I have an editorial about the effect of programmable logic on gizmo design on the front page of today’s New York Times Christmas Circuits section:

PLASTIC created the age of whimsical forms. Suddenly a radio could look like a moo cow. A chair could look like an egg. Toy ray guns could bulge and swoop. The exuberant designers of the golden age of plastic explored all the wacky, nonfunctional, decorative shapes that household objects could take.

Now that same plasticity is coming to microcontrollers, the computer chips that act as brains for the chirping, dancing, listening and seeing devices that line our knickknack shelves and dashboards and fill our pockets. The proliferation of cheap and cheerful programmable chips promises a new age of “whimsical logic,” chips that power devices whose functions are as delightfully impractical as their forms, the sort of thing you find in a stocking but keep on your desk forever.

I’m giving the opening keynote at Apachecon, the conference for users and developers of the Apache open source Web server and related tools. Other keynotes are coming from Sun’s Simon Phipps, XML-inventor Tim Bray, and VR pioneer Jaron Lanier, and there are sessions and tutorials on Xpath, SpamAssassin, Subversion, mod_python and mod_perl, as well as open source business models and tons of other topics.

ApacheCon is in San Diego, and runs from 10-14 December, 2005 at the Sheraton San Diego Hotel & Marina, and there are still several scholarships available for students working with Java.

My talk, “Open Source is not a crime — yet!” is on Monday, December 12 at 9AM. I’ll be talking about US and international legislative threats to copyleft, Free Software, and Creative Commons — hope to see you there!

Update: Wow! This is insane! Giant Robot is selling this shirt design and giving $1 per shirt sold to EFF! Color me stoked!

I am unbelievably flattered that a reader who wishes to remain anonymous made this “Che Doctorow” tee. Wow. He says, “I figure you’re nobody until someone makes a Che shirt out of your face.”

The tenth and final installment of my serialized novel-in-progress went live on Salon just now (previous installments). I’m working hard on the next section of the novel and hope to have it in the can by the new year, though it remains to be seen whether Salon will take up syndicating it, too. I’ve really, really appreciated the warm feedback I’ve gotten from you folks for this over the last two and a half months — it’s really helped me keep focused as I worked on the next section.

In today’s installment, Lester and Andrea reunite, but the New Work economy hits the skids:

Lester came down the drive grinning and bouncing on the balls of his feet. Perry had evidently been expecting him, for he came racing through the shantytown and pelted down the roadway and threw himself at Lester, grabbing him in a crazy, exuberant, whooping hug. Francis gimped out a moment later and gave him a solemn handshake. She hadn’t blogged their meeting in Detroit, so if Francis and Perry knew about Lester’s transformation, they’d found out without hearing it from her.

She finished recording the homecoming from Mrs Torrence’s crow’s nest, then paid the grinning old bag and took the stairs two at a time, hurrying to catch up with Lester and his crowd.

Lester accepted her hug warmly but distantly, letting go a fraction of a second before she did. She didn’t let it get to her. He had drawn a crowd now, with Francis’s protege printer-techs in the innermost circle, and he was recounting the story of his transformation. He had them as spellbound as a roomful of ewoks listening to C3PO.

“Shit, why don’t we sell that stuff?” Jason said. He’d taken a real interest in the business end of their 3D printer project.

“Too much competition,” Lester said. “There are already a dozen shops tooling up to make bathtub versions of the therapy here in America. Hundreds more in Eastern Europe. There just won’t be any profit in it by the time we get to market. Getting thin on the cheap’s going to be *easy*. Hell, all it takes to do it is the stuff you’d use for an E lab. You can buy all that in a kit from a catalog.”

Jason nodded, but looked unconvinced.

Andrea took Lester’s return as her cue to write about his transformation. She snapped more pics of him, added some video. He gave her ten minutes’ description of the therapies he’d undergone, and named a price for the therapy that was substantially lower than a couple weeks in a Hollywood fat-farm, and far more effective.

Next week, I’m returning to Vienna to speak at the brilliant a href=”http://roboexotica.org/en/main.htm”>Roboexotica conference, a whimsical technology/art event in which amateur robotocists gather to demonstrate their cocktail-making robots. Real, no-fooling cocktail-making robots! I went a couple years ago and was blown away by the robots on offer, particularly the robot that used a giant inkjet-style “print head” to pour out different measurements, as set in physical logic embodied in switches and solenoids (no microcontroller!).

There are lectures, readings, and films. I’ll be giving talks on Europe’s coming Broadcast Flag and about science fiction, and if this is anything like last time, it’s going to be a hoot.

Until recently, no attempts were made to publically discuss the role of cocktail robotics as an index for the integration of technological innovations into the human Lebensraum, or to document the increasing occurrence of radical hedonism in man-machine communication. Roboexotica is an attempt to fill this vacuum. It is the first and, inevitably, leading festival concerned with cocktail robotics world-wide. A micro mechanical change of paradigm in the age of borderless capital. Mr. Turing would without a doubt test this out.

Roboexotica will return November 16th through 20th 2005 in the Freiraum of
Museumsquartier Vienna

Here’s my schedule:

Thursday, 11/17, 4PM, Monochrom, Museumsquartier: “Excepts of Schnipsel by Cory Doctorow
read by Magnus Wurzer, with a short introduction by the author in english.”

Friday, 11.18, 6PM, Monochrom, Museumsquartier: Reading and talk on copyright

Part nine — the next-to-last part — of Salon’s serialization of my novel-in-progress, Themepunks, went up today
(Previous Installments). In today’s installment, Andrea hits the road to see how the rest of the New Work folks live, and runs into her arch-nemesis, Rat-Toothed Freddy:

She was in the middle of receiving her key when someone grabbed her shoulder and squeezed it. “Andrea bloody Fleeks! What are you doing here, love?”

The smell of his breath was like a dead thing, left to fester. She turned around slowly, not wanting to believe that of all the hotels in rural Rhode Island, she ended up checking into the same one as Rat-Toothed Freddy.

“Hey, Freddy,” she said. Seeing him gave her an atavistic urge to stab him repeatedly in the throat with the hotel stick-pen. He was unshaven, his gawky Adam’s apple bobbing up and down and he swallowed and smiled wetly. “Nice to see you.”

“Fantastic to see you, too! I’m here covering a shareholder meeting for Westinghouse, is that what you’re here for, too?”

“No,” she said. She knew the meeting was on that week, but hadn’t planned on attending it. She was done with press conferences, preferring on-the-ground reporting. “Well, nice to see you.”

“Oh, do stay for a drink,” he said, grinning more widely, exposing those grey teeth in a shark’s smile. “Come on — they have a free cocktail hour in this place. I’ll have to report you to the journalist’s union if you turn down a free drink.”

“I don’t think ‘bloggers’ have to worry about the journalist’s union,” she said, making sarcastic finger-quotes in case he didn’t get the message. He still didn’t. He laughed instead.

“Oh, love, I’m sure they’ll still have you even if you have lapsed away from the one true faith.”

“Good night, Freddy,” was all she could manage to get out without actually hissing through her teeth.

“OK, good night,” he said, moving in to give her a hug. As he loomed toward her, she snapped.

“Freeze, mister. You are not my friend. I do not want to touch you. You have poor personal hygiene and your breath smells like an overflowing camp-toilet. You write vicious personal attacks on me and on the people I care about. You are unfair, mean-spirited, and you write badly. The only day I wouldn’t piss on you, Freddy, is the day you were on fire. Now get the fuck out of my way before I kick your tiny little testicles up through the roof of your reeking mouth.”

Salon has published part eight of my novel-in-progress, Themepunks
(previous installments). In today’s installment, the shanty-town finds itself under siege, and shots are fired:

He pulled out the megaphone and went to his window.

“ATTENTION POLICE,” he said. “THIS IS THE LEASEHOLDER FOR THIS PROPERTY. WHY ARE YOU RUNNING AROUND WITH YOUR GUNS DRAWN? WHAT IS GOING ON?”

The police at the cars looked toward the workshop, then back to the shantytown, then back to the workshop.

“SERIOUSLY. THIS IS NOT COOL. WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?”

One of the cops grabbed the mic for his own loudhailer. “THIS IS THE MIAMI-DADE COUNTY SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT. WE HAVE RECEIVED INTELLIGENCE THAT AN ARMED FUGITIVE IS ON THESE PREMISES. WE HAVE COME TO RETRIEVE HIM.”

“WELL, THAT’S WEIRD. NONE OF THE CHILDREN, CIVILIANS AND HARDWORKING PEOPLE HERE ARE FUGITIVES AS FAR AS I KNOW. CERTAINLY THERE’S NO ONE ARMED AROUND HERE. WHY DON’T YOU GET BACK IN YOUR CARS AND I’LL COME OUT AND WE’LL RESOLVE THIS LIKE CIVILIZED PEOPLE, OK?”

The cop shook his head and reached for his mic again, and then there were two gunshots, a scream, and a third.

My short story Anda’s Game, which is about obesity, childhood, labor laws, and massively multiplayer role playing games, has just been reprinted in Michael Chabon’s Best American Short Stories anthology, something that I’m very, very proud of!

I’m speaking at a conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina next week on Nov 1/2. The event is sponsored by iBiblio, the Long Now Foundation and Red Hat, and I’ll be speaking about copy restriction technologies and the risk that they present to the future of technology. There’s a podcast and a telecast in case you can’t make it to UNC:

The Information Revolution has brought into question the wisdom of intellectual property regimes and their relationship to society, culture, jurisprudence, commerce, and government. Intellectual property law is built upon historical notions of tangible property ownership—with the basic premise of restricting access by others. By contrast, the Information Revolution is grounded in concepts of enhanced access and a more universal sense of ownership. Cultural, social, intellectual, and economic growth must be driven by creativity and innovation, and successful growth increasingly depends upon the dissemination of information and application of knowledge. The University Of North Carolina Symposium on Intellectual Property, Creativity, and the Innovation Process will invite 100 participants to question whether creativity and innovation can fully flourish under the current intellectual property regimes. By making the inquiry intellectual property regimes, rather than just intellectual property law, the Symposium can examine business, political, and cultural practices as well as jurisprudence.

Through support from Red Hat, and in cooperation with the Long Now Foundation and Ibiblio, the Symposium will be held November 1 & 2, 2005 in Chapel Hill and will draw participants from diverse disciplines — from lawyers to chefs — to take a hard look at all of the languages of creativity and innovation; in order to determine how current intellectual property regimes affect creative incentives. The Symposium will address key areas of concern, including Copyright, Patents, Open Source Code, Digital Rights Management, Downloading & Peer to Peer Revolution, Public Domain, Government Involvement and Regulation, and University/Industry Collaboration. The approach will be participatory and collaborative, and the focus of the Symposium will be to understand the creative incentives necessary for cultural, social, intellectual, and economic innovation and growth. An open public session will also provide the opportunity to take the dialog to a broader audience.