Eight is the number of copper conductors in a category 5 Ethernet wire. Before you roll your eyes at the “technical terms” it’s just that simple. Eight copper wires stretch the length the cable. They are covered in plastic (insulated) to keep them from touching each other. Of the eight wires each set of two are twisted around each other. Hence the name “twisted pair”. This is NOT rocket science, in fact even rocket science really isn’t rocket science. If you send a electricity (current) in one end of a copper conductor it comes out the other side. Think of it like an 8 lane bowling alley. You roll the ball it goes to the other end, then a conveyor belt brings you the ball back. So long as the lane is clear and the conveyor belt is working the ball goes back and forth and everyone is happy.

That leads into the inspiration for this article. Eight. I took it upon myself to attach our (the office I’m working in) new floor’s wiring to our old floor’s wiring. Things went just perfectly on the first set of wires. When I tested the second set I got nothing, assumed that the jack may be disconnected, and called it a day.

Every-so-often we all have interesting dreams. Last night I dreamt about all kinds of different animals. Some were familiar, and some were just weird. A little lizard that when afraid stands upright like a person and extends it’s neck about 4x its own body length and screams like a banshee. Then hops in a special way that catches the wind and allows it to float away. My old dogs. I’ve had quite a few, but my little beagle buddies were in my dream too. One of them found the crazy lizard. Then there was the snake.

Now I’ve never had a dream in which the snake wasn’t bad. It always causes trouble. It always hides away and while I’ve never been especially afraid of snakes in real life, in dream world they really bother me. Last night’s snake was scary. It was colored like a skunk shiny black and shiny white. I first spotted its tail, also pretty common in my dreams. I started to pull on it (because I always do this sort of thing when I find them in my dream) and discovered it was much bigger than it seemed. It had crawled way up in a hole and as I pulled it out I realized I didn’t want to see its head.

Anyway, I’ll leave that crazy dream for now. Maybe my neighbors were burning the marijuana weeds in their back yard last night or something. Yes, it’s literally a weed here. Who knows. I woke up pretty well rested and headed to work planning to get the jack fixed so that the wiring part of our move would just be done.

I went straight to the “plug” in question. Opened it up, and found that not only was it disconnected, but for some reason it had been connected and someone decided to just, apparently randomly, cut the wires? I’m picturing some disgruntled guy stewing about pay or something. Who knows, it was very strange. Anyway, I proceeded to reconnect the 8 wires to their correct places and with a smile on my face a bit overconfidently put it all back together. This should be done I thought.

I grabbed the tester (just picture 8 little bowlers to roll balls down the alley) and fired it up. 1-2—4-5-6-7–, 1-2—4-5-6-7– … Alleys 3 and 8 weren’t working. Bummer. I know I connected the jack well, most likely problem is the junction I made last night. Time to unwrap the electric tape. (Now, if you are actually technical you may be laughing about the use of electrical tape, I would be too if I hadn’t asked specifically for couplers and got something completely different & the answer “why would you need that, just splice… you know splice?”) … Splice & tape is a way of life for even the most accomplished South Asian technician.

Now may be a good time to point out that the general word here for electricians, phone repair men, even plumbers is “mistri” … It’s really not as big a mystery as everyone wants to believe. You get everything in place, just right, and things work. Even in computer science or rocket science for that matter. If the problem is very complicated just break it up into small problems and solve them one at a time. With a bit of intuition and experience, and most of all stubbornness, it becomes like riding a bike. Well, at least you would think…. the saga continues…

I hadn’t even begun to remove the tape before I saw the problem with one of the wires. The white/orange one (bowling alley number 3) was clearly broken. A sigh of relief knowing just where the problem is. Unfortunately the brown wire (alley number eight) looked pretty good. So I unwrap the mess and fix alley 3. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7– … Good news, this is clearing up nicely.

So now for that bowling alley #8. Currently the problem could be anywhere, the plug (jack) in the wall, the wire from that jack to the junction box, even the wire we pulled down to our main offices. Since the jack was the easiest to check I went back to that, switched the alleys around making brown alley 7 and white/brown alley 8. 1-2-3-4-5-6—8 … yup, that brown wire was the problem. Time to get a bit more drastic. I go back to the junction box, clip the end off altogether, and put a jack there so that I can put my tester there. Result: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 … Ah, that’s good, so I go down to our office and carefully analyze all of the cable on the other end. It looks perfect. Even the little gash I did find wasn’t in the cable I’m using! Welp, time to put another jack in the junction box. This one on the other side of my cable run from yesterday.

1-2-3-4-5-6-7– … well, it’s broken somewhere… Maybe I messed up the cable end, clip, cut, trim, push, crimp. Okay, new cable end…. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 … Eureka! Job done. Let’s close up our patient… and for the grand finale let’s test it all the way through. 1-2-3-4-5-6-7– …. WHAT? This is crazy, it was my cable end, I clipped it, replaced it, and that fixed it what in the world. Pop off a few connections test to the office again… 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8 … ok, test to the jack, –2-3—5-6—- … huh? Test to the office again 1-2-3-4-5-6-7– … The tester has gone batty! What is going on here & how did it just happend to fail at 8 again? Maybe this crazy Chinese crimper is faulty and messing up the eighth pin (I mean bowling alley) and causing the problem on just that pin, but that doesn’t explain how only 2,3,5, and 6 are working. Giving the tester a jiggle results in 1-2-3(dim)—5-6— … okay this is just plain stupid. Chinese cheap stuff (just as I look down and notice the word “Germany” written across the handle of the crimper) … what in the world. Or maybe, just maybe Ephesians 6:12?

“For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

I’m suddently in a world of screaming lizards and snakes crawling around in the walls. Where gargoyles and orcish demons stick their fingers in the wires and bang on people’s heads with hammers. It only lasts for a few minutes. Even in a world of just chance what were the chances that there would be such a thoroughly time wasting scenario as this?…

Well I suppose pretty good if the tester is simply faulty or the wiring shorted (ball swallowing cracks in the bowling alley surface) either way I’ve done all I can and really not very happy with the result. Close her up anyhow, get back to my desk, and back to the less superstitious world where if only I had gotten to this intersection 10 seconds sooner I would not be stuck behind this toxic fume spewing truck. Where if we sit down and think through every contingency we will predict the future with certainty. Where results are only the sum of all of the decisions made before.

It’s not hard to imagine where superstition comes from. If life’s acrobatics are random chance, perhaps it’s just our self-centeredness that causes us to think otherwise. The ultimate woe-is-me form of self pity. Maybe life really did “create itself” and no sooner than it could think it became arrogant enough to believe that it certainly must be the brunt of some galactic joke. Whatever the cause, I still think there are snakes in the walls. Maybe if I got to that intersection 10 seconds earlier that oil burning death trap TATA polution generator would be there to… and if a tree falls in the forest there is never no one there to hear it!

This topic has been on my mind for about a month now and I’ve read and prayed and considered and done that all over and over again. At first it was very difficult for me to imagine Jesus caring less about a computer, so I had to get a more ancient perspective.

We all know that stealing is morally wrong. When we take something from someone else because we want it we leave them without that thing and we get it. It is one of the base immoralities just up from lying, which I believe to be a (if not THE) base sin and will write about soon. In the digital world it is not so simple. Say Jesus the carpenter builds a chair. Someone breaks into his house and steals the chair. Now all of Jesus’ hard work has been stolen and for Jesus to have a chair again he has to build another.

Let me point out a few factors that while they may be emotionally charged they are not of any valid logic consequence to this discussion, aka, they are out-of-bounds:

1. How rich or poor the software developer is. From Steve Jobs to me (yep, I write programs and I’m poor) this has nothing at all to do with this debate.
2. The term pirated. While the industry has leveraged their money to label this “pirating” pirates literally steal things in the sense of Jesus’ chair above and not in this sense. The word does not equate to instant immorality any more than naming your child Pirate would instantly make them a thief. Though the industry would like you to believe so.
3. How much money is involved. The terms of the licensing is also not a factor. While it may sound like less of an issue to “pirate” a single song, or a $20 dvd, it is no different than using the $2000 3D Studio Max. In matters of morality this is simply irrelevant.
4. Whether or not you have ever copyrighted a work.
5. Whether by supernatural power or technological power the copying is accomplished. (you’ll see soon enough)

While that may not be a complete list it’s a good start. So let’s consider this.

Only for a little background, since the relevance of this probably belongs in the list above, consider the late 1970s and the entry of VHS & Beta into the market. Sony, a producer of video recorders at the time, went to war on copyright. Believe it or not, against. Now, this is not proof of anything other than the thoroughly fuzzy basis of connecting morality with copyright legislation. However, the fact remains, Sony won. The courts ruled that copyrighted media that enters into a person’s house is theirs to do with as they’d like. So long as they don’t sell it, they can record it, reproduce it, and even share it with their friends.

So back to Jesus and his stolen chair. In order to inject the dynamics of supposed software “theft” we have to inject a non-existent device into Jesus’ time. The Star Trek replicator! So our thief goes into Jesus’ shop and using his pocket replicator makes an exact copy of Jesus’ chair. Takes that and Jesus only knows what happened because he is omniscient (assuming you believe that he was). So he still has his chair.

That’s the problem with labeling software copying “stealing” … the only loss is the legislated right of the original producer to earn money from the bits. This does not mean that the case is proven, but it does highlight a major flaw in just assuming that this would equate to theft. Remember, copyrighting is only a few hundred years old. Before then most ideas were shared relatively freely.

I used to work for the International Bible Society, who made a significant portion of their funding through royalties on their own Bible translation, the NIV. As the statute of limitations approached on the NIV’s copyright they rushed to produce a new, improved, and whole ‘nother 20 years worth of copyright-ability from the new TNIV. Per United States law, this is perfectly legitimate. However, since when do matters of morality have term limits? Well, they simply don’t. The monkey wrench being that if there weren’t a limit then how could the IBS earn royalties on their copy of the Bible without paying royalties to the writers of the Bible? They could not…. it all becomes a big mess if legislators do not recognize that there’s something wrong with the whole model. So the fix? 20 year limit, then “public domain” and end of profitability.

While I love what the IBS does with the Bible, and am in no way crying foul at their business model, I do point out that it is just that. A business model and that it is based on legislation, not morality. After 20 years, they need a new product. End of story.

So back to Jesus, again…. His chair copied and cloned several hundred times and his ability to sell his chair at a high price quickly being undermined by a flood of supply in the market. Poor guy…. but alas some disciples show up and they decide to go for a walk. … Did you know that there was a replicator in the Bible??? … Anyway, they were walking along and someone says: “hey Jesus, man sorry to hear about that pirated chair you invented, but you need to get your taxes paid.” Wanna guess what Jesus does? Read it for yourself:

Matthew 17
24After Jesus and his disciples arrived in Capernaum, the collectors of the two-drachma tax came to Peter and asked, “Doesn’t your teacher pay the temple tax[b]?”

“Then the sons are exempt,” Jesus said to him. 27″But so that we may not offend them, go to the lake and throw out your line. Take the first fish you catch; open its mouth and you will find a four-drachma coin. Take it and give it to them for my tax and yours.”

So I’m not sure that we ever hear whether or not this happened, but it sure sounds pretty telling to me. Jesus either duplicated money with the supernatural fish-mouth replicator, or used money lost by some other poor soul to pay His tax, either way the entire dialog very nicely contrasts the difference between human law and legislation and morality. I believe one of the most immoral things a person can do is lie, however legislation on the matter is sorely lacking. Unless of course you are standing in a legal court, then it suddenly of utmost importance. They don’t care if you told your brother-in-law that you make 3 times more money than you actually do, or charge 1 customer twice what you charge another just cause “you can”, so long as you tell them the truth, wink… wink.

There’s more than just government legislating to be had too. Within any company, school, or even family there are institutional laws, that while they shouldn’t usually undermine the government, they can add to them. For instance, my children will be disciplined when they lie, no matter what president Obama does.

So in conclusion I will say that IMO so long as legislation does not support someone’s claimed entitlement to royalties or payment for bits that are laying around the public internet, then there is no moral obligation to pay them for them. It’s the profit model they chose. It’s very lucrative within the Countries that do enforce it, and trying to turn this to a matter of morality is like wanting one’s cake and eating it too. However, I will also concede that this is not trivial. There is a Biblical mandate to submit to weaker brothers on trivial matters of morality. Paul and Peter warred over the issue of circumcision. For some it had become a moral imperative and Paul insisted it could not be so. I will insist that this cannot be so, not in a place where the legislation simply does not require it.

I will however take this one step further. I believe there is a significant lapse in morality when people decide that they should be paid for their ideas. Not just to be idea people, that’s a worthy profession, but to do the job once and get paid for it for every use. That is greedy and IMO has it’s own moral implications that are virtually extortion. No man is an island and no piece of software exists which was not built on the backs of hundreds and thousands of previous ideas. If one can leverage legislation to allow their 101st contribution, to the stack of ideas represented in any given program, to earn them recurring profits on each free replication of the idea, then they are exploiting with the backing of the legislation.

When the legislation does not exist, then the crime does not exist, and morality is as far from this conversation as it was in the Matthew 17 dialog. Jesus made money appear out of a fish’s mouth to pay his taxes and His friend’s & gave the legislation no more respect than was necessary to avoid offense, while his supernatural counterfeiting may well have devalued the currency by 4 drachmas. If He lived in a Country where such tax was not required by law then He would probably not have bothered to pay such tax, and if He lived in a Country where copyright law is non-existent neither should He be required to obey it as though it were a legal obligation just because some would have proclaimed it also a moral obligation. All that, IMO.

Disclosures: I live in a Country with copyright laws that apply to very specific items and that only recognize its own list of qualified copyrighted works. There is no provision at all for software in the law & it has not been revised in 13 years. I have Windows 7, OSX, and Linux installed on my computer and find Linux to be the most flexible, Windows the most powerful, and OSX the most pointless, though it is the only OS that I was able to write iPhone apps on (not by accident per Mr. Jobs). I’m thoroughly familiar with each, especially OSX as making it work on a Dell laptop is not for the faint of heart.

Update: Some of my disclosure has been pointed out as incorrect, a newer copy from 2002 has been produced which does include software, and even the fees associated are modified to a much higher (50x) rate. As can be seen here: http://www.ipnepal.gov.np/copyright_act_2002.pdf. From the site by “fairylord Kumar KC”… just found that funny. Anyway, the loophole about the Nepali register of copyrighted works being the only valid one is actually alive and well & from what I could find there are exactly 7 copyrighted software programs (as of 2006 old data) and which those are is impossible to know! haha. Anyway, I was wrong… a little bit.