Internet Currency IC

I just had that thought today..
What do you think if there was a new currency called Internet Currency, one that could be bought from any currency exchanger or bank, its exchange rate would raise, fall and change just like any other, but this time it is according to web market demand, reflecting the web economy , size and volume as well as nature of web shopping and internet based businesses.
Online shoppers would simply stop using credit cards and all other stuff that required a lot of paper work and all these bank rules and nonsense, all they have to do is to just exchange their local currency with whatever amount of the Internet Currency and go online fill their shopping carts, check out and pay using the serial numbers on their internet currency notes. Once entered the serial number on the internet currency note, it is validated against a web service that belongs to the world bank or whatever bank that will issue these notes and it will be blocked from further usage, funds would then be transfered to the seller's bank account. Purchasers you no more need bank accounts, crediting rules or messy bills, sellers no need to worry about fraud, complicated rules and taxes to offer online purchasing mechanisms. The internet currency serial numbers never repeat, they don't as well enter the database and are available for validation against the world bank web service until the moment they are legally purchased from an authorized selling or cashing out point, upon exchange at some bank or exchangeer or withdrawal from an atm machine the notes are scanned and their numbers are submitted as sold. This protects the buyer from abuse, and the currency would never have to be resold by resellers or whatever black market, it will always be transparent, every transaction done reflects its price and contributes to the web economy. Customer awareness and guidelines that prevents illegal purchase of these notes would protect the note, the buyer and the seller from fraud, the seller wouldn't have to worry about it, no transaction would happen without a matching serial number in the system that hasn't been blocked before. And who knows, maybe salaries, markets in the street and everyone starts selling and using that currency instead of their local one, at least it is a currency that has a true price reflecting real demand, not geared by political or local government plans. Global banks to print that note might exist in several countries and later on in all countries wiping out the concept of a local currency altogether. It would be the most dynamic currency that ever existed in the history of man kind. Easiest in usage, safest, transferable as well as exchangeable, people would be able to deposit it in bank accounts, purchase all kinds of stuff with it as well as having it as a salary. The note would have strong serial numbers, strong bank end web services for validation and verification as well as water marks and other means to ensure it is a legitemate note. Web Economy would replace all old concepts and introduce a whole new world with limiteless possibilities, businesses and service providers would be encouraged to go web, go global and double the size and volume of its customers. Customs, taxes and local rules would just fade away, global economic free rules would come in. I believe this is the next step human kind would have to take sooner or later. Unlike the euro thing, this is the first currency that is unrelated to a specific kind, place or color.

Peering

It is all about decisions. Being a peer and just entering a peer to peer network you would start to look for seeds, know how fast these seeds are, what kind of overload they have and how many others have the what they have in case they leave. Those with the rarest parts are the most important to start with, if you get what they have you will keep their parts alive after they leave but you would have to face an increasing demand from other peers to claim what you have got. At some point you would find seeds with fast speed and large chunks idle and nearly newbie peers with the least of parts and even narrowest of pipes under heavy loads and many open connections, this risks losing them, the only peer carriers of seeds rarest parts. A new paradigm has to be adopted, that is, forecasting and expecting how long a seed or a part would survive. So not only you should analyze the speed, share ratio and maximum load each seed or peer have, you also have to track their behaviors, how long do they stay in network, how far did their response and round trips change on an average ping calibration and their replacement rates with other seeds or peers. The decision now is becoming wiser, knowing the overall situation a better understanding of consequences and expectations is achieved. The same is with humans, in human world, we have rare resources either minds, experiences, power sources even chances in life. If we are doing nothing but eating and consuming everything we know and need we will have nothing left and we will ourselves get consumed by our needs and greed. It has to be moderate, calculated and well planned, nothing of what we encounter even if too small or so trivial is random, everything is a result of something that was contributed by someone. The moment you act you change all conditions, as a result all factors are revisited and reevaluated by everyone including you.

What cadidates do

Running for presidency, what to expect from candidates?
They would appear in all media channels, talking about what they can do, take and answer all types of questions their organizers already wrote for them together with the answers. Dispatch some trucks with loud speakers waking sick and older people on nonsense election speeches. Bribing some officials and in a non fair means using law enforcement to guard their own and imprison others. Setting up stages with clowns talking and pieces moving infront upfront and above reporters to express how life cannot continue without this or that. It is very humiliating, embarrassing and disrespectful the way they treat us, our minds and our future. These people are after nothing but their own 4 year presidency period, if they do care about us, our fate and their country they would take a totally different approach. For example, they would start from now investigating what kind of material is that country formed of, what people need, do, listen to and want. They would every easily find out, it doesn't stop there, they would need to pull together a strong team that would form their future administration, a team representing this nation, one that can carry out the tasks and fulfill them responsibly and transparently. People do not want any more good speeches or pretences, they need actions that do not divert them from reality, problems need to be addressed now, through real continuous breath-taking planning, team playing and continuous reporting to people. A candidate who lives for that, won't need to talk himself, people will realize from his actions, movements, visions and clear mission what it means to lose him for some other big talker and bucks payer. If we tolerate it, and let it pass, we might be causing a close relative of us to die in a poor hospital bed due to the low economy conditions that took away medical insurance simply because our dear beloved and chosen candidate had no wisdom, nor efficient team nor even intended to exert any efforts to raise this country above the ground, he simply had nothing to lose. We need some one sophisticated, well educated enough to stand the most complicated problems our country has. It is not enough to list a series of establishments, it is not enough to mention the numbers in favor. Time has changed, this is a new age that needs new minds that can live with it, understand its needs and know how with the current tools make it possible to satisfy the eager demands. It is our responsibility to make sure the right choice is taken, everyone is to be blamed for what happens to this country's future. This is the most important duty of all, everything else comes second.

Being There

Technology now makes it possible, we can have all our moments saved and never lose anything again. It requires an immense change in our behaviors, attitudes and way of life. We have to keep ourselves mobile so that we can be reached and we can reach everyone, we need a steady access to a camcoding device to record the most precious moments that cannot come back again. Our ideas, notes and quotes have to be written down, that's where smart devices jump in. Education, Economies and Laws have to reshape to make it possible, people have to value life and its deep meaning, moments that are so precious, their value and what can be learnt of, extend to cover your family, friends and people on the other half of the world whom you never thought of or even knew. The more we connect, remember and review, the less we fall, tremble and lose.

Social Engineering

Kevin Mitnick in his book (The Art of Deception) defines it as "Social Engineering uses influence and persuasion to deceive people by convincing them that the social engineer is someone he is not, or by manipulation. As a result, the social engineer is able to take advantage of people to obtain information with or without the use of technology." He then defines hacker groups, "Some hackers destroy people's files or entire hard drives; they're called crackers or vandals. Some novice hackers don't bother learning the technology, but simply download hacker tools to break into computer systems; they're called script kiddies. More experienced hackers with programming skills develop hacker programs and post them to the Web and to bulletin board systems. And then there are individuals who have no interest in the technology, but use the computer merely as a tool to aid them in stealing money, goods, or services." Explaining how he turned into a hacker he continues saying, "My first encounter with what I would eventually learn to call social engineering came about during my high school years when I met another student who was caught up in a hobby called phone phreakin. Phone phreaking is a type of hacking that allows you to explore the telephone network by exploiting the phone systems and phone company employees. He showed me neat tricks he could do with a telephone, like obtaining any information the phone company had on any customer, and using a secret
test number to make long-distance calls for free. (Actually it was free only
to us. I found out much later that it wasn't a secret test number at all. The
calls were, in fact, being billed to some poor company's MCI account.)
That was my introduction to social engineering-my kindergarten, so to
speak. My friend and another phone phreaker I met shortly thereafter let
me listen in as they each made pretext calls to the phone company. I heard the things they said that made them sound believable; I learned about different phone company offices, lingo, and procedures. But that "training" didn't last long; it didn't have to. Soon I was doing it all on my own, learning as I went, doing it even better than my first teachers. The course my life would follow for the next fifteen years had been set. In high school, one of my all-time favorite pranks was gaining unauthorized access to the telephone switch and changing the class of service of a fellow phone phreak. When he'd attempt to make a call from home, he'd get a message telling him to deposit a dime because the telephone company switch had received input that indicated he was calling from a pay phone. I became absorbed in everything about telephones, not only the electronics, switches, and computers, but also the corporate organization, the procedures, and the terminology. After a while, I probably knew more about the phone system than any single employee. And I had developed my social engineering skills to the point that, at seventeen years old, I was able to talk most telco employees into almost anything, whether I was speaking with them in person or by telephone. My much-publicized hacking career actually started when I was in high school. While I cannot describe the detail here, suffice it to say that one of the driving forces in my early hacks was to be accepted by the guys in the hacker group. Back then we used the term hacker to mean a person who spent a great deal of time tinkering with hardware and software, either to develop more efficient programs or to bypass unnecessary steps and get the job done more quickly. The term has now become a pejorative, carrying the meaning of "malicious criminal." In these pages I use the term the way I have always used it - in its earlier, more benign sense. After high school I studied computers at the Computer Learning Center in Los Angeles. Within a few months, the school's computer manager realized I had found vulnerability in the operating system and gained full administrative privileges on their IBM minicomputer. The best computer experts on their teaching staff couldn't figure out how I had done this. In what may have been one of the earliest examples of "hire the hacker," I was given an offer I couldn't refuse: Do an honors project to enhance the school's computer security, or face suspension for hacking the system. Of course, I chose to do the honors project, and ended up graduating cum laude with honors."
Can't recommend that book for you :P but in case you're interested to know what Mitnick has to say, you can check his published book The Art of Deception.

Existence

Colors are nothing but shadows of light, odors are narrowly spectrums of energy, bodies are carriers of souls. Soul, mind, spirit is merely the only real thing of all. Appearances, matter and going physical, nothing of this exists. We see according to what our eyes transmit, neurons resolve and brain translate. The body, humanity and planetary forms represents a very limited prison for the indefinite being. The more we go back to ourselves, believe in it, feel it, the less imprisoned it gets, the more able it becomes. Surprisingly we try hard to know everything outside our own self, that self is literally the only true thing we really have. Unlike anything else, nothing can decrease or increase it, it is immeasurable, so deep and so full of unexplored territories, so smart that it fits and makes attached organs and surroundings fit to its plots. It is mostly misrepresented, no tongue or language or pen or bucket could really express the immense and extreme meanings, feelings and worlds of imaginations and thoughts it carries. Bounded by a brain, it can hardly project nothing more than a life time journey although it existed far earlier and far longer. How it binds with its kind was always better lasted and remembered through mental meanings that came from various traces of literature, creativity or arts that were never really physical. The moments souls retire from their bodies and stop being physical, are only when they get their freedom back. It is not just death but dreaming, madness and falling in love as well.

The pool

Imagine if all feelings, everyone has could somehow be saveable or serializable, how would we better understand the human nature, what about their thoughts, ideas, how and where they had them, how they lived their lives in general. These details are so important compared to many other cold raw data of either basic, modern sciences or even literature, all these are just a product or result of how these people lived, what they faced, how they were raised, what feelings they had. If you have a record of all these you can easily restore states to make these scientific inventions or creations but using different people that have the same life signatures. Crossing from eye to eye as well as browsing brains would be the future human explorer, you would just have to remember that personal identifier or so-called name or dna or any other unique key to move to his brain using a series of peer to peer human brains, starting with your own brain and moving on to the next nearest human brain till reaching that person, the connection would be :) Upon successful connection you would be able to see his current thoughts, what he sees with his eyes as well as recent history of what he did, visited, thought of or felt, according to how public he left his brain profile you mightn't have access to some stuff :P
He might need a hand, why not? there would be some way to enable you to aid him with ideas, thoughts or refer him to use another recommended brain he could use...

Which is deeper

You can't imagine the stories I had to translate in the united nations refugees psychological treatment centers, where patients had to describe how they were tortured, their families severed, their dreams torn apart, the committee would then approve or reject giving them the citizenship..I was there translating instantly what the patient answered and the doctors asked..
I don't know if their pain was deeper than the one who was betrayed by his soul mate or the one who lost what he built through his lifetime in Tsunami or anywhere..
Who deserves to be considered as a refugee, how do they scale it.. i think the only pain they recognize is the physical one, the one they still use against Guantanamo inmates..

HoMe ALoNe

Three days ago, my mum left to visit my sister in canada. It is not the first time we get separated but it is the first time I stay alone at home. It is expected to last for about two months.
At first I was busy tracking the progress of her flight, calling her on the roaming mobile I gave her as well as updating relatives of where she is at the moment. Then, after she arrived safely and after I got back from work I started to realize the difference. First thing when I entered from the door there was no air, as I closed all windows, doors anything that might let air in, I thought by that no dust will come in as well so I won't have to clean up :P
Whenever I needed or remembered something I realized I will have to make it on my own, I will in fact be in charge of the household. From food to laundry, answering phone calls, making sure things are closed behind, throwing garbage away..a lot of stuff. But I do believe it is a very good experience, I have to face that long before I start the immigration process, i learnt from it as well how important and vital the role of a mother is. The happy thing is that I can leave the laptop open or whatever anything anywhere in the house not worrying about who will cross over which cable causing what to fall or close, no visitors while I am at work, no worries of someone criticizing how things look, I am neat yes but sometimes I have to put a lot of things around as long as I need them and so as not to go back and forth between rooms to bring stuff, which might not look so cool but it saves me a lot of time and effort. Hope she is enjoying her stay at canada :)