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Deja moo
Well friends, despite the risks involved in saying anything in the understandable and dangerous aftermath of the terrible national tragedy that unfolded last week, I feel compelled to present the Raging Stupid Award (again!) to our old friends in Redmond, Washington.

As many of you know, Microsoft makes a very popular computer game called Flight Simulator. This game depicts various aircraft, cockpit interiors, and cityscapes so accurately that the U.S. Navy, among others,uses it for flight training. Furthermore, it is my understanding, and please correct me if I'm wrong, that Flight Simulator users can avail themselves of damned decent representation of the cockpits of Boeing jetliners like those involved in Tuesday's criminal disasters. According to one report I have seen (sorry, no link) a person could easily use Flight Simulator to memorize the location of the aircraft's transponder switch, for example.

The transponder is a device that broadcasts a signal identifying a particular plane and its location to air traffic controllers. No pilot in his right mind would turn this off, but as far as we know the hijackers did, presumably to mask their course changes and intended targets. This may not have occurred in all instances, as the Federal Aviation Agency did note the location and course of the plane that eventually crashed into the Pentagon. (In fact, the FAA notified the U.S. military air defense command 12 minutes before impact that a rogue aircraft was heading for the nation's capitol, but no one there did anything -- eerily similar to what transpired in Hawaii early on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, but beside the point of this particular column.)

The reason I've opened this topic, you see, is that Microsoft decided it could make public relations points by making sure the world knew the company had decided to remove the twin towers of the now-destroyed World Trade Center from the next version of Flight Simulator.

"We did decide this morning, after some careful consideration, that we want to do the appropriate thing, the right thing, so we decided to remove the towers. Obviously everyone's hearts are in this here, too. We don't want to have any any imagery in there that would upset anyone."

The spokesperson added that he wasn't sure "what would replace the towers" in the game (presumably not a smoking pile of rubble). In any case, it appears that we will all be able to use Flight Simulator 2002 to practice crashing into other buildings...

Innovate me, baby
Yes, of course I should let the matter rest right there, but I just can't. It just goes round and round in my mind, the fact that Microsoft in effect used the fact of last Tuesday's mass murders to draw attention to a product...but then, just take a look -- a brief one -- at their home page, and then turn to Apple.com. Interesting, eh?

What I want to know is, why did they say anything at all? (Update the digital rendering of Manhattan if accuracy demands it, but do it quietly, for heaven's sake.) And secondly, why not divert some coders from screwing up QuickTime and put them to work booby-trapping Flight Simulator? You know, put out a version that erases users' hard drives if people fly planes into buildings, or put in a fake transponder switch that in a real airliner would cause the navigational instruments to display Windows logos or excerpts of the "dancing monkey boy" video. This would of course require considerable modification of existing aircraft and raise hell with the airline pilots' union, but think of the morally righteous ingeniousness of it all. Aarghh!

Oh well.

Help me out here, folks, I'm trying to laugh to keep from crying. I mean, if you can't trust Microsoft to do the right thing, who can you trust? (Hahahaha!)

Hey, that worked.

Senior Applelinks editor and columnist John H. Farr hopes he won't end up in a gulag in North Dakota and begs your indulgence for treading much too close to the edge.

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AUDIO CREDIT: embedded 44k file, European Birds -- Sounds and Sonograms.

DESIGN CREDIT: GRACK! byline graphic by Bob Farr.