...more recent posts
Well, I guess it's turning out to be a little more complex than I had imagined. Probably not just anyone with a knife could have done this attack. Still, I think it was about as much damage as you could wreck with a conventional (non nuke; non bio/chemical) attack, and it was carried out with only small knives and box cutters. So there is a distrubing disconnect between the level of technology employed, and the scale of the damage. And I think my fear still stands that this is a difficult attack to defend against short of completely seperating the cabin from the cockpit. There'd be some restroom issues to work out but it still seems reasonable to do. Watching those towers come down was so sad. I don't want anything like that to happen again.
I think the best argument I've heard against a repeat occurrence is that other people on planes that are being hijacked in the future will probably not just sit around. I guess what seems to have happened with the fourth plane (where some of the passengers may have rushed the hijackers and forced the plane down in Pennsylvania) would probably happen in any future attempts. And I guess that's always where our real saftey comes from. Not from "officials" or "the government" (although so many of them are doing a great job right now) but just from the mass of reasonable people out there in the world. I think we're all a little wiser as to the stakes, and I think it would be hard to get us in the same way again.
Winds have completely shifted this morning. They will shift again this evening and blow everything south, but for now we are in the cloud. I know it's not healthy, but we are staying in doors with all windows shut. I thought about leaving, but I think I have to stay. Not for any particular reason, but just because this is where I live. Despite the horror, life in New York City does go on. AKA will be open for business tonight. Come on by.
One new picture added to the World Trade Center photos. Also, I fixed the issue that was preventing some versions of IE on the Mac from seeing the photos. I'll fix all other pictures on the site over the next few days.
My amazement continues. What a perfect attack. Beautiful really, if it wasn't so horrible. So simple and such complete destruction. News reports keep speculating about the masterminds behind the plot and how only a few terrorist groups in the world have the capabilities to pull something like that off, yet there appears to be no evidence to back that up. The reality, and the elegance of the attack, was that almost anyone could do it. The whole thing might have cost just a few thousand dollars. The damage is certainly well into the billions. Maybe trillions? That's some return on investment. And then on top of that, there seems to be no way to defend against it.
Assuming that the public will not stand for mandatory strip searches of all airline passengers I can only think of one thing to do. Airplanes should be reconfigured so that the cockpit is seperate from the cabin. No doors, and reinforced thick steel walls seperating the two areas. Not a locked door - no door. These planes can still be attacked. They can be blown up with bombs. Passengers can be killed. But the plane itself cannot be commandeered in mid flight by a passenger and turned into a guided missle. This seems like a simple to implement step that will almost completely take away the possibility of this sort of disaster (I guess the plane could be taken over on the ground while the attackers could still get into the cockpit section from the outside, but that seems orders of magnitude harder for the attackers.)
Without this measure, it's hard to imagine this won't happen again. And again. And again. A few hundred bucks for a couple of tickets, and a few ceramic knives is all it takes to bomb the pentagon or knock down the World Trade Center? (Well, plus that willing to die part.) This is not acceptible. Tougher security checks at airports are not going to matter. Moving naval battle groups into New York harbor is not going to matter. Star Wars or any other crazy high tech solution will not matter. We must try to make peace, and in the mean time we have to make it impossible for people to easily get their hands on giant flying bombs.
[I'm posting more WTC related stuff in the comments below]
I'm O.K., if anyone is wondering.
I wasn't expecting the future for a few more years, but Senator Fritz Hollings (Democrat, S.C.) is introducing a bill that makes Richard Stallman's dystopian fantasies seem right on the money. And in case you don't know, that is not a good thing. The bill is called the SSSCA (security systems standards and certification act,) and you can read the staff working draft here. For those less legally inclined, here's the first paragraph (they don't even try to bury the outrageous stuff!):
(a) IN GENERAL.--It is unlawful to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies that adhere to the security systems standards adopted under section 104.I'm utterly speachless. I've been trying to write something about this for a few days, but I am not able to do it without flying into a fit of rage. The effects of this bill would be so far reaching, and so completely devastating to "humanity" (at least in terms of how I think about "humanity") that it is difficult to sum up. Wes Felter offers this: "Anyway, general purpose devices would be essentially outlawed under SSSCA. Your PC's tamper-resistant TCPA BIOS would only load certified, DRM-laden operating systems." (Here's the entire HTP thread.) But outlawing linux (and most other open source software) is just the tip of the iceburg.
I know that crazy bills get brought before congress all the time, and just because it is a bill does not mean that it will ever become law. Still, I'm finding it hard to rely on the good judgement of others to keep this one from happening. Just who is in control here? I'm beginning to suspect that it is not human, whatever it is.
Here's the wired coverage.
Do you work for a large corporation? Are you sure that's what you should be doing?
Unix time is now 999967032 which represents the number of seconds that have elapsed during the "unix era" or, in other words, since January 1, 1970. Sometime later today it will roll over to 1,000,000,000 seconds. This is like the geek millenium (complete with possible y2k like problems.)
Photos from Sandy Neck Beach, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Labor Day weekend, 2001.
Haven't been posting much lately. Trying to get back on track, but of course there's no point in forcing anything. Something knocked me a bit out of orbit a few weeks ago. Still struggling to regain my normal path. Hopefully things will be picking up soon.