David Orban | David Orban

Try to help a hopeless 40 million euro online project in Italy, and get menacing emails

February 27, 2007 / General

As reported by Bru, and originally posted on his blog by Maurizio, the Ritalia initiative that we started yesterday to try and re-invent with modern tools, and effective open collaborative methods the abortive www.Italia.it portal, is causing an uproar in the blogosphere. The aim is ambitious, immodest, and innocent, happy, at the same time. Let’s […]

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Interactive Enigma machine simulator

February 26, 2007 / Security, Technology

On www.enigmaco.de there is an interactive simulator of the German Enigma machine that was used during World War II to encode messages sent to the u-boot fleet. The story of how the British found an inegenious way of decoding these messages at Bletchley park, and through a paintstaking process based on human calculation (the original,

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Participatory Democracy

February 24, 2007 / Technology

I am attending, from within Second Life, the conference “Beyond Broadcast 2007 – from Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy” at MIT, organized by the Comparative Media Studies of MIT, the Yale Information Society Project, and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society of the Harvard Law School. “For 50 years broadcast media have played a

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I attended the luanch of D-wave Systems’ quantum computer!

February 14, 2007 / Technology

I decided that the unveiling of the first commercial quantum computer by D-wave systems was a historical moment that I didn’t want to miss, and having received on Monday to confirmation of my invitation, I literally hopped on a plane to come to San Francisco, and attend the launch event at the Computer History Museum

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John Edwards announces presidential campaign in Second Life

February 11, 2007 / Policymaking, Technology

Today on the Second Life News Network there is the news that at least one of the presidential candidates at the 2008 elections in the United States, John Edwards, is going to conduct a campaign within Second Life as well. I have mentioned this possibility just two weeks ago at a talk I held about

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Transcript of my lecture in Second Life on the Democracy in Virtual Worlds

February 11, 2007 / Technology

Here is the transcript of my inaugural lecture of the Craedo Auditorium in Colonia Nova in Second Life: Welcome to this seminar about “The theory and practice of democracy in virtual worlds”. I want to thank CARE, CRAEDO, and the Confederation of Democratic Simulators for inviting me to give this talk at the inauguration of

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Working commercial quantum computer to be unveiled in a week!

February 7, 2007 / Technology

I think this is a pretty big deal. A 16 qubit quantum computer ready for commercial applications is about to be unveiled in Mountain View on Feb 13 by D-Wave Systems. Why is it a big deal? The current progress of computing power is based on the architecture designed by the Hungarian physicist John von

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Tommaso’s thoughts, as tracked by the ‘New Scientist’

February 6, 2007 / Science

My friend Tommaso has been thinking aloud on his blog, about quarks, the Higgs boson, and the origin of gravity, experimental results, and their interpretations. And as he kept thinking, and thinking, and thinking, and, well… thinking, other people noticed, and among them the UK magazine ‘New Scientist‘ which I picked up at Victoria Station

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Come to listen to the Inaugural Lecture of the CRAEDO Auditorium in Colonia Nova

February 1, 2007 / Talk, Technology

On Feb 10 at 12 PM SLT (SLT = Second Life Time = PST = Pacific Standard Time = GMT-8) at the inauguration of the CRAEDO Auditorium I will hold a talk entitled “The Theory And Practive Of Democracy In Virtual Worlds”. You can read the invitation that Michel Manen*, posted on the Confederation of

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Great video of coming multitouch interfaces

January 31, 2007 / Technology

Perceptive Pixel is a new company formed by Jeff Han, launching, appropriately enough, with a video demo online of its multitouch interface. Update: I was embedding the video, but could not turn autoplay off, so now I am only linking to it, until I find out how… Here is the video Very exciting new possibilities

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