well, now the US has to directly face a problem that the rest of the world has had to deal with for a while: how do you protect your people from unknown attackers?

<p>dealing with another government who is openly threatening you is one thing; you know where they live. they know that you can take the fight back to them and kill their people too. it keeps them from doing anything <em>too</em> stupid. </p>

<p>but what the fuck are you supposed to do when things just start blowing up and there&#8217;s no one to blame? or when those who are responsible are a  tiny  extremist group who don&#8217;t really have anything to lose. no country to bomb. if you do bomb someone in retaliation, you&#8217;ll just make more people angry and increase the likelihood of more terrorist attacks.</p>

<p>well, the obvious strategy is to just keep it from happening in the first place. so how do you do that? apparently a multi-billion dollar global intelligence network can&#8217;t predict or prevent even the largest operations, so that strategy is out. increase airport security? stop people from bringing their swiss army knives on the plane? lock up anyone who might possibly harbor ill will towards your country? enter into a total police state? </p>

<p>i&#8217;m not too excited at the idea of living in a police state. i don&#8217;t think even that would work. the whole point of terrorism is that it strikes where you&#8217;re weakest. if airport security were stronger, they&#8217;d have found a different way to cause the same amount of damage. you will always have a weakness. i don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s any way around that.</p>

<p>i&#8217;m seriously asking now. what do you do to protect the innocent people in the world from being blown to bits because of something their leaders did or just because someone with a chemical imbalance happened to have a few bags of fertilizer out back?</p> 

New York, Washington Rocked by Apparent Terrorist Attacks; World Trade Center Tower Collapses.

<p>damn. i just saw the pentagon for the first time a few weeks ago. </p>

<p>for anyone who is worried, no, i wasn&#8217;t downtown this morning. the phones are pretty much all tied up.</p> 

this article (found on lgf) in the russion based english language paper eXile is one of the most beautiful things i’ve ever seen. it brings a tear to my eye.

<p>some enterprising folks in moscow (pretty much out of the reach of the pesky american legal system) took it upon themselves to demonstrate in excruciating detail how easy it is to make someone&#8217;s life a living hell through any and all possible legal and illegal means. </p>

<p>and they chose such a worthy target&#8230;</p> 

the internal clock in unix which counts off the seconds since 00:00:00, Jan 1, 1970 will reach one billion (and thus 10 digits) at 21:46:40 on saturday night.

<p>if you have nothing better to do (i know i don&#8217;t) and want to have your own little countdown, just find your nearest unix box and run this from the command prompt:</p>

<p><tt>perl -le &#8216;sleep 1 while print 1e9-time&#8217;</tt></p> 

In the newest Rolling Stone I was reading an article about how the CD companies are investing a lot into non-pirateable CD’s. They never specified exactly what they were researching, but I’m assuming it’s probably the watermarking they’re talking about, which will take about a week for someone to come up with some software that goes through it like a hot knife through butter. Anyway, one of the execs. at BMG made a statement that pisses me off more than any other quote I’ve heard from a record exec. “If people love music, they should stop doing this. Music CAN’T be free.” I think he missed the point somewhere.

I was in NYC (sorry Anders, I was smoking crack and completely forgot you lived there for a while) over Labor Day weekend and was able to catch the Apocalypse Now Redux on the big screen. Damn. I understand why they made the cuts they made, but the missing scenes do make for a more complete movie, with a greater sense of Willard’s journey up the river, which I always thought was too short. The re-added scene with the Playboy Bunnies almost broke my mind. Seeing the opening blast with The End playing on a screen larger that the gym at MSSM was also a treat.

went out for dinner last night at a chinese restaurant. opened the fortune cookie. instead of a fortune and/or “learn chinese”, there was an add for time-warner cable. a fucking add in my fortune cookie.

my favorite thing about yourgoingtohell.com (although there’s plenty to love ;) is that the domain name is grammatically incorrect. sadly, someone appears to have let youregoingtohell.com’s registration lapse.

i finally got around to finishing the roll of film in my camera and developed pictures of Shu and Liz Ware’s wedding (at which tuck and i were “thugs”. jP was a thug too but he’s not in that picture because he took it).

<p>so, if you know Shu or Liz or just like looking at random pictures of other people&#8217;s weddings on the beach in deleware, <a href="images/shu/">look no further</a>.</p> 

this is the 1000th post on thraxil since last summer when i accidently hosed the old database and had to start over.

<p>i&#8217;d just like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has contributed for making this such an excellent place to waste time. keep up the good work.</p>

<p>once i get my cable modem installed on saturday, i should be back to contributing a little more frequently.</p>