Smaller. Cheaper. Lighter. More effective. Opens new vistas of usage, allowing people formerly reliant on expensive, centralized solutions to express themselves more freely.
The PC?
The cell phone?
Browser-based apps?
Nope. IEDs.
Andrew Cockburn has a nice piece in the LA Times about "explosively formed penetrators," the subject of much dinosauric rhetoric from our Dear Leader.
The punchline:
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld...bequeathed the Army the Future Combat Systems, a $168-billion extravaganza of computers, sensors and robots... Rumsfeld's mentor, defense intellectual Andrew Marshall, marketed the phrase "revolution in military affairs" as a justification for high-tech programs such as Future Combat Systems. But those copper disks [of EFP IEDs] represent the real revolution in military affairs, and it is not in our favor.
Are you a startup guy? Open source stack? Commodity servers? VOIP provider? Sneer at the old, the slow, the walnut-brained, who you're rapidly replacing with your clever new widget?
News flash: the nation-state you rely upon for the stability, social mobility, and capital that makes your life possible is fighting people just like you. And those people are winning.
I see the Bat Signal in the sky. After we make sure that we're the good guys, how are we going to help the good guys win?
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