This was a superbly well organised and executed operation on the part of the perpetrators, whoever they were, but it was also an incredibly cheap one. I should be surprised if the whole budget for the operation exceeded $100,000.
In a way, this is true. In another way, it is not.
Normally, when a terrorist group commandeers an airplane, all they need are weapons on board the plane and the ability to persuade the pilot to do what they want, normally achieved by threatening to kill everyone aboard.
In this case, they could not have had the ability to persuade the pilot to do what they wanted --- because they wanted to do something which would kill everyone aboard, including the pilot. You can't threaten somebody like that: "Kill yourself or I will kill you." A rational person will refuse, and hope that you don't really mean it - there's no point in going along.
So they must have had at least one trained pilot on each flight. Admittedly, they wouldn't have need a commercial pilot; an ordinary military pilot would be okay. But even that?
How much is a military pilot worth? More than $20,000? Now multiply that by 5.
This is why there are a limited number of possible organizations capable of pulling this off. Hell, the IRA couldn't have pulled this one off. (Not that they would have, at least not this way - even with the Manchester and Canary Wharf bombs, there were warning calls made.)
And now those five pilots are lost. We just have to hope there's no terrorist organizations out there with 35 pilots in their ranks. Imagine... ugh.
What evidence do you have that Dresden, or Hiroshima, or Nagasaki, was necessary for peace?
Besides, it sounds to me like you're arguing on the side of the terrorists. Assume that bin Laden is responsible for today's attack, and look at it this way:
Great Britain launches an attack against military targets controlled by Germany in World War II; similarly, bin Laden launches attacks against military targets controlled by the United States in the '90s;
Germany responds by bombing civilian targets in Britain; similarly, the United States responds by bombing civilian targets in Afghanistan;
Britain responds by carpet-bombing Dresden; and today, we have... well.
See my point yet?
Note: I loathe Bomber Harris, and think what he did was both unnecessary and wrong. Still, I can't see how what he did is really any different from the terrorist attack today, except that he had a lot more bombs at his disposal and so caused more damage.
It is bigger than Tripoli: 270 people were killed when Reagan ordered the attack on a civilian target. There were more people than that just on the planes.
Bombing Tripoli in the 80's caused an overnight drop in world Terrorism.
That's arguable. Some would say that the Tripoli bombing shifted world terrorist activity from the left to the right: instead of communists doing relatively minor things, instead we had contras bombing civilian targets in Nicaragua and things like that.
However, '80s terrorism aside. Look at the historical example of the Germans in World War II. They bombed the living daylights out of England. The result?
Dresden.
If it does turn out that this was the work of bin Laden, then it's hard to avoid the observation that the U.S. bombed Afghanistan in an attempt to get bin Laden (much like the Nazis bombed England in an attempt to get Churchill), and in response terrorists bombed the biggest civilian target they could find (compare: Bomber Harris vs. modern terrorist).
The only difference was that Bomber Harris had access to a much greater array of weaponry than the terrorists who attacked today. Certainly, the reaction of New Yorkers that I'm hearing on my TV today is similar to the reaction of the Germans when Dresden was bombed.
Massive Attacks Destroy World Trade Center, Hit Pentagon
Photos Reuters Photo Audio/Video
World Trade Center Hit By Planes (Reuters)
By Alan Elsner, National Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Three hijacked planes crashed into
major U.S. landmarks on Tuesday, destroying both of New York's
mighty twin towers, hitting the Pentagon (news - web sites) in Washington and
plunging the United States into unprecedented chaos and panic.
Loss of life was expected to be catastrophic from the
collapse of the giant towers of the World Trade Center where
many thousands of people work. The two enormous edifices both
fell in a huge cloud of smoke and fire two hours after the
initial impacts.
New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (news - web sites) said there had been a
''tremendous number of lives lost'' in the attacks on his city.
Another plane crashed near Pittsburgh. It was not clear if
this was another attempted hijacking.
Hospitals in New York were overwhelmed with patients as a
massive cloud billowed into the blue skies over Manhattan where
the city skyline had been dramatically and permanently altered.
``Hundreds of people are burned from head to toe,'' said Dr.
Steven Stern at St. Vincent's Hospital in the Greenwich Village
neighborhood of lower Manhattan.
``The whole of lower Manhattan is coated in half an inch of
dust,'' Reuters reporter Daniel Sternoff said.
BUSH CUTS SHORT VISIT
President Bush (news - web sites) cut short a visit to Florida and rushed back
to Washington to face the greatest crisis of his young
presidency.
He called the deliberate aerial assaults an ``apparent
terrorist attack'', and ordered a full-scale investigation.
Early speculation about the source of the attack centered on
Saudi-born guerrilla leader Osama Bin-Laden.
It was the most dramatic and deadly attack on the U.S.
mainland in modern history. The attacks forced the evacuation
of all government buildings in Washington, including the White
House and other tall buildings around the country, cut cell
phone communications on the East Coast and grounded all
commercial planes in the United States.
Early reports said all three planes used in the attacks
were hijacked, one of them from Boston and one from Washington.
It was not immediately known who flew the planes and what
happened to them.
The day of horror began around 9 a.m. in New York when the
first plane plowed into the south tower of New York's World
Trade Center, as thousands of workers were streaming into the
building to begin their day.
It opened a huge hole near the top of the building. Two
hours later, the whole building in which thousands of people
collapsed on itself in a huge cloud of smoke and fire.
TV stations caught the second plane plowing into the second
of the twin towers, exploding in a fire ball a few minutes
after the first impact. That building caved in about an hour
after the first.
Shortly afterward, a third plane crashed into or near the
Pentagon in Washington, throwing people off their feet inside
the building and setting off a massive fire.
most businesses are running on 98 still. I was working for the government of Canada a little while ago: they had a site license for Win95B. I kid you not.
a lot of their computers had Win98 on them, with OEM licenses. however, any blank computers that came in got 95B.
businesses don't like reinvesting in infrastructure every year or two. Infrastructure is something you buy and it stays there for a long time. You don't see Amtrak laying new railways every year or two, for example.
Operating systems are infrastructure. Gates appears to have forgotten that.
also, being classified as a church brings up the whole religious freedoms business. churches have more constitutional rights under most regimes than do non-religious charities.
fair use is an American copyright doctrine. while it undoubtedly applies in this case, particularly with things like Squid, it's irrelevant to the rest of the world.
what we're going to have to hope applies here is the principle of implied permission. basically, in copyright, under certain conditions I can by my conduct imply that I am granting permission for certain activities. for example, if I send a story to a magazine, I imply permission to publish. the magazine can publish my story without a separate copyright release, as long as they pay me their standard rate for it.
I would argue that by publishing a webpage, I imply permission to do quite a few things: I imply permission to index (unless I take reasonable technological protections to avoid being indexed, for example using a robots.txt file), and I imply permission to cache.
if this isn't the case, not only search engines will be hit: AOL's gonna get sued. they have a web proxy.:)
IBM global services prefers IBM products, but they'll support Solaris and Linux and VB apps too.
And IBM is working to turn Linux into an IBM product, I think.
one BILLION dollars into Linux development? This is not a small move, even for the ten-ton gorilla of computing.
ten years from now, they'll have probably replaced AIX with Linux. and be perfectly happy, selling systems (all perfectly Linux-tuned; after all, all their Linux engineers release drivers for every new piece of IBM hardware) and crippling Microsoft (you watch: the dominance of Windows is in large part due to the payoffs M$ has historically made to third-party software companies to develop software, especially games, for Windows; what stops IBM from doing the same for Linux?)...
the hardware monopoly is what IBM is after. again. there's a lot more money in it than there is in the M$ software monopoly. certainly the disappearance of Compaq, the company that broke IBM's monopoly the last time (and which bought Digital, the only company to seriously threaten IBM before the '80s) cannot fail to encourage them.
Right! Programming is fun, and working in the software industry really bites the big one these days, so open-source is the way to go. You meet people, nobody's telling you how to code, there's a lot less bullshit.
Egoboo is nice but the corporate BS is the real reason.
Me, I'd rather work in another industry. Programming is fun: if it becomes a job, then it really, really sucks. My job is something... other.
Of course, it's undocumented and in fact is a hack. Here's how it works:
Win16/32: Find the file cookies.txt. Delete it. Start Netscape and exit it. cookies.txt has now been recreated as an empty file. Edit cookies.txt's file properties and set it to read-only.
Unix: Mostly the same as Win16/32, except: chmod 400 cookies.txt
MacOS: The file is now called MagicCookie instead of cookies.txt. Delete it, start Netscape, exit, and then lock MagicCookie.
Same basic principle. The net effect is that when Netscape exits, it will lose any cookies that are set.
It is also possible to set permanent cookies: for example, your/. login cookie. Simply logon to/. with Netscape prompting for each cookie that is set: only accept the login cookie, and then quit. The cookies.txt/MagicCookie file will remember it forever more. My Netscape has, I believe, three permanent cookies. However, I've mostly transitioned to IE5: partly because of its cookie powers, which are much better.
here's a post to alt.cyberpunk that I flamed about four years ago:
Come on guys you can at least explain why it is dumb. Help the Newbie. I mean if there were 1000 elites in the world and they taught a newbie all they knew all the trick and every thing in a year, then after five years we would have 32,000!!!! ELITES. Please consider.
looking back, I now think my flame was somewhat lame. perhaps if I'd only been better, alt.cyberpunk would still be readable.
nope. AOLers and other vermin are the whole problem.
Listservs are way better than Usenet for a number of purposes.
When it really matters that members get each and every message. Usenet loses messages, and sometimes people are offline for a bit. Vacations, etc.
Increased authentication. The nature of Usenet as a distributed network, one which predates the commercial Internet, is why it's so prone to spammers. If you want to check out the alternative, it's Usenet2. Basically, the problem is that back in the days before the rise of.com, most Usenet posters were from.edus and they would have their account yanked if they did anything Naughty. It was in this environment that the authentication techniques (IP address is fine, thank you very much:) arose.
Lowered sysadmin resources. All you need to run a listserv is a cheapo little *nix box with a 365/24 connection. Usenet servers need a tad more, plus you have to persuade somebody to give you a feed.
...
The Dispossessed may one day be credited with reviving it. It was popular in the late '40s and early '50s when centrists tried to promote Sweden as the "middle way."
The Dispossessed was popular in the '40s?
It was published in the '70s.:)
Perhaps, a trailing antecedent?;)
And with respect, the Blairist liberals owe nothing at all to Swedish politics. Clinton probably owes even less: he's really founded on Kennedy; vote for me, I look really good.
On the other hand, let's look at ideas that originated in The Shockwave Rider that have some currency today:
Infowar;
Activism using anonymous electronic communications; and
Broadband.
On the infowar front, it'd be interesting to see a SirCam variant modified to do something similar to the Haflinger worm: i.e., search for Interesting documents.
And note: not only did Shockwave Rider not win, it didn't get nominated. I rest my case.
That said, I really like Worldcons. I've only ever been to one, it was a blast; but I skipped the Hugos. I did sort-of-meet RMS though.
You've moved three times in five years. You're mobile?
I'm guessing you're still in the same city, since you've kept the same PO box and area code.
In the past five years, I've moved 11 times (12 times if you count the move I made right about this time five years ago) between 8 different addresses. Plus there was the month I spent travelling a couple years back.
Those 8 addresses include cities on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
I know exactly what Canada Post's change of address forms look like. Up here, we get six months of mail forwarding to the new address. It's usually been good enough.
I have kept the same email addresses (well most of them). I have of course added a few.
I don't have a cellphone. My last three moves have all been within Ontario so the fact that I've changed area codes each time hasn't mattered: Bell happily forwards my phone calls. I used mass emails and icqs for most of my other phone number changes.
As for jobs, I've held a total of three during this time as well. wow, I'm getting old. the year before, I was knocking back four at once at one point. must be slowing down.:)
You're not mobile, buddy. You're just a guy who moves every so often.
It is commonly believed (and probably true, it makes sense) that No Such Agency and perhaps some of its competitors inside the US government can alter or delete SSNs as well.
That said, if this comes through, I want the ten nines. Barring that, a U-group code.
I shouldn't say anything: I really like Gaiman. But I read American Gods, and it was fun, but I would be quite shocked if it were to receive a Hugo (or a World Fantasy award - hey, remember that incident?:)
Slashdot Mirror
In a way, this is true. In another way, it is not.
Normally, when a terrorist group commandeers an airplane, all they need are weapons on board the plane and the ability to persuade the pilot to do what they want, normally achieved by threatening to kill everyone aboard.
In this case, they could not have had the ability to persuade the pilot to do what they wanted --- because they wanted to do something which would kill everyone aboard, including the pilot. You can't threaten somebody like that: "Kill yourself or I will kill you." A rational person will refuse, and hope that you don't really mean it - there's no point in going along.
So they must have had at least one trained pilot on each flight. Admittedly, they wouldn't have need a commercial pilot; an ordinary military pilot would be okay. But even that?
How much is a military pilot worth? More than $20,000? Now multiply that by 5.
This is why there are a limited number of possible organizations capable of pulling this off. Hell, the IRA couldn't have pulled this one off. (Not that they would have, at least not this way - even with the Manchester and Canary Wharf bombs, there were warning calls made.)
And now those five pilots are lost. We just have to hope there's no terrorist organizations out there with 35 pilots in their ranks. Imagine... ugh.
What evidence do you have that Dresden, or Hiroshima, or Nagasaki, was necessary for peace?
Besides, it sounds to me like you're arguing on the side of the terrorists. Assume that bin Laden is responsible for today's attack, and look at it this way:
See my point yet?
Note: I loathe Bomber Harris, and think what he did was both unnecessary and wrong. Still, I can't see how what he did is really any different from the terrorist attack today, except that he had a lot more bombs at his disposal and so caused more damage.
Salon is still up. Also, so is The Toronto Star, the largest-circulation paper in Canada. Salon's newswire listings are flooding with coverage.
Agreed, but it's not Dresden either.
It is bigger than Tripoli: 270 people were killed when Reagan ordered the attack on a civilian target. There were more people than that just on the planes.
That's arguable. Some would say that the Tripoli bombing shifted world terrorist activity from the left to the right: instead of communists doing relatively minor things, instead we had contras bombing civilian targets in Nicaragua and things like that.
However, '80s terrorism aside. Look at the historical example of the Germans in World War II. They bombed the living daylights out of England. The result?
Dresden.
If it does turn out that this was the work of bin Laden, then it's hard to avoid the observation that the U.S. bombed Afghanistan in an attempt to get bin Laden (much like the Nazis bombed England in an attempt to get Churchill), and in response terrorists bombed the biggest civilian target they could find (compare: Bomber Harris vs. modern terrorist).
The only difference was that Bomber Harris had access to a much greater array of weaponry than the terrorists who attacked today. Certainly, the reaction of New Yorkers that I'm hearing on my TV today is similar to the reaction of the Germans when Dresden was bombed.
Of course, the item has now been delisted. Thankfully.
According to CTV, the Pentagon's west wing collapsed. They haven't shown any images other than billowing smoke around the Pentagon, though.
Both towers of the World Trade Centre have definitely collapsed. That made the TV. Many times repeatedly.
an excellent point.
most businesses are running on 98 still. I was working for the government of Canada a little while ago: they had a site license for Win95B. I kid you not.
a lot of their computers had Win98 on them, with OEM licenses. however, any blank computers that came in got 95B.
businesses don't like reinvesting in infrastructure every year or two. Infrastructure is something you buy and it stays there for a long time. You don't see Amtrak laying new railways every year or two, for example.
Operating systems are infrastructure. Gates appears to have forgotten that.
there was a case in the early 20th century in Britain where test answers got "unofficially" released. this is for a standardized test.
copyright was successfully claimed. for test answers.
he made the graphics. that's all he has to do really. the source data, he has no copyright on, true enough... the graphics though: he's got it.
also, being classified as a church brings up the whole religious freedoms business. churches have more constitutional rights under most regimes than do non-religious charities.
fair use is an American copyright doctrine. while it undoubtedly applies in this case, particularly with things like Squid, it's irrelevant to the rest of the world.
what we're going to have to hope applies here is the principle of implied permission. basically, in copyright, under certain conditions I can by my conduct imply that I am granting permission for certain activities. for example, if I send a story to a magazine, I imply permission to publish. the magazine can publish my story without a separate copyright release, as long as they pay me their standard rate for it.
I would argue that by publishing a webpage, I imply permission to do quite a few things: I imply permission to index (unless I take reasonable technological protections to avoid being indexed, for example using a robots.txt file), and I imply permission to cache.
if this isn't the case, not only search engines will be hit: AOL's gonna get sued. they have a web proxy. :)
And IBM is working to turn Linux into an IBM product, I think.
one BILLION dollars into Linux development? This is not a small move, even for the ten-ton gorilla of computing.
ten years from now, they'll have probably replaced AIX with Linux. and be perfectly happy, selling systems (all perfectly Linux-tuned; after all, all their Linux engineers release drivers for every new piece of IBM hardware) and crippling Microsoft (you watch: the dominance of Windows is in large part due to the payoffs M$ has historically made to third-party software companies to develop software, especially games, for Windows; what stops IBM from doing the same for Linux?)...
the hardware monopoly is what IBM is after. again. there's a lot more money in it than there is in the M$ software monopoly. certainly the disappearance of Compaq, the company that broke IBM's monopoly the last time (and which bought Digital, the only company to seriously threaten IBM before the '80s) cannot fail to encourage them.
Right! Programming is fun, and working in the software industry really bites the big one these days, so open-source is the way to go. You meet people, nobody's telling you how to code, there's a lot less bullshit.
Egoboo is nice but the corporate BS is the real reason.
Me, I'd rather work in another industry. Programming is fun: if it becomes a job, then it really, really sucks. My job is something ... other.
Netscape also has this feature.
Of course, it's undocumented and in fact is a hack. Here's how it works:
Same basic principle. The net effect is that when Netscape exits, it will lose any cookies that are set.
It is also possible to set permanent cookies: for example, your /. login cookie. Simply logon to /. with Netscape prompting for each cookie that is set: only accept the login cookie, and then quit. The cookies.txt/MagicCookie file will remember it forever more. My Netscape has, I believe, three permanent cookies. However, I've mostly transitioned to IE5: partly because of its cookie powers, which are much better.
Yup. You're using Pegasus or one of its relatives, I see.
Even the 'mail has arrived' requires a compliant MTA at the other end. Something I don't run. (Okay, my mail server doubles as a TV stand. Sue me. :)
Your friends are less paranoid than I am. I routinely deny return receipt requests.
Now I'm starting to rant. I before E except after C. It's not too hard.
Yes. For example, it promotes two things:
It's surprising to find both features exhibited in one post.
Woo-hoo! Time to whip out those shells. :)
whiners.
here's a post to alt.cyberpunk that I flamed about four years ago:
looking back, I now think my flame was somewhat lame. perhaps if I'd only been better, alt.cyberpunk would still be readable.
nope. AOLers and other vermin are the whole problem.
Listservs are way better than Usenet for a number of purposes.
The Dispossessed was popular in the '40s?
It was published in the '70s. :)
Perhaps, a trailing antecedent? ;)
And with respect, the Blairist liberals owe nothing at all to Swedish politics. Clinton probably owes even less: he's really founded on Kennedy; vote for me, I look really good.
On the other hand, let's look at ideas that originated in The Shockwave Rider that have some currency today:
On the infowar front, it'd be interesting to see a SirCam variant modified to do something similar to the Haflinger worm: i.e., search for Interesting documents.
And note: not only did Shockwave Rider not win, it didn't get nominated. I rest my case.
That said, I really like Worldcons. I've only ever been to one, it was a blast; but I skipped the Hugos. I did sort-of-meet RMS though.
Someone might not, but pizza joints definitely would.
They already pay more for numbers like 310-2222 and so on.
You've moved three times in five years. You're mobile?
I'm guessing you're still in the same city, since you've kept the same PO box and area code.
In the past five years, I've moved 11 times (12 times if you count the move I made right about this time five years ago) between 8 different addresses. Plus there was the month I spent travelling a couple years back.
Those 8 addresses include cities on both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts.
I know exactly what Canada Post's change of address forms look like. Up here, we get six months of mail forwarding to the new address. It's usually been good enough.
I have kept the same email addresses (well most of them). I have of course added a few.
I don't have a cellphone. My last three moves have all been within Ontario so the fact that I've changed area codes each time hasn't mattered: Bell happily forwards my phone calls. I used mass emails and icqs for most of my other phone number changes.
As for jobs, I've held a total of three during this time as well. wow, I'm getting old. the year before, I was knocking back four at once at one point. must be slowing down. :)
You're not mobile, buddy. You're just a guy who moves every so often.
Witness Protection people get new SSNs.
It is commonly believed (and probably true, it makes sense) that No Such Agency and perhaps some of its competitors inside the US government can alter or delete SSNs as well.
That said, if this comes through, I want the ten nines. Barring that, a U-group code.
Hah.
Perhaps.
I shouldn't say anything: I really like Gaiman. But I read American Gods, and it was fun, but I would be quite shocked if it were to receive a Hugo (or a World Fantasy award - hey, remember that incident? :)
Not as shocked as I am for Harry Potter, though.