I was in 11th grade German at the time. We were in the middle of a party enjoying a delicious Schwarzwälder Kirschtorte (Black forest Cherry Cake). Kinda changed the mood dramatically since we were 40 minutes from DC (central Maryland) in an area where almost everybody works in DC or in other federal government jobs in the area. The place I currently work at had a crew onsite at the Pentagon and was working on installing a new library (which was destroyed by the crash). Fortunately, everybody was at the loading dock waiting on supplies at the time and nobody was hurt. Kinda of weird how small the world can be at times.

That said.... It is a shame how we have let this tragedy push us further down the slippery slope that our nation (and most other 1st world countries) has been sliding down for decades. We are the least free that we've ever been, and it's getting worse daily. America is, and has been, in a position to move the world in any direction it wants (whether the rest of the world likes it or not) and it's a shame that we can't leverage that position to do some real good. America does many good things, but it also does some high profile dickish things; and those are what we are remembered for.

I know it's naive and unreasonably optimistic, but if we could collectively grow up and work together on building the culture that we so proudly proclaim we already have: A culture that values liberty, freedom, and all the other values we claim to have; then, maybe we could actually make the world a better place, starting with right here. It's a fools errand to work to that end though, it goes against human nature to actually care about others. It's much easier to pretend to, all the while thinking about yourself or maybe a select group you are attached to.

It doesn't matter if the American dream ever existed; we can still make it exist today if we all (including those at the top) want it to.

Why can't you run Chrome on Linux? I'm using it right now in Ubuntu 10.10. http://google.com/chrome has binaries for Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE. You can always get the Chromium source and build for any distro without binaries.

I want a business training game based of Half-Life, that game seemed to outline pretty ordinary situations you might encounter working in a research lab. You know, experiments going horribly wrong accidentally brining about an alien invasion, which cause the government to destroy all evidence and kill everybody to cover up the existence of your workplace. That sort of stuff happens at least twice a week.