Shit like this happens daily in some countries, huge losses of innocent civilian lives. I find the fact that you are so disgusted about this, and not about that horribly disturbing. You aren't mourning the dead at all, (unless maybe you somehow knew some people affected by it), you're mourning the loss of our feeling of invulnerability.
Very well put. No one here seemed to care much about the 20000 people burried under rubble in India back in January (just to pick one example). To me, the disconnect is far more disturbing than the actual deaths; I would hope that a country with as much weapontry as we have could aford a bit more perspective.
Your response illustrates perfectly the sort of "emotional reasoning" to which I am objecting. For example:
Um, there's a difference between 6,000 people dying in accidents and 6,000 people being intentionally murdered (not to mention the economic cost).
I would argue that there is little or no difference to the people who die. I for one, do not expect to have fundamentally different feelings about my death based on whether if it is brought about by a drunk driver or a terrorist. In fact, I expect to be dead.
To the living (or perhaps in this context it would be better to say "To the yet to die") there is, I would agree, a great deal of difference. I am for example, far, far more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than by a terrorist (assuming of course that a smoker doesn't get me with second hand smoke first). Furthermore, there are many more steps I can take to protect myself from these more likely threats, and almost none of them involve letting the media work my up to a blood lust so that I sanction more senseless killing. But I doubt that was your point.
Just out of curiosity, how many have to die for you to think it's important? Another 10 jumbo jets? We know the terrorists are actively trying to get nuclear weapons. It should be pretty clear that they don't care how much damage they do or how many people they kill. How many need to die? Would a nuke killing 5 million people be enough for you?
This seems to me utter blather. I object to using the deaths of some innocents to justify killing more innocents; you "rebut" by asking how many more people I want to die, as if I were the one screaming for blood. In case you still don't get it:
I don't think killing innocent people is a good idea.
I have no objection to apprehending the culprits, including their support staff, charging them with murder and, if they are convicted, imprisoning or executing them to prevent further atrocities. This is a far cry from declaring "war on Afganastan" or "nuking 5 million people."
Guess what -- sometimes there are more important things in life than how soon you get your shiny new video game.
I have no idea where this came from. In point of fact, I have never owned a video game, shiny or dull, new or used. And even if I had, I expect that I would still object to being badgered into attacking a nation of several million poor people on the basis of the alleged actions of one wealthy nut case and his misguided followers.
Yeah, that map showing the destruction of one of America's greatest symbols sure is "nifty"!
Get some perspective please. Ten thousand Americans die every day. I lot of them are killed by automobiles, but I can still say "that's a nifty car"; more of them are killed by diet related problems, but I can still say that I know a place that serves nifty deserts.
Sorrow is one thing; the sappy, uber-solemn milking of "our national grief" that the media is pumping out to manipulate us into going out and killing a bunch more people is quite another; and I, for one, want no part of it.
Now, there are those who will say "remember, they don't want matterial comforts the way Westerners do" or some such. But I think they are missing the point. True, they may not want Linux PDAs or whatever, but I'll bet good shoes would be appreciated.
Those few who infiltrate will grow accustomed to the softness of the new lifestyle, and be unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to fight their cause.
There is some evidence of this already, in that it now appears that there may have been other hijackings planned that didn't happen because the hijackers backed out.
Build them a beautiful mosque. Allow them to pray. Give them a world where they need not fear, where they are defended by the United States military.
And most importantly, what we really have to offer isn't material comforts, it's freedom. This is the kind of thinking--using American strengths rather than letting the opposition choose the terms of engagement--that might really get us somewhere.
A little-known web site suddenly achieves popularity, perhaps with a link from Cool Site of the DaySM or a mention in a prominent news story. Word of mouth spreads, and soon the web site's servers are overwhelmed. Or rather, would have been overwhelmed except that heuristics in the Millennium system had noticed the new link and already started replicating the site for increased availability. Monitored traffic increases confirm the situation and soon the site's data has been "pre-cached" across the Internet. As the site's usage drops over the following weeks, Millennium reallocates resources to meet new demands.
It's a trick! They're out to undermine the very/. effect on which we thrive!
From an export point of view, strong encryption is considered "arms". Last time I checked the constituion, we have the right to bear arms and that right cannot be infringed. Perhaps we need some help from the NRA???;)
In the spirit of free-as-in-chaos, I have instituted my own private moderation system. Under this system, I hereby give you +1 Hackish. If more people thought like this the world would be a much better place (IMHO).
An alternative to direct key escrow is the system used by Lotus Notes for their export versions a while back. Known as a "Work Factor Reduction Field", it's some fractional part of the key (Lotus used 24 of the 64 bits in their keys), encrypted with a system-wide key (usually half of an asymmetric key pair) and included in the transmission.
The problem here is that this system-wide key now becomes the sweet one-stop-shopping target for crackers that the whole escrow system seeks to avoid.
I did not know it was possable to cause a buffer overflow in VB
It was, at least about two years ago. We reported the problem to MS, so it may well be fixed by now. IIRC, by giving a long string to GetHostByName (e.g., working with an e-mail address like "Bob@NoneOfYourDaaaaaaaaaaaaa[lots more "a"s]aaaaamnBeeswax.edu"--I think this was the actual address that did it) you could make it go south for the winter. So far south under Win98 that your screen turned blue. Under NT it just got a belly ache.
It turned out to be a limit of 384 characters or so (don't depend on my memory at this level of detail--I don't), which was easy enough to check for, once we knew about it.
So this means the USA, in theory, should be the safest country in the world!
And, if you look at the numbers, it pretty much is. Of course, we have news broadcasters to keep us feeling at risk (by, for example, making a bigger deal out of a handfull of people dying in a Washinton State earthquake than they made out of 20000+ people dying in an earthquake in India); but stripped of the hype America is an amazing safe place.
...if you write your C++ program in a painstaking and dangerous C-like fashion (using one stack-based buffer for a string across many levels of function call), it can be an 1 or 2 orders of magnitude faster...
There is a general principle at work here: you can quite often go one or two orders of magnitude faster if you are willing to give up safety. It applies to everything from sex to ice hockey, and (viewed at the right level of abstraction) the results are always pretty much the same.
I kinda hate to say it, but a lot of stuff crashes under 7.1--at least, a dozen or more apps that ran fine under older RH (and seem to work fine on other distros) core dump. etc. on my RH 7.1 box. Mostly it's been glibc incompatibilities and such, but still rather anoying if you don't have the time to chase it down. So this may not be a problem with the IVM per se.
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Who the heck moderated the parent "offtopic"?
If an author write an application, or what not, then releases it under GPL even he himself can not take his code, compile it, and not re-release that without the source (technically speaking).
No true. The original author(s) can release under any other licence(s) they choose. What they can't do is take something that someone else wrote, munge it up a bit, and then release that as a binary only.
I could, for example, write MarkOS, a from-the-ground-up operating system coded in Haskel, and release it under the GPL, while at the same time selling MarkOS-QPro with portions of the kernel rewritten in Forth, under an ultra-restrictive-I-now-own-your-first-born-and-yo u-don't-get-the-source licence.
What I can't do is release Markux, a linux clone produced by running sed on the 2.2 sources, under that restrictive licence, because I don't hold the copyright.
Please stop convincing yourself it can't work. It can work, and pretending otherwise will only make it more likely.
The people who are pretending are the ones that claim it can work. Crypto, as an arms race, is over. Given sufficient computational power on both sides, there is a guaranteed win for the encryptor.
Claiming otherwise is like claiming the second player can force a win in Naughts-and-Crosses (aka Tick-Tack-Toe). It simply isn't true. The effort to hide information grows O(log2(N)) for parameters N for which the effort to find the information can not be bounded by a polynomial. In English: as the game gets more complex, it gets harder to encrypt at a much slower rate than it gets harder to decrypt.
At some point (say, now) encryption has such a lead that it isn't even possible to say what contains encrypted data and what doesn't. Even the fact of encryption becomes hidden. From that point on, the decryptor is left with social tools (infiltration, hoping the bad guy slips up, etc.). Technology (and legislation about technology) can't help.
We had a small local design contest on this question. The favoured strategy seems to be:
Head up the isle with the beverage card as a ram/seige engine; use seat cushons as arm-shields; have the mob behind lob cans of pop at the terrorists until you can close on them.
I agree with much of your post. But you lost me with: I'm a first generation American. My parents were driven from Iran by this same Islamic filth (I'm sorry but I can't help but be prejudice, and feel hate for them all...Half a century ago the descendants of european immigrants went by the tens thousands to the homeland of their ancestors to rid the earth of a great evil. We must do the same, the battles will be fought differently but in the end we too shall prevail...Victory at any cost.
I appreciate your patriotism, but (IMHO) that isn't how America works. Here is my position, as posted earlier today on another site.
By The Numbers(a cross post)
2001 will doubtlessly go down in history as a year when thousands of
Americans died because some people felt so strongly about their way of life
that they were willing to die rather than change, and were willing to kill
countless innocent bystanders in the process.
Except of course that "countless" is absolutely the wrong word to use here.
One of the many things that Americans do quite well is count
things--everything from hanging chad to corpses gets tallied and tabulated
here. So we will in fact have concrete numbers to think about, eventually.
Even before the year is out we will have good estimates to start thinking
rationally about--thinking being another thing Americans are quite good at.
We will know not only how many people they killed, but who they were and why
they did it.
Drunk drivers, for instance, are expected to kill around 16000 people this
year, give or take a few depending on how jolly the holidays turn out to be.
While this is a horrid toll, it is quite a bit better than the 27000 or so
that smokers will take out with second hand smoke--both because there are
fewer of them, and because most victims of drunken drivers are spared the
painful, lingering death of the smoker's victim. These are just two
examples, falling between the somewhat larger numbers killed by (say)
reckless driving in general and the slightly smaller numbers taken out (for
example) by terrorists. But we'll count them all.
Terrible, surely. As Americans we can hardly hear numbers like this without
asking ourselves the next question: what are we going to do about this?
Some countries have systems in place to deal with these sorts of problems
quickly and effectively. Drink alcohol? We'll chop off your head. That
certainly solves the problem of repeat offenders, and there is reason to
believe that it acts as an effective deterrent. We, of course, aren't so
direct. When an individual can be tied to a crime (say, a drunk driver) we
deal with their behavior on a case by case basis. But whether a perpetrator
can be found or not, we react like--well, like Americans. There really
isn't another word for it. We install air bags, we segregate public places
into smoking and non-smoking areas, we take myriad small steps to reduce the
risks, to mitigate the damage, to solve the problem. We study it. We seek
cures and explanations, predictive indicators and systematic risk factors.
We debate. We argue. And above all, we seek to educate.
Some may call us wimps, others may call us civilized. In the long run, it
doesn't really matter what they call us, because in the long run our system
is phenomenally effective. Our wheels may grind slowly, but like the mill
of justice they grind exceedingly fine.
True, there are always those who preach the extremes. Anyone with a radio
can hear them--just fiddle with the dial until you find a station that's all
talk (and I am thankful, little action). Or hop on the internet. Smokers
should be doused with gasoline. Drunk drivers are doing us a service by
culling those people too weak or stupid to get out of their way. We should
use our military might to turn foreign countries into parking lots. All the
fags should be sent to Haiti. Everyone should be required to smoke for a
year, so they'll see how hard it is to quit. Drunk drivers were sent here
by Satin. We should embrace Allah. Nuke them from orbit. Kill them all,
let God sort 'em out. Everyone is gay, but most people haven't admitted it
yet. The Blacks are behind this. Or the Jews. Or the Californians. Elvis
is stalking me. Etc, etc.
The great thing about America is that we don't shut these people up. We
don't have them shot, or locked away for decades. We don't even ignore
them, really, although most of us don't act on their advice. Instead, we
react to them like Americans always react to things. They get counted,
along with the chad, along with the casualties, and their voices are weighed
in when we consider our options, ground in the mill of public policy.
Which, as has been noted, grinds exceedingly fine.
The real security increases
took place at internet speed, within the first half hour after the first
plane hit. Passengers on that plane used cell phones to let the world
know they had been hijacked. The news media let the world know that
hijacked planes were being used as weapons. Callers from the fourth
plane got their cultural norm updated when they called out on their
cell phones. They recomputed the risks and benefits of
A) 30+ people
attacking five hijackers armed with knifes, vs.
B) sitting quietly while
the plane is crashed at high speed into a large object.
Because they
were a little late getting this news, they were unable to regain control
of the plane when they attacked the hijackers, but they thwarted its
use as a weapon. Within twenty four hours the news had spread: if
someone with a knife starts to hijack a plane you are on, jump them--
kick them, bite them, knee them in the holy land. Do whatever it takes,
because even though you might get hurt, or killed, your odds are a lot
better than if you let them get control of the plane.
The real lesson here is that, when attacking a wired society, you'd darn well better
coordinate your attacks, because within a blindingly short time the society will have
learned and that trick won't work anymore.
We appeased and appeased and negotiated and whined, and the incidents got more and more frequent until after we retaliated for the Berlin Disco bombing. And it wasn't a blind counterstrike, either. It was a very well-targeted counterstrike on the man responsible--who lives but doesn't cause us much trouble anymore.
I agree. The key concept here was that it was well targeted. Neither appeasement nor sweeping counterstrikes are the answer. We need to be smarter than that. One idea might be a reasoned and stately arrest and trial of the leaders, after they have been identified by a fair and honest investigation.
Another might be a move to decentralization. Or a re-examination of our foreign policy. Or equipping our planes with automated anti-hijacking systems that automatically fly them to a designated desert air strip and land them there on receipt of a command from the ground.
Counter attacking is not a good solution, for several reasons. 1) We do not know who to blame, and blind lynching leads to many problems, 2) even if we did know who to blame, counter attacking stands a good chance of angering others, and perpetuating the cycle, 3) even if we knew which nation to attack, and could get away with it, it is still wrong to kill people for the actions of others--we would be no better than the terrorists.
On the other hand, doing nothing is likewise unacceptable. It will send the message that these actions can be taken with impunity, and likely lead to further assaults. Failing to stand up for yourself is the best way to become a victim.
So, logically, we need to do something that is not a counter attack.
This is where brains come in. What can we do that will reduce or eliminate this kind of threat but isn't a blind reprisal? That is the question we should be turning our brains to.
In the spirit of free-as-in-chaos, I have instituted my own private moderation system. Under this system, I hereby give you +1 for Veracity, in partial recompense for the fact that your post was modded down by someone who doesn't share your eye for detail.
Slashdot Mirror
Very well put. No one here seemed to care much about the 20000 people burried under rubble in India back in January (just to pick one example). To me, the disconnect is far more disturbing than the actual deaths; I would hope that a country with as much weapontry as we have could aford a bit more perspective.
-- MarkusQ
Um, there's a difference between 6,000 people dying in accidents and 6,000 people being intentionally murdered (not to mention the economic cost).
I would argue that there is little or no difference to the people who die. I for one, do not expect to have fundamentally different feelings about my death based on whether if it is brought about by a drunk driver or a terrorist. In fact, I expect to be dead.
To the living (or perhaps in this context it would be better to say "To the yet to die") there is, I would agree, a great deal of difference. I am for example, far, far more likely to be killed by a drunk driver than by a terrorist (assuming of course that a smoker doesn't get me with second hand smoke first). Furthermore, there are many more steps I can take to protect myself from these more likely threats, and almost none of them involve letting the media work my up to a blood lust so that I sanction more senseless killing. But I doubt that was your point.
Just out of curiosity, how many have to die for you to think it's important? Another 10 jumbo jets? We know the terrorists are actively trying to get nuclear weapons. It should be pretty clear that they don't care how much damage they do or how many people they kill. How many need to die? Would a nuke killing 5 million people be enough for you?
This seems to me utter blather. I object to using the deaths of some innocents to justify killing more innocents; you "rebut" by asking how many more people I want to die, as if I were the one screaming for blood. In case you still don't get it:
I don't think killing innocent people is a good idea.
I have no objection to apprehending the culprits, including their support staff, charging them with murder and, if they are convicted, imprisoning or executing them to prevent further atrocities. This is a far cry from declaring "war on Afganastan" or "nuking 5 million people."
Guess what -- sometimes there are more important things in life than how soon you get your shiny new video game.
I have no idea where this came from. In point of fact, I have never owned a video game, shiny or dull, new or used. And even if I had, I expect that I would still object to being badgered into attacking a nation of several million poor people on the basis of the alleged actions of one wealthy nut case and his misguided followers.
-- MarkusQ
Get some perspective please. Ten thousand Americans die every day. I lot of them are killed by automobiles, but I can still say "that's a nifty car"; more of them are killed by diet related problems, but I can still say that I know a place that serves nifty deserts.
Sorrow is one thing; the sappy, uber-solemn milking of "our national grief" that the media is pumping out to manipulate us into going out and killing a bunch more people is quite another; and I, for one, want no part of it.
-- MarkusQ
In the spirit of free-as-in-chaos, I have instituted my own private moderation system. Under this system, I hereby give you -1 for CannedText.
How many times are you going to post this silly FUD? You could at least write something fresh each time, and rise to the status of FlameBait.
-- MarkusQ
Now, there are those who will say "remember, they don't want matterial comforts the way Westerners do" or some such. But I think they are missing the point. True, they may not want Linux PDAs or whatever, but I'll bet good shoes would be appreciated.
Those few who infiltrate will grow accustomed to the softness of the new lifestyle, and be unwilling to make the sacrifices necessary to fight their cause.
There is some evidence of this already, in that it now appears that there may have been other hijackings planned that didn't happen because the hijackers backed out.
Build them a beautiful mosque. Allow them to pray. Give them a world where they need not fear, where they are defended by the United States military.
And most importantly, what we really have to offer isn't material comforts, it's freedom. This is the kind of thinking--using American strengths rather than letting the opposition choose the terms of engagement--that might really get us somewhere.
-- MarkusQ
A little-known web site suddenly achieves popularity, perhaps with a link from Cool Site of the DaySM or a mention in a prominent news story. Word of mouth spreads, and soon the web site's servers are overwhelmed. Or rather, would have been overwhelmed except that heuristics in the Millennium system had noticed the new link and already started replicating the site for increased availability. Monitored traffic increases confirm the situation and soon the site's data has been "pre-cached" across the Internet. As the site's usage drops over the following weeks, Millennium reallocates resources to meet new demands.
It's a trick! They're out to undermine the very /. effect on which we thrive!
-- MarkusQ
It's a joke for gosh sake; he was playing off the first person's Grendel reference by alluding to The Three Billy Goats Gruff!
-- MarkusQ
Cute. For those of you who are math challenged, it's a joke.
-- MarkusQ
In the spirit of free-as-in-chaos, I have instituted my own private moderation system. Under this system, I hereby give you +1 Hackish. If more people thought like this the world would be a much better place (IMHO).
-- MarkusQ
The problem here is that this system-wide key now becomes the sweet one-stop-shopping target for crackers that the whole escrow system seeks to avoid.
-- MarkusQ
It was, at least about two years ago. We reported the problem to MS, so it may well be fixed by now. IIRC, by giving a long string to GetHostByName (e.g., working with an e-mail address like "Bob@NoneOfYourDaaaaaaaaaaaaa[lots more "a"s]aaaaamnBeeswax.edu"--I think this was the actual address that did it) you could make it go south for the winter. So far south under Win98 that your screen turned blue. Under NT it just got a belly ache.
It turned out to be a limit of 384 characters or so (don't depend on my memory at this level of detail--I don't), which was easy enough to check for, once we knew about it.
-- MarkusQ
And, if you look at the numbers, it pretty much is. Of course, we have news broadcasters to keep us feeling at risk (by, for example, making a bigger deal out of a handfull of people dying in a Washinton State earthquake than they made out of 20000+ people dying in an earthquake in India); but stripped of the hype America is an amazing safe place.
-- MarkusQ
There is a general principle at work here: you can quite often go one or two orders of magnitude faster if you are willing to give up safety. It applies to everything from sex to ice hockey, and (viewed at the right level of abstraction) the results are always pretty much the same.
-- MarkusQ
-- MarkusQ
P.S. Who the heck moderated the parent "offtopic"?
No true. The original author(s) can release under any other licence(s) they choose. What they can't do is take something that someone else wrote, munge it up a bit, and then release that as a binary only.
I could, for example, write MarkOS, a from-the-ground-up operating system coded in Haskel, and release it under the GPL, while at the same time selling MarkOS-QPro with portions of the kernel rewritten in Forth, under an ultra-restrictive-I-now-own-your-first-born-and-yo u-don't-get-the-source licence.
What I can't do is release Markux, a linux clone produced by running sed on the 2.2 sources, under that restrictive licence, because I don't hold the copyright.
Does that clarify things?
-- MarkusQ
A: Yes. Since there has only been one question so far, the FAQ is very short and I will post it here:
Q: Is there a FAQ?
A: Yes. Since there has only been one question so far, the FAQ is very short and I will post it here:
Q: Is there a FAQ?
A: Yes. Since there has only been one question so far, the FAQ is very short and I will post it here:
ERROR: Unbounded recursion decteded in line 7. Job FAQ terminated.
Hmmm...guess it's a lot longer than I thought.
-- MarkusQ
While I don't claim to support all his points, the post is on topic he has a right to ask these sorts of questions.
-- MarkusQ
Thanks!
-- MarkusQ
The people who are pretending are the ones that claim it can work. Crypto, as an arms race, is over. Given sufficient computational power on both sides, there is a guaranteed win for the encryptor.
Claiming otherwise is like claiming the second player can force a win in Naughts-and-Crosses (aka Tick-Tack-Toe). It simply isn't true. The effort to hide information grows O(log2(N)) for parameters N for which the effort to find the information can not be bounded by a polynomial. In English: as the game gets more complex, it gets harder to encrypt at a much slower rate than it gets harder to decrypt.
At some point (say, now) encryption has such a lead that it isn't even possible to say what contains encrypted data and what doesn't. Even the fact of encryption becomes hidden. From that point on, the decryptor is left with social tools (infiltration, hoping the bad guy slips up, etc.). Technology (and legislation about technology) can't help.
-- MarkusQ
Head up the isle with the beverage card as a ram/seige engine; use seat cushons as arm-shields; have the mob behind lob cans of pop at the terrorists until you can close on them.
-- MarkusQ
I'm a first generation American. My parents were driven from Iran by this same Islamic filth (I'm sorry but I can't help but be prejudice, and feel hate for them all...Half a century ago the descendants of european immigrants went by the tens thousands to the homeland of their ancestors to rid the earth of a great evil. We must do the same, the battles will be fought differently but in the end we too shall prevail...Victory at any cost.
I appreciate your patriotism, but (IMHO) that isn't how America works. Here is my position, as posted earlier today on another site.
By The Numbers (a cross post)
2001 will doubtlessly go down in history as a year when thousands of Americans died because some people felt so strongly about their way of life that they were willing to die rather than change, and were willing to kill countless innocent bystanders in the process.
Except of course that "countless" is absolutely the wrong word to use here. One of the many things that Americans do quite well is count things--everything from hanging chad to corpses gets tallied and tabulated here. So we will in fact have concrete numbers to think about, eventually. Even before the year is out we will have good estimates to start thinking rationally about--thinking being another thing Americans are quite good at. We will know not only how many people they killed, but who they were and why they did it.
Drunk drivers, for instance, are expected to kill around 16000 people this year, give or take a few depending on how jolly the holidays turn out to be. While this is a horrid toll, it is quite a bit better than the 27000 or so that smokers will take out with second hand smoke--both because there are fewer of them, and because most victims of drunken drivers are spared the painful, lingering death of the smoker's victim. These are just two examples, falling between the somewhat larger numbers killed by (say) reckless driving in general and the slightly smaller numbers taken out (for example) by terrorists. But we'll count them all.
Terrible, surely. As Americans we can hardly hear numbers like this without asking ourselves the next question: what are we going to do about this?
Some countries have systems in place to deal with these sorts of problems quickly and effectively. Drink alcohol? We'll chop off your head. That certainly solves the problem of repeat offenders, and there is reason to believe that it acts as an effective deterrent. We, of course, aren't so direct. When an individual can be tied to a crime (say, a drunk driver) we deal with their behavior on a case by case basis. But whether a perpetrator can be found or not, we react like--well, like Americans. There really isn't another word for it. We install air bags, we segregate public places into smoking and non-smoking areas, we take myriad small steps to reduce the risks, to mitigate the damage, to solve the problem. We study it. We seek cures and explanations, predictive indicators and systematic risk factors. We debate. We argue. And above all, we seek to educate.
Some may call us wimps, others may call us civilized. In the long run, it doesn't really matter what they call us, because in the long run our system is phenomenally effective. Our wheels may grind slowly, but like the mill of justice they grind exceedingly fine.
True, there are always those who preach the extremes. Anyone with a radio can hear them--just fiddle with the dial until you find a station that's all talk (and I am thankful, little action). Or hop on the internet. Smokers should be doused with gasoline. Drunk drivers are doing us a service by culling those people too weak or stupid to get out of their way. We should use our military might to turn foreign countries into parking lots. All the fags should be sent to Haiti. Everyone should be required to smoke for a year, so they'll see how hard it is to quit. Drunk drivers were sent here by Satin. We should embrace Allah. Nuke them from orbit. Kill them all, let God sort 'em out. Everyone is gay, but most people haven't admitted it yet. The Blacks are behind this. Or the Jews. Or the Californians. Elvis is stalking me. Etc, etc.
The great thing about America is that we don't shut these people up. We don't have them shot, or locked away for decades. We don't even ignore them, really, although most of us don't act on their advice. Instead, we react to them like Americans always react to things. They get counted, along with the chad, along with the casualties, and their voices are weighed in when we consider our options, ground in the mill of public policy.
Which, as has been noted, grinds exceedingly fine.
-- MarkusQ
The FAA security increases are irrelevant.
The real security increases took place at internet speed, within the first half hour after the first plane hit. Passengers on that plane used cell phones to let the world know they had been hijacked. The news media let the world know that hijacked planes were being used as weapons. Callers from the fourth plane got their cultural norm updated when they called out on their cell phones. They recomputed the risks and benefits of
A) 30+ people attacking five hijackers armed with knifes, vs.
B) sitting quietly while the plane is crashed at high speed into a large object.
Because they were a little late getting this news, they were unable to regain control of the plane when they attacked the hijackers, but they thwarted its use as a weapon. Within twenty four hours the news had spread: if someone with a knife starts to hijack a plane you are on, jump them-- kick them, bite them, knee them in the holy land. Do whatever it takes, because even though you might get hurt, or killed, your odds are a lot better than if you let them get control of the plane.
The real lesson here is that, when attacking a wired society, you'd darn well better coordinate your attacks, because within a blindingly short time the society will have learned and that trick won't work anymore.
-- MarkusQ
I agree. The key concept here was that it was well targeted. Neither appeasement nor sweeping counterstrikes are the answer. We need to be smarter than that. One idea might be a reasoned and stately arrest and trial of the leaders, after they have been identified by a fair and honest investigation.
Another might be a move to decentralization. Or a re-examination of our foreign policy. Or equipping our planes with automated anti-hijacking systems that automatically fly them to a designated desert air strip and land them there on receipt of a command from the ground.
Or...
--MarkusQ
Counter attacking is not a good solution, for several reasons. 1) We do not know who to blame, and blind lynching leads to many problems, 2) even if we did know who to blame, counter attacking stands a good chance of angering others, and perpetuating the cycle, 3) even if we knew which nation to attack, and could get away with it, it is still wrong to kill people for the actions of others--we would be no better than the terrorists.
On the other hand, doing nothing is likewise unacceptable. It will send the message that these actions can be taken with impunity, and likely lead to further assaults. Failing to stand up for yourself is the best way to become a victim.
So, logically, we need to do something that is not a counter attack.
This is where brains come in. What can we do that will reduce or eliminate this kind of threat but isn't a blind reprisal? That is the question we should be turning our brains to.
-- MarkusQ
In the spirit of free-as-in-chaos, I have instituted my own private moderation system. Under this system, I hereby give you +1 for Veracity, in partial recompense for the fact that your post was modded down by someone who doesn't share your eye for detail.
-- MarkusQ