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Engineers Make Good Terrorists?
An anonymous reader writes "Engineers' focus and attention to details, along with their perceived lack of social skills, make them ideal targets to be recruited as terrorists, according to EETimes. Planning skills make engineers good 'field operatives' was written up by Raphael Perl, who heads the Action against Terrorism Unit of Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. He offers that 'Engineers ideally make excellent strategic planners, and they make excellent field operatives. They think differently from how other people think.' That may sound like a stereotype, but Perl claims that 'because of those traits, terrorist groups actively recruit engineers.' He says that Al-Qaeda has widely acknowledged that a significant number of the group's top leadership had engineering backgrounds." This is the second time in just a few months that engineers have been likened to terrorists.
We've been tapping engineers for our cause ever since Counterstrike came out.
DRM: Terminator crops for your mind!
...but alas I'm an engineer, not a lawyer. :(
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
We should flood these terrorist groups with engineers and let them improve all their weapons. Afterwards, they'll have pieces left over and nothing will work. Isn't there some saying about "give an engineer a broken computer and he'll give you a working radio"?
Absolute power corrupts absolutely. indymedia
With a name like Perl, this man is well-suited to discuss the link between coding and terror.
Also, if you read TFA, he goes on to state that "laziness, impatience, and hubris" are the three virtues of a good terrorist.
P.S. Christ, what has happened to Slashdot's page layout today?? The goggles do nothing!
Breakfast served all day!
I mean, I can't be the only one who thought this would be an article about the Internet Explorer team at Microsoft?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
How do you tell if an engineer is an introvert or an extrovert?
The extrovert looks at your shoes.
It's not that we're smart, but that they're dumb.
It takes methodical planning to coordinate the near-simultaneous slamming of four planes, especially when starting with nothing but some money and a group of suicidal, sex-starved Saudis who have no flight training.
Engineers will be better than scientists or academics, despite similarly high intelligence levels, because engineers actually have to show results with their projects.
Instead of profiling and waging wars, though, America's efforts to stop terrorism would best be served by a policy aimed at getting everyone on the planet a good fuck and some cold beer.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
what does it pay? Health care? Time off? Options? Company Car?
As an engineer, when I read "Engineers make good terrorists" my first thought was:
Why would I want to make a terrorist? Aren't there enough?
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
Lack of social skills? No way. I actually had a date last year, thank you very much. We even almost kissed.
We were supposed to go out on a second date, but she got the flu, and then her mother was sick, after that her grandma died and her father had a heart attack and she couldn't make it.
I figured I was better off anyway. With that many people sick in her family, she must have had horrible genes.
Just because you're paranoid, it doesn't mean that they're not out to get you.
I think you misspelled "end users"... :-)
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
You sound like a good engineer. Would you like to join our club to design remote controlled, um, toy cars?
Tsunami -- You can't bring a good wave down!
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
I'm an Electrical Engineer.
THIS MAKES ME SO ANGRY I WANT TO BLOW SOMETHING UP!
And yeah, C&C had Engineers. You could take over buildings with them, as long as the building health was below 50%. Otherwise, they would damage the building.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
That's as may be, but we have to have a balance, otherwise we might get into feature-creep, and never ship Terrorist 1.0.
Fortunately, it's been found that salespeople make the best suicide bombers. It seems you need two things to be a good suicide bomber
1) Ability to find the place you're looking for. This is also an essential skill for salespeople, who often travel to client sites.
2) Having what it takes to close the deal no matter what it takes.
Additionally, Al Queda has found that inexplicably, using salespeople as suicide bombers helps recruit engineers to the cause.
The reign of terror imposed by GDI can only be ended by GDI+. Or maybe OpenGL.
Why not fork?
I think this device might be evidence to support the article's viewpoint. Engineers sometimes like to see other people suffer untold agonies.
You see... that is the problem. The term "Engineer" has been so deluded that most people will fall into that category anymore. Write software? Engineer. Use a cheap CAD program to draw your house addition? Engineer. Drive a train? Engineer.