Temporal Convection

It's a Condi kind of day.

After several days of hemming and hawing about the execution crisis in Afghanistan, the US is finally taking a stronger stand. In case you need a refresher, a Muslim-turned-Christian was reported by his family to the local police. Converting from Islam to another religion is illegal under sharia (Islamic law). A judge has said that the man may face the death penalty.

It turns out that we did not, after all, overthrow the Taliban only to let a duplicate run the country. Condi and the US Department of State are pressuring the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, to intervene. The US, not incidentally, still has twenty thousand troops in Afghanistan. Conservative Christians in the United States are pressuring the US government to take action against the potential execution.

Naturally, the issue is not as one-sided as it seems. Conservative Muslims represent a large portion of Karzai's electorate. In a country still largely controlled by regional warlords, upsetting a good chunk of your supporters could prove disasterous for your government and your life. He attempted to nullify the issue by pressing the judge to declare the man temporarily insane. Of course, this doesn't satisfy the conservative Christians either, who don't usually like to be called insane.

At least somebody's doing something to protect religious expression in the world, though! And would you look at that - it's people trying to protect their own faith! Shocking.

Yesterday, in St. Louis, Missouri, a morning show radio host, Dave Lenihan, was discussing Condoleezza Rice on the air. Apparently a big fan of the Secretary of State, he had been piling on the praise, even saying that if she ever ran for President, he would love to work on her campaign. Rice had expressed interest in running the National Football League some day - the lady loves football - and Lenihan wholeheartedly approved of this aspiration. While discussing her qualifications for that job, he said the following:

She's been chancellor of Stanford. She's got the patent resume of somebody that has serious skill. She loves football. She's African-American, which would kind of be a big coon. A big coon.

He immediately realized what he'd said and apologized profusely. In fact, he said he was "terribly, terribly, terribly, terribly, terribly sorry". Nonetheless, listeners called and complained. Twenty-five minutes later, the general manager came on the air and reported that Lenihan had been fired on the spot and would never again be employed by that radio station. He called the remark "unacceptable, reprehensible, and unforgivable."

Wait. Hold it. Stop.

What??

Lenihan later apologized again, officially, and reported that he'd meant to say "coup", as in a sudden appropriation of leadership or power. In the NFL, only 35% of the players are white. On the other hand, 80% of the coaches are white. 71% of the assistant coaches and support staff are white. The commissioner is white. Replacing with this word, his comment makes sense - it would indeed be a coup for an African-American to run the NFL. A big coup.

A second word that makes sense, in context, is "boon". As racism is a common problem within the NFL, it might greatly benefit the large number of minority players should Condi, both a woman and member of a minority group, control the league. Whether it would be a great boon for her to replace the current commissioners is questionable, but since this radio host seems to find her qualifications impeccable, it isn't difficult to imagine that he might have been trying to say "boon". Having an experienced African-American woman in charge of the NFL would indeed be kind of a boon. A big boon.

Have you ever tried to say two words at the same time, and the resulting verbal utterance was a mangled combination of the two? Is it difficult to imagine that, after talking almost uninterrupted, live, for almost three hours, a radio host might make the same mistake?

Even if we can't trace the precise mental etymology of the word used, it remains unacceptable to fire the man on the spot. Lenihan spent the few minutes preceeding the "coon" remark praising Condi, live, on the air. He even said he would love to help her be elected as President of the United States. He mentioned that she possessed serious skill and has held a prestigious academic position. Obviously, he'd done some background research to determine her qualifications for those positions. So let's get this straight - a man was fired for making apparently racist remarks about an African-American woman he would love to see run either the lily white NFL or the United States of America. Let's repeat that. It's important. Lenihan wants to work on the United States Presidential campaign for an African-American female. These are not the marks of a racist man!

Apparently, there is a deeper problem than the use of a single racial slur by a radio host. According to the press, a large number of listeners were so offended by simply hearing the single word mistakenly uttered in a nonsense context that they took the time to call the radio station and complain loudly enough that the man was promptly fired. Are we so thin-skinned that we cannot accept the use of a single word which may, in some circumstances, be offensive? Are we so paranoid that we assume all users of that single word are avowed white supremacists having a difficult time keeping their secret desire to lynch minorities off the airwaves? Are the words themselves so evil, so deplorable, so harmful, that public speakers should be terminated immediately for saying them? Are these words, uttered by any human being (not just a racist), really reprehensible?? Does simply hearing these words send tolerant listeners (or any other kind) into uncontrollable frenzies of racial hatred?

At some point in history, many words we consider destructive slurs were accepted labels for a particular group of people. Many were used by the groups themselves as empowering labels. Some still are! Words like "gay", invented by the homosexual community, have become terms of disparagement ("That's gay"). "Negro" (from nigris, Latin for black) was once the de facto label for a person of African descent, but has since become the catchphrase of the racist. Sometimes "black" is even considered offensive, depending on who says it and why. Once offensive words like "nigger" have been adopted by youth as "nigga", a synonym for "dude", but don't dare use the term if you aren't black yourself.

It's the meaning - that a certain group is a subhuman - that matters, not the word itself. Furthermore, it's the perception of the listeners, not the intention of the speaker, that matters. Any word yelled with enough hate or violence becomes an insult. I could use the word "coon" or the word "kerbungus" to express the same sentiment, provided that my listeners understood that I disliked the target. If I innocently use a term considered offensive in a particular culture, I might be considered a bigot. I could invent a nonsense word and apply it solely to Mexican-Americans, and it would probably be considered a racial slur within a year.

In 2006, we use cumbersome terms descriptive of ancestry, like African-American, Japanese-American, and Italian-American, to describe different ethnic groups. Perhaps that was the intention; nobody is likely to adopt a seven- or eight-syllable phrase as a quick ethnic slur in the near future. However, much racism takes place online today, and syllables are irrelevant to typed language. If white supremacists started using any of these words to offend an ethnic group, all of them would quickly become offensive to every right-minded liberal in the country. The year 2000 census documentation would become a quaint example of our racist past when we used horrible slurs like "African-American" to describe our own citizens.

Everybody really knows in the back of their minds that when we say African-American, we really mean "black person" (and so on). I once knew an African-American. He was born in South Africa, as were his parents and grandparents. He personally immigrated to the US directly from Africa. He spoke with an almost British accent. And he was as white as the Queen of England. Now, hypothetically, he could write "African-American" in the race area on his census form, but he would probably be criticized for it if anybody knew. He could probably apply for scholarships intended for African-Americans, but he probably wouldn't win. Some people might even be offended if he applied. The same people would not be offended if a dark-skinned American ten generations (200 years) removed from the African continent applied and won. So, why don't we just say "black"?

How does the cycle stop? We ignore race altogether and recognize it as the pre-genetic analysis artifact it really is. We discard all organizations, laws, and support groups that help or augment a particular race and no other. We don't cry foul when a white man is selected for a job over a black man, or vice versa. We don't analyze racial statistics at colleges and universities to make sure we're accepting enough minorities. Affirmative action goes out the window. When a person does make a racial slur, we don't identify with it because we don't have a race. The entire concept of a race is reduced to the realm of 19th century plantation owners and their children who refuse to give up the past.

Unfortunately, this is impossible. Children mentally identify themselves according to their skin color as young as five. The human brain uses the simplest descriptor possible to categorize and then identify an entity. In many cases, "different skin color than mine" or "African hair structure" is sufficient to select a list of candidates. It would take us 10 seconds to recognize every person we saw if we used micro-characteristics like nose shape and distance between the eyes to characterize their appearance. Walking into a room with ten people would require minutes of orientation.

So it goes on. Somebody uses a word offensively, another person gets offended, and the media panics. Anybody who hadn't heard "coon" used as a racial slur, or had forgotten about it, certainly knows about it now. In the future, when they hear the word "coon", they aren't going to think of a lovable forest creature - they're going to think about racists and racism! In the back of their mind, hearing that word, like hearing the notorious "N-word", will always produce imagery reinforcing the differences between races.

Children who had heard it used before aren't likely to start using it because of some random radio host - they're likely to use it because their peers or parents already use it! Furthermore, the speech patterns of children aren't necessarily important. When I was 13 years old, it was popular to say "that's Jewish" to indicate that something was stupid. I'm not aware of any of my classmates who still use that phrase for any reason.

If Dave Lenihan was a racist, then his views have now achieved notoriety - negative though it may be - across the world.

If you disagree with me, you're as stupid as those Hubgubbles.

Obviously, somebody's going to get offended reading this article. I would be shocked and amazed if somebody did not, since Americans are likely to be offended by everything from coffee to particle physics.

So here's a simple and blunt summary: I am not encouraging the use of racial slurs. They are stupid, archaic, and reaction-seeking. Like other reaction-seeking behaviors, the remedy is often to simply ignore them. In 20 years, those who use them with an intention to intimidate or harm another preson will spread their hate through nursing homes and senior living communities, and then die with their beliefs.

Those Weapons of Mass Destruction

We all know the story of the weapons of mass destruction. In 2002, President Bush used them to sell the idea of war with Iraq to Congress with great success. After all, if Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, it was our responsibility as world citizens to reclaim them from such a barbaric man. Despite several years of UN inspections turning up empty, there were still signs that Saddam was withholding some weapons from detection. Inspectors, for instance, were asked to give 24 hours notice to the Iraqi government before inspecting a location, certainly long enough to hide certain weapons.

We went to war. We found no weapons. It shortly became apparent that there were indeed no weapons - our only good justification for war. Critics of the war blasted the President, saying that we'd known all along that there were no weapons and touting the minority of government representatives who had been saying that all along. "Bush lied, people died" became a popular slogan among the anti-war crowd, appearing in graffiti, on the Internet, and on car bumpers across the country. The slogan later mutated into weapons of mass distraction, a slur on the administration's alleged attempts to establish a theocracy or fascist dictatorship under our noses.

The government went into the spin cycle. Oh, it wasn't the weapons, they said, it was the link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. Bush has subtly linked 9/11 and Iraq dozens of times in speeches. A recent Zogby poll indicates that of US soldiers who want to leave Iraq, 85% believe that Americans are there to retaliate against Saddam for his role in the 9/11 attacks. No conclusive evidence has provided links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. It's even been said that Osama and Saddam only tolerated one another due to their common enemy, and that each disliked the other's viewpoints. Osama was too radical for Saddam and Saddam was too secular for Osama.

Military historians have been busy interviewing Saddam's former underlings about the events that took place inside the Iraqi government before and during the war. They'll be publishing their findings in a book-length report next April. However, they've presented a preview on the website of a prominent topical magazine and The Economist has done some brief analysis of the material. A short excerpt:

As for those weapons of mass destruction (WMD), it seems that some senior members of the ruling circle never stopped believing, even after the war, that Iraq had these, even though Saddam himself knew otherwise. When he revealed the truth to members of his Revolutionary Command Council not long before the war, their morale slumped. But he refused a suggestion to make the truth clear to the wider world on the ground that his presumed possession of WMD was a form of deterrence, and that coming clean might encourage an attack by Israel.
- "Inside the Box", The Economist, Mar 16 2006 [Link] (emphasis mine)

In other words, the existence of WMDs was unclear to even the powerful military leaders and government officials who ran Iraq! Most of them believed wholeheartedly that he had those weapons and would use them against any future invaders. Saddam, on the other hand, knew that the weapons no longer existed but deliberately chose to obscure as an invasion deterrent. Naturally, the plan didn't work, as the supposed weapons were the biggest selling point for the war that eventually toppled his government. However, that does not change the decisions of past in any way. Hindsight is 20/20 but foresight is blind. We thought Saddam had weapons of mass destruction because Saddam wanted us to think he had weapons of mass destruction. He thought we wouldn't dare invade if our troops might be anthrax'd, but we called his bluff and invaded anyway. And the rest is history.

That Puppet Government in Afghanistan

The Bush administration has been critiqued for conveniently setting up shop in Afghanistan and installing a puppet government for the sake of the country's oil. (A recently discovered oil field vastly increases the amount of petroleum available in that country, supposedly a boon for the President's oil baron friends.)

So what's that government up to? The democracy, virtually scripted by US officials, must be doing a great job at doing whatever Washington officials tell it to do. The media was bored with Afghanistan shortly after the more controversial war in Iraq began, so we haven't heard much about it. Surely they're doing a great job being a little America and teaching their kids nice American values of tolerance and acceptance.

Or maybe not:

An Afghan man who allegedly converted from Islam to Christianity is being prosecuted in a Kabul court and could be sentenced to death, a judge said Sunday. The defendant, Abdul Rahman, was arrested last month after his family went to the police and accused him of becoming a Christian, Judge Ansarullah Mawlavezada told the Associated Press in an interview. Such a conversion would violate the country's Islamic laws.
- Associated Press, March 19 2006 [Link]

Essentially, not only are the Islamic rulers and courts alive and well in Afghanistan, but they're still threatening to execute people for converting to different religions. Apparently, while the government tolerates members of other religious groups, Muslim citizens are still subject to Muslim laws. Under that law, the punishment for apostacy is death.

The part I find most interesting and revealing about this incident is that the man's family turned him in. If there were laws in that country that simply did not accord with modern feelings - like the clauses in many American state constitutions refusing offices to atheists - the people could simply ignore them. The prosecuters could simply not press charges. After a time, the laws would be seen as archaic remnants of an intolerant past. In other words, this incident shows that the people and leaders of Afghanistan look so favorably upon conservative Islamic rule that they'll turn in their own fathers to continue its rule.

This war is not going to end soon.

Two groups holding opposing viewpoints will often use the same words to refer to the other group's views. For instance, many ideological groups feel that their ideological opponents are either stupid or uninformed. From atheists to conservatives, these groups feel that if the other group simply had all the facts, they would immediately see the light and come around to the true viewpoint. Such a viewpoint becomes threatened when revealing the facts that led the adherents to choose that particular viewpoint becomes a secret.

It is words and phrases like this which will make my list: words that have been overused to the point of ambiguity, words that add no value to discussions, and phrases that are simply insulting.

Hate

The word hate should be banned from intellectual discussion because it has been overused to extinction. The definition of the word, according to the dictionary, is intense hostility and aversion usually deriving from fear, anger, or sense of injury. Now, I highly doubt that most people reading this article feel intense hostility and aversion toward anything. There are very few groups that can be said to honestly hate another group.

Lawmakers misunderstand the word, as well. "Hate crimes" are those crimes in which the criminal afflicted some victim because he felt some loathing toward the victim's social group. This is fine. Attacking a gay man or lynching a black man is certainly a display of intense hostility. Many of these people also show aversion to the victim's group or habits, although whether they feel this way out of fear, anger, or sense of injury is questionable.

Hate speech, on the other hand, is speech which is designed to negatively change other peoples' opinions about a certain group in one of those protected classes - race, sexuality, gender, etc. For instance, a pastor reading to his congregation from a certain verse in Leviticus (or maybe one in Romans) may be guilty of hate speech under the laws of some countries. But does this pastor honestly hate homosexuals? Does he feel aversion or intense hostility toward their actions? Does he fear them? Is he angry with them? Does he think they're attacking him? While some pastors (Fred Phelps) may feel some enmity toward homosexuality, I would imagine that the vast majority look on it with a sort of pity. Your opinion on the correctness of pitying gays is certainly permissible, whatever it may be. This viewpoint, however, is not hate and so should not be discussed as though it is.

Furthermore, using hate instead of disagree with or dislike is a reprehensible straw man. Certainly, it's wrong to hate things - it is not wrong to disagree with them or feel they are morally wrong. Incidentally, hate is not the opposite of love. That would be indifference.

Fundie

This word, short for fundamentalist, and largely used only on the Internet, is another word that should be retired for ambiguity. What is a fundie? From the discussions in which I've participated, a fundie appears to be any Christian or member of an organized religion who disagrees with American liberalism.

But what is a fundamentalist? Fundamentalism (capital F), like all other movements, has gone through evolution over time. It began in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in the United States (surprise!). Fundamentalists hold five beliefs that are, well, fundamental to Christianity: inerrancy of the Scriptures, the virgin birth and deity of Jesus, the doctrine of atonement by Jesus's death, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, and the authenticity of Jesus's miracles. In other words, the basic doctrine of Fundamentalism sounds a whole lot like the Nicene Creed. (The Nicene Creed, incidentally, was the actual output of the Council at Nicea, not the Bible.)

Over the years, Fundamentalists have disagreed on a wide variety of topics and the group split up into separate entities, all of which deny any historical links with the early Fundamentalist movement. The current group of fundamentalists is largely identified by their refusal to cooperate with other Christian groups. They also have a tendency toward legalism - the designation of spiritually neutral things (such as styles of dress) as sacred or required for recognition as a Christian. Thus, to a fundamentalist, a Christian who wears a halter top shirt needs correction.

Basically, there are a very limited number of fundamentalists in the United States today, and most of them are not very active in politics. A person you accuse of being a fundamentalist is far more likely to be an evangelical. (Google finds approximately twice as many search results for "evangelical" as "fundamentalist".)

So, this word should be banned because its use pollutes intelligent dialogue with insults and guilt by association.

Religion of _______

After the September 11th terrorist attacks, President Bush used the phrase "religion of peace" to describe Islam. Pundits have since developed a series of designations to describe each religion. For instance, Christianity is often described as the religion of love. Many religions describe themselves as the religion of hope, including Islam, Sikhism, Christianity, Buddhism, Sufism, etc.

No religion can be called the religion of something, because no religion is about just one thing. Christianity, like many other religions, has ideals of love, mercy, faith, justice, charity, peace, compassion, reconciliation, forgiveness, repentance, humility, worship, and hope. It talks of both God's wrath toward humanity and his love toward his children. The Bible has some 1189 chapters, written over some 1200 years. It is amazing that the message is as consistent as it turned out, but it certainly cannot be whittled down to faith, love, or humility. (If we are forced to reduce it to one message, I would argue for repentance.)

In other words, when you use this phrase or make the assumption that any religion can be reduced to a single theme, you are wrong.

Note/Disclaimer: This article is intended to be both educational and facetious and does not advocate, under any circumstances, doing any of these things. Many of these things are illegal under most nations' laws. Performing just about any action described in this article could get you, at best, jail time, at worst, a treason charge from your national government. Plus, you'd pretty much piss off every geek in the world, and you don't want to be on the receiving end of an angry geek.

The Internet is the biggest military faux pas of all time. Intended to be a simple communication network between the government and research institutions, it has exploded into epic and nearly uncontrolled proportions. Almost everybody within a moderate distance of a good-sized American village currently has access to the Internet. Populated by rugged and sometimes lawless geeks, it is often the Wild West of the electronic world.

What is the Internet? Quite literally it is a connection between networks, like interstate highways are a connection between states. The owners of these networks, from small businesses to home users to large corporations, depend on a delicate infrastructure for the services the Internet provides to them. Our entire economy and most of our government has come to depend on the presense of the global Internet as it exists today. (It's likely, though, that the US military and the governments of most countries have their own Internets that they could still use if the public Internet was destroyed.)

So could the Internet be destroyed? Well, that depends on what we mean by destroyed. The geniuses working for DARPA in the 1970s specifically designed the primary data protocol of the Internet (creatively, Internet Protocol, or IP) so that the system will still function if a large chunk of the network is disabled or destroyed (say, by a nuclear blast). Data intended for somebody on the other side of the blast crater will find another way to get there. While there might be some brief service interruption as the system reconfigures itself, it will eventually do so.

So we'll have to redefine "destroyed". Let's define it as temporarily denying a large number of private citizens access to a large number of Internet services. Perhaps a better term would be "disabled". We can also assume that the Internet is destroyed/disabled if nobody is using it. The answer is now yes, the Internet can be destroyed. Here's how:

Method 1: Take out the root nameservers
What you'll need: 13 large bombs or maybe some Rods from God
Effectiveness: Brief
How it works:

Every computer on the Internet has a numeric address, like 13.57.81.12. The only way to communicate with another computer is to know its address. Unfortunately, these are very difficult for humans to remember. A global system called DNS (Domain Name Service/System) translates between common names like www.google.com to these addresses, for communication purposes.

Let's say you want to drive to a particular location in San Fransisco, California but you don't have a specific street address, only that it's called Joe's Coffee House. First, you probably want to be in the appropriate country. Once you're there, you can ask somebody who knows where to find California. Next, you can go to California and ask somebody where to find San Fransisco. Finally, you can go to San Fransisco and ask somebody where to find Joe's Coffee House. That person probably will be able to provide you with an address so that you can go there.

DNS works in a similar fashion. If your destination is windowsupdate.microsoft.com (which it should be on a fairly regular basis), you first need to make sure you're in the .com "country". If you've been there before, you probably don't need directions to get there, but you might if you haven't. These countries are called top-level domains. Next, you ask somebody there how you can find the domain called microsoft.com. Next, you go there and ask how you can find the "subdomain" called windowsupdate. The result of this process, like when you searched for Joe's, is the address of the computer you're looking for, so that you can communicate with it. This is called resolving an address.

The entities which are responsible for directing you to the appropriate "country" (top-level domains - com, org, net, etc) are called root nameservers. They can direct you to the subordinate nameserver that knows about .com addresses or the server that knows about .net addresses, etc. Without them, since things on the Internet sometimes change, the entire system would fail.

Now here's the kicker: There are only thirteen root servers in the entire world, labelled A through M. Nine of these are physical machines in a single location (the rest are distributed). Eight of these are in the United States. Each is heavily protected by concrete bunkers, heavy security, shielded lines, etc. So you're going to have a make a pretty big bang. It will probably take five or six root nameservers going down to affect the Internet heavily. (This almost happened a few years ago.)

What would happen:

For a while, everything will be okay for many people. The top-level DNS records are cached by providers all over the world, so destroying them won't interrupt all service immediately. There may be intermittent failures in less-used domains. Smaller providers may invalidate their caches before larger ones, so users outside of cities will be unable to resolve domain names. After a while, certain domains with changing addresses will become unavailable. Before that, though, somebody will build a new set of root servers. It will still take a while to get everything back up to speed (how do you get that information to service providers?) so your evil plan will still be a limited success!

Method 2: Make your own root nameservers (or modify the existing ones)
What you'll need: A lot of fairly talented hackers and a pretty fast connection
Effectiveness: Brief
How it works:

Nobody says that you have to use root servers A through M (well, okay, Microsoft says so). You can easily use your own root servers and your own top-level domains (i.am.awesome) if somebody is willing to trust your system for information. You'll need to set up a system that knows all about the existing top-level domains, and directs people asking about them to phony addresses. Alternatively, you could hack the existing root servers and change their tables to point to your phony addresses. Since these tables may be stored in hardware, this could prove difficult.

Next, you'll have to hack every major service provider and either erase or invalidate their DNS cache. While you're in there, if you made your own root nameserver, you'll have to change their settings to point at those instead of the ICANN ones.

What would happen:

Unlike the previous method, this will cause a massive service interruption as nobody is able to access any domains. Unfortunately, unless you're more clever than the system's designers (unlikely), this includes the companies whose records you just destroyed, and they'll get to fixing those fairly quickly.

Method 3: Disable an Internet Exchange Point (IXP)
What you'll need: Very large scissors (or the same stuff from Method 1)
Effectiveness: Medium
How it works:

Backbone networks provide service to large businesses in a whole geographical region. They are physical networks that consist of direct physical (wires) or satellite links between networked devices. Your Internet Service Provider either is a customer of or owns one of these networks.

An IXP is the location at which two or more backbone networks join together to form the global Internet. Each participating backbone provider plugs into devices called ethernet switches which direct incredible amounts of traffic (gigabytes per second) from one network to another. There are fifteen such locations in North America, with members such as AT&T, NASA, and British Telecom.

So to destroy the Internet, basically, we'd have to unplug those networks from that switch. The best way to do this would be to destroy the device itself, but cutting each individual wire would delay things for a while while somebody spliced a new tip. Eliminating one such IXP would remove service to a great number of people. I recommend the London Internet Exchange, which serves over half of named computers on the Internet.

What would happen:

Backbone networks will be unable to communicate directly. Although many will still be able to route communications through other networks, Internet access will slow down beyond the frustration level for most users. Data going from Pittsburgh to France, for instance, might be routed first through Japan and New Zealand, depending on which IXP(s) you destroyed. If you picked your target(s) well, many networks may be unable to communicate at all.

There might also be a temporary outage (described in the introduction) as every router in the world adjusts to the new network topology.

Method 4: Packet flood
What you'll need: About a million computers on high-speed connections
Effectiveness: High
How it works:

Networks can only transport a limited amount of data in a fixed time. If your network can handle 1000 megabits per second, attempts to send any more than 1000 megabits are going to have to wait until the next second. Your home Internet connection is likely capable of some much smaller value, in kilobits per second.

Furthermore, recipients of network data are required by the most common protocols to respond to the sender with an acknowledgement (ACK) signal when they receive the data. This effectively doubles the number of computers that you can use to send signals.

So, if a large number of computers send random information to a large number of random recipients, the networks of those individuals would be quickly rendered ineffective. If those large numbers of computers are on very distinct networks in distinct areas of the world, Internet providers will be unable to block the flood of useless information.

What would happen:

This is called a packet flood (or SYN flood) denial of service (DOS) attack and actually happens on a smaller scale on a fairly regular basis. The older variant of DOS attack used a single high-speed computer bombarding one or more slower computers. Modern variants recruit networks of "zombie computers" using malicious programs (e.g. viruses) unwittingly installed on users' computers. These attacks are often used to block access to useful services like Microsoft's Windows Update. The 2003 Blaster computer worm was designed to do just this on a specific date.

A third, and very dangerous, variant uses bogus "return addresses" and the ACK signals from innocent computers to bombard a target. In this variant, there is no need to infect the zombie computers - any server will do. When such an attack was successfully carried out in 2002, it generated almost 8 gigabits per second of Internet traffic.

In our case, since we're randomly choosing targets, it will affect every network in the world at the same time. If our attack also installs an Internet worm (Method #5), we could continually grow our army of noise until the useless data overwhelms the Internet and forces the people who run it to pull the plug(s).

Method 5: Clip all the service lines
What you'll need: Wire cutters, a hard hat, patience
Effectiveness: Very high
How it works:

Very simply - everybody is connected to the Internet by one or more wires, most of which are hanging in the air. Simply cutting those wires will eliminate the Internet connection to all those served by them. Simply look at the areas affected by power and service loss following a single storm to deduce the effectiveness of this method.

You will, however, need a lot of patience and some sort of invisibility suit. That's a lot of wires. If you're lucky, though, you'll take out everybody's cable TV and telephone service in the process. Try to avoid the electric lines.

What would happen:

It sometimes takes providers days to restore electric and phone service following a heavy ice storm or thunderstorm. These only eliminate a small fraction of the wires. If you cut all of them, it will take exactly as long as it took to put the wires up in the first place, as they'll all need to be replaced.

Result: Severe long-term Internet outages, particularly if you hit companies providing Internet services for a lot of businesses. Massive financial chaos. If the process takes long enough, companies will abandon their Internet ways of doing things and likely be reluctant to try it again.

Method 6: Discover and exploit a new network-based buffer overflow bug
What you'll need: Patience, practice, a computer
Effectiveness: High (but brief)
How it works:

Computer programs often store received or input data in sections of their memory called buffers, which are usually of a fixed size (say, 1024 bytes). Sometimes, and more often than they should, careless programmers accidentally allow a program to read input longer than some buffer in which it will eventually be stored. Let's say, for instance, that our programmer accidentally allows users (or another program) to provide 1024 bytes of input but, through some error, that data ends up in a 1000 byte buffer. Something has to happen to those extra 24 bytes, and that something is usually that they're written as though the buffer is actually 1024 bytes long. (Alternatively, the program might crash. This is actually the cause of many program crashes.)

This means that any data that was stored right next to the buffer in memory has been replaced by the last 24 bytes of the input. Now, if input is almost never longer than 1000 bytes, the programmer might not find this problem during testing. (This is how many such problems escape notice.) A malicious hacker, however, might be able to use those extra 24 bytes to put dangerous programming code into places where it shouldn't necessarily be going.

Most recent Windows worms work this way: A security group finds a flaw in Windows. If this flaw is a buffer overflow, some hacker easily writes a program that exploits it. The hacker can then do anything he wants to any computer with the flaw, including using it to spread the worm to more computers. These infected computers are then used, for instance, to cause damage to networks by executing distributed denial of service attacks (see Method #5).

What would happen:

If a worm infected enough computers worldwide with malicious software that continuously bombarded random addresses with data, the Internet would, as with several of the other moethds, slow to a crawl. This would be the global Internet, though, and not a single subset of it. Businesses might disable their network connections or restrict access to networked computers in order to prevent their data from being corrupted. This has happened several times in the past few years, each time producing billions of dollars of damage.

A single coordinated attack, appearing in several countries at once, would be devastating, driving users to disconnect their computers for the safety of their information.

Method 7: Government seizure
What you'll need: A substantial military and a powerful despot
Effectiveness: Total
How it works:

Simply order all of your country's telecommunications providers to disconnect their networks from other networks except those used by the government.

What would happen:

At worst, the government could simply unplug every network from its backbone. At not much better, they could simply restrict content within your own country and simply pull those plugs leading to other countries.

Method 8: Charge money for ridiculous things
What you'll need: A service that is current highly used and free (email)
Effectiveness: High
How it works:

Like you, criminals can also obtain access to the Internet for free. These criminals are sending spam emails by the millions, flooding servers with unnecessary data, and driving users away from certain email providers. They are also writing viruses and worms that disable personal computers and networks. They are posting pornographic images, leading to legal battles regarding the protection of children.

Major corporations have proposed many methods for eliminating or reducing the number of criminals who are able to use the Internet for malicious purposes. Most of these solutions involve some sort of payment for using a service. For instance, imagine if your company had to spend 1.5 cents per email it sent. That doesn't seem like much, but many companies send thousands of emails per day. This is over half a million dollars for a service that the company already uses for free.

Other companies have proposed a "priority routing" service, in which clients whose emails is preferred (for whatever reason) gets priority in reaching its destination over data from Joe College from his dorm room. This means that users using such a high-priority service could send emails in a few seconds while users of a low-priority service might be better off sending their emails via the postal service.

Since most people mainly use the Internet to communicate, charging money for things that are already free might drive users away from popular Internet services like America Online. When 22 million people leave the Internet, it leaves a big hole.

What would happen:

Home users who could not afford the new services would probably disable their Internet connections. The phone, after all, is largely free and faster than waiting six hours for an email to arrive. Email would be used in extraordinary circumstances where time was not an issue. Small business users who send thousands of emails per day would be charged exhorbitant prices per email and probably return to using fax machines and the postal service, like they did ten years ago. If prices are not exhorbitant, they will not stop spammers. In the end, the only people using the Internet would be the people who used it to begin with: the government, big businesses, and geeks (who have other ways to do things).

Method 9: Decrease the signal to noise ratio
What you'll need: Approximately 100 gigabytes of gibberish, or people capable of writing it
Effectiveness: Well underway
How it works:

The whole purpose of the Internet is to communicate information. If that information is useless, full of propaganda, or downright incorrect, there is no real reason to continue using the system. The producer of a satirical Usenet newsgroup (predecessor to the modern web message board) called alt.destroy.the.internet noted that a network overrun with useless data is no different than a network that is missing. A quick look at the remains of that newsgroup (now operated, like all others, by Google) shows that the author was not far off in his predictions. Every post during the past two years is an advertisement for $PENI$ PILL$*& or some other product.

Spam isn't the only way in which useless information is filling the Internet. The BBC recently reported that a declassified document recently released by the US Department of Justice speaks of foreign psychological warfare reaching United States citizens. With the global Internet, psyops data and propaganda - intentionally false information - released in other countries often finds its way back to Americans, who repeat it as though true.

Finally, the biggest problem with the Internet is that anybody can release information on the Internet. Publishers of false or questionable data often go out of their way to make their data look official. Furthermore, the Internet's anonymity provides crackpots, quacks, ideologues, bigots, and other fine examples of human society a place to extoll their views. The Internet's availability makes strange practices and beliefs seem commonplace. After all, if almost 400 people on the Internet have witnessed the same paranormal phenomenon as me or practice the same sexual fetish, we must be normal!

What would happen:

Despite the best efforts of publishers and honest people, information obtained via the Internet would be rendered untrustworthy at best. Most professionals also will not accept arbitrary websites as sources without corroborating data from a trusted non-Internet source. In other words, as a source of information, the Internet is no more useful than a card catalog.

Furthermore, any attempts to automatically filter the useless data will either fail to filter useless data or filter a lot of useful data in the process. This has been a problem for services which try to disable minors' access to adult websites. Even Google, the hero of automatic data analysis, has trouble distinguishing between news articles and adult websites in their SafeSearch feature.

An internet filled with useless data is the same as an internet that is not present.

Method 10: Solve some difficult math problems
What you'll need: More intelligence (or luck) than any mathematician in the past 60 years
Effectiveness: Brief
How it works:

Most data passed over the Internet is passed "in the clear". If that data is intercepted, anybody can read it as though they were the recipient. It's like opening somebody else's mail and reading a letter written to them. Financial data, and data passed between businesses, is often encrypted, or mangled in some way that makes it unreadable except to the recipient. It's like writing a letter to somebody in a secret code, like Enigma. Anybody who opens the letter will find a useless garble of seemingly random letters (if you use strong encryption), but the recipient, who has a machine that can decode the letters, can read the original message.

There are various methods, or algorithms, of encrypting data. Most of them depend on a particular mathematical problem being "hard", meaning that they take a lot of time for a computer to solve. The best encryption algorithms depend on problems that would require longer than 15 billion years to solve with present computers. As computers get faster, problems that were previously considered hard become easy (requiring 1 year instead of 15 billion), and we change encryption algorithms. However, new technology that could speed up computers to the same degree as has occured since 1970 is unlikely to emerge in the near future.

These problems range from simple (factoring very large numbers) to convoluted (discrete logarithms). Speed, in terms of algorithms, is measured by complexity, or how many times we have to look at each piece of data to solve the problem. Solving one of these problems means discovering or inventing a fast algorithm for solving the problem, rather than the complex algorithms that exist today.

What would happen:

All security on the Internet would briefly become non-existent. Financial institutions and even your email provider would be in chaos. Every web browser in the world would instantly become obsolete. Solving just one or two problems would greatly startle the financial world while every business in the world raced to update its software.

Of course, the Internet would never be the same. Internet worms propagate quickly in many cases because people are slow to update their computers. Most are stopped not because people update but because providers filter information known to be sent by a worm. The problem of encryption, though, is not one that any Internet provider can solve. Every single computer, running every single operating system, in the world would need to be updated at the same time to use different encryption algorithms. (Of course, this update operation is often also protected by encryption, further compounding the problem!)

Method 11: Refuse to cooperate with IANA's policies on IP addressing
What you'll need: Selfish nationalism, spunk
Effectiveness: Very high
How it works:

IP addresses must be unique. That is, given an IP address, we should be able to identify a specific device attached to the Internet. With the current system of addressing, approximately 4 billion devices can use IP addresses at the same time. With a newer system - IPv6 - that is not very widespread, approximately 50 million billion billion addresses could be assigned for each person alive today. Nevertheless, each of these must be unique for a given device.

At the present time, IP addresses are assigned by IANA - the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority - a subset of the ICANN group, which performs this role under contract with the US Department of Commerce. This group is a United States not-for-profit corporation, and it is in a provider's best interests to cooperate with it. Other networks are not likely to cooperate with a group that refuses, because the threat of duplicate IP addresses on incooperative systems could hinder their ability to route data to the intended recipient.

But you can refuse! In fact, some countries that are political or financial enemies of the United States are pushing the United Nations to seize control of this authority. Other countries are backing them out of simple nationalism - why should the United States have all the power on the Internet? Some countries will likely go ahead with the plan regardless of the United States' objections.

What would happen:

If any of these countries use IP ranges that are already assigned to devices in the United States, then those networks cannot be attached to the global Internet. This does not mean they won't work; network devices will still route the data appropriately within that nework. In the end, if nobody intervenes and makes a global body for assigning IP addresses, the world will no longer have a single global Internet. Instead, the biggest interconnection in the history of mankind will be fractured into several Internets, each responsible for a particular area, with its own alternative to IANA and ICANN. Nobody on one Internet would have access to materials on another Internet without severe limitations.

So, um, try to avoid doing any of these things. We don't need another dot-com bust. If you can think of any other ways, post them as comments!

(I have no idea what's up with blogger's fonts. Try to ignore them.)

Recently, the media has occasionally reported on a school board or home school group who have elected to use creationism or intelligent design (not the same thing unless you're dishonest) materials in their lessons. Naturally, in our secular society, this sort of learning is frowned upon in favor of solid scientific theory and evidence. The court cases brought by concerned parents become media frenzies as each publication attempts to accurately report on the proceedings without devolving into a fit of giggles. The local atheists grin from ear to ear when the courts inevitably rule that intelligent design does not belong in the science classroom. Despite this, school districts continue to defy the courts, instituting intelligent design curriculums in such distant places as California, Pennsylvania, and Kansas. But all of these pale before one episode of forgotten courtroom drama.

The time is 1871. The place is England. It's been twelve years since Charles Darwin's publication of his revolutionary Origin of Species. The book has enjoyed considerable success, as a philosophical viewpoint, as a science, and as a way for atheists to bash those silly religious people once and for all. Darwin is primed to be hailed as a genius and a hero for the next 140 years. Earlier in the year, he released his seminal work on the evolution of human beings, The Descent of Man. In this book, he suggested that all creatures, including humans, were ultimately descended from a slug-like sea creature called an ascidian.

But humanity wasn't about to take this sitting down. Descended from an ascidian? Oh no! Oh shocking! Those darn atheists and heathens were just trying to ruin the Christian faith! Preachers railed against the theory from the pulpit. In the end, humanity was offended enough to file a lawsuit against Darwin in the British court. The court case was called "Homo vs Darwin", and it was momentous enough to warrant publication of the transcript in the United States.

The arguments presented in this court case are the predecessors of modern creationism. Occasionally, Darwin appears the fool and the court official criticizes his logic on several occasions. Even if none of the arguments are new, it's still a fairly entertaining read!

Naturalism - The philosophical claim that all phenomena, supernatural or otherwise, can be studied by the same methods. A naturalistic approach to inquiry limits itself to natural, physical, and material approaches. Methodological naturalism, the variant used in the scientific method, assumes that all observations have a natural explanation, leaving no room for the supernatural. In other words, this philosophy, central to the scientific method, excludes the supernatural as an explanation before it begins. Another form of naturalism, called metaphysical naturalism, holds that the natural world is all that exists. True? Maybe. False? Maybe. Impossible to know? Yes.

Uniformity - This is the assumption that the future will resemble the past and that the past resembles the present. The philosopher Hume made much of this assumption in his works on miracles, claiming that the uniformity of the universe proves that miracles are impossible. The structure of the philosophy and the fallacy of making this assumption rigid can be demonstrated by a magic bag of marbles.

Assume that the universe is that bag and every scientific investigation is pulling a marble from the bag. The earliest scholars pulled marbles and found that red marbles are always followed by blue marbles, and vice versa, but did not have the scientific tools necessary to determine whether all of the red marbles were the same. Modern study has made this simple - every red marble is followed by a blue marble, which is followed by an identical red marble, etc. This is the case every time somebody performs an experiment and pulls a new marble from the bag.

Now, in some ancient work (or modern news story), we read about a man, perhaps claiming to be a prophet, who reached into the bag and extracted a red marble, and then immediately extracted another red marble. Horrors! Miracles! Signs and wonders! Naturally, given our experience with the bag, we might question the authenticity of that second marble. The observation was wrong, the man was a nutbag, or the ancients were simply stupid, confusing blue for red. Hume argued that we should distrust the earlier story because the total experience of mankind has proven beyond reasonable doubt that the bag contains only alternating red and blue marbles.

Is this justified? Since there is at least one instance in which two red marbles may have been produced, we cannot verify Hume's assumption. The total experience of mankind is ripe with stories of dual reds, dual blues, purples, greens, yellows, and aquamarines! We must discount all of these stories before we can even begin to assume that uniformity is true. Since we were not there, we can only do this by making the assumption that there are only alternating red and blue marbles in the bag - that is, we must assume that uniformity is true!

Empiricism - The assumption or philosophy that all human knowledge comes from experience or the senses. It is this assumption that has led to the great boom in experimental science over the past two centuries, and led to a great number of advances as a result. Humans, it says, are born with no innate ideas about the supernatural, the universe, etc. Therefore, the only knowledge we can say is true is that which has been demonstrated and tested via the scientific method. Some religions claim that there are other sources of knowledge - revealed knowledge, for instance - and that these should be given equal weight. Some quantum physicists also argue that the many-worlds interpretation shows that our experience is irrelevant. Who is right? It's impossible to be certain, but scientists assume for the sake of the scientific method that this is the case.

Instrumentalism - This important philosophy, largely ignored by the scientific community, claims that all of the concepts and theories produced by scientific research are merely tools that happen to be the best way to explain phenomena. These theories and concepts do not necessarily represent actual reality, but merely explain it. Scientists before the 20th century generally assumed this to be the case, but this philosophy is not given much attention in modern thought.

In the 19th century, scientists assumed that a fluid called luminiferous ether [2] [3] [4] permeated the entire universe and was the conduction medium in which light travelled. During its reign, the luminiferous ether provided elegant explanations for the behavior of light, electricity, and magnetism. The interactions between the aether and matter were well-documented and explained all of the known properties of light. James Clerk Maxwell, the pioneer of electromagnetic theory, expressed his famous equations in terms of the ether. Twenty years after Maxwell's death, clever experiments showed that the luminiferous ether did not exist and, twenty years after that, the theory was largely replaced by Einstein's theory of relativity. Maxwell's equations were adjusted into their modern form to compensate for the lack of ether.

Clearly, although the ether does not exist, it provided a powerful framework in which scientists developed everything from the telephone to the radio to the electric light. Contemporary science writers did not lament the lack of information about the ether. They speculated how it might behave, but its actual nature (and even existence) was irrelevant. How many modern theories, concepts, and structures will be viewed in a similar light in 100 years?

The names of these gentlemen have been changed to protect their identities. We would not want their descendants to suffer as a result of their failings.

John Guiseppe

Mr Guiseppe, the son of a Kentucky Baptist minister, held office intermittently between 1806 and 1852. In 1806, he was appointed, not elected, to a seat in Congress, violating the Constitution by serving under the Congressional age limit of thirty. He never served more than a nine year stint before being resigning or being voted out of office, clearly showing that he could never make up his mind. He was the architect of several major deals, including one which limited the rights of citizens in United States territories to make their own property decisions. He was called the "Great Compromiser" by the contemporary media, a testament to his ideological flip-flops. He switched from the House to the Senate between terms, an unacceptable practice for somebody who wishes to properly influence American policy.

Furthermore, he failed at bids for President not once, but five times. He took strong views on property rights, causing a majority of the United States to reject him. At the end of one election, he commented that he would rather be right than President, signifying his stubborn refusal to moderate his extremely liberal views. According to biographers, he had the same electric and hypnotic speaking style later adopted in part by the fascist dictatorships prior to World War 2, with listeners claiming it was the most beautiful instrument they had ever experienced. He was also noted by his biting sarcasm, superficial research, half-knowledge and unwillingness to follow his propositions to their logical result. He was fond of alcohol, introducing several drinks to the Washington area that are still served to this day.

He was buried in a cemetery near his home in Kentucky. His epitaph attempted one final time to deny the ethnic and cultural diversity in America by reading, "I know no North, no South, no East, no West".

Samuel Tavington

Mr Tavington lived through several American wars, yet did not fight in any of them, choosing instead to produce a series of esoteric political statements. He was a Deist, like many rich white men at the time, and had professed doubts to his friends about the divinity of Jesus Christ. He was intimately involved with the French and enjoyed illicit sex with many of his servants, despite being married. He once claimed to have a "canine thirst for popularity".

He advocated a fastidious and pure lifestyle for women, believing that they should never be seen in public with a pin out of place. He commented in a letter on the cleanliness of women at the time, calling their slovenly hygiene disgusting and foul. He believed women should be restricted to housekeeping and childbearing, even outright declaring that he saw no reason to give them the vote. He felt that allowing women to join discussions with men would lead to sexual tension that might disrupt the pure intellectual nature of those discussions. It has been suggested that his personality led him to associate female sexuality with uncleanness, a view echoed by the ancient Hebrews in the book of Leviticus, which also declares homosexuality a sin.

His ventures as a politician led to the vast expansion of the territory of the United States by opening the way to the repression of its native people and environment. He was a poor public speaker and mumbled his way through his many speeches. He was cold and aloof to strangers, although warm and friendly with those friends who no doubt contributed highly to his election fund. He was disliked strongly by a large portion of the American people, who attacked him anonymously via the newspapers.

His personal views were influenced by European thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a famed romantic philosopher who had an affair with his much older teacher when he was sixteen years old. He was also friends with avowed anti-Christian Thomas Paine. He also viewed most American thinkers as "second rate".

Thomas Soman

Thomas Soman was a statesman around the time of the Revolutionary War in America. He was a member of the committee for the Constitution but did not like the direction in which it was headed, and so abandoned the committee before the document was completed. In doing so, he also abandoned his friendship with that noble father of our country, George Washington. After the document was placed into office, Soman continued to agitate for his own ideas of what it should have been, ignoring the good judgment of the leaders of this country. He died in 1796 after so hounding the famous Founding Fathers that they eventually implemented eleven of his ideas to keep him quiet.

Soman was prolifically sexual, fathering some twelve children over twenty years with two different wives. Each of his children inherited this tendency, bearing the man some seventy grandchildren by the year 1800.

As you can see from his portrait, Soman was a rotund, unattractive man with a hooked nose. Clearly a man with such a demeanor belongs in a bakery or a fudge factory and not the seat of a President or Senator. He would never stand before a television camera or pose for a newspaper photograph in modern politics.

James Parker

Recently described as the original stud in American politics, Parker held powerful sway over the young American government.

Parker was a plantation owner who owned a bevy of slave men and women. His plantation, among other crops, cultivated hemp, otherwise known as marijuana. He publicly professed knowledge of the immorality of slavery. However, he refused to free those slaves he personally owned. He kept his personal slaves in miserable huts and did not provide them with proper clothing for the chilly weather that sometimes afflicted his location. One of Parker's slaves actually escaped the horrid conditions and fled to New Hampshire, where she lived out her life in relative freedom.

He was a non-religious man, often leaving church services prior to communion as a gesture of hatred toward the Christian church. When clergy complained that he was setting a poor example by leaving, he simply stopped showing up at all. Despite this, he publicly professed his religious beliefs, often asking for the blessings of Heaven, and once served as a lay officer for the Church of England. He is fortunate that his constituents were so gullible: such hypocrisy would never stand in a modern politician.

He was also a member of the Freemasons, a ritualistic pseudo-religious society that has been criticized for its secrecy and its propagation of a "good ol' boy" network. (Some modern critics even compare Freemasonry with a cult.) Upon being sworn into his government office, he demanded to swear upon a Masonic Bible, which he then kissed.

Parker's health was hideous. Having lost his teeth at a young age, he had them replaced by those of various animals, including elk and hippopotamus. During his lifetime, several men under his command were hanged for sedition and treason, for supposedly attempting to thwart his rule. He was not a virile man, having been made sterile by a case of tuberculosis. He also suffered from repeated episodes of gout.


Would you vote for these men? Why or why not?

Maybe you should highlight here:
Mr Guiseppe is Henry Clay. Mr Tavington is Thomas Jefferson. Mr Samon is George Mason. Mr Parker is George Washington. Mr Mason's eleven ideas were the Bill of Rights and the 11th Amendment. Yes, some of the biographical details are wrong, but, then, so are some of the biographical details commonly known about our current politicians.