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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…

While EA seems to have understood how to play the game, the Swedish court (and the European legal system) not only fails to get it, but also came with a lame excuse to reject the pirate bay retrial.

On one side, one of the judges was a member of several copyright protection groups and forgot to mention that before the case. This fact itself should be enough for a reconsideration of the decision, as his interests were too tied up with the case to have a fair opinion. But what bugs me most is the reason (or rather, the excuse) of why they are still determined to make them pay for their “crimes”.

The court found them guilty because, it said, they continued to operate the service even when they knew users were being pointed to pirated material.

So, they’re not keeping any copyrighted material themselves, and they have a clause that takes away their responsibility of whatever material is shared across their networks, but that’s not enough, they should have done something.

Let’s say they did have to do something, now we should apply the same rule to others as well right? What about the weapons industry? They know it’ll be used to kill other people, but they still make it and sell it (much worse than only provide the means). What about the tobacco industry? They know it’s not healthy, they know people will get lung cancer, but they still do it (and quite a lot of it).

What about the recording industry? Yes, the same one that is accusing pirate bay of “harming the artists”, forces artists to sign diabolical contracts where they get all the money and the artists get all the work. Who’s harming the artists in the end?

I completely agree with the court decision, as long as they apply the same rule to everyone. No more firearms (for civilians, at least), no more cigarettes, 50/50 for contracts. Fair is fair.

Since the early days (millions of years ago), the human race is being watched. Not by any sort of god or alien race, but by itself.

During the cave age, human-apes lived in groups. Either on trees or proper caves, they were all together. It was, then, pretty impossible to do something and not being noticed. If you want to enjoy the sunset while all others are working hard on protecting the cave, you’ll be spotted. If you get someone’s else wife for a ride, people would know.

Empires came and went and the only thing they brought as a relief for that was the number of unknown people around you. People would know you on your neighbourhood, but you could go away a few blocks and you’d be a total stranger. Moving cities was even better, but that was nothing that you couldn’t do during the cave age.

Even with the ability of changing homes, during your stay in a particular place, you are being watched. Not all vigilance is bad, though. Some might learn that you like football and invite you for the local team. Others could notice you left your door open and warn you, and even babysit your children.

Whenever you interact with the people, you invariable leave a trace. If a policeman asks your neighbour where have you been, he’ll probably have a good hunch and that will probably help the police to find you. The only thing that matters, really, is if you’re lost (and needs finding) or running away.

The Internet is a much bigger place than any city or country, it’s far easier to go on without being noticed. But, as with real life, people are watching. Sometimes for good, other times for bad, and that doesn’t make the Internet any different than the real world.

If you come to my house, I’ll remember. When you visit websites, your IP and page you visited is logged on their servers. We eventually forget your visit, if you were not that important, or clear old logs from the server, but for a while, you are there.

Being logged in a server is no different than being remembered, and that’s hardly a bad thing. What is bad is what you do with that piece of information. And for that, it doesn’t matter if you’re on the net or at my house, it’s a violation of your freedom for me to use that information solely to my profit. Hiding behind proxies is not the way to go, because that is only pushing your freedom even further away.

So, what is neutrality?

Net neutrality is to give the freedom to people do whatever they want, whenever they want and not cap their ability for profit or legal reasons. This may seem dangerous, if someone is trying to do any harm, the chance they’ll succeed is big, but that is also the case with real life. Suicide bombers,, for instance, always manage to explode themselves and no one can do anything about it.

Well, they can, and that leads us to a much worse scenario: Guantanamo Bay. Caping everyone’s connections and inspecting everyone’s packets because some will abuse is against human rights. The same with locking people in far away prisons without any charge just because there was a hunch that he/she would do something wrong whenever they would.

Society is complex and evil. Freedom comes with a high price: harm. If you start guessing who’ll do the wrong thing and punishing them before they do, you can surely save a lot of harm being done, but also you’ll harm lots of innocent people to a no return point. Your society will be as bad as the quality of your guess.

So, judging people for the crimes they have commited won’t change the harm they have done, but will save the lives of people that didn’t commit any crime. Crime is part of the nature. Not human nature, but life itself. It’s not possible to stop it once and for all, it’s not possible to accurately predict when it’s going to happen and the outcome of trying is far worse than not, so don’t even start.

Not only that, but these guess-works give permission to certain people (or groups) to deviate the logic for their own profit. That’s the case of recording companies and the fight against copying and borrowing. That’s the case of idea patents and the inherent inability to think. That’s the case of all major wars since the second world war (and probably many more before that).

Guessing on people’s freedom is evil, not even hideous crimes are that evil.

Recently the whole family has been engaged in a complete greenification and organification. We prefer regional organic food (fruits, vegetables, meat, dairy products) than regular ones. We recycle everything we can, even if that means a car trip to the recycling centre every now and then.

But the recent trip to Scotland made us to want a new car, and the new car we wanted wasn’t green at all: the Toyota’s Rav4. It took me a while to have courage to actually buy one, but in the week I was listing them to get one on the local Toyota dealer, I saw a talk by Prof. David MacKay at ARM and changed my mind…

Besides being one of the key world figures on information theory, inference and learning, he’s also pushing hard on sustainable energy. His talk was great and it was then I figured out how much difference you can make with little things. Not getting planes unless you really have no other choice, changing your car to something greener and buying food from local markets does make a big difference.

It was then that we bought a Toyota Prius. I have to say that I’m impressed. Not only it runs on battery for quite a while, but the petrol engine is super effective, only turns on when needed and doing 60mpg (21 km/l) at constant speeds. Not only that, but the amount of gadgets and technology they put in those cars is amazing.

I’m not saving the world, I know, but does help a lot. If those cars were more common, if the globalization used more internet and less aeroplanes, and if people ate more local food, maybe we could reduce the energy footprint and than sustainable energy could be viable.

One thing is for sure, people do need to change their attitude towards life and comfort and be prepared to live more and complaint less.

Pension plans are always too optimistic, and in this case, being optimistic is not at all a good thing. It’s actually getting the situation worse and, if nothing is done about it, it’ll be impossible to make the work force pay the pension for the huge retired population.

During the 80′s and 90′s we learned in school that European countries’ population pyramid had clear signs of development, because it had low birth rate and high life expectancy. Opposed, of course, to those from Brazil at that time, which was pretty much triangular, especially in the poorest regions.

This is obviously a problem as much more children are being born and dying, due to lack of education of the parents (that have dozens of children rather than a couple) and complete lack of health care. They were adopting the R-selection (as insects and lower organisms), where the more children you have, the higher are the chances of having grandchildren (and so, propagate your genes). It may sound terrible, but if you actually go there and talk to those people, that’s what they say. If you say you only have two children they think it’s an absurd, asking: “what would you do if one or two die?”. It’s not lack of love for all of them, it’s the hard truth they have to live with.

Now, terrible as it is, let’s see the other way around. In a high educated society, with excellent public health care, you normally see couples with none, one or at most two children. Seeing three is ok, but four is an absurd. How can you cope with all of them? Imagine the cost of childcare! (Note that this is no problem for those that have 15 in the situation above). What happens is that, with time, less children become adults and the number of retired people get bigger than those that pay for their pensions.

You may think that you (retired folks) have paid already your public and private pension in the past, but truth is that both the government and the banks already spent your money on something else (probably paying the pension of your parents). They never think soo long term as they ask you to. They force you to think on your own pension when you’re around 30 years old but all that money is being re-invested, lost and getting money from the government to pay the bill. Government money (from your tax and pension payments) were actually to pay other bills they had in the past, and they hope they’ll have money in 30 years to pay yours.

The big problem is that, today, the number of employed and retired people are still similar, but in 50 years it’ll be very unequal. With better health care (as we all expect), with stem cell research, gene therapy, cloning and other wonders of modern medicine we’ll probably be immortals by the end of the century. How can a small group of people between 20 and 65 years can ever pay for the pension of 65 until 200 years old? We don’t have to go so sci-fi, nor so distant in the future, some predictions are telling that the size of the work-force is going to be much smaller. Either the pensions payments go up or it’ll be impossible to pay up.

Have more children?

Until now the answer is “Have more children!”. Lots of couples in “baby-age” nowadays are having more than three children. They do it because, in developed countries, it’s cheap. Health care is free, schools are free, medicines and most services are free too. Who is paying for that? All of us. What happens with having more children is that, not only the work force is paying for the pension of the old, but also for the joy of the young. If it’s already a disaster to rely on such a small work force to pay the pension, how fair is it to demand them to pay for the young too?

But there is another, even bigger, question: Isn’t the population already big enough? Can we ever give decent food to every single living being (including animals, of course) that already exists in the world? Do we really need more? Shall we let people kill babies in China with the one-child policy while we have joy with our 10 children? If we really need those babies, shouldn’t we be adopting the “unwanted” Chinese, Ethiopian, etc?

Well, I particularly don’t believe in cheap charity. As my mother always said (and stuck for life in my mind): “Give the fishing pole and teach them how to fish”. So, I still think we should promote education and health care for countries in need so they can also have a population pyramid like the developed countries, but the policy of children, pension and taxes has to change. Of course, education and health care do take some time to evolve, and the children on those countries today won’t benefit from that, so plain old charity IS also fundamental to help those regions.

Managing the retirement age

People’s health is better today that it was 30 years ago. More and more people today retire older and older (quick Google for “increase retirement age” and you’ll see), and some countries are even increasing the official retirement age. That helps a lot, of course, but it’s only temporary and can work against the people. What happens, for instance, if the average retirement age decreases from one year to another? Would the official age reduce too? Is it fair for everyone, between one year and the other? I don’t think so.

One possible solution is to provide incrementing retirement payments, proportional to age and external remuneration. Say I turn 55 and, because of health problem, I need to reduce my work load by one third. I should be able to get one third of my retirement and keep on working, until I need another break and get, say, half of it by the age of 65. I could have gotten the full amount, but because I’m still working (or getting funds from elsewhere), I only get the amount proportional to what I was earning before and am now.

In numbers: With 55, I’m earning 60K a year. I have to work only 2/3 and therefore get only 40K. My pension is total of 30K, and 1/3 is 10K, so my new salary is 50K. With 60 years I need another break, so my new salary is 1/2 (30K) plus 1/2 of my pension (15K) = 45K. If I stop completely, I’ll only receive the 30K or my pension. Of course, if you want more you can always make a private pension plan and trust your bank won’t go bankrupt in the next 30 years.

Why this is fair?

1. If you’re still working full steam you should not get money from the government.
2. If you still want to work but can’t full time, you should get a proportional help from the government, but only what the government can afford to pay
3. If you can’t work at all, you should receive the full amount, exactly what the government already pays you today

This is just an example of how things can be worked out, not intended to be extensive not exhaustive. There are plenty of room for good ideas, we just need to get people talking about the alternatives rather than only thinking about how to get MORE money.

Why is retirement SO important?

Simply because there is just too much people in the world. Malthus would say: “Kill’em all”. I’d rather say: “Don’t let them be born at such an enormous rate”. If the solution for the future recession is having more babies, we’ll get ourselves into yet another one, much worse, in the next generation, like a snowball.

We have to stop having babies right now, deal with the consequences right now and hopefully in the future, our grandchildren will be better off. According to the CIA, the world population has just passed 6.7 billion people. With birth rate at 20/1000 and death rate around 8/1000 (same source), it’s not going to lower so soon. Raising 2% per year and with mortality rate extremely lower than in nature (which varies a lot, but seldom reach 0.8%), it’s very likely that in a few decades we’ll be the only animal on the planet. In a few centuries maybe the only living being (if you can say so).

Will we discover how to do photosynthesis with melanin? Or will we become cannibals?

Quality is fundamental in any job, and software is no exception. Although fairly good software is relatively easy to do, really good software is an art that few can truly reach.

While in some places you see a complete lack of understanding about the minimal standards of software development, in others you see it in excess. It’s no good either. In the end, as we all know, the only thing that prevails is common sense. Quality management, all sorts of tests and refactoring is fundamental to the agile development, but being agile doesn’t mean being time-proof.

One might argue that, if you keep on refactoring your code, one day it’ll be perfect. That if you have unit tests, regression tests, usability test (and they’re also being constantly refactored), you won’t be able to revive old bugs. That if you have a team always testing your programs, building a huge infrastructure to assure everything is user proof, users will never get a product they can’t handle. It won’t happen.

It’s like general relativity, the more speed you get, the heavier you become and it gets more difficult to get more speed. Unlike physics, though, there is a clear ceiling to your growth curve, from where you fall rather than stabilize. It’s the moment when you have to let go, take out what you’ve learned and start all over again, probably making the same mistakes and certainly making new ones.

Cost

It’s all about cost analysis. It’s not just money, it’s also about time, passion, hobbies. It’s about what you’re going to show your children when they grow up. You don’t have much time (they grow pretty fast!), so you need to be efficient.

Being efficient is quite different on achieving the best quality possible, and being efficient locally can also be very deceiving. Hacking your way through every problem, unworried about the near future is one way of screwing up things pretty badly, but being agile can lead you to the same places, just over prettier roads.

When the team is bigger than one person, you can’t possibly know everything that is going on. You trust other peoples judgements, you understand things differently and you end up assuming too much about some of the things. Those little things add up to the amount of tests and refactoring you have to run for each and every little change and your system will indubitably cripple up to a halt.

Time

For some, time is money. For me, it’s much more than that. I won’t have time to do everything I want, so I better choose wisely putting all correct weights on the things I love or must do. We’re not alone, nor is all we do for ourselves, so it’s pretty clear that we all want our things to last.

Time, for software, is not a trivial concept. Some good software don’t even get the chance while some really bad things are still being massively used. Take the OS/2 vs. Windows case. But also some good software (or algorithms or protocols) have proven to be much more valuable and stable than anyone ever predicted. Take the IPv4 networking and the Unix operating system (with new clothes nowadays) as examples.

We desperately need to move to IPv6 but there’s a big fear. Some people are advocating for decades now that Unix is already decades deprecated and still it’s by far the best operating system we have available today. Is it really necessary to deprecate Unix? Is hardware really ready to take the best out of micro-kernel written in functional programming languages?

For how long does a software lives, then?

It depends on so many things that it’s impossible to answer that question, but there are some general rules:

• Is it well written enough to be easy to enhance to users’ request? AND
• Is it stable enough that won’t drive people away due to constant errors? AND
• Does it really makes the difference to people’s lives? AND
• Are people constantly being reminded that your software exists (both intentionally and unintentionally)? AND
• Isn’t there something else much better? AND
• Is the community big enough to make migration difficult?

If you answered no to two or more questions, be sure to review your strategy, you might already be loosing users.

There is another path you might find your answers:

• Is the code so bad that no one (not even its creator) understand it anymore? OR
• The dependency chain is so unbearably complicated, recursive and fails (or works) sporadically? OR
• The creator left the company/group and won’t give a blimp to answer your emails? OR
• You’re relying on closed-source/proprietary libraries/programs/operating systems, or they have no support anymore? OR
• Your library or operating system has no support anymore?

If you answered yes to two or more questions, be sure to review your strategy, you might already be on a one-way dead-end.

Ad infinitum

One thing is for sure, the only thing that is really unlimited is stupidity. There are some things that are infinite, but limited. Take a sphere, you can walk on a great circle until the end of all universes and you won’t reach the end, but the sphere is limited in radius, thus, size. Things are, ultimately, limited in the number of dimensions they’re unlimited.

Stupidity in unlimitedly unlimited. If the universe really has 10 dimensions, stupidity has 11. Or more. The only thing that will endure, when the last creature of the last planet of the last galaxy is alive is his/her own stupidity. It’ll probably have the chance to propagate itself and the universe for another age, but it won’t.

In software, then, bugs are bound to happen. Bad design has to take part and there will be a time when you have to leave your software rest in peace. Use your time in a more creative way because for you, there is no infinite time or resources. Your children (and other people’s children too) will grow quick and deprecate you.

Ars Technica has a fantastic article on software patents in US, and how the process is slowly reversing to what it should be (and was) since the beginning.

They describe all the history, important cases, different points of view and how the whole thing was going nuts in this century. The system was due to fail since the big companies started paying billions for patent trolls, but it took a bit too long to actually start reversing…

Would that be Obama’s aura? Or does both events mean that the US people finally started to think on their own? Whatever that is, it’s in the right direction, I think.

Knowledge was always hand in hand with power. Still is, but recently there seems to be an unusually high value, higher than most concrete things, like land. The last 10 years of the financial market shows us a bit of this shift.

In the beginning…

… there was land. The old empires, from Sumer to Mongols, had a big fixation on land. The more the better. It was quite obvious, more land always means more food, slaves and tax payers. During that period, though, much was achieved on science. Astronomy, mathematics and philosophy were the biggest advances from that age, and they had a lot to do with power, as all good kings had their own good scientists around.

But there was something missing on that connection… The scientist had the power to give advices but the kings had the power to ignore them. Astronomy was entangled with astrology, chemistry with alchemy, biology with religion… The true scientist didn’t have any power whatsoever, as kings always liked best those that would say everything would be all right.

Land is not enough (aka. knowledge goes dead)

After the first period of land-setting, when all kings and landlords had their share, it was obvious that they needed a new coin to get richer. With the collapse of the trade network during the (so called) dark ages, new forms of power came to surface. Faith was by far the greatest. The catholic church (and lots of sub-divisions of it) became the most powerful entity world has known so far. This power comes from the opposite of knowledge, unfortunately, and many scientists lost their lives fighting against it.

Other things were also highly valuable, like gold and gems, vassals and slaves, soldiers and castles. And they had lots of them. With the discovery of the new world, there was a new boost for land, but the old emperors were smart already and knew that it was only a matter of time to consume all that land.

It was actually easier to work it around, when the Spanish found an unbelievable amount of gold on Central America. Most colonialists started to ripping off their colonies of whatever they could find, and knowledge, science or wisdom is hardly ever associated with power in that period.

People have brains, after all

Renaissance fighting bravely the dark ages (for science, at least), came the age of enlightenment, when science had, once again, its role on power. Descartes, Newton and many others were not only digressing, but defining the intrinsic mechanisms of the universe. Later on, Darwin would set the final course for life, and Adam Smith and Karl Marx would define the next centuries in politics and economy.

Those thinkers had a huge power in their hands, they were shaping how we understand life, the universe and everything, but yet concrete values were still concrete. Money was more valuable than ever, fact, but land was still a stable market. Trade routes, consumers and the food market was still at the top of most governments.

Image is everything…

When we get to the 20th century that things start to get fuzzy. The consumer market turned into the most important thing in the world. More than land, trade routes and food, consumers would buy anything. If they don’t need it, you can advertise as fundamental to their existence and they will buy it. Advertisement surpassed even faith in matters of power. It doesn’t matter your religion, skin colour, place of birth, as long as you keep buying. See the fantastic Story of Stuff to know more about it.

Nevertheless, science didn’t stop being important to power. The atomic bomb and the impressive developments on computing is a clear outcome of that. It was so important that the image of the scientist changed from the weird guy in the dark room to the visionary guy on wheelchairs. The computer nerd image changed from the long-bearded-large-glasses weirdo to the charming multi-billionaire on his private cruiser.

People are now trying to become smarter for some time in order to reach this grail, a clear demonstration of this power.

But with this power also comes corruption. Like in the old days, pure science is a rare myth. Governments will always prefer to invest in science that has a solid return in money.

The last 10 years and the image of knowledge

Even though Wall Street assured the world that the crisis of 1929 would never happen again, banks lending more than they should made a new crisis this year. Other crisis happened in the late 90′s and early 2000. The problem this time is the image of knowledge.

In the late 90′s, the trust on the power of the internet (a technological and scientific concept) was so great that many old investors got greedy enough to spend millions on crap or non-existent projects. The usual risk is invest in 10 to get 1 good return, but in this case the return was close to nothing. The image was everything.

A Harvard PhD’s paper was enough to release half-million investments. Closer to the dot-com bubble‘s climax, even smart kids would get their funding anyway, leading to the collapse of the whole internet and technological market.

Speaking of image, what better case than Enron’s? They sold the image of electricity, gas and even broadband! Today we call this vapour-ware, and they managed to make billions only on that. Fooling the government, all major banks in the world and consumers.

Short selling was again the cause of the new financial crisis. Blamed also for the 1929 crisis, it consist in selling something you will have in the near future, as in, selling before you buy. Two things can happen wrong with that:

1. Chain of short-selling: when you sell to someone who will sell to another person (again and again) before you even bought it in the first place. It’s not hard to see that this is a recipe to disaster. This was responsible for the 1929 and the current crisis.
2. Not buying at all: As soon as you get the money you don’t actually have to buy the thing anyway. You just pretend to have it and delay the delivery. You can also borrow from someone else and give it to the other, in a circular dependency and never (ever) having to actually buy anything at all. Enron and the internet bubble were cases like this.

What’s the knowledge’s role on that?

Simple: Knowledge is difficult to acquire and accumulate. It’s also quite often difficult to test and assure consistency throughout all the scientific domain. As with every single program written, it’s impossible not to have bugs. There is no such thing as a perfectly safe system.

Nobel prizes were won defining “the rules” of short-selling. When such beautiful differential equations are demonstrated by famous professors and the whole economic community laureates this very idea with a Nobel prize, it’s quite difficult to be sceptical about it.

The pen is mightier than the sword, knowledge is mightier than land. Houses lost their real value and began spiralling to imaginary prices. Banks hoping for increasing prices forgot that it was all a dream and lent more money than they had, and it all ended in this.

Quants, locked in their hedge-funds offices, with pens and computers, dictates the future of the market. They change the way we, non-investors, buy houses to live and raise families.

In turn, computer nerds define the way people buy clothes and books, search for knowledge and talk to their granny and grand-children. All this technology and science is shaping the world of tomorrow. It’s defining how we think, who we are and how our children will be.

Do your part!

If you have this power, do your part. If you’re a quant, do it with responsibility. If you’re a programmer, think about the future. Think about the world tomorrow, not just your pocket today. Freedom is more important than money. Education, health and security is more important than the financial market. Think on the planet, think green!

Above all, please be sensible. There is no win-win situations, someone (or ultimately Earth) will always loose. And the more you gain, the more they (or it) will loose.

DRM sucks, we all know, but I couldn’t have expressed in a better way than that!

Of course, I’m not an artist (and he’s one of the best), but still, clear as vacuum.

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