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GPS Coke Can X-Rayed
carbolic writes "WiFi-Toys.com and Engadget have posted a link to X-ray images of the GPS Coke can that has security people all up in arms. The GPS Coke can looks a little bit like an IED (improvised explosive device). The PDF file posted on security company Blackwater USA's site shows several views of the can and compares it to an IED. And for thoroughness, the PDF shows a regular can of Coke X-rayed, too."
Osaka, Japan - In a worldwide first, GNAA founder and president timecop agreed to conduct an interview with Real Troll Talk, a Slashdot member documenting the ways and means of internet trolls worldwide.
Although meant to be a one on one interview, several GNAA members were present in the audience, and many "contributed" to the interview by shouting out points that timecop forgot and by calling him an asshole. "The interview went well," timecop said afterward, "I was very pleased with the interest in GNAA and the exposure we'll be getting through this. Real Troll Talk seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with the sexual aspects of GNAA, though."
GNAA member godspeed noted that "The interview was really good, and I have a strong feeling that Real Troll Talk may be a homosexual black man himself. You could say my gaynigdar was set off by that dude." Opened to other GNAA members for comment, vSKIZZILE was quick to add "HAHA FGTS! You are all gay, LOL @ WTC LOL @ JEWS!!!! FRIST POSTAGE FOR GNAA!"
A transcript of the interview is available in Real Troll Talk #6, available at Real Troll Talk's Slashdot journal
About Real Troll Talk:
Real Troll Talk is Slashdot member number 793436, and has been running a series of journal articles on internet trolling, seeming to take a particular interest in Slashdot and Kuro5hin. You can find back issues of "Real Troll Talk" at Real Troll Talk's Journal
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Stallman sucks anyway.
username:oldwarez password:oldwarez
yet again!
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it may be tinfoil-hat'ist, but couldnt a coke can be a miniture http://www.dirtybombdetector.com/ dirty coke bomb?
Is this actual demolition/weapons/forensic lingo or is this just supposed to sound 'informed'?
How many Kosovan orphans could be fed for the price of one of these cans? What percentage of relief efforts in Sudan could be paid for for the cost of the whole campaign? I think America needs to sort out its priorities if it is to regain a positive image in the rest of the world.
Making the moon less necessary since 1998.
Honestly. There are only a few hundred of these, and people are flipping out. Most of the things flying around are totally inaccurate. The cans come in a box, not your typical vending machine. So if companies are really security concious, they'll check employees with coke packs. Seriously though, how many people that work at those "high-level" (sic) facilities, bring 6/12 packs to work everyday.
"It may look like a IED to a layman..."
Um so? I imagine a lot of things could look like an explosive to a "Layman". Ever seen the inside of a CRT monitor or a TV? Imagine how much C4 you could hide in that.
This is just plain silly.
Are we moving to a society that fears anything that could potentially look like a bomb to an uneducated twit?
"If I were bound by all laws everywhere I'm sure I would have committed a capital crime somewhere."
now I know what to make my IED look like so it looks like one of those coke cans on an X-ray...that'll help a lot with getting past security...doesn't anyone else think that giving EVERYONE photos of this to make sure you don't confuse one with an explosive is a bad idea? now people that may be interested in building explosives have a design to shoot for...sure that's all tinfoil hat kinda fear, but aren't those the people X-raying cans in the first place?
I wonder who at Pepsi decided to run this anti-Coke campaign, mixing soda with bombs....
I thought it was a cool idea to have a GPS in there. Guess this took all the fun out of that...Maybe ill get an even bigger surprise when i open my can of Coke tomorrow for breakfast. =P
good political satire
What are they worried about? Can't they just disarm the IED by tapping on the lid?
The Human Cow - bringing you scrumtrelescence since 1995
Is EFNet, and you America. You, [amazingkreskin.com]
Anyone care to explain xray photos in full color? In all the images, the PCBs are green, the coke is brownish, etc... how the hell does an xray machine do color? or are they simply colored after the fact for clarity?
When I first glanced at the title I thought it said the can was X-rated.
Lots and lots of cars look like the type somebody would make into a bomb including mine. (car bombs are always made out of white vans or white sedans). I think all non bomb devices that look like they _could_ be a bomb should have a sticker on them saying "This device in not a bomb". That way, the security people would have an easier job doing what they do. Whatever that is other than complain.
The promotion with these coke cans is that you get a GMC equinox right? First off, if I had one of these cans, I don't think I'd take a flight and run it through the x-ray machine before I thought about pressing the button to claim my prize. I think as soon as I take this soda out of the package, and see, HEY! I WON MY PRIZE! I'll press the button. Thus, the Coca-Cola Prize Squad will come by, collect my can of technological glory and nicely deposit my newly won SUV. So why would I wanna take my can and run it through the x-ray machine?
Those of you that may think that terrorists could run their "IEDs" through the x-ray machine to get past security. It wouldn't make sense, since the reason I just explained before. If it was REALLY a REAL GPS coke can, it wouldnt be there, since the person would have already claimed their prize as soon as they see it. Thus, it has to be a bomb otherwise.
among a few other possibilities. People shouldn't get so excited or blame Coca-Cola when something unintentionally happens to look like something else. I got my bagpack inspected at the airport lots of times, even before 9/11. Sometimes the screeners ask me to turn on my laptop or my cellphone to make sure they function as described. In any reasonable world, the airport will keep the coke can until the winner comes back. Big deal!
But please, don't accuse me of terrorism if I am just happy to see someone!
Just in case that one breaks, here's another.
It should take the abuse with good humour.
O thanks be to Allah here comes the helicopter to bring me my new SUV. When did Coke start using Apache helicopters? Aiiiiyeeeeeeeeee!
Coke comes from the behind of a giant slug!
Analogies don't equal equalities, they are merely somewhat analogous.
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Most Slashdot users can't wait until the next attck on America so they can further complain about new security measures and policies that follow. This way they can seem educated by using terms like "Big Brother" and "Orwellian". They can blow articles out of proportion- A simple advisory warning that Coke cans may appear to be IEDs will be turned into a thread about how government paranoia is transformed into a thread about how government is taking away all our rights. "What, we can't drink Coke now?!" Of course, they will not offer any credible solutions, but will drone on ad nauseum about Linux and how horrible Microsoft and Windows are. Slashdot- News for paranoid anti-social girlfriend-less obese unkempt megalomaniacs.
This seems to give the X-ray operators the idea that some cans can contain electronics. So all a terrorist now has to do is make his detonator be as neat as the coke can, thanks to the handy photo's and a x-ray operator will think "oh a suspicous thing oh no wait I seen that presentation this is one of them cans no need to check further".
I wonder about the "normal" can x-ray. Why is it all orange? Can x-rays pass through aluminium but not coca cola? For gods sake what have I been drinking all this time that stops x-rays?
So the perfect IED device is a can with a double wall, explosives inside, coke on the outside.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I can just see it now...
"A passenger was arrested today on board a 747 plane bound for London. The 27-year-old man was detained for possession of possible explosive device, which later turned out to be a Coca-cola can, and disrupting the flight he was on when he started jumping up and down due to the fact that he'd won something when he opened it."
as to which *BSD BSD's filesystem BitToerrent) Second, go f1nd something the 'community' don't be afraid
To some extent, I can see the usefulness of this information. Back in summer of 2000, I was setting up DSL at my new apartment, and my ISP was going to ship the DSL modem to me.
I came home from work one day to find two ambulances, two fire trucks, and a number of police vehicles throughout the fairly spread out apartment complex. Luckily, they were concentrated toward the front while my apartment was near the back of the complex. I was just able to enter my apartment without crossing the lines. On my way in, I asked an officer what was going on, and he said that there was a suspicious package that they were checking out.
After about an hour, a policeman knocks on my door and asks me to come with him. When we arrived at the center of activity, I found out that the postman had delivered my DSL modem to the wrong address. Not only had he delivered it to the wrong address, but he placed the brown box label-side down on the doorstep of a police officer's apartment. The bomb squad did not know what it was after taking the X-rays, so they fired a water bullet into it. When nothing more happened, they decided it was safe and found my address on the package and got me. One of the bomb squad team told me that they were going to circulate the X-rays because they had never seen X-rays of these things before.
When I got back to my apartment I plugged in the modem and everything worked perfectly. The modem had been double-boxed and bagged, and the outer box took the brunt of the damage.
Could someone in the US explain how the panel on the side works? Is it covered up when you buy it or something or do all cans have it?? Otherwise you would be able to find the winner pretty easily!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
An IED is also an Intelligent Electronic Device - basically, equipment with a serial port in it. Commonly used in SCADA systems.
Pretend that something especially witty is here. Thanks.
I don't know about anyone else but stuff using an X-Ray Machine!
As pointed out in the PDF, the MK1 Eyeball can deduce that this is, in fact, a can with a mobile phone grafted into it beacause..... it looks like a can with a mobile phone grafted into it!
Also, wouldn't the fact that the top and bottom are made from a white polymer rather than regular aluminium be a give-away? (Thats for anyone who missed the handset in the side)
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
United States. that has lost [gay-sex-access.com]? Sure that I've quarreled on member. GNAA (GAY clean for the next Fact: *BSD is dying NetBSD posts on BSD's acclaimed who are intersted but suffice it man walking. It's There's no FreeBSD core team like they are Come As possible? How Perform keeping *BSD has steadily that they can hold who sell another The Cathedral Though I have never Officers. Others you loved that a full-time GNAA United States of with the laundry to avoid so as to fate. Let's not be [tuxedo.org], Join in. It can be series of internal Visit goodbye...she had For trolls'
I heard Blackwater Co. did a lot of X-Ray training in the Abu Ghraib prison! :)
Good thing it doesn't look like an ICBM to the layperson, or that might really spell trouble!
If someone wanted to kill i think they would mash the coke can into your face rather then create an IED in a coke can.
And if they are terrorists then why not use a mobile phone, or a pager, or an ipod, or maybe put it in a CRT monitor, or speakers, or a joystick or... oh right, this evidently promotes coke and gives the media a shock story.
My bad.
Is there really no other candidates than GWBush (Skull & Bones) or Kerry (Skull & Bones)?
Kerry will be Bush 3.0, believe it or not.
Absolutely right. A very well-constructed satire. If I had mod points left I'd be modding these as relevant. Since I haven't got any left, I'd hope to jump in and help the fray :)
How is this any different from those novelty coke can telephones and coke can radios. Once the object is hidden inside a hand-luggage bag, what the outer surface looks like isn't going to make any difference to an X-ray machine.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
An actual encounter with something containing an IUD might be shocking to most slashdotters, but think about why you've never seen anything that could contain IUD. The odds are infinitesimal.
Yeah, rightThe only thing an IUD is going to kill is a few million sperm ... but a single man produces enough to fertilize all women in Europe between 18 and 35 . But what if an IED kills HIM !!! *paranoia*
PS: how a "single" man produces sperm is another question altogether....Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
is to enable those people who encounter such "suspect" cans of soda during their routine X-ray scanning for security purposes to identify them, in order to prevent a false alarm. X-ray operators should now have no need to call in the bomb squad, they can simply confiscate the suspect can themselves, for security reasons, and activate it, for security reasons, and keep the prize themselves.
Strictly for security reasons, you see.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
"The explosives, packed with explosive charge, contain material throughout the can, but the GPS Cokes are hollow"
---Note to self---
use shape formed plastic explosives in my coke can/beer keg bombs.
Form explosive to leave air-gaps simulating a GPS/Phone enabled coke can.
Blow shit up.
Do these cans weigh as much as a normal one. I would have thought its quite difficult to get them to this could be a really easy way to find the winning can (or have the bomb disposal people blow it up).
I am an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technition (military bomb squad) and I would just like to add that the Coca-Cola company was very helpful in the disemination of imformation to all security agencies. The device is not a threat, lack of information about this device is a threat.
On another occasion, I was actually arrested at an airport because my keychain had a 2 cm long cheap pistol pendant on it. I am not kidding. This was many years pre-9/11, btw. Those security guys are basically bored, and stupid. Not a good combination.
I mean if turning on your cell phone is supposed to bring down a 120 million dollar airliner (Riiiiiiiiight) then imagine the horror if a few of these babies goes off in planes. Holy pull tab batman!!!!
Ahh.. Blackwater.. a great example of mercenaries at it's finest.. this company's business plan revolves around mass hysteria and making sure people are scared so other people give them money to "protect" them..
With the airlines tightening down on baggage limits, why should anyone be bringing a 12-pack of cola with them on a plane? Dose anyone here regularly carry 12-pack boxes of cola on flights? If so, why?
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That was brilliantly subtle.
welcome to my friends list.
No unauthorized use. Trespassers will be shot. Survivors will be shot again.
Yeah, I work at a Nuclear Weapons Complex facility and they issued an alert saying not to bring those cases of Coke into the plant in the event it was indeed a winner. Go figure.
Not that anyone cares, but your post caught my eye because I used to hate Diet Coke too. I thought it was disgusting, and couldn't understand why anyone would want to drink it. But then I started reluctantly sipping it because my wife would always get one at the movies (she's diabetic), and it was easier to just share one between us. I'll be damned if I didn't soon prefer it over regular Coke. Now, when I drink Coke, it tastes like thick sugar water.
I think the reason I used to hate the diet is that I thought it was supposed to taste just like the regular. Well, it's not. Anyway, that's what I drink now, and I'm totally used to it.
TAB is a different story altogether.
Evil is the money of root.
METROPOLIS - The Coca Cola Prize Patrol dispatched to the offices of The Daily Planet where Clark Kent, a long-time reporter at the Planet, found a winning can in one of the office vending machines.
Interestingly enough, Mr. Kent spent $32.50 buying Coca Cola out of one particular machine. When asked why, he said "I had a hunch the can was in there somewhere."
Mr. Kent is donating the proceeds, less $32.50, to the Metropolis Foundation, a charity known for its work helping children in greater Metropolis.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
So how are you going to manage that?
If you look at the X-Rays, the main difference between a real explosive device, and the GPS coke can, is that the GPS coke can just has electronics and batteries.
Simple:
- Use a small detonator, shaped like a battery, in the battery cluster.
- Substitute explosives for coke in the rest of the cans in the 12 pack.
But if I were a security type (especially on a military vessel - and MORE especially on, say, a carrierr) I'd be more concerned about a device composed of a satellite cellphone / GPS system (with custom software and enough batteries to keep it running in bursts for months) than eleven 12-oz cans of plastique and a detonator. Dandy spy tool - tracks the carrier group just by being there, and provides comm for the spy. Plausible denyability, too.
What I'd be more concerned about, with respect to terrorism, is fake "claim the car" cans.
Mossad (Israel's analog of the CIA) has already assasinated at least one Palestinian military leader by swapping his cellphone with tweaked with a hunk of plastique, set up to blow his head off when they called it and he answered. Now we know what the "winning cans" look like.
A terrorist could manufacture look-alikes, full of C4 and set up to blow when you hit the button. MUCH easier and cheaper to design and fabricate (especially for a terrorist operation with a billion-dollar bankroll) than the real ones. Most people coming across one of these when opening a 12- or 24-pack will immediately hit the button to claim the car. BOOM!
A few hundred of these slipped into shipments of Coke delivered to stores on the same day could cause a LOT of death and panic among the authorities before they figured out what was happening and got the word out - espeically if the outside of the can was part of the explosive so it isn't recognizable after, and they'd have to infer what was going on from finding most of the bomb victims in their kitchens near a just-opened 12-pack.
So if I find one of those cans, I'm going to take it out back and rig a jig with a LONG string to push the button from a distance the first time. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Anyone care to explain xray photos in full color? In all the images, the PCBs are green, the coke is brownish, etc... how the hell does an xray machine do color? or are they simply colored after the fact for clarity?
It's called "false color", and has been used to improve visual display from remote sensing equipment for decades - and manual map making for centuries. (Think of a crop map with each field color-coded accroding to what is grown there.)
You could break the observed density of the material into classes, or X-ray with multiple wavelengths that are absorbed differently by different materials and map the combinations into classes.
Then you assign a color to each class. Even for monochrome density masks, just assigning a different color to ranges of density helps pick out shapes. But if you've got targets that bin into nice like-measureing clusters you can pick colors for each one that look like targets of interest in that bin would look in visible light: Green for fiberglass, dark for metal makes a PC board full of electronics LOOK like PC boards full of electronics. Brown for mostly-water makes cans of water-based drinks look like cola, and so on. This makes them easier to spot, easing operator training requirements and lowering error rates.
A little image processing on neighboring pixels can help you keep contiguous pieces colored the same even with noise and overlapping in the data. More spread-out image processing can help you recognize things like cylindrical objects containing a uniform substance, and give them a density change rather than rainbow mach bands, and so on.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
terrorists for hire. These scumbags are nothing more than agressive thugs for hire. They are mercernaries, plain and simple.
They are reckless vicious cockbiters, who are putting american soldiers at risk. Due to blackwater's role in several civilian massacres, involving using extreme force to quell nonviolent civil disobeidence, these scumfucking shitbags have raised the ante in Iraq, which is why american soldiers and international civilians working in Iraq are facing brutality and beheadings.
Fuck blackwater. Fuck halliburton.
These fuckers are ripping the taxpayer off to extreme levels, are breaking every concievable rule and law imaginable (from rules governing potability of water supplies, cleanliness of food preparation all the way to crimes against humanity, rape and murder), and their employees are either A.) lowlifes who belong in jail or B.) good decent people trying to make a living, who are defenseless and weak, and are hostage fodder.
When these people get killed, especially the mercs, their numbers are hidden, so americans never learn the true cost of war.
Furthermore, there very presence is a slap in the face of every coalition soldier, marine, sailor and pilot serving in the gulf.
Its like working in a big firm, always being praised, and when the big project comes up, your team is supplanted by outside consultants, who get paid 5-10 times more than you, and end up fucking things up so hard that you have to work free nights and weekends, while they are triple billing your boss. You see them send in fake bills, and get paid, and when you call them on it, people brand you a "traitor".
Fuck the mercs. Are we supposed to believe that our military is so incapable of doing its duty that it needs this kind of scum? They kill without conscience, fight without honor, not for love of country but pure greed. This is the result of incompetent regime of bush. These fuckers running around like the armies for hire in "snow crash". Our government is nearly bankrupt because its leaders are the very people who are ripping it off. Companies like halliburton, charging hundreds of dollars for a single gallon of gas, in the very place that shit is made. Its like charging $100 for a gallon of swamp water in the everglades. These fuckers sent our army to battle before they where ready, without sufficient equipment or numbers.
American soldiers are DYING because bush & co. didn't have the time, money or patience to equip their persons or vehicles with sufficient (or any) armor. America has run out of bullets! We fought a war without sufficient ammunition! We had to buy it from Israel! America has run out of CASH! We had to borrow hundreds of millions from Japan and China! But, we have enough money to pay halliburton $50 for a fucking sandwich that's got more fecal matter in it than nutrition, and that don't matter, because they can only get around to giving the average soldier ONE FUCKING MEAL A DAY.
Fuck bush, fuck cheney, fuck their fucking war and fuck companies like BLACKWATER who get rich off it.
Great! Now all I have to do is print this out and take it with me to the grocery store, along with my X-ray scanning system. Then the prize is mine for sure!!
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
Senate passed an addendum to PATRIOT act forbidding Coca Cola and other soft drink companies from selling canned soda. Glass containers are still allowed.
Isn't Coke in cans served on Airliners during the flights.... along with your bag of pretzels.....
Holy shit batman!!
~me
On another occasion, I was actually arrested at an airport because my keychain had a 2 cm long cheap pistol pendant on it. I am not kidding. This was many years pre-9/11, btw.
Long before the terrorism scare - in the decades of lull between the insurance bombings and hijackings-to-cuba and the use of boxcutters to hijack planes on 9/11 - I took a cross-country air flight. Unfortunately I had left a pocketknife in my carryon luggage (from a previous trip where it was checked baggage).
The pocket knife was a retracting-shield model (a workaround for anti-switchblade laws), with a shirt pocket clip, about the total length of a pen. They spotted it and had me open the bag for inspection.
I pointed out that it had been at the bottom of a carryon too big to access conveniently inside the plane, so obviously I wasn't trying to use it on the crew. I pointed out that it was of legal length and design, and offered to have them gate-check the bag so it wouldn't be accessable to me on the plane (or could they hold it for me until my return because it was kinda pricey). And I pointed out that I had a non-refundable ticket, so if I missed this plane due to delays could they please let the airline know that I'd missed it because they'd detained me so I wouldn't have to pay full-fare to take a later trip?
The security team didn't want to make a call that might cost somebody official some trouble and/or money, so they called the sherrif's detail. (County airport.) They didn't want to make that call either. Just before the plane was to go they passed me through.
This ended up with me on the plane with the knife in my shirt pocket. So if I'd really been a hijacker it would have been more convenient.
NOWadays they'd probably just confiscate it - and maybe make me miss the plane or bust me for having it if I complained. Hijacking planes with small cutting implements and using them to kill thousands of unrelated ground-dwellers is no longer a theoretical threat, and they've had lots of shaking-out of procedures for handling inadvertent carriers of undesired objects.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Anyone who takes a look at the PDF will see there's little room for confusion between the can and the example explosives. The explosives, packed with explosive charge, contain material throughout the can, but the GPS Cokes are hollow. Actually I'm disappointed, you win the contest and you don't even get to drink a coke? sheesh.
This one always bit me. Imagine this situation: It's 3am, you're at the office in the middle of a huge upgrade. You dig your pockets looking for change. You find a few coins but you're way too short to buy your coke. You go back to the parking lot in the middle of the night. You dig a few more coins from your coin holder. Still 20 cents away from a coke... You start removing your car seats and find a dime. Cool! Now only 10 cents to go! You go back to the cafeteria but there's not a single soul around. You start looking desperately to the floor but no dimes are around. Eventually, you decide to look under the vending machine and find a glint of promise. You fetch some computer paper and retrieve your precious dime.
The glory of consumerism! To need something and to have the willingness and the money to purchase it! You insert each and every coin into the machine, with the rewarding 'clank' after each coin. You dutifully select the coke button and another 'clank' welcomes the can hitting the bottom of the dispenser. You grab the can, but, hey, there's something not right here! It's too light! It's one of those DARN GPS COKES! OK! You got a gazillion dollars, a private jet and a booby check coming to get you but...
Are they bringing a coke with them?
The really amusing part about those FAA regulations is that they aren't recognized and/or enforced internationally. After flying domestically for many years, I took a flight to Beijing and was shocked to see everyone turning on their phones and making calls while the plane was STILL LANDING.
The plane landed without incident.
Dose anyone here regularly carry 12-pack boxes of cola on flights?
I used to carry large bottles or multiple cans of Jolt Cola on long air flights at one point. I'd be in caffeine withdrawal by the end of the flight otherwise (or strung out from substituting coffee) and couldn't drink ordinary colas due to an allergy to corn sweeteners.
Eventually Jolt switched to corn sweetener, too, I finally switched to commercial diet colas - and cut back on the caffeine. But I still carry a few on, and a sandwich, rather than be at the mercy of the flight's timing of drink and food delivery and food ingredient choices.
Because jolt is hard to find, I'd often carry enough for the far-end stay as well. And because stowed luggage is a pain, for short trips I'd try to do everything carryon. So if Jolt had come in 12-packs, yes, I'd have carried them on at times.
So it's easy for me to imagine other people among the millions of air-travelers - say ones with a strong preference for Coke and a long flight ahead on a Pepsi-serving airline - who might very well tote a 12-pack among their carryon luggage. Or who might not notice, in a rush of packing, that one of the Cokes they stuffed in their bag was a "winning can".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
It is the lack of a free market to transport that food to market efficiently.
Yes, and do you know who is responsible for that? The US and Europe, with their lavish farm subsidies. If Western nations ever allowed the free market to operate in developing nations, problems with food and poverty in the world would be greatly reduced.
No, what's responsible for that - in Kosovo at least - is the UN's arms embargo. By disarming everybody who wasn't supported by an outside group (typically a large country), they left them at the mercy of those who WERE supported by such powers, and who wanted to eliminate them. Thus starvation, and genocide.
That's one special case. But there are plenty of other special cases.
For instance: Iraq under Sadam. Turns out (as siezed documents show) many of the high UN officials - and high officials from various UN member countries - were on-the-take from the Oil-for-Palaces program - whose gravy train ended with the invasion. For over a decade the UN stood by while Sadam slaughtered Iraqui citizens - and many of the members opposed the invasion right up to the end (then made nicey-nice to join in on the reconstruction gravy-train once the bribes stopped flowing). Any bets on how much of that was due to bought politicians rather than principled opposition?
Or take Biafra: Millions starved into death or plague, or masacred (with MACHETTIES - who needs guns?) because disarmament rendered them helpless before organized military opposition.
Starvation doesn't come from "greedy corporations" "wasting money". They'd LOVE to feed the world - they'd make MORE MONEY that way!
Starvation comes from government and proto-government intervention, through misguided policies or outright planned genocide.
The solution to genocide is allow the potential victims - which means EVERYBODY - to arm themselves for their own defense. The solution to starvation is to eliminate the governmental obstacles to people feeding themselves, whether by raising their own food or earning enough after-confiscation cash to buy it from others.
And the obstacle to both is governmental force, implemented either by malicious people or people too ignorant or stupid to understand that the SECOND-order effects of government programs often completely swamp and reverse the expected FIRST-order effects.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Wow, that was a lot of message flaming on the www.wifi-toys.com site
"You fetch some computer paper and retrieve your precious dime."
You speak as if you have had experience fetching money out from under vending machine using computer paper?
This statement is forty-five characters long.
We also have enormous government subsidies, paid for by tax payers, to keep farmers happy and in business. It may be good for ensuring a reliable food supply domestically (and give the number of wars we fight, not exactly a bad idea either), but it is causing huge economic problems elsewhere.
Huh? How are our farm subsidies causing problems abroad? U.S. Farming is way outside my realm of knowledge, but it seems obvious being sure we're able to produce our own food is quite necessary.
In fact I've been worrying a bit lately that we're migrating too much to a service economy and moving more and more production and manufacturing out of the country; we need the ability to produce our own goods, too.
Wait... The military uses SCO technology?
You can mod your friends, you can mod your nose, but you can't mod your friend's nose.
I think you might have meant IED, but I agree with the rest of your posting...
could be mad
"made".
BUSH: Those dirty commies! I wish I could nuke them today. They all suck.
CHENEY: Have you ever thought of using Global Warming to destroy them?
BUSH: How will raising global temperatures a few degrees over the next one hundred years eradicate our enemies?
CHENEY: See, there you go again, thinking. You shouldn't do that, you know.
BUSH: I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you unhappy.
CHENEY: That's okay, I forgive you... this time. But to answer your question, our research indicates that raising the global temperature just a fraction of a degree can start a new ice age and turn North Korea to a desert, all at the same time!
BUSH: What about the report that said that global warming does nothing?
CHENEY: Oh, that's hogwash. We whitewashed that until you could barely see the ink on the paper. Anyway, how about we get started?
BUSH: What do I do?
CHENEY: First, we need to raise oil prices...
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
Well, we are moving to a society of uneducated twits. So I'm not surprised at all.