My Digital Manifesto, 2021

 I'm just shy of 4 full years since I published my first manifesto. I think I was fairly spot on with my predictions. A few things have modified some, such as the abbreviations. But in all, I'm not going to change my path much. So allow me to introduce this year's manifesto.

Camera based XR

This area is still going strong. The nomenclature is now eXtended Reality, rather than Augmented Reality, as I anticipated. We have OpenXR, which superseded OpenAR. The big names are still in the game, but Facebook has upped their ante considerably. Their Oculus 2 has been selling like hotcakes. I still see them as the ones that will bring XR to the masses. Especially once their AR glasses hit the market. WebXR should also fall under this category now.

Blockchain

As I write this, the insanity of the ERC-20 token, also know as an NFT, has taken the internet by storm. I believe its safe to say that the world has discovered blockchain. Now it's a matter of time for world governments to step in and tame the beast.

Assignment servers

This is an area that is struggling. If I thought anything would skyrocket, it would be this. But much of the concept was hinged on VR goggles being ubiquitous by now. So we'll see what happens.

Speaking of skyrocketing, SpaceX has suddenly become the darling of the public space sector. Only Elon Musk. Anything is possible from that insane man.

Haptics

Wearable haptics was not something I had considered seriously until just last year. Start watching for affordable haptics VERY soon. Vests and gloves are still in the realm of enterprise. But things like haptic straps from companies like Woojer are making people sit up and take notice. It's a simple device that pairs up to your device with Bluetooth. I own one. Very cool! And watches. Trust me on this. A wrist controller from Facebook that uses EMG is going to make some companies think twice.

Microsoft Mixed Reality

I'm including it again in this list because they finally upped their game, so to speak.  Their mixed reality finally IS mixed reality. They introduced something called Microsoft Mesh in Q1 of this year. it brings them closer to the concept of default and digital on any device. Other than that, MS has kept focus on enterprise as well.

Creation Engines

Unity and Unreal have held the world rapt attention. But on the edge there are other engines. Godot is muscling it way in from the open source arena. Blender as always is a great tool for creating individual in game items. There are so many flavors of tools, I'm sure you have your own favorites. Keep an eye on the at home 3D printer market. Facebook might be leading the VR charge, but at a price of personal privacy. And not everyone wants to pay it.

So there you have it for the next few years.

Just How Big IS the Cloud?

 Once in a while, I will do something silly, like reengage Google and Amazon integration on my laptop. Just to sync everything up. Now, if you're not careful, these apps start to suck everything in from your devices, from photos and documents, to images from other apps. This is how you unknowingly clog up your free allotment of space, and FAAMG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Google) gleefully talks you into buying more cloud space.

About a month or so back, I had reinstalled an old CD copy of SimCity 3000. Windows 98 old. Cringe old. After attempting to play it for about 5 minutes, I had to give it up. The graphics reflected the tech of the time. "I'll uninstall it later", I told myself. But not before I had forgotten about it and reengaged Google. So imagine my surprise as my laptop slowed to a crawl as Google is Hoovering up umpteen zillion gifs and jpegs from the SimCity graphics files. I put a stop to it, and uninstalled the Google and Amazon apps, and SimCity, until I could clean up my cloud storage.

This got me to thinking. My cloud drive is bursting with what I deemed as unnecessary texture images. But are they? Most of us know that FAAMG relies on the petabytes of data we provide to them daily to fine tune their AI algorithms. As we proceed to transition into spatial computing, FAAMG is charging along with parallel development of the AR cloud. How many of us have unwittingly allowed our game graphics to be uploaded into the servers as well?

Very soon, popular virtual worlds will be as mapped out as the default world. And that will be in some small amount due to our allowing textures to be uploaded to the cloud. We (including personal AI agents) will do a search, and textures already in the cloud will be anchored to VR and gaming locations, allowing FAAMG's algorithms to say "Your search for Mom & Pop Shoppe has been located in City Skylines, Westlake, 12th Corridor, 122, 683, 192" (or whatever the XYZ coordinates would be).

So. Do you want to keep your textures in the cloud? At first, I was against it. Now, I'm not so sure!

The State of Immersion

I'm feeling kind of mopey. 

Burning Man has happened online. Second Life has had a camp up for a number of years. This year, the even also took place in AltspaceVR. What's the difference? Second Life is computer monitor 3D. Altspace is HMD (head mounted device) VR.

Normally I don't get excited for Burning Man. Living in a desert for 5 odd days to experience art isn't my cup of tea. But it's occasionally fun to visit the SL sim to experience the next best thing. And I popped in quick to see the displays as always.

So imagine my enthusiasm when I learned that Altspace was hosting it as well. All fine and dandy. But there have been a number of tweets, podcasts, and blog posts all extolling the richness of the Altspace experience. Without the mention of Second Life. So I'm a bit dismayed with it all.

I get it that you feel like you're once again on the playa when you're in an HMD. I, for one, have championed HMDs for a number of years. But have we really moved beyond the use of screens and monitors that far?

There would be no VR, were it not for the pioneers of 3D. The whole concept of 'immersion' is the suspension of the surrounding environment. I proudly anchor my 3D experiences in the early days of VRML. I cut my eye teeth in a world called Colony City, put out by a long forgotten company called Blaxxun Technologies. I was able to lose myself in a 13" monitor on a 16 bit 386 machine with a 2400 baud landline modem for 3 hours while I explored a wondrous location that was then 'cutting edge'.

And, I strongly point out, it was web based. No apps. No app stores. No 30% cut of anything. Keep that in mind.

An Oculus Quest, which is 'state of the art' now, will soon be rendered obsolete when Facebook follows Apple's path in upgrading hardware every few years, and the old stuff quits. No other company will be able to match their prices without being inside an ecosystem. Valve will come close. Don't try to deny it. You know in your own heart I'm right.

Which leaves us with 'fall back' tech. Screens.

Developers need to stop drinking the Kool Aid. There is another platform that exists. It's called the World Wide Web. And there are open standards that are ridiculously easy to code in. Are you going to keep your heads buried in the sand forever, thinking that your work needs to be 'VR immersive'? I challenge you to investigate a standard called X3D. It's XML based. And specs are expanding to include HMDs. But the best part about X3D? It's viewable on older machines. And on phones.

That's right. Screens. Because not everyone will own an HMD. 

Blah Blah Blah

Lots of random today. I've been chomping at the bit to go back to work like thousands of others. Almost did tonight, but hey, shit happens. Not going now until the 16th.

I've been messing around some with A-Frame. Got some basics done thru Frame Academy. But I've slacked off. I can't focus.

Worked some on the Westlake modules. That kind of is in limbo again. JMRI, A-Frame and XR is hinging on those.

Played in IMVU and Second Life. My storefronts are going to shit. no business for 3 months. Visitors. No business. If you can't afford to buy play money, you cant afford to buy digital goods.

And I try not to follow the news. Too damn depressing. So that was my week. Hope yours was better!

"Pets" and "Bots"

Good morning everyone. I hope you're all staying occupied during the lockdown. I just wanted to share a few ideas rolling around in my head. I've been brooding over the differences between what virtual pets and bots are in games, VR, and internet life in general.

So, what is a pet? A classic example is Tamagotchi. A web version would be Neopets. These are digital critters that you must groom and feed and pay attention to. Most often you'll find pets in games. Bots, on the other hand, are most often a snippet of code that executes when a particular function happens. Depending on the application that you find a bot in, it either will or won't have a visual representation of itself. So here is my dilemma. I would like to run a few bots that I've been finding online. They're being offered as pets.

I know what you're saying. "But you just made two different distinctions". That's my problem. I don't want to have to "feed and groom" the things, but simpler code isn't as effective. I've always been of the opinion if it's a program, it should be able to tend to itself. If I wanted to tend to a pet, I would get myself a cat. What I'm seeing is the complexity levels of these things are starting to incorporate AI. Now if it has a rudimentary AI, it should know how to tend to itself. I guess I'm going to have to keep looking.

OS Agnostic

Sometimes I can be a dunce. Seriously, I can look at something for hours or days, or in this case, years, and not see the forest for the trees. Then when the dawn comes, it's like a great revelation from God. You'll understand this as you read along.

We're on the edge of Spacial Computing. I refer to it as eXtended Reality. you probably recognize it as plain old Augmented Reality. The whole tech has been percolating for years. There have been a few apps released over the years. Nothing mind blowing, with the possible exception of Pokemon Go. But we're reaching critical mass. The key ingredient will be an Head Mounted Device. I have been championing Vuzix for almost as long as they've been in business. But Apple is in the arena, and as usual, everyone in the industry is sizing up the elephant to see the best way to tackle the beast. Damned hard to take down an elephant.

But what is the crucial feature of ANY hardware device? It's OS. Now I'm partial to Windows. I won't belabor the virtues of Windows over iOS, nor Android over Linux, etcetera. Each is efficient in it's own manner. But I've been casually following the progress of the way Microsoft has been positioning Windows to be the gateway into it's enterprise Azure cloud. The reasoning is to eventually wean companies off of Win XP. And to maybe lock them into Software as a Service. So I let my mind wander. What if, instead of the Win 10 shell, they could use the Win XP shell? Or something even farther back, like Win 98? Or the granddaddy of them all, Win 3.1?

And then it hit me like a ton of bricks: Who's to say that we couldn't use a Windows shell in an HMD? And my mind was blown.

Apple will stubbornly stick to it's proprietary iOS, of course. I expect nothing less. But think with me for a moment. All computing devices use a BIOS. Including HMDs. After that, something called the Open AR Cloud kicks in. Or your shell of choice runs in the background. The point I'm making is that regardless of your operating system, a shell is a shell. You can have Android, or windows or linux or any damn thing that can appear on the horizon.

(Edit) I thought I had published this back in October of 2019 when I wrote it. So I'm sending it off now.
(2nd edit) Now the date is showing April. And somewhere else it shows September. Ugh.

Uff Da, Have a Corona!

Yup, I'm still around. I'm weathering the lockdown just like everyone else is. I just wanted to boot up the blog, and maybe start doing weekly posts again. We'll see what happens. In the meantime, everyone stay safe!

Windows Vs Linux

Even though I do all my work on a two year old HP Windows laptop, I have an old eMachines desktop that I've been threatening to upgrade to Linux for years. I got it from a friend that bought it new almost 10 years ago. It originally came with Windows Vista. I finally put Windows 7 on it about a year ago. But now Win 7 is reaching end of support on 14 January 2020.

I'm quite familiar with MS's end of support cycles. I started out with Win 3.1 on a Packard Bell. Which was cutting edge for me then. I had been using Commodore computers before that. But since the eMachines is still a working product, I'd much rather upgrade it to Linux. This way I'll know that the machine will be stable, rather than trying to shoehorn Win 10.

I very much enjoy working in Windows. But... Ah, where to begin? Since Microsoft has been guiding everyone to the cloud, Windows has made some significant changes. They haven't affected me to badly, but I'm concerned that if I make changes on files in One Drive, their online storage system, it possibly changes the file on the C: drive. I have done stupid things in the past like delete whole folders, and then find that the folder is missing on the machine. Fortunately I keep a master backup on a USB drive. Google has done this to me as well.

Linux, as far as I know, has no cloud storage feature, unless you use One Drive or Google's cloud through the web browser. This is what I think is best for me right now. I need to be able to control what I send to the cloud, and when. I really don't need EVERYTHING in the cloud. I'll fill you in on how the instillation goes.

The Future of eXtended Reality and the Metarverse

I wanted to mention a little bit about my opinion on the current state of XR. As I see it, eXtended Reality is reaching critical mass. I know a lot of people have been saying this. But when someone like me can see where things are heading, you can place bets that this is a sure thing. Because I never speculate this far ahead without being seriously wrong in the end.

Consider the gaming industry as it stands currently. While companies are still offering single player titles, The majority of titles are MMOs. Zombies and war titles abound. And when you get tired of shooting and bombing the undead, you can always run them over with stolen vehicles. But when even that becomes tedious, you can now go to your favorite in-game casino and kick back and win some moola to buy more stuff to run more people over. Cool, huh?

Switching gears, no pun intended, now I ask you to consider the loosely termed "social" world games, such as Sansar, VRChat, and the like. You can kick back after a long day in the default world, and visit with your friends from around the globe and do anything from shopping to intimate cuddling. I don't need to explain much here.

Tying most of these experiences together is a VR headset for immersion. Anyone in the default world that bleeds pixels will own one (or more) by now. But a vast majority, myself included, are still waiting for prices to drop. Which is why companies like High Fidelity have had to change direction to stay afloat.

Augmented Reality has its own unique position as well, and which is one that will explode once Apple releases an AR head mounted device. Anyone that would know on that is Robert Scoble. He is part of a group of tech watchers that live and breathe AR. And if Mr. Scoble says that Apple will release an HMD, it's simply a question of when. I personally get frustrated that the entire industry is in a holding pattern to see what Apple does.

Another thing that has been taking place is the parallel development of blockchain tech. There are dozens and dozens of indie developers that have latched onto the potential of cutting the ties to the industry giants, and taking the metaverse to the next level. Cryptocurrencies are a wildcard right now, giving default world governments ulcers as they all try to figure out how the hell to milk them for taxes. That's all I'll say on that.

And one more item to complete this exercise, is Artificial Intelligence. The Amazon Echo and the Google Assistant are neck and neck in voice interfaces. Microsoft, like High Fidelity, have seen the battle, and have taken Cortana in another direction around it, and are putting her in business boardrooms.  The "Holy Grail" will be AGI, if you will indulge me. It's so close now, there aren't many big thinkers that dismiss it out of hand. I'm going to gingerly sidestep "sentience". That's for the theologians to determine.

I think you can see where I'm going here. We're living in an eXtended Reality universe already. It's been seeping into our lives for years. One bit of innocent tech at a time. When Neal Stephenson wrote about The Street, he wasn't too far off from whats in existence today. There's just a heck of a lot more teleporters. People hate walking.

Mars Rover, "Opportunity", 2004 January 25 - 2019 Februrary 13. R.I.P.

It's only fitting that I post about the Opportunity rover. I had honored the Spirit rover back when she had passed several years previously. There's not much to say here. Many others will be more descriptive in their obits of the robot. Perhaps some day in the future, both Spirit and Opportunity will be singled out and honored in a VR or AR presentation. As will all the other machines that were successfully landed.

To me, the names of the rovers perhaps embodied what it meant to represent the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA was the premiere agency that the world followed along with in many missions. Perhaps some day, the world will, again. But for now, let's raise our glasses and toast to the community that was behind Opportunity. Well done, team! Your offspring earned her retirement.

Rest in peace, Opportunity. Your sister, Spirit, is waiting for you on the other side. :-)

Getting Back Up To Speed

Trying to get back into a rhythm is difficult, as many of you can attest. Once a person lets themselves slide, it can be an uphill struggle. I've already let a couple of weeks go by without blogging. But I need to post something, so here's what progress I've made.

I've gone back to my weekly tasks. It's a list that I've kept on my desktop in sticky notes forever. I'm glad I did. Its a visual reminder of the goals I need to keep to. Here it is

Tuesday -
   #HTML
        •blog
        •web page
Wednesday -
   #VR
        •X3D/VRML
            •office
            •avatars
Thursday -
   #AR
        •Westlake Transportation Systems
Friday -
   #Chatbot
        •Mariah
Saturday -
   #microtasking
        •cryptocurrency
Sunday -
    off
Monday -
    off

I might wind us swapping the blog posts to Saturday, and shifting everything up a day. It might give me some content to post about this way. Stay tuned!

Daily Life

It's winter and the snow is falling. It's not bad today. Last week we got dumped on. So anyway, I'm on a seldpm used desktop. I needed to wipe my laptop from a suspected rootkit. it's bgeen running slower and louder for weeks, and I've finally had enough. Windows has made it almost too easy to do this. I spent almost an hour trying to get into the BIOS using key combos of either f2 or f10 to no avail. Then in desperation, I turned to the web. That waasnt much help. So then I get into setting on the laptop, and there staring me in the face was the "recovery" feature. *sigh*

The blog will take me a bit to come up to speed as I get refocused. Also, *sigh*.

Testing... Is This Thing Still On?

Hi, everyone. Sorry about blowing off most of 2018. My mind wasn't into much of anything. Including blogging. Hey, it happens.

Granted, this entry isn't much to speak of, but its a new start to a new year. Let's see if I can get some momentum going, shall we?

Conquering the Uncanny Valley

We live in a unique time in history. We sit at the edge of a grand, golden valley where we will naturally interact with technology in the manner that the grand masters of Science Fiction could only tantalize us with. Avatars appear to us in stunning three dimensional glory. Fantastic 360 degree scenery engulfs us in breathtaking beauty. Scenarios play out as though they were common occurrences. And pixelation is  practically obliterated in thanks to fractal mathematics.

There is an ongoing debate about how good/how terrible the state of VR is. I won't ask where you stand in this debate. I've been on both sides of the argument, much to my chagrin. But what I want to mention in this post, isn't how that debate is going. Rather, I want to just lift the hood a bit and look at the magic that runs it.

There is a kind of a happy little technological war going on behind the curtain. Open source code JavaScript weaves in and out of C++ titans like javelins thrown at battle tested tanks. The spears jam the gears of the tank treads forcing it to head in a particular direction that was never anticipated. The ground troops dance gleefully at the direction and follow along merrily, as the tank driver shrugs and simply goes along for the ride and follows orders automatically.

We have wearables that render their hearts out at full max. Motion trackers strain at movements that were never considered when specs were set down. Hand controllers race to keep up with flailing arm movements that were not anticipated for the app that's loaded. And all the while more hardware keeps getting thrown into the fray in a cacophony of full body immersion.

I watch a lot of YouTube videos of people using VR gear in places like High Fidelity, and VR Chat. In these videos, you never have less than a dozen individuals interacting with each other in real time. All of them wearing a kludged combination of tech that fits their budgets. Now stop and think. Off the top of my head, I know of Occulus, Vive, and Sony. Microsoft's entry into the fray with partners like HP, Acer, and Samsung.  And god only knows the side markets for haptics. Oh, did I mention that the video content creators are also streaming all this chaos live?

And damn if it's not all working. Maybe not perfectly. After all, we are on the edge of that valley. Not actually in it. Yet. Can you imagine when we actually descend into that valley? It's going to be like entering the Promised Land. I'm tagging along like a camp follower behind the ground troops!

Virtual Reality, Blockchain, and the Brave New Future

I've been rather starry-eyed for the last few months. I've been swept up in the potential of blockchain, and how it will change our way of life on the internet. I've daydreamed about how all our digital purchases in world will eventually be neatly pigeonholed for use in numerous games and social worlds. And the possibility of being able to cross over those items to worlds that never had such items previously. Heady stuff, to say the least!

The looming potential for all this hyperbole is a proposed Ethereum token ERC-1155. The standard was introduced by enjincoin.io. I won't go into the fine details of it, but it basically lets you make a digital purchase of several items under one transaction, rather than several items with several transactions. You should do some further research if you're unfamiliar with the concept.

So being the virtual world enthusiast I am, I let my mind wander to the ownership of digital land again.  Wouldn't it be cool to actually own that decentralized sim, rather than the ugly physical reality of leasing it from the parent company controlling the servers? So Then I started looking into blockchain controlled VR. The prominent one in my sights is decentraland.org. I needed to get Mana tokens in order to buy the plots. Sadly, I fell thru the cracks on that, because I couldn't afford the token price.

But today, I got a big awakening. I read this article on the Bloomberg site. The price of the token was miniscule compared to the valuation of the digital plots quoted in the article! Then it hit me: humanity is porting the haves and have-nots into the internet. This Genesis City in Decentraland has already been carved up by the default world investors with default world money. These guys bought hundreds, even thousands of tokens, and have the equivalent in blockchain land holdings. I quote the article here: "Today, resellers can reliably get as much as $30,000 for a Genesis City plot." I encourage you to read the article in its entirety.

Those of us in Second Life that have whined about tier cost being high should count our blessings. While we have been at the mercy of Linden Lab and their pricing structure, they have at least allowed common folks like us to run simple businesses and a few of us to make a living. Affordably. Blockchain simply gives the ability to the wealthy to enter virtual worlds to earn hundreds of thousands of fiat currency that they would never have bothered to do before because there was no previous value for them to do so!

Have I soured on the concepts of blockchain? Not really. It still holds potential for everyone willing to invest. And the important word here is invest. But the mom and pop stores on Second Life are about to find themselves with the possibility of a Walmart for a neighbor across the digital street selling digital trinkets that the Asian coders will crank out for a few Enjin Coins. Because that's going to be the only place you can buy them at for a fair price.

'Winning the Cultural War' Charlton Heston's Speech to the Harvard Law School Forum February 16, 1999

I've been quiet for a while. Not much to say that has been worth saying. Been playing on the computer. Cleaning files. Then I found this again. And decided it needs to be shared. Again. It's just as fresh and poignant as ever, and a dire warning for today's society.

'Winning the Cultural War' Charlton Heston's Speech to the Harvard Law
School Forum February 16, 1999

I remember my son when he was five, explaining to his kindergarten class what his father did for a living. "My Daddy," he said, "pretends to be people."
There have been quite a few of them. Prophets from the Old and New Testaments, a couple of Christian saints, generals of various nationalities and different centuries, several kings, three American presidents, a French cardinal and two geniuses, including Michelangelo. If you want the ceiling re-painted I'll do my best. There always seem to be a lot of different fellows up here. I'm never sure which one of them gets to talk. Right now, I guess I'm the guy.

As I pondered our visit tonight it struck me: If my Creator gave me the gift to connect you with the hearts and minds of those great men, then I want to use that same gift now to re-connect you with your own sense of liberty of your own freedom of thought ... your own compass for what is right. Dedicating the memorial at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln said of America, "We are now engaged in a great Civil War, testing whether this nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure." Those words are true again. I believe that we are again engaged in a great civil war, a cultural war that's about to hijack your birthright to think and say what resides in your heart. I fear you no longer trust the pulsing lifeblood of liberty inside you ... the stuff that made this country rise from wilderness into the miracle that it is.

Let me back up. About a year ago I became president of the National Rifle Association, which protects the right to keep and bear arms. I ran for office, I was elected, and now I serve ... I serve as a moving target for the media who've called me everything from "ridiculous" and "duped" to a"brain-injured, senile, crazy old man." I know ... I'm pretty old... but I sure ain't senile. As I have stood in the crosshairs of those who target Second Amendment freedoms, I've realized that firearms are not the only issue. No, it's much, much bigger than that. I've come to understand that a cultural war is raging across our land, in which, with Orwellian fervor, certain acceptable thoughts and speech are mandated. For example, I marched for civil rights with Dr.King in 1963 - long before Hollywood found it fashionable. But when I told an audience last year that white pride is just as valid as black pride or red pride or anyone else's pride, they called me a racist. I've worked with brilliantly talented homosexuals all my life. But when I told an audience that gay rights should extend no further than your rights or my rights, I was called a homophobe. I served in World War II against the Axis powers. But during a speech, when I drew an analogy between singling out innocent Jews and singling out innocent gun owners, I was called an anti-Semite. Everyone I know knows I would never raise a closed fist against my country. But when I asked an audience to oppose this cultural persecution, I was compared to Timothy McVeigh. From Time magazine to friends and colleagues, they're essentially saying, "Chuck, how dare you speak your mind. You are using language not authorized for public consumption!" But I am not afraid. If Americans believed in political correctness, we'd still be King George's boys - subjects bound to the British crown. In his book, "The End of Sanity," Martin Gross writes that "blatantly irrational behavior is rapidly being established as the norm in almost every area of human endeavor. There seem to be new customs, new rules, new anti-intellectual theories regularly foisted on us from every direction. Underneath, the nation is roiling. Americans know something without a name is undermining the nation, turning the mind mushy when it comes to separating truth from falsehood and right from wrong. And they don't like it.

" Let me read a few examples. At Antioch college in Ohio, young men seeking intimacy with a coed must get verbal permission at each step of the process from kissing to petting to final copulation ... all clearly spelled out in a printed college directive. In New Jersey, despite the death of several patients nationwide who had been infected by dentists who had concealed their AIDs --- the state commission announced that health providers who are HIV-positive need not..... need not ..... tell their patients that they are infected. At William and Mary, students tried to change the name of the school team "The Tribe" because it was supposedly insulting to local Indians, only to learn that authentic Virginia chiefs truly like the name. In San Francisco, city fathers passed an ordinance protecting the rights of transvestites to cross-dress on the job, and for transsexuals to have separate toilet facilities while undergoing sex change surgery. In New York City, kids who don't speak a word of Spanish have been placed in bilingual classes to learn their three R's in Spanish solely because their last names sound Hispanic. At the University of Pennsylvania, in a state where thousands died at Gettysburg opposing slavery, the president of that college officially set up segregated dormitory space for black students.

Yeah, I know ... that's out of bounds now. Dr. King said "Negroes." Jimmy Baldwin and most of us on the March said "black." But it's a no-no now. For me, hyphenated identities are awkward ... particularly "Native-American." I'm a NativeAmerican, for God's sake. I also happen to be a blood-initiated brother of the Miniconjou Sioux. On my wife's side, my grandson is a thirteenth generation native American... with a capital letter on "American." Finally, just last month ... David Howard, head of the Washington D.C. Office of Public Advocate, used the word "niggardly" while talking to colleagues about budgetary matters. Of course, "niggardly" means stingy or scanty.

But within days Howard was forced to publicly apologize and resign. As columnist Tony Snow wrote: "David Howard got fired because some people in public employ were morons who, (a) didn't know the meaning of niggardly, (b) didn't know how to use a dictionary to discover the meaning, and, (c) actually demanded that he apologize for their ignorance." What does all of this mean? It means that telling us what to think has evolved into telling us what to say, so telling us what to do can't be far behind. Before you claim to be a champion of free thought, tell me: Why did political correctness originate on America's campuses? And why do you continue to tolerate it? Why do you, who're supposed to debate ideas, surrender to their suppression? Let's be honest. Who here thinks your professors can say what they really believe? It scares me to death, and should scare you too, that the superstition of political correctness rules the halls of reason. You are the best and the rightest. You, here in the fertile cradle of American academia, here in the castle of learning on the Charles River, you are the cream. But I submit that you, and your counterparts across the land, are the most socially conformed and politically silenced generation since Concord Bridge. And as long as you validate that ... and abide it... you are - by your grandfathers' standards - cowards.

Here's another example. Right now at more than one major university, Second Amendment scholars and researchers are being told to shut up about their findings or they'll lose their jobs. Why? Because their research findings would undermine big-city mayor's pending lawsuits that seek to extort hundreds of millions of dollars from firearm manufacturers. I don't care what you think about guns. But if you are not shocked at that, I am shocked at you. Who will guard the raw material of unfettered ideas, if not you? Who will defend the core value of academia, if you supposed soldiers of free thought and expression lay down your arms and plead, "Don't shoot me." If you talk about race, it does not make you a racist. If you see distinctions between the genders, it does not make you a sexist. If you think critically about a denomination, it does not make you anti-religion. If you accept but don't celebrate homosexuality, it does not make you a homophobe. Don't let America's universities continue to serve as incubators for this rampant epidemic of new McCarthyism. But what can you do? How can anyone prevail against such pervasive social subjugation? The answer's been here all along. I learned it 36 years ago, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C., standing with Dr. Martin Luther King and two hundred thousand people. You simply ... disobey.

Peaceably, yes. Respectfully, of course. Nonviolently, absolutely. But when told how to think or what to say or how to behave, we don't. We disobey social protocol that stifles and stigmatizes personal freedom. I learned the awesome power of disobedience from Dr. King ... who learned it from Gandhi, and Thoreau, and Jesus, and every other great man who led those in the right against those with the might. Disobedience is in our DNA. We feel innate kinship with that disobedient spirit that tossed tea into Boston Harbor, that sent Thoreau to jail, that refused to sit in the back of the bus, that protested a war in Viet Nam. In that same spirit, I am asking you to disavow cultural correctness with massive disobedience of rogue authority, social directives and onerous laws that weaken personal freedom. But be careful ... it hurts. Disobedience demands that you put yourself at risk. Dr. King stood on lots of balconies. You must be willing to be humiliated ... to endure the modern-day equivalent of the police dogs at Montgomery and the water cannons at Selma. You must be willing to experience discomfort. I'm not complaining, but my own decades of social activism have taken their toll on me.

Let me tell you a story. A few years back I heard about a rapper named Ice-T who was selling a CD called "Cop Killer" celebrating ambushing and murdering police officers. It was being marketed by none other than Time/Warner, the biggest entertainment conglomerate in the world. Police across the country were outraged. Rightfully so-at least one had been murdered. But Time/Warner was stonewalling because the CD was a cash cow for them, and the media were tiptoeing around it because the rapper was black. I heard Time/Warner had a stockholders meeting scheduled in Beverly Hills. I owned some shares at the time, so I decided to attend. What I did there was against the advice of my family and colleagues. I asked for the floor. To a hushed room of a thousand average American stockholders, I simply read the full lyrics of "Cop Killer"- every vicious, vulgar, instructional word.

"I GOT MY 12 GAUGE SAWED OFF
I GOT MY HEADLIGHTS TURNED OFF
I'M ABOUT TO BUST SOME SHOTS OFF
I'M ABOUT TO DUST SOME COPS OFF..."

It got worse, a lot worse. I won't read the rest of it to you. But trust me, the room was a sea of shocked, frozen, blanched faces. The Time/Warner executives squirmed in their chairs and stared at their shoes. They hated me for that. Then I delivered another volley of sick lyric brimming with racist filth, where Ice-T fantasizes about sodomizing two 12-year old nieces of Al and Tipper Gore. "SHE PUSHED HER BUTT AGAINST MY ...."
Well, I won't do to you here what I did to them. Let's just say I left the room in echoing silence. When I read the lyrics to the waiting press corps, one of them said "We can't print that." "I know," I replied, "but Time/Warner's selling it." Two months later, Time/Warner terminated Ice-T's contract. I'll never be offered another film by Warner's, or get a good review from Time magazine. But disobedience means you must be willing to act, not just talk. When a mugger sues his elderly victim for defending herself ... jam the switchboard of the district attorney's office. When your university is pressured to lower standards until 80% of the students graduate with honors ... choke the halls of the board of regents. When an 8-year-old boy pecks a girl's cheek on the playground and gets hauled into court for sexual harassment ... march on that school and block its doorways. When someone you elected is seduced by political power and betrays you...petition them, oust them, banish them. When Time magazine's cover portrays millennium nuts as deranged, crazy Christians holding a cross as it did last month ... boycott their magazine and the products it advertises.

So that this nation may long endure, I urge you to follow in the hallowed footsteps of the great disobediences of history that freed exiles, founded religions, defeated tyrants, and yes, in the hands of an aroused rabble in arms and a few great men, by God's grace, built this country. If Dr. King were here, I think he would agree. 

TokenStars and UBI

I just read an article about a blockchain project called TokenStars. I thought it was kind of weird at first, but then I reconsidered. What if instead of all this nonsense about taxes and redistribution of wealth to pay for a universal basic income, we just start a blockchain foundation dedicated to the creation of funds to pay people in bitcoin?

Then it struck me to do a search for that very idea. and I found this: http://www.grantcoin.org/ So I signed up. If you're curious, please use my reference code: yknrfpz7tg. If you sign up, you'll get one as well. There are other site attempting this as well, but I thought I'd try this one first.

Social Burn-Out

I knew this moment was coming. The one when you realize that for all the time you spend engaged digitally, fooling yourself into thinking that you can keep up with everything you have joined online, you really can't.

I was looking at Instagram when it happened. One of the guys I follow there, which I follow almost everywhere else as well, said "I suppose I'll start using Instagram more often". To which I replied out of the blue, "Heh, I'm thinking about deleting my Instagram account". You can't really delete Instagram if you're using Facebook, as it's part of Facebook. Unless someone had found a way to do it. I just decided to count how many social networks I AM a part of in one way, shape, or form. I'm sure you're list is similar:

Instagram
LinkedIn
Facebook
Twitter
Google Plus
Foursquare
Amino
Fur Affinity
Tunblr
Deviant Art
Second Life
IMVU
High Fidelity
iBotta
Kik
Facebook Messenger

And a few others that I can't even remember, and maybe have closed up shop and left the internet. I know in a previous blog I said that we all need to get on social networking. But wow, there has to be a point where we just say "enough is enough"!

At my age, I'm throwing in the towel, and admitting that I just can't do it all anymore. Over the next few weeks I'm going to be scaling back. I've already stopped using Foursquare and I'm eliminating my use of Instagram. I gave up on Flickr quite a while back, on the principle that Yahoo was willlingly evil. Even though Verizon owns Yahoo and all its properties now, I still won't return there. And I will be giving up on Tumblr as well. I just can't do them all.

For those of you that follow me on all of these, you're awesome, but I need to consolodate in order to keep my sanity.

NY Times Rebuttal

I just read an article from the New York Times about another "AI is gonna destroy humanity" concept. Ho-hum.

I'm kind of getting tired of people crying "wolf!", and hollering "the sky is falling!". The only reason I'm taking issue with this one is the concept that the author, Kai-Fu Lee, makes in his second to last paragraph:

"So if most countries will not be able to tax ultra-profitable A.I. companies to subsidize their workers, what options will they have? I foresee only one: Unless they wish to plunge their people into poverty, they will be forced to negotiate with whichever country supplies most of their A.I. software — China or the United States — to essentially become that country’s economic dependent, taking in welfare subsidies in exchange for letting the “parent” nation’s A.I. companies continue to profit from the dependent country’s users...."

Seriously?

Why does the rest of the world still think that we are some monstrously rich nation-state that can just pay for the rest of the world? Granted, AI is eating our lunch right now. But come on, people, let's use some common sense. There are hundreds of thousands of people in America that are just as displaced from AI and machines taking their jobs. Do you hear them hollering that India needs to pay their way? Well, some actually are, but most of us know better. And frankly, Mr. Lee, you should too.

Massive taxation will NOT solve where the money will come from for a universal basic income. What WILL solve this dilemma is all the stinking data that EVERY individual human on this planet generates. Even the smallest backwoods company taps into that data for streamlining their operations. What needs to happen is tieing that data into a blockchain that places a monetary value to it for the individual that generates that data. Then the individual gets a portion of the payment that the backwoods company paid to XYZ megacorp that audits and compiles the data stream.

Until this happens, the mega corporations are gonna fight taxation tooth and nail. You think there is a problem with offshore holdings now? You ain't seen nothin' yet.

Acronym Soup

I'm watching a Miku Miku Dance video by Anonymous Boat F***er in YouTube today, and I read this comment to him:

lychanking 13 hours ago
Have you thought about doing these kinds of vids in vr?

To which I replied to lychanking:

Joe Nickence 1 second ago
I understand your question, but I had to smile and suppress a chuckle. Think about what you just asked. XD

Miku Miku Dance is broadly defined as Virtual Reality. Albeit more of a gaming engine for dance motions, along the lines of Unity and Unreal.

For a while the industry had it all figured out. We had "Virtual Reality", "Augmented Reality", and "Mixed Reality". These separated us from "Real Life". Occasionally I started to see "3D". Not too bad. Most understood that it meant old style flat screen virtual reality. I read a page many years ago by a person that used the term "Default World" to define what many call RL. I personally like that definition, so I use it a lot. And I prefer to use MR whenever possible. Now we have "Internet of Things" to add to the list, being powered by "Artificial Intelligence". But now I've recently come across a definition called "eXtended Reality". I actually do like that one, because it attempts to pull in and combine the blending of MR, IoT, and AI. Let's add "Immersive Computing" to the list. Oh, let's not forget "eSports", perhaps the most blended activity of the last five years.

Confused yet? You're not alone. As the big four, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and now Apple, attempt to jostle each other to be the ones to precisely define this hodge-podge of acronyms. Microsoft, perhaps, should be lauded for stubbornly sticking to the Mixed Reality label. However, they are choosing to simply ignore the individual acronyms AR and VR, that make up MR, never mind that they want to be your hub platform as well for IoT in the foreseeable future. Mixed Reality just doesn't reach far enough to blanket IoT as well.

I'm going to go out on a limb in this post, and officially say that I believe that XR, eXtended Reality, will eventually be the acronym that triumphs. So I'll be using that as I move forward.

Don't anticipate the gaming industry to capitulate to that one any time soon. For them, it's VR, with a respectful nod to AR. And most people that haven't curled up in a whimpering ball in the corner will keep to MR. IoT will interchange between commercial and residential applications and trudge along in parallel to MR, possibly dipping into XR as needed. It's an uphill fight, folks. One that has no clear winner for some time to come.