I think you may have misread the parent comment in the opposite way that comment misread the title. Isn't it a bit sad that System Verilog ended after a bit over two centuries?
This is about smudging as a leftie, because your hand is trailing the pen if you write a LtR language like English. If you blotted every word or character before moving on you’d be there a while.
“Rm9sbG93ZXJz” almost precisely presaged the entire plot of all of the Black Mirror episodes combined, and was great fun (particularly the near-total lack of dialog). I thought the “My Struggle” bookends in Season 10 were quite good, but then Season 11 retconned the whole plot away.
The change in that zeitgeist is also one of the things the creators "credit" with its decline, though Duchovny getting into a lawsuit with Fox and checking out certainly didn't help. After the 9/11 attacks public interest in not trusting the government sharply declined. The pilot episode of the Lone Gunmen spin-off, released earlier in 2001, featured a plot where "terrorists" had flown a passenger liner into the WTC but it was really a government inside job to gain support for a new war. That show didn't get renewed.
The pilot episode of the Lone Gunmen spin-off, released earlier in 2001, featured a plot where "terrorists" had flown a passenger liner into the WTC but it was really a government inside job to gain support for a new war. That show didn't get renewed.
The idea of terrorists flying planes into buildings was a not entirely uncommon threat scenario and the WTC was a prominent building that had been targeted by bombings before.
The difference on 9/11 was that A) they actually did that, B) they used fully loaded very large airplanes (767s), C) they used two planes for the same attack (four in total but the two hitting the towers were noteworthy by themselves) and D) the buildings actually collapsed.
Remember that at the time airplane hijackings were usually about ransom (either money or releasing political prisoners) and the usual threat scenario were attacks against the airplane itself. Also following 9/11 there was a huge hysteria around the use of "dirty bombs" (conventional bombings using radioactive material to contaminate a civilian population center) which despite its many depictions in TV shows never actually ended up happening (mostly because radioactive material is difficult to acquire and transport in the amounts necessary to perform such an attack whereas the hijackers just needed sharp objects and enough flight training to hit a large building while avoiding hitting anything else).
It'd be an overstatement that this was due to happen but in abstract the scenario wasn't unexpected. The truthers are right about one thing: the scenario was a known possibility. That doesn't mean how it played out is how it was anticipated or that anyone in a position to intervene knew exactly how it would play out once it started.
>>Remember that at the time airplane hijackings were usually about ransom
This standard assumption is a critical point for understanding 9/11.
The well-established procedure was to keep talking with the hijackers, get the plane on the ground at an airport, and negotiate to get the hostages out, etc. Airplane hijacking was also remarkably common, and despite this, there were no real efforts to take measures like reinforcing aircraft cockpit doors.
That set of assumptions is completely incompatible with assuming that hijackers are on a suicide mission.
So the suicide mission succeeded in the first three airplanes, but withing an hour or so, when passengers on the 4th hijacked plane had heard about the other planes being crashed into buildings, they realized that they were all already dead, so attacked the hijackers, and the plane crashed into a field in PA. Fighter jets were also scrambled so quickly that they had no time to load ammunition/armaments, and the mission was to take down the plane (but it went down first); this would also have been almost surely suicidal for the unarmed fighters, having to make contact in midair.
So, as a side-effect, in a single morning, the entire set of assumptions underlying hijacking was eliminated, and hijacking was also essentially eliminated. Any potential hijacker would be treated with the assumption that they were on a suicide mission, and had essentially zero chance of survival, let alone achieving their goal (money or release of prisoners). I don't recall hearing of a single hijacking since then (although a few instances of pilot suicide taking the passengers with them).
This is a very interesting take, thanks for raising it! And also super interesting detail about the fighters not having time for weapons loadout. I did not know either of those things...A lot of good people died that day.
How would the unarmed fighters even have taken down the airliner?
I'm not sure what part of the passenger jet they'd crash into, but ramming head on into the cockpit might give you the the best success rate if you have enough time to get into position.
There were interviews with or voice recordings of the two fighter pilots discussing who would hit the cockpit and who would hit the tail, should it have come to that.
No, I agree: there was definite precedent, but to land those 4 specifics: time, type, place, and even consequence/motive is insane. People sometimes say "The Simpson's" predicted X (erm, not the social network can't believe have to say that now, heh), but the time's I've looked into it it's been a bit of a stretch (they may have some hits tho). But this just nails it. And the weird things is: it's a conspiracy-focused spin-off of a conspiracy focused show. It's just so weird. What are the odds, man? So fucking low. Anyway...
I do remember that flap about dirty bombs. It was pretty scary for a while. Thankfully it never eventuated. It's weird how Byzantine the "successful" attack scenario ended up being, versus the techno-sophistication of our imagined ones. Sad and a tragedy nonetheless.
Maybe there was an attempt but it was thwarted in one of those stories that will never make the news because it's all classified.
About a decade before that I was at a friend's house. The guy was a little bit weird so he subscribed to magazines for people to keep track of airline security and ant-terrorism monitoring and whatever.
I looked through his magazines. I remember one magazine recommended that security forces should be on the lookout for terrorists using passenger planes as essentially human guided missiles. Went way into details of how much explosive power fuel would have etc.
I suppose it wasn't especially prescient, more like obvious for any expert in the field.
I love how the "guy was weird so he subscribed to security magazines" like it's an expected correlate with weirdness, haha. Sorry if the humour does not transmit in text, it just seems funny to me.
I guess you're referring to these magazines not being especially prescient, but rather a standard analysis and I'd agree. But on the off chance you meant the Lone Gunmen spin-off, I mean...1) same year, 2) same location, 3) same type of attack, 4) same backstory or consequence...I'd say that's pretty fucking prescient. To land a broad-strokes analysis is not specific; but this is highly specific! It's just wow.
>I love how the "guy was weird so he subscribed to security magazines"
well he was weird and he subscribed to a lot of funny things that would normally be boring things for specific employments that he was not employed as. He basically wasn't employed as anything.
For example he also subscribed to in depth geopolitical analysis journals whose target demographic was evidently people in diplomatic corps - which he was not.
I don't know - do you like to be referred to as the Emperor, and claim to be Karl Franz Josef Ludwig Hubert Georg Otto Maria the former Emperor of Austria who has been dead for a while?
Because then you qualify in my book as a little weird, but I guess our mileage may vary.
not the whole name, that was genealogical, just basically The Emperor was the preferred name.
on edit: he was a cool enough guy and certainly I myself am prone to non-normative behavior but as I said he was weird, and one thing that you would notice he had a bunch of stuff he didn't really have reasons for having, so you put it down to his weirdness as potential cause, because when someone has a big flag "weird" everything out of the ordinary about them gathers beneath that flag.
IIRC terrorists using planes to attack buildings is a common threat scenario for infrastructure projects like nuclear power plants. However usually this refers to small civilian planes like Czesna. Not large passenger airliners like a Boeing 767. Let alone two of them.
> IIRC terrorists using planes to attack buildings is a common threat scenario for infrastructure projects like nuclear power plants. However usually this refers to small civilian planes like Czesna. Not large passenger airliners like a Boeing 767.
Honestly, that doesn't make any sense to me and I'm doubtful. I work at a company that had a data center (built pre-2001) 10 or 20 miles from an airport. It was built like a literal bunk because (IIRC) their threat model included "jet airliner crashes into datacenter" (no terrorism required).
It looks like they were testing/modeling that scenario with nuclear power plants way back in 1988:
> The 19 experts, many of them retired, work or worked at universities or companies that build or operate reactors. In an article on Friday in the journal Science, they dismiss fears voiced by opponents of nuclear power that the nation's reactors are vulnerable to a terrorist attack.
> "We read that airplanes can fly through the reinforced, steel-lined 1.5-meter-thick concrete walls surrounding a nuclear reactor," the article says, "and inevitably cause a meltdown resulting in 'tens of thousands of deaths' and 'make a huge area uninhabitable for centuries,' to quote some recent stories." But, they add, "no airplane regardless of size, can fly through such a wall."
> The article says the scenario "was actually tested in 1988 by mounting an unmanned plane on rails and 'flying' it at 215 meters per second (about 480 m.p.h.) into a test wall." The engines penetrated only about two inches and the fuselage even less, according to the article.
Something with two engines at 480 mph is a jet, definitely not a Cessna-type general aviation plane.
I believe that shielding is for the reactor itself, and while the rest of the buildings are hardened, they aren't that hardened.
I wonder if targeting the control building, or the transformers/electrical shit that connects to the grid with a jetliner would be more effective. Or maybe a shipyard with 'nuclear vessels'.
> However usually this refers to small civilian planes like Czesna. Not large passenger airliners like a Boeing 767.
That is a really odd thing to say on the context of security. If people did indeed have this rationale, I would be surprised at the obvious and absurd display of incompetence.
A vulnerability is a vulnerability, and you expect the attacker to decide how much impact he will try to cause (with a bias into "a lot"). The part about 3 planes is reasonable (something at this level of organization should raise an alert somewhere).
I mean, speaking of conspiracies, I've watched the spin-off show and it's... not that good. Turns out, you need good writing and Mulder/Scully to keep those three interesting. It most assuredly got cancelled because it wasn't that good :-)
I'd say X-Files largely survived because of the dynamic of the characters. A lot of the episodes were not very good except for the interplay between the two. But in the absence of good writing you definitely needed Mulder and Scully and the spin-off didn't have them.
If anyone is interested the whole series can be watched on Youtube for free. Altogether it is not that great, nevertheless I find the meta story about the pilot fascinating (a show about conspiracy theories "predicts" the 9/11 attack).
You can watch it as two shows (like a lot of shows from the 26 episode season era), one being the story arc episodes and two being the monster-of-the week style episodes.
The problem is that most people who say this don't know what the passive voice means. What they want to say is make the most important noun in the sentence the subject and keep the subject near the beginning of the sentence. That concept is only tangentially related to the grammatical voice being used.
Sometimes passive voice is the best way to do that though, because the subject of the action is more important (e.g. the target of a shooting rather than the shooter). Using active voice would either put the important person at the end, or might require you to find an alternative verb with reversed arguments, resulting in more awkward phrasing
Yes, passive voice is used effectively all the time. The rule was created by grammarian's who didn't understand its effectiveness or overstated its necessity. Judgement should be used to determine when it works.
There should be an (n+1)th rule for these lists that's break the rules when you want, just know you're breaking them and do it because you like the result better, not out of sloppiness.
Rules (which don’t involve courts & prisons) are just shorthand for reasons.
The better you understand the reasons behind the rules, the easier it will be to know when to break them.
Or, in an artistic sense, how best to dramatically or subtly break them in service to some creative perspective.
Any of them! All of them!
This is as true in architecture, rocket design, fashion and etiquette, as it is in prose.
—-
And this is why organizations that impose process without delegating and encouraging an organization-wide agency to make intentional exceptions, smother innovation so effectively.
They lose most of their creative and adaptive abilities.
None of these are meant to be "rules" in my understanding. The post starts with "In most instances", so it leaves plenty of room for "exceptions" to the list based on what you intend to convey.
No, Boole was dealing with probabilities. The first half of his investigation on the laws of thought is all ones and zeroes, but the second half admits any value in between.
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