One more reason why second life is sick...

| climate cange, internet, dubai, stupidity

I have never really understood the appeal of second life. Don’t really like the esthetics and never really got the concept of hanging out in some fantasy world that makes no sense whatsoever (if you really need that you should probably just head over to dubai). Now i have been musing about energy consumption here before, but if it is really true what this number crunching blogger writes, the playing second life is not only stupid but outright sick: If there are on average between 10,000 and 15,0…

(banned) in Dubai

| emirates, cities, dubai, public transport, airtravel, internet, censorship

Spend a day in Dubai yesterday and that place is positively insane. will post in more detail later, but in the meanwhile some initial observations. About the first thing i noticed – even before leaving the transit area of the airport – was that the local authorities do not have much love for this blog. in fact they have so little love for it that they censor it: No clue what i have done to piss-off the sheiks, but my guess would be that they also assume some kind of connection between me and 9/1…

Short interruption ...

| media, copyright, internet, stupidity, cycling

Was watching the live stream of the tagesthemen (the late edition of the main news show of the ARD) earlier this evening. after a rather helpless interview with the german foreign minister again avoided to tell the Israelis their completely unjustified attacks on Lebanese civilians) they had a bit about the final of this years Tour de France which had the potential to cheer up my mood a little bit, but instead of seeing images of champagne-drinking cyclists i got this: Short interruptio…

We live in public

| public domain, internet, messengers, new york

It seems like i am surrounded by references to the public domain lately. sarai readers, conference topics, creative commons dedications and now there is even talk about renaming the public research programme of waag society (which i run) into ‘public domain’. In the last two days i have however been reminded that this is nothing new. it appears that i have always been surrounded by people who care a lot about the public domain. My childhood/puberty (when is unsuccessfully trying to master the ar…

The city of the dead...

| beirut, lebanon, elections, mobile networks, internet, bandwidth

Tomorrow will see the start of the parliamentary election in Beirut. (The other parts of the country will vote on the consecutive sundays). The city while feeling relatively empty and calm is full of campaign posters and flags. As all of them are in arabic it is hard to to tell what they advocate but the whole thing seems to be centered on persons anyway. By far the most prominent is the face of the late Rafiq Hariri whose party is now run by his son. There is not a single place in Beirut…