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Game industry in US outgrew economy by 4 to 1

Via Ars Technica:

As gaming enters the mainstream and video game consoles become as ubiquitous in entertainment centers as DVD players, the industry has become an important economic driver of the United States economy. The economic effects of the video game business economically haven’t faced much serious study to date, but the Electronic Software Association took the task upon themselves with a new report. Titled Video Games in the 21st Century: Economic Contributions of the U.S. Entertainment Software Industry, it found that the US video game industry grew a whopping 17 percent from 2003 to 2006, far outpacing the 4 percent general growth of the US economy. Retail sales totaled $7.0 billion in 2005, and sales of games for both PCs and consoles grow from 74.1 million units in 1996 to over 250 million units last year.

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Copyright and the SFWA – here we go again

Hooo-boy. Remember the Scribd/Science Fiction Writers of America dust-up a while ago? It would appear the fat lady has not yet sung.

Andrew Burt, the man behind the Scribd DMCA take-downs, was removed from the SFWA Piracy Committee because of the incident. But now, despite recommendations to the contrary, the committee has been re-established under a new aegis (the Copyright Committee) … and Burt is back at the helm.

Charlie Stross is, to say the least, livid – especially as he was part of the exploratory committee that recommended, among other things, that Burt be kept well away from copyright issues.

Scalzi is politely baffled.

Cory Doctorow is, unsurprisingly, not very impressed either.

I’m not even going to pretend to understand the deep architecture of this debate – I’m not a professional writer, much less a member of SFWA – but from an outsider’s perspective, no matter how valid their motivations may be, the SFWA is displaying a marked lack of smarts by going back on themselves and, in the process, annoying three of the most popular and publicly outspoken writers on their roster. Not very pragmatic, really.

I think Steve “My Elves Are Different” Wilson has struck the nail firmly on the head in this instance. In the meantime, I think this will be the sf story of the moment for a few weeks to come.

[tags]writing, copyright, SFWA[/tags]
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Man defeats constant government surveillance with his own constant surveillance

Elahi showing his work at a conferenceArtist Hasan Elahi was wrongly arrested by the FBI in 2002. He found if he called and told them before each of his many flights, he wasn’t troubled again. So he decided to beat Big Brother in the most brilliantly counter-intuitive way – by photographing everything about his life.

Elahi uploads hundreds of photos a day and a tracking bracelet on his ankle gives a constant update of his wherabouts. So it seems the way to stop overzealous intelligence agencies falsely accusing you is to give them all the information about everything you do, all of the time.

[via collision detection, image by open content]

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The infancy of e-democracy

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Houses of Parliament by night I have to confess to a certain bullish optimism about the potential of internet technologies to transform the way democratic governments operate – but I’m not under any illusions that we’re even close to success yet. There are steps being taken in the right direction, however – Michael Cross takes a look at the UK government’s electronic petition site, and concludes that – while it’s largely used in frivolous ways at the moment – the fact that it’s there at all, allowing admittedly odd (and occasionally crack-pot) opinions to appear on government webspace can only be a good sign. [Image by spjwebster]

Sadly, politics being politics, new technology isn’t always going to be used in the nicest of ways – I was rather disappointed to hear [via MetaFilter] that the US Democrats are crowdsourcing their smear campaigns by supplying video footage of Republican candidates for people to remix as they see fit. Fighting fire with fire … as the old anarchist joke goes, “it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the government always gets in”.

[tags]internet, politics, democracy[/tags]
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Thermoelectrics – conduct electricity well but heat badly

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Today thermoelectrics let you keep your car seat at the right temperature. In the future they might make everything more efficient.Usually, heat and electric conductivity go hand in hand. Now, thanks to the emerging nanostructure technology movement, scientists think they can separate these two.

“Thermoelectric devices are based on the fact that when certain materials are heated, they generate a significant electrical voltage. Conversely, when a voltage is applied to them, they become hotter on one side, and colder on the other. The process works with a variety of materials, and especially well with semiconductors — the materials from which computer chips are made.”

Previously thermoelectric devices were far too inefficient to be of use. But by adding nanoscale structures a few billionths of a metre across, the heat conductivity of a material can be disrupted whilst the electricity passes through fine, ramping the efficiency up massively. Imagine a computer chip that doesn’t get heated as it works, or a solar cell that uses heat as well as light to generate electricity. Thermo electrics are already starting to get efficient enough to cool your car seat – how soon before they start to be used in the growing low energy pc market?

[via ScienceDaily, image from Amazon.com ]

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