I'm a few years older than you, and over the last years I've started playing more games. But much different than 15 years ago, when I was playing Doom. Oh and the Settlers. And Civilisation. Could get you stuck there all night.
I'm playing bridge on line (a card game and a brain sport), and puzzle games on my phone.
While impressed by modern games graphics it tends to bore me quickly. Either it needs a lot of practice not to die immediately, or it needs a long time to actually get into it (like RPGs).
Puzzles you can pick up, play a bit while standing on the train, and leave it when no time. And bridge just gives me a nice challenge, especially when I find a seat at a good table. Good for a quiet evening, but always makes me go to sleep too late:)
Sure... one of the first things my son got stuck in his mouth after birth was his mother's nipple. And you bet he loved sucking it, he loved it maybe even more than I do. Sucking it for up to half an hour straight.
Oh man his mind must be so twisted by now. Seeing those naked breasts all the time. What will ever come to be from him.
And worst of this all is that we're following the recommendations of the WHO. Breast is best!
As a child I had a computer (no Internet at the time yet - just games); which was installed in the living room.
And I think that's actually quite good. There's more to the Internet than porn, much more. Children, especially the younger ones, need supervision. I don't think a porn filter is necessary (and then I'd rather have a filter against stuff like mindless bloody violence - but for some reason that's totally OK).
And when I hear about people having actual problems related to Internet use it's never porn, it's games and to a lesser extent chatting and social networks. MMORPGs are infamous, but there are more. They can be addictive, and can really lead to interference with normal life - and study or work. I've never heard about porn doing anything like it.
Yes it is too easy, really. Many web sites advertise one thing, and then when you visit them it's got tits all over.
Take 4chan for example. I like to visit that site, especially/b/, as they're mighty famous for those funny cat pics, also known as "lolcats". I always here there are funny cat pics there and you know I love cats. They're cute and funny and so.
But going to that site, you often stumble upon pornographic images. But that's not what's supposed to be there! The moderators are even quite slow in removing that... and in the meantime the funny cats are no-where to be found except on caturday I hear. But my week doesn't come with a caturday, so I have to continue visiting them. And lurk moar.
Only to have to look at those naked women... life sucks doesn't it?
For me though there is no replacement for an actual visit, as when visiting overseas suppliers I not only want to see the person, I also want to get hands-on with the cargo they available. Everything else can be done by phone or e-mail. Inspecting stock can not be done like that.
(Imagine the havoc if someone had a brassiere-based weapon...)
You're absolutely right.
We had an underwear bomber already.
It seems to me quite easy for a small-chested woman to take a large size bra, pad it with quite some high explosives, and pass through the scanner unnoticed as long as the shape is more or less natural.
The next step going to be not only taking off shoes, but for the women also to remove their bras? Oh well at least after the underwear bomber incident they refrained from requiring everyone to take off their underwear to put it through the scanner along with their shoes.
How does a random passer-by with gun deter a suicide bomber?
How does it prevent a roadside bomb going off?
How would it, for example, have prevented the London metro/bus bombings?
How would it have prevented the first IFC bombing, and other car bomb attacks?
Most terrorists do not come out in the open shouting "I'm going to attack you!". They sneak up on their target, and go boom. Remember even most suicide bombers you do not notice until they set off their explosives, as they tend to hide it very well.
12 million people to be checked twice a day; most of them traveling within two hours of rush hour.
So that would be say 8 million people to be checked in 2 hours time (twice a day at different locations). One scanner scans 120 people an hour (30 seconds per scan on average according to Italian reports), that means you need almost 70,000 scanners. At a reported $100k each, that means a cool $7 bln contract just to build those scanners.
Oh and as every scanner needs to be manned, at least two people per scanner to cover the day (no need to have them all open all day), that would create at least another 140,000 jobs.
I think I've just come up with an outlet for all that newly printed money, and a solution for the unemployment in the US. Win, win, win. What're you Americans waiting for?
By the way, 1 million matches lit creates a fire column 3 to 5 meters in size over 10 meters tall. For the Americans, that's 10 to 16 feet wide and over 40 feet tall. I don't want to know how how big the fire column would be for a 3.3 million match lighting experiment.
Maybe you should make a video of that, post it online, and send it to the Mythbusters. See how, after confirming (or busting) your fireball claim, they can scale it up to your requested 3.3 millon matches. Sounds like fun!
Imagine the news: "person tries to blow up their underwear, boarded plane, passed full body scanner check".
The reaction will probably not be a realistic "dump those scanners, as they do not work to begin with". Even though they have never caught anyone trying to get a bomb on board (at least I have never heard about anyone being caught yet!), and after such an attack someone did pass through. That'd be a full 100% fail rate after all. One known to have been passing through (potentially more but those we don't know about); none caught.
More likely the reaction would be "full body scanner followed by extra enhanced full body manual pat down".
Support drops to 58 percent among Americans who say they fly at least once a year.
As this are scanners that largely affect the people that are actually flying (those that do not fly are not affected at all I'd say; they're even barely affected by terrorist attacks - especially considering that a new 911 type attack is impossible unless the hired pilot is the terrorist), the poll should quote the support from people that actually use planes first. Not surprisingly support from that group is lower, even though that are also the people most at risk of attacks on planes.
Personally I consider the weapons that are routinely taken on board of planes a bigger security risk. Weapons do not belong on a plane. That includes those carried by air marshals.
From various news paper articles I learned that it takes about 30 seconds to scan and clear a passenger.
A busy commuter station can easily see about 20,000 people per hour at peak times. You need the capacity to handle those numbers, as otherwise commuters will revolt. They just want to get home, after all.
One scanner can do no more than 120 people per hour. So to handle 20,000 people in an hour, that would require almost 170 scanners. They're about 1m wide, so put straight next to each other that would require an entrance to the station 170m wide, not allowing for extra room around the scanners for the people staffing them. So you will likely have to triple that width. This is instead of the maybe 50m of total entrance width that those stations actually have.
No, the direction they're heading is to broaden it from securing transportation to securing public places.
The best way to do just that would be to install a scanner at the exit of everyone's home. Require them to be scanned before they're allowed on the public streets.
You're not too far off - thinking of my experiences around Asia.
A few months ago a tourist bus with Hong Kong tourists was hijacked by a man posing to be police officer (he stopped the bus in the middle of a big road), and thanks to total incompetence in handling the crisis eight people died.
No scanners would have stopped this drama. Properly trained police - for example having a trained hostage negotiator - would have helped a lot, most of this kind of hijackings luckily end without casualties.
On the other hand, when I was there on vacation some 5, 6 years ago, most shopping malls and hotels there actually have metal detectors at the entrance, plus security people. So the shopping mall point isn't that far off. No lines for security though.
China has metal detectors for some metro systems already since the Beijing Olympics. Not sure whether they have been removed or not. During the Olympics they would also search bags.
And I recall having seen similar measures in Indonesia and Singapore, including your taxi being checked when arriving at a hotel by mirrors looking under the vehicle.
The left-facing swastika is a very common symbol in various Buddhist related religions. There are many temples around Asia that are completely covered in them.
Actually I once heard the tale that the swastika comes in two types: left and right facing. The left facing shows good luck, the right facing bad luck. The tale didn't elaborate on why the Nazis chose the right-facing one... it didn't help them much at least.
Probably the argument goes like "this body scanner can see everything, and on x-rays metals stand out anyway, so no need for separate metal detectors".
While true that it's old news, it's again a very bad mark for those full-body scanners.
This kind of razor blades would have set of the metal detector that was in common use a decade ago already. Metal buttons on my jeans set it off already! It is rare that I do not have to stand and get checked again with a hand-held metal detector to see where the metal bits are that set off the gate. They're really sensitive.
A 15-second manual sweep afterwards would have detected the exact spot where that metal is. Further inspection would have revealed those blades.
Adam said he went to a full body scanner and they missed that. So those full body scanners make security worse, not better. And that's maybe the scariest part of it.
And why it's coming now? Well maybe because anger is rising over the machines. In the video Adam's audience is laughing it off even!
But why the enforcement of staying with current contracts? It stinks of the lobbying parent describes. More from TFA:
Very fishy indeed. No need to put that into the law: for starters, a contract is a contract and is supposed to be respected from both sides. Breaking contracts should only be done in special cases. No need to put that again in a law.
NASA should go for a technology which is best for the job. Besides this is a new project, for new technology, so whether existing tech can be used right away well that's not so sure of course. Logically NASA should go with the tried and tested stuff, again no need to put this in the law.
Indeed. I had to read that summary again, as on first reading I thought I was reading it wrong. NASA breaking the law for investigating alternatives to a single supplier? It just doesn't read right. When I started reading I expected it to be the other way around, as in NASA going for a certain supplier, without properly investigating other options.
If those solid boosters caused so many problems, then it only makes sense they will search other options. On top of that I'm not expecting anything less from a research institute like NASA. Isn't development of new technologies part of their mandate?
That's why my question: how slow is slow to reprogram? Could this be a replacement for various dedicated chips - taking up a task when needed? Like when you want to play a video, it becomes video decoder, or maybe it can be used for other tasks that are fairly intensive, and last long.
They help freedom of information, and it's hard to say how that can be bad. If say the US gets hit by information about torturing in Iraq, which they themselves say is illegal, then they shouldn't have tortured in the first place. If they are caught lying about the number of casualties, that means they've been untrustworthy in their information. Had the governments been honest in the information released to the press, then they should have a lot less to fear.
Though leaking documents days before US elections (they admitted that was intentional timing) makes me wonder how neutral they really are. They should release documents as soon as they're ready for release (in case of the Iraq stash they were sanitising names, and giving time to established news outlets to go through the information).
This also explains why Ford was the only one of the big-three not begging for cash handouts from your central government. Not sure whether they actually got any bailout money or so, I didn't follow it well enough.
Anyway. Ford has been selling quite well in Europe for a very long time - many decades. My parents used to own one, and were quite happy with it. They called it the most European American car when it comes to quality, reliability and overall design. American cars have the name to be oversized and overweight expensive gas guzzlers.
Otoh, all the brands that were mentioned in the stories about GM and Chrysler you can barely find on the roads in Europe. Also in Asia I haven't seen them. It does say something about the quality: Japanese are exporting cars worldwide (and even producing worldwide). European manufacturers exporting big time too, mostly US, also Asia. But American brands other than Ford - very little, if at all.
I don't know really what the US automakers are doing worse than the competition, but they really have some catching up to do.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a few years older than you, and over the last years I've started playing more games. But much different than 15 years ago, when I was playing Doom. Oh and the Settlers. And Civilisation. Could get you stuck there all night.
I'm playing bridge on line (a card game and a brain sport), and puzzle games on my phone.
While impressed by modern games graphics it tends to bore me quickly. Either it needs a lot of practice not to die immediately, or it needs a long time to actually get into it (like RPGs).
Puzzles you can pick up, play a bit while standing on the train, and leave it when no time. And bridge just gives me a nice challenge, especially when I find a seat at a good table. Good for a quiet evening, but always makes me go to sleep too late :)
Sure... one of the first things my son got stuck in his mouth after birth was his mother's nipple. And you bet he loved sucking it, he loved it maybe even more than I do. Sucking it for up to half an hour straight.
Oh man his mind must be so twisted by now. Seeing those naked breasts all the time. What will ever come to be from him.
And worst of this all is that we're following the recommendations of the WHO. Breast is best!
As a child I had a computer (no Internet at the time yet - just games); which was installed in the living room.
And I think that's actually quite good. There's more to the Internet than porn, much more. Children, especially the younger ones, need supervision. I don't think a porn filter is necessary (and then I'd rather have a filter against stuff like mindless bloody violence - but for some reason that's totally OK).
And when I hear about people having actual problems related to Internet use it's never porn, it's games and to a lesser extent chatting and social networks. MMORPGs are infamous, but there are more. They can be addictive, and can really lead to interference with normal life - and study or work. I've never heard about porn doing anything like it.
...think that porn is too easy to "stumble" upon.
Yes it is too easy, really. Many web sites advertise one thing, and then when you visit them it's got tits all over.
Take 4chan for example. I like to visit that site, especially /b/, as they're mighty famous for those funny cat pics, also known as "lolcats". I always here there are funny cat pics there and you know I love cats. They're cute and funny and so.
But going to that site, you often stumble upon pornographic images. But that's not what's supposed to be there! The moderators are even quite slow in removing that... and in the meantime the funny cats are no-where to be found except on caturday I hear. But my week doesn't come with a caturday, so I have to continue visiting them. And lurk moar.
Only to have to look at those naked women... life sucks doesn't it?
Some business can be done like that.
For me though there is no replacement for an actual visit, as when visiting overseas suppliers I not only want to see the person, I also want to get hands-on with the cargo they available. Everything else can be done by phone or e-mail. Inspecting stock can not be done like that.
(Imagine the havoc if someone had a brassiere-based weapon...)
You're absolutely right.
We had an underwear bomber already.
It seems to me quite easy for a small-chested woman to take a large size bra, pad it with quite some high explosives, and pass through the scanner unnoticed as long as the shape is more or less natural.
The next step going to be not only taking off shoes, but for the women also to remove their bras? Oh well at least after the underwear bomber incident they refrained from requiring everyone to take off their underwear to put it through the scanner along with their shoes.
How does a random passer-by with gun deter a suicide bomber?
How does it prevent a roadside bomb going off?
How would it, for example, have prevented the London metro/bus bombings?
How would it have prevented the first IFC bombing, and other car bomb attacks?
Most terrorists do not come out in the open shouting "I'm going to attack you!". They sneak up on their target, and go boom. Remember even most suicide bombers you do not notice until they set off their explosives, as they tend to hide it very well.
That must be a mouthwatering contract to secure.
12 million people to be checked twice a day; most of them traveling within two hours of rush hour.
So that would be say 8 million people to be checked in 2 hours time (twice a day at different locations). One scanner scans 120 people an hour (30 seconds per scan on average according to Italian reports), that means you need almost 70,000 scanners. At a reported $100k each, that means a cool $7 bln contract just to build those scanners.
Oh and as every scanner needs to be manned, at least two people per scanner to cover the day (no need to have them all open all day), that would create at least another 140,000 jobs.
I think I've just come up with an outlet for all that newly printed money, and a solution for the unemployment in the US. Win, win, win. What're you Americans waiting for?
By the way, 1 million matches lit creates a fire column 3 to 5 meters in size over 10 meters tall. For the Americans, that's 10 to 16 feet wide and over 40 feet tall. I don't want to know how how big the fire column would be for a 3.3 million match lighting experiment.
Maybe you should make a video of that, post it online, and send it to the Mythbusters. See how, after confirming (or busting) your fireball claim, they can scale it up to your requested 3.3 millon matches. Sounds like fun!
I'm afraid so...
Imagine the news: "person tries to blow up their underwear, boarded plane, passed full body scanner check".
The reaction will probably not be a realistic "dump those scanners, as they do not work to begin with". Even though they have never caught anyone trying to get a bomb on board (at least I have never heard about anyone being caught yet!), and after such an attack someone did pass through. That'd be a full 100% fail rate after all. One known to have been passing through (potentially more but those we don't know about); none caught.
More likely the reaction would be "full body scanner followed by extra enhanced full body manual pat down".
From the linked article:
Support drops to 58 percent among Americans who say they fly at least once a year.
As this are scanners that largely affect the people that are actually flying (those that do not fly are not affected at all I'd say; they're even barely affected by terrorist attacks - especially considering that a new 911 type attack is impossible unless the hired pilot is the terrorist), the poll should quote the support from people that actually use planes first. Not surprisingly support from that group is lower, even though that are also the people most at risk of attacks on planes.
Personally I consider the weapons that are routinely taken on board of planes a bigger security risk. Weapons do not belong on a plane. That includes those carried by air marshals.
I was thinking in a different line.
From various news paper articles I learned that it takes about 30 seconds to scan and clear a passenger.
A busy commuter station can easily see about 20,000 people per hour at peak times. You need the capacity to handle those numbers, as otherwise commuters will revolt. They just want to get home, after all.
One scanner can do no more than 120 people per hour. So to handle 20,000 people in an hour, that would require almost 170 scanners. They're about 1m wide, so put straight next to each other that would require an entrance to the station 170m wide, not allowing for extra room around the scanners for the people staffing them. So you will likely have to triple that width. This is instead of the maybe 50m of total entrance width that those stations actually have.
No, the direction they're heading is to broaden it from securing transportation to securing public places.
The best way to do just that would be to install a scanner at the exit of everyone's home. Require them to be scanned before they're allowed on the public streets.
You're not too far off - thinking of my experiences around Asia.
A few months ago a tourist bus with Hong Kong tourists was hijacked by a man posing to be police officer (he stopped the bus in the middle of a big road), and thanks to total incompetence in handling the crisis eight people died.
No scanners would have stopped this drama. Properly trained police - for example having a trained hostage negotiator - would have helped a lot, most of this kind of hijackings luckily end without casualties.
On the other hand, when I was there on vacation some 5, 6 years ago, most shopping malls and hotels there actually have metal detectors at the entrance, plus security people. So the shopping mall point isn't that far off. No lines for security though.
China has metal detectors for some metro systems already since the Beijing Olympics. Not sure whether they have been removed or not. During the Olympics they would also search bags.
And I recall having seen similar measures in Indonesia and Singapore, including your taxi being checked when arriving at a hotel by mirrors looking under the vehicle.
The left-facing swastika is a very common symbol in various Buddhist related religions. There are many temples around Asia that are completely covered in them.
Actually I once heard the tale that the swastika comes in two types: left and right facing. The left facing shows good luck, the right facing bad luck. The tale didn't elaborate on why the Nazis chose the right-facing one... it didn't help them much at least.
Probably the argument goes like "this body scanner can see everything, and on x-rays metals stand out anyway, so no need for separate metal detectors".
While true that it's old news, it's again a very bad mark for those full-body scanners.
This kind of razor blades would have set of the metal detector that was in common use a decade ago already. Metal buttons on my jeans set it off already! It is rare that I do not have to stand and get checked again with a hand-held metal detector to see where the metal bits are that set off the gate. They're really sensitive.
A 15-second manual sweep afterwards would have detected the exact spot where that metal is. Further inspection would have revealed those blades.
Adam said he went to a full body scanner and they missed that. So those full body scanners make security worse, not better. And that's maybe the scariest part of it.
And why it's coming now? Well maybe because anger is rising over the machines. In the video Adam's audience is laughing it off even!
But why the enforcement of staying with current contracts? It stinks of the lobbying parent describes. More from TFA:
Very fishy indeed. No need to put that into the law: for starters, a contract is a contract and is supposed to be respected from both sides. Breaking contracts should only be done in special cases. No need to put that again in a law.
NASA should go for a technology which is best for the job. Besides this is a new project, for new technology, so whether existing tech can be used right away well that's not so sure of course. Logically NASA should go with the tried and tested stuff, again no need to put this in the law.
Indeed. I had to read that summary again, as on first reading I thought I was reading it wrong. NASA breaking the law for investigating alternatives to a single supplier? It just doesn't read right. When I started reading I expected it to be the other way around, as in NASA going for a certain supplier, without properly investigating other options.
If those solid boosters caused so many problems, then it only makes sense they will search other options. On top of that I'm not expecting anything less from a research institute like NASA. Isn't development of new technologies part of their mandate?
That's why my question: how slow is slow to reprogram? Could this be a replacement for various dedicated chips - taking up a task when needed? Like when you want to play a video, it becomes video decoder, or maybe it can be used for other tasks that are fairly intensive, and last long.
Interesting. I was thinking the same as GP: what the heck is that!
Can this reprogramming be done by the OS, upon need? And how slow is slow?
Could be nice for e.g. video decoding.
I would call them "neutral" actually.
They help freedom of information, and it's hard to say how that can be bad. If say the US gets hit by information about torturing in Iraq, which they themselves say is illegal, then they shouldn't have tortured in the first place. If they are caught lying about the number of casualties, that means they've been untrustworthy in their information. Had the governments been honest in the information released to the press, then they should have a lot less to fear.
Though leaking documents days before US elections (they admitted that was intentional timing) makes me wonder how neutral they really are. They should release documents as soon as they're ready for release (in case of the Iraq stash they were sanitising names, and giving time to established news outlets to go through the information).
This also explains why Ford was the only one of the big-three not begging for cash handouts from your central government. Not sure whether they actually got any bailout money or so, I didn't follow it well enough.
Anyway. Ford has been selling quite well in Europe for a very long time - many decades. My parents used to own one, and were quite happy with it. They called it the most European American car when it comes to quality, reliability and overall design. American cars have the name to be oversized and overweight expensive gas guzzlers.
Otoh, all the brands that were mentioned in the stories about GM and Chrysler you can barely find on the roads in Europe. Also in Asia I haven't seen them. It does say something about the quality: Japanese are exporting cars worldwide (and even producing worldwide). European manufacturers exporting big time too, mostly US, also Asia. But American brands other than Ford - very little, if at all.
I don't know really what the US automakers are doing worse than the competition, but they really have some catching up to do.
Plus a fine of RMB 1 mln (approx USD 150,000).
Sorry for replying to myself, was too quick in posting.
Maybe not american, still accusation is theft of state secrets: 10 years prison.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/rio-tintos-stern-hu-jailed-10-years/story-e6frg9df-1225847088979