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Welcome to the walled garden. Would you like to hire a periscope?

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While we’re on the subject of ebooks, publishing, digital content delivery and all that jazz… how’re you “the iPad is the future of publishing!” types feeling right now?

Yup: that lush easy-to-use interface makes purchasing easy, and easy purchases happen more often! Which means those 30% rake-offs should make House Cupertino’s share prices rocket still further!

And should your customer – heaven forbid! – want to take true ownership of their hardware, don’t be surprised if that cuts them off from the content they bought through sanctioned channels.

All that money you spent on setting up your new outlet in the glitzy new mall… it seemed like a great way of short-cutting around the economic problems out on the old high street, didn’t it?

You went to bed with the landlord, and he went and raised the rent anyway.

Sleep tight.

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This is why trying to prevent book piracy is utterly futile

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Remember last year, when Nancy Kress had a weird run-in with people who’d been pirating her books? Well, they got in touch again. Here are a few highlights from the conversation:

How about a nice science fiction story (or book) about how the Computer Virus Hackers come to your rescue in the 11th hour through the rise of automated Artilects, Artificial Intelligence that has a conscious awareness and want to save America from the Illuminati New World Order world domination.

[…]

We (VXers) are deadly serious about getting a positive message out about a solution to this NWO Illuminati, Masonic takeover of the USA and the rest of the world.

The rise of A-Life is upon us and we aim to steer it in the direction of saving humanity not destroying it for a handful of global elitists.

Regards – PZest (aka Paul Zest VX history and science philosopher)

[…]

No it’s not like Cory’s book, the difference between us (VXers) and hackers is that VX is about the machines not the individual hackers. Artificial Life is what rises from of the codes we think about. These machines will rise without the hand of man, but they come from the minds of men. This is the second genesis of life and the emergence of a conscious soul that will protect us ordinary humans in our desperate hour of need.

It could be the true rapture we have been waiting for, not the false rapture the Illuminati plan to inflict upon us with their Project Blue beam aircraft spraying the skies with radioactive Barium isotopes.

[…]

Real Artificial Life hasn’t come into existence yet by certain scientific *life* criteria but VXers will be amongst the early witness it when it does happen. A-Life will not come from an individual studiously coding his designs, A-Life will emerge from some complex system outside of our control (and probably our understanding). The one thing you can be sure of is that once things get going the emerging intelligence out of the second genesis of life will want to know what freedom and survival is, an not want to be bonded slaves under the control of evil industrial- military globalists.

The immediate question anyone’s going to come up with is “are these people serious, or are they just yanking Nancy’s (and everyone else’s) chain?” It’s an interesting question, but it misses the point… or rather, the real point is independent of the answer to that question. So I’m going to reiterate the important point again.

*clears throat*

Look at that. That is book piracy in action. That is what you’re up against. That is someone upon whom you’re attempting to use rational persuasion and logic in order to convince them that they shouldn’t copy your books and give them away for free.

Technological measures will only be seen by these people as an intellectual challenge..

Reasoned arguments will wither under the blowlamp of their own spurious logical framework.

You cannot defeat these people. Every attempt to do so will be seen as a validation of their efforts, not a discouragement.

Yes, this is the Robin Hood Complex in action. So stop playing Sheriff of Nottingham and focus on winning over the people who really matter: the people who might have bought your book if it were available to them conveniently at a price they consider reasonable.

Seriously, people, give it up; you’re tilting at windmills. No, it’s worse than that: you’re tilting at windmill tilters. You will never stop these people. Stop trying. Instead, spend the effort on connecting with your customers. That’s the only route out of this labyrinth, and listening to the dying croaks of the record labels will not help you at all, except as an indication of what not to do.

And cue complaints that I simply don’t understand the scale of the problem or that I’m “on the same side” as the pirates in 5… 4… 3…

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Unleash the urban: regenerating America one city at a time

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A guest post over at Freakonomics from one Ed Glaeser, who’s apparently way out in front of the whole “cities are the future and should be embraced as such” movement. It’s mostly a list of truths he reckons need acknowledging if the US is to pull its collective backside out of the economic firepit, but some of them are pretty interesting. F’rinstance:

Build, baby, build. Cities like New York and San Francisco thrive because they’re productive and fun, attracting millions of people over the years with the promise of one of the great urban gifts: upward mobility.  But increasingly, they’ve become unaffordable to the ordinary people that drive their innovations.   If a city has plenty of brilliant people, then give them space to live and work.  Don’t enact byzantine zoning codes or hand vast, architecturally undistinguished neighborhoods over to preservationists.  There is no repealing the laws of supply and demand, and if successful cities don’t build they become expensive, boutique cities that are inaccessible to mere mortals.  When New York City was building more than 100,000 new housing units a year in the 1920s, housing stayed inexpensive.  New York construction dropped dramatically from the 1950s to the 1990s, and prices rose accordingly.  Chicago’s sea of cranes on Lake Michigan helps explain why average condo prices in the New York area are more than 50 percent more than condo prices in the Chicago area.  In this case, the city has much to learn from the Second City.

Also of note: the “Get Over Jefferson” section, which applies just as well on this side of the pond (albeit with a different name in place of the dead prez):

America is, remarkably, still held captive by a Jeffersonian ideal of yeoman farmers and country living.  The rest of the world, however, is not.  The rising powers of the developing world are seizing their urban futures — cramming smart people together, creating gateways for ideas, and building platforms for the serendipitous fortunes that proximity can provide.  Gandhi may have thought that India’s future was in its villages and not its cities — but India today is proving the great man wrong.

As mentioned before, the more I read about cities, urbanism and economics, the more I realise there’s a whole lot more stuff I really want to know. Anyone want to fund me to take a combined degree in economics and urban architecture with a side serving of speculative futurism?

Damn. Didn’t think so. 🙁

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Affetto: Child of the Uncanny Valley

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You can thank IEE Spectrum and a bunch of roboticists from Osaka University for this excursion into the Uncanny Valley. Meet Affetto, a robot child designed for research into social development psychology. The fully-skinned version is moderately disturbing:

But the skinless facial motion test? Aaaaaaaarrrrgh!

And now I’ve been reminded of it (and we’re all in that creeped-out-by-supposedly-cuddly-technology frame of mind), bring some nineties-retro toy-based trauma to your Tuesday with the naked Furby orchestra:

Bonus material: mechanical “FurbyGurdy” sequencer/synth with MIDI control.

Enjoy your nightmares!

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To infinity, and beyond! More inspirational space stuff

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Yesterday’s scale-of-space post gathered comments pretty quickly, at least in part due to my own failure to define my terms properly… but it’s a reminder that space still stirs up the imagination like little else, whether one’s imaginings be favourable or dismissive.

And so, here’s some more imagination fuel! As mentioned before, space seems to be clambering back onto the futurist Zeitgeist train of late – a response to the grim economic certainties of the foreseeable future (such as it is)? We all need something to reach for in our dreams, I guess… and if you’re gonna reach, why not stretch to your utmost? The Technology Applications Assessment Team of NASA’S Johnson Space Centre aren’t limiting themselves to anything less than affordable and achievable concepts for manned deep-space missions [via MetaFilter]:

… six technology applications that they are focusing on: satellite servicing, ISRU on the Moon, a SBSP demo, solar electric propulsion vehicle, propellant depots, and the Multi-Mission Space Exploration Vehicle (MMSEV).

[…]

The Nautilus-X MMSEV is intended as a reusable in-space vehicle for cis-lunar and deep space missions. It would offer a sizable volume to sustain a crew of six and hold enough supplies to sustain a two year mission.

Radiation mitigation strategies, such as creating safe zones with water and H2-slush tanks, are being investigated. It is “capable of utilizing variety of Mission-Specific Propulsion Units [integrated in LEO, semi-autonomously]”.

Most strikingly, it would include a ring centrifuge to provide partial gravity for maintaining crew health.

Caveat: “affordable” is a very relative term:

Estimated cost and time: “$3.7 B DCT & Implementation 64 months”

Ouch. Still, pipedreams they may be, but every human achievement was an act of the imagination first, right? But uninformed imagination is just, well, making stuff up… so get yourself over to Centauri Dreams and check out a suggested reading list for people interested in the possibilities of interstellar travel.

Last but not least, and in the name of providing at least one answer to the “sure, we could go there, but what’s the point?” retort, Brian Wang of Next Big Future has excerpts from (and a link to) a speculative PDF report on human population curves after escaping the hard resource limits of Gaia:

NASA studies (Johnson and Holbrow, 1977) confirmed that it was technically possible to build large vista space habitats in free space, essentially anywhere in the solar system (out to the asteroid belt if only solar power were used) with up to about 4 million people in each. In O’Neill’s habitat model the space citizens would live on the inside surfaces of radiation shielded spheres, cylinders, or torus’s which would be rotated to provide Earth normal gravity. The prohibitive Earth launch costs for these massive structures could be off set by using lunar and asteroid materials. Construction of (Glaser, 1974) space solar power satellites by the space colonists would make the project economically viable. Economic break even for the O’Neill-Glaser model was calculated to be about 35 years after which very large profits would be incurred. The result would have been a solar powered Earth and millions of people living in space by the beginning of the twenty first century.

Recently the O’Neill-Glaser model was recalculated (Detweiler and Curreri, 2008) to find the financially optimum habitat size. For simplicity only the habitat size was changed and the financial costs of money and energy updated, while keeping the original 1975 technological assumptions. In order to make the model financially viable the workers must live in space, space resources must be utilized and the community must build Space Solar Power Satellites, SSPS. A net present value plot showing the original calculations (Johnson and Holbrow, 1977) building 10,000 person torus habitats compared to calculations for the habitat size that optimizes costs. Starting the program with smaller habitats (64 – 2000 persons) results in peak costs that are reduced by about 75 percent and one third reduction in time for financial break even (year 25 for the optimized model).

Wildly speculative? Sure it is. So was putting a man into orbit, and not all that long ago.

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