I didn't 'turn' it into a sexist issue, I just pointed out it was already one. In fact, that was all it actually was.
I chose to discuss it from the POV of women because society used to discriminate against women, and decided it would stop, except apparently in who they could marry.
Men, of course, are being discriminated against also, but as this society doesn't have a history of doing that, and hence doesn't have a backlash against it, and tends to treat claims of discrimination against men with laughter, I went with the discrimination against women aspect. (And, of course, trying to mention both every single time would become incredibly unwieldy. Although I did, in fact, point this out in my first post.)
I have no idea how you thought I insulted homosexuals. As I mentioned, this issue isn't even about homosexuals, legally. Pretending it is is why no one is getting any traction on the issue, as homosexuals can do exactly the same thing heterosexuals can: Marry someone of the opposite gender. (As people opposed to 'gay marriage' will happily point out.)
No, the discrimination in marriage is currently based on gender. Men cannot marry people that women can, and women cannot marry people that men can. Sexual discrimination at its starkest and most blatant, enshrined into law, and people are instead running around yelling about discrimination based on sexual orientation, which marriage is not.
It's clearly aimed at people of homosexual orientation, but it restricts marriage by gender. Which we already forbid by law from happening. People don't need to worry about sexual orientation at all to get rid of such a clearly discriminatory law.
Now, there is discrimination based on sexual orientation in other places, I don't want to imply there is not. And certainly it that should be forbidden, I'm all in favor of those laws. But this issue doesn't have anything to do with that, and is not a subset of that one....gay people are not discriminated against in their ability to marry the exact same people that straight people can. They're discriminated against in their ability to marry people that the other gender can.
The tying of the marriage-partnership debate to discrimination is unfortunate and, as near as I can see it, inaccurate.
Erm, how is it inaccurate? Men can marry people that women cannot. That is discrimination against women by definition. That is what discrimination means.
This isn't some obscure debate about how many women are in computer science or whether women get paid less because they're women or because they're less serious about their careers. This doesn't require weird statistics or something to understand.
And this isn't some claim that all of society is set up by men, that we're living in some patriarchy that just gives lip service to equality. This isn't some 'femnazi' crazypants claim about how all men are predators of women.
No, here we're talking about where people are barred by law from a certain thing solely because they do not have a penis.
It's the damn middle ages or something. 100 years of progress, poof, magically vanished. Where is Susan B Anthony when you need her?
Marriage has long been understood to be between man and woman.
Yes, and women have long been understood to be property of men, but I don't really see when what has been 'long understood' has to do with anything. We stopped our 'long understood' concept of the role of the sexes decades ago. Because it was morally indefensible.
Redefining marriage (for this is what the LGBT movement promotes) is not necessary.
No one is attempting to redefine anything. They are simply attempting to allow women to do something men can already do.
You know, that thing we decided was correct 40 years ago or something? That we would not attempt to keep women from doing things men could do? That, in fact, we would make such behavior illegal?
Seriously, where did all the blatant sexist come from? I had no idea it was still that acceptable to be that sexist.
I guess the logic is that opposing 'gay marriage' (1) is okay because people are 'discriminating against both men and women'.
Which is stupid logic, and, whether you like it or not, closely akin to the claim that segregation is okay because it is discriminating against blacks and whites using each other water fountains. Well, yes, technically, it is, in fact, discrimination 'both way', and dictating who men can marry and who women can marry is, in fact discrimination both way...but that doesn't make it better.
That just means you're discriminating twice.
1) Which is, like I said, a stupid term...gay people can get married now. One side wants marriage to continue to have sexual discrimination, the other side wants the sexual discrimination removed from the law. 'Orientation' has nothing to do with it. (Homosexual women are probably the only women who want to marry a woman, but that's neither here nor there.)
It's not shown at the end of the second film, but it is explained right at the start of the first film if you pay attention.
It clearly says that the final battle would be fought here...tonight.
Now, if Skynet had killed Connor retroactively, that would have been the final battle of humans, but that didn't happen, so that's not what it was talking about.
No, Skynet only sends the terminator back because it lost. Human burst in, and it fired up the experimental time machine and it sends two terminators back. One to 1984 and one to 1995. (If you think about which was sent where, and what Skynet had to have know about each time, you'll realize it makes sense. Remember the first one managed to kill two Sarah Connors.)
The humans quickly send Reese back, and then they quickly reprogram the other Arnold that's laying around and send him back too.
Perhaps this was two different battles, or two different facilities, but anyway, the point is, the time machines were, essentially, the last stand before Skynet was defeated. (Logically, you don't want to let your enemies have access to your time machines, so they'd be almost as well protected as yourself.)
I suspect that Skynet figured out altering the past was just as big a threat to it as anything else, hence the time machine being used only when it about to be defeated.
If you're wondering about T3, that actually took place in a different future, after T2 moved judgment day. (Which means that Skynet was right about time travel being a threat to it, as the Skynet from the first two movies is essentially dead, or rather never existed.)
There are two possibilities:
1) The movie timeline, with T3, was first, and the trip back that started TSCC was an alteration of that.
Aka, the events at the start of TSCC were the same as the events at the start of T2...they postponed Judgment Day for a bit, and altered things, but it still happened.
This has the rather disconcerting fact that without the Connors wandering around, Judgement Day happened later! (Fanwank: Perhaps there was a 'Terminator 2.5' movie we, and John Connor, never knew about, where a terminator came back to, say, 2001, and got killed without Connor or the audience noticing...and its parts were used help skynet. But in the SCC where he jumped forward, Skynet didn't even vaguely know where he was and thus didn't try to kill him.)
2) The SCC happened 'first', and originally.
But at some point at the end of that story, someone was going to go back to before all this, and stop the entire series from happening at all, thus letting T3 happen. As it's been hinted that in the 'current' future, Connor was dead and Cameron was running things, we can see a rational for changing all that.(By 'current future', I meant the five minutes before the end of the series, not the one at the end.)
The entire series timeline is a mismash of paradoxical nonsense, so saying something 'voided' something else is silly. Yes, we've now seen two alternatives 2007, but we'd already seen two alternatives 1997s! We just don't have any story to tell us which 2007 was altered into the other one, and thus we don't know which is 'real', or, at least, current.
And the last five minutes nullified all the movies. Skynet isn't going to send anyone back in time to kill Sarah Connor now, so no one's sending Kyle back there either.
They should have taken a concept from the Sarah Connor Chronicles and simply had 'John Connor' be this guy off somewhere that no one really ever saw. (1) Just a voice on a radio or a video message, and who shows up at the end to take charge.
Yeah, lame, but less lame than having him but him not being the lead.
Hell, they could have pulled a 'Six Day' twist and had the lead be a terminator who thought he was John Connor.
Also, the terminator didn't kill Kyle because Skynet doesn't know who he is. It barely knew that Connor was born in California at a specific time to a 'Sarah Connor', it doesn't know who Kyle Reese is.
Until, of course, John Connor stupidly told it. But Connor's a moron. Hell, if he'd started giving a fake name out after Judgment Day, his childhood would have retroactively been a lot easier. (OTOH, he wouldn't exist at all, so at least that makes some sense.)
1) With a few hints that, possibly, it's not even Connor leading anymore, and he might even be dead. I suspect that, had that series gone on long enough, it would have been revealed to be an AI in charge, either Cameron or John Henry, having taken the long way to the future.
Oh, and before anyone says anything, T3 was somewhat lame, and T4 sucked. But they didn't suck because they 'changed the basic message of the series', they sucked because they were shitty movies.
They would have been fine movies with slightly better plotting and a lot better writing and directing.
Also, three leading to four didn't make any sense either. You can't introduce the premise that John Connor is standing there starting the rebellion in that old base, and then suddenly transition to the next movie where he's a famous 'rebellion leader wannabe' or something. (Why the hell would he even tell people he was supposed to be 'the leader'?)
If I was writing T3, I would have had the reveal they couldn't stop Skynet about an hour from the end, Judgment Day about 30 minutes, and had Connor spend the rest of the movie attempting to hold humanity together via radio and inform people what was going on and how to fight back.
While, of course, we had an epic terminator vs. terminator battle outside.
Dude, did you even see the first movie? Why did you decide 'the basic message of series' was that you can change your fate? That held for maybe one movie, although it was really just them being optimistic.
Trying to make sense of the time travel 'rules' in Terminators movies is stupid.
The most logical assumption is that you can, in fact, change the future, but you can't change 'fate'. No matter what you do, you always have a Skynet and you always have John Connor fighting it and sending people back.
This premise of time travel works for every movie and TV show and video game and whatnot. Anything else is just people making stuff up.
The problem with this analogy is that LGBT couples already have the same rights in many states as any other couple.
Couples do not have rights. People have rights.
Women (Either straight or gay) have the same right that men (Either straight or gay) have, to marry a woman. And the same applies to men, of course. This is equality under the law.
It doesn't have anything to do with 'couples' or 'sexual orientation' at all. All that nonsense is a red herring. Nor do we have to pass any additional laws.(1)
Barring marrying someone from getting married to another person based on the gender of either person is sexual discrimination, and, as such, is already illegal in every state, although for some reason the courts haven't noticed this. You cannot take someone's gender into consideration when offering government services to them.
How come the government gets to point to a man and say 'You can only marry these three billion people' and then say to a woman 'But you're restricted to these other three billion.', and neither can marry someone in the other group?
I mean, what's next? Letting men have dog licenses and women have cat licenses? Separate schools for each gender? Separate water fountains? Didn't the Supreme Court say something about that?
A more blatant case of sexual discrimination I have never seen in my life.
1) We might want to bar discrimination based on sexual orientation, but that's not the same thing as marriage, which is orientation neutral. (Obviously, people will want to marry someone they're attracted to, but we don't actually require this, or attempt to stop them if they are not.)
Sure. If you make it hard / long-and-boring to add other repositories, Linux will still be a member of the failbucket of OSes. If you make it really easy (such as "click here and temporarily add our repo. and install any software you want on a single click"), you just made Linux join the Easy Virus And Trojan Club.
Did you not actually read what I said?
You make it easy to add repositories which are on a whitelist that the distro maintains.
It's not damn rocket science. They want to add a repository, you check first to see if it's an allowed repository. Christ. That's my entire fucking point.
Pretty much any repository that had an actual real person or company behind it would be whitelisted.
And there is no miracle that will keep users from inserting their root passwords at the cute dialogs
Um, yes, there is. Namely, if they don't have to put in their root password for anything else, they just might get a little suspicious if they have to pull it out for malware.
I love the idea that people just do random things to operate their computer.
No, they are taught how to operate their computer. In Windows, they are taught to download and run, with admin permissions, the flash installer, or the Silverlight installer, or the Skype installer, or the malware installer, or RSS reader installer, or the...hey, wait, what was that one before the last one again?
If you don't teach them that's how you install programs, they don't install programs that way, and look askew at any programs that says they should be installed that way.
or keep limited user trojans from sending mails and accessing important USER (what kind of thief cares about boring OS files anyway?) files.
Except that user trojans (Which they'd have to manually change the permissions on to launch in the first place.) would be much much much easier to clean up via antivirus software.
We wouldn't have a race to get antivirus updates out before a virus got in into the system, like on Windows, where viruses get in and embed themselves so deeply that two hours later, when new antivirus definitions comes out, the antivirus can no longer find the virus, and has, in fact, been totally disabled by said virus.
I swear, it's like no one here has any knowledge of how antivirus works at all, and is incapable of reading what I actually type. Malicious programs that run under a single user account are trivial to clean up, a hell of a lot easier to clean up than the rootkit infections that cripple Windows. You could even reboot the computer into an 'antivirus mode' where no user programs get executed at all. (You know, sorta like safe mode is supposed to work, except that none of the trojans on Windows are running under user accounts or via the normal startup, but have instead inserted themselves as system files.)
Apple 'encrypting' the iTunes database has nothing to do with anything.
The fact you can't install Apple Mobile Device service without iTunes, and you can't connect your iPod or iPhone without that, is the problem. There's plenty of third party software that will do almost everything iTunes will, like put your own music or videos on there, or syncing address books. And for the rest, like buying software and music for the phone, you can use the device itself to do it.
But you can't, in any way, communicate with your computer without the stupid Apple Mobile Device service on said computer, even if you're using a third party app to do it, and to get that service you need to install iTunes.
Yeah, but a computer would let them actually keep track of each order, and let them give out the free stuff off-schedule. I.e., if someone wants to have their free drink right away, fine, less work for the crew when they're actually busy serving everyone else. Likewise, people could pay in advance for meals and stuff.
But, anyway, anything is better than the stupid 'slowly roll the cart up the isle, stopping act each row and taking an order and serving it'. It's bad enough when that's 'free drinks', it's really horrible when they're selling actual sandwiches and stuff and having to take money.
Oh, and, incidentally, running orders to the back would let them take credit cards.
They have a flight attendant crew of a dozen people, and yet somehow can only operate like they're some sidewalk street vendor, instead of moving to the model food service moved to hundreds of years ago of asking customers what they want, preparing it in the back, and bringing it out to each customer. It's really idiotic.
Oh, and as an added bonus of all this: They could start charging slightly cheaper prices for people who order before the flight, because, as people use that system, they'd have to carry less extra food to sell on the flight on the flights they sell food.
A UAV can fly at low altitudes evading radar long enough to hop over the border.
Indeed. Radar can only go so low, especially in hilly areas.
The question isn't if drug dealers could use UAVs, it's if they could use them cheaper than humans. They can't, yet. The weight capacity isn't up to it, UAVs are not luggage carriers.
OTOH, I fully suspect they're already using 'UAVs', aka, remote controlled airplanes with video cameras, as scouts.
We probably haven't heard about it because it is not even illegal. As long as they don't actually cross the border with them, which is possibly not technically illegal but would result in them getting shot down. Fly one on each side of the border, locate law enforcement, radio locations to people crossing.
There are really three entirely different kinds of distractions, and we need to deal with them differently, I think.
The first is visual distractions. Looking at stuff in the car. Your radio, your AC, your iPod, whatever.
We can solve this by having more intuitive controls that can be found by touch, or at least can be found by looking but adjusted by touch so people glance away for a second to grab the control, but then look back at the road.
The second is, for lack of a better term, 'hand distractions'. Let's face it, we all drive with one hand. Holding a drink and driving is not difficult, nor should it cause a problem most of the time. Yes, if we're in an emergency situation we'd want two hands, but, in reality, 90% of auto accidents don't give people much time to react in any way except slamming on the brakes.
The problem is when we try to hold two things, and end up juggling them and the wheel. Or holding an mp3 player in one hand and pushing buttons with the other hand. Or holding a burrito and trying to wipe off our shirt.
This, strangely enough, could be solved in exactly the 'wrong' way...by making it easier for drivers to hold things. Cupholders are already doing that, and they have mounts for mp3 player, and some sort of table for food for the driver would seem a good idea.
The third is concentration distractions, and there's not a hell of a lot to do about that. People driving when sleepy, people driving and talking angrily on their speakerphone, people chatting with others in the car. (Which is why my state, for example, bans the amount of people that can be in the car of teenage drivers.)
The other two distractions also cause concentration distractions if we're not careful.
Incidentally, anyone find it funny they specifically exempt calling 911. I guess that's for if someone sees a something major outside their car and doesn't have a hand's free kit, but I'm just laughing imagining people actually in auto accidents dialing 911 during the accident. (And wondering how that could possibly be a good thing.)
Most people call 911 after an accident. Although, strictly speaking, sometimes their engine is still on, and they technically are still operating a motor vehicle.
You have decided to read those two sentences as if I said 'I have the right to be in all public property', which I obviously did not think, as then I went on to explain what sort of public property it was.
All government-owned property in this country is called 'public property'. There are, however, different kinds of public property.
Airports were 'public spaces', where anyone could freely walk around without any purpose at all, with (almost) no restrictions at all, like public parks.
Now they are semi-public spaces, like zoos or a subway stations or a library. Or, like I said, a publicly owned mall. (And, yes, they do exist.) Where you need permission to enter (Sometimes you have to pay.), and you're only allowed there if you're using the area for a specific purpose.
But this doesn't change anything about searches, which the government can't require to enter a public or semi-public area, or even a private government area. The ability of the public to enter an area, either automatically or with specific permission, has nothing to do with whether or not they can be required to submit to a search upon entrance.
It's funny how Slashdotters will argue all day long about how people who disobey speed limits should be shot on sight, that driving is a "PRIVILEGE NOT A RIGHT", and that drivers' licensing is a good idea to establish minimum standards for drivers since a shitty driver can kill people, yet people scream in outrage at the idea of not having the INALIENABLE RIGHT to get on any airplane they please without the airline or government having any say in it whatsoever.
It's funny how people will just assert that people argue X, without it being true. I've never actually seen 'slashdotters' argue that at all, and it's certainly not a consensus. In fact, every time speed limits get brought up, usually we end up with people demanding that speed limits get set higher, like they are supposed to be. (Speed limits are supposed to be based roughly on the actual speed people drive on the road, not randomly 15 mph lower.)
And that analogy is stupid anyway. No one is arguing against any sort of operator licenses, nor is anyone arguing for or against any sort of punishments for violating a law.
Hell, we're not even arguing that attempting to operate a vehicle doesn't give the police a right to search you. I don't think it does, but that's not the issue here.
We are arguing that attempting to enter in a vehicle as a passenger does not give the police the right to search you before you do.
Which, incidentally, has been definitively decided in favor of the passengers for cars and busses, the police cannot search them, despite passengers with weapons being able to hijack cars much easier than people with weapons being able to hijack airplanes.
Considering that people can buy airplanes and fly them into whatever they want, and that cockpit doors now are secured so people can't just walk in waving guns, and passangers are hardly going to let anyone hijack a plane anymore, perhaps you should save pissing your pants and dumping the piss all over the constitution for some other issue, where allowing random searches of people might actually make sense?
You use keep using that word 'unreasonable'. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Reasonable searches, under US law, are those with warrants, or exigent circumstances, or a limited search in the case of arrest, or those you have consented to. Other searches are 'unreasonable' as the word is used in the Constitution.
And, as I said, the 'consent' is a red herring. The government cannot bar you from proceeding somewhere unless you 'consent' to a search, or the 4th amendment is a mockery, and luckily, the Supreme Court has already figured this out and banned that behavior.
In fact, the government cannot decide to let you do something, or do anything for you, based on whether or not you consent to a search, as that is 'coercion'. (Or they could just, for example, tax people at 100% if they did not consent to a search, or, like I said, bar them from public roads.)
Just saying 'there is nothing unreasonable' about warrantless searches required for people to board planes does not, in fact, make that true.
And I have no idea how what percentage of people are searched makes a difference, or when people's possession stopped 'counting'. The fourth amendment assigns equal weight to searching someone's person and searching their effects.
The danger of someone being on an airplane is immaterial to any constitutional grounds. If you want some sort of 'unless they're boarding an airplane' exception to the fourth amendment, I suggest you read Article 5 of the Constitution, which gives two clearly defined way for you to alter the 4th amendment. (Although do the first, no one's sure how the second works.)
25% of 'the masses' just want a web browser, an email client, an office suite that can read their files, and maybe an MP3 player.
Another 25% also want an IM client, Google Earth, torrent client, rss reader, other random small pieces of software. All of which comes with Linux too.
And another 25% of the public would want to add software from several large publishers, like Adobe or EA or even Microsoft or whatever, people who could easily register their repository with a master list. (We're not debating the availability of software in some hypothetical Linux future, we're debating if having repository as the sole source would work.)
If you don't use Linux, you're probably not aware that most producers of free Linux software who don't get included in distributions already put their packages in repositories for download.
You have somehow misunderstood what I said to mean that the distros would be in charge of what is made available. No. The distro would just take minimum steps to determine that a repository is moderately legitimate and has some sort of company or actual real person behind it, and stick it on a list of 'places you can add to your software list by clicking on a link'. (Heck, some sort of delayed automatic entry would probably be workable. If they can submit their name, and have an SSL cert and a domain name and respond to an automatic email and phone call and actually remain up for a week, they're probably not malware and we can let people tentatively download from that repository. And just blacklist them if we were wrong...and, while we're at it, pop up messages about malicious software on users machines who added that repository the next time they update their master list.)
Sorta like Authenticode from Microsoft is supposed to work, but does not, because software publishers can't afford it.
Now, there is the question of what to do with store purchases. Frankly, I'd be okay with just allowing installs off a CD...asking people to download malicious ISOs and then burn them to a CD to install them have a high enough 'weird' factor that people are unlikely to normally fall for it. (And if you can get people to do that, you can get them to boot off said CD, which the OS can't protect from anyway.)
And the other 25% of Linux users can turn the damn feature off and install from anywhere they want. The point is what average users are trained to do to install software, not what people can do.
On Linux, users should install software by opening their 'software installer' and searching for what they want, or by sticking a CD in the drive, which should pop up their installer listing software on that CD, or clicking a link in a web page, which pops up their software installer with software in that repository. The first already is true, the middle is easy enough to do but usually done different, and the last is trivially easy to implement.
And all of them are safer than on a Windows system, where almost all the software (Except purchased in stores) is installed via the exact same way that malware is installed...downloaded and run. If you a) Don't have people install legit software that way, and b) don't let people easily install malware that way without a lot of strange steps, you've essentially totally stopped people from installing malware. Microsoft thinks you can just do 'b' without 'a', but adding steps that all software installs require means people will learn to happily do them for malware also.
It doesn't matter what is possible outside the norm. Outside the norm, on Windows or Linux, people could run fdisk and unpartition their computer, or delete their startup files, both of which processes are as destructive as malware...but people aren't trained to do that normally, whereas, on Windows, they are trained in the process to install malware when they install legit software, and, thinking malware is legit software, they follow exactly those steps. Whereas, on Linux, those steps differ, and they could easily differ even more.
You know that shoe-bomber dude would have probably tore a hole in the plane, and he fit the explosives within his shoe. (And if he'd been smart enough to light it in the bathroom, he would have succeeded.)
So we now take off our shoes and have them xrayed.
Of course, the amount you can fit in the sole of your shoe can easily be fit pretty much anywhere on your body if you flatten it.
Even millimeter wave won't detect it, because of, because of privacy issues, they blur out specific areas of the body, and the amount of explosives he had was smaller, cubic centimeter-wise, than one breast implant.
I am not suggesting breast implant bombings, but rather that a standard bra could trivially have that much padding inserted in it without the slightest notice.
Likewise, men could pad another area that gets blurred out, without anyone noticing.
And both could probably fit enough between their buttocks.
But, no, we all have to take off our shoes, because apparently terrorists are going to hide stuff in there. Again.
And this ignores the fact there's actually questions about whether or not the xrays could actually see explosives in shoes. Shoes commonly have 'hollowed out areas' in the bottom, where air or liquid is put in, so it is dubious if someone would recognize explosives.
And I, personally, have gone through airport security four times with the steel toe boots I normally wear. Which means, unless the shoe just happened to turn exactly right, they could not, in fact, see inside the toe of the shoe, which could have been full of explosives for all they knew. (Yes, cramped toes...but they don't know my shoe size, perhaps they were three sizes too big.) The last two times I actually watched to see if they reached in and checked inside...they didn't.
Yes, but empty two liter bottles are suspicious, like I said.
See, whenever I talk about 'a bunch of people could easily just carry binary explosives through security in pieces', there's always a fool who says 'Yes, but that would be suspicious, and thus somehow they'd get noticed and caught.'. (Of course, there aren't any security personnel walking around inside the security perimeter to notice these 'suspicious' behaviors, but whatever.)
So I specifically figured out a way to do it that not only is within the rules, but no part of it is even slightly suspicious.
People going through security with plastic liter bags that could are watertight and could be filled with explosives: Not suspicious. In fact, required.
People sitting next to each other where you can't see them trading things: Not suspicious.
People actually trading items between carry-ons and poking around in them before a flight: Not suspicious.
People buying bottled water and sticking it in their carry-on: Not suspicious. In fact, almost required
People sitting for ten minutes in a bathroom stall, and taking their luggage in with them: Not suspicious.
Yeah, sorry I went off on you, it's just there are a lot of goofyballs here who are 'standing up for businesses' which is usually wrongheaded libertarian thinking that generally annoys me.
But it is really wrongheaded here, because this isn't a business trying to do anything, it's the government barring businesses and people from doing businesses unless the people consent to a government search beforehand. Which is a restriction of both the people's right, and the businesses' 'rights' insofar as they have any.
I find myself on the same side as libertarians, which doesn't happen that often, that 'businesses ought to be free to do whatever they want', like, say, not search their customers, and half of the libertarians are goofily standing there defending the government unconstitutionally search people and acting like it's a business doing it!
What would they do if, to 'protect businesses from armed robbery', the government banned guns in businesses, and started searching people who entered public property leading to those businesses (aka, the highway system) for said guns? Would they stand there and defend the rights of businesses to bar anyone they want, like that was slightly relevant?
I have no idea where you got that silly idea. "Public property" is not equivalent to "anyone can be there anytime they want". Courthouses, jails, the Whitehouse, the floor of the Senate, the Mayor's office, school classrooms, and the area beyond security at the airport are all "publicly owned". Tell me that you have a right to walk into any kindergarden classroom in the country and just wander around whenever you want. Try it at midnight.
I didn't say I could be there anytime I wanted. The government has the perfect right, on public property that exists for a specific reason, to keep people out who do not fit under that reason. The government can keep me out of airports if I don't have a ticket, there is no discussion about that.
I said I could be there without being searched.
If you think the government has the right to search people who enter schools, or courthouses, or even visit prisons, or things like that, you are, well, wrong.
They do have a right to make you walk through a metal detector, which is not legally a search.
That airport isn't "essentially a publicly owned mall", and yes, they have every right to search you because YOU CONSENTED TO THE SEARCH when you got in the line to be searched.
First of all, that's just wrong on the face of it. You don't 'consent to a search' when you get in the line to be searched. If you leave the line, they can't legally chase you down and search you, so obviously your 'consent on entering the line' theory is rather stupid to start with. You consent to a search when you let them search you.
Secondly, you cannot consent to government searches just by trying to use their public property. The government cannot barricade all public property off and state that, to use it, you have to consent to being searched. That is an absurd theory and renders the 4th amendment meaningless, and, yes, the Supreme Court has specifically said that.
In fact, the courts just fixed their idiotic 'having a car on a public road means you consent it its search' ruling it had previous made...which you will notice still didn't let police search you, just your vehicle.
The idea that the government can barricade access to all airplanes and only let you fly a
And having people switch to their own drinks is a horrible thing for airlines. Forget the money lost by not selling a drink...people will start bringing more drinks. Instead of carrying 6 oz a person, people will have a 18 oz bottle. (Which of course costs the same amount of gas to fly if the person drinks it or not.) I actually think this was why they started providing food and drinks on airlines.
The thing that gets me is that they want to save all the weight they can...and yet they still inexplicably serve soft drinks in half cans, which require them to carry both cans, and cups.
A fountain drink system would seem to be much lighter. I understand that pressurized stuff can act weird in the low pressure environment of a plane, but surely that wouldn't be too hard to figure out.
It would be hard under the existing system unless the fountain system was movable, but the existing system of handing drinks out is, well, incredibly stupid to start with. Have someone walk though, taking each order into a handheld computer as they go, and have two or three people running them to each seat. (I wonder how much that cart weighs.) They're just lucky it's an airplane...blocking the isle anywhere else like that would get the fire marshal on you like a ton of bricks.
This would also mean that indecisive people didn't hold things up, and that people could actually order at any time, although they would still want to have a 'scheduled' loop through the cabin. It would also mean that they wouldn't have to carry everything on that cart and could actually heat things up and whatnot. (Yes, airplanes don't carry 'meals' on short flights, but almost all airplanes have microwaves in them anyway, so could provide things like popcorn and stuff.)
A lot of the 'weight' stuff is nonsense until they actually start charging people based on weight. (Which they should.)
Likewise, when I park at shopping malls, the stuff I buy pays for the store lease, which in turns pays for the part of the parking space I don't use because I have a small car!
Oh, and when I go to Taco Bell, and buy a taco, I always get a soft taco, which costs the same as a hard taco despite being about 3 cents cheaper to make. (And don't even get me started on the AC, cleaning, and restroom overhead when I'm using the drive through)
Your argument might actually have some weight if it cost more than 30 cents total for that airline to provide that half-soda and a bag of pretzels, and if an airline ticket didn't cost, at the cheapest, $60.
Anyone who complains about any 'built in hidden price' of something that costs between 1/200th and 1/1000th of their actual cost is a total moron.
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I didn't 'turn' it into a sexist issue, I just pointed out it was already one. In fact, that was all it actually was.
I chose to discuss it from the POV of women because society used to discriminate against women, and decided it would stop, except apparently in who they could marry.
Men, of course, are being discriminated against also, but as this society doesn't have a history of doing that, and hence doesn't have a backlash against it, and tends to treat claims of discrimination against men with laughter, I went with the discrimination against women aspect. (And, of course, trying to mention both every single time would become incredibly unwieldy. Although I did, in fact, point this out in my first post.)
I have no idea how you thought I insulted homosexuals. As I mentioned, this issue isn't even about homosexuals, legally. Pretending it is is why no one is getting any traction on the issue, as homosexuals can do exactly the same thing heterosexuals can: Marry someone of the opposite gender. (As people opposed to 'gay marriage' will happily point out.)
No, the discrimination in marriage is currently based on gender. Men cannot marry people that women can, and women cannot marry people that men can. Sexual discrimination at its starkest and most blatant, enshrined into law, and people are instead running around yelling about discrimination based on sexual orientation, which marriage is not.
It's clearly aimed at people of homosexual orientation, but it restricts marriage by gender. Which we already forbid by law from happening. People don't need to worry about sexual orientation at all to get rid of such a clearly discriminatory law.
Now, there is discrimination based on sexual orientation in other places, I don't want to imply there is not. And certainly it that should be forbidden, I'm all in favor of those laws. But this issue doesn't have anything to do with that, and is not a subset of that one....gay people are not discriminated against in their ability to marry the exact same people that straight people can. They're discriminated against in their ability to marry people that the other gender can.
If people actually wanted the right to use the same restroom, that argument might make sense.
The tying of the marriage-partnership debate to discrimination is unfortunate and, as near as I can see it, inaccurate.
Erm, how is it inaccurate? Men can marry people that women cannot. That is discrimination against women by definition. That is what discrimination means.
This isn't some obscure debate about how many women are in computer science or whether women get paid less because they're women or because they're less serious about their careers. This doesn't require weird statistics or something to understand.
And this isn't some claim that all of society is set up by men, that we're living in some patriarchy that just gives lip service to equality. This isn't some 'femnazi' crazypants claim about how all men are predators of women.
No, here we're talking about where people are barred by law from a certain thing solely because they do not have a penis.
It's the damn middle ages or something. 100 years of progress, poof, magically vanished. Where is Susan B Anthony when you need her?
Marriage has long been understood to be between man and woman.
Yes, and women have long been understood to be property of men, but I don't really see when what has been 'long understood' has to do with anything. We stopped our 'long understood' concept of the role of the sexes decades ago. Because it was morally indefensible.
Redefining marriage (for this is what the LGBT movement promotes) is not necessary.
No one is attempting to redefine anything. They are simply attempting to allow women to do something men can already do.
You know, that thing we decided was correct 40 years ago or something? That we would not attempt to keep women from doing things men could do? That, in fact, we would make such behavior illegal?
Seriously, where did all the blatant sexist come from? I had no idea it was still that acceptable to be that sexist.
I guess the logic is that opposing 'gay marriage' (1) is okay because people are 'discriminating against both men and women'.
Which is stupid logic, and, whether you like it or not, closely akin to the claim that segregation is okay because it is discriminating against blacks and whites using each other water fountains. Well, yes, technically, it is, in fact, discrimination 'both way', and dictating who men can marry and who women can marry is, in fact discrimination both way...but that doesn't make it better.
That just means you're discriminating twice.
1) Which is, like I said, a stupid term...gay people can get married now. One side wants marriage to continue to have sexual discrimination, the other side wants the sexual discrimination removed from the law. 'Orientation' has nothing to do with it. (Homosexual women are probably the only women who want to marry a woman, but that's neither here nor there.)
It's not shown at the end of the second film, but it is explained right at the start of the first film if you pay attention.
It clearly says that the final battle would be fought here...tonight.
Now, if Skynet had killed Connor retroactively, that would have been the final battle of humans, but that didn't happen, so that's not what it was talking about.
No, Skynet only sends the terminator back because it lost. Human burst in, and it fired up the experimental time machine and it sends two terminators back. One to 1984 and one to 1995. (If you think about which was sent where, and what Skynet had to have know about each time, you'll realize it makes sense. Remember the first one managed to kill two Sarah Connors.)
The humans quickly send Reese back, and then they quickly reprogram the other Arnold that's laying around and send him back too.
Perhaps this was two different battles, or two different facilities, but anyway, the point is, the time machines were, essentially, the last stand before Skynet was defeated. (Logically, you don't want to let your enemies have access to your time machines, so they'd be almost as well protected as yourself.)
I suspect that Skynet figured out altering the past was just as big a threat to it as anything else, hence the time machine being used only when it about to be defeated.
If you're wondering about T3, that actually took place in a different future, after T2 moved judgment day. (Which means that Skynet was right about time travel being a threat to it, as the Skynet from the first two movies is essentially dead, or rather never existed.)
It doesn't. It's just in a different history.
There are two possibilities: 1) The movie timeline, with T3, was first, and the trip back that started TSCC was an alteration of that.
Aka, the events at the start of TSCC were the same as the events at the start of T2...they postponed Judgment Day for a bit, and altered things, but it still happened.
This has the rather disconcerting fact that without the Connors wandering around, Judgement Day happened later! (Fanwank: Perhaps there was a 'Terminator 2.5' movie we, and John Connor, never knew about, where a terminator came back to, say, 2001, and got killed without Connor or the audience noticing...and its parts were used help skynet. But in the SCC where he jumped forward, Skynet didn't even vaguely know where he was and thus didn't try to kill him.)
2) The SCC happened 'first', and originally.
But at some point at the end of that story, someone was going to go back to before all this, and stop the entire series from happening at all, thus letting T3 happen. As it's been hinted that in the 'current' future, Connor was dead and Cameron was running things, we can see a rational for changing all that.(By 'current future', I meant the five minutes before the end of the series, not the one at the end.)
The entire series timeline is a mismash of paradoxical nonsense, so saying something 'voided' something else is silly. Yes, we've now seen two alternatives 2007, but we'd already seen two alternatives 1997s! We just don't have any story to tell us which 2007 was altered into the other one, and thus we don't know which is 'real', or, at least, current.
And the last five minutes nullified all the movies. Skynet isn't going to send anyone back in time to kill Sarah Connor now, so no one's sending Kyle back there either.
They should have taken a concept from the Sarah Connor Chronicles and simply had 'John Connor' be this guy off somewhere that no one really ever saw. (1) Just a voice on a radio or a video message, and who shows up at the end to take charge.
Yeah, lame, but less lame than having him but him not being the lead.
Hell, they could have pulled a 'Six Day' twist and had the lead be a terminator who thought he was John Connor.
Also, the terminator didn't kill Kyle because Skynet doesn't know who he is. It barely knew that Connor was born in California at a specific time to a 'Sarah Connor', it doesn't know who Kyle Reese is.
Until, of course, John Connor stupidly told it. But Connor's a moron. Hell, if he'd started giving a fake name out after Judgment Day, his childhood would have retroactively been a lot easier. (OTOH, he wouldn't exist at all, so at least that makes some sense.)
1) With a few hints that, possibly, it's not even Connor leading anymore, and he might even be dead. I suspect that, had that series gone on long enough, it would have been revealed to be an AI in charge, either Cameron or John Henry, having taken the long way to the future.
Oh, and before anyone says anything, T3 was somewhat lame, and T4 sucked. But they didn't suck because they 'changed the basic message of the series', they sucked because they were shitty movies.
They would have been fine movies with slightly better plotting and a lot better writing and directing.
Also, three leading to four didn't make any sense either. You can't introduce the premise that John Connor is standing there starting the rebellion in that old base, and then suddenly transition to the next movie where he's a famous 'rebellion leader wannabe' or something. (Why the hell would he even tell people he was supposed to be 'the leader'?)
If I was writing T3, I would have had the reveal they couldn't stop Skynet about an hour from the end, Judgment Day about 30 minutes, and had Connor spend the rest of the movie attempting to hold humanity together via radio and inform people what was going on and how to fight back.
While, of course, we had an epic terminator vs. terminator battle outside.
But, instead, we got really shitty writing.
But the 'rules' are just fine.
Dude, did you even see the first movie? Why did you decide 'the basic message of series' was that you can change your fate? That held for maybe one movie, although it was really just them being optimistic.
Trying to make sense of the time travel 'rules' in Terminators movies is stupid.
The most logical assumption is that you can, in fact, change the future, but you can't change 'fate'. No matter what you do, you always have a Skynet and you always have John Connor fighting it and sending people back.
This premise of time travel works for every movie and TV show and video game and whatnot. Anything else is just people making stuff up.
I know where he's confused.
They made two movies and then a TV series.
The problem with this analogy is that LGBT couples already have the same rights in many states as any other couple.
Couples do not have rights. People have rights.
Women (Either straight or gay) have the same right that men (Either straight or gay) have, to marry a woman. And the same applies to men, of course. This is equality under the law.
It doesn't have anything to do with 'couples' or 'sexual orientation' at all. All that nonsense is a red herring. Nor do we have to pass any additional laws.(1)
Barring marrying someone from getting married to another person based on the gender of either person is sexual discrimination, and, as such, is already illegal in every state, although for some reason the courts haven't noticed this. You cannot take someone's gender into consideration when offering government services to them.
How come the government gets to point to a man and say 'You can only marry these three billion people' and then say to a woman 'But you're restricted to these other three billion.', and neither can marry someone in the other group?
I mean, what's next? Letting men have dog licenses and women have cat licenses? Separate schools for each gender? Separate water fountains? Didn't the Supreme Court say something about that?
A more blatant case of sexual discrimination I have never seen in my life.
1) We might want to bar discrimination based on sexual orientation, but that's not the same thing as marriage, which is orientation neutral. (Obviously, people will want to marry someone they're attracted to, but we don't actually require this, or attempt to stop them if they are not.)
Sure. If you make it hard / long-and-boring to add other repositories, Linux will still be a member of the failbucket of OSes. If you make it really easy (such as "click here and temporarily add our repo. and install any software you want on a single click"), you just made Linux join the Easy Virus And Trojan Club.
Did you not actually read what I said?
You make it easy to add repositories which are on a whitelist that the distro maintains.
It's not damn rocket science. They want to add a repository, you check first to see if it's an allowed repository. Christ. That's my entire fucking point.
Pretty much any repository that had an actual real person or company behind it would be whitelisted.
And there is no miracle that will keep users from inserting their root passwords at the cute dialogs
Um, yes, there is. Namely, if they don't have to put in their root password for anything else, they just might get a little suspicious if they have to pull it out for malware.
I love the idea that people just do random things to operate their computer.
No, they are taught how to operate their computer. In Windows, they are taught to download and run, with admin permissions, the flash installer, or the Silverlight installer, or the Skype installer, or the malware installer, or RSS reader installer, or the...hey, wait, what was that one before the last one again?
If you don't teach them that's how you install programs, they don't install programs that way, and look askew at any programs that says they should be installed that way.
or keep limited user trojans from sending mails and accessing important USER (what kind of thief cares about boring OS files anyway?) files.
Except that user trojans (Which they'd have to manually change the permissions on to launch in the first place.) would be much much much easier to clean up via antivirus software.
We wouldn't have a race to get antivirus updates out before a virus got in into the system, like on Windows, where viruses get in and embed themselves so deeply that two hours later, when new antivirus definitions comes out, the antivirus can no longer find the virus, and has, in fact, been totally disabled by said virus.
I swear, it's like no one here has any knowledge of how antivirus works at all, and is incapable of reading what I actually type. Malicious programs that run under a single user account are trivial to clean up, a hell of a lot easier to clean up than the rootkit infections that cripple Windows. You could even reboot the computer into an 'antivirus mode' where no user programs get executed at all. (You know, sorta like safe mode is supposed to work, except that none of the trojans on Windows are running under user accounts or via the normal startup, but have instead inserted themselves as system files.)
Apple 'encrypting' the iTunes database has nothing to do with anything.
The fact you can't install Apple Mobile Device service without iTunes, and you can't connect your iPod or iPhone without that, is the problem. There's plenty of third party software that will do almost everything iTunes will, like put your own music or videos on there, or syncing address books. And for the rest, like buying software and music for the phone, you can use the device itself to do it.
But you can't, in any way, communicate with your computer without the stupid Apple Mobile Device service on said computer, even if you're using a third party app to do it, and to get that service you need to install iTunes.
Yeah, but a computer would let them actually keep track of each order, and let them give out the free stuff off-schedule. I.e., if someone wants to have their free drink right away, fine, less work for the crew when they're actually busy serving everyone else. Likewise, people could pay in advance for meals and stuff.
But, anyway, anything is better than the stupid 'slowly roll the cart up the isle, stopping act each row and taking an order and serving it'. It's bad enough when that's 'free drinks', it's really horrible when they're selling actual sandwiches and stuff and having to take money.
Oh, and, incidentally, running orders to the back would let them take credit cards.
They have a flight attendant crew of a dozen people, and yet somehow can only operate like they're some sidewalk street vendor, instead of moving to the model food service moved to hundreds of years ago of asking customers what they want, preparing it in the back, and bringing it out to each customer. It's really idiotic.
Oh, and as an added bonus of all this: They could start charging slightly cheaper prices for people who order before the flight, because, as people use that system, they'd have to carry less extra food to sell on the flight on the flights they sell food.
A UAV can fly at low altitudes evading radar long enough to hop over the border.
Indeed. Radar can only go so low, especially in hilly areas.
The question isn't if drug dealers could use UAVs, it's if they could use them cheaper than humans. They can't, yet. The weight capacity isn't up to it, UAVs are not luggage carriers.
OTOH, I fully suspect they're already using 'UAVs', aka, remote controlled airplanes with video cameras, as scouts.
We probably haven't heard about it because it is not even illegal. As long as they don't actually cross the border with them, which is possibly not technically illegal but would result in them getting shot down. Fly one on each side of the border, locate law enforcement, radio locations to people crossing.
There are really three entirely different kinds of distractions, and we need to deal with them differently, I think.
The first is visual distractions. Looking at stuff in the car. Your radio, your AC, your iPod, whatever.
We can solve this by having more intuitive controls that can be found by touch, or at least can be found by looking but adjusted by touch so people glance away for a second to grab the control, but then look back at the road.
The second is, for lack of a better term, 'hand distractions'. Let's face it, we all drive with one hand. Holding a drink and driving is not difficult, nor should it cause a problem most of the time. Yes, if we're in an emergency situation we'd want two hands, but, in reality, 90% of auto accidents don't give people much time to react in any way except slamming on the brakes.
The problem is when we try to hold two things, and end up juggling them and the wheel. Or holding an mp3 player in one hand and pushing buttons with the other hand. Or holding a burrito and trying to wipe off our shirt.
This, strangely enough, could be solved in exactly the 'wrong' way...by making it easier for drivers to hold things. Cupholders are already doing that, and they have mounts for mp3 player, and some sort of table for food for the driver would seem a good idea.
The third is concentration distractions, and there's not a hell of a lot to do about that. People driving when sleepy, people driving and talking angrily on their speakerphone, people chatting with others in the car. (Which is why my state, for example, bans the amount of people that can be in the car of teenage drivers.)
The other two distractions also cause concentration distractions if we're not careful.
Incidentally, anyone find it funny they specifically exempt calling 911. I guess that's for if someone sees a something major outside their car and doesn't have a hand's free kit, but I'm just laughing imagining people actually in auto accidents dialing 911 during the accident. (And wondering how that could possibly be a good thing.)
Most people call 911 after an accident. Although, strictly speaking, sometimes their engine is still on, and they technically are still operating a motor vehicle.
You have decided to read those two sentences as if I said 'I have the right to be in all public property', which I obviously did not think, as then I went on to explain what sort of public property it was.
All government-owned property in this country is called 'public property'. There are, however, different kinds of public property.
Airports were 'public spaces', where anyone could freely walk around without any purpose at all, with (almost) no restrictions at all, like public parks.
Now they are semi-public spaces, like zoos or a subway stations or a library. Or, like I said, a publicly owned mall. (And, yes, they do exist.) Where you need permission to enter (Sometimes you have to pay.), and you're only allowed there if you're using the area for a specific purpose.
But this doesn't change anything about searches, which the government can't require to enter a public or semi-public area, or even a private government area. The ability of the public to enter an area, either automatically or with specific permission, has nothing to do with whether or not they can be required to submit to a search upon entrance.
It's funny how Slashdotters will argue all day long about how people who disobey speed limits should be shot on sight, that driving is a "PRIVILEGE NOT A RIGHT", and that drivers' licensing is a good idea to establish minimum standards for drivers since a shitty driver can kill people, yet people scream in outrage at the idea of not having the INALIENABLE RIGHT to get on any airplane they please without the airline or government having any say in it whatsoever.
It's funny how people will just assert that people argue X, without it being true. I've never actually seen 'slashdotters' argue that at all, and it's certainly not a consensus. In fact, every time speed limits get brought up, usually we end up with people demanding that speed limits get set higher, like they are supposed to be. (Speed limits are supposed to be based roughly on the actual speed people drive on the road, not randomly 15 mph lower.)
And that analogy is stupid anyway. No one is arguing against any sort of operator licenses, nor is anyone arguing for or against any sort of punishments for violating a law.
Hell, we're not even arguing that attempting to operate a vehicle doesn't give the police a right to search you. I don't think it does, but that's not the issue here.
We are arguing that attempting to enter in a vehicle as a passenger does not give the police the right to search you before you do.
Which, incidentally, has been definitively decided in favor of the passengers for cars and busses, the police cannot search them, despite passengers with weapons being able to hijack cars much easier than people with weapons being able to hijack airplanes.
Considering that people can buy airplanes and fly them into whatever they want, and that cockpit doors now are secured so people can't just walk in waving guns, and passangers are hardly going to let anyone hijack a plane anymore, perhaps you should save pissing your pants and dumping the piss all over the constitution for some other issue, where allowing random searches of people might actually make sense?
You use keep using that word 'unreasonable'. I don't think it means what you think it means.
Reasonable searches, under US law, are those with warrants, or exigent circumstances, or a limited search in the case of arrest, or those you have consented to. Other searches are 'unreasonable' as the word is used in the Constitution.
And, as I said, the 'consent' is a red herring. The government cannot bar you from proceeding somewhere unless you 'consent' to a search, or the 4th amendment is a mockery, and luckily, the Supreme Court has already figured this out and banned that behavior.
In fact, the government cannot decide to let you do something, or do anything for you, based on whether or not you consent to a search, as that is 'coercion'. (Or they could just, for example, tax people at 100% if they did not consent to a search, or, like I said, bar them from public roads.)
Just saying 'there is nothing unreasonable' about warrantless searches required for people to board planes does not, in fact, make that true.
And I have no idea how what percentage of people are searched makes a difference, or when people's possession stopped 'counting'. The fourth amendment assigns equal weight to searching someone's person and searching their effects.
The danger of someone being on an airplane is immaterial to any constitutional grounds. If you want some sort of 'unless they're boarding an airplane' exception to the fourth amendment, I suggest you read Article 5 of the Constitution, which gives two clearly defined way for you to alter the 4th amendment. (Although do the first, no one's sure how the second works.)
25% of 'the masses' just want a web browser, an email client, an office suite that can read their files, and maybe an MP3 player.
Another 25% also want an IM client, Google Earth, torrent client, rss reader, other random small pieces of software. All of which comes with Linux too.
And another 25% of the public would want to add software from several large publishers, like Adobe or EA or even Microsoft or whatever, people who could easily register their repository with a master list. (We're not debating the availability of software in some hypothetical Linux future, we're debating if having repository as the sole source would work.)
If you don't use Linux, you're probably not aware that most producers of free Linux software who don't get included in distributions already put their packages in repositories for download.
You have somehow misunderstood what I said to mean that the distros would be in charge of what is made available. No. The distro would just take minimum steps to determine that a repository is moderately legitimate and has some sort of company or actual real person behind it, and stick it on a list of 'places you can add to your software list by clicking on a link'. (Heck, some sort of delayed automatic entry would probably be workable. If they can submit their name, and have an SSL cert and a domain name and respond to an automatic email and phone call and actually remain up for a week, they're probably not malware and we can let people tentatively download from that repository. And just blacklist them if we were wrong...and, while we're at it, pop up messages about malicious software on users machines who added that repository the next time they update their master list.)
Sorta like Authenticode from Microsoft is supposed to work, but does not, because software publishers can't afford it.
Now, there is the question of what to do with store purchases. Frankly, I'd be okay with just allowing installs off a CD...asking people to download malicious ISOs and then burn them to a CD to install them have a high enough 'weird' factor that people are unlikely to normally fall for it. (And if you can get people to do that, you can get them to boot off said CD, which the OS can't protect from anyway.)
And the other 25% of Linux users can turn the damn feature off and install from anywhere they want. The point is what average users are trained to do to install software, not what people can do.
On Linux, users should install software by opening their 'software installer' and searching for what they want, or by sticking a CD in the drive, which should pop up their installer listing software on that CD, or clicking a link in a web page, which pops up their software installer with software in that repository. The first already is true, the middle is easy enough to do but usually done different, and the last is trivially easy to implement.
And all of them are safer than on a Windows system, where almost all the software (Except purchased in stores) is installed via the exact same way that malware is installed...downloaded and run. If you a) Don't have people install legit software that way, and b) don't let people easily install malware that way without a lot of strange steps, you've essentially totally stopped people from installing malware. Microsoft thinks you can just do 'b' without 'a', but adding steps that all software installs require means people will learn to happily do them for malware also.
It doesn't matter what is possible outside the norm. Outside the norm, on Windows or Linux, people could run fdisk and unpartition their computer, or delete their startup files, both of which processes are as destructive as malware...but people aren't trained to do that normally, whereas, on Windows, they are trained in the process to install malware when they install legit software, and, thinking malware is legit software, they follow exactly those steps. Whereas, on Linux, those steps differ, and they could easily differ even more.
Oh, there's even more fun than that.
You know that shoe-bomber dude would have probably tore a hole in the plane, and he fit the explosives within his shoe. (And if he'd been smart enough to light it in the bathroom, he would have succeeded.)
So we now take off our shoes and have them xrayed.
Of course, the amount you can fit in the sole of your shoe can easily be fit pretty much anywhere on your body if you flatten it.
Even millimeter wave won't detect it, because of, because of privacy issues, they blur out specific areas of the body, and the amount of explosives he had was smaller, cubic centimeter-wise, than one breast implant.
I am not suggesting breast implant bombings, but rather that a standard bra could trivially have that much padding inserted in it without the slightest notice.
Likewise, men could pad another area that gets blurred out, without anyone noticing.
And both could probably fit enough between their buttocks.
But, no, we all have to take off our shoes, because apparently terrorists are going to hide stuff in there. Again.
And this ignores the fact there's actually questions about whether or not the xrays could actually see explosives in shoes. Shoes commonly have 'hollowed out areas' in the bottom, where air or liquid is put in, so it is dubious if someone would recognize explosives.
And I, personally, have gone through airport security four times with the steel toe boots I normally wear. Which means, unless the shoe just happened to turn exactly right, they could not, in fact, see inside the toe of the shoe, which could have been full of explosives for all they knew. (Yes, cramped toes...but they don't know my shoe size, perhaps they were three sizes too big.) The last two times I actually watched to see if they reached in and checked inside...they didn't.
Yes, but empty two liter bottles are suspicious, like I said.
See, whenever I talk about 'a bunch of people could easily just carry binary explosives through security in pieces', there's always a fool who says 'Yes, but that would be suspicious, and thus somehow they'd get noticed and caught.'. (Of course, there aren't any security personnel walking around inside the security perimeter to notice these 'suspicious' behaviors, but whatever.)
So I specifically figured out a way to do it that not only is within the rules, but no part of it is even slightly suspicious.
People going through security with plastic liter bags that could are watertight and could be filled with explosives: Not suspicious. In fact, required.
People sitting next to each other where you can't see them trading things: Not suspicious.
People actually trading items between carry-ons and poking around in them before a flight: Not suspicious.
People buying bottled water and sticking it in their carry-on: Not suspicious. In fact, almost required
People sitting for ten minutes in a bathroom stall, and taking their luggage in with them: Not suspicious.
Yeah, sorry I went off on you, it's just there are a lot of goofyballs here who are 'standing up for businesses' which is usually wrongheaded libertarian thinking that generally annoys me.
But it is really wrongheaded here, because this isn't a business trying to do anything, it's the government barring businesses and people from doing businesses unless the people consent to a government search beforehand. Which is a restriction of both the people's right, and the businesses' 'rights' insofar as they have any.
I find myself on the same side as libertarians, which doesn't happen that often, that 'businesses ought to be free to do whatever they want', like, say, not search their customers, and half of the libertarians are goofily standing there defending the government unconstitutionally search people and acting like it's a business doing it!
What would they do if, to 'protect businesses from armed robbery', the government banned guns in businesses, and started searching people who entered public property leading to those businesses (aka, the highway system) for said guns? Would they stand there and defend the rights of businesses to bar anyone they want, like that was slightly relevant?
I have no idea where you got that silly idea. "Public property" is not equivalent to "anyone can be there anytime they want". Courthouses, jails, the Whitehouse, the floor of the Senate, the Mayor's office, school classrooms, and the area beyond security at the airport are all "publicly owned". Tell me that you have a right to walk into any kindergarden classroom in the country and just wander around whenever you want. Try it at midnight.
I didn't say I could be there anytime I wanted. The government has the perfect right, on public property that exists for a specific reason, to keep people out who do not fit under that reason. The government can keep me out of airports if I don't have a ticket, there is no discussion about that.
I said I could be there without being searched.
If you think the government has the right to search people who enter schools, or courthouses, or even visit prisons, or things like that, you are, well, wrong.
They do have a right to make you walk through a metal detector, which is not legally a search.
That airport isn't "essentially a publicly owned mall", and yes, they have every right to search you because YOU CONSENTED TO THE SEARCH when you got in the line to be searched.
First of all, that's just wrong on the face of it. You don't 'consent to a search' when you get in the line to be searched. If you leave the line, they can't legally chase you down and search you, so obviously your 'consent on entering the line' theory is rather stupid to start with. You consent to a search when you let them search you.
Secondly, you cannot consent to government searches just by trying to use their public property. The government cannot barricade all public property off and state that, to use it, you have to consent to being searched. That is an absurd theory and renders the 4th amendment meaningless, and, yes, the Supreme Court has specifically said that.
In fact, the courts just fixed their idiotic 'having a car on a public road means you consent it its search' ruling it had previous made...which you will notice still didn't let police search you, just your vehicle.
The idea that the government can barricade access to all airplanes and only let you fly a
And having people switch to their own drinks is a horrible thing for airlines. Forget the money lost by not selling a drink...people will start bringing more drinks. Instead of carrying 6 oz a person, people will have a 18 oz bottle. (Which of course costs the same amount of gas to fly if the person drinks it or not.) I actually think this was why they started providing food and drinks on airlines.
The thing that gets me is that they want to save all the weight they can...and yet they still inexplicably serve soft drinks in half cans, which require them to carry both cans, and cups.
A fountain drink system would seem to be much lighter. I understand that pressurized stuff can act weird in the low pressure environment of a plane, but surely that wouldn't be too hard to figure out.
It would be hard under the existing system unless the fountain system was movable, but the existing system of handing drinks out is, well, incredibly stupid to start with. Have someone walk though, taking each order into a handheld computer as they go, and have two or three people running them to each seat. (I wonder how much that cart weighs.) They're just lucky it's an airplane...blocking the isle anywhere else like that would get the fire marshal on you like a ton of bricks.
This would also mean that indecisive people didn't hold things up, and that people could actually order at any time, although they would still want to have a 'scheduled' loop through the cabin. It would also mean that they wouldn't have to carry everything on that cart and could actually heat things up and whatnot. (Yes, airplanes don't carry 'meals' on short flights, but almost all airplanes have microwaves in them anyway, so could provide things like popcorn and stuff.)
A lot of the 'weight' stuff is nonsense until they actually start charging people based on weight. (Which they should.)
And the restroom! I have to pay for that, too.
Likewise, when I park at shopping malls, the stuff I buy pays for the store lease, which in turns pays for the part of the parking space I don't use because I have a small car!
Oh, and when I go to Taco Bell, and buy a taco, I always get a soft taco, which costs the same as a hard taco despite being about 3 cents cheaper to make. (And don't even get me started on the AC, cleaning, and restroom overhead when I'm using the drive through)
Your argument might actually have some weight if it cost more than 30 cents total for that airline to provide that half-soda and a bag of pretzels, and if an airline ticket didn't cost, at the cheapest, $60.
Anyone who complains about any 'built in hidden price' of something that costs between 1/200th and 1/1000th of their actual cost is a total moron.