The question never is and never has been "public vs private"; rather, it is always does THAT SPECIFIC JOB match your needs, goals and personal style? I've worked at both and probably will continue doing so (currently, its private).
Two other comments: (1) I've found that the size of the organization has more bearing on the style than whether its private or public. Large organizations are almost always fairly bureaucratic, smaller ones tend to be much more familiar and dynamic (and riskier to work for) (2) I find the stereotype of lazy/incompetent public sector employees very misleading: there are idiots, a**holes, and various types of difficult people everywhere. Identify them, and avoid (or quit, if they are your boss or otherwise unavoidable/unbearable)
"Before you take any action that interferes with my First Amendment rights, please consult with counsel for the college."
IANAL, but if I remember correctly, the right to free speech is the right to say/express your opinions without fear of being censored. It makes no guarantees of being heard, nor does have any provisions for making others to distribute your opinions for you.
You hit the nail on the head... almost. In my experience the danger lies more in letting political or sales types manage projects. I've worked with technical pms before and that can be great, but I've also worked with good pms that were non-technical. The worst pms that I've worked with were salesmen (or ex-salesmen). Alot of them distrust techies and tune out any technical talk. One guy I worked with (the biggest asshole I've ever met BTW) didn't think technical concerns were valid issues to raise ("that's your problem, just solve it"). Anyway, the problem with salespeople is the salesperson's mantra is: sell first, figure out how to deliver later. This is insane for technical projects, but lucky for them techies are (usually) a. honest and b. not great politicians; and hence become great scapegoats (especially since salespeople are very good manipulators).
Where I work, they don't even care if it looks good!
"Hmm, the interface looks good, but I've god a few changes... it shouldn't take too long... but if you can just change the colorscheme and the layout... You've got a two days 'til we ship, so you should be okay. Oh, and there are some features that need to be added too. I forgot to mention them earlier..."
And of course, when it has bugs and a kludgy design after the last minute overhaul... "I can see you're having trouble handling your level of responsibility. You need to get organized and get on the ball! Everyone here works pretty hard to get things done and you seem to be the weak point."
Just because someone says (or writes) something, like claiming ownership of content or declaring a set of terms in an agreement, doesn't mean it will hold up in court. In contract law there must be consideration of both parties AND if one party is knowly deceiving the other (spyware anyone?) the contract is very likely to be tossed out. For example, if I say you are my slave for life deep in an EULA and you click on 'agree', do you really think that this is enforceable?.
End user agreements are a legally weak system. Their primary use is the implied threat and a pretense of legality. This is a COMMON TACTIC in legal circles. Lawyers are frequently hired to use scare tactics on the untrained: just because it sounds technical/legal doesn't mean courts will see it for anything but the BS that it is.
In fact, it is quite likely that the courts will throw out a EULA even if you read it and agreed to it. Excessive, deceptive or overly biased (in a legal sense) contract terms are frequently unenforceable. In particular, the agreements allowing spyware are frequently designed to deceive the user and therefore likely to be tossed out by the court.
The real catch with EULA's is: do you want to be the person going to court over it?...myself... well, only if they catch me...
At the Hollywood Stock Exchange [hsx.com] simulated stock market, there have been problems with cheaters for many years. HSX cheaters - called "manipulators" and "shills" - use information tactics and coordinated buying and selling patterns to dishonestly make HSX dollars.
The fatal flaw with ranking and voting systems is that they only work well with regular gamers. As a newbie, that would be the kiss of death -- all it would take is a cheater using a hack (or some other technique, like a new account, character or serial number) to circumvent the system. I've experienced this problem firsthand (with starcraft, IIRC) where the server ranked players (by victories or losses) using their account. Cheaters would create new accounts and go after newbies (like me). This really discourages you from returning.
First off, I'll start by saying that I AM a casual online gamer and have had a number of bad experiences with cheating. In fact, I ONLY play with direct connections to friends because of these problems. Quite frankly, I have been burned badly enough and often enough that I WILL NOT go online to play in a public game -- whether it is free or not. I've tried many times and have given up -- this really sucks since it seemed to have great potential. Here is why...
My first online game experinces was on Yahoo Games. It looked interesting: meet new people, have some fun. I was a newbie, and so, went to the newbie area. I a game of cards seemed like fun but was dropped out of the game (lag). When I returned to the server I was chased and verbally harassed (with swears) through 3 other card games. I've never been back... and will never go back.
Sometime later I regained my curiosity and thought I'd try Diablo online. Foolishly I took a high level character (can't remember how high, but had made it to hell difficulty) online and was killed instantly (twice! once in town!). I didn't know anything about 'hacks' then and persisted thinking this was due to server lag (or bugs). Then all of my equipment was stolen after a healing spell was cast on me. No backups, so goodbye all the effort. That was my last Diablo I game online.
The pattern seems to repeat itself with frightening regularity: Quake II: dead, dead, dead and dead again), Unreal Tournament: similar to Quake, Starcraft: rushed (after making no rushing agreements) and had defences repelled by infinite numbers of enemies and attacks that failed even with overwhelming technical and numerical superiority, AOE 2: faced impossible tech advances and armies, Diablo 2: PK'd in no-pk mode. The list goes on.
I make no claims to be an expert player in these games and would have no problem being beaten by a better player -- I find that's often the best way to improve! But, I have taken efforts to use the newbie areas to find other newbies to play with. Unfortunately, cheaters look at these areas as their playground too!
I like the word cartel* myself, though oligopoly** works quite well too.
* cartel -- n : a consortium of companies formed to limit competition
**oligopoly -- A market condition in which sellers are so few that the actions of any one of them will materially affect price and have a measurable impact on competitors.
I concur. When groups of people do something for 'free', people immediately get suspicious. After all, we've all learned not to trust corporate generousity -- they ALWAYS want something for it (would you trust anything M$ or GM gave you for 'free'?).
Of course there are many reasons for doing open source projects (altruism, fun, building your skills or portfolio, frustration with the software currently available, a need for customized solutions, etc). Our simplistic media and M$'s massive FUD campaign don't exactly make it easier for people to understand these reasons.
I've seen this elsewhere today, but it cannot be overstated...
Everquest uses a randomized rewards system, meaning that you do not consistently get responses for repeating the same behaviour. If you kill a monster you may get experience, but not always. This is intermittant reinforcement which is a highly effective method of conditioning behavior. And, like advertising*, it works works very well whether you believe it is affecting you or not. Just repeat, over and over, stimulus-response, stimulus-response... there is a reason for the nickname Evercrack!
* If you don't believe that you are affected by advertising, spend a few days working at a direct marketing company or ad agency... it is very scary how effective ad 'tricks' can be on any audience. The only advertising question what is the right stimulus for the audience.
Lobbying is a long-term game. The recording companies & associations are also looking at their long-term profit potential, which is fairly soft 5-10 years out. It has nothing directly to do with piracy, it has to do with demographics and greed.
The demographics are simple: there is a fairly large cohort of baby-boomer's kids in the premium 14-24 age group. Five to 10 years from now they will start to move out of this age-group (en mass). To the MPAA & RIAA this is a nightmare. People between 10 and 30 are their core market. SO, 5-10 years from now, their profits will plunge (and I do mean plunge) -- after all, who can afford to spend 100's of dollars on CD's, music and entertainment when you've got kids and a mortgage.
So why do the execs care? Greed and security. Even though the average exec (exec, not owner) couldn't give a damn about their current company 5-10 years from now, investors do. So, to to justify their huge salaries and bonuses, execs have to look out for the long-term interests of the company. If the industry/industry is considered a bad investment, you can't make as much money on the stock markets. If you can't make as much money on the markets, the executive pay shouldn't be as high.
And, this issue is industry-wide, so if they want to keep working in music (which I assume most of them do), there is a career crisis.
So what do they do? They look for new revenue sources. And P2P payments look great! In fact, it looks like a money tree. The profits will only grow, even if the demographics shift, since you can creep up pricing over time. And, your marginal costs will drop over time as the technology gets cheaper and cheaper.
Too bad for the rest of us that their idea seems more like taxation by corporations rather than a fee for a service or product.
IANAL, but who is going to sue? The blunt answer with patents (and copyrights) is that without someone to actively defend the patent in court, the patent is effectively meaningless. The GPL is a contract, and so is even more dependent on legal enforcement. If no-one will sue for damages, what is there to lose? Bad karma?
It is very likely that the lawyer's advice is based on the following idea: obfuscate the code enough that it is not easily identified. If someone sues us, we will make sure it costs more than its worth to sue -- this is risk management and has little to do with strict legality. Sad but true, this happens all the time -- business is about risk & cost management, not ethics or fairness.
That said, if the company's name 'leaked' to the media and they became known as the thieves they are, I wouldn't be that upset.:)
I Turnitin holds and uses my term paper to 'validate' other people's papers, shouldn't I be able to charge them for using my work? After all, since they are using my material to make a profit, I should have the right to be compensated. IT IS MY COPYRIGHTEN MATERIAL after all.;)
Re:Bah. Weak argument at best.
on
The Crime of Sharing
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In a balanced economic environment the producer DOES NOT and CANNOT determine price by fiat if they have any expectation of selling their product. Price is set by negotiation with the purchaser (more or less). The current music system is run by a monopolistic group of companies that are actively seeking to choke supply to extort money out of customers. The counterpoint that we can choose to not buy their music is empty because we cannot participate in modern society without buying from monopolists (MS, Time-Warner, etc).
Quite frankly, I don't being extorted. I feel badly that some artists will lose money on their music*, but I do have issues with paying ridiculous sums of money for a product that has a negligible production cost.
* I do feel bad that artists don't get paid for their music, but I also have no problem paying for a live performance either. And, perhaps we shouldn't be looking for revenue from broadcasting/distribution per se where its unreasonable to collect fees (think about the use of unenforceable laws in general).
I seem to recall BT having some problems financially. This is is a really bad sign for them. The presence of lawyers filing cash-grab lawsuits (like this one) is frequently a sign of a desperate or dying company.;)
Things never really change. I remember the same arguments about video arcardes when I was a kid. The thing is anywhere teens hang around* will attract negative parental/adult attention since the teens will experiment with alot of things that make adults uncomfortable. Gangs, sex, drugs, violence (etc) have always been around and probably always will.
* excluding certain pre-approved places where adults are welcome (eg. sports games) or that seems innocuous (eg. school or music classes)
Irrational responses don't help anyone. Yes they do (necessarily) have a narrower world-view with respect to tribalism. However, 'they' don't want to kill us all either (generally speaking). Frankly, your world-view scares me as much as theirs does. Lets kill them first or just bully them about until they obey is a pretty uncivilized attitude -- it seems to justify their actions pretty cleanly to me.
As for the death counts. I don't know the actual numbers, but Western military actions have been happening in that region for CENTURIES. Yes, the terrorists murdered 5000 people at once. Yes, that was wrong. But eye-for-and-eye its a foolish, dangerous and ultimately pointless way of accounting.
As for you comments on violence. What other choices do we have? Many. A better question is: how exactly is bombing Afganistan anything except a huge waste of time and money? What exactly are we trying to accomplish? Whatever it is it won't prevent future terrorist attacks and it won't reduce their hatred of us.
As for your take on Western culture, I don't disagree. Our culture symbolizes affluence and the leisurely life (don't laugh too much) around the world. The problem comes from the perception (reality?) that this affluence is at others expense.
Wealth is the issue
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't think that the underlying issue is fundamentalism vs democracy at all. Or even fundamentalism vs technology. Access to technology and distrust of globalisation are issues here in the West too. People that can't afford a good education or computers are scared. They know that they are competing at a strong disadvantage in our economy. This makes them, and the large number of people in many industries who have had stagnant wages over the last 20 years, (justifiably) afraid of globalisation.
But, take it a step further. If you are living in a place where you don't have decent access to clean water, let alone the internet, how will you react to globalisation? Remember, the message you will hear is the importance of technical skills and knowledge -- things you don't have and can't get. Any rational person (or even not-so-rational) will be afraid. Especially if you feel powerless to do anything about your situation.
This is where fundamentalism kicks in. Its leaders offers two things these people want: easy answers and a voice -- a way to express their frustration and fear to a society (the West) that they perceive (largely correctly) as indifferent to them and their needs.
Democracy (or lack thereof) is irrelevant in this situation. The issue is fear and poverty. Why would you ever support a program (globalisation) that you feel is against your own interests? If you felt that fundamentalism would help defend you from it , wouldn't you support it?
The question for Westerners is twofold. First, are they wrong about globalisation's effects on them? And second, what are we willing to do address their (real and perceived) concerns.
If globalisation is to be a good thing, all parties need to benefit and feel that they are benefitting. Otherwise, we are having a discussion about imperialism and exploitation: which is exactly what many of these people feel we are discussing.
The cryptography may be secure, but the system is not. The easiest way for a terrorist network to rip the ID system apart would be to issue a barrage of false positives -- at the very least it would cost a fortune to recall and reissue the cards and reassess security risks. Is anyone going to tell me that these terrorists couldn't get willing volunteers for this (lets see, 10 years in a comfy US prison or life/death in an Afgan minefield, hmmm... don't know what i'd choose).
The simple truth is that you don't need to breach the security to disable the system if your goal is to cause fear. All you really need to do is to make people doubt its effectiveness (or make the authorities look like idiots).
As a quick aside... is anyone honestly suggesting that fingerprint/retina/DNA/whatever scanners are going to be installed everywhere that someone could cause a problem (if so, I've got a few hot stock tips!) -- otherwise, the card is essentially the same as any other photo ID (great cryptography and amazing identification techniques are useless if no-one ever checks their validity).
If the inherent greed and obvious self-serving goals of the card pushers aren't hints enough, current problems with Anthrax being mailed to people should demonstrate the idiocy of this idea. SECURITY IS AND CAN NEVER BE PERFECT. There are always other means. Always a weakness. Deal with it. This is just another attempt to sell us something we don't need.
Slashdot Mirror
The question never is and never has been "public vs private"; rather, it is always does THAT SPECIFIC JOB match your needs, goals and personal style? I've worked at both and probably will continue doing so (currently, its private).
Two other comments: (1) I've found that the size of the organization has more bearing on the style than whether its private or public. Large organizations are almost always fairly bureaucratic, smaller ones tend to be much more familiar and dynamic (and riskier to work for) (2) I find the stereotype of lazy/incompetent public sector employees very misleading: there are idiots, a**holes, and various types of difficult people everywhere. Identify them, and avoid (or quit, if they are your boss or otherwise unavoidable/unbearable)
"Before you take any action that interferes with my First Amendment rights, please consult with counsel for the college."
IANAL, but if I remember correctly, the right to free speech is the right to say/express your opinions without fear of being censored. It makes no guarantees of being heard, nor does have any provisions for making others to distribute your opinions for you.
You hit the nail on the head... almost. In my experience the danger lies more in letting political or sales types manage projects. I've worked with technical pms before and that can be great, but I've also worked with good pms that were non-technical. The worst pms that I've worked with were salesmen (or ex-salesmen). Alot of them distrust techies and tune out any technical talk. One guy I worked with (the biggest asshole I've ever met BTW) didn't think technical concerns were valid issues to raise ("that's your problem, just solve it"). Anyway, the problem with salespeople is the salesperson's mantra is: sell first, figure out how to deliver later. This is insane for technical projects, but lucky for them techies are (usually) a. honest and b. not great politicians; and hence become great scapegoats (especially since salespeople are very good manipulators).
Where I work, they don't even care if it looks good!
"Hmm, the interface looks good, but I've god a few changes... it shouldn't take too long... but if you can just change the colorscheme and the layout... You've got a two days 'til we ship, so you should be okay. Oh, and there are some features that need to be added too. I forgot to mention them earlier..."
And of course, when it has bugs and a kludgy design after the last minute overhaul... "I can see you're having trouble handling your level of responsibility. You need to get organized and get on the ball! Everyone here works pretty hard to get things done and you seem to be the weak point."
Just because someone says (or writes) something, like claiming ownership of content or declaring a set of terms in an agreement, doesn't mean it will hold up in court. In contract law there must be consideration of both parties AND if one party is knowly deceiving the other (spyware anyone?) the contract is very likely to be tossed out. For example, if I say you are my slave for life deep in an EULA and you click on 'agree', do you really think that this is enforceable?.
End user agreements are a legally weak system. Their primary use is the implied threat and a pretense of legality. This is a COMMON TACTIC in legal circles. Lawyers are frequently hired to use scare tactics on the untrained: just because it sounds technical/legal doesn't mean courts will see it for anything but the BS that it is.
...myself... well, only if they catch me...
In fact, it is quite likely that the courts will throw out a EULA even if you read it and agreed to it. Excessive, deceptive or overly biased (in a legal sense) contract terms are frequently unenforceable. In particular, the agreements allowing spyware are frequently designed to deceive the user and therefore likely to be tossed out by the court.
The real catch with EULA's is: do you want to be the person going to court over it?
That's only about $6,573,640,280 USD (6.5 trillion) adjusted for inflation for US/USSR alone!
shhh!!! don't give the marketing people ideas
At the Hollywood Stock Exchange [hsx.com] simulated stock market, there have been problems with cheaters for many years. HSX cheaters - called "manipulators" and "shills" - use information tactics and coordinated buying and selling patterns to dishonestly make HSX dollars.
Sounds like the real world...
The fatal flaw with ranking and voting systems is that they only work well with regular gamers. As a newbie, that would be the kiss of death -- all it would take is a cheater using a hack (or some other technique, like a new account, character or serial number) to circumvent the system. I've experienced this problem firsthand (with starcraft, IIRC) where the server ranked players (by victories or losses) using their account. Cheaters would create new accounts and go after newbies (like me). This really discourages you from returning.
First off, I'll start by saying that I AM a casual online gamer and have had a number of bad experiences with cheating. In fact, I ONLY play with direct connections to friends because of these problems. Quite frankly, I have been burned badly enough and often enough that I WILL NOT go online to play in a public game -- whether it is free or not. I've tried many times and have given up -- this really sucks since it seemed to have great potential. Here is why...
My first online game experinces was on Yahoo Games. It looked interesting: meet new people, have some fun. I was a newbie, and so, went to the newbie area. I a game of cards seemed like fun but was dropped out of the game (lag). When I returned to the server I was chased and verbally harassed (with swears) through 3 other card games. I've never been back... and will never go back.
Sometime later I regained my curiosity and thought I'd try Diablo online. Foolishly I took a high level character (can't remember how high, but had made it to hell difficulty) online and was killed instantly (twice! once in town!). I didn't know anything about 'hacks' then and persisted thinking this was due to server lag (or bugs). Then all of my equipment was stolen after a healing spell was cast on me. No backups, so goodbye all the effort. That was my last Diablo I game online.
The pattern seems to repeat itself with frightening regularity: Quake II: dead, dead, dead and dead again), Unreal Tournament: similar to Quake, Starcraft: rushed (after making no rushing agreements) and had defences repelled by infinite numbers of enemies and attacks that failed even with overwhelming technical and numerical superiority, AOE 2: faced impossible tech advances and armies, Diablo 2: PK'd in no-pk mode. The list goes on.
I make no claims to be an expert player in these games and would have no problem being beaten by a better player -- I find that's often the best way to improve! But, I have taken efforts to use the newbie areas to find other newbies to play with. Unfortunately, cheaters look at these areas as their playground too!
I give up. Too bad, it could have been fun.
I like the word cartel* myself, though oligopoly** works quite well too.
* cartel -- n : a consortium of companies formed to limit competition
**oligopoly -- A market condition in which sellers are so few that the actions of any one of them will materially affect price and have a measurable impact on competitors.
I concur. When groups of people do something for 'free', people immediately get suspicious. After all, we've all learned not to trust corporate generousity -- they ALWAYS want something for it (would you trust anything M$ or GM gave you for 'free'?).
Of course there are many reasons for doing open source projects (altruism, fun, building your skills or portfolio, frustration with the software currently available, a need for customized solutions, etc). Our simplistic media and M$'s massive FUD campaign don't exactly make it easier for people to understand these reasons.
Anyone who reads slashdot should know better... never look at PC pricing until at least 6 months after you buy your system
I've seen this elsewhere today, but it cannot be overstated...
Everquest uses a randomized rewards system, meaning that you do not consistently get responses for repeating the same behaviour. If you kill a monster you may get experience, but not always. This is intermittant reinforcement which is a highly effective method of conditioning behavior. And, like advertising*, it works works very well whether you believe it is affecting you or not. Just repeat, over and over, stimulus-response, stimulus-response... there is a reason for the nickname Evercrack!
* If you don't believe that you are affected by advertising, spend a few days working at a direct marketing company or ad agency... it is very scary how effective ad 'tricks' can be on any audience. The only advertising question what is the right stimulus for the audience.
Like running an ad or spam server
Lobbying is a long-term game. The recording companies & associations are also looking at their long-term profit potential, which is fairly soft 5-10 years out. It has nothing directly to do with piracy, it has to do with demographics and greed.
The demographics are simple: there is a fairly large cohort of baby-boomer's kids in the premium 14-24 age group. Five to 10 years from now they will start to move out of this age-group (en mass). To the MPAA & RIAA this is a nightmare. People between 10 and 30 are their core market. SO, 5-10 years from now, their profits will plunge (and I do mean plunge) -- after all, who can afford to spend 100's of dollars on CD's, music and entertainment when you've got kids and a mortgage.
So why do the execs care? Greed and security. Even though the average exec (exec, not owner) couldn't give a damn about their current company 5-10 years from now, investors do. So, to to justify their huge salaries and bonuses, execs have to look out for the long-term interests of the company. If the industry/industry is considered a bad investment, you can't make as much money on the stock markets. If you can't make as much money on the markets, the executive pay shouldn't be as high.
And, this issue is industry-wide, so if they want to keep working in music (which I assume most of them do), there is a career crisis.
So what do they do? They look for new revenue sources. And P2P payments look great! In fact, it looks like a money tree. The profits will only grow, even if the demographics shift, since you can creep up pricing over time. And, your marginal costs will drop over time as the technology gets cheaper and cheaper.
Too bad for the rest of us that their idea seems more like taxation by corporations rather than a fee for a service or product.
IANAL, but who is going to sue? The blunt answer with patents (and copyrights) is that without someone to actively defend the patent in court, the patent is effectively meaningless. The GPL is a contract, and so is even more dependent on legal enforcement. If no-one will sue for damages, what is there to lose? Bad karma?
It is very likely that the lawyer's advice is based on the following idea: obfuscate the code enough that it is not easily identified. If someone sues us, we will make sure it costs more than its worth to sue -- this is risk management and has little to do with strict legality. Sad but true, this happens all the time -- business is about risk & cost management, not ethics or fairness.
That said, if the company's name 'leaked' to the media and they became known as the thieves they are, I wouldn't be that upset. :)
I Turnitin holds and uses my term paper to 'validate' other people's papers, shouldn't I be able to charge them for using my work? After all, since they are using my material to make a profit, I should have the right to be compensated. IT IS MY COPYRIGHTEN MATERIAL after all. ;)
In a balanced economic environment the producer DOES NOT and CANNOT determine price by fiat if they have any expectation of selling their product. Price is set by negotiation with the purchaser (more or less). The current music system is run by a monopolistic group of companies that are actively seeking to choke supply to extort money out of customers. The counterpoint that we can choose to not buy their music is empty because we cannot participate in modern society without buying from monopolists (MS, Time-Warner, etc).
Quite frankly, I don't being extorted. I feel badly that some artists will lose money on their music*, but I do have issues with paying ridiculous sums of money for a product that has a negligible production cost.
* I do feel bad that artists don't get paid for their music, but I also have no problem paying for a live performance either. And, perhaps we shouldn't be looking for revenue from broadcasting/distribution per se where its unreasonable to collect fees (think about the use of unenforceable laws in general).
I seem to recall BT having some problems financially. This is is a really bad sign for them. The presence of lawyers filing cash-grab lawsuits (like this one) is frequently a sign of a desperate or dying company. ;)
Things never really change. I remember the same arguments about video arcardes when I was a kid. The thing is anywhere teens hang around* will attract negative parental/adult attention since the teens will experiment with alot of things that make adults uncomfortable. Gangs, sex, drugs, violence (etc) have always been around and probably always will.
* excluding certain pre-approved places where adults are welcome (eg. sports games) or that seems innocuous (eg. school or music classes)
Irrational responses don't help anyone. Yes they do (necessarily) have a narrower world-view with respect to tribalism. However, 'they' don't want to kill us all either (generally speaking). Frankly, your world-view scares me as much as theirs does. Lets kill them first or just bully them about until they obey is a pretty uncivilized attitude -- it seems to justify their actions pretty cleanly to me.
As for the death counts. I don't know the actual numbers, but Western military actions have been happening in that region for CENTURIES. Yes, the terrorists murdered 5000 people at once. Yes, that was wrong. But eye-for-and-eye its a foolish, dangerous and ultimately pointless way of accounting.
As for you comments on violence. What other choices do we have? Many. A better question is: how exactly is bombing Afganistan anything except a huge waste of time and money? What exactly are we trying to accomplish? Whatever it is it won't prevent future terrorist attacks and it won't reduce their hatred of us.
As for your take on Western culture, I don't disagree. Our culture symbolizes affluence and the leisurely life (don't laugh too much) around the world. The problem comes from the perception (reality?) that this affluence is at others expense.
I don't think that the underlying issue is fundamentalism vs democracy at all. Or even fundamentalism vs technology. Access to technology and distrust of globalisation are issues here in the West too. People that can't afford a good education or computers are scared. They know that they are competing at a strong disadvantage in our economy. This makes them, and the large number of people in many industries who have had stagnant wages over the last 20 years, (justifiably) afraid of globalisation.
But, take it a step further. If you are living in a place where you don't have decent access to clean water, let alone the internet, how will you react to globalisation? Remember, the message you will hear is the importance of technical skills and knowledge -- things you don't have and can't get. Any rational person (or even not-so-rational) will be afraid. Especially if you feel powerless to do anything about your situation.
This is where fundamentalism kicks in. Its leaders offers two things these people want: easy answers and a voice -- a way to express their frustration and fear to a society (the West) that they perceive (largely correctly) as indifferent to them and their needs.
Democracy (or lack thereof) is irrelevant in this situation. The issue is fear and poverty. Why would you ever support a program (globalisation) that you feel is against your own interests? If you felt that fundamentalism would help defend you from it , wouldn't you support it?
The question for Westerners is twofold. First, are they wrong about globalisation's effects on them? And second, what are we willing to do address their (real and perceived) concerns.
If globalisation is to be a good thing, all parties need to benefit and feel that they are benefitting. Otherwise, we are having a discussion about imperialism and exploitation: which is exactly what many of these people feel we are discussing.
The cryptography may be secure, but the system is not. The easiest way for a terrorist network to rip the ID system apart would be to issue a barrage of false positives -- at the very least it would cost a fortune to recall and reissue the cards and reassess security risks. Is anyone going to tell me that these terrorists couldn't get willing volunteers for this (lets see, 10 years in a comfy US prison or life/death in an Afgan minefield, hmmm... don't know what i'd choose).
The simple truth is that you don't need to breach the security to disable the system if your goal is to cause fear. All you really need to do is to make people doubt its effectiveness (or make the authorities look like idiots).
As a quick aside... is anyone honestly suggesting that fingerprint/retina/DNA/whatever scanners are going to be installed everywhere that someone could cause a problem (if so, I've got a few hot stock tips!) -- otherwise, the card is essentially the same as any other photo ID (great cryptography and amazing identification techniques are useless if no-one ever checks their validity).
If the inherent greed and obvious self-serving goals of the card pushers aren't hints enough, current problems with Anthrax being mailed to people should demonstrate the idiocy of this idea. SECURITY IS AND CAN NEVER BE PERFECT. There are always other means. Always a weakness. Deal with it. This is just another attempt to sell us something we don't need.