Even there, you can do a fine grained firewall to allow connections to specific other servers. I do that stuff all the time.
If you're talking more about a consumer app that talks to a database, that should be routed through ssl, etc, and well authenticated.
I do agree, however, most databases can be "exposed" without too much risk, and that risk is justifiable for certain types of applications. Lock down your high-access user accounts to local-only access, and allow authenticated connections. There is always the danger of a "Slammer" situation (I must be getting old; the number one google hit for slammer is a "gay sex club"), but if no one can access your database, then you're pretty much limited to local applications, or feeding data through multiple security levels to an exposed server, which has a high performance hit.
Well, dogs seem to take delight in chasing cars, as an example, so I wouldn't be surprised if you're right. The run response is something I've noticed myself, time and time again. Bears, dogs, cats...If you stand still, they stop chasing.
I've never had the misfortune of being menaced by a bear in an aggressive situation, and they're not very aggressive in general, so a little loud noise and some raised arms will usually send them lumbering off, while they may chase you a bit if you run.
Dogs...I used to run competitively, and I have more "being chased by dogs" experience than a half dozen normal people. Generally, if you stop, the dog will stop. Doesn't hold for a really aggressive dog who is after you because he specifically wants to kill YOU, but it works fine for any kind of dog that's just excited by the whole idea of running prey.
Cats...Well, I've never been chased by a big cat. But I've led little cats around with all manner of shiny cat distractions. They are excited by movement and bored by stillness.
We see that more because, in our world, cats are usually well fed. Catch a squirrel, don't catch a squirrel, who cares?
I usually think of it as a sort of "hunting practice"...My most domestic cats are usually pretty lax...They'll even let things get away, once they're bored...But that initial bit of, "Ha! Gotcha! Ooooh, you wanna get away, well okay... Ha! Gotcha!" is all about "I could kill you if I wanted to...Damn I'm good."
My best hunting cat...I never saw him play with anything. It was dead, or it was beneath his notice. He was kind of a "big game" cat though; rabbits, groundhogs, crows...If he ever killed mice, he didn't bother leaving a "trophy" as it were.
I sure hope so. Getting this sort of tech as a backyard/rooftop energy generator could be insanely useful. Off the grid for nothing...Hydrogen beats the crap out of batteries as far as energy storage, so high efficiency solar or this sort of biological solution used to produce hydrogen to power your house and your car...Wow. And 80% efficiency is pretty damn good, for a line of research that is still pretty primitive.
A biological system would (probably) be lower setup than a solar system as well, at least given current tech.
It's not really about fun; most predators are hardwired to chase things that run, because that's a good indication of edibility...If it doesn't run, there may be something going on there, something that it may not be in your best interest to find out about the hard way.
If it does run, however, you can make a high percentage guess that it thinks that's its best defense in the situation, so you're pretty safe in chasing it...It's not going to fail at running, then turn around and bite your head off.
But...But...that's like stealing from the company! Ha. Of course, the last time I created a commercial product, they fired me, then inadvertently destroyed the code themselves before they could deploy it (they were worried I'd compiled timebombs into the binaries on my development server, so they wiped it). They also tried to sue me under a non-compete that I signed with my pseudonym "I won't sign this." Real bunch of winners. They went out of business not long after I left; I wish I could claim credit.
Makes me glad I don't work in R&D. Most times, if I come up with something clever, I can deploy it, open source it, and take it with me to the next job. I don't have to worry about greedy management trying to steal it, because they're in no position to profit from it, except incidentally. I still have plenty of stress, but it's not that kind of stress.
Yea, I had that happen a lot as well. They'd try to peg my nationality, and start off in whatever language I _looked_ like I spoke. I can get by in French and Spanish, but as soon as I got a couple of words out they'd switch to English...They knew both languages well enough to recognize an english accent.
I've been in both types of business. I find that the higher the level of trust that they've had to have in you, the less likely you are to get booted immediately. If you're in charge of data integrity and security on a financial system, a position of high trust, you're not going to get railroaded like you would if you're an applications developer.
The job I'm in now, I should get "perp-walked" when I put in my notice (I have way too much systems access), but I doubt I will be, because they'll be desperate for me to train someone, and catch up my documentation. It's a trust position, though a number of people over me probably don't trust me...If I were them I wouldn't trust anyone, due to the amount of backstabbing they've been dealing in.
They're not always rational...It'll be interesting to see.
The real hilarity of it is, in the Netherlands, of all places, you can find tons of english speakers. Hell, the people who got the letter probably spoke decent english. Why, in gods name, would you do such an amatuer translation, and not just assume that someone will be able to read it.
Jesus, you're a pally, and that's 99% of the problem right there. Speaking from experience, I win about 70% of my pvp fights with my druid, and about 10% with my pally, and both characters are endgame characters with mostly blue/purple gear.
People rant about how hard it is to kill a paladin, but the truth of it is, unless you're full retrib, and jacked to the gills with +crit and +spell damage, you're going to get murdered...You just can't do enough damage.
A rogue can deal enough damage to kill you four times over before you can kill them once, and they can disengage at will. Warlocks, Priests, Hunters, and Mages are all capable of killing you from a distance (Pursuit of Justice buff may change this BIG TIME, hello +15% run speed) and the sum total of your offensive punch is melee, so they can just stay at max range and pound you to death. Warriors tend to do more damage, but they're more beatable than most (fury spec excepted, of course =P). Shaman's just have more damage output than the pally, so you're at a negative there, and a smart Shammy will heal when you heal, negating a lot of your durability, and the goddamn earthbind totem will beat you more often than not by allowing them to keep the range open. Feral druids are nasty hard to beat; they'll jump you in kitty do some quick damage, then shift to bear and beat the crap out of you, and Balance druids have all the same issues as any other ranged caster, coupled with the fact that they're tough as nails in boomkin form.
Take heart in that the pally is the undisputed MASTA of pve, and accept that your primary pvp role is just to piss people off. I do far better in battleground and arena pvp as a prot or holy pally than as any other class. I can't kill anyone, but I never, ever, die.
I know a lot of christians like to believe that all ethics were derived from the bible, but Plato and Aristotle were laying the intellectual foundations for modern ethics in the 4th and 5th century, BC. Before that was the Babylonians, with Hammurabi in the 19th century BC.
Christianity hasn't had a great track record for ethics in the last millenium. It's been used to justify some of the worst excesses of humanity.
No puppies!?! Shit man, that's over the fricking line. Who the hell are you to mess with my social life!?
Sorry, I did misrepresent you...Got you confused with someone a few posts up who said that "abnormal" behaviour should be monitored and squashed if it went over some imaginary line.
In long term retrospect, I can see where you were going, though telling the rape victim that her coping mechanisims are wrong is probably not what I'd consider tasteful. I've dealt with the emo crowd...Well, mostly goths in my case, as I'm too old to intersect with actual emo types on a regular basis...Had people tell me that I "Didn't understand pain" because I couldn't appreciate their unrequited love for Billy Corgan. So I understand the whiny "feel my pain" crowd, and I share your distaste for them.
But with real trauma you often get "real" self-destructive behviour, and it's not always bad...It's like poking a wound to see if it's healed. Now of course there are degrees, but sometimes its healthiest to express some of the ugliness inside yourself, not to build it up, but to wear it down.
Oh, I've had my share of bad experiences as well; been beaten, broken, cut, and even shot once, if you count birdshot, which I'm not sure I do...Getting the pellets removed isn't much worse than picking gravel out of your legs after a bad spill. Had a bit of a rough childhood.
Didn't ruin my life, but it and other similar stuff put me through a pretty dark period...Under your rules, I'd have been locked up no doubt, for being abnormal, though I never hurt any one outside of the occasional fistfight, and those seldom had a lot of blood.
You've got the tact and empathy of a turnip. You deny that other people are entitled to their emotional problems, and you equate having seen other people suffer to having empathy. I've seen other people suffer, and it's ugly, but it's a lot easier than dealing with your own problems. May be frustrating, may induce some pity in people who are capable of it, but you move on.
On top of that you pigeonhole everyone as freaks and masochists, and just say they do it for fun, like self-destructive behaviour, the real deal not the attention-seeking kind, is just a rational choice with a nice payoff. If you really feel that way about the world, I pity you.
Well, a good 10 of those characters are me, and I haven't logged on in months. Lining things up with 1 character per account is way off if you consider how many long time players there are. If I logged in every character I created since it went live, I'd probably have two dozen that were lvl 30+ and I'm hardly alone in that.
It also doesn't count item mules, auction house characters, trade skill mules, etc...Doesn't count the 2 new characters everyone started to play through the Blood Elf and Dranae starting areas.
I don't have any percentage in seeing WoW's player base rise or fall, I honestly don't care. But I think it's pretty unlikely that they have 9 million active subscribers if the Armory numbers aren't at least 18 million. That just doesn't jive with what I know about the game.
My personal experience is that membership among people I know is dropping off. Whether that is being replaced with new players, I have no idea.
No...But I'd beat 'em to death (or at least beat them to serious injury) for pulling a weapon, no matter how insignificant, and running for the cockpit. I doubt I'm the only one. A lot of people have been dogpiled for acting up on planes since 9/11.
It's a good response. If we'd had responses like that, 9/11 would never have happened. The only thing that let them get away with it was the fact that people thought they had something to lose by standing up and going after the terrorist. When you have nothing to lose...That's a whole different story.
See, that's my point. Do you think that post was in any way a catharisis or a release for me? That was just description; I don't really do the dark writing anymore, and as much as I did do it it was more about myself, and less about emotional trauma in general.
But I'm sure there are people out there who come across imagery of wounds and pus and think, "ZOMG! Psycho killer!" because clearly, only someone with a seriously deranged mind could ever write something like that, as opposed to butterflys and flowers and happy running children.
Life's not naturally pretty. Lot of people don't seem to realize that our current state of strife-free happiness is not the universal state. Read some poetry coming out of war zones, and you'll see some seriously "deranged" stuff...People trying to articulate their feelings, so they can put them to rest. It's not a product of a dangerous mind; it's more about a mind trying to cope with emotional damage, and with events that have done damage to their world view.
I used to know a guy who only had one eyebrow, and by contorting his face he could undulate it in such a way as to resemble a furry wave going back and forth on his forehead.
I think he's saying you're missing the point. You may think that telling someone to "get over it" is enough, but it's usually not. I spent a lot of time telling myself to get over it, and it was never notably helpful.
The problem is usually not figuring out what's bothering you. It's usually pretty obvious. The question is what do you do about it? If you've been through some kind of abuse, how do you get over it? If you're shunned by all your peers, how do you fix it? If you hate yourself, how do you go on from there? You're very flip about it, but usually it's more complicated than someone with little empathy giving you their pithy one-sentence diagnosis of all your problems.
As for the guy who's trying to commit suicide, I think both of your answers are ridiculous. Either he's serious, in which case, you're not going to be able to do anything about it. Or he's just out for attention, and it doesn't really matter what you say. Either way, it doesn't have anything to do with the topic at hand: people venting their anger in ways you find threatening. If you want to help someone in that situation you have to try to help them, not just snidely opine about their condition. Even if you try to help them, you'll probably fail, and that's speaking from a lifetime of watching people fail and be failed.
It's a very easy thing to say when you've never been through that type of thing.
"Why can't you get over it?" "What's wrong with you that this still effects you?" "Why can't you understand that that was yesterday/last month/last year and get on with your life?"
Very easy to say when it's not you.
There are emotional traumas that do not go away. It's like an old wound. Sometimes it gets sore again, years later. May even get a little gross again, vent some pus, whatever. Emotional scars are just like that. You may not like that fact, but when you spend all your time trying to be happy, and not dealing with the crap going on inside you, it eats at you, and does a lot more damage to you than some dark writing or a crying jag or self destructive exercise (my personal fav) or whatever that you believe, from your happy world, to be harmful.
Your "inject some heroin" metaphor sucks, by the way. You think people express self-destructive emotions because it makes them feel good? Sometimes the cup runneth over, and if you can put those feelings into something productive, no matter how weird someone like you may think it is, then you're doing a hell of a lot better than most people, living their lives of quiet despair.
God the PATRIOT act is a fricking nightmare. Has it made anyone safer?
The real issue is, 9/11 won't happen again. As a country, we've learned our lesson about "just sit tight and wait" when it comes to plane hijacking. Box cutter? You best have a flamethrower next time, because me and everyone in business class are going to beat you to death with our laptops as soon as you start trying to wave that piddly crap in our faces. Akbar Macbook, Bitch!
It was a surprise. People bought it. That day has passed. But in response we have done unto ourselves far worse things than they could have ever hoped to have accomplished. Massively stupid.
And we will have other successful attacks on our soil. It's inevitable that, over time, everyone will miss someone. The occasional deranged teen will go on a shooting rampage. The occasional terrorist will pull off a successful attack.
But the fact that there is a possible danger is not a reason to upend your entire society. Analyze, find your mistakes, and correct them...Don't throw out a system that failed once, and try to replace it whole cloth with something new, designed by committee! Ridiculous.
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Even there, you can do a fine grained firewall to allow connections to specific other servers. I do that stuff all the time.
If you're talking more about a consumer app that talks to a database, that should be routed through ssl, etc, and well authenticated.
I do agree, however, most databases can be "exposed" without too much risk, and that risk is justifiable for certain types of applications. Lock down your high-access user accounts to local-only access, and allow authenticated connections. There is always the danger of a "Slammer" situation (I must be getting old; the number one google hit for slammer is a "gay sex club"), but if no one can access your database, then you're pretty much limited to local applications, or feeding data through multiple security levels to an exposed server, which has a high performance hit.
Well, dogs seem to take delight in chasing cars, as an example, so I wouldn't be surprised if you're right. The run response is something I've noticed myself, time and time again. Bears, dogs, cats...If you stand still, they stop chasing.
I've never had the misfortune of being menaced by a bear in an aggressive situation, and they're not very aggressive in general, so a little loud noise and some raised arms will usually send them lumbering off, while they may chase you a bit if you run.
Dogs...I used to run competitively, and I have more "being chased by dogs" experience than a half dozen normal people. Generally, if you stop, the dog will stop. Doesn't hold for a really aggressive dog who is after you because he specifically wants to kill YOU, but it works fine for any kind of dog that's just excited by the whole idea of running prey.
Cats...Well, I've never been chased by a big cat. But I've led little cats around with all manner of shiny cat distractions. They are excited by movement and bored by stillness.
We see that more because, in our world, cats are usually well fed. Catch a squirrel, don't catch a squirrel, who cares?
I usually think of it as a sort of "hunting practice"...My most domestic cats are usually pretty lax...They'll even let things get away, once they're bored...But that initial bit of, "Ha! Gotcha! Ooooh, you wanna get away, well okay... Ha! Gotcha!" is all about "I could kill you if I wanted to...Damn I'm good."
My best hunting cat...I never saw him play with anything. It was dead, or it was beneath his notice. He was kind of a "big game" cat though; rabbits, groundhogs, crows...If he ever killed mice, he didn't bother leaving a "trophy" as it were.
I sure hope so. Getting this sort of tech as a backyard/rooftop energy generator could be insanely useful. Off the grid for nothing...Hydrogen beats the crap out of batteries as far as energy storage, so high efficiency solar or this sort of biological solution used to produce hydrogen to power your house and your car...Wow. And 80% efficiency is pretty damn good, for a line of research that is still pretty primitive.
A biological system would (probably) be lower setup than a solar system as well, at least given current tech.
It's not really about fun; most predators are hardwired to chase things that run, because that's a good indication of edibility...If it doesn't run, there may be something going on there, something that it may not be in your best interest to find out about the hard way.
If it does run, however, you can make a high percentage guess that it thinks that's its best defense in the situation, so you're pretty safe in chasing it...It's not going to fail at running, then turn around and bite your head off.
But...But...that's like stealing from the company! Ha. Of course, the last time I created a commercial product, they fired me, then inadvertently destroyed the code themselves before they could deploy it (they were worried I'd compiled timebombs into the binaries on my development server, so they wiped it). They also tried to sue me under a non-compete that I signed with my pseudonym "I won't sign this." Real bunch of winners. They went out of business not long after I left; I wish I could claim credit.
Makes me glad I don't work in R&D. Most times, if I come up with something clever, I can deploy it, open source it, and take it with me to the next job. I don't have to worry about greedy management trying to steal it, because they're in no position to profit from it, except incidentally. I still have plenty of stress, but it's not that kind of stress.
Yea, I had that happen a lot as well. They'd try to peg my nationality, and start off in whatever language I _looked_ like I spoke. I can get by in French and Spanish, but as soon as I got a couple of words out they'd switch to English...They knew both languages well enough to recognize an english accent.
There wouldn't have been a need for one, if everyone hadn't caved at Munich.
I've been in both types of business. I find that the higher the level of trust that they've had to have in you, the less likely you are to get booted immediately. If you're in charge of data integrity and security on a financial system, a position of high trust, you're not going to get railroaded like you would if you're an applications developer.
The job I'm in now, I should get "perp-walked" when I put in my notice (I have way too much systems access), but I doubt I will be, because they'll be desperate for me to train someone, and catch up my documentation. It's a trust position, though a number of people over me probably don't trust me...If I were them I wouldn't trust anyone, due to the amount of backstabbing they've been dealing in.
They're not always rational...It'll be interesting to see.
The real hilarity of it is, in the Netherlands, of all places, you can find tons of english speakers. Hell, the people who got the letter probably spoke decent english. Why, in gods name, would you do such an amatuer translation, and not just assume that someone will be able to read it.
Jesus, you're a pally, and that's 99% of the problem right there. Speaking from experience, I win about 70% of my pvp fights with my druid, and about 10% with my pally, and both characters are endgame characters with mostly blue/purple gear.
People rant about how hard it is to kill a paladin, but the truth of it is, unless you're full retrib, and jacked to the gills with +crit and +spell damage, you're going to get murdered...You just can't do enough damage.
A rogue can deal enough damage to kill you four times over before you can kill them once, and they can disengage at will. Warlocks, Priests, Hunters, and Mages are all capable of killing you from a distance (Pursuit of Justice buff may change this BIG TIME, hello +15% run speed) and the sum total of your offensive punch is melee, so they can just stay at max range and pound you to death. Warriors tend to do more damage, but they're more beatable than most (fury spec excepted, of course =P). Shaman's just have more damage output than the pally, so you're at a negative there, and a smart Shammy will heal when you heal, negating a lot of your durability, and the goddamn earthbind totem will beat you more often than not by allowing them to keep the range open. Feral druids are nasty hard to beat; they'll jump you in kitty do some quick damage, then shift to bear and beat the crap out of you, and Balance druids have all the same issues as any other ranged caster, coupled with the fact that they're tough as nails in boomkin form.
Take heart in that the pally is the undisputed MASTA of pve, and accept that your primary pvp role is just to piss people off. I do far better in battleground and arena pvp as a prot or holy pally than as any other class. I can't kill anyone, but I never, ever, die.
Christianity != Ethics.
I know a lot of christians like to believe that all ethics were derived from the bible, but Plato and Aristotle were laying the intellectual foundations for modern ethics in the 4th and 5th century, BC. Before that was the Babylonians, with Hammurabi in the 19th century BC.
Christianity hasn't had a great track record for ethics in the last millenium. It's been used to justify some of the worst excesses of humanity.
Yes, but only because of their defense force comprised of giant robots.
No puppies!?! Shit man, that's over the fricking line. Who the hell are you to mess with my social life!?
Sorry, I did misrepresent you...Got you confused with someone a few posts up who said that "abnormal" behaviour should be monitored and squashed if it went over some imaginary line.
In long term retrospect, I can see where you were going, though telling the rape victim that her coping mechanisims are wrong is probably not what I'd consider tasteful. I've dealt with the emo crowd...Well, mostly goths in my case, as I'm too old to intersect with actual emo types on a regular basis...Had people tell me that I "Didn't understand pain" because I couldn't appreciate their unrequited love for Billy Corgan. So I understand the whiny "feel my pain" crowd, and I share your distaste for them.
But with real trauma you often get "real" self-destructive behviour, and it's not always bad...It's like poking a wound to see if it's healed. Now of course there are degrees, but sometimes its healthiest to express some of the ugliness inside yourself, not to build it up, but to wear it down.
Oh, I've had my share of bad experiences as well; been beaten, broken, cut, and even shot once, if you count birdshot, which I'm not sure I do...Getting the pellets removed isn't much worse than picking gravel out of your legs after a bad spill. Had a bit of a rough childhood.
Didn't ruin my life, but it and other similar stuff put me through a pretty dark period...Under your rules, I'd have been locked up no doubt, for being abnormal, though I never hurt any one outside of the occasional fistfight, and those seldom had a lot of blood.
You've got the tact and empathy of a turnip. You deny that other people are entitled to their emotional problems, and you equate having seen other people suffer to having empathy. I've seen other people suffer, and it's ugly, but it's a lot easier than dealing with your own problems. May be frustrating, may induce some pity in people who are capable of it, but you move on.
On top of that you pigeonhole everyone as freaks and masochists, and just say they do it for fun, like self-destructive behaviour, the real deal not the attention-seeking kind, is just a rational choice with a nice payoff. If you really feel that way about the world, I pity you.
Well, a good 10 of those characters are me, and I haven't logged on in months. Lining things up with 1 character per account is way off if you consider how many long time players there are. If I logged in every character I created since it went live, I'd probably have two dozen that were lvl 30+ and I'm hardly alone in that.
It also doesn't count item mules, auction house characters, trade skill mules, etc...Doesn't count the 2 new characters everyone started to play through the Blood Elf and Dranae starting areas.
I don't have any percentage in seeing WoW's player base rise or fall, I honestly don't care. But I think it's pretty unlikely that they have 9 million active subscribers if the Armory numbers aren't at least 18 million. That just doesn't jive with what I know about the game.
My personal experience is that membership among people I know is dropping off. Whether that is being replaced with new players, I have no idea.
No...But I'd beat 'em to death (or at least beat them to serious injury) for pulling a weapon, no matter how insignificant, and running for the cockpit. I doubt I'm the only one. A lot of people have been dogpiled for acting up on planes since 9/11.
It's a good response. If we'd had responses like that, 9/11 would never have happened. The only thing that let them get away with it was the fact that people thought they had something to lose by standing up and going after the terrorist. When you have nothing to lose...That's a whole different story.
See, that's my point. Do you think that post was in any way a catharisis or a release for me? That was just description; I don't really do the dark writing anymore, and as much as I did do it it was more about myself, and less about emotional trauma in general.
But I'm sure there are people out there who come across imagery of wounds and pus and think, "ZOMG! Psycho killer!" because clearly, only someone with a seriously deranged mind could ever write something like that, as opposed to butterflys and flowers and happy running children.
Life's not naturally pretty. Lot of people don't seem to realize that our current state of strife-free happiness is not the universal state. Read some poetry coming out of war zones, and you'll see some seriously "deranged" stuff...People trying to articulate their feelings, so they can put them to rest. It's not a product of a dangerous mind; it's more about a mind trying to cope with emotional damage, and with events that have done damage to their world view.
I used to know a guy who only had one eyebrow, and by contorting his face he could undulate it in such a way as to resemble a furry wave going back and forth on his forehead.
A strange world we live in.
Well, we are talking about the geek market here...At least it's near his eyelashes...He could be batting ear hair or something.
Sounds like Earth written by David Brin...in 1991. It was up for a Hugo, same year.
I think he's saying you're missing the point. You may think that telling someone to "get over it" is enough, but it's usually not. I spent a lot of time telling myself to get over it, and it was never notably helpful.
The problem is usually not figuring out what's bothering you. It's usually pretty obvious. The question is what do you do about it? If you've been through some kind of abuse, how do you get over it? If you're shunned by all your peers, how do you fix it? If you hate yourself, how do you go on from there? You're very flip about it, but usually it's more complicated than someone with little empathy giving you their pithy one-sentence diagnosis of all your problems.
As for the guy who's trying to commit suicide, I think both of your answers are ridiculous. Either he's serious, in which case, you're not going to be able to do anything about it. Or he's just out for attention, and it doesn't really matter what you say. Either way, it doesn't have anything to do with the topic at hand: people venting their anger in ways you find threatening. If you want to help someone in that situation you have to try to help them, not just snidely opine about their condition. Even if you try to help them, you'll probably fail, and that's speaking from a lifetime of watching people fail and be failed.
It's a very easy thing to say when you've never been through that type of thing.
"Why can't you get over it?" "What's wrong with you that this still effects you?" "Why can't you understand that that was yesterday/last month/last year and get on with your life?"
Very easy to say when it's not you.
There are emotional traumas that do not go away. It's like an old wound. Sometimes it gets sore again, years later. May even get a little gross again, vent some pus, whatever. Emotional scars are just like that. You may not like that fact, but when you spend all your time trying to be happy, and not dealing with the crap going on inside you, it eats at you, and does a lot more damage to you than some dark writing or a crying jag or self destructive exercise (my personal fav) or whatever that you believe, from your happy world, to be harmful.
Your "inject some heroin" metaphor sucks, by the way. You think people express self-destructive emotions because it makes them feel good? Sometimes the cup runneth over, and if you can put those feelings into something productive, no matter how weird someone like you may think it is, then you're doing a hell of a lot better than most people, living their lives of quiet despair.
Waterboarding? Oh yea, that's going to work. Getting good intel via torture is almost impossible, despite what the movies have told you.
When everyone knows that the plane is going to crash into something, you think everyone will sit tight for a pocketknife? Doubt it.
Everything is either occasional, constant, or impossible. Imagining that we'll stop all attacks is naive.
God the PATRIOT act is a fricking nightmare. Has it made anyone safer?
The real issue is, 9/11 won't happen again. As a country, we've learned our lesson about "just sit tight and wait" when it comes to plane hijacking. Box cutter? You best have a flamethrower next time, because me and everyone in business class are going to beat you to death with our laptops as soon as you start trying to wave that piddly crap in our faces. Akbar Macbook, Bitch!
It was a surprise. People bought it. That day has passed. But in response we have done unto ourselves far worse things than they could have ever hoped to have accomplished. Massively stupid.
And we will have other successful attacks on our soil. It's inevitable that, over time, everyone will miss someone. The occasional deranged teen will go on a shooting rampage. The occasional terrorist will pull off a successful attack.
But the fact that there is a possible danger is not a reason to upend your entire society. Analyze, find your mistakes, and correct them...Don't throw out a system that failed once, and try to replace it whole cloth with something new, designed by committee! Ridiculous.