In IT We Trust

*(adjective) characterized by or conforming to the technical or ethical standards of a profession . exhibiting a courteous, conscientious, and generally businesslike manner in the workplace . from Merriam-Webster dictionary Nothing to say more, isn't it? Sorry, but I will step out of the theme a bit... As one of the aspects of our professionalism and professionalism of scientists in common worries me more than others... Ethical standards? What are they? The one of main questions which blows up my head from time to time is the ethical side of inventions in IT and Technologies. Common case for inventions is that they find the usage in army first, after that they serve us in our peaceful live. Zuse tried to build his computers and offer them for calculation of wing's aerodynamics for Luftwaffe, and his S1 was "misused" to calculate wings measurement for bombs ( 1 ). "Peaceful atom was born" after nuclear bombs. Encoding was used to hide message...

* Tiny BASIC's distribution notice, June 1976 ( 1 ) It's a second post about licenses and rights and the second post started from a bit of history: the old pirate song, the old distribution notice... It was a new word for me - "copyleft" and it was very interesting first to dig out it's history. It was born as a joke, controversy to "copyright, all rights reserved" in early 1976, before the concept itself. Well, that's all, that was interesting for me. I am aside of this wordings of law and I don't like to swim in this poll. When I was younger, I thought that there are bad things and good things in the world, but in fact there is nothing purely good or purely bad, only gradations... So the concept of copyleft was developed as a good thing to give the right to people to use freedoms of use, study, copy, modify and share with others, but under the same terms, license as the original. So the freeware should stay free, even if y...

* a line from one old pirate shanty.    All rights reserved to some pirates...    (blah blah blah... just to be on a safe side) You can argue whole day that the Copyright is good, it protects authors and owners of intellectual property, but I'd vote for Piratepartiet if I could be a citizen of Sweden, and that's why... I agree that the law works against users and sometimes the implementation of the law leads to ridiculous situations. We need the right to share the things we like with friends and relatives, and we need to declare this right and regulation of it some other way than it is done today. Otherwise the current law leads us the situation when you'll have to buy 2 copies of song just in case if you want to listen it with you girlfriend(boyfriend). Sounds funny, but... let's discuss every topic in Chapter Two of The Case For Copyright Reform ( 1 ) (must I write here some kind of copyright reference?). Moral Rights Unchanged " Nobody should be a...

No. 10: Be forgiving of other people's mistakes. Do you know why I can't write in Estonian? Because I am afraid of making mistakes. For me, it was always a way to show a respect to culture of interlocutor, by trying to express myself on his language. Estonian is not my native language, and I still try to use it, if I can, but sometimes I have to step back from my own rule. My English is not perfect as well, but still it is easier to use it for writing the blog. Maybe due to the fact that I convinced that mistakes in English grammar would be taken less seriously by readers. I know, that it is annoying to read the text with mistakes, but believe me, there is more destructive thing in the Net and this is correction of all your mistakes with especial accent on every mistake you did. Such people prefer to call themselves the Good Language Lovers or Grammar Lovers, but the Net knows them as Grammar Nazi. Who are they? The persons, who decide that they have the right to co...