Slashdot Mirror
Man Tries To Use Explosive Device On US Flight
reporter writes with news that a Nigerian man allegedly attempted to set off a small explosive device — possibly a firecracker — on a Delta Airbus 330 airliner bound for Detroit yesterday. "There was a pop and then smoke wafted through the cabin. A passenger then climbed over several seats, lunged across the aisle and managed to subdue the suspect, the eyewitnesses said. The Nigerian man was placed in a headlock before being dragged up to the first class cabin. Passenger Zeina Seagal told CNN that after the suspect was collared and parts of his burning pants were removed, flight attendants quickly grabbed fire extinguishers and doused the fire at his seat." The man has claimed links to al-Qaeda, though the investigation hasn't confirmed that yet. (They're not taking anything for granted given that his pants were literally on fire.)
The new rules are hilarious however:
- Not allowed to have any items or anything on your lap for the last 1 hour of flight
- Not allowed to go to toilet during that time either
- Crew doesn't tell about cities or landmarks so passengers don't know where they are flying (it's so hard to time that on clock)
What is that going to improve?
Crazy loner sets off home made firecracker on plane and lights pants on fire.
He was coming to the States to deliver my $40,000,000US.
"The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old......They literally know nothing." - Ben Rhodes
Oh, this is wonderful. Now we will probably be strip searched and forced to wear airline clothing. Why not just reconfigure planes to be more like cargo vehicles and put all passengers into a coma and pack and transport them like packages? :(
Our service today includes a light snack, complimentary beverages and a weenie roast in coach class.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
It did not sound like a firecracker in the latest reports I have been hearing on the radio. Latest: it was a powder, plus a liquid from a syringe. My blogger buddy remembered something I forgot, there is a way to ignite thermite with a liquid (potassium permanganate and glycerol? sorry for forgetting), but no idea what this was yet.
Home of The Suki Series
... that the plane landed in Havana, the hijacker got off the plane, and everyone went around their business or it landed in Tel-Aviv, the plane on the ground, and the hijackers shot/arrested with one or two dead passengers that the hijackers had killed to show they were "serious". The passengers sat in their seats and waited it out.
Those were the days when hijackers could depend on the passivity of passengers.
With planes being flown into buildings, passengers are no longer passive. It's not the TSA that keeps planes safe, it's the passengers and crew that will beat the snot out of the latest Al-Q "martyr."
--
BMO
The message is clear: Don't fuck with people flying in to Detroit. We have very little to lose. I can see that scenario playing out now:
"I will blow up the plane!"
"Jackass, I'm *willingly* leaving a place with universal health care, low crime, and pot on every street corner to go *home* to a city with crushing illiteracy, high crime, and an epic unemployment level. Do you think I really give a flying fuck about dying?"
I just wonder how many people were uncomfortable with the extra federal attention the flight got when it landed =)
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
From the desk of Barrister Kofi Kukukuku,
Ministry of Finance,
Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Dear ,
I hope this message finds you well. I am in urgent need of a representative in you country
to assist with the transfer of $10 USD Million for legal assistance. The son of the deposed
dictator Silas Kofi Abdulmutallab who was assassinated in a violent coup in 2007. Is accused
of attempted bombing of a commercial flight from Amsterdam and is being held Ilegally by the
United States., who is demanding immediate bribe of $4 USD million for his release.. For your kind
assistance in this matter we are prepared to pay $5 USD million for simple transfer to an account
in your country, to prevent further taxation by corrupt officials. To assent, simply reply soonest
with the following information:
Your bank account number;
your address and phone numer;
your national idenification number for security pruposes.
I look forward to your kind assistance.
Sincerely,
Barrister Kofi Kukukuku
Or, it's some basic cultural misunderstanding where he thought it was appropriate to celebrate with firecrackers on Xmas. If this the biggest terrorist threat of the year then America can sleep soundly.
What better way to weed out possible terrorist than strip searching everyone who does not prominently display a $0.10 pewter cross.
BRILLIANT!
I don't suppose you actually work for the TSA? Sounds like you were born for that career.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
And there was a great big fizzing sound as his device failed to accomplish it's task with was either a detonation or an incendiary intended to burn the plane out of the sky.
Since it was in his, ahem, pants or pocket he burned himself where it hurts effectively removing himself from the gene pool either by a lifetime of incarceration or more directly by incineration.
You'd like to think, ouch that's gotta hurt but then who has sympathy for someone attempting to kill other people with explosives or flames?
In a way you want the lone wolf jihadies to come out of the woodwork and fail since they illuminate their otherwise low key network connections. It's sorta like a flash light in the darkness of terror plots by individuals or states.
Mandatory bacon sandwiches before boarding the plane. Everybody wins.
Why isn't the TSA strip searching Muslim males? That's easy:
1. They couldn't identify which men are Muslim or not. It's not like there's a big sign written on each Muslim saying "I am a Muslim" (and if there were, a reasonably smart terrorist wouldn't wear it when they went to bomb a plane).
2. The First Amendment of the Constitution protects the free exercise of religion, Islam included. Treating members of a particular faith as second-class citizens would definitely violate that. And yes, there are Muslims citizens of the US, some of them currently serving the country in Iraq and Afghanistan, who are more loyal to the US and what it stands for than you are.
3. At least 99.9% of Muslim men aren't terrorists. You're arguing for strip searching about 800 million people in order to find a few thousand people. Your odds are only slightly better than strip searching the 99.99% of Christian men who aren't terrorists to find the 0.01% who are (e.g. Tim McVeigh or members of the Real IRA).
I am officially gone from
Have you noticed a pattern to most Terrorism attempts? They tend to fail.
The plot that hit the USS Cole started with a boat so loaded with explosives that it sank before it reached an American warship.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
>2. The First Amendment of the Constitution [...]Treating members of a particular faith as second-class citizens would definitely violate that
Right. So we treat EVERYONE like second-class citizens so it is fair.
Not that I disagree with you, I am just pissed about the whole plane security thing. Typical reaction? They will spent hundreds of million dollars to perform background checks on passengers to see if they have ever attended a fireworks show. Passengers wearing clothing depicting fireworks or who have laptops with a fireworks screen saver will be banned. If the "firecracker terrorist" wore an earring, earrings will be banned from planes. You get the idea- a bunch of pretty meaningless steps to further ruin air travel, delay passengers, violate privacy, push prices up, all so people will feel "safe" again.
http://xkcd.com/651/
Granted, the weapon of choice is a bit different...
Mandatory bacon sandwiches before boarding the plane. Everybody wins.
Accompanied by a snifter of fine cognac. Or at least a shot of cheap vodka. No swallow - no fly.
Damn, I'd even pay a couple of bucks for that kind of security...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
seriously? just because it wasn't successful by your standards you are ruling out Al-Qaeda? they are not perfect. they fail just like everyone else. they do however learn very fast from their mistakes and try again. there is no reason to believe this wasn't them just because it wasn't successful in bringing down the plane. it was successful in showing them how to get certain components onboard. it was successful in showing how to assemble them onboard. it was successful in showing how we react to their new plan. i'm sure it was successful in accomplishing any number of their objectives. sometimes they just send people out to test reactions and responses to attempted attacks. not all actions are full on real attacks, sometimes they are just testing our lines.
i'm not saying that is was for sure Al-Qaeda, but i'm not stupid enough to rule them out just because it didn't fit my idea of what a successful Al-Qaeda attack should be. they only have to be successful in bringing down the plane once, we have to be successful in stopping them every time.
what has me is how this guy was allowed to land ALIVE. i for one will not take prisoners when somebody trys to blow me up in the sky.
The perpetrator is claiming he received the explosives from Al-Qaeda in Jemen. He did visit Jemen before boarding this flight, so that is quite likely the source.
Also, it was a binary explosive: he was trying to inject liquid chemicals into solid chemicals strapped to his legs. They exploded mildly, but mostly set him on fire - that was were the bang and fire came from. Right then a Dutch passenger jumped over a few chairs and subdued him. Although I've read reports that the terrorist was "sitting dazed in his chair" - he'd probably expected to die right there, and when he didn't he was in shock.
Binary explosives are a bit hard to mix and if you don't get it right, you don't get a big bang. Also, it looks like there was no containing vessel so the bang could have been like gunpowder in the open: a big flash but apart from that, nothing much.
I'm wondering that kind of chemicals they were using though, because he was checked by security and nothing showed up on the scanners. He probably had the nitrogen-rich stuff strapped to his legs and harmless-looking stuff in his handluggage.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
So every muslim that still wants to fly the plane is a terrorist. You're not thinking this through ;)
Expect the Authorities to milk this event for what it's worth when it comes to justifying mandatory pre-flight anal probing sessions, more mass surveillance and the outlawing of encryption they're not sure how to crack.
If it works, why not? Are you going to claim some kind of Bacon allergy?
Surely people on Slashdot won't dismiss a functional idea because it makes you laugh?
No, people are dismissing that "functional idea" because it's born out of the most disgusting type of xenophobia.
I thought Apple had fixed this problem?
Bet this guy wishes he'd bought an Android.
Have you forgotten the second wave of London bombings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/21_July_2005_London_bombings)? These guys were really bunch of stupid incompetents.
It's important to remember that the goal here is not to bring down planes or buildings - it's to create turmoil and terror. Simple actions like this cause millions to billions of dollars of cost to our economy for the investment of a can of lighter fluid and a firecracker. Because of one case of semi-successful action by one clown millions of us will now be subject to ineffective additional screening, more TSA invasions of privacy and general police state tactics, more delays. I don't have the answer - but I know the ROI from a terrorist perspective is outstanding.
If this was really an al-Qaeda plot - then why did he not succeed in crashing the airplane ?
Because they had to depend on a suicidal human for the final part. And not all parts of Al Qaida (which is in practice a funding network for otherwise disparate Islamic themed terrorist groups) are uniformly competent. Having said that, this guy might well be someone who got scammed ("You want to strike a blow against the Great Satan? And you got real American dollars? We'll be whatever terrorist network you want us to be, buddy! Here's your top quality suicide pants! I use them myself!"). The so-called "lone wolf" who isn't connected to obvious terrorist groups.
Are you really trying to convince me that they are a bunch of incompetents who just manage to cause a little damage but that is all ?
Most terrorists, like most other criminals, are not smart people. Smart people don't tend to try and blow themselves up.
You realize of course that this is a relatively low bar. For some Senators, a fork would be "quite sophisticated".
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Binary explosives are a bit hard to mix
That's an understatement.
The TSA itself has admitted that it is nearly impossible to pull off:
The preparation of these bombs is very much more complex than tossing together several bottles-worth of formula and lighting it up. In fact, in recent tests, a National Lab was asked to formulate a test mixture and it took several tries using the best equipment and best scientists for it to even ignite. That was with a bomb prepared in advance in a lab setting. A less skilled person attempting to put it together inside a secure area or a plane is not a good bet. You have to have significant uninterrupted time with space and other requirements that are not easily available in a secured area of an airport.
2.04.2008 More on the Liquid Rules: Why We Do the Things We Do
That's right -the TSA has admitted that binary explosives are essentially impossible to pull off, and yet they still insist on on the totally pointless liquid restrictions.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Really, on what planet does that exist? Right now I'm booked for a flight from Pennsylvania to Colorado. Both involve a layover in Chicago.
My round trip cost for the flight was about $200. The first half is actually direct, and will only take me about 4-5 hours. The return trip has a 2 hour delay due to the layover.
Now lets compare that to what Amtrak offered me.
Same departure time/date. I would leave PA on Sunday and arrive in Denver on.... Tuesday. So that means I'll HAVE to purchase the rooms. (27 hours of travel time if you ignore the transfer delays)
Round trip cost for Amtrak with the necessary rooms? $800+ Not to ignore the fact that I'd spend nearly 2.25 days travelling alone. If I were to drive, GoogleMaps puts the travel time at 22 hours. So I could rent a car for a week, drive there in less time, and actually have three other people travel with me for no additional cost. The cost on Amtrak would be $2400 before tax to take 3 people from PA to CO.
Trains are good for sightseeing tours for a couple at most. A family would be expensive beyond belief. Better to fly and then rent a vehicle (since you have to rent a vehicle on the other end for the train anyway.
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I've done the same thing a few times and there are a number of problems.
The first is it's one thing to spend over night or most of a day traveling by train instead of most of a day "flying" (flying, say, from NYC to Palm Beach consists of approximately 3-4 hours of flying, but a little over two hours of "getting there, checking in, going through security, making sure you're way early due to paranoia, etc", umpteen hours of layovers, and at least thirty minutes of baggage claims, plus another thirty to sixty minutes of getting out of the air port and getting to your destination), but generally with Amtrak it's a little of both, multiplied.
I've taken the train from Palm Beach to NYC, it's around 26-30 hours, depending on the precise train you take and how much it's delayed. In practice, that's most of two days, plus a night.
Then there's the cost. A bedroom (which is what you describe, roomettes don't include showers - and the "toilet" in them isn't something you'd want to use given it's not enclosed) generally costs around $500-1,000 per night on top of the regular fares. Roomettes are a little cheaper, $300-500 per night, generally, but are even less comfortable and, like I said, you wouldn't want to use the toilet and you have to share a shower. Again though, you add fares to that. You can forgo both and sit in the standard seats, which are certainly more comfortable than airline seats, for something more competitive with airlines, but for a minimum of 26 hours?
Rail travel could be cheaper and could actually compete with the airlines. If Amtrak and CSX et al improved the track, including engaging in a program of electrification (which they should do anyway), and started using lighter, lower cost, rolling stock, they could run faster trains at lower cost, which in turn would increase passenger numbers exponentially and mean they could use the same rolling stock for more trips. Palm Beach to NYC is only 1,200 miles. At an average of 100mph, which is hardly rocket speed outside of the US, that trip could be done in 12-15 hours (depending on number of stops.) I think a huge contingent of people would be more than willing to go by train if you could get in a train in the morning and get off at your destination before the end of the day. Travel for ten hours in confusion and discomfort, or travel for fifteen in comfort. Not the world's hardest choice.
Alas, outside of the North East, I seriously think Amtrak sees itself as a state subsidized version of a Heritage Railway. In England, there Heritage Railways are limited to 25mph because they originally operated under a nineteenth century law making it easy to create independent railways that was never updated. In the US, Amtrak runs most of its East Coast trains at 25-30mph outside of the DC to Boston portion because the sodding track doesn't support faster speeds.
And then people turn around and complain that trains are obsolete and we shouldn't fund (and fix) Amtrak because railways are inherently slow and inflexible, while the French, Japanese, and even the post-Beeching British, scratch their heads and wonder what the hell happened to a country that was built by the railroads.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
To advocate that idea seriously, it's not enough to be an anti-Muslim bigot: you have to be anti-Semitic as well.
Yeah, but nearly 99.9% of terrorists are Muslim.
By that logic we should strip search anyone who breathes, after all 100% of terrorists breathe air.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Who needs success? Plans are enough! Just plans is how we got those silly no-liquids rules. And on top of that a week of highly disrupted air traffic. Terrorism is that easy. I'd almost call it dead easy but in that case no death involved.
That's right -the TSA has admitted that binary explosives are essentially impossible to pull off, and yet they still insist on on the totally pointless liquid restrictions.
Philippine Airlines Flight 434 - one passenger killed and hole in the aircraft fuselage by just such a bomb.
After all the billions of dollars spent on TSA, great delays and annoyances to customers, fictitious work of thousands of employees, and the unfathomed damage to the airline industry, the one time when an actual terrorist tries to smuggle explosives on board and all this charade fails spectacularly.
The response? Add more of the same ineffective measures.
Thank goodness for the incompetence of the terrorist.
That's right -the TSA has admitted that binary explosives are essentially impossible to pull off, and yet they still insist on on the totally pointless liquid restrictions.
That's likely because, as was demonstrated by this incompetent in miniature, even an improperly-mixed binary explosive, if in sufficient quantity, can cause a fire in the cabin that will compromise the safety of the passengers -- depressurization, fumes from the fire, fumes from upholstery, etc.
The passengers will fight the fool to his death.
People do strange things under stress. They do not always do the right things.
The aircraft is most vulnerable to the suicide bomber in take-off and landing. Passengers and crew are belted in.
The plane can be pitched steeply up. The acceleration is significant.
The bomber may take the window seat.
The party of four from the Sun and Shadows Retirement Home may be seated next. Not Bronco Billy Anderson and The Ranger From San Antonio.
None of this will matter, of course, if the primary explosive device ignites within a heart beat or so.
I have wondered idly if it would be worth trying to ignite a magnesium laptop case - or whether a potent explosive or incendiary could be impregnated into ordinary clothing.
Hydrogen Peroxide and Chapatti flour again then?
Ramadan feasts and belly dancers.
Wow, that's pretty stupid. Attackers who are captured alive can give further information, while dead ones can't. Maybe he was a lone nut, but maybe not. But I'm sure making you feel like Jack Bauer is totally worth not potentially preventing other attacks.
Have you noticed a pattern to most Terrorism attempts? They tend to fail.
bin Laden's mates bought some loser a plane ticket for a few thousand dollars and we then impose restrictions that will cost billions of dollars over the next years and assist with driving more airlines into bankruptcy.
And you call that a failure?
Al Qaeda is not, as I understand it, a real entity. There's no board of directors, no "Department of Bringing Down Aeroplanes", no CTO. No organizational structure whatsoever. The term itself is supposed to have originated at the CIA.
The way to look at it instead is a term analogous to "Silicon Valley". The is a common thread ("A united Arab superstate/Making money through the advancement of computer technology"), there are the sources of funds (Osama Bin Laden/numerous Venture Capitalists), and then there are the numerous operations themselves. For every 9/11, there's a hundred shoe bombers. For every Apple Computer, there's a hundred Pets.coms.
Pants On Fire Guy was an idiot who wanted to bring down a plane in the cause of striking at the infidels and thus helping bring about an Arab Superstate. That's all the label means. That's all PoFG meant by invoking it. PoFG is no more an employee of Al Qaeda than Greg McLemore (who?) was an employee of Silicon Valley.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
From the vague and incompetent description by the news media, the explosive device sounds like Kinepak or something similar. This is a little tube filled with ammonium nitrate, aluminum powder, plus proprietary stuff; to which you take a tube of red liquid (nitromethane and dye) and pour in the top. Eventually when the liquid soaks all the way through, you have a cap-sensitive blasting agent that's about as strong as dynamite when in a confined place. There's plenty of room for "operator error", though, as this material has to be handled properly if you want it to work. And it needs the right type of blasting cap. But even if he did everything right, I don't think it's powerful enought to bring down a jet unless it hit something critical.
The sad thing is, these pathetic incompetent terrorists are going to be responsible for causing billions of dollars to spent on extra airport security and many, many lifetimes of time will be wasted in stupid delays.
Some incompetent terrorists tries to blow up the plane, but can't build a proper electronic detonator that a 10th grader could solder together? Now we all have to be humiliated by taking our shoes off.
Some incompetent wanna-be terrorists think about a liquid bomb because they saw it in the movie Die Hard 3? Now millions of Americans have to buy overpriced beverages and/or die of thirst. Not to mention that the world's best chemists don't know a reasonable way to make a liquid bomb actually freakin work.
And now, some useless waste of space terrorist doesn't build a proper bomb using over the counter ingredients like fertilizer/diesel fuel or tannerite. (both are so easy to get that a 10th grader could order either of those explosives). No, the idiot tries to blow up an airliner with what sounds like a gunpowder bomb. And despite only managing to burn his own pants off, undoubtedly some new round of draconian security measures will kill many lifetimes of wasted time at security checkpoints.
Fact is, the United States has killed far more of it's citizens through reacting to the actions of terrorists than terrorists have ever harmed.
... flying while wearing pants will no longer be permitted.
Have gnu, will travel.
In the line of trains: China just opened a line from Guangzhou to Wuhan, almost 1100 km, travel time is now under 3 hours, similar to flying. There are nine stops on the route, trains run at 350 km/h with top speed of almost 400 km/h. It's the fastest high-speed link in the world now. And a ticket costs something like RMB500 (USD 73), eight times the cost of a normal train ticket (10-11 hour trip) and a little less than a plane ticket.
With such a system you could do your route in like yours in about 6 hours.
Check-in for Chinese trains is also still simple: buy a ticket (preferably using cash), walk through a metal detector while your bag is scanned in an x-ray device, and walk on to your train. Very efficient. And that way easily competitive with airliners.
One of the things I rather miss in the UK is the whole train travel experience. Here's how it works:
1. The US.
Now, the Chinese experience sounds better. But here's what I had to do on British Rail. Now, British Rail was an awful, nationalized, mess full of everything bad you associate with nationalized industries. It had been ripped apart in the 1960s by the road lobby, and from then until privatization was heavily underfunded and everything was constantly under the threat of closure or reduction. So, this is Crap by the standards it could have been. Also, this was during a time when Britain was suffering real terrorism from people who couldn't be screened out via passport checks.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Well, it turns out he really is a son of a prominent nigerian banker. I'm not making this up :)
These guys are not stupid, if they wanted to do it they would succeed.
Huh? If these guys were smart they wouldn't be using violence as a purported means to achieve their ends.
Only the brain-dead use political violence, or they do so not to achieve what they claim to want, but rather because they like killing people.
Just ask the Basque, recently celebrating a half century of killing people in the name of an independent homeland they are no closer to now than they were decades ago. Just ask the Tamils. Just ask the Palestinians. Just ask the Catholics in Northern Ireland.
Political violence can get you there eventually, but winning the lottery can make you rich too, and that doesn't make it a good retirement plan.
Meanwhile, India somehow managed to liberate itself from British rule without decades of senseless terrorism. It's almost as if there is another way, a better way, that doesn't involve an endless cycle of posturing monkeys thumping their chests and splattering collateral damage all over the landscape.
So don't confuse al Qaeda--or their co-dependent partners in violence who run the US government--with anyone intelligent.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
It is funny how many smart slashdot geeks forget their conditional probabilities - 99.9% of Muslims may not be terrorists but 99% of terrorists trying to blow up planes are most probably Muslims. Ergo, by searching Muslims you have a higher risk of catching the terrorist rather than searching, lets say, Buddhists who board the plane. These people will also certainly have a tendency of being agitated before the flight therefore careful screening of passengers with cameras a-la casino security against cheaters plus pattern recognition software a la "lie to me" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie_to_Me) could help screen many potential threats.
Rail travel could be cheaper and could actually compete with the airlines. If Amtrak and CSX et al improved the track, including engaging in a program of electrification (which they should do anyway), and started using lighter, lower cost, rolling stock,
I don't disagree with most of what you wrote, but I have to comment on this segment. First, regarding "lighter, lower cost rolling stock" there's a huge perception that the Acela service on the NEC corridor sucks because they train is too heavy, and in turn the train is too heavy because of FRA safety regs. Yes, the Acela is heavy, and yes the Acela is heavy because of safety regs (although the FRA regs were revised in the late 1990's to make accommodations for the Acela) but that's not the cause of any performance problems. I worked on the testing of the Acela trainsets in Pueblo and in NJ in 2000 and the trainset can sustain speeds of well over 150 mph for hours at a time. The power cars are plenty powerful - one of the Amtrak engineers on the project told me that if a trainset was powered by one PC instead of the normal two, the end-to-end (Bos-DC) run time would only be increased by 5 minutes). If you look at the cost of an Acela trainset, it falls within the range of other HSR trainsets like the ICE, TGV and Eurostar (albiet at the higher end). The Acela service sucks because it shares tracks with freight trains (in fact most of the NEC is dispatched by CSX and Norfolk Southern who tend to prioritize their trains over Amtrak trains), because the catenary south of NYC dates from the 10th century and can't handle high speeds, because there are a number of grade-crossings along the line north of NYC that the trains have to slow down for, and because the track has a lot of curves that the train has to slow down for.
In any event, the rolling stock is by far a minor cost compared with the total capital cost of an HSR system. Train track costs on the order of $1 million/mile for a single track. That costs does not include land acquisition, electrification, environmental review, the inevitable NIMBY litigation, mitigation costs, etc. And I agree that more electrification is something we need, but it's not just a matter of stringing wire. Bridges have to be raised to allow for the additional clearance for the catenary, if you're electrifying an existing line you have to do the work at night to minimize traffic disruption which means nighttime nose & lighting concerns, you have safety concerns (especially at crossings), you have to acquire more ROW for electrical substations, and so one. Combine all these costs with the perception that "transit needs to pay for itself" and you have a country unwilling to invest the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary for a world class rail system.
Exactly correct, every time the TSA figures out how to make traveling even more a pain than before, it's another victory for the Al Qaeda and their buddies. If we change our society, they are achieving success.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
"I do prefer our insanity to 'theirs' but lets not throw stones here."
I'll throw as many stones as I like while they're randomly blowing people up.
And you'll sit there and take it because I'm right and you're wrong.
Why are so many posts with factual errors modded up?
The bomb described in the Wikipedia article used nitroglycerine, NOT a binary liquid explosive mixed together onboard.
The alleged threat of a terrorist mixing up a bomb from 2 or more inert ingredients smuggled aboard was the story used to justify the TSA liquid restrictions we now fly under. THAT is the threat that even the TSA now admits is farfetched.
Obviously, making a bomb from hitroglycerine is fairly easy (assuming that you don't blow yourself up in the process). But nitroglycerine should also have triggered the explosive detectors at security, assuming that they were operating properly that day.
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
First we need to exterminate the Catholics, apparently paedophiles the bunch of'em...
Oh, wait, it seems that instead, the acts of individuals or comparatively small groups are not characteristic of everyone who shares some label with them. Didn't you get the memo?
No wonder you are anonymous - and coward certainly fits the bill. Desire for murder is strong in you, yes? So you share at least one trait with the terrorists then.
Philippine Airlines Flight 434 - one passenger killed and hole in the aircraft fuselage by just such a bomb.
Not a binary explosive mixed in flight.
It was a bunch of cotton balls soaked with nitroglycerin - you know that explosive that you just look at it funny and it blows up.
In fact, it is so delicate that the apartment they were using to build the bombs in DID blow up, whcih is how they caught the guys.
So, if the TSA wants to ban all damp cotton balls they might have some justification. But, if they treated them the same way they do liquids today, they'd make you throw them into that huge trash can at the head of the line and there would be a good chance that the nitroglycerin would go BOOOOM when the bad guy did so, killing or maiming most people in the near vicinity.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Yes we need to stop worrying, but you missed a point.
You can't bring down an airliner with a matchhead bomb. You can't bring down your own seat with a matchhead bomb. All you can do is set your trousers on fire like this nonce did. The same goes for the idiot who tried to mix a bomb with liquids he took on board. The idea that you can cook serious explosives in airplane toilets with the chemicals he had is laughable, yet we have these ridiculous rules about the liquids we can take on board because of this non-existent threat.
People in the security services have an interest in exaggerating threats in order to improve the position in society and the personal power.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?