A short 'rant' on techno-dinosaurism... Saw a blurb on CNN last night about computerized missiles that would defeat jamming devices and analyze the type of target and configure their warheads appropriately. All that I could think of is what an expensive waste of computing machinery... is the cost of a "genius bomb" (assuming it does actually work, unlike the Patriots in Gulf War) worth while? Wouldn't it be better to use a lot of dumb bombs that launch several millions of dollars apiece at a tank or bit of artillery? I'm reminded of the tech they used to detect guerrillas in Vietnam... sensors that went off when uric acid (?) was present so the VC would pis in buckets and walk away, making the sensors go wild... the US put a lot of effort into bombing pis buckets. Or look back to the 13th century when European soldiers were high-tech wearing tons of armor and used cross bows. it was imposing high-tech for the time, but they couldn't move fast or fire arrows quickly... and they were skagmeat for Mongols who were comparatively low-tech. Cypherpunks or crypto relevance? Sometimes high-tech can be a weakness. I've heard that the Soviets, not having the luxury of sexy Crays and whatnot, were adept and using hundreds of PCs to do their cryptanalysis... and so may have a lot of interesting parallel processing algorithms. To paraphrase Miles Davis, creativity is "freedom within limitations".