Bruce Schneier makes some good points about the embarassing public displays of stupidity that culminate in a broken home front against terrorism. In his essay, The War on the Unexpected, he writes:
The problem is that ordinary citizens don’t know what a real terrorist threat looks like. They can’t tell the difference between a bomb and a tape dispenser, electronic name badge, CD player, bat detector, or a trash sculpture; or the difference between terrorist plotters and imams, musicians, or architects. All they know is that something makes them uneasy, usually based on fear, media hype, or just something being different.
Here’s the crazy part: all of those examples, if you follow the link to view them on Schneier’s site, actually happened. Particularly interesting are his points about how law enforcement employees, fearful of losing their job, lose their common sense in the process.
When I get home, I will be installing Foxit Reader, a replacement for Adobe’s terrifyingly bad PDF reader called… Reader. A quick description of the replacement:
Foxit Reader is a free PDF document viewer and printer, with incredible small size (only 2.1 M download size), breezing-fast launch speed and amazingly rich feature set. Foxit Reader supports Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/2003/Vista. Its core function is compatible with PDF Standard 1.7.
Here’s the thing, that feature set listed above actually makes Foxit Reader superior to Adobe’s own offerings. I mean… it’s like someone other than Microsoft offering an alternative to Windows that works better than Windows. And Mykala, you still don’t have to worry about all this because, well, Macs come with built in software that reads PDFs.
The pen is mightier than the sword: Often propaganda will work better than overt force. Shackle a man’s hands and he will try to break free, shackle his mind and he will never consider it.
This is the reason I consider false or sensationalist news more dangerous to the wellbeing of society than terrorism.
Discuss, if you’d like. Plus, in this fellow’s signature, he clarifies a spot of grammatical minutiae: i.e. is “that is,” while e.g. is “for example.” So, i.e. is never “for example.” Most educational comment I’ve read in a while — A+++ would read again!
