This being a vulnerability only upon establishing the initial key. What you are really describing is not a MITM attack. Rather you are describing a situation where somebody is attempting to impersonate somebody else.

If you are sending an email to somebody encrypted with their public key a MITM will not be able to decrypt the message because they don't have the private key.

Perhaps I am missing something here...

PGP is a public key system. If you are going to be doing a mail system based on this, it seems to me that the receiving email client would check to see if the public key associated with the email address is on file. If not, request the public key from the email address. If the key is on file it could even check and verify that it is the same. If it is different, throw a warning.

I don't see that there is a need for central key distribution.

I thought Harry Harrison's "Homeworld" would also have been a good candidate to make the list as well...

And how does this work with the fact that your regular lock is easily bypassed using a bump key?

Seems to me that your argument should apply to regular locks and yet it doesn't seem like it is...

Loved the Stainless Steel Rat...but I also really enjoyed his more serious book "Homeworld". An interesting look at a big brother society... He was one of the better Sci-Fi authors. He will be missed.

Reminds me of the bit from "The Games" where John and Brian are arguing about whether or not genetically modified horses should be allowed to compete in the Olympics... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0pRe4GApTg

UC Davis has a 2 MW reactor...

K-9!

Larry Niven as well. Ringworld Engineers. 1980.

Surprisingly (at least to me), you can send classified documents up to a certain level via certified or registered mail, I can't remember which one it was... I thought that there would be more drama surrounding it but apparently not...

I also really enjoyed "Homeworld" by Harry Harrison. Protagonist is an EE. Big brother state. It was part of the "To the stars" trilogy, but I particularly liked this book.

I also liked some of his other books like "Rebel in Time" and "Bill, the Galactic Hero".

Unless you have a car which doesn't have a robust transmission...

Our Hyundai Accent apparently has an automatic transmission which has a design issue with the thrust bearing which can wear out in about 100,000 miles. We had ours go at 180,000 but a 100,000 mile transmission failure is not unheard of in the older Accents apparently...

You might want to give Eric a try. Eric is an IDE for python which can call Qt designer. This allows you to create the gui using Qt and with PyQt write your actual program in Python.

Plus, there is an assumption that these networks are up 24/7. If the are used on an as needed basis, flying a SIGINT plane may not turn up very much...