I think people underestimate the psychological effect of small bombings, I've been in one, sure I didn't have a scratch on me, but running through the gore with peices of people raining down on me, that I will never forget. To this day I abhore elevators and open front shops, they scare me to death, so in a way it was a terrorist victory, the difference is I take that fear and keep on doing what I want instead of hiding. Hit small town America and watch these parents pull their kids out of school, off teams, demanding more cops on the grounds, metal detectors, the national guard, security dogs. THAT is what terrorists really want, mass panic, marshal law, the suspension of human rights, because THEN they have a victory over our system of freedom, once they take away the SENSE of freedom there is no need to destroy Democracy, you just let it crumble. "Maybe thats exactly what they want, us to put soldiers on the streets, and herd our kids into stadiums." - The Seige. After 9/11 people were scared of planes and skyscrapers, what if it had been a bus or three, or a school, a prison, a courthouse, a McDonalds. Hit them were they feel safe is twice as damaging as hitting them where they are already afraid, make little Johnny afraid to go to school because the muslim kids might blow themselves up, trigger panic and racism and then really watch this country burn. Least, that is what I would do, if I were a terrorist.

Bingo, you win a cookie. The truth is that as fear inspiring as a "shock and awe" bombing is, like say an airplane, if you REALLY wanted to damage this country you would set off a sarin gas bomb at four or five homecoming rallies at middle schools, one a day for a school week, claim to represent Iran, and watch the sparks fly. "People said Hitler was crazy, Hitler wasn't crazy, Hitler was an imbecile. You don't FIGHT Russia and America, you get Russia and America to fight each other, and destroy each other."

Listen, I am not sure at all that the parent was attempting to say that violence, in this specific case, was the default solution. I believe, and could be mistaken, that he/she was talking about last resorts. The main premise here is if it is justifiable to break the law if the law is unjust; the answer, according to historical precedent, is a resounding YES. Need a few examples? Civil rights movement in the US, it was ILLEGAL for Americans of African descent to eat at "all white" establishments. This is a prime example of an unjust law, and by staging sit ins and restaurant owners allowing desegregated restaurants they were, by law, criminals. My grandfather was a criminal because he refused to have segregated bathrooms or drinking fountains in his store, he was given numerous tickets and fines over the years and was the object of intense harassment, I live in NC, just so you know. In the face of an oppressive government which, by nominal standards, is criminal armed resistance is certainly a fair choice. The American Revolution, the French Revolution, Cuba, Brazil, the current situation in Iran, these are great examples of justifiable force. The people who advocate a peace only approach are generally the first to surrender their rights, granted not in all cases, but "bloodless" revolutions, even justified ones, tend to end with the rebellion being put down by overwhelming force. An anonymous friend of mine participated in the Iranian Revolution and told me from the start it could only end in one or two ways, the Government using force, or the Resistance using force, the world watched the end result of that little experiment. If you are in a small unarmed group and the government comes with guns saying; "Disband or we attack," there is little you can do. If you are implying that small groups of, terrorists, can't make a difference I advise you to get a history book. Horrible as it may have been good luck arguing that the 9/11 hijackers didn't completely change American history!

You know I have often wondered if evolution isn't simply a race to sentience. It might seem bizarre, but with all the risks consciousness brings it also brings the best chance for long term survival by creative thinking. As for bootstrapping technology there is always this assumption that our technology is going to be ANYTHING like theirs. Sure there are universal constants and those should give us some measure of compatibility unless they have a completely different perception of the Universe. We are largely visual creatures so we naturally assume another intelligent species would be as well, except it might be far too much of a liability on plenty of planets to have something so weak as an eye and be so dependent on it. Other races could just as easily describe the world in terms smell, electromagnetic fields, vibrations, temperature, etc.

I'm still trying to figure out why everyone is assuming that there are likely tons of more advanced civilizations out there, I mean it is entierly possible that we are way ahead of the curve. Problem is, without MUCH faster than light travel, when we, or they, show up to Visit they are likely to find Neanderthals or Gods. Too many variables, too early in the morning, too much tusinex.

While I may be off base here I do have a suggestion; perhaps we could all cut a deal with the Japanese, give them a new country, preferably NOT in the middle of cyclone central, and far away from the Chinese, we then decimate the island, place all of the prison lifers/deathers on the island giving them only tools to hunt Jellyfish, and leave. We either get rid of the prisoners or the jellyfish and preferably BOTH. What's this "humane" you speak of?

EXACTLY, Christ why do so many people misunderstand this? Any truly clever piece of malware/viruses are going to require very few system requirements, there is no point in stealing data if it gets caught. Could you seriously say to me that if my keylogger has no identifiable processes, ran on sub 15mb of RAM, only sent files in and out when you were using an active http/bittorent/ftp connection that 60% of users would catch it? Let's be realistic here, frankly for all intents in purposes one of the most effective attacks I saw for a company I was contracted to "solve" was this: They used client access, there were frequent odd hour logins of multiple users with sysdev and qsysopr privileges running throughout late afternoon and night, a very small spike in webtraffic around 1AM over exchange to unknown foreign IP addresses. After the usual questions about security/antivirus/firewall/users/etc I asked how often the security team actually goes and looks at these PCs. I go into the IT office, with eight people....long story, and start running scans looking around and suddenly I notice that the USB plug going into the PC looks, well, weird, so I turn the PC around. It's a jetblack keylogger about the size of a earbud headphone. I plug it into a sandboxy environment and wait for it to find a blackhole network leading nowhere, it starts trying to ping and ftp over logfiles for the past WEEK. Turns out the old System Admin installed these "Security Locks" on the keyboard so no one could visit adult sites, he was fired a month later for sexual harrasment and nobody thought twice about the box. That was one of the biggest guano-holes I have ever been forced to clean up.

You have a point going on here but you stopped your analogy too SOON. The music industry is indeed like the beer industry, and the beer industry has seen the resurgence of microbrewery's and why is this? Microbreweries having been churning out better and more unique beer more and more over the past ten years. and the major beer corporations are being chipped down from being mountains to nice sized hills and the rest of the valley filled in by the little guys. Love it or hate it, Myspace, Facebook, Youtube, these services have functioned as independent record labels, the internet has given a large portion of people the ability to produce, record, market, and SELL there music with very little overhead.

You simple minded fools, we don't bring IN anything to eat the Goats. WE eat the goats! They are food, we feed the goats to the homeless and send millions of their frozen carcasses to Africa for food and reduce the amount of foreign aid we have to provide in the form of money. PRESTO INDEED.

Oh please anyone with the last name of "Punchmyballs" would be given a free pass in my office, we would assume he had been through enough in High School. However we WOULD promote him to a job where he would be known as Mister Punchmyballs, give him a public facing office with a plaque, and send him to corporate overnights.

I do so hate to feed the troll but I do feel obligated to defend my hometown. Yes, I come from Hillbillyville, also known as a lovely small town in rural NC. That is IF you define Hillbillyville as a pleasant town with a statistically abnormally low crime rate, zero murders in three years, and a an unemployment rate of less than three percent. Out of curiosity have YOUR grandparents ever seen the Terminator films, could they describe the functionality of Skynet, or explain why it is ironic to name a robotics company Cyberdyne. Hillybillyville my foot, it's a matter of generational knowledge you git. By the way don't eat the apples, I was annoyed with you and laced them with cyanide. Oh my, too late, well perhaps it is for the best.

I'm not saying that there is no such thing as bad publicity, of course there is. I am simply saying that the people who buy this are going to chuckle at seeing Grandma walk around in an exo-suit with Cyberdyne written on it, likely for reasons I stated in an above reply. Marketers are judged on both how well known a product is and how well it SELLS. I have worked in marketing, clever is great but if you can't move your product you don't HAVE a JOB, much less bonuses. Case in point with the Catholic church they have spent hundred of MILLIONS of dollars dealing with the rape scandal, however religion is actually the greatest marketer's case study in history, right above bottled water. Luckily for the world BOTH are on their way out and being outed as BS, slowly but surely. You have no experience in the field of marketing I take it, so why are you commenting on it? Oh, right, /., as YOU were.

Of course it's clever, it's on /. isn't it? Plus, the target audience is NOT the elderly, they don't trust technology and have likely never even WATCHED the Terminator films. It is targeting good for nothing grandchildren who get this for their grandparents trying to be "helpful," and then proceed to "borrow" it and never give it back. Not to mention whether or not you would WANT it named after the eventual destroyer of humanity would depend on how much you like your grandparents I'd suppose.

They named their company Cyberdyne and later realized their mistake did they? I highly doubt this, clever marketing though. On the other hand I have a coworker who IS actually named John Conner, poor man we covered his office in tin foil while he was on vacation, left him a nice note explaining that we are trying to hide him from satellite surveillance. Did lead to one of the greatest owned moments I have ever seen, our boss from NJ was handing out our new Blackberry Tours, everyone on the IT team got one but John, Jay says "I just thought in the interest of personal safety....these things have GPS tracking you know." He did actually get one of course, but not before we set his ringtone to say "Come with me if you want to live." and play the theme.

Except 95% of history was freaking boring. Seriously hundreds of years of people walking, talking, trying to find food, running out of food, moving somewhere new, getting into pansy-waisted fights over goats and rivers, and getting drunk and telling their grandkids about how they used to be heroes. Think about every single second of YOUR life, I am sitting at work, posting to /., anybody lining to right a thesis on how this contributed to society or thinking future archeologists will go "Amazing, what insight into a primitive people!" We sit around a lot, spent a 1/3 of human history sleeping, they are hundreds of thousands of interesting lives and stories, but there are BILLIONS of stories like THIS: "I was hungry." "People died of malntrition, including my brother" "I think I may be dying to." "Yep, pretty much dead" "...." Who the hell wants movies or games about THAT? The greatest stories in human history are TOTAL bullshit. The Odyssey, The Aeneid, Dante's Inferno, this list goes ON, and ON, and ON, all complete and utter BS, but interesting!