December 2001
Monday, 31 December 2001
Coming Attraction: “Any change in the way customers behave is incredibly difficult to engineer but necessary to make many new offerings succeed.”
Crisp and even: “The first people to do it were the Chinese, who printed the earliest banknotes over 1,000 years ago. Rather like Croesus before them, they soon grew so fond of their invention that they also pioneered excessive monetary growth, triggering inflation.”
Revealed: how lint gets into the navel
Israeli Activists Urge Army to Probe Civilian Slayings: “This is not a police situation. It’s almost a war.”
PayPal Needs a Friend: “Just because they have 12 million users doesn’t make them a big success.”
Malcolm Gladwell: Safety in the Skies - “Even as the number of terrorist acts has diminished, the number of people killed in hijackings and bombings has steadily increased. And, despite all the improvements in airport security, the percentage of terrorist hijackings foiled by airport security in the years between 1987 and 1996 was at its lowest point in thirty years. Airport-security measures have simply chased out the amateurs and left the clever and the audacious.” - touches all sorts of stuff related to human factors and general risk assessment
I am once again standing at ground zero. Not the Ground Zero of 9/11, but the one of “the nuclear age”.
I spent my early to mid teens and my early twenties in Bethesda, MD - an almost equidistant spitting distance from the White House, the CIA headquarters, and a number of strategic military operations in Maryland. I lived with the simultaneously disquieting and reassuring knowledge that, in the event of nuclear war, I would be within the circle of total destruction, that my body would be reduced to component atoms within a split second.
Now I live in California, away from all that. Or so I thought, until half the developing world decided to play Nuclear Chicken. The PRC military has to be getting awfully nervous right now. When the missiles do start flying, I’m on the close shore, in the place with a lot of the wounded economy that our infamous bearded compadre just told every half-baker in the world to attack. Between this and all the talk of National Missile Defense, it’s just like being back in the ‘eighties.
Minus the hair.
Well, that’s progress.
In other news, I’m starting a new project and also changing the software back end for this site, which will diminish the number and frequency of posts, at times to zero.
Saturday, 29 December 2001
NASA to seek Earthlike planets
The Council of Elrond, as directed by Kevin Smith and The Mines of Moria, as directed by: Michael Bay
Toward the end of last year I made a joke about the millenium: that people had gotten it wrong, that the real millenial chaos would happen on or around 2001 (because 2001 was the “real” first year of the new millenium). I propped this argument up with all sorts of convenient current events (economy collapsing, Sharon getting elected, the Florida election fiasco, etc.). Today, with India, Japan, Pakistan, North Korea, the U.S., Israel, Saudi dissidents and virtually everyone with a gun in occupied Palestine preparing to start the killing, the joke does not seem as funny. When life immitates art, that’s one thing. When life rips off my jokes, I demand front points.
Hamas says halt to suicide attacks on Israel is only temporary: “it is only a temporary measure to protect national unity and avoid a civil war”
Missile Defense: The Untold Story: READ THIS - <ren hoek>It’s all so clear to me now!</ren>
Three Spacecraft Detect Huge Energy Burst in Distant Cosmos
Back to School: “The reality is that our kids don’t know anything. … This generation of kids is as nice and smart as any other generation in U.S. history. Kids don’t get 'worse’ from one generation to the next. But we are so overly concerned with things like self-esteem training and other stuff which the kids are the first to make fun of and tell you is total and utter nonsense, that we have forgotten that we are disempowering them by not teaching them the things that they really need to know.”
‘This late in history,’ what shall we choose to read?: “His reading list is typical of most people who suffer from reading anxiety. He subscribes to four daily newspapers and the weekly Times Literary Supplement and The New Yorker. Then he buys a slew of monthly magazines at the newsstand and keeps a constant stream of books coming into his house. At the moment, he is reading four books at once.”
Friday, 28 December 2001
Police relax attitude towards cannabis possession: “There is a lot less paperwork involved when you issue a warning, which gives our officers more flexibility.”
The Wireless Year: Bad and Getting Worse: “We’ve also seen too many handset problems. In an effort to launch phones ahead of their competitors, quality control corners have been cut resulting in subsequent recalls.”
Thursday, 27 December 2001
From Morgan: Starving, Bandaged Bin Laden Offers U.S. One Last Chance To Surrender - “We still have three or four guns and a full crate of bullets. And some knives, I think. You cannot hope to prevail.”
The Origins of Biblical Monotheism: “In short, the rise of the individual as a social unit next to the traditional family unit provided intelligibility to the rise of a single god rather than a divine family.”
Movies-On-Demand Could Harm Pay-Per-View: will cannibalize PPV rather than VCR/DVD.
Ann Coulter: SURRENDERED NATION I.S.0. IMPERIALIST VICTOR - I suspect I’d really like her as a stand-up comic. And for once, an article doesn’t make me want to end that sentence with “just so long as she’s doing the standing up in front of a moving train”.
Labels Singing the Blues Over Expensive Failures: “In a business in which some 90% of the 6,000 CDs released domestically each year are unprofitable, according to major-label executives, stars are seen as safe bets–particularly when corporate parents are pressuring music labels to hit quarterly earnings targets.” - what a bunch of nonsense. The entire accounting structure is designed to make things look like a loss. This is L.A. accounting, after all. And “Napster era” users aren’t causing the demise of Mariah Carey. Napsterites are looking for old Etta James or Skinny Puppy or new Disco Biscuits. The only thing about the internet threatening Mariah Carey’s record sales is how obvious it made the fact that nobody wants to see Glitter under any circumstances. Maybe if the music industry spent time sanely developing a large number of artists instead of pushing for big hits while shafting the rest of their portfolio, I might be concerned. But if they did that, they probably wouldn’t be in this situation.
How to Build a 1.5 Terabyte SAN for Less than $35,000
Tuesday, 25 December 2001
Israel and the Palestinians: “Then what?”
The triumph of English: “English-speakers have not always been so Angst-free about this laisser-faire attitude to their language, so ready to present a façade of insouciance at the de facto acceptance of foreign words among their cliché s, bons mots and other dicta.”
Singles and the city: “What explains the trend? The key seems to be the higher education of women.”
The future of the company: “The trouble with this view is, er, the facts.”
The Big Mac Index: this implies a rather steep fall in the dollar?
America the unready: “In the search for efficiencies, its hospitals have largely eliminated ‘surge capacity’ (the ability to cope with a flood of patients). And its public health system, which is supposed to track the progress of infectious diseases, has been starved of funds for decades.”
Is Santa a deadweight loss?: “This might explain the high volume of chocolate that changes hands over the holidays.”
Monday, 24 December 2001
Eek! A Squid So Big It Baffles “We don’t know of any cephalopod that has arms like that.” - not the giant squid, this is something different
Leisure activity decreases risk of Alzheimer’s disease
Sunday, 23 December 2001
Trade Center Site Becomes Evolving World of Its Own: “But if the spotters notice any sign of remains, work stops at once.”
Who Brought Bernadine Healy Down?: “Maybe you wanted more of a Mary Poppins and less of a Jack Welch.”
All Suicide Bombers Are Not Alike: “‘It’s not a phenomenon of individual psychology,’ he said. ‘It’s an organizational phenomenon.’ What we needed to understand was not why bombers did it but how they were recruited and trained.”
How Islam Won, and Lost, the Lead in Science: “Among other sociological and economic factors, like the lack of a middle class, Dr. Hoodbhoy attributes the malaise of Muslim science to an increasing emphasis over the l ast millennium on rote learning based on the Koran.”
Sharper Than Ever: “What makes Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems continue to think that PCs will just disappear when we all realize that what we need is a workstation that costs 10 times as much and requires an IT department to maintain?”
Saturday, 22 December 2001
Fourth estate, or fourth branch of government? - “the voluntary self-censorship of civilian casualties and wartime atrocities cannot be excused or condoned when it takes place in the context of a liberal democracy”
Bin Laden Translation Omitted Sections: “The new translation uncovers statements that could be embarassing to the government of Saudi Arabia” - Ahem. Memo to the Saudi government.
Friday, 21 December 2001
Roots of Resentment - Why Are They So Angry At Us?: “I’ve heard over the last month, oh, why do they hate us? … Oh, because they’re envious of our way of life. They’re envious of our freedom. They’re threatened by our democracy. How can anybody believe this rubbish?”
PLO’s Nusseibeh: Palestinian state will solve refugee problem - “The Palestinian dream of the past needs to be replaced with the (new) dream, that we need to create for the future” - the link to this was in Ha'aretz but got lost due to [user] error
Saudi Officials Accuse U.S. Media: Saudi. Officials. Still. Un. Clear. On. How. This. Freedom. Of. Speech. Thing. Works.
Thursday, 20 December 2001
Heh: New on DVD: OBL - does it answer the question of whether bin Laden is a replicant?
Hot ‘Bot: Ice Melter Could Find Europa’s Warm Heart: “It’s going to be checking for life all the way”
Wednesday, 19 December 2001
XML-RPC as object model: “XML-RPC is a remote function invocation protocol with a great virtue: It is worse than all of its competitors.”
Microsoft Settlement Likely To Fail: “But plaintiffs’ lawyers raise more fundamental problems. They say the lead lawyers on the case tricked others into signing off on a proposal that serves the Microsoft public-relations engine and lawyers’ egos, but their clients not at all. They also say the lawyers who negotiated the settlement failed even to calculate damages to the class members they represent.”
Mac OS X is the Death of Linux on the Desktop
Tuesday, 18 December 2001
The FBI’s House Calls: “most people aren’t concerned about what’s going on with internal security in this nation because they’re under the impression that the FBI is targeting and profiling mainly noncitizens”
White House CyberSecurity ignores bad (MS) software: “The proposed bill would give $90 million for colleges to develop graduate degree programs in cybersecurity, as if earning a degree confirms that its bearer is any wiser in the ways of information security than someone with twenty years of hands-on experience. Wisdom occurs through trial, error, and experienced over a significant period of time. You can’t create an expert overnight, or in two years, or with millions of dollars.”
Jobs is all talk before Macworld: Macworld Expo rumors, OS X kvetching
Monday, 17 December 2001
Suspect Claims Al Qaeda Hacked Microsoft - Expert: defense attorneys correct ascertain that a plot to add bugs to Windows XP would be about as dangerous as pouring a can of Pepsi in the Pacific; push for insanity plea
Bin Laden video plays to mixed reviews in Arab world: “On Al Jazeera, the popular Qatari satellite news station, a poll conducted over the weekend found that 80 percent of viewers thought the video was fake. Such opinions, although anomalous with the Arab majority who now accept bin Laden’s guilt, are fanned by the few remaining voices of militant Islam still heard after Sept. 11.”
Who Needs Arafat?: “Hamas is now supported by 30% of Palestinians in contrast to 9% of Palestinians who declared support for Hamas before the outbreak of violence in September 2000. However, it is very unlikely that in the event of Arafat’s removal, this support will be translated into political backing of a Hamas regime. Palestinians are far from interested in establishing an Islamic state.”
Lineo: MS ‘lied’ about embedded Linux: or at least wildly distorted
Sunday, 16 December 2001
Experts Say Decision Could Undermine Online Journalists: “there is no explicit paragraph in the appeals opinion that draws a bright line between lawful and unlawful links to prohibited material”
allNetDevices: - Roaming Said Key to GPRS Adoption
Genetic Anthrax Match Inconclusive: which is a funny title, since the genetic match is conclusive, it just doesn’t tell you who was sending it
Test run for future phones: “The problem for phone companies, which have committed billions to 3G, is that they do not really know what people will want to do with these futuristic services.”
Saturday, 15 December 2001
Transitive demo’s ARM, MIPS, PPC, x86 binary translation: If this works, and especially if it can work in the context of low power and embedded systems, it changes a lot of assumptions. However, a lot of people have made claims liks this and shipped nothing.
Spec sprawl derails home net consensus: does a good job of describing the mess of the home networking market, and what’s coming, while avoiding falling into the trap of “802.11b v. Bluetooth fight!”
Friday, 14 December 2001
Trials and Tribulations: “Senator Orrin Hatch declared in a hearing last week that during the trials of the culprits in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, architectural plans came out that helped the terrorists who destroyed the towers the next time around. This charge does not stand up in a light breeze.”
Ha'aretz OpEd: An excess of zeal - “The same geography that has pitted Israel and Palestine against each other in the bosom of the Arab world determines Israel’s existential interest in avoiding a situation in which the Muslim world perceives the Jewish state as a religious enemy, as opposed to a political and territorial adversary. If that should happen, it is hard to foresee the conflict here ever ending peaceably.” - READ THIS
IETF debates lawsuit risks of U.S. copyright act
Ha'aretz: The good guise - interesting article on people’s cultural associations (but, IMHO, people complaining about (or praising) New Yorkers are talking about New Yorkers, be they Irish, Jewish, Hispanic, Lebanese, Italian or otherwise. nobody else can show you Figure 1 quite like the residents of New York City)(which I miss)
Vatican Says No Peace Until Israel Quits Territories: Pope evidently not considering other options. Israel has lots of firepower. Palestinine has lots of people with nothing to lose but their life. Israel could probably export the population to someplace nicer for the price of a couple desalination plants and a the standard bribe to the House of Saud. Think outside the green lined box.
Thursday, 13 December 2001
Russian Hacker Charges Dropped: “ElComSoft’s chief executive, Alex Katalov, said he was pleased that the company, not Sklyarov, would bear sole responsibility for the charges.”
Connect the Enron Dots to Bush
Autobiography of John F. Nash, Jr. - Economic Sciences - 1994: “Thus further time passed. Then gradually I began to intellectually reject some of the delusionally influenced lines of thinking which had been characteristic of my orientation. This began, most recognizably, with the rejection of politically-oriented thinking as essentially a hopeless waste of intellectual effort.”
‘Sucks’ online is a good thing: official: “it has carefully and methodically misinterpreted the rules over domain disputes”
Justice releases report on Lee probe: finds Reno did not act quickly enough to railroad Lee before anybody noticed
E-Mail Gets the Cold Shoulder in Congress
Wednesday, 12 December 2001
Suspected Israeli Spies Held by U.S.: This is completely bizarre, and given the Justice Department’s recent track record for detaining people, hard to believe.
Israel cuts off contact with Arafat: “Chairman Arafat has made himself irrelevant”; “Palestinian Authority spokesman Nabil abu Rudeineh told CNN Wednesday it will close all offices and institutions of Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.”
U.S. Hits Al Qaeda Caves; B-1 Bomber Crashes: [“Dude, where’s my BILLION DOLLAR AIRCRAFT”]
Xerox’s Research Lab to Be Spun Off: PARC
‘God particle may not exist’: “If there is no Higgs, science will be left totally unable to explain mass.”
Thomas Friedman: Dear Saudi Arabia
US and Pak: Sleeping with the enemy: “In all but name, the United States is at war with Pakistan.”
Organizations to mark centennial of Marconi’s transmission: some early history of wireless communications
DC Chapter To Help Our FRiend, Linda Tripp – Here’s How You Can Help, Too: “It is with great sadness and concern that we learned recently that, while others have profited handsomely from their criminal acts during the Clinton era, Linda Tripp has been nearly bankrupted and is facing foreclosure on her home. She was fired from her government job by Bill Clinton on the last day of his term. Her attempts to find another position in her field at the George C. Marshall Center in Germany were sabotaged by a leak to the press.” - Surely W can find a place for her. Maybe his buddies at Enron can afford to give her a job with all the kickbacks they’ve been getting.
Tuesday, 11 December 2001
Laissez Not Fair: “Why did the same people tend to admire Enron and Argentina? Because in their different ways, both the company and the country tried to turn back the clock to 1913.” - see also: SatireWire | Enron Actually Argentina
From Vijay: Broadband lesson: Power’s in the plumbing - Read this if you care about network provider business models.
Court: Online Scribes Protected: publisher = publisher
CSFB to pay $100 million in IPO-related case: “CSFB would neither admit or deny guilt as part of the settlement”
Ex-anthrax makers want FBI to talk with them: “We’ve been reading about how thorough the Department of Justice is. That’s a bunch of nonsense. They haven’t investigated me.”
Getting Back Our Rights: “Because much of the media has reported on our vanishing rights only fragmentarily and superficially, most Americans do not know the extent to which Bush and Ashcroft have violated their oath to protect the Constitution.”
Monday, 10 December 2001
Demanding Clarity From Analysts: “Instead of gibbering about phony recommendations (strong buy, buy, hold, etc.), inevitably guess-work price targets, and vagaries about upside and downside, and instead of lumping all investors and investments into a generic system, they need to tell us precisely for whom an investment makes sense, in what time frame, and for what reasons.”
New plan for Mid-East peace: dose entire water supply of Arabian peninsula with large doses of MDMA. Sit back. Wait. Sell techno to recover the cost.
New York investigating Blodget?
So this may be obvious to some and not to others, but I’ve been playing with the format. Much of this has to do with how my views and interests in news have changed in the past 3 months. I will continue to play with it until I find a new comfort point. Feedback welcome.
blinkenlights: Blinkenlights: one building. 144 room lights. computer control. your cell phone. pong.
Ananova - US study finds link between disease and Gulf War service: ALS, ouch
OK, Verizon is being dumb. They’re against number portability in cell phones and say it’s not a big deal? They’re afraid of losing customers. I’d jump ship to Verizon in a second if I could keep my number. Sprint’s Bay Area service is pathetic and Verizon’s is reputed to be substantially better. Sprint might be smart to oppose local number portability, but Sprint has that smarmy Sprint PCS guy talking people into buying.
BC an objective observer on the battlefield: “the BBC ‘presenters’ and reporters are often more professional, ask tougher questions, and seem to have a greater level of knowledge about news subjects than their US counterparts.”
Interface Design Is Trickier Than It Seems
This Modern World: still not funny
Innocent are caught in cross hairs of the hunt for suspected terrorists: “banks are supposed to block accounts first and then investigate to see whether the person is actually the terrorist”
EU urges Arafat to dismantle Hamas and Islamic Jihad: Faisal Jawdat urges Arafat to sit down, shut up, take pension, and retire to Miami.
111,111,111 hits = shag: “For those not experienced in setting up personal home pages and getting hits, that’s a polite way of her saying, ‘I don’t think so’.”
Sperm Donor Must Pay Child Support
Sunday, 9 December 2001
Sharon’s War Cannot Be Won: “The burden of death has fallen on Palestinians as it has fallen on Israelis. The only surprise will come if dozens more innocent people are not killed in the coming weeks.”
Source: Israel rejects partial truce offer by Islamic Jihad, Hamas: “Islamic militant groups said in a statement Sunday they will halt attacks within Israel for a week if the IDF ends strikes in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A senior Israeli security official dismissed the offer and said Israel had no choice but to continue to ‘act in self-defense’ as long as the Palestinian Authority failed to ‘fight terrorism and make arrests.’”
When Voice Recognition Leads to Bias
Gods and monsters: “Do a number of intelligent and educated people actually believe this? Yes, because they must; their self-understanding hinges on it.” - good overview of the modern religious underpinnings of anti-U.S. and anti-Jewish sentiment in extremist Islamist factions
Ali Abunimah on the Israeli and Palestinian politics: “I think neither side is now capable of stopping the increasingly brutal and indiscriminate use of violence. The two societies are locked in grip that they cannot get themselves out of: Israel refuses to end its occupation, and the Palestinians refuse to live under it.”
Sufi renaissance after Taleban fall: “When they first came here, the Taleban invaded all our gatherings and they humiliated and beat up many great Sufis. We couldn’t understand why, because we were worshipping and praising God.”
Muslim behing bars, despite a judge’s order: Kafka
Study Suggests Mars Ice Caps Eroding
The Right Still Has Religion: “Polls show, however, that the number of conservative Christians in the United States is stable or shrinking. Most Americans are religious in theory but secular in practice.”
Federation of American Scientists: Anthrax Report - “The US government has known for some time that the anthrax terrorism was an inside job. They may be reluctant to admit this. They also may not yet have adequate hard evidence to convict the perpetrator.”
Saturday, 8 December 2001
‘Voices of Negativism’: “Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has refused to follow lockstep behind Ashcroft in deriding strict constructionists as negativist. On the contrary, Rumsfeld calls the informed outcry ‘useful’ in refining the order. The hopeful news is that Rumsfeld has reached outside the Pentagon to get advice from legal minds not conflicted by administration ties. Lawyers inside the armed services are also determined to resist the subversion of the Uniform Code of Military Justice by Bush’s diktat.”
Bruce Sterling: Geeks and Spooks: READ THIS (courtesy of Nathan Torkington)
I am the broadband Bermuda Triangle: “This brings up my second evil power: I turn employees at broadband ISPs into liars.”
Friday, 7 December 2001
Virginia students caught using school-issued laptops to download pornography
The return of Lord British: “‘The bad blood, so to speak, that exists between Korea and Japan is surprisingly present from the Korean side,’ he says. Retribution for past grievances goes down online.”
Encyclopedia.com - Results for Reichstag : Hitler and the Reichstag Fire
Ashcroft Defends Antiterror Plan and Says Criticism May Aid Foes
Archived Memepool Post: Dec 7, 2001
Get into Alison’s pants with the PantsCam. (Posted to Gadgets)
Thursday, 6 December 2001
Russian Police Arrest Seven Over Uranium Sale Bid
National computer-security site attacked
Feds Sued by Civil Rights Groups: “One problem with mounting a court challenge is that so little is known about those detained. Lawyers would have to know basics about a case to claim that someone’s civil rights were violated.”
No-HTML display plug-in for Outlook available: “Among the more ostentatious security pitfalls deliberately coded into Outlook is its determination to accommodate the mighty Direct Marketing Association (DMA) spam lobby by refusing to allow users to shut off HTML (which exposes us to myriad forms of malicious code in received messages), as this would have a devastating impact on advert click-throughs for hot, wet teens, scientific studies have shown.”
Man Wanted in Abortion Anthrax Hoaxes Arrested
Government Approves Encryption Standard: “Secretary of Commerce Donald Evans Tuesday officially finalized the federal government’s approval of the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), a data encryption technique that will be used to protect sensitive information and which is widely expected to be adopted by the private sector as well.” - isn’t this the standard that had NSA influence and presumed back doors and weaknesses?
Wednesday, 5 December 2001
Microsoft backs two bids vs. AOL: “With $36 billion in cash at its disposal, Microsoft is trying to keep AT&T?s 13.7 million cable subscribers in the hands of a friendly ally.”
The Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas): your hotline to fanatical religious nutcasery
Pat Buchanan: America first: interview, worth reading to understand where he’s coming from even though he is (as usual) all over the map of sanity
TMC Report: “Only a few short years after the company was founded, this initial mission of building an artificially intelligent machine was redefined to attack the scientific computing market. This transition was very significant, involving a change in the company structure, the corporation?s product line, and its target customers.”
Tuesday, 4 December 2001
Bobby Fischer speaks out to applaud Trade Centre attacks: “I was shocked but not surprised. I know his views about America because I have spoken to him on a number of occasions”
California Appeals Court Upholds Message Board Speech: “if Dan Rather says something about ComputerXpress or its management on the nightly news, that is different than someone who can’t even spell right posting something on a message board”
Women get paid less because they’ve always been paid less: “The report also identifies a strong link between pay history and boardroom reluctance to appoint women into high level executive positions.”
MS to Europe: opening source would break patent laws: “Big Blue skulking in the shadows in Brussels alleyways again, undoubtedly, sticking stilettos into hapless monopolists… In the document Microsoft also defends itself against charges that it made up letters of support from its customers; this seems deliciously lame.”
Staring into the abyss: “The debt-restructuring plan is widely seen as Argentina’s last chance to avoid default and devaluation. But critics believe that, even if the plan succeeds, it will only delay the inevitable for a few extra months.”
Tribunal Comparison Taints Courts-Martial, Military Lawyers Say: “If the government can spread the impression that the tribunals are like the courts- martial, that would allay many fears.”
Monday, 3 December 2001
The Witch Hunt: “If you don’t want to drag Osama bin Laden to the U.S. for a circus of a trial, fine. Shoot him in his cave. Bomb him. Whatever. He’s a war criminal on the loose and a genuine threat to kill thousands more at any time. But if you’re the United States of America, and you’re going to start arresting people and bringing them to trial, you have to give them fair trials. And before you start executing people, you have to try to make sure you’re separating the guilty from the innocent. This is not a principle that evaporates because the populace is angry and frightened.”
‘Israel or Arafat’: “It strikes me that the only way to avert a full-scale war between Palestinians and Israelis - a war in which the terror coalition against Israel would suffer the fate of the Taliban in Afghanistan - is to await the outcome of the necessary civil war among Palestinians.”
Sunday, 2 December 2001
Ginger: GOT IT?
Ashcroft Seeking to Free F.B.I. to Spy on Groups: “Most of the opposition comes from career officials at the F.B.I. and the Justice Department.”
The Real Story of Flight 93: “Bin Laden is also reported to be deeply historical, to recall with immediacy the struggles and triumphs and humiliations of the Islamic world of a century or a thousand years ago. He might have been wise to have learned more about the historical willingness of Americans to die for liberty.”
Saturday, 1 December 2001
Engineers Suspect Diesel Fuel in Collapse of 7 World Trade Center: “A combination of an uncontrolled fire and the structural damage might have been able to bring the building down, some engineers said. But that would not explain steel members in the debris pile that appear to have been partly evaporated”
Rocket enthusiast preps for manned flight after test: “We got pieces back so we’re happy. We’re going to launch it again.”