🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <unruh.720338918@physics.ubc.ca> unruh@physics.ubc.ca
(William Unruh) writes:

   For those of us outside the USofA these analogies make us wonder whether
   such registration is not a good thing. If crypt really is like guns,
   whose only use is to kill lots of innocent people it seems, then maybe
   crypt were better strictly controlled. Ie, your arguement would be
   stronger if you limited yourself to the uses and abuses of cryptography
   and didn't engage in the silly American penchant for seeing yourselves oa
   as lone cowboys out to right wrongs no matter how many people get killed
   in the crossfire.

Or as a hopped-up Don Quxote, flailing verbally away at imaginary
strawmen?  At least this image has a basis in fact, given your post.

   When people today cry out "Give me liberty or give me death" I'm tempted
   to say, fine, go away and die, only please do it quietly, and don't haul
   down a whole bunch of innocents with you.

We "silly Americans" are very glad that Patrick Henry did not take
this marvelous advice.  Feh.

   [Note for those of you unable to see through sarcasm, I do not think
   that cryptography and guns have any similarity at all. I see no problem
   with the government trying to regulate our lives for the common good
   (and yes that is hard to discerne at times and that is why we have open
   political processes so the arguements can be advanced and experiments
   tried and thrown out if they don't work) I doubt greatly that any
   attempt to regulate cryptography in the manner suggested would work, and
   as such the impassioned debate sounds about as pointless as it would be
   against a govenment attempt to legislate pi to be 3.000]

Then perhaps you can begin to see why gun control will not work, and
has not worked.  It takes about the same amount of effort to make dies
for the production of a gun as it does to write a good encryption
program, and not all that much more to make a gun from the dies than
to duplicate the software.

Dimwit.

					Dave Barton
					dlb@hudson.wash.inmet.com