Posts Tagged ‘Computers’

Gold Farming: Virtual Slavery?

It was an hour before midnight, three hours into the night shift with nine more to go. At his workstation in a small, fluorescent-lighted office space in Nanjing, China, Li Qiwen sat shirtless and chain-smoking, gazing purposefully at the online computer game in front of him. The screen showed a lightly...

March 28th, 2011 | Social Insight | Read More

Hackerville: How a Remote Town in Romania Has Become Cybercrime Central

Three hours outside Bucharest, Romanian National Road 7 begins a gentle ascent into the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps. Meadowlands give way to crumbling houses with chickens in the front yard, laundry flapping on clotheslines. But you know you’ve arrived in the town of Râmnicu Vâlcea when...

February 14th, 2011 | Social Insight | Read More

The AI Revolution Is On

Diapers.com warehouses are a bit of a jumble. Boxes of pacifiers sit above crates of onesies, which rest next to cartons of baby food. In a seeming abdication of logic, similar items are placed across the room from one another. A person trying to figure out how the products were shelved could well conclude...

January 31st, 2011 | Science & Technology | Read More

Wikileaks’ aim to defeat “Authoritarian Conspiracy”

The following is an interesting analysis (by ‘zunguzungu’) of a text by Wikileaks leader Julian Assange, probably written around 2006. See the paper: State and Terrorist Conspiracies For additional analysis, see here. By Michel Bauwens for the P2P Foundation Analysis: (nearly quoted in full) “Most...

December 14th, 2010 | Social Insight | Read More

‘I’m planning to retire to Mars’

Elon Musk, The SpaceX founder, is convinced that humanity’s survival rests on its ability to move to the red planet. He here speaks of how his company is making the leap to the stars an affordable dream The fresh-faced 39-year-old man, in a dark T-shirt and jeans, is talking about travelling to...

August 6th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

Inside the Apocalyptic Soviet Doomsday Machine

Valery Yarynich glances nervously over his shoulder. Clad in a brown leather jacket, the 72-year-old former Soviet colonel is hunkered in the back of the dimly lit Iron Gate restaurant in Washington, DC. It’s March 2009—the Berlin Wall came down two decades ago—but the lean and fit Yarynich...

July 20th, 2010 | Big Ideas | Read More

Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World

Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year’s list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails,...

July 13th, 2010 | Big Ideas | Read More

Feathering the Falcon’s nest

ELON MUSK is not, to paraphrase James Watson’s bon mot about Francis Crick, a man given to modest moods. Today, though, he might be forgiven a little hubris. The co-founder of PayPal, and developer of the Tesla, the first modern electric sports car, has long wanted to get into the space business as...

June 13th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

Entrepreneurs leading the Space Race

NORTH LAS VEGAS, Nev. — At the Bigelow Aerospace factory here, the full-size space station mockups sitting on the warehouse floor look somewhat like puffy white watermelons. The interiors offer a hint of what spacious living in space might look like. From the New York Times by Kenneth Chang “Every...

June 11th, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More

Geek Power

“It’s funny in a way”, says Bill Gates, relaxing in an armchair in his office. “When I was young, I didn’t know any old people. When we did the microprocessor revolution, there was nobody old, nobody. It’s weird how old this industry has become.” The Microsoft cofounder and I, a couple...

May 1st, 2010 | Science & Technology | Read More