Random Linkage

• How virtual world economies and financial institutions are like and unlike real world equivalents
  

  Ginko had all the trademarks of a bad investment idea. It promised that people who deposited their virtual money would earn an astronomical interest rate of more than 40 percent, and similarly loaned out money with absurdly high interest rates attached to repayments. Thousands of “Second Life” residents opened accounts with the bank.

  The end came when panicked investors began withdrawing their virtual money, known as Linden dollars in the game and exchangeable for U.S. dollars at a rate of roughly 250 Linden dollars to one U.S. dollar. Ginko did not have enough reserves to pay up. When the bank finally announced it was finished, an equivalent of $750,000 in real-world U.S. dollars went up in smoke. The collapse not only wiped out time spent earning Linden dollars in the game, but also hit the wallets of players who had legally paid U.S. dollars to buy Linden dollars.

• Creation of material repels all liquids, even after complete immersion in fluid
  

  Last year, the MIT group, led by chemical engineer Robert Cohen and mechanical engineer Gareth McKinley, created the first superoleophobic, or oil-repellant, surfaces. They started with a polymer developed by the Air Force that contains large numbers of oil-repelling fluorine groups. The MIT researchers made the material even more oil resistant by using lithography to pattern it with overhanging microstructures. These tiny structures create air pockets that help suspend liquids and prevent them from penetrating to the surface. The MIT researchers found that the surfaces are both superoleophobic and also superhydrophobic, or water repelling. Because they repel everything, they’re called omniphobic.

• How to build an igloo
• More defective-by-design on the 35 days against DRM.  Today, when artist Prince shut down his DRM-ladened music service, he failed to warn fan-club members (otherwise known as “Friends” in his terms) their downloadable music purchases would no longer work
  

  Also, there was never any mention to his fanclub (which I DID pay $25 to join) that they would no longer be supporting the DRM-laden files when the NPG Music Club went under. No other fans, or what Prince likes to call “Friends”, knew what to do about the files either. The only suggestion I was given, which isn’t possible now that the files cannot be played, was to burn the files to a cd and rip them back to mp3 if I want to put them on the ol’ mp3 player. Well… the files won’t play, so how am I supposed to burn them? It’s just not possible.

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