Dear American,

We need your help. Us, your neighbours around the world, have always admired your industriousness, ingenuity, and spirit of enterprise. We absorb your music, your movies, your language, fashion, books, your science and technology, and enjoy all of them while thanking you for it in sympathy. In return, we like to offer you what we're proud of in our own culture. We dream of your beautiful country, so vast and varied, where dreams can be realized. Because we also have dreams we want to realize, very similar to yours. Indeed, many of us have settled in your country to realize their dreams and their true potential. So you see, we look up to you in many ways.

It just hit me that all the countries that congratulate themselves on upholding freedom of speech and even try to shove it down other people's throats have a blatant breach of that principle right under their very eyes: the secrecy practices of corporations. When an employee is hired or fired, he signs a non-disclosure agreement concerning the activities of the company he joined. If he breaks that agreement, he is liable to legal pursuit, from the same legal system which holds freedom of speech as a sacred principle.

I wish to unveil before an unsuspecting population a plan to reconcile P2P technology with the interests of content producers: music labels, production firms, software firms, book publishers, etc. I do so at the risk of being laughed out of my own blog.

I've read so many endless threads of political discussions on forums and blogs that I'm nauseated. Here's an open letter to netizens who take sides.

One of the great blinders of science stems from the burden of provability: if something is not scientifically provable, then it does not have objective existence, and it's labelled as "superstition".

"Your economic theory makes no sense".

Intelligent musicians have realized that the Internet gives them the opportunity to reach their consumers directly, bypassing the dinosauric and frankly greedy middleman, yielding a fairer deal for everyone who deserves it. Radiohead and NIN are definitely not your average teeny boppers :-)

Musicians, take a good look at this page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/kentbye/1813174776/

Fascinating study (from 2003) on the amount of information stored and flowing through different media (Broadcasting, Telephony, Internet). Must-read for anyone serious about informatics. We're talking exabytes (one million terabytes) and zettabytes (1000 times more).

According to this study, 5 exabytes were stored digitally in 2002. 18 exabytes flowed through electronic channels. Information would be doubling every 2-3 years.

Humans are thinking machines, among other things. We think, we learn how to think, we are asked to think (or not). Some would go as far as saying we think therefore we are.

Why think?

What is thought?