At 01:11 PM 2/12/00 -0500, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>Given that, it seems to me a society in which cryptography and locks are
>not needed because privacy is respected with such absolutivity as soon
>above is also closer to my ideal.
But private data is accidentally revealed, without malice[1].
That's why we use paper envelopes around our letters.
Postcards end up in the wrong mailboxes (and some folks
read everything extremely rapidly and automatically, to their annoyance
when confronted with idiotic bumper stickers and
advertising in general.)
Have you never mistaken an identical car for your own, in
the parking lot, and tried the door?
But more fundamentally, you describe an unstable
situation. One culture may be "ideal" but you haven't
excluded non-ideal other cultures. Which when they
discover your vulnerability make you extinct. The "other"
might be one of the "ideals" who flips.
An ideal society shouldn't be unstable -small perturbations
cause it to fail. (An amoral argument against tyrants, btw)
Sure, as pointed out, genocide, internal thought police, and forced
monopolies to eliminate competition would help, but they force a rather
national socialist utopia.
IMHO.
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[1] (If everyone used a well-known key to (insecurely) scramble the
plaintext against casual viewing, most tools would automatically decrypt
their content without their operators' explicit instruction. If all email
and news was rot-13, the tools would automatically unrot it. If every car
in a lot was
keyed the same, you would not discover that you entered
the wrong car until too late. If you object that biometrics
replaces this, note that biometric tech follows locks by
a few thousand years)
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In Eden, were the large carnivores vegetarians?
DH
