Re: That wonderful 1980-ies hippie vibe...

I have pictures of some of those signs from when I was cycling through
Europe. :)

As I mentioned in one of the myriad different threads, there are a number
of engineering challenges that we definitely know about that we can work
towards solving.
I agree that we should keep speculation about political stuff out of the
engineering!
-=R


On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 2:53 PM, Poul-Henning Kamp <phk@phk.freebsd.dk>wrote:

>
> 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.
>
>