RANT: When hi-tech is a hinderance (freedom w/in limits)

[Anonymous]

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".