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So, the day has ended and we’ve seen many protests around the world. Did it help? Well, a bit, but don’t hold your breath right now.

European citizens are still being sued by the American government and being extradited to the US because their sites had links to copyrighted material. So, in a way, what SOPA and PIPA stands for is already reality, but it takes the US government a lot of effort and money to do so. With SOPA and PIPA, enyone in the world could end up in Guantanamo Bay, as easy as any American.

While I welcome the protest, and feel that Americans did a good job converting 30 more senators to their cause (it was 5, now it’s 35), it’s far from enough. I think people still haven’t realised that this is not an American issue. Just like American copyright laws have bankrupted creativity around the world (think Mickey Mouse effect) and the American patent system has destroyed technological advancement (patent trolls, et al), SOPA and PIPA will spread throughout the world and be the icing on their cake.

The people that are so desperate to preserve their profits by breaking the rest of the world are the people that already have more than anyone. Last year, Viacom’s CEO had a 50mi raise in his salary. Not a bonus, mind you, a raise. To protect those people’s profits, we’re letting them destroy the entire world, stop technological advancements (that don’t give profits to them) and kill all the artists in the process.

If you, like me, are outside of the US, please make sure your government stops short of bending to the US government, as they always do. Europe, and particularly UK and France, has been America’s puppet for far too long. The US is not the only country in the world, and nowadays, it’s not even the most important one. We need to change the world to multi-polar and promote countries like China, Russia, Brazil, India. Not that I like any of them, but we must not put all our coins into one crazy country, we need more crazy countries to re-balance the world.

Now, for some of the protests

Apart from the obvious Wikipedia, Google, WordPress, there were some others I’ve seen that are worth mentioning.

• FightForTheFuture had a very interesting video explaining the whole thing.
• Ars Technica published only SOPA/PIPA articles, and very good ones at that.
• Bruce Schneier, security legend, also joined the protests.
• Avaaz, always alert, started a petition and already got more than 1.5mi signatures.
• People that live on content (in theory, the ones affected by piracy) also had their say: XKCD, Abstruse Goose, Basic Instruction.
• Last, but not least, The Daily WTF has a very interesting piece about how bad it already is, and supporting PIPA so we can go back to the BBS era that was much more comfortable!

It was not just that, some people actually went on to the streets (NY and SF) and it seems most senators’ phones and websites went dead for the traffic. It’s working, but this is not the end, nor this is just about copyright. This is about freedom of thought, freedom to share, freedom to be a human being. Stopping SOPA/PIPA is just the first step, we need to undo most of what the media/war/oil/tobacco industry has done for the past 80 years, unless you like dictatorships, of course.

There’s this little girl on the hotel’s lobby. She seems very smart, but at odds with one of the popular magazines she’s reading. It looks like one of those low-quality magazines that people publish for children, assuming they’re dumb and can’t take a bit of logic. This one seems to be about history, mostly relating facts to simple conclusions and trying to get started the child’s imagination on what would be like hundreds of years ago.

I’m only waiting for them to get my room ready, so anything to pass the time is game, and watching the puzzled face of that little girl looking at a picture of what looks like a war scene is, at least, entertaining. Her dad is busy with some details of his bill, so she refrains from interrupting him, but enough is enough, I can see that she must ask what that is. And so she does.

“Dad, what is war?”. A bit puzzled with the numbers still floating in his mind and having to cope with such an unexpected question, he stops for a moment. “I, uh… war is… er, like… why do you ask?”. The little girl flips the magazine without letting it go, so her dad can read, and look at him with those big reflecting eyes, demanding a fair answer.

After switching his mind quickly yo cope with the upside-down writings and the glare from the sun outside on the screen, her dad finally tries to answer. “Well, honey. War is when people get angry and fight.” That was really amazing, because you could clearly see how fast her mind was pattern-matching in all her reactions. The involuntary contraction of her neck, the slight tilt of her head and the eyes going back and forth looking at nothing in particular. About a second later, she concluded. “Oh, I see, like you and mum?”

At this time the father wasn’t listening any more, and just issued the standard “uh-huh”. It was clear as filtered air that, in the next seconds, lots of memories of her family would be unequivocally associated with war, and at a later stage (if she ever became a historian), she would have to deal with that. It seems silly for me to interfere, but learning is an emergent behaviour, and she could have other unpredictable side-effects that would ruin her life for a number of reasons.

I looked around and there was no sign of the hotel staff bringing me my key, so I put my reservation aside and dived in. “Hello, little girl. How is your magazine?”. She looked at me in a slight panic, but my smiling face is anything but threatening. She looked at her dad, than at me. Her dad didn’t seem particularly worried, so she relaxed and continued the conversation.

“This is a magazine about the dark ages. I’ve learned dark ages at school and that people used to fight a lot, but I’ve never seen pictures of a real war before.” I said, “Well, these pictures are very old and bi-dimensional, it’s hard to see anything in them. Besides, they were usually taken by one or the other side, so you never knew how bad things really were other than what people told in the news or left in the pictures.”

She still seemd a bit confused, and not because of the quality of the pictures, I have to say. “I imagine how angry these people had to be to come to this…”. There was my cue. “You see, this has nothing to do with being angry… Your mum and dad will never go to war for disagreeing, because war is not about anyone’s feelings, really”.

Nevertheless, she seemed very resolute in her fantasy of mum and dad waging wars. “When they got separated, my mum said she was going to kill dad if he ever showed up again…”. But I was not going to give up, “That doesn’t mean it’s war. She was just angry and I’m sure she won’t kill anyone.”

By that time, my keys had arrived and I was ready to leave, but the little girls’ eyes weren’t stable enough for me to leave. Not just yet. “I don’t get it. If people were not mad, why did they fight?”. I could not hold my urge to elaborate… so I did.

“You see, back in the 21st century, people used to be a lot less rational than today. They used to call the early days as ‘dark ages’, only that those days were a lot less dark than – what we call today – the dark ages. People had a very blurry view of what science is or can do, and religion was still a strong player in worlds business.”

“Not only that, but people also had a very limited point of view. They thought only about their own profit and even then, only their short term profit – think about a month or so, no more – so they were always taking rapid-firing short-sighted decisions. For instance, they would wage wars in the – then, called middle east – area to control the oil production, even decades after realising fossil fuels weren’t good at all. Even mother China would wage wars with our neighbours because of their political agenda…” “Not mother China! We’d never do that!” I was taken aback a bit for her reaction, but continued nevertheless… “Hundreds of years ago, dear, everyone did that, even mother China.”

She was puzzled. Maybe I was making it worse, which was another reason to continue…

“Let’s go back a bit. When science was still at its early stages, there were some fundamental questions that people couldn’t answer, like ‘where do we come from’ and ‘why are we here’” “But that’s non-sense!” “Yes, yes, calm down, we’re talking about back then, remember?” “Oh, yes, sorry.” “Those questions, however irrelevant to the universe, were fundamental to even the most prodigious scientists of that era. It was not all bad, since most of the discoveries of that time came from trying to find the ultimate truth.”

“Religion is that stuff about the universe being created, right?” “Exactly, there is a deity that is more powerful than us and have created us. Somewhat like man and ants, we could do whatever we wanted with them…” “but we didn’t create the ants!” “Yes, I was, uh, trying to come up with an analogy, sorry. You see, that’s one of the reasons why it failed over the time, people ran out of stupid analogies and science took care of the rest. With time, we stopped asking stupid questions as well, so the long sought answers about the universe died out and, well, came the age of enlightenment.”

“What does that have to do with war?” “Oh, yes, war. So, ever since the stone age, most wars were waged for religious reasons. It may not make a lot of sense now, but different people had different religions, and they could not accept that other people could believe in a different deity, or even in the same deity, with slightly different rules. That has led to a lot of controversy, and due to the lack of diplomacy, wars.”

“However, after a while, people realised that religion was not just a matter of belief, it was a powerful weapon. If you could make people believe in what you want – that you are in direct communication with such deity, for instance – you would recruit every single man that believes in that deity to your cause. With time, when money came into scene, that was the most powerful way to acquire money. Later on, when religion started to fail, people had to create different fears, such as their own safety. That’s when terrorism came to scene, but again, that had strong religious roots.”

“So, war was about money, then?” “Exactly! Money and power, which invariably leads to more money (or power).” “Oh, that’s stupid! Everyone knows you get more if you cooperate than if you fight over something…” She was warming up and I’d lose my meeting but I wouldn’t stop now!

“Have you ever heard of John Nash?” “Hey, John Nash, I know him! Game theory, right?” “Well done!” I was really impressed, they normally learn that stuff at 10, but she was barely 7 years old. “There were some people a bit ahead of their time, like John Nash and Stephen Hawking, but they were few. Most of the prodigious scientists were all looking for the ultimate answer. And funny enough, for more than a century after John Nash, people still waged wars for money…”

She was looking down, and a bit sad… “My mum always say that I don’t listen and I only learn through pain… I guess this was their problem, wasn’t it?” “I think so” said I, resolute. “I think there’s yet another explanation that fits into Nash’s predictions. There were so many factors into why waging wars actually makes less profit than not, that people could not see it straight away. Whoever said that was taken as an anarchist, or an idiot – which at the time, was almost the same thing…” “What’s an anarchist?” That truly took me out of balance… I wasn’t prepared to elaborate on that. So I didn’t.

“Back to war… Nash’s idea, and that we all take for granted today, is that collaboration is far more stable and profitable than competition. I personally think that, what was really difficult for them to realise, was that competition is what made men evolve, but that’s also what made men stop evolving for millennia. Learning to collaborate was the single most important change in the world over the last three hundred years, and also what made our fauna and flora to go back to its original intent, and thanks to that, we still have our planet to live in.”

“Of course we do! Where else? Ha!” She was laughing seriously loud now. I believe a man of that age would not understand why, but I did.

My watch went crazy on the alarm, reminding me I had a meeting in 15 minutes, and I even hadn’t had a shower. That was my cue to leave, so just made some silly moves like pointing at the watch and smirking, and she got it straight away. Clever girl.

The concept of privacy is born from the antagonism between individuality and the desire to belong to a group. The instinctive drive to form groups – for protection, mating and warmth – is much older than the human race itself. It’s an instinct of almost every animal, and a successful characteristic or many plants and fungi. Individuality itself comes from pride and greed, two characteristics more specific to higher animals (such as felines, canines and primates).

Pack animals, like zebras, benefit a lot from being indistinguishable from each other (this is why they have stripes). Other animals, such as most felines, have leaders and there’s a succession line (much like royalty, but favouring physical strength). However, even on hierarchical species, the people is just the people, and they’re fine with it. Even on primates, you seldom see identification of one’s work or specific concerns with privacy. You can see them mimic privacy (if you beat them when doing something you wouldn’t do in public), but that’s Pavlov’s conditioning more than anything else.

Communism

However, group behaviour’s strengths and benefits if applied to the human race are quickly dismissed as communism.

There was a lot of group psychology in Marx’s political views (and a lot of Marxism in Pavlov’s ideas), hence, there was a strong rejection of any conditionalization of the people impose by the state or any strong enough body, on the capitalist side of the world.

The individual entrepreneurism of modern capitalism (as opposed to the original binary model from Adam Smith and co.), borne during the colonisation of America (no rules, no government), has been revamped by communism fears during the cold war, Cuba and now China.

Faith

As with any faith, the belief that individuality is the landmark of the human race brought its own problems.

First, individuality goes against most of other values we have as humans. My right to fart in a bloated bus goes against the respect I should have for others. My right to eat my pudding goes against the compassion I should have to spend the same amount for the mains of an impoverished child. My right to press the tooth-paste in the middle goes against my love for my wife.

Putting individuality higher than other important human values, such as respect, compassion and love, makes it a lot harder to live in societies. And given that we are now passing the 7 billion people, it’ll be a lot harder to be alone. But faith has no boundaries, nor logic. People were raised believing their individuality is more important than anything else and they die for it.

Biting the hand…

But life has it’s ways of being ironic, and deeply satisfying at it, for the bystanders. Extremely capitalist countries (like UK and US) have figured out long ago that such freedom cannot be. There is no society based on individuality (they’re antagonistic, after all). Worse still, a society that is purely based on individuality is a society without government. That, whose people have the right to do whatever they please. For this society to thrive, people would choose the right thing to do more often than not. That apolitical society has a name: anarchy. I don’t believe any government would like that!

To control people without telling them they’re being controlled, you have to resort to subversive techniques, extensively described in Orwell’s 1984. For centuries, both sides of the Atlantic have resorted to such measures, but today, no country is more Orwellian than the US.

Countries in Latin America or old USSR are failed nations (in the ayes of the American Government), where people know how bad it is and, well, live with it.

West European countries have, to a certain extent, succeeded in creating a more stable, if somewhat socialist, government. People still have their own liberties, but the government is strong and has it’s strong hand (NHS, public schools, social security, etc.). While they could do much better on many things, people know the failures and, well, live with it.

But the US is a special case. And the critical elements in the country’s history of the aggressive capitalism (internally and externally), individualism and greed, is biting the hand that fed it. For decades now, the government is increasing the grip on people’s freedoms, while increasing the liberty of major industries such as media, software, pharmaceutical, weapons on its grip of the government. After all, the recent breakdowns (like the one in 1929) of Enron, the Internet bubble and now the housing market and the financial crisis are signs that capitalism still has a lot to go wrong if unrestrained.

And still, the government gives more power to those same companies every year. The social reform Obama promised is yet to be seen, the technology-savvy campaign he did turned out on a technology-moron government, failing to understand basic concepts of day-to-day life that most Americans already know for ages. And since the US has such a power on the world’s economy, they’re spreading their chaos to Europe, as they did with Latin America for centuries (ever since Monroe Doctrine).

Recent court battles in EU for copyright infringements, the three-strike laws (rushed in by puppy Sarkozy even before the US) and all the prosecutions over Europe regarding software (Microsoft) and stupid hardware patents (Samsung vs. Apple), shows that stupidity took over the world, for good.

SOPA

After the recording industry successfully convincing underpaid musicians that they were being robbed by piracy, and the successful creation of the the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, making legal things such as DRM (and illegal to have the right of privacy), and crippling their own patent system with useless patents (giving birth to a whole new industry, called patent trolls), the US government now is superseding itself by creating the Stop Online Piracy Act, the new idiocy that goes beyond any idiot boundaries any human being has ever gone.

The US government has consistently and strongly reminding us, the rest of the world, of countries like China, where people don’t have the right to freely access the internet (due to the Big Firewall of China), and how much better is the freedom that capitalist countries give you. That freedom, ultimately linked to individuality and the greed to make more money that your peers, is what makes the American capitalism thrive. But every action, every argument has been destroying this dream, for more than a decade already.

Of course, as with any decent Orwellian government, they don’t tell you your freedoms are being displaced. And people that do say that, like Richard Stallman, are tagged as crazy lunatics, in spite of what GNU has done for society in the last 30 years. Anyway, the government’s arguments are, actually, promoting freedom. The freedom for the companies to make pornographic profits at the expense of the population’s freedom.

We, the people

But the people is not fooled. Recent movements to occupy Wall Street and the increasing mention that capitalism is failing in the alternative media (blogs, independent media channels, etc.) are clear indications that the nation’s mindset is changing.

A recent survey has shown that 75% of the Americans disagree with the outrageous fines (or any fine at all) for copyright infringement. Actually, most of them are knowingly infringing copyright themselves.

So, how does this happen? From a nation that valued their individuality and community to a nation of filthy pirates that don’t give a dime about other people’s property? Well, nothing has actually happened. To the people, I mean. But two things have, indeed, happened to the government.

First, the notion of property, individuality and respect, that were never meant individually, are now showing its colour. Second, the greed in which people were bred made them respect so much their individuality that other people’s profit is not as important as their own comfort. While this is the driving factor behind the population fight against the failed patent and copyright system (a fight that I do support), it’s for the wrong reasons.

Respect

My view is that the patent system, copyright, the media industry, the firewall of China, etc. fail on a basic respect level. Not only individualism, mas also the sense of society and community. Respect is by far more important than individualism or community. It’s a concept that, when applied correctly, can derive communities that do respect your right to individuality and privacy, at the same time that it stops abuse short of damaging others.

Respect is not perfect, nor equal to everyone. There are always those that abuse of the system and people will get hurt, or killed, before the community can do anything about it. But isn’t it true to every kind of community? Do you really believe that SOPA will stop piracy more than harm loyal customers? Did DRM? Did DMCA? Did the Terrorism Act really stopped more terrorists than it locked up regular air travellers?

All those solutions were direct infringements of privacy, the right to defend yourself (ex. Guantanamo Bay and patent trolls), the right to share and give away (DRM), the right to use your property where and how it’s meant to be used (DRM). Now, the US is also losing the right to use the Internet. And don’t think that this is staying within their borders… it’s most definitely not!

Expect Cameron and Sarkozy to be adhering to that idea sooner than the Americans do…

About 15 years ago, when I was working on a dodgy Brazilian firm, I had a conversation with an older programmer that I never forgot. He said something along the lines of:

Medicine is way easier than computer science. Doctors are still using the same books, written decades ago, while we have to buy only the latest ones. Our reality gets rewritten every five years or so, and by the time you leave university, you’re already outdated.

There is a lot of merit in this argument. Even though the common cold’s strain changes every week, its symptoms are exactly the same. Cancer, HIV, malaria, Lupus and other big diseases are treated more or less the same way as they were when first treated, and GPs still give you aspirin/paracetamol/ibuprofen for any kind of pain.

Human anatomy, physiology and psychology doesn’t change at all. Broken legs, runny noses and swollen tonsils are the same on every person and they require the same treatment for everyone.

While doctors kill one patient when they do make a mistake, developers can kill hundreds if they happen to introduce a bug on the Airbus fault-tolerant fail-over system.

But recently, I had to re-think this through, and I have to say I’m not 100% in agreement any more.

When programmers change jobs, they get a few weeks to get used to the new system. They might get months to actually be productive as their peers and will mature within a few years working with the same piece of software. Programmers can run tests, regression tests and usability tests, unit tests, etc, which is something a bit complicated with human beings.

When a doctor gets a new patient, it’s like getting a new programming job. It’s the same language, but the system is completely different. It might take you weeks to start getting the prognosis right, and in a few months you’ll be able to get it right before your patient even tells you the symptoms.

The similarities are remarkable

Consultant programmers get new systems to work on every week. Like ER doctors. They do what they can, with the time they have and the solution is most of the time acceptable. A more stable doctor or programmer might look at the job and cry, but the job was done, the fire was put off and the “patient” is out of the door.

Family doctors, that were there when you were born, know you better than yourself. They know when your symptoms are only psychological and what cause that and when it’s going to go away. They rarely touch the “system”, but normally fix an unrelated bug and you’re good as new.

But not everybody is lucky enough to have such doctors. They are expensive, and there aren’t enough good doctors in the health system of any country to account for every family. Even if the doctor share a hundred families, it’s still very far from enough.

This is the reason that systems fail, and get half-fixed, and why most GPs will send you home with a paracetamol unless you’re dying in front of them.

If doctors and programmers had such a different world, the emergent behaviour wouldn’t be that similar, I believe.

No, not the one everyone is talking about. The one that actually made it all work.

Not the one that was worried about uniforms and style, the one that actually designed and develop the foundations of modern society.

Not the one that enclosed people into a dungeon of usability, but the one that created the tools to enable everyone’s freedom.

The one whose work made possible the computer revolution in the 70s, the micro-computer revolution in the 80s, the open-source revolution in the 90s and the mobile revolution this last decade. Without Unix and C, and their simplistic but elegant design, the stronghold of modern society, none of this would be possible. We’d still be fighting over who invented the bloody pipe.

Rest in peace, Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie and may your wisdom embedded in the world today, linger as much as possible in our minds.

UPDATE: (Wired) Dennis Ritchie: The Shoulders Steve Jobs Stood On

As a postal worker, Mark had plenty of time to wonder in his head about things. Being in the post was not the most boring job ever, but wasn’t also complex that would put his brain cells to work that much. A bit of letter sorting and route planning was more than he needed to perform his job well and, even though he had a few neurons to spare, that actually didn’t help with his boss’ appraisal.

Not that Mark’s boss didn’t welcome a bit of thinking, it’s just that sometimes, too much thinking can do more harm than good. Nevertheless, Mark had that job for a few years now, and no plans to actually make a change. He had no family to care for, nor any massive debt to pay out and wasn’t particularly good looking to actually have a girlfriend.

But all that averageness wouldn’t help Mark to stop thinking about those things. Things that would make him loose his job. Things that always made him awkward when talking to women. Things that nobody else could understand, and nobody cared for that matter. Probably the very reason why he was thinking about it again this morning…

Spam

Between delivering some spam to a semi-detached family house and dropping a small box to a bungalow with lots of rubbish on the pavement, he thought how hard it is to do what people expect you to. Why do we have to deliver spam to half the country? Why can’t he just skip the spam, since nobody wants it anyway, and just deliver the good stuff? Would they really know if he’d delivered the spam in the first place?

For a few minutes that day, people walking down the pavement were somewhat annoyed with the presence of a motionless postman holding a few flyers. He was thinking… If they were actually paying attention, people on that street, that day, would see a perfectly regular postman sorting through his delivery quota in his bag with anger, until all the flyers were in his hand. He opened the green bin of that bungalow, and dropped them all in there.

To be honest, one mother coming down the high street, immediately after dropping her daughter at school (and the usual chat with other parents), actually saw all that happening. But her head was so full of problems, her daughter’s performance in school wasn’t that good and her husband, if you can call that husband, wasn’t being particularly nice that day. She dismissed the whole scene as another common madness of the world.

Mark was anxious, waiting for someone to say something, to reprehend him or to cheers for his bravery, but nothing really happened. It was exactly the same village as he was just a few minutes ago. A very radical move from his part had no damage whatsoever on the course of man kind. It was in that moment that he decided to do that every day.

For 3 years he put all the flyers in random bins (there weren’t that many, but he managed to hid some other on random places, too). To no surprise, absolutely nothing happened to any one. Local business were still working, Tesco was still full of people buying the same chicken wings on sale and the brand new chip shop had a very good clientèle, despite all their spam going to the bin every day.

With great power…

His success was a bit disappointing. Not only he managed to keep doing for so long, but nobody ever cared. Now, people were actually used to seeing him dropping flyers, no matter how extravagant were his moves around green bins. People would even greet him good morning while he was doing it. But he wasn’t a normal fellow, and his sense of righteousness put him on track to reform society. Small changes for a small man, but nevertheless, changes.

He decided to do every right thing where a wrong thing was expected. He delivered letters to doctors on the same day, even when a second class stamp was used. He’d slack off during most of the afternoon to deliver the big packages during the evening, when everybody was at home. He even delivered letters to people he knew while shopping and one day he replied to a letter himself.

It was a letter to a marriage lawyer firm on the postbox next to school. The letter was a bit crumpled and had a very shaky hand writing. He knew exactly from who that was and why. He replied:

Dear Mrs. Wife,

Your husband is a crook. He gambles the unemployment benefit, he hits your daughter and has an affair with more people that I’d dare to say.

You don’t need a lawyer, you need to slap him in the face and throw him out of your house.

Regards,
The postman

If that ever helped, nobody knows, but how that made him feel better, is inexplicable. The good feeling was taking over his life. He was less tense, had a few dates with the bakery attendant and even sent a letter to his mother. But all that feeling was stopped dead by a call from his boss. Apparently there were some complaints that the postal service was a bit erratic and some letters were not reaching their destinations.

Mark’s boss reassured him that he trusted Mark, but wanted him to know that there would be some investigations and questions to all members of staff. As it turned out, another postman was unhappy about his work and stopped delivering anything and went to the pub for the few last days. After a weekend delivering more letters than usual, everything went back to normal.

Happiness is ethereal

During the next few months, Mark managed to have a sound relationship with Emma (the bakery attendant) and they were actually happy. After the year’s end, Mark got a raise and could now afford a cable TV subscription. He didn’t get the sports pack, since Emma wanted the entertainment one, but all was fine as long as she was there, with him.

However, as it couldn’t be different, Mark started to wonder… He was really happier now than some years ago. The whole city seemed to have accepted his behaviour, no matter how odd. Even Emma ignored the issue after Mark told her during one of their first dates. It really wasn’t that important. How is that possible?

Can he, then, do whatever he wants? To what extent will bending the laws imposed by the people actually go before people start noticing, and doing something about it? How can some people do so little and go to jail, while him, with such a radical take on life, gets completely ignored. What would he have to do to be noticed?

In whatever group you are, Mark realised, as long as you don’t interfere with its natural course, you will be ignored. He learnt from the one of the documentary channels that this is true with every animal. Man is not more than any other animal. Society is not more than any other group. Not only you can do whatever you want, as long as that doesn’t interfere with the group, but everything you do will be completely ignored and, when you die, forgotten.

Obviously, Mark’s new take on life put some dents in his relationship, but he managed to suppress his thoughts while Emma was around. He wouldn’t want to loose her, not after so much trouble to get her. He also agreed not to talk weird while her friends would come over, and that took their relationship to a marriage, and life went on as you know it.

…

To be honest, I never heard of a postman named Mark, but according to his own theories, he could very much have existed and you’ll never know it…

In most of the computers today you have the same basic structure: A computing hardware, composed by millions of transistors, getting data from the surroundings (normally registers) and putting values back (to other registers), and Data storage. Of course, you can have multiple computing hardware (integer, floating point, vectorial, etc) and multiple layers of data storage (registers, caches, main memory, disk, network, etc), but it all boils down to these two basic components.

Between them you have the communication channels, that are responsible for carrying the information back and forth. In most machines, the further you are from the central processing unit, the slower is the channel. So, satellite links will be slower than network cables that will be slower than PCIx, CPU bus, etc. But, in a way, as the whole objective of the computer is to transform data, you must have access to all data storage in the system to have a useful computer.

Not-so-useful

Imagine a machine where you don’t have access to all the data available, but you still depend on that data to do useful computation. What happens is that you have to infer what was the data you needed, or get it from a different path, not direct, but converted into subjective ideas and low-quality patterns, that have, then, to be analysed and matched with previous patterns and almost-random results come from such poor analysis.

This machine, as a whole, is not so useful. A lot less useful than a simple calculator or a laptop, you might think and I’d agree. But that machine also have another twist. The data that cannot be accessed have a way of changing how the CPU behave in unpredictable ways. It can increase the number of transistors, change the width of the communication channels, completely remove or add new peripherals, and so on.

This machine has, in fact, two completely separate execution modes. The short term mode, executed within the inner layer, in which the CPU takes decisions based on its inherent hardware and the information that is far beyond the outer layer, and the long term mode, executed in the outer layer, which can be influenced by the information beyond (plus a few random processes) but never (this is the important bit, never), by the inner layer.

The outer layer

This outer layer change data by itself, it doesn’t need the CPU for anything, the data is, itself, the processing unit. The way external processes act on this layer is what makes it change, in a very (very) slow time scale, especially when compared to the inner layer’s. The inner layer is, in essence, at the mercy of the outer layer.

This machine we’re talking about, sometimes called the ultimate machine, has absolutely nothing of ultimate. We can build computer that can easily access the outer layers of data, change them or even erase them for good as easy as they do with the data in the inner layer.

We, today, can build machines much more well designed that this infamous machine. When comparing designs, our current computers have a much more elaborate, precise and analytical design of a machine, we just need more time to get it to perfection, but it’s of my opinion that we’re already far beyond (in design matters) that of life.

Living machines

Living creatures have brains, the CPU and the inner memory and the body (all the other communication channels and peripherals to the world beyond), and they have genes, the long-term storage that defines how the all the rest is assembled and how it behaves. But living creatures, unlike Lamarck’s beliefs, cannot change their own genes at will. Not yet.

The day humans start changing their own genes (and that’s not too far away), we’ll have perfected the design, and only then we would be able to call it: the ultimate machine. Only then, the design would have been perfect and the machine could, then, evolve.

Writing your own genes would be like giving an application the right to re-write the whole operating system. You rarely see that in a computer system, but that’s only because we’re limited to creating designs similar to ourselves. This is why all CPUs are sequential (even when they’re parallel), because our educational model is sequential (to cope with mass education). This is why our machines don’t self-mend since the beginning, because we don’t.

Self-healing is a complex (and dangerous) subject for us because we don’t have first-hand experience with it, but given the freedom we have when creating machines, it’s complete lack of imagination to not do so. It is a complete waste of time to model intelligent systems as if they were humans, to create artificial life with simple neighbouring rules and to think that automata is only a program that runs alone.

Agile Design

The intelligent design concept was coined by people that understand very little of design and even less about intelligence. The design of life is utterly poor. It wastes too much energy, it provides very little control over the process, it has too many variables and too little real gain in each process.

It is true that, in a hardware point of view, our designs are very bad when compared to nature’s. A chlorophyll is much more efficient than a solar cell, spider webs are much stronger than steel and so on. But the overall design, how the process work and how it gets selected, is just horrible.

If there were creators for our universe, it had to be a good bunch of engineers with no management at all, creating machines at random just because it was cool. There was no central planning, no project, ad-hoc feature emerging and lots of easter eggs. If that’s the image people want to have of a God, so be it. Long live the Agile God, a bunch of nerdy engineers playing with toys.

But design would be the last word I’d use for it…

Nothing to do with the topic of this blog, you are right, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the reality England faces regarding football.

All these years watching a mediocre football, even in the Premier League, where Cristiano Ronaldo is the top player and where Robinho can’t play football made me wondering what’s terribly wrong with the nation’s love for the sport. Not just passion, but the English people were the ones that invented the sport. Here in Cambridge its very first rules were written and the first match with those rules played in Parker’s Piece in 1848.

With more than 160 years of football history you would imagine that they’d have a bit more skills… Recently I have found a perfectly good reason why this happens.

Another English passion, maybe even more important that football, is lawn. Not cricket, not complaining, not political jokes: lawn. Mediocre football is all right, mediocre grass is a crime. But, grass and football are very much connected, probably the very reason why they loved to play it in the past, but as priorities are laid, lawn apparently comes first. In my recent visit to my son’s new school, with very impressive lawns, bigger than an official football pitch. The “football pitch”? It’s made of asphalt, which is also used as car park some times…

Baffled as I was, when I asked the children about football, they said they were allowed to play, but they had to bring their own balls. So far so good, but then it came reality: there is a recommendation to use foam or rubber balls, to avoid injury. Question is, what does more injury, proper footballs or asphalt?

In Brazil, children as young as 1 year old play football with anything. Coconuts, food cans, socks rolled into a ball, even stones. And they usually play barefoot, on dirt, or even asphalt. Health and Safety is important, but not to the point of removing completely the fun of being a child. If a child doesn’t get dirty, it won’t learn to clean itself, to avoid the situation in the future and, more importantly, to understand the pain of living and how good that feels.

European football? Never heard…

Ever since 1995 I hear the same phrase, and ever since 2000 I stopped listening. It was already the year of Linux in 95 for me, so why bother?

But this year is different, and Linux is not the only revolution in town… By the end of last year, the first tera-electronvolt collisions were recorded in the LHC, getting closer to see (or not) the infamous Higgs boson. Now, the NIF reports a massive 700 kilojoules in a 10 billionth of a second laser, that, if it continues on schedule, could lead us to cold fusion!!

The human race is about to finally put the full stop on the standard model and achieve cold fusion by the end of this year, who cares about Linux?!

Well, for one thing, Linux is running all the clusters being used to compute and maintain all those facilities. So, if it were for Microsoft, we’d still be in the stone age…

UPDATE: More news on cold fusion…

I have recently joined the IETF Smart Grid group to see what people were talking about it and to put away my fears on security and privacy. What I saw was a bunch of experts discussing the plethora of standards that could be applied (very important) but few people seemed too interested in the privacy issue.

If you see the IEEE page on Smart Grids, besides the smart generation / distribution / reception (very important) there is a paragraph on the interaction between the grid and the customers, being very careful not to mention invasive techniques to allow the grid to control customer’s appliances:

“Intelligent appliances capable of deciding when to consume power based on pre-set customer preferences.”

Here, they focus on letting the appliances decide what will be done to save power, not the grid or the provider. Later on, on the same paragraph:

“Early tests with smart grids have shown that consumers can save up to 25% on their energy usage by simply providing them with information on that usage and the tools to manage it.”

Again, enforcing that the providers will only “provide [the customer] with information”. In other words, the grid is smart up to the smart meter (that is controlled by the provider), where inside people’s houses, it’s the appliances that have to be smart. One pertinent comment from Hector Santos in the IETF group:

“Security (most privacy) issues, I believe, has been sedated over the years with the change in consumer mindset. Tomorrow (and to a large extent today) generation of consumers will not even give it a second thought. They will not even realize that it was once considered a social engineering taboo to conflict with user privacy issues.”

I hate to be pessimist, but there is a very important truth in this. Not only people are allowing systems to store their data for completely different reasons, but they don’t care if the owner of the system will distribute their information or not. I, myself, always paranoid, have signed contracts with providers knowing that they would use and sell my data to third parties. The British Telecom is one good example. He continues:

“Just look how social networking and the drive to share more, not less has changed the consumer mindset. Tomorrow engineers will be part of all this new mindset.”

There is no social engineering any more like it used to be. Who needs to steal your information when it’s already there, on your Facebook? People are sharing willingly, and a lot of them know what problems it may cause, but the benefit, for them, is greater. Moreover, millions bought music, games and films with DRM, allowing a company control what you do, see or listen. How many Kindles were bought? How many iPhones? People don’t care what’s going on if they have what they want.

That is the true meaning of sedated privacy concerns. It’s a very distorted way of selfishness, where you don’t care about yourself, as long as you are happy. If it makes no sense to you, don’t worry, it makes no sense to me too.

Recently, the Future of Privacy Forum published an excellent analysis (via Ars) on the smart grid privacy. Several concepts that are easy to understand how dangerous they can be, became commonplace to not think about it or even consider it a silly worry, given that no one cares anyway.

An evil use of a similar technology is the “Selectable Output Control“. Just like a Kindle, the media companies want to make sure you only watch what you pay for. It may seem fair, and even cheaper, as they allow “smart pricing”, like some smart-grid technologies.

But we all have seen what Amazon did to kindle users, of Apple did to its AppStore, taking down contents without warn, removing things you paid for from your device, allowing or disallowing you to run applications or contents on your device as if you hadn’t pay enough money to own the device and its contents.

In the end, “smart pricing” is like tax cut, they reduce tax A, but introduce taxes B, C and D, which double the amount of taxes you pay. Of course, you only knew about tax A and went happy about your life. All in all, nobody cares who or how much they pay, as long as they can get the newest fart app…

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