"Your Browser: Mozilla10" There is no such browser!

I'm running 11.0 and an update is ready. The 10.x certainly exists.

That's a pretty efficient idiot. Also, "affected" is not the same as "destroyed".

I chose the words carefully. It is also not known what is worse for the society - to have one member destroyed outright or to have one member's worldview crashing down upon him. The damage is not just psychological, it could be very physical. Some survivors of gang encounters have to escape the town completely to avoid wrath of the gang. The police will not protect them, and waging a one-man war against a gang is neither legal nor practical.

You do realize that the main difference between these was how the captain, not the rabble, behaved, right?

The captain is a part of the sample that we are looking at.

Did it ever occur to you that the "militarization of society" is not a universal problem, but mostly an American problem? It's your culture that's broken, not humanity in general.

I cannot comment on cultures that I know nothing of. If this discussion is N/A to your particular society, just ignore it. I'm sure, for example, that many Amazonian tribes have pretty stable societies; their murder trials are always quick, and the piranhas are always hungry :-)

But if you insist that the problem uniquely belongs to the USA, look at Greece today, or at UK in time of troubles, or at Germany at time of Turkish pogroms. As Quark said, humans are nice only when well fed; once that is taken away they become as bloodthirsty as a Klingon.

I just leave my house, go around conducting my business or taking my pleasure, and return home unmolested. Again you are projecting American problems to humanity as large.

Either you are claiming that your countrymen are above the average, or the US average is lower than your country's. Which may be true; but it requires having firsthand data on both societies to do a fair comparison.

However reports from UK are not very encouraging. While firearm ownership there is nearly outlawed, gangs carry knives - and you don't want to be slashed with a knife any more than you'd like to be shot. It hurts either way.

And all of these groups started by trying to make their victims seem less than humans, as rabid animals undeserving of sympathy or even life. Just like you're doing here.

Propaganda, in war times or in boot camps, distorts reality to fit the need. However there are objective methods of measuring things; there is scientific method. You can exactly measure the probability of being mugged on streets of NYC, and you can exactly measure the distribution of races involved in those muggings, and the distribution of their social characteristics (income, employment, IQ, etc.)

It is indeed not politically correct to call a spade a spade. There are many contortionists that do their best to hide who commits crimes and who does not. There is a political need for that; since you appear to not be interested in US internal affairs you probably don't know, it's convoluted enough and many US citizens willingly tune out of that discussion. The facts, however, remain. It is stupid to refuse to look at them, to humanity's benefit, just because you don't like what you see.

If you still wish to ignore history, you are free to do so. However sticking your head in the sand will not make you safe.

the Net is full of stuff idle hands built

There are very few absolutes in statistics. Of course one pair of idle hands can be creative, while another pair will become destructive. It all depends on the level of self-control, and on the level of creativity of any given person. In short, it depends on his brains.

We can always debate what is the percentage of people who go bananas if only left unmonitored for a moment. It is not 100%, of course, and not even 50%. I think 10% is the maximum. And that is too much, simply because if each such idiot injures 9 others then the entire society is affected.

People's behavior in war times, in shipwrecks, in fires gives us an idea who is who. When Titanic went down a lot of people were willing to save others, endangering themselves in the process. But when Costa Concordia went down a lot of people were willing to kill others in their rush to lifeboats - though the land was within spitting distance.

As one bad apple spoils the entire barrel, a small percentage of antisocial people terrorizes the entire society - and changes that society. Look at any criminal scare in the USA or anywhere else, for example. People lock the doors and keep a shotgun at the ready even though their homes may never be invaded. But they know someone who knows someone who was invaded. One criminal terrorized a hundred citizens, and that hundred instead of growing roses bought reloading presses. You cannot claim that militarization of the society has no side effects.

Also, when you talk about "unemployed" and "unemployable", and then link to an article about school kid gangs

That's how they begin their career. A 25 y/o murderer has to start somewhere...

But they have a stronger impact on the society in another aspect. If you regularly walk the streets for pleasure or for business, and therefore place themselves into the path of those roving gangs, do you just pray to your god(s) before leaving home, or you make sure that your concealed-carry firearm is loaded? Whichever you choose, it changes you forever. The society of "brotherly love" morphs into the "wild west" where you have to write the will before you go outside. All these wonders are done by a sub-10% group of people. Never underestimate the influence of small but loud groups; human history is written in blood of their victims.

the billions of idle hands are trouble only because people can't set their own purpose - but if they could [...]

That little word "if" is the trouble here. USSR was trying to change the man for almost entire century and failed.

Golovachev has an interesting, if myopic view

Even later books of his are set in the Multiverse, where multiple societies, similar but minutely different, are depicted. The theme of societal decay is addressed in some of those "branches." Some of his books are officially available for free access as long as you know the language; I wouldn't use Google Translate there...

Sadly, the theme is not invented out of whole cloth, as many Fantasy writers do. It is very real. Most of the USA's social problems stem from the fact that large segments of population don't work, don't need to work, and are as matter of fact unemployable. Then they go out and entertain themselves as they may. Heard about "knockout kings?" That's them, geniuses at work. They are the fifth column of the modern civilization.

Perhaps the humankind can survive only apart from each other. We'd have no wars if anyone could at any time escape to his own, personal planet where nobody else could come without permission.

probably because they were too lazy to figure out the ramifications

They probably were either too lazy or too incompetent to decode the charges. As I said, they can't be experts on Saudi criminal code. There is a catch-all charge in the US code as well, it's called "Disturbing the peace." It could mean anything, from shooting a firearm in the street to just photographing a cop. A charge like that, coming from Saudi Arabia, translated into broken French or English, and with zero expectation of anything being wrong... Saudis likely didn't send any other materials (such as what exactly happened.) So the warrant just got rubberstamped by a lowly clerk. After all, top notch secret agents (if only Interpol would have them) don't do desk duty. It's probably an intern level position, to push papers.

When the fuck are we humans going to make it properly out of the dark ages?

What in the world prompts you to think that we are even going in that direction?

Late works of Vasily Golovachev (for example - he is far from being alone) are very deeply looking into social effects of the age of communism. He paints a Star Trek type society where nobody needs to work for food, and then investigates what happens.

The answers that he comes up with - in the "Black {Man,Time,Force}" trilogy and in other books - are very depressing. He predicts that the society will rot. Billions of idle hands, having no purpose in life and no need to be busy, turn into drug users, thrill seekers, criminals; ultimately they form a planet-wide gang trying to gain power over others; this is the last, and most powerful, drug that a happy and rich society cannot deliver. Humanity is doomed to be mired in wars until the last man who is dreaming of power over others is no more.

Unless Saudi Arabia lied about the charges against the man, Interpol had a duty not to issue a Red Notice for him.

Saudis didn't have to lie. They could simply accuse him of hate crimes, or of inciting a riot, or of something equally obscure. Interpol may not act on a warrant for "preaching a forbidden religion" but it's very difficult, without having a Saudi lawyer on hand, to understand what the accused actually did. It would require a full scale investigation on part of Interpol, and they don't have people to do that (it's not even physically possible without involving national forces - which brings us back to square one.)

But with all the international uproar about this case probably Saudis will get a slap on the wrist. Interpol cannot allow itself to be dragged into religious wars.

But while this is happening, the guy is in hot water. Malaysia has a state religion, and it is Islam. He might have a choice, however, of the country where his head is chopped off.

By demanding the secret key from the defendant, the prosecution is demanding that the defendant tell them how the document should be interpreted.

I don't think you stressed this point enough. Let me rephrase for sake of anyone reading this.

Given a completely random ciphertext X of length M I can create a set of keys K that produces all possible plaintexts of length M. That's how OTP works.

Software like Truecrypt may restrict your options. However if all the adversary has is M kB of randomness, it is trivial to create a key that decrypts that randomness into the Bible, for example, or a photo of a cat:

for (k=0; k < M; k++) { keystream[k] = cat_photo[k] ^ ciphertext[k]; }
for (k=0; k < M; k++) { plaintext[k] = (ciphertext[k] ^ keystream[k]); }

Guess what, plaintext[] ends up being a cat photo for any given ciphertext! (You can see that the ciphertext[] gets XORed with itself and cancels itself out.)

Let's say I know my password. It's a short poem in this example. How would I know what is its 17th character without intentionally counting? I doubt that I can count it in my head anyway.

my TruCrypt password - a 48-character collection of non-rememberable characters - was stamped into one of my gold coins

You could do better than that. Split the 256-byte (ASCII-armored) key into three pieces and stamp each piece on each one of three gold coins. (You don't need 4 coins here.) Then lose one coin. The missing segment corresponds to a 256/3 bytes = about 683 bits. That ought to keep them busy for a while. Since two segments of the key are present on the other two coins you have proof of your claim; but the available pieces are useless (even if they actually are a key to something.)