I don't agree that it's only slashdotters who want (or at least need) strong encryption. There are lots of professionals like attorneys, therapists, clergypeople, etc. who should be using some form of privacy enhancement for their email.
I agree, though, that people like this may not know yet that they need encryption. Most people aren't aware that (1) the internet is a lot like a party line and (2) you need good encryption. It's not a matter of being a terrorist or of being paranoid. The simple fact is that even ankle-biters, given the power of modern PCs, can break weak encryption. And there could easily be a lot of ankle-biters out there who want to read a shrink's correspondence.... Not to mention the real criminals out there who might want to read the correspondence of a lawyer, stockbroker, etc.
This isn't a way to convince people to learn Scheme, but one of the reasons I think it's critical to use a language like Scheme in CS education is that it helps learn the critical concept of recursion. While you may never use recursive programming again (or you might use it all the time, like me), it is an absolutely critical concept for computer science and for other fields like mathematics, linguistics, etc.
Recursion is a critical concept and is much harder to master than iteration.
I once taught Computer Science in a University where the introductory courses were all taught in procedural programming languages. I had to teach theory and some other advanced topics to people who'd never mastered recursion and it was unspeakably painful. Like teaching physics to students who hadn't mastered algebra.
Actually, C++ is kinda bad for learning about Object-oriented programming, etc. Here are a couple of reasons:
C++ isn't a fully object-oriented language. It's a set of object-oriented extensions grafted onto a non-OO substructure. One particular place where you can see this is the way the object-oriented extensions combine with operator overloading and type coercion to create something that's deeply confusing. Also, since C++ is aimed at building very efficient systems programs, it skirts things that seem difficult, like multiple inheritance.
C++ has no garbage-collection. This means that lots of things that should be natural (like having methods that CONS together new objects and return them) become difficult and fraught with error.
Scheme, on the other hand, provides a good framework for teaching not just object-oriented design, but functional programming, as well.
Note that I'm not trying to get into a war about the best programming language for building things, nor am I trying to diss C++. But I think it's a pretty crummy language from a teaching perspective.
Fundamentally, I don't think that CS education should be vocational education. If you learn the concepts and theory, learning a new language is a breeze. If you don't, then you don't walk away from the education with much; everything you learn is in imminent danger of evaporating in your hands.
It's not clear that morality is the right way to condsider this question. The United States and the Soviet Union avoided serious strife for many years through Mutually Assured Destruction.
MAD was immoral by your criterion: according to you, massive retaliation would make the retaliating power "as bad as" the original attacker. I don't accept that, but let's put that aside for now.
MAD worked. Part of the problem here is that the states that have harbored these people have faced no meaningful consequences. Why not bring MAD back? Mr. Dictator of Elbonia, if terrorists you are sheltering use weapons of mass destruction on us, we will use weapons of mass destruction on you, and annihilate your country. Oh, those terrorists may not mind dying (although bin Laden's been pretty shy about showing up for his martyrdom), but the nations that shelter them most assuredly do.
I don't support nuking Afghanistan, but I'd be willing to see the US say, "the next thing like this will be met with the full force of our strategic deterrent, up to and including nuclear weapons."
Actually, there is censorship of right-wing Israeli organizations. Do you remember Kahane's Kach movement? It was outlawed, just like Nazism is outlawed in Germany. No Arab country does anything similar.
And, as far as Ariel Sharon is concerned, if the Palestinians don't like him, they shouldn't have elected him. They had a chance at peace with Barak and Clinton working hard to make it happen. They turned their backs on it. Not only didn't they go along, they didn't even make a counter-offer.
Your view is so topsy-turvy it's almost not worth a response, but I simply can't let this kind of hogwash go unchallenged.
R: If your opponent uses terror-bombing (as the Axis did in World War II), do you do likewise?
D: I'd say we did do likewise. Hiroshima? Nagasaki? We killed thousands of people in order to demoralize them and scare them into surrender.
Yup. I didn't mean to say we didn't. But note that I don't necessarily feel it wasn't a necessary or even a justified evil. I am very grateful I was not called upon to make that decision and live with it. Who are we to say that the costs of invading wouldn't have been greater? Who are we to say that they wouldn't have been greater, even for the Japanese? I'm not saying it would have been, I'm just saying that even reasonable, moral people, in the difficult place of making these decisions, could differ on the conclusion.
One place where I part ways with you is that you seem to think lots of these actions are good and evil without gradation and without context. By analogy, it seems to me that you'd say that a police officer who shoots a bank robber in the act of an armed robbery, was committing murder and was just as bad as the robber. I don't think that's the case.
Feel free to respond --- I don't want to leave you with the impression that I have to have the last word --- but I'm not sure there's much more to be said on this topic. It's been thought-provoking emailing with you,
I'm willing to go with that. It seems to me that morality is, at least to some extent, a luxury of those who can expect to survive with it.
I think, actually, that this is where private and public morality must diverge. That is, I may, if I wish, say that I won't retaliate or preventively strike, someone who wants to kill me. But if I'm a public official, I don't necessarily have that right. If I feel that indulging my personal moral qualms will lead to the deaths of people who trust me to make decisions for them, I don't know that I have that right.
These are, at any rate, deep ethical waters, and reasonable people can reasonably disagree about them.
As for the name-calling, I have two answers:
When you're at war (or other conflict with people) name-calling just happens. "Evil and cowardly" is public rhetoric.
If it really matters, I think the acts here were evil, but cowardly seems odd, unless you're referring to the people who hid in the shadows and used the terrorists themselves.
To some extent, in wartime, some moral rules go by the wayside. And we're caught in zillions of gray areas. What do you do when striking valid enemy targets costs civilian lives? If your opponent uses terror-bombing (as the Axis did in World War II), do you do likewise? In retrospect, the interning of Japanese-Americans was cowardly and evil (but not on this scale). We should regret it, and own it as a wrong, but can still be sympathetic to at least some of the people who thought it was the right thing to do.
One of the evils of war is that most of one's choices will be between bad and worse.
For that reason, we are going to have to start asking ourselves "how do we do what we need to do while doing the least violence to our principles?"
This brings us back to the original question: Do we have an effective response to this, that will not be horrific? I sure hope so. And I don't envy the people who are going to make that decision, any more than I envy Truman or Roosevelt.
I used to agree with you, but I'm starting to change my mind. So don't take this as an attack, but....
I think other people have already made the argument that the sniper rifle doesn't work. They have done this unwittingly, by arguing against the Israeli approach, which is almost literally the sniper rifle.
The problem is that the people on the other end of the sniper rifle may not mind dying. Maybe the only thing we can do is to take immense, disproportionate countermeasures against the nations that support this. We can't get the terrorists really, because they aren't reasonable. But there are reasonable people in places like Elbonia (fill in your favorite villain here), who promote these kinds of attack because they feel safe.
Anyway, the US is no good at the sniper rifle, and the sniper rifle doesn't work against people in Afghanistan, which is a nest of other people with sniper rifles.
So maybe we have to go back to something we understand: assured destruction. If you sponsor people who bomb the World Trade Center, the US will simply flatten your country. We will take the capital of Elbonia and turn it into glass.
The Soviet Union and the US had this policy through the Cold War and, no, it was not moral, but it was practical and by and large worked.
As much as this comment proposes assured destruction, it's also a plea for someone to come up with an alternative that is both moral and practical. But I don't see one proposed here, yet.
No, arguably what's wrong is that Israel has not done decisive but massive killing. They've done very precisely targeted, minimal killing, to do the best they can to wipe out terrorists without incurring too much trouble from world (read European) opinion.
I think your argument has the seeds of its own contradiction in it. You say "Retaliation should be strong and as swift as possible -- but against terrorists only." and also "What Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people in response to the Intifada has created a breeding ground for terrorists -- especially suicidal terrorists."
But what Israel's been doing precisely is targeted counterattacks, and targeted as well as anyone could ever reasonably expect. They find a guy they know is trouble in an office, in a car, or wherever, and they kill him. It doesn't get any more targeted than that, except in cases where you can actually go in with law enforcement. And we can't expect to take the FBI into Afghanistan any more than --- in fact, even less than --- the Israeli's can go into Gaza towns.
So my reading of your proposal is extremely pessimistic: it amounts to allowing our attackers impunity whenever they can get into another sovereign country. And it completely fails to address the problem of state-sponsored and state-abetted terrorism.
I'm afraid yes, I do believe that we should counterattack with a bigger stone. The whole point of being a superpower is to have the biggest stones. And there's no point in being a superpower if you don't use them --- if you don't, you are just the supertarget, which is what we are now.
I think it's goofy to think we can just "make nice," and everyone in the world will like us and there will be no more terrorism. Sure, we should try to bring peace to the world --- in our own self interest if nothing else. But it's just goofy to count on that as being our only strategy. Unless you are a true pacifist, there comes a point when you have to say, "OK, it's war now, and we don't win a war by dying, we win a war by killing the other guys."
Imagine if we'd said "Oh, Tojo and Hitler are just misunderstood guys and they're bummed about our foreign policy. Let's let this little Pearl Harbor thing go and just make nice." Neville Chamberlain tried that and it didn't work.
Re:What repercussions --- should they be colossal?
on
Our New Pearl Harbor
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· Score: 1
OK, I'm not sure I believe this myself, but here's an alternative.
We've heard this referred to as an act of war. What if that's true? What if we find out that Afghanistan -- or better yet, let's say Elbonia -- has harbored the person who has carried out a beyond-Pearl Harbor scale attack.
Why should we respond with restraint? [Notice this is only if we find out that it's Elbonia.] Why shouldn't we treat Elbonia the way we'd have treated the Soviet Union if they'd bombed NY? Why shouldn't we drop a nuclear weapon on Elbonia?
And, as far as concern for there just being more terrorists to follow, as some posters have proposed --- we just say "we'll do it again to the next terrorist attacker on the US."
This seems awful but assured destruction did work for the Cold War. Why not bring it back? What's the alternative? Arrest a few people who are willing to die anyway? Or even kill them, the way Israel does? They don't seem to care. Maybe what we need is a response that goes beyond, awfully beyond (in the literal awe-fully sense, too), the attack so that no one will ever want to do this again.
I'm not going to be just happy, I'll be overjoyed to hear a better alternative. But arresting a few guys or sending a cruise missile into a chemicals plant don't seem like good methods. Anyone got a better?
Can you give some substantiation for your charges here? In particular your claim that "Some guys who were allegedly linked to the World Trade Center bombing were kept in jail, without being charged, for several years." Were these U.S. citizens? I'd be very surprised if that was true, since that would clearly be unconstitutional. On the other hand, foreigners have more limited rights in some cases.
But if you're going to post inflammatory stuff like this, it'd be great to see some substantiation. Who are these guys? Where can we find out more about them?
Gosh. I hate to go against the flow, but I think this is a terrible book. It's one of the worst books I can imagine for learning a language. The organization doesn't follow any structure you would use to learn the programming language --- instead it follows the structure of a spec. It's a real contrast with Kernighan and Ritchie, which seems a much better example of how to learn and master a programming language. And C++ is a terribly confusing language to learn. It's like perl in being an organically grown, instead of designed language, but unlike perl, it wasn't designed with the programmer in mind; it was designed with the compiler in mind.
I suppose this is a classic, but I wish it weren't so. The library should have it as a historical document, but not as an exemplar of a good book.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree, though, that people like this may not know yet that they need encryption. Most people aren't aware that (1) the internet is a lot like a party line and (2) you need good encryption. It's not a matter of being a terrorist or of being paranoid. The simple fact is that even ankle-biters, given the power of modern PCs, can break weak encryption. And there could easily be a lot of ankle-biters out there who want to read a shrink's correspondence.... Not to mention the real criminals out there who might want to read the correspondence of a lawyer, stockbroker, etc.
Recursion is a critical concept and is much harder to master than iteration.
I once taught Computer Science in a University where the introductory courses were all taught in procedural programming languages. I had to teach theory and some other advanced topics to people who'd never mastered recursion and it was unspeakably painful. Like teaching physics to students who hadn't mastered algebra.
- C++ isn't a fully object-oriented language. It's a set of object-oriented extensions grafted onto a non-OO substructure. One particular place where you can see this is the way the object-oriented extensions combine with operator overloading and type coercion to create something that's deeply confusing. Also, since C++ is aimed at building very efficient systems programs, it skirts things that seem difficult, like multiple inheritance.
- C++ has no garbage-collection. This means that lots of things that should be natural (like having methods that CONS together new objects and return them) become difficult and fraught with error.
Scheme, on the other hand, provides a good framework for teaching not just object-oriented design, but functional programming, as well.Note that I'm not trying to get into a war about the best programming language for building things, nor am I trying to diss C++. But I think it's a pretty crummy language from a teaching perspective.
Fundamentally, I don't think that CS education should be vocational education. If you learn the concepts and theory, learning a new language is a breeze. If you don't, then you don't walk away from the education with much; everything you learn is in imminent danger of evaporating in your hands.
When it folds the laundry I'm buying me one!
MAD was immoral by your criterion: according to you, massive retaliation would make the retaliating power "as bad as" the original attacker. I don't accept that, but let's put that aside for now.
MAD worked. Part of the problem here is that the states that have harbored these people have faced no meaningful consequences. Why not bring MAD back? Mr. Dictator of Elbonia, if terrorists you are sheltering use weapons of mass destruction on us, we will use weapons of mass destruction on you, and annihilate your country. Oh, those terrorists may not mind dying (although bin Laden's been pretty shy about showing up for his martyrdom), but the nations that shelter them most assuredly do.
I don't support nuking Afghanistan, but I'd be willing to see the US say, "the next thing like this will be met with the full force of our strategic deterrent, up to and including nuclear weapons."
And, as far as Ariel Sharon is concerned, if the Palestinians don't like him, they shouldn't have elected him. They had a chance at peace with Barak and Clinton working hard to make it happen. They turned their backs on it. Not only didn't they go along, they didn't even make a counter-offer.
Your view is so topsy-turvy it's almost not worth a response, but I simply can't let this kind of hogwash go unchallenged.
D: I'd say we did do likewise. Hiroshima? Nagasaki? We killed thousands of people in order to demoralize them and scare them into surrender.
Yup. I didn't mean to say we didn't. But note that I don't necessarily feel it wasn't a necessary or even a justified evil. I am very grateful I was not called upon to make that decision and live with it. Who are we to say that the costs of invading wouldn't have been greater? Who are we to say that they wouldn't have been greater, even for the Japanese? I'm not saying it would have been, I'm just saying that even reasonable, moral people, in the difficult place of making these decisions, could differ on the conclusion.
One place where I part ways with you is that you seem to think lots of these actions are good and evil without gradation and without context. By analogy, it seems to me that you'd say that a police officer who shoots a bank robber in the act of an armed robbery, was committing murder and was just as bad as the robber. I don't think that's the case.
Feel free to respond --- I don't want to leave you with the impression that I have to have the last word --- but I'm not sure there's much more to be said on this topic. It's been thought-provoking emailing with you,
R
I think, actually, that this is where private and public morality must diverge. That is, I may, if I wish, say that I won't retaliate or preventively strike, someone who wants to kill me. But if I'm a public official, I don't necessarily have that right. If I feel that indulging my personal moral qualms will lead to the deaths of people who trust me to make decisions for them, I don't know that I have that right.
These are, at any rate, deep ethical waters, and reasonable people can reasonably disagree about them.
As for the name-calling, I have two answers:
To some extent, in wartime, some moral rules go by the wayside. And we're caught in zillions of gray areas. What do you do when striking valid enemy targets costs civilian lives? If your opponent uses terror-bombing (as the Axis did in World War II), do you do likewise? In retrospect, the interning of Japanese-Americans was cowardly and evil (but not on this scale). We should regret it, and own it as a wrong, but can still be sympathetic to at least some of the people who thought it was the right thing to do.
One of the evils of war is that most of one's choices will be between bad and worse.
For that reason, we are going to have to start asking ourselves "how do we do what we need to do while doing the least violence to our principles?"
This brings us back to the original question: Do we have an effective response to this, that will not be horrific? I sure hope so. And I don't envy the people who are going to make that decision, any more than I envy Truman or Roosevelt.
I think other people have already made the argument that the sniper rifle doesn't work. They have done this unwittingly, by arguing against the Israeli approach, which is almost literally the sniper rifle.
The problem is that the people on the other end of the sniper rifle may not mind dying. Maybe the only thing we can do is to take immense, disproportionate countermeasures against the nations that support this. We can't get the terrorists really, because they aren't reasonable. But there are reasonable people in places like Elbonia (fill in your favorite villain here), who promote these kinds of attack because they feel safe.
Anyway, the US is no good at the sniper rifle, and the sniper rifle doesn't work against people in Afghanistan, which is a nest of other people with sniper rifles.
So maybe we have to go back to something we understand: assured destruction. If you sponsor people who bomb the World Trade Center, the US will simply flatten your country. We will take the capital of Elbonia and turn it into glass.
The Soviet Union and the US had this policy through the Cold War and, no, it was not moral, but it was practical and by and large worked.
As much as this comment proposes assured destruction, it's also a plea for someone to come up with an alternative that is both moral and practical. But I don't see one proposed here, yet.
In sadness...
No, arguably what's wrong is that Israel has not done decisive but massive killing. They've done very precisely targeted, minimal killing, to do the best they can to wipe out terrorists without incurring too much trouble from world (read European) opinion.
But what Israel's been doing precisely is targeted counterattacks, and targeted as well as anyone could ever reasonably expect. They find a guy they know is trouble in an office, in a car, or wherever, and they kill him. It doesn't get any more targeted than that, except in cases where you can actually go in with law enforcement. And we can't expect to take the FBI into Afghanistan any more than --- in fact, even less than --- the Israeli's can go into Gaza towns.
So my reading of your proposal is extremely pessimistic: it amounts to allowing our attackers impunity whenever they can get into another sovereign country. And it completely fails to address the problem of state-sponsored and state-abetted terrorism.
I think it's goofy to think we can just "make nice," and everyone in the world will like us and there will be no more terrorism. Sure, we should try to bring peace to the world --- in our own self interest if nothing else. But it's just goofy to count on that as being our only strategy. Unless you are a true pacifist, there comes a point when you have to say, "OK, it's war now, and we don't win a war by dying, we win a war by killing the other guys."
Imagine if we'd said "Oh, Tojo and Hitler are just misunderstood guys and they're bummed about our foreign policy. Let's let this little Pearl Harbor thing go and just make nice." Neville Chamberlain tried that and it didn't work.
We've heard this referred to as an act of war. What if that's true? What if we find out that Afghanistan -- or better yet, let's say Elbonia -- has harbored the person who has carried out a beyond-Pearl Harbor scale attack.
Why should we respond with restraint? [Notice this is only if we find out that it's Elbonia.] Why shouldn't we treat Elbonia the way we'd have treated the Soviet Union if they'd bombed NY? Why shouldn't we drop a nuclear weapon on Elbonia?
And, as far as concern for there just being more terrorists to follow, as some posters have proposed --- we just say "we'll do it again to the next terrorist attacker on the US."
This seems awful but assured destruction did work for the Cold War. Why not bring it back? What's the alternative? Arrest a few people who are willing to die anyway? Or even kill them, the way Israel does? They don't seem to care. Maybe what we need is a response that goes beyond, awfully beyond (in the literal awe-fully sense, too), the attack so that no one will ever want to do this again.
I'm not going to be just happy, I'll be overjoyed to hear a better alternative. But arresting a few guys or sending a cruise missile into a chemicals plant don't seem like good methods. Anyone got a better?
But if you're going to post inflammatory stuff like this, it'd be great to see some substantiation. Who are these guys? Where can we find out more about them?
I suppose this is a classic, but I wish it weren't so. The library should have it as a historical document, but not as an exemplar of a good book.