Horst Herb wrote: > On Fri, 7 Apr 2006 06:04, Tim Churches wrote: > >> Two problems with this. There is no such thing as "our government". >> Australia has a three tier system, and in the top two tiers there are >> legislative and executive arms, with an often uncomfortable (and often >> too comfortable) relationship, and within each of those arms there are >> hundreds of departments and agencies with overlapping powers, >> responsibilities and goals, all fighting for slices of the same budget >> pie. To view such a system as a monolithic entity with some form of >> collective consciousness is a bit naive. > > Each body consists of multiple organs, each organ of lots of fairly > independent cells, and each cell has it's organelles, etc. > > Yet I see my body as a whole for practical purposes, and if the liver is > cirrhotic or the kidneys fail, I'd say the body is sick. If the brain fails > to coordinate the rest of the body, the whole body is very sick in my > opinion. > > Likewise, I'd say our government is very, very sick and in this case I think > the analogy is perfectly valid and very much to the point.
Horst, I am not going to enter into a contest of weak analogies (see http://www.fallacyfiles.org/wanalogy.html ). Your analogy is debatably weak on many levels, but its biggest weakness a failure to distinguish that the main problem with HeSA stems from their policies (refusal to allow self generation of keys, ridiculous legal agreements for individual keys etc) rather than day-to-day operational errors (and a large part of their operations are outsourced to a private company in any case), whereas NSW Police has no policy of exposing journalists' passwords to Internet mailing lists on its Web sites, and the incident is question is clearly an operational stuff-up. However, please note that by pointing out your error of logic in asserting that a NSW Police operational error is another reason not to trust HeSA with private keys, I am not asserting that HeSA (or any other organisation) can be trusted with anyone's private keys. To assert that would be to fall prey to the Fallacist's Fallacy (see http://www.fallacyfiles.org/fallfall.html ). Tim C _______________________________________________ Gpcg_talk mailing list [email protected] http://ozdocit.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gpcg_talk
