Metta

"I metta man? What man? The man with the power? What power? Hoodoo! Hoodoo? You do? Do what? Metta man! What man? The man with the power!"

The world writhes in agony tonight. Some for the images they see. Some for being those images. One may look in the mirror to find the fault, or one may ask of the receiver that which makes them happy without fault. However we choose, the agony is of our making, so we make a hell for ourselves. Still, hell is a place we make for our torment and if we wish to be peaceful, we must begin the path away from hell.

Here are helpful means to navigate a path out of hell:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/buddharakkhita/wheel365.html

Note well: all the qualities of metta are the qualities of inbound links because they can only be validated by the receiver. To receive, others must care; to give, one is not other.

At The Point Of Value

Tim Bray says:

"But Simon’s right, too, that a lot of money is swirling around; and in particular he’s right that the money happens when the software goes into production."

At the point of value: the software market is replicating the evolution of the music market at the advent of cheap home recording. Prior to that, distribution in the form of fixed media (paper and vinyl), was controlled from point of creative act to point of sale. Once replication or copying technology is in the hands of the purchaser, control by distribution morphs in to control of release value.

The cost is the cost of innovation. In community efforts, this cost is inexpensive by comparison to closed efforts. Open source is still a loss-leader but that is insignificant to the cost of a closed system loss-leader.

The cost of content is less for the complexity of the product, but in an ad based revenue system, quality still requires professional work. The cost of content falls but the competitive edge is best tools. For content, the competition has not changed; the scale of production required has. More can do but it is a market based on small differentiation of the same styles with a slow evolution from cross-breeding styles and saving serendipity. Small teams can do mighty works, but cool counts.

A software market like the music market thrives on Hits. The problem for the very large companies is they need too many to feed the kids and don't really get a subscription model: it requires a high rate of change to get more from less. The closer the software is to the core of the platform, the lower the rate of change. A subscription model is still an expensive subscription. To make this work, the tools built on top must diversify and become smaller and more adaptible. In music, VST improved the lot of all of the follow-on producers of plugins.

Unless the core is common.

So far, the software market won't step up to this except in the domain of open source. Sun makes too much core and not enough plugins. It carries too much community overhead and not enough follow on software.

Planet Quest Website: Brilliant!

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab's PlanetQuest website is brilliant. This is a stunning proof of the power of X3D as an educational format that is beautifully surreal presenting complex information compactly. The techniques applied are ingenious but easy to use and comprehend. This is the professional level of multimedia web content production that X3D needs.

The Wirefusion production approach to integrating text, 2D and 3D is straightforward. They build one dominant object and explain it in the style of a product presentation. Each topic is presented in a mode perfectly suited to it so navigating it is childishly simple and enrapturing.

My only nit here is the sound is noisy. Streaming sound is still the biggest quality gap in the X3D. Multitrack sound streams that enable the spatial capabilities of real-time 3D such as proximity based mixing and soundFollowers aren't here. On the other hand, this sound is a vast improvement over what we had to use ten years ago so I am still blown away. Personally, loops bore me unless other sound nodes are used with them, for example, an option to have the text entries read by a human voice (not a synth). It only takes a little work to record the voices. I understand the bandwidth vs click through problems, but as a musician/actor, you can blame a guy for wanting. :-)

With only that nit, I recommend this site to anyone, but particularly to X3D authors and site designers as a to-be-studied example of doing it right.

Anywhere I'm Not

Some say love is when two people want to be together and do what they must to make that happen. That's the good stuff but not the only stuff. Sometimes love is when you desperately want to be with someone but you know that it has zero chance of working out. Desperation becomes frustration. You will hurt them and by bitter experience, you know you can't stop this from happening. It is a terrible dark thing to know about oneself, a cold confrontation with the uglyness that desire becomes, a disease of the blood and then the soul.

So you take any measures to be sure that she is somewhere you're not, and pray for the Faerie Queen to release you from the tree.

X3D: Real Time Contexts As Emergent Event Sets

Real time contexts are event sets. Events are strictly ordered given a simple locale but may overlap given multiple locales so event order is not the only signature. When identifying a situation semantic in an emerging phase, event order is very important but so is proximity of multiple instances of event types. Say you have a system of sensors, you may be tracking the order that these send alerts to determine time and speed of some object. You may be monitoring multiple sensor clusters and correlating these values in a higher dimensional space.

To identify an emergent event and dispatch on warning (roughly analogous to launch on warning), you have to be able to assign force values to the events because the emergence of a situation may be presaged by weak signals in combination with strong signals. Proximity is a scalar for weak-to-strong events.

Proximity is one of the signals that you monitor given a locale ontology to make a threat assessment. In an intelligence assessment, you may have multiple intelligence types and fusing these into actionable information where the responder assets are limited is the key to effective dispatch. Otherwise, all you are doing is running to false alarms although false alarms are also a key piece of information. Eventually, all of these signals coalesce and are assigned a value from a code list.

The tricky bit here is learning to get all of this information from multiple XML streams emanating from different information source types (think HUMINT, OSSINT, SIGINT, etc). If the control is emergent, then it may just be an Xlink type, at least, that is one way to do it. Metadata can be emergent information, in fact, likely is.

To Find Peace

I have everything I ever wanted. If that is not the same as what I deserve, then that is good because I am sure there are many punishments for those who get ALL they deserve. I pursued justice as I see it, not as I have been told to see it. I pursued pleasure as I could afford it, not merely as I have desired it. In this combination, I have done my duty. Is that not the way of the temple?

Such wonderful things I have seen and known. Is it not enough to drink from the river, to bathe in the river, to watch it fill the ocean? What good comes from trying to hold it or claim it as one's own? None. Knowing this and accepting it is a way to peace. In peace, one may eventually know enlightenment and there is no higher good than that for a human.

Om shanti. Hari om.

The Second Best Revenge

They say that success is the best revenge. It is no doubt true, but if it is not to be personal success, then the second best revenge is to help one who has wronged you attain their most precious desire where that is something they are not prepared to have or do.

The State of Denial

Here in the heart of the Red states, there is only one word for the right wing noveau riche Republicans that make up the majority:

Denial.

Last month we had a Statewide election with an anti-gay marriage ammendment on it. Keep in mind, same sex marriage is already illegal in Alabama so this ammendment was as redundant as G.W. Bush's left ear. Why was it on the ballot? I think it was the usual politics of distraction, but it was also a way to rally the faithful. How did it do?

It passed with an 89% approval. Yep, nine out of ten voters approved the measure.

These same people are holding rallies to show their support for G.W.s war record and still trying to keep the Dixie Chicks off the local radio.

On the other hand, the free rangers are getting louder. I was on jury duty last week sitting in the holding pen (the venire room) when the announcement of G.W.'s grandstand visit to Iraq came on CNN. A lady in front of me guffawed and the man in front of her called her unpatriotic. Can you say, screwed up? The man, in this case. The woman, it turned out, was a soldier fresh from Afghanistan and she chewed a hole in that man that he couldn't cover with his flag. According to her the troops' morale doesn't improve when politicians come for their photo ops using Amercian soldiers as props. She said it makes them angry because of everything they have to do to protect them and it takes them away from their jobs of keeping each other alive.

He moved to another chair. I thanked her for going.

Still, the denial brigade is far from done and desperation in the face of the inevitable collapse of their worldview which at this point I can only describe as willfully dumb and naively evil, they will become mean. I've seen this movie before. The same people who believed in Nixon waited for a chance to resurrect their egos and their ideologies. These people will too. Stupid people aren't smart enough to admit a mistake in their worldview, and too worldly to give it up for others.

If the nation continues to elect this crew, we may deserve them. There are no excuses left and the State of Denial is full of immigrants from the rest of the red states. I don't see any Statesmen on the horizon except Colin Powell, and he is too smart to want their jobs.

X3D And Ontological Space

X3D and Ontological Space

In an X3D world, the emergent engine is the proximity sensor
because it is a scalar identity of a location and locations
organize the semantic tensor: the objects and methods of the
spaces and the objects they contain.

The location organizes the ontology of the space. The distance
organizes the relationships and force per related set. The
distance is scalar by position and velocity. These values in
a mapped space self-organize by the force per related set as
afforded by the norms of the tensor set, or situation semantic:
a spatio/temporally identified norm.

In an X3D world, events find you.

Growing Up Buttermilk

I grew up in a neighborhood that became a black neighborhood as the 60s social experiment known as Model Cities tore down the ramshackle downtown and moved the blacks that lived there into the better poorer neighborhoods to the north of the city. Slowly but surely, we became the minority living in a minority neighborhood. Some fanciful Hollywood movies attempt to portray the American South during this period, but most concentrate on portrayals of the black side of that experience and many miss the real experience of both sides. It was tough at times but seldom as violent or strained as the movies make it out to be. It was the slow begruding acceptance of each other and the coming to lose our fears and our anger. It was sometimes very funny.

Blacks have a word for a white kid growing up in a black neighborhood: Buttermilk. I grew up Buttermilk. No regrets. I don't think that will be understood by some historical plumbers, but I don't care much. It was a time of stories. Here is one.

While I was in college, my younger brother decided to engage in a horticulture experiment by putting marijuana seeds in my Mother’s wooden flower pot on the front porch of our house. My father made the flower pot for my Mom. Night after night I would come home from class and see it growing there, large and healthy by dint of my Mother’s talented but naïve skills. In such a neighborhood, that shade of green does not go unnoticed but it did go unmolested as my Dad was not someone to trifle with. One night, I decided it was just too risky so at 2AM, I picked up the flower pot and took it into the backyard.

When I came home the next afternoon from class, my Mother greeted me at the door and asked if I knew where her flower was. I hemmed and hawed and finally confessed that it was in the backyard. She asked me why and I told her. She immediately collapsed on the couch in a fit of hysterical laughter. This was not the expected reaction so when she calmed down, I asked why she wasn’t mad. She said she should be but that at that moment my Dad was walking up and down the street asking the neighbors if they knew who had stolen her ‘pot’. I imagine the conversations when he left were quite interesting.

Geishas

Every business has them. The titles vary but the job is the same: they are the donut-dollies of business. They are detailed to ensure that meetings go smoothly, shows are well organized, or lunch with the boss has the right kinds of food depending on who the boss is lunching with. They know who the power players are and who to keep out of the executive suite. Sometimes they are highly paid but most of the times they aren’t. They are overbooked, over promised, underappreciated and if not smart or too young, under something or someone. They are always pretty and ambitious and think that this job that let’s them network at the highest levels of a company ensures them a bright future.

The future?

Geishas are seldom promoted into real management positions of authority even if they are delegated to roles that give them resources to command. The reasons are simple. The geisha by practice is a hostess. Politely handling situations and people is their primary skill set as far as business is concerned. Those years spent in business classes getting advanced degrees don’t mean anything. Like the person skilled in English and editing, those rare gifts outweigh their training and background ensuring they stay in the service industry of business management. In all the time I’ve spent in business, I’ve never seen a geisha promoted to management. That which makes them skilled as hostesses or the perception of their skills cripples them as managers. The aggressive ruthless cunning that must be displayed by the so-called ‘high potential’ candidate is hidden beneath the politeness and allure. Worse, too often, like the donut-dollies in the military, they become the property of the officers.

The good news is a smart geisha learns much from the upper management class about business, and makes friends with their subordinates. If they are really strong, they start their own business and by their own hand become the power player they believe they can be. Yet all too often they remain geishas, and in a job that values their allure, their career begins to wane in their late thirties as age takes away their power. They fight it in the gym, with diets, with makeup, with dresses ten years too young, or with the thousand indignities that accompany submission, but unless they have created a new source of power, they lose.

The aging geisha is the saddest of the sad in a world of values that only knows winners or losers. On the other hand, in a world that prizes the sharp wife, Mom or companion who’s eyes see all, appreciate the gifts of knowledge and fidelity, they can be quite powerful. As in all arts, and the geisha is an artist, the best loss is the loss of desperation that comes when the mirror is not the model. The world is.

Practice and maturity can produce the most sublime works.

tensorWorlds

The proximity sensor is the emergent engine of the virtual space.

The difference between a scene and a situation is proximate space in motion.

The intensions of the space are operations of the object mapped to it.

Say, avatars + proximity sensors in motion.

An avatar has types and operations, eg, norms and affordances as some pragmatists would say.

Proximate space vectors are the situation semantic as scalar relationships among proximate spaces in motion limited by the norms and affordances of the objects mapped to that proximate space and proximate spaces within it.

Reciprocity among objects in motion in proximate space coevolves the norms and affordances of objects and the containing space: tensorWorlds. In a tensorWorld, everything is a stream of events in motion.

"Row Row Row Your Boat..."

The XeCond Life of X3D

Hi Rita

It is still too hard to build, but we are clever lads and gals.

As good as it is to build social games, a WikiPedia3D can also be a game.

1. There are only a handful of basic sensor types. As the core GUI, these are semiotic engines. They respond to events and emit signs where those signs are the events in 3D. An avatar pragma + scene events == situation. Situations have semantics. See SemWeb.

Because the avatar is under real time control of the user, it has pragmatics: the rules of intension.

2. Clica (gestures as sensor events) can entertain, attract, repel, restore, whatever. They can also teach.

3. The advantage to a WikiPedia3D is it can use situation semantics to conduct events, therefore, instruct in context.

A buildable world teaches the pragmatics of building.

Online worlds are as good as the personalities of the inhabitants are strong in the media. People build to their tastes so all the world adds is amplification if that is all one does with a world. The games should emerge out of the environment itself because in the virtual world, the environment is an ambient/semiotic server.

The key is to use the sensors to collect data that enables the cultural models to be harvestable by the server itself. It analyzes the models selected, the text descriptions of the world, the behaviors selected by metatypes and feedsback those dynamics to the scene itself as backgrounds, terrain, avatarBots, botHumans, and so on... express that metadata in a common ontological dataset. Standardize it.

Different terms such as virtual ambience or server-ubiquity or sensate world apply. Some just call it virtual reality, a term out of vogue but still applied.

Imagine a server site that instructs in practices because the building tools enable a simple triples engine for declaring semantics, and easy assembly of semantically enabled models where the ontological root is religion... or math.

No magic here. It is an ontology built into a real time 3D rendering so the use of it modifies its rendering.

Affordances are given to conformance with norms but affordances are the means to change the norms. In gamespeak, you get powers for figuring out the puzzles, but the puzzles include the kind of world you build.

I've been around web3D a long time. Vendor worlds are about systems. User worlds are about content because content *is* about people.

The problem of VRML is it was too early; the problem of X3D is that it is VRML.

OTW, this works well and if the authors stick to good authoring techniques, it works acceptably well. Geekdom aside, VRML and X3D are still the HTML of web3D. The bet of X3D is that ownable content is a better investment for the customer. By that I mean, fully ownable down to the syntax. X3D is a bet that standards always achieve that goal better than proprietary systems. Proprietary systems don't have to negotiate with competitors, and that my friend, is the rub.

But the BEST deal for the content builder on the web is still X3D. It is the best bet for your customer too. Why?

OWNING THE CONTENT WHEN YOU ARE DONE.

Let the software vendors debate open source, the profit in it for the content builder and the customer of the content builder is to OWN THE CONTENT.

Ownership is ultimate resale. Ultimate reapplication. Freedom to build an avatar that you can show off on any X3D server operated by ANY X3D company. Your potential set of worlds only gets bigger and bigger and will not go away if a server company folds and friends, LOTS OF THEM HAVE. Think of it as your blog disappearing one day, oopsie...

... but until the freakin' X3D browsers and conforming X3D are interoperable, and the servers are stable, it's just a bet that what you are building works with other 3D worlds, unless of course, you pay competent 3D artists to do their voodoo. Yes, customers build but professionals can build better and get it up faster and keep it up longer. The prize is there for the taking if X3D is adopted by a community of content builders.

<RudeButTheModelIsObvious>
The difference between a call girl and a hooker for the same product is quality.
</RudeButTheModelIsObvious>

Gesthemane: The Video

For the Easter holiday, I wrote the song blogged earlier. I made the video over the weekend. You can download it here: (approx 6mb).

http://home.hiwaay.net/~cbullard/video/Gesthemane.wmv

Windows Movie Maker proves to be a good utility for this kind of work. Now that many churches have big audio-visual systems, there is a ready venue for it, so between the video-enabled iPods, the web in general, and the big systems, this is fun stuff to do.

Messages of Mutual Exclusion

For Staff:

Everyone is counting on you.
Good attitudes make good teams.
Teams make sacrifices.
When the team wins, we all win.
Keep up the good work.

For Executives:

Hire proven performers.
Eliminate doubt.
Fresh blood makes fresh ideas.
When stockholders win, options vest.
Keep up the good work.

I'm not disgruntled. I like to think of myself as the last of the original class of "nattering nabobs of negativism".

Gethesemane: A Song

Anyone who knows me or downloads my songs knows I write pop and not for the sanctuary. I was asked to do a solo for Good Friday by our choir mistress. This is the piece.

Gethesemane

The image of Christ praying in the garden is compelling to me because I believe this is when He is the most human. Confronting the hours of betrayal, humiliation, torture and execution, Jesus knows the real nature of original sin: to love life more than Heaven. So he prays to be released, and in this, he understands why He came: to pray for forgiveness for all humanity, Himself included.

Some songs come so easily, it feels as it they are breathed into me and all I did was write them down. This is one of those. If you enjoy it, credit the source and not the emanuensis.

Office Affairs

Office affairs are always among parties where at least one is married and not to another party to the affair. Otherwise, they would be office romances and while those can lead to problems or a better life, they don't break covenants so don't fall into all of the problems of the office affair.

The dynamics of office romances or affairs are such that in the beginning, the male is at the greatest risk because he typically initiates and until the female says yes, the male can always be gotten rid of with harassment charges. At the point at which the female says yes and the affair is consummated, the female assumes almost all of the risks. While both may have risks associated with their spouses, those are outcomes outside the office.

The unfair part of the office affair is that when concluded by consent or command, the most severe consequences usually are to the female. The worst that happens to males in the majority of cases is they are reassigned, warned, or can lose a security clearance, but little else economically or socially within the workplace unless the female is pregnant, and then the pregnancy is politely ascribed to the marriage. If all parties remain polite, life goes on.

When exposed, and the majority of office affairs are because these are transparent to colleagues, the female can lose her career and possibly her marriage. The male may lose the marriage but seldom if ever the career. There is something Western here, but it seems the modern opinion is that it is the female who is most at fault for accepting and loses the most trust among her colleagues and that is what devastates the career.

Men who are politically compromised may suffer a setback in upward career momentum, but it is typically short-lived if other skills are valued.

For a female to recover, she typically moves to another company and away from any social connections to the former company, often to a new town to ensure this. If there are spousal objections, the problem becomes much more complicated and often, the deceit, much deeper and difficult to manage. So the risks grow exponentially unless she and her spouse can cope with the infidelity openly or at least in private.

The male may have similar issues but they aren't as severe.

It is not uncommon for the male, having seen that the consequences are few, to engage in multiple office affairs serially or even in parallel. While the risks of parallel affairs are great, the risks for serial affairs are little as long as he can maintain the social arrangements of the marriage. In some networks and cultures, affairs by men are tolerated without approval, with little consequence to the marriage which is viewed socially as an economic and parenting arrangement. The primary mistake the male can make is to subject the spouse to social humiliation by publicly flaunting his other liaisons; so in these cultures, keeping the mistress or office girl at a distance from his social world is considered polite even if having her close at the office is not considered impolite but risky. Because a male gains status from risk taking and managing risk, the office affair can be a plus to his advancement.

This is never true for females.

None of this is fair. Fairness and justice are concepts of legitimacy and there is no framework in which the office affair is considered legitimate. They are part of the fabric of desire that drives the humans at the emotional and sometimes economic levels. That they are unbalanced as to consequences appears to be a cultural problem of perceptions, not a problem of right or morality. If they were right or moral, people wouldn't hide them, make up stories when confronted, or otherwise be 'keeping it on the side'. It is what it is: risky behavior.

How risk is managed and rewarded is the crux. Caveat emptor.

Gethesemane

Father, take this cup from me
Swap it for a cooling rain
For a dream we share
By the river there
Cover your face from my shame.

Oh Father, take this cup from me
Take back this drink of despair
For the feelings that harden
So far from the garden
Gethesemane here ensnared.

I came to love them, Father
Share their joyfulness and pain
When our deaths were so far away
But now I share their hunger
For the breath of inspiration
Breathed into me, Father, Life!
It ends today.

Father take this cup from me.
Human, have you made me and frail.
Though your face I see,
Will I still be me
Remembering all beyond the pale?

Oh Father, forgive me, this sin I bare
For the love that you have for your child
From the garden of Eden
To the ending of the world
For forgiveness, merciful mild.

Oh Father, forgive.

len bullard 03/13/06

Pirates and Innovation

It's been calculated that money spent on R&D is not correlated to innovation. Believe it or not. If you don't spend any money on R&D, you lose, but if you spend too much, the stockholders lose. Since most management plans are couched in terms of shareholder value, one can pretty much forget pleading for R&D money without a solid short term turnaround return on investment.

So you still need an innovative staff, you still have to manage to get them across technology chasms requiring lots of homework, and you want them to be happy about that?

Children won't learn arithmetic writing numbers on a board. They will count the numbers of toy pirates they have and how many they lost in a sea battle with a friend. Occasionally, they will fill a ship model with firecrackers and gas and blow it up just to watch together and tell their chums.

Keeping the little buggers entertained is 80% of teaching hard lessons. There is no agenda on a playground but the one in a child's heart just before recess.

We can't spend money, but we can have fun.

ARRGGG! MATEY!!

... and they wonder why the development staff is so silly.

XML Was Invented By The Losers: Part II

Point is, XML was a coup, Mike, over fish and bigger fish. ... and it was the right thing to do, implicature and inference. I don't want to reel off the names because that is an assessment based on the sales I saw at the time and who they were selling too. SGML systems were very expensive.

The bigger fish don't always win. It doesn't mean they are evil. Some are being eaten/herded by even bigger fish. But put enough losers on the street and they figure out how to beat the winning fish to the bigger fish. No legacy. Nothing to lose. Everything to win and software requires no more than household costs to develop to prototypes.

Were I The Evil Coyote at the Evil Empire:

Cut the loss leaders off into open source. Spread the risk and cost of development out. As the hardware costs come down, software is a bundled component and it is shipped that way. To reduce costs, reduce non-standard bundling of software and hardware. See Macintosh 1986.

A standard bundling of hardware/software collapses the licensing costs, sales costs and dilutes the threats of patents and patent trolls without removing the competitive edge of quality.

Solve the problems of versioning and identity management. The problems of the second are social in that they are the history of systems like those based on SSN beating against the new web based systems that are quick to grant rights and slow to revoke them.

The application of identity tokens such as Social Security numbers, that is, tokens which are printed and therefore easily lost are insufficient for a digital society. Because the rate of interconnection, relations, and types in the system have increased, the speed and size of damage is fast and hard to undo with current mixed human/machine schedules (eg, what user can contract with the server and what a human has to review/approve). Not relaxing the constraints on registration of transaction where the business logic is adequate to approve a transaction is costly and paranoid.

Portals must integrate notification services based on legitimacy, sensitivity and autonomy.

Identity theft is discovered only when the first collection agency calls. That is too late.

Services to stop all transactions on the lost id are closed on weekends. That is too slow.

Services can be insensitive. That is rude.

This lack of orchestration/choreography/event systems for building implicature and inference from events over data increases costs and reduces reliability. BI systems ARE the next hot emergence zone.

Reliability is a problem of undercertified systems. Undercertified systems require tests and tests must be transparent. Mapping specifications to open testing is still the best means to certify.

This requires all the big fish to put down their guns and see the desktop market equilibrium for what it can be: a cost cutting system that doesn't sacrifice the quality of the product to increase the rate of sales. Make sure this piece is a rock-solid indisputably patent neutral system.

Any time a component rises to commodity status, buy the rights and put it in the standard system. Buy the patents and put them in the public domain. Innovate and standardize by providing profits to the owner from the profits made of selling the system to public domain. Let the market economy do the rest.

Pretty much what The Losers do. Lose the least profitable risks by sharing the costs of the most profitable ones. In that way, economic gains are sustained by social benefits.

Then it's norms and affordances, or culture and rights. With these come national interests. We speak of society as if it were homogenous and that is observably not so. But given the power of nations, culture is where our standard systems and marketplaces interlock, where social benefits and economic gains are made uncertain by the unreliability of those relationships in the human context. Cultural interfaces mean system filters. System filters mean autonomy.

The conflict is here between human and virtual systems.That is the hard problem of the emerging generation of digital systems designers and strategists: to couple social benefits to economic needs through the dimensions of legitimacy, sensitivity and autonomy of the virtual systems with respect to the norms and affordances of the human systems. Where we cannot, we risk the nationalist agenda oscillating against our global conversations. But the rule of autonomy says that we cannot continue simply by system fiat: we must desire this. That is the crucible sensitivity over autonomy in the rights of the human over the virtual, and the virtual over the human, and by representation, human over human.

I have hope.

Last week I received an email from a fan who shares my music with his friends in China. My wife warns me people in China have a thriving business duplicating western music and selling it and might steal mine. I told her, "I hope so."

A bit of memory from my generation: the music of Motown made for peace in an integrating racist Southern America. If there is to be peace, it is to be found in our shared languages, and of these, music speaks to the heart. When we hear this, we listen. Then no one loses.

"Leave gentle fingerprints on the Soul of another for the Angels to read"..- Proverb