Better informed? I agree about law enforcement people but I would not include judges and juries.
Midway through the hearing, the presiding U.S. magistrate asked, "What are GIF files?"
The author of the article makes a sneering remark about this:
This combination of cluelessness and irresponsibility is, unfortunately, not unusual.
To quote another part of the article: "Puhleez!". For one, there are expert witnesses to bring detailed technical expertise to a case.
Judges may not know all the details about the latest technical terms and developments. Neither do they know the ins and outs of forensic research, or modern medicine. Yet they are quite able to render just verdicts in murder cases or medical malpractice cases where such areas of science play a major role. A judge may not understand all the details, but most of the times they are well able to gauge the relevance and impact of technological issues in context of the current law. The law is sometimes ill-equiped to deal with modern technology, but that is hardly the judges fault.
To take the author's example... many ordinary folk, including judges, would not have the slightest clue what a GIF file is. So, simply tell them that it is a type of file used to store images on a computer, and you can get on with the case. These people may be ignorant of technology but they aren't stupid or "clueless" as the author puts it. Some techies may think otherwise, but almost anything in cases like this can be explained in layman's terms. I blame tech-savvie lawyers and expert witnesses for not doing so, not the judges and juries for failing to understand.
Read my original argument. I was not defending McDonalds, not will I defend the tobacco industry. Make them pay if they have it coming, however I maintain that any money they have to cough up should be in the form of fines, that go to the state, or perhaps cancer research or whatever. Reimburse any victims only for actual damages suffered, to the extend that the companies in question were responsible for the damage.
My point was that using punitive levies to line the pockets of the victims does nothing but encourage suing for anything and everything.
Okay, bad examples, you are right. I could have sworn that I remembered reading about the microwave poodly lady bringing a suit against the manufacturer though.
When people talk about tort reform they always trot out this overhyped example, as if there are no better ones to use.
It is the one that everyone knows about though. To be sure, many of these cases are overhyped. The fact is that in any reasonable court, there wouldn't have been any questions about silly damages of $200.000 or $2.7 million, or settlements of $225.000. The only questions would have been: how much real damage did the lady suffer (medical bills and legal fees), and was McDonalds wholly or partly responsible for this mishap? I stand by my arguments...
...Punitive damages! Punitive damages awarded to victims by idiot juries, are fuelling the hunger for litigation. Since lawyers sometimes get a cut of the amount awarded, they do notvstop short of bullying otherwise uninterested victums into sueing.
Solution: Do away with punitive damages. Or, if you feel that lawbreaking firms have to hurt sometimes, levy a fine instead of punitive damages. The fine goes to the state, not the victim.
Over here, there is no such thing as punitive damages. One can only sue for real and quantifyable damage. The most intangible thing one can sue for is mental anguish, but the amounts awarded for those are tiny, and usually are only to cover psychiatric help to overcome this anguish, not as some sort of monetary compensation for suffering. The result? There are no cases in my countries legal history, of people sueing because they spilled hot coffee on their leg, tried to dry a poodle in the microwave, or any of that sort of idiocy.
Compensate your victims instead of rewarding them, and people will be less inclined to sue over anything and everything.
Almost everyone knows that the Earth's climate shifts over time, sometimes dramatically. What is still unclear (despite best efforts of people to firmly convince you one way or the other) is how much impact human activity has on the climate. Volcanic emissions dwarf global emissions due to human activities, for some gases and chemicals. The past has seen dramatic climate changes without humans having anything to do with it
The question is not if we are bringing about an ice age or a warmer period (depending which scare of the day is going around). The question is if we are accelerating the change and by how much. If we bring an ice age about 100 years sooner than it would have occurred naturally, it hardly matters in the long run (but this generation might think otherwise). I believe in cutting back emissions and energy usage, cleaner factories and recycling and all that. But I am tired of the "we are killing the Earth" line.
I can hardly believe this... Presumably the machine uses some private key, but once that is hacked, people could create their own cards... it would be as secure as a black&white passport on plain paper: everyone could print their own on their laserprinter at home.
The machines are meant to ensure that costly post-Sept. 11 security at Canada's airports is focused on "people we don't know instead of those that we trust," she added.
So they screen people they know not to be terrorists and issue them passes for this scanner. That means that security people will not waste time with these passengers, and focus on the unknown ones.
Three questions:
- How do you know someone is not a terrorist. A background check will only reveal so much
- Suppose half the passengers get a pass for the scanner, so the customs officers can stare twice as long at the faces of the remaining passengers, will that help them uncover more terrorists in the crowd? It might at that, but the effect is not very large I suspect.
- The sentence about security being "costly" made me wary. If they can get half of the passengers to use the scanner, will they not just fire half of the security checkpoint staff?
The article does mention Schiphol. The interesting thing to note is that Schiphol uses these devices to speed up passport control, not check-in or customs. For a fee, travellers can sign up for this program and bypass passport control completely. The scanner is placed next to the passport control booth so the officers can keep an eye on it, to help people resist the temptation to just hop over the barrier.
A year ago I picked up a Sony DSC-P1, which does 3.3MP. After a little experimenting I found no noticable difference in quality between 2.2MP shots and 3.3MP shots, when printed on 5x8 at a professional print shop. Even printing on 8x10, the difference is hardly noticable. So I use 2.2MP exclusively and fit more pictures on a memory stick as a result.
It is true enough: for those people that are not really into photography, but just want to make happy snaps of their holidays, 2.2MP is just fine. As with anything, pick your camera according to your particular needs. I am a casual photographer so I picked the Sony, one of the better hobby camera's at the time. It fits in any coat or even trouser pocket so I carry it with me, always. Also a very good underwater house was available, and the underwater pictures it makes even with just the built-in flash ar just incredible. All that for a mere $900, not a lot at the time. If you make photos like I do, spending big bucks on a digital SLR is a waste of money
One thing that I try to impress upon people about broadband is that when you have it, you will do MORE than just check email once or twice a day, etc.
That is why a few providers here have started to offer low-budget DSL: a very limited bandwidth (same as ISDN), at very affordable rates. Those users are always-on for a price that doesn't exceed dial-up by much, and the ISP can hope that those users get a taste for the Internet and upgrade to a higher bandwidth package. Smart thinking IMHO.
Not tricky at all from the side that matters: the public's side. People who want movies without the profanity and whatnot now have a choice. The rest of us can still rent the smutty versions at our local video rental. This is not censorship, and it isn't any different from TV stations editing out naughty bits or beeping out cusswords.
Times have changed. In the days of the C5, it was highly unusual for a family to own two cars (at least around most of Europe). These days, many families have two cars, usually one that "does more" and another for driving around town, or a fun car like a small, impractical convertible.
Furthermore the C5 is not a car that "does less", it "does nothing". It is not a car to drive for fun, they seat only one and don't even carry your groceries. The only thing it is good for is getting one person around over a short distance, which a bicycle does that better and safer, giving a larger baggage capacity as well.
Many people are already buying small cars for town use. If these cars can be made into hybrids or air cars that are cheap to run and inexpensive to buy, they could be a big hit.
Great... child labor! Have you no sense of decency?!
Then again... get a bunch of blank accounts, have a bunch of kiddies train up the characters on those accounts, and pay them "a few pennies". Then sell the accounts on eBay. Heh, you may be on to something here.
The problem with independent review boards.
on
Politicizing Science
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· Score: 2
Independent boards staffed by volunteers are often biased as well. Boards dealing with medical science are often staffed with self-styled "medical ethicists", and like to propose bans on stem cell research, genetics research, and so on. Proponents of such research usually cannot be bothered to volunteer for such boards. Similarly, environmental boards are staffed mostly with scientists who are also environmentalists. In my country at least, these boards make biased and rather conservative recommendations, conservative being "opposed to new things" rather than "right wing".
Funny, over here the tendency is to ban things, while it seems these boards in the US seem to swing the other way and take a rather laissez-faire attitude. You'd expect real scientists to choose to research, then regulate.
Most objections I hear against the big record labels is not that they are preventing us from making illegal copies of their music, but that they are taking away several of our rights in the process.
"Forget about them" as you say, and you'll find that one day that the movie you taped will no longer play at your friend's house, or that you no longer can transfer the CD you bought to Minidisc for your walkman. Worse, you may also find that DRM has effectively barred independent labels from the market. The measures proposed by the RIAA aim to prevent piracy, but they will also assert a large measure of control over the distribution of music. I bet the RIAA is fuly aware of that.
Simply stop buying their music, and they'll probably claim their slumping sales on piracy, and call for even harsher measures. Don't lose sight of the bigger picture!
It's the first security hole that has good potential to spread far and wide. Well, the first one I heard about anyways, which doesn't mean a whole lot, agreed.
"What is happening is that more mainstream users are starting to use such software."
That was my point... sort of. The average qualifications of the people running Linux servers is declining.
Oh and I did mean crackers, not hackers. My bad. While the Jargon File lists the use of "Hacker" meaning "someone who illegaly breaks into computers" as deprecated, most of the non computer-literate people do not make the distinction between cracker and hacker. By all means try and correct the public's use of the two terms, but I would advice anyone not to call themselves hackers in public, unless they are so starved for attention that they won't mind a few FBI agents to come calling.
Of course, it was only a matter of time before hackers showed an interest in this OS. Most parts being open source, perhaps that means that holes in the OS or applications are easier to find, but that goes for both the hackers and for people on the up-and-up. I'm surprised it took so long, and it will certainly happen again. The real question is: how will the admins of the affected or vulnerable servers act, and how many are aware of the issue?
And that is where Linux is starting to lose its edge on Windows: the quality of the sysadmins. With the risk of being accused of making a crass generalisation, I'd say that many, many Windows sysadmins are of the point-and-click Mickey Mouse variety. Worse, not just the admins, but the infrastructure architects as well. After all, all you need to set up a domain is to complete one easy wizard, right? I have seen the result in all its ugly glory. Linux on the other hand required an admin who knows what he is doing, since there were no easy wizards. Much configuration was by editing files, with the how-to printouts in hand.
I say "required" in the past tense, since Linux is becoming easier and easier to set up. Some distros are close to the point where I'd be happy to give the CD to my mom and have her set up her own desktop. That is not a bad thing. Yet, I already have seen a few (very few, thankfully) "sysadmins" setting up Linux boxes for database or web services, without really knowing what they are doing. When we get to the point where managers themselves can set up Linux, they will be tempted to hire less and less qualified staff, as has already happened to a large degree with Windows NT.
My fear is that Linux servers will be run by less qualified people in the future, and that it will cause the proliferation of aggressive and effective Linux virii.
Good reviews...
on
ChronoSpace
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Does a good review, where the reviewer trashes a certain work, have a place in Slashdot? Certainly, if only so that you can avoid the book. Then again, a review is after all only the opinion of the reviewer, and you may find the book an interesting one even if he does not.
A good review will give you a fairly good indication whether you will like the reviewed work or not, regardless of what the reviewer thinks. I have read reviews of films where the reviewer goes all-out to show us his disgust for the movie, after which I immediately made up my mind about having to see it. Good reviews provoke some sort of emotion in the reader. A bad review makes a bland read, and it will not tell me whether or not to pick up the book even though the reviewer is trying to persuade me one way or the other.
Writing a letter (as people did in the olden days, or so I am told) is hardly the same as typing messages in ICQ, email or IRC. When one writes a letter, one has the time to carefully weigh the thrust of each sentence so that ones meaning isn't lost upon the reader. On line communication is often more like to spoken conversation rather than written communication. Real people don't speak like characters in a book. In normal conversation, people use half-sentences, they slur over bits of words, and most importantly people can see and gauge each other's emotions. Similarly, in on-line conversation, people use abbreviations and they make spelling mistakes that they don't care to correct. What is missing is facial expressions, and smileys fill that gap.
There are two ways politicians react to events such as 9-11:
1) Politicians in charge will "do something". They have to do something, the public will not expect, nor stand for government to sit still in the face of such an event. So what do they do? You can hope that they'll start working on measures to prevent such events and bring the perpetrators to justice, but this takes time. In the meantime, they have to act so they pass a few bollocksy measures to reassure the public. A placebo if you will.
2) Every politician will jump on the bandwagon of public outcry and use it as a platform to launch any and all of their crackpot ideas, laws and proposals.
It doesn't take a disaster like 9-11 either. Look for this behaviour in politicians whenever an issue comes up that generates a public outcry. Here in the Netherlands we have seen the exact same effect on various occasions, most recently with the shooting of mr. Fortuyn who was running for parliament in the May elections.
Re:Wonder what the heck this is all about?
on
Crushing Experience
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· Score: 2, Troll
And the point of it all? From the site:
"This work is an archetypal work of tsunamii.net whose work often conjures ridiculous scenarios and challenges about technology."
Slashdot Mirror
Hm? Any things wrong with RealVideo that I should be aware of?
Better informed? I agree about law enforcement people but I would not include judges and juries.
Midway through the hearing, the presiding U.S. magistrate asked, "What are GIF files?"
The author of the article makes a sneering remark about this:
This combination of cluelessness and irresponsibility is, unfortunately, not unusual.
To quote another part of the article: "Puhleez!". For one, there are expert witnesses to bring detailed technical expertise to a case.
Judges may not know all the details about the latest technical terms and developments. Neither do they know the ins and outs of forensic research, or modern medicine. Yet they are quite able to render just verdicts in murder cases or medical malpractice cases where such areas of science play a major role. A judge may not understand all the details, but most of the times they are well able to gauge the relevance and impact of technological issues in context of the current law. The law is sometimes ill-equiped to deal with modern technology, but that is hardly the judges fault.
To take the author's example... many ordinary folk, including judges, would not have the slightest clue what a GIF file is. So, simply tell them that it is a type of file used to store images on a computer, and you can get on with the case. These people may be ignorant of technology but they aren't stupid or "clueless" as the author puts it. Some techies may think otherwise, but almost anything in cases like this can be explained in layman's terms. I blame tech-savvie lawyers and expert witnesses for not doing so, not the judges and juries for failing to understand.
Read my original argument. I was not defending McDonalds, not will I defend the tobacco industry. Make them pay if they have it coming, however I maintain that any money they have to cough up should be in the form of fines, that go to the state, or perhaps cancer research or whatever. Reimburse any victims only for actual damages suffered, to the extend that the companies in question were responsible for the damage.
My point was that using punitive levies to line the pockets of the victims does nothing but encourage suing for anything and everything.
Heh... don't use it as a password though, it'll be a "weak" one!
Seriously, at least when I type my password, other people have a hard time seeing what I type. If I sit there gesturing at the computer though...
Okay, bad examples, you are right. I could have sworn that I remembered reading about the microwave poodly lady bringing a suit against the manufacturer though.
When people talk about tort reform they always trot out this overhyped example, as if there are no better ones to use.
It is the one that everyone knows about though. To be sure, many of these cases are overhyped. The fact is that in any reasonable court, there wouldn't have been any questions about silly damages of $200.000 or $2.7 million, or settlements of $225.000. The only questions would have been: how much real damage did the lady suffer (medical bills and legal fees), and was McDonalds wholly or partly responsible for this mishap? I stand by my arguments...
...Punitive damages! Punitive damages awarded to victims by idiot juries, are fuelling the hunger for litigation. Since lawyers sometimes get a cut of the amount awarded, they do notvstop short of bullying otherwise uninterested victums into sueing.
Solution: Do away with punitive damages. Or, if you feel that lawbreaking firms have to hurt sometimes, levy a fine instead of punitive damages. The fine goes to the state, not the victim.
Over here, there is no such thing as punitive damages. One can only sue for real and quantifyable damage. The most intangible thing one can sue for is mental anguish, but the amounts awarded for those are tiny, and usually are only to cover psychiatric help to overcome this anguish, not as some sort of monetary compensation for suffering. The result? There are no cases in my countries legal history, of people sueing because they spilled hot coffee on their leg, tried to dry a poodle in the microwave, or any of that sort of idiocy.
Compensate your victims instead of rewarding them, and people will be less inclined to sue over anything and everything.
... that it is us causing this?
Almost everyone knows that the Earth's climate shifts over time, sometimes dramatically. What is still unclear (despite best efforts of people to firmly convince you one way or the other) is how much impact human activity has on the climate. Volcanic emissions dwarf global emissions due to human activities, for some gases and chemicals. The past has seen dramatic climate changes without humans having anything to do with it
The question is not if we are bringing about an ice age or a warmer period (depending which scare of the day is going around). The question is if we are accelerating the change and by how much. If we bring an ice age about 100 years sooner than it would have occurred naturally, it hardly matters in the long run (but this generation might think otherwise). I believe in cutting back emissions and energy usage, cleaner factories and recycling and all that. But I am tired of the "we are killing the Earth" line.
I can hardly believe this... Presumably the machine uses some private key, but once that is hacked, people could create their own cards... it would be as secure as a black&white passport on plain paper: everyone could print their own on their laserprinter at home.
Their reasoning, from the artice
The machines are meant to ensure that costly post-Sept. 11 security at Canada's airports is focused on "people we don't know instead of those that we trust," she added.
So they screen people they know not to be terrorists and issue them passes for this scanner. That means that security people will not waste time with these passengers, and focus on the unknown ones.
Three questions:
- How do you know someone is not a terrorist. A background check will only reveal so much
- Suppose half the passengers get a pass for the scanner, so the customs officers can stare twice as long at the faces of the remaining passengers, will that help them uncover more terrorists in the crowd? It might at that, but the effect is not very large I suspect.
- The sentence about security being "costly" made me wary. If they can get half of the passengers to use the scanner, will they not just fire half of the security checkpoint staff?
The article does mention Schiphol. The interesting thing to note is that Schiphol uses these devices to speed up passport control, not check-in or customs. For a fee, travellers can sign up for this program and bypass passport control completely. The scanner is placed next to the passport control booth so the officers can keep an eye on it, to help people resist the temptation to just hop over the barrier.
A year ago I picked up a Sony DSC-P1, which does 3.3MP. After a little experimenting I found no noticable difference in quality between 2.2MP shots and 3.3MP shots, when printed on 5x8 at a professional print shop. Even printing on 8x10, the difference is hardly noticable. So I use 2.2MP exclusively and fit more pictures on a memory stick as a result.
It is true enough: for those people that are not really into photography, but just want to make happy snaps of their holidays, 2.2MP is just fine. As with anything, pick your camera according to your particular needs. I am a casual photographer so I picked the Sony, one of the better hobby camera's at the time. It fits in any coat or even trouser pocket so I carry it with me, always. Also a very good underwater house was available, and the underwater pictures it makes even with just the built-in flash ar just incredible. All that for a mere $900, not a lot at the time. If you make photos like I do, spending big bucks on a digital SLR is a waste of money
One thing that I try to impress upon people about broadband is that when you have it, you will do MORE than just check email once or twice a day, etc.
That is why a few providers here have started to offer low-budget DSL: a very limited bandwidth (same as ISDN), at very affordable rates. Those users are always-on for a price that doesn't exceed dial-up by much, and the ISP can hope that those users get a taste for the Internet and upgrade to a higher bandwidth package. Smart thinking IMHO.
Not tricky at all from the side that matters: the public's side. People who want movies without the profanity and whatnot now have a choice. The rest of us can still rent the smutty versions at our local video rental. This is not censorship, and it isn't any different from TV stations editing out naughty bits or beeping out cusswords.
Times have changed. In the days of the C5, it was highly unusual for a family to own two cars (at least around most of Europe). These days, many families have two cars, usually one that "does more" and another for driving around town, or a fun car like a small, impractical convertible.
Furthermore the C5 is not a car that "does less", it "does nothing". It is not a car to drive for fun, they seat only one and don't even carry your groceries. The only thing it is good for is getting one person around over a short distance, which a bicycle does that better and safer, giving a larger baggage capacity as well.
Many people are already buying small cars for town use. If these cars can be made into hybrids or air cars that are cheap to run and inexpensive to buy, they could be a big hit.
Great... child labor! Have you no sense of decency?!
Then again... get a bunch of blank accounts, have a bunch of kiddies train up the characters on those accounts, and pay them "a few pennies". Then sell the accounts on eBay. Heh, you may be on to something here.
Independent boards staffed by volunteers are often biased as well. Boards dealing with medical science are often staffed with self-styled "medical ethicists", and like to propose bans on stem cell research, genetics research, and so on. Proponents of such research usually cannot be bothered to volunteer for such boards. Similarly, environmental boards are staffed mostly with scientists who are also environmentalists. In my country at least, these boards make biased and rather conservative recommendations, conservative being "opposed to new things" rather than "right wing".
Funny, over here the tendency is to ban things, while it seems these boards in the US seem to swing the other way and take a rather laissez-faire attitude. You'd expect real scientists to choose to research, then regulate.
Right, taking all bets as to how much longer this server will stand up to the /.'ing.
Most objections I hear against the big record labels is not that they are preventing us from making illegal copies of their music, but that they are taking away several of our rights in the process.
"Forget about them" as you say, and you'll find that one day that the movie you taped will no longer play at your friend's house, or that you no longer can transfer the CD you bought to Minidisc for your walkman. Worse, you may also find that DRM has effectively barred independent labels from the market. The measures proposed by the RIAA aim to prevent piracy, but they will also assert a large measure of control over the distribution of music. I bet the RIAA is fuly aware of that.
Simply stop buying their music, and they'll probably claim their slumping sales on piracy, and call for even harsher measures. Don't lose sight of the bigger picture!
...Harry's voice sounded a bit odd? "Harry Potter: the year my voice broke" or something...
It's the first security hole that has good potential to spread far and wide. Well, the first one I heard about anyways, which doesn't mean a whole lot, agreed.
"What is happening is that more mainstream users are starting to use such software."
That was my point... sort of. The average qualifications of the people running Linux servers is declining.
Oh and I did mean crackers, not hackers. My bad. While the Jargon File lists the use of "Hacker" meaning "someone who illegaly breaks into computers" as deprecated, most of the non computer-literate people do not make the distinction between cracker and hacker. By all means try and correct the public's use of the two terms, but I would advice anyone not to call themselves hackers in public, unless they are so starved for attention that they won't mind a few FBI agents to come calling.
Of course, it was only a matter of time before hackers showed an interest in this OS. Most parts being open source, perhaps that means that holes in the OS or applications are easier to find, but that goes for both the hackers and for people on the up-and-up. I'm surprised it took so long, and it will certainly happen again. The real question is: how will the admins of the affected or vulnerable servers act, and how many are aware of the issue?
And that is where Linux is starting to lose its edge on Windows: the quality of the sysadmins. With the risk of being accused of making a crass generalisation, I'd say that many, many Windows sysadmins are of the point-and-click Mickey Mouse variety. Worse, not just the admins, but the infrastructure architects as well. After all, all you need to set up a domain is to complete one easy wizard, right? I have seen the result in all its ugly glory. Linux on the other hand required an admin who knows what he is doing, since there were no easy wizards. Much configuration was by editing files, with the how-to printouts in hand.
I say "required" in the past tense, since Linux is becoming easier and easier to set up. Some distros are close to the point where I'd be happy to give the CD to my mom and have her set up her own desktop. That is not a bad thing. Yet, I already have seen a few (very few, thankfully) "sysadmins" setting up Linux boxes for database or web services, without really knowing what they are doing. When we get to the point where managers themselves can set up Linux, they will be tempted to hire less and less qualified staff, as has already happened to a large degree with Windows NT.
My fear is that Linux servers will be run by less qualified people in the future, and that it will cause the proliferation of aggressive and effective Linux virii.
Does a good review, where the reviewer trashes a certain work, have a place in Slashdot? Certainly, if only so that you can avoid the book. Then again, a review is after all only the opinion of the reviewer, and you may find the book an interesting one even if he does not.
A good review will give you a fairly good indication whether you will like the reviewed work or not, regardless of what the reviewer thinks. I have read reviews of films where the reviewer goes all-out to show us his disgust for the movie, after which I immediately made up my mind about having to see it. Good reviews provoke some sort of emotion in the reader. A bad review makes a bland read, and it will not tell me whether or not to pick up the book even though the reviewer is trying to persuade me one way or the other.
Writing a letter (as people did in the olden days, or so I am told) is hardly the same as typing messages in ICQ, email or IRC. When one writes a letter, one has the time to carefully weigh the thrust of each sentence so that ones meaning isn't lost upon the reader. On line communication is often more like to spoken conversation rather than written communication. Real people don't speak like characters in a book. In normal conversation, people use half-sentences, they slur over bits of words, and most importantly people can see and gauge each other's emotions. Similarly, in on-line conversation, people use abbreviations and they make spelling mistakes that they don't care to correct. What is missing is facial expressions, and smileys fill that gap.
There are two ways politicians react to events such as 9-11:
1) Politicians in charge will "do something". They have to do something, the public will not expect, nor stand for government to sit still in the face of such an event. So what do they do? You can hope that they'll start working on measures to prevent such events and bring the perpetrators to justice, but this takes time. In the meantime, they have to act so they pass a few bollocksy measures to reassure the public. A placebo if you will.
2) Every politician will jump on the bandwagon of public outcry and use it as a platform to launch any and all of their crackpot ideas, laws and proposals.
It doesn't take a disaster like 9-11 either. Look for this behaviour in politicians whenever an issue comes up that generates a public outcry. Here in the Netherlands we have seen the exact same effect on various occasions, most recently with the shooting of mr. Fortuyn who was running for parliament in the May elections.
And the point of it all? From the site:
"This work is an archetypal work of tsunamii.net whose work often conjures ridiculous scenarios and challenges about technology."
I'll say...