No I am claiming that the spying prevented the Cuban missile crisis from getting out of hand. It is also many historians opinions that it also prevented the Yom Kippur war from getting out of hand.
It also saved many lives in the battle of the Atlantic during WWII and helped the Allies win WWII.
So "which is contradictory to _ALL_ evidence and historical data."
No it is not.

"But seriously? Trying to equate especially nuc power with religion is pretty silly."
No I am equating the anti-technology views of those that are not atheists with those that are.

"Don't like seeing anything you don't like, eh? Life can be tough."
I don't like the direction that Slashdot has taken. It is like NPR has been taken over by FOX News or MSNBC.
" Chernobyl and Fukushima and come up with a rational reason to be wary of nuclear power."
Actually being worried about Nuclear energy because of Chernobyl is as bad as fearing flying because of Hindenburg. Fukushima should actually make people feel good. The absolutely worst case situation happened it was not the massive disaster of everyone's fears.

"This is very important, because religious wackos tend to be the ones against modern science and technology."
Really? I see a lot of Atheists that are antinuclear and anti GMO.
Sorry but this just about does it for me and Slashdot. I have already turned off Politics on the my front page but the editors of slashdot still keep pushing politics into other sections.
Now they are getting into social issues. News flash folks Slashdot provides as much good information on politics and social issues as People magazine does with science and technology.

For those that want this type of crap on Slashdot. Fine just put into a section I can ignore. If not I guess I will have to vote with my clicks. It is a shame because frankly the community here is so much better than say CNN or Endgadet.

" Eventually you get to the point where the software was originally designed to do something so totally different to what it's doing now that it may make more sense to rewrite it than to keep adding hacks."

Adding new features to a system does not mean adding hacks. Every system grows in features over time. It takes a lot to make rewriting from scratch to be the best solution.
For example how old is Linux?

"Cobol is in attrition as far as most of the world is concerned."
Old working code has a huge advantage over a rewrite... It works.
You may be shocked how much effort people will make to keep old software running.
http://www.comwaretech.com/PDP...
http://www.dbit.com/

Once you have X amount of software written in a language the language will never die.
Fortran, Cobol, c, c++ will probably never die.

This is really very funny but the sad thing is that somewhere on the internet people are going to talk about this as a serious subject...
I really hope that you are intending this to be a joke.

Acts that prevent things from happening can never be 100% proven.
The classic example is taking the keys away from a drunk. You can not prove that you prevented an accident.
A prevented war can never be proven because it didn't happen.

"which really means nothing because we measure reality"

Okay fine using your logic.
The unrestricted arms race was perfectly safe since they were never used.
The current state of surveillance in the US and Britain is also just fine and dandy since nothing bad has happened

It got modded up because the readers on Slashdot do not want to hear that porn and or video games have any downside.

Of course they forget that free access to addictive substances has been shown in study after study to cause problems.

I mostly agree. The question I have where the accidents that the car was in control over easily avoidable by a human but not by a program. The end result may be more fender benders but fewer lives lost. Still a good trade off.
In the end the sample is too small to jump for joy or shriek in horror.

that is pretty much what I said.

Had the Cuban missile crisis gotten out of hand it could have caused a full on nuclear exchange between the US and the USSR.
Yea that would have beat the Nazis.
It is my mistake in not limiting this to the area of ComInt/SigInt/PhotoInt which what the discussion is all about.
The whole turn in the odd guy the street thing is a far different kind of "spying". Frankly one that is really looked down on by the Intelligence community at large.

" Russians to be sent to Gulags, countless Jews to be sent to concentration camps, countless people from the DPRK to be killed because they disagreed with the "dear leader". In fact go back further in history and see how many lives spying cost throughout history."
The Jews did not really involve spying or communication intercepts.
And I counter with D-Day, Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Yom Kippur war.

Actually you can prove that he did.
"The agents were not difficult to spot - a task made still easier by the cracking of the German's Enigma encryption. "

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

sure he was. Any "spy" in the UK that transmitted anything would be intercepted and decrypted...
In fact.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

"The agents were not difficult to spot - a task made still easier by the cracking of the German's Enigma encryption. "
So yes they did spy on British citizens. I will also bet you really good money that anybody in the UK sending a telegram to Germany in 1938 had that telegram stored at Mi5