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I found the official sequel, Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human by K.W. Jeter (one of Philip K. Dick's good friends and the guy who coined the term "steampunk") to be a pretty decent read. Why don't they option that?

They got through it by agreeing to not sell music... Untile they started iTunes and the whole issue came back...

It also came back in the system 7 days when they added Sound Manager. That's why one of the system chimes is named "sosumi"

http://www.boingboing.net/2005/03/24/early_apple_sound_de.html

Boing boing posted a few stories today about different ISPs offering free dialup to people throughout the Middle East, as apparently international phone calls are not being limited at this time. Slow and expensive, but you should be able to access Twitter and Facebook.

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/22/free-dial-up-isp-for.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+(Boing+Boing)

and

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/21/operation-libya-whit.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+(Boing+Boing)

Boing boing posted a few stories today about different ISPs offering free dialup to people throughout the Middle East, as apparently international phone calls are not being limited at this time. Slow and expensive, but you should be able to access Twitter and Facebook.

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/22/free-dial-up-isp-for.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+(Boing+Boing)

and

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/21/operation-libya-whit.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+(Boing+Boing)

This comment seems to sum up the arrogant stupidity of so many posters here so well. I'll grant the poster below that probably the US army could nuke away the red army (though remember China has nukes too, and has been specifically targeting US military systems for a while, so we can assume they have at least some secret systems to do so effectively). The idea that a bunch of gun nuts interfering is going to do anything except slow down the bullets from mini-guns is so stupid that the only comparable stupidity is that of people telling the country that invented toilet paper, most of the basic vegetables you eat, gunpowder that you need for your wars and a bunch of other things that you just expect to use without thought that they own you for your "intellectual property" because "we say so".

China's development is likely to slow down lots; They have environmental problems beyond belief which are going to mess up their economy whether they try to ignore them or not. Building them up into a magical dragon about to eat the world is not going to help you in dealing with this. On the other hand, just a little bit of respect for your fellow intelligent human beings would really really help you to develop into some kind of civilization. Failing to underestimate your potential opponents will also help you avoid problems like the Battle of Unsan. If you could show some kind of consistent respect for the Chinese at the same time as not continually selling out your industrial secrets and industrial future for cheap plastic toys.

You don't see stories because you may not even know about malware hidden behind a facade. For example, Storm 8 was once sending customer phone numbers to themselves without their knowledge. Storm 8 games do a lot of interaction with their servers so it was rather trivial for them to get it past the App Store censors. What I like about android however is that it at leasts tells you what permissions it requires and if it doesn't ask for it the app will not be able to access the relevant section. A wallpaper app for example should not have camera+gps access.

OK, I'll try again.
What does an American hip-hop site, having music tracks provided by the American bands, whose domain was seized by ICE for copyright infringement, have to do with Customs?
Isn't Customs related to bringing goods INTO the US?
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/30/eff-on-us-domain-cop.html

Where exactly is the smuggling here?

And what prompted all the hostility?

They think that this is a good idea because showing up in crowded areas and making a disturbance is an excellent way to remain anonymous.

Your post seems to suggest that Anonymous is smart enough to not show up in person, and that HBGary is only using this as a scapegoat. You seem to think that Anonymous is logical and believes that staying online is the best course of action to preserve their anonymity.

I think you have some reading to do.

Larger protests - may be picking up steam?

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/13/a-bad-day-for-sultan.html

And a hypocrite when it came to accepting government hand-outs while she publicly denounced such things.

I appreciate any bit of opinion from a Chinese person that helps me better understand China; it's very hard, from my experience, to learn what anyone from the People's Republic actually thinks about any given sensitive subject unless you're really, really good friends with them. I imagine that's probably because they spend their whole lives in an environment where you're not supposed to ever say out loud that the authority is wrong, nor are you ever supposed to step out of line.

But again, I think that the more people like you that can comment on these stories the better. What with the astroturfing army and the "angry youth" being seemingly the only kind of Chinese people on the internet, about the only insight into China and Chinese cultural that most of us ignorant Westerners can get is filtered through Taiwanese or Chinese ex-pat opinions of the PRC and its people.

From what I, personally, have experienced, though, Chinese people seem to consistently be extremely hospital, caring people that welcome you as a friend and will help you when you're in need. At the same time, however, they also seem to be ruthless, uncaring and unforgiving monsters that will stop at nothing to get ahead in business.

To most Westerners, I think that those two kinds of behaviors -- caring on a personal level, evil on a business level -- are contradictory. From what you say, though, there's nothing contradictory about that kind of behavior at all to a Chinese person, and it's just business?

Foreign? It's not just foreign. I see it happen at American sites all of the time. Heck, BoingBoing is both one of the biggest fans of Creative Commons licenses and one of the biggest abusers. They always post the CC license link prominently when it allows copying, but when it doesn't they just post the image anyways. And they're about as commercial as a website gets charging some of the heaviest ad rates around. ($20 CPM.) They reportedly raked in more than $1 million in 2006. (http://blogbuildingu.com/articles/making-money-blogging-profiles-of-6-very-successful-blogs)

There's a reason why their masthead lists two lawyers but no staff photographers. They would rather pay the lawyers to spew squid ink about fair use than to pay anything to the people who contribute the art. This attitude, of course, is not unique to this site. A number of sites do it.

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/04/george-bernard-shaws.html

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/06/startups-of-londons.html

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/ol-space-food/

Foreign? It's not just foreign. I see it happen at American sites all of the time. Heck, BoingBoing is both one of the biggest fans of Creative Commons licenses and one of the biggest abusers. They always post the CC license link prominently when it allows copying, but when it doesn't they just post the image anyways. And they're about as commercial as a website gets charging some of the heaviest ad rates around. ($20 CPM.) They reportedly raked in more than $1 million in 2006. (http://blogbuildingu.com/articles/making-money-blogging-profiles-of-6-very-successful-blogs)

There's a reason why their masthead lists two lawyers but no staff photographers. They would rather pay the lawyers to spew squid ink about fair use than to pay anything to the people who contribute the art. This attitude, of course, is not unique to this site. A number of sites do it.

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/04/george-bernard-shaws.html

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/02/06/startups-of-londons.html

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/ol-space-food/

He would be wiser to make it right by sending Mubarak a million out-of-fashion, leftover, unpopular, unsold shoes.

That would likely be a form of insult in the Muslim/Arab world... Muslim

*Whoosh*THUNK!

Boing Boing captures a great comeback at a Kenneth Cole store.

I'd say that portability (and, by extension, longevity) is very important, especially considering that eBooks are often not cheap. Currently ePub is a decent bet - it's supported by most readers (iPad, nook, Sony's range, etc.) and is a fairly simple open format, so even if it's not directly supported in future devices it will be easy to convert without loss of formatting and so forth. The one notable exception here is the Kindle, which requires books to be converted into its own format before reading.

The real problem, though is that if it's DRM'ed it's not portable, and can't be converted to another format. There are very few DRM free options out there, and none that do exist have the range that the major sellers do. Currently Apple forces sellers to use DRM, whether the author and publisher want to or not - I'm not sure how strong the DRM on Apple purchases is, but even so I'd recommend against supporting that behaviour by purchasing from them.

This isn't about protecting children, it's about making damn sure no men get to roleplay as hot female elves:

http://boingboing.net/2007/09/26/chinese-mmo-bans-ing.html

I did read the review before its site got Slashdotted and it was a relatively mild rebuke of the restaurant, saying that it was new so it might be understandable not to have everything fully running but since he had other options for Japanese food the reviewer wouldn't be returning, the "Benihana experience" not being enough of a draw. It got a bit more angry in the comments because the manager of the restaurant obviously was attempting to "astroturf" the review with counter reviews supposedly from different people but apparently from the same IP. The reviewer did NOT accuse the restaurant of illegal or unethical practices, only of unnotable presentation of mediocre food.

Also, the legal actions seem to be the responsibility of the manager of the restaurant and not at all related to Benihana of Tokyo as a corporate entity. Cory Doctorow actually contacted their COO in his article at BoingBoing and said exec understandably refused to comment directly about the suit.

The popular belief these days is that everyone is allowed to a have 'democratic' opinion on any subject regardless if they have any clue as to what they are talking about

These links may also be enlightening:

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/05/12/confident-dumb-peopl.html

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Dunning-Kruger_Effect

... and you didn't link to http://www.boingboing.net/images/muce/8-1.jpg because...?

This is actually a TORX bit, and yes has been around since the 70s and in Europe is used in all sorts of electronics as a deterrent to casual fiddling. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torx

Actually, if you scrolled down to the "Pentalobular" picture on the page you referenced and clicked on it, you would get to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentalobular_screw

Which states, in it's entirety:

A pentalobular screw is a five-pointed security screw being implemented by Apple in its products.[1] It resembles Torx but is not a Torx-Plus security screw and has no commercially available screwdriver equivalent[2].

Pentalobular screws first appeared in mid-2009, holding the battery in the MacBook Pro; smaller versions are now used on the iPhone 4 and the MacBook Air.

[edit] References

1. ^ Frauenfelder, Mark (2011-01-20). "Apple's diabolical plan to screw your iPhone". Boing Boing. http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/20/apples-diabolical-pl.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+boingboing%2FiBag+(Boing+Boing). 2. ^ Madway, Gabriel (2011-01-21). "Apple tightens the screw on iPhone 4". San Francisco, California: Reuters. http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLNE70K02T20110121?loomia_ow=t0:s0:a49:g43:r2:c0.137380:b41167378:z0. Retrieved 2011-01-21.

[edit] External Links

* iFixIt iPhone 4 Liberation Kit

So it may now be classed as a form of Torx but in fact it's a pure Apple; as someone previously noted, not an iScrew but rather a ScrewU.

Except when you send out a C&D that gets your law firm fired...

Seriously, a little due diligence goes a long way here.

You can't be serious.... right? You're comparing a law firm who sends C&D over a phrase which is clearly not a proper noun (as it wasn't capitalized), nor was referring to their client in the context, to a law firm who sends a C&D about game mod, which has a similar name to two of their client's existing IPs (and is a clear play on words of both IPs), uses the assets from one IP, and is trying to copy the other IP? Blizzard has more than plenty legal justification to send a C&D.

Some "due diligence" could have been done on the behalf of the mod's author. He could have called his mod "Secrets of the Lost Widgets" (or more likely something more creative) that didn't use Blizzard's characters or IP (only using the ingame assets which he is allowed to use as per the Map Editor license) and avoided the hammer altogether.

Except when you send out a C&D that gets your law firm fired...

Seriously, a little due diligence goes a long way here.

Actually the chance of getting your electronic things confiscated exists when entering the glorious nation of United States of America as well. Yeah, who's the Free Nation(TM) now?

the rights enshrined in US law are intended to apply to all humans

No. The rights enshrined in US law are intended to apply to all subjects.

That is: the rights are reserved to your financial owners. You, the subjects, have these pieces of paper to make you act like you have rights but, when we show up, you don't really have any. It is a carefully manipulated psychological game to keep all of you nicely under our thumb. It has been that way since we cut everything down in the book of Genesis to starve you out and make you do what we say.

Organized crime falling back on their violent nature maybe. If someone is so immoral that they'd make malware, is it that hard to believe they'd be so immoral as to kidnap or murder the guy, or hire someone to do it for them?

Similar things may have happened before.

Too bad really, I like the google captchas because they were easy to read (and served a greater purpose with the book scanning). honestly I wish they would make some of these things harder though. how often do you really need to make an email account? I've done it just a couple times with google and wouldn't be bothered by a more complex captcha system. i suspect they don't do this because they wouldn't want people to get frustrated and go to hotmail instead because the captcha was too hard.

though in the end you can never really win since the most high profile targets will just get focus from actual humans

on a side note i wish the article had more details on how he was cracking. I suspect most slashdotters like myself have pondered captcha systems and how to improve them.

Palin put a crosshairs over the congresswoman's face in a political setting.

Care to provide a link? I've seen plenty of pics of a map with crosshairs on the congressional districts, such as http://www.boingboing.net/2011/01/08/congresswoman-gabrie.html (an anti-Palin discussion linked by HufPo), but I haven't see one that had crosshairs on portraits. Maybe you're not so polite and insightful and are exaggerating to boost your position, but that would be "just irresponsible."

I hated companies that made my old 1541 disk drive hammer itself into oblivion with their crap copy protection.

No need to go so far back in time. StarForce has been doing the same with optical disk drives in recent years.

An easier target lets you get your foot in the door...

"Music industry spokesman loves child porn"
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/04/28/music-industry-spoke.html

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/29/lamomanning-wikileak.html

"Responding to questions on Twitter, Poulsen wrote that the unpublished portion of the chats contain no further reference to 'private' upload servers for Manning, while Hansen indicated that they contain no further reference to the relationship between Manning and Wikileaks chief Julian Assange."

Yesterday it was noted that they can do this but getting all of those available will exceed their available cash. Seems like a waste of time and energy.

I recently watched The Biggest Street Gang in America. It made you wonder that if we manage to see this sort of footage then what aren't we seeing? But, sometimes 86yo grandmothers do take threatening postures towards you while lying in bed. Multiple fluffy pink pillows of death are within her easy but evil reach begging to be used against you.So of course it's best to stand on her oxygen hose and then taser her a few times until she complies. After all, as a policeman my safety comes first above all else..

...and this has *nothing* to do with 1/20th of the military keeping secrets for their own livelihoods from their superiors for 20 years. As long as the Joint Chiefs go along with it, and make openly serving legal, (you know following that whole 14th ammendment thing) Now the only "squirly" people who are "evasive" will be suspected leakers. Bradley Manning, your service to the military was your swan song. Your service to your nation... well that's still up for debate.

Brings to mind this admittedly speculative article.

Also this article in the telegraph.

Why attack twitter? http://www.twitter.com/wikileaks seems to be working fine, and the explanation at http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/06/why-wont-wikileaks-t.html#comment-958285 for why Wikileaks didn't appear in trending topics makes sense to me. Everyone seems to agree that #cablegate did trend. The issue of why Twitter should be attacked is not mentioned at all in the original article.

There is no point in releasing this.

The State Department covering up a child sex slave racket that was run by a US corporation isn't something that should have been released?

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/07/report-wikileaks-cab.html

If the government is going to pull shit like this, then the only real solution is to deny them secrecy of any kind.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/09/video-of-kids-reacti.html

This is horrifying. That a child has been brought up and taught that the conversion rate for American lives too an entire country is; a few Americans at risk, (after first attempt fails) KILL THEM ALL, because yeah who cares?

Yes he's only a child and may not have a better understanding of the sanctity of human life, but someone taught him this!

Most of the Linux-based appliances that can stream Netflix do so because they contain hardware based DRM support (Western Digital Live Plus contains a Sigma 8654 chip, for example.) Most desktop hardware running Linux has no such support, hence no Netflix. Most Linux users wouldn't tolerate software-based DRM either, so again no Netflix. An unpleasant reality, for sure, but wrong-headed or not, the content owners require it. Not that Netflix is exactly being arm-twisted into requiring DRM, since they don't support DRM-free streaming even when the content owners request it: http://boingboing.net/2010/04/25/nina-paley-passes-ne.html

Personally I can live with this for now, because at least I can buy reasonably priced hardware (probably in part because they contain Linux rather than a more expensive proprietary OS) that does what I (and more importantly my family) want - stream Netflix to my TV. I don't really watch video on my computers much, so I don't miss the lack of streaming content from the web. For those that don't mind, there's always the option of running a Windows instance in a VM which streams Netflix just fine, so I hear.

They are not pointing out specific wrong doings

They are, in fact, pointing out wrong doings.

(1) the U.S. military formally adopted a policy of turning a blind eye to systematic, pervasive torture and other abuses by Iraqi forces;

(2)theState Department threatened Germany not to criminally investigate the CIA's kidnapping of one of its citizens who turned out to be completely innocent;

(3) the StateDepartment under Bush andObama applied continuous pressure on the Spanish Government to suppress investigations of the CIA's torture of its citizens and the 2003 killing of a Spanish photojournalist when the U.S. military fired on the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad (see ThePhiladelphia Inquirer's WillBunch today about this:"The day BarackObama Lied to me");

(4) the British Government privately promised to shield Bush officials from embarrassment as part of its Iraq War "investigation";

(5) there were at least 15,000 people killed in Iraq that were previously uncounted;

(6) "American leaders lied, knowingly, to the American public, to American troops, and to the world" about the Iraq war as it was prosecuted, a conclusion the Post's own former Baghdad Bureau Chief wrote was proven by theWikiLeaks documents;

(7)the U.S.'s own Ambassador concluded that the July, 2009 removal of the Honduran President was illegal -- a coup -- but the StateDepartment did not want to conclude that and thus ignored it until it was too late to matter;

(8) U.S. and British officials colluded to allow theU.S. to keep cluster bombs on British soil even though Britain had signed the treaty banning such weapons, and,

(9)Hillary Clinton's State Department ordered diplomats to collect passwords, emails, and biometric data on U.N. and other foreign officials, almost certainly in violation of the Vienna Treaty of 1961.

(TotH to GG, as usual.) I appreciate why you believe what you wrote. You might want to reconsider your position given your primary source of news is from organizations whose allegiance is to parent corporations that, like Amazon, absolutely cannot afford to get on the wrong side of the government that regulates them.

One of the best places is ACCRC. Usable stuff is refurbished for charity organizations, schools, etc. and the rest is handled responsibly and locally by ECS Refining in Santa Clara

Unlike the "normal" e-waste companies who take hardware and ship it Chindifrica to places where kids melt components off PCBs over an open fire, ACCRC actually does it right.

My God, has it really been 5 Thanksgivings since I wrote my Alice's Restaurant parody in response to a comment on a Slashdot post on "Whose Burden is it to Recycle Computers?" when the CA law came out.

The punchline to the joke is that less than two years after I wrote it, life imitated art. Officer Obie really did have a problem when someone took a big pile of garbage and turned it into something that a school could use, and it was only through the dumb luck of blind justice that the Judge didn't see it that way.

I've never had to pay a dime to ACCRC, but whenever I make a dropoff, I've always tossed a few bucks in as a donation, because I know that anything useful will get used - if not at a school, at least in an art project, and the rest will be disposed of of safely and responsibly.

So we'll sing it again when it comes around on the guitar.

"Reuse any hardware you want from Natalie's Restaurant,
(excepting drives with .JPGs of Natalie)
Reuse any hardware you want from Natalie's Restaurant,
Monitors, just around the back,
Just a half a mile from the railroad track,
And you can get any grits you want at Natalie's Restaurant."

Do de do, dee de doo de doo...

This is the fundamental problem with "crowdsourcing" reviews. Where the number of reviewers is large compared to the number of items being reviewed, as with movies, it works fine. Where the ratio is small, it doesn't. It's far too easy to game the system. There are automated tools for that.

This problem has become worse since the October 27th change to Google, when Google Places/Maps results were merged into web search. This made "local" results much more prominent. Look at the first screen of Google search results for a local product or service. Most of what you see are Google Places results, maps, or ads. The organic results are so far down they don't matter.

As a result, the "black hat" SEO companies are now aggressively targeting Google's places and maps system. "Convert Offline" is quite open about this, with their article Dominating Google Maps- The Most Effective Spam Ever And What You Can Learn From It" In some ways, Google Places is more vulnerable to attack than organic search. The number of web mentions of a local business tends to be small, so the amount of phony material that has to be generated to make a business look good is also small. Each mention carries a lot of weight.

Google might lose this battle. Craigslist did. Back in 2008, Cory Doctorow wrote about "Spammers discuss breaking Craigslist verification system". It's become much worse since then. Personals were the first to go, and are now over 90% spam. Then Computer Services and Self Employment fell to the spammers. Jobs and Real Estate are under attack. Along the way, Gmail became a spam haven, especially after Jiffy Gmail Email Creator became widely used.

The fundamental design assumption of Google is that important stuff has lots of links to it. That's not a valid assumption in local search.

No if you cross the US they just kidnap you and send you to some shithole to be tortured. Then, if it turns out you're not the one they're looking for, they'll dump you out in the middle of nowhere and pressure your government to forget the whole thing ever happened. This is what happened to a German of Lebanese descent and that's a case we know of, god knows what else the CIA is up to where nobody's looking.

According to at least one article ( http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/29/level-3-says-comcast.html ) part of the issue is that the traffic flow between L3 and Comcast is unbalanced, with most traffic going from L3 to Comcast. This means that the normal peering relationship where traffic flow is about even in both directions isn't working. Comcast is bearing a burden of excess traffic from L3 without the normal compensation of equivalent traffic flow in the opposite direction.

On the other hand, there are a few other factors that point to ulterior motives on Comcast's part. First, this is traffic being requested by Comcast subscribers. Comcast doesn't retransmit data to other ISPs, except in limited cases. The peering argument mainly applies to exchanges between backbone providers, while ISPs like Comcast are supposed to get their compensation from their subscribers, not from their peering partners. Given the nature of the net, the downstream flow from the backbone to the ISP will almost always be greater than the flow upward.

Second, it's notable that the telcos haven't requested similar fees. This may be due to a different regulatory environment, but while Verizon and AT&T have started to offer TV service, they still don't (to my knowledge, anyway) charge the upstream providers for content sent to their subscribers.

Third, is Comcast charging any other backbone providers for unbalanced traffic? The articles don't say, but it would be a telling point if they do not.

One last point in mitigation is that maybe L3 just signed a bad peering contract with Comcast and now they are on the hook because they didn't practice due diligence during their contract negotiation.

uses a tremendous amount of bandwidth. I know we should be arguing that they need new infrastructure, but just try to convince comcast to spend 2 billion dollars so you can watch fresh prince of bel-air. Not gonna happen.

Not commenting, just saying:

In October, Internet monitoring service Sandvine said:
Netflix streaming represents 20 percent of all U.S. Internet non-mobile bandwidth use during prime-time hours.

I read it here.

uses a tremendous amount of bandwidth. I know we should be arguing that they need new infrastructure, but just try to convince comcast to spend 2 billion dollars so you can watch fresh prince of bel-air. Not gonna happen.

Not commenting, just saying:

In October, Internet monitoring service Sandvine said:
Netflix streaming represents 20 percent of all U.S. Internet non-mobile bandwidth use during prime-time hours.

I read it here.

The real problem is not on the "negotiating with terrorists" end, it's the other end (the ass end?) that makes problems for everyone by suggesting knee-jerk solutions to the wrong problems.

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/11/24/tom-the-dancing-bug-27.html

Because copyright is theft from the public domain. It's trivially demonstrable that copyright hinders innovation and the economy. Food and clothing are not covered by copyrights and you would find it hard to suggest food and fashion industries are lacking creativity. Further, gross sales of goods in low IP industries vastly outstrip sales in high IP industries.

Johanna Blakley on the topic [Transcript].

Copyright is unethical. And it harms the economy. Get rid of it.

calling bs on this. Provide citations of ANY of the above happening.

Well, they issued new guidelines, relaxed restrictions on "registered photographers", stopped using section 43 and 44 of the Terrorism act, had a 'snitch campaign', hassle people with commercial permits, and even push people down stairs.

If you aren't aware of the myriad ways in which the London Police have gone completely batshit crazy with photographers .... well, you haven't been paying attention to the news. Do a google search for "london photography police", and read.

There are loads of documented cases of some cop or another deciding they have a law on their side which allows them to do almost anything to photographers. And, in fairness to London, I'm sure this isn't the only place this happens.

The citation for what the GP suggests is bloody easy to find.

Yeah, about those air marshals? More air marshals arrested since 9/11 than arrests made by marshals

The best way (long-term) to deal with terrorists is to make them irrelevant, by not responding to them. Once you make it clear you'll make arbitrarily large changes to your policies and practices in response to a terrorist event, you have given them the lever they want; all they need now is to find the right event for the effect they want.

From a game theory perspective, if you pre-declare a response policy, then you grant the instigator the power to dictate that response. It had better be a response you're willing to live with. This holds whether the policy is to over-respond or under-respond.

There was a faction within American power that wanted to do most of this stuff anyway, and just needed a good pretext. The cleverest attack is to trigger your adversary's latent self-destructive impulse.

I'm in favour of a more freedom and a little less safety. America seems to have the idea that a successful terrorist act on American soil damages the global image of American might more than the American crack-down on freedom damages the global image of American right.

My First Cavity Search

Proposed subtitle: "Helping your child understand why he is a threat to National Security"

I suppose that was offered in jest. The problem is that young children are often completely under the sway of their evolution-denying forebears. We'd have to explain the dangers of ideology, and that fact that many children are born to complete wing nuts, and the risk of growing up to become an independent voter, among other things.

These are all good lessons, but not lessons most parents wish to teach. Either the parent doesn't want to pass this knowledge along, or regrets having to paint trust in parental love in such a poor light.

And that's really the picture this paints: in a nation of family values, that parental love can't be trusted.

Seems like the wrong square in the game theory matrix to me.