Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  It has always been our desire to have tomorrow be better than today.  The better moral or ethic code we have, the better tomorrow will be.  If the days are growing darker then it is because our ethics are diminishing.  To many are concerned about having a better today at the expense of tomorrow.  The key to having a better tomorrow is having a higher level of morals today.  Doing what’s right is rarely convenient or directly beneficial to ones day.  With a bit of faith and sacrifice in helping others, we can all hope for a better tomorrow.  The more people doing good equals a world with more good in it.

Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.  It has always been our desire to have tomorrow be better than today.  The better moral or ethic code we have, the better tomorrow will be.  If the days are growing darker then it is because our ethics are diminishing.  To many are concerned about having a better today at the expense of tomorrow.  The key to having a better tomorrow is having a higher level of morals today.  Doing what’s right is rarely convenient or directly beneficial to ones day.  With a bit of faith and sacrifice in helping others, we can all hope for a better tomorrow.  The more people doing good equals a world with more good in it.

Take a dollar bill and on a physical layer it is paper and ink.  These words are formed out of contrasting pixels to form a sequence of symbols that on that same physical layer, are meaningless.  But the meaning is found in the meta physical nature of things.  That paper with green ink can mean so much to a person that they will murder for it.  This very blog post has many layers of meaning.  Our curiosity to explore and understand the true nature of things is a natural desire to know the truth.  The more we understand something, the closer to the true nature of something we become.  What is the meta physical nature of computers.  On the lower levels, a computer is just electrical pathways with switches and buttons. On an ever increasing level, a computer is intelligence in its purist form.  The biggest mistake we can make is to focus on trivial errors and a nature of things that don’t agree with us.  When we make those mistakes, we become damned in further understanding the true nature of things.  For example, it has become an unwritten rule not to use the same word repeatedly within a paragraph.  If such is the case with some piece of writing and such a mistake cannot be over looked, such people become damned in understanding the true nature of an author’s argument. It is always best to look for the deeper meaning of things.

The additional power of computers has been matched by the increasing demand of computer programs.  These programs have continually grown to acquire new abilities and features at the cost of increasing size and complexity.  Two approaches compete to provide the better software.  The Bazaar approach as mentioned by Eric Steven Raymond in his publication of The Cathedral and the Bazaar is open source.  The Bazaar approach presents rapidly adapting software and has resulted in great developments like the Linux operating system.  Such an approach has its problems.  With no director or conceptual model of the program, the program becomes greatly limited in its design.  Bazaar programs are like bacteria.  Bacteria rapidly evolves to a new environment and can become a deadly microbe but will never become more than a microbe.  The Cathedral approach is more like a fungus.  We are still along ways from creating an elegant program but fungus in many ways is superior to bacteria.  Fungus doesn’t evolve as quickly as bacteria, but it is far more resilient.  Many of the genes experimented with by the bacteria will influence the fungus into learning new skills.  The relationship between the Bazaar and the Cathedral is not so different. To say that either one is the superior is not to understand the relationship.

The book entitled The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman, expresses the flattening economic or general nature of an emerging global society.  The borders separating nations that were once walls to isolate and provide security have fallen to the emergence of a global market.  Fictional story writers have alluded to a society ruled by corporations ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union.  An American company is not in America any more, but is labeled American because of loyalties and general practices.   The world is no longer divided.  While government powers continue to influence economics in the best interest of the people, soon global corporations will become more powerful than the governments that supervise them.  Already, the effects can be measured by the bias within media, also known as propaganda.  General Electric owns a greater portion of the media and has used allegations of global warming to generate fear in the citizens of the United States.  With that fear, they have justified the increases in price of the utilities that General Electric provides and acquired government funding for various expensive projects.  Meanwhile, GE gets richer and more powerful.  Would it be surprising if pharmaceutical companies and medical suppliers are doing something similar with the current health care reform?  The general populace is just too stupid and gullible to keep these corporations in check.  The future is not going to have a free market or freedom unless we do something. How long will it take before the Bible is a front to these corporations?  When does the taking of life become part of a corporation’s business?  I worry about this future we’re creating.

Protection of intellectual property has always been a source of contention.  Unlike physical property, ideas and knowledge can be taken without anyone noticing that something is missing.  Forging steal was a secret that kingdoms paid heavy bounties to obtain.  Electronic bits of information is not all that different.  The source code behind Windows OS is extremely valuable.  But some information or data is simply absurd to assume that it can be patented.  Imagine patenting a choreographed dance routine in a music video.  Having such a patent enable the owner to do what?  Sue anyone that stole dance moves?  Companies like Adobe and Microsoft are within reason to protect their investments but minor things, like Lady Gaga’s Poker Face, are unreasonable to enforce copyrights.  Good judgement over impossibly complex legal codes provide the only solution to this epidemic, as it is the personal decision of computers users to download content.  Just be wise about what you do with the internet.

Since the 1971, a theoretical computer component know as Memristor had been theorized.  Only about two years ago was this theory realized with the invention of the first viable Memristor made from Titanium Dioxide.  A Memristor is short for Memory Resistor.  Memristor is much like Flash Memory and RAM combined.  It stores information that doesn’t dissipate after a loss of power and is as fast as RAM.  This means that computers could combine the RAM and Hard Drive into one unit.  Imagine a Terabyte of memory and no boot up or shut-down time.  Soon the vary CPU could be merged with the unit and computers as we understand them will become ancient history.  What makes this Memristor future a reality is that not only do we now have a circuit that can store information without the need of electricity, but that Memristors made with Titanium Dioxide are actually cheaper than Flash Drives and Hard Drives to produce.  The real question isn’t if computers are going to change but when and how fast are they going to change.  Money is money, and at the moment HP who owns this technology wants to get as much money out of their current products before they start transitioning.  Boycott and we may get this technology sooner, or Japan may just steal it like they have with other technologies.  Please see this article for more official information. [Demystifying the Memristor: Proof of fourth basic circuit element could transform computing]

Going on now is a controversy regarding censorship of Google’s utilities in conformity to Chinese laws (Google vs China: capitalist model, virtual wall.)  This is an important topic in directly correlating to the philosophies of free speech and democracy.  It is important to note that the western mentality is very different than how the citizens of China think.  We pride ourselves on the separation of church and state.  No matter how far removed a government appears to be from any religious affiliation, the more of a religion the state becomes.  A government is the beliefs that all of a nation must share and if we can no longer trust in God, I want no more part in it.  Is it wrong to hide information?  A parent places internet filters so their children won’t wander into the bad parts of the world.  The problem is really a moral one.  For any government to censor or promote propaganda, they begin to become the peoples religion.  China is in its moral right to censor and hasn’t broken any laws.  We have as much a problem in the United States as our government continues become ever more atheistic.  Before we can go solving China’s problem, we need to solve our own.

The book written by Cliff Stoll has a very interesting controversy not unlike what is going on right know between China and Google.  What rights or rules are there to the internet?  To make any claim that the internet is the property of any party is like trying the claim that the Moon is US property.  The internet is very much a new world that is growing larger every day but without a central government or security force to ensure its proper use.  In some countries like Iran, the internet has become a legitimate means to overturn oppression.  In other countries like Sweden, it is used to subvert copyrights and other legal blocks.  The internet is clearly international property that belongs to the world as a people.  Without a centralized police force for the internet, no decisive actions can be made to catch and prosecute offenders.  It won’t be much longer until a cyber government is formed to bring order to the chaos.  I’d prefer that such a government was a constitutional republic but with how things are going right now, it will likely become an unconstitutional oligarchy and end up being worse than the open net as we enjoy it now.  We really have three options at this point.  The first is that everyone acts with honesty and things don’t continue to degrade so that we won’t need more security.  The second is too begin to form the international networks government so that all the privileges we enjoy know will be preserved and the offenders can be punished.  Or last, we do nothing until frustrated organizations continue to consolidate the power of the net until a powerful enough dictatorship takes over the networks and dictates to all of us the terms of how we can use the internet.  I like the first option best but unfortunately it is the least realistic option.