I was thinking about the definition of patriotism again. I was looking at a new website I found after googling "Global Patriotism" check it out here. The author points out something interesting
A report about the wreck of an airplane over the ocean without fail will begin with a report of how many Americans died, notice, not teenagers, not children, not women who often generally are not referred to as statistical units, but of Americans in particular. That is, if Americans were not injured, isn't this such a great tragedy any longer? It’s the very same picture in any country of the world. When terrorists blew up a night club on Bali, all the Russian mass media emphasized in their reports that no Russians were there.

My idea boils down to this. Computers are an awesomely powerful tool. More and more of our infrastructure relies on software. We're going to see all sorts of issues with the global economy in the coming years because of terrorism and other problems. I agrue that the bickering among software engineers that are responsible for the future of Linux should be aware that there is more at stake here than pride and recognition. The lack of standardized databases at the CIA, FBI and Pentagon is one of the reasons why terrorists are able to succeed. What if all of these agencies decided to make use of PostGRESQL, XML and a solid security system? and they did it 4 years ago? Could things be different?

Should the Internet be thought of as Infrastructure just like highways currently are?