Shannon Love

In Neil Gaimen’s Sandman graphic novel Dream Country, Morpheus, the anthropomorphization of dreams, commissions William Shakespeare to write a play about Fairies. Shakespeare writes A Midsummer Night’s Dream and his troupe premiers the play one summer night on a hillside before the court of the real Auberon and Titania. The Fey have never seen a play before and the real Puck, watching his portrayal on stage, exclaims.

“This is magnificent — and it is true! It never happened; yet it is still true. What magic art is this?”

This is a fair statement of the magic of the theater but is that we want from a news service?

Tradition says that, “Ignorance is bliss.”

Will Rogers said, “Everybody is ignorant, only on different subjects.”

So how come everybody isn’t happy?

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At its heart, terrorism is theater.

Each act of terrorism has an intended audience. Most acts of terrorism have at least two audiences. The terrorist who struts bloodily across the boards plays not only to the greater world out in the stands but to his own local community who watch from the wings. In many cases, the audience in the wings is the most important one to the terrorist long-term goals.

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This post over at Slashdot highlights the problems that small software publishers have with the piracy of their products. One publisher was so frustrated he programmed his product to delete the home directory of the user if the product was activated with an illegitimate serial number but even this “nuclear” option did not work. The small publishers lament that only a big publisher like Microsoft can reliably get paid for its software.

This is a critical issue of intellectual property rights and like all intellectual property rights issues it has a lot to do with cows.

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In a previous post ken argues that it is counterproductive to disarm passengers since weapons will help them resist a hijacking better. I’m a big fan of personal weapons but in this case I respectfully disagree.

One problem is that since hijackings are extremely rare events letting passengers carry serious weapons like tasers, pepper spray, knives or even guns will be statistically more likely to cause a fatal accident than to be used to resist a hijacking. Also, since any terrorists are likely to be seriously outnumbered by the passengers and crew, depriving everyone of weapons would throw the advantage to the passengers and crew. They can just overwhelm the terrorist with numbers.

And, we can be very, very sure that the passengers will fight.

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