When I last wrote about this subject (Ledeen's Lair May 2013), they called them "homegrown" terrorists, the phrase of the month a year and a half ago.  Back then, such imaginary monsters were bombing marathons;  today they are shooting Canadian parliamentarians and security guards, and attacking NYPD guys with their jihadi axes.

It doesn't really matter what you call them, because they're figments of the "expert" imagination. The legend-mavens tell us that there are "normal" Americans (this part is very important) who somehow just go bad, and turn into murderous terrorists.  There is no foreign input, no alien country or intelligence service, no global conspiracy.  The terrorists are homegrown and they are on their own. They are  Lone Wolves.

It's not so. There are homegrown terrorists like the Unabomber, but these aren't the people we're talking about just now.  Unabomber is a nut, but he's a distinctly American nut, and definitely a lone wolf. 

The so-called lone wolves of recent days-the killer in Canada, the axeman in New York, and, we should add, the Oklahama City decapitator - aren't loners, they're members.  They've been inspired by local or online jihadis.

Well, most of you may have heard about the new Operating Systems from Apple and Microsoft, Snow Leopard and Windows 7. The more things change, the closer in convergence these OS's have become over time.

First one must realize that Windows 7 is really Vista 2 with a lot of cleanup of the interface and improvements in performance. Internally at Redmond, it's called Windows 6.1, however that would not exactly work for the marketing campaign.

Marketing would not be able to get away with charging anywhere from $99.00 to $319.00 depending on which version you choose.  There are six, from Starter and Home Basic to Ultimate or Enterprise. Apple's upgrade Snow Leopard, which is actually version 10.6, costs out at a $29.99 per box.

Apple decided to waver from introducing lots of new features and instead focused on performance enhancements. They should have also focused on getting rid of all the bugs. One of the undocumented undesired "uh-oh" enhancements was a bug that would wipe out users data, if an upgrade was performed with an existing previously set guest account. Oops...

The coming years will make you more vulnerable than ever
What are the dangers of storing ever more e-mail, documents, photos and financial account information online? I first read interviews with experts and then designed several scenarios that depict what could happen in the next few years if technological innovation and public policy trends in three categories - online storage, location tracking and biometrics - remain on their current course.

Tracking Your Location

The scenario: The police are at your house on official business, your inbox is flooded with pornographic ads - and all you did was drive to the mall to buy an anniversary gift. Welcome to wireless location tracking in the year 2020.

On Saturday morning, you jumped into your car and plugged in your new high-speed Internet phone. The phone downloaded data to the car's real-time holographic traffic map and guided you to the mall along the route with the least traffic. To find the jewelry store, you downloaded a map of the mall to your phone. The turn-by-turn directions took you past a new lingerie shop, so you wandered inside for a few seconds. Then you proceeded to the jewelry store, and in 15 minutes your shopping was done.

A little later, you started receiving raunchy multimedia messages hawking sex toys.

While you were inside the lingerie shop, the store's data reader pinged your phone via Bluetooth and then automatically bought your contact information from commercial data brokers. Now its affiliate, which sells novelty adult items, can legally market to you via e-mail, claiming an ongoing business relationship.

To The Point is honored to have received this letter

Dear Dr. Wheeler,

I am an active duty Colonel in the United States Army, and have just returned from Fallujah, where the fight has been hot. I am also a brand new subscriber to To The Point!

Thank you for saying what is in the hearts of our military on the ground in Iraq. Your readers need to know that SECDEF Rumsfeld is held in very high regard by the troops. Our Marines have high morale and all of them have personal body armor, contrary to liberal media lies and distortions.