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Eastern Standard Tribe Aparrently instead of paying a toll for the New Jersey Turnpike, one downloads music, then pays for it at the gate. Don't ask me tho...

Think any of the researchers are fans of Cory Doctrow?

This sounds akin to the highway networks described in his fiction novel Eastern Standard Tribe

From the book:
"Drivers on the MassPike who used traffic jams to download music from nearby cars and then paid to license the songs. Only they didn't. They circumvented the payment system in droves, running bootleg operations out of their cars that put poor old Napster to shame for sheer volume..."

Sounds like fun ;-)

Think any of the researchers are fans of Cory Doctrow?

This sounds akin to the highway networks described in his fiction novel Eastern Standard Tribe

From the book:
"Drivers on the MassPike who used traffic jams to download music from nearby cars and then paid to license the songs. Only they didn't. They circumvented the payment system in droves, running bootleg operations out of their cars that put poor old Napster to shame for sheer volume..."

Sounds like fun ;-)

There will be portions of the population that will see this as unnatural or unholy or un-something and will refuse to partake, but unless they are willing to kill all of the people who did get age extension treatments, there's a simple solution: wait.

I can see the conversation now:
Opposer: You're unnatural and you should not have decided to live forever.
Immortal: Okay, see you in a century. Oops, no, I won't.

Basically, anyone who lives a few hundred years, outlives any of their detractors who thought that people shouldn't ever live that long. And with each succeeding generation, exposure to this concept makes it more and more normal, acceptable and desirable.

Corey Doctorow's "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" discusses this concept quite well. (BTW, it's available for download from his site, www.craphound.com.)

It seems to originate from Cory Doctorow's website. Not too sure about it, though.

Woried about overpopulation? Enforce China's one child law in all countries that have the life-extension technology available and if you procreate beyond the limit you lose all rights to future longevity treatments.

Picture a new form of reproduction where when you die accidentally or perhaps choose to leave the mortal coil due to boredom your DNA is combined with another person in a similar situation and a new person is cloned to replace the departed.

Also realize that many will choose not to participate with the new society for religious or moral reasoning and will conveniently die out on their own as their children depart to join the new long-living Bitchin' Society.

Oh and go read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. It's fun, free and on-topic.

But anticirumvention lets rightsholders invent new and exciting copyrights for themselves -- to write private laws without accountability or deliberation -- that expropriate your interest in your physical property to their favor. Region-coded DVDs are an example of this: there's no copyright here or in anywhere I know of that says that an author should be able to control where you enjoy her creative works, once you've paid for them. I can buy a book and throw it in my bag and take it anywhere from Toronto to Timbuktu, and read it wherever I am: I can even buy books in America and bring them to the UK, where the author may have an exclusive distribution deal with a local publisher who sells them for double the US shelf-price.

http://www.craphound.com/msftdrm.txt

Or perhaps whuffie, which is pretty much the same thing. But while it worked in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom the concept of respect as a currency needed a complex infrastructure in place for it to work.
Perhaps dedicated anarchists could set up the system and keep it working, but a material object like gold (or wepons as also mentioned) is often useful for the people who don't like to just trade promises with one another.

Whether or not we can agree on a successful business model in Anderson's predictions, the events he describes are indeed coming to pass. The market for content is dissolving.

Last year, according to R.R. Bowker http://www.bowker.com/press/2004_0527_bowker.htm, 175,000 book titles were published in the US alone. That's more than any other year in history, and it doesn't even include all the titles being published without ISBNs through outfits like Lulu http://www.lulu.com/, which gives authors the option to distribute directly. And yet, the same report notes that sales of books are down. Why? More content; less consolidated sales.

This is bad news for big publishers and for brick and mortar retailers, whose profits have always relied upon the 80/20 rule described in the Wired article. It's good news, on the other hand, for authors (and bands and game designers, etc.) who are hoping for a sliver of the marketplace that they might not otherwise have gotten.

Lulu, where I work, currently sees over 50 new titles published a day by authors hoping for the attention of a few readers. That number is growing all the time. Most of these authors won't sell very many books. But the money being spent on books by the book-buying public is being divided into many more slices.

"How am I going to get rich if I only sell 100 books?" complains a typical author.

Well, the truth is that getting rich as an author has always been a bit like winning the lottery. The world can support very few Stephen Kings. But it can support an almost infinite number of Cory Doctorows http://www.craphound.com/down/ or Tucker Maxes http://www.tuckermax.com/. The publishing world (and I include music) is more democratic, but it's also less glamorous.

If you have content-- and people will always be compelled to generate more content, for better or worse -- in the digital world it costs you nothing to put it out there and hang a price tag on it (Lulu and CafePress are good examples). If it's out there, and it's valuable to someone, eventually it will sell. The economics of that marketplace, on the other hand, are not those of the publishing industry as it now exists.

This speech seems to have had zero affect on Microsoft. Lets hope its predictions (i.e. that DRM is bad for Microsoft) are accurate.

It's amazing how apt Leia's "the more you tighten your grip..." prediction is coming true for DRM: That DRM systems don't work.

I've never even heard of half of these "prominent science fiction writers." Guess I've been living under a rock!

Yup. You might want to grab a copy of the Encylopedia of Science Fiction and catch up with the rest of us. My guess is that you're a hard SF / space opera fan, and you haven't heard of the authors listed because they write new wave / cyberpunk SF rather than the stuff you're into.

Cory Doctorow is a new author who has had success giving away his books under the creative commons licence. You might know him better as a blogger.

Pat Murphy has been around for a while. She mostly writes science-fantasy stuff... kind of like a midway between LeGuin and Cherryh, if you've heard of them.

Kim Stanley Robinson writes hugely popular airport newsstand bestsellers. Y'know, those big thumping books with gold leaf on the front. You've probably read his Mars books.

Norman Spinrad is one of my all time favourite writers. He is often compared to Norman Mailer (also a favourite), a comparison I find apt. You'd probably hate him, as he presents a strong criticism of psychology space opera fans in his novel The Iron Dream.

Bruce Sterling is probably best known to Slashdotters as the author of The Hacker Crackdown (full text here) and my sig. He's also a blogger for Wired and the Pope Emperor of the Virdian movement.

Ken Wharton is a relatively new writer, but a long time physicist. He's probably the most convention hard SF type writer of the lot.

I've never even heard of half of these "prominent science fiction writers." Guess I've been living under a rock!

Yup. You might want to grab a copy of the Encylopedia of Science Fiction and catch up with the rest of us. My guess is that you're a hard SF / space opera fan, and you haven't heard of the authors listed because they write new wave / cyberpunk SF rather than the stuff you're into.

Cory Doctorow is a new author who has had success giving away his books under the creative commons licence. You might know him better as a blogger.

Pat Murphy has been around for a while. She mostly writes science-fantasy stuff... kind of like a midway between LeGuin and Cherryh, if you've heard of them.

Kim Stanley Robinson writes hugely popular airport newsstand bestsellers. Y'know, those big thumping books with gold leaf on the front. You've probably read his Mars books.

Norman Spinrad is one of my all time favourite writers. He is often compared to Norman Mailer (also a favourite), a comparison I find apt. You'd probably hate him, as he presents a strong criticism of psychology space opera fans in his novel The Iron Dream.

Bruce Sterling is probably best known to Slashdotters as the author of The Hacker Crackdown (full text here) and my sig. He's also a blogger for Wired and the Pope Emperor of the Virdian movement.

Ken Wharton is a relatively new writer, but a long time physicist. He's probably the most convention hard SF type writer of the lot.

The "open source" idea is relevant to the issue simply because it illustrates - and provides a solution for - the problem at hand. Certain devious "features" would never be implemented with the eyes of the public watching. In addition, any minor security "bugs" would be ironed out. That's a pretty sweet deal - prevent against corruption and create better code! This reminds me of Cory Doctorow's Microsoft Research DRM talk @ http://craphound.com/msftdrm.txt/. In illustrating the advantages of public ciphers, he tells us:

"This means that the only experimental methodology for discovering if you've made mistakes in your cipher is to tell all the smart people you can about it and ask them to think of ways to break it. Without this critical step, you'll eventually end up living in a fool's paradise, where your attacker has broken your cipher ages ago and is quietly decrypting all her intercepts of your messages, snickering at you."

This is called Schneier's Law: "Anyone can come up with a security system so clever that he can't see its flaws."

Even if the programmers at Diebold were good and honest, we can get better security by moving to open source. Especially on this issue, I imagine 80% of all security programmers on Slashdot would love to contribute.

Stephen King's experiment failed, in my opinion, because the book sucked. I read the free sample and wasn't interested in reading any more, even if it hadn't cost anything. (And I've enjoyed some of his other books, so it's not like I didn't give it a fair chance.)

I'm a Microsoft customer. Like millions of other Microsoft customers, I want a player that plays anything I throw at it, and I think that you are just the company to give it to me.

• Predicting how people will react to one or more significant changes to society, either in the future (most SF) or the past (the subgenre of Alternate History. Start with these 1,600+ stories.) The Handmaid's Tale wasn't predicting a fundie future for the US. It did capture the feel of what happened in Afghanistan after the fundie Taliban took over.
• Predicting interesting uses for new technologies. Networks hadn't been out for that long when Brunner, and even before that Brin (or Benford? one of the 'killer B's') wrote about possibilities for worms and viruses in cyberspace.
• Extrapolating / having fun with an exponential growth or decay of an important resource. What if our population booms or crashes? What if the planet freezes or goes greenhouse? What if a person or computer gets vastly more intelligent than before?
• And the most important part of SF-- Sensawunda. The sense of wonder when you're pulled out of your own time and space and get to gaze (for the length of a book) through the eyes of other humans at a deep future, wide universe, and wide range of societies.
• and as part of Sensawunda-- inspiring the future... all the scientists inspired by Heinlein or LeGuin or Gibson ("Neuromancer didn't predict the future. Neuromancer *created* the future. If you would understand the past twenty years' technological advance and retreat, this book is required reading..."- C. Doctorow.) to go into the sciences or computing...

Enough has been written about The Singularity that any SF writer writing about 50+ years into the future should at least explain why if one isn't in their universe. Doesn't have to be a long explanation: put it in and go on with the story. Good SF writing hasn't been stopped by actual advances in science. Discovering that Venus is 700 degrees, going to the moon, or widespread PCs outdated some earlier SF stories' technology. But those events inspired many more new writers and new stories. The possibility of a singularity in a few decades should have less of an effect than those actual advances.

And if a singularity does happen, there could be a second golden age of SF. You don't just write about universes, you create them. Certainly Alternate History will be filled with that, like "what would happen if Reagan *won* the 1980 election?" versions of earth being run within the trillions of ongoing simulations (and no, the Matrix wasn't original- SF movies are usually far behind the SF literature.)

SF writers who are particularly good at sensawunda in a post singularity (and/or humans dealing with beings larger than ourselves) universe include Greg Benford, the 'can make you empathize with loss in the life of regular deathless people' Greg Egan, the 'pulls off multiple believable economic systems in one novel' Ken Macleod, the recently reviewed Richard Morgan, Ian Banks, and of course Cory Doctorow and the early Slashdot adoptor (and I worry that he's going to hit an Algernon moment soon- how can he keep writing so well?) Charlie Stross.

Many are scientists, but you don't have to be a scientist to be a good SF writer. You do have t

Baen has done it, and it worked great. Cory Doctorow has done it (I think his publisher is Tor), and it worked great. I've done it, and it worked great.

(X) Users of email will not put up with it

NB: This list was lifted from http://www.craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt I am uncertain of further attribution.

Anyway.

You're missing the point, which is entirely usual for an AC. The response in the FAQ/QnA to all questions of "How will we handle X?", where X is "unbonded/poor/anonymous/whatever senders", "mailing lists", etc. have the same two answers: "Well, you'll have to put them on your whitelist", or "you'll have to look at the messages individually to determine if you want to read them".

BUT WE DO THAT NOW. There is nothing new here, except an elaborately-designed bit of wankery designed to flag potential spam messages in a slightly novel way. You still have to undertake the Aegean task of discovering which ones are spam and which are not, unless you are willing to forego communication with everybody who is not on your whitelist and/or who does not post a sufficiently large bond. The very best you can hope for from this system is to recover some amount of money for reading spam, THEORETICALLY. (The ability of this service to guarantee this has not been demonstrated to my satisfaction, any more than the existing system's capability to prevent spammers from obtaining access in the first place.)

To address some points of your "rebuttal":

"(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
Incorrect, see other posts"

No, not incorrect. It increases the difficulty of running a mailing list, to say nothing of increasing its costs.

"(x) Users of email will not put up with it
Depends on the effectiveness and the cost. This system promises legitimate users negative cost!"

Hell, I can go through my spam archive and find messages promising me wealth, a 50-foot penis, and hot sex with teen virgins. I don't believe that, either. (Wait until that legitimate user gets every bond redeemed due to losing the eternal online popularity contest, or even better, has his bond account emptied due to a security flaw somewhere. We'll see what he/she thinks of it then.)

"(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
Incorrect, a non-participating recipient will simply not request bonds. As with most other anti-spam solution, a fall back address can be used which is checked with lower priority and stricter content rules to discourage users from sending mail to the non-participating address."

Thereby providing, for 99% of all email users, zero benefit over the existing system. (A "solution" where you still have to clean a spam trap is not a solution.)

"(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
Correct, a working and secure micropayment system is a requirement."

... Which we don't have now, and for various reasons, will probably _never_ have. Why not predicate the existence of a functional antispam system on something vaguely probable, like a secret group of four superhumans wearing leotards? We could call them the "Spamtastic 4", and they could fly around preventing evil spammers from spamming. Ooo, and they could have a moon base too. Yeah, that's the ticket.

"(x) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
Incorrect. Why would you accept to provide bonds for messages which you didn't send?"

I wasn't aware that you had to agree to an identity thief/cracker emptying your bond account of however much you had in it. A security flaw hardly requires your permission to exploit. (But now that I know you have to agree to it, that makes it much better. Tell me, do the attacks against the system require the use of the RFC 3514 "Evil Bit"?) For extra crunchy added badness, ponder possibilities like bond accounts being attached to checking accounts, and the average state of home network security. ("Hey, I'm gonna go wardriving and spam myself a new Mercedes!")

"(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
Incorrect. With increasing popularity of Atte

dude, that's an awesome list. i may blatantly steal it in the future.

Yup - someone's making a ton of money and it's not the mpaa.

Cinea will invest several million dollars to make and distribute the DVD players to academy members and possibly to movie critics and other awards groups.

So, wait. The mpaa has millions to spend on this new way to prevent piracy? I thought they were losing money out the ass! (they'll have to reimburse Cinea somehow - so the mpaa is really paying the millions for the DVD players and the encryption)

Sounds like they need to read this.

Definitely worth checking out Danny O'Brien's (NTK) "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks" speech (given for O'Reilly and at NOTCON '04), in which he argues on the basis of research that the most prolific programmers/hackers/geeks organise themselves via... text-based todo lists!

Check out
A summary or shorter summary

Well we could tell the govt about. Mabey they are not bought and sold, mabey they are just ignorant.

Slashdot congress. I'm going to send the EFF text to congress.

In case you don't know, Doctorow is the author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom (available for free), a great book which explores a sort of utopian future where the economy is no longer scarcity based and reputation is everything. Interestingly, if there's anything that's sure to kill any chance of our transitioning to an abundance-based society, it's DRM.

Most media SF is 30-40 years behind written SF, both in topics and style. Few current SF movie or TV shows show concepts that weren't already old-hat in the 1970's SF literature. This museum doesn't seem to be afraid of gently pointing this out. As many board members are SF writers I could guess how they'd push giving credit where it is due. Of course the movies have had much more influence in terms of numbers of people seeing them (I read a calculation saying 23 of the top 25 movies by popularity have been SF/fantasy).

But for influence on science and technology- the books and stories have done quite a lot more. For one example, I like a quote that Cory Doctorow (who does fine post-singularity writing) has on Neuromancer:

"Neuromancer didn't predict the future. Neuromancer *created* the future. If you would understand the past twenty years' technological advance and retreat, this book is required reading. I re-read it every year, just to get an edge on the year that's coming, and to glory in Gibson's prose and cunning artifice."

(1) When talking about SF topics, pop writers can get away with a show of ignorance that wouldn't work for many other genres. How many reviewers compare a movie to anything more than other movies and/or "the Time Machine, F451, Ray Bradbury, Star Wars, the Matrix [and if they've done extra research] P.K.Dick"? That'd be like mystery reviewers starting with A.C. Doyle and ending with Agatha Christie. How many reviews of books like "Prey," "Oryx and Crake," "Children of Men" or "Fatherland" mention anything about similar SF books (books written in some cases decades before) and instead talk about how original the popular author's idea is? (For example CoM published in the early 90's, vs Greybeard published in the early 60's. Many reviews of the former didn't mention the latter.)

...in Eastern Standard Tribe.

SF future-prediction strikes again!

Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom has an interesting vision of a future world where immortality has been achieved. Of course, material scarcity has also been eliminated.

The main character has several doctorates and has composed numerous symphonies.

If someone is willing to work as a janitor, they can live a life in leisure in the future world's reputational economy.

I was wondering what the flood had to do with living forever. Then it became clear. That's why the creators of Halo wanted to destroy all biological matter. Once converted to flood, aging stops and your free to live forever, with a very strong urge to share the wonderous longevity with others by slashing them or shooting them until they are incapacited enough to receive the gift of eternal life.

On a more serious note though, that's exactly what the book
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is about. It says pretty much exactly the same thing in the first chapter. Everyone is for life extension because anyone opposed to life extension died out, and to the kids growing up it was just a fact of life that you could live forever. Excellent read, and a free download for you cheapos. :)

Cory Doctorow wrote about this concept in eastern standard tribe. The novel is available for download (free!) here.

http://craphound.com/est/

Does it sound to anyone else that this guy is doing his best to sabotage MS in Asia, a la Eastern Standard Tribe?

Your ultimate spam solution will not work.

The Minister was the first to talk about spam in a sane manner. They acknowledge that it is a very difficult problem to solve, and it is going to require international organization and cooperation, AND cooperation of various standards groups and corporations.

The best part of the speach was, lets think about this, try some things get together in a year and see if anything worked. He didn't say here is My Bill, this will stomp out spam once and for all. He said we are all in this together...

...including, of course, the current email system on a number of counts, but there is something to the old "The Devil you know is better then the one you don't." when dealing with a system involving reputations. At least right now, the fact that just because an email is labelled as coming from "Santa Claus" doesn't mean that it did is preventing people from having their reputations damaged by spam sent out with their name. I was recently "Joe Jobbed" and I was not looking forward to having to explain that my domain wasn't really a spammer's domain... I didn't have to, not to a single person. At least the current mail system is a known quantity.

It's not all doom and gloom.

Microsoft's Cloud9 blog had a question similar to this, and I answered pretty much what I'm saying here:
A PDA is great to read a short story, when on a bus or plane, or on the can, when there's limited time and space spend on reading.

I won't take a PDA to the beach, and in my house there are enough dead tree books that I don't think I'll ever need to read off my PDA.

But for reasonable-size fiction, such as Cory Doctorow's A Place So Foreign and 8 More, are great to haul around. Note the e-version only has 6 more, not eight. Two clever stories are left for the dead tree version.

Some years, the Hugo nominees get e-published free, and I'll snag those and have enough short reading for a coupl'a months.

What am I reading on? A Palm 505 using Palm Reader. Would other things be better? Sure, but probably not enough to get me to read novels, or have it be my primary reading source.

I have a Palm Vx which does all of this. It has 8 MB of RAM and I haven't even filled up 2 Megs yet even with all the games and texts I've downloaded. It is certainly cheap. It recharges every night when you set it in the cradle. And charge life is about 14 hours of continuous use. I used to think the screen was too low res at 160x160 since I had tried reading on it and didn't like the results. But I've found that reading on it is fine if you use the right software. Since I downloaded Palmreader I have been reading Cory Doctorow's stories from Craphound.com and loving it. Ive only evaluated three readers but out of those three, Palmreader is by far the best.

Like Cory Doctorow describes in "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom"?

Back before Bungie were owned by The Borg (cheap shot -- sue me), they had a April Fool's prank going by the name of Pimps At Sea. So between this and Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom, I claim to have seen this before.

You might enjoy Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, a book that includes this as a plot device. It's available as a free e-book. One of the points it brings up is that you can't remember your own experience of death, though you can watch your final moments as recorded by others.

...the Baen bound-into-hardcover CDROMs would make a great addition to any library. Best of all, since they're freely copyable, all it would cost would be a CDROM blank...and they could be easily replaced if anyone broke or lost them.

I've actually taken to putting all five of them (available via BitTorrent at this website), three Blackmask.com public domain book CDROMs, and the free works of Cory Doctorow on a single DVD+ROM and handing it out to folks who have DVD drives.

You should read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow.

You should read Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow.

Try reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow. It should give some hint at least to what the world could be like without MS (ideally, that is).

See Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books.

I'd like to reprint a 1932 work by a priest. He died leaving no heirs. To find the owner, I'd need his will, the agreement he signed with his publisher, etc. This stuff was all lost around WWII.

I own a $500 parcel of Arizona desert. Every year I must pay $13 to the state for taxes, which pays so the government can remember who owns the land.

I find it troubling that intellectual property "needs" automatic free 90 year registration, but real property needs yearly tax payments.

How about a little credit, like a link?

It appeared in a slashdot comment here
and its also at Cory Doctorow's site here.

My guess is that Cory wrote it.

"Sterling has his fingers on about a hundred different pulses in this book, which vibrates with fantastic in-jokes and insights from Bollywood to dot-bomb, from mil-spec gear-pigs to earnest cybercops. The story rockets along like a hijacked airliner heading straight at you, like a flash-worm compromising every unpatched Windows box on the net at once. I read it in one sitting, and I'll read it again before the month is out. Lots of books are called "thrillers" but very few are this thrilling."

BTW, Sterling called this kind of writing "Nowpunk" at his SXSW talk last week: http://craphound.com/sterlingsxsw04.txt

Just over a year ago, I released my first novel, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, as an experiment in what would happen if I allowed my precious copyright to be slightly eroded by one of the Creative Commons licenses. I chose the most restrictive CC license available to me, staying cautious, and I waited to see if the sky would fall.

It didn't.

Not (just) because I'm a swell guy, a big-hearted slob. Not because Tor is a run by addlepated dot-com refugees who have been sold some snake-oil about the e-book revolution. Because you -- the readers, the slicers, dicers and copiers -- hold in your collective action the secret of the future of publishing. Writers are a dime a dozen. Everybody's got a novel in her or him. Readers are a precious commodity. You've got all the money and all the attention and you run the word-of-mouth network that marks the difference between a little book, soon forgotten, and a book that becomes a lasting piece of posterity for its author, changing the world in some meaningful way.