Because the way this actually plays out outside of fairy tales is that some moron that doesn't know anything about a field "invents" and patents some old and well known stuff to those skilled in the art.
It's obvious just how much of your knowledge of the patent system comes from being involved in it, and how much comes from reading Slashdot. The "morons" inventing software algorithms are software engineers, who know the state of the art and know that there's a key detail distinguishing their algorithm from the obvious one, just like the morons inventing techniques for metallurgy are usually metallurgists, the morons inventing theatrical lights are theatre technicians, and the moron inventing a gravimetric feeder for feeding coal is a coal-shoveller.
People who want a patent are well empowered as it is. Actually, well beyond what is sane.
I'm insanely well-empowered? This is news to me. Let me just call the President and see what he says... No, he says that's a sweeping generalization based on a stereotype.
...easy and obvious, as most ideas, and the vast majority of patents, are.
[citation needed]. No, really... show me any study that actually counts the number of easy and obvious patents, compared to the ones that are aren't and never make it onto Slashdot's front page.
Of course I was meaning things like patents that are central in standards.
Oh, yes, of course using a technology has "nothing to do with the technology"! Sorry for the misunderstanding.
It happened in the 80's for my uncle, the 90's for one of my in-laws, and the 2000s for a friend of mine. They got patents, licensed them off to recoup the investment (that friend even made a profit!), and effectively improved the world for very little expense.
Feel free to continue your quaint "underdog fighting the big bad corporations and corrupt government" story, though. It's charming.
I've personally seen it happen about a half-dozen times.
One of those patents I'm connected to...
...people who invest their time and money inventing things. I'm one myself, and so's my uncle, my father, great-grandfather, and more of my inlaws than I can recall.
So he's not a client in any way, and his story isn't rare, in my experience.
Now that you mention it, I do know several folks who've won various lotteries and casino games, too... their average win is somewhere under $20.
Patents do not guarantee profit or even breaking even... they give the inventor a chance.
I doubt there's any definitions that will suffice.
To build a wall 100 feet high, you must use Chit's Bricks, stacked as so, and connected with Chit's Mortar. Now is that because Chit's Bricks and Mortar are made stronger, so they'll support a wall 100 feet high, or is it because they're shiny, so it'll look good? One's a patent issue, the other's copyright (or design patent, but that overlap really only exists for trivial cases)
The practical distinction is that a patent for covers only the vital components of a mechanism. Design a different mechanism that doesn't use all those vital components means you're invented a novel solution to the problem (which is really the first solution to a problem like "build a 100-foot-high wall without using Chit's Bricks"). Without knowing ahead of time all components that can be worked around or all future technology that will be invented, no component can be declared absolutely vital or not, so a perfect minimal patent is impossible.
Now we're getting into mathematical theories, so I'm going to need some more coffee...
First-to-file is irrelevant. It only clarifies who legally invented something first. Here, we know that A invented first, and we know that B didn't know it was already invented.
Contrary to the horror stories told to you by the hivemind, it's also what the patent system helps reduce. The patent protection (should, and often does) keep the well-connected people and companies at bay while you have a chance to build your own connections so you can compete in the real world. Patents do not guarantee profit or even breaking even... they give the inventor a chance.
One of those patents I'm connected to is for a particular type of gravimetric feeder. The inventor's day job was shoveling coal, and his connections were about what you'd expect for a coal-shoveler. After filing for a patent, he turned his own employer into his first customer, founding a company that eventually made him a small fortune engineering solids-handling machines. Bearing in mind that these were pre-union, post-industrial-revolution days, the patent was the biggest thing preventing his employer from firing him and building the feeder themselves.
Despite the pervasive paranoia of Slashdot, that's the kind of story the patent system is actually pretty good at creating. I've personally seen it happen about a half-dozen times. Making it easier for an average person to build connections before getting screwed is a good thing, in my opinion.
A bit of oil, applied repeatedly and worked into the hinge over many cycles of opening and closing the door. You might also need a plane to trim down the frame to compensate for warping and a screwdriver to remount the hinge.
Also letters, protests, and lobbyists. They aren't as self-gratifying as jury nullification, but they're more effective in the long run.
I want cloning companies to sprint past "inventors", so that they can keep single players from holding back progress.
So you're saying you don't want patents at all. Okay. "Survival of the most-connected" is a valid theory, though I personally don't think it's best for most people.
If sprinting past them is even possible, then the "inventor" has no business getting a patent.
"I've spent 5 years inventing this Widget, but I'm not a shrewd businessman who's well-connected to suppliers and fabricators. I guess I shouldn't be inventing."
What you want is further empowerment of trolls. This is downright evil, and I have no choice but assuming that you work for a patent troll or are one yourself.
I want empowerment of people who invest their time and money inventing things. I'm one myself, and so's my uncle, my father, great-grandfather, and more of my inlaws than I can recall. Not one of our patents have ever been trollish, or done anything but contribute to their field (though the portable chiropractic table is debatable). You must be right though... since I disagree with you, I'm clearly a paid shill working for a patent troll. Funny how it looks like the IT department of a financial service company...
As it stands, it is possible to corner huge markets with pretty minor contributions by just being shrewd in ways that have nothing to do with the technology itself
Congratulations, you've discovered marketing. Welcome to the last millennium.
Currently, suing against FooBarBaz is only feasible if the Widget inventor has enough money to start the legal process. Of course, this isn't restricted to just patent lawsuits, so the entire legal climate will need to change to reduce the starting cost of a suit, which also means better means to expedite frivolous lawsuits, etc...
As a stopgap measure until we revamp the entire American legal system, this helps.
Then company B walks into a courtroom, says "the patent was secret. We had no way of knowing the patented technology. Unless A can prove espionage, the patent should be re-examined and thrown out as being obvious, since our researchers were clearly able to produce the same technology from simply the current state of the art."
...which is like using a wrench to nail a door closed so it won't squeak when someone opens it. It's the wrong tool to do a job that's the wrong solution to a relatively minor problem.
Implementations of a solution should not be patentable (copyright applies in this case).
Yes they should, and no, it doesn't.
A patent covers the mechanism of an implementation: Lever A pushes toggle B changing path C...
Copyright covers the details: Lever A (which is built of steel truss and painted royal blue, whose fulcrum is an axle mounted between two oak panels) pushes toggle B (built of brushed aluminum, and attached to a platform holding so a little statue of a German holding a full beer stein, raised to chin level as in a toast) changing path C (which is a semicircular track made from copper mesh, which carries blue marbles made of recycled glass, at a 5% incline)...
Or, to put it another absurd way, copyright covers Star Wars. A patent would cover the monomyth. You can write a different story using the same design by changing the characters and circumstances, but the underlying design is still the same.
Copyright and patents have entirely different intents. Neither one solves the other's problem.
Likely consequences are absolutely nothing, in the grand scheme of information freedom. Patent protection remains the same, but there's less risk in patenting technologies that are likely to be copied outright by other companies.
Currently, if you file a major patent for a Widget that will change the world, it'll take three years for that patent to be approved. During those three years, a smart businessman will be gathering funding to produce Widgets (or license them off to someone who can) to recoup the research investment. In 18 months, an evil company will likely see the patent application, and start preparing legal battles to screw with the inventor while producing their own FooBarBaz. If the inventor is financially weaker than the aggressor, there's a good chance FooBarBaz will be able to enter production faster and penetrate the market better, defeating the whole point of the patent process in the first place.
By allowing patents to be secret until they're protected, the inventor doesn't need to rush into license and production negotiations, because the cloning company can't sprint past them. When they do start negotiations, the inventor has a bit more leverage, because their technology is patented, rather than just pending.
I'm inclined to agree, and the letters to my representatives said as much.
The TSA's biggest problem is that it exists to solve a problem that's practically unsolvable. If terrorists want to attack the US, they will, period, and airplanes just happened to be a convenient method in 2001. Now with cockpit reinforcements and more air marshals, that's very unlikely to be the easy route again, and it won't carry the same "we can strike anywhere you think we can't" message.
The TSA should die, and the sooner the better, but making a media circus about an offended parent doesn't help put sanity in airports. Politicians will see the news, know it's spun for reaction, and ignore the whole event.
For one, the tenuous attachment of this post to the topic is the assumption that Microsoft only fixed this when they were facing a profit disaster... except they were only aware of the problem a few hours before the fix was released, per the summary.
The rant against corporations assumes that corporations are those big evil faceless things that are just money-making machines. That's an incredibly simplistic and naive approach. Corporations exist to accomplish whatever goals their directors want, and that's not necessarily just "make money". I've worked with one company whose stated goal (even on a plaque and everything) was "make cool-looking things". Drive down the right highway at the right time, and you'll see an animated Christmas light display, built by the company as a training exercise in the engineering and construction of DMX lighting. Last I knew, the company had one paying client and made no profit, but still met their goal.
Another implication in the post is that companies are rejecting security mandates purely out of concern for profit. From my experience in IT, this is seldom the real issue. More often, the IT managers are balking at the time and effort mandated for no practical gain. As one example, I used to work at a company that dealt with medical data. Before we were required to be HIPAA-compliant, we salted & hashed (SHA512, multiple times for technical reasons) personal identifiers before they were stored. After HIPAA, we were required to use a two-way encryption algorithm, and have the decryption key stored offsite by another company. The end result was less actual security (because the data could be decrypted, and the key did exist somewhere) and a lot of effort by the software developers.
It's been my experience that security mandates and certifications involve a lot of hassle to meet a set of standards that are too strictly-defined to be practical. I'm not surprised to hear corporations are pushing back against government bureaucrats.
Personally, I've thought for a while it goes the other way: When someone's susceptible to conspiratorial nonsense, they see the existing balanced (or at least wavering near the center) government as the result of the conspiracy, so they'll fight back by pushing whatever extreme they like.
Back in my college days, I had a mythology class, and one of the sources studied was the Bible. As I recall the lesson/lecture/digression, the story of Noah's ark is just one of several ancient stories from the middle east about a catastrophic flood. Some stories talk about a large boat, some talk about a man moving a river, and some just say that Atlantis fell into the sea.
It was my professor's opinion (though I haven't bothered researching this further since) that there was likely a major storm and flood in the middle east a few millennia ago. As far as the nomads living there were concerned, their whole known world was flooded, and only those who had managed to get their animals on a raft survived. Others on the edge of the flooding would find a lake where there was a valley a month earlier. Over the ages, the stories develop their particular details and exaggerations, becoming the legends of today.
The Bible doesn't need to be literal or metaphorical to be accurate. It just has to be viewed from the perspective of a scribe from a few thousand years ago.
Jobs envisioned the ad-supported version of Mac OS 9 displaying a 60-second commercial from a "premium" company at startup, with the ads occasionally being automatically swapped out for new ones over the Internet.
Sounds like it'd be pretty darned usable, and I personally wouldn't notice much, since I reboot once every few months (usually due to moving cords or power failure)
Oh, look at that cute kid! Ha ha, he's got a flamethrower! Isn't that adorable?
Kids only do random things when their parents let them.
I assume you've never either (a) been a kid and (b) ever seen any kids ever. No, basically only the kids mother will do. That's just how most kids work.
So let the kid cry. It worked for me, and it worked for my kids. In ten minutes, the manager's approved an alternative procedure, and the problem's solved.
The reason for the media circus is because they insisted...
Nope. It's because people like you see the just-like-me think-of-the-children underdog getting abused by the evil bad nasty gub'mint, and band together in an orgy of hate, feeling for two minutes like you have a common enemy, and that if you scream loud enough at the villain of the day, the world will listen to you, and you don't need to play politics or actually work toward improvement, but just be united in your anger.
At this point it's obvious you don't deal with security or children (or shouldn't be, at least). Security is pointless if it's compromised, or left to the whims of people involved. I'll pick out a few bits of nonsense:
And that only happened when they tried to grab her. If they'd been sensible, that would never have happened.
There's no evidence the kid was ever "grabbed". From a clearer source:
She said the officers told the girl her she had to come to them, alone, and spread her arms and legs. When the girl ran in the opposite direction, she said, an officer told Brademeyer “they would shut down the entire airport, cancel all flights, if my daughter was not restrained.”
And, frankly at that point, you're seriously evaluating the risk of a 4 year old pulling off two complex transfers with the second one not being detected? That's not common sense.
No, I'm evaluating the risk of a child being used as a tool for pulling off two complex transfers, where everyone involved has an unknown level of training. Children of all ages are known to be used around the world as pickpockets and drug mules. When your goal is to maintain security, "common sense" is expecting a hug to be part of the act.
Kids get scared, computers don't. Computers do exactly what you tell them, kids don't. Kids can't be reasoned with by the person who is scaring them.
By age four, children are perfectly capable of understanding appropriate behavior, and being patient enough to wait through lines. They're also capable of being used for smuggling. The "sensible" thing to do would be to talk to your kids about appropriate behavior before entering the checkpoint, not assume the TSA's going to babysit your kids for you at the expense of security.
The TSA officials had mature, sensible options with prefectly adequate security open to them.
Like have the mother accompany the child during her pat-down, with a manger's approval and additional supervision? That's what ultimately happened, and it took a whole 10 minutes to accomplish... but please don't let that get in the way of your rant.
There's nothing I've seen that isn't a blatant retelling of the family's story, with minimal input from the TSA. There's one source that shares most details with TFA, but has less sensationalism, and gives a clearer picture of the sequence of events. Since the TSA's statement is short and not very informative, separating the actual events from the family's emotional retelling is a matter of interpretation.
A female officer started “yelling at my child and demanded she, too, must sit down and await a full body pat-down,” Brademeyer said. Her daughter responded by putting her hands over her face and crying.
“I was prevented from coming any closer, explaining the situation to her, or consoling her in any way. It was implied, several times, that my mother, in their brief two-second embrace, had passed a handgun to my daughter.”
I interpret that to mean that the parent didn't control their kid through the checkpoint or explain sufficiently that they'd need to "stay near mommy", and apparently the grandmother (who was worthy of getting a running hug a few seconds prior) didn't console the confused child herself. When the TSA tried to explain that the procedure is because contraband could be passed, the family took that as an accusation.
I personally think the TSA's a ridiculous waste of my government's time and resources, but that's no excuse for turning a child's confusion into a sensational media circus.
Slashdot Mirror
The plural of "anecdote" is not "evidence". The singular is "counter-example".
Because the way this actually plays out outside of fairy tales is that some moron that doesn't know anything about a field "invents" and patents some old and well known stuff to those skilled in the art.
It's obvious just how much of your knowledge of the patent system comes from being involved in it, and how much comes from reading Slashdot. The "morons" inventing software algorithms are software engineers, who know the state of the art and know that there's a key detail distinguishing their algorithm from the obvious one, just like the morons inventing techniques for metallurgy are usually metallurgists, the morons inventing theatrical lights are theatre technicians, and the moron inventing a gravimetric feeder for feeding coal is a coal-shoveller.
People who want a patent are well empowered as it is. Actually, well beyond what is sane.
I'm insanely well-empowered? This is news to me. Let me just call the President and see what he says... No, he says that's a sweeping generalization based on a stereotype.
...easy and obvious, as most ideas, and the vast majority of patents, are.
[citation needed]. No, really... show me any study that actually counts the number of easy and obvious patents, compared to the ones that are aren't and never make it onto Slashdot's front page.
Of course I was meaning things like patents that are central in standards.
Oh, yes, of course using a technology has "nothing to do with the technology"! Sorry for the misunderstanding.
It happened in the 80's for my uncle, the 90's for one of my in-laws, and the 2000s for a friend of mine. They got patents, licensed them off to recoup the investment (that friend even made a profit!), and effectively improved the world for very little expense.
Feel free to continue your quaint "underdog fighting the big bad corporations and corrupt government" story, though. It's charming.
Let's try your reading comprehension again:
I've personally seen it happen about a half-dozen times.
One of those patents I'm connected to...
...people who invest their time and money inventing things. I'm one myself, and so's my uncle, my father, great-grandfather, and more of my inlaws than I can recall.
So he's not a client in any way, and his story isn't rare, in my experience.
Now that you mention it, I do know several folks who've won various lotteries and casino games, too... their average win is somewhere under $20.
Patents do not guarantee profit or even breaking even... they give the inventor a chance.
I doubt there's any definitions that will suffice.
To build a wall 100 feet high, you must use Chit's Bricks, stacked as so, and connected with Chit's Mortar. Now is that because Chit's Bricks and Mortar are made stronger, so they'll support a wall 100 feet high, or is it because they're shiny, so it'll look good? One's a patent issue, the other's copyright (or design patent, but that overlap really only exists for trivial cases)
The practical distinction is that a patent for covers only the vital components of a mechanism. Design a different mechanism that doesn't use all those vital components means you're invented a novel solution to the problem (which is really the first solution to a problem like "build a 100-foot-high wall without using Chit's Bricks"). Without knowing ahead of time all components that can be worked around or all future technology that will be invented, no component can be declared absolutely vital or not, so a perfect minimal patent is impossible.
Now we're getting into mathematical theories, so I'm going to need some more coffee...
First-to-file is irrelevant. It only clarifies who legally invented something first. Here, we know that A invented first, and we know that B didn't know it was already invented.
Contrary to the horror stories told to you by the hivemind, it's also what the patent system helps reduce. The patent protection (should, and often does) keep the well-connected people and companies at bay while you have a chance to build your own connections so you can compete in the real world. Patents do not guarantee profit or even breaking even... they give the inventor a chance.
One of those patents I'm connected to is for a particular type of gravimetric feeder. The inventor's day job was shoveling coal, and his connections were about what you'd expect for a coal-shoveler. After filing for a patent, he turned his own employer into his first customer, founding a company that eventually made him a small fortune engineering solids-handling machines. Bearing in mind that these were pre-union, post-industrial-revolution days, the patent was the biggest thing preventing his employer from firing him and building the feeder themselves.
Despite the pervasive paranoia of Slashdot, that's the kind of story the patent system is actually pretty good at creating. I've personally seen it happen about a half-dozen times. Making it easier for an average person to build connections before getting screwed is a good thing, in my opinion.
A bit of oil, applied repeatedly and worked into the hinge over many cycles of opening and closing the door. You might also need a plane to trim down the frame to compensate for warping and a screwdriver to remount the hinge.
Also letters, protests, and lobbyists. They aren't as self-gratifying as jury nullification, but they're more effective in the long run.
I want cloning companies to sprint past "inventors", so that they can keep single players from holding back progress.
So you're saying you don't want patents at all. Okay. "Survival of the most-connected" is a valid theory, though I personally don't think it's best for most people.
If sprinting past them is even possible, then the "inventor" has no business getting a patent.
"I've spent 5 years inventing this Widget, but I'm not a shrewd businessman who's well-connected to suppliers and fabricators. I guess I shouldn't be inventing."
What you want is further empowerment of trolls. This is downright evil, and I have no choice but assuming that you work for a patent troll or are one yourself.
I want empowerment of people who invest their time and money inventing things. I'm one myself, and so's my uncle, my father, great-grandfather, and more of my inlaws than I can recall. Not one of our patents have ever been trollish, or done anything but contribute to their field (though the portable chiropractic table is debatable). You must be right though... since I disagree with you, I'm clearly a paid shill working for a patent troll. Funny how it looks like the IT department of a financial service company...
As it stands, it is possible to corner huge markets with pretty minor contributions by just being shrewd in ways that have nothing to do with the technology itself
Congratulations, you've discovered marketing. Welcome to the last millennium.
I'm in favor of both.
Currently, suing against FooBarBaz is only feasible if the Widget inventor has enough money to start the legal process. Of course, this isn't restricted to just patent lawsuits, so the entire legal climate will need to change to reduce the starting cost of a suit, which also means better means to expedite frivolous lawsuits, etc...
As a stopgap measure until we revamp the entire American legal system, this helps.
Then company B walks into a courtroom, says "the patent was secret. We had no way of knowing the patented technology. Unless A can prove espionage, the patent should be re-examined and thrown out as being obvious, since our researchers were clearly able to produce the same technology from simply the current state of the art."
...which is like using a wrench to nail a door closed so it won't squeak when someone opens it. It's the wrong tool to do a job that's the wrong solution to a relatively minor problem.
Implementations of a solution should not be patentable (copyright applies in this case).
Yes they should, and no, it doesn't.
A patent covers the mechanism of an implementation: Lever A pushes toggle B changing path C...
Copyright covers the details: Lever A (which is built of steel truss and painted royal blue, whose fulcrum is an axle mounted between two oak panels) pushes toggle B (built of brushed aluminum, and attached to a platform holding so a little statue of a German holding a full beer stein, raised to chin level as in a toast) changing path C (which is a semicircular track made from copper mesh, which carries blue marbles made of recycled glass, at a 5% incline)...
Or, to put it another absurd way, copyright covers Star Wars. A patent would cover the monomyth. You can write a different story using the same design by changing the characters and circumstances, but the underlying design is still the same.
Copyright and patents have entirely different intents. Neither one solves the other's problem.
... nothing to see here. Period.
Likely consequences are absolutely nothing, in the grand scheme of information freedom. Patent protection remains the same, but there's less risk in patenting technologies that are likely to be copied outright by other companies.
Currently, if you file a major patent for a Widget that will change the world, it'll take three years for that patent to be approved. During those three years, a smart businessman will be gathering funding to produce Widgets (or license them off to someone who can) to recoup the research investment. In 18 months, an evil company will likely see the patent application, and start preparing legal battles to screw with the inventor while producing their own FooBarBaz. If the inventor is financially weaker than the aggressor, there's a good chance FooBarBaz will be able to enter production faster and penetrate the market better, defeating the whole point of the patent process in the first place.
By allowing patents to be secret until they're protected, the inventor doesn't need to rush into license and production negotiations, because the cloning company can't sprint past them. When they do start negotiations, the inventor has a bit more leverage, because their technology is patented, rather than just pending.
That's a brilliant statement, full of evidence and compelling logic!
I'm inclined to agree, and the letters to my representatives said as much.
The TSA's biggest problem is that it exists to solve a problem that's practically unsolvable. If terrorists want to attack the US, they will, period, and airplanes just happened to be a convenient method in 2001. Now with cockpit reinforcements and more air marshals, that's very unlikely to be the easy route again, and it won't carry the same "we can strike anywhere you think we can't" message.
The TSA should die, and the sooner the better, but making a media circus about an offended parent doesn't help put sanity in airports. Politicians will see the news, know it's spun for reaction, and ignore the whole event.
For one, the tenuous attachment of this post to the topic is the assumption that Microsoft only fixed this when they were facing a profit disaster... except they were only aware of the problem a few hours before the fix was released, per the summary.
The rant against corporations assumes that corporations are those big evil faceless things that are just money-making machines. That's an incredibly simplistic and naive approach. Corporations exist to accomplish whatever goals their directors want, and that's not necessarily just "make money". I've worked with one company whose stated goal (even on a plaque and everything) was "make cool-looking things". Drive down the right highway at the right time, and you'll see an animated Christmas light display, built by the company as a training exercise in the engineering and construction of DMX lighting. Last I knew, the company had one paying client and made no profit, but still met their goal.
Another implication in the post is that companies are rejecting security mandates purely out of concern for profit. From my experience in IT, this is seldom the real issue. More often, the IT managers are balking at the time and effort mandated for no practical gain. As one example, I used to work at a company that dealt with medical data. Before we were required to be HIPAA-compliant, we salted & hashed (SHA512, multiple times for technical reasons) personal identifiers before they were stored. After HIPAA, we were required to use a two-way encryption algorithm, and have the decryption key stored offsite by another company. The end result was less actual security (because the data could be decrypted, and the key did exist somewhere) and a lot of effort by the software developers.
It's been my experience that security mandates and certifications involve a lot of hassle to meet a set of standards that are too strictly-defined to be practical. I'm not surprised to hear corporations are pushing back against government bureaucrats.
I think your tinfoil hat's on a bit too tight.
I sleep well enough at night myself... I don't use Hotmail.
Personally, I've thought for a while it goes the other way: When someone's susceptible to conspiratorial nonsense, they see the existing balanced (or at least wavering near the center) government as the result of the conspiracy, so they'll fight back by pushing whatever extreme they like.
Back in my college days, I had a mythology class, and one of the sources studied was the Bible. As I recall the lesson/lecture/digression, the story of Noah's ark is just one of several ancient stories from the middle east about a catastrophic flood. Some stories talk about a large boat, some talk about a man moving a river, and some just say that Atlantis fell into the sea.
It was my professor's opinion (though I haven't bothered researching this further since) that there was likely a major storm and flood in the middle east a few millennia ago. As far as the nomads living there were concerned, their whole known world was flooded, and only those who had managed to get their animals on a raft survived. Others on the edge of the flooding would find a lake where there was a valley a month earlier. Over the ages, the stories develop their particular details and exaggerations, becoming the legends of today.
The Bible doesn't need to be literal or metaphorical to be accurate. It just has to be viewed from the perspective of a scribe from a few thousand years ago.
From TFA:
Jobs envisioned the ad-supported version of Mac OS 9 displaying a 60-second commercial from a "premium" company at startup, with the ads occasionally being automatically swapped out for new ones over the Internet.
Sounds like it'd be pretty darned usable, and I personally wouldn't notice much, since I reboot once every few months (usually due to moving cords or power failure)
Sometimes they do random things.
Oh, look at that cute kid! Ha ha, he's got a flamethrower! Isn't that adorable?
Kids only do random things when their parents let them.
I assume you've never either (a) been a kid and (b) ever seen any kids ever. No, basically only the kids mother will do. That's just how most kids work.
So let the kid cry. It worked for me, and it worked for my kids. In ten minutes, the manager's approved an alternative procedure, and the problem's solved.
The reason for the media circus is because they insisted...
Nope. It's because people like you see the just-like-me think-of-the-children underdog getting abused by the evil bad nasty gub'mint, and band together in an orgy of hate, feeling for two minutes like you have a common enemy, and that if you scream loud enough at the villain of the day, the world will listen to you, and you don't need to play politics or actually work toward improvement, but just be united in your anger.
At this point it's obvious you don't deal with security or children (or shouldn't be, at least). Security is pointless if it's compromised, or left to the whims of people involved. I'll pick out a few bits of nonsense:
And that only happened when they tried to grab her. If they'd been sensible, that would never have happened.
There's no evidence the kid was ever "grabbed". From a clearer source:
She said the officers told the girl her she had to come to them, alone, and spread her arms and legs. When the girl ran in the opposite direction, she said, an officer told Brademeyer “they would shut down the entire airport, cancel all flights, if my daughter was not restrained.”
And, frankly at that point, you're seriously evaluating the risk of a 4 year old pulling off two complex transfers with the second one not being detected? That's not common sense.
No, I'm evaluating the risk of a child being used as a tool for pulling off two complex transfers, where everyone involved has an unknown level of training. Children of all ages are known to be used around the world as pickpockets and drug mules. When your goal is to maintain security, "common sense" is expecting a hug to be part of the act.
Kids get scared, computers don't. Computers do exactly what you tell them, kids don't. Kids can't be reasoned with by the person who is scaring them.
By age four, children are perfectly capable of understanding appropriate behavior, and being patient enough to wait through lines. They're also capable of being used for smuggling. The "sensible" thing to do would be to talk to your kids about appropriate behavior before entering the checkpoint, not assume the TSA's going to babysit your kids for you at the expense of security.
The TSA officials had mature, sensible options with prefectly adequate security open to them.
Like have the mother accompany the child during her pat-down, with a manger's approval and additional supervision? That's what ultimately happened, and it took a whole 10 minutes to accomplish... but please don't let that get in the way of your rant.
There's nothing I've seen that isn't a blatant retelling of the family's story, with minimal input from the TSA. There's one source that shares most details with TFA, but has less sensationalism, and gives a clearer picture of the sequence of events. Since the TSA's statement is short and not very informative, separating the actual events from the family's emotional retelling is a matter of interpretation.
A female officer started “yelling at my child and demanded she, too, must sit down and await a full body pat-down,” Brademeyer said. Her daughter responded by putting her hands over her face and crying.
“I was prevented from coming any closer, explaining the situation to her, or consoling her in any way. It was implied, several times, that my mother, in their brief two-second embrace, had passed a handgun to my daughter.”
I interpret that to mean that the parent didn't control their kid through the checkpoint or explain sufficiently that they'd need to "stay near mommy", and apparently the grandmother (who was worthy of getting a running hug a few seconds prior) didn't console the confused child herself. When the TSA tried to explain that the procedure is because contraband could be passed, the family took that as an accusation.
I personally think the TSA's a ridiculous waste of my government's time and resources, but that's no excuse for turning a child's confusion into a sensational media circus.