Wikipedia discribes LCID as “ a humor webcomic by Ryan Sohmer and Lar deSouza, which debuted on February 10, 2003. Although Lar deSouza is the current artist, the comic was previously drawn by Chad WM. Porter, for two years, and before that, Trevor Adams. The primary theme of the strip is sexuality, especially the promiscuity of the primary character, Rayne Summers, a modern-day Casanova.”

He says, “Stage6 began as an experiment, and we always knew there was a chance that it might not succeed.”

Upload functionality has been disabled, and videos will only be available until Thursday.

Companies hosting their videos on Stage6 are being helped to migrate their videos to other pages, DivX says.

Users are quickly attempting to mirror videos from Stage6 to other video services.

Veoh currently allows uploads from a URL and because of this users are able use Stage6’s bandwidth when moving the videos.

So if other video services are still around why is Stage 6 shutting the service down?

Tom says, “The short answer is that Stage6 is very expensive and requires an enormous amount of attention and resources.There are a lot of other details involved, but at the end of the day it appears to be as simple as that.”

However, Stage6 has been known for users uploading full copies of movies that are still in theaters, many in HD quality.

They have complied with all take down requests when copyright infringement is in question, but this has not saved them from costly lawsuits.

In our article “Divx’s Stage6 Walks Closer To Piracy Plank” we looked at Universal Music Group’s lawsuit accusing Divx of digital piracy.

Legal battles such as this could surely cause a company to close its doors.

Stag6 was launched in 2006 by Divx with the mission of empowering content creators and viewers to discover a new kind of video experience.

Like Youtube & other video services, users are able to upload videos and share them with others.

It’s to bad that one of the only HD streaming video site is closing its doors.

Please take a moment to read over the official announcement here and if your looking for some discussion head here.

Link: Stage6, Quicksilverscreen

A H-2A rocket carrying the satellite was launched from the Tanegashima Space Center at 17:55 (0855 GMT) on February 24th, 2008 with no reported glitches.

The communications satellite separated from the rocket approximately 35 minutes after the launch and was maneuvered into orbit.

The $342 million dollar satellite will allow super high speed data communications of up to 1.2 Gbps, which would make it the fastest in the world.

That rate would be about 150 times that of the average high-speed ADSL connection rate of about 8 Mbps, or 12 times the speed of a fiber optic communication delivery to a person’s home.

The launch was delayed by one week after the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency said it had discovered a problem with the gas jet thruster for its launch rocket.

The “Kizuna,” which translates to “bond” in Japanese, is expected to begin transmitting and receiving data with terrestrial infrastructures in July after completing preparations and confirming the satellite’s safety.

With a small antenna you can receive data at up to 155Mbps and transmit data at up to 6 Mbps.

With a larger antenna mainly for organizations and companies super high speed data communications of up to 1.2 Gbps will be available.

Aiming for a society where anybody can get information anytime, anywhere the KIZUNA will serve 4 major functions over its life of five years.

Even when a ground-based network is severed by a disaster in Japan or in other Asian countries, broadband network communications can still be secured by the KIZUNA using an additional small antenna. By installing a small antenna high-resolution images can be securely sent to a disaster countermeasures office via the KIZUNA. Therefore, the satellite is expected to function as a reliable pipeline between a disaster stricken area and a countermeasures office.

The Internet’s infrastructure is well-established in urban areas in Japan. However, a similar Internet environment is not available in many mountainous regions and remote islands in Japan and in other Asian countries. The KIZUNA can provide a broadband Internet environment and super-high speed communications that are at a level with those in city areas to regions where such communication methods are currently out of reach.

The satellite-based Internet is also expected to become a useful tool in the educational field. Using conventional satellite communications, a small time lag often exists between conversations because communications are conveyed via relay stations. With the KIZUNA, conversation will be smoothly exchanged, thus, when terminals in various schools in Japan or even in Asian countries are directly connected, students can communicate as if they are all in the same classroom.

By connecting with urban areas via the KIZUNA, residents who live in mountainous regions and remote islands where no major hospital is available can receive the same level of medical treatment and physical checkups as those who live in cities. The KIZUNA will enable remote diagnosis, as the conditions of a patient can be transmitted by high-definition images to a specialist in an urban hospital, who can then diagnose the problem and advise a local doctor in a rural area to provide appropriate treatment.

Sources: JAXA (English KIZUNA Launch Site)

The auction was held at the 7 star Emirates Palace Hotel in Abu Dhabi.

This record sale surpassed the $6.8 million paid for a license plate with the number 5 on it.

25 year old Saeed Abdul Ghafour Khour, a member of a wealthy Abu Dabi family, bought the vanity license plate saying, “I bought it because I want to be the best in the world.”

The Khouri family made their fortune in real estate and its unknown exactly how many automobiles they own or which will use the single digit plate.

According to Bloomberg.com:

Khouri won the auction in Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace hotel amid chaotic scenes in the auditorium, which was packed with more than 700 people. The Abu Dhabi businessman had to push through photographers, cameramen and spectators to the front of the room to be seen by the auctioneer before thrusting his number into the air for the final time, his mobile phone at his ear throughout the bidding.

The sum of money was “normal” for his family, Hamdan Khouri said after the auction. “I was prepared to spend as much as 100 million dirhams.”

100 million dirhams is about $27 million dollars.

The oil rich cities of the Persian Gulf are driven by car culture, with relatively few pedestrian areas or public transport options.

Vanity plates are considered a matter of personal pride.

Persian Gulf license plates and most vanity plates include both Arabic and western numerals and script. The special vanity license plates auctioned off only contain a western numeral with no letters.

The actual value of a license plate depends on a mix of math and emotional appeal.

“From 1 to 10, these are the most expensive numbers,” said Abdulla al Mannaie, managing director of Emirates Auctions. “Ten to 99 are the second category. On the other side, you look to numbers which is like 11, 22, 33 they are expensive because it carry repeating digits.

A total of 90 license plates, including numbers 100, 1111, 2001 and 31313, were auctioned off raising a total of 89 million dirhams ($24 million dollars) for a rehabilitation center for victims of traffic accidents.

Links: KATU, CNN, ABCNews, Bloomberg

Three main points can be taken away from that interview:

1. Cuse aims to produce FIVE more episodes of Season 4. That is three fewer than the eight scheduled before the writers strike occurred. Season 4 will now end with a total of only 13 episodes.
2. The entire order of 48 episodes for Seasons 4-5-6 will still be delivered, leaving 35 episodes to be split between Seasons 5 and 6.
3. There will be at least a 4 week hiatus between the broadcast of season 4 episode 8 and the new episode 9.

Cuse was asked what will happen to the three “lost” episodes of season 4. He explained that he is committed to producing the 40 additional hours of the show that had been promised.

They haven’t exactly figured out when the three episodes will air, but they will not be removing them from the show. Cruse has said that, “You will get those three episodes downstream”.

Source: TVGuide,  Lostpedia

U.S. officials wishing to remain anonymous have said that the Bush administration’s top choice is to fire a missile from a U.S. Navy cruiser, and shoot down the satellite. The Navy would likely shoot it down using a special missile modified for the task.

Details about the missile and the targeting were not available and will likely be publicly discussed at a Pentagon briefing.

Known by its military designation, US 193, the spy satellite was launched December 2006. It lost power and its central computer failed almost immediately afterward, leaving it dead in space. It carried a very expensive, sophisticated secret imaging sensor. US193 is said to have been built by the Lockheed Martin Corporation and operated by the secretive National Reconnaissance Office.

China sparked criticism from the U.S. and other countries on Jan. 11 2007 when they shot down a broken weather satellite.

Using a ground-based medium-range ballistic missile the aging satellite was destroyed roughly 537 miles above the earth with kinetic energy (Aka slamming into it).

The concern from U.S. and other countries was due to the resulting debris that could harm civilian and military satellite operations.

Debris is a primary focus now, as the U.S. is determining exactly when and under what circumstances to shoot down its errant satellite. By doing this the military can limit any damage to other satellites in the sky.

There is the possibility that large chunks could remain and stay in orbit where they can collide with other satellites or possibly return to Earth.

In an interview with the NY Times Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, noted that 328 satellites had come down in the past five years without injury to anyone.

Source: Associated Press, MSNBC, CBS, Wikipedia, NY Times

In a legal filing published February 5th,2008, Judge Dana Sabraw denied a request filed by Divx to prove Stage6’s legality outside of the UMG piracy trial.

To understand what this means we have to go back to when UMG first contacted Divx about Stage6.

The dispute started in 2006 when UMG sent a cease and desist letter to Divx. UMG’s letter accused them of providing pirated material on Stage6. UMG, however, did not provide a list of the infringing video’s, but instead expected Divx to review and remove all UMG content.

One month later UMG sent a second letter, but this time identified the specific infringing videos. Divx quickly removed the videos from Stage6 complying with UMG’s requests.

UMG and Divx sat in silence for 8 months until UMG sent Divx an offer. For 30 million dollars UMG would allow Stage6 to show UMG material legally. Divx balked at this deal and decided to chance any legal proceedings UMG would file.

Divx complies with all provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). UMG would have to question the DMCA’s safe harbor provision if they wanted to attack Divx directly.

With possible legal proceedings looming, Divx made a bold move and asked the courts to rule on whether or not Stage6 is protected under the safe harbor provision.

Six weeks after Divx’s legal filing, UMG made good on their threat and filed a lawsuit accusing Divx of digital piracy. This new legal case would allow UMG to regain control of the DMCA safe harbor lawsuit and caused Judge Sabraw to file a judgment.

Sabraw ruled that a separate trial would not be needed and wrote in the discussion section of the judgment that “the DMCA safe harbor analysis Plaintiff seeks here will be more completely and efficiently undertaken in the Central District, where the court will be able to determine Plaintiff’s compliance with respect to particular copyrights the Defendants identify in the course of those proceedings.”

Even though Divx’s lawsuit has been dismissed, they will still have an opportunity to defend Stage6 and the DMCA safe harbor provision in court.

This court battle gives the impression as though both sides will stick it out for the long run, potentially costing Divx significant legal fees.

Links: Stage6

Source: Stage6 Forums, Seekingalpha, Mashable, Technorati

A limited 250 were released on January 28th and were promptly scooped up by those who had missed out the first time.

While they were available they sold for $15 and came packaged in a little Wii shaped box. Perfect for that Wii loving lover on Valentine’s day instead of the ‘o so common’ dying flowers.

A crew of kids from Creighton University were hired to help assemble all of the avatars for shipping. Paul posted on his blog that”Even though they got paid, without their help, it wouldn’t have happened.”

I received my chocolate miis the other day so lets take a closer look at what all the fuss was about.

I received an e-mail from Paul Pape Design’s letting me know that since it is chocolate, they are sending orders out in batches to help maintain the freshest product possible.

My avatars were in a batch sent out on the sixth of February, via USPS Priority Mail and was received 2-3 days after shipping.

Let’s look at what I received.

The box was in great condition without any damages from shipping and I assume that I was order 613. If that’s true then at least 800 chocolate avatar pairs were sold because my order was in before the additional 250 were released.

After opening the outer protective shipping shell we were greeted by my name and a message of Mm Mm. My wife and I wern’t quite shure what Mm Mm ment at first but we soon found out.

Opening the Wii like box we were greeted by two smiling, well packaged (no pun intended), male chocolates. I looked over my order confirmation and I noticed I had made the error in ordering two male mii’s. I’m not going to hear this end of this from some people and my wife found this to be hilarious.

Each individual Mii chocolate measures 4 inches tall, 2 inches wide (at the head) and 1-1/4 inch thick. The box it came in measures 4 inches by 7 inches by 1-1/2 inches thick.

As you can see the wii skin on the box is starting to lift away and the printing quality isn’t the best. However, this isn’t something that your going to be putting on a display case.

It’s meant to be a surprise, something not everyone is going to receive this year.

In the end, I believe I received more than my $15 and I hope to see other interesting things from Paul Pape Designs in the future.

Paul Pape Designs wanted to give a little something back, so they placed 20 boxes on e-bay for the Child’s Play Charity run by Penny Arcade. They ended up raising almost $500 and as a gesture,  decided to match the donation and round the whole thing up to and even $1000.

Paul has been getting some nasty e-mails from people wondering when there chocolates will arrive.

He posted a response >> Here << going over what, if any, the hold up is.

Links: Paul Pape Designs Home Page & Paul Pape Designs Store

This could tap into a cheap & clean energy, you.

It’s called the Biomechanical Energy Harvester and it fits around each knee. As the wearer naturally walks around the device generates electricity.

At normal walking speed, and with little extra physical effort, the device can generate about five watts of constant electricity. Meaning a single minute of walking could power a cellphone for 10 minutes or an MP3 player for 40, said Max Donelan, a researcher who worked on the Biomechanical Energy Harvester.

This is not the first device to try to capture electricity from normal human movement. What makes it different is it does so without requiring the user to exert much extra effort.

The researchers tested the knee brace on six men walking on a treadmill at 1.5 meters per second. One group had the generator activated at a number of settings while another acted as a control group. In the group where the brace was only activated while the knee was braking, the subjects required less than one watt of extra metabolic power to produce one watt of energy.

The current version of the knee brace is just a proof-of-concept, there are plans to make the device less bulky while still retaining its energy harvesting capabilities.

It’s currently unknown how much the device may cost, but the first versions will likely run in the thousands.

For that reason, the device will likely be most attractive as a way of powering expensive prosthetic limbs or for use by the military. Once the price comes down the general public will most likely see this in the open market.

Links: Newscientist.com

Visitors to Stage6’s main page were redirected to multiple “shock” sites, like the famous goatse and 2girls1cup.

A pop up was added stating that the site had been hacked by Ebaumsworld. It’s unknown if they had any involvement with the hacking.

Several threads on Ebaumsworld and various forums have been deleted regarding the attack. Posts like “Why did you do this?”, “What did they do to you?”, but also threads with verbal insults against the site.

This incident lasted about two and a half hours before a site maintenance notice was put up by the Stage6 admin team.

The main site of Stage6 was replaced with a message stating “We’re unable to service your request.”.

UPDATE: Stage6 has announced they will permanently shut down February 28th 2008.

UPDATE: Stage6 is back up! If you haven’t tried this site before go check out the top rated videos >> Here << you will enjoy the quality video over Youtube.

UPDATE:  New information about Stage6’s piracy lawsuit, check out “Divx’s Stage6 Walks Closer to Piracy Plank”

Wikipedia reports that “A partial list of email addresses and passwords for several thousand Stage6 users was released by hackers shortly after the attack began, in the form of a plain text file posted to 4chan’s random board. The file has since been removed from the site.”

Users that had registered a new account at Stage 6 between December 11th, 2007 and February 9th, 2008 were mainly those who were affected. There is talk, however, that the hacker(s) may have had access to the entire Stage6 user database.

Not much more is known at this time, but discussion is currently going on Quicksilverscreen >> Here << and at Stage6 forums >> Here <<

Stag6 was launched in 2006 by Divx and is currently in beta form. Many sites utilize Stage6 for streaming video.

Like Youtube & other video services, users are able to upload videos and share them with others.

Stage6 is known for users uploading full copies of movies that are still in theaters, many in HD quality. They do comply with all take down requests when copyright infringement is in question.

Many users utilize temporary e-mails to create multiple accounts to stay in ahead of bannings.

Link: Stage 6

“We have an ongoing epidemic among needle users in Stockholm. They have been infected by a virus strain that originated in Finland. It possibly began spreading in 2006, but the increase only became evident in 2007,” SMI said in a statement reported by Google.com.

The increase in infections gives indications that people are less worried about contracting HIV than they were in the past. This is possibly due to early thoughts that AIDS would quickly spread in the 80s. New medicines are decreasing the chance to contract AIDS. However, risky sexual behavior and casual sex without a condom have greatly increased over the years.

On a positive note medical researcher Claes Herlitz, who has been tracking Swedish attitudes towards HIV since the late 80s  said,  “people with HIV are less stigmatized today and most people are no longer afraid of having contact with them.”

Hopefully people will take this as a reminder that HIV is on the rise all over the planet.

Sources: Google.com, Kaisernetwork.org, Medicalnewstoday.com, News.Yahoo.com

“We are hoping an astronaut will throw the paper plane during a spacewalk,” Suzuki told DiscoveryChannel.ca in an exclusive interview.

Surviving re-entry will be no easy task, temperatures can be hotter than 575 degrees Fahrenheit, but Suzuki believes the small paper aircraft is well-suited for the descent.

“The origami plane is very light and would receive sufficient drag force even at very high altitudes. Since the flight velocity quickly drops at 100 km altitude, it is expected that aerodynamic heat effect is small,” Suzuki says. “Consequently, the origami plane should reach Earth’s surface without burning up.”

According to Suzuki’s calculations, the paper craft would start traveling at Mach 20 in orbit. Eventually slowing to Mach 7 as it’s pulled by gravity towards earth and descends through the upper layers of our planets atmosphere.

A special compound will incorporate silicon into the plane’s structure, and will increase its heat and water resistance. After being coated with this compound, the plane will gain glass-like characteristics, while still retaining is paper qualities. Tests conducted by the University of Tokyo, on a smaller model of the airplane, have shown it to be successful.

Though this seems like a silly idea, but it may just bring new technology that will help move us into space.

John Martian, a neuroscientist at Columbia University in New York, told the Guardian “What we’ve documented is that we’ve reconnected the nervous system above the injury with below the injury in a robust way.” The newly attached nerves grew well and returned partial movement to paralyzed body parts. He also commented that nerve cells, which control sensation or feeling unfortunately do not show the same encouraging results.

While reconnecting a single nerve will not be enough to restore all lost functions, it would allow an improvement to improve quality of life.

Hopefully we will see more about this in the next few years.

It is currently unknown which gaming platforms will receive DNF, but Miller stated in a recent e-mail, with the Dallas Business Journal about DNF, that “..hitting the big three makes the most sence (Pc,PS3,360).”

DNF was originally announced 1year after the release of Duke Nukem 3D in the spring of 1997 and initially was to be released on the Quake 2 engine. A release date of 1998 was given and gamers around the world read about it in PC gamer. 3D Realms has run into a few problems along the way, the largest being they did not receive the Q2 engine until November 1997.

3D Realms announced the change from the Q2 engine to the Unreal engine in 1998 and this started, what seemed to be, the death of Duke Nukem. From 1998 to 2001, 3D Realms continued to state DNF was still under development even releasing screen shots and game footage. At some point however, 3D Realms website announcement that DNF will be done when its done and stopped further public discussion about development.

It seems the recent comments will bring an end to the 12 year wait, but we wont know for sure until the end of this year.

Miller has commented that there is a Xbox Live Arcade release coming soon to the Microsoft 360. DN3D will be available as a digital download sporting a new on-line multiplayer, co-op mode and Xbox Live achievements. “We’re really excited about bringing classic Duke to the 360″ said Miller during an interview.

3D Realms Co-Founder George Broussard has issued a statement, on the 3D Realms forum, rejecting Millers comments explaining that the release date is still “When it’s done”

George Broussard says:

In what appears to be an unfortunate turn of events, there seems to have been some confusion between what was ‘off the record’ and what was not. I suppose we’re used to dealing with gaming press and not mainstream press. Lesson learned.

While we have internal targets, dates and goals, like every developer, we are not ready to share them. What’s amazing about this is that the DBJ must have assumed that we’d actually announce a date to them, and not gaming press, and that even in the light of Scott’s quote of “We can’t make an official announcement.”, the DBJ effectively did that. Lesson learned.

The release date is still ‘when it’s done’, and will be until the appropriate moment. Platforms have not been finalized or announced. You can rest assured that we are moving toward a goal and that the recently released teaser trailer is the start of that process and seeing more of the game, sooner than later.

We apologize to gamers and websites everywhere for this series of events. Sometimes, you can be too trusting of people and assume things that come back to bite you. Lesson learned.

Letter Source: Kotaku

So if 3D Realms keeps its word on this download for the 360 it might just be the start of the DNF release hype. Lets keep our fingers crossed that Millers statements stand and the DNF team will have a release sometime this year.

Gucomics.com has it’s own take as to the games release.  >>here<<