Got a hankering to play the stock market, but don't have the money to make your car payments? Fear not: the MIT Media Lab has a solution for you.
Graduate student Jon Orwant has created Mammon, a Net-based stock-trading simulation. You can buy stocks or sell them short, trade currency, and even create your own mutual funds (in which others can invest). The data is all live, direct from various stock exchanges (with a 15-minute delay).
I signed up late last year and bought IBM, Sun, and Hewlett-Packard shares. Within a few days, I had lost thousands. Then I realized I could sell short lires and pesos, and now I have enough to buy a house. Unfortunately, there's no way to convert virtual money into the green stuff.
To sign up: URL telnet://mammon.media.mit.edu:10900. You'll be given US$100,000 and a space on the floor.
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