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Having just visited the mideast for a bit of geek outrage earlier this week we’re just as surprised as you are to return to the region. But when the iPod serves as inspiration for a multi-million dollar tower (cleverly named the iPad), you know we’ll be there. From Boing Boing:

Dubai-based real estate firm Omniyat Properties plans to construct a tall building in Dubai modeled after the Apple iPod. The name of the 24-story tower: iPad. Architects James Law Cybertecture International will design, and the structure will sit over a six-degree-angled “docking station,” just as the ipod does on its docking station.

Just goes to show having more money than sense (or taste) isn’t just an American phenomenon.

Visual Aid for the Ignorant Average American:

Qatar, the vaguely phallic country thrusting into the Persian Gulf, has been banned from making changes on Wikipedia, the decidedly unphallic online reference. From Techcrunch:

Qatar has a single ISP, Qtel, with a single IP address shared by the entire country. Wikipedia has blocked that IP address for anonymous edits, but is allowing users of that IP address with actual Wikipedia accounts to continue to edit articles. There’s one problem, though. You can’t create an account if you enter Wikipedia from that IP address. It’s a bit of a Catch 22, and users will be forced to either use a proxy to enter the site (many of which are also banned), or simply stop editing altogether.

While that makes perfect sense we’d like to pretend this is a conspiracy by conservative cartographers from the military/industrial complex. They hope to eliminate countries they deem NSFW from their puritan digital utopia. Following this non-logical thought through we can only conclude that Dijibouti is next.

Update (from CNET):

Administrators later set up a workaround to allow Qatari posters to edit the site, and the block was later removed, according to an update from Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

The RIAA has been able to bully everyone from Napster to the recently deceased with the long arm of litigation. Apparently, however, the Russians were too busy with their vodka and faux lesbian pop acts to be bothered to pass anti-piracy legislation. It’s a quirk that makes AllOfMP3, a Russian based DRM-free music download site, faux legal.

Major credit cards have stopped accepting payments for the site and international trade talks have centered on shutting AllOfMP3 down. However, the site continues. With more lawyers than sense the RIAA fell back into its old routine. They sued AllOfMP3 for $1.65 Trillion. To put that in perspective that’s roughly six times the gross national product of the entire Russian country. And you thought the lines for bread were long now.

Lesser comrades would wither like a dissent in a Siberian gulag, but not AllOfMP3. TechCrunch notes that the site continues to be defiant:

“AllofMP3 understands that several U.S. record label companies filed a lawsuit against Media Services in New York,” an unnamed “senior company official” stated. “This suit is unjustified as AllofMP3 does not operate in New York. Certainly the labels are free to file any suit they wish, despite knowing full well that AllofMP3 operates legally in Russia. In the mean time, AllofMP3 plans to continue to operate legally and comply with all Russian laws.”

Zing! Not even Red Dawn portrayed New York as a soviet region. Oh, troublesome international sovereignty!

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It’s quite a testament to a consumer good’s popularity when it used as a tool in an international tit-for-tat. That’s the position that Apple’s iPod found itself last week when the US banned their export to North Korea. Is the new iPod shuffle worth exchanging a nuclear bomb for? We shall see…

In related news: Retailers, left with disturbing number of brown Zunes on their hands this holiday season, are excited. There might actually be a market for Microsoft’s maligned music player.

Or at least so sayest Bill O’Reilly, perennial blow hard and self aggrandizement magnet. In a typical hallucinatory screed brought about by the excess of hot air, the Fox commentator rallied against the borg… at least the coming of it.

Basically what you have is a large portion of the population, mostly younger people under the age of 45, who don’t deal with reality - ever. So they don’t know what day it is; they don’t know temperature it is; they don’t know what their neighbor looks like. They don’t know anything… because they are constantly diverted by a machine.

The source of this vile escapism - the PS3!

The newest thing is the PlayStation 3. Now this is a machine that allows you to play games in hi-def and all this other stuff… It’s the newest state of the art system from Sony…. It has a video game console, plays DVDs, connects you to the Internet, tells you how handsome you are. It’s six-hundred bucks. Now people lined up for hours to get this thing. Hours!

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Hours! Hours he sayest! But Bill, what should the youth of America be doing instead?

If this is your primary focus in life - the machines… it’s going to have a staggeringly negative effect, all of this, for America… did you ever talk to these computer geeks? I mean, can you carry on a conversation with them? …I really fear for the United States because, believe me, the jihadists? They’re not playing the video games. They’re killing real people over there.

Sounds like somebody is still pissy that they couldn’t find all the stars in Mario 64…. Anywhoo, remember kids: if you play with your Wii, the terrorists will win.

Coverage via the Game Politics blog and CNet’s Gadget Blog.