As the old saying goes, when you find hoof-prints, suspect horses, not zebras. In this case, I'm sure this is more likely some plastic that found its way from Earth. How much space junk do we have floating around our planet, again? Getting excited about oil from fossilized organisms on Mars seems a bit of a stretch here.
As someone living in Toronto, I'm happy to say that this probably isn't so much an issue of "silly" as it is an issue of "politics."
The issue at hand here is that the City of Toronto is essentially going bankrupt. The reason, the city asserts, is that the federal and then provincial governments have pushed expenses down all the way to the city; a good example is that cities in Ontario are now paying for social services (something the province once did). The Federal government just posted a CA$13 billion surplus, and the province has their own surplus as well; none, both have said, will go to help the City of Toronto with its near half-billion budget deficit.
Of course, the higher levels of government take a huge amount out of Toronto in taxes to subsidize the rest of the country. Torontonians are feeling a bit jaded knowing this now that there's such a huge budget shortfall for the city.
So the City of Toronto has been campaigning for both the province and federal governments to help out. The One Cent campaign was part of this, demanding more money from the higher levels of government. My guess? The demand for royalty payments from the mint is a political ploy from the federal government to slap Toronto on the wrist for, I'm guessing, rocking the boat.
Unfortunately [for science], not everything that dies will end up as a fossil. Fossils are only formed during very specific processes, often in very dry or very wet conditions. Most parts such as hair, organs, and feathers are usually not preserved but end up decomposing.
The famous Archaeopteryx (the feathered specimen from the Jurassic timeframe - much earlier than Velociraptor, actually, so no it's not the earliest feathered dinosaur) was found with fossilized feathers, but that is extremely rare. Usually, researchers have to be quite clever in looking for more hidden evidence pointing to such things, such as higher than expected levels of beta keratin around a fossil (the main protein found in bird feathers). Essentially, evidence of something like feathers is hard to come by; we never have a complete picture.
It's probably also important to note that fossils are not the actual bones of these long-dead animals, but mineral deposits that have taken on the shape of some aspects of those creatures (usually bones). Thus, studying fossils is often an exercise in deductive reasoning.
Thank you for sharing your inside scoop on working within the cable companies.:o)
What I think we're starting to see is a bit of a revolution of viewers. For as long as TV has existed, programming has always been considered "bait" to lure in viewers to watch commercials; that's how TV paid for itself. But even today I don't think people know that this is how the business was built from the beginning.
What I think is happening now is that nearly everyone alive, especially those in the programmers' target audience (ages 20 - 40 or so), all grew up watching television. Having television become such an integral part of their lives, they're now starting to demand that they be treated as consumers, not commodities. They're used to being able to buy and influence markets based on their purchasing power. TV has become a very personal habit, and people want full disclosure over what they watch; they don't want to pay for things they're not watching, and I think many of them are tired of being treated as criminals for not watching commercials.
I personally download everything I watch because I do not want to be exposed to advertisements. They use proven psychological techniques to get you to purchase their products, and few are immune to such techniques. But image a day where advertisers aren't the ones who pay for television, but people do by purchasing programming a la cart. If this market is switched around so that viewers are finally the actual customers, I would imagine that marketing will have to start looking elsewhere for market penetration.
I would imagine a la cart purchasing could also lead to much better programming. I'd guess that a la cart would also help certain series to stay alive longer than they used to, especially if such things could be purchased and watched on everyone's own time, not some arbitrary (and often changed) schedule the networks force you in to.
Even certain cult television series (e.g., Firefly) would probably also have longer lives simply for the "cult" part of the following. (They could be a more reliable fan/income base.)
I'm sure such a switch in this market would also bring about certain things we also won't like, but I think the benefits would outweigh the cons in this situation. There's a lot of very interesting directions such a move could take.
Besides, at the moment it's in the ISPs' best interest NOT to help the recording agencies out. They are, after all, a business and policing everyone's internet usage would cost a great deal of money. Are the recording industry peeps going to help pay for those costs? I didn't think so...
I'd like to say that I'm surprised at the misinformation out there regarding certain substances, but the U.S. Government (and others, of course) like to spread about misinformation on anything with which they don't agree.
There is a very interesting article from the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5230006.stm regarding an actual, real study (not faked) by the British Government on the ranking of substances based on their actual harm. Scroll to the bottom of the linked page to see the graph ranking them - LSD, for example, ranks lower than tobacco in terms of harm, and even further below alcohol.
I just hope we can finally start realizing that just because something is legal, it can still be a drug (e.g., alcohol, caffeine, etc.).
Is everyone forgetting all the other companies that have had battery problems? What about Sony and all their issues? I don't think this is so much an Apple issue as it's an electronics issue.
I find it funny how the word 'evolutionist' has entered into so many people's vocabulary. I think it comes around from all those religious folks who have been so anti-evolution in America. ("Those evolutionists are out to destroy our morals!") I think most people who study evolution usually call themselves something more along the lines of 'evolutionary biologist'.:-D
It appears that these companies, more and more, are turning to law-makers to assist them in keeping up their expected income levels. Instead of supporting draconian laws that in essense give these companies assisted life-support, perhaps law-makers need to encourage these companies to re-evaluate their business models so they may adjust to changing times and markets.
Oh wait, that would only happen if law-makers in the New World would stop running the governments as corporate-run oligarchies.
"People have been Killed, robbed, beatened, and otherwise harmed by people's greed to acquire these [Wii, PS3] products. Yet, none of these are items that are within the definition of "basic needs". Nobody "needs" these."
You're quite right by saying that nobody *needs* these items, but it certainly wasn't the rich out there fighting the crowds for these products. Often, they were poor bastards who were paid by someone to stand in line for them, or people who didn't actually want the machines, but wanted to cash in on the reselling of these machines on ebay or whatnot.
The point here is that America's poor are getting poorer, and the richer are getting richer. The concern is that America is losing the middle class. You like bitching about America now... are you hoping for more material down the road?
Even if America's poor have a higher standard of living than the poor elsewhere in the world, does that mean America shouldn't continue to consider the situation of their own poor and continue trying to make America a better place?
"The "poor" Americans are some of the richest people in the world, just look at the obesity levels."
Actually, I'd say the obesity levels in America's poor aren't due to some great amount of nutrition they're getting, but more to the LACK of nutrition they're getting. Take a trip to a grocery store in a poor neighbourhood, and you'll see cart fulls of ramen, boxed meals, and red fruit drink - all full of questionable chemicals, MSG, and high-fructose corn syrup. These people are fat because they can't afford nutritious food like fresh fruits & vegetables.
I'd highly recommend a visit to the Southeast section of Washington, DC at some point. Seeing such neighbourhoods in person might change your mind about the poor in America, especially in areas like this where it's quite obvious that the poor neighbourhoods are defined by things like skin colour. Yes, such things do still matter.
Another factor contributing to the resistance of living more in harmony with our environment (i.e., reducing CO2 emissions, stopping corporations from blindly stripping the planet of resources) is religion itself.
Having grown up experiencing several different versions of Christianity, one message was pretty clear throughout: the world is for the taking, to use however we please, and the world itself has little other value as it isn't this life that counts, but the afterlife.
This attitude, it seems, is exactly the attitude so many people in the Western world exhibit in their views of global warming and the fact that we're significantly contributing to it. Protecting the status quo (as in 'protecting' the current economic setup) seems to hold much more importance than avoiding any possible disaster scenarios. This is only propagated further by the obsession of many Christians with the "imminent" apocalypse.
Mother Nature, in my observations, has one important rule for every living critter: adapt or die. Whether or not we're causing or contributing to global warming is really irrelevant; what matters is whether or not we're going to successfully adapt to the upcoming changes caused by global warming, such as rising sea levels (port cities will most likely need to be moved) and changing climates (once fertile areas may become deserts, etc.).
Additionally, there isn't much of a genetic mechanism to cap population growth. It's just ridiculous to think that we can continue to reproduce at our current levels. We also have the idea that we have the 'right' to reproduce, which is understandable considering our genetically-engrained urges. Religions that embody the need to reproduce like rabbits, however, certainly aren't helping matters.
I believe we will need a dramatic change in consciousness if we're actually going to survive, and a move towards humanity's root spirituality, animism, would be an excellent means. We need to realize and embody the idea that, as 'intelligent' beings, we have a lot more responsibility than other critters. We can't just take from the world without thought for consequences; we will need to be smart about what we can use, what we can reuse, and what we must give back to the world. This will, most importantly, include responsibility in terms of our population: what level can the world realistically sustain (many would argue that we're already artificially sustaining a population that is too large) and how can we encourage people to help balance it.
Should we fail to act (especially in terms of our population size), mother nature will gladly take care of things for us: disease epidemics, natural disasters, global catastrophes...
This, of course, is assuming that said possible civilization even discovered high-power broadcast radio. They may have discovered something else entirely that worked better for them.:D
First of all - the Dems only *just* took power over Congress; they haven't had enough time to do much of anything, let alone setting in motion a move from 2- to 10-prints under the US VISIT program.
And secondly - half the comments here seem to think that this is about taking finger prints from U.S. citizens - it's not; it's actually taking finger prints from visitors to the U.S.
Privacy issues aside, this is actually a good move for U.S. VISIT. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rushed U.S. VISIT out the door, and in doing so they slapped the system together with the legacy IDENT 2-print system, which was the old INS' way of tracking finger prints of new immigrants. This is completely stupid, of course, because not only does this defeat one of the purposes of taking finger prints (the FBI's 10-print database contains finger prints from not only U.S. criminals, but also finger prints from other criminals from around the world), but the 2-print system is significantly more faulty in correctly matching prints.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) (which includes the FBI) has been fighting DHS for years in trying to get them to move U.S. VISIT to a 10-print system, for the two reasons I mentioned above. I know about this because I interned for the DOJ a few years ago and got to hear all the juicy gossip (and frustrations) over this issue. Whether or not U.S. VISIT should exist, at least they're finally moving to 10-prints, which should weed out a few false checks that are probably occurring with the 2-print system.
And speaking of quantity over quality... just see the MATRIX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistate_Anti-Terro rism_Information_Exchange project as an excellent example. I haven't a clue why people think the data-mining of commercial databases (which usually have very inaccurate data) is a good idea, but holy craziness!
I actually meant to include the entire Healthcare Industry in with this. It's a grab for profits, and I don't believe profits (for shareholders) should have anything to do with healthcare. A free market is absolutely brilliant for many sectors, but fragrantly unethical when applied to things that should belong to the entire community (infrastructure, healthcare, etc.).
But changing the Healthcare Industry to a not-for-profit structure wouldn't spell the end for all Healthcare-related jobs, just the end of gross profiteering by shareholders. We will still need all the medical supplies we currently use - this change would just reduce the insane prices attached to these medical supplies. (For example, why is US$10,000 seen as a reasonable price for a hospital bed, or US$6,000 for a pager-sized insulin pump?)
Even so, any economic changes resulting from this transition would need to be done at a slow enough rate to allow for local economies to adjust. As humans, we have a tendency to use the status quo as an excuse not to change - but as life generally teaches us: "evolve or die; the status quo is always a transitory state".
This is exactly why I feel we need to fundamentally change the way these companies operate... by legally forcing all pharmaceutical and medical companies to be Not-For-Profit. The inherent nature of corporations can be broken down into one function: to provide profits for the shareholder. In my world view, I cannot see how we can ethically continue to allow these companies to reap these massive profits (see the below comment for comparison figures) at the expense of the needy (read: the sick). As a not-for-profit organization, these companies could then cut away all those profits and put that money where it should be going - to reducing the cost of medical supplies and funding R&D.
Agreed. The terrorist attacks changed *nothing,* unlike what so many political leaders have been telling us since moments after 9/11 ocurred. Yes, it was tragic, but it wasn't the result of some mass terrorist uprising. There have always been terrorists, and there always will be. "Terrorism" is simply the buzzword of the decade, used to manipulate people to particular ends. I wonder how long it's going to be before certain unnamed agencies are bitch-slapped back into legal and logical operations.
I'm personally not surprised that the TSA is taking up the same case and evidence the FBI was using.
Robert Mueller (Director of the FBI) has been very careful in protecting his agency from certain scandals; for example, FBI agents were no where to be found any time the CIA used torture during any interrogation. Likewise, I wonder if he is worried about fallout if the public continues to question the methods and tactics used by certain federal enforcement agencies. He may well have decided that this investigation could put his agency in water that was too hot for his comfort.
The TSA, on the other hand, appears to have little in the way of self restraint or ethical guiding.
Slashdot Mirror
As the old saying goes, when you find hoof-prints, suspect horses, not zebras. In this case, I'm sure this is more likely some plastic that found its way from Earth. How much space junk do we have floating around our planet, again? Getting excited about oil from fossilized organisms on Mars seems a bit of a stretch here.
I think trickle-down economics has been repackaged for today as the "rich are job-creators" argument that we keep hearing over and over again.
As someone living in Toronto, I'm happy to say that this probably isn't so much an issue of "silly" as it is an issue of "politics."
The issue at hand here is that the City of Toronto is essentially going bankrupt. The reason, the city asserts, is that the federal and then provincial governments have pushed expenses down all the way to the city; a good example is that cities in Ontario are now paying for social services (something the province once did). The Federal government just posted a CA$13 billion surplus, and the province has their own surplus as well; none, both have said, will go to help the City of Toronto with its near half-billion budget deficit.
Of course, the higher levels of government take a huge amount out of Toronto in taxes to subsidize the rest of the country. Torontonians are feeling a bit jaded knowing this now that there's such a huge budget shortfall for the city.
So the City of Toronto has been campaigning for both the province and federal governments to help out. The One Cent campaign was part of this, demanding more money from the higher levels of government. My guess? The demand for royalty payments from the mint is a political ploy from the federal government to slap Toronto on the wrist for, I'm guessing, rocking the boat.
Unfortunately [for science], not everything that dies will end up as a fossil. Fossils are only formed during very specific processes, often in very dry or very wet conditions. Most parts such as hair, organs, and feathers are usually not preserved but end up decomposing.
The famous Archaeopteryx (the feathered specimen from the Jurassic timeframe - much earlier than Velociraptor, actually, so no it's not the earliest feathered dinosaur) was found with fossilized feathers, but that is extremely rare. Usually, researchers have to be quite clever in looking for more hidden evidence pointing to such things, such as higher than expected levels of beta keratin around a fossil (the main protein found in bird feathers). Essentially, evidence of something like feathers is hard to come by; we never have a complete picture.
It's probably also important to note that fossils are not the actual bones of these long-dead animals, but mineral deposits that have taken on the shape of some aspects of those creatures (usually bones). Thus, studying fossils is often an exercise in deductive reasoning.
Thank you for sharing your inside scoop on working within the cable companies. :o)
What I think we're starting to see is a bit of a revolution of viewers. For as long as TV has existed, programming has always been considered "bait" to lure in viewers to watch commercials; that's how TV paid for itself. But even today I don't think people know that this is how the business was built from the beginning.
What I think is happening now is that nearly everyone alive, especially those in the programmers' target audience (ages 20 - 40 or so), all grew up watching television. Having television become such an integral part of their lives, they're now starting to demand that they be treated as consumers, not commodities. They're used to being able to buy and influence markets based on their purchasing power. TV has become a very personal habit, and people want full disclosure over what they watch; they don't want to pay for things they're not watching, and I think many of them are tired of being treated as criminals for not watching commercials.
I personally download everything I watch because I do not want to be exposed to advertisements. They use proven psychological techniques to get you to purchase their products, and few are immune to such techniques. But image a day where advertisers aren't the ones who pay for television, but people do by purchasing programming a la cart. If this market is switched around so that viewers are finally the actual customers, I would imagine that marketing will have to start looking elsewhere for market penetration.
I would imagine a la cart purchasing could also lead to much better programming. I'd guess that a la cart would also help certain series to stay alive longer than they used to, especially if such things could be purchased and watched on everyone's own time, not some arbitrary (and often changed) schedule the networks force you in to.
Even certain cult television series (e.g., Firefly) would probably also have longer lives simply for the "cult" part of the following. (They could be a more reliable fan/income base.)
I'm sure such a switch in this market would also bring about certain things we also won't like, but I think the benefits would outweigh the cons in this situation. There's a lot of very interesting directions such a move could take.
Besides, at the moment it's in the ISPs' best interest NOT to help the recording agencies out. They are, after all, a business and policing everyone's internet usage would cost a great deal of money. Are the recording industry peeps going to help pay for those costs? I didn't think so ...
I'd like to say that I'm surprised at the misinformation out there regarding certain substances, but the U.S. Government (and others, of course) like to spread about misinformation on anything with which they don't agree.
m regarding an actual, real study (not faked) by the British Government on the ranking of substances based on their actual harm. Scroll to the bottom of the linked page to see the graph ranking them - LSD, for example, ranks lower than tobacco in terms of harm, and even further below alcohol.
There is a very interesting article from the BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/5230006.st
I just hope we can finally start realizing that just because something is legal, it can still be a drug (e.g., alcohol, caffeine, etc.).
Is everyone forgetting all the other companies that have had battery problems? What about Sony and all their issues? I don't think this is so much an Apple issue as it's an electronics issue.
What?! And give up that cushy, ultra-secure government job? :-D
I find it funny how the word 'evolutionist' has entered into so many people's vocabulary. I think it comes around from all those religious folks who have been so anti-evolution in America. ("Those evolutionists are out to destroy our morals!") I think most people who study evolution usually call themselves something more along the lines of 'evolutionary biologist'. :-D
Indeed ...
It appears that these companies, more and more, are turning to law-makers to assist them in keeping up their expected income levels. Instead of supporting draconian laws that in essense give these companies assisted life-support, perhaps law-makers need to encourage these companies to re-evaluate their business models so they may adjust to changing times and markets.
Oh wait, that would only happen if law-makers in the New World would stop running the governments as corporate-run oligarchies.
"People have been Killed, robbed, beatened, and otherwise harmed by people's greed to acquire these [Wii, PS3] products. Yet, none of these are items that are within the definition of "basic needs". Nobody "needs" these." You're quite right by saying that nobody *needs* these items, but it certainly wasn't the rich out there fighting the crowds for these products. Often, they were poor bastards who were paid by someone to stand in line for them, or people who didn't actually want the machines, but wanted to cash in on the reselling of these machines on ebay or whatnot. The point here is that America's poor are getting poorer, and the richer are getting richer. The concern is that America is losing the middle class. You like bitching about America now ... are you hoping for more material down the road?
Even if America's poor have a higher standard of living than the poor elsewhere in the world, does that mean America shouldn't continue to consider the situation of their own poor and continue trying to make America a better place?
"The "poor" Americans are some of the richest people in the world, just look at the obesity levels."
Actually, I'd say the obesity levels in America's poor aren't due to some great amount of nutrition they're getting, but more to the LACK of nutrition they're getting. Take a trip to a grocery store in a poor neighbourhood, and you'll see cart fulls of ramen, boxed meals, and red fruit drink - all full of questionable chemicals, MSG, and high-fructose corn syrup. These people are fat because they can't afford nutritious food like fresh fruits & vegetables.
I'd highly recommend a visit to the Southeast section of Washington, DC at some point. Seeing such neighbourhoods in person might change your mind about the poor in America, especially in areas like this where it's quite obvious that the poor neighbourhoods are defined by things like skin colour. Yes, such things do still matter.
Since the topic was brought up ...
...
Another factor contributing to the resistance of living more in harmony with our environment (i.e., reducing CO2 emissions, stopping corporations from blindly stripping the planet of resources) is religion itself.
Having grown up experiencing several different versions of Christianity, one message was pretty clear throughout: the world is for the taking, to use however we please, and the world itself has little other value as it isn't this life that counts, but the afterlife.
This attitude, it seems, is exactly the attitude so many people in the Western world exhibit in their views of global warming and the fact that we're significantly contributing to it. Protecting the status quo (as in 'protecting' the current economic setup) seems to hold much more importance than avoiding any possible disaster scenarios. This is only propagated further by the obsession of many Christians with the "imminent" apocalypse.
Mother Nature, in my observations, has one important rule for every living critter: adapt or die. Whether or not we're causing or contributing to global warming is really irrelevant; what matters is whether or not we're going to successfully adapt to the upcoming changes caused by global warming, such as rising sea levels (port cities will most likely need to be moved) and changing climates (once fertile areas may become deserts, etc.).
Additionally, there isn't much of a genetic mechanism to cap population growth. It's just ridiculous to think that we can continue to reproduce at our current levels. We also have the idea that we have the 'right' to reproduce, which is understandable considering our genetically-engrained urges. Religions that embody the need to reproduce like rabbits, however, certainly aren't helping matters.
I believe we will need a dramatic change in consciousness if we're actually going to survive, and a move towards humanity's root spirituality, animism, would be an excellent means. We need to realize and embody the idea that, as 'intelligent' beings, we have a lot more responsibility than other critters. We can't just take from the world without thought for consequences; we will need to be smart about what we can use, what we can reuse, and what we must give back to the world. This will, most importantly, include responsibility in terms of our population: what level can the world realistically sustain (many would argue that we're already artificially sustaining a population that is too large) and how can we encourage people to help balance it.
Should we fail to act (especially in terms of our population size), mother nature will gladly take care of things for us: disease epidemics, natural disasters, global catastrophes
This, of course, is assuming that said possible civilization even discovered high-power broadcast radio. They may have discovered something else entirely that worked better for them. :D
First of all - the Dems only *just* took power over Congress; they haven't had enough time to do much of anything, let alone setting in motion a move from 2- to 10-prints under the US VISIT program.
... just see the MATRIX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multistate_Anti-Terro rism_Information_Exchange project as an excellent example. I haven't a clue why people think the data-mining of commercial databases (which usually have very inaccurate data) is a good idea, but holy craziness!
And secondly - half the comments here seem to think that this is about taking finger prints from U.S. citizens - it's not; it's actually taking finger prints from visitors to the U.S.
Privacy issues aside, this is actually a good move for U.S. VISIT. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rushed U.S. VISIT out the door, and in doing so they slapped the system together with the legacy IDENT 2-print system, which was the old INS' way of tracking finger prints of new immigrants. This is completely stupid, of course, because not only does this defeat one of the purposes of taking finger prints (the FBI's 10-print database contains finger prints from not only U.S. criminals, but also finger prints from other criminals from around the world), but the 2-print system is significantly more faulty in correctly matching prints.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) (which includes the FBI) has been fighting DHS for years in trying to get them to move U.S. VISIT to a 10-print system, for the two reasons I mentioned above. I know about this because I interned for the DOJ a few years ago and got to hear all the juicy gossip (and frustrations) over this issue. Whether or not U.S. VISIT should exist, at least they're finally moving to 10-prints, which should weed out a few false checks that are probably occurring with the 2-print system.
And speaking of quantity over quality
I actually meant to include the entire Healthcare Industry in with this. It's a grab for profits, and I don't believe profits (for shareholders) should have anything to do with healthcare. A free market is absolutely brilliant for many sectors, but fragrantly unethical when applied to things that should belong to the entire community (infrastructure, healthcare, etc.).
But changing the Healthcare Industry to a not-for-profit structure wouldn't spell the end for all Healthcare-related jobs, just the end of gross profiteering by shareholders. We will still need all the medical supplies we currently use - this change would just reduce the insane prices attached to these medical supplies. (For example, why is US$10,000 seen as a reasonable price for a hospital bed, or US$6,000 for a pager-sized insulin pump?)
Even so, any economic changes resulting from this transition would need to be done at a slow enough rate to allow for local economies to adjust. As humans, we have a tendency to use the status quo as an excuse not to change - but as life generally teaches us: "evolve or die; the status quo is always a transitory state".
This is exactly why I feel we need to fundamentally change the way these companies operate ... by legally forcing all pharmaceutical and medical companies to be Not-For-Profit. The inherent nature of corporations can be broken down into one function: to provide profits for the shareholder. In my world view, I cannot see how we can ethically continue to allow these companies to reap these massive profits (see the below comment for comparison figures) at the expense of the needy (read: the sick). As a not-for-profit organization, these companies could then cut away all those profits and put that money where it should be going - to reducing the cost of medical supplies and funding R&D.
Agreed. The terrorist attacks changed *nothing,* unlike what so many political leaders have been telling us since moments after 9/11 ocurred. Yes, it was tragic, but it wasn't the result of some mass terrorist uprising. There have always been terrorists, and there always will be. "Terrorism" is simply the buzzword of the decade, used to manipulate people to particular ends. I wonder how long it's going to be before certain unnamed agencies are bitch-slapped back into legal and logical operations.
I'm personally not surprised that the TSA is taking up the same case and evidence the FBI was using. Robert Mueller (Director of the FBI) has been very careful in protecting his agency from certain scandals; for example, FBI agents were no where to be found any time the CIA used torture during any interrogation. Likewise, I wonder if he is worried about fallout if the public continues to question the methods and tactics used by certain federal enforcement agencies. He may well have decided that this investigation could put his agency in water that was too hot for his comfort. The TSA, on the other hand, appears to have little in the way of self restraint or ethical guiding.