A few weeks back Matt Blaze posted on top ten problems we face. I'll add two to that list. First is our inability to accurately assess the strength of various government agencies. We tend to make very pessimistic assumptions, which tends to be safe, but having real data on which to base our assumptions would be better. The other problem we face is that people like Matt write solid essays on various things, and no one responds. People who write essays, post solid mathematical results, etc, bemoan this pretty regularly. Fortunately, this problem is easier to address. Try to spend more time on the posts which people took longer on. Its usually obvious which those are. The reason to spend more time on solid posts is that someone took the time to write well on something. If they get solid feedback, they'll do more solid writing, and the quality of discourse goes up. Adam Perry writes: | The black community also has lots of day-to-day experience that we | don't have, and they understand both the threat model and the | practical side of things a lot better than we do. | | Overall, I'd say that in the long run the open community is going to | catch up regardless of what the NSA likes. That does not mean, | however, that this is going to happen particularly soon, or that they | don't still know decades more than we do. -- "It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -Hume