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T-Ray Camera Sees Through Clothes, Preserves Privacy
Quite a few readers are sending in stories about ThruVision's products, slated to be demonstrated in Britain next week, that are claimed to use Terahertz radiation ("T-rays") to detect foreign objects under clothing, without revealing body details, from a distance of 25 meters and while the subject is in motion. T-rays lie on the electromagnetic spectrum between infrared and microwaves, and are the subject of lively research efforts worldwide. ThruVision says it developed its products in cooperation with the European Space Agency.
Last year they installed a device at Airport Schiphol in Amsterdam, that can also scan through your clothes to see what's beneath it. Read the article [url=http://www.dutchamsterdam.nl/174-amsterdam-airport-body-scanning]here[/url]. Some articles on the internet claim that "The Security Scan scanner is based on a technology that uses millimeterwaves. The waves will persist over clothing, and are reflected by the skin. Also other materials, such as plastic, metal, wood, iron, ceramics, etc. reflect the waves. This will help to detect suspicious objects." More information can also be found here.
To repeat what others have said, requires education, to challenge it , requires brains.
Stupid things getting confiscated happens a lot. I've accidentally brought scissors onto a plane while my girlfriend had make-up and beauty cream stolen from her. (It wasn't in the mandatory plastic bag (don't see how a plastic bag makes make-up less dangerous though)). By focussing on too many things, security actually drops because it allows more error for more dangerous things to get on. They wasted so much time arguing with my girlfriend they didn't actually catch what was in my jacket as it went through the scanner.
The Unicode standard is over 20 years old. Why does Slashdot not support it?
It's a really unfortunate choice of names, this "T-ray." Inevitably, it wants to make a person associate these waves with x-rays. Photons are photons, but as far as these guys go healthwise, it's pretty certain they'll have more in common with radio or microwaves than x-rays. Heck, the reason they call them x-rays and gamma rays in the first place is because they're in the regime where it makes sense to talk about photons as particles, rather than waves. And they call them "radio waves" and "microwaves" because THEY are down in the more wave-like regime. Just call it "millimeter wave" and be done with it, before we get people claiming they're getting ARS from T-ray devices.
(Let us not forget that a single terahertz-range photon carries about 4meV of energy. That's little-m milli, not big-M mega. These guys might cause some heating, but they're not going to be ionizing many atoms in your body.)
People taking their own drinks on planes is a real threat ...to the profits of Airport Operators who make A LOT of money selling duty-free retail space.