No one has to right to remove any idea from existence, even if it's one they thought of. We give people the right to control ideas for a 'limited' time, supposedly solely to encourage you to tell other people. (This concept has gotten a little disconnected from the reality of the laws, but that's the theory.)
But if, for example, you die, and you wrote your song on a pad, and then tore it off and threw it away, and we rub a pencil on the next sheet to discover it, and publish it, and the whole world learns of it and sings it, I have no problem with that.
Whether or not I have the 'right' to be free from any unreasonable seizure, that's not listed in the Constitution. Merely the right to be free from government unreasonable seizures.
While the government is forbidden from itself doing that, and required to stop itself from doing that (Which, like I said, does not actually count as 'protection' in my book.), it is not in the least bit required to stop others from doing it.
The concept of 'rights' is quite clear: If it's voluntary for the government to decide to obey it or not, it's not a right.
You cannot sue over things you did not even vaguely try to stop, and in this case have actually encouraged, even if they are explicit torts under the law.
They not only have delibrately used a system where the users upload, they actually set up the system (the tracker) itself.
They cannot turn around and sue when people do exactly that, even if that would otherwise be a civil offense.
It's kinda the civil version of entrapment. If someone commits 'harms' me, I cannot silently put up with their behavior and then someday sue them for damages from the past X years, when I have never bothered to ask them to stop. The courts assume that the 'harm' wasn't actually harmful. (In fact, I'd probably get no damages at all, whereas if I has just immediately sued them without asking them to stop I might have gotten some.)
And I certainly cannot put a 'kick me' sign on my back, stick a valuable object in my back pocket, and sue them for it when they kick me, which is what the MPAA is (hypothetically) doing here.
No, they're just running trackers to hand out crap and confuse people. A lawsuit based on uploading they enabled and encouraged would get nowhere, and any lawyer and a lot of non-laywers (me, for example) could tell them that.
I know that here you can be charged with smuggling flour if they can prove that you thought you were smuggling drugs.
No, that's just because drug laws are written by a bunch of lunatics, where the intent to smuggle drugs is illegal in some places.
This isn't true of any other laws. (Except maybe attempted murder.)
In fact, it is actually a legal defense that what you were trying to do is impossible.
For example, if you attempt to walk off with the Washington Monument, it is not theft, as that is impossible. Even if you create plans involving distractions of guards, and have aquired a fence to resell it, and a way to smuggle it out of the country, the simple fact is that you cannot pick up the Washington Monument, and thus the crime is impossible, and thus not illegal.
That's an absurd example, but that defense has actually been used before.
If someone harm you, and you fail to do anything about it for long enough, despite you being in communications with them, you can't sue them for damages. You must make some effort to migrate the damages beforehand.
Civil law is based on the idea of 'tort', that other people caused harm to you, and you can't let other people keep 'hurting' you and then sue them when you think they've racked up enough damages. You have to try to stop them at some point. Otherwise the court rightly supposes that you weren't really being harmed, or didn't mind the harm.
I.e., I can't let my next-door neighbor can't drive over a corner of my grass for ten years as he pulls into his driveway, keep track of how much grass he's killed, and then sue him for that amount. I have to actually have tried for stop him for the last ten years, via talking to him and even putting up a pole so he can't do that anymore. (And then I can sue him for the cost of the pole.;) )
And you can't cause people to keep 'hurting' you and then sue them for it. That'll get you laughed out of court so fast it's not funny.
If the MPAA hands out a torrent into a network that is designed for end users to share the files, they can't complain when exactly that happens.
But as far as the time travel episodes go, yes, only Moebius really pulled a magic reset button on us. Maybe they'll surprise me and make those events important again sometime later.
Ah, but they are important. Because of SG-1 and then non-SG-1's meddling in the past, Ra left the ZPM on earth. Non-SG-1 and the original Dr. Jackson recovered it and buried it, along with a record of what happened, where it was dug up in present day, causing much confusion to SG-1, who were about to go into the past to get it, only to discover they'd already done so twice.
That ZPM is currently powering Atlantis.
They have not addressed the fact that the entire team of SG-1 died 10,000 years in the past, or the fact that non-SG-1 died 9,995 years in the past.
And because of their meddling, they now have three time machines laying around on earth, the original, which actually came from another planet, the copy that's been sitting around for 10,000 years, and the copy of that which was also left 10,000 years in the past, again.
What's an even weird possibility is if non-SG-1 got a time machine working (either one) and took off with it. They could arrive any day now.
In any other show, I would assume those time machines had vanished. Not this one.
And, yes, it's nice how Stargate has amazing continity. You get the feeling they grab new writers and stick them in front of seasons 1-8 DVDs before their pen hits the paper.
Sliders had some great episodes. For example, the episode where the arrow of time ran backwards and cause kept preceeding effect. (How do you get out of jail? Plead guilty!)
It was marred by several things:
Getting home is a nice premise. But do not screw with us. (If you watched Sliders, you know what I'm talking about. Creaky gate, anyone?)
Blatant ripping off of other shows and movies.
Attempting to continue without the damn actors.
Some good things:
The mix of 'sci-fi' worlds and 'normal' ones. Some worlds had some weird technological advance, some had normal science and weird social structures (The one with no America, where illegal Canadians got smuggled through the Mexican border.), and some were near identical to ours.
What I would do:
Longer on some worlds. Four or five episodes sometimes. Or even repeat worlds.
'Systems' of worlds. One magic world? One world with ESP? One world where humanity evolved differently? One world where time ran slower and it was still 1980? Come on. The great thing about Sliders is that we can have a premise, and explore it in one direction, and then explore it in a completely different direction.
Stargate SG-1 has only had like four time travel episodes. 1969, 2010, Window of Opertunity, and the Season 9 closing double, Moebius. Stargate Atlantis has had one.
1969 was a 'stranded in time, need to get back.'. No reset button.
In 2010, we entered in 2010, and the plot was 'send something back to 'the present' to change history. Arguably that's a reset button, but that was rather the plot.
WoO was a classic 'time loop' episode. You could argue there were a very large number of reset buttons in it, but I think that's rather required in a time loop episode. (And sci-fi shows are required by law to do time loop episodes.)
In the Atlantis episode, we learn that this is the second timeline, and what happened in the first time. No reset button.
In the SG-1 season ender, we have SG-1 go back in time and screw up the timeline so bad that the the Stargate program doesn't even exist, leaving only a video recording of themselves.
So the team members that should have been in SG-1, who get shown the video, go back and screw up the timeline even more, so much that not only does the original timeline come back, but altered in such a way that SG-1 doesn't have to go back in the first place. (Hence the title 'Moebius'.)
So, in eight and a half seasons of SG-1, and one and half seasons of Atlantis, let's see..
If by 'reset button' you mean 'altering the timeline and then altering it back where no one remembers it', we've had...one. Although, technically, the original SG-1 still died in the past, as did later did their replacements. The new SG-1 doesn't remember because they didn't do it, although they do have a tape recording to tell them what happened.
If by 'reset button', you mean 'events got out of control and the solution was to alter the past', the only episode that did that was 2010, and that was rather obviously the solution in the first place, as skipping 10 years of history would be a silly way to continue the show.
I don't really know which reset buttons you are talking about thtat didn't fit with the theme.
Although American 11 and United 175 were reported to be hijacked using knives, according to the 9/11 Report (see page 26) American 77 was hijacked using box cutters.
Yes, one out of three was. Yet everyone keeps saying 'box cutters', mainly because the airlines are trying to avoid the fact they let actual knives onto the plane.
I provided it... all the message I'm replying to is smoke and mirrors to try to obscure the fact that somehow you missed the obvious answer to your own question.
Well, no. My question was a trick. If you can smuggle box cutters onto a plane, you can smuggle a dozen razor blades. I think that's the entire point there.
If you can't smuggle them on regardless, than there's no point in 'extra' searches, is there? The mere existence of extra search presumes they catch some people who would otherwise get bad things on the plane.
Here's how you think the universe works:
Five terrorists try to take over a plane. They all bring weapons. Four of them are singled for searches and are caught, and, of course, this completely ruins the plans. The fifth guy might or might not be caught at this point.
Here's how I think the universe works:
Five terrorists are going to take over a plane. They make test runs. Four of them are regularly searched. They give the weapons to the fifth guy. He brings them on the plane while the other four people are searched. (In fact, if they're clever, they can bring a lot of their terrorist friends along, who also tie up the searchers.) He gives them back to them on the plane, and they win.
Here's how I think the universe should work:
Five terrorists are going to take over a plane. We have enough security screeners to search, oh, one of out ten people. They give all the weapons to one guy. When we roll the die, he has a one out of ten chance of being caught.
Which clearly sucks, but it's better than the zero out of ten non-random searches have at catching him. Moreover, we can increase the probability of him being caught by searching more people, whereas under your system, we'd have to increase it enough that we search every possible terrorist, which in practical terms means searching almost everyone.
When you increase security for some people, you decrease it for others. This is not hard to understand. If you want to argue we should search everyone, well, hey, that's fine, if we can afford it. Saying we should search some people more means that there are people we are searching less then that.
Which works fine when no one knows who those people are. The FBI has wiretaps on people they are suspicious of, right now, and those work because people do not know they are there.
When people do know who is suspicious, and who isn't, they will use unsuspicious people.
So terrorists would never kidnap an Israli that left the country and subsitute their own person in his place to come back across the border?
I don't know what you're trying to demonstrate here anymore. They could, indded, do that. Israeli security might, or might not, have a way to detecting stuff like that.
However, if your logic is that Palestinian suicide bombers don't use the best plan, ergo, Muslim extremists attacking airlines in the US can't use the best plan, that doesn't really make any sense. The attack on the WTC was extemely well planned. It is presumably that kind of attack we are protecting against with the search, not goofballs who strap a bomb to themselves and walk into Israel. (If someone in the US wanted to do that, there are a million better places to set it off than on a plane.)
In fact, we've yet to have a crappy attack on an airline that's been foiled by screening that I can think of. The goofball who did strap a bomb to himself, the shoe bomber, was foiled not by screening, but because of technical difficulties.
Helps show they're just like us... helps them connect with the voters.
I actually agree here, because the searches are idiotic to start with and this would kill them. Anyone can get a weapon onto an airplane, if 'weapon' means 'something you can hold at someone's throat'. I seriously doubt it is possible to hijack an airplane with that anymore, though.
But it does catch the vast majority of members of the terrorist organizations we're worried about.
Oh, as long as we forbid the 'vast majority' of terrorists from carrying stuff onto airplanes, I guess that's okay. I'm sure the few terrorists who find themselves never searched won't do anything bad. I mean, statistically, we won!
95% is only good enough when people can't game the system.
Having a system that can be gamed so that some people are searched less (Which obviously happens when some are searched more) is worse than just actually randomly searching people.
For all the people who've discovered they get searched every time they fly, there are plenty of people who have never been searched, and, if they think about it for a second, they'll realize that fact. By sheer chance, some of those people are willing to be terrorists, or already are.
So while they search 95% of the people they should be searching, and a large section of people they shouldn't (You, I suspect.), all of whom now have a 0% chance of getting stuff on the plane, the 5% of people they should be searching but aren't have a 100% chance of being able to sneak things onto the plane. The math is actually quite logical.
If everyone was searched randomly, those people would have maybe a 75% chance. Granted, so would the 95% of the suspicious people, but that only matters if the theory is that terrorists cannot observe who is searched and who isn't.
So you're arguing that, even if he gives up freedom, he'll still have terrorists? Wha? Well, that's possible, but it's not a false dilemma.
He said he's rather not give up X to gain Y, that the trade is not worth it.
The fact that giving up X might not actually get people Y is, rather obviously, not going to sway anyone who thinks the trade isn't worth it. If people don't want to give up X if it gains them Y, they certainly doesn't want to if it doesn't.
If he had said 'You can have security, or you can have freedom', that would be a false dilemma, because you can (possibly) have freedom with security. The way he said it is not. He just said, if there is a choice, I choose this one. There's nothing to indicate he wouldn't be happy with both.
Admit it. You just read about 'false dilemma' and decided to try it out, didn't you?
And what would happen if he had the bomb on a deadman's switch, like any mildly-intelligent suicide bomber would?
Hell, like any bomber would. Even normal bank robber who use the threat of a bomb instead of a gun. Even if the switch, or even the whole bomb is fake, he will still claim it will explode if you kill him.
Why? Because carrying a bomb is only a threat when people can't snipe you in the head. People worked that out decades ago.
Anyone who recommends shooting someone because they might have a bomb is a lunatic. (That's not even considering the fact it might not be on a deadman switch, but they might drop it.)
That's why the quote is actually: Those who give up an essential liberty to obtain a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security.
Temporary is important, and people often understand quote backwards, meaning you should give up liberty for permanent security.
But the way I read it, all you can gain from giving up essential liberty is 'a little temporary security'.
Terrorists can kill anyone they want, at almost any time. We have not solved 'murder' yet, or even 'mass murder'. If we had, a lot less people would be dead.
Hey now. We only wasted that goodwill on invading Iraq.
The Afganistan invasion was quite well supported by everyone else, even other Muslim countries. They were a bunch of assholes. Remember when they blew up those giant Buddhas? They weren't even an actual country, just a bunch of warlords.
Too bad that we're stretched so thin, and Afganistan has absolutely nothing we want, so is probably going to fall into anarchy the second we leave.
However, the rest of your post was spot on. We could spend that money on lots of useful things.
However, don't limit yourself to blatant deaths.
How about we spend some money reducing the 10% of the cars that make 80% of the car pollution? Give everyone who doesn't have one a mandatory inspection, reinburse all expenses at repair to get it up to snuff over 100 dollars. If the car honestly cannot be fixed, give them an equivalent-value used car.
I bet we could have done that for the cost of the war. A War on Polluting Cars.
How about a War on Unwanted Pregnancy? Free birth control for all! Wait, damn, the Republicans are in power.
FYI, circletimesquare is a known troll. He's usually found on Kuro5hin, I don't know how he got over here.
He poses as extremely pro-American, anti-any-critisism of the US government.
His favorite tactic is to bring up how bad other places are, so it's okay for the American (And probably the British, although I'm not going to read his posts to confirm it.) government to act in a despicable manner, as, at least, it's not as bad as them.
He constantly harps on how stupid people are who point out that outrage towards government actions actually solves something. According to him, we should direct our rage impotently at people we can't possible change, like terrorists, instead of the governments we are in charge of.
Any time the US government screws up, rest assured that we need to pay attention to something else, according to him.
If he had a bomb, wouldn't he just detonate it when approached.
Better just to shoot him through the head from a distance. As we all know, there is no device that could set off an explosive upon the death of someone.
Wait, there is?
Okay, hrm. How we just realize we can't keep bombs out of public places?
Slashdot Mirror
No one has to right to remove any idea from existence, even if it's one they thought of. We give people the right to control ideas for a 'limited' time, supposedly solely to encourage you to tell other people. (This concept has gotten a little disconnected from the reality of the laws, but that's the theory.)
But if, for example, you die, and you wrote your song on a pad, and then tore it off and threw it away, and we rub a pencil on the next sheet to discover it, and publish it, and the whole world learns of it and sings it, I have no problem with that.
While the government is forbidden from itself doing that, and required to stop itself from doing that (Which, like I said, does not actually count as 'protection' in my book.), it is not in the least bit required to stop others from doing it.
The concept of 'rights' is quite clear: If it's voluntary for the government to decide to obey it or not, it's not a right.
What the hell does 'forcing your way in' have to do with anything?
You cannot sue over things you did not even vaguely try to stop, and in this case have actually encouraged, even if they are explicit torts under the law.
They not only have delibrately used a system where the users upload, they actually set up the system (the tracker) itself.
They cannot turn around and sue when people do exactly that, even if that would otherwise be a civil offense.
It's kinda the civil version of entrapment. If someone commits 'harms' me, I cannot silently put up with their behavior and then someday sue them for damages from the past X years, when I have never bothered to ask them to stop. The courts assume that the 'harm' wasn't actually harmful. (In fact, I'd probably get no damages at all, whereas if I has just immediately sued them without asking them to stop I might have gotten some.)
And I certainly cannot put a 'kick me' sign on my back, stick a valuable object in my back pocket, and sue them for it when they kick me, which is what the MPAA is (hypothetically) doing here.
No, they're just running trackers to hand out crap and confuse people. A lawsuit based on uploading they enabled and encouraged would get nowhere, and any lawyer and a lot of non-laywers (me, for example) could tell them that.
No, that's just because drug laws are written by a bunch of lunatics, where the intent to smuggle drugs is illegal in some places.
This isn't true of any other laws. (Except maybe attempted murder.)
In fact, it is actually a legal defense that what you were trying to do is impossible.
For example, if you attempt to walk off with the Washington Monument, it is not theft, as that is impossible. Even if you create plans involving distractions of guards, and have aquired a fence to resell it, and a way to smuggle it out of the country, the simple fact is that you cannot pick up the Washington Monument, and thus the crime is impossible, and thus not illegal.
That's an absurd example, but that defense has actually been used before.
If someone harm you, and you fail to do anything about it for long enough, despite you being in communications with them, you can't sue them for damages. You must make some effort to migrate the damages beforehand.
Civil law is based on the idea of 'tort', that other people caused harm to you, and you can't let other people keep 'hurting' you and then sue them when you think they've racked up enough damages. You have to try to stop them at some point. Otherwise the court rightly supposes that you weren't really being harmed, or didn't mind the harm.
I.e., I can't let my next-door neighbor can't drive over a corner of my grass for ten years as he pulls into his driveway, keep track of how much grass he's killed, and then sue him for that amount. I have to actually have tried for stop him for the last ten years, via talking to him and even putting up a pole so he can't do that anymore. (And then I can sue him for the cost of the pole. ;) )
And you can't cause people to keep 'hurting' you and then sue them for it. That'll get you laughed out of court so fast it's not funny.
If the MPAA hands out a torrent into a network that is designed for end users to share the files, they can't complain when exactly that happens.
According to the contracts the TV stations have, they aren't allowed to do this.
Ah, but they are important. Because of SG-1 and then non-SG-1's meddling in the past, Ra left the ZPM on earth. Non-SG-1 and the original Dr. Jackson recovered it and buried it, along with a record of what happened, where it was dug up in present day, causing much confusion to SG-1, who were about to go into the past to get it, only to discover they'd already done so twice.
That ZPM is currently powering Atlantis.
They have not addressed the fact that the entire team of SG-1 died 10,000 years in the past, or the fact that non-SG-1 died 9,995 years in the past.
And because of their meddling, they now have three time machines laying around on earth, the original, which actually came from another planet, the copy that's been sitting around for 10,000 years, and the copy of that which was also left 10,000 years in the past, again.
What's an even weird possibility is if non-SG-1 got a time machine working (either one) and took off with it. They could arrive any day now.
In any other show, I would assume those time machines had vanished. Not this one.
And, yes, it's nice how Stargate has amazing continity. You get the feeling they grab new writers and stick them in front of seasons 1-8 DVDs before their pen hits the paper.
It was marred by several things:
Getting home is a nice premise. But do not screw with us. (If you watched Sliders, you know what I'm talking about. Creaky gate, anyone?)
Blatant ripping off of other shows and movies.
Attempting to continue without the damn actors.
Some good things:
The mix of 'sci-fi' worlds and 'normal' ones. Some worlds had some weird technological advance, some had normal science and weird social structures (The one with no America, where illegal Canadians got smuggled through the Mexican border.), and some were near identical to ours.
What I would do:
Longer on some worlds. Four or five episodes sometimes. Or even repeat worlds.
'Systems' of worlds. One magic world? One world with ESP? One world where humanity evolved differently? One world where time ran slower and it was still 1980? Come on. The great thing about Sliders is that we can have a premise, and explore it in one direction, and then explore it in a completely different direction.
And is currently on Numb3rs.
1969 was a 'stranded in time, need to get back.'. No reset button.
In 2010, we entered in 2010, and the plot was 'send something back to 'the present' to change history. Arguably that's a reset button, but that was rather the plot.
WoO was a classic 'time loop' episode. You could argue there were a very large number of reset buttons in it, but I think that's rather required in a time loop episode. (And sci-fi shows are required by law to do time loop episodes.)
In the Atlantis episode, we learn that this is the second timeline, and what happened in the first time. No reset button.
In the SG-1 season ender, we have SG-1 go back in time and screw up the timeline so bad that the the Stargate program doesn't even exist, leaving only a video recording of themselves.
So the team members that should have been in SG-1, who get shown the video, go back and screw up the timeline even more, so much that not only does the original timeline come back, but altered in such a way that SG-1 doesn't have to go back in the first place. (Hence the title 'Moebius'.)
So, in eight and a half seasons of SG-1, and one and half seasons of Atlantis, let's see..
If by 'reset button' you mean 'altering the timeline and then altering it back where no one remembers it', we've had...one. Although, technically, the original SG-1 still died in the past, as did later did their replacements. The new SG-1 doesn't remember because they didn't do it, although they do have a tape recording to tell them what happened.
If by 'reset button', you mean 'events got out of control and the solution was to alter the past', the only episode that did that was 2010, and that was rather obviously the solution in the first place, as skipping 10 years of history would be a silly way to continue the show.
I don't really know which reset buttons you are talking about thtat didn't fit with the theme.
Us Firefly fans got a feature film. That's, like, Star Trek level success. ;)
(Not that I have anything against Farscape. That show rocked.)
Yes, one out of three was. Yet everyone keeps saying 'box cutters', mainly because the airlines are trying to avoid the fact they let actual knives onto the plane.
I provided it... all the message I'm replying to is smoke and mirrors to try to obscure the fact that somehow you missed the obvious answer to your own question.
Well, no. My question was a trick. If you can smuggle box cutters onto a plane, you can smuggle a dozen razor blades. I think that's the entire point there.
If you can't smuggle them on regardless, than there's no point in 'extra' searches, is there? The mere existence of extra search presumes they catch some people who would otherwise get bad things on the plane.
Here's how you think the universe works:
Five terrorists try to take over a plane. They all bring weapons. Four of them are singled for searches and are caught, and, of course, this completely ruins the plans. The fifth guy might or might not be caught at this point.
Here's how I think the universe works:
Five terrorists are going to take over a plane. They make test runs. Four of them are regularly searched. They give the weapons to the fifth guy. He brings them on the plane while the other four people are searched. (In fact, if they're clever, they can bring a lot of their terrorist friends along, who also tie up the searchers.) He gives them back to them on the plane, and they win.
Here's how I think the universe should work:
Five terrorists are going to take over a plane. We have enough security screeners to search, oh, one of out ten people. They give all the weapons to one guy. When we roll the die, he has a one out of ten chance of being caught.
Which clearly sucks, but it's better than the zero out of ten non-random searches have at catching him. Moreover, we can increase the probability of him being caught by searching more people, whereas under your system, we'd have to increase it enough that we search every possible terrorist, which in practical terms means searching almost everyone.
When you increase security for some people, you decrease it for others. This is not hard to understand. If you want to argue we should search everyone, well, hey, that's fine, if we can afford it. Saying we should search some people more means that there are people we are searching less then that.
Which works fine when no one knows who those people are. The FBI has wiretaps on people they are suspicious of, right now, and those work because people do not know they are there.
When people do know who is suspicious, and who isn't, they will use unsuspicious people.
I don't know what you're trying to demonstrate here anymore. They could, indded, do that. Israeli security might, or might not, have a way to detecting stuff like that.
However, if your logic is that Palestinian suicide bombers don't use the best plan, ergo, Muslim extremists attacking airlines in the US can't use the best plan, that doesn't really make any sense. The attack on the WTC was extemely well planned. It is presumably that kind of attack we are protecting against with the search, not goofballs who strap a bomb to themselves and walk into Israel. (If someone in the US wanted to do that, there are a million better places to set it off than on a plane.)
In fact, we've yet to have a crappy attack on an airline that's been foiled by screening that I can think of. The goofball who did strap a bomb to himself, the shoe bomber, was foiled not by screening, but because of technical difficulties.
Helps show they're just like us... helps them connect with the voters.
I actually agree here, because the searches are idiotic to start with and this would kill them. Anyone can get a weapon onto an airplane, if 'weapon' means 'something you can hold at someone's throat'. I seriously doubt it is possible to hijack an airplane with that anymore, though.
But it does catch the vast majority of members of the terrorist organizations we're worried about.
Oh, as long as we forbid the 'vast majority' of terrorists from carrying stuff onto airplanes, I guess that's okay. I'm sure the few terrorists who find themselves never searched won't do anything bad. I mean, statistically, we won!
Having a system that can be gamed so that some people are searched less (Which obviously happens when some are searched more) is worse than just actually randomly searching people.
For all the people who've discovered they get searched every time they fly, there are plenty of people who have never been searched, and, if they think about it for a second, they'll realize that fact. By sheer chance, some of those people are willing to be terrorists, or already are.
So while they search 95% of the people they should be searching, and a large section of people they shouldn't (You, I suspect.), all of whom now have a 0% chance of getting stuff on the plane, the 5% of people they should be searching but aren't have a 100% chance of being able to sneak things onto the plane. The math is actually quite logical.
If everyone was searched randomly, those people would have maybe a 75% chance. Granted, so would the 95% of the suspicious people, but that only matters if the theory is that terrorists cannot observe who is searched and who isn't.
He said he's rather not give up X to gain Y, that the trade is not worth it.
The fact that giving up X might not actually get people Y is, rather obviously, not going to sway anyone who thinks the trade isn't worth it. If people don't want to give up X if it gains them Y, they certainly doesn't want to if it doesn't.
If he had said 'You can have security, or you can have freedom', that would be a false dilemma, because you can (possibly) have freedom with security. The way he said it is not. He just said, if there is a choice, I choose this one. There's nothing to indicate he wouldn't be happy with both.
Admit it. You just read about 'false dilemma' and decided to try it out, didn't you?
Hell, like any bomber would. Even normal bank robber who use the threat of a bomb instead of a gun. Even if the switch, or even the whole bomb is fake, he will still claim it will explode if you kill him.
Why? Because carrying a bomb is only a threat when people can't snipe you in the head. People worked that out decades ago.
Anyone who recommends shooting someone because they might have a bomb is a lunatic. (That's not even considering the fact it might not be on a deadman switch, but they might drop it.)
Those who give up an essential liberty to obtain a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security.
Temporary is important, and people often understand quote backwards, meaning you should give up liberty for permanent security.
But the way I read it, all you can gain from giving up essential liberty is 'a little temporary security'.
Terrorists can kill anyone they want, at almost any time. We have not solved 'murder' yet, or even 'mass murder'. If we had, a lot less people would be dead.
The Afganistan invasion was quite well supported by everyone else, even other Muslim countries. They were a bunch of assholes. Remember when they blew up those giant Buddhas? They weren't even an actual country, just a bunch of warlords.
Too bad that we're stretched so thin, and Afganistan has absolutely nothing we want, so is probably going to fall into anarchy the second we leave.
However, the rest of your post was spot on. We could spend that money on lots of useful things.
However, don't limit yourself to blatant deaths.
How about we spend some money reducing the 10% of the cars that make 80% of the car pollution? Give everyone who doesn't have one a mandatory inspection, reinburse all expenses at repair to get it up to snuff over 100 dollars. If the car honestly cannot be fixed, give them an equivalent-value used car.
I bet we could have done that for the cost of the war. A War on Polluting Cars.
How about a War on Unwanted Pregnancy? Free birth control for all! Wait, damn, the Republicans are in power.
He poses as extremely pro-American, anti-any-critisism of the US government.
His favorite tactic is to bring up how bad other places are, so it's okay for the American (And probably the British, although I'm not going to read his posts to confirm it.) government to act in a despicable manner, as, at least, it's not as bad as them.
He constantly harps on how stupid people are who point out that outrage towards government actions actually solves something. According to him, we should direct our rage impotently at people we can't possible change, like terrorists, instead of the governments we are in charge of.
Any time the US government screws up, rest assured that we need to pay attention to something else, according to him.
He doesn't actually believe any of this.
Of course, this was a decade ago.
He was LOITERING! We've figure it out!
Of course, so was everyone else in the train station.
I hope they've taking this officer in for 'questioning'.
Heh. Reminds of a joke, the punchline goes:
What kind of woman do you think I am?"
"We've already determined that. Now we're just haggling over the price."
If he had a bomb, wouldn't he just detonate it when approached.
Better just to shoot him through the head from a distance. As we all know, there is no device that could set off an explosive upon the death of someone.
Wait, there is?
Okay, hrm. How we just realize we can't keep bombs out of public places?