Kidz Rage !

We’re not so massively fond of the whole U3 machine-independent application and computing package thing, but if there’s one thing we can get behind, it’s a big ol’ damned flash memory drive. Toshiba’s new TransMemory line, which they’re launching in November in sizes from 512MB to 4GB, are all well and good, but only the 16GB Limited Edition due in December would have gotten get us through the year (what with the occasional Vista build and Leopard beta and all). Of course, as with the other 8GB+ flash memory drives, we leave it to Toshiba to ensure we aren’t extorted for five or more figures in order to get our unworthy hands on one.

[Via FarEastGizmos]

Joe Wilcox at Jupiter Research’s Microsoft Monitor blog discovered pre-order pricing information for Windows Vista upgrade packages on Amazon.com yesterday. Here’s what he spied with his little eye:

• Windows Vista Home Basic Upgrade, $99.95
• Windows Vista Home Premium Upgrade, $159
• Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade, $259
• Windows Vista Business Upgrade, $199

According to the individual pages for the various upgrade packages, the release date is set at January 30, 2007. This detail was noticed by Ed Bott at ZDNet, and he has also has some observations on the confusing mess that customers will encounter when they try to select the proper upgrade package.

Consensus seems to be that pricing for the upgrade from XP to Vista is in line with expectations, if not higher. The Canadian upgrade prices, posted by Bott yesterday, are in line with most industry predictions that Vista licenses will be about $40-50 more expensive than corresponding Windows XP licenses.

As for the release date, it has to be taken as a maybe. After all, this release date is simply one that Amazon has attached to its SKU, and it’s not a hard release date announced by Microsoft. In case you’re wondering, there isn’t an official release date for Vista just yet, but developers within Microsoft have vaguely offered “late January” as a possible release date. The Amazon dates back up that claim.

Amazon has often posted crazy-strange preliminary street dates for vaporware and titles without definite manufacturer’s release dates. For example, if you’re excited to hear the new Boredoms album, or if you want to get your hands on the DVD release of Lucio Fulci’s Zombi 2, you only have to wait another 19 years.

Meanwhile, the first release candidate of Windows Vista has already been made available to the public.

Dr. Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, was named to the board of directors at Apple today. Read the press release from Apple.

Schmidt arrived at Google after a stints as the CEO of Novell and as the CTO of Sun, where he headed the company’s Java group. He’s also an alum of Xerox PARC. Since landing at the search company, he has supervised Google’s marked growth through rapid development of a wide range of web services. With this move, Apple is hoping Schmidt will put some of his experience steering a company with diversified products through a fickle marketplace to use.

So Sayeth Steve Jobs:

“Eric is obviously doing a terrific job as CEO of Google, and we look forward to his contributions as a member of Apple’s board of directors… Like Apple, Google is very focused on innovation and we think Eric’s insights and experience will be very valuable in helping to guide Apple in the years ahead.”

OK, prediction time. Google and Apple team up to distribute music and movies (for real this time)? Google tools integrated into Mac OS X? Maybe — at the very least — Google Desktop for the Mac?

All signs point to good things ahead. As Valleywag notes, this is a sad day in Redmond, WA.

Associated Press 14:26 PM Aug, 25, 2006

WHO: A wiggly design collective started by French Crisp and Waspy Steven and a host of enablers called ‘Famous NAMES’. Presently there are designers in NYC, Tokyo, and Montreal w/ one guest designer featured each season.

PHILOSOPHY: (as translated by Famous NAME Grandma Yip-see) Good crothes for good peeper. If you can be better, we wirr put crothes on you.

WHY: Progressive streetwear from several labels got good, so progressive street kids copped it. Then some of the brands got cocky, and then they got expensive, too expensive for progressive street kids that made them thrive. That’s when those brands got ‘dumb’. We’re for people who avoid ‘dumb’.

HOW: NAME Ribbon was born in a tattoo parlor on the Lower East Side, NYC. The tattoo artist had simply left the word ‘NAME’ on their sample drawing of the distinctive ‘I love Mom’ tattoo which incorporates a ribbon over a heart. It was striking how a meaningless graphic could be imbued with such life-long personal meaning just by adding the individual. The NAME ribbon is therefore a platform for expression that is given meaning by the individual who owns and displays it.

http://www.nameribbon.com

The UK is poised to drop that crazy law that legally prevented people from using FM transmitters to send their iPod’s buttery beats to their radio, so Britons will need to start shopping around for the myriad FM transmitters, the most promising of which is the iCast from iStuff. Given the official seal of approval from the UK’s Ministry of Truth (or whomever), the iCast plugs right into the iPod’s headphone jack, so it should work on other, non-iPod DAPs, too. The iCast is capable of transmitting music between the frequencies of 88.1 MHz and 107.9MHz and is powered by a single AA battery (or you can plug her into the cigarette lighter). The iCast retails for around $56. – Nicholas Deleon

Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.

After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930. The new definition of what is — and isn’t — a planet fills a centuries-old black hole for scientists who have labored since Copernicus without one.

Although astronomers applauded after the vote, Jocelyn Bell Burnell — a specialist in neutron stars from Northern Ireland who oversaw the proceedings — urged those who might be “quite disappointed” to look on the bright side.

“It could be argued that we are creating an umbrella called ‘planet’ under which the dwarf planets exist,” she said, drawing laughter by waving a stuffed Pluto of Walt Disney fame beneath a real umbrella.

The decision by the prestigious international group spells out the basic tests that celestial objects will have to meet before they can be considered for admission to the elite cosmic club.

For now, membership will be restricted to the eight “classical” planets in the solar system: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Much-maligned Pluto doesn’t make the grade under the new rules for a planet: “a celestial body that is in orbit around the sun, has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a … nearly round shape, and has cleared the neighborhood around its orbit.”

Pluto is automatically disqualified because its oblong orbit overlaps with Neptune’s.

Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of “dwarf planets,” similar to what long have been termed “minor planets.” The definition also lays out a third class of lesser objects that orbit the sun — “small solar system bodies,” a term that will apply to numerous asteroids, comets and other natural satellites.

It was unclear how Pluto’s demotion might affect the mission of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft, which earlier this year began a 9 1/2-year journey to the oddball object to unearth more of its secrets.

The decision at a conference of 2,500 astronomers from 75 countries was a dramatic shift from just a week ago, when the group’s leaders floated a proposal that would have reaffirmed Pluto’s planetary status and made planets of its largest moon and two other objects.

That plan proved highly unpopular, splitting astronomers into factions and triggering days of sometimes combative debate that led to Pluto’s undoing.

Now, two of the objects that at one point were cruising toward possible full-fledged planethood will join Pluto as dwarfs: the asteroid Ceres, which was a planet in the 1800s before it got demoted, and 2003 UB313, an icy object slightly larger than Pluto whose discoverer, Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena has nicknamed Xena.

Charon, the largest of Pluto’s three moons, is no longer under consideration for any special designation.

Dragged down by its own bulk and ripped apart by the rebellious energy of the file-sharing revolution, the recording industry hit rock bottom. That was three years ago. Today, signs of renewal are everywhere: amazing technologies, smart business models, even ingtones as hit singles. The best part? An explosion of creativity from artists and fans alike. Rock on.

Terry McBride has an idea. Another idea. A good – no, a great idea. McBride, CEO of Nettwerk Music Group, is sitting in his Vancouver, British Columbia, office with his local marketing staff discussing strategy for the release of a new album by Barenaked Ladies. The marketing departments in three other cities are conferenced in. The conversation ping-pongs from Nascar promotions to placement in a Sims videogame. McBride is on a roll.

“This one’s a real wingdinger,” he says, leaning into the speakerphone so New York, Denver, and Los Angeles won’t miss a word. “Let’s give away the ProTools files on MySpace. Vocals, guitars, drums, and bass. We’ll let the fans make their own mixes.” The room falls quiet. Musicians usually record their instruments and vocals on separate tracks; the producer and mixer combine those tracks into a finished product. McBride wants to make the individual files available so that amateur DJs can use them like Lego bricks to create something all their own. The record industry likes control. McBride is proposing unfettered chaos.

A voice from LA breaks the silence: “For the single, you mean, right?” McBride’s features screw up in concentration, then quickly expand into a grin. “What I’m proposing,” he says, “is that we make all 29 songs available as ProTools files. In two weeks.” The Internet marketers in Vancouver look worried. “But,” he adds, “we’ll get the files from the single up on MySpace by Monday.” Libby White, a member of the department, shoots McBride a skeptical look. Can they make it? McBride asks. White sighs. “We’ll make it,” she says.

To all appearances, Nettwerk is just a midsize music management company with an indie record label on the side. Many of the artists on its client roster – which includes Avril Lavigne, Dido, Sarah McLachlan, and Stereophonics – are mainstream acts. But McBride, the company’s cofounder and creative force, is quietly carrying out a plan to reinvent the music industry, including legalizing file-sharing and giving artists control over their own intellectual property.

Which puts Barenaked Ladies, the goofy folk-pop jam band from Canada known to their fans as BNL, at the vanguard of this stealth revolution. Three years ago, on McBride’s advice, BNL left the Warner Music Group imprint Reprise Records to create its own label, Desperation Records. The upcoming album will be the first major test of that decision. It will also reveal whether Terry McBride is a crazy genius or just crazy.

The music industry is suffering. The major record labels – which rely on CDs for most of their revenue – are in decline. CD sales in the US have dropped more than 20 percent from a peak of $13.4 billion in 2000. But don’t be fooled: The market for music is thriving. With the rise of peer-to-peer networks, the iPod, and other digital technologies – plus a 100 percent jump in concert ticket sales since 1999 – the world is awash in music. The industry now has more sources of revenue – ringtones, concert tickets, license agreements with TV shows and videogames – than ever before.

Record labels have always been the center of gravity in the industry – the locus of power, ideas, and money. Labels discovered the talent, pushed the songs, and got the product on the air and into stores. The goal: move records, and later, CDs. “The labels were never in the business of selling music,” says David Kusek, vice president of Boston’s Berklee College of Music and coauthor of The Future of Music. “They were in the business of selling plastic discs.”

Musicians generally make very little from the sale of their records. The costs of production, marketing, and promotion are charged against sales, and even if they go multiplatinum and cover those costs, their cut of any extra revenue is usually less than 10 percent. On top of this, the labels typically retain the copyrights to the recordings, which allows them to profit from the musicians’ catalogs indefinitely. “It’s as if you received a loan for a house,” says Ed Robertson, one of BNL’s lead vocalists. “But when you finish paying off that loan, the label says thank you and keeps the house.”

And, funny thing, this model isn’t just bad for artists, it’s increasingly bad for business. Because the label makes most of its profits from recorded music, much of the money spent marketing an artist benefits third parties like concert promoters and music publishing companies. In addition, copyrights to a piece of music are usually divided between a label and a publisher, which collect royalties every time the work is recorded, performed, or played publicly. “What other business splits up its key assets and sells them to separate businesses that wind up in conflict with each other?” asks Duncan Reid, a venture capitalist who now helps run UK-based Ingenious Music.

Industry insiders like McBride think the old model is as antiquated as the 8-track. “The future of the business isn’t selling records,” McBride says. “It’s in selling music, in every form imaginable.” And by establishing a series of so-called artist-run labels, McBride is creating the next-gen music company. “We become the management company, the publishing company, and the record company rolled into one,” McBride says. “We take our 20 percent cut of the whole pie.”

More important, he says, the new model frees him and his artists from the overgrown bureaucracy of the music industry, and that means more money for everyone. He can book tours, sell ringtones, peddle songs to advertising agencies and, yes, give away free downloads without any of the complex, multiparty negotiations that once gummed up the works. “It used to take months to sell a frickin’ ringtone to Bell Canada,” McBride says. “With BNL, one phone call gets the job done.”

McBride’s success will depend on what he calls “collapsed copyright.” Nettwerk will represent artists like BNL, but the bands will record under their own labels and retain ownership of all their intellectual property, an anomaly in the industry. The bands, in turn, can expect to earn considerably more money – say, $5 to $6 from the sale of each CD instead of the standard dollar or two.

Nettwerk is also poised to take advantage of the significant changes in music marketing wrought by social networking sites like MySpace. Radio, and the labels that provide tunes for radio playlists, are no longer the gatekeepers to stardom. Some of the most promising new bands, like Arctic Monkeys and Arcade Fire, owe their success to online word of mouth and grassroots marketing. Nettwerk has tapped this phenomenon to the fullest, offering prizes to people who sell a certain number of CDs to friends and using software to keep close tabs on its extensive network of volunteer marketers, formerly known as fans.

By becoming a one-stop shop, Nettwerk fronts some of the money and does most of the work once performed by the various players associated with a big, complicated act like BNL. (The band itself pays the studio costs of its recordings.) And however admirable and logical it might be to keep the intellectual property in the hands of an artist, McBride also runs a risk: Acts could use Nettwerk to reach stardom only to then abandon the company for a different management firm.

It’s a risk McBride is willing to take. Twelve of the nearly 40 acts on Nettwerk’s roster now have their own labels, and McBride says that within six years nearly all his artists will have shed their major-label partners. “The old system kept us from imagining what a music product could be,” McBride says. “Now we can really start to have fun.”

McBride’s growing empire started small. “There were these great bands in Vancouver that didn’t have managers,” says McBride, who founded Nettwerk Productions with an old friend, Mark Jowett, in 1984. By the late ’80s, their fledgling music management company was beginning to deal in major-league talent, including a classically trained up-and-comer named Sarah McLachlan. Her first release, Touch, eventually went gold in Canada, and her second, Solace, went platinum up north. Still, she wasn’t able to penetrate the crowded American marketplace. McBride and Jowett were convinced that her third album, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, could become a breakout success. The product of more than a year’s collaboration with producer Pierre Marchand, it showed considerably more maturity and musical sophistication than her previous work. But after the first single failed to light up radio stations, Arista Records stopped pushing the album.

“That’s how we discovered we could do a lot of things major labels do. Sarah had made this incredible album, and we felt that if we were just persistent, it would find an audience,” McBride says. And, eventually, it did. Traditionally, a management company limits itself to things like booking tours and helping artists negotiate deals with their labels. Marketing is left to the labels. But for McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, McBride had his employees call radio stations and record stores to push the disc. Slowly, it inched into popular consciousness. “It sold a quiet million,” McBride says with a chuckle. “We went from city to city and spent a year working the album.” The grassroots effort built a following for McLachlan, and four years later, her next major album, Surfacing, debuted at number two on the Billboard charts.

During this period – the early to mid-’90s – the record industry was soaring. Aging boomers were replacing vinyl with CDs, and grunge ignited a rock renaissance. CD sales were growing at double-digit rates, and label execs developed an addiction to easy money: manufactured hits by pop acts like ‘NSync or compilations that could be sold in volume at big-box retailers like Wal-Mart.

This was a high-water mark for corporate rock. Recent consolidation and acquisitions meant that almost all labels were owned by one of five companies: BMG, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment, Universal Music Group, and Warner Music Group. A new emphasis on quarterly results discouraged label executives from nurturing new bands and focusing on long-term development.

Meanwhile, Barenaked Ladies was running into the same problems Sarah McLachlan had faced. The band was a sensation in Canada in the early ’90s when an independently released cassette tape went gold – a first. The Ladies were quickly courted by all the major labels, and they signed with Reprise in 1992. But their second album failed to meet Reprise’s sales expectations, and on the eve of its next release in 1995, the band found itself facing an artistic and financial crisis.

“Radio just didn’t believe in us, and Reprise wasn’t doing anything to convert them,” recalls Steven Page, the band’s cherubic lead vocalist. “They signed us at the height of the grunge era, and we were playing this folk-pop music that they just didn’t know what to do with,” he says. “We would have been dropped after the second album, except we had this success in Canada.” In late summer 1995, BNL asked McBride to become its manager. The band had finished recording its third album, Born on a Pirate Ship, and all the members were burned out, says McBride. He told them to take some time off, then give him 18 months of their lives.

Album sales in both countries were lackluster. But following the template he created for McLachlan, McBride chose a single, “The Old Apartment,” and sent the band out on tour, pushing the single one city at a time. “Terry worked it like crazy, basically doing the label’s job,” Page says.

McBride micromarketed the album, slowly expanding BNL’s fan base in the US to set the stage for its next LP, a live album called Rock Spectacle. “The first two albums didn’t get any airplay in the US, but they had great singles,” McBride says. Rock Spectacle became a minor hit, priming American audiences for BNL’s breakout 1998 album, Stunt. “Stunt blew the industry away. It debuted at number three on the charts, and no one even had us on the radar screen,” Page says. “It was all because of the work Terry put in.”

Stunt went on to sell more than 5 million copies, a major success. But the band’s subsequent albums fell far short of that mark, and by 2003, when BNL’s contract with Reprise expired, the members were unsure of their next move. In December of that year, McBride traveled down to Portland, Oregon, to discuss the band’s future. “We were at this Vietnamese restaurant, and I think they were totally unprepared for what I said,” McBride recalls. “I told them not to sign a new contract, that they could do better on their own.” It was a big step, and while the band’s first effort on its own label, a Christmas album called Barenaked for the Holidays, has sold a respectable 400,000 units, the real test of McBride’s model is still to come.

The freedom from major-label constraints that BNL now enjoys was at first “nerve-racking,” Page says. The feeling passed. For the new album, Barenaked Ladies Are Me (read: army), McBride and BNL have reinvented the release campaign, starting with the music itself. The band wrote 29 new songs, which will be packaged and sold in a variety of formats, including a CD, four different digital versions, a 14-track collection for Starbucks in Canada, and a second full-length disc, Barenaked Ladies Are Men, due early next year.

And that’s just the beginning. Between ringtones, acoustic versions, and concert recordings, those 29 songs have been multiplied into more than 200 “assets” – song versions – that can be used individually or in conjunction with others to create a product. “Because the copyrights are in one place [in BNL’s hands], we can be really creative,” McBride says. Hardcore fans can buy 45 of those assets on a USB drive; others can download the special Sims versions (recorded in Simlish, no less). “For decades, people in music have used the number of albums sold as a measuring stick for success,” McBride says. “We’re trying to get people to see beyond that. It’s about revenue from music, however you make it – selling concert tickets, licensing to TV, or selling packed USB drives.”

Eventually McBride would like to pioneer another source of revenue with even greater potential: P2P networks. Earlier this year, he sparked a music industry uproar when he announced he would pay the legal defense for a Texas man being sued for piracy by the Recording Industry Association of America. “The lawsuits are hurting my bands,” he says. “If you could monetize the peer-to-peer networks, everyone would make more money.”

But even such a radical step is just one facet of McBride’s larger strategy. In May, President Bush signed into law a revision of the tax code that will make it easier to sell intellectual property as a stock, with profits being taxed at the same lower rate as other capital gains. “Once we have access to all the intellectual property, we’re going to offer shares in individual artists and take in equity investments,” McBride says. “Eventually, a major band could be its own public company.” The key, he adds, sounding like an overzealous investment banker, is that the value of a band would be measured like a stock and would receive capitalization in expectation of future earnings. “At that point, even a band selling 100,000 units a year becomes profitable,” McBride says.

McBride isn’t the only industry executive who sees music and musicians from the perspective of an investment banker. In 2005, Ingenious Media launched Ingenious Music, which operates more like a VC firm than a label, running several equity funds that invest in bands, managers, and small labels. “We’re not interested in making a record company; we’re making a music company,” says Duncan Reid, the firm’s commercial director. Like Nettwerk, Ingenious wants a slice of every pie, not just the increasingly small morsels from CD sales.

On this side of the Atlantic, Dimensional Associates has a similar long-term goal. The firm owns eMusic, the second-largest digital music service after iTunes, and The Orchard, a digital distributor of independent music. Dimensional has invested in a variety of music industry services, including a mobile recording studio and a publishing company. And like Nettwerk, the company is starting to back artists who will hold the rights to their own work. Even the major labels are beginning to experiment. Warner’s all-digital label, Cordless Recordings, for example, gives bands their masters in exchange for a cut of concert and merchandising revenues.

McBride has every reason to be confident that his experiment with Barenaked Ladies will pay handsomely. The band has a loyal following that has warmly embraced its new independence. If Barenaked Ladies Are Me can bring in even modest returns, both Nettwerk and the band will be in the black. The real test will come as Nettwerk tries to launch bands like the Format, an indie act with a small following and no real presence in the popular consciousness. “If we can break bands using this model,” McBride says, “the industry will never be the same.”

On Aug. 16, two men were escorted off a plane headed for Manchester, England, because some passengers thought they looked either Asian or Middle Eastern, might have been talking Arabic, wore leather jackets, and looked at their watches — and the passengers refused to fly with them on board.

The men were questioned for several hours and then released.

On Aug. 15, an entire airport terminal was evacuated because someone’s cosmetics triggered a false positive for explosives. The same day, a Muslim man was removed from an airplane in Denver for reciting prayers. The Transportation Security Administration decided that the flight crew overreacted, but he still had to spend the night in Denver before flying home the next day.

The next day, a Port of Seattle terminal was evacuated because a couple of dogs gave a false alarm for explosives.

On Aug. 19, a plane made an emergency landing in Tampa, Florida, after the crew became suspicious because two of the lavatory doors were locked. The plane was searched, but nothing was found. Meanwhile, a man who tampered with a bathroom smoke detector on a flight to San Antonio was cleared of terrorism, but only after having his house searched.

On Aug. 16, a woman suffered a panic attack and became violent on a flight from London to Washington, so the plane was escorted to the Boston airport by fighter jets. “The woman was carrying hand cream and matches but was not a terrorist threat,” said the TSA spokesman after the incident.

And on Aug. 18, a plane flying from London to Egypt made an emergency landing in Italy when someone found a bomb threat scrawled on an air sickness bag. Nothing was found on the plane, and no one knows how long the note was on board.

I’d like everyone to take a deep breath and listen for a minute.

The point of terrorism is to cause terror, sometimes to further a political goal and sometimes out of sheer hatred. The people terrorists kill are not the targets; they are collateral damage. And blowing up planes, trains, markets or buses is not the goal; those are just tactics.

The real targets of terrorism are the rest of us: the billions of us who are not killed but are terrorized because of the killing. The real point of terrorism is not the act itself, but our reaction to the act.

And we’re doing exactly what the terrorists want.

We’re all a little jumpy after the recent arrest of 23 terror suspects in Great Britain. The men were reportedly plotting a liquid-explosive attack on airplanes, and both the press and politicians have been trumpeting the story ever since.

In truth, it’s doubtful that their plan would have succeeded; chemists have been debunking the idea since it became public. Certainly the suspects were a long way off from trying: None had bought airline tickets, and some didn’t even have passports.

Regardless of the threat, from the would-be bombers’ perspective, the explosives and planes were merely tactics. Their goal was to cause terror, and in that they’ve succeeded.

Imagine for a moment what would have happened if they had blown up 10 planes. There would be canceled flights, chaos at airports, bans on carry-on luggage, world leaders talking tough new security measures, political posturing and all sorts of false alarms as jittery people panicked. To a lesser degree, that’s basically what’s happening right now.

Our politicians help the terrorists every time they use fear as a campaign tactic. The press helps every time it writes scare stories about the plot and the threat. And if we’re terrified, and we share that fear, we help. All of these actions intensify and repeat the terrorists’ actions, and increase the effects of their terror.

(I am not saying that the politicians and press are terrorists, or that they share any of the blame for terrorist attacks. I’m not that stupid. But the subject of terrorism is more complex than it appears, and understanding its various causes and effects are vital for understanding how to best deal with it.)

The implausible plots and false alarms actually hurt us in two ways. Not only do they increase the level of fear, but they also waste time and resources that could be better spent fighting the real threats and increasing actual security. I’ll bet the terrorists are laughing at us.

Another thought experiment: Imagine for a moment that the British government arrested the 23 suspects without fanfare. Imagine that the TSA and its European counterparts didn’t engage in pointless airline-security measures like banning liquids. And imagine that the press didn’t write about it endlessly, and that the politicians didn’t use the event to remind us all how scared we should be. If we’d reacted that way, then the terrorists would have truly failed.

It’s time we calm down and fight terror with antiterror. This does not mean that we simply roll over and accept terrorism. There are things our government can and should do to fight terrorism, most of them involving intelligence and investigation — and not focusing on specific plots.

But our job is to remain steadfast in the face of terror, to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to not panic every time two Muslims stand together checking their watches. There are approximately 1 billion Muslims in the world, a large percentage of them not Arab, and about 320 million Arabs in the Middle East, the overwhelming majority of them not terrorists. Our job is to think critically and rationally, and to ignore the cacophony of other interests trying to use terrorism to advance political careers or increase a television show’s viewership.

The surest defense against terrorism is to refuse to be terrorized. Our job is to recognize that terrorism is just one of the risks we face, and not a particularly common one at that. And our job is to fight those politicians who use fear as an excuse to take away our liberties and promote security theater that wastes money and doesn’t make us any safer.

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Bruce Schneier is the CTO of Counterpane Internet Security and the author of Beyond Fear: Thinking Sensibly About Security in an Uncertain World. You can contact him through his website.