Huxley: The Dystopia Changing Distributors - The UpStream

Scott is a developer who has worked on projects of varying sizes, including all of the PLUGHITZ Corporation properties. He is also known in the gaming world for his time supporting the rhythm game community, through DDRLover and hosting tournaments throughout the Tampa Bay Area. Currently, when he is not working on software projects or hosting F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Scott can often be found returning to his high school days working with the Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology (FIRST), mentoring teams and helping with ROBOTICON Tampa Bay. He has also helped found a student software learning group, the ASCII Warriors, currently housed at AMRoC Fab Lab.

With over ten years of audio engineering experience, Nick's addition to PLuGHiTz Corporation is best served when he is behind the mixing board every Sunday night to produce the audio side of F5 Live: Refreshing Technology, Piltch Point and PLuGHiTz Live Night Cap. While mixing live every week, his previous radio show hosting experience gives him the ability to co-host as well, giving each show a unique flare with his slightly off-center, yet still realistic take on all things tech. An integral part of the show, you can find Nick always enveloped in coming up with new (and sometimes crazy) ideas and content for the show and you can always expect the most direct opinion on the stories that he feels need to be shared with the world. During the few hours where Nick isn't sleeping or working on ways to improve the company, he spends his free time going to hockey and football games and playing the latest titles on Xbox 360. Email him for his gamertag and add him today for a fun escape from the normal monotony and annoyance that the Xbox LIVE gaming community can sometimes be!

Jon is a F5 Live co-host and UpStream contributor as well as the Chief Cash Officer of PLuGHiTz Corporation. We don't know how he wears so many hats so well or how he still finds time to feed his need for all things tech but some questions are best left unanswered. If you're up for a challenge go find him on Xbox Live @shinobiJon and if you figure him out...let us know.

Josh has come from the Brazilian wilds to bring yet another perspective on the gaming industry as well as today's up-and-coming technology. You may have seen him at GameStop over the past two years, or if you're a lover of Largo High School Productions, you have seen him up on stage doing his thing the last 4 years. On occasion, you can catch him on Xbox Live mowing down zombies in Left 4 Dead or making it rain on Madden 2010.

Back in the day when I actually had the time to keep up with upcoming games, one of the titles that caught my eye was Huxley. For those of you that are not familiar with the title, Huxley is a massively multiplayer first-person shooter set in a post-apocalyptic world where humans and mutants are at war.

I am a software developer myself, so I totally understand the feeling of distress when your product starts showing up on torrent sites. It has gotten so bad that now, even the $2 iPhone apps are starting to find their way to the underground despite their proprietary systems and low costs. At some point you have to consider the value of your own time to find, crack and install software onto a phone that you could have just bought for the cost of a Starbucks coffee.

Early this month, Oracle joined the ranks of every other technology company on the planet and filed suit against Google. Oracle has claimed that Google violated patents they acquired when they purchased Sun Microsystems, namely Java-related patents, with their Dalvik virtual machine on the Android platform.

With the advent of Internet-based communications those old fashioned land-line phones have been getting hit pretty hard and Google has recently added their new phone service to Gmail helping to reassure that the beating will continue.

MIT is always hard at work trying to solve the world's problems one piece of technology at a time. This week's solution is a floating yellow box that collects oil.

As kids most of us either watched cartoons, read comic books, or pretended to zip around saving the day attached at the hip to our trusty flying machine, the jet pack. While not particularly practical or useful, the first rocket belt was built by Bell Labs in 1953 and I'm sad to say that they still have a long way to go. However, two companies are keeping the dream alive, so to speak. Technologia Aeroespacial Mexicana has their custom-built TAM Rocket Belt that can get you 30 seconds of lift at speeds of over 60mph on a full tank of hydrogen peroxide. The Colorado-based competition, Jetpack Inter­national has the longest flying jet pack, the H202, which can keep you off your feet for a cool 33 seconds, 3 seconds longer than the TAM Rocket Belt. The H202 is also faster with a top speed of 70mph. With a $250k price tag for the TAM Rocket belt, which includes maintenance and flight lessons, or $150k for the H202, everything included, the choice is obvious: neither.

Mobile chip manufacturer Infineon has been a hot topic of discussion for the past month. Just two weeks ago Apple was in a bidding war with Intel, Samsung, and several other large manufacturing companies to acquire this firm and sources close to the current deliberations have stated we could be hearing some news as early as next week about the private talks between Intel and Infineon.

Final Fantasy XIV is a game that both Jon and I are very excited for. Earlier this week, however, my excitement for the game faltered a little bit. Why? Because of a new system that Square Enix introduced a few days ago. It is called the "fatigue system" and it basically limits the amount of play time one can have with their characters.

If you, like me, were not lucky enough to get your hands (digitally speaking, of course) on Final Fantasy XIV closed beta invite, our first chance to log a few hours on the game will come next week! Square Enix announced through the game's official forums that open beta servers will go live next Tuesday, August 31 at 7 p.m. Pacific, or 10 p.m. Eastern.

Paul Allen, entrepreneur and co-founder of Microsoft, has filed a lawsuit against 11 companies for infringements on his Web search patents. The suit names Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix, YouTube, and Microsoft partner Yahoo as defendants for violating four Interval Licensing LLC patents, though the court will likely have to weigh whether the patents in question are "obvious" or not.

Movie studios are sick of websites that offer pirated material and have decided to open a new lawsuit targeting an ad company that provides their services to these sites. Warner Bros and Disney have joined forces to sue Triton Media, saying the company is responsible for contributory and induced copyright infringement because Triton helps keep these sites alive by supporting them with ad and referral income.

George Lucas is taking out his lightsaber to attack the makers of a wireless headset called Master Mind that states its users can interact with computers through brainwaves. Jedi Mind, Inc. is the target of this Lucasfilm lawsuit over copyright infringement, claiming that the products made by this company could hurt Lucas' business and make customers confused.