Shanghai Yummy

I don't have a lot of time for an entry today, but I wanted to clarify a couple of things from the last diatribe.

I used the word "vote" in the last entry as a very general term. You vote every day on the future of mankind with your actions. This incluces, but is not limited to, how you spend your money, what demands/requests you make of products and companies and people, and of course, participating in elections.

To clarify on PGP, one cannot pretend to be me having only my public key. PGP is an asymmetric cryptography system. The issuer of a signed message signs the message with a private key which only they hold. A public key is used to verify that the message is authentic. Simiarly, someone can encrypt a message to me using my public key, and only my private key will be able to decrypt it. Therefore, someone holding my public key is able to: 1) verify that a message was signed by my private key (which only I hold) and thus have a very good degree of confidence that the message was written by me, and 2) encrypt a message that they want only me to read, because a message encrypted to my public key is only decrypt-able by my private key. There is plenty of information on the net about PGP and other asymmetric crypto-systems. For more info, try The International PGP Page and this page on PGP's history. I might add that I link to the International PGP Page from my contact page, which was referenced in the original post announcing this change. So, someone can copy and paste the text off of this page, and then edit it, or someone can write some other message entirely, but they cannot sign it with my private key. The signature is not a copy and paste deal; it is generated from the content of the message plus my private key. So changing the message will invalidate the signature. Bottom line: There Can Be Only One.

Finally, I want to say that I am a Boeing fan. I go out of my way to fly Boeing aircraft, and I was very excited about the 777 and the 747 will always be Queen of the Sky, even after the A380 boat comes out. But the point of my last entry was, even being such a fan of Boeing, I can't help but feel that the world is getting complacent. Like I said, we should have all been flying Mach 2.2 by 1980 if you saw the rate things were going in the 60's, but we allowed ourselves to be overwhelmed by an establishment whose purpose is to do as little as possible to make as much money as possible. Despite this, I actually do hope the Sonic Cruiser gets the go-ahead, but even the prospects of that don't look that good right now. Let's hope anyway.

PGP Signed Entry