The biggest F word!

Fidelity. Yes, that is a word that perhaps is the most important word in any relationship. Of course, then come faith, fun and eventually the future.

So, what is important physical fidelity or emotional fidelity?

Perhaps, many would disagree, but emotional fidelity is more important, ultimately. It is because of the disrespect of the emotional bond that lets deceit, lies and needless “was at an official party” excuses creep in.

Now, forgiveness is another huge F word that one is advised to keep part of the relationship too. But, forgiving when your trust has been breached? Is that not, in fact, pure foolhardiness?

All I can say is that the hollowness inside of you, that emptiness after you know that the one you trusted and loved with your life betrays you…there can never be the same bond. Trust once lost, is difficult if not impossible to regain.

So, should you still forgive and go in for a relationship where the threads of love have already been burnt?

The conversation is thrown open to you…

It makes me see RED!

“Oh, darling…with people like you by my side, why would not my world rock….and you know honey how selective I am…you know more than most;-)”

Does this not sound like a very cheesy and flirtatious comment? You know what is the worst thing? It is made by an elderly lady to a young man who is quite hitched and getting married soon!

What is with the older crowd? I thought it was just old degenerate men in our local buses who still had too much of testosterone running through their body. I am clearly wrong; of late I have seen older women picking up younger boys happily just to satiate a few needs. And yes, some men seem to be making the most of it.

The world seems sadly driven by self obsession and a compulsive need to be desired. Switch on the television or surf the Internet and voila in minutes you would be told you resemble ‘Ugly Betty’. Turn around, and the first man who says, “Oh, baby you are sooo pretty” and you go after him like a flame after TNT. Why did I use an explosive for a metaphor, well that is because the relationship you zipped after is self destructive.

Many older women say they have enormous self confidence and therefore go for younger charming men. Baah – hogwash! The younger man gives you the confidence in the first place, if it was not for say Ashton perhaps Demi would not be the same person she is today.

So am I against it? No, find love wherever, but stooping down to the levels of depravity…that is sad. And I pity you, lady. Know, when you have over stepped the border…

Broken guitar...

Do you know what it feels like loving someone that’s in a rush to throw you away?
Do you know what it feels like to be the last one to know the lock on the door has changed?
.
.
How can I love you? How can I love you? How can I love you? How can I love you? . . . If you just don’t talk to me, babe?

- Enrique Iglesias

And now I ask you this how many of you have felt that you gave it your all…you got a hint, and you ran after that flicker of hope. You were there, but he never came home. And what was left inside of you got sucked inside a black hole. It showed on your face, but you fought it bravely. The world saw you smile, yet a gnawing pain was eating you inside.

But what if you had to give up your love? Or you were there, he was there…but there was something missing… Why do we fall in love, and make ourselves so vulnerable that if one string breaks and you sound like a broken guitar. Music makes no sense, the world seems a senseless race to achieve…but achieve what?

Does love hold us back? Make us alter our chosen path?

Maybe, but the only way out, as they say, is through it.

And yes, no matter whether you feel like faceless name in a file, or have no great job or are the brightest star in your group – love will find you. She/he will love you any way… And when you’ll meet you’ll realise that you’ve always been in love; even before you met. And you will know that this time it is real. He is not the man who kissed you good morning and never said it was good bye. This time it is real; this time…

...for I shall wait

...for I shall wait

One day the clouds will burst,
The rain will drench me till my socks,
I shall shiver, while people shall call out my name.
And yet I shall wait.

There in my hand for you is an umbrella,
You said you would be back, I cannot let you get cold,
Minutes have turned into months,
And yet I shall wait.

My feet are aching, my shoes are biting me,
The wind has beaten my face,
And yet I carry my comb and compact,
I must look good for you...for I shall wait.



Akansha, May 2007

The Lollypop Race

This is one of my earliest memories. Racing with a lollypop. A delicious chocolate éclair flavoured one I took, hard on the outside and when you bit it, it would release a soft melting chocolate that will squirt onto your tongue…mmmm…yummy…. Ok, ok no distractions.

Let me take you down memory lane. I must have been in nursery or kindergarten when this happened.

I and my classmates stood in a huge field with scores of people all around us seated on benches; parents we guess. So, what is the occasion we are animatedly discussing.

The coach hushes us and shows us a poster with infinite number of lollypops stuck on it. A million different flavours done in a multitude of colourful wrappings. Whoa, as a three-and-a-half-year-old that is a view which passes for pure unadulterated ecstasy.

“Keep your hands behind your back and using only your teeth free the lollypop from the board,” says the coach.

What I fail to hear while romancing the notion of having a lollypop so near to my lips is that after you free the lollypop you must run to the finish line. It is a race. And we are celebrating our annual Sport’s Day.

“Ok, now. Start!”

Aha, I had already had laid eyes on my beauty– a sweet chocolate lollypop. And there I went ahead furiously biting the white stick that held it up.

“Free at last dear one,” I said to myself. It has taken me barely 10 seconds to free the lollypop. And now I glance upon my classmates. They are still at it. Gnawing at its end yet unable to free the glued confectionary.

“Ok, so now what? Can I just start eating? Or will that seem rude…perhaps I should just wait for the rest to grab theirs as well,” I start contemplating.

“Yes!” exclaims one gleeful friend of mine freeing his orange lollypop.

And there he goes running, whizzing past me. Another classmate has also by this time bitten of a lollypop and is now readying to break into a sprint.

“Oh, so you have to run, eh,” I figure.

Zoooooooooom.

That is me running happily, skipping with joy…. And then I spot my parents and sprint even faster to greet them and show off my loot. As my parents hug me, I see a teacher coming towards me.

“Here, come with me Akansha,” she announces cheerily as she offers her hand.

And I find out I have just won the race! Silver medal, but why nitpick :-) :-)

“You may have your lollypop now,” says my teacher.

“Now, is this not an absolutely superb day? I get to eat my favourite chocolate treat, win a race and get to pose for the cameras,” the very visibly excited little me has concluded.

Years later today I can safely say that childhood is bliss. A treat in itself undeniably the best God has on offer:-)

Billions vanishing without a trace

It happened in the 1880's first, and now it is happening again. Worker bees go out and then never return. No bodies have been found, no trace of any infection or ailment... it is like an alien force is beaming them away somewhere. This is certainly more serious a problem than it sounds....



read more

The future of the world 3.0 is in my hands...

“The future of the world is in my hands...And I'm modest about it,” I recently stated. And I can tell you I am not wrong. Look outside the window, how many of those people who walked just by do you know or recognize? One, two…none? Think now again of the people spread all over the world. Do you know them? Do you know what makes them laugh, what pulls at their heart strings? Do you know that one of them was an aspiring soccer player turned accountant? Do you know that one of them became the CEO of his own company at the age of 19, but donated all his money to become a regular kid again? Do you know?

Really WHAT do you know?

But you have a chance to learn and answer; and this chance is this one lifetime. People around me feel very technology handicapped so much so that they would not want to hear the T word. But the only choice you have to make the most of this life is through accepting technology. At the moment your newest friend could be a thousand miles away or in the next dormitory room, but our culture has made us too cold to get up and say hi to the stranger next door. In fact if a stranger would come up to you I am sure you will squint and indeed be perturbed by the free-willed action. The same guy pops into your chat window or leaves you a message in your MySpace/Orkut/Ryze/ guest book and see yourself happily responding.

Accept the world has changed and so has our socio-cultural dynamics. And it is going to change even further. Social networks have already taken us by storm and so has avatar technology. We have created false or more politically correct – virtual selves on the Internet. I am not talking about just the fakes in chat rooms, but the reality of having a second lease of life in virtual worlds created by Second Life and the sorts. You can earn money, have sex and even have drugs on the Internet! “Users of virtual drugs have reported the effects of these virtual drugs to be surprisingly realistic and lifelike,” is what Brian Shuster, chief Utherverse feels. Even virtual sex sells. Second Life confessed pervert and businessman ‘Stroker Serpentine’ a.ka. Kevin Alderman sold his ‘amorous’ technology for $50,000!

Clearly, our perception of reality has been altered.

And that now brings us to the topic of the semantic web or WEB 3.0. Our computers are still too dumb inspite of these sweeping changes that we are still grappling with. We are now building newer ways to understand the world – and that is WEB 3.0. We still rely on human intelligence to sift through Google search results, but what if you are hurried and all you want to say is: I need a flat for my family of me, my husband, mum and 3-year-old twins. But my budget cannot exceed Rs. 35,00,000 and it must not be more than 10 kilometers away from my office in Santa Cruz West, Mumbai. Google this and you’ll be lost in tones of data or perhaps lack of it. The semantic web will understand you and your needs and then answer you. It will intelligently understand that when you ask your operating system to “open files on my investments” it needs to open up data on mutual funds, stock ops, fixed deposits etc and not have you look up each.

Apart from the intelligent semantic web we desperately need and will have open architecture in the future where the programming power is in the hand of the user – as I said in the beginning the future in our two hands. . So we surely need:

• A universal operating system – that means one common Windows/Mac/Linux platform. And not sold in CDs, but just pure downloads off the web;

• Web conferencing facilities that are automatically updated and scale up with need – this means businesses not only close deals in real time over the globe but also nuture new ideas, recruit talent and talk to shareholders inside their homes and bounce off ideas with them;

• An avatar system that can travel within many virtual worlds enabling users to interact – and not just within closed games, but replacing email ids with virtual 3D representations.

This is not your future world. This OUR world today − thinking tomorrow A.K.A WEB 3.0.

And NOW you know!

Beauty Immunity?

It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah . . ."

The word doesn't come easily.

". . . ignoring me."

Bell is laughing. It's at himself.

"At a music hall, I'll get upset if someone coughs or if someone's cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change." This is from a man whose talents can command $1,000 a minute.

These profound thoughts are from a piece I read on The Washington Post: Pearls Before Breakfast. One of the world’s most brilliant violent virtuoso was playing classic masterpieces on a very busy working morning. He appeared like a street side musician; only he was THE musician – Joshua Bell! But did any of the thousands notice? No prizes for guessing.

The little experiment showed our very intrinsic nature:-

We appreciate beauty only with a price tag.

Pay a thousand dollars and you will never criticize him. In fact if you had put a street musician on the stage and tagged him with the same amount of money; voila you would have found a winner.

Makes me think – do we even understand beauty? Or is this pre-assumption incorrect. My brother loves hard rock and dark rap music. He swears by it; mum calls it noise. So who is the illiterate?

Beauty is personal. Deeply personal....

Smile Cheeeeese; CLICK!!!

Have you ever faced that torturous passport-sized photo clicking session?

“Say cheese, smile a bit, relax…don’t bite your lips, tilt your head bit to the side.”

CLICK!

“Hmmm, no one more…. Bend your head down a bit.”

By this time I am looking at my mum just wishing the stupid photographer would disappear.

CLICK!

“Fine”


Why do I feel as if I have finally been freed from the gladiator’s arena? Am I now a photo-phobic? When I was young my father clicked infinite photos of me, and you bet I posed like a little doll for each. I have seen one of mine sitting on a stool with some cute looking doll…hmm, I don’t know how that came about; all I have ever loved as a kid has been fast toy cars, puzzles and stuffed toys. Anyway, I have another of me when I crawled into a red VIP suitcase when Papa was going off on some tour. He grabbed the camera and immortalized by dimpled smile.

Nowadays, I run from the camera. I just do not like it. Click, click, click… I am hardly ever satisfied with the photograph. Look at the number of cameras around you, almost every one of us has a camera phone. Every single little thing is now an occasion to shoot. Grrr, almost on cue…while typing this away my dear colleague and friend Ashutosh has just clicked one of me. See, you just cannot escape.

You know I have nothing against the art; I have done a six month photography course under Mr. O P Sharma – an acclaimed international level photographer. It is from him that I developed a love for black and white photography. It is funny how the seemingly simple play of shadows comes out so poignantly in the black and white colour scheme. As far as portraits go, would you not agree that somehow the best are of little innocent kids and the wrinkled faces of the old timers. They are both selfless and carefree.

As a young adult you are perhaps more conscious of your outer beauty, and the correct ‘image’. We have an incredible amount of pressure on what the correct smile, skin colour and body type should be. Babies are lucky; the cute bald little sugar cubes look sweet any way! And toothless grannies have never had it better ;-)

Anyway, guess for now I will have to grin and bear it… Go ahead and say it –
CHEEEEESE. CLICK!

Yeah, so they kissed...

Guess what has got people’s panties in a twist now? Lip action by Shilpa Shetty and Richard Gere. Blame it on the hormones, but the amazingly handsome and Hollywood megastar planted more than a couple of pecks on Bollywood and Big Brother winner Shilpa Shetty. He gave a kiss on the hand, a hug, then the cheek and the la Hollywood style…at an AIDS awareness camp for Indian truck drivers.

Hmmm, so the country is shocked and agitated. But seriously what the heck? Who cares? So Rakhi Sawant’s declared close friend is not acting like the former and slapping away the apparent offender. But why should she? Come on, these are showbiz guys this is part of their lives and such coupling is something you should not even bat an eyelid about.

I was forced to blog this, because many around seem concerned! And what concerns you, concerns me…

Now go vote:

Do you care about the Shilpa and Richard Gere's kissing exchange?
	Na, it is cool. Look at the saucy movies she's been on..I don't think she was new to that!
	Yuck! Disgusting! I am so soooo bugged. How could this happen?
pollcode.com free polls

Vegetable Chocolates… No more fat!

Praise the lord, declare an international holiday. The US FDA is allowing changing the definition of chocolates allowing “chocolate products which would permit the use of cheaper vegetable fats instead of the traditional cocoa butter”.

Do you know what that means – in the future some time we would have vegetables that will be chocolate flavoured. I mean really we have chocolate flavoured ice-creams, easter bunnies…even ants for Christ sake. Why not healthy chocolate brinjals, or soft melting chocolate flavoured spinach? Scientists are heavily into genetically modified food, so why not insert a coca gene in bitter gourds?

BTW there is news that soy extract based Easter eggs have become a rage in Brazil.

Seriously, this could be an election campaign issue. Chocoholics rule!!!

Can your name be a copyright violation?

Just think about it – your parents have named you Microsoft. Now you grow up and you are signing this on your credit card, receipts, bills… your home address, salary accounts reads this. Can Microsoft – the IT mammoth – sue you for infringing upon their name?

Or what about baby Reebok? Will the sports company sue you?

You know why I got thinking on this seemingly crazy idea? Well, it started with my pet Alsatian. His name is Diesel – I had given the folks an option of Diesel and Antonio, they went with the former. Anyway, his mum’s name was Pepsi I have found out much later. So, I am thinking can the Pepsi guys say hey that the liquid beverage named bitch (pardon me, but that is what a female dog is called) is their property?

Are you actually aware that there are many names that have become public property like say Benetton, McDonald or Sothebys – surnames that command respect and bags of green…the currency kind.

What if your name becomes as famous as Calvin Klein or Giorgio Armani, eh? Will you go around like a second fiddle to the famous, or would you opt to change it? What if you already have a blog, Second Life avatar and an email address by that name? Can the patent lawyers hunt you down and make you relinquish your identity?

If that made you paranoid, go out relax and order a nice cheesy pizza at Dominoes…or is that your name… hahahahaaaa (devilish)

What the... Horse!!!

I could not go without telling you about this... Zoo is a movie by Robinson Devor, it is about horses and humans.. Horse Whisperer you say? No! It is about..hold your breath...about a community of people who enjoy making love - god I did not say that - to horses! YUCK!!!

It is based on a real life guy from Seattle whose sick personal video surfaced online. This fella supposedly injured himself during the whacko video he was making and died in the horsey intercourse. And Devor thought, hey that is a bright idea!

Well, I don't know what he was thinking, but it seems to create a sense of sickening curiosity and disgust at the very same time. We have films exploring male bonding like Brokeback, and I get it....but ummm horses... well I got to give it to you, it is eye-popping...but pretty pretttty bad taste choice for a storyline!

Do we not have any better ideas? Puhleeeasse spare us Zoo man!

Comic Stripping ;-) ;-)

Been roaming around the net.... found Comeeko - a personal comic strip builder... Cool idea. But what i want to share is this from Blaugh.com... laugh and be merry

Identity Theft or lax in Identity Continuance?

One huge question that arises from the Oracle and SAP battle is not just the unfair and illegal practices that brings to mind the Virgin and British Airways “dirty tricks” dispute. But the serious question of ‘identity continuance’ – a term I would like to describe the phenomenon of employees accessing older data after the license expires and logging onto protected/private and public URLs using log-ins and passwords issued while employment with the issuing company.

It is certainly a very scary idea; and I too am well aware of employees leaving with the knowledge of public and private log-ins and passwords, subscriptions to highly expensive resource portals like (say for a journalist) gettyimages, AFP or livewire. It is especially forbidding in a scenario when most employees can even log on to their work email servers through a specific URL, and few, if any, use secure tunnels (VPNs or virtual private networks) to access it, whether they are at home or in their hotel rooms!

Perhaps linking the HR and IT department more closely might help stymie such efforts. However, insisting on something akin to digital signatures would be the only real method to stop illegal use of log-in ids as every time a ‘terminated’ user tries logging on the signature would identify the perpetrator from his unique personal access code. Though, fool-proof, is a something that is a term next to impossible; pun intended!

Remember, play safe ;-)

Oracle cries thief; sues SAP

Oracle has just sued SAP. And boy, is the 44-page complaint worth a read, or what! Before I get into the nitty-gritty, one must know that by their own admissions these two are the biggest and finest enterprise application and database software companies. Well to be fair, Oracle strength is database and is graduating at an incredible strength to the enterprise applications space through an awesome number of acquisitions, while the German company SAP is the clear frontrunner in ERP (enterprise resource planning) arena. The latter admits to invest in organic growth, and refuses to go acquire at the mind-numbing pace of the former.

Ok, so what is the hullabaloo all about? Well, Oracle claims that SAP has used fake/expired log-ins and log-ins of customers who were in the process of migrating from Oracle to SAP to access the Oracle support website and “steal” unauthorised information, programmes and downloads to build up SAP’s own tech support database. For example Oracle states, “In January 2007, a user on an SAP TN computer signed in as Oracle customer Honeywell International…to access Oracle’s support system and copy literally thousands of Oracle’s Software and Support Materials in virtually every product library in every line of business.”

The interesting point to note is that Honeywell is now a SAP TN customer and was cited by Oracle downloading “1800 solutions per day” after making the shift to the German conglomerate compared to an average of 20 downloads when it was with Oracle. These illegal downloads included tech solutions for JD Edwards products when the user – Honeywell – was on Peoplesoft! “Oracle subsequently connected many of the illegal downloads to an SAP TN IP address and to SAP TN’s employee, Wade Walden – a former PeopleSoft employee now employed by SAP,” states the company. (read Oracle and SAP - Identity Theft or lax in Identity Continuance for more)

Other companies like pharmaceutical major Merck was seen signing on to Oracle networks even after its support license expired in Jan 2007; Merck supposedly continued to download JD Edwards copyrighted documents well into March, 2007! (Really, it took the world’s ‘best’ database company – Oracle –3 months to update their own databases! I don’t know who to blame for this carelessness)

Now, for the uninitiated, SAP earns money from maintaining and supporting Peoplesoft, JD Edwards and Siebel solutions – marquees that have been acquired by Oracle. Well, SAP acquired TomorrowNow (what is SAP TN now) to maintain these products and gives the “Safe Passage” as an option for customers who do not believe Oracle can support Peoplesoft in the future. But, SAP’s idea to support a third party software is dicey when being fully-aware that Oracle will continue updating and tweaking these products as technologies change; and providing a support product without knowing about the original codes and that to without infringing upon patents is one hell of a tough task! And that too at half the cost!!

What will happen? Allegations and counter-allegations, and lot of free publicity for the two! As no one more than the media loves a public mud-slinging! For more keep watching this space...

What is the power of love?

What is the power of love?
	1)You can love in silence
	2)You need words to express love
	3)Physical contact is needed for love
pollcode.com free polls

This isn't what is typical of my blog, but would you not want to know the answer? So vote, and leave comments... Something tells me, it will make a great write up ;-)

New species walking the Earth for centuries!

Just in the news; a whole new species of the cat family has been announced! It is called the “clouded leopard” and differs genetically from its other relatives as is clearly visible in the picture from its different pattern of spots and fur. "For over a hundred years we have been looking at this animal and never realized it was unique,” said Stuart Chapman, WWF International Coordinator of the Heart of Borneo programme.

Did you hear that?? We have been staring at them for over a hundred years, and now it clicks! The red-tape bureaucracy has clearly found their winner :-) :-)


PS: If you would like to read up on this then go to http://www.worldwildlife.org/news/displayPR.cfm?prID=360

Science reasons why bosses rarely laugh…

A friend recently admitted to me that he never understood his assigned roommate’s humour all throughout the two years they were together, but always gave a nice hahaha at the end of the joke since he wanted to be congenial. I can recount endless times when I have burst into a fit of laughter and I have no idea what the joke is! Mostly the laughter of my dear joke teller has been infectious enough, much like a sound track on our daily sitcoms for me to go giggling away; and my guffaws enough to get my sweet confused friends break into a belly-aching, tear inducing laughter spree!

Now all of us, according to a research released recently, laugh not always because we find something very funny, but because of our social status. The Boss will not laugh at a joke by the subordinate in front of the team unless he wants to cut the ice and be the “pally-boss”; the uptight boss though actually is a jolly and goofy type with his friends as there he does not need to prove his intellectual strength, power and is by status among 'equals'. The junior though will laugh at his boss’ joke not always to please, but genuinely because he is in a position not to lose face even if he laughs at a stupid joke, as he is already (perhaps only ‘subconsciously’) not as smart as per dictum of the hierarchy.

Confused? Well the logic is simple – we laugh not because it is funny, but because we want to make friends! Oh come on, truthfully tell me how many times have you actually feigned a little chuckle when you had no clue what the joke was, but every one else has broken into a guffaw? Well, that was to win the approval of your friends around you. If you have overheard a superbly funny joke from an adjacent dinner table will you be chortling away like crazy? No, because you are not part of that social group.



HISTORY:

Now, for a little fact here: Laughter is truly contagious. History bears witness to a laughter epidemic that lasted for six months in Tanganyika. A couple of school kids heard a joke and supposedly laughed uncontrollably. Their laughter spread to adjoining schools and their parents; with the whole village and surrounding villages soon caught in the same fit! The laughter epidemic caused schools to close for half a year! (Wonder what the joke was?)

So, does the theory apply here? Well, if you again go into that time, then we see that at that time the populus was stressed about its new found freedom, and impending grouping with another country Zanzibar to make Tanzania. Clearly, the laughter was the same trick my friend was using to get along with his roommate and make the atmosphere more amiable.



YEAH, RIGHT!

Now, if only laughter could be the only disease we humans be inflicted with…

And I hope you figured why the thin line stretched across your boss’ face rarely curls up. It is not your spate of poor jokes, but compelling neuroscience! (Yeah, I am not funny, it is neuroscience;-))


(PS: The research has been done by laughter researcher Robert R. Provine of the University of Maryland Baltimore County. Of course, his research papers in the past have included studying the behavioural pattern of a (don’t save your screams) cockroach, and also the contagious effect of yawning!).

Read more on: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/science/13tier.html?ex=1174708800&en=2e572727cb169597&ei=5070

Does your vacuum cleaner have human rights?!

“To you, a robot is just a robot. But you haven't worked with them. You don't know them. They're a cleaner, better breed than we are…” I, Robot (paperback edition)


And so said Isaac Asimov, the writer that actually coined the termed robotics, through his characters in his short collection of stories named I, Robot. Well, perhaps they took him too seriously, because today the world has demanded to make an ethical charter to prevent abuse of robotics!

In South Korea, a committee has been formed to debate and formulate such a charter that will be released sometime in 2007. European Robotics Research Network have similar plans; and if you would like to know, no less than the government of United Kingdom has stated that in the next 50 years robots will be able to compete for the same legal, emotional and physical rights that are applicable to the human race! Surely, no one is taking artificial intelligence as an equivalent of fake IQ, because with the sort of advancements like Honda’s Asimo (his name that seemingly is inspired by the writer Asimov) or the simplistic yet amazing Roomba – a vacuum that has sensors and can clean up your house without your supervision – is indeed very real!

In fact, it has been projected that in South Korea alone from 2015 to 2020 every household would be having a robot in their house (reminds one of Robin William’s Bicentennial Man). The laws that shall form the base of the Ethics Charter are from Isaac Asimov’s novel Runaround. This was one of the short stories in I, Robot, which for the first time formalised a law for robots; mind you at that time, i.e. 1942 when the stories were written, this was a futuristic concept and no real gadgets as such had been developed.

The laws are:

• A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
• A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
• A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law

THE DEBATE

Now, all this seems fine, the real debate centres upon whether robots, which were developed as tools to help our race, deserve to become in fact a de-facto human? Before we jump to conclusion, look at the origin of the word. Robot actually comes from a Czechoslovakian word for slave/forced labor that is robota or robotnik. So does that mean Nelson Mandela has found his new campaign statement? Or is there going to be a Bhartiya Robot Party in India one day?

The answer perhaps lies in 322 B.C. As the Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote...

“If every tool, when ordered, or even of its own accord, could do the work that befits it... then there would be no need either of apprentices for the master workers or of slaves for the lords.”

Author’s view: I demand the right today as a human being to reject my personal computer to upgrade to a fancy, Wi-Max laptop with teraflops worth of RAM and hard disk. I demand the right to kick my vacuum cleaner when it gets stuck on my carpet. I demand the right to throw away my robotic puppy, when I get bored. I demand the right to upgrade! AND NO, upgrading the human race to robots is not acceptable. So, though according to Darwin, we might not be the fittest when compared to robots, but we invented them and I demand the right to remain MASTER!


PS: In case anybody would like to learn about I, Robot and its short stories you could check it out at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A455898, which has small write ups on the same. Keep reading!

I want to break free… Blogging needs freedom!

“It has been recognized that China's mines are among the most dangerous in the world…corner cutting by owners … lead to almost 5000 deaths during 2006 alone, and to an unknown number of potentially serious injuries that is thought to far outstrip the number of outright casualties….” (source: http://angrychineseblogger.blog-city.com/)

Now, it is statements like these on Internet blogs that many website hosting providers and search engines are pressured to censor. Last year, Google and Yahoo took flak for censoring web searches in China prohibiting sites that seemed politically ‘unfit’. In fact, a political dissident, Shi Tao, is serving a 10 year jail term for an email that did not suit the government. Information on him was given out by Yahoo. MSN Spaces too bent over and removed certain objectionable blogs that did not meet the approval of the Chinese government. In fact, now news of China banning opening up of new internet cafes for the ‘protection’ of the public from ‘objectionable material’ is not too unexpected either.

“Censorship of certain content is usually argued for when considering the possibility that children may have access to that content. The mass of the population of any country are not children and we should not be treated as such by our various governments,” shares avid blogger Steven McDermot of one controversial blog singabloodypore.blogspot.com, “Usually governments use such arguments to censor material that they feel is detrimental to their claim to legitimacy to rule within a given state....as an adult I merely require the protection of the law as all other adults do.”

Now, this Jan-end the internet behemoths like Google, Microsoft and Yahoo reportedly finally agreed to get together with Amnesty, Human Rights Watch and Reporters Without Borders to come out with an online ethical code of conduct. “The positive effect may simply be that they are less likely to self-censor their thoughts. It may even lead to a whistle-blower ethos taking formation online. One such endeavour recently launched was http://wikileaks.org/news.html,” argues McDermot.

Considering, China, Vietnam and Iran are on a list of sensitive countries that restrict freedom of speech on the Internet and have persecuted citizen journalists based on the same this would indeed come as good news, though we still are waiting for the formal charter to appear. Of course, one icky issue is that the US based companies are handing over this censorship or non-censorship role to the US government! Considering, it is the very country where many blogs by army men on their opinion on the Iraq war and ground realities have been banned and deemed ‘objectionable material’ the situation is indeed murky, to say the least.

So the question remains, how far is “freedom of speech” really free? How far is user’s data private? Take the case of MySpace that finally decided to turn over their database to help track sexual offenders. The site is employing Sentinel Safe technology that will match user profiles with the federal sex offender database in real time. Google’s Orkut has been heavily criticized for helping pornography as some user’s photographs were being used to build fake profiles and solicit ‘clients’. When many ‘I hate ….’ communities took long to be pulled off, the social networking site was lashed out at in the papers.

Not that we condone any of this irresponsible behaviour, what is then this debate of absolute freedom of speech online? Is this a farce, like our idea of truly non-politically motivated deeds of “social welfare” by many corporate houses in the real world?

Well, here sites like http://peacefire.org/, http://psiphon.ca/download.php and http://www.afreeproxy.com/ come to the fore, which provide numerous ways to circumvent censorship – from ideas that help you get a proxy URL to routinely testing out filtering software that in many cases have been caught subverting “inappropriate” political content.

It is through information alone that the fight to clamp down information can work. The ethics code is one step, the marathon run is yet to begin.