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> As far as sci fi day dreams go, I'm guessing something more like Rishathra than Bitcoin.

What about 'Whuffie' as described in Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom?

We have a standard form for spam solution failures, we should really have the same for tricks to loose weight.

That solution is likely to help loosing weight, but as soon as the user will stop using that tube, (s)he will regain weight, thanks to the negative feedback the body maintains on its adipose stocks. But perhaps this is not a bug, but a feature : once someone use it and gets satisfied by the results, this is a product that will be hard to put down.

Good solutions to loose weight on the long term are to modify the diet forever (eat less carb if you want to give your body a chance to burn fat), or to modify exercise habits forever (building muscle is especially interesting as it burns fat even when one is not exercising)

I just finished re-reading Makers.

She bought it all: all the fast-passes and priority cards, all of it loaded into a grinning Mickey on a lanyard, a wireless pendant that would take care of her everywhere she went in the park, letting her spend money like water.

Thus girded, she consulted with her bellhop some more and laid out an itinerary. Once she'd showered she found she didn't want to wear any of her European tailored shorts and blouses. She wanted to disappear into the Great American Mass. The hotel gift shop provided her with a barkcloth Hawai'ian shirt decorated with tessellated Disney trademarks and a big pair of loose shorts, and once she donned them, she saw that she could be anyone now, any tourist in the park. A pair of cheap sunglasses completed the look and she paid for it all by waving her Mickey necklace at the register, spending money like water.

OK, so it's a bracelet, not a necklace -- otherwise, pretty much spot-on.

Great book, and you can read the whole thing (and all of his books) online for free in a variety of formats.

I just finished re-reading Makers.

She bought it all: all the fast-passes and priority cards, all of it loaded into a grinning Mickey on a lanyard, a wireless pendant that would take care of her everywhere she went in the park, letting her spend money like water.

Thus girded, she consulted with her bellhop some more and laid out an itinerary. Once she'd showered she found she didn't want to wear any of her European tailored shorts and blouses. She wanted to disappear into the Great American Mass. The hotel gift shop provided her with a barkcloth Hawai'ian shirt decorated with tessellated Disney trademarks and a big pair of loose shorts, and once she donned them, she saw that she could be anyone now, any tourist in the park. A pair of cheap sunglasses completed the look and she paid for it all by waving her Mickey necklace at the register, spending money like water.

OK, so it's a bracelet, not a necklace -- otherwise, pretty much spot-on.

Great book, and you can read the whole thing (and all of his books) online for free in a variety of formats.

The original post sounds like a snippet from that Corey Doctorow end-of-the-world novel. Did they have to find parts to fashion a rudimentary lathe along the way? I applaud the efforts of the server team, but as one commenter stated, it sounds like a failure of the company's business continuity/disaster recovery plan. The cost of dealing with employees and customers in a burn ward should overshadow revenue flow.

And hey, it's a plastic gun.

No, it's not. It's not even close to that. It's a plastic lower receiver with the rest of the gun being not plastic.

Actually, that's exactly what it is.
The lower reciever is the "firearm" as far as BATF are concerned. The rest is just unregulated parts.
So, if you want a gun, you have 3 (legal) choices
          Run down to Dick's Sporting Goods, hand over your Visa, and (after satisfying all the regulatory burdens), walk out with your gun.
          Wait for a gun show, find a random guy, swap cash and gun on the spot. More privacy, less convenience, no warranty.
          Build your own. As long you're not transferring it to someone else this is (for the moment) perfectly legal.

The last option, as parent points out, is only safely available to a relatively small group of very skilled experts.

A "plastic gun"--more specifically a safe lower receiver which can reliably be manufactured with little special skills is significant.
We are watching the development of a process and set of instructions that will make this available.

I think we're about to see some very interesting (and fun) developments in firearms design.
Some folks hear "Holy cow--people could do anything " as a joyful expression of individual freedom.
Some folks hear it as a threat that must be curtailed at all costs

In the book Makers the company Duracell buys Kodak, guts the company and uses Kodak's spoils to fund hundreds of makers to invent the imaginable while making use of Kodak's supply chain network to bring those inventions to market. 3d printing and re-purposing discarded products for parts plays a big role for low-cost of production and fast prototyping inventions. One of the inventions is smart bins with RF chips, where you tell you computer "where is my ?" and the bin with that item will make sounds and rattle so that you can find it.

http://craphound.com/?p=4146

To close the sarcasm tag, here's also an obligatory xkcd.

On a side note, this reminded me of Cory Doctorow's "When Sysadmins Ruled The Earth".

FreedomBox is the answer!

And for a thought-provoking treatment of the issues, for sci-fi fans (or freedom fans, really), consider reading Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother", downloadable for free.

I did.

Here is a link to the text. Chapter one is where reality meets fiction.

If you prefer other formats than HTML, those are available, too.

I did.

Here is a link to the text. Chapter one is where reality meets fiction.

If you prefer other formats than HTML, those are available, too.

That piece of writing was neither very good nor very entertaining. I can recommend Cory Doctorow's writing for more realistic views of what the future (close present) might have for us. He goes in multiple direction depending on his current writing. It is most of the time very enjoyable.

http://craphound.com/

I just saw two new titles on his website. i know what I will read tonight! BTW, all his novels and books are released under creative commons, you can get the book in electronic format on his website.

Just to say Kelly Link's are more then just DRM free, they are CC BY-NC-SA:

http://smallbeerpress.com/wp-content/uploads/Kelly_Link_Magic_for.htm
http://smallbeerpress.com/wp-content/uploads/Kelly_Link_Stranger_Things.htm

And Cory Doctorow's is at least CC BY-NC-ND:
http://craphound.com/pc/Cory_Doctorow_-_Pirate_Cinema.html

See comments above about the Tobin tax. We need a form for this, something along the lines of Cory Doctorow's famous spam solutions form.

Here you go. Fill it out yourself:

Your post advocates a

( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
( ) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

Reminds me of the monitoring enabled by the mesh network from Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town.

Cory Doctorow's "Little Brother". Technically it's a more upbeat book than 1984, but it's more relevant to today's society, giving it more impact.

It's a good read all right. http://craphound.com/littlebrother/

I like when sysadmins roamed the earth.
Basically a computer virus infects the internet.
The sysadmins go to the data centers to fix it.
There are terrorist attacks and a real virus is released that kills just about everyone except the sysadmins as data centers filter the air.

You can read the contents on the link below.
There is a comic book adaptation as well as a radio play as the story is cc licensed.
http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_When_Sysadmins_Ruled_the_Earth.html

From looking at the cover, maybe this was an issue with it looking very, very similar to another series of books that is fairly famous?

oh, i'm sure we will get awesome 3d printers. we will get ones that print metal, plastic, diamonds, whatever the method or technology, it will be transparent to the user.

i'm more concerned about printcrime :)
http://craphound.com/?p=573

> Time to get rid of guns. It will take a while.

(Oops, hit 'submit' instead of 'preview' on that other one. What I meant to say was...)

Like, forever. And guess who will be the LAST to give up their guns? If you said "criminals", YOU'RE RIGHT!

One last time: not a practical solution. You can wish all you want, but until you have a workable solution, you have nothing to contribute. Any post that boils down to "I wish guns would disappear" has no value.

You know the famous spam solution checklist that contains all the reasons any particular spam-fighting measure won't work? We need to have one of those for anti-gun laws. In particular, the line

( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers

which would be changed to

( ) Requires too much cooperation from criminals

So ice cream for currency?

No, we can have a "Bitchun society" with whuffie as currency .

Check it out in Cory Doctorow's Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town .

Sure, it's only fiction. But my home wireless, which I invite you to use whenever you're within range, is called ParasiteNet.

If I built a machine that could replicate anything, then the first person that bought it could just use it to replicate the machine itself and my patent would be worthless.

If I built a machine that could replicate anything, I would start giving it out to everyone so that we would not need more wars over scarce resources. Yes, any patent that I got on it would be worthless, but so would any Intellectual Property be in the future. Our current climate of rampant IP extension reminds me of the Simpson's grampa photo in the newspaper, "Angry man yells at cloud" -- they can rail all they want against reality but they will not win. They will perhaps succeed in destroying a lot before they are ultimately overcome, but they will be overcome.

See Printcrime: http://craphound.com/overclocked/Cory_Doctorow_-_Overclocked_-_Printcrime.html

Creative Commons License Deed
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5

Printcrime
(Originally published in Nature Magazine, January 2006)

The coppers smashed my father's printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da's look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.

The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da's customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals -- performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of thing that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of thing you could print at home, if you didn't mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.

They destroyed grandma's trunk, the one she'd brought from the old country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of printer-wire.

Da. What they did to him. When he was done, he looked like he'd been brawling with an entire rugby side. They brought him out the door and let the newsies get a good look at him as they tossed him in the car, while a spokesman told the world that my Da's organized-crime bootlegging operation had been responsible for at least twenty million in contraband, and that my Da, the desperate villain, had resisted arrest.

I saw it all from my phone, in the remains of the sitting room, watching it on the screen and wondering how, just how anyone could look at our little flat and our terrible, manky estate and mistake it for the home of an organized crime kingpin. They took the printer away, of course, and displayed it like a trophy for the newsies. Its little shrine in the kitchenette seemed horribly empty. When I roused myself and picked up the flat and rescued my peeping poor tweetybird, I put a blender there. It was made out of printed parts, so it would only last a month before I'd need to print new bearings and other moving parts. Back then, I could take apart and reassemble anything that could be printed.

By the time I turned eighteen, they were ready to let Da out of prison. I'd visited him three times -- on my tenth birthday, on his fiftieth, and when Ma died. It had been two years since I'd last seen him and he was in bad shape. A prison fight had left him with a limp, and he looked over his shoulder so often it was like he had a tic. I was embarrassed when the minicab dropped us off in front of the estate, and tried to keep my distance from this ruined, limping skeleton as we went inside and up the stairs.

"Lanie," he said, as he sat me down. "You're a smart girl, I know that. Trig. You wouldn't know where your old Da could get a printer and some goop?"

I squ

http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download - some schools in South Carolina and elsewhere might be badly in need of that too...

At least unlike British politicians the authories of Brazil do not seem to have proposed that kids be implanted with radio IDs (just yet).

If/when civilization collapses, we're going to need examples of past technology. Everything from the butter churn on up. What if you were trying to recreate a movie projector and found that only the casing was preserved, with no internal workings? I understand the health issue for the public, but they should mothball one of those intact.

One function of museums is to be a repository of knowledge, art, and technology, for future generations. It's not the only function, but I would argue that it's the most important function. It's not just a display that you look at for entertainment.

Cory Doctorow has a book, Makers, from 2009 (available for DRM free download http://craphound.com/makers/download/ ) that talks about distributed open source museum spaces. Three years later the Smithsonian announces they're going to offer a part of the collection for worldwide printing.>

That's great. It will serve the surface educational mission of museums. Multimedia exhibition. But if you're at a post sea-rise far inland Argentinian coast trying to figure out how to make a steam engine, how are you going to make use of a rotting polymer copy?

It's an old old /. meme
the original is here: http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

lighten up francis

...to make the "happy" ending of this http://craphound.com/?p=3704 story impossible. Someone @ Sony must hate Cory Doctorow ;-)

Captcha: stimuli - that tingling 50-60Hz feeling when you stick your noodly appendages into a non-Sony power socket...

That checklist is for address spam, not phishing
Here is it if you want to try adapting from it: http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

What is this, Slashdot for the illiterates? How about a link to the story, instead of some weird robot thing reading it for you? Still, at least we now have evidence that illiteracy actually is a job requirement for working at Slashdot...

That's Makers.

Don't copy that... bike part.

Printcrime!

Increasing efforts to free the signal? Escalating counter-measures to block traffic to prevent piracy? This is starting to sound vaguely familiar.

http://craphound.com/unwirer/

Please reference the authoritative guide to why your anti-spam solution will not work. Actually, anyone reading this story or any of the comments posted herein should probably read it. HTH.

So I've seen at least three Neal Stephenson threads, a Will Gibson, a Phil Dick, and Ender's Game. Some more recommendations on books I think most geeks should read:

Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End. Seriously, every geek should read this book. It's the best fiction on near future augmented reality that I've seen myself. Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep is also outstanding, but much more "out there"; it's more entertaining than eye-opening. It does have one of the best alien perspectives I've read. Not just humans with bumpy foreheads, really *alien* aliens.

Charles Stross - Just about anything, really. His "Laundry Files" fantasy read like a cross-between H.P. Lovecraft, Douglas Adams, and Ian Fleming ("James Bond"). I know that sounds really weird, but it works. They're a riot. More serious and sciency are the "Eschaton" books -- Singularity Sky and sequels. Some of his works are available online for free, legally. Scratch Monkey for example.

John Scalzi - Old Man's War. I just finished this myself. The finish was weak but the ideas are a blast. As one reviewer put it, it's like Starship Troopers without the lectures.

Here's a few others I'm suspect will won't appeal as broadly, but I'll throw in 'cause I want to. It's my post.

C.S. Friedman - This Alien Shore. Space SF. Protagonist is a girl with cooperative multiple personalities; this is fascinatingly portrayed. Very good speculation on how direct brain interfaces might be realized. Lots of diverse human cultures. The real winner, though, is a human culture that values emotional differences and has social customs to let people interact across such boundaries. Introverted geeks (INTJ) will love this. Friedman packs a very high density of ideas into her books.

Corey Doctorow - Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom . Free content. An interesting take on a post-scarcity meritocracy. I think it's kind of nutty, but interesting. For the price, it's decent.

J.K. Rowling has STILL refuses to allow the Harry Potter books to be released as e-books (until her own little Potterweb, or whatever the heck she's calling it, is ready) but that sure hasn't prevented her from being one of the most-downloaded authors online. She just doesn't get a penny from it, because she has chosen to go that way.

As compared to Louis C.K. who has taken in half a million dollars in four days by having a DRM-free download of his Beacon Theater performance available for $5.
https://buy.louisck.net/

Or, of course, Cory Doctorow, who manages to do quite well on book sales even with having his books available as free CC-licensed downloads.
http://craphound.com/

_CANNOT_ provide themselves?

Let's just say that was an oversimplification, but it's gone a bit too far. Doctorow figured plenty of those things out before and without the use of publishers. It's a lot of work, but it can be done. Get creative.

Can big brother withstand the onslaught of a hundred thousand little brothers?

I remember a comic book put out by Omni Magazine about a guy who took down criminals and dictators by walking into their headquarters and declaring their reign of power over. He was followed by thousands of tiny flying webcams being remote controlled by random people all over the world. I could honestly see something like that happening sometime soon.

Big Brother used 1984 as his playbook. Little Brother has a playbook too, in the form of a hard SF novel set in near-future Northern California.

But this isn't technically email, though the principle is the same. You only get a Link.

Your post advocates a ( ) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

...

Except the fact that it's garbage is valuable in itself. If one of your "trusted friends" is using your card while you're provably somewhere else, then you have a big red flag saying this person is faking his actions and whereabouts.

Which is why, when push comes to shove, someone will develop a means by which everyone's tracking data can be interchanged. With or without their knowledge. When there are thousands of people whose profiles don't match up with their tracking data, the system chokes to death on its own bureaucracy.

Chapter 8this novel might be of interest.

The implications of individuals, especially kids, having access to 3D printing is a pretty well-explored scifi trope. Cory Doctrow's Makers, and Bruce Sterling's Kiosk are both based on the concept, reasonably good, and make a solid starting point for implications.

Seriously, the unison call-and-repeat chanting is straight outta Mao, as is the refusal to allow videotaping of a public event.

The call-and-response is a kludge to get around a legal restriction, but it has nothing to do with their politics. It's a side effect of the fact that under New York City regs, they're not supposed to be using megaphones or other amplified audio.

The videotaping paranoia is likely because people present are concerned about being picked up by facial recognition and added to HomeSec's databases. I think that's pretty ironic, given that they're already outing themselves via the use of social media.

Little Brother is required reading for participants and observers on both sides of this conflict.

...1984.

The original was a HOWTO for the government. The 2005 sequel, Little Brother, is a HOWTO for the 9^Hrest of us.

They could, if they worked at it. Writers and other artists have to start working at creating a more personal relationship with their audience again. This is what the internet excels at: blog, tweet, create video's, provide your readers with a place to discuss your work and chime in once in a while. Neil Gaiman seems like one of the few authors who get this, Doctorow is another. When people recognize you as a real human being, one with whom their share a bond through your creations, they will be willing to pay.

Cory Doctorow?

Charles Stross?

Sounds like someone needs to read Cory Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe, available free in a variety of eReader formats. http://craphound.com/est/?page_id=1574

Everybody should read this.

Picard's Star Trek post-dated Douglas Adams' take on the replicating tea machine, which was a sadly far more likely outcome than the Star Trek ideal.

hey, we're talking about the 24th century here. maybe Picard prefers his Earl Grey as almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea :)

A far more interesting exploration of replicating technology within the home was in Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age. Although aspects of the exploration within that book went somewhat esoteric it did at least give a hard sci-fi contemplation of the impact of the technology, instead of using it as the background to space opera.

/. and literature, a strange but fitting combination... another nice novel about the possibilities of a self-made/replication-tech society is Doctorow's Makers.

It also seems to me that the Southampton Engineers have been reading Doctorow's "Makers" and taking it to heart, as we all should.