Statistically I have less days remaining on this earth than time already spent. Reconnoitering the future has become increasingly important to my day as has contemplating what benefit I’ve given to the legacy of the entire human race. It’s easier now than ever to see past the meteoric amount of bullshit my fellow man is capable of gestating. Recently, I’ve learned about the latest bullshit attempt to undermine the future of humanity known as the Stop Online Piracy Act, and it’s disgusting.

In short, this bill that is currently in the workings demonstrates that the government wants to give law enforcement agencies such as the US DoJ and copyright holders an easier path to counter piracy of intellectual property. Oh, and also offer protection for the citizens of the US against counterfeit drugs. What? Aside from the logical leap to connect those two issues, this bill doesn’t sound bad at all. Of course, why would any bill ever proposed in the history of legislation would any bill ever be made to sound bad? That’s because, like most recent legislature, this bill stinks of hidden motives at the cost of civil liberties.

Keeping partisan politics out of this blog, I’ll instead focus on just why this bill irks me so.

Since I became computer literate over 20 years ago, I’ve spent an unhealthy disproportional amount of time on computers and the internet, when that came into fruition. While I actually feel right at home spending my time on a computer, it’s really important to note that I’ve made my living off the computer for almost as long. From designing websites, to chatting with players over a video game interface, I’ve survived on the existence and success of the internet. The Stop Online Piracy Act (or SOPA) plans to put a real shitstain on that.

Under the guise of protecting copyrights and, for some reason preventing counterfeited pills (I’ll get to that later), this bill will eventually allow governmental enforcement agencies as well as just about any corporation who asks to monitor what we do over the internet. I don’t mean learning we visit porn sites. It doesn’t take a legislative act to know that. I mean, literally sniffing each packet that gets transferred to and from a network source (iPhones, PCs, smart refrigerators). This includes, and is not limited to, email, file transfer, web sites, streaming content, what you can see on our web cams for fuck’s sake! Currently, it would appear that nobody has any legal right to do this. Not even our internet provider can go around peeking under the hood. Makes sense, because if you wanted to talk about some sensitive shit, just find our what exactly companies and internet users alike are doing with their internet access. I’m sure it’s pretty crazy.

Ever since the internet came onto the radar of government officials (I would expect 5 years after everyone else figured it out), legislators have been trying find a way to monitor and control it. Each year as a senator has to justify his paycheck, you have to expect them to come up with some way to piss in our punch. Since glomming onto counter-piracy has been one of the easiest, legislators have finally found a bill that looks like it has legs. Introduced in October last year, this latest incarnation at limiting our civil liberties is about to go to session, again. And, I simply wanted you, my faithful reader(s) to know about it.

All is not lost, I think. For one, the internet is pissed. They DO NOT like this Bill. I really doubt anyone likes the idea of every move they make being monitored and possibly cataloged. That’s some serious 1984 shit right there. Well, I suppose Facebook gets a pass. I mean, most of the dumb shit the average citizen does is “out there”. Mark Zuckerberg knows just about everything about me, and more so than my mother probably. As well as countless other corporations that ask my entire life history before I can sign up for a download of a new screensaver. But, even in the face of ever increasing openness about one’s private identity on the internet, nobody wants their fucking dirty laundry exposed and the stench that comes with it.

Obama’s administration is not on board. That’s somewhat more relevant, perhaps. They’ve been pretty clear that this bill will stomp on American rights and that’s just not cool. Obama’s group has been staunchly opposed to lobbyist organizations getting bills to congress since day one, and the SOPA bill is no exception. And, shockingly, or perhaps UNshockingly, this bill has all the makings of a lobbyist’s agenda.

Quick tangent. Oddly enough, while researching this, I also found some serious shenanigans with releasing public information by the Bush family. Lesson from this kids, you can fuck over anybody’s civil liberties you want (Patriot act) but be sure to become President before 12 years has passed so your father’s records don’t become public property. Not cool, team Bush. Ironic to say the least.

So, back to SOPA. Fuck SOPA. Nobody likes you. Nobody needs you. Look, people. The beauty and beast of the internet is that everything is already on record. If it’s on the internet, it’s open season and nobody needs a hunter license. Again, your SHIT is OUT THERE. The other day, a TV actress uploaded a picture of herself, and didn’t realize her nip was showing. Within minutes she took the picture down and replaced it. Five days later, the picture was posted hundreds of times by countless trash media sites. Somebody somewhere has a copy of that file with the dissertation you wrote in college about the potential medical benefits of a yeast infection. But let’s get it straight. It’s out there, because you put it out there. You may not have physically uploaded those pics of you doing the scrunched kissy face naked in front of a mirror, but you gave them to your boyfriend. And, well, it’s on the internet now. Really, the internet is the world’s version of the Library of Congress, except it stores the worst of the worst, among the sparkling diamonds of awesomeness. And, I for one feel we should keep it that way!

Now, who is motivated to move this shitstain into law? Who wants their internet meanderings studied and categorized, and perhaps even manipulated a lil bit? Big pharma. The US pharmaceutical industry with so much pull the earth’s orbit gets jealous. With zero investigatory evidence to back my claim, please read on about why I’m right.

Two points. First, a spokesperson for Pfizer testified at the committee hearing on this bill about the potential danger associated with outside pharmacies offering prescription drugs cheaper and easier than their US counterparts. Er, well, I mean, they argued that Google was caught profiting off the illegal sale and distribution of foreign drug sales through its AdWords advertising. Since 2003 they have been allowing Canada to distribute and sell prescription medication through its ads. And, well, they had to forfeit 500 million dollars to the DoJ once they were punished. Of course, try to not to laugh when you realize how much $500 mil means to Google today compared to 9 years ago. Try to not to laugh when you realize Google probably spent that $500 mil to make billions while expanding their corporate foothold in the world. Please, feel free to laugh at the idea that it’s so blatantly obvious that they’re just tacking on counterfeit drug sales to an intellectual property argument. I mean, I didn’t see anything in there about their concern for people’s well being. Well, nothing substantial at least. No, just how much money was being made selling drugs to people cheaper.

Second, if you already caught Google and can already enforce law without needing to sniff my packets, then why the fuck do we need a bill to make this happen? Clearly you did this without the need to see what my emails to mom are about. Google got busted, and your trillion dollar fortune is in tact. Why do you need to compromise my civil liberty to further pursue hot justice? I can only imagine, more control. Control seems to be the key to capitalism. Keeping the masses at bay using the power of information. If this law passes, and I want to see Dexter season 7 in all its HD glory, I sure as hell better pray I don’t piss off Pfizer in the process. That sentence doesn’t make sense, but then, neither does SOPA. Fuck SOPA.

Old school MySpace profile jokes I made up after drinking 10 cans of Red Bull. Imagine if I went to 11!
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Between good and bad lies the word “and”.

A lot of money went into making this page for your enjoyment. Not from me, of course, but from that guy who runs Fox Television. He spent a shitton of money on this website. Like billions. Because he knew that giving away free stuff is the best way to make money. Like when I gave away a pencil once, and I totally didn’t die on the way home that night. Worth it.

Is the next word you look up the meaning of, hebetudinous?

If you are visiting me from another country, then I welcome you. If not, well, not much I can really do about that.

The last thing I want to do is be first.

Feast your eyes on this. But don’t make your mouth jealous, feasting your eyes and all.

Is it true what they say? It goes away if you don’t rub it too much?

I quit MySpace because of too much drama. Well, call me quitter because I am back.

Please do not finish this sentence unless you really mean it.

If you could ask God one question, would you ask him two thinking you are a journalist?

Happiness is when you no longer take drugs to escape life, but when you take drugs to explore life.

They say that too much television rots your brain. Well, I believe being smart ruins your enjoyment of television.

Ladies first. Well, unless the right to vote is brought up.

Read this sentence again and prove to me that you aren’t confused that this sentence has no predicate.

I pee lying on my side. Just to be different. And messy.

Seek shelter before the storm. That is, if your buddy Shelter knows how to survive tornadoes.

Don’t ask. Don’t tell. Don’t use proper sentence structure, either.

Is there more to life than not feeling fulfilled?

Tonight we dine in Hell! Tomorrow, China Star.

The thoughts expressed in this image I made and below are why I recently quit my customer service position at a video game company. You have to read the whole thing to win the prize!

Humans are capable of accomplishing amazing feats for very little reason. On May 25, 1961, President John Kennedy requested one small little favor of the people of the United States; He suggested we go to the moon. On top of that, he said we should consider getting this done sometime before 1970. He gave the citizens of the US less than an entire decade to start a program from scratch that would land a human being on the surface of the moon. What amazes me the most is not that his challenge was accepted, met, and exceeded. Not at all. It was that some ability inside human beings exists allowing us to accomplish the impossible with very little motivation. While I’d like to think the United States wanted to impress John Kennedy, or wanted to give a big fat middle finger to the rest of the world, I believe the motivation was rooted on one factor: Someone was willing to pay for it.

While a politician giving a grand speech in front of a US flag on the steps of an old building at our nation’s capital might be epic, it’s still only a motivational speech. Why should I be more motivated by a politician making that speech than say a window washer? Because, the politician is basically implying that his words are backed by a proposal that will soon be made to find funding to support this new endeavor. When a President says we get to use his wallet, the Treasury, people line up around the block to get a piece of the pie.

At this point, I’ve begun using metaphors, so I know it’s time to get back on track. Shit. Did it again. Cat’s out of the bag. Shit! One more: the rat race.

Money is our prime motivator. As much as I want to believe we can move mountains with the power of love…helping your brother move is hardly flying to the moon. Fixing your mom’s computer is hardly walking outside a space shuttle while traveling at 17,500 mph. Even though Huey Lewis declared love is “…the power that makes the world go round”, human beings still won’t achieve greatness without a little something on the side. Again, even though I know most men would barter over degrees of sexual favors as currency, nobody is going to invent a flying car because they were horny. (Well, Japan might.)

Not that I haven’t seen people do some crazy shit just because they were bored. Check out what Hitler was capable of in lieu of having friends, or the iPhone to keep him busy. Yes, I just wrote that Hitler’s regime killed millions of people on the premise that he was bored. I really have no idea what his motivations were. But, I’m willing to bet it had something to do with money. Please get past that little attempt at invoking humor while referencing Hitler, and let’s discuss why I mentioned earlier that money is what I consider to be a prime motivator.

By money, I mean currency. Whether it’s gold, silver, beads, pennies, or a “prize” like I said in my first paragraph, human beings love exchanging similar items for services and goods. We’ve developed a view ways to acquire our modern form of currency. The most common is earning it while under the employ of a company. People will do “whatever it takes” while employed on the promise of getting paid at the end of their service. Unfortunately, for me, I choose to do that whatever while working for a glorified call center. For almost five years I poured my whole being into providing customer service for a popular video game.

While I wasn’t developing a space rover that would survey the Martian soil, I was under a different kind of challenge. On a daily basis I communicated with frustrated and irate customers, dealt with backlash from terrible managerial and departmental decisions, was under constant pressure to achieve results based on metrics that were always “good but not good enough”, faced an increasing work load where every task imagined was given to you on top of the pile you were already burdened by, was shamed by the way the rest of the company and other industry members felt about your role, saw and had to embrace constant changes to our workflow that are never fully explained, had received no inclination that promotion was a possibility, learned more and more that there were forces in place to prevent you from getting promoted period, found the gap between your department and the rest growing at an alarming rate, met a growing lack of respect from peers and management combined, struggled while trying to contribute to the success of our company and never understood why so much effort was put into doing the opposite from corporate, worked every holiday because “hey, why not”, fought to do my job in a full eight hour day without our support tool program crashing or killing our mobility. Really. I’ve got some major first world problems. Or, at least I did.

At first it was easy to joke about the constant pressures of the job and overall silliness of the ineptitude of persons who chose to make customer service a career goal. But, really, it was joking in the same way you would equate Hitler murdering millions of people out of boredom. In other words, more sad and not funny. Eventually, for me, the joking became so absurd I came around to realizing that I simply couldn’t press on anymore. Working a shit job is a young man’s game. It was becoming increasingly impossible for me to tell people who played our game how to find their way in a virtual world, because my motivation was lacking.

Financially, living where I do is very difficult. While I was able to manage for a couple years, surviving long term just started to seem impossible. Don’t want to cause any panic attacks from the sudden shock of saying this, but call centers don’t pay very well. Once you get back in your chair, I want to surprise you again. Sure, money motivated me to do some retarded soul sucking activities to make other people rich, but I knew the risk I was taking when I came back to work for this company. All this talk until now about money being a motivator is actually irrelevant to my decision to leave the company. I just though it would be really easy to say I quit because I wasn’t making enough money. Sadly, that had nothing to do with it. In fact, let’s make a new paragraph to actually explain what it took to quit.

I had a career goal when I landed back at the same department I left a couple years earlier. Not exactly a groundbreaking statement, nor was I the first to think of it. But, I really thought I had a plan. Won’t go into details here, but I was determined to meet that goal. After two additional penniless years I began to realize it wasn’t going to happen if I kept on the same path. Many nights were spent contemplating how I was going to hop out of my circular maze of the rat race. Only one concept rose to the challenge. And, it’s really embarrassing. At 36 years old, I feel dumb saying it. Before I do though, understand I spent my life in the video game bubble. This is a bubble where age is meaningless. Video games and the culture it comes with are invulnerable to criticism once you break the hurdle of living at home with your parents. I broke out of that some time ago, but there was one thing I refused to do until the moment was necessary. I grew up.

Ugh. I really do hate to admit it. I matured. I manned up. I grew some balls. Or, wouldn’t it be more proper to say, my balls finally dropped. More metaphors that all reference puberty. And for good reason. The sad fact is you can’t stop aging. I used to think I would live forever if I never grew up. It makes sense on paper! If I don’t grow up, how can I GROW UP? Finally, no matter how hard it is to give up control, my body just wasn’t going to take it anymore and made the choice for me.

Maturity is now my prime motivator. The necessity to be an adult, to make responsible decisions, to care for the next generation or two, to boldly face the impossible, and protect my friends and family. This is the next step for me, and I’ll leave with one small piece of advice. Dear reader or readers of this blog, please know that one day, you too will have to mature. Until then, embrace the surrounding world however you damn well please. And don’t you dare touch any of my toys. The end.

This will eventually contain the closing of first chapter of the Reboot. What success really means.

This will eventually contain text about what’s so fascinating about murder. o.O

This will eventually contain text on why I hate shopping and traffic for the same reasons. How I would like to manage routine via computer. Why OCD is highly inconvenient.

This will eventually contain text about why Uggs are the worst clothing on Earth.

On this day of remembrance, I wanted to say a couple things. Terrorists will be terrorists with or without our help. Bad things will happen. Smaller bad things can be prevented, like being hurt in a car wreck if you wear your seat belt. But the bigger things like 9/11 require a lot more than you or I are capable of on our own. I’m grateful for and proud of the men and women, like my nephew Steven, out there taking care of those bigger things. So please do us all a favor. If any of you know anyone who still talks about 9/11 being a conspiracy, or know someone who panics when someone with a Turban sits next to you on a plane, or know someone who can’t tell the difference between Islam and the Al Qaeda, would you consider helping them ease their way back into sanity. Here are some old clips of Bill Clinton responding to 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Watching this just really makes me wish we would put this kind of crap to rest.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdtTccXcThE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU-nMsyXP0s&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eVFDY8IN1s&feature=related

-EDIT-
This post turned into a bigger challenge than I anticipated. Will be back later

Got a dilemma, tonight. Every post, I would like to provide the most entertainment possible for as many readers of this blog, as possible - present and future. At the time I post this, maybe 6 people read this blog. I anticipate in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future I’ll have thousands or more. It could happen. Currently, catering would be very easy since I know my audience somewhat personally. But, in the future, everyone else could be visiting from anywhere because this is the internet.

Anyway, none of this is my dilemma. The dilemma is, what exactly is entertainment?

My oldest brother, Corey, is a very smart individual. Technically my half-brother but has long since been accepted as the oldest of five male siblings; he works for IBM in a major role that utilizes smart individuals. Whenever we get together, conversation turns pseudo-geek philosopher as we discuss science, math, the universe, religion, computers, life, and death. No topic is hit upon lightly as we both can keep this up for hours since we are overly analytical…and nerds. We will thoroughly destroy a topic as we dig deep looking for the purpose and meaning of each and every minutiae. Typically I’m forced into the ‘devil’s advocate’ role in certain conversations because I feel it provokes Corey’s more expressive and argumentative analysis. He’s a natural-born teacher and I’m usually the one being schooled.

Don’t mistake my blog flow. Clearly, this post has yet to be entertaining. I get that. But I brought this bit up about my brother for a reason.

Earlier tonight we talked about how our father invented phonetic text-to-speech algorithms. Actually, the first part of the chat was just laughing at the idea our father invented anything. The second part was discussing how Google search knows that when you search the word “Nucular” you’re really trying to search for the proper “Nuclear”. Normally, one would just go to Google.com and read about how they do it. That’s not how we roll. Now stay with me, since I feel an aside is necessary here. Computers pull off some magical shit. How they do this magic will in turn explain how Google implemented the feature. And that explanation, in turn, will either detail what entertainment is or not. I know this because we’ve analyzed it to the hilt.

Corey and I have both been employed professionally in a computer software programming capacity. He still does this daily, and myself as a customer service rep, not so much lately. However, we’ve both picked up a few facts as we went along. Fact: Computer programs will only do what a programmer codes. Fact: Computer programs only correlate and follow rules as delegated by the programmer. Fact: Computers are not sentient (Sorry Anthony). Much like what you’re reading this moment, you only get to see what I’ve typed out and not something that will be generated by the program that allows typing in this blog. If a programmer somewhere determined that last sentence would be generated, coding it in would be absolutely necessary. Usually a programmer must decide and implement the code that generates the words ‘Hello World’ as their first effort with a scripting language since displaying text is the most basic thing you could do. The edit box I’m typing into right now and the generation of this text is far more complicated. In no conceivable manner would this program ever veer off and do anything beyond what I expect it to do, allowing me to finish this paragraph.

Unfortunately, the nature of programming really makes it hard for me to achieve my real dream in life. I want a robot that does my laundry. Think of an extremely sophisticated Rhoomba. Menial tasks really suck, and I would love to create a machine that would do those tasks for us humans. Robots aren’t alive, so no task would be too much. My menial task robot would have to do some very complex routines. Depressingly, getting to that end will require some carpal tunnel inducing coding. As I mentioned earlier, my robot won’t do my laundry until I’ve put that code into its hard drive.

Google search has evolved over the years and grown a huge database thanks to millions or even billions of users. Originally, Google and other internet search engines weren’t that impressive. Some kid in his mom’s basement somewhere coded a program called a web crawler. Web crawlers would connect to an internet address and usually download content or copy hyperlink data and return that information back. Probably invented to make it easier to grab porn images, search engines would eventually rely on this retrieved data for indexing and linking one web page to an address that would indexed making it easily searchable. The problem was, web crawlers didn’t grab the entire internet. Nobody could actually download the entire internet even when it was relatively small. Some addresses wouldn’t resolve or would time out, or be entirely unreachable. Indexing the entire internet wasn’t realistic.

Google’s creators at the time realized this and took it one step further. They realized if a link keeps coming back multiple times, that link is significantly relevant. If they set the web crawler to follow that link, they could repeat the relevant link process over and over until a healthy majority of the internet was being returned and resolved properly. As the internet was increasing its user base, Google made another good decision. They realized they could rely on human beings to also provide information about web pages that were useful, even if the humans didn’t realize they were doing this. Named after Google’s co-creator Larry Page, Page Rank, an algorithm used to compare relevance of browsed web pages, became a method for internet users to either manually rank a page for its relevance or, and more commonly, to monitor user’s browsing habits reporting back those visited sites to Google. While this practice was nasty, it was all legal and we wouldn’t have the Google we know and love today without it. Fun side note: Google didn’t own the patent to the PageRank algorithm, and had to give Stanford University 1.8 million shares of Google stock for its use. Stanford University sold those shares awhile back for $336 million. Meanwhile, Larry Page is worth $19 billion. See kids, math IS useful!

All this data was so much more than just feeding back links to Star Wars fan sites; it was developing the brain of the Google Search engine. More users meant more data. And Google had such a cute silly name as well as provided links to Star Wars fan sites that didn’t suck, so its popularity kept growing. Eventually the coding for the search engine would develop to include this data in a meaningful way that provided the most intelligent seeming results. Programmers used this gigantic resource of data they accumulated and were able to make rules that would parse this data looking for specific patterns allowing them to further correlate search terms with search results, allowing other rules to be implemented for generating some awesome magical shit. A programming rule is something like “If A then B else C”. Correlation is the magic you can pull off with one of these rules. For example, a cat is also a kitten. If I search for cat, please give me results with kittens, too. Then the programmer could add this rule “If A then B else C, but A could also be D and if D then B else C, but oh shit, B might be A, and if B is A then omg I just invented Pong”.

Programs don’t know that cats are like kittens. Programs don’t know anything. Someone out there in Text Searching Land developed a line or two that essentially did the following: The term Cat comes up a lot when the term kitten is also used. Dog and Cat are used a lot together, but not as much as Kitten. Kitten and Dog are used a lot, but not as much as Cat and Dog are, and definitely still not as much as Cat and Kitten. Therefore, it’s reasonable to consider Cat could just as easily be replaced by the word Kitten, but not if the term Dog is being used. This bit of code alone makes search results really decent. But, you need a lot of people typing Cat and Kitten together and people NOT typing Cat and Kitten together, put up against all the other millions of terms people would type into a search box to really nail it down. Google has this kind of information to draw from. Over time, every word became linked to every other word, and weighted values could be added in the mix to ensure certainty. Using my example above, if I type “baby cat” into a search field, I want it to reply with “kitten” and not “dog”.

Since most of the data coming in was input by humans, and humans are naturally stupid, there is also a lot of useless fluff to sort through. If I wanted to find out more on “fucking” I don’t want to know about “assholes”. But, it’s highly probably millions of users typed “Tom Cruise is a fucking asshole” into search and a programmer would have to be clever to filter this out. Add in the problem that most people were also typing “Tom Cruise is fucking gay” and now you’ve got a lot of data that links “Tom Cruise” to “gay” and “fucking” and “assholes”. While a human could look at that data and say “Yea, makes sense” a computer doesn’t KNOW what a Tom Cruise is or why he’s so fucking gay. So how does someone make a computer understand this concept?

Turns out making a computer understand is impossible. Humans had to evolve over several millenia for our computer processor-like brains to recognize patterns and interpret them into something, a.k.a. understanding. A simple game like human versus computer Tic Tac Toe isn’t coded by thinking like a human could, but instead uses calculations of victories and goes backward each move in order to make its current move. A beginner programmer could use some rules like “If player puts an X into square one, have computer put an O in square 5.” And for millions more lines of code, could put a rule in for each possible move a player and computer could make. However, to make a computer play like a human, you have to code the game to think like a computer. Make sense? A computer can calculate millions of possible moves using data available so much faster than a human could. Using this, it’s a better idea to realize that Tic Tac Toe only has so many possible outcomes that result in a victory for a computer. Far less than the millions of rules you would have to write. A developer code then code a “loop” that would force the program to calculate these victory conditions and recognize those patterns, interpret them, correlate them with the current state of the board, and what amounts to cheating really, chooses the next move based on the pattern that leads to victory. Oh, and don’t forget to program the game to know that victory is the result it wants in the end. Summing up, correlating and rules lead to interpreting patterns, resulting in what humans might just confuse for understanding. Add in another math algorithm, such as phonetics of speech, and you can match annunciation with actual words that exist. So, now if George Bush goes to a Google and types in “how do I find the nucular weapons in Iraq” the search engine recognizes that most of those things are actual words, but nucular isn’t one. “‘Nu-cu-lar’ could be ‘new-queler’, but those aren’t words either. How about ‘nuke-ular’? No, those aren’t words. How about ‘nuke-clear’? Now we’re getting warmer. I know! The word should be ‘nuclear’, an actual fucking word.” Of course, it does this practically faster than you could type the word out, especially when nucular has been matched with nuclear a million times over, that Google can simply ignore the idiots who spell it as nucular. Much like they can match Cat with the term Kitten.

My laundry may never be done by computers, because computers will never develop reasoning. If I’m going to have a computerized robot mucking about my house working with electrical equipment, or maybe even being the electrical equipment, it could very well kill me at some point. Not like Terminator tried to kill Sarah Connor, but like accidentally setting the house on fire while I’m sleeping. Much like the ability to understand things, humans have evolved a device in our brain to quickly calculate, and discriminate between right and wrong. Sadly, not every human is born with this ability, but a good majority of us know that setting houses on fire while their owner is sleeping is a bad thing. As a programmer of artificial intelligence, I would need to make sure my laundrybot would know to stop starting fires. But, again, how do I make that happen? I can’t just put code in that says “If fire starting is a likely result of doing this laundry, don’t do the laundry”. Well, I could. But that would mean instead of writing millions of lines of code giving the program the ability to win at Tic Tac Toe, I’m now writing a million billion million lines of code to decipher conditions in which fires wouldn’t be started by doing this load of laundry.

Fortunately, I’m a dreamer. And I want to one day make a program I could put in a computer so it will do menial tasks for me. In fact, forget laundry. I’m going to make a program that writes entertaining blogs, because, well, I’m not sure I figured out how to do that, yet. :)