"I'm no fan of MS but no one will deby that the Xbox has the best graphics of the current crop of consoles and thats what gamers go for."
First off, the quality of Microsoft's graphics compared to the other two consoles is debatable at best. I've seen displays where all three consoles are playing next to each other and I see no clear difference between the three in terms of graphical performance.
Secondly, if gamers just wanted graphics then companies would be selling screen savers, not games. Gamers want games (hence the name "gamers"). Historicly, gamers have consistently gone for the console with the better games or the larger library than the one with superior hardware.
The Atari 2600 instead of the Intellivision or the ColecoVision.
They bought the NES instead of the Sega Master System.
They bought the Game Boy instead of the Lynx, Turbo Express, Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color, etc.
They continued buying NESes after the Sega Genesis came out.
They bought the Sega Genesis instead of the SNES.
While the 16-bit SNES and Genesis were duking it out, nobody bought a Neo Geo, a Jaguar, a 3DO, or a CD-I.
The 32-bit PlayStation outsold the 64-bit N64 (at least outside North America).
The Dreamcast found itself hard-pressed to compete against the PlayStation and N64.
"frankly the GC has some pretty damn lame games so far except for Luigis Mansion but thats only of interest if you're 15 or under IMO."
Then you've obviously never played any GC games (which is consistant with your "Graphics Uber Alles" statement). I have yet to see a game on any of GC's competitors, for example, that has the 4-player fun that Super Smash Bros. Melee has.
Nice try at trolling but you could have tried a lot harder.
I'm probably not the first person to say it, but...
"The epicenter was 4.7 miles below surface."
BUZZ! Wrong! The epicenter is by definition on the surface. The focus is what was 4.7 miles below the surface.
Now then, why is this particular earthquake generating news (just another Californian earthquake), but the one in New York state a few weeks ago didn't?
"Private investors and consumers create competition."
Consumers? Perhaps. Investors? Heck no. As has been shown repeatedly in recent years, your stock is far more attractive to investors if you work to stifle competition (and screw over the consumer in the process) than by trying to compete on a level playing field. Monopolies aren't a problem unless the monopoly power is abused, and a corporation is practically guaranteed to abuse monopoly power (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) in their effort to attract new investors. Investors would rather corporations force the consumer to spend more money and increase the stock dividend.
However, it has been shown that non-corporate monopolies are workable. The US Postal Service, for instance, has a monopoly in letter delivery (and only letter delivery) in the US. Because they aren't a corporoation, they have no incentive to pad their profits to attract investors, and what money they're allowed to keep (ie. not sucked up by Congress to pay other federal debts) simply gets spent on improving services and offering new ones.
"Private investors and consumers create competition because, unlike taxpayers, they can take their money elsewhere."
Are you serious? Have you looked at what's happened when communications markets get privatized? Corporations, in their quest to pad their profits, have no incentive to compete in areas with a low population density. If the return in their investment isn't quick and large, they simply won't do it. So while there may be competitive markets in cities and their surrounding areas, there is no longer any service (let alone competition in trying to provide that service) once you get 10-15 miles away from the Interstate. Privatization means eliminating any markets that don't have an immediate return on their investments, so they're by definition less competitive.
Again looking at the example of the USPS, it has been shown that quasi-government businesses with monopoly power can offer a truly universal basic level of communications service without draining a single cent from public coffers. Because they have no reliance on outside money (whether you call them "investors" or "taxpayers"), the only people they have to listen to are their customers and potential customers. I can't think of any corporation that asks for as much customer involvement in decisions about such things as pricing and service offerings as much as the USPS.
I'm sorry, but investor-driven markets are just as anti-competitive as state-driven ones. Unless the businesses involved in the privatization are truly private (as opposed to public corporations), there will always be the drive towards a monopoly marketplace and the eventual abuse of that monopoly power.
Even in this day and age, many of us still decry the evils of the automatic transmission (me being one of them). There are reasons why a great many cars are still made with a stickshift, the main one being that those of us who know how to drive a stickshift find that the automatic transmission tries to second-guess the driver too much and ends up getting things wrong, or at least not as smooth as they could have been. Even those "auto-stick" things they put in newer cars aren't capable of shifting at different RPM speeds very well. The only coding analogy I can think of is comparing HTML coding in Notepad to HTML coding in FrontPage.
I think BMW is really shooting themselves in the foot with this idea. Sure, this technology will probably eventually catch on much like the automatic transmission did (I expect to see this idea flourish in the "family vehicle" market), but it will generally be detested by those drivers that like having an honest-to-God interface with the car instead of having to deal with a machine that assumes too much. And seeing as how BMW typically markets themselves to the sports car user...
If this was something like cruise control, where I could push a button, turn off the computer and do the driving myself... maybe. But even then there's no way you'd see a device like this in a manual transmission. And if it doesn't have three pedals, I refuse to use it.
"The text of this line is a short phrase describing the organization to which the sender belongs, or to which the machine belongs."
Being a customer of AOLTW and being a part of their organization are two very different things. Or am I a part of the USPS because I mail things? Don't tell the union or I might have to start paying dues!
From the text of that RFC, unless either the user is an AOLTW employee or the terminal PC being used is the property of AOLTW, they're violating the standard. Unless they want to claim responsibility for all kiddie porn posted by AOLTW users...
"there's absolutely no "rights" issue here. stop confusing rights with privileges..
Privileges are something you don't have to do anything for. Rights are something you have to pay for, such as the rights granted to you by a service agreement (ie. "contract") for a certain price.
"They are your ISP and you are using THEIR machines, hence they may do as they wish."
They gave up the right to do whatever they wish with their hardware as soon as they started charging you money to use it. An ISP is bound as much to an agreement as a user (if not more so) because of the exchange of money involved, and they should not be able to unilaterally change the terms of the contract without at least informing the customers.
2002-05-11 20:23:49 UK's Telewest to be banned from Usenet? (articles,spam) (rejected)
... and this gets posted instead? Seriously, I was expecting a good "shipper broke the hardware and it took three months to get things straightened out" story and... well... let's just say this is one of those articles where you should have put "spoilers" in the description.
"even though they had a better shuttle design than NASA"
How do you figure? The Buran seems to be inherently more expensive to operate than the STS. With the STS, all engines (both the STS main engines and the SRBs) are recoverable and resuable, and all you have to do is refuel the SRBs and make a new external tank. With the Buran, you have to build a new Engeria booster for every launch, and the Buran had no engines of its own.
"Does anyone have any idea how Buran got transported?"
From this article, it looks like they mostly used the An-225.
"The bill has lined up 22 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle, among them Rep. Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee."
The same Billy Tauzin that's in BellSouth's back pocket and is currently sponsoring a bill to increase the Baby Bells' monopoly powers? YES INDEED!
I swear this November just can't come soon enough... maybe I should start writing letters to the local papers now...
... that government agencies themselves are susceptible to much more stringent privacy laws than corporations. Blockbuster Video can ask for your SSN with ease, but a government agency needs to tell you first exactly what they can (and can't) do with your SSN. An even better example is the USPS. I have yet to see a corporate privacy policy statement that is this stringent:
"We maintain physical, electronic, and procedural safeguards pursuant to federal regulations to guard your nonpublic personal information. We restrict access to only postal personnel and contracters, who have a need to know the information to provide services to you."
You're saying HAL won't exist because of the advantages of a keyboard and monitor. But you forget one thing:
HAL was designed for use in a working environment.
David Bowman and Frank Poole had other things to worry about without also having to type and read text. The thing that comes first to my mind is the use of the EVA pods. Their hands are already on the controls, their eyes are on their work and the numerous other sources of visual information from within the pod itself, and you think that adding yet another button is going to be easier than "Open the pod bay doors, please?"
Um... if you bothered to read the whole sentence you'd see that it's supposed to be posessive (as in "the application regulations of the EPA"). Or do we have multiple Environmental Protection Agencies in the US? Where are they getting all their funding?
"if subsequent phenomena depend in any way on previous phenomena (phenomena being the most general term I can manage), there will be a tendency for the whole shebang to degenerate,"
But if it doesn't depends on the preceding occurences, there is no way to say that anything has any influence on anything else and everything "just happens." You reading this text isn't effecting the thoughts in your mind, they "just happen" to be happening at the same (or however it looks in your relativistic frame of reference).
Maybe I need to read up on entropy more, but it seems that there's an inherent flaw in trying to go back to exactly the way things were in the beginning of the cycle becasue you're only resetting three dimensions.
"Is this really new? I don't know where I first heard it, but I know that a "big crunch" has certainly been theorized. I've always thought that it seems likely that a big crunch might cause a big bang to follow. I don't know, maybe I was assuming something."
A few years ago I tried tackling The Elegant Universe (string theory and such). I remember reading that one of the fundamental parts of string theory is the idea that distance (space-time) is quantized (much like energy) and there is a lower limit to how close two things can be, and when you try to bring them closer you actually bring them further apart (what did you expect? It's partly quantum mechanics!). One of the examples given was that how a potential Big Crunch would shrink the universe to a smaller and smaller size until it reaches this finite limit and the very forces that are contracting the universe end up expanding it again.
If this turns out to be the case, concepts like "Big Bang" and "Big Crunch" could end up being meaningless, or at least synonyms.
"The latest versions of the big bang theory, with the addition of dark energy or whatever, of an extra repulsive force, predict, basically, the entropic death of everything - the universe as we know it today, with hot stars and habitable planets and the like, exists for some finite period and then disperses forever."
The heat death of the universe is something I rank up with the Big Crunch and the sun going nova. These are things that, if humanity is still around at that point, I'm confident we'll have a solution figured out by then.
Re:Extrodinary claims require extrodinary proof...
on
The Magic Box Hoax
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
"If anyone shows you a "magic box" but won't let you touch it, change the setup of the demonstration, or suggest other ways to test it, RUN !"
There was an interesting documentary on either A&E or Discovery (one of those two) based on the book Longitude. Somebody was talking about Harrison's apprehensiveness about letting others (ie. the Astronomer Royal) poke around inside of his invention and he made an interesting point: If you really did have a magic box and it did what you said it did, would you want potential competitors seeing its insides?
"On the "war is mostly a neighborhood affair" bit, I thought I'd add that I think this is changing in today's high tech world."
Let's go by continents.
Africa: Northern part of the continent is predominantly Muslim and really don't like their neighbor Israel (especially Egypt). Sub-Saharan Africa seems to have at least a dozen conflicts (international or civil) at any given moment.
Europe: All sorts of localized conflicts, from Ireland to Yugoslavia.
Asia: India and Pakistan are obvious examples, but not the only ones. About the only neighbors China hasn't tried invading are either already puppet states or are quite capable of mauling China (such as Russia and India).
Australia: Came pretty damned close to a shooting war with neighbor Indonesia recently. See East Timor.
South America: Colombia is still trying to get rid of FARC. International relations still aren't all that peachy-keen down there.
North America: Things may seem fine in the US, but once you get south of Mexico...
"Of course most wars of antiquity were fought close together. Who's gonna send tens of thousands of troops on a leaky boat across the world?"
Alexander the Great went from Greece to India. Hannibal got from Lybia to Italy by land. The Roman empire stretched from Scottland to Turkey. Genghis Khan had Mongols in Hungary. China has been that big for a very, very long time. Conquistadores conquered peoples on both American continents as well as various Pacific islanders (the ocean used to be referred to as a "Spanish lake"). England and France had the first globe-spanning war before the invention of the marine chronometer, let alone the telegraph.
"The supply line nightmares alone would destroy you."
Knowing where you are once you lose sight of land isn't a pre-requisite for sending an invasion force to another hemisphere. Look what Cortez did, and all he could do was follow a line of latitude.
"These days we can cross the globe in hours, develop space based weapons platforms, lob cruise missiles,"
Um... just because the US has a four ocean navy and manned spaceflight capabilities doesn't mean everybody does. Most navies are lucky to be able to project any kind of power outside of their territorial waters, let alone into an ocean they don't border. We're given the designation "superpower" for a reason.
But even then it should be noted that the article pointed out that the "titans" were essentially everybody's neighbor.
One has only to look at sub-Saharan Africa to realize that the vast majority of wars are still very much regional.
"and employ fanatical human vectors carrying bio weapons, suitcase nukes, or M$ Flight Sim: WTC Detail pack."
It's easy to get such human weapons into the US because we're the largest economy in the world and a great deal of the world's traffic is either coming to or leaving from the United States. See the "everybody's neighbor" comment above.
Slashdot Mirror
of consoles and thats what gamers go for."
First off, the quality of Microsoft's graphics compared to the other two consoles is debatable at best. I've seen displays where all three consoles are playing next to each other and I see no clear difference between the three in terms of graphical performance.
Secondly, if gamers just wanted graphics then companies would be selling screen savers, not games. Gamers want games (hence the name "gamers"). Historicly, gamers have consistently gone for the console with the better games or the larger library than the one with superior hardware.
- The Atari 2600 instead of the Intellivision or the ColecoVision.
- They bought the NES instead of the Sega Master System.
- They bought the Game Boy instead of the Lynx, Turbo Express, Game Gear, Neo Geo Pocket Color, etc.
- They continued buying NESes after the Sega Genesis came out.
- They bought the Sega Genesis instead of the SNES.
- While the 16-bit SNES and Genesis were duking it out, nobody bought a Neo Geo, a Jaguar, a 3DO, or a CD-I.
- The 32-bit PlayStation outsold the 64-bit N64 (at least outside North America).
- The Dreamcast found itself hard-pressed to compete against the PlayStation and N64.
"frankly the GC has some pretty damn lame games so far except for Luigis Mansion but thats only of interest if you're 15 or under IMO."Then you've obviously never played any GC games (which is consistant with your "Graphics Uber Alles" statement). I have yet to see a game on any of GC's competitors, for example, that has the 4-player fun that Super Smash Bros. Melee has.
Nice try at trolling but you could have tried a lot harder.
I'm probably not the first person to say it, but...
"The epicenter was 4.7 miles below surface."
BUZZ! Wrong! The epicenter is by definition on the surface. The focus is what was 4.7 miles below the surface.
Now then, why is this particular earthquake generating news (just another Californian earthquake), but the one in New York state a few weeks ago didn't?
"Remember, those guys invented the computer in order to defeat Nazis."
I didn't realize Babbage was so long-lived...
"Private investors and consumers create competition."
Consumers? Perhaps. Investors? Heck no. As has been shown repeatedly in recent years, your stock is far more attractive to investors if you work to stifle competition (and screw over the consumer in the process) than by trying to compete on a level playing field. Monopolies aren't a problem unless the monopoly power is abused, and a corporation is practically guaranteed to abuse monopoly power (*cough* Microsoft *cough*) in their effort to attract new investors. Investors would rather corporations force the consumer to spend more money and increase the stock dividend.
However, it has been shown that non-corporate monopolies are workable. The US Postal Service, for instance, has a monopoly in letter delivery (and only letter delivery) in the US. Because they aren't a corporoation, they have no incentive to pad their profits to attract investors, and what money they're allowed to keep (ie. not sucked up by Congress to pay other federal debts) simply gets spent on improving services and offering new ones.
"Private investors and consumers create competition because, unlike taxpayers, they can take their money elsewhere."
Are you serious? Have you looked at what's happened when communications markets get privatized? Corporations, in their quest to pad their profits, have no incentive to compete in areas with a low population density. If the return in their investment isn't quick and large, they simply won't do it. So while there may be competitive markets in cities and their surrounding areas, there is no longer any service (let alone competition in trying to provide that service) once you get 10-15 miles away from the Interstate. Privatization means eliminating any markets that don't have an immediate return on their investments, so they're by definition less competitive.
Again looking at the example of the USPS, it has been shown that quasi-government businesses with monopoly power can offer a truly universal basic level of communications service without draining a single cent from public coffers. Because they have no reliance on outside money (whether you call them "investors" or "taxpayers"), the only people they have to listen to are their customers and potential customers. I can't think of any corporation that asks for as much customer involvement in decisions about such things as pricing and service offerings as much as the USPS.
I'm sorry, but investor-driven markets are just as anti-competitive as state-driven ones. Unless the businesses involved in the privatization are truly private (as opposed to public corporations), there will always be the drive towards a monopoly marketplace and the eventual abuse of that monopoly power.
You sound like someone I know who can argue that seat belt laws are helping to lower the average IQ... :)
Even in this day and age, many of us still decry the evils of the automatic transmission (me being one of them). There are reasons why a great many cars are still made with a stickshift, the main one being that those of us who know how to drive a stickshift find that the automatic transmission tries to second-guess the driver too much and ends up getting things wrong, or at least not as smooth as they could have been. Even those "auto-stick" things they put in newer cars aren't capable of shifting at different RPM speeds very well. The only coding analogy I can think of is comparing HTML coding in Notepad to HTML coding in FrontPage.
I think BMW is really shooting themselves in the foot with this idea. Sure, this technology will probably eventually catch on much like the automatic transmission did (I expect to see this idea flourish in the "family vehicle" market), but it will generally be detested by those drivers that like having an honest-to-God interface with the car instead of having to deal with a machine that assumes too much. And seeing as how BMW typically markets themselves to the sports car user...
If this was something like cruise control, where I could push a button, turn off the computer and do the driving myself... maybe. But even then there's no way you'd see a device like this in a manual transmission. And if it doesn't have three pedals, I refuse to use it.
"What exactly is the problem here?"
Back to the RFC you blockquoted...
"The text of this line is a short phrase describing the organization to which the sender belongs, or to which the machine belongs."
Being a customer of AOLTW and being a part of their organization are two very different things. Or am I a part of the USPS because I mail things? Don't tell the union or I might have to start paying dues!
From the text of that RFC, unless either the user is an AOLTW employee or the terminal PC being used is the property of AOLTW, they're violating the standard. Unless they want to claim responsibility for all kiddie porn posted by AOLTW users...
"there's absolutely no "rights" issue here. stop confusing rights with privileges..
Privileges are something you don't have to do anything for. Rights are something you have to pay for, such as the rights granted to you by a service agreement (ie. "contract") for a certain price.
"They are your ISP and you are using THEIR machines, hence they may do as they wish."
They gave up the right to do whatever they wish with their hardware as soon as they started charging you money to use it. An ISP is bound as much to an agreement as a user (if not more so) because of the exchange of money involved, and they should not be able to unilaterally change the terms of the contract without at least informing the customers.
2002-05-11 20:23:49 UK's Telewest to be banned from Usenet? (articles,spam) (rejected)
... and this gets posted instead? Seriously, I was expecting a good "shipper broke the hardware and it took three months to get things straightened out" story and... well... let's just say this is one of those articles where you should have put "spoilers" in the description.
He'd be better off buying a DC-8.
"even though they had a better shuttle design than NASA"
How do you figure? The Buran seems to be inherently more expensive to operate than the STS. With the STS, all engines (both the STS main engines and the SRBs) are recoverable and resuable, and all you have to do is refuel the SRBs and make a new external tank. With the Buran, you have to build a new Engeria booster for every launch, and the Buran had no engines of its own.
"Does anyone have any idea how Buran got transported?"
From this article, it looks like they mostly used the An-225.
"The bill has lined up 22 co-sponsors from both sides of the aisle, among them Rep. Billy Tauzin, the Louisiana Republican who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee."
The same Billy Tauzin that's in BellSouth's back pocket and is currently sponsoring a bill to increase the Baby Bells' monopoly powers? YES INDEED!
I swear this November just can't come soon enough... maybe I should start writing letters to the local papers now...
You're saying HAL won't exist because of the advantages of a keyboard and monitor. But you forget one thing:
HAL was designed for use in a working environment.
David Bowman and Frank Poole had other things to worry about without also having to type and read text. The thing that comes first to my mind is the use of the EVA pods. Their hands are already on the controls, their eyes are on their work and the numerous other sources of visual information from within the pod itself, and you think that adding yet another button is going to be easier than "Open the pod bay doors, please?"
... is the fact that professional athletes make an appreciable fraction of the cost of a space shuttle.
Um... if you bothered to read the whole sentence you'd see that it's supposed to be posessive (as in "the application regulations of the EPA"). Or do we have multiple Environmental Protection Agencies in the US? Where are they getting all their funding?
Nice try at trolling. I give it an E for effort.
I've heard of Marvel vs. Capcom, but Marvel vs. Hogwartz? Now that's something I'd pay to see!
"if subsequent phenomena depend in any way on previous phenomena (phenomena being the most general term I can manage), there will be a tendency for the whole shebang to degenerate,"
But if it doesn't depends on the preceding occurences, there is no way to say that anything has any influence on anything else and everything "just happens." You reading this text isn't effecting the thoughts in your mind, they "just happen" to be happening at the same (or however it looks in your relativistic frame of reference).
Maybe I need to read up on entropy more, but it seems that there's an inherent flaw in trying to go back to exactly the way things were in the beginning of the cycle becasue you're only resetting three dimensions.
"Is this really new? I don't know where I first heard it, but I know that a "big crunch" has certainly been theorized. I've always thought that it seems likely that a big crunch might cause a big bang to follow. I don't know, maybe I was assuming something."
A few years ago I tried tackling The Elegant Universe (string theory and such). I remember reading that one of the fundamental parts of string theory is the idea that distance (space-time) is quantized (much like energy) and there is a lower limit to how close two things can be, and when you try to bring them closer you actually bring them further apart (what did you expect? It's partly quantum mechanics!). One of the examples given was that how a potential Big Crunch would shrink the universe to a smaller and smaller size until it reaches this finite limit and the very forces that are contracting the universe end up expanding it again.
If this turns out to be the case, concepts like "Big Bang" and "Big Crunch" could end up being meaningless, or at least synonyms.
"The latest versions of the big bang theory, with the addition of dark energy or whatever, of an extra repulsive force, predict, basically, the entropic death of everything - the universe as we know it today, with hot stars and habitable planets and the like, exists for some finite period and then disperses forever."
The heat death of the universe is something I rank up with the Big Crunch and the sun going nova. These are things that, if humanity is still around at that point, I'm confident we'll have a solution figured out by then.
"If anyone shows you a "magic box" but won't let you touch it, change the setup of the demonstration, or suggest other ways to test it, RUN !"
There was an interesting documentary on either A&E or Discovery (one of those two) based on the book Longitude. Somebody was talking about Harrison's apprehensiveness about letting others (ie. the Astronomer Royal) poke around inside of his invention and he made an interesting point: If you really did have a magic box and it did what you said it did, would you want potential competitors seeing its insides?
No, the patent gives him the right to sue other hoaxers out of existance, since he was obviously there first. :)
If PacTec won the lawsuit against Monsterhut, why is it they're still in Spamhaus' "realtime" statistics as being up and being on PacTec's servers?
"On the "war is mostly a neighborhood affair" bit, I thought I'd add that I think this is changing in today's high tech world."
Let's go by continents.
Africa: Northern part of the continent is predominantly Muslim and really don't like their neighbor Israel (especially Egypt). Sub-Saharan Africa seems to have at least a dozen conflicts (international or civil) at any given moment.
Europe: All sorts of localized conflicts, from Ireland to Yugoslavia.
Asia: India and Pakistan are obvious examples, but not the only ones. About the only neighbors China hasn't tried invading are either already puppet states or are quite capable of mauling China (such as Russia and India).
Australia: Came pretty damned close to a shooting war with neighbor Indonesia recently. See East Timor.
South America: Colombia is still trying to get rid of FARC. International relations still aren't all that peachy-keen down there.
North America: Things may seem fine in the US, but once you get south of Mexico...
"Of course most wars of antiquity were fought close together. Who's gonna send tens of thousands of troops on a leaky boat across the world?"
Alexander the Great went from Greece to India. Hannibal got from Lybia to Italy by land. The Roman empire stretched from Scottland to Turkey. Genghis Khan had Mongols in Hungary. China has been that big for a very, very long time. Conquistadores conquered peoples on both American continents as well as various Pacific islanders (the ocean used to be referred to as a "Spanish lake"). England and France had the first globe-spanning war before the invention of the marine chronometer, let alone the telegraph.
"The supply line nightmares alone would destroy you."
Knowing where you are once you lose sight of land isn't a pre-requisite for sending an invasion force to another hemisphere. Look what Cortez did, and all he could do was follow a line of latitude.
"These days we can cross the globe in hours, develop space based weapons platforms, lob cruise missiles,"
Um... just because the US has a four ocean navy and manned spaceflight capabilities doesn't mean everybody does. Most navies are lucky to be able to project any kind of power outside of their territorial waters, let alone into an ocean they don't border. We're given the designation "superpower" for a reason.
But even then it should be noted that the article pointed out that the "titans" were essentially everybody's neighbor.
One has only to look at sub-Saharan Africa to realize that the vast majority of wars are still very much regional.
"and employ fanatical human vectors carrying bio weapons, suitcase nukes, or M$ Flight Sim: WTC Detail pack."
It's easy to get such human weapons into the US because we're the largest economy in the world and a great deal of the world's traffic is either coming to or leaving from the United States. See the "everybody's neighbor" comment above.