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"No Scan, No Fly" At Heathrow and Manchester
An anonymous reader writes "It is now compulsory for people selected for a full body scan to take part, or they will not be allowed to fly from Heathrow or Manchester airports. There is no optional pat down. Also, a rule which meant that people under 18 were not allowed to participate in the body scanner trial has been overturned by the government. There is no mention of blurring out the genitals, however reports a few years back said X-ray backscatter devices aren't effective unless the genitals of people going through them are visible."
a) Put the C4 in your intestines.
b) Wear a latex belly full of explosives/guns.
c) Be fat and hide stuff in the folds of skin
What we really need to do before signing off on anything is give a machine to Mythbusters for a couple of weeks, see what they can come up with.
No sig today...
[Trains...] Unfortunately the UK is an island so going to most places is more difficult (but Paris and Brussels remain quite reachable).
Brussels-London is just under two hours, Paris-London is just over two hours. Unfortunately, if you're coming from Germany it's probably cheaper to fly, but perhaps that will change once DB start running services through the Channel Tunnel later this year and introduce some competition. I'd like to see some sleeper trains extended to London, and some direct services to Germany (e.g. Koeln).
I'm travelling from London to Leipzig in May. Last year I left home at 3:30 to get to the airport to fly with a budget airline to Berlin, then took the train to Leipzig. I was so tired I fell asleep before take-off and woke up on landing. I arrived in Leipzig at about 13:30. This costs about £80 if booked now.
This year, I'm considering taking the train. I can leave work early in the afternoon, take the train to Paris, then take a train to somewhere in Germany (there's a couple of possibilities) and a sleeper train to Leipzig, arriving at about 7am. This costs about £130.
The final option is to fly with Lufthansa from London City (8:05) to Leipzig (12:30), with a connection at Munich, for £150.
If you're flush enough, City airport is awesome for flying around Europe. It's primarily designed for business travellers, and is notable being the only airport I've seen where you can get from the station platform to your plane seat in seven minutes. Last time my girlfriends and I flew to Berlin, I insisted we fly via City on a Lufthansa business and stumped up her ticket fare myself; in the end it only cost us about 30% more in ticket prices (half of which we got back by not having to buy the stupidly expensive trains tickets that run to the airports). The gf had never flown from City before, was astonished at the lack of queues, the *polite and friendly* security staff; we fly out of there at every opportunity now.
It's been a year since I last flew out of there so I dunno if the thermite-panted idiot has changed things much there, but City has always been a cut above hellpits like Heathrow. It doesn't have much in the way of long distance because the approach path limits the types of planes that can take off from there but I'd heartily recommend it to any traveller wanting less stress on their way out of London.
Moderation Total: -1 Troll, +3 Goat
Two things. Firstly, you've missed the point. This could well be for the reason that most of the general public miss the point: Media hype. This guy has been charged for possession of cartoon images of indecent acts involving children. He has been made example of because previously he had been convicted of possession of indecent images of actual children. This is all freely available information, much of it posted on /.
Secondly, no I absolutely will not be a test case. Firstly, images of cartoon characters having sex are puerile and daft to me, not sexually alluring. If I want that kind of humour, I'll check out some lolcats. This makes me someone who is not the target of this law, so prosecuting me for contravening it is at best moot and achieves nothing.
Secondly, I'm already involved in issues of child protection in a professional manner. My interest here is to see sane laws which will actually protect children put in place, and idiotic laws repealed. This law is idiotic, for the reason you've implied above: Images of cartoon characters are not images of real people (the allusion to such from your final statement) and as such nobody is harmed by their (cartoon images) creation. However, the guy in Australia has a proven sexual interest in minors. He has already been convicted of such. The press coverage is to illustrate that the law protects children; A loose correlation in this case, but then again that's all the media need to trumpet it from the mountain tops. Note that I didn't say that I agree with the law in my original post, just recounted the facts from the story. I also didn't say that I agreed with the conviction based upon possession of images of non-persons. The difficulty is that there is a correlation between the evidence of both cases: Both involve depictions of a sexual nature which have been deemed illegal by the AUS government. Right now, they did the right thing convicting him. If they want to change that, they can vote on it and get it repealed.
tl;dr: No, thanks.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
And what are the reasons young Muslims turn to terrorist groups? Because they feel alienated and harassed by the rest of the world (who treat them like terrorists for no reason at all) and are looking for somewhere to find friends and feel like they belong. They don't even want to kill anybody until they have been brainwashed (and frequently drugged) by their new "friends".
When are we going to realize that draconian security measures, racial profiling, and dropping bombs on civilians are part of the PROBLEM instead of the SOLUTION?