I don't know where you live, but, no, you cannot be charged with breaking and entering by unlocking a door with a key you were given by the owner of the door.
You are an imbecile. I feel ashamed to share a name with you.
Your IT people are idiots. Even if antivirus software can do that, which I've never seen before, it wouldn't be random workstations that were trying it.
What if the kid had entered someone's house, and raped, killed and eaten them? He could be charged with all sorts of crap! Do you want someone like that roaming around free?
You want an actual analogy:
It's like you're eating a restaurant and you, while leaving the restroom, wonder what's behind an unmarked door. Only to discover an office-like area with credit card receipts laying around. You report this, only to be arrested.
Now, if there were 'Staff only' signs, you were, in fact, trespassing. Assuming you saw them. If there were not, you were not. You had permission to be on the property, if there were places you weren't supposed to go on the property, you should have been informed.
This is why places traditionally use locks, which you cannot fail to see. They are not just to physically keep people out, most of them can be busted down with a kick or two, they are to make it clear where people legally cannot go. Even latch gates that you can reach over and unlatch with your hand legally bar you from passing without permission.
And it's the same with computer trespass...it requires you are somewhere you have been informed you have not been allowed. Whether or not the areas that the kid was poking around in were so marked is unknown.
We already know the school didn't bother to use the traditional method of informing people they were not allowed to go somewhere, by prompting for a name and password they don't have. The kid, and everyone at the school, had that password, apparently legitimately. It's possible the server was named NO_STUDENTS_ALLOWED or something, but honestly, the charge of 'trespass' seems entirely bogus.
And as for 'copying' stuff...people here essentially made that up. There's no reference to that in any of the articles about this.
That honestly would be the best if we're bound and determine to use electronic machines for voting.
Essentially, make it an ATM, although with a larger screen and more buttons down the side. Let's say six down one side and six down another. Let's even make them different color and number them and put the choice next to them, also labeled and numbered. This isn't rocket science, people.
There's just way too many examples of touch screen screwing up, and we already solved this damn problem. The world, in general, does not use touch screen, because they suck and are stupid, and I have no idea why we're determined to use them for voting.
As for people worried about cost: It would probably be cheaper than a touchscreen, which is actually a fairly expensive piece of equipment. There's probably some already-existing USB keyboard device that would just require printing new key labels and making a mounting setup.
Note using electronic machines to print a human readable ballot, which is what I'm talking about, is much different than the inherently stupid idea of having a machine keep count.
Some people are saying this is a serious issue. Everyone else could not be reached for comment.
Seriously, uh, only some people think it's serious? No one else cares?
And, yes, this is a calibration issue instead of a fraud issue. Fraud, of course, we'd never actually hear about.
The fact we can't even managed to have machines that act like they're properly working should be a rather serious indication that even if they do act like they're properly working, we don't know if they are.
The way to stop illegal immigration is to go after businesses that provide massive amounts of jobs to them. There is no way to stop people from being in the US.
Remove 90% of the jobs that are provided by a few large manufacturing companies, usually focused in major cities, and 90% of the people here illegally will leave, especially if we provide free, punishment-less transportation back.
We can then start worrying about the rest, if we actually need to.
You can get into Lake Michigan without touching land, from Canada, right?
And the same with Maryland. They aren't counting distance from the 'border', which would be wrong anyway...the border is 12 miles out from 'the coast', which is ofter a lot further out than people think thanks to various islands. I seriously doubt you can leave Tallahassee, for example, and get to a international border within 100 miles, because the border in the Gulf is not where you'd think it would be, but much further out thanks to the odd continental shelf.
No, they appear to be counting distance from the place that people entering the country might first touch land, regardless of how far inside the US that might be. I suppose we're lucky they didn't include the navigable part of the Mississippi as 'the border' and run a corridor up the center of the US.
I don't know if this is justified or not, but it's certainly possible that's what the border patrol people are claiming, and the ACLU just made the map to match.
Incidentally, this isn't the first time this happened. This sort of 'the border is inside the US' crap happened with the Florida Keys a while back. Google 'Conch Republic'.
There is also no nation in the world that has a law on the books that states: "If we, your government, suddenly turns oppressive (determined by the citizen's opinion), it is hunky dory to kill cops.
Actually:
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
-US Declaration of Independence.
That said, you're entirely right, and people here are idiots. The 'revolution' will be a bunch of loons fighting off the ATF after they kill a deputy who tried to evict them from their house, while the news media plays a tape of the deputy's grieving widow.
Or, hell, I already wrote a rant about this. To quote myself 'America is not a bunch of tiny castles where, as long as you can hold off the invading armies, you will be fine. The idea that that is how the world works is astonishingly naive. Almost all the population of America lives in housing they do not fully own, they get food from places they do not control like the supermarket, they require operating in society for money to obtain said food and shelter, a society where economics are controlled by some very large players that can crush them like bugs.'.
Not that this clears anything up though, because if you were to kill a pregnant mother in a car wreck while drinking you can be charged for two counts of homicide.
You could be charged with fifty-six counts of homicide, or ten counts of jaywalking, or three counts of impersonating an officer, too. Depending on how the laws are written.
Those are laws. They do not define constitutional meanings of things.
Just because a law says that killing someone unborn counts as homicide doesn't mean they are technically a person under the constitution.
To clarify: There is a question if the 16th amendment actually passed one of the states it supposedly passed, as Ohio wasn't technically a state at the time. It looks slightly dodgy, but most people agree it legitimately passed.
However, this is moot for two reasons:
1) Other states then passed it, unequivocally placing it over the line, no matter what.
2) The 16th amendment isn't needed for income tax, anyway.
I know people read it as it is, but the federal government could already do that. What it couldn't do is have taxes that impact states differently. It had to collect taxes based on censor enumeration per state, but that didn't mean that it had to tax everyone the same.
Just that it had to tax a state with 10 million people half as much as one with 20. This in practice meant a straight 'head tax', but there is nothing stopping an income tax in theory...it would just have to be scaled per-state.
Which, incidentally, would impact the red states a lot more severely than the blue. Think about where a person lives the next time you see them complain about the 16th amendment...I'm willing to bet they live in a state without rich people to make up the shortfall. People in California could pony up, for example, $50,000 a year on average. People in Kansas probably could not.
Of course, we'd probably just go back to taxing the state itself, and making them collect the taxes from whoever, but it's the same issue. Either we'd have shortfalls in the poor states, or have to seriously cut back on taxes in the rich states. Taxing based on population is stupid.
And there is a legitimate question if, without the 16th amendment, if the Federal government tried to tax people like they tax people now, whether or not individuals could complain anyway. That was a state equal protection issue.
That's completely absurd, a tiny rat couldn't avenge your death. He have to be exposed to mutagen of some sort and become much larger, and, preferably, humanoid.
It would also work better if some more mutant animals helped, although those, of course, would not have to be rats.
The real joke, of course, is that all these 'liquid explosive' plots operate on the theory that to get a bomb on airplane requires smuggle binary liquid explosives and building a non-nitrate bomb with them.
So you'd actually need two such bottles...assuming, of course, that the premise was sane and you couldn't just walk on with normal plastic explosives like the shoe bomber did.
And you thought hijackers weren't opportunistic. Glad you changed your mind.
As I have explicitly and repeatedly said that I did not think that, I don't really see the point of continuing a conversation with someone who can't read.
Can you take a random street thug from your local county jail and ask them to create a fake boarding pass in 5 minutes? No.
Your local street thug doesn't need a fake boarding pass, you loon. Only people on the no-fly list do, and only if they want to get through security with real ID instead of just buying a fake ID.
My local street thug can just buy a ticket under his real name. This is how people on the no-fly list can fly.
And, more to the point, yes, anyone can create a fake boarding pass in five minutes, and it doesn't take magical computer skills to do it. It takes downloading one of the many 'boarding pass templates' available on the internet and drawing your real name on it in paintbrush. (Although I like the 'five minute' time limit. It takes more than five minutes to get from your car to the front entrance of the airport. I like the idea that planning longer than 'five minutes' would deter a hijacking that takes at least two hours before you get on the damn plane.)
With your whole mugging, create fake ID, print fake boarding pass, etc. you are giving the example of a person putting a significant amount of effort into boarding a plane.
You have failed to understand the scenario. I was listing options, not steps. Let us assume that I wish to get on a plane with minimal effort and I'm on the no-fly list. I need:
1. An actual ticket purchased from the airline, on the actual flight I wish to fly, under a fake name. (To get on the plane.) I can trivially buy this using a stolen credit card number, or mug someone, or buy it using cash or whatever to get it. It is not hard to buy tickets under someone else's name, either...I've twice had airplane tickets purchased for me by my company. So that step is actually incredibly easy.
2. To go online, download a blank boarding pass image, and write down my actual real name on it and any flight. And print that. Also fairly easy.
I do not need any fake ID, I do not need to actually mug anyone, I don't need anything except 1) a real ticket in someone else's name, which is very easy to get and 2) five minutes at a computer writing my name on a template image and printing that.
I had them #2 at security, along with my actual real photo ID (Which I presumably already have), and hand them #1 at the airplane.
First you say that it is trivial to get a weapon past security to hijack a plane. Then you say there are less hijackings because guns are easy to spot. Which is it chief?
If only there were some sort of weapons that weren't guns! You know, like the exact ones I was talking about called 'knives'!
I think I explained my position fairly clear: It is easy to detect and ban the entire range of projectile weapons, as those are easy to spot in x-rays and it is difficult to build one that would not be. (That said, there are always poisoned blowguns, but those are rather difficult to threaten people with and have a much higher skill level of use.)
It is impossible to ban bladed weapons. Bladed weapons can be made from almost any object that can be sharped, and will not show up on x-ray machines.
What is your argument for the decrease in hijackings since you think getting weapons on board is trivial?
Because no single individual can hijack a plane with a knife. Um, duh. You cannot control a room of people with a knife, and you certainly can't control the multiple rooms that are on an airplane. It's the same reason bank robbers don't use knifes.
If it's a rigged bottle with the top a tiny reservoir of saline solution and the bottle whatever idiotic liquid explosive they're talking about today, I fail to see the point of shaking it.
I'm still of the opinion that we barely have 'dreams' at all. We just think about random shit as we sleep, hypothesis about random things and piece stuff together.
When people 'remember' dreams it's just throwing it all together as we wake up, or when we change in and out of different sleep cycles. Any sense of linear time in a dream is just us putting that on it afterward, or running through a lot of images rapidly as we wake up.
And while I don't know if I 'dream' in black and white or not, I do know I often dream in third person, which would be completely insane if it was actually happening in real time. I can't imagine how I'd walk around and whatnot. But, like I said, I suspect that's just me imagining something and placing 'me' in it, and then later inventing some sort of linear sequence to explain it.
This also explains how 'remembering' dreams can be incredibly erratic, where you often 'forget' things that it would be impossible not to notice. You didn't forget, you just simply didn't flesh that detail out when imagining about it.
Of course, the whole premise that it would be possible to imagine something and be conscious of imagining it but not notice that, in fact, it's a dream, is actually pretty silly to start with. You can't be conscious and have no volition at the same time!
In my world, reality, those people are no longer capable of bringing weapons on board.
Except, as Bruce pointed out, this is completely not true. Not only do they often not detect actual weapons carried on board in violation of their police, but, as Bruce as pointed out, it is trivial to demonstrate even if they magically caught everything they were looking for, you could trivially get a weapon on the plane.
Bruce likes to use the example of carrying a piece of cardboard and metal epoxy, and creating a knife from it, but I think a better example is just having a sharpened CD in a CD player, taking it with you into the bathroom, and snapping it in half with your foot to make two knives.
They are no longer capable of producing fake boarding passes without being detected.
Um, did you not read the article? Of course they can do that. People have been pointing out they can do that for years.
If you have boarded a plane since 9/11, you saw exactly much scrutiny they gave the boarding pass. They took the piece of paper produced by your own printer, looked at the name which was printed there by you, looked at the flight number and date which were printed there by you, and compared it a photo ID. While they could, in theory, detect a fake ID, they have absolutely no way of determining that that name and flight number and date correspond to a reservation for a flight.
Hence any moron can get around the no-fly list by buying a ticket under a fake name, or, heck, mugging someone and taking theirs, and then printing a fake boarding pass with their real name and using that and their real ID to get through security. And then using the real boarding pass with the fake name to get on the plane. Granted, it would be safer to just get a fake ID, but the point is that even with 100% magically unforgeable IDs, people who are on the no-fly list can get on airplanes.
In other words, there's not just a practical failure of the system in that you can't detect fake photo IDs, there's a theoretical failure of the system in that, even if it worked perfectly, it could not stop what it is attempting to stop: People on the no-fly list from getting on airplanes.
In your fantasy world, these people were not opportunistic and therefore, if they still existed, they would still be hijacking planes.
I said there are no opportunistic airplane hijackers, not that there never were any. You've imagined a position I don't hold based on a conversation elsewhere with a fool. 0 out of 10 airplane hijackers do it without a plan at this point in time.
And of course banning guns from planes resulted in less hijackings. Guns are a unique and easy to spot item, they allow a level of hostage taking that nothing else does, and they are so unique that all of them can be banned...movie plots about non-metal guns aside.
It does not logically follow that stopping someobjects that can be used as knives from a plane would have any effect, if other objects that can used in exactly the same manner can easily be smuggled on. If we had banned, for example, handguns, but let people carry on shotguns, I suspect airplane hijackings would have continued.
And 'knifes', which are essentially 'sharp objects' are impossible to ban unless we start making people fly in the nude. And since, like I said, there are no opportunistic airplane hijackers, it seems entirely likely that if someone wished to hijack a plane and the plan required knives, they'd just use one of the dozens of ways to get knife-like objects on board. (I can think of half a dozen off the top of my head.) And hence banning knives isn't helping anything at all.
Hydrogen peroxide, while dangerous in concentrated form, is not dangerous because of any specific burning properties. It's dangerous because it evaporates water out and spontaneously catches fire when it reaches a certain density.
Hence spilling even a moderate concentration of it can randomly start a fire hours later when enough water evaporates. Or if you left the cover off the bottle. That's the actual reason they only sell low densities to people...it's not a 'restrict explosives' issues, it's a 'let's not sell people things that catch on fire by themselves if spilled or left open' issue.
If you were going to deliberately start a fire, you'd be better off with the same amount of gasoline and a match. It's used in rocket fuel because it's easy to make and can be induced to vaporize by a catalyst, instead of having to be ignited, and because it turns into oxygen and water.
Acetone peroxide, OTOH, is a moderately powerful and very unstable non-nitrogen-based explosive. The problem, of course, is that the absurd 'plot' required them to make a delicate explosive in the plane's bathroom.
Whereas in the real world people would do what Richard Reid did, and make it beforehand, and carry it in, in his case in his shoes. It looks somewhat like salt, I believe. Although it's worth pointing out that he was just using it as a detonator for normal plastic explosives...blowing up a plane, or even doing anything more than killing your seatmates, would take a lot more than he had. Which rather implies the sniffers failed completely, and he should have just used gunpowder as a detonator, and not worried about the fancy stuff.
The idea that anyone would actually make acetone peroxide on an airplane, where the chemical smell alone would cause panic (We've all smelled acetone, aka, nail polish remover, before, right?) and that need a constant heating is insane. The whole point of explosives that are not nitrogen-based is you can just carry them pre-made through sniffers.
But a more important question for you and everyone else is:
Why on earth do you think x-ray machines can spot liquids?
They cannot.
And thus you can carry as much damn liquid you want, of any sort, onto a plane. As long as you put it inside something that doesn't look like a container and put it in your carryon.
Or, of course, have a dozen people print fake boarding passes and bring past security and combine it after the security checkpoint to the one person with the real ticket.
You can't take samples or poke a stick down to the bottom. Saline containers have pinpoint holes at the top that mean you can't stick anything in them, and they have to remain sterile anyway.
Really? How are you going to test that the whole thing is saline solution?
It would be rather easy to just have the solution in the tip and the rest filled with whatever imaginary 'bad liquid' we're defending again.
Of course, all this is rendered moot by the fact that security can't actually detect liquids in your carry-ons. It is easy to hide liquids from x-ray machines...just carry them in things that aren't shaped like bottles. Grab a very big, flat, water bottle, fold it in half, and tape a coat hanger to it, and, presto, it's a garment bag.
Or, just do what the guy in the article did and carry it in one of those fake stomachs used to smuggle drinks into stadiums.
It is, of course, rendered even more moot by the fact that liquid, non-nitrogen-based explosives are basically imaginary. They're the stuff of spy novels, and the check is rendered all the more silly by the fact that many non-nitrogen-based explosives can, in fact, be solids.
I am, of course, pretending that you can't actually walk onto an airplane with nitrogen-based explosives because there's a sniffer somewhere, despite the fact I don't recall seeing it.
Except there are no opportunist airplane hijackers, you doofus.
People lock their car doors, despite the fact that any idiot with a slimjim can get in about 20 seconds.
That's not who they're defending against. They're defending against the guy who sees their CD player sitting out on their seat and opens the door to grab it quickly.
There are no people who go: Well, I was going to go down the airport today to hijack a plane, but printing a fake boarding pass to get past the security is too much work.
His conclusions aren't 'original' because he's been out there from the start criticizing security theater, you tard. Of course after a while he starts repeating himself.
Anyway, this isn't an article about Bruce Schneier, and it isn't doing what he points out, which is to attack the logical flaws in security systems. Flaws that render them unable to work. Your link also did not mention such flaws, but rather practical ones.
This article is someone else talking about the practical flaws in the security system working with Bruce and demonstrated that the TSA can't even accomplish what it's trying to do. Even if it could do that, it would still fall victim to the logical flaws that Bruce has pointed out, but it can't.
The government is willing to admit practice flaws, because that just means more money to fix them. It seems incapable of admitting logical flaws, like the fact it's 'liquid ban' cannot possibly stop someone from carrying ten gallons of gasoline onto an airplane...they'd just need a bunch of guys to walk it through security and combine it.
Or, as his favorite example, epoxy knives made after boarding. That is a logical flaw, but, in actuality, people fly with actual knives all the time. Bruce just points out that even if the TSA could do their job perfectly...it wouldn't help.
Exactly. He's not pointing out that ID can be faked, everyone knows that. He's pointing out, because of the stupidity of the design, you don't even need a fake ID. You can, armed with a printer and a real ID with a name on the watch list, get on airplane.
It's like the stupidity that I noticed:
If there really was a point that some amount of liquids magically became dangerous (Despite the idea if liquid explosives being near insane.) than the current measures are just stupid...because any number of people can be used to carry it in and collect the liquids together in the restroom in a perfectly normal water bottle or two.
Hell, you actually only need to buy one ticket, to get it on the plane...as Bruce has quite correctly pointed out that you can get into the 'secure' area with imaginary tickets you print yourself. Send fifteen guys with fake boarding passes through security with this 'liquid' and then have them all meet and hand it off to the one flyer. (Which I always assumed would happen in some isolated location, but Bruce has apparently demonstrated that absurdly suspicious behavior in bathrooms is not reported.)
This is pretending that the x-ray machines can, in fact, detect liquid inside your bags, which they can't, so it's triply stupid. But people have long since moved past pointing out the failure of the system, and into pointing out that even if the system works magically perfect it can still be completely ignored.
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You mean the password everyone was given?
I don't know where you live, but, no, you cannot be charged with breaking and entering by unlocking a door with a key you were given by the owner of the door.
You are an imbecile. I feel ashamed to share a name with you.
Your IT people are idiots. Even if antivirus software can do that, which I've never seen before, it wouldn't be random workstations that were trying it.
Escalate the problem.
What if the kid had entered someone's house, and raped, killed and eaten them? He could be charged with all sorts of crap! Do you want someone like that roaming around free?
You want an actual analogy:
It's like you're eating a restaurant and you, while leaving the restroom, wonder what's behind an unmarked door. Only to discover an office-like area with credit card receipts laying around. You report this, only to be arrested.
Now, if there were 'Staff only' signs, you were, in fact, trespassing. Assuming you saw them. If there were not, you were not. You had permission to be on the property, if there were places you weren't supposed to go on the property, you should have been informed.
This is why places traditionally use locks, which you cannot fail to see. They are not just to physically keep people out, most of them can be busted down with a kick or two, they are to make it clear where people legally cannot go. Even latch gates that you can reach over and unlatch with your hand legally bar you from passing without permission.
And it's the same with computer trespass...it requires you are somewhere you have been informed you have not been allowed. Whether or not the areas that the kid was poking around in were so marked is unknown.
We already know the school didn't bother to use the traditional method of informing people they were not allowed to go somewhere, by prompting for a name and password they don't have. The kid, and everyone at the school, had that password, apparently legitimately. It's possible the server was named NO_STUDENTS_ALLOWED or something, but honestly, the charge of 'trespass' seems entirely bogus.
And as for 'copying' stuff...people here essentially made that up. There's no reference to that in any of the articles about this.
That honestly would be the best if we're bound and determine to use electronic machines for voting.
Essentially, make it an ATM, although with a larger screen and more buttons down the side. Let's say six down one side and six down another. Let's even make them different color and number them and put the choice next to them, also labeled and numbered. This isn't rocket science, people.
There's just way too many examples of touch screen screwing up, and we already solved this damn problem. The world, in general, does not use touch screen, because they suck and are stupid, and I have no idea why we're determined to use them for voting.
As for people worried about cost: It would probably be cheaper than a touchscreen, which is actually a fairly expensive piece of equipment. There's probably some already-existing USB keyboard device that would just require printing new key labels and making a mounting setup.
Note using electronic machines to print a human readable ballot, which is what I'm talking about, is much different than the inherently stupid idea of having a machine keep count.
Some people are saying this is a serious issue. Everyone else could not be reached for comment.
Seriously, uh, only some people think it's serious? No one else cares?
And, yes, this is a calibration issue instead of a fraud issue. Fraud, of course, we'd never actually hear about.
The fact we can't even managed to have machines that act like they're properly working should be a rather serious indication that even if they do act like they're properly working, we don't know if they are.
The way to stop illegal immigration is to go after businesses that provide massive amounts of jobs to them. There is no way to stop people from being in the US.
Remove 90% of the jobs that are provided by a few large manufacturing companies, usually focused in major cities, and 90% of the people here illegally will leave, especially if we provide free, punishment-less transportation back.
We can then start worrying about the rest, if we actually need to.
Damn, and I was going start promoting Atlanta as the biggest major city inside the constitution.
You can get into Lake Michigan without touching land, from Canada, right?
And the same with Maryland. They aren't counting distance from the 'border', which would be wrong anyway...the border is 12 miles out from 'the coast', which is ofter a lot further out than people think thanks to various islands. I seriously doubt you can leave Tallahassee, for example, and get to a international border within 100 miles, because the border in the Gulf is not where you'd think it would be, but much further out thanks to the odd continental shelf.
No, they appear to be counting distance from the place that people entering the country might first touch land, regardless of how far inside the US that might be. I suppose we're lucky they didn't include the navigable part of the Mississippi as 'the border' and run a corridor up the center of the US.
I don't know if this is justified or not, but it's certainly possible that's what the border patrol people are claiming, and the ACLU just made the map to match.
Incidentally, this isn't the first time this happened. This sort of 'the border is inside the US' crap happened with the Florida Keys a while back. Google 'Conch Republic'.
There is also no nation in the world that has a law on the books that states: "If we, your government, suddenly turns oppressive (determined by the citizen's opinion), it is hunky dory to kill cops.
Actually:
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness...But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
-US Declaration of Independence.
That said, you're entirely right, and people here are idiots. The 'revolution' will be a bunch of loons fighting off the ATF after they kill a deputy who tried to evict them from their house, while the news media plays a tape of the deputy's grieving widow.
Or, hell, I already wrote a rant about this. To quote myself 'America is not a bunch of tiny castles where, as long as you can hold off the invading armies, you will be fine. The idea that that is how the world works is astonishingly naive. Almost all the population of America lives in housing they do not fully own, they get food from places they do not control like the supermarket, they require operating in society for money to obtain said food and shelter, a society where economics are controlled by some very large players that can crush them like bugs.'.
Not that this clears anything up though, because if you were to kill a pregnant mother in a car wreck while drinking you can be charged for two counts of homicide.
You could be charged with fifty-six counts of homicide, or ten counts of jaywalking, or three counts of impersonating an officer, too. Depending on how the laws are written.
Those are laws. They do not define constitutional meanings of things.
Just because a law says that killing someone unborn counts as homicide doesn't mean they are technically a person under the constitution.
To clarify: There is a question if the 16th amendment actually passed one of the states it supposedly passed, as Ohio wasn't technically a state at the time. It looks slightly dodgy, but most people agree it legitimately passed.
However, this is moot for two reasons:
1) Other states then passed it, unequivocally placing it over the line, no matter what.
2) The 16th amendment isn't needed for income tax, anyway.
I know people read it as it is, but the federal government could already do that. What it couldn't do is have taxes that impact states differently. It had to collect taxes based on censor enumeration per state, but that didn't mean that it had to tax everyone the same.
Just that it had to tax a state with 10 million people half as much as one with 20. This in practice meant a straight 'head tax', but there is nothing stopping an income tax in theory...it would just have to be scaled per-state.
Which, incidentally, would impact the red states a lot more severely than the blue. Think about where a person lives the next time you see them complain about the 16th amendment...I'm willing to bet they live in a state without rich people to make up the shortfall. People in California could pony up, for example, $50,000 a year on average. People in Kansas probably could not.
Of course, we'd probably just go back to taxing the state itself, and making them collect the taxes from whoever, but it's the same issue. Either we'd have shortfalls in the poor states, or have to seriously cut back on taxes in the rich states. Taxing based on population is stupid.
And there is a legitimate question if, without the 16th amendment, if the Federal government tried to tax people like they tax people now, whether or not individuals could complain anyway. That was a state equal protection issue.
That's completely absurd, a tiny rat couldn't avenge your death. He have to be exposed to mutagen of some sort and become much larger, and, preferably, humanoid.
It would also work better if some more mutant animals helped, although those, of course, would not have to be rats.
The real joke, of course, is that all these 'liquid explosive' plots operate on the theory that to get a bomb on airplane requires smuggle binary liquid explosives and building a non-nitrate bomb with them.
So you'd actually need two such bottles...assuming, of course, that the premise was sane and you couldn't just walk on with normal plastic explosives like the shoe bomber did.
And you thought hijackers weren't opportunistic. Glad you changed your mind.
As I have explicitly and repeatedly said that I did not think that, I don't really see the point of continuing a conversation with someone who can't read.
Can you take a random street thug from your local county jail and ask them to create a fake boarding pass in 5 minutes? No.
Your local street thug doesn't need a fake boarding pass, you loon. Only people on the no-fly list do, and only if they want to get through security with real ID instead of just buying a fake ID.
My local street thug can just buy a ticket under his real name. This is how people on the no-fly list can fly.
And, more to the point, yes, anyone can create a fake boarding pass in five minutes, and it doesn't take magical computer skills to do it. It takes downloading one of the many 'boarding pass templates' available on the internet and drawing your real name on it in paintbrush. (Although I like the 'five minute' time limit. It takes more than five minutes to get from your car to the front entrance of the airport. I like the idea that planning longer than 'five minutes' would deter a hijacking that takes at least two hours before you get on the damn plane.)
With your whole mugging, create fake ID, print fake boarding pass, etc. you are giving the example of a person putting a significant amount of effort into boarding a plane.
You have failed to understand the scenario. I was listing options, not steps. Let us assume that I wish to get on a plane with minimal effort and I'm on the no-fly list. I need:
1. An actual ticket purchased from the airline, on the actual flight I wish to fly, under a fake name. (To get on the plane.) I can trivially buy this using a stolen credit card number, or mug someone, or buy it using cash or whatever to get it. It is not hard to buy tickets under someone else's name, either...I've twice had airplane tickets purchased for me by my company. So that step is actually incredibly easy.
2. To go online, download a blank boarding pass image, and write down my actual real name on it and any flight. And print that. Also fairly easy.
I do not need any fake ID, I do not need to actually mug anyone, I don't need anything except 1) a real ticket in someone else's name, which is very easy to get and 2) five minutes at a computer writing my name on a template image and printing that.
I had them #2 at security, along with my actual real photo ID (Which I presumably already have), and hand them #1 at the airplane.
First you say that it is trivial to get a weapon past security to hijack a plane. Then you say there are less hijackings because guns are easy to spot. Which is it chief?
If only there were some sort of weapons that weren't guns! You know, like the exact ones I was talking about called 'knives'!
I think I explained my position fairly clear: It is easy to detect and ban the entire range of projectile weapons, as those are easy to spot in x-rays and it is difficult to build one that would not be. (That said, there are always poisoned blowguns, but those are rather difficult to threaten people with and have a much higher skill level of use.)
It is impossible to ban bladed weapons. Bladed weapons can be made from almost any object that can be sharped, and will not show up on x-ray machines.
What is your argument for the decrease in hijackings since you think getting weapons on board is trivial?
Because no single individual can hijack a plane with a knife. Um, duh. You cannot control a room of people with a knife, and you certainly can't control the multiple rooms that are on an airplane. It's the same reason bank robbers don't use knifes.
If it's a rigged bottle with the top a tiny reservoir of saline solution and the bottle whatever idiotic liquid explosive they're talking about today, I fail to see the point of shaking it.
I'm still of the opinion that we barely have 'dreams' at all. We just think about random shit as we sleep, hypothesis about random things and piece stuff together.
When people 'remember' dreams it's just throwing it all together as we wake up, or when we change in and out of different sleep cycles. Any sense of linear time in a dream is just us putting that on it afterward, or running through a lot of images rapidly as we wake up.
And while I don't know if I 'dream' in black and white or not, I do know I often dream in third person, which would be completely insane if it was actually happening in real time. I can't imagine how I'd walk around and whatnot. But, like I said, I suspect that's just me imagining something and placing 'me' in it, and then later inventing some sort of linear sequence to explain it.
This also explains how 'remembering' dreams can be incredibly erratic, where you often 'forget' things that it would be impossible not to notice. You didn't forget, you just simply didn't flesh that detail out when imagining about it.
Of course, the whole premise that it would be possible to imagine something and be conscious of imagining it but not notice that, in fact, it's a dream, is actually pretty silly to start with. You can't be conscious and have no volition at the same time!
In my world, reality, those people are no longer capable of bringing weapons on board.
Except, as Bruce pointed out, this is completely not true. Not only do they often not detect actual weapons carried on board in violation of their police, but, as Bruce as pointed out, it is trivial to demonstrate even if they magically caught everything they were looking for, you could trivially get a weapon on the plane.
Bruce likes to use the example of carrying a piece of cardboard and metal epoxy, and creating a knife from it, but I think a better example is just having a sharpened CD in a CD player, taking it with you into the bathroom, and snapping it in half with your foot to make two knives.
They are no longer capable of producing fake boarding passes without being detected.
Um, did you not read the article? Of course they can do that. People have been pointing out they can do that for years.
If you have boarded a plane since 9/11, you saw exactly much scrutiny they gave the boarding pass. They took the piece of paper produced by your own printer, looked at the name which was printed there by you, looked at the flight number and date which were printed there by you, and compared it a photo ID. While they could, in theory, detect a fake ID, they have absolutely no way of determining that that name and flight number and date correspond to a reservation for a flight.
Hence any moron can get around the no-fly list by buying a ticket under a fake name, or, heck, mugging someone and taking theirs, and then printing a fake boarding pass with their real name and using that and their real ID to get through security. And then using the real boarding pass with the fake name to get on the plane. Granted, it would be safer to just get a fake ID, but the point is that even with 100% magically unforgeable IDs, people who are on the no-fly list can get on airplanes.
In other words, there's not just a practical failure of the system in that you can't detect fake photo IDs, there's a theoretical failure of the system in that, even if it worked perfectly, it could not stop what it is attempting to stop: People on the no-fly list from getting on airplanes.
In your fantasy world, these people were not opportunistic and therefore, if they still existed, they would still be hijacking planes.
I said there are no opportunistic airplane hijackers, not that there never were any. You've imagined a position I don't hold based on a conversation elsewhere with a fool. 0 out of 10 airplane hijackers do it without a plan at this point in time.
And of course banning guns from planes resulted in less hijackings. Guns are a unique and easy to spot item, they allow a level of hostage taking that nothing else does, and they are so unique that all of them can be banned...movie plots about non-metal guns aside.
It does not logically follow that stopping someobjects that can be used as knives from a plane would have any effect, if other objects that can used in exactly the same manner can easily be smuggled on. If we had banned, for example, handguns, but let people carry on shotguns, I suspect airplane hijackings would have continued.
And 'knifes', which are essentially 'sharp objects' are impossible to ban unless we start making people fly in the nude. And since, like I said, there are no opportunistic airplane hijackers, it seems entirely likely that if someone wished to hijack a plane and the plan required knives, they'd just use one of the dozens of ways to get knife-like objects on board. (I can think of half a dozen off the top of my head.) And hence banning knives isn't helping anything at all.
It was acetone peroxide.
Hydrogen peroxide, while dangerous in concentrated form, is not dangerous because of any specific burning properties. It's dangerous because it evaporates water out and spontaneously catches fire when it reaches a certain density.
Hence spilling even a moderate concentration of it can randomly start a fire hours later when enough water evaporates. Or if you left the cover off the bottle. That's the actual reason they only sell low densities to people...it's not a 'restrict explosives' issues, it's a 'let's not sell people things that catch on fire by themselves if spilled or left open' issue.
If you were going to deliberately start a fire, you'd be better off with the same amount of gasoline and a match. It's used in rocket fuel because it's easy to make and can be induced to vaporize by a catalyst, instead of having to be ignited, and because it turns into oxygen and water.
Acetone peroxide, OTOH, is a moderately powerful and very unstable non-nitrogen-based explosive. The problem, of course, is that the absurd 'plot' required them to make a delicate explosive in the plane's bathroom.
Whereas in the real world people would do what Richard Reid did, and make it beforehand, and carry it in, in his case in his shoes. It looks somewhat like salt, I believe. Although it's worth pointing out that he was just using it as a detonator for normal plastic explosives...blowing up a plane, or even doing anything more than killing your seatmates, would take a lot more than he had. Which rather implies the sniffers failed completely, and he should have just used gunpowder as a detonator, and not worried about the fancy stuff.
The idea that anyone would actually make acetone peroxide on an airplane, where the chemical smell alone would cause panic (We've all smelled acetone, aka, nail polish remover, before, right?) and that need a constant heating is insane. The whole point of explosives that are not nitrogen-based is you can just carry them pre-made through sniffers.
But a more important question for you and everyone else is:
Why on earth do you think x-ray machines can spot liquids?
They cannot.
And thus you can carry as much damn liquid you want, of any sort, onto a plane. As long as you put it inside something that doesn't look like a container and put it in your carryon.
Or, of course, have a dozen people print fake boarding passes and bring past security and combine it after the security checkpoint to the one person with the real ticket.
You can't take samples or poke a stick down to the bottom. Saline containers have pinpoint holes at the top that mean you can't stick anything in them, and they have to remain sterile anyway.
Really? How are you going to test that the whole thing is saline solution?
It would be rather easy to just have the solution in the tip and the rest filled with whatever imaginary 'bad liquid' we're defending again.
Of course, all this is rendered moot by the fact that security can't actually detect liquids in your carry-ons. It is easy to hide liquids from x-ray machines...just carry them in things that aren't shaped like bottles. Grab a very big, flat, water bottle, fold it in half, and tape a coat hanger to it, and, presto, it's a garment bag.
Or, just do what the guy in the article did and carry it in one of those fake stomachs used to smuggle drinks into stadiums.
It is, of course, rendered even more moot by the fact that liquid, non-nitrogen-based explosives are basically imaginary. They're the stuff of spy novels, and the check is rendered all the more silly by the fact that many non-nitrogen-based explosives can, in fact, be solids.
I am, of course, pretending that you can't actually walk onto an airplane with nitrogen-based explosives because there's a sniffer somewhere, despite the fact I don't recall seeing it.
Except there are no opportunist airplane hijackers, you doofus.
People lock their car doors, despite the fact that any idiot with a slimjim can get in about 20 seconds.
That's not who they're defending against. They're defending against the guy who sees their CD player sitting out on their seat and opens the door to grab it quickly.
There are no people who go: Well, I was going to go down the airport today to hijack a plane, but printing a fake boarding pass to get past the security is too much work.
This was the premise of the show Sleeper Cell, where an Arab terrorist was passing himself off as a Jewish leader.
His conclusions aren't 'original' because he's been out there from the start criticizing security theater, you tard. Of course after a while he starts repeating himself.
Anyway, this isn't an article about Bruce Schneier, and it isn't doing what he points out, which is to attack the logical flaws in security systems. Flaws that render them unable to work. Your link also did not mention such flaws, but rather practical ones.
This article is someone else talking about the practical flaws in the security system working with Bruce and demonstrated that the TSA can't even accomplish what it's trying to do. Even if it could do that, it would still fall victim to the logical flaws that Bruce has pointed out, but it can't.
The government is willing to admit practice flaws, because that just means more money to fix them. It seems incapable of admitting logical flaws, like the fact it's 'liquid ban' cannot possibly stop someone from carrying ten gallons of gasoline onto an airplane...they'd just need a bunch of guys to walk it through security and combine it.
Or, as his favorite example, epoxy knives made after boarding. That is a logical flaw, but, in actuality, people fly with actual knives all the time. Bruce just points out that even if the TSA could do their job perfectly...it wouldn't help.
Exactly. He's not pointing out that ID can be faked, everyone knows that. He's pointing out, because of the stupidity of the design, you don't even need a fake ID. You can, armed with a printer and a real ID with a name on the watch list, get on airplane.
It's like the stupidity that I noticed:
If there really was a point that some amount of liquids magically became dangerous (Despite the idea if liquid explosives being near insane.) than the current measures are just stupid...because any number of people can be used to carry it in and collect the liquids together in the restroom in a perfectly normal water bottle or two.
Hell, you actually only need to buy one ticket, to get it on the plane...as Bruce has quite correctly pointed out that you can get into the 'secure' area with imaginary tickets you print yourself. Send fifteen guys with fake boarding passes through security with this 'liquid' and then have them all meet and hand it off to the one flyer. (Which I always assumed would happen in some isolated location, but Bruce has apparently demonstrated that absurdly suspicious behavior in bathrooms is not reported.)
This is pretending that the x-ray machines can, in fact, detect liquid inside your bags, which they can't, so it's triply stupid. But people have long since moved past pointing out the failure of the system, and into pointing out that even if the system works magically perfect it can still be completely ignored.