That wonderful 1980-ies hippie vibe...

It's bedtime here in Denmark, but before I go to bed, I want to
thank for the wonderful 1980'ies hippie-vibe of the last couple of
days, it's been a wonderful nostalgic experience.

I don't know how many of you remember "atomic weapon free zones" ?

Maybe if you are younger, you might have seen a faded "Atomic Weapon
free Zone" sign somewhere ?

What happened was that well-meaning city councils made lofty
proclamations and declared there city would never allow atomic
weapons inside city limits etc.

It was of course an empty gesture, it's not like the military cared
what the Burgermeister of some dutch or german town signed, if they
needed to drive their nukes through, they would damn well drive
their nukes through the town-square.

In some cases it was down-right laughably hypocritical.

Does Berkeley still have their sign up ?  Berkeley Uni made a fortune
running LLNL, which designed atomic bombs, but they were appearantly
not allowed to bring the work home with them, or something.

Anyway...

Ending the cold war, one nuclear-weapon free city after the other,
was as effective as slightly more encryption in HTTP/2.0 will
be at ending USAs "War Against Privacy".

I do understand you are upset about it, so am I, and I do recognize
that when you have only a watchmakers screwdriver as tool, you use
the only tool you have.

But rolling back the US police-state, a firmly nailed down
military-industrial complex with a budget measured in billions, and
what looks like almost unanimous political support of USgov, is not
going to happen because we tighten a screw somewhere in a internet
protocol.

Sorry.

If you want to do something about the polic-state, by all means get
involved in politics:  Expose the lies, support the whistleblowers,
vote the bums out, run for office.

But in this WG, please leave your politics at the door and
concentrate on the objective in our charter: Making a better
performing HTTP protocol.

G'night...

-- 
Poul-Henning Kamp       | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20
phk@FreeBSD.ORG         | TCP/IP since RFC 956
FreeBSD committer       | BSD since 4.3-tahoe
Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.

Received on Sunday, 17 November 2013 22:53:48 UTC