"Michael Swanwick - The Dog Said Bow - Wow" - читать интересную книгу автора (Swanwick Michael)

GSM link. "Am not open source!"

"We have nothing to talk about, then." Manfred punches the hang-up button and
throws the mobile phone out into a canal. It hits the water and thereтАЩs a pop of
deflagrating LiION cells. "Fucking cold war hang-over losers," he swears under his
breath, quite angry now. "Fucking capitalist spooks." Russia has been back under the
thumb of the apparatchiks for fifteen years now, its brief flirtation with anarcho-
capitalism replaced by Brezhnevite dirigisme, and itтАЩs no surprise that the wallтАЩs
crumblingтАУbut it looks like they havenтАЩt learned anything from the collapse of
capitalism. They still think in terms of dollars and paranoia. Manfred is so angry that
he wants to make someone rich, just to thumb his nose at the would-be defector.
See! You get ahead by giving! Get with the program! Only the generous survive! But
the KGB wonтАЩt get the message. HeтАЩs dealt with old-time commie weak-AIтАЩs before,
minds raised on Marxist dialectic and Austrian School economics: theyтАЩre so

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"The Dog Said Bow-Wow" by Michael Swanwick


thoroughly hypnotized by the short-term victory of capitalism in the industrial age
that they canтАЩt surf the new paradigm, look to the longer term.

Manfred walks on, hands in pockets, brooding. He wonders what heтАЩs going to
patent next.

Manfred has a suite at the Hotel Jan Luyken paid for by a grateful multinational
consumer protection group, and an unlimited public transport pass paid for by a
Scottish sambapunk band in return for services rendered. He has airline employeeтАЩs
travel rights with six flag carriers despite never having worked for an airline. His
bush jacket has sixty four compact supercomputing clusters sewn into it, four per
pocket, courtesy of an invisible college that wants to grow up to be the next Media
Lab. His dumb clothing comes made to measure from an e-tailor in the Philippines
who heтАЩs never met. Law firms handle his patent applications on a pro bono basis,
and boy does he patent a lotтАУalthough he always signs the rights over to the Free
Intellect Foundation, as contributions to their obligation-free infrastructure project.

In IP geek circles, Manfred is legendary; heтАЩs the guy who patented the business
practice of moving your e-business somewhere with a slack intellectual property
regime in order to evade licensing encumbrances. HeтАЩs the guy who patented using
genetic algorithms to patent everything they can permutate from an initial
description of a problem domainтАУnot just a better mousetrap, but the set of all
possible better mousetraps. Roughly a third of his inventions are legal, a third are
illegal, and the remainder are legal but will become illegal as soon as the
legislatosaurus wakes up, smells the coffee, and panics. There are patent attorneys in
Reno who swear that Manfred Macx is a pseudo, a net alias fronting for a bunch of
crazed anonymous hackers armed with the Genetic Algorithm That Ate Calcutta: a
kind of Serdar Argic of intellectual property, or maybe another Bourbaki maths
borg. There are lawyers in San Diego and Redmond who swear blind that Macx is
an economic saboteur bent on wrecking the underpinning of capitalism, and there
are communists in Prague who think heтАЩs the bastard spawn of Bill Gates by way of