Another great reason to buy in to MMORPGs:


Online gamer charged with killing competitor

Qiu Chengwei, 41, went on trial on Tuesday in a Shanghai court on charges that he stabbed to death Zhu Caoyuan, a fellow player of a popular game called Legend of Mir III, the China Daily newspaper said.

Qiu confronted Zhu after learning that he sold the virtual weapon lent to him by Qiu to another player, the newspaper said. It said Qiu reported the loss of the “Dragon Saber” to police but they said it wasn’t real property protected by the law.

And if that wasn’t enough:


Exabyte, the new megabyte

Here’s a scary thought: at the moment, most of the world’s telephone calls are ephemeral – as soon as the words are spoken, they are lost. But storage capacity is now so great, and cost so low, that it is becoming feasible to store all telephone conversations on computer disk.

With the increased requirements for audit trails for compliance, the real and artificial imperatives of the war on terrorism, and the increased sophistication of data mining software that can analyse digitised voice patterns, can this be far away?

And since when did have 41 friends? Man, none of mine even post in their journals so there’s only about 2-3 things to read on the friends page every now and then.

Perhaps I should get more e-social.

Perhaps.