two quickie reviews

Ten Thousand Clicks One of the reasons I like Moloko, apart from the fun music, is the sheer physicality of Roisin's live performances as she wraps herself in her music (and silk and roses and leather and chains and...). It makes me sad that I didn't get to see them on their last Australian tour. Then again, they didn't play Adelaide, so it totally escaped my attention until the day after they had left the country. Damnation! Rainbows End This is Vernor Vinge's new near-future novel of overally ubiquitous and cheap computing and virtual reality. While it has some interesting ideas, such as the sensation of touch becoming a marketable quantity, it does show his libertarian leanings (viz The Ungoverned), which is at extreme odds to the sheer autocratic control that enables and facilitates such a future. I don't think the author really ever escapes the conflict between the two mindsets. Most of the interesting ideas (idea futures, personal certification, etc) have already been presented elsewhere, such as in Marc Steigler's Earthweb, or in the more pedestrian venue of academic papers in information systems. The good news is that Microsoft has finally fixed their problems by making it illegal to have knowledge of, or physically modify, the Secure Hardware Architecture on which all trusted computing relies. Of course, this has the side-effect of making a Linux (well Hurd to be precise) laptop a highly illegal item in a world were Homeland Security have their own nukes...