He started a war? Amazing, I didn't know he had his own country.
Well we declared war on terrorism and drugs. Doctors have declared war on cancer. I hardly see how countries are associated with these "modern" wars.
There's one reason why this is a poor method of insurance. Suppose there's somebody out there with an even bigger axe to grind than Assange, who will stop at nothing to get the contents of this "insurance" file released. With over six billion people in the world, and a substantial number of them having a beef with the U.S., it's not beyond the realms of possibility.
The implication here is that if something happens to Assange, then the key gets released. So, it logically follows that if you want the key to be released.......
(For my own safety, I have no interest in the contents of that file. And while I personally think Julian Assange is a self-righteous ass, I don't wish physical harm on him or any of the other people involved with Wikileaks.)
But you have not thought this all the way through. The US itself is a big enough entity that nobody's axe is bigger than theirs. Knowing that someone might want to force Assange to give up the key, its probably in the US's best interest to protect Assange.
Your religion might say killing a doctor who performs abortions is acceptable. Their religion might say killing a cartoonist who mocks their prophet is acceptable. In both cases you're saying murder is acceptable because your religion says so. That's pretty much textbook religious extremist.
Well, I don't see them as equivalent. Teller was providing a public service, giving substance to the law of the land (having the freedom to choose a medical procedure is meaningless if no doctor will perform it). The cartoons only have "freedom of expression" at their disposal which does not apply to corporate airwaves (not saying I agree with this, just stating the facts), and the laws about freedom of expression are not universal (the US is the only country I know of that has upheld the idea in court -- other countries at most claim it, even in the face of obviously contradicting laws.)
While the murders are equivalent from the point of view of the number of victims, the justification for killing Theo-Van Gogh was just vacuous, whereas the justification for killing Teller makes the crime far, far worse. I can go make a Muhammad cartoon anytime I like to fill in that void, I cannot suddenly go perform abortions to fill in the void left by Teller.
As Ayan Hirshi Ali stated, in order to fix the Muslim attitude towards depictions of Muhammad, you can just have *everyone* actually engage in it. The weight of the world opinion is not trivial and would give them pause to think. I think her analysis is correct. For the abortion issue, there is no changing those people's minds. Even if there was a pervasive education campaign, whatever remaining pro-lifers there would be would always be the most radical and would still carry out murders of doctors no matter what their demographic.
(You can't accuse me of being lead by my religion, because I am atheist.)
The more annoying it is to spam, the fewer people will do it. If writing software to get past this (or buying the software) costs a fortune, good.
Since when does it cost anyone anything to write software? The whole lesson of the computer industry is that developing (most) software has reasonable finite fixed costs and relatively small on-going costs and (if its any good) has perpetual returns (for as long as you can sell it; funding your development costs for upgrades.)
I hate to be a spoil sport, but unless you cost the person sending the spam in exact proportion to the amount they send, you fundamentally are not addressing the cost structure of SPAM.
If it can stop a lot of this kind of spam, that's fine with me. Let it be an arms race. If the spammers have to make up new templates every 4 hours, that's going to make things a lot harder.
It would be very temporary. One thing we need to realize is that the spammers have reasonably intelligent programmers working on *their* side. A template deducer relies on the fact that the message has fixed text that forms a signature for the template. The spammers do it this way right now, because its really easy to do this and hash based filters can be defeated this way.
But if the spammers need to write more complicated "automated alternate sentence rewording" generators they will.
Love may laugh at locksmiths, but he has a profound respect for money bags. -- Sidney Paternoster, "The Folly of the Wise"
