If you read the Apocrypha (the bits of the Bible the church throws away because they don't like it) you'll find that Lucifer (bringer of light) was created as God's conscience. When Lucifer tried to tell God he shouldn't be doing this, there was a bit of a scuffle.
Now, I don't believe this either, but the point is, these texts, and many more like them exist; with no good reason to call them any better or worse than others. Entire segments of christian literature are made up (well, more so than usual:) hell was invented for the purposes of simony, and satan is blatantly based on Pan. The cross is stolen from pagan religions.
Now, for all these people who say I shouldn't criticise religion; why ? I criticise politics, I criticise research papers, I criticise articles; what marks religion out so that I should treat it any different ? I don't go around with the idea that all Christians are stupid, or bigoted or whatever... I have plenty christian friends, and we have loads of arguments, but at least both sides see arguments as a good thing, and don't try to claim persecution every time.
As an aside, I found this quote on the website...
"Outwit and outfight immortal beings armed with a variety of lethal weapons!"
Does this sound like a cynical money-making ploy to you ? And why would immortals be worried about lethal weapons ? NP
"You don't have to be a right winger to realize that a teenager who abuses animals is going on to worse, much worse. Once you get some background on Kleybold and Harris, you realize that their parents were worthless and that something evil was going to happen here."
Right, so anbody who abused an animal is going to mass murder his classmates ? Anybody with bad parents ? Bad parents AND abusing animals ? AND looking a bit evil ?
Inevitably, at basic level these questionnaires are either little more than self-assessment programs (which are trivially easy to direct the outcome of, and are pretty inaccurate) or if relying entirely on details from another person, then they really won't have enough information to get an early warning of *possible* violent behaviour, let alone a complete picture.
I have done the tests employers use, but then employers are looking for different things; this program is more than a Keirsey-Grammer sorter; it's not just classifying personality types. It's trying to predict the possibility of future violent behaviour. And the overall point is not even the psychiatrists themselves feel they can make that kind of judgement accurately. A machine will do worse. Furthermore, by making the data from these machines available to people who are not qualified to interpret it will cause all manner of problems, both social and psychological.
You can run all the tests you like and I can guarantee you won't know me after it all. If that were the case, psychiatric diagnosis would be trivial, and we wouldn't have the level of misdiagnosis we do. The things picked up on by the MMPI et al. are simply probabilistic indicators, and we don't have any "good strength" indicators of severe personality disorders. NP
You could write software to do the same job using tha automated purity test proggie, mySQL, and a few psychlogy textbooks (scientific papers if you're going to get all sophisticated).
It's speedy utilisation of a spontaneous yet powerful area of market demand; the demand may be short term or chaotic, being affected by certain classes of outside events which occur relatively infrequently, but whose qualitative power provokes a strong response. Because of this instability in demand, it is necessary that the product development should take place at high speed, so a low work implementation must be found, and a nice GUI put on front of it to make it look professional. All working details and statistics should be hidden from user in case they realise it's just numbers and stuff and can't be trusted.
Future developments
(i) Hold training days for operators, and include the opportunity to become a fully qualified $-grab Inc certified psychiatric professional.
(ii) Extend marketing branch to include doping kids sweets in the hope of precipitating more violent gunfights (R&D report high success rates on dry run with blue Smarties, expanding to include M&Ms) NP
All this will be doing is taking existing psychiatric data-gathering methods and applying them more widely. The problem with this is, each program doesn' come with a free psych in the box. There is always a capacity for "false positives", and having seen a fair few of these tests myself, I can tell you that it's easy to answer questions to give a false negative or positive in just about whatever field you wish.
Things like this are usually considered personality disorders; they're not mental illnesses like depression where something has messed up the workings of the brain, but someone who's just learned and become "bad". Now, that sounds a scary statement, and you're right. There is a LOT of dissent about the status of personality disorders within the psychiatric profession. So, not only could you find your life changed on the say of a doctor, or a computer program, but you could find it changed because you're diagnosed with a disorder the professionals can't agree over, and that many don't even believe in.
Here in the UK, we're slightly ahead of the US on the psychiatric thought police track; our resident fascist and home secretary has decided that anybody who is diagnosed with a severe personality disorder should be locked up, possibly indefinitely -- even if they haven't comitted any crime. Not surprisingly human rights campaigners are miffed, and the law may be in violation of the EU convention (personality disorders are considered untreatable by most professionals, so you can't claim it's medical reason), and that's certainly what a lot of people are hoping. Even the psychiatric profession has denounced it, saying they have no way of effectively or reliably diagnosing such disorders, and that as many as 1 in 3 people could be imprisoned wrongly.
This fine piece of populist knee-jerk legislation resulted from the discovery that the man who Lynn and Megan Russel and seriously injured another child, happened to have a personality disorder. Never mind the fact that this is an incredibly rare set of events, the frenzy ensued, and the cry went up: Something Must Be Done.
It's hardly surprising the American government has concocted some equally bizarre and right-wing Big Brother inspired answer to all of this which would placate the restless masses, despite consigning thousands to a social backwater/scrap-heap. The ridiculous thing is, suggest they seriously restrict their gun controls , and they'll call you mad. NP.
What is this doing here..? I mean, how many of us really want to read this kind of patronising, saccharine, gooey guff ? I keep getting deeply unpleasant mental images of rob setting a collective slashdot (is there a word for that?) on his knee, and with a glint in his eye
That in itself wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for some of the truly pathetic stories which accumulate in the comments, which plumb even lower depths of self-absorbed, slushy platitude than even robs post.
Add to this the wholly unwelcome firefight from the PC police... first of all, can I strongly suggest that you all take time to realise the subtleties of the english language, particularly such phenomena as jokes, sarcasm, and irony. It will reap you no end of reward, and you'll even find yourself able to follow British comedies. Marvellous. anyways, aside from what was pretty obviously a joke at the start, the PC brigade would doubtless whine that there is evidence of sexism elsewhere, etc, etc.
Well, if you look hard enough, then there is. But then these are probably the same sorts of people who would whine if you had a goto in your code which could be avoided with fifteen extra lines and about 5 different flags. Can I really be arsed carefully phrasing my words to ensure no hint of bias could possibly, rightly or wrongly, be inferred from my statement ? I think not.
That said, watching "romantic" types and the politically correct trying to sanitise physical attraction to their own ends can be endlessly funny. one talks as if all events, qualities physical and mental, surroundings, and forces converge at some objective aesthetic pinnacle... the other tries to sanitise it completely, vainly attempting to suppress anything so prejudiced as base physical attraction. Dispel any hopes for a quick synthesis, this'll be a long one.
"Key findings concerning the state of the art in Comint include :
Comprehensive systems exist to access, intercept and process every important modern form of communications, with few exceptions (section 2, technical annexe);
Contrary to reports in the press, effective "word spotting" search systems automatically to select telephone calls of intelligence interest are not yet available, despite 30 years of research. However, speaker recognition systems - in effect, "voiceprints" - have been developed and are deployed to recognise the speech of targeted individuals making international telephone calls;
Recent diplomatic initiatives by the United States government seeking European agreement to the "key escrow" system of cryptography masked intelligence collection requirements, and formed part of a long-term program which has undermined and continues to undermine the communications privacy of non-US nationals, including European governments, companies and citizens;
There is wide-ranging evidence indicating that major governments are routinely utilising communications intelligence to provide commercial advantage to companies and trade."
These are just the major findings condensed, all the details and the evidence have been published in that report. In an earlier report, An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control, we get the very welcome conclusion:
"If even half of these allegations are true then the European Parliament must act to ensure that such powerful surveillance systems operate to a more democratic consensus now that the Cold War has ended. Clearly, the Overseas policies of European Union Member States are not always congruent with those of the USA and in commercial terms, espionage is espionage. No proper Authority in the USA would allow a similar EU spy network to operate from American soil without strict limitations, if at all. Following full discussion on the implications of the operations of these networks, the European Parliament is advised to set up appropriate independent audit and oversight procedures and that any effort to outlaw encryption by EU citizens should be denied until and unless such democratic and accountable systems are in place, if at all."
It's pretty much certain that ECHELON exists, (the 1999 report contains interesting technical details and speculation, for those interested) and it's doing more than just monitoring those seeking the downfall of global capitalism.
Given that they have these capabilities, and that they are well known for paranoia, they'll more than likely be using these things to "ensure national security isn't breached". So, if you send round mail containing made up stuff about, say, TEMPEST, bacterial cultures, etc etc, they'll probably have filters to detect those signatures; too many keywords will strain the system AND its operators who have to check its output. So go ahead and jam up the bugger:-)
This isn't a wholly new idea, (though maybe linking it with/. is) I recall it appearing a year or two ago under the name "Abundance of Service Attack". If you found a site which was big on graphics, you could link a series of big images to your page with size zero. Of course, this requires you have a pretty popular page, (though you could certainly run up peoples data volume limits/charges) and getting the site on slashdot is most of the work done.
What hubris it is for humans to even dare suggest that they are indeed exempt from natural selection.
Not exempt, but certainly in the western world, the forces of natural selection are very slight. In the absence of strong selective forces, and with the degree of intelligence we possess, humanity is relatively resistant to natural selection. Conscious selection plays a much more significant role. Interestingly, Dawkins suggest that intelligence should be a tool for us to rise above "base darwinian interests", but doesn't really say why.
Do you think that out in the wild parents (read animals) allow their offspring to go on living if it is clear that they can not fend for themselves? Clearly not. Only the strong survive. This is the natural way of things. The only thing that separates humans from the natural world is their disgusting way of thinking.
Ah, here we are. In nature this would happen, and again we hear the mantra "natural good, artificial bad". To quote Hume (badly) "Simply because something is the case, doesn't mean it ought to be the case. Since we are not living in a situation where the survival of the human race is at stake, or indeed the survival of anything else, arguments based on natural selection aren't relevant. Your further appeals to natural order founder on the same problem.
But in any case, this is a rather poor defence of Singers philosophy; he's by no means a shoddy thinker. Singer takes a utilitarian line in most of hs philosophy (ie act as to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number). Since animals are capable of experienceing pain and pleasure, and pain and pleasure are the only things which utilitarianism concerns itself with, it is consistent to treat humans and animals as equals, or at least on a scale according to their capacity for pain and pleasure. I don't think you can attack Singers principles effectively except by attacking utilitarianism, or perhaps more fundamental, morality as a whole. It's here that Kant's criticisms provide the most substantial attack
a) You can't know the future, and so you can never know if the action you take (killing a handicapped child) will in the long run increase or decrease the overall level of happiness.
b) even if you could, there is no way of evaluating the amount of happiness or pain caused by such actions.
This makes for a pretty poor moral theory, since moral theories are supposed to guide you in your actions in response to any given situation (or at least a wide range of them). Letting a response be determined by a factor which is in principle unknowable does not resolve things any further.
This is by no means a complete refutation, and the arguments between deontologists and consequentialists has raged ever since Bentham and Mill (J. S. Mill made the statement that animal life should be valued as much as human life long before Singer ever appeared on the scene) and it certainly doesn't show any signs of abating or reaching conclusion... and indeed a good few would say it never can. Singer is a philosopher of some repute, and I'm glad he's been appointed to the position, because even if I do disagree with his views, he's certainly going to force people to think.
What hubris it is for humans to even dare suggest that they are indeed exempt from natural selection.
Not exempt, but certainly in the western world, the forces of natural selection are very slight. In the absence of strong selective forces, and with the degree of intelligence we possess, humanity is relatively resistant to natural selection. Conscious selection plays a much more significant role. Interestingly, Dawkins suggest that intelligence should be a tool for us to rise above "base darwinian interests", but doesn't really say why.
Do you think that out in the wild parents (read animals) allow their offspring to go on living if it is clear that they can not fend for themselves? Clearly not. Only the strong survive. This is the natural way of things. The only thing that separates humans from the natural world is their disgusting way of thinking.
Ah, here we are. In nature this would happen, and again we hear the mantra "natural good, artificial bad". To quote Hume (badly) "Simply because something is the case, doesn't mean it ought to be the case. Since we are not living in a situation where the survival of the human race is at stake, or indeed the survival of anything else, arguments based on natural selection aren't relevant. Your further appeals to natural order founder on the same problem. But in any case, this is a rather poor defence of Singers philosophy; he's by no means a shoddy thinker. Singer takes a utilitarian line in most of hs philosophy (ie act as to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number). Since animals are capable of experienceing pain and pleasure, and pain and pleasure are the only things which utilitarianism concerns itself with, it is consistent to treat humans and animals as equals, or at least on a scale according to their capacity for pain and pleasure. I don't think you can attack Singers principles effectively except by attacking utilitarianism, or perhaps more fundamental, morality as a whole. It's here that Kant's criticisms provide the most substantial attack a) You can't know the future, and so you can never know if the action you take (killing a handicapped child) will in the long run increase or decrease the overall level of happiness. b) even if you could, there is no way of evaluating the amount of happiness or pain caused by such actions. This makes for a pretty poor moral theory, since moral theories are supposed to guide you in your actions in response to any given situation (or at least a wide range of them). Letting a response be determined by a factor which is in principle unknowable does not resolve things any further. This is by no means a complete refutation, and the arguments between deontologists and consequentialists has raged ever since Bentham and Mill (J. S. Mill made the statement that animal life should be valued as much as human life long before Singer ever appeared on the scene) and it certainly doesn't show any signs of abating or reaching conclusion... and indeed a good few would say it never can. Singer is a philosopher of some repute, and I'm glad he's been appointed to the position, because even if I do disagree with his views, he's certainly going to force people to think.
And anybody who's taken a glance at Lord Gnome's organ (Private Eye) lately will also be aware of his general incompetence...
Being convinced that the internet is the tool of anti-capitalist anarchists, and was used to orchestrate violence at a demonstration in london, he contacted the organisers of the demonstration purporting to be interested in more direct action, as opposed to shouting and waving a placard about... ie yer basic journalistic sting. The only problem was, he used his Times email address to send the email, which was a bit of a bad oversight, really.
Not one to be worried, he tried again, this time sending from a hotmail account. Unfortunately, the thought never occurred to him that he should register the account in a name other than his own, thereby advertising who he was for all to see in the From: header.
Doesn't exactly inspire much confidence in his abilities...
Socially liberal, keep the fundies from getting their way. Decentralise government to spread the base of power, and stop one or two getting too much control. Fiscally left, because whether or not you deserve a decent standard of living shouldn't be dependent on how much currency you can rake into your curent land mass... so tax everyone and hike up public spending, I say. Is a manager a better citizen because he makes more money for the country he works in, even though he might not work as hard as a manual labourer on a fraction of the salary ? High taxes and decentralised govt also make it harder for rich types to buy political power, as some of them are prone to doing.
Hardly surprising at all... this comes at the insistence of the man who wants to lock up people with severe personality disorders without a proper trial even if they haven't committed a crime. Still, at least we don't have a death penalty... yet.
In an even more devious way, you could try using one-time pads. Generate your message you want to keep private, and then generate a message the same length as this which is full of non-private (preferably believable) information. Next generate some high-quality random data (okay, it's not exactly trivial, but there are a number of ways of doing this) so thatyou have a file of random data the same size as your message. Now, XOR each bit of message data with the random data. This gives you your encrypted message. The random data is your key. To regain your message from the encrypted version, simply XOR with your key again. This will give you your original message, since K XOR (K XOR M) = (K XOR K) XOR M = f XOR M = M (where K is the key, M the message, and (K XOR M) the encrypted message.) Now the devious bit. XOR your encrypted message file with your "alternative" message file. This file is your dummy key. If you surrender this key, then the resulting cleartext will be your dummy message, since (D XOR (K XOR M)) XOR (K XOR M) = D (where D is the dummy message)
Of course, this isn't very useful for transmitting information, since it's secret-key based, and requires a key as large as the file to be encrypted, but it's entertaining for it's sheer deviousness:-)
The main listening station is at Menwith hill; this is what I was referring to by ECHELON, the existence of which was confirmed recently by a European Commission Report entitled "Assessing the Technologies of Political Control" (though it was initially revealed in an article in the New Statesman in the 80's). Interestingly, Mark Thomas (lefty type comic on C4) has set up a website advertising balloon tours over the site during the summer, with all the required paraphenalia such as parabolic microphones and such...
This is made even more worrying given that in the last fortnight, details have emerged showing that the UK Ministry of Defence monitored all phone calls and email communications passing from Ireland into or through the UK secretly. The Irish were, understandably, slightly irked at this. On top of that there's the joint UKUSA Echelon system which monitors communications throughout the UK, Europe, and Africa. The EU are, funnily enough, annoyed at this as well. If they gain the ability to serve decryption orders, then the thought police would have a ridiculously scary amount of power.
Slashdot Mirror
NP
If you read the Apocrypha (the bits of the Bible the church throws away because they don't like it) you'll find that Lucifer (bringer of light) was created as God's conscience. When Lucifer tried to tell God he shouldn't be doing this, there was a bit of a scuffle.
Now, I don't believe this either, but the point is, these texts, and many more like them exist; with no good reason to call them any better or worse than others. Entire segments of christian literature are made up (well, more so than usual :) hell was invented for the purposes of simony, and satan is blatantly based on Pan. The cross is stolen from pagan religions.
Now, for all these people who say I shouldn't criticise religion; why ? I criticise politics, I criticise research papers, I criticise articles; what marks religion out so that I should treat it any different ? I don't go around with the idea that all Christians are stupid, or bigoted or whatever... I have plenty christian friends, and we have loads of arguments, but at least both sides see arguments as a good thing, and don't try to claim persecution every time.
As an aside, I found this quote on the website...
"Outwit and outfight immortal beings armed with a variety of lethal weapons!"
Does this sound like a cynical money-making ploy to you ? And why would immortals be worried about lethal weapons ?
NP
Right, so anbody who abused an animal is going to mass murder his classmates ? Anybody with bad parents ? Bad parents AND abusing animals ? AND looking a bit evil ?
Inevitably, at basic level these questionnaires are either little more than self-assessment programs (which are trivially easy to direct the outcome of, and are pretty inaccurate) or if relying entirely on details from another person, then they really won't have enough information to get an early warning of *possible* violent behaviour, let alone a complete picture.
I have done the tests employers use, but then employers are looking for different things; this program is more than a Keirsey-Grammer sorter; it's not just classifying personality types. It's trying to predict the possibility of future violent behaviour. And the overall point is not even the psychiatrists themselves feel they can make that kind of judgement accurately. A machine will do worse. Furthermore, by making the data from these machines available to people who are not qualified to interpret it will cause all manner of problems, both social and psychological.
You can run all the tests you like and I can guarantee you won't know me after it all. If that were the case, psychiatric diagnosis would be trivial, and we wouldn't have the level of misdiagnosis we do. The things picked up on by the MMPI et al. are simply probabilistic indicators, and we don't have any "good strength" indicators of severe personality disorders.
NP
You could write software to do the same job using tha automated purity test proggie, mySQL, and a few psychlogy textbooks (scientific papers if you're going to get all sophisticated).
It's speedy utilisation of a spontaneous yet powerful area of market demand; the demand may be short term or chaotic, being affected by certain classes of outside events which occur relatively infrequently, but whose qualitative power provokes a strong response. Because of this instability in demand, it is necessary that the product development should take place at high speed, so a low work implementation must be found, and a nice GUI put on front of it to make it look professional. All working details and statistics should be hidden from user in case they realise it's just numbers and stuff and can't be trusted.
Future developments
(i) Hold training days for operators, and include the opportunity to become a fully qualified $-grab Inc certified psychiatric professional.
(ii) Extend marketing branch to include doping kids sweets in the hope of precipitating more violent gunfights (R&D report high success rates on dry run with blue Smarties, expanding to include M&Ms)
NP
Things like this are usually considered personality disorders; they're not mental illnesses like depression where something has messed up the workings of the brain, but someone who's just learned and become "bad". Now, that sounds a scary statement, and you're right. There is a LOT of dissent about the status of personality disorders within the psychiatric profession. So, not only could you find your life changed on the say of a doctor, or a computer program, but you could find it changed because you're diagnosed with a disorder the professionals can't agree over, and that many don't even believe in.
Here in the UK, we're slightly ahead of the US on the psychiatric thought police track; our resident fascist and home secretary has decided that anybody who is diagnosed with a severe personality disorder should be locked up, possibly indefinitely -- even if they haven't comitted any crime. Not surprisingly human rights campaigners are miffed, and the law may be in violation of the EU convention (personality disorders are considered untreatable by most professionals, so you can't claim it's medical reason), and that's certainly what a lot of people are hoping. Even the psychiatric profession has denounced it, saying they have no way of effectively or reliably diagnosing such disorders, and that as many as 1 in 3 people could be imprisoned wrongly.
This fine piece of populist knee-jerk legislation resulted from the discovery that the man who Lynn and Megan Russel and seriously injured another child, happened to have a personality disorder. Never mind the fact that this is an incredibly rare set of events, the frenzy ensued, and the cry went up: Something Must Be Done.
It's hardly surprising the American government has concocted some equally bizarre and right-wing Big Brother inspired answer to all of this which would placate the restless masses, despite consigning thousands to a social backwater/scrap-heap. The ridiculous thing is, suggest they seriously restrict their gun controls , and they'll call you mad.
NP.
What is this doing here..? I mean, how many of us really want to read this kind of patronising, saccharine, gooey guff ? I keep getting deeply unpleasant mental images of rob setting a collective slashdot (is there a word for that?) on his knee, and with a glint in his eye
That in itself wouldn't be so bad, if it weren't for some of the truly pathetic stories which accumulate in the comments, which plumb even lower depths of self-absorbed, slushy platitude than even robs post.
Add to this the wholly unwelcome firefight from the PC police... first of all, can I strongly suggest that you all take time to realise the subtleties of the english language, particularly such phenomena as jokes, sarcasm, and irony. It will reap you no end of reward, and you'll even find yourself able to follow British comedies. Marvellous. anyways, aside from what was pretty obviously a joke at the start, the PC brigade would doubtless whine that there is evidence of sexism elsewhere, etc, etc.
Well, if you look hard enough, then there is. But then these are probably the same sorts of people who would whine if you had a goto in your code which could be avoided with fifteen extra lines and about 5 different flags. Can I really be arsed carefully phrasing my words to ensure no hint of bias could possibly, rightly or wrongly, be inferred from my statement ? I think not.
That said, watching "romantic" types and the politically correct trying to sanitise physical attraction to their own ends can be endlessly funny. one talks as if all events, qualities physical and mental, surroundings, and forces converge at some objective aesthetic pinnacle... the other tries to sanitise it completely, vainly attempting to suppress anything so prejudiced as base physical attraction. Dispel any hopes for a quick synthesis, this'll be a long one.
NP
(Irritable, cynical, and bent as a hinge)
These are just the major findings condensed, all the details and the evidence have been published in that report. In an earlier report, An Appraisal of the Technologies of Political Control, we get the very welcome conclusion:
It's pretty much certain that ECHELON exists, (the 1999 report contains interesting technical details and speculation, for those interested) and it's doing more than just monitoring those seeking the downfall of global capitalism.
Given that they have these capabilities, and that they are well known for paranoia, they'll more than likely be using these things to "ensure national security isn't breached". So, if you send round mail containing made up stuff about, say, TEMPEST, bacterial cultures, etc etc, they'll probably have filters to detect those signatures; too many keywords will strain the system AND its operators who have to check its output. So go ahead and jam up the bugger :-)
This isn't a wholly new idea, (though maybe linking it with /. is) I recall it appearing a year or two ago under the name "Abundance of Service Attack". If you found a site which was big on graphics, you could link a series of big images to your page with size zero. Of course, this requires you have a pretty popular page, (though you could certainly run up peoples data volume limits/charges) and getting the site on slashdot is most of the work done.
But in any case, this is a rather poor defence of Singers philosophy; he's by no means a shoddy thinker. Singer takes a utilitarian line in most of hs philosophy (ie act as to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number). Since animals are capable of experienceing pain and pleasure, and pain and pleasure are the only things which utilitarianism concerns itself with, it is consistent to treat humans and animals as equals, or at least on a scale according to their capacity for pain and pleasure. I don't think you can attack Singers principles effectively except by attacking utilitarianism, or perhaps more fundamental, morality as a whole. It's here that Kant's criticisms provide the most substantial attack
This makes for a pretty poor moral theory, since moral theories are supposed to guide you in your actions in response to any given situation (or at least a wide range of them). Letting a response be determined by a factor which is in principle unknowable does not resolve things any further.
This is by no means a complete refutation, and the arguments between deontologists and consequentialists has raged ever since Bentham and Mill (J. S. Mill made the statement that animal life should be valued as much as human life long before Singer ever appeared on the scene) and it certainly doesn't show any signs of abating or reaching conclusion... and indeed a good few would say it never can. Singer is a philosopher of some repute, and I'm glad he's been appointed to the position, because even if I do disagree with his views, he's certainly going to force people to think.
---
And anybody who's taken a glance at Lord Gnome's organ (Private Eye) lately will also be aware of his general incompetence...
Being convinced that the internet is the tool of anti-capitalist anarchists, and was used to orchestrate violence at a demonstration in london, he contacted the organisers of the demonstration purporting to be interested in more direct action, as opposed to shouting and waving a placard about... ie yer basic journalistic sting. The only problem was, he used his Times email address to send the email, which was a bit of a bad oversight, really.
Not one to be worried, he tried again, this time sending from a hotmail account. Unfortunately, the thought never occurred to him that he should register the account in a name other than his own, thereby advertising who he was for all to see in the From: header.
Doesn't exactly inspire much confidence in his abilities...
Atheist, Liberal Left...
Socially liberal, keep the fundies from getting their way. Decentralise government to spread the base of power, and stop one or two getting too much control. Fiscally left, because whether or not you deserve a decent standard of living shouldn't be dependent on how much currency you can rake into your curent land mass... so tax everyone and hike up public spending, I say. Is a manager a better citizen because he makes more money for the country he works in, even though he might not work as hard as a manual labourer on a fraction of the salary ? High taxes and decentralised govt also make it harder for rich types to buy political power, as some of them are prone to doing.
And finally...
"Free Beer" or "Free Speech" ? Free sunlight...
Hardly surprising at all... this comes at the insistence of the man who wants to lock up people with severe personality disorders without a proper trial even if they haven't committed a crime. Still, at least we don't have a death penalty... yet.
In an even more devious way, you could try using one-time pads. Generate your message you want to keep private, and then generate a message the same length as this which is full of non-private (preferably believable) information. Next generate some high-quality random data (okay, it's not exactly trivial, but there are a number of ways of doing this) so thatyou have a file of random data the same size as your message. Now, XOR each bit of message data with the random data. This gives you your encrypted message. The random data is your key. To regain your message from the encrypted version, simply XOR with your key again. This will give you your original message, since
:-)
K XOR (K XOR M) = (K XOR K) XOR M = f XOR M = M
(where K is the key, M the message, and (K XOR M) the encrypted message.)
Now the devious bit. XOR your encrypted message file with your "alternative" message file. This file is your dummy key. If you surrender this key, then the resulting cleartext will be your dummy message, since
(D XOR (K XOR M)) XOR (K XOR M) = D
(where D is the dummy message)
Of course, this isn't very useful for transmitting information, since it's secret-key based, and requires a key as large as the file to be encrypted, but it's entertaining for it's sheer deviousness
The main listening station is at Menwith hill; this is what I was referring to by ECHELON, the existence of which was confirmed recently by a European Commission Report entitled "Assessing the Technologies of Political Control" (though it was initially revealed in an article in the New Statesman in the 80's). Interestingly, Mark Thomas (lefty type comic on C4) has set up a website advertising balloon tours over the site during the summer, with all the required paraphenalia such as parabolic microphones and such...
This is made even more worrying given that in the last fortnight, details have emerged showing that the UK Ministry of Defence monitored all phone calls and email communications passing from Ireland into or through the UK secretly. The Irish were, understandably, slightly irked at this. On top of that there's the joint UKUSA Echelon system which monitors communications throughout the UK, Europe, and Africa. The EU are, funnily enough, annoyed at this as well. If they gain the ability to serve decryption orders, then the thought police would have a ridiculously scary amount of power.