That page you linked to shows that USB-2.0 real-world througput is often 1/2 that of FireWire when talking to the same device. So the question remains... if FW and USB2 PCI cards cost about the same, and FW is masterless, is faster, and is already standard on so many devices, WHY use USB2?
You are considering RAM at the high end of the scale. The RAM in this cache-on-drive only needs to be fast enough to transfer at 20MB/s to make the drive comparable to most HDs today. That means even pre PC66 RAM should be enough to use here.
My particular option would be to use non volitile memory like FLASH. Then you could reboot your computer from the cached image. Since flash takes no energy to maintain and only a little to read from, this would do wonders for CPU power consumption and for laptop battery life while using a CD.
Your computer side caching also doens't allow people to use software that requires the physical CD to be inserted. With the cache in the drive, the software wouldn't know the difference.
Exactly. But two points: 1. The memory wouldn'y even be in the computer, it'd be in the drive. 2. The memory could even be FLASH, so you could boot to the RAM image in the drive.
Yup.. All three of you are correct, A square disk makes more sense for such a scanner. All the more reason for someone to develop one. The drive would still work for round (or square or triangle) shaped media. I just don't see the point in going to a new CD format when DVD and DVD-R is already available.
As seen by my initial post's math error, my brain is in sleep mode, not accurate math posting mode so I won't attempt to calculate the percentage gain in storage by going 12cm square and loosing the hole while keeping density the same.
But the question would be WHY? There's a new optical data format in the same form factor that has about 3 times the base transfer rate, and stores about 4x as much data. It's called DVD.
When we start thinking that a 52x DVD readers is too slow, THEN I'll start wondering when the stronger materials will arrive.
CD transfers speeds are lower than hard drive transfer speeds because hard drives have multiple platters and higher data density.
A 7200RPM hard drive today may be able to sustain 40MB/s transfer rate, but that comes from at least four read heads. Each head is only transfering about 10MB/s. That roughly equates to 60X in a CD burner. So a single read head of a hard disk at 7200 RPM is roughly equivilent to CDROM at 22,000RPM(avg).
And that shows us that the HD data density is much greater than that of a CD. The reason: CDs are a portable media. The have to remain compatible for long periods of time. You can't just arbitrarily shrink the size of a bit or change the encoding scheme. If this happened you'd need to purchase new CD players and CDRW drives every six months to keep up with technology. HDs are non-portable. The media is treated as a black box. You never need anyone to be able to read the media, just send the proper commands to the interface to the black box, so you can do whatever you like to the medium's format.
1. The CD will be spun at 64x or so clockwise. Under that will be a second counter-rotating plane that will contain the laser. With the platters rotating in opposite directions you can break the 30K RPM physical limitations of the media. You can build the mechanism strong enough to do 300x normal CD speed I'd guess. 300 * 64 = 6,000x or ( 2.5GB/s). I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing such a mechanism in hard drives either. The disks i
2. What I think will truely be the big breakthrough will be to not spin the disk or reader mechanism at all. Instead, the drive will use a scanner like method to read the entire CD in to a 700MB buffer in a few seconds. The disk will then sit idle while all requests are served from the buffer. I see this used in a slot loading scheme, so as the disk is drawn in it is read. The nifty thing about this would be that you could create a CD image in the buffer, change the bugger copy just like a normal disk drive, then eject the physical master and burn the buffer to a new CDR(/CDRW disk.
Exactly. What we need 1000x more of is developer hours on the games. Teh graphics are pretty damed realistic now. The plot-lines and interactivity of most games is at about the level of the games in the 80s. Worse in many cases.
Why do these companies continually throw processor performance at a problem that requires a larger but no more processor intensive code base.
Since Kernel 2.2 I think NTFS paritions have been supported as read-only. The stock kernel from your distro probably doesn't have the support comiled in. Assuming the kernel was compiled for loadable modules, you could compile the code as a module, and it would probably auto-insert itself when you tried to mount the partition.
The HOW of getting that done isn't very difficult, but beyond the scope of this thread.
Yes, that's exactly what I've been talking about since near the start of this thread. The potential damage that would have been caused if the 19 hijakers had used small planes instead of the four jumbo planes they did use.
It only takes one tech-savvy guy to do the planning. The rest just need to know what to push/turn, and when. The accuracy of the GPS is good enough. Let's say at 0mph it's accurate to 100ft. If at 500mph it's only 1/100th as accurate, that's still less than two miles of error. But, modern GPS devices also can access WAAS data, providing accuracy in the 6-9ft range depending on signals. They also use continuous vector updating. Meaning it interpolates between samples to develop a more accurate location.
Before you discount the impact and exlosive force of a light plane loaded with high explosives, I want you to think back to the video footage of the attacks against Iraq a decade ago.
Do you remember all the buildings being totally destroyed? hangars simply vanishing in explosions? Those where 500, 1,000 and 2,000 pound bombs. Are you seriously telling me that you think 10 such equivelent explosions would not cause mass damage and a sky scraper's collapse?
Undertand that bomb making is probably one of the strong suits of these terrorist groups. If they could get their hands on the explosives they could build a very formitable bomb in to that weight class.
I already stated they had that right under another section. I just said I didn't think they should. And supposedly they really don't because as I also said, they don't require such checks for chartered flights which are also interstate commerce.
The mechanics of flying the plane are also pretty simple. As I stated in the root post, almost anyone can learn to fly any plane in about 3 days training. At least well enough to take command while already in the air, and to complete a suicide mission like this. Navigation is minimally important. Takeoff and landing are not needed. Proper proceedures for traffic space traversal, weather evaluation, flight planning, fuel management, collision avoidance, weight and balance, cockpit resource management and all that other pilot training stuff are unneccesary.
Most everything you need to know, the plane already knows if it has current instrumentation. All you need is someone to have given you notes on what buttons to press, and when. That information is simply gleaned from the plane's flight operation manual which is freely available, or from the flight data system's manual. Once the auto-pilot is disengaged, you don't need to necessarily mess with the hardware on the plane. You can simply usea a handheld GPS reciever and a laptop with a moving map. You can get such a setup from many electronics retailers.
Tell ya what: Try this very thing onX-Plane. I only suggest X-PLane because it's on Mac and PC, and is very realistic. Have it start you off in a random spot around New York City and try flying in to any particular building. Use a dry erase marker to make the circle on your windscreen.
It conflicts with the right reserved for the Federal government to print the official currency of the Union. Us Constitution: Art 1, sec 8, cla 5: To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures
And the necessary and proper laws that Congress has passed to fulfill that duty and right. Specifically counterfieting of Federal money has an impact on the value of the rest of the Federal money, and as such Congress can limit other's production of that money.
No, I'm not advocating anarchy. I firmly believe in the rule of law. I'm just stating that there are only two rights that the government (or anyone) can truly deprive you of. Life and Freedom. The Law provides a process whereby both rights may be taken from you for the violation of the laws.
Beyond that you can retain all your rights. Everything else comes down to a court battle over who's rights take precidence.
To quote the 10th ammendment (emphasis added):
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,
or to the people.
In the case of murder: You have the right to kill people. You exercise your right and kill someone. Your victim's have the right to not be killed. As such you violated someone else's rights, against their will. The public, via the government, excercise their right to limit your behavior and put you on trial for your act. Your right to freedom and/or life then may be permanently or temporarily revoked/suspended by the court/jury.
I'd considered the V1 for analogy. While the V1 would be closer in flight mechanism (long cruise under power), the V2 is closer to the attack mechanism (drop from high altitude at super-sonic speed).
The plane attack I described would certainly provide no warning, much like the V2. The V1 on the other hand made a very distinctive noise, hence the nickname "buzz-bomb", and people knew it was coming, just not where it would hit.
It's a tossup really. Either analogy works on some level.
Here's how to hit any target with any airplane at any speed:
Use a marker to put a small circle on the windshield. Steer your target into the circle. Keep the target in the circle until the plane goes boom!
This is specifically how pilots are trained to do basic collision avoidance. If the other plane is staying stationary relative to some mark/corner/scratch on your windscreen, you are likely headed for a collision and you should take evasive maneuvers and/or contact ATC for instructions. This is taught in ground school, even before you start flying in many cases.
Freedom to print my own money? Freedom to make copies of copyrighted works without permission? Freedom to start a bank? Freedom to swim in other people's pools? I don't have a problem with freedom of markets, but that means I'm free to create my own currency and ignore the one created by the federal government. Eliminate corporations, eliminate federal money, and divide up the land and natural resources of this country equally and I'm fine with leaving the rest to the markets.
Yes. You have the right to do absolutely anything you want to, as long as you are willing to accept the concequences. The 'people' on the other hand have the right to declare certain actions to be against the public good (illegal) and to arrest, try and punish you under the rule of law for commiting those illegal acts. The fact that those act are illegal, however, does not remove your right to commit them.
Specifically as to the creating your own money; many orginizations do. It's called sript. As long as all parties involved agree on the value and you never attempt to pass your money off as Federal legal tender, you're okay. Disney's theme parks are perhaps the most famous example of this economic system.
Eliminate corporations? On a limited scale. It's called zoning. A town could zone land such that no business larger than a certain dollar income or net worth could take up residence. It was certainly not the intention of the founders to protect freedom at all costs.
I don't think that is true, there are very few 'unless' type clauses in the Constitution. If it where the case, then why was Lincoln willing to risk dissoloution of the Union in order to guarantee freedom to the slaves? In WW1 and WW2 we where willing to risk the lives of most, if not the entire population of the world to guarantee freedom to opressed nations (esp 2 with the nukes).
Driving drunk: There is nothing wrong with that. If you choose to disobey a law (most everyone does it every day of their life) and no-one else is hamed during or as a result of that act... you should not be punished. If you are driving beyond the inflexible maximum alcohol intoxication, but are still in control of your vehicle then you are fine. There are also those who can drive well under the 'legal limit' and be a hazard on the road.
Fly drunk: same as above. Frankly I'd feel safer with an intoxicated pilot than with an intoxicated driver. The pilot has training well beyond the feeble excuse of 'driving lessons' that most Americans get. The pilot's actions (at least on commercial flights) will be monitored by no fewer than 5 contollers during the trip (departing ground, departing local, en-route, arrival local, arrival ground). If none of them have any reason to doubt the pilot's sobriety or ability to fly, why should I?
Require certs to fly: Yes it is within their power, at least arguably according to the Constitution (art 4 sec 3 cl 2). Do I think it's right to require such a certification? No. I think certs should be voluntary. I also think driver's licenses should be voluntary. BUT if you do something wrong or are involved in a collision or other incident without a cert, you could be sentenced more harshly if you where convicted of neglegence or wrongdoing as a cause of the incident. Let the free market work, all the airlines that pay to have cert holding pilots would be able to charge a premium. Those willing to risk a seasoned by non-cert pilot would pay a lesser fare. This would also open up GA to be much more approachable to the public.
Breathalizer to pilots: required by the Gov? no. Required by the employer? sure. Again with the free market system. You'd probably pay more to fly on an airline you know breathalizes their pilots before each flight. It still won't stop them from downing a few swigs from a pocket bottle during the flight. It would be just another illusion of security.
Metal detectors: Nope. That is presumption of guilt, and undo search in my book. It also doesn't stop a determined person from getting a weapon in the building. It's another illusion of security.
Background checks: again no. for both the pilot and hazmat driver. There are a few simple premises in the US that many have forgotten: You are innocent until proven guilty. You have the right to not provide testimony against yourself. If you are convicted of a crime and complete your sentence, you have paid your debt to society and (in most all cases) regain all of your rights. Your past convictions should not thwart your attempts to make a better life for yourself. Background checks may lead to discrimination for what people believe in or think. You might be denied a job because you wrote a paper that supported reinstatement of slavery and involuntary servitude several years ago. You don't own any slaves and you don't in any way practice your belief, but you would be denied access because of it.
And yes, I know there are negatives to all of my opinions. But there is one big positive: freedom. And as I recall, Freedom was the core principle the United States was founded on. Freedom of choice. Freedom of action. Freedom of markets. Freedom from govermnent intrusion.
It was the intention of the founders that the government be used to protect our freedoms, not to slowly erode them in the name of fighting terrorism, or any other purpose.
Killing hundreds or thousands of people at once with an airliner - government protection required Killing dozens to hundreds of people at once with a bus, car bomb or on a subway- no government protection required
Where exactly do you draw the line in potential death toll where the government can tell us who can access a method of transportation?
A Citation CJ1 has a useful payload of 1,550 lbs, it can cruise at about 92kts min. A Piper Seneca V has a useful payload of 1,337 lbs, it can cruise at about 65kts min.
I took stall speed and added a few knots. Low speed would be key to accurately hitting a target for maximum effect. Both of these planes (and many similar GA twins) are fairly common and could be purchased, rented or stolen from most regional GA fields.The two plane's I mentioned above could hold even more explosive if the fuel is reduced: in all likelyhood they'd only need 20 gals (134lb), leaving another ~800lbs available for explosive.
The moron in FL had a small (C152?) with nothing explosive on board. Liquid engine fuels are actually quite stable, and require specific conditions to explode.
A large truck would indeed be a great for hiding a bomb (recall the small Ryder truck in Oklahoma City). But you can't hit the top of a skyscraper with a truck. There's just something about 'death from above' that really strikes terror in to people.
The most effective use of small aircraft would be to put in an auto-pilot system and set them up to use GPS to guide them someplace, then release a nuclear, chemical or biological agent/device. That way you keep your operatives alive for further attacks.
Because despite the Gov's and Media's spin on things, the attacks on 9/11 did not require a lot of skill, planning or tactics. It does not take a genius to hijack a plane and fly it in to something as large as the WTC towers or The Pentagon. Learning to fly a jumbo jet (after it's already in the air): rather simple. Buying plane tickets for four flights that take off around the same time: one visit to travelocity or expedia or any other ticketing web site. Hickjacking a plane: please, any moron with anything resembing a weapon could do that.
Because the goal of the people who planed, and the people purpetrated the attack wasn't the most effective way to kill people. They merely figured out the best way to stike the most fear/terror in to the people of the U.S. They succeded. They've caused the US Gov to start stripping away fundamental rights. They caused people to fear travel, and large buildings.
On top of the initial attack, they've inderctly caused hundreds if not thousands of deaths in Afganastan, which was not in any way responsible for the attacks. The planners/operators of 9/11 were mostly Saudi Arabian and they used Saudi money. So are we attacking Saudi Arabia? Nope, we're attacking the people of Afganastan.
You don't need a State issued ID to be a passenger in a car, on a bus, a boat, or any other form of transportation. The thing here is that there are federal regulations (written or not) that require you to prove who you are in order to be a passenger on a scheduled commercial airliner.
Note I specifically stated "scheduled commercial airliner". All of this airline security is just a smokescreen. Did you know that chartered flights don't have any of these security restrictions? On a chartered flight you can drive your car up to the plane and board without ever passing through any security checkpoint. The size of the plane doesn't matter, nor do the number of passengers (to the best of my knowledge).
If the terrorists are going to do this large-plane-into-larger-building thing again, they'll be smarter to get on a large corporate jet, like a chartered 737 or something. They wouldn't even need to sneak anything on board, just act like really rich people. They could load their luggage with C4. They could board with guns conceled in their coats, take over the plane and fly into anything. No plane full of pesky passengers to thwart any hijaking attempts.
As for the air-force shooting them down when they left the flight path? Well, imagine the hijackers treating the plane like a German V2... keep the normal flight path until they get near/over a major city, they just point the nose at the ground. Aim for something large downtown. 35,000ft to impact in under 7 minutes. Even if the plane was hit by a missile from a figher jet, it'd still fall in a flaming wrek over the city.
Or perhaps this... You can learn to fly a small plane like a Cessna, Beechcraft, Piper, etc in a matter of days. At least well enough for a suicide run. These planes have a usable cargo load of above 1500lbs in most cases (that's a LOT of bomb). Imagine a fleet of 19 of these things loaded with high explosives making a systematic hit on a downtown area. Again.. no metal detctors, no bomb-sniffing machines, no passengers to deal with. Just the attackers and their ordinance.
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That page you linked to shows that USB-2.0 real-world througput is often 1/2 that of FireWire when talking to the same device.
So the question remains... if FW and USB2 PCI cards cost about the same, and FW is masterless, is faster, and is already standard on so many devices, WHY use USB2?
You are considering RAM at the high end of the scale. The RAM in this cache-on-drive only needs to be fast enough to transfer at 20MB/s to make the drive comparable to most HDs today. That means even pre PC66 RAM should be enough to use here.
My particular option would be to use non volitile memory like FLASH. Then you could reboot your computer from the cached image. Since flash takes no energy to maintain and only a little to read from, this would do wonders for CPU power consumption and for laptop battery life while using a CD.
Your computer side caching also doens't allow people to use software that requires the physical CD to be inserted. With the cache in the drive, the software wouldn't know the difference.
Exactly.
But two points:
1. The memory wouldn'y even be in the computer, it'd be in the drive.
2. The memory could even be FLASH, so you could boot to the RAM image in the drive.
Yup.. All three of you are correct, A square disk makes more sense for such a scanner.
All the more reason for someone to develop one. The drive would still work for round (or square or triangle) shaped media. I just don't see the point in going to a new CD format when DVD and DVD-R is already available.
As seen by my initial post's math error, my brain is in sleep mode, not accurate math posting mode so I won't attempt to calculate the percentage gain in storage by going 12cm square and loosing the hole while keeping density the same.
But the question would be WHY? There's a new optical data format in the same form factor that has about 3 times the base transfer rate, and stores about 4x as much data. It's called DVD.
When we start thinking that a 52x DVD readers is too slow, THEN I'll start wondering when the stronger materials will arrive.
CD transfers speeds are lower than hard drive transfer speeds because hard drives have multiple platters and higher data density.
A 7200RPM hard drive today may be able to sustain 40MB/s transfer rate, but that comes from at least four read heads. Each head is only transfering about 10MB/s. That roughly equates to 60X in a CD burner.
So a single read head of a hard disk at 7200 RPM is roughly equivilent to CDROM at 22,000RPM(avg).
And that shows us that the HD data density is much greater than that of a CD. The reason: CDs are a portable media. The have to remain compatible for long periods of time. You can't just arbitrarily shrink the size of a bit or change the encoding scheme. If this happened you'd need to purchase new CD players and CDRW drives every six months to keep up with technology. HDs are non-portable. The media is treated as a black box. You never need anyone to be able to read the media, just send the proper commands to the interface to the black box, so you can do whatever you like to the medium's format.
will be one of two things I think:
1. The CD will be spun at 64x or so clockwise. Under that will be a second counter-rotating plane that will contain the laser. With the platters rotating in opposite directions you can break the 30K RPM physical limitations of the media. You can build the mechanism strong enough to do 300x normal CD speed I'd guess. 300 * 64 = 6,000x or ( 2.5GB/s). I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing such a mechanism in hard drives either. The disks i
2. What I think will truely be the big breakthrough will be to not spin the disk or reader mechanism at all. Instead, the drive will use a scanner like method to read the entire CD in to a 700MB buffer in a few seconds. The disk will then sit idle while all requests are served from the buffer. I see this used in a slot loading scheme, so as the disk is drawn in it is read.
The nifty thing about this would be that you could create a CD image in the buffer, change the bugger copy just like a normal disk drive, then eject the physical master and burn the buffer to a new CDR(/CDRW disk.
Exactly. What we need 1000x more of is developer hours on the games.
Teh graphics are pretty damed realistic now. The plot-lines and interactivity of most games is at about the level of the games in the 80s. Worse in many cases.
Why do these companies continually throw processor performance at a problem that requires a larger but no more processor intensive code base.
Since Kernel 2.2 I think NTFS paritions have been supported as read-only.
The stock kernel from your distro probably doesn't have the support comiled in. Assuming the kernel was compiled for loadable modules, you could compile the code as a module, and it would probably auto-insert itself when you tried to mount the partition.
The HOW of getting that done isn't very difficult, but beyond the scope of this thread.
Yes, that's exactly what I've been talking about since near the start of this thread. The potential damage that would have been caused if the 19 hijakers had used small planes instead of the four jumbo planes they did use.
It only takes one tech-savvy guy to do the planning. The rest just need to know what to push/turn, and when.
The accuracy of the GPS is good enough. Let's say at 0mph it's accurate to 100ft. If at 500mph it's only 1/100th as accurate, that's still less than two miles of error. But, modern GPS devices also can access WAAS data, providing accuracy in the 6-9ft range depending on signals. They also use continuous vector updating. Meaning it interpolates between samples to develop a more accurate location.
Before you discount the impact and exlosive force of a light plane loaded with high explosives, I want you to think back to the video footage of the attacks against Iraq a decade ago.
Do you remember all the buildings being totally destroyed? hangars simply vanishing in explosions? Those where 500, 1,000 and 2,000 pound bombs. Are you seriously telling me that you think 10 such equivelent explosions would not cause mass damage and a sky scraper's collapse?
Undertand that bomb making is probably one of the strong suits of these terrorist groups. If they could get their hands on the explosives they could build a very formitable bomb in to that weight class.
I already stated they had that right under another section.
I just said I didn't think they should.
And supposedly they really don't because as I also said, they don't require such checks for chartered flights which are also interstate commerce.
The mechanics of flying the plane are also pretty simple. As I stated in the root post, almost anyone can learn to fly any plane in about 3 days training. At least well enough to take command while already in the air, and to complete a suicide mission like this. Navigation is minimally important. Takeoff and landing are not needed. Proper proceedures for traffic space traversal, weather evaluation, flight planning, fuel management, collision avoidance, weight and balance, cockpit resource management and all that other pilot training stuff are unneccesary.
Most everything you need to know, the plane already knows if it has current instrumentation. All you need is someone to have given you notes on what buttons to press, and when. That information is simply gleaned from the plane's flight operation manual which is freely available, or from the flight data system's manual.
Once the auto-pilot is disengaged, you don't need to necessarily mess with the hardware on the plane. You can simply usea a handheld GPS reciever and a laptop with a moving map. You can get such a setup from many electronics retailers.
Tell ya what: Try this very thing onX-Plane. I only suggest X-PLane because it's on Mac and PC, and is very realistic. Have it start you off in a random spot around New York City and try flying in to any particular building. Use a dry erase marker to make the circle on your windscreen.
It conflicts with the right reserved for the Federal government to print the official currency of the Union.
Us Constitution: Art 1, sec 8, cla 5: To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures
And the necessary and proper laws that Congress has passed to fulfill that duty and right. Specifically counterfieting of Federal money has an impact on the value of the rest of the Federal money, and as such Congress can limit other's production of that money.
Beyond that you can retain all your rights. Everything else comes down to a court battle over who's rights take precidence.
To quote the 10th ammendment (emphasis added): In the case of murder:
You have the right to kill people.
You exercise your right and kill someone.
Your victim's have the right to not be killed.
As such you violated someone else's rights, against their will.
The public, via the government, excercise their right to limit your behavior and put you on trial for your act.
Your right to freedom and/or life then may be permanently or temporarily revoked/suspended by the court/jury.
I'd considered the V1 for analogy. While the V1 would be closer in flight mechanism (long cruise under power), the V2 is closer to the attack mechanism (drop from high altitude at super-sonic speed).
The plane attack I described would certainly provide no warning, much like the V2. The V1 on the other hand made a very distinctive noise, hence the nickname "buzz-bomb", and people knew it was coming, just not where it would hit.
It's a tossup really. Either analogy works on some level.
Here's how to hit any target with any airplane at any speed:
Use a marker to put a small circle on the windshield.
Steer your target into the circle.
Keep the target in the circle until the plane goes boom!
This is specifically how pilots are trained to do basic collision avoidance. If the other plane is staying stationary relative to some mark/corner/scratch on your windscreen, you are likely headed for a collision and you should take evasive maneuvers and/or contact ATC for instructions. This is taught in ground school, even before you start flying in many cases.
Hmm.. this is gonna be long:
Driving drunk: There is nothing wrong with that. If you choose to disobey a law (most everyone does it every day of their life) and no-one else is hamed during or as a result of that act... you should not be punished. If you are driving beyond the inflexible maximum alcohol intoxication, but are still in control of your vehicle then you are fine. There are also those who can drive well under the 'legal limit' and be a hazard on the road.
Fly drunk: same as above. Frankly I'd feel safer with an intoxicated pilot than with an intoxicated driver. The pilot has training well beyond the feeble excuse of 'driving lessons' that most Americans get. The pilot's actions (at least on commercial flights) will be monitored by no fewer than 5 contollers during the trip (departing ground, departing local, en-route, arrival local, arrival ground). If none of them have any reason to doubt the pilot's sobriety or ability to fly, why should I?
Require certs to fly: Yes it is within their power, at least arguably according to the Constitution (art 4 sec 3 cl 2). Do I think it's right to require such a certification? No. I think certs should be voluntary. I also think driver's licenses should be voluntary. BUT if you do something wrong or are involved in a collision or other incident without a cert, you could be sentenced more harshly if you where convicted of neglegence or wrongdoing as a cause of the incident. Let the free market work, all the airlines that pay to have cert holding pilots would be able to charge a premium. Those willing to risk a seasoned by non-cert pilot would pay a lesser fare. This would also open up GA to be much more approachable to the public.
Breathalizer to pilots: required by the Gov? no. Required by the employer? sure. Again with the free market system. You'd probably pay more to fly on an airline you know breathalizes their pilots before each flight. It still won't stop them from downing a few swigs from a pocket bottle during the flight. It would be just another illusion of security.
Metal detectors: Nope. That is presumption of guilt, and undo search in my book. It also doesn't stop a determined person from getting a weapon in the building. It's another illusion of security.
Background checks: again no. for both the pilot and hazmat driver. There are a few simple premises in the US that many have forgotten: You are innocent until proven guilty. You have the right to not provide testimony against yourself. If you are convicted of a crime and complete your sentence, you have paid your debt to society and (in most all cases) regain all of your rights. Your past convictions should not thwart your attempts to make a better life for yourself. Background checks may lead to discrimination for what people believe in or think. You might be denied a job because you wrote a paper that supported reinstatement of slavery and involuntary servitude several years ago. You don't own any slaves and you don't in any way practice your belief, but you would be denied access because of it.
And yes, I know there are negatives to all of my opinions. But there is one big positive: freedom. And as I recall, Freedom was the core principle the United States was founded on.
Freedom of choice. Freedom of action. Freedom of markets. Freedom from govermnent intrusion.
It was the intention of the founders that the government be used to protect our freedoms, not to slowly erode them in the name of fighting terrorism, or any other purpose.
Killing hundreds or thousands of people at once with an airliner - government protection required
Killing dozens to hundreds of people at once with a bus, car bomb or on a subway- no government protection required
Where exactly do you draw the line in potential death toll where the government can tell us who can access a method of transportation?
A Citation CJ1 has a useful payload of 1,550 lbs, it can cruise at about 92kts min.
A Piper Seneca V has a useful payload of 1,337 lbs, it can cruise at about 65kts min.
I took stall speed and added a few knots. Low speed would be key to accurately hitting a target for maximum effect. Both of these planes (and many similar GA twins) are fairly common and could be purchased, rented or stolen from most regional GA fields.The two plane's I mentioned above could hold even more explosive if the fuel is reduced: in all likelyhood they'd only need 20 gals (134lb), leaving another ~800lbs available for explosive.
The moron in FL had a small (C152?) with nothing explosive on board. Liquid engine fuels are actually quite stable, and require specific conditions to explode.
A large truck would indeed be a great for hiding a bomb (recall the small Ryder truck in Oklahoma City). But you can't hit the top of a skyscraper with a truck. There's just something about 'death from above' that really strikes terror in to people.
The most effective use of small aircraft would be to put in an auto-pilot system and set them up to use GPS to guide them someplace, then release a nuclear, chemical or biological agent/device. That way you keep your operatives alive for further attacks.
Because despite the Gov's and Media's spin on things, the attacks on 9/11 did not require a lot of skill, planning or tactics. It does not take a genius to hijack a plane and fly it in to something as large as the WTC towers or The Pentagon.
Learning to fly a jumbo jet (after it's already in the air): rather simple.
Buying plane tickets for four flights that take off around the same time: one visit to travelocity or expedia or any other ticketing web site.
Hickjacking a plane: please, any moron with anything resembing a weapon could do that.
Because the goal of the people who planed, and the people purpetrated the attack wasn't the most effective way to kill people. They merely figured out the best way to stike the most fear/terror in to the people of the U.S. They succeded. They've caused the US Gov to start stripping away fundamental rights. They caused people to fear travel, and large buildings.
On top of the initial attack, they've inderctly caused hundreds if not thousands of deaths in Afganastan, which was not in any way responsible for the attacks. The planners/operators of 9/11 were mostly Saudi Arabian and they used Saudi money. So are we attacking Saudi Arabia? Nope, we're attacking the people of Afganastan.
You don't need a State issued ID to be a passenger in a car, on a bus, a boat, or any other form of transportation. The thing here is that there are federal regulations (written or not) that require you to prove who you are in order to be a passenger on a scheduled commercial airliner.
Note I specifically stated "scheduled commercial airliner". All of this airline security is just a smokescreen. Did you know that chartered flights don't have any of these security restrictions?
On a chartered flight you can drive your car up to the plane and board without ever passing through any security checkpoint. The size of the plane doesn't matter, nor do the number of passengers (to the best of my knowledge).
If the terrorists are going to do this large-plane-into-larger-building thing again, they'll be smarter to get on a large corporate jet, like a chartered 737 or something. They wouldn't even need to sneak anything on board, just act like really rich people. They could load their luggage with C4. They could board with guns conceled in their coats, take over the plane and fly into anything. No plane full of pesky passengers to thwart any hijaking attempts.
As for the air-force shooting them down when they left the flight path? Well, imagine the hijackers treating the plane like a German V2... keep the normal flight path until they get near/over a major city, they just point the nose at the ground. Aim for something large downtown. 35,000ft to impact in under 7 minutes. Even if the plane was hit by a missile from a figher jet, it'd still fall in a flaming wrek over the city.
Or perhaps this... You can learn to fly a small plane like a Cessna, Beechcraft, Piper, etc in a matter of days. At least well enough for a suicide run. These planes have a usable cargo load of above 1500lbs in most cases (that's a LOT of bomb). Imagine a fleet of 19 of these things loaded with high explosives making a systematic hit on a downtown area. Again.. no metal detctors, no bomb-sniffing machines, no passengers to deal with. Just the attackers and their ordinance.