I'm not sure which way to make
the old bits call on this:
[A]
was posted well after
[B]
was in the archives, but then
again, [B] didn't bother with
any commentary (new bits).
If you two can agree upon who
was at fault, penance will be
to explain how feedback phase
is affected by time lags, and
tie that in to the spontaneous
generation of "business cycles"
in the Beer Game. *
-Dave
*
see also:
Explaining Capacity Overshoot and Price War: Misperceptions
of Feedback in Competitive Growth Markets
in which the scenario 4 (margin
oriented tit for tat) seems close
to the strategy described in:
"game theoretical gandhi / more laptops"


This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by khare@alumni.caltech.edu.
Sure does explain FoRK :-)
not yet abandoned,
Rohit
khare@alumni.caltech.edu
Some Friends, Indeed, Do More Harm Than Good
September 10, 2002
By MARY DUENWALD
Friends are supposed to be good for you. In recent years,
scientific research has suggested that people who have
strong friendships experience less stress, they recover
more quickly from heart attacks and they are likely to live
longer than the friendless. They are even less susceptible
to the common cold, studies show.
But not all friends have such a salutary effect. Some lie,
insult and betray. Some are overly needy. Some give too
much advice. Psychologists and sociologists are now calling
attention to the negative health effects of bad friends.
"Friendship is often very painful," said Dr. Harriet
Lerner, a psychologist and the author of "The Dance of
Connection." "In a close, enduring friendship, jealousy,
envy, anger and the entire range of difficult emotions will
rear their heads. One has to decide whether the best thing
is to consider it a phase in a long friendship or say this
is bad for my health and I'm disbanding it."
Another book, "When Friendship Hurts," by Dr. Jan Yager, a
sociologist at the University of Connecticut at Stamford,
advises deliberately leaving bad friends by the wayside.
"There's this myth that friendships should last a
lifetime," Dr. Yager said. "But sometimes it's better that
they end."
That social scientists would wait until now to spotlight
the dangers of bad friends is understandable, considering
that they have only recently paid close attention to
friendship at all. Marriage and family relationships -
between siblings or parents and children - have been seen
as more important.
Of course, troubled friendships are far less likely to lead
to depression or suicide than troubled marriages are. And
children are seldom seriously affected when friendships go
bad.
As a popular author of relationship advice books, Dr.
Lerner said, "Never once have I had anyone write and say my
best friend hits me."
Dr. Beverley Fehr, a professor of psychology at the
University of Winnipeg, noted that sociological changes,
like a 50 percent divorce rate, have added weight to the
role of friends in emotional and physical health.
"Now that a marital relationship can't be counted on for
stability the way it was in the past, and because people
are less likely to be living with or near extended family
members, people are shifting their focus to friendships as
a way of building community and finding intimacy," said Dr.
Fehr, the author of "Friendship Processes."
Until the past couple of years, the research on friendship
focused on its health benefits. "Now we're starting to look
at it as a more full relationship," said Dr. Suzanna Rose,
a professor of psychology at Florida International
University in Miami. "Like marriage, friendship also has
negative characteristics."
The research is in its infancy. Psychologists have not yet
measured the ill effects of bad friendship, Dr. Fehr said.
So far they have only, through surveys and interviews,
figured out that it is a significant problem. The early
research, Dr. Fehr added, is showing that betrayal by a
friend can be more devastating than experts had thought.
How can a friend be bad? Most obviously, Dr. Rose said, by
drawing a person into criminal or otherwise ill-advised
pursuit. "When you think of people who were friends at
Enron," she added, "you can see how friendship can support
antisocial behavior."
Betrayal also makes for a bad friendship. "When friends
split up," said Dr. Keith E. Davis, a professor of
psychology at the University of South Carolina, "it is
often in cases where one has shared personal information or
secrets that the other one wanted to be kept confidential."
Another form of betrayal, Dr. Yager said, is when a friend
suddenly turns cold, without ever explaining why. "It's
more than just pulling away," she said. "The silent
treatment is actually malicious."
At least as devastating is an affair with the friend's
romantic partner, as recently happened to one of Dr.
Lerner's patients. "I would not encourage her to hang in
there and work this one out," Dr. Lerner said.
A third type of bad friendship involves someone who insults
the other person, Dr. Yager said. One of the 180 people who
responded to Dr. Yager's most recent survey on friendship
described how, when she was 11, her best friend called her
"a derogatory name." The woman, now 32, was so devastated
that she feels she has been unable to be fully open with
people ever since, Dr. Yager said.
Emotional abuse may be less noticeable than verbal abuse,
but it is "more insidious," Dr. Yager said. "Some people
constantly set up their friends," she explained. "They'll
have a party, not invite the friend, but make sure he or
she finds out."
Risk takers, betrayers and abusers are the most extreme
kinds of bad friends, Dr. Yager said, but they are not the
only ones. She identifies 21 different varieties. Occupying
the second tier of badness are the liar, the person who is
overly dependent, the friend who never listens, the person
who meddles too much in a friend's life, the competitor and
the loner, who prefers not to spend time with friends.
Most common is the promise breaker. "This includes everyone
from the person who says let's have a cup of coffee but
something always comes up at the last minute to someone who
promises to be there for you when you need them, but then
isn't," Dr. Yager said.
Some friendships go bad, as some romantic relationships do,
when one of the people gradually or suddenly finds reasons
to dislike the other one.
"With couples, it can take 18 to 24 months for someone to
discover there's something important they don't like about
the other person," said Dr. Rose of Florida International.
"One might find, for example, that in subtle ways the other
person is a racist. In friendships, which are less intense,
it may take even more time for one person to meet the
other's dislike criteria."
Whether a friendship is worth saving, Dr. Lerner said,
"depends on how large the injury is."
"Sometimes the mature thing is to lighten up and let
something go," she added. "It's also an act of maturity
sometimes to accept another person's limitations."
Acceptance should come easier among friends than among
spouses, Dr. Lerner said, because people have more than one
friend and do not need a full range of emotional support
from each one.
But if the friendship has deteriorated to the point where
one friend truly dislikes the other one or finds that the
friendship is causing undue stress, the healthy response is
to pull away, Dr. Yager said, to stop sharing the personal
or intimate details of life, and start being too busy to
get together, ever.
"It takes two people to start and maintain a friendship,
but only one to end it," Dr. Yager said.
Friendship, because it is voluntary and unregulated, is far
easier to dissolve than marriage. But it is also
comparatively fragile, experts say. Ideally, the loss of a
bad friendship should leave a person with more time and
appreciation for good ones, Dr. Lerner said.
"It is wise to pay attention to your friendships and have
them in order while you're healthy and your life and work
are going well," she said. "Because when a crisis hits,
when someone you love dies, or you lose your job and your
health insurance, when the universe gives you a crash
course in vulnerability, you will discover how crucial and
life-preserving good friendship is."

HOW TO ADVERTISE
---------------------------------
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or other creative advertising opportunities with The
New York Times on the Web, please contact
onlinesales@nytimes.com or visit our online media
kit at
For general information about NYTimes.com, write to
help@nytimes.com.
Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company


Robert Harley writes:
> >OK, then. Consider a population of 1,000,000. 500,000 men each
> >pair off with 500,000 women. Then, 1 man, let's call him "Wilt",
> >also has sex with the other 499,999 women
>
> This has never happened.  Its relevance is nil.
It was a extreme contrived example because you glosded over the
point of the earlier 3-person example.
But OK, Mr Math, let it be N men and women, for any N>2. They
all pair off. Then, some number H, N>H>0, of men has sex with
all the other N-1 women he hasn't yet had sex with.
Pick any N and H that might be interesting. Any choice of
values results in meaningful differences between the sexes'
"promiscuity", as commonly understood. It should be more
obvious with extreme choices of numbers, but it is also true
for any choice of N and H, if unrealistic totals distract you.
Further, and I was hoping this would be clear without saying
so outright, this model actually approximates the cliche
"common wisdom" about per-gender sexual behavior, if you
reverse the male and female roles.
Those stereotypes are: that more men than women seek multiple
partners -- men being "more promiscuous" than women -- and that
surplus of male interest is satisfied by a smaller number of
hyperpromiscuous women (often derisively labelled "sluts").
> So I chose not to type "on average" explicitly in my post, since this
> is FoRK and one tends to assume that people have a clue.
>
> There is no disagreement between us, except that I am more interested
> in typical behaviour and you in extreme.
Nope, now you've amended the meaning of your initial statement to
make it more defensible. What I objected to was:
Robert Harley:
# >The assumption that females of all species tend to be less promiscuous
# >than males simply does not fit the facts, Hrdy contended.
#
# Well, DUH!!!
#
# It is perfectly obvious that (heterosexual) promiscuity is exactly,
# precisely identical between males and females.
#
# Of course the shapes of the distributions may differ.
If you assumed people on FoRK had a clue, would you have needed
to jump in with a patronizing "DUH!!"?
If you were talking about fuzzy, typical behavior, would you have
huffed and puffed with the words "perfectly obvious" and "exactly,
precisely identical"?
If your concern was with the "typical", why didn't you adopt the
typical definition of "promiscuous", rather than a straw-man
definition which allowed you to interject "DUH!!" and mock an
anthrolopology professor's conclusions?
> Actually, you probably just
> had a bad day and felt like jumping down my throat for the hell of it.
You are welcome to that theory!
But here's an alternate theory: when you jump in with a patronizing
and overblown pronouncement -- e.g. "DUH!!... perfectly obvious...
exactly, precisely identical..." -- and that pronouncement is
itself sloppy and erroneous, then others may get a kick out of
popping your balloon.
- Gordon


dreams-are-like-radio analogy: i program my Jetta Monsoon for Planet 93.3,
80's 102.9, and NPR 89.9 but when i leave my local broadcast range i have to
scan for new stations. dreaming is outside my local broadcast range.
-----Original Message-----
From: garym@maya.dyndns.org On Behalf Of
Gary Lawrence Murphy
Sent: Tuesday, September 10, 2002 10:14 AM
To: Geege Schuman
Cc: johnhall@evergo.net; FoRK
Subject: Re: Recommended Viewing
>>>>> "G" == Geege Schuman
writes:
G> you meant "SURPRISINGLY perceptive," didn't you?  :-)
Of course, dear.  Especially without zazen training.  Veritably
Operational Thetan-like.
G> recent exceptionally vivid and strange dreams lead me to
G> believe i'm sparking synapses that have lain dormant lo these
G> many years.  Lots of problem solving going on up there at
G> night.
It's a myth that we don't use parts of our brain.  We use it all,
always.  It's just that our culturally-induced focal-point causes most
of us to most of the time ignore and waste 99.999% of it.  "Lucid" is
a measure of notch-filter bandwidth; all stations are broadcasting,
but we only /choose/ Easy Rock 105.
For example, don't look now but your shoes are full of feet.
The sensation of toes the above statement evokes is not a "turning on"
of circuits, it is a "tuning in".  The next step, of course, is to
"drop out" :)
To paraphrase an old saw: Life is wasted on the living.
--
Gary Lawrence Murphy
TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Advantage through Community Software :
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)


==

Microsoft Tuesday said it has purchased a Mountain View, Calif.-based
security company to better secure its core file services including its
Windows platform and .NET initiative.
The Redmond, Wash-based software giant has acquired the assets of XDegrees
for an undisclosed amount of cash and is in the process of relocating the
team of 12 or 14 engineers to the Microsoft campus.
XDegrees' technology assigns URLs to Word files, video clips, and other
digital documents for access across a peer-to-peer network
XDegrees founder Michael Tanne was offered a job, but decided instead to
play his hand in the Silicon Valley.
==========
"XDegrees' technology assigns URLs to Word files, video clips, and other
digital documents for access across a peer-to-peer network" - assigns URLs
to Word files... and somebody /bought/ that?
===

"The XDegrees System allows users to easily and consistently locate, access
and manage information by assigning each document a unique link. Providing
end-to-end security, the XDegrees System unifies authentication of all
users, provides file-level access control and encrypts all stored and
transferred files. Seamless integration with existing applications such as
email clients and Microsoft Office products allows companies to rapidly
deploy the XDegrees System and users to get up-and-running quickly."
Whoa... high tech...
===
More bits here...

"The essence of XDegrees consists of a naming system and a distributed
database that allows peers to resolve resource names. XDegrees manages these
services for customers on its own hosts, and sells its software to
enterprises so they can define and run their own namespaces on in-house
servers. You can search for a particular person (whatever device the person
is currently using), for a particular device, for a file, or even for a web
service. The software that resolves resource names is called XRNS (the
eXtensible Resource Name System)."


I like this part - sounds like httpd on the client...

"Once the Client Component is installed, a server can order a program to run
on the client. Any CGI script, Java servlet, ASP component, etc. could be
run on the client. This is like breaking the Web server into two parts.
Originally, Web servers just understood HTTP and sent pages. Then the field
started demanding more from the Web and the servers got loaded down with CGI
and mod_perl and active pages and stuff. So now the Web server can choose to
go back to simple serving and (where the application is appropriate) let the
client do the other razzamatazz. This is superior to JavaScript in one
important detail: the program doesn't have to reload when a new page is
loaded, as JavaScript functions do.
And because XDegrees uses Web-compatible technology, users can access
XDegrees resources without installing any software, simply by using their
browser."
===
"Scaling is the main question that comes to mind when somebody describes a
new naming and searching system. CEO Michael Tanne claims to have figured
out mathematically that the system can scale up to millions of users and
billions of resources. Scaling is facilitated by the careful location of
servers (XDegrees will colocate servers at key routing points, as Akamai
does), and by directing clients to the nearest server as their default
"home" server. Enterprise customers can use own servers to manage in-house
applications."
"Files can be cached on multiple systems randomly scattered around the
Internet, as with Napster or Freenet. In fact, the caching in XDegrees is
more sophisticated than it is on those systems: users with high bandwidth
connections can download portions, or "stripes," of a file from several
cached locations simultaneously. The XDegrees software then reassembles
these stripes into the whole file and uses digital signatures to verify that
the downloaded file is the same as the original. A key component of this
digital signature is a digest of the file, which is stored as an HTTP header
for the file."


Mr. FoRK writes:
> "Files can be cached on multiple systems randomly scattered around the
> Internet, as with Napster or Freenet. In fact, the caching in XDegrees is
> more sophisticated than it is on those systems: users with high bandwidth
> connections can download portions, or "stripes," of a file from several
> cached locations simultaneously. The XDegrees software then reassembles
> these stripes into the whole file and uses digital signatures to verify that
> the downloaded file is the same as the original. A key component of this
> digital signature is a digest of the file, which is stored as an HTTP header
> for the file."
This "more sophisticated than [Napster or Freenet]" part seems
to be the same behavior implemented in many other P2P CDNs,
such as:
- Kazaa
- EDonkey/Overnet
- BitTorrent
- Gnutella (with HUGE extensions)
- OnionNetworks WebRAID
...though the quality of the "digest" used by each system varies
wildly.
- Gordon


At 12:32 PM 12/28/00 -0600, Adam Rifkin wrote:
>I repeat, IBM 76.8Gb ultra dma/100 hard drive at Fry's for $375...
>"home of fast, friendly courteous service! (R)"
>
>I kid you not.  That's a half a cent a Megabyte for storage.
>Not El Cheapo storage but top of the line storage.
less than two years later, we have 320 GB for the same price:

Maxtor Driving Capacity-Centric Enterprise Apps With "Super-Sized" ATA Drives
Maxtor Continues its Leadership in the Market it Pioneered with a New
Category of High-Density ATA Drives
MILPITAS, Calif., September 9, 2002-
Maxtor Corporation (NYSE: MXO), a worldwide leader in hard disk drives and
data storage solutions, today announced Maxtor MaXLineTM, its newest
generation of ATA drives designed specifically for rapidly emerging
enterprise storage applications including near-line, media storage and
network storage. The MaXLine family features two critical differentiators:
huge capacities up to 320 GB for corporate archiving and media recording;
and unique manufacturing and quality for 24/7 operations with mean time to
failure (MTTF) rates exceeding one million hours.
The MaXLine family is designed to bring hard disk drives into "near-line"
archive applications. By adding a layer of MaXLine drives to archive
architectures, companies can instantly recover time-critical data including
executive e-mail, transaction data and accounting data that may need to be
recovered on demand.
These new drives are designed to solve another enterprise problem with the
storage of video, media and audio conference call files. Even compressed,
these files take up tremendous amounts of high-cost server space. Priced
starting around $299.95 to $399.95 MSRP, Maxtor's MaXLine family offers
high capacity drives for enterprise applications at price points between
traditional ATA and SCSI drives.
For system OEMs and white box builders, MaXLine offers high-density,
easy-to-integrate storage for use in entry-level and mid-size server
environments.
"The demand for instant recall of archived data is expanding as companies
are meeting their obligations to quickly access executive e-mails,
financial documents and transaction records," said Mike Dooley, senior
director of marketing for the Desktop Products Group at Maxtor. "Users may
not need to access information in these applications on a daily basis, but
when they do need access, it must be instant. Recent advances in ATA
technology and our manufacturing processes allow us to build upon our
legacy of experience and provide our customers with a family of premium ATA
hard drives that can be integrated into a variety of systems for these
enterprise applications."
The MaXLine family includes the 5400-RPM MaXLine II, designed for
capacities up to 320 GB and the 7200-RPM MaXLine Plus II, designed for
capacities up to 250 GB. At these capacities, MaXLine offers higher storage
density than many tape and optical solutions. These drives have also been
tested and are projected to meet enterprise reliability requirements,
already exceeded by prior drives employing the same robust Maxtor designs,
which exceed MTTF of over one million hours. These drives will also carry a
three-year warranty.
The MaXLine II and MaXLine Plus II feature the Maxtor Fast DriveTM
UltraATA/133 interface for data transfer speeds up to 133 MB per second.
The MaXLine II and MaXLine Plus II will be available with next-generation
serial ATA interface for higher performance. At 150 MB per second maximum
data transfer rate, serial ATA improves hard drive performance to keep pace
with the rapidly increasing performance requirements of data intensive
environments and enterprise applications.
With a point-to-point connection architecture, and rich command set for
managing hard drive activity and data flow along the interface, serial ATA
advances the performance and efficiency of the drive to system interface.
The interface's reduced pin count allows for simpler cabling which in turn
allows better airflow within a system and further benefits the user with
increased design flexibility and hot plug capability.
"Maxtor's MaXLine family of drives provide a solution for storing data that
has previously been too expensive to keep on disk," said Dave Reinsel,
analyst at IDC. "The ATA drives offer a great value, low cost per GB and
when integrated into storage systems and file servers offer a compelling
cost-effective alternative to tape libraries and optical drives, which have
been the traditional solutions used for near-line applications."
Availability
Limited qualification units of the parallel ATA versions of Maxtor MaXLine
II and MaXLine Plus II are now available; with volume units available in
the fourth quarter. Qualification units of the MaXLine II and MaXLine Plus
II with serial ATA will be available later this month with volume shipments
scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2003.
About Maxtor
Maxtor Corporation (www.maxtor.com) is one of the world's leading suppliers
of information storage solutions. The company has an expansive line of
storage products for desktop computers, storage systems, high-performance
servers and consumer electronics. Maxtor has a reputation as a proven
market leader built by consistently providing high-quality products and
service and support for its customers. Maxtor and its products can be found
at www.maxtor.com or by calling toll-free (800) 2-MAXTOR. Maxtor is traded
on the NYSE under the MXO symbol.
Note: Maxtor, MaXLine and the Maxtor logo are registered trademarks of
Maxtor Corporation. Fast Drive is a trademark of Maxtor Corporation. All
other trademarks are properties of their respective owners.
GB means 1 billion bytes. Total accessible capacity varies depending on
operating environment.
This announcement relating to Maxtor may contain forward-looking statements
concerning future technology, products incorporating that technology, and
Maxtor's execution. These statements are based on current expectations and
are subject to risks and uncertainties which could materially affect the
company's results, including, but not limited to, market demand for hard
disk drives, the company's ability to execute future production ramps and
utilize manufacturing assets efficiently, pricing, competition, and the
significant uncertainty of market acceptance of new products.  These and
other risk factors are contained in documents that the company files with
the SEC, including the Form 10-K for fiscal 2001 and its recent 10-Qs.
Copyright © 2001, Maxtor Corporation ®. Privacy Policy.
--
((Udhay Shankar N)) ((udhay @ pobox.com)) ((www.digeratus.com))


>>>>> "U" == Udhay Shankar N
writes:
U> At 12:32 PM 12/28/00 -0600, Adam Rifkin wrote:
>> I repeat, IBM 76.8Gb ultra dma/100 hard drive at Fry's for
>> $375...  "home of fast, friendly courteous service! (R)"
U> less than two years later, we have 320 GB for the same price:
So then why does my webhost _still_ only give me 200MB?
--
Gary Lawrence Murphy
TeleDynamics Communications Inc
Business Advantage through Community Software :
"Computers are useless.  They can only give you answers."(Pablo Picasso)


September Haiku
Freezing my ass off
Air conditioning on high
heats small apartment.
Cindy, in Mississippie
P.S. this one's for you, geege.
On Tue, 10 Sep 2002, Paul Chvostek wrote:
>
> I can tell I'm not the only one without air conditioning.  ;-)
>
> Maybe I'll move to Canmore.
>
> p
>
>
> On Tue, Sep 10, 2002 at 03:37:08PM -0400, Swerve wrote:
> >
> > moo hahahaha.
> >
> > i need a smoke.
> >
> > stop this heatwave.
> >
> > bring on winter.
> >
> > bring on fall.
> >
> >
> > Swerve, shut up.
> >
> > bye.
>
>
--
"I don't take no stocks in mathematics, anyway" --Huckleberry Finn


XDegrees was at the WebDAV Interoperability Testing Event last year, so
there may be some DAV under the hood there someplace.
- Jim
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fork-admin@xent.com On Behalf Of
> Gordon Mohr
> Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2002 12:00 AM
> To: fork@spamassassin.taint.org
> Subject: Re: Microsoft buys XDegress - more of a p2p/distributed data
> thing...
>
>
> Mr. FoRK writes:
> > "Files can be cached on multiple systems randomly scattered around the
> > Internet, as with Napster or Freenet. In fact, the caching in
> XDegrees is
> > more sophisticated than it is on those systems: users with high
> bandwidth
> > connections can download portions, or "stripes," of a file from several
> > cached locations simultaneously. The XDegrees software then reassembles
> > these stripes into the whole file and uses digital signatures
> to verify that
> > the downloaded file is the same as the original. A key component of this
> > digital signature is a digest of the file, which is stored as
> an HTTP header
> > for the file."
>
> This "more sophisticated than [Napster or Freenet]" part seems
> to be the same behavior implemented in many other P2P CDNs,
> such as:
>
>   - Kazaa
>   - EDonkey/Overnet
>   - BitTorrent
>   - Gnutella (with HUGE extensions)
>   - OnionNetworks WebRAID
>
> ...though the quality of the "digest" used by each system varies
> wildly.
>
> - Gordon
>


September 11, 2002 8:00 a.m.
The Wages of September 11
There is no going back.
September 11 changed our world. Those who deny such a watershed event take a
superficially short-term view, and seem to think all is as before simply
because the sun still rises and sets.
This is a colossal misjudgment. The collapse of the towers, the crashing
into the Pentagon, and the murder of 3,000 Americans  all seen live in real
time by millions the world over  tore off a scab and exposed deep wounds,
which, if and when they heal, will leave ugly scars for decades. The killers
dealt in icons  the choice of 911 as the date of death, targeting the
manifest symbols of global capitalism and American military power, and
centering their destruction on the largest Jewish city in the world. Yes,
they got their symbols in spades, but they have no idea that their killing
has instead become emblematic of changes that they could scarcely imagine.
Islamic fundamentalism has proved not ascendant, but static, morally
repugnant  and the worst plague upon the Arab world since the Crusades. By
lurking in the shadows and killing incrementally through stealth, the
vampirish terrorists garnered bribes and subsidies through threats and
bombs; but pale and wrinkled in the daylight after 9/11, they prove only
ghoulish not fearsome.
The more the world knows of al Qaeda and bin Laden, the more it has found
them both vile and yet banal  and so is confident and eager to eradicate
them and all they stand for. It is one thing to kill innocents, quite
another to take on the armed might of an aroused United States. Easily
dodging a solo cruise missile in the vastness of Afghanistan may make good
theater and bring about braggadocio; dealing with grim American and British
commandos who have come 7,000 miles for your head prompts abject flight and
an occasional cheap infomercial on the run. And the ultimate consequence of
the attacks of September 11 will not merely be the destruction of al Qaeda,
but also the complete repudiation of the Taliban, the Iranian mullocracy,
the plague of the Pakistani madrassas, and any other would-be fundamentalist
paradise on earth.
Foreign relations will not be the same in our generation. Our coalition with
Europe, we learn, was not a partnership, but more mere alphabetic
nomenclature and the mutual back scratching of Euro-American globetrotters
a paper alliance without a mission nearly 15 years after the end of the Cold
War. The truth is that Europe, out of noble purposes, for a decade has
insidiously eroded its collective national sovereignty in order to craft an
antidemocratic EU, a 80,000-person fuzzy bureaucracy whose executive power
is as militarily weak as it is morally ambiguous in its reliance on often
dubious international accords. This sad realization September 11 brutally
exposed, and we all should cry for the beloved continent that has for the
moment completely lost its moral bearings. Indeed, as the months progressed
the problems inherent in "the European way" became all too apparent:
pretentious utopian manifestos in lieu of military resoluteness, abstract
moralizing to excuse dereliction of concrete ethical responsibility, and
constant American ankle-biting even as Europe lives in a make-believe Shire
while we keep back the forces of Mordor from its picturesque borders, with
only a few brave Frodos and Bilbos tagging along. Nothing has proved more
sobering to Americans than the skepticism of these blinkered European
hobbits after September 11.
America learned that "moderate" Arab countries are as dangerous as hostile
Islamic nations. After September 11, being a Saudi, Egyptian, or Kuwaiti
means nothing special to an American  at least not proof of being any more
friendly or hostile than having Libyan, Syrian, or Lebanese citizenship.
Indeed, our entire postwar policy of propping up autocracies on the triad of
their anticommunism, oil, and arms purchases  like NATO  belongs to a
pre-9/11 age of Soviet aggrandizement and petroleum monopolies. Now we learn
that broadcasting state-sponsored hatred of Israel and the United States is
just as deadly to our interests as scud missiles  and as likely to come
from friends as enemies. Worst-case scenarios like Iran and Afghanistan
offer more long-term hope than "stable regimes" like the Saudis; governments
that hate us have populations that like us  and vice versa; the Saudi royal
family, whom 5,000 American troops protect, and the Mubarak autocracy, which
has snagged billions of American dollars, are as afraid of democratic
reformers as they are Islamic fundamentalists. And with good reason: Islamic
governments in Iran and under the Taliban were as hated by the masses as
Arab secular reformers in exile in the West are praised and championed.
The post-9/11 domestic calculus is just as confusing. Generals and the
military brass call civilians who seek the liberation of Iraq "chicken
hawks" and worse. Yet such traditional Vietnam-era invective I think rings
hollow after September 11, and sounds more like McClellan's shrillness
against his civilian overseers who precipitously wanted an odious slavery
ended than resonant of Patton's audacity in charging after murderous Nazis.
More Americans were destroyed at work in a single day than all those
soldiers killed in enemy action since the evacuation of Vietnam nearly 30
years ago. Indeed, most troops who went through the ghastly inferno of
Vietnam are now in or nearing retirement; and, thank God, there is no
generation of Americans in the present military  other than a few thousand
brave veterans of the Gulf, Mogadishu, and Panama  who have been in
sustained and deadly shooting with heavy casualties. Because American
soldiers and their equipment are as impressive as our own domestic security
is lax, in this gruesome war it may well be more perilous to work high up in
lower Manhattan, fly regularly on a jumbo jet, or handle mail at the
Pentagon or CIA than be at sea on a sub or destroyer.
Real concern for the sanctity of life may hinge on employing rather than
rejecting force, inasmuch as our troops are as deadly and protected abroad
as our women, children, aged, and civilians are impotent and vulnerable at
home. It seems to me a more moral gamble to send hundreds of pilots into
harm's way than allow a madman to further his plots to blow up or infect
thousands in high-rises.
Politics have been turned upside down. In the old days, cynical
conservatives were forced to hold their noses and to practice a sometimes
repellent Realpolitik. In the age of Russian expansionism, they were loathe
to champion democracy when it might usher in a socialist Trojan Horse whose
belly harbored totalitarians disguised as parliamentarians. Thus they were
so often at loggerheads with naïve and idealist leftists.
No longer. The end of the specter of a deadly and aggressive Soviet
Communism has revived democratic ideology as a force in diplomacy. Champions
of freedom no longer sigh and back opportunistic rightist thugs who promise
open economics, loot their treasuries, and keep out the Russians. Instead,
even reactionaries are now more likely to push for democratic governments in
the Middle East than are dour and skeptical leftists. The latter, if
multiculturalists, often believe that democracy is a value-neutral Western
construct, not necessarily a universal good; if pacifists, they claim
nonintervention, not justice, as their first priority. The Right, not the
Left, now is the greater proponent of global freedom, liberation, and
idealism  with obvious domestic ramifications for any Republican president
astute enough to tap that rich vein of popular support.
All this and more are the wages of the disaster of September 11 and the
subsequent terrible year  and yet it is likely that, for good or evil, we
will see things even more incredible in the twelve months ahead.


Dear Garrison,
There are at least six plans about what to do with
"Ground Zero" in New York. I believe a suitable memorial
surrounded by a lovely park with benches, walkways,
children's playgrounds, possibly some concessions such
as a restaurant, small theater and a place for art works
would be the best tribute to those who lost their lives.
What do you think should done with the space?
Joe Adams
Hillsdale, New Jersey
I dread the thought of a big memorial in Manhattan
that's designed by committee and that's gone through
public hearings and so forth ----- it's going to be cold
and ugly and pretentious and the upshot will be one more
public space that the public hates, of which there are
plenty already. New York is a bustling commercial city
and that's the beauty of it, it's a city of young
ambitious dreamy people, like the folks who died in the
towers, and it's not a memorializing city. Historic
events occurred in New York that in any other city would
be commemorated with interpretive centers and guides and
historical museums and in New York there's barely a
little plaque. That's a great thing, in my estimation.
It's a hustling city, full of immigrants looking for
their big chance, and compared to that spirit of
entrepreneurship, a memorial plaza with a fountain and a
statue of something seems dead to me. Look at Grant's
Tomb. Who walks past it and thinks about President
Grant? Nobody. People sit in the plaza by Grant's Tomb
and think about lunch, about sex, about money, about all
the things that New York is about. If you want to find
Grant, read his memoirs. His monument seems odd in New
York: it belongs in Washington, which is our memorial
city. New York is for the young and lively.


On 11 Sep 2002, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote:
> So then why does my webhost _still_ only give me 200MB?
Because ~10 krpm server SCSII doesn't follow the curve. Most rackspace is
ridiculously expensive/unit, so people don't use low end EIDE hardware
there.


Hanson is always good.
One of my sci-fi authors is planning on slipping the following line into
one of their stories:
"The worst strategic mistake since the 911 attacks".
> -----Original Message-----
> From: fork-admin@xent.com  On Behalf Of
Bill
> Stoddard
> Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2002 9:37 AM
> To: Fork@Xent.Com
> Subject: Hanson's Sept 11 message in the National Review
>
>
>


i though this was all rather interesting, first bit of 9/11 coverage that
i've liked.

Chris


Is this old bits? It should be.
I was browsing the local zine store here in Portland OR and found the
second issue of The Thresher...very very sweet. Poltical socio articles on
all manner of things from names you have come to love/despise over the
years. If you have not already, tombobjoewhore says check it out.
www.thethresher.com


Gays, gay sex, gay marriage.....wooohooo its been a mano e mano week and
thursady will be the mass market consumer period on it.
The WWE's gay marriage cermemony is in the can, that is its been filmed
last night for thursady nights Smackdown. Did they do it tastefully? Oh
come on its the WWE for cripssake, of course they didnt. Did they use it
ot promote an story line? Despite the WWE throwing away more good story
lines in the last 2 years than a wood chuck who could chuck wood if the
enviromentalists did not slap lawsuits on them, the sotrywrites seemed to
have finaly hit on a big tie togther event for several story lines.
But of course, no one here watches the WWE, and not even because you would
rather watch old Divxs of the ECW, so this little bit is probably fallign
on the old killsawfiles.
SO I wont be bursting anyones thursdaynight plans if I smarkout and say
that B and C waver near the final vows, the blame is falling on Ricco,
thier "manager"*, for  pushing them to carry out their "gay" act far too
long and just when things look to be heating up with that story
arc......the mask comes off the justice of the piece as he pronounces
that they have gone 3  minutes, yes 3 minutes, too long.....Yep, its the
Bisch and in come Rosey  and Jamal to attempt a stomping on Stpehnie
McMahon. Hopefully they did  not get off a kick like they did on the first
lesbain back on Mondays raw as that broke a rib.
Of course the editing truck boys might change some none or all of this
around, so if thursday nights tape play reveals them hitch and on thier
way to a honeymoon, thats the luck o the smarkies. I doubt it will be
edited much though from the way I heard it.
So the bottomline is, they really were not gay all along, they were play
acting and it got out of hand because Ricco made them, Steaphnie gets a
face push while the Bisch gets a thursady night special 3 min heel push,
thus furthing the story arc of the brand split. Rosey and Jamala  get heat
and B and C get a new Tag Team to play with.  Ricco..who knows, maybe some
heat time would be good for him as a single.
All this of course at a time when the ratting are in the bottom of a 4
year valley of gloom, the last 2 years have been mostly squandered on
borken story arc promises and bad acting, and to top it all off Mick is no
longer ont he sceen so...bang bang...how can it be all good?
Well, its back to my growing ECW divx collection where Tajiri was the shiz
and Mick cut promos unrivaled by any of todays mic monkeys.
* Todays managers are a far cry form the managers of the 80's/early 90's.
Ricco is nota  Paul Bearer or a Jimmy Heart at all but more like a buddy
who goes to the ring with them and occasional interferes..ugh.


"MIAMI, Sept. 10 -- A two-gram rock of crack
cocaine was found inside the shoe of Florida
Gov. Jeb Bush's 25-year-old daughter by workers
at the central Florida rehabilitation center
where she is undergoing court-ordered drug
treatment, Orlando police said today.
Noelle Bush was not arrested because witnesses
would not give sworn statements, but the
incident is under investigation, according to
Orlando police spokesman Orlando Rolon."
Wow, the witnesses would not nark of a Bush girl in an era where there are
no mare restrictions on being held without a cause?
Imagine that...
-tom


yeshterday we f*cked up our gubernatorial election, too.  results to be
contested by reno.  same six districts that were sued in 2000 still came up
gimpy.
i suggested to jeb via e-mail we hold a run-off pinata party.  hoist up a
papier mache donkey and a papier mache elephant.  first one to batted open
wins.
-----Original Message-----
From: fork-admin@xent.com On Behalf Of Tom
Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2002 9:16 PM
To: fork@spamassassin.taint.org
Subject: Bush blew take two

"MIAMI, Sept. 10 -- A two-gram rock of crack
cocaine was found inside the shoe of Florida
Gov. Jeb Bush's 25-year-old daughter by workers
at the central Florida rehabilitation center
where she is undergoing court-ordered drug
treatment, Orlando police said today.
Noelle Bush was not arrested because witnesses
would not give sworn statements, but the
incident is under investigation, according to
Orlando police spokesman Orlando Rolon."
Wow, the witnesses would not nark of a Bush girl in an era where there are
no mare restrictions on being held without a cause?
Imagine that...
-tom


meant "gubernatorial PRIMARY."
-----Original Message-----
From: fork-admin@xent.com On Behalf Of Geege
Schuman
Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2002 9:32 PM
To: Tom; fork@spamassassin.taint.org
Subject: RE: Bush blew take two
yeshterday we f*cked up our gubernatorial election, too.  results to be
contested by reno.  same six districts that were sued in 2000 still came up
gimpy.
i suggested to jeb via e-mail we hold a run-off pinata party.  hoist up a
papier mache donkey and a papier mache elephant.  first one to batted open
wins.
-----Original Message-----
From: fork-admin@xent.com On Behalf Of Tom
Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2002 9:16 PM
To: fork@spamassassin.taint.org
Subject: Bush blew take two

"MIAMI, Sept. 10 -- A two-gram rock of crack
cocaine was found inside the shoe of Florida
Gov. Jeb Bush's 25-year-old daughter by workers
at the central Florida rehabilitation center
where she is undergoing court-ordered drug
treatment, Orlando police said today.
Noelle Bush was not arrested because witnesses
would not give sworn statements, but the
incident is under investigation, according to
Orlando police spokesman Orlando Rolon."
Wow, the witnesses would not nark of a Bush girl in an era where there are
no mare restrictions on being held without a cause?
Imagine that...
-tom


Interesting ebay item......(and no it wasnt me even though the spellingis
oddly familar)


"60 Minutes II" Bush Interview:
(CBS) No president since Abraham Lincoln has seen such horrific loss of
life in a war on American soil. No president since James Madison, nearly
200 years ago, has seen the nation’s capital city successfully attacked.
But, one year ago, President George W. Bush was thrown into the first
great crisis of the 21st century.
This is the president’s story of September 11th and the week America
went to war. 60 Minutes II spent two hours with Mr. Bush, one, on Air
Force One and another in the Oval Office last week. Even after a year,
the president is still moved, sometimes to the point of tears, when he
remembers Sept. 11.
“I knew, the farther we get away from Sept.11, the more likely it is for
some around the world to forget the mission, but not me,” Mr. Bush says
during the Air Force One interview. “Not me. I made the pledge to myself
and to people that I’m not going to forget what happened on Sept. 11. So
long as I’m president, we will pursue the killers and bring them to
justice. We owe that to those who have lost their lives.”
The memories come back sharp and clear on Air Force One, where Pelley
joined the president for a recent trip across country. 60 Minutes II
wanted to talk to him there because that is where he spent the first
hours after the attack.
Not since Lyndon Johnson was sworn in on Air Force One has the airplane
been so central to America in a crisis.
For President Bush, Sept. 11 2001, started with the usual routine.
Before dawn, the president was on his four-mile run. It was just before
6 a.m. and, at the same moment, another man was on the move: Mohammad
Atta. Two hours later, as Mr. Bush drove to an elementary school,
hijackers on four planes were murdering the flight crews and turning the
airliners east. As the motorcade neared the school at 8:45 a.m., jet
engines echoed in Manhattan.
Atta plunged the 767 jumbo jet into World Trade Center Tower One.
“I thought it was an accident,” says Mr. Bush. “I thought it was a pilot
error. I thought that some foolish soul had gotten lost and - and made a
terrible mistake.”
Mr. Bush was told about the first plane just before sitting down with a
class of second graders. He was watching a reading drill when, just
after nine, United Flight 175 exploded into the second tower. There was
the sudden realization that what had seemed like a terrible mistake was
a coordinated attack.
Back in the Florida classroom, press secretary Ari Fleischer got the
news on his pager. The president’s chief-of-staff, Andy Card stepped in.
“A second plane hit the second tower; America is under attack,” Card
told the president
When he said those words, what did he see in the President’s face?
“I saw him coming to recognition of what I had said,” Card recalls. “I
think he understood that he was going to have to take command as
commander-in-chief, not just as president.”
What was going through Bush’s mind when he heard the news?
“We’re at war and somebody has dared attack us and we’re going to do
something about it,” Mr. Bush recalls. “I realized I was in a unique
setting to receive a message that somebody attacked us, and I was
looking at these little children and all of the sudden we were at war. I
can remember noticing the press pool and the press corps beginning to
get the calls and seeing the look on their face. And it became evident
that we were, you know, that the world had changed.”
Mr. Bush walked into a classroom set up with a secure phone. He called
the vice president, pulling the phone cord tight as he spun to see the
attack on TV. Then he grabbed a legal pad and quickly wrote his first
words to the nation.
"Ladies and gentlemen, this is a difficult moment for America,” he said
in the speech. “Today, we’ve had a national tragedy.”
It was 9:30 a.m. As he spoke, Mr. Bush didn’t know that two more
hijacked jets were streaking toward Washington. Vice Pesident Dick
Cheney was in his office at the White House when a Secret Service agent
ran in.
“He said to me, ‘Sir, we have to leave immediately’ and grabbed, put a
hand on my belt, another hand on my shoulder and propelled me out the
door of my office,” Cheney recalls. “I’m not sure how they do it, but
they sort of levitate you down the hallway, you move very fast.”
“There wasn’t a lot of time for chitchat, you know, with the vice
president,” says Secret Service Director Brian Stafford, who was in his
command center ordering the round-up of top officials and the First
Family. He felt that he had only minutes to work with. “We knew there
were unidentified planes tracking in our direction,” he says.
Cheney was rushed deep under the White House into a bunker called the
Presidential Emergency Operations Center. It was built for war, and this
was it. On her way down, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
called Mr. Bush.
“It was brief because I was being pushed to get off the phone and get
out of the West Wing,” says Rice. “They were hurrying me off the phone
with the president and I just said, he said, ‘I’m coming back’ and we
said ‘Mr. President that may not be wise.’ I remember stopping briefly
to call my family, my aunt and uncle in Alabama and say, ‘I’m fine. You
have to tell everybody that I’m fine’ but then settling into trying to
deal with the enormity of that moment, and in the first few hours, I
think the thing that was on everybody’s mind was how many more planes
are coming.”
The Capitol was evacuated. And for the first time ever, the Secret
Service executed the emergency plan to ensure the presidential line of
succession. Agents swept up the 15 officials who stood to become
president if the others were killed. They wanted to move Vice President
Cheney, fearing he was in danger even in the bunker. But Cheney says
when he heard the other officials were safe, he decided to stay at the
White House, no matter what.
“It’s important to emphasize it's not personal, you don’t think of it in
personal terms, you’ve got a professional job to do,” says Cheney.
Cheney was joined by transportation secretary Norm Mineta who remembers
hearing the FAA counting down the hijacked jets closing in on the
capital.
Says Mineta: “Someone came in and said ‘Mr. Vice president there’s a
plane 50 miles out,’ then he came in and said ‘Its now 10 miles out, we
don’t know where it is exactly, but it’s coming in low and fast.’”
It was American Flight 77. At 9:38 a.m., it exploded into the Pentagon,
the first successful attack on Washington since the War of 1812.
As the Pentagon burned, Mr. Bush’s limousine sped toward Air Force One
in Florida. At that moment, United Flight 93 - the last hijacked plane -
was taking dead aim at Washington. At the White House, the staff was in
the West Wing cafeteria, watching on TV. Press Secretary Jennifer
Millerwise was in the crowd when the order came to evacuate.
“I no sooner walked outside when someone from the Secret Service yelled
‘Women drop your heels and run, drop your heels and run,’ and suddenly
the gates that never open except for authorized vehicles just opened and
the whole White House just flooded out,” she recalls.
In Florida, as Mr. Bush boarded Air Force One, he was overheard telling
a Secret Service agent “Be sure to get the First Lady and my daughters
protected.” At 9:57 a.m., Air Force One thundered down the runway,
blasting smoke and dust in a full -hrust take off. Communications
Director Dan Bartlett was on board.
“It was like a rocket,” he remembers. “For a good ten minutes, the plane
was going almost straight up.”
At the same moment, 56 minutes after it was hit, World Trade Center
Tower Two began to falter, then cascade in an incomprehensible avalanche
of steel, concrete and human lives.
“Someone said to me, ‘Look at that’ I remember that, ‘Look at that’ and
I looked up and I saw and I just remember a cloud of dust and smoke and
the horror of that moment,” recalls Rice of the TV newscast.
She also felt something in her gut: “That we’ve lost a lot of Americans
and that eventually we would get these people. I felt the anger. Of
course I felt the anger.”
Down in the bunker, Cheney was trying to figure out how many hijacked
planes there were. Officials feared there could be as many as 11.
As the planes track toward Washington, a discussion begins about whether
to shoot them down. “I discussed it with the president,” Cheney
recalls. “‘Are we prepared to order our aircraft to shoot down these
airliners that have been hijacked?’ He said yes.”
“It was my advice. It was his decision,” says Cheney.
“That’s a sobering moment to order your own combat aircraft to shoot
down your own civilian aircraft,” says Bush. “But it was an easy
decision to make given the – given the fact that we had learned that a
commercial aircraft was being used as a weapon. I say easy decision, it
was, I didn’t hesitate, let me put it that way. I knew what had to be
done.”
The passengers on United Flight 93 also knew what had to be done. They
fought for control and sacrificed themselves in a Pennsylvania meadow.
The flight was 15 minutes from Washington.
“Clearly, the terrorists were trying to take out as many symbols of
government as they could: the Pentagon, perhaps the Capitol, perhaps the
White House. These people saved us not only physically but they saved us
psychologically and symbolically in a very important way, too,” says
Rice.
Meanwhile, Tower One was weakening. It had stood for an hour and 43
minutes. At 10:29 a.m., it buckled in a mirror image of the collapse of
its twin.
The image that went round the world reached the First Lady in a secure
location somewhere in Washington. “I was horrified,” she says. “I
thought, ‘Dear God, protect as many citizens as you can.’ It was a
nightmare.”
By 10:30 a.m., America’s largest city was devastated, its military
headquarters were burning. Air force One turned west along the Gulf
Coast.
“I can remember sitting right here in this office thinking about the
consequences of what had taken place and realizing it was the defining
moment in the history of the United States,” says President Bush. “I
didn’t need any legal briefs, I didn’t need any consultations, I knew we
were at war.”
Mr. Bush says the first hours were frustrating. He watched the
horrifying pictures, but the TV signal was breaking up. His calls to
Cheney were cutting out. Mr. Bush says he pounded his desk shouting,
“This is inexcusable; get me the vice president.”
“I was trying to clear the fog of war, and there is a fog of war, says
the president. "Information was just flying from all directions.”
Chief of staff Card brought in the reports. There was word Camp David
had been hit. A jet was thought to be targeting Mr. Bush’s ranch.
“I remember hearing that the State Department might have been hit, or
that the White House had a fire in it. So we were hearing lots of
different information,” says Card.
They also feared that Air Force One itself was a target. Cheney told the
president there was a credible threat against the plane. Using the code
name for Air Force One, Mr. Bush told an aide, “Angel is next.” The
threat was passed to presidential pilot Colonel Mark Tillman.
“It was serious before that but now it is -no longer is it a time to get
the president home,” Tillman says. “We actually have to consider
everything we say, everything we do could be intercepted, and we have to
make sure that no one knows what our position is.”
Tillman asked for an armed guard at his cockpit door while Secret
Service agents double-checked the identity of everyone on board. The
crew reviewed the emergency evacuation plan. Then came a warning from
air traffic control – a suspect airliner was dead ahead.
“Coming out of Sarasota there was one call that said there was an
airliner off our nose that they did not have contact with,” Tillman
remembers.
Tillman took evasive action, pulling his plane high above normal
traffic. They were on course for Washington, but by now no one thought
that was a good idea, except the president.
“I wanted to come back to Washington, but the circumstances were such
that it was just impossible for the Secret Service or the national
security team to clear the way for Air Force One to come back,” says
Bush.
So Air Force One set course for an underground command center in
Nebraska. Back in Washington, the president’s closest advisor, Karen
Hughes, heard about the threat to the plane and placed a call to Mr.
Bush.
“And the military operator came back to me and in a voice that, to me,
sounded very shaken said, ‘Ma’am, I’m sorry, we can’t reach Air Force
One.’” Hughes recalls. Hughes was out of the White House during the
attacks. When she came back, it was a place she didn’t recognize.
“There were either military, or maybe Secret Service, dressed all in
black, holding machine guns as, as we drove up. And I never expected to
see something like that in, in our nation's capital,” says Hughes.
When she walked into the White House, no one was inside. “I knew it was
a day that you didn't want to surprise anybody, and so I yelled,
‘Hello?’ and two, again, kind of SWAT team members came running, running
through the, the hall with, again, guns drawn, and then took me to, to
the location where I met the vice president.”
On Air Force One, Col. Tillman had a problem. He needed to hide the most
visible plane in the world, a 747 longer than the White House itself. He
didn’t want to use his radio, because the hijackers could be listening
to air traffic control. So he called air traffic control on the
telephone.
“We actually didn't tell them our destination or what directions we were
heading,” says Tillman. “We, we basically just talked to 'em and said,
'OK, fine, we have no clearance at this time, we are just going to fly
across the United States.'”
Controllers passed Air Force One from one sector to another, warning
each other to keep the route secret.
“OK, where’s he going?” one tower radioed to another.
“Just watch him,” a second tower responded. “Don’t question him where’s
he's going. Just work him and watch him, there’s no flight plan in and
we’re not going to put anything in. Ok, sir?”
Air Force One ordered a fighter escort, and air traffic control radioed
back: “Air Force One, got two F-16s at about your 10 o’clock position.”
“The staff, and the president and us, were filed out along the outside
hallway of his presidential cabin there and looking out the windows,”
says Bartlett. “And the president gives them a signal of salute, and the
pilot kind of tips his wing, and fades off and backs into formation.”
The men in the F-16s were Shane Brotherton and Randy Roberts, from the
Texas Air National Guard. Their mission was so secret their commander
wouldn’t tell them where they were going.
“He just said, 'You’ll know when you see it,' and that was my first
clue, I didn’t have any idea what we were going up until that point,”
says Brotherton. He knew when he saw it.
“We, we were trying to keep an 80-mile bubble, bubble around Air Force
One, and we'd investigate anything that was within 80 miles,” says
Roberts.
Bush says he was not worried about the safety of the people on this
aircraft, or for his own safety: “I looked out the airplane and saw two
F-16s on each wing. It was going to have to be a pretty good pilot to
get us.”
We now know that the threat to Air Force One was part of the fog of war,
a false alarm. But it had a powerful effect at the time. Some wondered,
with the president out of sight, was he still running the government? He
hadn’t appeared after the attack on Washington. Mr. Bush was clearly
worried about it. At one point he was overheard saying, “The American
people want to know where their dang president is.” The staff considered
an address to the nation by phone but instead Mr. Bush ordered Air Force
One to land somewhere within 30 minutes so he could appear on TV. At
11:45 a.m., they landed at Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana.
“The resolve of our great nation is being tested. But make no mistake,
we will show the world that we will pass this test. God bless,” Bush
said to the nation from Barksdale.
At Barksdale, the Secret Service believed the situation in Washington
was still unsafe. So the plane continued on to Nebraska, to the command
center where Mr. Bush would be secure and have all the communications
gear he needed to run the government. Aboard Air Force One, Mr. Bush had
a job for press secretary Fleischer.
“The president asked me to make sure that I took down everything that
was said. I think he wanted to make certain that a record existed,” says
Fleischer
Fleischer’s notes capture Mr. Bush’s language, plain and unguarded. To
the vice president he said: “We’re at war, Dick, we’re going to find out
who did this and kick their ass.” Another time, Mr. Bush said, “We’re
not going to have any slap-on-the-wrist crap this time.”
The President adds, “I can remember telling the Secretary of Defense, I
said, ‘We’re going to find out who did this and then Mr. Secretary, you
and Dick Myers,’ who we just named as chairman of the joint chiefs, ‘are
going to go get them.’”
By 3 p.m., Air Force One touched down at Offutt Air Force Base in
Nebraska. Mr. Bush and his team were herded into a small brick hut that
gave no hint of what they would find below.
At the bottom of the stairs was the U.S. Strategic Command Underground
Command Center. It was built to transmit a president’s order to go to
nuclear war. But when Mr. Bush walked in, the battle staff was watching
the skies over the United States. Many airplanes had still not landed.
After a short briefing, Mr. Bush and Card were taken to a teleconference
center which connected them to the White House, the Pentagon, the FBI
and the CIA. Mr. Bush had a question for his CIA Director George Tenent.
According to Rice, Bush asked Tenent who had done this. Rice recalls
that Tenent answered: “Sir, I believe its al Qaeda. We’re doing the
assessment but it looks like, it feels like, it smells like al Qaeda.”
The evidence would build. FBI Director Robert Mueller says that an
essential clue came from one of the hijacked planes before it crashed.
A flight attendant on American Flight 11, Amy Sweeney, had the presence
of mind to call her office as the plane was hijacked and give them the
seat numbers of the hijackers. “That was the first piece of hard
evidence. We could then go to the manifest, find out who was sitting in
those seats and immediately conduct an investigation of those
individuals, as opposed to taking all the passengers on the plane and
going through a process of elimination,” says Mueller.
In Nebraska, the White House staff was preparing for an address to the
nation from the Air Force bunker, but by then the president had had
enough. He decided to come back.
“At one point, he said he didn’t want any tinhorn terrorist keeping him
out of Washington,” Fleischer says. “That verbatim.”
On board, he was already thinking of issuing an ultimatum to the world:
“I had time to think and a couple of thoughts emerged. One was that
you're guilty if you harbor a terrorist, because I knew these terrorists
like al-Qaeda liked to prey on weak government and weak people. The
other thought that came was the opportunity to fashion a vast coalition
of countries that would either be with us or with the terrorists.”
As Air Force One sped east, the last casualty of the attack on America
collapsed, one of the nation’s worst days wore into evening. At the
World Trade Center, 2,801 were killed; at the Pentagon, 184; and in
Pennsylvania 40. Altogether, there were 3,025 dead.
“Anybody who would attack America the way they did, anybody who would
take innocent life the way they did, anybody who's so devious, is evil,”
Bush said recently.
Mr. Bush would soon see that evil face to face. After arriving in
Washington, he boarded his helicopter and flew past the Pentagon on the
way to the White House.
Was there a time when he was afraid that there might not be a White
House to return to? “I don’t remember thinking about whether or not the
White House would have been obliterated," he recalls. "I think I might
have thought they took their best shot, and now it was time for us to
take our best shot.”
Mr. Bush arrived back at the White House nine hours after the attacks.
His next step was an address to the nation. Karen Hughes and her staff
were already working on the speech.
“He decided that the primary tone he wanted to strike that night was
reassurance,” remembers Hughes. “We had to show resolve, we had to
reassure people, we had to let them know that we would be OK.”
Just off the Oval Office, Mr. Bush added the words that would become
known as the Bush Doctrine - no distinction between terrorists and those
who harbor them. The staff wanted to add a declaration of war but Mr.
Bush didn’t think the American people wanted to hear it that night and
he was emphatic about that.
He prepared to say it from the same desk where Franklin Roosevelt first
heard the news of Pearl Harbor. Now Bush was commander in chief. Eighty
million Americans were watching.
“Today our fellow citizens, our way of life, our very freedom came under
attack in a series of deliberate and deadly terrorist acts,” he said
from the Oval Office that night.
The Oval Office speech came at the end of the bloodiest day in American
history since the Civil War. Before he walked to the White House
residence for the night, Mr. Bush dictated these words for the White
House daily log: “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today.
We think it's Osama bin Laden.”
(CBS) When Sept. 12 dawned, President Bush was demanding a war plan. No
one in the White House or the Pentagon could be sure of what the
president would do. In office for just eight months, he’d never been
tested as commander-in-chief.
“I never asked them what they thought,” President Bush said of the
Pentagon brass, “because I didn’t really – because I knew what I was
gonna do. I knew exactly what had to be done, Scott. And that was to set
a strategy to seek justice. Find out who did it, hunt them down and
bring them to justice.”
In the cabinet room, the president made clear what was next: “The
deliberate and deadly attacks which were carried out yesterday against
our country were more than acts of terror, they were acts of war,” he
said.
To the war cabinet, al Qaeda was no surprise. National Security Advisor
Condoleezza Rice says the administration had been at work on a plan to
strike bin Laden’s organization well before Sept. 11.
“The president said, ‘You know I’m tired of swatting at flies, I need a
strategy to eliminate these guys,’” Rice recalls.
In one of the worst intelligence failures ever, the CIA and FBI didn’t
pick up clues that an attack in the United States was imminent. Without
a sense of urgency, the White House strategy the president had asked for
came too late.
Chief of Staff Andrew Card recalls that the plan Mr. Bush had asked for
was “literally headed to the president’s desk, I think, on the eleventh,
tenth or eleventh, of September.”
On Sept. 12, the war cabinet was debating the full range of options -
who to hit and how to hit them. There were some at the Pentagon who
worried in the early hours that Mr. Bush would order up an immediate
cruise missile strike, of the kind that had not deterred bin Laden in
the past.
“Well, there’s a lot of nervous Nellies at the Pentagon, anyway,” Mr.
Bush tells Pelley. “A lot of people like to chatter, you know, more than
they should. But no, I appreciate that very much. Secretary of Defense
(Donald) Rumsfeld early on discussed the idea of making sure we had what
we called ‘boots on the ground.’ That if you’re gonna go to war, then
you’ve gotta go to war with all your assets.”
The president says he wanted to “fight and win a guerilla war with
conventional means.”
It was an innovative but risky idea being proposed by CIA Director
George Tenent. Tenent wanted to combine American technology and
intelligence with the brute force of Afghan fighters hostile to the
Taliban government.
Secretary of State Colin Powell, noting that the CIA had already
developed a long relationship with the Afghan resistance, called it an
unconventional solution to an unconventional problem.
“As I like to describe it to my friends,” Powell says, “we had on the
ground a Fourth World army riding horses and living in tents with some
CIA and special forces with them and we had a First World air force, the
best in the world. How do you connect it all?”
The president gave them 48 hours to figure it out.
Meanwhile, Mr. Bush went to the battlefield himself. Just the day
before, he had called the Pentagon the “mightiest building in the
world.” Now one-fifth of it was in ruins. The wreckage of American
Flight 77 was being examined by Navy investigators. And before Mr. Bush
left, he made a point of speaking personally with the team recovering
the remains of the first casualties of war on his watch.
The next day, Sept. 13, there was another warning of attack that the
public never heard about. Threats had been were coming in constantly but
this one sounded credible: a large truck bomb headed to the White House.
The Secret Service wanted the president back in the bunker.
“He wasn’t real receptive to that, to that recommendation,” remembers
Brian Stafford, director of the Secret Service. “And he ordered a
hamburger and said he was going to stay in the White House that evening
and that’s what he did.”
The next day, would be one of the longest and the most difficult for the
president. On Friday, Sept. 14, Mr. Bush started the day with a cabinet
meeting, but he wept when he walked in and was surprised by applause.
“He sat down, slightly overcome, for a moment but he recaptured it,”
says Powell who remembers being worried that the president might have
trouble getting through his speech at the national memorial service
later that morning.
“And I just scribbled a little note to him,” Powell recalls, “and I
said, ‘Mr. President, I’ve learned over the years when you are going to
give a very emotional speech, watch out for certain words that will
cause you to start to tear up.’ He looked at me and he smiled and then
at the next break in the conversation he said, ‘The Secretary of State
told me not to break down at the memorial service,’ and that broke the
tension and everybody started laughing and I felt embarrassed.”
First Lady Laura Bush was involved in planning the memorial service and
she says she wanted it to be both dignified and comforting. “I wanted
the Psalms and everything to be read to be comforting, because I think
we were a country, that needed, everyone of us, needed comforting.”
It also stirred the mourners’ resolve, as Rice remember. “As we stood to
sing the Battle Hymn of the Republic,” she says, “you could feel the
entire congregation and I could certainly feel myself stiffen, the kind
of spine, and this deep sadness was being replaced by resolve.
“We all felt that we still had mourning to do for our countrymen who had
been lost but that we also had a new purpose in not just avenging what
had happened to them but making certain that the world was eventually
going to be safe from this kind of attack ever again.”
Next came a visit to ground zero. The president was not prepared for
what he encountered there.
“You couldn’t brief me, you couldn’t brief anybody on ground zero until
you saw it," Mr. Bush says. “It was like – it was ghostly. Like you’re
having a bad dream and you’re walking through the dream.”
The president found the scene very powerful, particularly when the men
and women at ground zero began to chant, “USA! USA!.”
“There was a lot of bloodlust,” the president recalls. “People were, you
know, pointing their big old hands at me saying, ‘Don’t you ever forget
this, Mr. President. Don’t let us down.’ The scene was very powerful.
Very powerful.”
When Mr. Bush tried to speak, the crowd kept shouting, “We can’t hear
you.”
The president responded, “I can hear you. I can hear you. The rest of
the world hears you. And the people who knocked these buildings down
will hear all of us soon.”
Mr. Bush had been in New York just a few weeks before; he’d posed with
the firemen who always stood by whenever the president’s helicopter
landed there. Now, five of the men who stood with the president in the
picture were dead – lost at ground zero.
When the president arrived Sept. 14, Manhattan was papered with the
faces of the lost. Families, unable to believe that so many had vanished
in an instant, held onto the hope that their loved ones were just
missing. It was a place where a child comforted a grieving mother.
At a meeting the public never saw, the president spoke with several
hundred of these families in a convention hall.
“People said to me, ‘He’ll come out. Don’t worry, Mr. president, we’ll
see him soon. I know my loved one, he will - he’ll find a place to
survive underneath the rubble and we’ll get him out.’ I, on the other
hand had been briefed about the realities, and my job was to hug and
cry, but I remember the whole time thinking, ‘This is incredibly sad
because the loved ones won’t come out.’”
One little boy handed the president a picture of his father in his
firefighter uniform and as he signed it, Mr. Bush remembers, he told the
boy, “Your daddy won’t believe that I was here, so you show him that
autograph.”
It was an effort “to provide a little hope,” the president recalls. “I
still get emotional thinking about it because we’re dealing with people
who loved their dads or loved their mom, or loved their…wives who loved
their husbands. It was a tough time, you know, it was a tough time for
all of us because we were a very emotional, and I was emotional at
times. I felt, I felt the same now as I did then, which is sad. And I
still feel sad for those who grieve for their families, but through my
tears, I see opportunity.”
The president was supposed to be with the families for about 30 minutes;
he stayed for two and a half hours. It was there he met Arlene Howard.
The body of her son, George, was among the first to be found at ground
zero.
“I called the police department,” Howard remembers, “ and they said he
hadn’t called in for roll call and to call back in an hour and I said,
‘No, I don’t need to call back.’ If he hadn’t called in, I knew where he
was.”
George Howard had rescued children trapped in an elevator back in 1993
when the World Trade Center was bombed. He had been off duty that day,
and he was off duty on Sept. 11, but couldn’t stay away. The police
department gave his badge to his mother and she gave it to the president.
“He (the president) he leaned over to talk to me,” Howard recalls. “And
he extends his sympathy to me and that’s when I asked him I’d like to
present George’s shield to him in honor of all the men and women who
were killed over there.”
By the end of that day, Mr. Bush flew to Camp David visibly drained.
“He was physically exhausted, he was mentally exhausted, he was
emotionally exhausted, he was spiritually exhausted,” recalls Card..
The next day – Saturday, Sept. 15 - Mr. Bush met members of his war
cabinet at the presidential retreat for a last decisive meeting.
“My message is for everybody who wears the uniform – get ready. The
United States will do what it takes,” Mr. Bush told them.
As Powell remembers it, “He was encouraging us to think boldly. He was
listening to all ideas; he was not constrained to any one idea; he
wanted to hear his advisors talk and argue and debate with each other.”
President Bush was pleased with the progress that had been made. “On the
other hand,” he says, “I wanted to clarify plans and I went around the
room and I asked everybody what they thought ought to happen.”
When he left that meeting on Saturday night, he still had not told the
cabinet what he was planning.
“I wanted to just think it through,” Mr. Bush remembers. “Any time you
commit troops to harm’s way, a president must make sure that he fully
understands all the consequences and ramifications. And I wanted to just
spend some time on it alone. And did.”
What were his reservations?
Mr. Bush says, “Could we win? I didn’t want to be putting our troops in
there unless I was certain we could win. And I was certain we could win.”
Nine days after the attacks on America, before a joint session of
Congress the president committed the nation to the war on terror.
“Each of us will remember what happened that day and to whom it
happened,” Mr. Bush told the Congress and the nation. “We’ll remember
the moment the news came, where we were and what we were doing. Some
will remember an image of a fire or a story of rescue. Some will carry
memories of a face and a voice gone forever. And I will carry this. It
is the police shield of a man named George Howard, who died at the World
Trade Center trying to save others. It was given to me by his mom,
Arlene, as a proud memorial to her son. It is my reminder of lives that
ended and a task that does not end.”
A year has passed since then, but the president says his job is still to
remind Americans of what happened and of the war that is still being
waged, a war he reminds himself of every day in the Oval Office,
literally keeping score, one terrorist at a time.
In his desk, the president says, “I have a classified document that
might have some pictures on there, just to keep reminding me about who’s
out there, where they might be”
And as the terrorists are captures or killed? “I might make a little
check there, yeah,” Mr. Bush admits.
But there is no check by the name that must be on the top of that list –
Osama bin Laden.
(CBS) A lot has happened in the year since Sept. 11. One year ago, the
president was new on the job, with little experience in foreign policy.
He had wanted to pull the military back from foreign entanglements. Now,
on his orders, U.S. forces are engaged around the globe in a war he did
not expect, in a world completely changed. In the Oval Office last week,
CBS News Correspondent Scott Pelley asked the president about Iraq,
about whether Americans are safe at home and about Osama bin Laden.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Scott Pelley: You must be frustrated, maybe angry. After a year, we
still don’t have Osama Bin Laden?
President Bush: How do you know that? I don’t know whether Osama bin
Laden is dead or alive. I don’t know that. He’s not leading a lot of
parades. And he’s not nearly the hero that a lot of people thought he
was. This is much bigger than one person anyway. This is — we’re slowly
but surely dismantling and disrupting the al Qaeda network that, that
hates America. And we will stay on task until we complete the task. I
always knew this was a different kind of war, Scott. See, in the old
days, you measure the size and the strength of the enemy by counting his
tanks or his airplanes and his ships. This is an international manhunt.
We’re after these people one at the time. They’re killers. Period.
Pelley: But have you won the war before you find Osama bin Laden dead or
alive?
Mr. Bush: If he were dead, there’s somebody else to replace him. And we
would find that person. But slowly but surely, we will dismantle the al
Qaeda network. And those who sponsor them and those who harbor them. And
at the same time, hopefully lay the seeds for, the conditions necessary
so that people don’t feel like they’ve got to conduct terror to achieve
objectives.
Pelley: Do you look back on the Afghan campaign with any doubts?
Certainly, we’ve overthrown the Taliban government. Certainly, al Qaeda
has been scattered. But some of the Taliban leaders appear to have
gotten away. And there have been many civilian casualties as well.
Mr. Bush: Uh huh. Well, you know, I am sad that civilians lost their
life. But I understand war. We did everything we can to — everything we
could to protect people. When civilians did die, it was because of a
mistake. Certainly not because of intention. We liberated a country for
which I’m extremely proud. No, — I don’t second guess things. It’s —
things never go perfect in a time of war.
Pelley: Are you committed to ending the rule of Saddam Hussein?
Mr. Bush: I’m committed to regime change.
Pelley: There are those who have been vocal in their advice against war
in Iraq. Some of our allies in the Gulf War, Saudi Arabia, Turkey for
example. Even your father’s former national security advisor, Mr.
Scowcroft has written about it in the paper. What is it in your
estimation that they don’t understand about the Iraq question that you
do appreciate?
Mr. Bush: The policy of the government is regime change, Scott, hasn’t
changed. I get all kinds of advice. I’m listening to the advice. I
appreciate the consultations. And we’ll consult with a lot of people but
our policy hasn’t changed.
Pelley: On Air Force One you described the terrorists as evil.
Mr. Bush: Yeah.
Pelley: I don’t think anyone would disagree with that, but at the same
time, many in the Arab world are angry at the United States for
political reasons because of our policy in Israel or our troops in the
oil region of the Middle East. Is there any change in foreign policy
that you’re considering that might reduce Arab anger against the United
States.
Mr. Bush: Hmm. Well, I’m working for peace in the Middle East. I’m the
first president that ever went to the United Nations and publicly
declared the need to have a Palestinian state living side-by-side with
Israel in peace. I’ve made it clear that in order for there to be peace
the Palestinians have gotta to get some leadership that renounces terror
and believes in peaces and quits using the Palestinian people as pawns.
I've also made it clear to the other Arab nations in the region that
they’ve got responsibilities. If you want peace they gotta work toward
it. We’re more than willing to work for it, but they have to work for it
as well. But all this business isn’t going to happen as long as a few
are willing to blow up the hopes of many. So we all gotta work to fight
off terror.
Pelley: Arafat has to go?
Mr. Bush: Either, he’s, he’s been a complete failure as far as I am
concerned. Utter disappointment.
Pelley: There has been some concern over the year about civil liberties.
Mr. Bush: Yeah…
Pelley: In fact, an appeals court recently was harsh about your
administration’s decision to close certain deportation hearings. They
said, quote, “A government operating in secrecy stands in opposition to
the Constitution.” Where do you draw the line sir?
Mr. Bush: I draw the line at the Constitution. We will protect America.
But we will do so on, within the guidelines of the Constitution,
confines of the Constitution, spirit of the Constitution.
Pelley: Is there anything that the Justice Department has brought to you
as an idea that you’ve thought, “No, that’s too far. I don’t wanna go…"
Mr. Bush: Nah, not that that I remember. And I am pleased with the
Justice Department. I think that Attorney General’s doing a fine job, by
the way...and to the extent that our courts are willing to make sure
that they review decisions we make, I think that’s fine. I mean, that’s
good. It’s healthy. It’s part of America.
Pelley: Franklin Roosevelt said that America should stand in defense of
four freedoms. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom from want
and freedom from fear. Do we have that today Mr. President? Freedom from
fear?
Mr. Bush: I think more than we did, in retrospect. The fact that we are
on alert, the fact that we understand the new circumstances makes us
more free from fear than on that fateful day of September the 11th.
We’ve got more work to do.
Pelley: And Americans should not live their lives in fear?
Mr. Bush: I don’t think so. No. I think Americans oughta know their
government’s doing everything possible to help. And obviously if we get
information that relates directly a particular attack we’ll deal with
it. And if we get noise that deals with a general attack, we’ll alert
people. There are a lot of good folks working hard to disrupt and deny
and run down leads. And the American people need to go about their
lives. It seems like they are.


> (and no it wasnt me even though the spellingis
> oddly familar)
Not that this is news to FoRKs, but:
> ... randomising letters in the middle of words [has] little or no
> effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. This
> is easy to denmtrasote. In a pubiltacion of New Scnieitst you could
> ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same,
> and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come
> to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce
> retigcionon.  Saberi's work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael
> prsooscers at work. The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing
> coentnt by paarllel prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need
> the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang.
-Dave


Dave Long writes:
> > (and no it wasnt me even though the spellingis
> > oddly familar)
>
> Not that this is news to FoRKs, but:
>
>
>
> > ... randomising letters in the middle of words [has] little or no
> > effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. This
> > is easy to denmtrasote. In a pubiltacion of New Scnieitst you could
> > ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same,
> > and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come
> > to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce
> > retigcionon.  Saberi's work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael
> > prsooscers at work. The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing
> > coentnt by paarllel prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need
> > the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang.
Hmm, there's probably a patentable input-method for
touch-tone keypads in there somewhere.
- Gordon


On Thu, 2002-09-12 at 12:22, Dave Long wrote:
>
>
> > ... randomising letters in the middle of words [has] little or no
> > effect on the ability of skilled readers to understand the text. This
> > is easy to denmtrasote. In a pubiltacion of New Scnieitst you could
> > ramdinose all the letetrs, keipeng the first two and last two the same,
> > and reibadailty would hadrly be aftcfeed. My ansaylis did not come
> > to much beucase the thoery at the time was for shape and senqeuce
> > retigcionon.  Saberi's work sugsegts we may have some pofrweul palrlael
> > prsooscers at work. The resaon for this is suerly that idnetiyfing
> > coentnt by paarllel prseocsing speeds up regnicoiton. We only need
> > the first and last two letetrs to spot chganes in meniang.
I'm working with an experimental text recognition/processing engine that
exhibits similar characteristics.  It can read right through
misspellings like the above without any difficulty.  And as the author
above suggested, the pattern matching is inherently parallel internally.
If the text recognition algorithm/architecture humans use is anything
like the algorithm/structure we've been working with, the reason the
first letter (and to a lesser extent, the last letter) is important is
that without it the text pattern recognition problem is exponentially
more difficult (from a theoretical standpoint anyway) and has to be
resolved using deeper abstraction analysis.  The middle letters are far
less important and computationally much easier to resolve correctly.
Cheers,
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com


So much for carnivore ;)
--
Gary Lawrence Murphy - garym@teledyn.com - TeleDynamics Communications
- blog: ~teledyn - biz:  -
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers." (Picasso)


On 12 Sep 2002, Gary Lawrence Murphy wrote:
--]
--]So much for carnivore ;)
Yep, that ws the plan all alng with my typos, I am the only one to be
consistently fighting the evls of da vore.


On Thu, 12 Sep 2002, Tom wrote:
> Yep, that ws the plan all alng with my typos, I am the only one to be
> consistently fighting the evls of da vore.
Well, yeah, but there's an easier way.

There's still MITM, but it requires a far higher capability, and is easier
to detect once you go beyond the scamed interaction of two parties, since
being manipulative in principle.
If you run your own mailserver, or have a say in what your host does, make
him adopt STARTTLS.


> If the text recognition algorithm/architecture humans use is anything
> like the algorithm/structure we've been working with, the reason the
> first letter (and to a lesser extent, the last letter) is important is
> that without it the text pattern recognition problem is exponentially
> more difficult (from a theoretical standpoint anyway) and has to be
> resolved using deeper abstraction analysis.  The middle letters are far
> less important and computationally much easier to resolve correctly.
I think keeping the number of middle letters consistent with the correct
spelling is important.  Would be interesting to see if this same effect is
applicable to written forms of other languages, maybe even Japanese romongi.
Bill


I am delurking to comment on the Salon article. I just wanted to say that I am grateful they choose not to publish my forbidden thought. I sent it in a couple of days before the 9/11 commeration. If I had just watched the sentimental network and cable shows on 9/11 my cynical thoughts would have remain unchanged. However, I watch the Frontline show "Faith and Doubt at Ground Zero" on PBS. That show tackled head on, with much more courage than I have seen elsewhere, the larger questions about good and evil, about art as an alternate religion (Karlheinz Stockhausen -- 9/11 was a great work of art), and especially the question about how religion has a darker side which when carried to fanatic extremes tends to negate the humanity of the non-believers.
I am not a religious person but I stunned at the scope of this program. It talked about the Lutheran minister who spoke at Yankees Stadium on a podium with other religious leaders present who was charged with heresy by his own church for promoting the idea that all religions are equal (presumably the Lutherans have the one true path?).
Thanks for listening, I just felt like I needed to put the word out about this program. My shallow comment on Salon and others like it (my boyfriend and I had sex while the towers collapsed) gives me pause about how some of us tend to harden ourselves to the suffering of others.
Mike
Chris Haun wrote:i though this was all rather interesting, first bit of 9/11 coverage that
i've liked.

Chris
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When we were discussing Kuhn, I wrote:
> My understanding of the history of
> plate tectonics is that the magnetic
> reversal patterns encoded in seafloor
> basalts were crucial supporting data
> which suddenly became available only
> after Navy declassification, so the
> adoption curve may be skewed.
Many of the essays in Oreskes' _Plate
Tectonics_ seem to support this idea:
Sandwell, "Plate Tectonics: A Martian View"
> In this essay, I'll describe a few of the important confirmations of
> plate tectonic theory provided by satellites and ships.  These tools
> were largely developed to support the Cold War effort, and many are
> labeled geodetic since they are used to make precise measurements
> of the size and shape of the earth and the spatial variations in the
> pull of gravity.  The tools of satellite geodesy are needed for all
> aspects of global warfare; precise satellite tracking and gravity
> field development are needed for precision satellite surveillance
> as well as for targeting ballistic missiles; the global positioning
> system is used in all aspects of modern warfare; radar altimetery is
> used or aiming submarine-launched ballistic missiles as well as for
> inertial navigation when submerged.
>
> The global seismic networks were developed, primarily, to monitor
> underground nuclear tests.  Marine magnetometers were developed,
> primarily, for detection of submarines.  Multibeam sea floor mapping
> systems were developed, primarily, for surveying critical and
> operational areas of the northern oceans.
... and the Navy was in no hurry
to declassify any of these data,
as any uneven coverage could have
revealed the parts of the oceans
they found most interesting.
-Dave
(What do our seismic networks say
about the middle east?  I hazily
recall a story about LA reporters
asking their local geophysicists
about an early morning quake, to
be told that, as far as could be
figured, the "epicenter" was at a
negative depth, travelling near
mach speed, and presumably headed
towards Edwards)


> I think keeping the number of middle letters consistent with the correct
> spelling is important.
Aeftr tinryg it out on my lacol daciinorty,
the worst I cloud find were teilprs, and of
tehm the most cfinnosug seeemd to be:
parental paternal prenatal
as cenotxt wloud be mcuh more sacfgiiinnt
with the rest, scuh as:
bakers beakers breaks
98% of the 45k wdors were uinque.
-Dave
1. romaji, or european languages which
tend to end in vowels, would presumably
work better with attention on the ending
syllable (or at least consonant sound)
2. are typos a larger or smaller space?
I had a whoromatic proggy that scattered
transpositions at hazard where the hands
alternated quickly; that would be a much
smaller space -- but transposing/eliding
spaces might make for a much larger one.


The USAF had a program in the 1959-1960 in which successful free jumps
were made from balloons at up to ~32 km (100,000 ft.). The relevance was
astronauts and SR-71 bailouts. This would top that achievement
comfortably.

Chuck
On Monday, September 9, 2002, at 11:20 AM, Owen Byrne wrote:
> John Hall wrote:
>
>> Why so fast?  Normal terminal velocity is much slower.
>>
> Not at 40,000 m. I found this article
> ( :
>
> "The last person to try to break the highest free fall record died in
> the attempt. In 1965, New Jersey truck driver Nick Piantanida suffered
> catastrophic equipment failure when his facemask blew out at 57,000
> feet. Lack of oxygen caused such severe brain damage that he went into
> a coma and died four months later."
>
> And in amongst the flash at
>
>
> you can discover that he will break the sound barrier at 35,000 m,
> presumably reaching top speed somewhere above 30,000.
>
> Owen
>
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: fork-admin@xent.com  On Behalf Of
>>> bitbitch@magnesium.net
>>> Sent: Sunday, September 08, 2002 8:36 AM
>>> To: (Robert Harley)
>>> Cc: fork@spamassassin.taint.org
>>> Subject: Re: The Big Jump
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> So uh, would this qualify for the Darwin awards if he doesn't make it?
>>>
>>> Freaking french people...
>>>   :-)
>>> -BB
>>> RH> Today a French officer called Michel Fournier is supposed to get
>>>
>> in a
>>
>>> RH> 350-metre tall helium balloon, ride it up to the edge of space (40
>>>
>> km
>>
>>> RH> altitude) and jump out.  His fall should last 6.5 minutes and
>>>
>> reach
>>
>>> RH> speeds of Mach 1.5.  He hopes to open his parachute manually at
>>>
>> the
>>
>>> RH> end, although with an automatic backup if he is 7 seconds from the
>>> RH> ground and still hasn't opened it.
>>>
>>> RH> R
>>>
>>> RH> ObQuote:
>>> RH>   "Vederò, si averò si grossi li coglioni, come ha il re di
>>>
>> Franza."
>>
>>> RH>   ("Let's see if I've got as much balls as the King of France!")
>>> RH>   - Pope Julius II, 2 January 1511
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> Best regards,
>>> bitbitch                            mailto:bitbitch@magnesium.net
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>


As I've had to resubscribe to fork and fork-noarchive,
I guess I have to reintroduce myself.  I'm formerly
known as gbolcer at endtech dot com to the FoRK
mailman program, formerly an overposter, and love
soaking up bits through avid reading or scanning
of almost every single list that's got informative to say.
Hopefully all those overpost will get cleared out at
somepoint and fork-archived.
Greg