I'm kind of surprised no-one has noted the connection to this paper, 'Designing and Implementing Malicious Hardware':
http://www.usenix.org/event/leet08/tech/full_papers/king/king_html/

I'm kind of surprised that no-one's mentioned the multi-author YA 'Jupiter' series (by Charles Sheffield, Jerry Pournelle, and James P. Hogan). These were explicitly modeled on the Heinlein juveniles.

More recently, Harry Turtledove's 'Crosstime Traffic' series is great, as are Timothy Zahn's 'Dragonback' series and David Gerrold's 'Starsiders' trilogy. I do most of my book shopping online, so I'm not sure these are actually *in* the YA section, but they should be.

Also, the kids' sections of yore, while certainly overrun with series like 'Sweet Valley High' and 'The Babysitters Club' (bleargh), also had 'Hardy Boys' and 'Tom Swift Jr.', so it wasn't all bad.

Finally, Cory, you said "and yes, I'm aware of the irony of calling attention to a field that has prospered because it wasn't receiving too much attention to blossom."

It's not *ironic*, Cory, it's *counter productive* (at least potentially). Now some bluenose is going to be 'shocked' at the content of these books and suggest a rating board to keep 'inappropriate' material out of the hands of the youngest readers. Great.

Several notes:

1) Watch "The End of Suburbia" (you can of course find it on BitTorrent, but I'd recommend buying it to support the producers): http://endofsuburbia.com/

2) A lot of demand for gasoline is elastic, so we're seeing a measurable decline in freeway traffic right now.

3) Other uses of oil are not as elastic. Specifically, many places in the northern states use heating oil. If prices stay high, some folks are going to freeze come winter. To me it looks like pellet furnaces are your best bet if you can afford to install one.

I first heard about these bacteria-busting peptides 15 years ago. IIRC, they were discovered in the skin of amphibians and dubbed 'magainins' (from the Hebrew word for 'shield') back in the early '90s.

I second Karpov's recommendation of the Unicomp buckling spring keyboards. I use the 'Customizer 101' with no 'Windows' keys:
http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/cus101usenon.html

ObNitPick: These are cartograms, not heat maps.

Shirley MacLaine made a pretty interesting movie about Mary Kay a few years back:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0328877/

Here are some links to previous Filk coverage by Xeni:

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2005/09/68697

http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/multimedia/2005/09/68697

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4967052

Refspoof is easier to install from this page:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4513

Oligopoly Watch has been tracking the buy-up of organic by the conglomerates for quite a while:

http://www.oligopolywatch.com/2003/04/15.html

http://www.oligopolywatch.com/2003/06/25.html

http://www.oligopolywatch.com/2003/08/02.html

http://www.oligopolywatch.com/2003/08/22.html

http://www.oligopolywatch.com/2004/07/10.html

http://www.oligopolywatch.com/2004/09/21.html

http://www.oligopolywatch.com/2006/05/12.html

http://www.oligopolywatch.com/2006/05/13.html

http://www.oligopolywatch.com/2006/10/16.html

http://www.oligopolywatch.com/2007/04/05.html

I agree with Bugs @ #6. I *much* better name would have been 'Sinistre'. Or maybe just 'Lefty'.

My first impression was also "cool". My second impression was "dust collectors".

Hmm. I think Godin's business model here is a bit bogus. The tribal management business is likely one with thin margins, unless they figure out a way to raise the switching costs for the artists.

But, aside from the business model, a lot of what he says rings true. It also resembles Josh Ellis' 2003 article on 'Taste Tribes':

http://www.mindjack.com/feature/tastetribes.html

If his time estimates are in the ballpark, at some point he should be able to start making them from the trees he's planting now... Now *that* is a sustainable project.

Not as good as the 'No You Can't' video, IMO:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gI7WwY4a9ro

This brought to mind the excellent 'Apocamon: The Final Judgement':

http://web.archive.org/web/20070112155149/http://www.e-sheep.com/apocamon/

Sigh. e-sheep.com, gone but not forgotten.

Cory, the PDF download link is for the original edition, not the alpha release of the update. The alpha release is available in four parts from here:

http://www.hackerlabs.net.nyud.net/downloads/stw/STBT/0.0/

So. Would it be inappropriate to ask the the BB crew weigh in on the question of whether the information architecture of the site needs to be considered 'editorial' and subject to separation from advertising?

My own view is that IA *can* be considered editorial, but it depends on the site (ie. to the degree that IA influences the content that is produced), but that in BB's case this is *probably* a completely misplaced concern, unless the advertising contract has some requirement or incentive that x articles be produced for the sponsored categories so they don't go stale.

There are, of course, other site types (such as wikis) where IA has a direct influence on the content and the IA does need to be considered editorial, but I think, in general, blogs like BB that are primarily chronologically organized are NOT one of those types.

A good book on the power of categories to shape our thinking is George Lakoff's 'Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things'.

I guess what is getting some people's gizzard is that they don't really understand that there isn't necessarily any reason to separate advertising from a publication's *structure*, in this case specifically the URL structure of a site.

I mean, all BB has done here is create a category, retroactive assign already-published stories to that category, and create a category page. And now, besides the usual 'run of site' deal, they can offer an advertiser a 'run of category'. Big deal.

Yes, I suppose it could be presented as fodder for a slippery slope argument, but only through the use of rather tortured logic and by ignoring the BB crew's track record.

Teresa, you're doing yeoman duty. Thank you. I can only hope that the perennially disemvowelled eventually leave for greener pastures.

Previously on BoingBoing:

The creepy, creepy world of "reborn baby dolls":
http://www.boingboing.net/2004/11/10/the_creepy_creepy_wo.html

Sculptor makes dolls of babies that died:
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/08/08/sculptor-makes-dolls.html

Um. These aren't actually *new* sections. I mean, some items have been tagged with sections ever since the redesign, or soon after, like this:

http://www.boingboing.net/maker/

http://www.boingboing.net/civlib/

Assuming that the long-term existence of these URLs isn't actually dependent on the sponsorship, *I* have no objection to what basically amounts to the addition of an alternate navigation scheme with category specific URLs. It's just white-hat SEO, and if they get some extra advertising revenue as well, so much the better.

Rock on.

Seriously demented. In a GOOD way.

Conga Rats!

Hmm. It's worth noting that 'being funny' has very different requirements in conversation than on stage. I get my biggest laughs when all I interject, the only thing I say, is a punchline that dramatically re-contextualizes the previous statements made by other people.

It is an interesting analysis based on social simulations, but I think the premises may be flawed. Influentials are not merely socially promiscuous people, they are explicitly being watched for trends etc., so their larger coterie is also more likely to be infected by them.

And more complete video is here:
http://www.ala.org/ala/washoff/washevents/midwinterwo/midwinter.cfm#FBI%20Whistleblower

Audio of the event (much more than the video excerpt covers) is here:
http://www.wo.ala.org/districtdispatch/?p=340

Cory, I doubt that Whuffie is as stable as gold, for example.

Cory, I concur about the photo looking like bare board, that's why I asked.

Frankly, I wouldn't want to regularly handle something carved out of fiberglass without some kind of protective sealant or coating, at least along the edges.

Cory, I can't tell from the photo, was the handle lacquered or otherwise coated, or was this bare board material?

Odd, none of James Burke's important series (Connections, Connections 2, Connections 3, The Day The Universe Changed, etc.) seem to have made the cut.

Hmph. Cory, your enthusiasm aside, so far the site looks like it is about less actual SF (as opposed to movies and TV) than, say, BoingBoing.

Nevertheless, I've subscribed. I'll give them a month at least.

Wow, five days later and nobody else commented on this...

Hey, cool, another submission of mine made it!

New movie plot threat: Battery powered EMP device!

I've pulled guard duty in Bethlehem in December. It's a frozen shithole of a tourist-trap, and the various xtian denominations jealously guard their territorial prerogatives because it represents quite a bit of income (over broadcast rights, for example).

They are so vigilant because managing to move a boundary an inch per year would have large effects after a century or so.

The main thing that prevents incidents like this from flaring up in public *every year* is the fact that there are so many journalists around, but you better believe that as soon as the cameras are packed up and the journos leave it's back to the status quo.

The Google Books project has probably already got a large fraction of these scanned.

Unfortunately, even though documents authored by U.S. government employees do not have copyright protection, most of these documents are still viewable only as snippets. Example searches:

http://books.google.com/books?q=inauthor%3A%22United+States+Congress%22&as_drrb=c&as_miny=1923

http://books.google.com/books?q=inauthor%3A%22United+States+Senate%22&as_drrb=c&as_miny=1923

Those are the two big ones I am aware of. Other variations of the 'author' field that I've tried for alternate spellings and specific agencies yield at most few more thousand results each.

I've tried getting them to address this (backchannels too), but the most I ever hear back is that only pre 1923 works are *certain* to be in the public domain, and that their agreements with libraries (including the Library of Congress) precludes displaying full versions of documents obtained from libraries unless they are in the PD.

So far (and I've been giving them consistent and repeated feedback on this for two years now) pointing out that post-1923 documents authored by the US govt. are also in the PD has only yielded me silence.

Sigh.

As a kid, Struwwelpeter had nothing on Max and Moritz.

Is there a DMCA exception for removing DRM on otherwise public domain works?

Although Amazon does not seem to be claiming copyright on the public domain works it gets from Project Gutenberg, they *are* wrapped in noxious DRM.

When I first saw this cartoon (probably about 25 years ago) it was the first time I became consciously aware of the existence of sponsoring product placement (Bordens -> milk bottles) in entertainment.

A formative experience, though certainly a minor one.

TwoShort @ #7: Do you include the EKG-etc. monitoring of the demographic 'representatives'?

Personally, I think corporations (and other group organizational forms) should definitely have rights. I even think that those rights would overlap with 'human rights' in some ways.

However, the legal hack that arrogated 'human rights' to inhuman corporations via the notion of corporate personhood was clearly ill-considered, though equally clearly it provided many short term benefits. For that matter, it unfairly privileges corporations over other organizational forms.

The main problem is that in many ways a corporation can exercise it's rights more completely than any individual can (especially freedom of speech). This becomes most evident when corporations exercise their first-amendment rights in order to lie. While I certainly think corporations should have a right to speech, I do not think this should extend to the right to lie (this is but an extension of the 'truth in advertising' rule).

Corporations are not human. Corporations should have rights. Some of those rights may be functionally similar with some human rights, but not all. What's so difficult about this?

Here is a description (and toolset) for 'Purple Numbers':
http://www.eekim.com/software/purple/purple.html

Wow. HEAVYG, thanks for the follow-up, and for the confirmation.

It looks like Mobipocket's commandline mobigen utility can be run under wine. I'll probably give that a try this weekend, but it's rather unsatisfactory as a solution.

Amazon's actions here in taking public domain works (previously converted to DRM-free .prc files and available as free downloads), encrusting them with DRM, and selling them to Kindle users as device-locked unshareable files stinks.

These public domain works in the Kindle store each have this disclaimer:

"This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery."

The implication here is that the delivery (plus a modest margin) costs Amazon 99 cents per-book, but that is undermined by the existence of a very large number of in-copyright works in the Kindle store for half that amount, and a several other non-gutenberg public-domain works available from Amazon for 25 cents:

http://www.amazon.com/Alices-Adventures-in-Wonderland/dp/B000ZKSZFW/

http://www.amazon.com/The-Adventures-of-Huckleberry-Finn/dp/B000ZIMBH2/

http://www.amazon.com/Pride-and-Prejudice/dp/B000ZINGRQ/

Given these prices, I'd be *fascinated* to hear Amazon's justification for charging $.99 in order to add DRM to over 7k public domain works with the intent of making them less featurful than the ones available for free download.

Fascinated, I tell you.

Cory, your 'fax' analogy missed a point: Junk faxes. The value of a network also declines in proportion to it's abuse (see also: spam).

"I wouldn't be able to recognize a good technology person — anyone with a good bullshit story would have gotten past me."

But that's exactly what DID happen, as long as the bullshit story involved DRM silver bullets.

Teresa, I agree that disintermediation is not going to happen (in most industries that have had this prediction it didn't happen, or if it did, an immediate reintermediation followed).

Amazon was actually in a perfect position to effect this if they chose to, but their recommendation engine is tuned to maximize book sales, rather than maximize reader satisfaction (the two are only indirectly correlated). Compare this with Netflix, whose profit motive is tied to people watching fewer movies...

Other book recommendation engines that do better suffer from not being built into the Amazon site.

In any case, the only disintermediation that the Kindle model represents at this time is the collapse of the retailer and distributor roles into one.

Anyway, as the economics of book production change, I do think we may see less concentration of the publishing market in the hands of the large conglomerates and a resurgence of small publishers and the midlist.

I also have a feeling that over the next decade we'll see increasing decentralization (and free agency) of the various functions you've mentioned on the production side (independent editors working for royalties?), and possibly the rise of independent book 'producers' (similar to current 'packagers').

Of course, all or none of this may happen in any particular segment of the publishing world, and fiction as you noted probably has the least pressure to change.

One interesting possibility however (given that Amazon will apparently sell works for as little as a penny) is the creation of a new market for shorter fiction (novellas and novelettes, not just short stories), as well as more variable pricing in general.

Update: searching for "Public Domain Book" in the Kindle store gives 7,379 results, all priced 99-cents.

Hmm... more info: If you sort the Kindle bookstore by price (low to high), you can see three books from Springer for 1-cent, some 25-cent and 33-cent books from various sources, and a whole mess of books from Fictionwise starting at 49-cents (quite a lot of those, actually) on up.

This means that Amazon is charging *more* (99 cents) for at least some of the public-domain works it got from Project Gutenberg via Mobipocket than it is charging for some in-copyright works from other publishers (49-cents).

Now I'm REALLY curious as to whether the (formerly free) public domain Project Gutenberg books in the Kindle store have been converted to DRM-encrusted .azw files ...

OK, bookmarking a search does not work on the mobipocket site. Here are direct links to the two versions of 'The Mysterious Island' they have:

http://www.mobipocket.com/freebooks/download.aspx?id=8993

http://www.mobipocket.com/freebooks/download.aspx?id=1268

I just discovered something interesting by searching for 'H. G. Wells' in the kindle bookstore: It looks like free ebooks available from the mobipocket site are also available from Amazon as 99-cent downloads.

Can someone check one of these out and see whether Amazon is converting these to DRM-infested .azw files or if these are still unprotected .prc files?

Amazon page for 'Mysterious Island':
http://www.amazon.com/The-Mysterious-Island/dp/B000JMLBHU/

Mobipocket search for the same title (2 results):
http://www.mobipocket.com/freebooks/default.aspx?portletSearch%24tbCriteria=mysterious+island&portletSearch%24butSearch=Search&portletSearch%24language=rbAllLanguages

HEAVYG @ #69:

"Those features work for all the files I have tried [...] I'll send the [gutenberg] file to amazon and let them convert it and send it to the Kindle and see if the same problem exists"

Thanks for following up, I really appreciate your ongoing reportage.

"It's not surprising that the Kindle offers direct support for un-DRM'ed mobi and prc files since amazon bought Mobipocket a couple of years ago."

Huh. I didn't realize that.

"I agree that the Kindle being able to natively support un-DRM'ed mobi and prc files is a definite plus as that opens up a lot of free existing books to ready use on the Kindle and makes it easy for others to convert files into an unlocked format that can be used by the Kindle and many other platforms/devices."

Perhaps we're not using the same terms here. While un-DRM'd .mobi and .prc files are nice, the only software currently available to create this format (Mobipocket Creator) is, AFAIK, a windows-only download, and the .prc ebook format itself is proprietary and undocumented. This is not *quite* free enough for my purposes, as it basically means that Amazon has set themselves up as a central point of failure for converting my own legally obtained content (either that, or I'm forced to install Windows, an operating system I don't use).

I'd really like to see either some open-source tools for creating un-DRM'd .mobi, .prc, or .azw files, or Amazon updating the Kindle to read any one of the other ebook file formats for which such tools (for example rbmake) already exist.

HEAVYG @ #68 said: "It seems those features work regardless of file format."

Thanks for the additional info.

I'm curious though, do those features really work for *all* file formats as you imply, including text files (such as those downloadable from Project Gutenberg), and not just for ebook formats like .prc and .azw?

If Free content in Free formats is downloadable via Whispernet at no extra cost, the value proposition of the Kindle is rather different (and larger) than what Amazon is presenting.

The only missing piece necessary to unlock that value proposition is open source software that can produce a supported ebook format. This could happen either by Amazon adding support for any open ebook format to the Kindle, or by some third party creating software to produce one of the supported ebook formats (by reverse engineering the format, if necessary).

The non-user-modifiability of the Kindle would still be annoying, but I think I'd be willing to pay a couple hundred dollars for an appliance device that gave me free wireless browsing + storage for ~200 novels + Free format ebook downloads + an e-ink display for reading + 30 hours battery life.

That would be useful to me without ever buying a DRM'd book, although I think I'd still wait for the price to drop.

ObNitPick: 'impulses'.

HEAVYG @ #65: Thanks for the info!

In that case, it should be possible for someone to create an online archive with free (as in beer and speech) ebooks to download, assuming that un-DRM'd mobipocket files can be bulk produced, using public-domain and CreativeCommons works as sources.

I am still searching for free software that can run on Linux to create mobipocket files, though.

Do mobipocket files have feature-parity (ie. reopening on the last viewed page, bookmarking, clipping, etc.) on the Kindle with the .azw format?

reposted from one of Joel's Kindle postings on gadgets.boingboing.net:

"Given that the Kindle ostensibly lets you read Mobipocket files, does the mobipocket version of Down and Out (http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.prc) work? Can you download it using the browser, or do you have to transfer it via USB?"

Brian Carnell @ #60 says that the mobipocket EST file works, but that he transfered it using USB. I'd still like to know if you can use the built-in browser to download and read un-DRM'd mobipocket files.

I'd also be interested to know if any software exists to produce mobipocket files on Linux.

Joel, Given that the Kindle ostensibly lets you read Mobipocket filesm, does the mobipocket version of Down and Out (http://craphound.com/down/Cory_Doctorow_-_Down_and_Out_in_the_Magic_Kingdom.prc) work? Can you download it using the browser, or do you have to transfer it via USB?

Cory, I'm not sure exactly what functionality you're looking for, because from what I can tell, gedit doesn't have what you describe either.

Can you explain what it is you need?

Cory, I was intrigued that you've settled on gedit (the default GUI text editor) as a substitute on Ubuntu for BBEdit on Mac. It works for me as a Notepad substitute (and a huge improvement of course), but I would have pegged you as a vi user, or perhaps Cream.

Are you using any non-default plugins for gedit?

ghurley @ #14: Yep. Cool, huh?

You can see a list of other high profile Plone sites here: http://plone.net/sites

BTW, I *am* aware that 'soft focus on a guy looks even weirder' is a rather heteronormative aesthetic judgment. Oh well.

But I also think that in context (ie. geek-oriented TV) it looks kind of strange on Xeni as well, even given her 'glam' personal aesthetic.

Teresa, I meant in the 'cognitive dissonance' sense.

I'll chime in with a production critique of my own: What's with the soft-focus? It looks weird when it's Xeni, but positively bizarre on Mark (in the first 'episode').

The OpenMoko certainly seems available:

http://direct.openmoko.com/