Most 20th-century discussions on terrorism seem to me to have missed the point that, short of an unlikely act of international will, we have passed irreversibly through an historic transition... To understand the potential of this form, one must not stop with a prognosis of likely technical means. The new technological capabilities in the present context ? e.g., nuclear and other spectacularly destructive physical means, or biological and chemical (binary) weapons ? form only one part of the context. Neotechnic means can vastly increase the scale of damage, and through television can almost instantly and repeatedly spread the news and imagery of the act; but by themselves they need not coerce a determined people. One should be equally concerned with the other components that are essential to the successful act of terror. For whether it is carried out by individuals, a group, a state, or a coalition of these, terror succeeds or fails on a "stage" that has four components, each of which is subject, in our time, to the enlargements of opportunity or scope...
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/holton/holton_p2.html
Tuesday, February 12, 2002
Popular Posts
-
The concept of dragons was probably brought to Japan around 2,000 years ago, along with the technology for paddy agriculture. Their images h...
-
...These measures, based on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) give far too much power to publishers, at the expense of individu...
-
His system, he said, starts with a laser that sends part of its beam into photo detectors which produce electrical signal that feed back to ...
-
Someone that gets it. Service-oriented software, when done correctly in a platform-agnostic way can be flexible, cheap, and can motivate m...
-
...why was this given the file name of skyfall?... Certain information, while not specific as to target, gives the government reason to beli...
-
When it comes to buying equipment, think g, not b. New 802.11g hardware is nearly five times faster than 802.11b gear, and it will interoper...
-
This edition provides a prose rendering of The Epic of Gilgamesh, the cycle of poems preserved on clay tablets surviving from ancient Mesopo...
-
From the bygone debates over DDR vs. RDRAM to the current controversy over Apples DDR implementations, one issue is commonly misunderstood i...
-
In my mind, this is a huge waste of effort. Put a base on Mars instead of the Moon -- there's huge science finds waiting there to be dis...
-
Personally, I believe that consciousness is an emergent property of complex, ordered (yet chaotic) systems which are not necessarily biologi...