Daily Archives: September 5, 2007

Feeds, Seeds, and Gray Goo

Our old buddy Karl Gallagher steps us through some of the more entertaining scenarios featuring nanobots run amok:

A couple of the books I’ve read recently illustrated the powers and dangers of nanotechnology. One of the disputes in the field is whether molecular manufacturing can provide exponential production capabilities. MM would let us create a “nanofactory”, a machine which builds things atom by atom, capable of producing anything it has the design data for. Exponential production happens when a nanofactory can build a duplicate of itself. Then the they could both duplicate themselves, until we have 4, 8, 16, 32, . . . enough nanofactories for every household in the world to have one. That would totally eliminate the world economy as we know it. If there’s no limits on what the nanofactories can produce there could be a wave of homemade WMDs that would eliminate the world as we know it.

My favorite would have to be the “flesh-eating assemblers.” Yikes!

-Linkathon.

Simulating with a purpose…

Dr. Pat offers thoughts on living in a simulation. If this is a simulation, what is the Simulator trying to learn?

In what way is the simulation different from the original?

This could be very subtle, it could be a butterfly effect type change, like altering the gravitational constant by 1/googleplex or (in a more local, less basic tweak) change the size of a continent slightly, change visible constellations…. in other words, something we could never guess.

Rejecting these possibilities as unguessable, and hence boring, what contingencies would I fool with to see how history changed. This is (I imagine) part of an overall scheme to gain divergent views, possibly even divergent technologies, that would be useful to the instigator of the simulation.

…

Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel argues that the long East-West axis of Eurasia determined its greater technological development compared to Subsaharan Africa, Australia and the Americas. Well that would be worth playing with.

More here.

-Linkathon.

iFly Swarms

Keitousama predicts a world full of flying cameras that he cleverly calls iFly’s. Some would be owned by individuals, others would be used publicly like webcams.

He seems excited about this, but I have to wonder whether any privacy would be possible in a world where everyone is a iFly on the wall.

-Linkathon.

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Subscription Model for iTunes

Stephen has been arguing for some time that the trouble with iTunes is that allows only a 99-cents-a-pop ownership model of music rather than an all-you-can-eat rental model such as that provided by Napster.

Glenn Derene at Popular Mechanics is picking up the cause:

Nevertheless, the all-you-can-eat subscription model should work, and it would certainly make sense for real music lovers—the more music you listen to, the cheaper the overall cost per song becomes. What’s more, subscription certainly works for Netflix, which continues to grow with streaming subscription on demand. So why do users still want to pay 99 cents per song and not, say, $15 for a month’s worth of infinite songs? Would the iTunes Store work just as well as a subscription service?

On the other hand, if Apple does stick with a purchase-only pricing policy, they may venture beyond the “everything costs $.99″ model:

Which brings us to another of the big ideas circulating around the music industry these days: popularity pricing. This model makes the cost of each song scalable depending on demand—a song by a niche indie band could cost 40 cents while a song by a big act such as U2 would sell for $1.50. Letting the market drive pricing could be a good idea or a horribly bad one. In the Internet realm, where a world of illegal, free material is only a few mouse clicks away, high-priced content can become an incentive for bad behavior.

It will be interesting to see where Apple goes with these various licensing options. I’d certainly like to see them adopt something a little more Netflix-like for video content. I love being able to load TV shows and movies down to my iPod, but this is where, to me, both the price and the notion of “ownership” seem excessive. And apparently they strike Apple as being excessive, too. I note that as I’ve been working my way through Season 1 of Battlestar Galactica, iTunes removes each episode I’ve watched from my iPod. All the episodes are all still there in my iTunes on the computer, should I decide to load them back onto the iPod, but what are the chances I’m going to do that? Apple is tacitly admitting that this is content I would not necessarily want permanent, ongoing access to.

So why sell it to me, then? Why not just let me rent it? I think Stephen is on to something, here.