But, just as his pacifism in the First World War and his flight from an Austria imperilled by Fascism had both principled causes and personal ones, so, too, the public message of his suicide note tells only one side of the story.
"They are computer scientists who have principled causes," said Ronald J. Deibert, an associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto who has studied the activities of such groups and runs the Citizen Lab, a political science technology laboratory that supported Mr. Villeneuve's work.
For a few years after the bailouts of General Motors and the financial sector, objectors in both parties found rowdy but principled common cause against centrists like me who preferred a bloody save to outright economic collapse.
"What matters is that Mr Miliband set out a principled position that could cause him a lot of trouble," he says, adding that the Conservatives will be put on the defensive because their funding will be unreformed.
"There is nothing more powerful than inspirational leadership that unleashes principled behavior for a great cause," said Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN, which helps companies build ethical cultures, and the author of the book "How".
But the principled case is even stronger.
In the 1770's, the "Glorious Cause" of revolution attracted an amazing crop of principled, able leaders.
He was deeply principled and unswervingly loyal to his friends and to countless causes and communities.
"It could be an expedient way to wind this down without causing anyone to lose face or requiring either to compromise their principled position on the Diaoyu islands," he said.
Some criminal lawyers often appear to present themselves as principled Eighteenth Century abolitionists of the letter de cachet, willing to die for a noble cause.
