Older blog entries for mirwin (starting at number 101)

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ramble on

I once proposed space pyramids in parallel with other projects worthy of the clans of man, but the interest was low. Interest is the key. To learning. To interacting effectively with team members or collegues in a collegial fashion. To generating the initiative to act, and fail, until failure is no more on this task. This must be joyfully celebrated and shared to maintain a high level of interest and energy for the next task on our winding path. Onward then, perhaps with a new buddy or leading a crowd of newbies (please! only one or two .... at a time) or following in a master's tracks or traveling with a mentor or two.

Good tools are important. High volume mail lists are challenging to manage when the deadlines are tight and the pressure is high. Unprepared encounters with societal authorities while hyper focused, zoning, or behaving erratically from sleep deprivation can result in chemical lobotomy. AMA certified quacks and drug pushers abound.

A hacker or two have solved a problem I did not know I had a couple of years ago. Apparently they solved it in 1992. A wiki is an excellent tool for collaborative work by distributed engineering teams. An Advogato associate informed me of this over a year ago but it still a bit alien or perhaps my cerebral function was off a bit. It looked potentially useful but not ironclad demonstrably so on a PE (professional engineer) scale. Now I am convinced. I should have been using one two years ago, it would have saved me some serious grief. I have a wiki book now and the source and know what to search for online and a fairly effective google service available as long as I maintain internet access. Engineering teams can now be set up fairly cost effectively; if engineers can be found who really want to engineer space technologies vs. get paid well for pretending to engineer space technologies.

Still as space technologists frequently point out, there is no copy command for spacesuits. Implicitly neglecting that hackers must pay for hardware, bandwidth, food and shelter just as lesser mortals or mortals with differing interests must. If massive projects are to be designed, integrated, and polished into complex systems such as free hacker paradise (GNU is Not Unix ..... it must be everything else a hacker desires .... Linux, GNU, et. al .....free/open desktops, mainframes, networks, and internetworks have come a long way ) or free engineered space shuttles then there must be either many volunteers to spread the burden of research and development, or resources to compensate the best as well as the rest, and yes even profits to reward passive public investors willing to take some small risk in return for anticipated capital gains.

In an excellent strategy all paths lead to success. Since massive projects require massive resources they must make massive returns to a large enough community to attract the critical masses in talent, in effort, in resources, in cash (liquid resources), in time, in committment, etc.

MIT may soon be helping both the non existent space settler community and hackerdom in getting neophytes educated. They call it OpenCourseWare but it is currently vaporware and they have decided it will be subject to their standard IP policy. If it materializes an orientation and self training guide could easily be built with a wiki by any team wishing to get new volunteers up to speed in the technical issues and critical aspects of their project, task, program, etc. If it does not materialize, something else will. It is time to railroad and there are many smaller/similar/less known projects around the internet . MIT cannot be credited with innovation or originality. When OpenCourseWare exists it will be as if IBM supported linux on mainframes and the USG NSA operates supercomputer farms with distributed linux clusters ..... is anybody looking into suing to have the code released as per source licence agreements?

So if we need more peoplepower (hopefully english speaking) for massive projects where shall we find it? On the internet. What internet? 100 Million people, 50 million in U.S. and 50 million elsewhere last I heard. Perhaps we should set up a foundation to collect obsolete portable, refurbish (Install linux and internet cards and drivers) and ship them to the boundary of the internet where we can find interested neighbors. Long term investment but you never know when 5.9 billion people might be hiding just the volunteer, businessman, craftsperson, engineer, scientist, manager, trucker, or artist you need as a piece of a free or entrepreneurial project.

Perhaps if a hacker or a space settler wannabe could enjoy helping someone else solve a problem we could get a few others interested in helping us solve ours.

Wiki's are cool. Very easy to use. Very productive asynchronous transparent collaboration. Communites form. Good ones might be useful in designing tools to move large rocks.

An OpenBusinessWiki might assist with realizing the stated goals of globalization vs. the reality that corporate megaliths are delivering. Would you rather have a $100 pair of Nikes off the shelf assembled by a Chinese peasant or prisoner for $2/hours in the midst of carcinogens or a $50 pair of custom hand tooled whatevers (boots, berkenstocks, sandals, authentic togs, etc.) with a $50 shipping fee of which Fed Ex contributes 10% directly to the foundation of your choice?

A FreeEngineeringWiki might publish some standard designs, tooling, manufacturing methods, etc. suitable for cottage industries located in Europe, South America, Lunar Outback, Australia, Aldrin Cycler (new design project announced by a college), Phobos, Ceres, L5, or GeosynchCity. What do space colonies have in common with small Terrestrial Entrepreneurs or Businesspeople? They need the ability to manufacture a few on demand for quick delivery. It cuts capital invested in inventory and all the associated expenses.

A FreeEngineeringWiki will probably eventually use an Advogato style trust metric expanded to two dimensions to certify individuals skillsets and data products within some kind of appropriate revision control system until something better comes along. It will take the community a while to precipitate some meaningful understandings and guidelines as to how the social fabric flexes properly for the work to flow.

Of course, good engineering designers and engineers are not like hackers. For some of them the data online is sufficient to engage their interest but not many, and not the best. The best like to see projects implemented in the real world. Productive, useful, profitable (For useful results do all the accounting: A safe sturdy neighborhood playset is profitable .... it makes the kids happy. A buddy's homebuilt house is profitable .... it cuts his mortgage in half, he finances only the materials, not the labor. A portion of the other half is now venture capital ..... ) projects that create joy each time they are remembered. I helped do that, it was profitable for me and my buddies. It was not mismanaged by ill informed buffoons making 3 times my salary or screwed up by IT's ridiculous insistence on using soon to be non available IBMs and contracted temps instead of a solid PLC controller net and an engineering team to design the ladder logic control software.

A RocketRacerWiki to define a good class of alcohol/lox ultra lights. Not exactly a friend of mine but a fellow traveler of my acquaintenance from usenet (sci.space.policy) thinks he can make money creating a rocket racing circuit at air shows. He actually paid a couple of small space startups (rocket from XCOR, air frame or test flight by Rutan ..... I am fuzzy on the details) they are online if you are interested. Many of the sci.space.policy people are wishing he would succeed but thinking he will fail and waiting for results. What if a RocketRacerWiki generated enough interest in an ultralight class (we can always use smaller rockets for thrusters) among working engineers, engineering students and craftsmen or apprentices to get some standard parts designed so an ultralight could be assembled for tens of thousands of dollars instead rocket racing being restricted to the million dollar class? What if it didn't? Well maybe it would at least make my acquaintenance feel a bit appreciated so he would try again. He has had this dream for years and is only now making some progress (and helping pay some engineering staff at XCOR for some critical engineering) after being laughed at for years on sci.space.policy.

Well gotta go.

Need to checkout wikipedia for answer to my question regarding financial planning to assure the free future of wikipedia. I might need it in the future (spacesettlertechwiki will have to get some educational programs, participatory projects, and mentor oversight going so we do not have 14 year olds blowing up garages, exploding rockets are not as forgiving as a crashing kernals) so even if it is a commercial scam (using "free" wikipedia to achieve critical mass for commercial nupedia.com) it might be worth contributing to as long the material remains free. Perhaps even if it does not. Once the concept is proven it can certainly be implemented in a free volunteer style fashion if resources can be found for the server and bandwidth. Personally I do not see any reason a successful encyclopedia could not be organized to eventually be self financing as a non profit with a web store via discrete front page button access. This would allow a paid staff to do the hard boring stuff associated with maintaining the communities platform and activities.

Come to think of it .... if one wished to accelerate the schedule, I know where over 500 user accounts exist for volunteer encyclopediasts and over 5000 accounts for hackers, many of whom would occasionally be available if contractual terms could be successfully negotiated. Education is fundamental to hygiene and health programs.

If we had a TargetAndFixSomeBodiesProblemWiki somewhere with over say 50 interested knowledgeable volunteers we might be able to whip up a grant proposal to present to the Gates Foundation. Say we setup 5 independent wikipedia clone foundations under public domain (we do not want to be viral) license and contract with 10 hacker/admins and 20 encyclediasts/admins and provide the overhead, systems, bandwidth, dogooders, maybe a health professional or two, etc. with a grant to operate for 2 years get to breakeven. Charter will require any annual revenues over and above operating costs to be contributed to the World Health Organization or else cooperating hospitals assisting R&D, knowledge base development etc.

Might get a grant out of Gates Foundation. He is not a totally evil man, only a criminal who succeeded well enough to buy the system.

Might even get a grant out of Tom Ridge's new homeland protection funds. Preemptive strike at future terrorist organization's recruiting drives. Alleviating ignorance should be strong argument if the U.S.G. believes its own propaganda.

DOD has money. Part of their job could be perceived as preemptive defense.

Maybe I will skip wikipedia and install QuickiWiki on my portable, that will setup me up for a few more chapters this weekend. I might get to some useful perl hacking as soon as monday.

I think I figure out an easy way to do Work Breakdown Structures and tie them into a Gantt or PERT chart analogue .... that could be important. DARPA being part of the DOD probably likes to see tailored Mil Std methods in their proposals. Sort of a share the misery kind of concept. Only works if the proposal is presented in person though, otherwise become part of the problem.

I wonder where these hackers hang out? Maybe a HackerConspiracyWiki would be good first step, our first target for world domination might not be the best engineers, we could target the engineering literates who were promoted too quickly to management and never got their hands or brains dirty! A bunch of them out there pissed, leading lives of quiet desperation and paying the bills. Once we get enough done to prove to the best of the best that it can be done (plans and specifications, completed project, ....and accurate as built databases!!!! That will clinch it. Nobody ever gets accurate as builts much less in electronic database form.) then we can send them an engraved invitation and get on with the job with or without them.

Anyway, off to wikipedia. They know how to collaboratively create large specification like documents. Be a good thing to know even if their community collapses from an owner/bus collision and they are not charging me to volunteer my time. Knowledge gained personally will worth my feeble contributions. More useful than some of my mandatory college tuition expenditures.

ramble off

Finally! Some apparently productive motion.

Got a stripped down apache server installed on a new boxen. P166 with 128 Mb and 12 Gb. Should handle initial web serving requirements in an exemplary fashion. Next trick is to get an open source wiki installed and working. Downside .... going to have to learn vi or emacs to administer the box or else reinstall to include freex86 ???? probably got that designation wrong, it looks wrong.

Probably should also download myproject to my desktop and use it to plan this project out rather than passively waiting for others evaluation of it. Could do the initial plan in Microsoft Projects on my portable for refresher and to allow concentration on actual planning and then duplicate it or something close on myprojects to see how it works while refining the initial plan for detailed implementation feasibility.

On the slightly blasphemous side ...... found a book advertised online "The Wiki Way: Quick Collaboration on the Web" by Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham which the advertisement claims has working code for all example wikis discussed in the book and the components they depend upon. IIS and perl are specifically mentioned ...... since we have this combination already installed and working and Ray (my twin) has expressed interest ...... some backsliding may be impending.

If Ray decides to take over adminstration of the wiki and web server (not a trivial possibility, never let a real technician in on a project you wish to soldier on occasionally) I would be free to do product development and organizational setup. I know some artists and where to find some musicians. Maybe start with a space theme in art to discourage casual plagiarizers and shift gears to the big money in music when the bugs are out.

Besides an initial focus on artwork would provide rationale to recover a high performance dual for a 3DSMax station. It would not take much to provoke Ray into building a new powerhouse for his self study Microsoft Network environment ...... those guys are resource hogs! I could live with an obsolete server for a graphics workstation for a while ..... the max license is also obsolete and should emulate a high performance modern graphics workstation just fine for production of stills and small clips.

Future off log entry

Future rambling placeholder

ramble on

kgb provides this interesting informative link< regarding p2p distribution Record labels vs. MusicCity.com & EFF ala napster.

I wonder if anyone has looked into who is providing venture capital for these types of companies. They look like a spoof of a CIA operation to discredit open paradigms and get legal precedents set useful in curtailing constitutional freedoms. Perhaps they are merely surviving remnants of the dot.com imploding frauds fiasco ( or diff ...{tm} all rights reserved). Either way I think the Electronic Frontier Foundation ought to pick or set up their legal battles more carefully.

While I agree with the overall assessment regarding fundamental freedoms in electronic media in this article, MusicCity.com appear to me to be an incredibly poor test case for the righteous freedom loving peasants of the world against the greedy capitalistic totalitarians currently running megalith america and prattling incessantly about the alleged benefits (to the peasants) of globalization.

American judges will often go with a duck rule. (If it quacks, waddles, eats, and looks like a duck, then its a duck ..... even if it is an odd pink with red racing stripes, unless of course it has a large constituency of irritated vocal voting citizens like the spotted owl, subject to appellate review and reversal.) The U.S. Supreme Court can then safely ignore the issue until some sort of palatable solution appears near in the form of societal consensus or buy in.

Notice that while the defense theory claims the technology can provide a service to distribute electronic information of all kinds via p2p type technology pioneered by napster, the MusicCity.com store is dedicated strictly to selling equipment and supplies useful in ripping, burning, and consuming custom music CDs.

Why not include some original music CDs from original artists who have embraced their business concept and their legal defense theory that free exposure via p2p can be as effective at selling CDs as megalith record labels bribing radio stations?

Love has built most of the business case and offered to work with smaller companies. The PR the bands get from the distributed p2p network would provide compensation to the bands via reduced distribution costs.

All they require is some type of artistic distribution license that allows the music to be freely (as in beer and freedom) given away but not charged for. Then the central site sells authorized music CDs direct for retail profit. Once the novelty of burning CDs and giving them away has worn out this should have little impact on the overall market. People with cash will buy rather than impose on friends to manufacture CDs as a handout. Operations ripping, burning, and selling copyrighted material illegally will still have to contend with the FBI. Might even get a lot of help from the p2p net in reporting infringement if situation is handled with care and consideration for the honest users of the system.

The p2p net is then not assumed criminal youth misguided by subversive libertarians and wildly out of control ..... they are a valued community of music trendsetters and promoters. An Amazon style affiliate program to compensate click through from the p2p net with a sales commission might work handily. A new artistic field might form where music enthusiasts create their own CD arrangements out of the available components. Producers could negotiate reasonable/fair licensing fees with all the artists involved and the site can then mass produced an authorized arrangement for commercial sale on the site. Appropriate bookkeeping and micropayments should certainly be feasible.

To strengthen the EFFs case that the file sharing technology can also be used in other legal ways perhaps something similar could be established with gimp artists around publishing of art. The electronic form could be given away freely and even printed out for personal use or as gifts, the site would sell high quality hardcopy and printers and compensate the artists either up front, with royalties, or both.

The upfront cost of investment to advertise and deliver new content is potentially greatly reduced, the public is now exposed to the new material via a self financed (off balance sheet ...... a potentially useful term to interest enronrized U.S. business majors and peanuts scale VCs convinced that only crooked behomeths prosper and can offer desirable scales of salary, options, perks, and benefits) p2p network, this generates sells of authorized label CDs.

Instead MusicCity.com has setup a transparent workaround scheme. They appear to make money only from selling equipment and supplies to napster like clients swapping copyrighted works inappropriately (illegally, apparently or allegedly in violation of copyright). Where is the delivered value to the content creators? Ethical business practice does not depend on random fallout to compensate its suppliers. Indeed, Nike has been embroiled in controversy over this identical issue with grossly underpaid manufacturing labor in China. Globalization may be faltering on this and similar issues and we have unscrupulous VCs attempting to bring it home to the U.S. domestic economy and online into our brave new Electronic Frontier.

Where is the value to the target customers? Why will a 2 bit music pirate purchase common gear from MusicCity.com rather than saving ten percent by walking into a mall nearby and walking out with the goodies today rather than ordering via credit card over the internet and waiting 2 to 14 days for delivery?

Alas, I do not have the hackerly skills or bandwidth access to tackle this opportunity myself in the near term.

Maybe I should writeup a coherent business plan and submit it the EFF for endorsement, this might assist in recruiting the necessary talent sufficiently to get started.

Better yet, get it semi coherently posted on a wiki controlled by a known organization with a publicly posted charter and see if it clarifies. If it does, then myriads of small teams with some of all the critical pieces might spring up to deliver value to all parties. Dispersion effects inherent in innovative competitors in free markets will probably make it difficult for stodgy megaliths to successfully have all entrepreneurial teams rolled up into one collective lawsuit.

Needed: Some open p2p napster like code. Gnutella looks nice. Remember, we are not attempting to control the net through a central site. Rather we encourage the net to advertise, publicize, distribute freely our licensed content. If someone wants to buy it in a convenient alternate form (such as professional labeled CD or 3'X5' photoglossy poster) then they have to buy it from the licensed manufacturers ...... our site store.

Some artists

Some hackers

Some administrators (both system and paper)

Some hardware and bandwidth access.

Some product definition and packaging. Will not make many profits selling $2 posters and adding $10 shipping and handling unless suppliers and customers are arithmetically challenged.

Some shipping & handling ..... preferably in a sales tax free state such as Oregon. Simplifies our bookkeeping and reduces the price to our consumer. Net gain, we get no revenue from collecting 48 states sales taxes, only the bookkeeping expense.

Some organization. Corporation is a marvelous invention for limiting risk and tracking vested interests. Might be phase two for small teams with limited cash for startup, takes a few thousand in most states to have the paperwork processed by lawyers.

One nice thing about an open business concept, it cannot be stolen only copied. Should someone else prove this out, I can always start up small when I gather the necessary resources. One only has to be first to market and get humongo fastest, if substantial barriers to entry exist and large sums of capital investment are required to get started, requiring one to control the market and exclude competitors to provide desirable rates of return on the capital invested.

ramble off

Links for future personal reference

links provided by Raph An essay regarding the elusive nature of beauty. Is it intrinsic to timeless design? Informed by iteration through illustrative examples that are ocassionally recursive, one is swiftly yet delicately invited to ponder the universe.

Additional Design Aesthetics Links courtesy of: osullivy jakd

gnu mp3 server

On free models

A few misgivings on wikipedia.com. I need to browse around nupedia.com a bit to see how they are organized. Nonprofit, vc, corp, sole proprietor, etc.

I would hate to contribute a lot of effort to a "free" project only to find that it is/was merely an instrument for a commercial entity to hit critical mass.

While interested in the possibilities of using collaborative effort to initiate low cash commercial, nonprofit, and private start ups ..... I have no interest in duping people or being duped.

Perhaps projects that know they are going to get large (wikipedia has the stated goal of becoming a very high quality free online encyclopedia) and (if successful) will need lots of resources (bandwidth, servers, etc .) would grow faster if they organized a charter up front that clarified what is intended. Fair play is important in growing projects, teams, institutions, or organizations.

I will go soon (perhaps tomorrow ..... a good book and early to bed sound pretty good at the moment) to the wikipedia FAQ to ask if there is a financial or business plan to sustain the project long term should it succeed wildly. Should they inform me this is none of my business or excommunicate me .... then clearly it is none of my business and my contributions there are done.

Back in Boise, land of miscellaneous boxen.

Continued working with wikipedia. It is a good activity for killing odd bits of time. Unlike most modern coding activities (for me anyway) it can easily be dropped at a moments notice and picked back up later with little loss. Depending on your mood and the time available one can browse interesting subjects, correct or enter discrete facts, or tackle an outline, index or detailed article. The site is also structured well to allow kibitzing and trivial corrections or editing for style and content.

A feature that might be interesting to add would be a trust metric and certified articles and users. Then perhaps the best or certified articles could be protected with a change lock as follows:

One highlights the portion to edit, enters the changes in the popup screen and an indiciator or shading is entered in the original article to indicate there is a proposed change. Subsequent readers can click into the popup and revise or certify the change. When the change certification point threshhold is passed via the clicked certifications then the change is made in the certified article.

Joined wikipedia and wrote a couple of articles and tweaked a couple mirwin user page.

It has a prioritized "most wanted" page autogenerated from the wiki database which is a pretty cool collaboration technique. I noticed thrust was the current most wanted and wrote a fairly concise precise article for it. Then it suckered me into looking over force, which led to statics, dynamics, engineering mechanics, newton's law's etc. So ..... now I know that a good wiki with interesting material is much like peanuts, potato chips, and popcorn ...... singularity is difficult.

The site also provides diff support which provides easy review of modified articles.

Query regarding misgivings inserted here to avoid recentlog .... time travel ! 8) see wiki FAQ/talk page. see also entries 96, 97 13 Feb 02

A related question, is a business plan or organizational charter for wikipedia intended to be published at some point such that its contributors can be confident it will always be available free to the public at large?

Is the wikipedia code going to be released under a free or open license? The reason I ask is that it seems to me that the information in the wiki entries is greatly diminished if one cannot access the related wiki links and track to more detailed or general information on the subject of interest.

What is to prevent the wikipedia from vanishing or becoming unfree in the future once the critical mass has been achieved to attract aspiring academics and professionals and multitudes of prosperous users demand fast reliable access that only large server farms with plenty of expensive bandwidth can provide? [[user:mirwin]]

placeholder Rambling regarding wikipedia

It is unfortunate (If one wishes to have a free online collaboration encompassing a large subset of human knowledge online and freely available.) but I think it has already hit some self limitations.

Some discussions on the site make it obvious that there is some conflict pending regarding the use of the material and the organization of the community. While it advertised as open or free content there is some stratification developing between owners of the site, sysops, contributors, and users. The site owners wish anyone using the material to link back to the original site ..... natural enough and it has obvious commercial potential to eventually fund the site's requirements such as bandwidth, processing, disk space, sysop salary, shareholder dividends, etc.

The question that has to be answered (IMHO) for the site's long term stability and prosperity is why contributors will continue to contribute if sufficient commercial success occurs to fund sufficient bandwidth and access to a majority of the globe's internet users. Otherwise someone else who successfully answers this question will eventually displace this site.

I think contributor governed foundations similar to the gnome foundation will eventually come to dominate large successful collaborative efforts on the web. Anything else will eventually lose the majority of contributors to some effort where they have some input equivalent or weighted somehow to their contribution. Most people get plenty of hiearchy in existing societies and organizations to meet their daily quota, why seek some more out? Casual contributions will surely continue at some pace, but some of the site's discussions seek to interest highly qualified specialists and experts in contributing at little or no cost to the site. Alternatively, if paid specialists are introduced then will the more numerous casual contributers continue to participate?

Anyway, I am looking it over for application to online technical journals or free engineering projects. Adding an advogato style trust metric generalized to a peer to peer model to a wiki and formulating an appropriate self governing charter for a focused activity seems to have a lot of potential as a general starting point or method of expanding successful clubs, projects, or societies.

lol Diabolical wwwwolf tutors lazy students in two languages simultaneously. What a mentor!!! A technique worth emulating should opportunity arise in the future.

mpr provides missile command for linux. I will undoubtedly need this link in the near future as there was one of these in my college dormitory basement. It might be fun to organize a tournament next time some of us get together for old time's sake. Perhaps I should run a google for a linux based free asteroids ..... surely this must have happened already. Yep.

google {GPL asteroids source code} provides over ten pages of links to peruse, this one looked interesting initially: http://www.math.grin.edu/~rebelsky/Courses/CS397/2000S/maelstrom.txt

tnt provides some links potentially of future interest regarding potential linux multimedia tools.

logic provides a list of business tool links and also a project planner. Be interesting to see what he thinks of it after a few projects or months.

tk, old times I remember old times .....

Budgeting for (seriously!) and programming calculators, budgeting (team time and money) for buggy z100s (8086 "clone or compatible") and buggy software. Petitioning for mainframe and mini cpu time measured in milliseconds or MIPs (million not billion) or seconds/semester both in college and later at work. I much prefer now and free software running on highly capable inexpensive desktop hardware and distributed processing and communications nets. Teams and sharing brought us here today, not heroic solitary efforts. No doubt a lot of the valuable skills, components, and expertise were acquired or created in heroic solitary efforts. However, it takes a mighty big hero to outperform even a small effective team. Hence sharing and community and development of ways to enjoy the same.

For a historical view of the synergistic potential inherent in effective sharing and/or team activities see the Tower of Babel incident in the Bible.

tk If you prefer isolation and solitude, by all means sinfully enjoy yourself. To each rat his own cat.

I fail to understand how all the talk about sharing and contributing back to the community prevents you from hacking all by yourself just for the sheer joy of it, anytime you choose.

My perception of "hackerdom" is that it has always been about the freedom to use telecommunications and computer technology as one pleases as long as it caused no harm to others. Is freedom a sin?

It pleases some of us to share some efforts and form some communities around common goals and interests. Some of which are far too large for an individual to undertake with any expectation of completion in a single human lifetime.

Does it reduce your joy of personal programming somehow if others are cooperating and sharing to build bigger, better, useful, profitable, amazing, colossal, stupendous, marvelous, wondrous, software tools or monuments to human ingenuity and sentience? Or doing something useful or desired with these tools, toys, techniques, etc.?

Fear not! If we once again become successful enough to sinfully challenge the universe or verge on the potential to safely ignore the almighty .... no doubt he has a trick or two remaining up his sleeve for our eddification. Would you turn your back on or ignore indefinately a species that learned how to create debabelizers out of sand after they once proved dangerous with straw and clay bricks?

When messengers arrive it will be good to have some home coding alone types righteously working on one person projects requiring no dangerously effective communications or task sharing to point at while evacuating the cities.