Sleeker than the somewhat boxy G1, the myTouch boasts longer battery life–up to six hours of talk time, one more than its predecessor–a 3.2-megapixel camera, a virtual keyboard that orients automatically from portrait to landscape mode and, more importantly, better customization.

Now that the Android Market has 5,000-strong range of applications, devices like the myTouch offer a more compelling proposition than even before. “No two myTouch devices will be alike,” Andrew Sherrard, vice president at T-Mobile, told News.com. “They will be as unique as the users that own them. What we have found is that once consumers know how to customize a device and they add everything they want on it, they respond very well to having a phone that is specially designed for them.”

Yep, they sure do.

Sounds like someone’s been spending a little too much time with the Matrix RPG Society, eh? Either that or he’s the long-lost third Wachowski Brother.

That said, Whitworth’s argument does have its merits. Top among them: It offers a handy answer for troubling questions like: “What existed before the big bang?” Writes Whitworth:

… the virtual-reality hypothesis means the big bang is much easier to explain. No virtual reality can have existed forever, since it depends upon a processor to create it. All virtual realities come into being, or ‘start up,’ at a specific moment of time. They typically begin with a sudden influx of all the information necessary to initiate the virtual world. Whenever one starts a computer game or boots up a computer, such a ‘big bang’ happens. From the perspective of the virtual world itself, the creation is always from ‘nothing,’ as before the virtual world start-up there was indeed no time or space as defined by that world. There was nothing relative to that world, because the world itself did not exist. It is a hallmark of virtual realities that they must come into existence at a specific point in their space and time, which event also initiates the VR space-time fabric. Note that in a virtual world there is no logical reason why all initiating information cannot initially ‘point’ to a single arbitrary location, i.e. no reason why an entire universe cannot exist at a single point. In this view, then, the big bang was simply when our universe was ‘booted up.’ ”

If that is indeed the case, the world will presumably end with some sort of fatal error. What was it T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Hollow Men”?

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a BSOD.”

Priced at $129 for a single-user license, Leopard offers some 300 new features–“Even Leopard innovations have innovations,” says Apple–among them, a solution to the “Fix the F-ing Finder” problem, a significant update to Mail, a virtual desktop application called “Spaces” and Apple’s eagerly awaited backup solution, “Time Machine.”

Looks to be an impressive release. Certainly, Wall Street expects it to be. Just last week Piper Jaffray & Co.’s Gene Munster predicted Leopard would add $240 million to Apple’s next quarter, nearly double the $125 million in revenues that Tiger brought in during its opening quarter.

Chris Swenson of the NPD Group, too, figures Leopard will outperform its predecessor. “Tiger was the best launch of Mac OS X ever according to our data,” he told ComputerWorld, “and I expect Leopard to do even better.”

Beginning Sept. 1, animated beat cops will begin patrolling the nation’s 13 top portals, warning citizens away from material the ruling Communist Party finds politically or morally threatening.

According to the Beijing Public Security Ministry, the Sanrio-esque characters will begin showing up on all sites that are registered with the government by the end of the year. “We will continue to promote new images of the virtual police and update our Internet security tips in an effort to make the image of the virtual police more user-friendly and more in tune with how Web surfers use the Internet,” it said.

Not bad for Disney, either. The site currently boasts 12 million registered users, 700,000 of whom pay $5.95 a month for the ability to customize their penguin characters and decorate their igloos. How many more will do that once Disney throws its global marketing might behind the site? “Disney’s technological know-how, online capabilities and international reach will support global expansion of the Club Penguin franchise,” Disney CEO Bob Iger said yesterday during the company’s earnings call. “We plan to rename it Disney’s Club Penguin and to immediately use our Disney-branded properties such as Disney.com, Disney Channel, Radio Disney and our parks and resorts to raise its profiles. … We believe virtual worlds can extend and expand on the life of a franchise, expand our global reach for our entertainment content, and allow us direct contact with our consumers in a more personalized and engaging way.”

In other words, it’s only a matter of time before Buzz Lightyear and the Disney princesses appear as Club Penguin costume options and great piles of Club Penguin Puffles show up in local Disney stores. As Walt Disney’s brother Roy once said, “The sale of a doll to any member of a household is a daily advertisement in that household for our cartoons and keeps them all ‘Mickey Mouse Minded.’ ”

Congress’ Joint Economic Committee is expected to issue a report on the potential taxation of virtual goods by the end of July. No word yet on what it might say, although a JEC director has suggested that “as long as virtual activity stays within the virtual economy, it shouldn’t be taxable.” So is that to say that there are tax consequences for activity that extends beyond it? Sounds like it. “Any time someone wins a tangible prize or award, the value is reportable as taxable income,” an Internal Revenue Service rep told CNN earlier this year. “An accumulation of ‘points’ would not result in tax consequences, but redeeming or selling them for money, goods, or services would.”