siliconempire

Looking for a 'Virtual' Gold Mine?

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 02:45:02 -0500

For those who are not familiar with the secondlife online virtual environment, I'd like to take another look at the opportunities for employment and/or real cash revenue that a virtual world can offer.

First of all, secondlife is not a game. It is a virtual environment. It's more like a highly evolved chat program. It supports both text and voice and uses computer rendered avatars instead of a webcam or other videoconference hardware to place you into a virtual world, full of virtual objects, that you can buy with virtual money. So far it still sounds like most other games being played on the web. The difference is that there is no goal to be achieved in secondlife. There is no competition between players. In other games earning or gathering your virtual money is part of the challenge, in second life it is not. In other games allowing other players to purchase virtual money or items with real world cash would be disruptive and unfare. In secondlife there is no game to generate assets for you to accumulate. If you want virtual money, then you buy it with real money. And the best part is, when you have extra virtual money, you can trade it back for real world cash!! And that's where the magic happens. Virtual items in secondlife are not 'found' they are created by other users and sold to anyone who is willing to pay for them. Pretend Items selling for real money, and lots of it.

I tried working with secondlifes building system a few years ago. I spent a few days building something my wife wanted, which she then put on sale, and I promptly forgot about. I recently reviewed the sales of the item and was shocked to discover that it had a net earnings of over $500 a year. To be totally honest, it is not what i would consider a high-volume product. Needless to say, that my interest in virtual merchandise has been rekindled, and I would welcome anyone with a talent for graphic art, 3D modeling or state machine programming to come to secondlife and see if your talents can earn some additional income.

How 'Green' is ethanol?

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 23:17:36 -0500

There has been a lot of confusion about the status of ethanol as a 'green' alternative to other petroleum fuels. I would like to take this opportunity to clear up some of the misconceptions about ethanol and other bio-fuels in terms of environmental impact.

The most common view taken is that gasoline and ethanol are both hydrocarbons and both produce carbon dioxide when burned. That is true, and from that viewpoint ethanol is not any more 'green' than gasoline. People at that vantage point see ethanol only as a financial tool to try to break the monopoly that the petroleum fuel cartels hold over current fuel prices.

There is another aspect that is often overlooked in the production of bio-fuels, and that is that the plants, which are used to make them, take the carbon dioxide from the air in order to grow. With that in mind, we can see that the complete cycle of absorbing the carbon from the air and then putting it back, brings ethanol 'closer to zero' on the environmental scale, at least in terms of carbon waste.

Yes, ethanol is a 'green' fuel. It may not be perfect but it is far healthier for the planet than petroleum.

Today is a new day!

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 23:22:17 -0500

The world is changing, and siliconempire is changing to meet the new challenges that are on the horizon. We will still maintain our high standards of IT and technical services for those who need us or have relied on us in the past, but we are adding new focus for home office and telecommuting as well as remote management network appliances. The cost of travel is too much for any business to ignore, and the ecological impact of fossil fuels used for that travel is becoming an issue that can no longer be avoided as well.

In order to best determine what kind of services the future will need from us, the siliconempire website is going to expand its blogs and forums to cover the topics of Politics, Religion, Alternate Energy, Psychology, Ecology, Social Trends, and any other topic that might help us speculate on what the world will be like in the future. These topics will be moderated and are for analysis and speculation on the immediate future and not to argue personal or cultural biases.