You do realize you made absolutely no point whatsoever, don't you? I mean, it's not even worth taking apart.
Franklin was a doddering old man when the DOI was signed. He played very little role in the AOC. Jefferson was a believer in natural law (from Locke.) Native Americans would have absolutely interested him, but not for the reasons you suppose. Check out Hobbes sometime.
I don't know which is worse -- your argument, or your lack of critical thinking skills in defending yourself. Quoting a bunch of biased articles? Mentioning how contemporary the Iroquois were to the founders? Mentioning some of the paralells? It's just not a defense of your ideas. It's a bunch of anecdotes and innuendo strown together. I could use these same techniques to show that Barbary Pirates founded the United States Marine Corps, or that Sam Brown was responsible for reconstruction. You can't write the words you've written and expect to persuade. Surely you know that, right? It's very simple: give me a quote from the AOC claiming Iroquois heritage, a quote from the authors of the AOC claiming inspiration, any direct reference supporting your claim. It's like you have no idea the true heritage of the things you're talking about, and instead cling to a bunch of loosely assembled pieces of stories. The real story is pretty cool too, you know.
Some obscure European political theorist writing about how he admires the Iroquois does not an invention make. Compare your sources to the tradition of the republic, democracy, and confederations passed down in western history and well, it just looks sad. Like somebody ripped you off and gave you a bunch of half-truths that made you feel better.
Look back at the discussions around the articles of the Confederation. No Iroquois there.
Everybody is entitled to their opinion. But not their own set of facts. The Iroquois were a great and proud people. They have ifluenced and honored themselves and others. But grand political theorists they were not.
You've got a great assortment of facts at your disposal, but I have to disagree with your conclusion.
"In any case, the real problem is dogmatic belief systems"
Dogmatic belief systems that champion free will and personal choice by necessity must embrace science and secularism, since such belief systems are premised on the freedom of thought of the individual. Some individuals are more rationalists while some are more fideistic.
I won't follow into your fundie rant, sorry. Protestants have a religion that is "constantly reinventing itself", as is evidenced by the many brands of Protestantism, always changing. In general Christianity has shown itself to be quite malleable over a period of decades and centuries, but not months or years. This winter when we celebrate Saturnalia, er, Christmas, it's probably a good idea to think of how useful a love-based and generally inclusive mindset can be for society -- no matter what one's personal beliefs are. And that goes doubly true if one is a rationalist, atheist, and/or scientist. The type of dogma matters. It's not just any dogmatic religion is the same as any other. That's mindless prattle, imo.
You get the golden twinkie award for use of a general truth to completely miss the point about a specific instance.
While science and religion generally are orthogonal, various religions play nicer than others. A religion that contains a way for conducting a government, such as Islam, is going to be in your nickers a lot more than a religion that preaches love and persuasion by kindness, such as Christianity.
People who make the "all relgions are pretty much the same" should learn more about different religions. I agree with you in general, but you really missed the boat when it comes to commenting on this specific issue, in my opinion.
Is it impossible for you to realize there might be a situation in which she did not have a bomb, yet the use of deadly force was necessary? I can certainly see such a circumstance arising. Or perhaps you feel that with the appropriate training, no bombless person ever gets hurt?
What with America being so overweight and all, now we have to bring back the 'raptors.
I can see it now. A car pulls up to the drive-through. "I'd like the 48-pound chicken bucket, 4 pounds of mashed potatoes, and a 10-pound sack of beaks and feet"
"Would you like that Crunchy Jurassic, or Original Recipe?"
Sure, it hasn't been monitored continuously, but you'd think that during unusually warm summers someone would have thought to check it out since it would save so much time (and money) off of certain trips. Money can be a very strong motivator.
You might think that, and you might not. Having a satellite photoraphic record fo the last 30 years is the only positive we have of talking about it one way or another. People think a lot of things.
What bothers me about this news article is the way people are letting their pre-conceived ideas fit into a simple story. Satellites have been watching the earth for 30-40 years. We've seen something that we haven't seen before -- something that we consider to be unusual from the standpoint of recent history (400 years). Color me stupid, but I'm thinking with more and more sensors pointing at earth, we're going to see a lot of things that don't fit into received wisdom. Now we can either a) extrapolate that received wisdom tells us how the earth looked from space for 400 years (doubtful), or b) get used to seeing a lot of unusual stuff. In fact, seeing unusual stuff should be considered normal. That's why we have the satellites up there in the first place.
But I know even this comment will be taken as some sort of denier-talk. So yes, yes -- every thing that "hasn't been seen in recorded history" must be radically new and frightening.
The strange web site has an account with Verisign (or some other trust provider)
You go through the same motions as today. But in the background, you're using a one-time-pad with Verisign, who is handling the gnarly details for the site. (insert all the little technology details here like frames, out-of-band calls, JSON, etc) This is much the same as any website would do with a merchant account and one of the major credit cards. But guess what? No Public Key Cryptography required.
I haven't done all the work (hey -- this is slashdot! What do you expect? Reading the articles or thinking comments all the way through!) but I believe you can do most everything with OTPs that you do with a PKI.
One-time pads and symmetric crptography will replace PK, at least until we get wide-spead entangled systems. The cost of creating white noise and the cost of permanent storage is quickly becoming trivial. I can foresee something along the lines of trust providers with their own connections to various web sites.
The amount of information I _really_ need to encrypt in my daily affairs is crazy small compared to the size of modern storage technology -- and that technology is just getting cheaper and denser all the time.
As for the Man-in-the-Middle attack, there are lots of procols. My point was in regards to storage and OTPs, not protocols.
Cheap storage will eventually destroy any kind of crypto/anti-crypto technology.
What are the new DVD formats getting? 50GB of data RW? Will options up to 250GB or so of RW storage?
How much information do you really, really need to hide, anyway? Maybe a couple of megabytes of financial-related data per day? A one-time pad on a DVD should provide you with centuries of totally secure communications.
So you sign up for your bank account. The bank snail mails you a 10GB random noise memory stick. You add it to your 10TB secure random storage system and you and the bank can talk for the rest of your life without anybody else being able to listen in.
Or it could be that the Chinese are slowly pushing the limits, looking to a day where they have a deep water navy and can leverage Taiwan into the mainland.
Simply because something may have a propaganda value to one nation or another does not dimish its importance, or its veracity.
It's not an either-or situation. Both things may be true. I worry that people want to ignore real threats by simply characterizing them as propaganda. Let's stay friends with the Chinese. To do that, we're going to need to have a honest conversation about what each partner is doing. This story helps with that.
As a former imaginary traveling salesman, I beg you slashdotters to show some mercy.
Let's get this straight. To solve the traveling salesman problem, we make a big fiber optic thingy and shine a flashlight down the fibers. The interference pattern gives us the answer.
But it's not a computer any more. And it's not something that "runs on photons" as many commenters have said. Nope. These patterns happen because of quantum effects, which mean the little virtual photons are doing all the work.
So that's the plan, eh? Make the little virtual photons find the salesman? Well I've got news for you, Mr. Big Shot Scientist. Next year we're sending out an army of virtual traveling salesmen. That'll show ya!
So we have quantum computers that are doing work in other universes and virtual flashlights finding the best paths for salesmen? I'm thinking this whole traveling salesman gig is just getting too hard any more. I'm going to look into working for RIAA.
I think communism has advanced political theory a lot, don't you? We know that Russian-style communism was mostly a failure. Sadly, free-market theory predicted this, yet millions still died. In China, we see an interesting experiment with partially open markets. I believe it will lead to stagnation within a generation. While in India, I'm much more optimistic.
But my opinions as to the sucess of these political philosophies are based on theory, which in turn is based on bitter experience. I mean no "que sera, sera" at all about any of it. As I said, let's try to keep from killing each other, okay? Ideas advance through history. Good ideas overtake poor ones. It is neither "stuff happens" nor is it "who cares". It's more like the threading of the quilt of humanity. It exists outside of our ability to understand or react to it.
As a final example, let's assume that tomorrow a spaceship landed from the planet Xenon. They have a three-headed God, they only eat fried chicken and baked beans, they have a funny walk, and they speak by flatulating. They offer freedom of speech, assembly, ownership, religion, and they also offer to share their technology with those who accept the chicken and farting stuff. I can tell you, if they are the dominant culture in our part of the galaxy, and if they represent the future for the next few generations of humans -- I'm loading up on chicken and beans, dude. And you'd better stay upwind from me.
And if this unlikely event were to happen, I'm sure that all of this navel-gazing will repeat: the yearning for the simpler times wihtout FTL travel, the romanticizing of our non-spacefaring past. Yadda, yadda. You can just fill in the blanks with any two mismatched cultures in history. The Romans probably romanticized and bitched about how badly the barbarians were treated. For a long time in the States, most northerners romanticized the Southerners as noble rebels (a trend which dissappeared with civil rights in the 50s) It's always easier, sitting on the side _after_ the historical choice was made, to lament the pain of the choice. Nobody ever thinks that both sides can be full of good, honest, folk, and still the pain comes. We yearn for good guys and bad guys.
What you are doing is telling someone who has been beaten up for the last 50 years that they shouldn't complain about the person beating them, because 200 miles away, there used to be people who did something at least as bad.
I must have missed the part where I told somebody not to complain. Hey -- if you like complaining, complain! Have fun. My ancestors were probably on all sides of the fun: slavers, slaves, conquerors, the conquered. My point is either there are larger ideas that work or there are not. I would never take away somebody's chance to complain. I mean, it's not enough your society got absorbed, you should definitely harbor bitterness about it as long as you can. It makes for such a positive impact on the world.
That aspect is left out of a self-aggrandizing history of progress by which Western society looks at the "backwards" non-West and tells it how to behave
Er. Maybe because free, open markets work for the better good than closed, tribal societies? I don't uphold the Victorians as much of anything, but I can see that they had a better life than, say, the Romans. And I can see the Romans had a better life than the Mongols. Do I want to live to be 100, complaining all the way about how some greater culture stepped on mine? I guess. I'd much rather do that than live to be 20 while I worshipped the moon god or some such.
As for the Victorian presence in India, isn't India one of the premier democracies and an engine of wealth for that entire region now? Don't they still play cricket, drink tea, and speak in those cool accents? I don't want anybody to die, but I not stupid enough not to realize that all of that pain was for nothing. Some change came from it. Change that is going to happen anyway. I know that I'm really happy the Europeans were so stupid over the past 400 years or so. What a great base of history and lessons for us to have! And isn't it great that we never have to go back and wonder, for instance, if we should have a state-run church? Those things you disdain so much: aren't they great reminders of what worked and what didn't, performed mostly by moral people who were trying to make a positive difference in the world? Or do you prefer to see everything through a more cynical eye?
The United States was supposedly founded on the notion of liberty and justice. Which were, in their turn, founded on western ideals of private property rights. One has no liberty if one has nothing that is owned.
And how precisely did the US Army advocate this wonderous idea of property rights to American Indians? The US Army acted under orders from a democratically elected government. Either those people were morally inferior to you (which you seem to propose) or they knew something you do not. Now you have choice: you can either assume that you know everything that is worth knowing about those times, and that those people were deficient or defective, or you can open your mind. I'm not going to defend thier actions, nor do I have to. I simply acknowledge there is more than one explanation.
Where was the effort prior to the formulation of India reservations of bringing Indians into the modern era?Okay. Now you're really showing your ignorance. I'm not an expert, but I know that, for instance, many efforts were made to assimilate Native Americans. Take a look at the history of the Cherokee, for instance.
then comforting oneself with the idea that all of that bloodshed and hypocrisy was okay because they were a backward lot Why do you present such a false choice? Surely it's possible that they had to go, but they also were a noble culture? As I recall, the Native Americans were revered (and still are) as great warriors. You don't have to demonize a culture to acknowledge it is inconsitent with modernity.
Certainly they were no worse than the European savages that had cut each other to ribbons over the nature of salvation and whether the Bishop of Rome should have pre-eminence or notWell. There you go. I knew we had to get into some sort of "I have made this moral decision" conversation. Surely they weren't as bad. Surely they were worse. Beats me. I don't think of history as some sort of game where people who are better than others necessarily dominate. I think you can definitely say that the Europeans went through many of the same struggles, yet seemed to make advancements. They found a common religion. They founded the idea of nation-states. They had the Treaty of Westphalia. Does that make them "better"? We can certainly say that gave them longer lives, gave them philosophy, gave them health, wealth, technology, science, etc... I guess it could be a tough call.
but that economic and political interests trumped morality at every turn which, if understood in commercial terms, meant that we have cities with large skyscrapers, the internet, space travel, and all of that because merchants seeking to advance their own lot by helping others were able to access resources to do that. Would I kill a person of a primitive culture over a rock that might cure cancer? I don't think so, but I would certainly jockey to be in a position to make a lot of trades for those rocks. And I could see where eventually things might get very ugly between us.
Were the Americans "Children of the Enlightenment" supposed to know better? Better about what?
The more I learn about western expansion, the more I am left with the opinion that sometimes two cultures just do not get along. Sometimes cultures cannot exist in the modern age. You can't have much of a society without the ownership of private property. That's not a western idea, or a modern idea, or a white man's idea, or any of that. Private property ownership simply has been proven to make life better for every society that practices it.
Same goes for secularism. Same goes for the Enlightenment in general, for that matter. At some point (recently), we've started thinking of these ideas as somehow all relative, as if you could have a society that could cure cancer that was based on tribal chiefs.
Exaggerating the story of the settlers and the Native Americans does both parties injustice. Surely settlers could expect to be able to pull their wagon whereever they wanted to. It wasn't like there were any signs up. And surely some of the NAs could raid and torture as they saw fit. It's not like they started when the white man showed up.
The continent was stagnant. Society there had yet to invent the wheel, for goshsakes. Any sort of moral values discussion aside, how long could such a large percentage of the world's landmass be left in the stone age? Pain and change had to come -- if not by the Europeans than by another dominant group. To think otherwise is to engage in historic fantasy.
Well said. The parent seems to have lost all historical context. Perhaps his history instruction began with "Western Atrocities 101".
There's no excuse for what happened in China in with the treaty ports, et al, but to single out the Victorians and their colonialism as anything but the continuation of normal world politics up to their day is self-absorbed fantasy. (And I mean self-absorbed in the sense of "nobody can be as bad as we have been") Lots of cultures would have been far worse, had they survived. The thought of the apex of the Mongols lasting another 100 years would have made any these other examples look like a day at the beach.
But that's not hip, that's not cool. Any more we have to bash western ideals and western civilizations. Let's look at the partitioning of Africa, of China, by all means. Perhaps we could drag in the American use of the atomic bomb for good measure. This self-flagellating has got to stop.
Nobody has any context -- they just have lists of bad crap they're taught to repeat to support a pre-ordained philosophy. It's freaking sad.
"This is your job to know...How can people be so brain-dead as to justify this crap...you shouldn't be around sharp objects...Stop apologizing"
Okey dokey now. Let's remember to take the little blue pill in the mornings, and the little red pill in the evenings. When you get them mixed up, you know how upset you can get.
Let's review, shall we?
I explain that there is nothing illegal going on, just a bunch of "looks bad, let's pile on". Your response, best I can parse it through all of your angst and regret, is that any moron can see that horrible injustices are being done to our country and our way of life. As reasonable citizens, nay, as sentient beings, it should be as obvious as the nose on your face. [Insert extreme example here regarding missiles]
So the presumption of innocence is important to you when, exactly? When it's not the president? If the police catch me outside the liquor store with a gun and a bag of money right after it's been robbed, in your book I robbed it, right? Might as well just skip the trial and throw me right in jail.
Look -- I know what torture is, and waterboarding is not torture. Our kids get waterboarded every day in POW training and have been for decades. I know what extraordinary rendition is -- it's the thing we've been doing since the Indians left whenever we've caught "persons of interest" abroad. I know what wiretapping is -- it's what we've done to overseas calls since there have been telephones. I know this stuff. I know the history, I know how it has been used, and I know how it's being used now.
So for you and your anger -- grow up. This is a working democracy, not some theoretical construct. If you want to take away interception of messages overseas, non-lethal and non-harmful persuasion of terrorists, extraordinary rendition, and legal presidential powers, then guess what? Show me a) where it's really the end of the world and not simply some wet dream of yours, and b) how we're supposed to have a country that can defend itself with all of your high-minded ways.
As I pointed out in another comment, as a libertarian I'm really glad to see so many people bent around the axle about these things. Now, unless the constitution is a suicide pact, your anger ain't going to fly with me. I'm cannot imagine any rational person more supportive of individual liberty. I want cold facts and logic. And concrete examples of past circumstances where your high standards led to winning a war. Last I checked, we're at war, and quite frankly, we've had much more restrictive governments in the past when we won wars. You seem to be be bent on seeing how noble and pure we can be and still win. Sounds like chicken to me -- and it is not supported by history.
My only question is: how much pain do you want to put us through? So far, you seem eager to up the volume. I'm not going to fight somebody else over something I love as much as civil liberties. You're just wrong. I believe in this country and I can wait until you nice people with limited context figure the math out for yourselves. It's not like reality is going to go anywhere. Take your time. Seriously. 20 - 40 years is fine.
Look. Hey. I'm a libertarian. I believe in the ultimate sovreignty of the individual. So please don't lecture me.
I'm glad you've got the theory down straight. We agree that secret courts are not going to cut it. However -- and this is a big however, that's not happenng. No American is being arrested in his country on secret charges without recourse to the court system. So your argument is more of a hypothetical than a real-world one.
In addition, in every time of war I can find in our history the president is given broad powers to direct and execute the war. Now, for you to have some kind of point, either a) we don't have a war, or b) all of this historical evidence is useless as an example.
I'm glad you're so fired up about individual freedoms. I really am. The next time the environmental groups want to take away private property rights for wetlands I hope I can count you on the side of personal liberty. The next time the KKK or some other you find heinous wants to march through an ethnic neighborhood I hope you're there for them. The next time the government wants to use force to take money from people (taxes) for some kind of do-good cause like national healthcare, I hope you're on the ball. But I'm really tired of people who got their libertarianism from a comic book coming in and trying their hand at explaining how or why the government works the way it does. Abe Lincoln disbanded the Maryland legislature when he thought they might vote to succeed. He imprisoned Congressmen that he said were just "stirring up trouble" Adams signed the Sedition Act, which prevented criticism of the government. If you want a real-world view of how it works, look at the real world. Don't just spout off the theory without having any kind of historical depth to know why the theory works (and when there are exceptions)
There are all kinds of examples that show that the republic thrives just fine on temporary restrictions in the social contract. In fact, it seems to be the normal state of affairs in time of war.
But if chasing terrorists like those on 9-11 is more of a police action, then we are not at war, and my examples do not hold. For me, I believe we are at war -- a war that is mostly political in nature. Our enemies do not represent nation-states, and Congress has failed the people by not declaring war, so that really screws up the entire conversation for all of us, doesn't it.
Uniformed thugs? Surely you realize that the FBI is not usually considered "uniformed thugs"
I guess, that is, unless they do something you don't like. Stopping organized crime? Great guys. Cleaning up organized labor? Great guys. Counter-intelligence? Great guys. Civil rights? Great guys. Enforcing the oath of secrecy the employee took? Uniformed thugs.
Methinks you need a little critical thinking training. Let's see -- when the law suits you, it's still the law. When it does not suit you, it's still the law.
Everything that the courts have ruled unconstitutional has stopped. That's why the new legislation was passed recently -- we were effectively blind to watching foreign communications that went through the U.S.
Now before you spin off on some other ill-thought tangent, I'd simply like to know: do we have to ask your permission for every secret program this country has? Or just the ones that some politician convinces you are a danger to freedom as we know it? Perhaps every thing we do as a nation that is questionable should have 100% support of everyone involved. Either way you slice it, it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Slashdot Mirror
You do realize you made absolutely no point whatsoever, don't you? I mean, it's not even worth taking apart.
Franklin was a doddering old man when the DOI was signed. He played very little role in the AOC. Jefferson was a believer in natural law (from Locke.) Native Americans would have absolutely interested him, but not for the reasons you suppose. Check out Hobbes sometime.
I don't know which is worse -- your argument, or your lack of critical thinking skills in defending yourself. Quoting a bunch of biased articles? Mentioning how contemporary the Iroquois were to the founders? Mentioning some of the paralells? It's just not a defense of your ideas. It's a bunch of anecdotes and innuendo strown together. I could use these same techniques to show that Barbary Pirates founded the United States Marine Corps, or that Sam Brown was responsible for reconstruction. You can't write the words you've written and expect to persuade. Surely you know that, right? It's very simple: give me a quote from the AOC claiming Iroquois heritage, a quote from the authors of the AOC claiming inspiration, any direct reference supporting your claim. It's like you have no idea the true heritage of the things you're talking about, and instead cling to a bunch of loosely assembled pieces of stories. The real story is pretty cool too, you know.
Er no. Try again.
Some obscure European political theorist writing about how he admires the Iroquois does not an invention make. Compare your sources to the tradition of the republic, democracy, and confederations passed down in western history and well, it just looks sad. Like somebody ripped you off and gave you a bunch of half-truths that made you feel better.
Look back at the discussions around the articles of the Confederation. No Iroquois there.
Everybody is entitled to their opinion. But not their own set of facts. The Iroquois were a great and proud people. They have ifluenced and honored themselves and others. But grand political theorists they were not.
You've got a great assortment of facts at your disposal, but I have to disagree with your conclusion.
"In any case, the real problem is dogmatic belief systems"
Dogmatic belief systems that champion free will and personal choice by necessity must embrace science and secularism, since such belief systems are premised on the freedom of thought of the individual. Some individuals are more rationalists while some are more fideistic.
I won't follow into your fundie rant, sorry. Protestants have a religion that is "constantly reinventing itself", as is evidenced by the many brands of Protestantism, always changing. In general Christianity has shown itself to be quite malleable over a period of decades and centuries, but not months or years. This winter when we celebrate Saturnalia, er, Christmas, it's probably a good idea to think of how useful a love-based and generally inclusive mindset can be for society -- no matter what one's personal beliefs are. And that goes doubly true if one is a rationalist, atheist, and/or scientist. The type of dogma matters. It's not just any dogmatic religion is the same as any other. That's mindless prattle, imo.
You get the golden twinkie award for use of a general truth to completely miss the point about a specific instance.
While science and religion generally are orthogonal, various religions play nicer than others. A religion that contains a way for conducting a government, such as Islam, is going to be in your nickers a lot more than a religion that preaches love and persuasion by kindness, such as Christianity.
People who make the "all relgions are pretty much the same" should learn more about different religions. I agree with you in general, but you really missed the boat when it comes to commenting on this specific issue, in my opinion.
What is this "web" you speak of?
Is it impossible for you to realize there might be a situation in which she did not have a bomb, yet the use of deadly force was necessary? I can certainly see such a circumstance arising. Or perhaps you feel that with the appropriate training, no bombless person ever gets hurt?
In soviet russia, the chicken eats you!
What with America being so overweight and all, now we have to bring back the 'raptors.
I can see it now. A car pulls up to the drive-through. "I'd like the 48-pound chicken bucket, 4 pounds of mashed potatoes, and a 10-pound sack of beaks and feet"
"Would you like that Crunchy Jurassic, or Original Recipe?"
You might think that, and you might not. Having a satellite photoraphic record fo the last 30 years is the only positive we have of talking about it one way or another. People think a lot of things.
What bothers me about this news article is the way people are letting their pre-conceived ideas fit into a simple story. Satellites have been watching the earth for 30-40 years. We've seen something that we haven't seen before -- something that we consider to be unusual from the standpoint of recent history (400 years). Color me stupid, but I'm thinking with more and more sensors pointing at earth, we're going to see a lot of things that don't fit into received wisdom. Now we can either a) extrapolate that received wisdom tells us how the earth looked from space for 400 years (doubtful), or b) get used to seeing a lot of unusual stuff. In fact, seeing unusual stuff should be considered normal. That's why we have the satellites up there in the first place.
But I know even this comment will be taken as some sort of denier-talk. So yes, yes -- every thing that "hasn't been seen in recorded history" must be radically new and frightening.
Not if they are using another trust provider, such as Microsoft. With a Chinese wall in place, nobody would ever have all the pieces at the same time.
The strange web site has an account with Verisign (or some other trust provider)
You go through the same motions as today. But in the background, you're using a one-time-pad with Verisign, who is handling the gnarly details for the site. (insert all the little technology details here like frames, out-of-band calls, JSON, etc) This is much the same as any website would do with a merchant account and one of the major credit cards. But guess what? No Public Key Cryptography required.
I haven't done all the work (hey -- this is slashdot! What do you expect? Reading the articles or thinking comments all the way through!) but I believe you can do most everything with OTPs that you do with a PKI.
I should have been clearer.
One-time pads and symmetric crptography will replace PK, at least until we get wide-spead entangled systems. The cost of creating white noise and the cost of permanent storage is quickly becoming trivial. I can foresee something along the lines of trust providers with their own connections to various web sites.
The amount of information I _really_ need to encrypt in my daily affairs is crazy small compared to the size of modern storage technology -- and that technology is just getting cheaper and denser all the time.
As for the Man-in-the-Middle attack, there are lots of procols. My point was in regards to storage and OTPs, not protocols.
Cheap storage will eventually destroy any kind of crypto/anti-crypto technology.
What are the new DVD formats getting? 50GB of data RW? Will options up to 250GB or so of RW storage?
How much information do you really, really need to hide, anyway? Maybe a couple of megabytes of financial-related data per day? A one-time pad on a DVD should provide you with centuries of totally secure communications.
So you sign up for your bank account. The bank snail mails you a 10GB random noise memory stick. You add it to your 10TB secure random storage system and you and the bank can talk for the rest of your life without anybody else being able to listen in.
If all the little strings are broken, it's no wonder the universe is flying apart!
Or it could be that the Chinese are slowly pushing the limits, looking to a day where they have a deep water navy and can leverage Taiwan into the mainland.
Simply because something may have a propaganda value to one nation or another does not dimish its importance, or its veracity.
It's not an either-or situation. Both things may be true. I worry that people want to ignore real threats by simply characterizing them as propaganda. Let's stay friends with the Chinese. To do that, we're going to need to have a honest conversation about what each partner is doing. This story helps with that.
As a former imaginary traveling salesman, I beg you slashdotters to show some mercy.
Let's get this straight. To solve the traveling salesman problem, we make a big fiber optic thingy and shine a flashlight down the fibers. The interference pattern gives us the answer.
But it's not a computer any more. And it's not something that "runs on photons" as many commenters have said. Nope. These patterns happen because of quantum effects, which mean the little virtual photons are doing all the work.
So that's the plan, eh? Make the little virtual photons find the salesman? Well I've got news for you, Mr. Big Shot Scientist. Next year we're sending out an army of virtual traveling salesmen. That'll show ya!
So we have quantum computers that are doing work in other universes and virtual flashlights finding the best paths for salesmen? I'm thinking this whole traveling salesman gig is just getting too hard any more. I'm going to look into working for RIAA.
Elf -- I'd like to continue the conversation, or at least take apart your last response, which I found most interesting.
Not sure if writing comments 27 levels deep on /. is the right place for it. I suggest continuing this discussion over on my blog.
I think communism has advanced political theory a lot, don't you? We know that Russian-style communism was mostly a failure. Sadly, free-market theory predicted this, yet millions still died. In China, we see an interesting experiment with partially open markets. I believe it will lead to stagnation within a generation. While in India, I'm much more optimistic.
But my opinions as to the sucess of these political philosophies are based on theory, which in turn is based on bitter experience. I mean no "que sera, sera" at all about any of it. As I said, let's try to keep from killing each other, okay? Ideas advance through history. Good ideas overtake poor ones. It is neither "stuff happens" nor is it "who cares". It's more like the threading of the quilt of humanity. It exists outside of our ability to understand or react to it.
As a final example, let's assume that tomorrow a spaceship landed from the planet Xenon. They have a three-headed God, they only eat fried chicken and baked beans, they have a funny walk, and they speak by flatulating. They offer freedom of speech, assembly, ownership, religion, and they also offer to share their technology with those who accept the chicken and farting stuff. I can tell you, if they are the dominant culture in our part of the galaxy, and if they represent the future for the next few generations of humans -- I'm loading up on chicken and beans, dude. And you'd better stay upwind from me.
And if this unlikely event were to happen, I'm sure that all of this navel-gazing will repeat: the yearning for the simpler times wihtout FTL travel, the romanticizing of our non-spacefaring past. Yadda, yadda. You can just fill in the blanks with any two mismatched cultures in history. The Romans probably romanticized and bitched about how badly the barbarians were treated. For a long time in the States, most northerners romanticized the Southerners as noble rebels (a trend which dissappeared with civil rights in the 50s) It's always easier, sitting on the side _after_ the historical choice was made, to lament the pain of the choice. Nobody ever thinks that both sides can be full of good, honest, folk, and still the pain comes. We yearn for good guys and bad guys.
I must have missed the part where I told somebody not to complain. Hey -- if you like complaining, complain! Have fun. My ancestors were probably on all sides of the fun: slavers, slaves, conquerors, the conquered. My point is either there are larger ideas that work or there are not. I would never take away somebody's chance to complain. I mean, it's not enough your society got absorbed, you should definitely harbor bitterness about it as long as you can. It makes for such a positive impact on the world.
Er. Maybe because free, open markets work for the better good than closed, tribal societies? I don't uphold the Victorians as much of anything, but I can see that they had a better life than, say, the Romans. And I can see the Romans had a better life than the Mongols. Do I want to live to be 100, complaining all the way about how some greater culture stepped on mine? I guess. I'd much rather do that than live to be 20 while I worshipped the moon god or some such.
As for the Victorian presence in India, isn't India one of the premier democracies and an engine of wealth for that entire region now? Don't they still play cricket, drink tea, and speak in those cool accents? I don't want anybody to die, but I not stupid enough not to realize that all of that pain was for nothing. Some change came from it. Change that is going to happen anyway. I know that I'm really happy the Europeans were so stupid over the past 400 years or so. What a great base of history and lessons for us to have! And isn't it great that we never have to go back and wonder, for instance, if we should have a state-run church? Those things you disdain so much: aren't they great reminders of what worked and what didn't, performed mostly by moral people who were trying to make a positive difference in the world? Or do you prefer to see everything through a more cynical eye?
The United States was supposedly founded on the notion of liberty and justice. Which were, in their turn, founded on western ideals of private property rights. One has no liberty if one has nothing that is owned.
And how precisely did the US Army advocate this wonderous idea of property rights to American Indians? The US Army acted under orders from a democratically elected government. Either those people were morally inferior to you (which you seem to propose) or they knew something you do not. Now you have choice: you can either assume that you know everything that is worth knowing about those times, and that those people were deficient or defective, or you can open your mind. I'm not going to defend thier actions, nor do I have to. I simply acknowledge there is more than one explanation.
Where was the effort prior to the formulation of India reservations of bringing Indians into the modern era?Okay. Now you're really showing your ignorance. I'm not an expert, but I know that, for instance, many efforts were made to assimilate Native Americans. Take a look at the history of the Cherokee, for instance.
then comforting oneself with the idea that all of that bloodshed and hypocrisy was okay because they were a backward lot Why do you present such a false choice? Surely it's possible that they had to go, but they also were a noble culture? As I recall, the Native Americans were revered (and still are) as great warriors. You don't have to demonize a culture to acknowledge it is inconsitent with modernity.
Certainly they were no worse than the European savages that had cut each other to ribbons over the nature of salvation and whether the Bishop of Rome should have pre-eminence or notWell. There you go. I knew we had to get into some sort of "I have made this moral decision" conversation. Surely they weren't as bad. Surely they were worse. Beats me. I don't think of history as some sort of game where people who are better than others necessarily dominate. I think you can definitely say that the Europeans went through many of the same struggles, yet seemed to make advancements. They found a common religion. They founded the idea of nation-states. They had the Treaty of Westphalia. Does that make them "better"? We can certainly say that gave them longer lives, gave them philosophy, gave them health, wealth, technology, science, etc... I guess it could be a tough call.
but that economic and political interests trumped morality at every turn which, if understood in commercial terms, meant that we have cities with large skyscrapers, the internet, space travel, and all of that because merchants seeking to advance their own lot by helping others were able to access resources to do that. Would I kill a person of a primitive culture over a rock that might cure cancer? I don't think so, but I would certainly jockey to be in a position to make a lot of trades for those rocks. And I could see where eventually things might get very ugly between us.
Were the Americans "Children of the Enlightenment" supposed to know better? Better about what?
The more I learn about western expansion, the more I am left with the opinion that sometimes two cultures just do not get along. Sometimes cultures cannot exist in the modern age. You can't have much of a society without the ownership of private property. That's not a western idea, or a modern idea, or a white man's idea, or any of that. Private property ownership simply has been proven to make life better for every society that practices it.
Same goes for secularism. Same goes for the Enlightenment in general, for that matter. At some point (recently), we've started thinking of these ideas as somehow all relative, as if you could have a society that could cure cancer that was based on tribal chiefs.
Exaggerating the story of the settlers and the Native Americans does both parties injustice. Surely settlers could expect to be able to pull their wagon whereever they wanted to. It wasn't like there were any signs up. And surely some of the NAs could raid and torture as they saw fit. It's not like they started when the white man showed up.
The continent was stagnant. Society there had yet to invent the wheel, for goshsakes. Any sort of moral values discussion aside, how long could such a large percentage of the world's landmass be left in the stone age? Pain and change had to come -- if not by the Europeans than by another dominant group. To think otherwise is to engage in historic fantasy.
Well said. The parent seems to have lost all historical context. Perhaps his history instruction began with "Western Atrocities 101".
There's no excuse for what happened in China in with the treaty ports, et al, but to single out the Victorians and their colonialism as anything but the continuation of normal world politics up to their day is self-absorbed fantasy. (And I mean self-absorbed in the sense of "nobody can be as bad as we have been") Lots of cultures would have been far worse, had they survived. The thought of the apex of the Mongols lasting another 100 years would have made any these other examples look like a day at the beach.
But that's not hip, that's not cool. Any more we have to bash western ideals and western civilizations. Let's look at the partitioning of Africa, of China, by all means. Perhaps we could drag in the American use of the atomic bomb for good measure. This self-flagellating has got to stop.
Nobody has any context -- they just have lists of bad crap they're taught to repeat to support a pre-ordained philosophy. It's freaking sad.
"This is your job to know...How can people be so brain-dead as to justify this crap...you shouldn't be around sharp objects...Stop apologizing"
Okey dokey now. Let's remember to take the little blue pill in the mornings, and the little red pill in the evenings. When you get them mixed up, you know how upset you can get.
Let's review, shall we?
I explain that there is nothing illegal going on, just a bunch of "looks bad, let's pile on". Your response, best I can parse it through all of your angst and regret, is that any moron can see that horrible injustices are being done to our country and our way of life. As reasonable citizens, nay, as sentient beings, it should be as obvious as the nose on your face. [Insert extreme example here regarding missiles]
So the presumption of innocence is important to you when, exactly? When it's not the president? If the police catch me outside the liquor store with a gun and a bag of money right after it's been robbed, in your book I robbed it, right? Might as well just skip the trial and throw me right in jail.
Look -- I know what torture is, and waterboarding is not torture. Our kids get waterboarded every day in POW training and have been for decades. I know what extraordinary rendition is -- it's the thing we've been doing since the Indians left whenever we've caught "persons of interest" abroad. I know what wiretapping is -- it's what we've done to overseas calls since there have been telephones. I know this stuff. I know the history, I know how it has been used, and I know how it's being used now.
So for you and your anger -- grow up. This is a working democracy, not some theoretical construct. If you want to take away interception of messages overseas, non-lethal and non-harmful persuasion of terrorists, extraordinary rendition, and legal presidential powers, then guess what? Show me a) where it's really the end of the world and not simply some wet dream of yours, and b) how we're supposed to have a country that can defend itself with all of your high-minded ways.
As I pointed out in another comment, as a libertarian I'm really glad to see so many people bent around the axle about these things. Now, unless the constitution is a suicide pact, your anger ain't going to fly with me. I'm cannot imagine any rational person more supportive of individual liberty. I want cold facts and logic. And concrete examples of past circumstances where your high standards led to winning a war. Last I checked, we're at war, and quite frankly, we've had much more restrictive governments in the past when we won wars. You seem to be be bent on seeing how noble and pure we can be and still win. Sounds like chicken to me -- and it is not supported by history.
My only question is: how much pain do you want to put us through? So far, you seem eager to up the volume. I'm not going to fight somebody else over something I love as much as civil liberties. You're just wrong. I believe in this country and I can wait until you nice people with limited context figure the math out for yourselves. It's not like reality is going to go anywhere. Take your time. Seriously. 20 - 40 years is fine.
Look. Hey. I'm a libertarian. I believe in the ultimate sovreignty of the individual. So please don't lecture me.
I'm glad you've got the theory down straight. We agree that secret courts are not going to cut it. However -- and this is a big however, that's not happenng. No American is being arrested in his country on secret charges without recourse to the court system. So your argument is more of a hypothetical than a real-world one.
In addition, in every time of war I can find in our history the president is given broad powers to direct and execute the war. Now, for you to have some kind of point, either a) we don't have a war, or b) all of this historical evidence is useless as an example.
I'm glad you're so fired up about individual freedoms. I really am. The next time the environmental groups want to take away private property rights for wetlands I hope I can count you on the side of personal liberty. The next time the KKK or some other you find heinous wants to march through an ethnic neighborhood I hope you're there for them. The next time the government wants to use force to take money from people (taxes) for some kind of do-good cause like national healthcare, I hope you're on the ball. But I'm really tired of people who got their libertarianism from a comic book coming in and trying their hand at explaining how or why the government works the way it does. Abe Lincoln disbanded the Maryland legislature when he thought they might vote to succeed. He imprisoned Congressmen that he said were just "stirring up trouble" Adams signed the Sedition Act, which prevented criticism of the government. If you want a real-world view of how it works, look at the real world. Don't just spout off the theory without having any kind of historical depth to know why the theory works (and when there are exceptions)
There are all kinds of examples that show that the republic thrives just fine on temporary restrictions in the social contract. In fact, it seems to be the normal state of affairs in time of war.
But if chasing terrorists like those on 9-11 is more of a police action, then we are not at war, and my examples do not hold. For me, I believe we are at war -- a war that is mostly political in nature. Our enemies do not represent nation-states, and Congress has failed the people by not declaring war, so that really screws up the entire conversation for all of us, doesn't it.
Uniformed thugs? Surely you realize that the FBI is not usually considered "uniformed thugs"
I guess, that is, unless they do something you don't like. Stopping organized crime? Great guys. Cleaning up organized labor? Great guys. Counter-intelligence? Great guys. Civil rights? Great guys. Enforcing the oath of secrecy the employee took? Uniformed thugs.
Methinks you need a little critical thinking training. Let's see -- when the law suits you, it's still the law. When it does not suit you, it's still the law.
Everything that the courts have ruled unconstitutional has stopped. That's why the new legislation was passed recently -- we were effectively blind to watching foreign communications that went through the U.S.
Now before you spin off on some other ill-thought tangent, I'd simply like to know: do we have to ask your permission for every secret program this country has? Or just the ones that some politician convinces you are a danger to freedom as we know it? Perhaps every thing we do as a nation that is questionable should have 100% support of everyone involved. Either way you slice it, it doesn't make a lot of sense.