Do you remember? Do you remember?

Do you remember the days when we didn't have Lugradio? Or podcasts? Or even
the web? Ahhh... good old days. No spam, no troll, no bugs...

How would the internet be like in the 19th century?...
A series of tubes, most probably. People sending email using tubes and
steam engine. Would they call it "steamail"?

"*whiiiiiistle* you've got steamail!"
"OUCH! OH BUGGER IT'S FUCKING HOT!"

Well... it looks like the intertube is too dangerous.

Or they'd probably use pidgeons to send messages overseas. Yeah, pidgeons. Very
reliable. Cheap. You can feed them with a few grains. Of course they can't
carry heavy stuff.

"I am sorry, sir, but your message is too long, pidgeons can't carry it."
"And what's the limit?"
"140 characters, sir"
"Can't we rather use swallows?"
"Oh, of course. There are two types of swallows. The African and the European
    ones. The africans are more expansive, though - but they can carry more
    heavy things. Like a coconut."

ah... messaging... I guess that every time someone invents a way to communicate,
an other one invents a way to spam people around with it.

*rrrr... rrrr*
"Ah! a pidgeon. Let's see the message..."
    "Enlarge your..."
"DAMMIT"
*rrrrr... rrrrr*
"Mmmm! another one? Oh come on! there's bird shit on the message!"

And pidgeons often carry viruses along. You know?... Avian flu. That's the 19th
century version of blaster.

Of course, as spam exists, someone had to invent a way to stop it. I guess that
the invention of hunting comes from this.

"Look! a bird carrying a message" *BANG* *BANG*
"An other one!" *BANG* *BANG*
"This one! it looks sick! May be infected by a virus!" *BANG*

Hunters would be more popular if they said: "We're not a bunch of blood-thirsty
bird-killers, we're just a collaborative smap filter for a technology that
doesn't exist anymore. And my gun's a 'Bayesian'".

[Interlude: singing "poisoning pidgeons in the park"]

Middle-age was more fun. So many flamewars, trolls and unlimited arguments
about everything: Because science didn't really exist, you could say anything
without a proof, and it was true. Stuart would've been so happy to live at the
time...

Aq: "The earth is a disc"
Jono: "No, it's a square"
Aq: "A disc, like the moon"
Jono: "A square, it's more perfect"
Aq: "A circle is perfect!"
Jono: "Come on! you can't tell pi decimals up to the seventh!"
Aq: "I say it's a disc anyway!"
Matt: "And... what about a sphere?"
Jono: "Matt! Would you stop saying stupid things. Ok, that's enough. Let's burn a
    dozen of witches to relax..."

Do you think ministrels cared about DRMs? You know, they were travelling from a
city to another... Anyone could steal their songs for themselves.

*ploink*...
"You are about to hear this song, played by me. By listening to it, you accept
    not to sing it for yourself, or anyone else. or hum it. All the time."
"Come on now, share the software!..."

Before I continue, I'd like to point you at something. I think that the first big
improvement in computing was the invention of the screen. Instead of printing
results on a piece of paper, engineers could read it on a screen, without having
to wait for the paper to be printed. The second biggest improvement was the
keyboard. Stop using wires and light bulbs, or punch holes in cards... entering
the commands by typing them. What a relief.

The next one has been... copy... paste.

You can't imagine how life was *before* copy-paste, because you are using it
everyday. Just try it, for a day. Try to use your computer a whole day without
copying or pasting stuff. You'd be very suprised how less productive your day
will be.

What's the point? A few questions: who saw the movie "the name of the rose"?

Nice picture, huh?

Now who read the *book* by Umberto Eco?

Poor you. No, no, no... don't get me wrong. It's such a nice replacement for
sedative. Imagine a "House" episode:

"Give him 5mg of Benzodiazepines"
"Doesn't work, he's still convulsive"
"Ok, give me the name of the rose book, I'll read him chapter one."

What was the point already? Ah! yes!... The name of the Rose, thus... monks.
You remember monks? In french, it's "Moine copistes". In english, there's a
word: "Amanuensis". What they did for... 12... 14 hours a day? Yeah. Using
a pen and some ink, they used to write down lines and lines and lines of
code^W books, just to have one more copy of the book: before the invention of
printing. Can you imagine how would be their lives with a "copy-paste" thing?

"Mmmmm... The Bible... let's see... Page <1234>. Copyyyyy... paste. Ahh...
let's burn a few witches, to relax."

This just makes me think about the Bible. Did you see that awesome video about
Google Wave re-enacting the Pulp Fiction dialogue, with the Ezechiel 25:17
stuff?

I had a vision... A remake, with Eric Raymond as Vince (Travolta's character)
and Richard Stallman as Jules (Samuel Jackson's character)... You see that
monologue :

"The path of the righteous hacker is beset on all sides by the inequities of
    proprietary, and the tyranny of Microsoft. Blessed is he, who in the name of
    freedom and goodness, shepherds the n00b thru the valley of darkness, for he is
    truly his user's keeper and the finder of lost source code. And I will strike
    down upon thee with GPL and furious Affero GPL those who attempt to
    poison and destroy my projects with proprietary-licensed materials. And you will
    know my name is the GNU when I lay my vengeance upon thee."


Anyway... What was I talking about, already? yes! Monks, and copy-paste.
Bah... Well that was before the invention of printing on paper. Romans were
engraving texts on stones, right? A long, boring task. More boring than the Monk
one.

*miming the stone carving*

Sending a message took ages. You had to engrave it, and you had to transport
it. And don't tell me about attached documents!

It's known that the "ROT13" encryption was invented by Caesar. Before that,
romans had a different way to scramble messages.

First, you carve the stone. Then, you smash it with violence on the floor.
After that, just collect the tiny bits and put them into a bag. Of course, this
method was not very "end-user-friendly", because the message decryption was
one of the most difficult tasks in the world. Maybe that's because the Romans
were always beaten by Asterix and Obelix.

Cavemen had less problems with messaging. They used "Direct messages" when
they wanted to have an argument with each other.

"Hi Bob"
"Hi Bill"
*splang*
"OG!"
*spling*
"UG!"
*splang*
"OG!"
*spling*
"UG!"
*splang*
"OG!"
*spling*
"UG!"

etc...

----

Future will be fun.

What will be our future? Some people talk about technological singularity. This
is a strange theory. Pretty much like a massive acceleration of the technology,
devices making generation jumps from a day to a day, faster and faster and
faster, until we get into a massive BANG! a hit on the technological wall, a
wall we would crash ; and from this point, it's like a new big-bang, everything
changes : people start to become hybrids - half human, half machine, etc.

And everyone's got hit by a general Ctrl-Atl-Delete.

You, me, everyone's got reprogrammed. Just One and Only One True Kernel. No...
not GNU/Hurd. And we will just have one thought in our minds. One single goal,
a unique goal we all need to achieve. Find Sarah Connor and kill her.

Technological Singularity could lead to a kind of world where there could be
a pure Darwinian selection of the fittest. Some of us would get their head
around this change, and some won't. That's the way it is. The only ones that
would survive would be the people that accept that changes in our rules and
biology. People that would accept the nano-robots would invade their bodies
and mix it with their DNA and transform mankind in a totally different species.

The Singularity could make us better. Oh, well... that's a very optimistic
point of view. If nano-technology empowers our brain, we could use it more than
our little 10%, and by using our brains, maybe we could be more intelligent.
Maybe using 20, 50, 70, 100% of our brains!... Wow, that'd be nice to have a
cooling system.

Being more smart. We would stop wars. And crimes. And racism. Or just hate. One
would think about the others *before* doing things. People would care not to
harm anyone. Protect the planet from greed. Stop sexism. Stop overcosumption.

All right. Must stop drugs.

It might happen that you could use Telepathy.

(one hand open, thumb on the temple)
"Ha! mum! Hello!... Is it still okay for our sunday picnic? Righto, cool!...
    oh, hold on, someone else's calling on the other cortex"
(the other hand on the other temple)
"Ho! that's you Bob? yeah, yeah, I'm nice, thank you. Yes, I was just chatting
    with my mum while enjoying some Telepathic poetry. Yeah, yeah, call you
    back. See you"

Wouldn't that be cool? yeah, awesome. How fantastic it would be to have such
a great way to communicate! oh...

"Communicate". I now realise how Telepathic-spam will be a pain in the arse.

But this could be all bullshit. I don't believe much in this optimistic way.
Mandkind has always proved they can't get educated. And technology won't change
this.

When Singularity will approach, we'll most likely become more stupid, and use
technology as a tool to destroy, and not to create.

We'd become less clever. Lazy. Dirty. Unpolite. Selfish. Short-minded. We'd
constantly rant using a strange tongue. In a 2000-year-time, we would speak a
unique tongue, all over the world, and we won't even think about learning a new
one.

Maybe you, me, everyone is going to become...

FRENCH!

(end)