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There you go again, EXPLAINING Romney's 48% remark.

Stop that. Being honest isn't fair.

Please forgive the digression but I heard about this just today..... and the NRA effectively stymied Congress from funding a CDC study on gun violence. So, no, there are some studies Congress won't fund.

Instead of addressing real problems with real solutions, we are once again seeing the Congress bloviating instead of doing something. ... This is pretty much what this proposal is all about: a mass outbreak of useless posturing that gets in the way of anything meaningful.

You don't say.
Hell, Republicans (spearheaded by Bachmann) spent about 2-weeks worth of Congress time trying to repeal the Health Care Bill. 33 votes and counting!. Talk about posturing.

People blaming republicans, conservatives, FOX News, and general unfairness instead of the rich? Check.

HaHa. I love how this is evidence of propaganda to you.

You can read the report here.

One objection made by GOP staffers was that the report used the term "Bush era tax cuts", which didn't set the correct tone.

This is pretty pathetic.

"Romney wants to cut taxes for the rich, but a never-released economic report proves him wrong".

It *was* released, and then quietly retracted. You can grab a copy here.

One of the complaints was the phrase "Bush era tax cuts" doesn't set the correct tone.

Want to read that report? go here and download the PDF -> http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/ Thanks to Rachael Maddow for making this available

A single example of a US citizen being arrested for the way they look and not having papers?

Briseira Torres jailed for four months without bail for looking too Hispanic. http://ed.msnbc.com/_news/2012/08/10/13223063-us-citizen-falsely-imprisoned-under-arizonas-show-me-your-papers-law?lite

http://www.apple.com/ http://www.msnbc.com/

Speaking of "reporting", anyone find it odd that a search for Simon Negus on MSNBC returns no results? The Bing page shows mostly non-scandal related links (only two "negative" articles on the first two pages). Filtering results maybe?

Mij

And its illegal to use OTA for public display of sporting events. I realize sports aren't big to slashdot users, but if you've ever watched any major sporting event like a NFL or MLB game, or a big race ... the first thing you hear and see is a 'no rebroadcasting without permission'.

No, it's not. First, showing it isn't rebroadcasting.

Second, the ban on public display is only for screen sizes of 55" and greater. Don't you remember the fuss about churches being told that 55" screens were too big for watching the superbowl ?

Places are prohibited from charging admission to watch the Super Bowl, and the law prevents them from showing the game on a TV bigger than 55 inches.

That rule has been done away with now b/c of all the flack they got from coming down on church parties. It's been legal for the past 2-3 years.

[citation needed]

After all, I was kind enough to provide links in my original comment, and I'd love to learn that I'm wrong, and that someone actually did something middling reasonable :-)

Citation given: although a clarification that the rule waiver is for churches as referenced in your link. http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/01/will-your-big-screen-super-bowl-party-violate-copyright-law.ars http://www.copyrightsolver.com/dn2/pt/blog/default.aspx?id=27&t=Churches-Can-Now-Legally-Host-Super-Bowl

And its illegal to use OTA for public display of sporting events. I realize sports aren't big to slashdot users, but if you've ever watched any major sporting event like a NFL or MLB game, or a big race ... the first thing you hear and see is a 'no rebroadcasting without permission'.

No, it's not. First, showing it isn't rebroadcasting.

Second, the ban on public display is only for screen sizes of 55" and greater. Don't you remember the fuss about churches being told that 55" screens were too big for watching the superbowl ?

Places are prohibited from charging admission to watch the Super Bowl, and the law prevents them from showing the game on a TV bigger than 55 inches.

That rule has been done away with now b/c of all the flack they got from coming down on church parties. It's been legal for the past 2-3 years.

[citation needed]

After all, I was kind enough to provide links in my original comment, and I'd love to learn that I'm wrong, and that someone actually did something middling reasonable :-)

And its illegal to use OTA for public display of sporting events. I realize sports aren't big to slashdot users, but if you've ever watched any major sporting event like a NFL or MLB game, or a big race ... the first thing you hear and see is a 'no rebroadcasting without permission'.

No, it's not. First, showing it isn't rebroadcasting.

Second, the ban on public display is only for screen sizes of 55" and greater. Don't you remember the fuss about churches being told that 55" screens were too big for watching the superbowl ?

Places are prohibited from charging admission to watch the Super Bowl, and the law prevents them from showing the game on a TV bigger than 55 inches.

That rule has been done away with now b/c of all the flack they got from coming down on church parties. It's been legal for the past 2-3 years.

And its illegal to use OTA for public display of sporting events. I realize sports aren't big to slashdot users, but if you've ever watched any major sporting event like a NFL or MLB game, or a big race ... the first thing you hear and see is a 'no rebroadcasting without permission'.

No, it's not. First, showing it isn't rebroadcasting.

Second, the ban on public display is only for screen sizes of 55" and greater. Don't you remember the fuss about churches being told that 55" screens were too big for watching the superbowl ?

Places are prohibited from charging admission to watch the Super Bowl, and the law prevents them from showing the game on a TV bigger than 55 inches.

explode when overheated?

Exploding gadgets -- it's not just laptops

"[citations needed]"

http://cnn.com/
http://msnbc.com/
http://abc.com/
http://cbs.com/
http://nbc.com/
http://npr.org/

That's the short and easy list. Don't be disingenuous. I reference the prevailing popular^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hmainstream media. To claim otherwise is ignorant. And/or insulting.

"Some controversy erupted on March 9, 2001 after an Anonymous Coward posted the full text of Scientology's "Operating Thetan Level Three" (OT III) document in a comment attached to a Slashdot article. The Church of Scientology demanded that Slashdot remove the document under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. A week later, in a long article, Slashdot editors explained their decision to remove the page while providing links and information on how to get the document from other sources.[13] That article, posted on March 16, 2001, is still one of the ten most visited stories on the site, with just over 350,000 hits.[12]

The defensiveness by the moderators always seems to for force / couch position Assange in posts as the underdog ( and not as the Traitor Taliban supporter he is).
Lets try to understand that in 2001 the suppression was about religion and cash flow not about illegally obtained documents where callousness to redact names has a clear obvious measurement of death to those the named in the documents. This blistering laziness and slothfulness of course would be supported by most engineers (were all lazy bastards at heart right?) however in Asanges case HE puts at substantially higher risk the troops fighting against terror and Sharia Law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharia_law In case any one has doubt how unfriendly these people are to the press, freedom and the west consider

1) News of today's Taliban Sharia Murder objective http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/08/17/killed-attack-iraqi-army/?test=latestnews
2) The 275,000 mostly relevant hits on Google for "sharia+stoning" http://www.google.com/search?q=sharia+stoning&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Woman In the death stoning queue for tomorrow http://scj.msnbc.com/id/38146472/ns/38149201
Couple confirmed stoned to death on 8/16 http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/08/16/taliban-stone-couple-adultery-afghanistan/

This is the normal operating procedure for thoes targeted by the FOA's Friends of Assange

3) Support of everything Islam http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2010/08/17/ground-zero-church-archdiocese-says-officials-forgot/
4) Despised New York Governor David Paterson puts his foot into it. The man who's party hates him draws another target on him regarding him being Anti Islamic http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38740806/ns/politics-more_politics/
The friend of my enemy is Assange. Asange could only be thought of as good friend to Islam Sharia terrorists and those who plan to turn a handsome profit from the coming war. Yes were at war now, but you aint seen nothing yet with the likes of Asange running free loose and supported by his army of media pimps.

We've seem to forgotten 911 and forgotten you can not come to a mediated peace with folks who think of you as nothing better than a dog to be stoned to death. Folks who expressed no outrage at 911 and call us too thin skinned for wanting named redacted, or a mosque to go elsewhere, or not supporting the corruption and perversion of our government to debt and phobias delusional psychosis about bei

As is often the case here the cited article http://techdirt.com/articles/20100511/1018059377.shtml is just a highlight of a more thoughtful article http://redtape.msnbc.com/2010/05/as-the-battle-of-e-book-readers-heats-up-amazon-is-trying-to-beat-the-competition-by-continually-adding-new-features-to-its.html which reveals far more detail (yes, not only did I read TFA but TFAFA as well).

This "feature" is not required; a user can turn off "Annotations Backup" on their Kindle.

My concerns are these:

1) When privacy issues are implicated the default option should always require explicit "opt-in."

2) While this provides a helpful feature (the ability to retrieve one's annotations should they lose the data and wish to go to Amazon for a back-up) the only way to receive the benefit is by allowing aggregation of one's personal notes.

3) Will users understand the potential privacy implications? When dealing with tech issues I think of what my Mom would think and I doubt she'd realize that this could be a "bad" thing.

So... although this issue isn't necessarily as alarming as the summary above it is an issue that needs to be addressed. I've always liked Amazon and am hopeful that the Kindle privacy issues are the result of the same lone asshat who decided to delete "1984" and "Animal Farm" from Kindles last year. If so then it's time for said asshat to move on (Facebook would be a logical place) and allow the Kindle to flourish without any undue asshattery.

Oh, and could we stop playing "telephone game" with the articles on here? It doesn't take much time to locate a relevant (and more authoritative) source. I don't fully understand the "article approval process" but it seems that poorly cited / inaccurate summaries are more often the rule than the exception. My attempts to have any articles approved have been wholly unsuccessful and I'm not keen on engaging in deceptive hyperbole to change that.

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but it just goes to show you. NEVER trust ANYONE on the Ineternet. Not even your friends.

It's not so bad. I trust my good friend AC here on Slashdot. I admit I haven't figured out yet why he's always posting these garbled text strings that include links to a website with a man radically deforming his own anus, however.

Maybe it's a secret code?

I know I'm preaching to the choir, but it just goes to show you. NEVER trust ANYONE on the Ineternet. Not even your friends.

Throw in some old adages about "too good to be true," "fool and his money," etc., and it ain't rocket science. Yes, I blame "John" for the evils of these scams. But you know what? There's plenty of blame to go around. I also blame the victims, too, for being so greedy and/or naive.

Yes, the top google results all point to LG phones, Dell laptops and LG's Xnote with two stories and a youtube video about an MPB.

"overwhelmingly" iDevices, certainly.

Cell phones, flashlights, portable DVD players, GPS gadgets, even cordless drills also have all been recalled in recent months over concerns about dangerous batteries. During that time, there have been nearly 200 reported incidents of fires and explosions resulting from battery failure.

All of these recalls involve lithium ion rechargeable batteries, which now are the industry standard, because of their ability to yield high power in small spaces. It’s that concentration of power which makes these batteries more dangerous.

From: http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/08/exploding_gadge.html

Before the Dell recall, there were 23 recalls related to lithium batteries. Apple don't even make 23 handheld devices unless you count each iPod generation as a separate device. I'm failing to see how "overwhelmingly" i* devices are catching fire in the small device category.

It could always be worse.

no, no, no, this is the proof

more pics and some more

Sure... OK.
It didn't make the quadriplegic walk autonomously again - but it did allow his friend to hike up the mountain for three hours with him on his back.
Have you recently tried piggybacking a grown human for three hours? Up a mountain. In the snow.

Nearly doubling one's lifting strength, is kind of a wow-deal.

Microsoft?

I wasn't very keen on the delay (and offhand, I don't know how effective it will be anyways). But there's something that hasn't been discussed much. As I was reading this article, I've learned that it's not just the tuner. Some people may have to change their antenna. The DTV switch moves the signal to the UHF bands, and if you have experience with broadcast TV, you'll know that UHF does not have the range of VHF, and needs a special antenna (a "bow-tie" if I remember) to get the best reception. February is a terrible time to have to go up on a roof in the north... So, I can see some merit in the delay. Even with a better antenna, it could be that no reception is possible for some rural customers, which is a whole different issue.

Secondly, the press did cover Biden's "gaffes".

They did cover gaffes — socially awkward or tactless acts. But not the "gaffes" — stupidities and outright lunacies smoothed-over as mere gaffes. For example, if it were anyone from the opposing ticket, claiming:

When we kicked -- along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, "Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don't know -- if you don't, Hezbollah will control it."

MSNBC would've had a "Lebanon History Special" at prime time to show the entire nation, just how pathetically wrong that statement was — and on how many levels!

But it was Biden and up until very recently even a well-meaning slashdotter (not some Joe Carpenter) didn't realize, just how far from this Universe the man, chosen by Obama for his "foreign policy credentials," really lives.

McCain chose Palin. That was part of his strategy to energize the Religious Right AND an attempt to get the female vote.

And Obama chose Biden. That was part of his strategy to alleviate the concerns of his own foreign policy inexperience and reduce the impact of racial prejudices. That one strategy worked and the other didn't is works of the press and their now-documented bias towards Obama. The media — dishonestly — claimed, that Palin's inexperience trumps Obama's (as if they ran for the same post!), while looking the other way as Joe Biden mounted one lunacy over another.

Now that Obama has won, we might see more penance from the reporters and editors. We may even get some buyer's remorse from the voters. But they'll be justified, claiming, the papers misled them. This will be studied in journalism courses as a great example, of how not to write...

While CNN, MSNBC, and Faux News, are all likely to have live streaming feeds of election results, it might be more worthwhile to head to your local sports bar. They'll very likely have the election results on, and they have a reasonable supply of alcohol as well, which will come in handy no matter who wins (if your candidate of choice wins, you celebrate; if the other guy wins, you drown away your sorrows),... ;-)

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2008/08/almost-everyone.html

Almost everyone forgets a Web site password once in a while. When you do, you click on the familiar "Forgot your password?" link and, after entering your pet's name, identifying your high school mascot or answering some other seemingly obscure questions, you can get back into your account.

But there's a problem: A criminal can do that, too. With the help of social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, personal trivia is getting less obscure all the time. Youâ(TM)d be surprised how easily someone can uncover Fido's name or your alma mater with a little creative searching.

Some security researchers are beginning to sound the alarm about "password resetting" tools, suggesting they could be the weakest link in Web security.

What makes me laugh is that the first public victim of this "weakest link" is the candidate to the VicePresidency of the United States.

In any case, I completely distrust those websites which don't let me choose my own personalized security question.

i.e.

"Under the abandoned mines of the ancient dwarfs, which precautions would you take before finding the tomb?"
And my personal reply would be, "do not wake up the trolls".

IMO, her gold is just as good as Paul Hamm's. If the Americans would a set good moral example to the world, maybe the Chinese will follow.

What's really painful is that there are two ways they do this:

#1 - steal a SSN
#2 - make up an SSN (which usually results in a data-collision with whoever's SSN it is).

Now what REALLY makes this painful is that by "privacy" laws, your bank can see that someone else is using your SSN for accounts elsewhere... but they aren't allowed to tell you and if you try to pull your own credit report, the credit agencies won't tell you either.

The end result? A nightmare like this when the illegal who stole your SSN skips town on one of his bills, or else you apply for a job only to find out the thief works for the company somewhere else...

All the downmodders don't like hearing about it. Guess what? I had to deal with this myself when my SSN was stolen - from student application paperwork to UCLA - and 8 years later UCLA started sending debt collectors after ME demanding that I pay for the education of the illegals who'd taken out student loans using my SSN.

Those who modded my response on the impact of illegals on America "offtopic" may prefer to bury their heads in the "open borders" sand, but I don't have that luxury. I've already been fucked once and I'll be damned if I let them do it again.

Hmmmm.

This?

How about this?

Or this?

Every illegal immigrant may not commit every singly offense against the US, but a large number are committing crimes and offenses and causing problems.

And that doesn't address the various scams they run, like insurance fraud. (also here or here or here).

There isn't a shortage at all, in any industry - if you're willing to pay a fair and competitive wage.

This is true in IT, true in agriculture, true in housing, true anywhere.

Where the US worker is getting fucked over is by countries that lack our labor protections and environmental protections, that treat their people like slaves, who then sell "services" to fat-cat CEOs and undercut what ought to be a fair market wage. And of course, this actually amounts to the real inflation we've been feeling for years - instead of monetary, we get shit for services when jobs are moved to third-world crap countries.

Bought a new home and found that all sorts of repairs - roofing, supports, improperly laid foundation - were needed? Congratulations. An illegal mexican built your house, and you paid the price: money out of YOUR pocket on repairs, plus YOUR inflated tax bill to pay for his illegal family's medical bills in the emergency room, his anchor baby's birth in the local hospital, his illegal kids' schooling (stealing directly from YOUR kid's education), the crimes committed by his illegal friends and his kids in gangs, and of course the fact that HE and HIS ILLEGAL FAMILY are stealing someone's social security number to run up debt in their name.

The person whose SSN he stole, who will have their lives and credit ruined when he skips out on the bills later? Congratulations - that could be YOU or YOUR kid. The kid killed by his friends or his kids in gangs? Congratulations - that could be YOUR friend or family member.

Tried to call tech support any time in the past few years? Got nothing but idiot Indians with accents thick enough to strangle a moose and who can't actually address the problem, just keep yammering from a script? Congratulations, you're a victim of this.

They're wasting your time, and giving you substandard service. Oftentimes, I call in for a warranty only to run into the cultural problem that the indians don't understand what a warranty is or, worse yet, they are simply instructed to ignore the warranty terms. And forget asking for a supervisor - they just hand you off to someone else from the cubicle next to them, who then hangs up. Getting their name? Good luck - they all give lying fake names, to avoid someone actually managing to complain about them specifically should someone get to the person in the US who's supposed to check up on customer service.

Similarly, instead of being able to get a human (or substandard indian variant thereof) at all, I usually spend 20 minutes on hold with a looped tape of "you can get self service on our website"... well guess what sherlock, if your website was any good, if my question was actually answered, I wouldn't be on the phone calling.

But remember - "open borders" and "free trade" are good things. And you can keep repeating that to yourself as YOUR job gets shipped out to trash heap india, communist china or mexshithole.

It's a little like licensing a sewer system in which nothing is patented except the toilets

Is that why there are no toilets installed in the Olympic compound in China?

Installed a month ago (MSDN), work (Dell) and at home (Custom). No problems. File copying has improved a good bit (thank god). Start menu (or whatever it is called now) seems a little snappier. The "Save As" dialog still tends to list visited web sites. For example, Notepad, file save|as, first option (the default) is Desktop, second is http://www.msnbc.com/ WTF? Still tends to treat some folders as "media folders" (ratings columns and the like), so some annoyances fixed, others not.

You take the word right out my mouth, whoever you are. After all, a great source of ID theft come from illegal immigrants[1], which is exactly what BOA help creating. Not only that, BOA has the audacity to sue identity theft victim[2]. This proves once and for all that BOA is a genuine criminal organization.

[1] http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/03/hidden_cost_of_.html
[2] http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/254176/bank_of_america_sues_id_theft_victim.html

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2007/11/americans-think.html

According to a Ponemon Institute survey written up on MSNBC.com, people think Obama is the candidate most likely to care about privacy, and Giuliani is the one most likely to care the least. There's some errors in the survey results (of course Ron Paul got less than 5 percent, nobody knows who the fuck he is), but its interesting to see.

Of course this only bares a vague resemblance to the candidates' *actual* stances on privacy...

You can use https://www.donotcall.gov/ to help block the numbers. If they call after you sign up, report them.

The important thing is that the do not call list isn't for the government - it is for you. You can sue the telemarketer in small claims for every unwanted phone call $500 and win on the basis of this law (you might have to educate the judge of the law and the proper venue first, along with proving you got the call). The tricky part is to figure out who they are and where to serve them papers. To do this it is best to lie to the telemarketer and pretend you want to sign up or get more information. You then sue them in small claims court, most of the time you get a default judgement, and then you garnish their accounts. If enough people sue they might change their practices.

MAKING TELEMARKETERS PAY -- IN CASH

Consumer Reports came to this conclusion over a year ago. Here's some free synopsis of the the controversial issue where they used virus kits to make variants of existing viruses to determine how good virus scanners are.

http://www.dvorak.org/blog/?p=6674

http://redtape.msnbc.com/2006/08/consumer_report.html

Anti-virus software actually used to work much better, but I think that the variants have grown to such a large number it's more difficult. The cynic in me says that the virus makers do simple fingerprint based updates simply because it requires you to keep your yearly subscription up to date.

I think they add almost no value, but on the other hand, people will happily run viruses if you tell them it's the latest picture of Brittany.

You'll have to read the (comic) book.

This blog http://redtape.msnbc.com/ claims that criminal gangs are using millions of hijacked computers for spam and denial-of-service extortion.

Any other questions?

Yes. I have one. What makes you believe that Diebold ATMs are secure? In fact all evidence points to the contrary.

Muwahahahahaha... Tell that to Mogadishu. Tell that to Beirut. Tell that to Baghdad, Paris, and Amsterdam. Tell that to Banda Aceh. Tell that to Indonesia. And oh yeah... remember to tell your grandkids when they get drafted to fight for Christendom, as it were. I'm sorry, but they will NOT be enforcing any kind of Sharia on this Redheaded Rebel.

And I'm allergic to bees, so my chances are pretty good. Especially since I'm 10 miles from Tijuana.

I don't watch Faux News... I read Das Interwebs... :P Where the hell did they come up with that anyways? A few of my favorites:

http://www.drudgereport.com/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/
http://news.google.com/
http://www.haaretz.com/
http://www.msnbc.com/
http://thehill.com/
http://www.iht.com/
http://my.yahoo.com/ - of course, customized for worldwide RSS.


Grow up and open your eyes to the world reality. Not just the one you see in your four walls. Try working with some people from different parts of the world. Especially men from the worker caste in India that don't know anything about how to work with Females. One peed all over the bathroom IN OUR OFFICE, because the young janitorial Mexican girl knocked on the door while he was taking a leak. He was offended, so he whizzed all over all of the porcelain. Oh, and he was Muslim too... he would accost any woman he saw wearing a crucifix... and since we have a lot of Filipinas here, it was awful. Needless to say, it STILL took us 2 months of protesting to get HR to do something about him. I particularly enjoyed bringing in bacon and egg muffin sammies and eating them right in front of him. Oh, did I mention that he was in the cube next to me.. this is how I know all this.

My favorite foreigners that I've ever worked were with practically brothers... we even shared an office. One was a Christian Iranian, the other a Sunni Iraqi, and they surfed (in the ocean) together daily. I miss them both so much... and they treated HUMANS with a dignity and respect I've never seen since. Sad. I learned a lot from them.

It's not the terrorism I worry about, it's the FORCED IMPOSITION of Sharia on societies that are too vulnerable to know better. Women are being beaten in the public square now in Banda Aceh, and no one cares... the UN let them take it over... and now, they are beaten to death for meeting with a man in public. FUCK THAT SHIT maynard. FUCK IT ALL... I will give MY rotten ass life to make sure that NO ONE must suffer under such injustice. *sigh* Even you. Especially you... too damned ignorant to know better.. either that, or you're blinded by decades of such imposition already.

My colleague Bob Sullivan (an "actual journalist") takes a look at the Cyber Monday myth over at his blog, Red Tape Chronicles.

My colleague Bob Sullivan (an "actual journalist") takes a look at the Cyber Monday myth over at his blog, Red Tape Chronicles.

More a duty than a right, actually: The duty to help establish the rule of law. Sure, the trial was a circus, and that's because the defendants decided to use it for one last round of grandstanding and trying to look important. Saddam knew the jig was up and all he could hope for was to stall as long as possible.

The full verdict, a document of several hundred pages, explaining how and why today's judgment was reached was not released. U.S. officials said it should be ready by Thursday. So why issue the verdict today? U.S. court advisors told reporters today it was delayed mainly for technical reasons.

So basically they got the announcement out in time for the U.S. elections that he's going to die. In a few days they'll have the charges ready, i.e. for what.

Even though the verdict won't be ready for a couple days, the death sentence just had to be announced Sunday, for some reason.

these days the US government is far more careful to see to the legalities of a situation.

Yeah, it really shows. :P

Interesting response. Do you also have a minimum purchases amount for credit card purchases? Because that would be two violations of your merchant agreement. MSNBC did a story on here.

And well yes it is your buisness and you can run things the way you want you did agree to the merchant agreement to process credit card payments. Further more you don't have to prove to the customer that they did indeed buy something you merely have to show the receipt to Visa/Mastercard. They will eat the cost of the sale. That's what you pay them for with the processing fee.

There is a simple reason for this and it's because Visa and Mastercard allow you to let other people use your card if you give them permission. This way I can have a friend pick up lunch for me or whatever else I've authorized. If they were to buy something else it'd be just like any other fraudulent purchase.

And an aside I hate showing ID, giving phone numbers, ZIP codes or any other personal information and wouldn't buy anything from a store that can't be trusted to follow the instructions they agreed to. What ever happened to the customer is always right?

So...when people slow down light, does it gain mass?

How will that make them less likely to want to attack you?

Well, a good start would have been: Not training and financing Osama Bin Laden, then abandoning him after the cold war.

We *created* this guy. We gave him the tools money and training to commit terrorist acts. Perhaps that wasn't such a good idea.
And perhaps we shouldn't have given Saddam Hussein the key to the city of Detroit?

What on earth makes you think that unfounded retribution will make them hate you any less?

It's easier for you to believe that everyone with a grudge against the US is crazy, but there are many people for whom the US is either directly or indirectly for the death of a family member. Either through the civilian casualties we aren't even bothering to count in Iraq, or more indirect means.

About 20% of world-wide public CCTV equipment is installed in the UK. Compared to the country's size in respect of the rest of the world,
this is simply ridiculous. But due to the IRA bombings, UK police is expected to be good in "anti-terrorist" actions and "shoot on questionable
move" is accepted within large parts of UK society. Well, life adopts to the situation when any public waste baskets are being removed
(as possible bomb containers) and announcements in your average metro station ask you to check for and report any unattended luggage.
People actually do feel sort of "more secure", no matter how silly those things actually are.

Back to airport security :-)

The screening staff in airports is usually trained and tested quite hard, there are also often rumors that in most places they're fired when they miss something potentially
dangerous in a screening test, no matter how well it is hidden. Online games like MSNBC Airport Screener give you an impression on "2 minutes in the life of a security screener". In some places, incoming luggage is being screened as well for food and not only for weapons, so those screeners actually do have quite a hard job.

Until now, those guys had better ways to check back on any electronic devices, as anyone caring about their electronic or sensitve equipment
took notebooks, mobile phones or cameras with them as hand luggage, leaving mainly clothing in their checked-in baggage. The weight- and
dimensions-restricted hand luggage is quite easy to check with the owner in front of you ("please turn on that notebook - ok, it's a working
computer and unlikely a bomb container"), so any screener-flagged hand luggage can actually be quite quickly checked.

If everything has to go with the checked-in baggage, you can't really run such checks. Checked-in baggage usually allows about 4-5 times the weight
and there are way more possibilities to hide things, while any extra electronic devices in that large suitcase do distract the screener. Especially for now
I wouldn't rely on those screeners, as they haven't been trained to be distracted any extra electronic devices in those large suitcases that often.

It's only a matter of time until people see that an assasin, who would like to blast a hole into the cabin, for sure doesn't mind checking in a much bigger,
well-concealed time bomb in a suitcase while enjoying the flight. So, what's next?
Should we start flying in complete nudity, while any luggage is shipped in a separate freight-only plane?