Indeed, as the Russian encyclopedia for its practitioners concluded: "Information war … is in many places replacing standard war".
Alongside the Illusion Softworks title Hidden & Dangerous, Rainbow Six effectively invented the tactical shooter genre – a more tense and authentic combat experience than the standard war blaster.
But this new film simply takes a standard war movie template and cynically bolts the monsters on to it: they appear briefly, sporadically and uninterestingly.
In addition, unlike the similar American documentary Restrepo, this looks like a feature film rather than a documentary … the high contrast, treated colours and crisp focus make it look more like an art movie than your standard war reportage".
"The reason it's called terrorism as opposed to a standard war is these are weak enemies that can't match us in conventional power, but what they can do is make us scared.
Come Monday we'll be up to our ears in some of the emptiest, most self-serving dreck ever to ripple the atmosphere, the standard war-fantasy talk of American politics along with televangelist-style purlings about heroes, freedoms, the supreme sacrifice.
(I smell some evolution brewing...) No matter how many orchestras continue to play the standard war horses, more, not less of them, are made up of players whose ears are more - not less - attuned to a wider variety of sound, including the music of recent generations.
It lost the 1980s video-standard wars, for instance, despite its system being regarded by many as technically superior to Sony's Betamax and Matsushita's VHS which won by freely licensing its technology.
And that step is what may make the standards wars really interesting.
Such fights are called standards wars — a familiar example is Betamax's defeat by V.H.S. — and the biggest standards war today is the one between Blu-ray and HD DVD.
Ultimately, smart radios could do away with the standards wars that bedevil the wireless industry and so irritate users.
