• The power to make annoying songs of my choosing stick in people’s heads (always good to make any enterprising heroes think they have become manic depressives)
• The power to make stupidity hurt (continously).
• The power to always hit every streetlamp green
• The power to talk entirely in rhyming palindromes (because it would be awesome damnit)
• The power to force a person to think rationally about his next action (actually that would be kind of a hero power but what the heck)
• The power to instill mortal fear in telemarketers by whistling down the phone line
• The power to reverse entropy (so I can unscramble eggs you know)
• The power to prevent stupid things from becoming fads

This list is far from complete, but should give a fair idea of the kind of supervilian powers I believe will allow me as your future lord and master to rule with a relatively benign iron fist.

I also put a copy of the story up here for those who may want to read this after voting closes, it’s in the literature section of the site.

Not that there is anything wrong with that, I follow and comment on many such highly-personal blogs. But I became a bit more private in a sense. Over the years, rather than writing about my life – it became more important to me to write about my thoughts. My philosophical musings (as amatuerish as they may perhaps be), my take on technology news and more recently -roleplaying. How interesting that I stopped writing about my own personal life – and started to write about the personal lives of fictional characters. Personal lives with only the most tenuous connections to the game in which they are in fact set. The quests and events happen – but the thougths and feelings of those characters as they experience them – in fact their every experience of them, exist only in my mind.

I don’t want to try and analyze why the blog changed in this way because frankly – I haven’t got a clue where to start. I remain as adamantly on my quest of studying my own psyche for deeper meanings as I ever was, I suppose however that somewhere along the line I lost the capacity to express what I saw anymore – and that rather rules out the idea of crowd-sourcing the process.

Instead, the blog became an expression of my ideas and my fantasies rather than myself. I’m not unhappy about this, nor for that matter particularly extatic about it, I just find it interesting – and perhaps if I continue along this line of thought I’ll draw some useful conclusions to write a future post about. For now, I’ll go on with the philosophical post I was planning in my head as I lay in my bed late last night, which is in fact about pets.

It’s been said that having pets are the most uniquely human behaviour there is. No other species would raise, shelter, feed, protect and nurture another species for no other reward than the pleasure of it’s company. Evolutionary biologists generally believe however that it didn’t start out that way (though whose to say the first wolf-puppies brought into the cave by our ancestors as children was not brought in because he was cute and playful ? That the whole "hey he can help us hunt" thing only happened later ?). But let’s stick to the more orthodox theories for now, particularly as it aligns with the ones that fit into recorded history. Cats, horses – in fact almost every single pet humans keep did not start out as "pets". They started out as a simple symbiosis – the same kind of interspecies cooperation that is well documented throughout the animal kingdom.

Horses carried us around and pulled our vehicles- in return we gave them food, shelter and all the other amenities we could – allowing both species to exist in far greater numbers than either could have done alone. Some like rabits were originally domesticated purely for food reasons. Cats were kept primarily to keep down pests in grain stores and most likely – dogs were kept to guard and help hunt.

There is nothing particularly uniquely human about this. Sharks and Remoras have almost identically the same relationship as humans had with cats not long ago. In fact it almost appears that pets as we know it only even appeared on the scene in the last century or so – after the automobile was invented. Suddenly horses weren’t needed anymore – so they only ones left are kept for love. Urbanization largely removed the need for working cats – so cats came to be household companions like dogs. The result is that there has been interesting documented changes in cat behaviour over the past century. Cats still pretend to be highly independent creatures who could drop and forget their human hosts at a whim and only stick around and put up with the whole "affection" thing for the free food.

Any cat-owner knows it’s an act though – every cat knows it too. Cats need and seek out the love and affection of their human hosts, but the old loner-genes are still there, telling them they shouldn’t need it. So they pretend not to, as long as we are happy to let them pretend – they are happy to play along. Dogs however have been proper pets for far longer. Sure there are still hunting and guarding dogs out there – but they are a shrinking minority and most dogs haven’t been working dogs in any way at all for centuries.

Dogs have, in fact, managed to turn the whole master-pet relationship on it’s head. The best dogs are obedient and subservient – but also know they will never be asked anything more strenuous than a few simple tricks like "sit". In return for which – humans shelter them, feed them, clean up their poop, give them warmth and the loving affection which these pack animals are genetically programmed to crave as much as we do. Humans are masters only in name. We may believe we give the orders – but show me one decent human who can look at a hungry dog and refuse to give it food ? They may not vocalise the commands – but the commands are there nonetheless.

Domesticated animals have a deal with humans – they provide us something in return we provide them with things. When that which they provided us once loses value- and we keep providing without asking anything more than their company… we move beyond symbiosis, these animals become pets. If ever there was proof that humans are not merely slaves to our evolution but can transcend it – pets are it. Beyond symbiosis love survived, on both sides of the deal.

But if my hypothesis is correct then this civilized pet-keeping genuinely didn’t exist even a hundred years ago. Just 50 years ago the vast majority of people were still in favor of racial segregation (sure those people still exist but they are a shrinking minority now). The last 100 years or so of human history was not just the period of the most rapid scientific and technological advance in our history – it seems to me it was the period of the most rapid social and civilizational advance as well.

And in this there is a message perhaps of hope. Those who feel that peace for humanity is impossible because all of human history is war – are missing this. We were evolved to be a warfaring species, but we can transcend our evolution. The proof is all around us, pets being just one of the obvious examples. It’s not going to happen fast. It’s not going to happen easilly. But it certainly can happen – and the trend seems to be toward that change. Slow as it may be.

So do I believe world peace is possible ? I do in fact yes. Humanity is still evolving, our brains are, much faster than our bodies could. We’re getting better as a species. I don’t know if I, or anybody who reads this, will be around to see it. But look what we did in the last 100 years… imagine where we will be by 2110 ? Forget the technology and science, try to imagine what we can do socially… there is real reason to hope.

Having said that – hope alone has never done anything good. There is still in the world today many who relish our inherited, destructive natures. Who commit genocides and atrocities and call it "justice". Who order soldiers to kill and call it "honor". There are still soldiers who take pleasure in shooting a schoolbus to pieces from a helicopter – as many in the "good" nations as in the "bad". There are still politicians who will call torture "harsh interogation" and then go and claim it’s justified.

If we leave them be – we won’t progress. Progress depends on our efforts to speak out against these things. Decry them – and face the ire of their supporters. We won’t live to see world peace. But every time we open our mouths to say "no, it’s NOT okay" – we help make sure that our children or grandchildren might.

Those we call heroes, and those we call despots tend to sound exactly the same when you listen to their speeches superficially. Because they use the exact same vocabulary. They use words like "justice" and "honor" and "rights". To tell the difference you must look not at what words are used – but what they say with those words.

So when you next take your dog for a walk, when it licks your hand and you see that utter love in it’s eyes. Remember that once we used them like slaves – and they became our friends, our brothers. We crossed the line of perfectly peaceful coexistence with other species. Species who were evolved to be OUR predators ! In just a century – we evolved that friendship to persist past "usefulness" – into pure love and affection and companionship.

If our ancestors could do that with wolves – then there is absolutely no reason we cannot do it with one another.

Ironically from a strictly economic point of view unions are as capitalist an idea as you’ll find. The reason people see it differently is a lie spread in the last few decades that capitalism is all about benefiting companies – this makes the best of it’s ideas sour for socialists, and ironically produces a kind of capitalism that is not only deserving of disrespect but doomed to faillure. Capitalism in essence is based on rewarding production with money. Capitalism is therefore incapable of succeeding whenever one party has too much power or control over money – as that destroys he reward system. The reason to reward production in the first place is to create a society where more people have access to more resources.

If those resources all end up in a few hands, then you’re achieving the opposite to the goal of capitalism. Capitalism is built on the idea of bargaining to set market rates – and when you have a significant power imbalance (as between employers and employees) it makes sense to use collective bargaining to restore the equilibrium.

A lot of the sour feeling among many people about striking as a concept comes from a work ethic that is genuinely uncapitalist. The ideal of work as it’s own reward. This is a very religious position – but it’s not an economic one. The realty is that labour is a market, employees are selling a resource that employers are buying. The trouble is that in the vast majority of roles it’s a buyers market – there is excessive supply compared to the demand. This is one reason for inflation and the reduction in living standards over the past 30 years (the first time since the foundation of the USA that a generation has had a reduction in living standards compared to their parents, ever, and that was already true at the height of hte 2005 boom – long before the current downturn).

The role unions play is to allow employees to bargain collectively and set a more fair market price for their product. This is in fact a very essential part of the free-market system. If you think the free market is only about producing goods and maximising corporate profits then you may think that anything that prevents salaries from being at the lowest possible level is bad for the economy (like the people who believe that unemployment rates of less than 20% is bad for the economy as well). However if you think of each member of society as being a part of the free market system then whether you’re a business owner or an employee you have to think in terms of maximising your individual profit.

Employees can do so by gaining rarer skills that have higher market value but this is not an option available to all and wouldn’t be good for the economy if it was (after all -if nobody is a factory worker anymore, then there aren’t factories). So for those in the bad end of the market, unions and collective bargaining is a powerful and much needed means of ensuring they get to sell their product (labour) for a decent price. If capitalism is working then that means EVERYTHING must be sold at a profit. In the labor market this means even the floor sweeper must be able to earn more than his expenses. Merely meeting them is not enough (and besides is indistinguishable from slavery), there must be profit – profit that can be saved, so it can be invested in new industries and the economy can keep growing.

One standard practise of unions through the years have been to picket their places of work during strikes, this too is needed. If the employers can simply replace the strikers then bargaining is impossible and your downward spiral (that can ONLY lead to economic collapse) is actually hastened rather than prevented.

Where the South African unions however are truly getting the irk of people up are in their habit of using intimidation to prevent people who do want to work from performing important tasks. This is even worse when the employer is the state – not because the state is better than a corporation or shouldn’t get the same need to bargain – but because it’s services are usually a matter of life and death.

There must be an understanding that people’s lives, and the safety of children are of higher consequence than profit. This is why for many years teachers, policemen and health professionals did not have the right to strike. The South African constitution has since 1994 changed this, granting striking as a constitutional right to all citizens (unionized or otherwise) and also removing the previous red-tape of needing permission from a court before being allowed to commence a strike action.

It was needed to provide bargaining means to these professions. Our countries history is filled with health professionals in particular working under terrible conditions for terrible pay – and not having any recourse to bargain for better. It was so bad that I’ve heard hospital administrators (the people who they bargain against) declare the need for them to have industrial action recourses. What the law lacks however, is the means to ensure that this required ability to bargain as a group does not endanger lives.

When teachers and medical professionals go on strike people’s lives are risked and children’s safety is at stake – that is not condoneable either. There was a time in the 90′s when we saw people dying in empty hospitals while their nurses and doctors Toyi-Toyi’d outside. This is a terrible situation. Things are not that bad now, as the hospitals and unions have agreed to maintain enough staff to ensure that ICU and ER’s continue to operate – shutting down only the less immediate threats during the strike. This is still an issue for people whose illness may BECOME fatal if not treated now but it’s an improvement.

There is no doubt that there have been acts of intimidation during this strike to try and prevent volunteers and other workers (union-members and otherwise) from fullfilling these critical roles during the strike. This is decidedly NOT allowed by the constitutional right to strike and must be condemned. But it’s quite wrong to focus only on those cases and then decry the entire strike.

Somebody on twitter declared the strike imorral because "you do not become a nurse or a teacher for the money". Perhaps not, but nurses and teachers also need to earn a living wage, otherwise the only people who would take these jobs are those who can’t get any others – and those are not the people we want doing them. Wage-rates are a product and the price is set by the market, strikes are a part of that process.

In short, like just about everything people have a firm and absolute opinion on – the opinions are ill-informed and wrong. The issue is complex and the balance is hard to strike (no pun intended). Without unions and industrial action – employees are at a market disadvantage that sets the price of their product lower and lower (ultimately below cost) – and that destroys economies, on the other hand – ensuring that balance cannot be done at the cost of human lives !

So is there a solution ? Well to an extent part of it must consist of preventing strike actions in the first place. It is my opinion that nurses, doctors and teachers do perhaps the most crucial work in the country and their wages must represent that. They are striking for 8% but their basic rate ought to be some 800% higher than it is. Pay them well, really well, in the first place – and the likelihood of strikes are greatly reduced.

That is of course only a partial sollution – it is no better for the economy to give the employees 100% power than it is if the employers have it. The current system is still so sided toward employers (including the state) that even if the strikers get every demand they will still have far less than what their jobs ought to have. A first step ought to be the implementation of a different payscale for these roles to put them on salaries comensurate to the importance of their work. Ironically if you do this – you remove the need for unions.

In markets where labor does earn good incomes you rarely see unionization. IT workers and stock-brokers don’t have or need unions. We don’t need them because our labor rate can be effectively bargained on an individual basis. Our employers do not have absolute power because we can always get another job (and probably a better one), but we don’t have absolute power either because if we fired our ability to do so is diminished. That is the best balance to get.

There is probably no way to ever get that for floorsweepers and tea-ladies but it is an absolute shame on our government that we don’t have it for teachers and nurses. If set up the system to do so – then we won’t have, or need, strikes. We can then actually prohibit these roles from striking – and it won’t be a travesty because once the system IS like that, it becomes almost impossible to change it.

In short, we are seeing the problems we have right now because we’ve allowed crucial roles to be sold at a major disadvantage in the market. Thus unionised action is the only way for these people to bargain about the price. If we wish to end strikes – we must correct this and make the market for these roles comensurate to the need for them.

Well the joke is over that’s for sure. Larry spent the last few years on a drive of targetted acquisitions that usually ended up buying companies for their products and putting most of the employees who created those products out of a job (that btw. of ye who worship the "invisible hand of the market" does NOT count as economic growth. Bigger companies with FEWER employees is bad for everybody – including customers) culminating now in the acquisition of SUN.

Unlike most such acquisitions Oracle did not need to fire most of SUN’s top engineers – they almost all walked out on the first day in protest. These were people who worked for what was once perhaps the closest thing to noble any corporation could be, a company that was once rated the best I.T. company in the world to work for – founded by engineers. Oracle’s culture is almost a polar opposite – it has always and forever been for them about one thing only: how much money can we make.

Oracle’s purchase of SUN gave them control over a number of major technologies – the sun hardware business being practically speaking the least of them. SUN may not in recent years have been very good at monetizing their assets but the software technologies they owned were nonetheless disruptive, innovative and major forces in the market – and now Oracle owns them all.

They own MySQL – a database that was rapidly chewing away at their market share. Most analysts never realized just how huge a threat to their primary bottom line MySQL really was. A few more years, MySQL may have supplanted Oracle as the market leader in databases and the number two spot would have belonged to PostGreSQL. If you thought Oracles competition was Ingress and IBM’s DB2 they looked untouchable – but while this fooled analysts (and oracle was happy to keep them fooled) it wasn’t a true picture. Oracle knew very well that MySQL and PostgreSQL had the capacity to take over the database market from them and the inevitability of that success which is practically built into any successfull FOSS business model.

So Oracle bought SUN to get MySQL. The other major technology they wanted was Java. That most beloved of academic languages that somehow never took off on desktops or the web it was supposedly created for. It didn’t take off on desktops because frankly the story of Java the web-language was a bit of marketing. James Gossling and his team had designed oak: a language created for mobile and embedded systems, to capitalize on a coming revolution. SUN wasn’t wrong in predicting said revolution – they were just 15 years too early, so in the meantime they reinvented Oak into Java, called it a web-language and got it out there, getting a stable of developers ready.

Java expanded it became a darling of back-end services and application-service systems (tomcat is a lovely example). It became a cornerstone language in the market for many tasks (developing user-facing desktop applications was never it’s strong suit but there’s a lot more to the programming world than those) – and when the embedded revolution did come, Java was it’s darling.

It still is, J2ME is the most widely usable phone development platform there is. Android apps are written in a slight variant of desktop Java (but Android can also run J2ME apps through a compatibility layer). Even Windows7 phones support Java apps. The only exception is Android’s biggest rival: The Iphone.

People talk about Steve Jobs’s refusal to allow flash on the iphone but much more important is his continued prevention of java as a language. Both are prevented for one reason only: it makes iphone into a walled garden, whose apps run on nothing else, and which cannot run apps developed for anything else. Such deliberately blocking of interoperability is bad for the consumers and gets worse in the long run – in fact, it’s a classic Microsoft business technique (less so nowadays because Microsoft is frankly not as powerful as it once was and cannot get away with it so easilly).

Android is the great thorn in Apple’s side – a platform that gives comparable features while being open and interoperable breaks down the value of their walled garden approach. Apple however never had the gutts to sue Google – instead they sued HTC and other handsent manufactuers – their hope being to scare the handsets away from googles stack with the very real threat of patent litigation.

So far, nobody has backed down so I think Apple’s plan isn’t working very well for them. Larry Ellingson however, did not sue HTC. Larry went after google itself. It doesn’t have much choice really – their claim is that google’s adapted desktop JVM on a phone (rather than a desktop computer) violates the Java licensing (those parts that aren’t GPL’d at least) and patents. Patents which recent posts by people like James Gossling reveal to have been filed for absolutely no other reason than to build SUN a defensive position when other companies sued the once patentless company over trivial patents and won. Patents created through a "lets see who can get the stupidest patent granted" competition among the staff !

Now those patents belong to one of the most unscrupulous businessmen in I.T. today. The suit against google is about one thing – firmly cementing Oracle as the dictator over Java. They who shall decide which java features are available on which platforms. Google perhaps has some room for a defense based on stretching the defintions of desktop computer. Android is pretty close to a desktop OS as it is, and tablets will bring it even closer (much as it did for Apple). As the line between "phone" and "pc" has gotten blurrier – perhaps the legal seperation of the concepts aren’t so clear anymore either. I’m no lawyer so I won’t debate the viability of this but it’s worth considering that when J2ME was created with it’s smaller feature-set (a feature-set not good enough for Androids capabilities) phones (and the apps they could run) were far less powerful than they are now. My HTC Desire has more processing power than any of my first 5 computers. It just happens to fit in my pocket.

Oracle wants control over Java at that level. Sun already gave us the core java technologies under the GPL which makes oracle weak in what they can do with it, but here they are showing the power of patents. The Harmony class-libraries from apache were based on the GPL’d java source code, Android’s JVM is based on Harmony – yet Oracle is asserting a power that the GPL specifically removes: to control where and how the code may be run. Harmony remains an uncertified Java set – because to get certified requires one to comply with an additional license that removes almost all the GPL freedoms.

Oracle didn’t go after Harmony, at least – not yet, they went after Google and they have one goal in mind here: to take back control over Java. Ironic because it’s exactly the fact that SUN has been evermore relaxed about controlling it over the years that allowed it’s continued growth. It remains one of the few parts of SUN’s software business that was actually profitable right to the end.

But control Java, and you control a huge section of the software market, particularly that part where Oracle is the strongest. If you destroy it in the process ? So what. Oracle DB will only get stronger if that happens – they would much rather lose the Java revenue to protect their database market at all costs.

So does this mean the end of Java ? This lawsuit already has companies clamoring to start processes to move their code from Java to other platforms which has a largely negative knock-on effect on everybody (and ultimately the worst on consumers) so it’s already done terrible harm. It is likely to get worse. If Google prevails, or comes out with a good settlement – then mobile Java may yet survive – it’s too huge a market to die easily. If they fail – even that is dead.

But Java as we know it died the day Larry Ellingson filed that lawsuit. It will spend quite a few years on involuntary muscle spasms as the case drags on – but it’s dead. In the interest of consumers and corporates and everybody else outside Oracle it is now truly vital to viably replace all of Java with a truly free alternative. The good news is that the core Java technologies ARE GPL’d. Java may be dead – but it is now time to ressurect it, in a new form without corporate control. Use th GPL’d code that SUN gave us before it’s demise and rebuild the rest from the ground up. We weren’t far from it even before -nothing should stop us now.

I propose this as the new number one entry on the FSF’s important-projects list. We need a free J2ME, a free JVM, a free servlet engine. I write as somebody who learned Java at University and never voluntarily used it since. I despise the language, I find it clunky and hard to read and harder to build with and I much prefer leaner and cleaner languages like python myself, but I recognize the value Java and it’s position has brought to computing, I recognize the harm it can do to once more revert this power into a single corporate entity’s hands. In fact it will be far worse now. Java is much more powerful, and it’s not Oracle’s primary product for them it is nothing BUT a means of control – so they will fight to control it entirely, and with it a thousand companies and a million developers and a hundred million users.

I may not like Java – but I know we cannot let that happen.

Why is it so hard to imagine a world where everybody can be whatever sexual orientation they are, including you – mister homophobe, without feeling incredibly threatened by the idea of everybody not being exactly like you – without making everyone who is other than you an enemy ? Why is it so hard for a movement that starts to advance the rights of an oppressed group to advance those same rights for all – without creating a "them" to hate ? Feminism started out like that. Perhaps the most credible definition of sexism I ever heard came from a feminist icon who defined it as: "To consider sex, when sex doesn’t matter."

It’s credible because firstly it doesn’t pretend that sex (as in male or female) never matters – and limits sexism to when you use it as a judging tool, in cases where it doesn’t and shouldn’t influence the judgement – crucially it makes no distinction about the sex of the person practising sexism, it is something that can be done by either sex to either sex. The dictionary definition is almost identical though less poetically put.

But the people who run this blogsite (and many others) have decreed that sexism is only sexism if you have power as wel – and since women never have power they can never be sexist. I have written before about the flaws in their logic (what about a female business owner who sexually harasses a male employee ? It does happen – and it’s definitely sexist, it’s really sexist against themselves for women to imagine they have no power and no other women ever do either) but that is not what I want to write about now. I think if you look deeper then you see the same old problem.

What began as a noble goal (equal opportunities regardless of sex) had become an us-and-them issue for these people – and is now fueled by hatred. To justify an us-and-them attitude you have to create an enemy (they call it "the patriarchy" and cleverly pretend they don’t mean everybody on the planet who happened to have been born a heterosexual male), and you must make that enemy the symbol of all you consider evil. You cannot be honest and admit that the evil you oppose sometimes come from your own side, that your own actions can actually hinder sexual equality for some people (the very same actions that are decried as objectification in one context is claimed as feminist liberation by other women in other contexts – something else I have previously written about).

Of course not all feminists are man-haters, but some certainly are – and they speak loudly and their hatred causes them to act in ways that are harmful to society as a whole, just like homophobes and racists do.

In the end what all these ideas have in common is a basis of exclusion. A prehistoric tendency to split the world up into "my people" who are "the true human beings" and everybody else who is "the enemy". Overcoming this attitude could perhaps be deemed the only true measure of civilization. We become human when we stop seperating people into us and them but rather start to judge and consider them as individuals.

Sex columnist Dorothy Black in a tweet today decried how "an act of tenderness toward a male partner is often decried as unempowered in feminist discourse". To the kind of feminist who has (perhaps subconciously) turned it into a battle between "us and the patriarchy" tenderness toward a male partner does seem, without exception, to be unempowered – more specifically to be treachery. To show kindness to the enemy. Ironically the sexism that feminism was created to combat had done exactly the same thing, and once it was considered weak and unempowered for a man to show tenderness to his female partner. Merely turning the tables is no victory for feminism – it’s just a new kind of evil. A victory only happens when I can be tender toward my girlfriend, and she to me without either of having to fear that we are somehow not living up to societies expectations of us. There is no sexual equality if either sex cannot be happy in their sex lives, career lives and love lives. Is that such a hard concept ?

Such seperatist ideas have a long history of causing terrible harm, sadness, suffering and needless death. Surely we as people are not such slaves to our ancestry as to be unable to surmount it as a species ? I know many individuals who have – who have managed to come to see people as individuals and judge them as such alone. To determine who they want to be friends with or not based on how somebody acts- not the gender of that person, or their religion, or their culture or their country of birth.

As long as we entertain these us-and-them ideas, as long as we think it’s okay to split the world up into those who are acceptable and those who are not, hatred will continue to be our definining attribute. Wars will remain our natural state (there has only been 2 years of complete peace in the entire time since World War 2 – out of all of human history, less than 1% was peacefull times), and society will be unable to progress.

Of course to those who have made this leap – it becomes second nature and the us-and-them attitude is filled with logical contradictions and obvious stupidity – so we assume the people who hold it to be stupid. This isn’t entirely true – what is really happening is cognitive dissonance. People unable and unwilling to entertain facts that contradict what they want to, need to, believe.

It’s a curse of humanity and there is very little we can do about it, except to try and expose people to alternate beliefs at a young age -before they become so invested in those ancestral beliefs as to never again be able to live outside them. When we encounter other ideas from a young age, our emotional investment in one set is less intense, we can consider those ideas. We may yet reject them – but at least we consider them and will refine the ideas we do have to be smarter because of this.

That is a slow process, but it’s not an unstoppable one, and it’s not a process that can only be done to the young (it just works a little easier there). Every time a person is forced to confront facts that question his or her us-and-them believes there’s a small chance that person will not succumb to the lure of cognitive dissonance, will recognize the question and be forced to try and answer it… that a small crack in that believe system can appear. Cracks can and do break down walls.

So my question to all who reads this today, and to myself as well, is this: what are you doing to break down a little hatred today ?

A great quote from it is this one: “Programming a computer is, essentially, just discovering a number that suits the programmers wishes”.

The thing is – for somebody whose only understanding of computation theory is even that paper- this will seem like a bit of a leap. After all the process of writing code is creative, involves design and innovative thinking – surely this wonderful process cannot just be “discovering a number” – after all – you can do that just by counting – this is WHY it’s unpatentable…

What I want to do with this post is to – very simply – explain why that really is true. I’m going to give you a very simple computer program. I’ll write it in pseudocode so non-programmers can read it, but it can be implemented easily in any programming language and run – and in most of them will take less than about 10 lines of code to do:


Make the vairable X equal to 0;
Start a loop here:
Write the binary representation of X into a new file.
increase X by 1
continue the above loop until the program is interrupted by deliberately killing it (an infinite loop);


With this simple program – I can create an exact copy of every single program ever written and – this is important – every single program that CAN ever be written.
This is because any compiled program becomes a file filled with zeros and ones – to a computer, that’s just a big number (the whole computation theory and lambda calculus etc. that explains how a number can BE an algorithm is needed to know how this happens – but the important thing is – it’s a number). This program will store every number that can exist into a file – by just counting.

The process is very ineffective for a few reasons: firstly almost every program it produces won’t run, the vast majority of numbers do not correspond to useful programs – in fact only an incredibly small subset of them do – but they are still numbers you can count to, and they are still numbers my program WILL produce. Secondly there is no real way to determine the useful programs from the ones that aren’t- you have to manually try to run all of them – and see for yourself what happens. More-over for every program in there, you’ll produce thousands of copies – some that will only run on other computers than yours. But somewhere in there will be a full version of Microsoft OutLook that can run on your computer… if you run it long enough at least.
Another inefficiency is that it creates every program as one self-sustained entity – as it ends up in memory, but programs aren’t sold like that. Programs have many parts that are identical between them (just like the number 105 and the number 316 both contain the number 1 – just one a much bigger scale) – it’s smart to store these in separate files so multiple programs can use them – it saves disk space, but it doesn’t change the number that actually goes into memory when it is run, it merely stores it more efficiently by avoiding replication.

The process is fully doable however, it would take a massive amount of time to discover just the subset of numbers that correspond to a runnable program – let alone the ones inside that do anything useful – and of course since you’ll also be generating every virus program ever – the process is likely to be rather harmful to your computer.

So indeed, you CAN discover every computer program ever written, and every computer program that WILL ever be written just by counting – just like you can do any multiplication sum by adding up numbers repeatedly. But it’s a very crude an ineffective way of doing it, learning multiplication saves a lot of time and effort for the same result, but even though it’s a faster process- ultimately it is STILL just adding up repeatedly.
Programming in the end is a technique whereby we can very efficiently narrow down onto the numbers that are truly useful, we use principles of engineering and mathematics to skip the addition and multiply directly as it were – going straight to the number we are looking for. In fact it’s not a perfect process – that’s why all programs have bugs – we don’t get to exactly the perfect number for the program we want – we get to a number that’s so close however as to make no difference. Somewhere in there is the number that will be the perfect bug-free version of the program. The counting way could find it (but will be hardpressed proving it did) but the programming methods won’t – the closer you get the harder it gets to narrow down, the very same things that make programming a much more efficient way than counting to find useful software, also makes it’s results slightly less perfect. It’s sort of like calculating the value of Pi, the longer you go on – the more accurate your answer becomes but you never quite get there and the cost of one more digit of accuracy must eventually be higher than the value of having it.

So there you have it – not only is every program a number – they are all simple integer numbers that can be counted, and all the great skill and artifice of the programmer is really just a much more efficient way of finding the number we want – rather than counting through them all and checking if it is the one we want (which could take centuries to be honest).

You cannot ask for a more simple piece of proof that a program is in fact a number – that software is discovered rather than invented. The fact that we have very effective methods of discovering them does not change this and doesn’t change that you should not be able to patent numbers.

I still highly recommend reading the article I linked – especially if you are a lawyer or activist involved in the software patent field as it explains the underlying theories very clearly. Effectively it tells you how it came to BE that these numbers are useful, and how we derive their particular useful meaning from them. That process of derivation is what computer hardware does, and a better tool to do that with is patentable (which is why you should indeed be able to get patents on computer hardware), but go in with this basic understanding. That every computer program really is just a number, that those numbers can be reached by simple counting – I’ve proven this to you here, and all of computer programming – as wonderful and delicious and artistic a field of endeavor as it is – is really in the end – just a faster way to count to a number that we like.
This does not reduce from programming any of it’s artifice, if anything it adds to the merit of the field because the processes by which we count are complex and fantastic and beautiful and we are always looking at ways to count even more effectively so we invent new programming languages and ideas like agile programming to help us do it even better – but in the end, the results is just a number that anybody could have counted to – and that is NOT an invention you can patent.

UPDATE: Something I didn’t make clear above but which is important – is that you will generate not only every program that can exist but every FILE that can exist. This includes for example if you read them all as .jpg – every digital photograph – photoshop’d or not that can be taken. A digital camera is just a very efficient way to get to the number that represents a picture – it’s still art. Photoshop is a way to manipulate that same number with small algebraic changes to get to one very near it, but slightly different – it’s still art. This is why I say that this reality doesn’t reduce programming’s artistic and creative status. If you read them all – every text file that can exist is in there too, from the bible to Shakespeare’s Macbeth. But it also includes about a million numbers right NEXT to the one with Shakespeare’s Macbeth which differ only in that an A on line 6000 has been replaced by a Z for example. Again – authors seem to be real artists for finding the “magic number” without counting and checking every possible variation – indeed for doing so long before we had the mathematical knowhow to turn something like MacBeth into a number and back again. The PDF versions are in there too. Every music file, the mp3 compressed ones and otherwise. Every news report and every youtube video will get generated.
It will also be damn near impossible to find anything in there by looking manually – you’d have to study each number just to figure out if you should run it, try to boot it or open it in a video player ! What’s worse there’s real CPU specific stuff in this approach – the 64-bit version of outlook will be a very different (literally – an order of magnitude different) number from the 32-bit version of the same program.
The nice thing is that if you find the right source* file number, you can generate all the possible binary file numbers from it. You’d need to wade through a few thousand ones just like with MacBeth that are almost but not quite right – except for one altered or missing character somewhere.
So programmers focus on finding the the magic number for the file with the source code – because find that one, and you can jump straight to any of the executables magic numbers with a single calculation which we call “compiling” . See what I mean by “a much more efficient way to count to a useful number” ?

*Text files, executable, source code, pdf’s all files in fact are saved as just one gigantic number on a computer. The computer just follows a set of rules to make sense of them. The exact rules differ between architectures – on an 8-bit computer if you tell it that the file is “text” it will read every 8 digits, take that as a number by itself and find a corresponding letter from a chart (known as the ascii set), on 32-bit and higher computers it reads more – and can refer to longer and more complete charts like unicode – but ultimately – what gets saved on the disk is still just one big number. Here-in lies the secret to what lets the “universal Turing machine” actually work – software is data.

I left Arathi behind at the beginning of the week and travelled across the sea to Theramore. From where I had to choose the best way to get to my next destination, deep below the Thousand Needles in Tanaris. Since I lacked a nearby flightpoint for Thousand Needles, I thought for a moment then jumped in the water and swam for the Tanaris desert.

It’s quite a long way and even with aquatic form took me the better part of 15 minutes to swim but I came out near a small harbour run by the Steemwheedle Cartel and picked up some quests before heading into the local capital town of Gadgetzan. Goblin land it was. I gotta say there is something truly cute about Goblins in a kinky sort of way. Too bad they seem to be rather to preoccupied with money to be notice the opposite sex of even their own race. I swear if Goblins could order their kids from the auction house they wouldn’t bother to make them.

Still there was plenty to do in the area. I killed a lot of pirates (seems where-ever I meet the Cartel they have me fighting pirates) and stole their hats – apparently to be sold by a goblin with an eye on the fashion market. I recovered some stolen cargo from them as well. It was surprizingly easy most of the time, I would go into catform – sneak up behind my enemy and strike… they pretty much went over like mice.

Further questing had me recover stolen water towers and rescue a robotic chicken. This was the first time in a while that I went bear form but the chicken was beset by a number of scorpids at once and being able to pull aggro and tank them down made the quest a lot easier- even if I had to self-heal and root several times.

Finally I hit level 45 and could do what I’d been planning to do for ages. I travelled to the Searing Gorge. A volcanic wasteland overrrun with giant red spiders and the machinations of the dark iron dwarves everywhere. During the course of the next few days I rescued a dwarf called Dornius only to watch him hit by a sniper. So I stole an artifact from the Twilight Cult and used it to – I thought free the dwarves enslaved by the dark irons. Turns out it was all a mean old trick and Dornius was actually Lathorius the Black. I had to kill him and this giant mechanical called Obsidian.

I don’t like being lied to. It pisses me off. Be nice, I may just be a purring kitty, but lie or be mean and I’ll rake you till you look like somebody put you through a shredder. Grrr. I then recovered some stolen property form the dark iron dwarves, a smithing tuyere and a spyglass, killed a lot of incendosaurs and basically had an awesome time.

There is something very satisfying about prowling up behind an enemy, pouncing him and ripping his heart out. It’s a cat thing. The only bad thing is that there was practically no eyecandy at all in the whole place. The dwarves are their usual short ugly selves, the dark irons are stupid, the twilight cultists seriously don’t have what it takes to pull of bright red robes (and WTF anyway ? Red Robes ? You’re the TWILIGHT CULT – shouldn’t you be wearing grey or black ? Listen to pwnies – because you have as much fashion sense as turtle soup) and well that’s the entire population. The only semi decent looking guy around was a paladin hanging around with his squire – he had me collect parts to make a staff called the Torch of Retribution witch which I set the dark iron’s watchtowers alight. Then he summoned a dragon to help him with his vengeance. Okay so he was kina cute and apparently not to hung up on the whole vow of chastity thing… but well so angry depressed. Seriously, how do you have any fun with somebody who just wants to slaughter his enemies all the bloody time.

He was almost worst than RavenJet – and I’m guessing his staff isn’t nearly as big.

Well I hit level 48 after all that, and need to go back to my trainer soon. Then I will decide what next, I suspect it may be time to move on to a new location like the burning steppes.

I have done absolutely nothing all week. What with one thing and another my little family got all the minor attention going around so I basically sat in the Hinterlands waiting for a turn that never came. I am soo bored I swear if I don’t get to kill something tonight I’m going to seduce one of the guards here just to do something.

Now of course, nelf seduction is hardly unusual but these guards are all dwarves and I mean, I DO have my pride and besides, with dwarves you really never know where they’ve been so please let me kill some things tonight. Pretty please.

The JetRaven Chronicles: I hunter

Me an HollyPolly wen to da Arathi Highlands in da early part of the week. As we fought our way tru many quests killing lots of ugly dwarves wid uglier green vests, we ultimately got sent to da shoreline. There we killed lots of Naga’s to steal der fin’s and then lots of Murloc’s to steal der eyes. All this to help out da Tarren Mill alchemist. Basically I can only conclude dat alchemy be a pretty damn gross profession, a lot like da voodoo but widout da zombies. Anyway HollyPolly is a zombie too so Iz confused about dem now cos she be kina cute.

Da difficult bit was dat da murloc’s hang around right next to da Alliance town of Southshore which be filled wid guards who don’t take kindly to horde members passing tru, they was also very tough – in due time we’ll of course be able to slaughter dem but for now, dey be somewhat beyond our abilities. While dere however I put Screwch in the stable and tamed meself a spider pet adding a new class of pet (cunning) to me list. I named him Snapz. Snapz has certainly got his uses, when I attack something he will usually web me target allowing me to get many shots in before da target can even move. Dis be very nice for crowd control, cos now me and me pet both have trapz. Oh yes, I learned how to make immolation trapz. Dey be traps that let me do one of da same damages dat Hollypolly does – very useful wen da enemy get too close.

From Tarren Mill we wen to Strangletorn Vale to meet wid dis guy called Hemet Nessingwary. Him a very famous hunter so even though him a dwarve ant an alliance it was still great honor to meet him. Nessingwary he dinna just let us visit da camp, he give us a chance to prove our hunting skillz so we wen to kill panters and raptors and tigers, an each time we do – he send us to kill tougher ones. Da tigers were da easiest to kill each time but also da hardest quests cos der never be enuf of dem anywhere an always you haf to kill lots of extra panters cos they hang out in da same places as da tigers. I tink ole Hemet he hunted a bit too many of da tigers dats why der not be many left now. Lucky wid me tracking beasts we cud usually find whatever we was hunting pretty easy.

While still hunting for Hemet we made it to level tirty and got a lot of new quests which we did in between da hunting. Mostly dese were from Grom’Gol basecamp and dey was for us to kill da bloodscalp trollz who be using da bad voodoo. We collected der necklaces and der udder property. We had to kill many, many of dem. Many times we wud empty der camps and then wait for dem to send new ones and kill dem all again. I wud have died a lot doing dis and Hollypolly did (but she bein’ a zombie I guess it’s no big deal – she kina been der, done dat got da t-shirt ting hehe) but I now know how to feign death and many times I only stayed alive when too many trollz attacked by making dem tink I was already dead.

Wen next we enter we will need to kill more trollz cos we need more necklaces and we got new quests for dem and also we still have new hunting quests for Hemet.

The legend of RavenJet: The story so far (in short summary of only the important bits)

I grew up in Gnomeregan, the great city of the gnomes. A splendid place of engineering wizardry filled with devices of extraordinaryness and if anybody doubted it we would just zap them with the extraordinarytron and then they wouldn’t. I was barely 18 though when gnomeregan fell and alone with Mam and Pappy and most of our surviving friends we fled to Ironforge. It was there that I met a gnome called Briarthorn. Briarthorn was a warlock. Pappy had always wanted me to be an engineer like him and I agreed and studied hard, but Briarthorn had power. Dark and attractive and I was drawn to it. I had seen my homeland destroyed and my friends turned into irradiated monsters… I was not a happy young gnome and in this path I saw the route to revenge.

Revenge for the girl who had given me my first zap with a kissatron and whom I had last seen glowing green and filed with dire hatred. Revenge for losing my home. Here was the power to vindicate myself and my people. After much debate, Pappy agreed that I could train (under protest but I guess he realized I wouldn’t back down) but only if also trained engineering.

From the dwarves I learned mining, from pappy engineering and from Briarthorn my first steps on the path of dark wizardry and demonology as a warlock. I fought many creatures, often more powerful than me and enslaved many demons to do my bidding as I travelled Azeroth, in due time I would explore every corner of it and in fact I now wear the tabbard of the explorer’s league but my beginnings were of course, rather more humble than that.

By the time I was level 30, a mere 22 years old, I teamed up with a Night Elf priest and a Dwarven Warrior and together we entered gnomeregan and fought our way through trogs and corrupted technologies until we faced the Mekgineer and as I fired the final shadow bolt at him I could feel my thirst for vengeance somewhat quenched. But the thirst was still there, the knowledge that there was more injustice and suffering out there, and that I wanted to make those who brought it suffer as I had suffered.

I chose the path of the affliction warlock, the anger in me could only be appeased by the slow torture of my enemies it offered. When old age came to take Pappy, I went to Tanaris in the deserts of Kalimdor and learned Goblin engineering even though it would have broken his heart if I had done it while he was alive, but if I was to be an engineer as well – I wanted to blow things up.

On went my journey over several more years, my skills in the dark arts growing and ultimately I came to the plaguelands. At first my service to the Argent Dawn was merely as a mercenary. I was there to fight the undead scourge for money to fund my thirst to punish those who had made me suffer so, the Mekgineer may be dead but gnomeregan remained irradiated, the troggs survived in great numbers and I would see them all burned in the shadowflame.

Then as I fought for the Dawn in Darrowshire I came across the ghost of a little girl called Pamela Redpath, and that day I found a new focus for the dark thirst inside me as she asked me to fetch for her the parts of her dolly. I found out more about her, how her father had once been a great hero of his people before the scourge had turned him to darkness.

With the help of Chromie a bronze dragon who can turn into a gnome I set about to right some wrongs. Each time I looked in that little girls eyes I could feel a hatred build within me, but before I could avenge her – I would free her, and her father from their torment. As I reunited father and daughter I still cried, for their reunion was nevertheless as spirits. Not as tormented as before, but nevertheless … dead. My hatred found a new focus. The man who had betrayed all of the races of Azeroth, the once-good prince who had been hailed as a hero – and become instead the greatest force of darkness yet to unleash his cruelty on our world, the monster who had killed little Pamela Redpath. Arthas, the Lich King.

It would be some time yet before I could pursue Arthas however. I knew that to challenge him, I would need more power. Stronger allies and much preparation. So I signed up for yet another mercenary task in the wastes of Outland. There was great opportunity for a warlock in a land filled with demons – after all we specialize in controlling and overpowering demons. I fought my way through this demon infested land in service of the alliance and the Naaru and built up my finances and my skills for a full five years, always in the shadow of Illidan – the demon king.

Finally after I returned from the aftermath of the outland war, I was ready to set out for Northrend, where Arthas had built his dread citadel and the pursuit no longer of my own vengeance -but the vengeance of Pamela, the duty I had sworn upon myself all those years ago in the plaguelands. I was at the battle of the wrathgate and saw Horde and Alliance soldiers alike shatterd like cold metal on anvil before the forces of the Lich King and the Ebon Blade. I battled and quested my way through Northrend and fought it’s dark forces even in the undercity fighting at the side of king Varian Wryn and Lady Jaina Proudmoore themselves.

As we returned to Stormwind after the battle for the undercity the King gave me the order to conquer Northrend in his name. I nodded sagely and suppressed my dark laughter until I was out of the pallace. I would fullfill my duty – but not because he asked, because in doing so – I would get my chance for another shot at Arthas, so I joined the legions of Tirian Fordring and Lady Jaina once more – to fight in the war for Ice Crown Citadel.

Before I got there though, I had a visit from my old ally Chromie. She was asking for my help with a very important task. The blue dragonflight was trying to go back in time, and change history – by killing Arthas before he could betray lordaeron an become the Lich King. They had to be stopped, because to change history like that would sunder the world.

It was the hardest thing she could have asked me to do. I hated Arthas, and now she was showing me a chance to not just kill him, but prevent all the suffering he would cause… and asking me to fight by his side, protect him and ensure it all came to pass. But Chromie pleaded and I saw reason, and returned through time to Strathholme where once I had fought the forces of the undead to fight once more- but this time on the side of their future leader. As I entered the inn, there was a face I knew. Little Pamela Redpath, before she died.

My heart almost cracked then. All the hatred and darkness I had allowed to well in it came to boiling point, I remember nothing harder than to turn around and join Arthas in battle. With every enemy I slayed for him I felt like I was personally betraying Pamela, my hand was ensuring that she would die… I knew I had no choice, history had to happen, but nevertheless I loathed myself through every moment and as I finally left, on the reigns of a bronze drake given to me by Chromie I had only one more thought that mattered. That before I died, I would see Arthas burn.

Finally I returned to Ice Crown Citadel and began my quest to reach him. I fought his first minion, Lord Marrowgar and destroyed him with my band of trusted friends. We destroyed Lady Deathwhisper and protected the skybreaker and faced down deathbringer Saurfang and finally, last night I felt grim satisfaction as yet another of the minions guarding him – the absolutely despicable Festergut burned in the flame of hatred that powers the warlock’s spells. Five of his minions have fallen, 6 remain… and then finally I shall have my day. I shall stand face to face with the lich king and I oath, he will BURN.

• Astrology is bullshit. So is all other superstition. The stars don’t give a flying fuck about you, crystals have no power and the secret wisdom of nature isn’t. All of it is just elaborate ways to avoid getting a real job. Don’t fall for the scam. Don’t be an idiot or at least don’t expect me to participate in your idiocy.
• Nobody is giving away free cellphones, or free facebook credits, or free money or free peanut bags for forwarding mails or joining groups. Don’t be an idiot or at least don’t expect me to participate in your idiocy.
• Little girls that got lost are not being searched for via "please forward this message" e-mail chains. Don’t be an idiot or at least don’t expect me to participate in your idiocy.
• Easy money doesn’t exist. Don’t be an idiot or at least don’t expect me to participate in your idiocy.
• Politicians do not represent you, care about you or have your interest (best or otherwise) at heart. This includes your favorite one. Don’t be an idiot or at least don’t expect me to participate in your idiocy.
• You will not win the lottery this week. Or next week. Or ever. Don’t be an idiot or at least don’t expect me to participate in your idiocy.
• There is no such thing as "race", "culture" or "ethnicity". Don’t be an idiot or at least don’t expect me to participate in your idiocy.
• Grammar nazi’s are a pain in the ass. It doesn’t make you look smarter, it makes you look like a douche. Don’t be an idiot or at least don’t expect me to participate in your idiocy.
• It is not open-minded to consider idiotic ideas as possibilities. Only things that are possible should be considered possibilites. Don’t be an idiot or at least don’t expect me to participate in your idiocy.
• Beer is yummy and I like it. So are orgasms. And steaks. And video games. I don’t care if you agree or not. Nobody said you had to have any.
• If this post offends you in any way, feel free to assume it’s all a joke and laugh. It’s not as serious as it sounds, but it’s not as funny as anybody so easilly offended by dissagreement would need to think either. Whatever – there is no need to harrass me. This is what I think. If you think different – I will gladly change my mind provided you can present me with verifiable factual evidence.