Monthly Archives: February 2009

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Luc Reid suggests a type of ebook DRM that actually might not suck

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The eBook future looks pretty bright for consumers, with devices improving and dropping in price, and a wealth of material to read thereon. But writers are worried, with some justification – after all, if the Kindle does for publishing what the iPod has done for the record labels, no one’s going to get much money for writing short stories any more.

Writer Luc Reid has been scratching his head over the Digital Rights Management question in an attempt to satisfy his requirements as both a writer and a reader, starting from the premise that DRM is necessary to enable authors to be paid for their work:

In general, the biggest argument against DRM seems to be that it provides positive things for the seller but only negative things to the buyer. Here’s a DRM proposal that actually helps the buyer, while taking away some of the biggest nuisances. I’m sure I’m not the first one to come up with it. It’s account-based DRM.

What I mean by “account-based” is that when a person buys a book, that person gets a permanent license to read that book on any eReader device they own, from a smart phone to a dedicated eReader to, who knows, their wide-screen TV with a little black box attachment. Computers might or might not be included; that would be mainly a technical issue.

This “account-based” idea is different from what’s usually talked about when people talk about eReader DRM, which is “device-based.” That is, much of the thinking about DRM has been that when I buy a book, I get to read it on the particular device I bought it for and nowhere else.

It’s a well-thought out set of ideas, and Reid has worked hard at including the flaws and objections. Unfortunately, I suspect it’s predicated on too many ‘ifs’ for it to be viable. An industry-wide standard retail structure complete with hardware and software that supports the system may sound easy on paper, but the real world is a little more messy, and getting competing companies to work together is like herding cats.

That said, Reid’s piece is one of the most honest defences of DRM I’ve ever read; maybe the publishing houses should get a think-tank of smart writers and readers together to boil up new ideas instead of leaving it to the beancounters and engineers?

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Genes, genomes, and skiffy

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beesKen MacLeod has a monograph up on genomics, sociology and science-fiction at the genomics forum:

Social scientists are less likely than natural scientists to star as villains or heroes in SF. Their work, however, has deeply influenced the genre.

At first or second or third hand – directly, through popularizations, and as refracted through mass media – anthropology, economics, sociology, and political theory have all raised questions to which SF writers have imagined answers.

As well as highlighting the importance of sociology and economics to the development of science fiction MacLeod suggests a reading list of suitable novels that are relevant to his topic. He also compliments us literary SF fans:

Written SF (whose core readership and reviewers are more scientifically informed than the general public) usually has to hew to stricter standards of scientific plausibility…

Damn staight.

[via Ken MacLeod][image from Todd Huffman on flickr]

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Geneticists scolded for giving genes silly names

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grouchoSome fruit-fly genes have names like these:

Groucho Marx: A fruit fly that produces an excess of facial bristles.

Cheap Date: A fruit fly that expresses high sensitivity to alcohol.

Ken and Barbie: Fruit flies that fail to develop external genitalia.

I’m Not Dead Yet: INDY for short, these are fruit flies who live longer than usual. [NPR explains where this came from, like you don’t know if you’re reading this blog]

Harmless enough, you’d think, but:

Since it’s increasingly likely some fruit fly genes will show up in humans, Dr. [Murray] Feingold [a Massachusetts clinician who treats people with genetic diseases] warns it will not be possible for doctors to hide a scientific name like “I’m Not Dead Yet.”…

And for a doctor, these names become embarrassing “when that gene becomes responsible for some kind of medical problem and I have to tell that patient, ‘Well, I’m sorry things don’t look so good because you have [the] I’m Not Dead Yet gene.'”

So it’s not just PC run amok, but a curious case study in the democratization of information. Your take?

[The immortal Julius Marx: Wikimedia Commons]

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Global science fiction and optimism, part 1 – the Ukraine

Chernobyl nuclear reactor, UkraineOver at the Shine Anthology blog, Jetse De Vries has started surveying the science fiction scenes of the world to see how prevalent the optimistic streak is at a local level.

The first instalment is an essay from Ukrainian writer Sergey Gerasimov, who paints a grim picture of a post-Communist aesthetic that has moved from naive Soviet optimism to (unsurprisingly) a rather grim and gory militarism:

Besides resource depletion, climate change, and pollution, there are some special topics in Ukraine: 99 percent corruption everywhere, Chernobyl, and we’ve already lived in a diluted variant of 1984; when reading George Orwell’s book, we don’t find anything surprising in it. That may be why Ukrainian readers don’t look for novels which describe marvelous possibilities or give social commentaries anymore. With cannibalistic optimism they read another meaty spilling guts story. The best social commentaries are given here in R-rated language.

Hard to believe, but there was time when the main type of speculative fiction written in Ukraine was optimistic Sci Fi. The only subgenres of it I remember were: naive-optimistic and hypocritically optimistic. These soap opera flavored volumes populated with happy future communists illustrated some political issues of the day and the famous Michurin’s motto: “We cannot wait for favors from Nature. To take them from it — that is our task.”

If nothing else, it highlights the fact that Western sf isn’t quite so dystopian in tone by comparison. But I guess the big question here is whether a nation’s artistic output passively reflects its political and economic aspirations, or whether instead it can be used to influence and change those attitudes.

Perhaps it is more simple: maybe the bleakness of Ukrainian sf is inevitable, given that their real near-term future seems so devoid of hope. If that is the case, should we expect to see a swing toward optimism in the West riding in on the coat-tails of the Obama administration? [image by skpy]

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Recycling waste heat in computers to increase efficiency

computer processor pinsThe ever-louder whining of my computer’s processor fan is a constant reminder that there’s a lot of energy wasted in modern microprocessors (and that it’s high time I replaced the ageing beast for a machine less likely to collapse at any moment).

While we’re unlikely to be offered room-temperature computer systems any time soon, engineers in the emerging field of phononics are looking at ways to harvest that waste heat and make computers more efficient in the process:

It exploits the fact that some materials can only exchange heat when they are at similar temperatures. The small memory store at the heart of their design is set to either a 1 or 0 temperature by an element that can rapidly shunt in or draw out heat. The store itself is sandwiched between two large chunks of other materials.

One of those materials is constantly hot, but can only donate heat to the memory store when that too is hot, in the 1 state. The material on the other side of the memory patch is always kept cold, but can draw heat away from the store whatever state it is in.

Early days yet, of course, but maybe thermal computing will give Moore’s Law another stay of execution when we reach the practical limits of circuit integration. [via SlashDot; image by Ioan Sameli]