Austin American-Statesman from Austin, Texas • 109

3 1 1 .1 1 1 L5 Exploring all things high-tech in the world of entertainment, compiled by harleyjebens, american-statesman staff you'll be on fire for buckets As Hollywood discovered years ago, there's good money to be made in sequels. As the company that put out Mortal Kombat, Acclaim has been called a lot of things, but never stupid. And so it is that we now have NBA Jam: Tournament Edition for Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo ($64.99, recommended for players age 8 and up), the sequel to last year's NBA Jam. The concept behind NBA Jam is a two-on-two basketball game, featuring almost all of the biggest NBA stars; only Shaquille O'Neal seems to be missing. Otherwise, you can play with pretty much everyone who matters because for the tournament edition, a third player has been added to each team's roster, plus a fourth once you've beaten all 27 NBA teams.

This extra player is important, because in NBA Jam T.E., players are now injured when knocked down, so substitutions become vital. The new game has a whole raft of new power-up spots and secret characters, including the.Beastie Boys, Timberwolves mascot Crunch and Hillary Clinton. Hillary might not do much for health care, by the way, but she can shoot three-pointers with reckless abandon. The bottom line is that you're not going to get bored soon with the Tournament Edition. If you liked NBA Jam, you're sure to enjoy its sequel.

freedom of cyberspeech get balanced with rockin' reptiles The latest musicians to jump on the World Wide Web bandwagon are Van Halen and Guns N' Roses lead guitarist Slash, who are both promoting new albums and concert tours. The Van Halen site (set your Web-browser to is in support of the band's Balance CD. If you check it out, be prepared to spend a lot of time waiting, as the site contains 7 ft' guns roses As the Internet and on-line communication becomes a daily reality for more people, and as Congress and special interests continue to debate what will and will not be legal to distribute over the 'net, such issues as free speech, copyright protection and privacy in the electronic realm become evermore important. Those issues will be the focus of the John Henry Faulk Conference on the First Amendment, from 1 to 5 p.m. April 18 at the University of Texas' Joe C.

Thompson Conference Center, 26th and Red River streets. The legal definition of free speech on the information superhighway, universal access to the Internet, censorship on-line and new directions for information technologies in the 21st century will be debated in the conference, titled "The First Amendment in Cyberspace." Panels are scheduled to include Mike Godwin, on-line counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation; Peter Lewis, who reports on cyberspace issues for The New York Times; Gary Chapman, project coordinator for the LBJ School of Public Affairs' 21st Century Project; Katie Hafner, technology writer for Newsweek and author of Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, Jon Loehman, division manager for Southwestern Bell; and Eugene Volokh, professor of copyright and constitutional law at UCLA law school. For more info on the conference, call 495-4515. several humongous graphics that take a while to load, even with a 14.4K modem working as fast as it can. The site includes photos, comments from the band, video clips (if you have the right viewer), sound bytes and even information on Van Halen's pet charity, U.S.A.

Harvest (that page has a link to the White House, believe it or not, because President Clinton gave an award to U.S.A. Harvest's founder). Slash, meanwhile, treats fans to photos of his 300-plus snakes, snapped every two minutes by cameras that have been installed at one of the Los Angeles-area serpentariums where he keeps his collection. Slash's SnakeCam, as the folks at Geffen Records call it, can be accessed from Geffen's homepage, (http:geffen.com) which also has excerpts from It's Five O'clock Somewhere, the album by Slash's Snakepit, his "side project" band with Guns N' Roses drummer Matt Sorum, Alice in Chains bassist Mike Inez, rhythm guitarist Gilby Clarke and former Jellyfish guitarist Eric Dover. a guide for geeks If you have Web-browsing tools, here's another address to investigate: http:www.ccs.neu.edu There you can see the latest version of the Geek Code home page.

If you've ever wondered just what the manifestations of geekitude are, this is the place to find out. Be you a GE of or a lowly GH of you'll see just where you fit in the 'net's rich geek pageant. The ultimate arbiter of geekitude is the site's administrator, a cybersoul who goes by the name Stainless Steel Rat. new dimensions in E-mail Electronic mail, the unappreciated workhorse of the cyberage, is getting a face lift on Prodigy. The rejuvenated network should be making multimedia E-mail available this month.

Users will be able to send text, pictures and sound. Most PCs already have a microphone, or at least a sound card that can use one. But not too many are hooked up to scanners to digitize photos. So Prodigy is teaming up with the Seattle Film Works to put users' pictures on floppy disk. Of course there's a fee, an additional $3.95 above the routine film processing costs.

For the time being, the mail will work only when sent to other Prodigy members, and, as usual, it's not available for Macintosh users. But Prodigy says both are short-term problems. Although Prodigy is the first to promote the capability, users on America Online and CompuServe also can send pictures that will pop up with E-mail. It just takes a little more work. The challenge is making a photo into a computer file.

If you don't have a scanner, try getting your film developed into a Kodak PhotoDisc. Then use a cheap image manipulation program to copy the pictures into the computer and save them in either GIF or JPEG formats. From there, it's just a matter of attaching the photo as a file to your routine E-mail. When the person on the other end downloads the file, the picture automatically will pop up on screen. 26 April 6, 1995 Austin American-Statesman.