to want somewhere to store your stock, so it's going to be worthwhile investing in an apartment. I'm also going to have 200 shops, so hunters and crafters can exhibit their wares. But here's the key, and this is why I did this. Why are people going to come to this space station? One of the features is that I'm going to have audio and visual streaming so I can bring in DJs to stream in live DJ sets. If I'm working with top DJs, they're going to be pumping in fantastic music, and (I can) advertise to the DJs' fan bases that they can see their favorite DJs live in virtual reality. So how much can you make with this? [JJ] Let's say there's 20 hours a day of hunting, times as many as 100 hunters at a time. With my 5 percent tax, that's as much as $5,000 a day. That's $35,000 a week, $140,000 a month, or $1.68 million a year. I'm calling that the successful low end. . . .man 'o man 'o man.

What's the buzz? Teens can't stand it BARRY, Wales--Though he did not know it at the time, the idea came to Howard Stapleton when he was 12 and visiting a factory with his father, a manufacturing executive in London. Opening the door to a room where workers were using high-frequency welding equipment, he found he could not bear to go inside. "The noise!" he complained. "What noise?" the grownups asked. Now 39, Stapleton has taken the lesson he learned that day--that children can hear sounds at higher frequencies than adults can--to fashion a novel device that he hopes will provide a solution to the eternal problem of obstreperous teenagers who hang around outside stores and cause trouble. The device, called the Mosquito ("It's small and annoying," Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he said, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away. "It's loud and squeaky and it just goes through you," said Jodie Evans, 15, who was shopping at the store even though she was supposed to be in school. "It gets inside you." Using his children as guinea pigs, he tried a number of different noise and frequency levels, testing a single-toned unit before settling on a pulsating tone which, he said, is more unbearable, and which can be broadcast at 75 decibels, within government auditory-safety limits. "I didn't want to make it hurt," Stapleton said. "It just has to nag at them." He is considering introducing a much louder unit that can be switched on in emergencies with a panic button. It would be most useful when youths swarm into stores and begin stealing en masse, a phenomenon known in Britain as steaming. The idea would be to blast them with such an unacceptably loud, high noise--a noise inaudible to older shoppers--that they would immediately leave. "It's very difficult to shoplift," Stapleton said, "when you have your fingers in your ears."

. . .yeppers

If you've followed the recent controversy about sex and violence in video games, then you're probably not too surprised by Monday's announcement that Sony

Firefox 1.5 will be available for free on Tuesday afternoon, U.S. Pacific Standard Time, at www.getfirefox.com and www.mozilla.com, according to the open-source group. A complete press release outlining the new features in Firefox 1.5, as well as some additional Mozilla news, will be issued at the time the new version is available. New features in Firefox 1.5 include a better system for updating software, faster navigation using the

smart guy ~ there's only one internet and there's no such thing as speed! ~ it's all relative.

Although Internet domain names may be getting longer or more complex as Web sites creatively squeeze into the crowded ".com" address space, most single-letter names like "a.com" and "b.com" remain unused. That may soon change as the Internet's key oversight agency considers lifting restrictions on the simplest of names. In response to requests by companies seeking to extend their brands, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers will chart a course for single-letter Web addresses as early as this weekend, when the ICANN board meets in Vancouver, British Columbia. Those names could start to appear next year. But the transition won't be easy

The now infamous $100 laptop designed by MIT in cooperation with the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) assocation will run Redhat Linux according to an article at Tectonic, an African open source news site. The laptop, which features an eight inch SVGA display, 1 GB of flash memory, 128 MB of DRAM, and a 500 Mhz AMD processor will also ship with a web browser, a word processor, and a programming environment of some kind. At this point, it is probably safe to assume that the browser and word processor will be the increasingly popular Firefox and OpenOffice.org, but the nature of the programming environment remains a matter of debate. Some preliminary details suggest that the laptop will ship with the Squeak Smalltalk environment, which is not particularly surprising, since Squeak luminary Alan Kay is one of the researchers contributing to the laptop project. The laptop also features support for a unique, peer-to-peer wireless mesh network that will work right out of the box, and MIT researchers are currently investigating various ways to facilitate low cost internet access for the laptop systems. The latest details also indicate that the OLPC folks plan to distribute a commercial version for about US$200. Details on commercial distribution are still pretty sketchy, but based on the note at the bottom of the Tectonic article, it looks like OLPC could currently be negotiating with potential distributors. One can't help but wonder how this product will influence operating system market share, and the portable computing market. Regardless of how it affects industry, it could potentially revolutionize the way that people utilize and share information in the developing world.

REV0LUTI0NIZED ~ the only thing us Mods can do is hope our cats don't jump up on the keyboard and accidentally hit the Special Delete button for the entire Forum!! . . .here kitty kitty

. . .somebody forgot to donate this month!!

<img src="http://imagehouze.com/uploader/files/126/kenny.jpg" alt="kenny.jpg" /> . . .not me!!

. . .it's probably everyone in China with internet access testing their connection speed here. I knew I should've posted about our site with the Secertary General's Internet Exchange for the People of China / Committee's homepage!! lol . . .but, dang, I wanted 20,000 members by Xmas!!!

Connection Problems Sorry, SMF was unable to connect to the database. This may be caused by the server being busy. Please try again later. . . .am I the only one encountering this? ~ every other click!

[glow=red,2,300]Sorry [/glow] ~ [glow=red,2,300]reso[/glow][glow=blue,2,300]palra[/glow][glow=green,2,300]botnick[/glow] ~ you need to submit a 30-second commercial to convince us. . .

lol ~ resopalrabotnick ~ sometimes your all seeing cyber-mind . . . just sees way too much!

Cybercrime yields more cash than drugs: expert RIYADH (Reuters) - Global cybercrime generated a higher turnover than drug trafficking in 2004 and is set to grow even further with the wider use of technology in developing countries, a top expert said on Monday. No country is immune from cybercrime, which includes corporate espionage, child pornography, stock manipulation, extortion and piracy, said Valerie McNiven, who advises the U.S. Treasury on cybercrime. "Last year was the first year that proceeds from cybercrime were greater than proceeds from the sale of illegal drugs, and that was, I believe, over $105 billion," McNiven told Reuters. "Cybercrime is moving at such a high speed that law enforcement cannot catch up with it."

"The price of greatness is responsibility."

Singapore scientists embrace plan for cyberhugs SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Singapore scientists looking for ways to transmit the sense of touch over the Internet have devised a vibration jacket for chickens and are thinking about electronic children's pyjamas for cyberspace hugs. A wireless jacket for chickens or other pets can be controlled with a computer and gives the animal the feeling of being touched by its owner, researchers at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) told Monday's edition of The Straits Times. The next step would be to use the same concept to transmit hugs over the Internet, it said. "These days, parents go on a lot of business trips, but with children, hugging and touching are very important," the paper quoted NTU Associate Professor Adrian David Cheok as saying. NTU is thinking of a pyjama suit for children, which would use the Internet to adjust changes in pressure and temperature to simulate the feeling of being hugged. Parents wearing a similar suit could be "hugged" back by their children, the paper said. . . .now I think I know why waterRTBH likes wearing her crotchless chicken suit ~ lol

Supreme court to hear eBay patent appeal WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court said on Monday that it would consider an appeal by online auctioneer eBay Inc. in its patent battle with MercExchange, a developer of e-commerce technology. At issue for the justices is whether an appeals court erred in finding that a permanent injunction barring use of a technology must generally be issued once infringement of a valid patent has been determined. In its appeal, eBay said the ruling reduced a trial court judge's discretion to exceptions involving national health and handed a club to companies that buy patents to make infringement claims. The justices will hear arguments in the case most likely in March or April, with a decision expected by the end of June. The high court said it would reconsider its precedents, including one from 1908, on when it is appropriate to grant an injunction against a patent infringer. MercExchange had argued against Supreme Court review, saying the principles involved in the case were well established. In 2003 a federal court ordered eBay to pay Virginia-based MercExchange $29.5 million for infringing two e-commerce patents that MercExchange charged were key to eBay's "Buy it Now" feature, which handles fixed-price sales. Such sales accounted for about 31 percent of the total value of goods sold on eBay in the fourth quarter of 2004. But the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia declined to issue a permanent injunction. In March, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled one of MercExchange's patents was invalid and trimmed the damages against eBay to $25 million but reversed the lower court's denial of MercExchange's request for a permanent injunction against eBay. In addition, eBay says the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued an initial ruling rejecting all of the claims of the patents at the center of the case. The eBay case has attracted interest among those who believe it has become too easy to hold businesses hostage through patent suits. A group of 35 patent law professors filed a friend of the court brief arguing that an entitlement to an injunction allows unscrupulous patent owners to threaten products that are predominantly noninfringing. A computer chip, they noted, may include 5,000 different inventions.

Firefox 1.5 to launch this week with marketing blitz After three release candidate builds, Firefox 1.5 is expected to be made available for download this week (today, tuesday afternoon). And when it does arrive, it will be accompanied by a marketing campaign aimed at getting Firefox 1.0 users to upgrade and convincing users of other browsers to switch. The centerpiece of the marketing blitz will be user-submitted videos of Firefox users evangelizing their favorite web browser made available at the SpreadFirefox website. It sounds kind of like Apple's "Switch" campaign all over again ("I launched Internet Explorer and my computer was all like 'beep beep beep'...") Personally, I'm not dying to watch home videos made by computer geeks around the world explaining why Firefox is the best browser available. However, the VP of products for Mozilla, Christopher Beard, feels otherwise. "You will have real people telling you about Firefox's features--what's cool and great," said Beard. "People can create the video and upload it to the Mozilla site. The video will then be reviewed and put on our Web site, with a link from their location." In addition to the home videos will be a 30-second commercial. The commercial will again be user-driven, as anyone will be able to film one and submit it. The best ad will be aired... somewhere. Mozilla hopes that along with would-be commercial directors, the competition will attract talent in the form of film students. I'd love to see some noteworthy directors take a shot at a Firefox commercial. (Cue Mars Blackmon saying "it's gotta be the browser!")

UnifiedRoot has already clinched deals with most ISPs in Turkey. ISP Tiscali is also a UnifiedRoot client. If alternative root companies want their TLDs recognized by computers around the world, they need to circumvent ICANN by pointing every single Internet computer around the world to their own root servers -- which contain a copy of ICANN's root server plus the addition of own-made TLDs. A quicker way to change the settings in individual computers is by closing deals with Internet Service Providers (ISPs) which can change the settings for all their subscribers. . . .welcome to the New (World Wide Web) Order