So this will be about another great, epic WAR, right? Heros fighting for their country/planet?
Sorry, but what I hear about ME3 doesn't really appeal to me. Here is some news: most gamers that buy games are more than 14 year old, especially when it comes to RPGs.
How about making a sci-fi game based on an interesting story? A story where the player does not invariably save the whole universe? I wonder whether any of Bioware's developers have actually ever read some real sci-fi stories? Like the ones by Lem, Asimov, Heinlein, Dick, or the early stories of LeGuin? How about an interesting plot? At least show some minimum respect to the genre. Pleaaase!
It's interesting that persons promoting freedom want to restrict what other people do.
Conversely to what you might think that is pretty much part of the definition of what "freedom" means since Kant wrote about it. Restricting the freedom of some persons to guarantee the freedom of other persons (without prejudices or inequality in front of the law) is also the cornerstone of all modern democratic societies.
Sorry, but it looks as if RMS knows a lot more about freedom than you. (Oh, and before you ask: Yes, I do have a Ph.D. in philosophy.)
Regarding the second part of your post, RMS is not a FOSS fanatic. In fact, he's not a fanatic at all. Nobody forces anyone to use FOSS products and everybody has the right and the freedom to put his code under GPL. If you don't like the GPL, don't apply it.
RMS is just hated by many people for stating the truth (or, at least pretty convincing arguments) without being diplomatic about it -- he's very similar to Socrates in that respect (and, funny enough, also in physical aspects, hehehe). People that like to suppress and dominate other people hate such persons for obvious reasons. (If RMS would be as wrong as they claim, nobody would care about what he says...)
They fly drones, some of them perhaps even armed, that are known to be infected witha virus? I don't believe this story. Not even the US military is that irresponsible...or are they?
Spot on. Mod parent up. Almost everyone is guilty of some crime, be it copyright infringement, tax fraud, hate speech, or some driving felony. Heck, if the Six Degrees of Seperation hypothesis is right you're probably close enough to some terrorist to count as a terrorist yourself.
Everyone forgets, of course, that you don't need to be watched for very long before you break a law. It's so hopelessly complex that even lawyers, who spend several years learning about it, are unable to avoid being ensnared against a determined law enforcement effort. If they want you, they will get you.
Re:haskell for the masses? sure, but only...
on
OCaml For the Masses
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· Score: 1
But they don't RESTRICT you to those concepts. It's the insistence that everything be unchanging that is the weakness in the purely functional languages. The Scheme family is the only group of that to have any measurable use. (Note that Lisp is NOT a functional language, even though the concept originated via a subset of Lisp.)
Scheme is by no means a purely functional language as you seem to suggest here. Scheme programmers perhaps tend to program in a more functional style than in the CL community, but just like LISP it allows for all kind of side-effects.
As someone working in academia who knows the journal business well and is also a frequent anonymous peer-reviewer for an A-tier journal, I wholeheartedly welcome this decision. The publishers earn insane amounts of money for journals, yet practically all the work is done by unpaid volunteers. It's like a money milking machine and tremendously hinders research -- especially in poorer countries, because research institutions very often cannot pay for all subscriptions and have to make tough choices. At my working place in a not so rich country we cannot get access to many important journals and I frequently have to ask colleagues to send me some manuscript (which is embarasing, to say the least).
Before someone starts ranting about high-risk business, low volumes, they don't really make money etc. let me assure you that the majority of journals require authors to typeset the manuscript themselves, practically never pay for linguistic editing and do no editing in addition to what the voluntary peer-reviewers suggest to the author, and the rest of the typesetting is done as cheaply as possible (e.g. Springer commonly outsources to India -- fine for me, I like Indians and their country). Basically, the publishers do nothing - no proof reading, sometimes they don't even run a spell-checker, and make shitloads of money. One journal article USD $35 -- you get the picture!
Why don't you do the responsible thing to do and cancel your Facebook account instead?
It's not as if Facebook was offering anything of real value, it's just a big waste of time, and there are plenty of other social sites, chat rooms, etc. you can invite your (real) friends or business contacts to.
For me, speed is also secondary. What matters most is what extensions there are---particularly privacy extensions like Tor button, Adblocker, No Script, Facebook and Google blockers, etc.
I'd stick with Firefox even if it was 5x slower than any other browser because of the plugins available for it. One thing that really annoys me about FF is, however, that so many extensions break with each upgrade. Can't they agree on a stable API?
Can you quote the precise piece of the PATRIOT act that deals specifically with this, and that will get the MiB to show to my house if I'm building such a device? I'm not a fan of the act, but I think you are attributing an interpretation to it that simply does not follow even in the paranoid sense.
*Specific* passages? -- Have you *ever* read any law? There are barely ever any *specific* passages in laws...
Anyway, Patriot Act Title II, sections 201, 202, 204, 209, 210, 211 are the relevant passages.
Section 201 deals with the government powers for intercepting communication related to terrorism. Section 202 deals with similar powers but in the context of computer fraud. How do section 201 and 202 that prevent me from building a TS-capable communication device? How are these two sections relevant to the discussion at hand?
"deals with...." could you be a tad bit more unspecific??
First: I didn't say anywhere that these sections of the PATRIOT Act prevent you from building a voice encryption device that does not have any backdoor. I said that nowhere. Learn how to read. Really. I said the PATRIOT Act provides all the means to scare developers into implementing such a backdoor (be that ultimately lawful or not) and I wouldn't be surprised if it were used for that purpose. (And nobody might ever know because of so-called gag orders.)
Second, you have to take the act in combination with other laws in place such as the CALEA act from 1994: "The Act obliges telecommunications companies to make it possible for law enforcement agencies to tap any phone conversations carried out over its networks, as well as making call detail records available. The act stipulates that it must not be possible for a person to detect that his or her conversation is being monitored by the respective government agency." [wikipedia]
In other words, nobody prevents you from building such a device, as you rightly said, as long you are not providing the means for anyone to actually use it. Once you offer a service for encrypted voice communication or otherwise qualify as a communication provider you can be forced by CALEA to implement a backdoor and you can be required by the PATRIOT Act (and actually a whole bunch of other laws that might apply) not to inform anyone of it.
Now before you continue by paraphrasing the CALEA Act in the vaguest way possible ("deals with...") to try to disprove me, please just let it be. Security is a matter of trust. If you trust security of crypto products from a country with CALEA and Patriot Act in place, that's your problem and I really don't care.
Can you quote the precise piece of the PATRIOT act that deals specifically with this, and that will get the MiB to show to my house if I'm building such a device? I'm not a fan of the act, but I think you are attributing an interpretation to it that simply does not follow even in the paranoid sense.
*Specific* passages? -- Have you *ever* read any law? There are barely ever any *specific* passages in laws...
Anyway, Patriot Act Title II, sections 201, 202, 204, 209, 210, 211 are the relevant passages.
I'm not saying that the issue is crystal-clear or that the "MiB" could use the PATRIOT act to *rightfully and constitutionally* force you to implement a backdoor. I've just said that someone might have a long talk with you as the implementor of a voice encryption device, not that the threats you will hear in this talk are water-proof up til the Supreme Court. The legal issues are complicated, they e.g. depend on whether the maker of the secure communications device is also classified as a communications provider.
Uh, there is nothing preventing a US citizen or legal resident from creating a device that can handle information at different security levels, even TS.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Officially, yes, you may by now create a phone that does secure voice encryption without any backdoor or key escrow. Some data-channel apps out there claim to do that. But if you implement such an app on your own, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody had a long talk with you...
Don't forget that there is the PATRIOT act -- as long as it is in place no US-made encryption device can be considered secure.
'...don't worry about that,' says psychologist Patrick Markey of Villanova (Pa.) University. 'But is your kid moody, impulsive, or are they unfriendly?
...uh...such as about every child that gets into puberty? Yeah, sure.
How about not giving children guns? How many children kill others or themselves when they do not have a gun?
I don't claim that children without a gun don't kill themselves or stab others with knifes, yet it seems striking to me that the violent crimes (aka "running amok") by children (and probably also adults) are so violent because they have one or more guns. At least to me as a non-violent layman from Europe it seems much easier to shoot a dozen classmates than to club them to death or stab them. The bottom-line being that you should not give your child a gun when it reaches puberty. Oh yeah, and also give 'em very sharp katanas without further supervision...
Everything about software patents is really stupid.
They make it impossible for a small software company to be successful, because when it grows it will get sued and stand no chance. In the long run software patents mean that a small quasi-monopolistic cartel of large companies can control what software is produced. Either your with them by signing their contracts / selling your company, or you'll perish.
Software patents need to be stopped entirely. They do NOT work and stiffle innovation.
I've switched from Jungledisk and bought a 4 year subscription of CrashPlan and it works pretty well. It is very unobtrusive working in the background on Linux. The application updates itself automatically and is pretty well-designed.
Of course, if you have truly sensitive data such as trade secrets or patient records you should never rely on any claims such companies make about their proprietary encryption / security.
I was thinking about countries like the GDR. By communism I've meant "Marxism", which is what the original article was talking about.
If you include Maoism, Stalinism, Cambodia, the Juche military doctrine then, of course, millions starved to death, were suffocated by children with plastic bags, etc. No doubt about that. These ideologies have not much to do with the communism of Marx and Engels, though, and I don't think anyone in his right mind could find anything positive about them. Just read a few of the dumb texts that Stalin allegedly wrote (mostly derived from speeches written by ghostwriters) and that were published in large volumes and compare them to Marx's writings.
So, yes, you're right and I'd like to apologize if I've made the impression that no one starved to death under Stalin, Mao, etc.
I used to think so, too, but am no longer so sure that greed is really such a crucial factor.
AFAIK, all attempts of establishing communism at some point have adopted the Kader Principle, replacing democratic committees and other means of self-organization of the people by "professional revolutionaries" trained in communist doctrine and who supposedly know than everyone else what needs to be done. That idea inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Then there is the problem of planned economy, which does not seem to work well, although to be fair these systems managed to deliver basic needs and reduced unemployment to practically zero percent---so a comparison to capitalism in that respect would only be fair if there were capitalist systems where everybody has all basic goods for living and there is no unemployment. (That is not to say that the goods available in the east didn't suck...but people didn't starve to death either.)
Communism failed because of totalitarians and bureaucrats, and I've never heard any convincing story by communists how to avoid either of that.
That being said, it is also clear that the US is violently steering into the wrong direction. The gap between rich and poor has spread continuously during the past decades. Here are some facts. You don't have to be a communist to realize that there is something wrong with that. If the trend continues, the US will get another civil war some day.
If measures like this are really successful, they will reveal that the alleged losses that software makers suffer from due to piracy are completely imaginary. Nobody except well-running, larger companies can or will afford to buy the tons of commercial software available and certainly no school kid can afford to buy 10 games at 60 $ every month. The industry's expectations are ridiculous.
To give an example, when I used to be a very poor student that could barely afford to pay his electricity bill, I pirated all games, because there was simply no way I could have afforded them. Now I get a decent salary as a researcher and -- surprise! -- buy all games. (And no longer have the time to play them...)
So yes, one way to deal with it is to switch to open and free software for everything you do (and ignore commercial games, how mouth-watering they might look...most of them suck anyway) But there also needs to be a big initiative to get rid of all proprietary file formats or even just minor incompatibilities that force you to use proprietary software. That needs to be prohibited. For example, journal publishers must be prohibited by law to only accept Microsoft Word format.
True, the owner of the wire has quite a lot of control, but to truly make encryption and Tor impossible would mean changing the way the net works so radically that it would become a lot less useful.
Whishful thinking. How many people do you know personally that run a Tor exit node? How many of them would you consider 100% trustworthy? Compromised exit nodes offer a lot of possibilities: browser ID'ing, code injection, traffic analysis. How about the programs you run over Tor. Are you 100% sure they don't leak private information? Have you checked their source code and internet protocols? What about the endpoints? Are they secure? Do they use SSL? Which SSL encryption do they use, super-secure RC4 like Google search? Can you be identified from your browsing behavior?
Agencies like the NSA have the expertise, the money, and the infrastructure to own the majority of exit nodes. Not only that, if they wanted to and got the funding, they could easily own the majority of all Tor nodes. I'm not saying that they do or that you should assume they do (they might not have an incentive, as they are probably already drowning more valuable data), but that you shouldn't rely on Tor's anonymity too much.
Moreover, bear in mind what others have already pointed out. There are many dirty tricks to undermine the trustworthiness of projects, especially since it's highly likely that many private crypto implementors are on the secret payroll of some government. Take e.g. a look at Wikileaks for the results of such campaigns.
However, if a government wants to get rid of Tor officially there is a much easier way. They just prohibit it and that's it. Use of Tor is easy to identify. The same for encryption in general. Or you just make it illegal not to give away the password to authorities when they want it like in the fascist UK.
Honestly, do so many people have such a slow computer that they have to care for such minor speed differences?
I use Firefox because it has so many extensions and plugins. With just a few additional Firefox extensions installed I'm able to run TOR at the click of a button, block Flash selectively, block referer URLs, block Javascript selectively, block "Like" buttons and crap like that, delete cookies and Flash cookies, block Google analytics, control SSL certificates and being warned of bogus ones, and so on. Unfortunately, such functions and tools are essential nowadays. Not to speak with all the non-privacy related plugins available.
Slashdot Mirror
So this will be about another great, epic WAR, right? Heros fighting for their country/planet?
Sorry, but what I hear about ME3 doesn't really appeal to me. Here is some news: most gamers that buy games are more than 14 year old, especially when it comes to RPGs.
How about making a sci-fi game based on an interesting story? A story where the player does not invariably save the whole universe? I wonder whether any of Bioware's developers have actually ever read some real sci-fi stories? Like the ones by Lem, Asimov, Heinlein, Dick, or the early stories of LeGuin? How about an interesting plot? At least show some minimum respect to the genre. Pleaaase!
It's interesting that persons promoting freedom want to restrict what other people do.
Conversely to what you might think that is pretty much part of the definition of what "freedom" means since Kant wrote about it. Restricting the freedom of some persons to guarantee the freedom of other persons (without prejudices or inequality in front of the law) is also the cornerstone of all modern democratic societies.
Sorry, but it looks as if RMS knows a lot more about freedom than you. (Oh, and before you ask: Yes, I do have a Ph.D. in philosophy.)
Regarding the second part of your post, RMS is not a FOSS fanatic. In fact, he's not a fanatic at all. Nobody forces anyone to use FOSS products and everybody has the right and the freedom to put his code under GPL. If you don't like the GPL, don't apply it.
RMS is just hated by many people for stating the truth (or, at least pretty convincing arguments) without being diplomatic about it -- he's very similar to Socrates in that respect (and, funny enough, also in physical aspects, hehehe). People that like to suppress and dominate other people hate such persons for obvious reasons. (If RMS would be as wrong as they claim, nobody would care about what he says...)
I think he meant "one of the best languages among Java and C++".
For anyone else Java is just a monstrosity of ultra-verbose OOP hell.
They fly drones, some of them perhaps even armed, that are known to be infected witha virus? I don't believe this story. Not even the US military is that irresponsible...or are they?
Spot on. Mod parent up. Almost everyone is guilty of some crime, be it copyright infringement, tax fraud, hate speech, or some driving felony. Heck, if the Six Degrees of Seperation hypothesis is right you're probably close enough to some terrorist to count as a terrorist yourself.
Everyone forgets, of course, that you don't need to be watched for very long before you break a law. It's so hopelessly complex that even lawyers, who spend several years learning about it, are unable to avoid being ensnared against a determined law enforcement effort. If they want you, they will get you.
But they don't RESTRICT you to those concepts. It's the insistence that everything be unchanging that is the weakness in the purely functional languages. The Scheme family is the only group of that to have any measurable use. (Note that Lisp is NOT a functional language, even though the concept originated via a subset of Lisp.)
Scheme is by no means a purely functional language as you seem to suggest here. Scheme programmers perhaps tend to program in a more functional style than in the CL community, but just like LISP it allows for all kind of side-effects.
As someone working in academia who knows the journal business well and is also a frequent anonymous peer-reviewer for an A-tier journal, I wholeheartedly welcome this decision. The publishers earn insane amounts of money for journals, yet practically all the work is done by unpaid volunteers. It's like a money milking machine and tremendously hinders research -- especially in poorer countries, because research institutions very often cannot pay for all subscriptions and have to make tough choices. At my working place in a not so rich country we cannot get access to many important journals and I frequently have to ask colleagues to send me some manuscript (which is embarasing, to say the least).
Before someone starts ranting about high-risk business, low volumes, they don't really make money etc. let me assure you that the majority of journals require authors to typeset the manuscript themselves, practically never pay for linguistic editing and do no editing in addition to what the voluntary peer-reviewers suggest to the author, and the rest of the typesetting is done as cheaply as possible (e.g. Springer commonly outsources to India -- fine for me, I like Indians and their country). Basically, the publishers do nothing - no proof reading, sometimes they don't even run a spell-checker, and make shitloads of money. One journal article USD $35 -- you get the picture!
Why don't you do the responsible thing to do and cancel your Facebook account instead?
It's not as if Facebook was offering anything of real value, it's just a big waste of time, and there are plenty of other social sites, chat rooms, etc. you can invite your (real) friends or business contacts to.
For me, speed is also secondary. What matters most is what extensions there are---particularly privacy extensions like Tor button, Adblocker, No Script, Facebook and Google blockers, etc.
I'd stick with Firefox even if it was 5x slower than any other browser because of the plugins available for it. One thing that really annoys me about FF is, however, that so many extensions break with each upgrade. Can't they agree on a stable API?
Can you quote the precise piece of the PATRIOT act that deals specifically with this, and that will get the MiB to show to my house if I'm building such a device? I'm not a fan of the act, but I think you are attributing an interpretation to it that simply does not follow even in the paranoid sense.
*Specific* passages? -- Have you *ever* read any law? There are barely ever any *specific* passages in laws...
Anyway, Patriot Act Title II, sections 201, 202, 204, 209, 210, 211 are the relevant passages.
Section 201 deals with the government powers for intercepting communication related to terrorism. Section 202 deals with similar powers but in the context of computer fraud. How do section 201 and 202 that prevent me from building a TS-capable communication device? How are these two sections relevant to the discussion at hand?
"deals with...." could you be a tad bit more unspecific??
First: I didn't say anywhere that these sections of the PATRIOT Act prevent you from building a voice encryption device that does not have any backdoor. I said that nowhere. Learn how to read. Really. I said the PATRIOT Act provides all the means to scare developers into implementing such a backdoor (be that ultimately lawful or not) and I wouldn't be surprised if it were used for that purpose. (And nobody might ever know because of so-called gag orders.)
Second, you have to take the act in combination with other laws in place such as the CALEA act from 1994: "The Act obliges telecommunications companies to make it possible for law enforcement agencies to tap any phone conversations carried out over its networks, as well as making call detail records available. The act stipulates that it must not be possible for a person to detect that his or her conversation is being monitored by the respective government agency." [wikipedia]
In other words, nobody prevents you from building such a device, as you rightly said, as long you are not providing the means for anyone to actually use it. Once you offer a service for encrypted voice communication or otherwise qualify as a communication provider you can be forced by CALEA to implement a backdoor and you can be required by the PATRIOT Act (and actually a whole bunch of other laws that might apply) not to inform anyone of it.
Now before you continue by paraphrasing the CALEA Act in the vaguest way possible ("deals with...") to try to disprove me, please just let it be. Security is a matter of trust. If you trust security of crypto products from a country with CALEA and Patriot Act in place, that's your problem and I really don't care.
Can you quote the precise piece of the PATRIOT act that deals specifically with this, and that will get the MiB to show to my house if I'm building such a device? I'm not a fan of the act, but I think you are attributing an interpretation to it that simply does not follow even in the paranoid sense.
*Specific* passages? -- Have you *ever* read any law? There are barely ever any *specific* passages in laws...
Anyway, Patriot Act Title II, sections 201, 202, 204, 209, 210, 211 are the relevant passages.
I'm not saying that the issue is crystal-clear or that the "MiB" could use the PATRIOT act to *rightfully and constitutionally* force you to implement a backdoor. I've just said that someone might have a long talk with you as the implementor of a voice encryption device, not that the threats you will hear in this talk are water-proof up til the Supreme Court. The legal issues are complicated, they e.g. depend on whether the maker of the secure communications device is also classified as a communications provider.
I don't know of any list but I'm pretty sure that tons of successful software has come from academia.
Racket is a particularly nice example. I'm too lazy to Google so perhaps others can provide a few hundred more.
Uh, there is nothing preventing a US citizen or legal resident from creating a device that can handle information at different security levels, even TS.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. Officially, yes, you may by now create a phone that does secure voice encryption without any backdoor or key escrow. Some data-channel apps out there claim to do that. But if you implement such an app on your own, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody had a long talk with you...
Don't forget that there is the PATRIOT act -- as long as it is in place no US-made encryption device can be considered secure.
'...don't worry about that,' says psychologist Patrick Markey of Villanova (Pa.) University. 'But is your kid moody, impulsive, or are they unfriendly?
...uh...such as about every child that gets into puberty? Yeah, sure.
How about not giving children guns? How many children kill others or themselves when they do not have a gun?
I don't claim that children without a gun don't kill themselves or stab others with knifes, yet it seems striking to me that the violent crimes (aka "running amok") by children (and probably also adults) are so violent because they have one or more guns. At least to me as a non-violent layman from Europe it seems much easier to shoot a dozen classmates than to club them to death or stab them. The bottom-line being that you should not give your child a gun when it reaches puberty. Oh yeah, and also give 'em very sharp katanas without further supervision...
Everything about software patents is really stupid.
They make it impossible for a small software company to be successful, because when it grows it will get sued and stand no chance. In the long run software patents mean that a small quasi-monopolistic cartel of large companies can control what software is produced. Either your with them by signing their contracts / selling your company, or you'll perish.
Software patents need to be stopped entirely. They do NOT work and stiffle innovation.
I've switched from Jungledisk and bought a 4 year subscription of CrashPlan and it works pretty well. It is very unobtrusive working in the background on Linux. The application updates itself automatically and is pretty well-designed.
Of course, if you have truly sensitive data such as trade secrets or patient records you should never rely on any claims such companies make about their proprietary encryption / security.
Writing glue code is not much fun, though.
Great, the link disappeared. These were the facts I was referring to:
20 facts about inequality and poverty in the US.
I was thinking about countries like the GDR. By communism I've meant "Marxism", which is what the original article was talking about.
If you include Maoism, Stalinism, Cambodia, the Juche military doctrine then, of course, millions starved to death, were suffocated by children with plastic bags, etc. No doubt about that. These ideologies have not much to do with the communism of Marx and Engels, though, and I don't think anyone in his right mind could find anything positive about them. Just read a few of the dumb texts that Stalin allegedly wrote (mostly derived from speeches written by ghostwriters) and that were published in large volumes and compare them to Marx's writings.
So, yes, you're right and I'd like to apologize if I've made the impression that no one starved to death under Stalin, Mao, etc.
You guys are in constant denials of your ghettos...until you get shot when you take the wrong turn with your Humer.
I used to think so, too, but am no longer so sure that greed is really such a crucial factor.
AFAIK, all attempts of establishing communism at some point have adopted the Kader Principle, replacing democratic committees and other means of self-organization of the people by "professional revolutionaries" trained in communist doctrine and who supposedly know than everyone else what needs to be done. That idea inevitably leads to totalitarianism. Then there is the problem of planned economy, which does not seem to work well, although to be fair these systems managed to deliver basic needs and reduced unemployment to practically zero percent---so a comparison to capitalism in that respect would only be fair if there were capitalist systems where everybody has all basic goods for living and there is no unemployment. (That is not to say that the goods available in the east didn't suck...but people didn't starve to death either.)
Communism failed because of totalitarians and bureaucrats, and I've never heard any convincing story by communists how to avoid either of that.
That being said, it is also clear that the US is violently steering into the wrong direction. The gap between rich and poor has spread continuously during the past decades. Here are some facts. You don't have to be a communist to realize that there is something wrong with that. If the trend continues, the US will get another civil war some day.
The parent has a point.
If measures like this are really successful, they will reveal that the alleged losses that software makers suffer from due to piracy are completely imaginary. Nobody except well-running, larger companies can or will afford to buy the tons of commercial software available and certainly no school kid can afford to buy 10 games at 60 $ every month. The industry's expectations are ridiculous.
To give an example, when I used to be a very poor student that could barely afford to pay his electricity bill, I pirated all games, because there was simply no way I could have afforded them. Now I get a decent salary as a researcher and -- surprise! -- buy all games. (And no longer have the time to play them...)
So yes, one way to deal with it is to switch to open and free software for everything you do (and ignore commercial games, how mouth-watering they might look...most of them suck anyway) But there also needs to be a big initiative to get rid of all proprietary file formats or even just minor incompatibilities that force you to use proprietary software. That needs to be prohibited. For example, journal publishers must be prohibited by law to only accept Microsoft Word format.
True, the owner of the wire has quite a lot of control, but to truly make encryption and Tor impossible would mean changing the way the net works so radically that it would become a lot less useful.
Whishful thinking. How many people do you know personally that run a Tor exit node? How many of them would you consider 100% trustworthy? Compromised exit nodes offer a lot of possibilities: browser ID'ing, code injection, traffic analysis. How about the programs you run over Tor. Are you 100% sure they don't leak private information? Have you checked their source code and internet protocols? What about the endpoints? Are they secure? Do they use SSL? Which SSL encryption do they use, super-secure RC4 like Google search? Can you be identified from your browsing behavior?
Agencies like the NSA have the expertise, the money, and the infrastructure to own the majority of exit nodes. Not only that, if they wanted to and got the funding, they could easily own the majority of all Tor nodes. I'm not saying that they do or that you should assume they do (they might not have an incentive, as they are probably already drowning more valuable data), but that you shouldn't rely on Tor's anonymity too much.
Moreover, bear in mind what others have already pointed out. There are many dirty tricks to undermine the trustworthiness of projects, especially since it's highly likely that many private crypto implementors are on the secret payroll of some government. Take e.g. a look at Wikileaks for the results of such campaigns.
However, if a government wants to get rid of Tor officially there is a much easier way. They just prohibit it and that's it. Use of Tor is easy to identify. The same for encryption in general. Or you just make it illegal not to give away the password to authorities when they want it like in the fascist UK.
Any links? I need to get a good overview of this case in order to be able to judge it impartially and in a professional manner.
Honestly, do so many people have such a slow computer that they have to care for such minor speed differences?
I use Firefox because it has so many extensions and plugins. With just a few additional Firefox extensions installed I'm able to run TOR at the click of a button, block Flash selectively, block referer URLs, block Javascript selectively, block "Like" buttons and crap like that, delete cookies and Flash cookies, block Google analytics, control SSL certificates and being warned of bogus ones, and so on. Unfortunately, such functions and tools are essential nowadays. Not to speak with all the non-privacy related plugins available.