The atheist believes the sun will rise tomorrow and acts accordingly. This is a very well founded believe but it is a belief nevertheless and acting upon that belief is to act as though the other possibilities will not obtain.

Morpheus: The Link-bait is everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very article summary. You can see it when you load up your RSS feed, or when you log into Slashdot. You can feel it when you're skiving off at work... when you're tweeting during church... when you're moaning online about politics and taxes. It is the distraction that has been pushed into your eyes blind you from the truth.

Neo: What truth?

Morpheus: That You are the Product, Neo. Like everyone else you have logged into a panopticon. Into a marketing scam that you cannot taste or see or touch. A prison for your attention-span.

Everyone is religious. Its just that some call their religion their "belief system".

All belief-based acts are acts of faith. And all actions are based on beliefs.

Some time later...

"My name is Maximus Decimus Meridius, commander of the Armies of the North, General of the Felix Legions, loyal servant to the true Admin, Jon Postel. And I will advertise Cheap Affordable Cialis and Nigerian investment opportunities, in this life or the next."

How much did all of this cost?

Let's be blunt here. The purpose of this program was never to in any way seriously affect the Cuban regieme. The purpose of this program, like so many others at the NSA, was to "legitimize" bonuses and to buy new Cadillacs for NSA managers and senior officers. If General Alexander's Star Trek office revealed one thing, it is that the NSA has a culture of gorging at the public trough.

Corporations and commerce are basically run by elementary school-yard rules. Essentially the CEO runs up, takes something belonging to you, and runs away yelling "Nally-nally-neener-cakes! I get what you make!". There are no take-backsies unless you are willing to call a teacher/lawyers and get engaged in a huge fuss.

In fact, our modern system of commerce has become so efficient and automated that you do not even need to enter into a prior agreement or even a school in order for your property to "neener-caked". This will be the next step in the evolution of rent-seeking.

That's not freedom, that's power.

That's not a tautology, that's a platitude.

And if you don't want to be a victim of paparazzi and vindictive newspaper editors, black out all of your windows and never go outside again.

if you don't want to be a victim of the NSA or ad tracking companies, never go online again.

And if you don't want your pension scalped, don't invest it in the stock market where HFTs and Goldman rule the roost.

One the one side of all of these arguments, we have victims, and on the other, we have predators of all kinds who happily proclaim "It's legal. I'm allowed to exploit you. Freedom of Speech!! Small government!!.....Ignore the man behind the curtain I paid to have laws changed in my favor."

I have a different philosophy. I believe that the Law can be used to shape societies; to encourage behaviors we would like to promote, and discourage behaviors we would like to see curtailed. As long as we can have a debate about what Laws are legal and reasonable -- and not devolve into a Dogmatic ideological shouting match about commas in constitutions -- and as long we can apply Reason and wisdom, over emotion and ignorance when doing so, the Laws we develop stand a good chance of shaping society to make it a better place.

In short, I don't think a young girls smile in a photograph constitutes sacred, inalienable grounds for the bearer to upload said photograph to the Internet whenever he feels like 'sperging out would make him feel better.

Sorting proponents into governments that test them is the penetration of the Enlightenment into the social sciences. This allows the social sciences to progress beyond "correlation doesn't imply causation" to perform ethical experiments on human subjects that, because there are experimental control groups, permits much stronger inference of causal laws in human ecologies (human societies) than do mere ecological correlations.

So what's not to like about locales, like the Mozilla Foundation or Google or even Silicon Valley, excluding from their midst those who are incompatible with the social experiment that most people want to perform on themselves? After all, it is only by consent of the governed that a jurisdiction can be deemed legitimate.

Here's the problem:

In the modern zeitgeist it is considered the moral equivalent of Satanism to practice what is called "the politics of exclusion". Why? Because it "discriminates".

These fuzzy tropes forget one thing, however -- and it is something that anyone who is involved in technology should understand in their gut:

It is only by "excluding" various hypotheses that we can "discriminate" between truth and falsehood in the real world.

But no one wants to admit that their religion might be false -- including those whose religion is the de facto state religion that enforces "inclusion" and prohibits "discrimination".

The people who are waiting for you to develop secure password login libraries.

If you send too few people out then production won't be high enough in the beginning. You need to send a fair few billion out to at least the first few star systems so that the population can grow, then once the colony is establish, you need to ship people back to maintain production levels on the home world. This is basic stuff people.

I, and others, can relate story after story about people like this,....

I can also related dozen of stories of people who drove dangerously, passed me out, and flew passed the lights ahead before they went red.

So called "bad" or dangerous drivers are more often than not rewarded for accellerating quickly and swerving dramatically. Those of us foolish enough to stay within the speed limit, and not take risks, are left waiting at the red light.

There are only so many times you can see this happening before one say, you decide to speed up as well.

And geeks and other "smart people" working in finance, law, and the NSA are doing just that, one egregious breach of trust at a time.

It's A, she's turning the voice back on us -- outside of the stream!!. The end is nigh!!

b+down+start9

Me and many others. I was the primary designer of the crypto processing hardware which intersects with these specs. My public comments on the specs are here .

And how do you know the NSA's influence didn't simply steamroll over all your professional objections and put the flawed standard in the chips anyway? The NSA has social as well as technological backdoors.