From those failures i deduced 3 very important lessons i want to share with everyone who reads this blog.

First lesson :

Work smart, not hard OR think before acting:
I saw in the latest projects that many people just run in without really thinking their decisions through. When starting a project, it’s best to first just sit down and just think where you wanna go, and were you wanna be at the end of the project. Depending on that you can easily make a rough planning and get a rough idea of the things you want and need to do.

You might think, I already think about all the things I need to do. Yet very often i catch myself doing something without often having thought it through. Many things you take for granted and very often you just dive in and don’t think the consequences through. Some say it’s nice to be impulsive, not thinking of everything that could happen. But from experience i learned that for some small things it’s nice to be impulsive. But very often i had to conclude that if i weren’t so impulsive, my life would have been a lot easier (or at least with less annoyances ).

But when starting something serious and longterm, think before acting. Many project lessons teach that the sooner you correct an error, the less the cost is of the correction. The longer you wait, the higher the cost. Why? Very simple. When you start, you have endless possibilities of change, you start with a lot of freedom. But then you start to build and build, adding more and more building blocks. Look at it as a house of cards. You start with a few cards on the lowest level, and then you build it and build on it. When you are 3 levels higher and have to correct a mistake made on the first level you have 2 choices. Either you correct the error while trying not to make the house collapse or you you just dig into your house of cards, remove the affected parts of the levels and build again. Now how much effort would it have saved you if you just corrected the mistake when you were still at lvl 1.

So, first advice, think before act and review on a regular basis what you have achieved  (critically review to find flaws). Catching small things now saves you a lot of pain in the end.

Second lesson:
Thing modular, think layered, think hierarchical.

Everything in the world can be interpreted modules and interfaces between modules.
To start in the spacial axis:
… > The universe > Galaxies > Solar Systems > planets > continents > countries > … > molecules > atoms > electron + protons > …
And on the time axis
… > millennia > centuries > decades > years > months > weeks > days > hours > minutes > seconds > milliseconds > …

In  a social context :
inhabitants of a village > inhabitants of a street > inhabitants of a house > adults / children > individuals

Of course these are just a few possibilities of dividing space and time and individuals into modular and hierarchical units.  There are many possible ways to divide the world into hierarchical modules, but you catch my drift here.

And why do we want to do this you’re asking. Well very simple, to reduce complexity. To look at the entirity of a problem is just too much for any human to handle. So how do we manage to handle those large problems: by layering, modularizing and defining interfaces between the modules. This way you create a nice separation between blocks. Each of them can then be handled separately and with reduced complexity since you have less responsibilities in that single block.

There are countless examples of this approach: the more complex the problem the more important this is. From a cell phone to a orbiting satellite, from a NASA space rocket to a bike, they all exist out of modular parts. And the more complexer, the more modules there are, the larger a hierarchy should be used. In the end every problem can be separated into parts, which can be separated into parts until the solution is almost trivial.  I’m maybe oversimplifying it, but if you know how to modularize a problem, it is already half solved. Of course that does mean that half the problem is figuring out how to divide the things into modules and how to make those modules work with each other. Again, think about it at the start, think your modularization through, and have a higher chance of going your way.

And a third and last tip i’m gonna give is the nicest one of all i think:
KISS

Keep It Simple (&/,) Stupid

These past few months i noticed a very important fact. People very often tend to overcomplicate even the simplest of things. People make their lives needlessly complicated, projects get extended because this new highly complex feature just has to be in it.  And what does it causes: that the projects get delayed, people frustrated and money wasted because the new features and the new additions are really unnecessary and totally out of scope and out of realm of possibilities.

This is truly another version of the all known Occam’s razor, the simplest answer is most likely the correct answer. Do not search for needless complexity. Things are even in their simplest form quite complex so do not try to add to it.

Conclusion:
These are the 3 main guidelines I consider necessary for completing a project of virtually any size. I hope you find these general tips useful. They do seem a bit easy, but although they seem easy, living by them is far from easy. Just like everything in the world, things are complex, but that doesn’t mean we should not try to simplify our lives and our existence here. If anything it should be a goal to keep things simple!

So, to start with the woman who refuses to be fingerprinted. In the US, it seems that the government requires people performing certain profession to be fingerprinted. However, some woman starts quoting some little known passage from the bible and then refuse to be fingerprinted, claiming freedom of religion as enough reason not to be fingerprinted, believing that the fingerprint is the mark of the devil.

Now, should we allow this teacher i think it was to not be fingerprinted, and allow religions to create their own set of rules outside of the law? I wonder… This does seam to be a dangerous road to go down. To what end should a religion be allowed to interfere with the law? Is religion enough to refuse to undergo mandatory inquiries? But where is the limit, where is the end of the line which religion can’t cross?

Then I start thinking… if this is granted, i’m gonna start my own religion. My house is my holy ground. Only people that i want to enter are allowed, all others are in violation of my religion. So should i ever do some illegal activity in my house (definatly not saying i am) and the police knocks on my door, i can refuse them entry based on my religion. Those heathens are not welcome on my holy ground… Something else. In the recent past, there was some news about many countries negotiating a treaty about copyright enforcement. The agreement appears to be that people that download copyrighted material have to be disconnected from the internet. But my religion dictates a daily connection to the giant network we call the internet. So they’re in violation of my religion. Even stronger. My religion says that we should share all the stuff that we currently consider intellectual property. So the law is in violation of my religion, and since there is a freedom of religion, my religion wins. These are many more nice examples. What if i start adhering to the ancient religions of the south america’s with their human sacrifice. Should murder be allowed if my religion dictates it? This might be over the top. I guess i could draw the line at religions that respect the basic human rights.

Law is already based on religion in most if not all countries, but the Law should stand above religion in each and every case. There can be no discussion of this principle. The Law should be universal. The Law should be logic above all else. But what are logical laws.  A simple start might be the basic human rights. But i read article 3 that says all persons should be free and secure, which is a contradiction in a way. Basicly the law itself is a limitation of my liberties, so i am not entirely free. Of course free is a very general concept.

However we’re very far from one universal law, since at the moment we’re still all nicely divided in our little countries. The law is still a flexible concept depending on location. And the fact is that many laws are based on the religious views of the people that made the laws. Some things are allowed due to our religion, but many things aren’t. Me myself looking at my own laws, it’s a bit hard to detect typical religious laws. One possibility I already told about is the marriage. It is kind of a artificial living arangement that was locked in our society by the holy ceremony of marriage. And i doubt that many other possible forms of living together are supported by the law. Another example of this is the gay marriage. Because of religion it was impossible for gay couples to marry in most if not all countries. These days though there is some improvement on that field.

However, looking to other societies it is easier to detect religious based laws. Especially in Muslim countries. Many laws are based on their religion. For example many laws still exist that puts women in a weaker legal position, because of religion. Of course not only in Muslim countries this still exists, but also in many other countries.

The point I want to make though, is that freedom is one of the costs of justice, a cost of security. If everybody is free to do as they please, nobody is safe, nobody can live safe. By giving up some freedoms, we gain justice, we gain security. A simple example is one of the fundamental freedoms of the USA. The right to carry firearms. What if this right wouldn’t be  a right, but the right is actually limited to the government forces such as army and police. Probably the amount of firearms related deaths in the USA would be a lot lower due to the fact that there are almost no firearms in circulation. Hence, by giving up freedom, we gain security.

Then i move on to the second series of articles. Today i read that it is possible to detect a humans emotion by their scent. More specifically it should be possible to “smell fear”. So this is yet another way people can get information about others. One other way our privacy is compromised. Not even our feelings are private anymore.  This would have an important possible use to detect terrorists going to do a suicide bombing, and probably also students going to an exam.

Fact is again, the more information the government has about a person, such as his current state of emotion, the better they can prevent crime. So how much privacy should one have. If a person enters my house, what should i know about him. At least i should be allowed to know his name i guess. Maybe the place he lives, maybe who he’s married to. Probably if he’s on facebook/twitter/linkedin i can learn all this allready and more. I can learn his interests, his friends, his opinions. Something else i recently read on a news website is that the european government wants to start road toll based on the time and place you take roads. To achieve this the cars have to send their GPS location continuously to a back-end server. So in theory it should be perfectly possibly for the government to track all cars motion.  Should or shouldn’t this be allowed, i have no idea.

Something else i recently read was an articly about GPS tracing collars for pets, and also gps watches for children.  Basicly the idea is that we equip persons or animals with gps tracers so that we can check where they are at all time when need be. If you look at the possibilities, they are endless. No more children that can go missing, we can track ‘m at all time.  Also i read that some important people in risky countries have gps chips implanted to trace them in case of kidnap.  I wonder how long it’ll be before we all will have to get such a tracer.  If we’ere equipped with such a tracer, probably coupled with a personal health monitor, i think physical crimes would drop very fast. Who shot/beat/kidnapped/robbed person A: simple, check the logs and you’ll probably always have your answer. And with personal health monitoring, if something were to happen, emergency services would be notified within seconds thus possibly saving lifes.

So, how long till this is reality. I don’t know if it’s probable in the near future. To many privacy related issues i guess. I think though to get security, to get justice, you need correct information. And the more correct information is available about everyone, the safer we all are. But i hope you readers really start think about these things. We’re living on a wave of revelations and innovations. We can’t really stop it.  We’ll just have to try to steer a bit and see where we end up.

Tonight i sit here, wondering about the elements. I’m looking at the thunder which lights up this nights sky. Listening to the wonderful sound of the rain, pouring down on the local roads and rooftops. It’s amazing if you stand still to observe it. Every drop in it’s own way is unique, even though we can barely see them. Every lightning bolt follows it’s own unique path, makes its own unique sound. Some loud, some quiet, depending on how far they are away from me.

Looking at this awesome and fearsome show of nature, you start to think. How much can or can’t I do. A few dozen years ago, no one would ever have thought that we would be able to shape the weather to our own needs. How could we interfere or control such complex mechanics as the weather. The weather has always been there, it will always remain. It might change but it’ll always be there. It is immense, all powerful, everlasting, eternal.

And yet, here we are a few decades later. What has changed, not that much. And already we begin to be able to manipulate the weather to our own needs. Well, at least that is what the Chinese want us to believe. During the Olympic games and their national holiday a few days ago, they claimed that they manipulated the weather so it wouldn’t rain. How much of that is true and how much of that is fabricated, nobody knows.

I remember very great people looking at the rain pouring down, and realizing how insignificant they were. Looking at the lightning and realizing how weak they were. I’m starting to look at it, and I’m starting to realize how powerful we have become. We can at this time manipulate the weather in a very limited fashion. Doesn’t it seam logical to assume that in a few decades we’ll be able to control the weather altogether?

And what then, what else of nature would be within our control. There is so much we can do, and yet so little. We can tell time to thousands of a second accurate, we can measure distance in the lengths of electrons, we can bend and trap light and so much more. We can visualize particles that are a hundred of the radius of a hair. And yet, there is still so much we can’t do so much that isn’t within our control. We can’t fight all diseases. We can’t instantly be transported across the globe. We can’t fly faster then a few 1000 km per hour. We can’t solve global warming. There is much we can’t do, and yet still so much we also can do.

To go deeper into that global warming item. I’ve read and heard so much about global warming, read so many dooms-day scenario’s. Will it come to pass, who am I to say. I just know that our capabilities just increase and increase. Our understanding of the delicate balance of nature only increases with every passing day. We learn more about the way the world works, the way we ourselves work, that soon, there will be very little unknowns left. Every day we find new answers to new problems. Every day we gain some new insight into the world. What I honestly believe is by the time push comes to shove, our insight will allow us to handle what needs to be handled.

Believing in science works wonders for your peace of mind. It’s almost like believing in God, except science actually proved itself up to expectations time and again. Believing in science, is believing in ourselves. But what is science exactly. It’s very hard to define.

Apparently it comes from the Latin “scientia” which means knowledge. So science is what we know. Practising science is expanding what we know, and applying what we know. At least this seams to be an accurate description. And what do we know? What we know is what our predecessor’s have told us, and whatever we generated ourselves. Knowledge is the idea’s of our ancestors, that they proved and since passed the critical review of countless people who crave knowledge. Knowledge is not something individual, it’s something social. Current knowledge is all the thoughts and information stored in the brains of all of us as a collective. Knowledge thus is something social.

So in the end, what challenges can’t we handle, where lies the limit of human possibilities. Where lies the limit of what we can or cannot do. To be honest, I think we’ll go as far as we can go. We’ll try to manipulate everything, from playing with planets, till playing with quarks. What we can do, well in the end it’ll depend on the laws of physics. We can’t do what cannot be done. (yes a nice evident truth). However, it’s like some math problems. We know what can be done, but do we really know what cannot be done? We believe that certain things cannot be done. We know that certain things have not been done (at least on this planet as far as we can tell to this date). But truly know that something can not and will not be done, that is like driving through long country roads. You see the end of the road ahead, and you get closer and closer to it. But when you finally reach the end of the road, you see the end is just a turn, and the road continues for miles still.

So, where does that leave us. Well, depends, what do you want to do. You can either just be happy with the way things are or you can try to add one to our general body of knowledge, add one to our way of understanding the world. What we can do, we known, but what we will be able to do, we can only dream. And strangely enough, what we are able to do tomorrow, we’re already dreaming today, so dream big, dream wild, dream to infinity.

]]> http://retoreris.wordpress.com/2009/10/17/what-we-can-and-cannot-do/feed/ 0 retoreris http://retoreris.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/immortality/ http://retoreris.wordpress.com/2009/10/01/immortality/#comments Thu, 01 Oct 2009 18:53:04 +0000 retoreris http://retoreris.wordpress.com/?p=32 ]]> I just said yesterday, immortality is next, and what do we read today: in 50 years we’ll all be pretty much immortal

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9138726/Nanotech_could_make_humans_immortal_by_2040_futurist_says

To sum it up:
Today we’re starting to develop means to artificially combat diseases with nano technology (cancer mostly). This trend will undoubtably only increase in the coming years, till a point that all biological cause for dying (like diseases) will be pretty much a thing of the past. Aging might also be fixed when we really get a grasp of all the processes involved, if we don’t already.

So, that leaves us with an eternity to spend together. If you thought overpopulation was bad now, just wait till there is no or very little population exit.  Numbers will just keep rising and rising. Soon we will have no choice but to move some people to the oceans, the moon and maybe even mars. Wouldn’t be so big a leap to be able to build self-sustaining space ships. Since what really is necessary to survive. Nothing more and nothing less as energy.

Energy will be the resource of the next 100-200 years, probably mostly in the form of electricity if no better way of storing and transporting energy is discovered by then. (Who knows, maybe we can just fire compact lasers one day to transmit energy ).This will be the most crucial issue that needs to be figured out i think. All technology needs some form of energy provision. Nano bots need energy from somewhere, humans need it from somewhere, machines need it from somewhere. If we were to have clean and abundant energy a lot of problems would just go away. we’d be able to grow food around the clock, or at least create enough nutrients to survive.

Anyway, back to immortality. What would we do when we’re all immortal, we couldn’t very well keep on making children for the rest of our lives. Maybe artificial castration on nanobot implementation would be an answer. It would seem fitting, giving up your ability to create life to gain eternal life. Of course how would we repopulate the planet if something tragic were to happen. How would we survive if some global pandemic were to hit that wouldn’t be solved by our nanobots. Who knows, so many things of the future. Would be quite nice. Carry one child or even none at all and then inject yourself. You can just have sex without any fear of getting pregnant. You don’t even have to worry about STD’s etc, since your nice nano friends will just track those down and eliminate them.

How would our society look like in 100 years if we attain immortality. Can we still live like we do now. Can the law still work like it does now. More and more things will go automatic, so there won’t be much things that still needs humans involved, we can spend our time doing absolutely nothing but gaming and entertaining ourselves. although we would still need to have research i guess, going where no human has gone before and stuff like that.

Much of what is now might not be what it will be. For example, marriage. Marriage is a bond between two people to form a small entity in order to procreate and raise children, grow old together and die together. But what if the growing old and dieing part isn’t going to happen anymore.  Is there still a need for the small group of people. Why not expand it to include more people. Would be nice if the living together thing wouldn’t be something exclusive.  I once saw in a sci fy program a civilisation that were to have something very similar. Instead of just man and wife, you had men and women living together in a single household, loving each other, being close to each other. Another example is the Aiel race in the popular book series “wheel of time”. One man is allowed to have several women there (hmm, would be nice ).  Then i think why not expand it a bit further. Of course to extend your little household you’d have to have general unanimous consensus of all men and women in it. Only fair no.  Personally i’d like to see way more women in my personal little household, but that’s just me )

It will also be quite interesting though to see what will happen on the dark side of man . Remember, most things can much easier be used to destroy as to construct. How much easier would it be to send a flying robot the size of a bee to someone, inject him with nanobots and then just wait and watch them die without many things that can be done about it. Maybe EMP, but even that… Ow you could make it hurt so much just by keeping stimulating his pain parts in his brain. The cruel people we are.  The perfect assassination, nobody can see that it was you, since the nanobots will be a pretty common tool. Anyone who would have some programming skill might be able to make ‘m do stuff. So just a robot the size of a bee that will kill you. War will never be the same.

Conclusion, the assumptions on which we have based our entire existence are changing beneath us. The knowledge we have of the world isn’t the as it was a few decades ago, let alone a few hundred  our thousand years ago. Our values need to change and will change. There is no question there. We need to adapt to this change.

Things are changing. Where it will end, nobody knows. The only thing i know is that i’m here, and really trying to enjoy the ride.

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/17523

Believe it, i this is not a hoax (i think, who knows how accurate these things are, but i chose to believe ‘m). It is thus possible for a person to have an entirely artificial heart that does exactly the same thing as our own heart. Only a few differences. One, it doesn’t beat, so you don’t have a heartbeat, and two, it can be replaced. So we’ve come to a point where your heart most likely won’t be the part that fails when you die, only a few million parts left to go .

But this brings me to something i think about sometimes. How long will we continue to live as unaltered human beings of only flesh and blood. Today we can make these hearts, way a few years, we can make a liver and kidneys. Some more decades stomach, bit later intestines and longs. K, it might take a bit longer to just totally replace a brain, but i wonder whether there’ll be time or place when we just transplant our own consciousness into a fully artificial design.
No Way, Sci fi ! Dreams! Sacrilege!.

Maybe Maybe.
I know one thing, this evolution will continue to go on and on. How far it’ll go, who knows.
Next stop, immortality !

These pages are about religion and reasons to live and act.

The first page is about why believing in a deity is irrelevant for your afterlife. It doesn’t matter what you belief i think, but rather why you do the things you do. At least to be allowed into heaven.

The second page is about the butterfly effect and the legacy that we all leave behind.

Many people today allready know english. I’ve travelled a bit around the world, and whenever i came somewhere where they didn’t understand my native tongue, i just had to help myself with english. And the strange thing is, in most places where i came this actually worked. Granted, my experiences don’t span the globe, but i have met people from many different nations all across the world, and the best way i could communicate with them, was by using english.

In the ideal case, the entire world would be able to speak english and in my hope, someday they will speak english and only english. I hear all those people crying about culture allready. But remember, so many languages have existed and disappeared, some even quite recently. So what makes these languages so special in the grand scheme of things. The fact that they are used at the moment doens’t mean that they should forever be used.

If we trully want to be able to all live on an equal footing, we all have to speak english as our native tongue. This would allow the world to simplify so much. Only one version of all the texts of the worlds, no need for translation and re-interpretation of that translation. We would all be able to just write and say what we think, and all would be able to understand it. Granted, there might still be different dialects in the english language and different interpretation of words. But since we’re moving towards a global village, i think or would like to believe, that they would all evolve towards one interpretation of the same sentence.
We lost our past, but gained a future, where whatever i say, can be understood accuratly by all. All the knowledge in the world would be at the tips of our finger, all you’d need is a single connection to our global repository of information and you’d be set. No “sorry, not for your language” or “sorry, no such version” anymore.

Granted, there would be a significant unemployment downside. All the translation offices in the world would have to close their doors  and the translators have to become history teachers. But on the upside, all the useless work that has to be done, disappears. Imagine what all those people could have done instead of just blindly translating one text into another. They could have helped cure cancer, or in absence of that, made more food to solve the starvation problem in the world.

No longer would there be any mistranslations and misinterpretation. How many wars/fights might have been fought in the past because one person didn’t understand the other, because one could hear what the other was saying. If you trully want to help peace, you have to help understanding, and which better way to improve understanding each other as to speak one language.

Now, why english and not chinese or french or russian or german or whatever. Well, as i allready said english is allready spoken by many people in the world. It is the de facto language of the world. All international plane trafic is done in english, most international means of travel are translated in english, the worlds knowledge repository lives and breathes in english. So why should we try to get something else. Let the selection do it’s course, let the weak languages die out and have the strongest survive, thrive and multiply.

So, what can we do to get to this nice goal. Honestly, i have no idea. I try to do a bit by writing meaningless posts such as this to get people to think about it. Hopefully someone will read it, and talk about it with his friends / collegues, and this idea will spread the globe. So talk about it sometimes with people. Maybe even translate this post in your local language and distribute it. I don’t know what will / should happen. I can but hope.

And most importantly, think about it, don’t just blindly follow what i say, but think about the ups and downs, i can only write so much in these things but it’s up to you. Think about how you want your world to look like in 20-50-100 years. Are you happy with the way it is, or do you see a better solution. I am curious to see what others think . Maybe one day i’ll move to a site with a forum so there can be more of a discussion, but untill then the comments will have to do, if there are any readers at all out there.

Good night

retoreris

The second article i read was about the old sovjet doomsday project, named perimeter or also known as dead hand. What is does is when a party would strike the old sovjet union with such force that its entire command structure would have been killed, the perimeter program would automatically shoot the USSR’s missiles to their targets, whichever target might have been pre-programmed. Probably the targets would be targets in Europe and the USA.

What both of these projects have in common is that they both are/were classified programs started to protect “the homeland” from impending attack. The FBI’s program though is more targetted to terrorist attack, while the sovjet project was more aimed against the old cold war rival US.

So, why should they keep such things a secret.  Obviously we all care about our safety. It would seam logical that the governments would tell us about their very expensive operations to keep us all safe and secure so we can all rest easyer at night. However, there is a catch in both cases.
The first project impedes on the recent trend of privacy and protection of the innocent. How much should a government know about any one individual, and what should they be allowed to do with this. Obviously the more they know, the better they can do their job. If they can read a terrorists mind when he enters the country and see that he plans on killing people, well then, we can just lock him up and throw away the key (or can we, he hasn’t actually done anything :s).

My view on this is however, that government spying might not be a very bad thing, as long as we all know that the government is spying on us. Let’s face it, there are hundreds of sattelites in orbit, many of them used to spy upon people. Add to that all the camera’s that are used in city’s and stores (the london CCTV is a good example). We just don’t realize it or don’t really care about it. However, when something happens, it’s good to have such information. If, for example someone gets assaulted, robbed or, even worse, killed, how nice would it be if the government could just querry(ask) a database “which persons were present at time XY:AB”. Instant identification of culprits, instant arrests, instant justice !

But but but, i hear you all yelling, that would mean they know what i do, that would impede my liberties !!!! What liberty is that. Your liberty to kill people, to hurt people or to rob them? Or your liberty to do naughty stuff without anyone knowing about them (but which are not illegal, or shouldn’t be illegal in your opinion).  Some topic is that the people with access to the data would have too much information available to spy on other people and learn what they’re doing. But what if there was never any assault, never any robbery or killing anymore, would that be enough for you to give up your privacy in regards to the government (Off course the government and only the government should have access to this data). I’m probably missing many issues of these things, and i’d be happy to read links posted in comment if anyone ever actually reads this. But untill then, i’ll just stick to this simple opinion.

Of course, it seams a bit ironical that i’m talking about general knowledge if i don’t even reveal my name and location. Well, privacy is imo protecting yourself from the nutters/abusers in the society. And since this blog is available to all, it might just be best to keep certain my identity a secret to never get called / punished in the street for something i wrote here. And if you think about it, the government prolly knows who i am or at least can figure it out with some effort. Probably even some powerfull hackers or just smart people might in the end be able to figure out who i am (please don’t tell ) But untill then, i like to be shrouded in the warm cloak of anonimity.

To move back on track, why should all this information about their programs be made available. Well, knowing that you’ll be caught is usually a pretty strong incentive to not do whichever will lead to your capture.  Or to hide it better, either will work.  But this point leads me to my second article of the soviet doomsday machine.

Some of you may or may not know that a mere 20 years ago there were 2 great forces in the world that were dancing with starting an all out nuclear war.  The only thing believed to keep the peace was maybe the MAD principle. The principle of Mutually Assured Destruction. However, in the 1980′s president Reagan decided to build a rocket shield for Europe and the US. This would mean that the Sovjets wouldn’t be able to strike their enemy when they were attacked. The sovjets looked at this as almost an act of war, while Reagan saw it as the ultimate peace bringing device. Because the US wouldn’t need to fear a strike from the sovjets, they were free to attack themselves to get world dominition! . So what could the sovjets do. Either strike before the platform was active (MAD i tell you), or build a system that would allow them to strike after being hit (still MAD, if not more so). Luckily for all of us, they chose the latter, and thus perimeter was born.

Until then all actions by one party and reactions by the other party were always published, since it was the mutual knowledge that kept the balance.  This however wasn’t published for several reasons. The first reason given in the article was that the perimeter wasn’t supposed to be a deterrence for the outside, but a deterence for the inside. Remember that the radars etc from which the big bosses get their info aren’t always reliable,  so sometimes some random stuff like a flock of goose might seam like an attack. And since the estimated time to react was ca 15 min, it brings a lot of pressure and posibility to flinch with it. So thus they created perimeter to make sure that when they were all whiped out, there would still be something left to get back at the enemy. That way, they could just sit the possible attack out. If there was no attack, nothing happened, if there was, we were all as screwed as before. If they were attacked, the people at the rocket silo’s would get automatic clearance to launch.

This was certainly a reason in the past. But atm those times have past, however the system still exists, and apparently is still being updated. So why don’t we know about it. Because it would interfere with the balance of power between the nations in my opinion. That knowledge would mean that russia has something that the US doesn’t have. And since the US never got their rocket shield operational, that information would mean a significant imbalance. Also it’s probably some nice thought for the russians that they still have some power that the others don’t have or know about.

The third reason is that if the oposition knows about it, they will try to cancel it. One way would be to force the russians to disarm it, another to cheat it somehow.  The reason why the other would force the russians to disarm is that the system might bug and would allow some low level officer who happens to sit at the button to push it without supreme command’s conscent or a hack of the system would mean that a bad officer might launch without consent. Small note, the US believed that a low ranking US officer never would be able to send the rockets because their rockets need to be activated with launch codes. However, untill 1977, the launch code was 00000000 00000 give or take a few zero’s.  So if the knowledge is know, it might mean they would have to give it up, or lose a valuable surprise when it actually came to a war.

There are probably many more reasons i’m still forgetting, but this are just the ones i can come up with straight away.

So what would i like you all to remember from this way to long text. Remember that everyone keeps secrets. Even the people you trust to keep you safe. They will probably have to biggest secrets of all. Should we or shouldn’t we know them, a big discussion, maybe for another post. President Obama believed that we should, but believes that we shouldn’t, if i can believe/remember correctly a recent article i read on computerworld(i think). The problem is, that we don’t live in a friendly world, and knowing everything we can do against those unfriendly elements might not be the best coarse of action. Also there are probably a whole other range of practical considerations, but i only have so much space. Ask yourself, do you want to know everything that goes on in the high echelons of the world government, about all the enemies that threaten our well being and do you think it would matter if you did. Do you think you would still sleep well at night knowing all the evils that dwell our world.

Somewhy, i rather dream of a world without all the hatred and show of muscle of these days, without gods that needs worshipped but instead with people that accept each other and have similar values, customs and believes (which don’t involve deities) (otherwise they’d just end up fighting again). I’d like to dream of kind people that care about each other and wouldn’t dream of hurting each other, about people who are willing to think about what they do and believe, people that are not afraid to question themselves and others, and be questioned, for they should have  nothing to hide.

Good night

Retoreris

For those who aren’t intimate with the concept of hello world : the concept is simple. It comes from the early days of computing. People had to show that they were able to do something with the system,. Usually one of the simpler things to do is output text to a textbox or to the command line. And what more fitting for a new system to say then his first greating to the world. These days it is still very frequently used by starting programmers who write the hello world to get started with the new programming language.

Anyway, so, we come to my first greeting to the world. I guess i should tell you a bit about myself. The thing is, everything you say these days will come into a nice database (well yeah, the wordpress database) from which point on it is free for all to search and link it back to you. And very often it’ll come back to bite you. That’s why i have decided to keep the amount of personal information limited to start.

I’ll tell you this though. I’m a fairly young male who has studied the wonderfull art of engineering (yes, engineering is more an art in my opinion then modern day paintings, maybe more on this later), with some speciality in computer related topics. I’m from Europe, but i’m not a native english speaker. So please forgive me for my spelling mistakes and bad sentance structure sometimes.

My historical background is pretty straight forward. I grew up in a small fairly christian village, with the good christian values. However on a fairly young age i started to question the existance of God or any god for that matter. Yes maybe some childhood trauma might be the cause of that, but who knows . I still went to church often to honor my ancestors but i really didn’t believe in the whole story about the father, the son and the holy spirit.

But anyway, my christian background made me the man i am today,  who wants to write his vision on the world. Maybe some people will read it, maybe they won’t, who knows. One of my “believes” though is that to make a difference in this world, you have to make your idea’s known, you have to write about your idea’s and thoughts. What better way then to write them down in a blog.

What will i write about. It could basicly be anything that tickles my fancy, sort to say. First i’ll probably write some stuff about the some recent news facts, but i hope one day to write about my views on the world, on religion, spirituatily, politics and ethics. Probably a lot of the posts will have something to do with computers and informatics as that is one of my passions. Yes a whole heap of stuff to write about, so who knows how much i’ll end up writing. My goal by writing this is in a way to question my own view on the world, and hopefully make the readers question their view on the world too.

It all might seam chaotic at first. The main reason for that is that I really don’t have any master plan in writing this blog at the moment. So i’ll just make it up as i go along. Maybe someone will read this, maybe they won’t. Anyway, the writing itself is an experience worth having.