Stardate 20011023.1406 (On Screen): Every time there's a notable success or a notable catastrophe, the whatever-it-was becomes a meme and suddenly everyone wants to play with it. If it's a success, they'll try to find a way to paint their own product or cause with the same brush. If it's a catastrophe or an atrocity then they try to paint their opponents with it. Sometimes it approaches the ludicrous.
You saw it happen during the dot-com boom; for a while there nearly every startup company tried to figure out how to call themselves eSomething or iSomething or Something.com to catch the wave. Equally, after the dot-com bust, suddenly even successful online companies tried to find ways to distance themselves from that fact.
The latest meme of this kind is "terrorist". It's obviously a negative, and people are now using it as a generic epithet. Some of those who oppose the bombing of Afghanistan have taken to call it "the terrorist bombing" so as to make it morally indistinguishable from the NYC attack. And now Microsoft, the company everyone loves to hate, has gotten onto the bandwagon and declared that virus writers are terrorists. Let's try to keep a sense of proportion here, shall we? (Fat chance.) (discuss)
