We’ve got some pretty serious problems with our public library system over here in the UK, what with declining book budgets and the occasional librarian auctioning off the collectables. It would appear that things aren’t too rosy in Florida libraries either – they’re having trouble getting all the shelving done because the retirees who normally fill such volunteer jobs have refused to submit to drugs testing as a condition of employment. They must have been reading some radical leftist Chomsky books or something – don’t they know that the innocent have nothing to fear?

OK, so it’s not been great fun commenting here on Futurismic of late, largely because you’ve had to wait until one of us contributors gets a moment to log in and moderate the wheat from the chaff. The good news is that yours truly has had a vigorous poke-around in the Moveable Type interface and found that there is a way to make commenters ‘trusted’, which I am assuming means their comments skip the moderation process. I’ve tick-boxed a few of the more recent and regular visitors with things to say, but suffice to say that if you drop a comment that isn’t an advert for controlled prescription medicines or ‘haut f4tty latina v1dz’, I’ll trust you up next time I’m logged in, and you’ll be good to go. Maybe now we can get some decent banter going here – just keep it friendly, Queensbury rules and all that. I’ll not ban opinions that I don’t agree with, but griefers of all stripes will be nixed. So, speak up! 🙂

We’d all be forgiven for thinking that Second Life is just a playground for the weird edge of the techno cognoscenti – the media usually focusses on the stranger events and inhabitants. But there’s a lot of potential for the future there, at least as far as IBM are concerned. Big Blue are investing heavily in SL and other multiverse technologies as well as planning to develop their own 3D intranet, and when a player that big decides that the far shores are the promised land, a lot of people are going to follow in their wake.

I’ve been known to cheerlead for fabbing (or ‘rapid prototyping’) here on occasion, but it’s important to realise that such technologies are a double-edged sword – literally. DefenseTech considers the risk of weapons proliferation that hi-tech CNC set-ups could produce in the wrong hands; extrapolate this a few decades to the nanofactory era, and there’s a serious potential for nastiness.

Ever wondered why it takes a novel so long to get from the writer’s desk to the bookstores? Sit down, get comfy, and let Charlie Stross explain it all.