You're missing my point entirely. I know perfectly well that most of the software scientists use are open source, not in the sense of OSI, only that you get to see the source. Numerical Recipes is an example of this. Most of the code in IDL is open, so is most of Matlab.
However, scientists should validate their results, and if they don't, referees should reject their articles.
But you seem to have a much too high faith in the ability of refeeres to find such computer glitches. Most don't care, and even fewer have the ability, why? Because they aren't more concerned about it than the other scientists. If you've ever joined a conference in a relatively narrow field, you've probably met all the people who can possibly review your article. Do any of them look like they will make a big effort to check if you've used flawed code to you? There is a lot you can get away with, and computer glitches is certainly one of them.
If you don't care about the code, why is it that you expect the referee to do it? You know, it's called peer-review.
OK, an example: IDL is open source, most of it. IDL has the funny feature that it is supposed to detect underflows. Great. Well, I did a look around and found that a really reliable underflow detection system is either very difficult or very slow. So I did a look around, a long time ago, to see if I could find out how this was implemented, but I couldn't find something I could identify as "it".
Yet, most put blind faith the underflow control. How can you do that?
whether the results will be reliable
I'm sorry, you can't get away with the attitude that "I don't care about the code". That's something for the suits.
It is your duty as a scientist to check if the results are reliable. Even if coding isn't your goal (it isn't mine either, I'm an astrophysicist, and my code is just a few hundred lines, and I have carefully chosen the software I use to make my own coding simple but transparent), you have to understand the basics of computer science no less than you need to understand statistics if you use statistics, physics if you use physics, or biology is you use biology.
For example, if you can't appreciate the flaws in Numerical Recipes, you shouldn't be using Numerical Recipes. Yeah, and does the penetration of NR tell you anything about if enough people care about the rigor of their computations?
Well, imagine being a journalist working in an oppressing regime. Then, you get some information that may open the eyes of the outside world. Arguably, the murder of Stephen Biko and the subsequent release of the details had such an effect.
Obviously, you have to release the information anonymously, othervice they would kill you.
Unfortunately, all the paper in the world is marked. The manufacturer has inserted a unique watermark, and they have extensive records of who buys each sheet of paper.
If the secret police get their hands on any of the documents you distribute, it will point right back at you. You'll be dead.
To figure out who the "pirates" are, this is what RIAA et al. wants, even if they don't dare state it up front. They want extensive records of all the CDs, so that when a "pirated" CD is found, it points right back at everyone involved, and they can be nailed for it.
I think this small label is not going to do much to achieve that goal, but it is really beside the point.
And so what? Paper is one thing, CDs is an entirely different matter?
OK, so you get a piece of footage. Compressed down to 650 MB (by Ogg Tarkin...:-) ), you can burn it on CDs and distribute it to have it aired worldwide.
Unfortunately, because RIAA needs protection from "pirates" you can't do that. You can't do that to free your country from oppression.
OK, this is a bit far-fetched perhaps, but you never know if this could happen.
Before everyone runs off to seek political asylum in Ukraina, do note that the authorities there have quite a lot to answer for. I've posted about that before.
But you know, the Ukrainians could throw those out, and that could help.
Well, I'm an astrophysics student, and not really even a hacker, though I have made a couple of hacks that people have thought have been good. But I think that given a language where the concepts are clear, OOP isn't hard at all.
The reason why I learned OOP is pretty much that I had to. I'm at the University of Oslo in Norway, and OOP was invented here and implemented in SIMULA. So they really forced us to use SIMULA and program OO, but in just a couple of basic courses, so I didn't a prolonged forced exposure.
Examples where OO concepts are clear include SIMULA and the S system (my favorite implementation R). SIMULA is a full-blown OOP system (but there are various reasons why it failed), while S has just a few OO features, but the features that have been implemented are easy to understand, they incorporate some essential concepts, and they are very powerful.
Then, you have C++ which is also a full featured language, but where the concepts are not that clear and easy to grasp.
When OO gets muddy is usually when it is built on the top of existing languages. Perl OO is a bit muddy, but not too bad, but if you look at e.g. IDL it gets rather bad IMHO.
Well, I wouldn't recommend Numerical Recipes. It lacks rigor.
I haven't looked at NAG, but you're not getting all the source code? Actually, I find it weird that one does rely on closed source in science, when science depends on the full disclosure of all relevant material. Well, the computations done is arguably the most important aspect of most analysis done today, so all source code should be available for public scrutiny.
I would recommend R for many applications. It has some lightweight OO that is very efficient, it's a really beautiful language. It is also very rigorous, you will find the best things in Numerical Recipes there, but there is also a lot of code that has been through formal peer review.
Hehe, well, I haven't really had that much confidence in The Register, no, but I didn't think they weren't entitled to any confidence. After all, they are the only ones who are taking the CPRM stuff seriously, and that's really important.
Shouldn't be a problem that 1 out of 4 liars will get away and 1 in 10 innocents will be incorrectly nailed."
Unless that person is you! Just think about it: With a plane with a 100 people on board, 10 will be incorrectly flagged as "liars", and what's worse, the person behind the desk who is going to decide whether or not to let you on board or have you put in front of a military tribunal and shot, will have no clue as to where to start. The only thing they have is that you blushed when asked a specific question. I bet you were just looking down her..., you bastard!:-)
There is no way you can deal intelligently with all those false positives (contrary to a metall detector, where you can find out very fast exactly what caused the alarm).
Besides, take the scary option that they will actually record who were detected as liars, you'll get an incredible amount of data then to be cross-checked with a lot of other databases, and make a lot of people subject to criminal investigation wrongly.
Besides, I really doubt they will catch any terrorists this way. They only way you can achieve security against terrorists is to eliminate the desire to commit terror, and you can only do that by emphasizing human rights for everyone.
Actually, this isn't too far off... When I, I guess as a foreigner, enter a flight to the US, "Are you, or have you been involved in terrorism?" is the type of question you've got to answer.
Unless The Register sliced up the email themselves....
Yeah....:-) Whatever is the case, I think The Register should be very, very careful about publishing "leaked" messages unless they are very, very certain it actually comes from the claimed source (like having the VP's PGP sig on it...:-) ). Othervice, they will soon lack any credibility, as you would have to go and check every story they post yourself.
Besides, if they ever would really need to post a story based on an anonymous source or a real leaked memo, which is something very important for the press to be able to do, nobody will believe them after this. I certainly wouldn't.
Many of my spreadsheets qualify as "spreadsheet applications" and need quite a bit of flow control type logic.
Then you might want to drop the spreadsheet entirely, and go for R. R is a very beautiful system for statistical computing and graphics, and it is very powerful. I know there is quite some R code in Gnumeric, most of the statistics comes from there.
I think there has been some talk about a more extensive interface between Gnumeric and R, but I don't know what happened.
There is some more high-level GUI tools for R as well, but I have never had any use for them, so I haven't even compiled it, but there might be some things that are sufficiently spreadsheet-like there that you can use.
Yeah, it is a pretty stiff prize $3000, but actually for Linux adoption in the market place, I think it is a Good Thing[tm]:
You know how PHBs think: If it's free, then you can't make money off of it. If HP is able to sell this at $3000 a piece, maybe they will get their eyes opened for the possibility that there is money in Free Software.
OK, I'll give up on the first point, but not the second.
Flash is a proprietary standard, and having been on Tru64 most of the time, I can tell you Flash is among the most awful things you can encounter.
But indeed, it has more to do with its propretary status than technical abilities. But, SVG+DOM+SMIL should do most of the things Flash does (though I haven't seen a good comparison yet), and if people would use that instead, I would have no objections, as all technologies can be used intelligently.
Free Software is certainly a good thing, and a worthy cause, but open formats for exchange of ideas, thoughs and arts is even more important. Without it, me may end up in a situation where an Evil Corp[tm] can control what you can say.
I don't want to block anyone from access because they're not using MegaloBrowser 4.999.999.999.today's build.:-)
Certainly, I agree completely. But I still think that CSS is your friend, you just need to be careful, and BGCOLOR is Evil[tm]. In this particular example, using BODY {background : #fff} in a stylesheet will have no negative effect on any browsers (but you should define a foreground color too). BGCOLOR, OTOH, has a negative effect, because AFAIK, I know of no browser where you can turn it off.
All this boils down to whether best graceful transformation is offered by the Bad[tm] features of HTML or by careful use of (a small subset of) CSS. I have been through many such discussions, but they have usually concluded that careful use of CSS is the best for graceful transformation, and thus is
the best you can do to make your pages accessible to any browser.
I mean, what we really, really want, is to get rid of the BGCOLOR, FONT and all that stuff, remove it from HTML alltogether, right...?
I think there was a pretty exhaustive discussion about it on the WAI interest group mailing list, but I can't find it in the archives and this was also the main reason why BGCOLOR was marked as deprecated.
I also think it was the main reason why it took so long to get XHTML out. A lot of people thought that the Transitional DTD never should have made it to XHTML, because it represent a sort of tag soup that should be dead.
But the W3C membership wanted the Transitional in XHTML.
The only difference between my pages in 1997 and today is that I use a BGCOLOR="#FFFFFF" tag now.:-)
But why? I mean, when I design new pages now, I remove the BGCOLOR attribute. BGCOLOR is clearly marked as deprecated in the specs, and should only be used in a transitional period, and I think the tranaitional period has lasted more than long enough. From now on, I think one should use the Strict DTD, either 4.01 or XHTML 1. There is no use for BGCOLOR anymore (eh, actually, I think there never was....:-) ). Instead, use an (external) stylesheet. It's easy to turn off for the users, and it'll be easier for users to make your pages suit their taste.
Other than that, I agree with your philosophy. The pages I write now are XHTML 1 (it should be completely backwards compatible) and comply with at least two levels of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. I think that if everybody did that, the web would be a lot more usuable for everyone (it was a huge blunder by the W3C to market the Accessibility Guidelines as being something only for people with disabilities).
Yep, that's a pretty sure sign of Finnish, and indeed this article is Finnish.
probably Finnish (and Estonian too? Not sure 'bout that).
Both Finnish and Estonian (and Hungarian) belong AFAIK to the same group of languages. Finns and Hungarians can't understand too much of each other's languages though.
å and æ: some Scandinavian language... I can't tell the difference between 'em:) Probably one of Swedish, Norwegian, or Danish.
Hehe, telling the difference between Swedish and the two other are easy enough: Swedes use ö whereas we (I'm Norwegian) use ø. Also, "and" is "och" in Swedish but "og" in Norwegian and Danish.
Generally, spoken Swedish is closer to Norwegian than Danish, but written Danish is closer to Norwegian than Swedish. I have actually been acting as translator between Stockholmers and Danes at times...
Telling the difference between Norwegian (no) and Danish (da) is harder. It's easy enough to a native, but Danish was the official language in Norway for a very long time and dominated up to a big reform in 1917, where it was norwegianified. If that isn't bad enough, we have two official languages here, no is in fact nb and nn, so if you think it's hard to tell the difference between da and no, it's even harder to tell the difference between nn and nb. Besides, if I write informally, I'd like to write something in between of nn and nb.:-) I think no makes more extensive use of double consonants, but I'm not sure about that. You can see it on quite a few words, typically one letter is different, like "language" which is "språg" in da but "språk" in no, "of" which is "af" in da but "av" in no. And so on...:-)
Eh, well, yeah, I have to admit that I haven't checked that carefully no... I remember reading the Win95 license back then, and I don't think I have broken it, but yes, I've edited.ini-files... And all the proprietary software I have bought is installed on a single machine only (my parent's).
Also, I've read the Opera EULA, and that is OK (yeah, and I pointed out to the Opera CTO that it said "hackers" where it should say "crackers" and they changed it...:-) ).
Well, I'm a quite big fan of RMS, but I think you should be careful about what you put into this. I think RMS means that what they are doing is unethical, but I don't see it as an advocacy to breaking the license. RMS wants to, in the long run, to throw out licenses once and for all, but as long as they are there, they should be respected, at least as long as they don't break human rights or anything.
Also, the problem is that if you break the license, you breake the business model and take away the profits that make it possible to develop the software in the first place. If the software didn't exist, you couldn't copy it.
All this boils down to the most fundamental issue of business in our times: How can you ensure that people doing creative work and make non-scarce stuff available are paid for it, without using the (unsustainable) enforced-scarcity model.
We need to figure this out, we really need, urgently, to figure out how people can be paid. Meanwhile, I don't think people should use warez, because that may leave us without things we'd really, really like to have. Yeah, and besides, I'm very happy with the free software I rely on.
Yes, I agree with your point. Personally, I haven't broken a software license in 10 years, because I think that if I can't accept the terms of the license, I'm not entitled to use the software. Also, if they can't sell software to me on terms I can't accept, they will not get my money.
Technology can have an awfully alienating effect. Technology can be designed so that it becomes alienating, but it can also be designed with the opposite in mind.
If you can't relate the tools that you use to the people behind it, it becomes alienating. If you feel that you are writing posts to a computer, and not to people, it becomes alienating (thus flamewars).
I think that much of the trouble with copyright violations could be avoided if this alienation is reversed. People have to relate to people.
You're not going to rip off a software developer, if you could somehow relate to him/her. It might be as simple as just getting an announcement of updates on your software now and then. Nor would you rip off a recording artists, if you could relate to them.
We have to keep this in mind when we design our technology. Optimistic as I am, I believe it is possible to design systems to make people relate to each other, even if we're talking millions of people. I don't know how, exactly, but since I'm a strong believer of human creativity, I think we can figure it out if we just sit down and think about it.
Actually, one of the main reasons why I support free software (and many of RMS' points) is that I think that free software does address many of the core issues. When the source is closed, and the first thing you see when you install it is that "if you do not do as we tell you, we'll lock you up for years", it will necessarily be alienating. There is something completely different when you install e.g. Freeamp on a Windoze box: "You don't have to accept the license conditions just to use the software" and a button that says "Cool!"
I would propose an addition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with the intention of combatting alienation: "Everyone has the right to seek understanding of the technology that surrounds them."
Slashdot Mirror
I know, I've posted about it before.
However, scientists should validate their results, and if they don't, referees should reject their articles.
But you seem to have a much too high faith in the ability of refeeres to find such computer glitches. Most don't care, and even fewer have the ability, why? Because they aren't more concerned about it than the other scientists. If you've ever joined a conference in a relatively narrow field, you've probably met all the people who can possibly review your article. Do any of them look like they will make a big effort to check if you've used flawed code to you? There is a lot you can get away with, and computer glitches is certainly one of them. If you don't care about the code, why is it that you expect the referee to do it? You know, it's called peer-review.
OK, an example: IDL is open source, most of it. IDL has the funny feature that it is supposed to detect underflows. Great. Well, I did a look around and found that a really reliable underflow detection system is either very difficult or very slow. So I did a look around, a long time ago, to see if I could find out how this was implemented, but I couldn't find something I could identify as "it".
Yet, most put blind faith the underflow control. How can you do that?
I'm sorry, you can't get away with the attitude that "I don't care about the code". That's something for the suits. It is your duty as a scientist to check if the results are reliable. Even if coding isn't your goal (it isn't mine either, I'm an astrophysicist, and my code is just a few hundred lines, and I have carefully chosen the software I use to make my own coding simple but transparent), you have to understand the basics of computer science no less than you need to understand statistics if you use statistics, physics if you use physics, or biology is you use biology.
For example, if you can't appreciate the flaws in Numerical Recipes, you shouldn't be using Numerical Recipes. Yeah, and does the penetration of NR tell you anything about if enough people care about the rigor of their computations?
Obviously, you have to release the information anonymously, othervice they would kill you.
Unfortunately, all the paper in the world is marked. The manufacturer has inserted a unique watermark, and they have extensive records of who buys each sheet of paper. If the secret police get their hands on any of the documents you distribute, it will point right back at you. You'll be dead.
To figure out who the "pirates" are, this is what RIAA et al. wants, even if they don't dare state it up front. They want extensive records of all the CDs, so that when a "pirated" CD is found, it points right back at everyone involved, and they can be nailed for it.
I think this small label is not going to do much to achieve that goal, but it is really beside the point.
And so what? Paper is one thing, CDs is an entirely different matter?
OK, so you get a piece of footage. Compressed down to 650 MB (by Ogg Tarkin... :-) ), you can burn it on CDs and distribute it to have it aired worldwide.
Unfortunately, because RIAA needs protection from "pirates" you can't do that. You can't do that to free your country from oppression.
OK, this is a bit far-fetched perhaps, but you never know if this could happen.
But you know, the Ukrainians could throw those out, and that could help.
The reason why I learned OOP is pretty much that I had to. I'm at the University of Oslo in Norway, and OOP was invented here and implemented in SIMULA. So they really forced us to use SIMULA and program OO, but in just a couple of basic courses, so I didn't a prolonged forced exposure.
Examples where OO concepts are clear include SIMULA and the S system (my favorite implementation R). SIMULA is a full-blown OOP system (but there are various reasons why it failed), while S has just a few OO features, but the features that have been implemented are easy to understand, they incorporate some essential concepts, and they are very powerful.
Then, you have C++ which is also a full featured language, but where the concepts are not that clear and easy to grasp.
When OO gets muddy is usually when it is built on the top of existing languages. Perl OO is a bit muddy, but not too bad, but if you look at e.g. IDL it gets rather bad IMHO.
I haven't looked at NAG, but you're not getting all the source code? Actually, I find it weird that one does rely on closed source in science, when science depends on the full disclosure of all relevant material. Well, the computations done is arguably the most important aspect of most analysis done today, so all source code should be available for public scrutiny.
I would recommend R for many applications. It has some lightweight OO that is very efficient, it's a really beautiful language. It is also very rigorous, you will find the best things in Numerical Recipes there, but there is also a lot of code that has been through formal peer review.
Hehe, well, I haven't really had that much confidence in The Register, no, but I didn't think they weren't entitled to any confidence. After all, they are the only ones who are taking the CPRM stuff seriously, and that's really important.
Unless that person is you! Just think about it: With a plane with a 100 people on board, 10 will be incorrectly flagged as "liars", and what's worse, the person behind the desk who is going to decide whether or not to let you on board or have you put in front of a military tribunal and shot, will have no clue as to where to start. The only thing they have is that you blushed when asked a specific question. I bet you were just looking down her ..., you bastard! :-)
There is no way you can deal intelligently with all those false positives (contrary to a metall detector, where you can find out very fast exactly what caused the alarm).
Besides, take the scary option that they will actually record who were detected as liars, you'll get an incredible amount of data then to be cross-checked with a lot of other databases, and make a lot of people subject to criminal investigation wrongly.
Besides, I really doubt they will catch any terrorists this way. They only way you can achieve security against terrorists is to eliminate the desire to commit terror, and you can only do that by emphasizing human rights for everyone.
Actually, this isn't too far off... When I, I guess as a foreigner, enter a flight to the US, "Are you, or have you been involved in terrorism?" is the type of question you've got to answer.
Yes, you are entirely correct about that, it was inserted on a spacewalk. However, the article mentions that Pentiums wasn't ready for space.
Yeah.... :-) Whatever is the case, I think The Register should be very, very careful about publishing "leaked" messages unless they are very, very certain it actually comes from the claimed source (like having the VP's PGP sig on it... :-) ). Othervice, they will soon lack any credibility, as you would have to go and check every story they post yourself.
Besides, if they ever would really need to post a story based on an anonymous source or a real leaked memo, which is something very important for the press to be able to do, nobody will believe them after this. I certainly wouldn't.
Then you might want to drop the spreadsheet entirely, and go for R. R is a very beautiful system for statistical computing and graphics, and it is very powerful. I know there is quite some R code in Gnumeric, most of the statistics comes from there.
I think there has been some talk about a more extensive interface between Gnumeric and R, but I don't know what happened.
There is some more high-level GUI tools for R as well, but I have never had any use for them, so I haven't even compiled it, but there might be some things that are sufficiently spreadsheet-like there that you can use.
You know how PHBs think: If it's free, then you can't make money off of it. If HP is able to sell this at $3000 a piece, maybe they will get their eyes opened for the possibility that there is money in Free Software.
Flash is a proprietary standard, and having been on Tru64 most of the time, I can tell you Flash is among the most awful things you can encounter.
But indeed, it has more to do with its propretary status than technical abilities. But, SVG+DOM+SMIL should do most of the things Flash does (though I haven't seen a good comparison yet), and if people would use that instead, I would have no objections, as all technologies can be used intelligently.
There was a bit of discussion on this topic on Vorbis-dev not long ago. Worth a read if you're considering this.
But if I had any money they would certainly be donated to the Xiph.org Foundation
Free Software is certainly a good thing, and a worthy cause, but open formats for exchange of ideas, thoughs and arts is even more important. Without it, me may end up in a situation where an Evil Corp[tm] can control what you can say.
Certainly, I agree completely. But I still think that CSS is your friend, you just need to be careful, and BGCOLOR is Evil[tm]. In this particular example, using BODY {background : #fff} in a stylesheet will have no negative effect on any browsers (but you should define a foreground color too). BGCOLOR, OTOH, has a negative effect, because AFAIK, I know of no browser where you can turn it off.
All this boils down to whether best graceful transformation is offered by the Bad[tm] features of HTML or by careful use of (a small subset of) CSS. I have been through many such discussions, but they have usually concluded that careful use of CSS is the best for graceful transformation, and thus is the best you can do to make your pages accessible to any browser.
I mean, what we really, really want, is to get rid of the BGCOLOR, FONT and all that stuff, remove it from HTML alltogether, right...?
I think there was a pretty exhaustive discussion about it on the WAI interest group mailing list, but I can't find it in the archives and this was also the main reason why BGCOLOR was marked as deprecated.
I also think it was the main reason why it took so long to get XHTML out. A lot of people thought that the Transitional DTD never should have made it to XHTML, because it represent a sort of tag soup that should be dead. But the W3C membership wanted the Transitional in XHTML.
But why? I mean, when I design new pages now, I remove the BGCOLOR attribute. BGCOLOR is clearly marked as deprecated in the specs, and should only be used in a transitional period, and I think the tranaitional period has lasted more than long enough. From now on, I think one should use the Strict DTD, either 4.01 or XHTML 1. There is no use for BGCOLOR anymore (eh, actually, I think there never was.... :-) ). Instead, use an (external) stylesheet. It's easy to turn off for the users, and it'll be easier for users to make your pages suit their taste.
Other than that, I agree with your philosophy. The pages I write now are XHTML 1 (it should be completely backwards compatible) and comply with at least two levels of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0. I think that if everybody did that, the web would be a lot more usuable for everyone (it was a huge blunder by the W3C to market the Accessibility Guidelines as being something only for people with disabilities).
Yep, that's a pretty sure sign of Finnish, and indeed this article is Finnish.
Both Finnish and Estonian (and Hungarian) belong AFAIK to the same group of languages. Finns and Hungarians can't understand too much of each other's languages though.
Hehe, telling the difference between Swedish and the two other are easy enough: Swedes use ö whereas we (I'm Norwegian) use ø. Also, "and" is "och" in Swedish but "og" in Norwegian and Danish.
Generally, spoken Swedish is closer to Norwegian than Danish, but written Danish is closer to Norwegian than Swedish. I have actually been acting as translator between Stockholmers and Danes at times...
Telling the difference between Norwegian (no) and Danish (da) is harder. It's easy enough to a native, but Danish was the official language in Norway for a very long time and dominated up to a big reform in 1917, where it was norwegianified. If that isn't bad enough, we have two official languages here, no is in fact nb and nn, so if you think it's hard to tell the difference between da and no, it's even harder to tell the difference between nn and nb. Besides, if I write informally, I'd like to write something in between of nn and nb. :-) I think no makes more extensive use of double consonants, but I'm not sure about that. You can see it on quite a few words, typically one letter is different, like "language" which is "språg" in da but "språk" in no, "of" which is "af" in da but "av" in no. And so on... :-)
Eh, well, yeah, I have to admit that I haven't checked that carefully no... I remember reading the Win95 license back then, and I don't think I have broken it, but yes, I've edited .ini-files... And all the proprietary software I have bought is installed on a single machine only (my parent's).
Also, I've read the Opera EULA, and that is OK (yeah, and I pointed out to the Opera CTO that it said "hackers" where it should say "crackers" and they changed it... :-) ).
Also, the problem is that if you break the license, you breake the business model and take away the profits that make it possible to develop the software in the first place. If the software didn't exist, you couldn't copy it.
All this boils down to the most fundamental issue of business in our times: How can you ensure that people doing creative work and make non-scarce stuff available are paid for it, without using the (unsustainable) enforced-scarcity model.
We need to figure this out, we really need, urgently, to figure out how people can be paid. Meanwhile, I don't think people should use warez, because that may leave us without things we'd really, really like to have. Yeah, and besides, I'm very happy with the free software I rely on.
Hehe, if you were scared sh*tless in a foreign country you probably shouldn't be signing anything... :-)
Certainly not, Peter Blake was killed by robbers in the Amazon earlier this year. That's piracy.
Technology can have an awfully alienating effect. Technology can be designed so that it becomes alienating, but it can also be designed with the opposite in mind.
If you can't relate the tools that you use to the people behind it, it becomes alienating. If you feel that you are writing posts to a computer, and not to people, it becomes alienating (thus flamewars).
I think that much of the trouble with copyright violations could be avoided if this alienation is reversed. People have to relate to people.
You're not going to rip off a software developer, if you could somehow relate to him/her. It might be as simple as just getting an announcement of updates on your software now and then. Nor would you rip off a recording artists, if you could relate to them.
We have to keep this in mind when we design our technology. Optimistic as I am, I believe it is possible to design systems to make people relate to each other, even if we're talking millions of people. I don't know how, exactly, but since I'm a strong believer of human creativity, I think we can figure it out if we just sit down and think about it.
Actually, one of the main reasons why I support free software (and many of RMS' points) is that I think that free software does address many of the core issues. When the source is closed, and the first thing you see when you install it is that "if you do not do as we tell you, we'll lock you up for years", it will necessarily be alienating. There is something completely different when you install e.g. Freeamp on a Windoze box: "You don't have to accept the license conditions just to use the software" and a button that says "Cool!"
I would propose an addition to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with the intention of combatting alienation: "Everyone has the right to seek understanding of the technology that surrounds them."
Yeah, and somebody did actually mention Ronja in the comments back then.