> > Any thoughts? > > turquoiseb: > Any person who can affix a name like "liberal" or > "conservative" to his or her beliefs -- be they > political, social, or spiritual -- is not worth > paying any attention to whatsoever. > Or, calling oneself a 'pirate'. LoL!
Being an ex-pat hacker can sometimes be isolating and lonely - sometimes expats just feel better when they have someone to talk to. The programmer is God and Hackers are the prophets of Information Technology. So, if you are a hacker, it would be evil to not share your data and your code with the rest of the world, to save mankind from ignorance - a moral imperative for the hacker. The hacker's world view is idealistic libertarian. Hackers really fear that powerful individuals are taking over the Internet and controlling our thoughts through the media and social networking, violating their privacy, all the while posting reams of information about themselves. Go figure. "Underlying it all was the hacker belief that the world could be perfected if enough of us tapped society's vast reserves of knowledge and put it to proper use." "Because he knows the power of the technology he has mastered, he knows how distressingly fragile the barrier is between freedom and censorship—it's a simple matter of who writes the code." Read more: 'So Open It Hurts' What the Internet did to Aaron Swartz? New Republic: http://preview.tinyurl.com/ala5v77 Other titles of interest: 'Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace' by Lawrence Lessig Basic Books, 2000 'Information is power' The Guerilla Open Access Manifesto: by Aaron Swartz http://tinyurl.com/b7ntgef 'Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution' by Steven Levy O'Reilly, 2010
