NewsScan Daily, 10 February 2004 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 10 February 2004 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
       The Internet's Role in Politics
       Computerized Buses in Baltimore
       Latest Oracle Offer Not Sweet Enough for PeopleSoft
       Sun's New Servers
       PalmSource to Concentrate on Smartphones

FEATURES
       Flash Card
       Worth Thinking About: The Terrorist Mindset

THE INTERNET'S ROLE IN POLITICS
     Howard Dean's campaign may (or may not, of course) prove to be a case
of "Live by the Internet, Die by the Internet." Dean former campaign manager
Joe Trippi explains: "We were having a real problem with how to say, 'We
could be in real trouble here. We couldn't figure out how to tell people we
had a problem without raising the wrong impression. Part of the problem is
that the press are reading our blogs." Trippi is credited with organizing a
hugely successful grass-roots Internet recruitment and fund-raising effort
for Dean, attracting 600,000 volunteers and raising a record $45 million in
less than a year. Dean's rivals took advantage of Dean's online
organizational lists, and reporters focused attention on Dean's gaffes, such
as the frenzied speech the candidate made after losing the Iowa caucus vote.
Trippi characterizes that speech as "the heat-seeking missile hitting its
target" that the media ran over and over and over again. (Reuters/Washington
Post 9 Feb 2004)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26733-2004Feb9.html

COMPUTERIZED BUSES IN BALTIMORE
     Baltimore Gov. Robert Ehrlich has announced a $125 million plan to
outfit more than 700 Baltimore-area buses computerized to make them more
customer-friendly and efficient. The improvements include: computerized
marquees at the Baltimore area's busiest transit stops; surveillance cameras
at light rail, subway and MARC parking lots; and automatic announcements to
passengers. The new computers include global positioning systems that track
where buses are every two minutes. (AP/USA Today 10 Feb 2004)
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techinnovations/2004-02-10-md-bus-tech_x.h
tm

LATEST ORACLE OFFER NOT SWEET ENOUGH FOR PEOPLESOFT
     The board of PeopleSoft has rejected the latest acquisition offer from
Oracle: "The board believes that PeopleSoft has a better plan for
stockholders. Oracle's offer does not begin to reflect the company's real
value." PeopleSoft, which says its shares have recently been trading at the
low end of their historical valuation largely because of the uncertainty
created by Oracle's takeover attempt, charges that Oracle launched the
takeover bid to confuse the market and damage PeopleSoft's business.
PeopleSoft's chief executive says: "Don't underestimate the additional value
PeopleSoft can create once the disruption from Oracle's hostile activities
has ended." (New York Times 10 Feb 2004)
http://partners.nytimes.com/2004/02/10/technology/10soft.html

SUN'S NEW SERVERS
     Sun is offering new high-performance computer servers that use the next
generation of Sun's own UltraSparc IV chips and also some lower-cost servers
based on chips from AMD. Sun's still losing money, but appears now to be
benefiting from an industry-wide recovery; however, it is yet to be seen how
well Sun's new offerings will be received by customers, and industry analyst
Jeffrey Hewitt is cautious:  "I don't know if Sun is out of the woods yet.
Customers seem to be ready to upgrade, but it's early." (San Jose Mercury
News 10 Feb 2004) http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/7917761.htm

PALMSOURCE TO CONCENTRATE ON SMART PHONES
     Choosing a direction already taken by Nokia and Microsoft, PalmSource
has decided to concentrate on devices that handle both voice and data
communications.  PalmSource chief executive Dave Nagel says, "We've been a
player in this space for a long time, and we're making it official now that
it's a key market for us. We're going to go after it with every weapon that
we have." PalmSource makes the Palm operating system, which it licenses it
to makers of personal digital assistants and smartphones that combine
computing and cellphone functions. Nagel says the company will adopt a
"dual-version strategy" that offers a new operating system for the
smartphone market and targets the older Palm operating system at other
devices. (AP/Los Angeles times 10 Feb 2003)
http://www.latimes.com/technology/la-fi-palm10feb10,1,2029248.story?coll=la-
headlines-technology

*****

FLASH CARD
     "Life Shrinks or expands in proportion to one's courage." (Anais Nin)

WORTH THINKING ABOUT: THE TERRORIST MINDSET
     More than a decade ago, the erudite Irish diplomat, educator and
politician Conor Cruise O'Brien reacted to an editorial on terrorism with
these comments:
     "That editorial, like many others of the same tune, exemplifies a
dovish, or sentimental, variety of wishful thinking on the subject of
terrorism. There is also a hawkish, or hysterical, variety. Each has its own
misleading stereotype (or stereotypes) of the terrorist. Let us look at the
stereotypes:
     "Sentimental stereotype. According to this stereotype, the terrorist is
a misguided idealist, and unsublimated social reformer. He has been driven
to violence by political or social injustice or both. What is needed is to
identify the measures of reform that will cause him to desist. Once these
can be identified and undertaken, the terrorist, having ceased to be driven,
stops.
     "Hysterical stereotype. Less stable than the sentimental variety, this
can be divided into subvarieties:
     "(a) The terrorist is some kind of a nut -- a 'disgruntled abnormal'
given to 'mindless violence.' ('Mindless violence' may be applicable to the
deeds of isolated, maverick assassins. As applied to the planned activities
of armed conspiracies, it is itself a mindless expression.)
     "(b) The terrorist is nothing more than a thug, a goon, a gangster. His
'political' demands are simply a cover for criminal activity.
     "(c) The terrorist is an agent, or dupe, or cat's paw of the other
superpower. (He might, of course, be a nut or a goon as well as a dupe.)
     "These stereotypes serve mainly to confuse debate on the subject. There
is no point in arbitrarily attributing motives, nice or nasty, to the
terrorist. It might be more useful to look at the situations in which
terrorists find themselves and at how they act, and may be expected to act,
given their situations.
     "Terrorists have a grievance which they share with members of a wider
community. But they also have, from the moment they become terrorists,
significant amounts of power, prestige, and access to wealth, and these
constitute vested interests in the present irrespective of the attainment or
non-attainment of their declared long-term political objectives.
     "The sentimentalist thinks of the terrorist as driven to violence by
grievance or oppression. It would be more realistic to think of the
terrorist in hauling himself up, by means of the grievance or  oppression
and the violence it legitimizes, to relative power, prestige and privilege
in the community to which he belongs, For an unemployed young man in a slum
the most promising channel of upward social mobility is his neighborhood
branch of the national terrorist organization. There are risks to be run,
certainly, but for the adventurous, aggressive characters among the
unemployed or the otherwise frustrated the immediate rewards outweigh the
risks. In this situation the terrorist option is a rational one: you don't
have to be a nut, a dupe or an idealist."
                               ***
See 
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671667246/newsscancom/ref=nos
im for Conor Cruise O'Brien's "Passion and Cunning: Essays on Nationalism,
Terrorism & Revolution" -- or look for it in your favorite library. (We
donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy
programs.)

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