Some morning last week, Slashdot: prostoalex wrote "MSNBC points to the court cases spawned by virtual worlds. Recently, Tom Loftus notes, a virtual island in one of the MMORPGs sold for $30,000, enough to attract commercial attention. Apparently, some businesses create third-world sweatshops, where low-wage laborers are being paid to play and accumulate enough virtual merchandise, so that an eBay sale of it makes the operation profitable. ’One such business, Blacksnow Interactive, actually sued a virtual world’s creator in 2002 for attempting to crack down on the practice. The first of its kind to center on virtual goods, the case was eventually dropped,’ MSNBC says." I hope stuff like this won’t be prevalent in the digitized third world that we’re helping to create here...
I was told that my English is actually so totally not North-American at all. Fine. Well, yes. I’m here, mixed in two cultures. It seems that people have the tendency to ghetto-ize. French with French, Murcans with Murcans. I’m in a weird country with a weird culture, and I’m living with people with a totally different culture again. And honestly, I have to tell you: it’s fun! Last Saturday some of the most extreme ones on the one side offering me drinks... And the next day I had dinner with an African family.
As I promised myself, I went to the market Saturday last week. Great fun. Ignoring irritating bastards. Well, I was doing that. Peter however walked along with some of them, so I was kind of forced to join the motley crew and look at very nice but overpriced Dogon fabric.
Did you ever have spaghetti with mayonnaise? Honestly, I probably did, but then again, I’ve been a student for quite a while. So, at the egg-sandwich restaurant around the corner, where they put petrol on the counter to get rid of the flies, they not only serve egg-sandwich, they also eat spaghetti with mayonnaise there! Me I just had a plain egg-sandwich with some fries, but I did have tea with vinegar...
Here’s a must-read for both geeks as well as the non-initiated, to grasp a bit more about why people are actually sharing knowledge without any monetary incentives, such as working on free software, sharing their music using peer-to-peer networks and writing a free encyclopedia: The economics of sharing, (This site delves a bit deeper into the matter.) I would like to add to it though, that people are starting some initiatives, allbeit still a bit tiny compared to the scale of say eMule or Wikipedia, using the given possibilities of IT to share goods and services beyond IT, such as Hospitality Club or online give-away shops, or even without using IT, such as the real-life give-away shops.
Als ik in Nederland was zou ik vanavond naar een feest van mijn oom en tante gaan waar ik heel veel familieleden zou zien die ik al jaren niet meer heb gezien. ..snif.. :( Maja, hopelijk is er nog zo’n feestje over een half jaar of zo :)
The dust, and a couple of cigarettes... they made me sick. I had a real sore throat last week. So I promised myself not to smoke any cigarettes anymore. I’ve done that before, but then I didn’t taste the dust every time I inhaled "clean air". (Would you call the air clean a 100 metres away from Europe’s busiest highway?)
So again, I’m going to the market. Finding a guitar, or some other musical instrument, a more decent mosquitonet (yeah, these beasts, they’re eating me alive, even more so when I’m actually under the klamboe). But before I’ll join Laura to have lunch with her Malian family. If she hasn’t left already...
bye bye!