homeoffice.studio Electronic Homestead

Holistic Human Being is about healing all facets of the human organism, individually and collectively, including poverty. Studying classical liberal economics, understanding the rules of capitalism, and learning how to develop a symbiotic relationship with our worldwide collective consciousness ecosystem, is one way that you can build your homestead in the global cloud of electronic communications, education and entertainment, to improve your financial circumstances.

I figure that if we really want to solve these problems of poverty, drug abuse, bullying and sexual misconduct, etc., we’ll make it profitable to do so. Develop your online store, school or art gallery using free and open source software.

My interest in both capitalism and the free and open source economy seems like a confusing contradiction, even to me. However, my interest in my free agency is the basis of both of those ideas. Real capitalism is based on the idea of free enterprise. It involves private ownership and private control of the means of production.

Free and open source software gives you complete control of your computers, right down to the hardware. You are free to use your computers to advance your own agenda, not the corporate agenda of the company who manufactures your computer or its software.

Linux is the most popular free and open source operating system. LibreOffice can do pretty much anything Microsoft Office can do. Proprietary software does have its advantages. The freedom that comes with owning your own means of production is priceless.

There are tens of thousands of applications that you can install and run on Linux. WordPress and Drupal, Flask and Django are free and open source content management systems and web frameworks, which enable people to build powerful, beautiful and valuable websites.

This is the age of our interactive collective consciousness and our universal commonwealth. We, the people of earth, need to evolve, in order to improve our social and economic development. Big business will be around for a long time. We need it, to build our habitat for humanity and manufacture our cars, trains and planes, computers and fiber optics.

They will not need nearly as many workers as they have in the past. Much of the work is automated. It is also being spread out all around the world, which is a good thing. Some people will thrive working in the corporate ecosystem, others will prefer working in their own private free enterprise.

Own the company you work for. Do your own research. Learn how to invest and own a piece of the action. Make sure you get your profit sharing check from your investment in our increasingly robotic, social and economic development ecosystem.

We’re expanding the marketplace by absorbing the entire human race into one global economy. It’s the same principle as Henry Ford’s idea about building cars that his employees could afford to buy. America and the rest of human civilization, all benefit by having the whole world economy growing up together.

Farmers can build websites during the winter. Apartment dwellers can earn a living creating or trading and presenting something valuable in our one world wide web of education, entertainment and communications. With so many people living in mega cities, we’re adapting to living and working indoors. Think about what is going on inside our 21st century pueblos. Figure out a way to add value to our increasingly sustainable cities.

Find a niche for yourself and your family in this global network of millions of website developers. Learn how to write HTML, CSS and other computer software. It’s not that hard. It’s a puzzle of puzzles. Study the patterns, practice a lot and get really good at it.

Then build a website about, whatever your favorite subject is. Build an online store, an online school or even an online art gallery. Make photos and videos and design a beautiful website to present them to a global audience.

Make sure that what you design is valuable and sustainable. Just like an off line business, it takes a lot of work and a long time to build a business online. Develop a profitable relationship with your audience. Make sure that everyone gets a good deal trading with you. That way, they’ll come again, and they’ll tell other people about your business.

You’re going to have to figure out how to be successful in our knowledge based economy. Find something that you like to do and invest in the education and the tools that you need to do that well. What are you interested in? Just like division of labor enables people to trade their specialty in the free market, division of knowledge adds another dimension to our world wide free marketplace.

Be careful about locking yourself into any one specialty. Focus on one or two specialties, but make sure you have a holistic education, so you’ll be free to change your mind or adapt to any changing circumstances.

Create some arts and crafts and rent a stall at the flea market and sell your stuff there. You can work on the computers at the library and create a website and sell your stuff online. Do some research; learn about Etsy, eBay, eTrade and other online trading platforms. You can do it yourself. Just make sure you properly research your project. Don’t gamble with the stock market, you’ll most likely lose. You’ll harm yourself and the market.

Gather some friends and work together. Or help each other work on your individual websites. You can either, work together as a team on one or several big website projects or help each other design and build individual websites that you can take with you when you leave the group for any reason.

And be careful. The universal and divine civilization I’m describing is under construction. It is not universal yet. There are still a lot of selfish and greedy people infecting our universal commonwealth with all kinds of corruption. You’ll have to get a business license and insurance and consult with a lawyer to make sure your business is legal and secure.

We’ve built hundreds of beautiful 21st century pueblos throughout human civilization. We still have a very large segment of our people living in poverty. Teaching people how to use our world wide web of information technology is just one tiny facet of this holistic healing and teaching system, designed to contribute to completely and permanently eliminating poverty from the face of the earth.

Now that we have built all these beautiful cities all over the earth, how are we, the people living in them, going to thrive? How are we going to bring in, the millions of people who are still locked out of the increasing prosperity? How can we make this peaceful and prosperous civilization universal and sustainable and how can we improve the quality of life, the mental, emotional and spiritual aspects of life on earth?

Develop and practice a good work ethic. Our society is designed to help you get a job. If that is what you want to do, then by all means, get good at your job. Be a high performance employee. Make yourself valuable. Add value to the company you work for and add value to our universal commonwealth.

Be trustworthy. Strive to be reliable. Always deliver more than you promise. Make sure the people you’re trading with, always get a good deal trading with you. Be fair, to yourself and everyone else.

Computer Science

One of my interests is computer science. I’ve been tinkering with personal computers ever since they came out back in the 1980s and 90s. I’m not a professional computer scientist. I’m just intrigued by this idea of a global electronic communications and trading system; which is just one facet of our new age of collective consciousness.

The whole world is one giant computer. The human race is just one super-organism. Every human being alive on earth has easy access to every story ever told; at least the stories that have been uploaded onto the World Wide Web, which is most of them.

I can vaguely remember a debate in the computer industry during the 1980s or 90s, while I was working and playing with an old Apple II computer I had. I believe it was Apple that was talking about developing and installing applications on the new Macintosh desktop they were developing. Sun Microsystems wanted to build desktop computers that were simple work stations, with the applications on the Internet.

I remember thinking; I would rather have the applications on my computer, because I would own it, which is much better than renting. Right? I remember working with Windows 3 for a short time. I think I played around with that once or twice.

Then Microsoft Windows 95 came out, with the Microsoft Office application installed on personal computers, and the debate was over. Now, almost 20 years later, something like 80% of personal computers run on Microsoft Windows operating system, my desktop has evolved into a laptop and the Internet has evolved into a global network of cloud computing, spread out all over the earth.

Now, Microsoft has retained so much control over their Windows operating system, via licensing, that they end up controlling my computer and what I can do with it, with their Windows software and the accompanying licensing agreement.

From what I hear, Apple and all the rest of the big software companies are just as bad as Microsoft. For example, Adobe Corporation uses their user agreement, license and Digital Resource Management [DRM] technology to prevent the use of their proprietary creative suite technology on free and open source operating systems.

One time, I installed Apple’s iTunes on my Windows XP machine. Later, I decided to remove it, because I was cleaning up my computer and deleting programs I wasn’t using. Well, every time I deleted iTunes, the entire sound system of my computer was deleted with it. So, I had to keep this fairly large program sitting on my computer, doing who knows what, just so I could have audio on the computer. I’ve never touched a piece of Apple software since then.

When you read the self improvement literature, one of the things you learn about sales and marketing is that, you want to lock your customers into buying your products by making your products incompatible with other company’s products. Once anyone buys a product, they’re locked into buying support, applications and accessories from the same company.

Breaking Free From the Culture of Dependence

I’ve installed Linux on all my computers. I use Linux for everything all the time. I’ve been using it for years. There are some disadvantages. You can’t really use a lot of the zillions of PC applications out there. There are over 100,000 free and open source applications that you can use.

I hear that Gimp is not quite as powerful as the proprietary software. Which, when I think about how the Linux experience compares to using Windows, I can see how the proprietary software is probably easier to use and fancier in some ways.

Linux is free and open source software. We don’t have a multi-billion dollar research and development budget and military industrial scale product development and sales and marketing ecosystems.

The big advantage of Linux is that you get to be the artist. You get to build your own free enterprise, instead of Microsoft’s, Apple’s, Google’s or Amazon’s money vacuum. You can do anything you want to do with Linux, except keep anyone else from using it.

We’ve got millions of computer scientists hacking together a free and open source computer operating system, so that we can control our own computers, instead of being controlled by them. Its not really the computers that are controlling us. Its the people who own the corporations that produce the computers, who are working as hard as they can to sell dependence on their products and services, and suppress any alternatives.

Modern computers are intentionally designed to monitor and control the people who use them. I think that is a bad idea. It is unnecessary and harmful. Civilized people are controlled by their religion, not by their computers.

I figure that this is just the crack of dawn of the free and open source ecosystem. Its just one more facet of the universal and divine civilization that is coming up next. Zero point energy, free and open source education and natural health care are other examples of the alternative to the military industrial complex version of social and economic development.

Linux is getting more and more user friendly too. You still have to do everything yourself. You almost have to be a computer scientist to use it effectively, because it does not do things automatically, like Windows does. From what I can tell, it is just as capable as Windows, you just have to be able to do a lot of things manually, that Windows does automatically.

BSD

I also prefer the BSD License, rather than the GNU/ General Public License (GPL). I’m not so sure about the BSD technology, compared to the Linux technology.

I’m telling you this story in order to start chipping away at the imperial pyramid. Kind of like a prisoner chipping away, digging a tunnel out of the prison. The proprietary software and the military industrial complex are the prison.

Free and open source software is one of the tools we’re using to gradually and peacefully replace that pyramid scheme, with a circle of friends as big as the earth and the entire human race, helping each other survive and thrive during our life on earth.

Perhaps the pyramid and the circle will converge into some kind of cone! We’ll all be coneheads, with Almighty God and the Manifestation of God at the tip of the cone. Or like / is the symbol for root, the top of the file system hierarchy in the Linux operating system.

Many of the proprietary attachments that you can purchase for your computer, such as Adobe’s Creative Suite, do not automatically work with Linux. Some just won’t work, others you have to get or make and install a driver on your computer to drive the attachment. So, there are advantages and disadvantages to using Linux. You can use the Wine application to run most Windows compatible software.

Linux is the most promising alternative to the big business model of computing. Not only is it relatively inexpensive, it also supplies complete freedom to access and control the software, all the way down to the hardware and to modify and use it in whatever ways we want to. It is also very common, even big business is using it in a lot of their applications, so networking with a vibrant Linux community is also easy.

And now, between Red Hat and Canonical, we’re starting to get some global, corporation level technical support, development and service.

The General Public License [GPL] that comes with Linux does say that you have to include the GPL license with anything you incorporate it into. In other words, if you integrate some Linux software into a program you design, then you have to include the GPL license with it. You cannot legally incorporate Linux software into proprietary software. That is actually a severe limitation on what you can do with the software.

I like the current BSD [Berkeley Software Distribution] license better than the GPL. It allows you to do whatever you want to with the software, except prevent anyone else from using it or sue anyone if it doesn’t work the way you want it to. You can even create proprietary software with LGPL [Lessor General Public License] or BSD software embedded in it.

Richard Stallman, the author of the GPL, and others at the GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation argue that the regular GPL license is better, because it helps us build up a portfolio of free software that the big corporations do not have access to buy and control, which makes the free software more useful and competitive in relation to the proprietary software, which I agree is a good and legitimate argument. Except that I’m not really opposed to private property or big business, and I’m definitely not against earning a profit from your work and your private property.

I recently read a story, probably and hopefully an untrue rumor, about Google selling a computer built into a pair of eyeglasses. It’s running Google’s Android, which is a proprietary version of Unix, just like Apple’s OS X is. The rumor is that the glasses come with a license that prevents you from selling or giving your glasses to anyone else. That’s like saying you can’t buy or sell a used car! That is not free enterprise.

I just read the GPL and the LGPL again and all that legalese still seems like a foreign language to me. It’s like my brain shifts into some kind of neutral zone, or something, when I’m reading those legal documents. It’s even worse than when I read the W3C Recommendations for HTML5 or CSS3.

Even though my knowledge of the history of computer science is not very thorough, it is an important part of the story of how human nature is evolving in a symbiotic relationship with this one interconnected world wide computer network. Human consciousness is creating the network and the network is influencing the evolution of human consciousness.

A lot of these ideas, especially the names and dates, come from my research on Wikipedia, which is another free and open source project that is having a very profound influence on the evolution of human consciousness.

I’ve also read many books, such as The Google Story (Vise, 2005), Business @ the Speed of Thought (Gates, 1999) and the The Shallows, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, (Carr, 2010) and many technical manuals, about various aspects of computer science. I’ve been tinkering around with computers ever since they were developed. I was born in 1959, the same year the integrated circuit was patented. This story is probably not perfectly accurate. Its just a true story about the history of computer science as I currently understand it.

Some History of Computer Science

The Industrial Revolution started in Great Britain in about 1760 or so and had spread to continental Europe and America soon after that. By 1830, the industrial transformation of human social and economic development was a global feature of civilization.

The first telegraphs were smoke signals and various kinds of light beacons. The first electrical telegraph was patented in Great Britain by William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone in May 1837. The first wires were installed in pipes in the ground. However, they didn’t last very long and the wires were soon moved onto the telephone poles we’re all so familiar with. (wiki/Telegraph)

Samual Morse and Alfred Vail independently developed an electrical telegraph, also in 1837, in the United States, as well as inventing the Morse Code. They sent the telegram, “What hath God wrought,” from Washington to Baltimore in 1844 and every major city on the east coast was connected to the network within ten years. The Pony Express service ended soon after the telegraph reached the west coast in 1861.

In Japan, Tanaka Hisashige founded Tanaka Seisakusho in 1875 as Japan’s first manufacturer of telegraph equipment. By 1939, Tanaka Seisakusho’s company had been renamed Shibaura Seisakusho, and merged with a lighting company called Tokyo Denti, which had been founded in 1890. The new company was named Tokyo Shibaura Electric company, which eventually evolved into Toshiba Corporation. (wiki/Toshiba)

Alexander Graham Bell founded the Bell Telephone Company in Boston in 1877. In 1880, Bell Telephone Company founded AT&T Long Lines, to manage the development of the company’s growing network of telephone lines. By 1885 the whole company had evolved into American Telephone and Telegraph Company (wiki/AT&T_Corporation). AT&T has used their intellectual property rights to establish a financial and intellectual monopoly. It is still the second largest spender on political donations and lobbying the US government.

On December 22, 1948, the Hush-A-Phone Corporation [HAPC] filed an antitrust lawsuit against AT&T; charging that AT&T had prohibited telephone subscribers from using its product: the Hush-A-Phone (Pelkey 2012). Hush-A-Phone was a plastic cup that people could put on the phone to keep conversations private and to block out background noise from the telephone receiver.

In response to the HAPC case, another case involving AT&T refusing to allow offshore oil drillers to connect radio phones to AT&T’s telephone system and a case involving the government trying and failing to separate AT&T from its product development division, Western Electric; AT&T was finally established as a public utility, supplying telephone service and legally prevented from entering any other business, such as the computer industry. So, when computer scientists working at AT&T’s Bell Labs developed the Unix operating system and the C programming language during the 1960s and early 1970s, in order to control their telephone network, AT&T was required to give them to anyone who asked for them (Wiki/Unix).

I wonder if AT&T restricting the oil industry’s ability to connect their radio phones to AT&T’s long distance phone lines, has anything to do with AT&T finally losing its battle to maintain its monopoly and being broken up into a cluster of smaller companies. Standard Oil was broken up into the seven sisters too. So, the government does break up monopolies when they get too big. At least they used to. They never did break up Microsoft, and now Apple is even bigger than Microsoft ever was and Linux is getting ready to out grow all of the proprietary software.

Google is a monster that offered me a lot of free stuff when the Internet first started taking off and then turned out to be some kind of thought control system. Monopolies really suck. I didn’t like AT&T’s bully tactics and Google is just as bad as AT&T ever was, if not worse.

The one big difference between AT&T and the current ecosystem is that Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon are competing against each other. They are definitely big, but they are not really monopolies. And then there are the companies from other nations, like Alibaba, TenCent and Nokia.

Supercomputing

In 1970, Unix was first installed on a PDP-11/20 machine. The first commercial installation was in early 1972 at New York Telephone Co.’s, Systems Development Center, under the direction of Dan Gielan (Wiki/Unix). In 1972, Unix was rewritten from an assembly language, into the C programming language, which was also developed by the same group of scientists at AT&T’s Bell Labs. The higher level language made the operating system portable. It could be installed on a variety of computer hardware.

Apparently, several of the computer scientists who worked at Bell Labs ended up at University of California at Berkeley. During the 1970s, Berkeley Software Distribution [BSD] started offering a restrictive version of Unix in some kind of private academic network. Now, BSD is an alternative version of free and open source clone of Unix.

In response to the restrictive limitations placed on the use of the proprietary versions of Unix, Richard Stallman, an MIT computer scientist, began developing a completely free, Unix like operating system, in 1983, called the GNU operating system. GNU stands for GNU is Not Unix. The General Public License (GPL) is one of the most significant developments released by Stallman’s GNU Project and Free Software Foundation.

In my opinion, the current BSD license is the best of all the licenses. I would probably be using BSD instead of Linux because of it, if they hadn’t decided to use a devil as their corporate logo. Linux is way more popular anyway.

I wish we would change the name of all those national monuments back to the original Native American names, instead of the obnoxious Devil’s Tower and Hell’s Canyon, etc.

Across the San Francisco Bay in Silicon Valley, some computer scientists at Stanford University established Sun Microsystems, selling an early commercial version of Unix, with Open Office as a free and open source version of their Star Office commercial software. As far as I know, Sun’s Sparc workstations are still the fastest desktop computers available.

Linus Torvalds, working at the University of Helsinki, with permission from Andrew Tanenbaum, developed the Linux kernel. Linux was originally developed on a MINIX system. MINIX [mini-unix] was created for educational purposes by Tanenbaum, as a Unix like operating system based on a microkernel architecture. Linux differs from MINIX in that it employs a monolithic kernel, rather than a micro kernel. They still have a lot in common, such as the MINIX filesystem structure (Wiki, MINIX). Linux was first released in 1991.

MINIX has since been released under the BSD license, which is more like the LGPL, even less restrictive that the GPL. After getting the Linux kernel developed, the open source software began to be programmed on GNU/Linux itself.

So Minix was developed in Amsterdam and the Linux kernel was developed in Helsinki, so I guess Europe has contributed to the Computer industry after all. HTML and the World Wide Web was developed by CERN’s Tim Berners Lee. So even though there are no big personal computer companies like Toshiba, Sony or Dell or HP from Europe, at least that I know of, the Europeans have definitely been contributing their fair share to the computer science revolution that is transforming our economy and our culture.

The GNU Project and the Free Software Foundation were already developing a pretty substantial set of libraries for a free and open source operating system, except for the kernel, which is the central nervous system of any operating system. The applications, such as the Emacs text editor, the Graphical User Interface [GUI] desktop, the command line terminal, the LibreOffice productivity suite; all mount onto and run on the kernel. The applications are like the branches, the kernel is the trunk of the tree.

When Torvalds offered the Linux kernel as a temporary solution to the problem, the free and open source community snapped it up and mounted the GNU Project applications on the Linux kernel, and now the GNU/Linux operating system is one of the most diverse and widespread operating systems in use on earth today. Many commercial operations use Linux for their world wide Information Technology [IT]. Most supercomputers run on Linux. Most cell phone technology runs on Linux or other similar clones of Unix.

Apple Corporation’s OS X is another spin off from Unix. OS X is a modern version of Apple’s Darwin Operating system, which is one of the earliest spin offs from that original Unix operating system that AT&T had to give away, because they were legally restrained from working in the computer industry. Google’s Android operating system is a more recent version of this kind of cloning Unix.

Apple’s Darwin and all its derivatives are the most popular version of Unix. Linux is the second most popular. It seems like MINIX and Linux were actually developed independently, and intentionally designed to be able to work on the same machines that Unix works on. None of them have any of the original Unix code in them. They’ve all been completely rewritten, using Unix as a design template.

Linux, MINIX, BSD, Apple’s OS X, Google’s Android, Oracle’s Star Office and Novell’s Unix are all major computer operating systems, which originally spun off from AT&T’s Unix operating system and C programming language. I’m pretty sure that Novell owns the original Unix now. All these companies and their history are constantly changing. They’re buying, selling and trading with each other and us, the people of earth.

The GNU Project, the Free Software Foundation and GNU/Linux operating system are one of many streams of development that came out of the Unix system. It is actually a kind of anti-unix. It was designed from scratch to be able to do anything Unix could do, as well as be able to communicate and work with Unix systems, GNU is just not Unix.

It has evolved into one of the most widespread of all operating systems and is used on everything from smart phones to supercomputers. In fact, our smart phones are supercomputers. It’s the connection to the Internet that makes our phones so powerful. The Internet is one gigantic mixture of proprietary and open source software; an intelligent network of all the computers in the world.

I suppose there are a few isolated systems. The vast majority of them are connected into one worldwide computer. I’ve heard that the Chinanet, which is huge, with a market of 1300 million potential users, is fairly separate and distinct from the Internet. The Internet is mostly commercial and open source, the Chinanet is owned by the government of China, which can monitor and control the conversation.

The Chinanet is connected to the Internet, but there’s a very strict firewall separating them. It seems unfair that the Chinanet can interact with and influence the Internet, while blocking the Internet from freely interacting with and influencing the Chinanet.

Instead of allowing the Internet to flow freely into China, the Chinese copy the programs like Google, Facebook, Twitter and eBay, creating separate Chinese versions of them. They’ve done the same thing with cars, planes and skyscrapers.

This global network of computers is one of the most important events in the evolution of human consciousness. It ranks right up there with the invention of the printing press, the development of writing and perhaps even the evolution of language itself.

Supercomputers, like the one in the brand new National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration [NOAA] center in Cheyenne Wyoming, are just immensely bigger and more complex computers connected to the same Internet that our cell phones, iPads and laptops are. They have software that controls who can have what access to them.

And thanks to the free and open source encyclopedia, Wikipedia, for making much of this information available. It is just one more example of the dramatic evolution of our collective conscience, that super organism that I’ve been writing about, of human nature and civilization growing up in a symbiotic relationship with our natural habitat and the technological, habitat for humanity that we’re creating all over the earth.

Keep in mind that Wikipedia by itself is not very trustworthy. It’s very useful as an auxiliary resource, to compliment the more trustworthy sources. In other words, you have to go to the source. You have to read the books and talk to the people who are actually doing things, rather than reading encyclopedia articles about them. Wikipedia compliments the other sources, it doesn’t replace them.

Computers and the Internet are just tools that we use as leverage to influence our natural habitat and make it more comfortable for all of us. Like any tool, they can be used for good or evil. Its going to be up to us, the people of earth, to make sure that this technology is used to serve all the people of earth, rather than being used to control any of us.

Study, learn, adapt to this vast communications, education and entertainment network. Learn how it works and how it can influence you and how you can influence it. Do you have any good ideas, about how we can make this wonderful technological habitat for humanity, these giant cities and this electronic communications ecosystem more useful and valuable?

I just watched another story on TV, about the US Government building a giant computer located in three 6 or 7 story buildings, in Utah for the National Security Administration (NSA). So this world wide collective consciousness infrastructure is still very much, under construction, from our cell phones to our supercomputers.

Cultivating a Free and Open Source Internet

The Internet makes it possible for you to tell your story to a global audience; which makes it practical for you to earn substantial income working in a very small niche market, without depending on any corporate agenda, professional publishers or any other gatekeepers.

Its important, in my opinion, for us to work to insure that the Internet remains free and open source. Being accessible by a global audience makes the niche markets viable.

There are discussions taking place as I write this, at the UN, the World Trade Organization and the World Economic Forum, etc., about how governments can regulate the Internet. One of the ideas that I’ve been teaching in this story is that we should all strive to develop a society in which no one lords over anyone else. No big business, no government, not even families or tribes or nations or any other special interest, should be able to suppress the legitimate free agency of any human being anywhere.

That’s why I’m encouraging you to investigate, understand and use free and open source technology and exercise your self-determination and creative freedom in your own private free enterprise.

Most people will develop your own private enterprise. Some will work together in small and big businesses, but many of the people will earn a living working in your own family owned and operated cottage industry, serving other people, not trying to entrap them into a co-dependent hierarchical relationship.

It’s really important that we have a strong small government to insure that all of our technological and economic systems serve the people, rather than controlling us. While I’m a big fan of capitalism and free and open source software, etc., I want the government to be actively securing our self determination and free enterprise, making sure that these tools are used to serve the people, not control us.

I suspect that big business and government will become much less hierarchical. That military industrial complex is a primitive social institution, which human nature and civilization are gradually growing out of, all be it, with waves of progress and setbacks. Develop your own private cottage industry and use your computers and the Internet to turn them into profitable free enterprise for your family.

Social scientists have discovered that free agency is an inherent attribute of human nature and employees who are permitted to exercise their creative freedom are far more productive than employees who are being herded around like animals, accomplishing the will of a small minority of people, dominating the majority of the people.

I am not advocating anarchy here. Civilized people use the rule of law and government regulation of local, national and international commerce in order to secure our social and economic well being. What I’m saying is that the laws need to protect our private property, our self determination and our free enterprise, equal opportunity and justice for all, not exalt any oligarchy, expert or otherwise, over the people.

As far as the issue of people using the Internet for criminal or terrorist activities, we definitely need to be aggressively pursuing those people and interdicting any corruption. However, we should do so in ways and means that improve our freedom of conscience, not restricting it. Eventually, the divine education of all the people of earth, will cause the extinction of all crime and war.

I figure that we should treat cyber crime exactly like gun violence. Double, or even triple, the penalty for committing a crime with a gun or a computer.

It was scientists and engineers working at the Department of Defense who, practically strong armed big business into building the Internet. Big business was more interested in developing artificial intelligence and local area networks for big businesses.

During the 1950s and 60s, the Pentagon’s Information Processing Techniques Office [IPTO], was the Advanced Research Projects Agency’s [ARPA] first effort to fund research into “command and control” (Waldrop 2008). They were building a nationwide network of computers and radars, etc., that could monitor and report any nuclear attack. Talk about turning swords into plowshares!

While the scientists and engineers were developing the ARPANET, they were thinking and consulting with each other about developing a similar network of knowledge centers, linking universities and scientific research labs. And good for them. The Internet is the greatest advancement in learning and teaching tools since the printing press.

Robert Taylor was director of IPTO in 1966 when the ARPANET really took off. Taylor hired Larry Roberts to manage the networking project. Roberts leased long distance phone lines from AT&T that allowed the network to always be connected. He initiated the system of breaking the data into small packets, to help solve the problem of noise and degradation of the signal. It’s easier to repair one small packet, than a whole message.

They also decided to make the system completely decentralized, into a complex pattern like the Interstate Highway System, so that if any particular node was degraded for some reason, it would not affect the overall functioning of the ARPANET.

The first Interface Message Processor [IMP] became the first node of the new ARPANET at a research laboratory at UCLA on Labor Day, 1969. Los Angeles, San Francisco and Salt Lake City were the first three nodes of the Internet.

The IMP is the interchange computer in each town that handles all the routing, so that individual computers don’t have to do that. Instead, the individual computers just had to connect to the IMP, and they would receive the messages addressed to them. Now, all those AT&T and CenturyLink buildings downtown, are skyscraper sized IMPs, distributing our electronic communications within and between cities.

In 1971, Ray Tomlinson, an engineer at Bolt Beranek and Newman [BBN], the company hired to build the first IMPs, adapted an e-mail program developed for another project, to the ARPANET. It uses the individual’s login ID and the computer’s “host name,” connected by the @ symbol that we’re all so familiar with.

As the diverse assortment of networks, with a diverse assortment of programming languages, began to come together, an inter-networking protocol was developed by IPTO’s Robert Kahn, and Stanford University’s Vinton Cerf. Kahn and Cerf’s 1974 paper, “A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection,” became “the first architectural description of how the Internet would function as a network of networks, with TCP/IP holding it all together.” (Waldrop 2008)

The universal protocol itself would have to deal with a number of practicalities, including an “inter-networking protocol” that would encode such things as a packet’s ultimate address, and a transmission control scheme that would allow the destination computer to request replacements for packets that had been lost in transit. Thus the modern name: Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP.
Waldrop, 2008

The Department of Defense switched the ARPANET to TCP/IP on Jan/1/1983. By then there were several distinct networks running on TCP/IP and the National Science Foundation’s NSFNet, launched in 1986, soon became the foundation of the Internet in the United States. In 1989, the ARPANET was discontinued, because the Internet was an established network, rather than a research project.

Donald Davies, and his group at the National Physical Laboratory in the United Kingdom, had developed a system similar to ARPANET independently. I suspect that the Internet probably grew up in a lot of distinct locations and eventually grew together into the global Internet that we have now. Perhaps soon, the Chinanet will finally converge with the Internet and we’ll have one world wide web of computer services and communications connecting our one universal and divine civilization.

For example, in the continental United States a token ring formation was installed, in which each IMP passes messages along until it reaches its destination. In Hawaii, each Island has a central computer that all other computers connect to in a star formation. The central computers in each star, located on each island, are all connected to each other.

The World Wide Web

The American Institute of Electrical Engineers [AIEE] was founded in 1884. Through converging and merging with other similar organizations, the AIEE has evolved into today’s Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers [IEEE]. It participates in the establishment of standards and rules that make it possible for all the electrical equipment to work together with each other.

You know? All the manufacturers have to agree that all the machines use 120 volts AC, in order to make a practical electrical grid that all the machines can plug into. And then, there has to be some standards, the electronic version of the rule of law, so that all the computers in the world can communicate with each other.

TCP/IP is one such standard. HTML 5 and CSS3 are newer standards. They don’t replace TCP/IP. They make the information that we send over the electronic network more attractive and human readable.

Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML and founded the World Wide Web Consortium [W3C] while working at CERN, the big nuclear physics laboratory in France, in October of 1994. W3C is an organization in which several individuals and institutions consult with each other and work together to standardize the web.

While AT&T did develop the first national network. American companies didn’t want to create the Internet. They wanted to develop Artificial Intelligence and Local Area Networks for big businesses. It was the Europeans and the US Department of Defense that led the way to the global electronic communications tools that we enjoy today.

W3C is hosted by

Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the U.S.
The French National Research Institute in Europe
Keio University in Japan
and is an organization including such members as,
AT&T
IBM
Microsoft
Apple
Adobe
Oracle
Beijing University of Technology
Brainstage Research, Inc.
CERN
etc., etc., etc.

(w3schools.com)

The Internet is this network of networks, that communicate with each other via the TCP/IP protocol. The World Wide Web is the HTTP://, HTML, XML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript, etc., that we can all use to create such beautiful art and information, and then send it all over the Internet.

Those programing languages are sets of rules, just like English, Chinese or Arabic grammar and syntax and all that, which enable us to communicate with each other

They enable communications across a diverse assortment of platforms. Across different national languages, such as English, Spanish, Russian and Chinese and across different operating systems, such as Windows, Apple and Linux, etc.

Remember the dot com boom during the 1990s? Companies such as WorldCom, MCI, AT&T, Microsoft and IBM, etc., were laying thousands of kilometers of fiber optical cable all over the world, building giant warehouses full of servers and launching hundreds of satellites into space.

I can remember reading about Sea Launch during the 1990s. Sea Launch is a private company that was towing rockets out to sea and launching them in International waters to avoid national regulations. They were launching up to 5 communications satellites on each rocket. Now, we have global satellite communications, GPS and satellite mapping and navigation services.

Our cell phone’s connection to these satellite communications systems, through the cell phone towers, is what enables our cell phones to be such powerful collective consciousness terminals. Google Maps and GPS are some of the services we get from the satellites.

I saw an article the other day, June of 2020, where Elon Musk launched 60 satellites on one rocket, to start building his Starlink, satellite based Internet

After the dot com bubble burst, during the 1990s, that entire physical infrastructure has been consolidated into the present worldwide information age communication system. Earth is one giant network of networks. Every school, library, government and business is connected.

Using Skype, Zoom and other video conferencing technology, we can consult with each other via high definition video with anyone on earth, from anywhere on earth, to anywhere on earth. And TV and cell phones are just more channels of this world wide web of communications, education and entertainment.

I hear that Lenovo, Apple and HP and many others are working hard to merge the telephone, the TV and the computer, with cloud computing software, into one global information superhighway. Our cars are being engineered to be personal digital assistants, connected to the network and to our houses.

The walls of our smart houses will soon be high definition video screens that are connected to the network. We’ll be able to experience high definition 3D holographic scenes that we’ll actually be in. Our homes will have rooms like Star Trek holodecks, coming soon to a neighborhood near you.

I was reading the other day that a company has come out with a helmet that displays a very accurate 3D holographic experience. We’ll soon be able to actually see an image of the person we’re communicating with, standing or sitting in the room we are in. Or say, we could have two people in different locations, experiencing an adventure together in a third location.

I’ve also noticed the Linux Raspberry Pi computers, which are small enough to fit in the space of an electrical socket. The connections apparently make them too big to actually fit in an electrical socket. Of course, we’re all familiar with how fast that will change. These computers are making it possible to control all the appliances in our house from our computer. Our houses and cars are becoming intelligent, personal digital assistants.

Have you noticed how the Chinese like to turn their skyscrapers into giant animated neon signs. That’s the kind of thing that Raspberry Pi Linux enables. Building your own Linux network into your house, appliances and cars will give you complete control of every detail of your private energy and communications system.

The Internet is our 21st century global communications system, contributing to the unification of the human race into one worldwide civilization. It’s one of the most profound social and economic developments ever. Clocks and water pumps were the first machines, then printing presses, then TV and now the Internet is the biggest invention since the development of writing.

This world wide web of information, communications and entertainment is definitely influencing the evolution of human consciousness. The first picture of Earth taken from outer space was a dramatic influence on human psychology and sociology. Our cell phones and tablet computers are just the latest artificial impulse, influencing the evolution of human consciousness and the progress of human nature and civilization.

Converging Clouds of Artificial Intelligence

I read the other day that Apple is worth more than $600 billion dollars, the only company to ever achieve that value, other than Microsoft. Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft are racing to be the first trillion dollar corporation.

It seems like Apple and Microsoft made it to about one trillion dollar net worth in a tie. Amazon and Google soon followed. There are probably several companies from other countries, like China and Saudi Arabia that have reached the one trillion dollar threshhold.

I remember reading an IBM white paper quite awhile ago, about Knowledge-Spaces, or something like that, that introduced the idea of cloud computing, if not the name cloud computing. Companies could purchase their own data centers from IBM, which would supply terminals with applications and data on demand, with all the security protocols and stuff to insure that people have only the access they’re authorized to have.

Now, Sun Microsystems is selling the cloud computing model of information technology [IT]. Sun’s, Take Your Business to a Higher Level, white paper, describes how the private clouds of computing services, such as IBM’s Knowledge-Space, are converging into a global cloud of software as a service, available to small and large businesses.

Sun is saying that it’s more economical for the enterprise level companies to develop a hybrid system, with some sensitive proprietary information kept on private clouds, and other computer services purchased as on demand services from a third party. Once again, Sun Microsystems seems to be leading the way on the cloud computing science of business technology.

Companies such as Intel, Cisco, Oracle, which recently bought Sun Microsystems, IBM, HP, Sony and Toshiba, Apple and Microsoft, and many others are building the infrastructure, the computers and software, and selling it to companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Amazon.com. Now, Google and Amazon.com are building their own data centers and then reselling the software as a service at the retail level.

And now, we home office entrepreneurs can purchase and use that cloud computing technology to create our own private free enterprise. Investigate the marketplace. Find something that you like to do and work your way into your own little niche of our world wide web of computer science and artificial intelligence.

I once read a story about Oracle’s I-9 database system. It explained how it could manage all the information for a global corporation. I’m encouraging you to build your own home office based version of that system, using free and open source software, connecting your house with your car and all your appliances, including your electric yard tools, cell phones, tablets and computers.

Work on developing a family scale network, giving parents control of the connection to the Internet. Cars are smart machines. Connect your home office server, with the computer in your car. All of your personal devices will connect to the server in the office. Of course, you’ll want to back everything up on the cloud.

You’ll manage all the electrical appliances you own with your desktop computer in your office. In fact, you’ll be able to control the system from any appliance, using your biometric password. You can tell your house to water the lawn from your cell phone, while you’re on vacation on the other side of the world. Your house might even call you and warn you that one of your appliances malfunctioned and you can then send a repairman to fix any problem, before it gets any worse.

People born after about 1991 are digital natives. They grew up with this world wide web of computers connected to the Internet. The rest of us are digital immigrants. Human consciousness is adapting to computers and the Internet. We can all interact in a symbiotic relationship with the global network. It’s a whole new wave of developmental progress of human nature and civilization.