If your service sucks and your customers hate you, citing studies and statistics won't make them hate you less...
If your service sucks and it costs billions to make it better, citing studies and statistics is the only direction that is open to you.
There are only about three cell phone companies in the USA (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint; some say T-Mobile is also a cell company:-) The whole market is divided among them, and all these companies are bad. The customer only has an option to move from one bad company to another bad company. Networks lure customers by offering deals and hopes of better service, and repulse customers by poorly servicing them. In the end, it's one big circulation of customers. Marketing is a huge part of that. Nobody can just go out and upgrade a million towers on a whim, in the middle of an upgrade cycle. Even sending a tech to "look at the problem" is expensive, so as long as the tower is technically functioning nobody is going to mess with it.
They would actually need to have guards watching the entire length of the track
In World War II Nazis posted guards within visual / hearing distance from each other along the rail tracks, to protect them from partisanen. It didn't work, even though the guards were armed to the teeth and were allowed to shoot on sight.
Today a terrorist only needs to load a van full of something boomable, park near a railway crossing and drive it onto tracks (around the barrier) when the approaching train has no chance to stop.
The bottom of the oceans? Rich in seafood, unobtainium, nuclear fuels, and wave current power.
But are you willing to say goodbye to the Sun and the surface? There is nothing on the bottom but eternal gloom and cold. There is no wave / tide power down there, by the way; your settlement will need a lot of energy from day 0, and the only way to get it is by cable from the surface.
Such a settlement can't, with our current technologies, be made self-sustaining. You will need to trade with the surface for most of your needs (metals, paints, plastics, tools, medicine etc.) and you will have very little to offer in return. Mining is hard enough in the air; do it in water, and you won't see a thing an inch from your nose. It has to be done only by robots. We don't have those, and a poor colony 1,000 ft. under water is not a place to invent them.
In other words, an underwater settlement is just another version of "spam in a can", it's just in a different medium, a more hostile one. If you thought that the mold in space is a problem, wait until you see the mold (and rust) in an underwater installation. The spam inside will have just as little to do as spacefarers, but since the sea dwellers aren't going anywhere this is even more pointless.
And the driving course missions (which are probably doable on a console controller, not so much on a keyboard).
No, they are not doable with a controller either. Fortunately the driving school is optional; but flying wasn't, and it took a while to get past that.
GTA is famous for such hard tasks. In the Vice City, for example, I remember the boats, where you race against time. I had to redo the challenge probably 10 times before I learned the course in minute details and was able to beat the clock. And the demolition helicopter... none of that would be very hard if only there was a way to save a mission at any time, just by pressing some combination of keys. But no, you have to drive a few miles away to a safe house to save there. It's just like they want you to waste time...
Basically, a bunch of country bumpkins that think taxpayers should pay for a personal road to their own house and everywhere they wish to drive. These rural leeches live luxuriously off of taxpayer money. Some of them think roads are built for free. We need to get these people to break their nasty habits.
I didn't even realize that Robert Mugabe has a Slashdot account:-)
Anyway, yes - if you want it bad enough and if you are willing to do what Lenin did in 1917 then indeed you can arrest and kill (or reeducate) all those evil kulaks. But you know what, they are producing food that you eat every day. Do you think the grain, the vegetables and the meat are made in the back room at the grocery store? Kill the "country bumpkins" and die from hunger. This is exactly what happened to the USSR, even though communists were not stupid enough to kill all agriculture. But they sure tried...
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" -- George Santayana
because you don't want to live in a smaller apartment near the city?
You are approaching this from the viewpoint of a city slicker. But in real life not all jobs are in cities. There are farms, ranches, quarries, mines, power plants, and any number of other industrial objects that are well outside of cities. I, for example, often travel on CA-101, and I see fields with hundreds of workers on them, picking fruit or otherwise doing what needs to be done. How did they get there? In their cars, which are lined up right along the highway. The nearest city is tens of miles away. Do you propose that all such workers live in tents near the field? Even though they work in one field today and in a different one tomorrow? And their family also should do the same, regardless of where they work or study?
But even we come up with a scenario when someone works in an office in a large city (like NYC) and then travels 40 miles away to live in a smaller community... are you *serious* suggesting that a family that owns a large country home on several acres of land, with clean air and at a safe location, should sell it all (to who?) and move into a tiny, roach- (and bedbug-) infested rental apartment on a dirty, narrow street in a dirty, smoggy city? That would be London of 1800's, and thankfully we are past that point, to never revisit.
Better yet, tell the designers to Fuck Off. Just once build a car to be a car, not a moving work of art, not some sort of juvenile expression of the driver, not some douche-bag status symbol, just put functional over all else.
Why a car should be any different from everything else that people produce and consume? Even such basics as water and food are status symbols, not even mentioning clothes, books, gadgets, music... You can go back to Neanderthals if you wish, it was true even then. Even some animals exhibit this trait.
Now imagine if the child was carrying the bomb in one of its cavities, or swallowed in a bag. I'm really wondering if the TSA would mandate that every person undergo a full x-ray, or, as a friendly alternative, a cavity search.
A cavity search won't do a thing to detect explosives that are swallowed by the bomber. They don't even need to be in the bag, as long as they aren't too poisonous. A bomber with stomach (and bowels) full of explosives will be very destructive.
The only way to detect this and other implanted threats is to cut passengers open to look inside and take samples. Even a full X-ray will not tell what exactly material fills the digestive system.
If you vote for someone & they do, don't vote for them again.
Those lying politicians are expendable like ammo rounds in a belt-fed machine gun, and just as plentiful. Sure, you won't vote for that one any more, but there are twenty more waiting to replace him. And each politician chips another speck of freedom away. Give them time and nothing will remain.
If they do want to join the rest of us: shape up in the personal freedoms / democratic department first.
The most modern theory of political correctness, maintaned by those lying politicians, says that its not "them" who should shape up but it's "you" who has to shape down. Otherwise it would be unfair, or something.
they can take the freedoms that my ancestors fought for, from my cold, dead hands.
They don't care about the temperature of your hands. You probably will be more convenient to them dead. Not that I reject your choice, of course.
Yes, that's why I said that I don't trust TSA with anyone's safety. There are too many threats out there, and your example is just one out of hundreds. But TSA only knows of attacks that had been attempted. While we may criticize it (or not) for their lack of attention to future threats, at least it is understood that the TSA, being a bureaucracy, *will* be confiscating nail clippers and bottles of water - it's the nature of the beast.
Proposals to drop all this micro-screening and switch to profiling and questioning by trained detectives are met with screams about "betrayal of the soul of the country" and whatnot. But you have to do either the dumb confiscations of everything or allow whatever you want but pass profiling and interviews. At the moment the TSA is in favor of dumb things b/c they are easier to perform; but they are limited to just a few tools of terror and don't cover such a deadly thing as a piano string (possibly made today out of a polymer, totally undetectable.)
Some say that public liberty requires us to abandon all these checks and just allow the dice to fall however they may. But the public will never allow it - they "have to be protected." Well, they asked for it, and they got it. The public just doesn't want to think that you can never be safe; and in search of this unattainable goal they are willing to sacrifice everything they got.
Violent reactions when liquids mix happen where the liquids are in contact, so if they are explosive on contact you'd expect to get a rapidly expanding gas phase forming at that point which makes it even harder to mix because it keeps the liquids apart or liquid goes everywhere.
Two hair spray bottles, one for each hand, can become a pocket flamethrower. But all this is just an example; the original question was "why they are not allowing water" and by now it had been shown why - hopefully on purely logical and technical grounds.
On the other hand, there is no way for a reasonable person to "feel safe" in TSA hands and behind their checkpoints. TSA is a reactive organization; it can't foresee threats, and most importantly there is no physical way to protect from those threats, short of X-raying every passenger (through, not just backscatter.)
Once again, what would a chemist say about the subject? Can you mix them in an aircraft toilet without setting yourself on fire halfway through or poisoning yourself? A small fire is not going to bring the plane down.
I'm not a professional chemist, but I dabbled in chemistry in school. Certainly the quality of the mixture is a factor in the thermal efficiency of the reaction... in most cases.
However this particular pair of liquids is hypergolic. That means that the mixture self-ignites once it is made. And that, in turn, not only makes pre-mixing of them unnecessary - it makes it impossible. My example ("put several bottles together and smash them") was not contrived; most of these liquids will react.
Once again I'm not denying that liquid explosives exist.
Technically, these liquids are not explosives, they are just highly active propellants. But the distinction will be lost, given enough of either substance. Besides, UDMH *is* explosive in presence of oxidizers.
"closing the door after the horse has bolted"
There are still plenty of horses left in that barn, unless you imply that there are no more passenger flights. A better expression would be "once burned, twice shy."
I'm writing about the liquid explosive plot that didn't work
As I recall, it "didn't work" because the police didn't wait to let them try it in the air. As you acknowledge, liquid (and solid, and gaseous) explosives exist, and once you establish that fact you, as a public servant, have to close that hole - otherwise you'd be crucified by the mob after that hole is exploited (and it will be, since there is seemingly no lack of willing suiciders.) You'd have no excuse; you are not Condi Rice, after all (I think:-)
My chiropractor can "grope" my ass to locate my tailbone for an x-ray. What makes that any different?
You aren't forced to go to the chiropractor, and even if you do you can tell them to not do certain things (and then they may not service you.) When you go to the chiropractor it's all voluntary, and you know that it is done with best intentions and for your benefit.
At the airport, however, you don't have much of a choice. Flying is not voluntary if it is job-related. Sure, you can quit the job but that's not realistic in most cases (esp. considering this job market.) Even if you are on a personal trip, there is no viable alternative to flying long distances or overseas. You can take a train across the USA, or you can buy a ticket on a container ship, but that is neither heaper nor faster; you will need to spend one or more weeks on the road. One can argue that that's the price you pay for speed, but this price doesn't seem to have a solid foundation - you know that the probing at the airport is not done for your benefit or for anyone's benefit, as matter of fact - it is done as a "do something!" measure out of Spaceballs movie.
Please note that they stop you bringing on water and not lighter fluid!
They can't tell the difference. Not all dangerous substances are distinctive enough to be recognized through the bottle's wall or to be safely opened and sniffed. The linked chemical - hydrazine - is a colorless liquid, and if someone opens the bottle then it's too late (someone is going to get badly burned, or poisoned, or both.) Nitrogen tetroxide is also a colorless liquid (if kept cold enough.) When those are mixed you get one of most efficient - and very poisonous - rocket fuels; and a terrorist can probably mix them by just putting several plastic bottles together and smashing them.
Can't believe the alternative is to have an entire body grope. How is that procedure even remotely decent enough to be considered for deployment in an airport?
The groping is better because it is a bad thing, and they can't hide that fact, and they know it. TSA would love you to walk through their pr0n booth because that indignity is "out of sight, out of mind." If you want a change then insist on groping. If sufficiently many people are patted down like that, the practice will be in the open, with daily horror stories about a [more than usual] nasty TSA employee doing a pat-down of a 5 y/o girl a bit more thoroughly than most. With enough lawsuits and enough convictions TSA will have to mend its ways, and will stop asking its employees to commit sex crimes as part of their job.
I'd say I was impressed that they're going on a hunger strike
Would you be equally impressed if 20 young men are walking around your house and chanting "Microlith, hire us or else our death will be your fault!" (Note that you don't need anything that those guys are selling.) Will you hire them? Will you hire them if your name is not Microlith but Google?
If you were sacked and not given a reason, you would probably be asking questions.
If you are a permanent employee in the USA you still can be sacked and not given a reason. If you are a contractor in the USA nobody will even think about giving you a reason. Contractors are specifically employed for temporary, special jobs that are not expected to be needed all the time. This is becoming even more popular in the USA because labor laws put more and more burden on employers for the privilege of employing people.
Those contractors in China are likely disappointed, but that's the nature of their job. In the USA contractors are supposed to work for several companies, own the tools, etc.
We finished and started lending them to friends and family who were more patient than we were.
I wrote a bit more on that possibility in another comment. Lending of physical books is still relatively rare, though being a cult book helps. You need a chain of people who are all interested in the book and want to read it and who know each other (or at least two other members of the chain.) Such a chain can be easily broken for a book that is not a bestseller.
For example, I may want to borrow one of your HP books. But I have no idea where you live, and even if you trust me with the item, it still will cost me some shipping and some standing in line at the post office.
As another example, I have a bunch of paperbacks that I have read and haven't forgotten yet. Do you want to borrow any? Perhaps, but I can't tell you what exactly they are, and even which box they are in.
E-books make sharing much, much easier. Ideally one would read the book and then enter it (as a GUID or something) into a global database of available books. This needs to be done once, and can be run by a small company that won't charge much for its services. For that you can check the book out and return when you are done, with zero shipping expenses. Will 10 cents per day break anyone's bank?
You also say that libraries bought dozens of certain books. Perhaps they did, for a given popular book - which was known to be a hit ahead of time. But as a personal anecdote, when I checked my local library for a certain Sword of Truth book, none were available for quite some time ahead. And that is a pretty known Fantasy title. The library maybe has 2-3 copies of this book, and with people checking them out for weeks they are going to be unavailable most of the time.
My point is that a book today is sold and priced with unwritten assumption that most books will have only one owner. Publishers *expect* that most books spend their lives on shelves, and not in hands of readers. This generates sales, and combined with the price of each copy they get a certain revenue from each publication. As you can see, the publishers are dead set to use this model with e-books.
You are offering examples of a different behavior, but it is not typical. Sure, bestsellers will be affected by borrowing because many people want to read them. But how many people would be standing in line to read Baxter's Titan? If one day I feel masochistic, who do I turn to to borrow that book? I don't know anyone, and the nearest library is about 10 miles away, and it's raining... e-borrowing would be just as convenient as an impulse buy at Apple store instead of driving for half an hour to some brick-and-mortar music store. And very few people would argue today that Apple's music store is a failure. The same thing for e-books would do amazingly well, if only publishers can buy into this technology. Music publishers did.
Why the hell would they do it? It's unbelievably stupid.
It isn't stupid, and they have their reasons.
When you are done with a HC book what do you do then? You can put it on a shelf, and that's what happens to 99% of books. Or perhaps you give it to a friend, and then he has a 99% chance to put it on his shelf. Hardly any physical book progresses beyond one or two owners, and that is simply because you need a physical contact for such a transfer (a loan or a gift - doesn't matter.)
Amazon has a facility for book owners to sell used books, but considering the cost of postage, and the labor to ship, it's not a very interesting proposition.
However e-books can be sold and bought online, and all you'd need to do is to enter some sort of a key that the buyer and seller can use together to effect the transfer. This is not difficult at all, and many people will be interested in selling books that they have read and are done with.
But then the publishers will be selling fewer "original" e-books because a "used" e-book is exactly the same. (This is not so with used physical books.) This is what prompted restrictions on transfer.
One can argue that availability of cheap e-books would let more people to read them, and in the end the market for e-books will still grow. This is because a legitimate, activated e-book is needed for every reader at any given moment. However publishers (of books, or of music, or of movies) are traditionally conservative, and they prefer to maintain their existing way of doing things, rather than go with a disruptive technology, hail Mary and hope for the best.
Its a total mind fuck that they would do that, knowing full well that doing so would just encourage DRM removal.
The publishers simply optimized for the profit. True, there will be 1-5% of pirates; but pirates will be there anyway, and not much you can do about that. The rest of the populace is either not 31337 enough to pirate, or scared enough by lawsuits to not even try. A large percentage of book readers are MILFs who aren't likely to torrent stuff, and as long as e-books are convenient and cheap enough they will be seen as a service, not as an investment. Apple pionereed this approach, and everyone now knows that it works pretty well.
I would think authors would be the first to stand up and object.
That is what we want to do. Currently the two largest sellers are trying to block the type of lending we've been used to, the type of lending that Libraries operate on, and the type of lending the Doctrine of First Sale guarantees us.
The book sellers can't do that. They hate libraries already, but the libraries operate in the physical world. To borrow or return a book you need to go to the library, and there are only few copies available. So in the end libraries are just a drop in the ocean; if you want the latest Harry Potter or whatever, you'd better go and buy it, otherwise you won't see the book until the next year.
But e-books can be lent to anyone in the world, over the Internet, and they magically return to the owner. So in theory if the infinite lending is permitted you can lend your book - which you already have read - for $1 (or some other small money, or for free) per week. If you have 100 books and you lend them all the time you can have a nice $400/mo income out of nothing. The readers will be only spending $4/mo to read any number of books, which looks like a great deal. This is possible because your hardcopy library is not working for you, but your e-book library can work and bring you cash.
Of course this will result in fewer e-books sold. If there is a demand for 100,000 Harry Potters, today all 100,000 are sold in HC. However in the e-book world maybe only 10,000 will buy; the rest will just get in line to read. That may take 10 weeks to get a copy to read, but it's not a big deal - and if you are desperate, go and buy your own, read it and then start lending it to others.
A large number of book owners will be also lending their books for free; some will not want a hassle, other will do it from the charity POV, yet another just don't care about such a petty income. These people still will be competing with the publisher.
Because of that e-books aren't likely to be liberated. E-books are far smaller than HD movies, so they are actively pirated within the community of people who read them. If you want you can download tens of thousands of DRM-free e-books.
Is there a market for these devices? There sure is.
In this very house I have two notebooks that only run a Web browser. This is because they are used to access news, Web-based email and nothing else. You can do a lot today with just a browser.
I don't want to debate their pensions, but 1% attrition is not that low. Compare to writers, engineers, or sandwich makers. You graduate from the Police Academy with 99 other people and know that one of them will be killed. Oakland is hiring officers, I heard, so anyone who thinks 1% is a low enough ratio is welcome.
Even though only 1% may be killed, there are certainly other hardships of police work that are not that obvious to people with office jobs of "9 to 5" type. Police works 24/7/365.25, in any weather. I personally don't want to chase a drunk driver who is determined to kill himself (and others) on an icy 2-lane country road at 3:30am. Police officers have to do that if they have no better options. Also LEO's job brings him to worst places of cities, in worst circumstances. They are universally hated by their "clients," and in a sufficiently large city an officer has to watch his back - and his family's - at all times.
That said, you can certainly say that there are other jobs with similar hardships - sailors, oilmen, fishermen, even construction workers. I have no idea what, if any, benefits they have and how that compares to the police. My only point is that 1% of dying on the job is not something that I would dismiss out of hand. To compare, Shuttle astronauts have 2% chance of dying in any single flight.
That'd be like joining the army as a private at 20, serving for 20 years and then getting a colonel's salary until you die at 80 or so of old age. Soldiers don't get that
Sure soldiers don't get that. You need to be born as a colonel to become a colonel. There is absolutely no way for a soldier to become an NCO and then to study and become an officer. It's just so sad [/s]
The officer may request the retirement to be effective any date not later than 6 months from the date of PCS alert or the first day of the month after the officer attains 20 years of Active Federal Service, whichever is later.
Yes, I mentioned the removal of the "Labels" button. Only the "Move" button would remain. So here is the short list of changes that a billion-dollar company like Google would have to do:
Remove the "Label" button, keep the "Move" button
Inbox, Sent Mail views should only show messages without labels
Hide labels in all views
Did I forget anything? As I said, these few simple changes should be enough to convert Gmail's virtual folders into "real" folders (or as real as they ever get; not like the.pst database has a file structure inside.) Absence of the "Label" button only allows you to file messages once, and if you do the "Move to Inbox" action then the internal label is removed.
With regard to how Google presented its Gmail system a few years ago, who cares. They did it that way for their reasons, but you should be free to do it your way for your own reasons. Technically there is no difference between a single label and a mail folder. GMail should be tweakable to work exactly like its main competitor.
But of course some people say, and I agree, that Google is still an immature company. They make too many stupid mistakes (no need to list them here, but this is one of them.) With their money and coding resources they could have rewritten the whole Outlook and Exchange for "the cloud". Instead they sat on their $body_part and did nearly nothing, apparently unable to see farther than their nose. MS, on the other hand, always was business-savvy, and it pays. MS's Exchange/Outlook system is huge and complex and not always stable, but it does everything. In particular, MS always paid attention to government sales; even NT 3.5x was tested, and accepted, for security requirements that allowed it to be sold to the US government.
Slashdot Mirror
If your service sucks and your customers hate you, citing studies and statistics won't make them hate you less...
If your service sucks and it costs billions to make it better, citing studies and statistics is the only direction that is open to you.
There are only about three cell phone companies in the USA (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint; some say T-Mobile is also a cell company :-) The whole market is divided among them, and all these companies are bad. The customer only has an option to move from one bad company to another bad company. Networks lure customers by offering deals and hopes of better service, and repulse customers by poorly servicing them. In the end, it's one big circulation of customers. Marketing is a huge part of that. Nobody can just go out and upgrade a million towers on a whim, in the middle of an upgrade cycle. Even sending a tech to "look at the problem" is expensive, so as long as the tower is technically functioning nobody is going to mess with it.
They would actually need to have guards watching the entire length of the track
In World War II Nazis posted guards within visual / hearing distance from each other along the rail tracks, to protect them from partisanen. It didn't work, even though the guards were armed to the teeth and were allowed to shoot on sight.
Today a terrorist only needs to load a van full of something boomable, park near a railway crossing and drive it onto tracks (around the barrier) when the approaching train has no chance to stop.
The bottom of the oceans? Rich in seafood, unobtainium, nuclear fuels, and wave current power.
But are you willing to say goodbye to the Sun and the surface? There is nothing on the bottom but eternal gloom and cold. There is no wave / tide power down there, by the way; your settlement will need a lot of energy from day 0, and the only way to get it is by cable from the surface.
Such a settlement can't, with our current technologies, be made self-sustaining. You will need to trade with the surface for most of your needs (metals, paints, plastics, tools, medicine etc.) and you will have very little to offer in return. Mining is hard enough in the air; do it in water, and you won't see a thing an inch from your nose. It has to be done only by robots. We don't have those, and a poor colony 1,000 ft. under water is not a place to invent them.
In other words, an underwater settlement is just another version of "spam in a can", it's just in a different medium, a more hostile one. If you thought that the mold in space is a problem, wait until you see the mold (and rust) in an underwater installation. The spam inside will have just as little to do as spacefarers, but since the sea dwellers aren't going anywhere this is even more pointless.
And the driving course missions (which are probably doable on a console controller, not so much on a keyboard).
No, they are not doable with a controller either. Fortunately the driving school is optional; but flying wasn't, and it took a while to get past that.
GTA is famous for such hard tasks. In the Vice City, for example, I remember the boats, where you race against time. I had to redo the challenge probably 10 times before I learned the course in minute details and was able to beat the clock. And the demolition helicopter... none of that would be very hard if only there was a way to save a mission at any time, just by pressing some combination of keys. But no, you have to drive a few miles away to a safe house to save there. It's just like they want you to waste time...
Basically, a bunch of country bumpkins that think taxpayers should pay for a personal road to their own house and everywhere they wish to drive. These rural leeches live luxuriously off of taxpayer money. Some of them think roads are built for free. We need to get these people to break their nasty habits.
I didn't even realize that Robert Mugabe has a Slashdot account :-)
Anyway, yes - if you want it bad enough and if you are willing to do what Lenin did in 1917 then indeed you can arrest and kill (or reeducate) all those evil kulaks. But you know what, they are producing food that you eat every day. Do you think the grain, the vegetables and the meat are made in the back room at the grocery store? Kill the "country bumpkins" and die from hunger. This is exactly what happened to the USSR, even though communists were not stupid enough to kill all agriculture. But they sure tried...
"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" -- George Santayana
because you don't want to live in a smaller apartment near the city?
You are approaching this from the viewpoint of a city slicker. But in real life not all jobs are in cities. There are farms, ranches, quarries, mines, power plants, and any number of other industrial objects that are well outside of cities. I, for example, often travel on CA-101, and I see fields with hundreds of workers on them, picking fruit or otherwise doing what needs to be done. How did they get there? In their cars, which are lined up right along the highway. The nearest city is tens of miles away. Do you propose that all such workers live in tents near the field? Even though they work in one field today and in a different one tomorrow? And their family also should do the same, regardless of where they work or study?
But even we come up with a scenario when someone works in an office in a large city (like NYC) and then travels 40 miles away to live in a smaller community ... are you *serious* suggesting that a family that owns a large country home on several acres of land, with clean air and at a safe location, should sell it all (to who?) and move into a tiny, roach- (and bedbug-) infested rental apartment on a dirty, narrow street in a dirty, smoggy city? That would be London of 1800's, and thankfully we are past that point, to never revisit.
Better yet, tell the designers to Fuck Off. Just once build a car to be a car, not a moving work of art, not some sort of juvenile expression of the driver, not some douche-bag status symbol, just put functional over all else.
Why a car should be any different from everything else that people produce and consume? Even such basics as water and food are status symbols, not even mentioning clothes, books, gadgets, music... You can go back to Neanderthals if you wish, it was true even then. Even some animals exhibit this trait.
Now imagine if the child was carrying the bomb in one of its cavities, or swallowed in a bag. I'm really wondering if the TSA would mandate that every person undergo a full x-ray, or, as a friendly alternative, a cavity search.
A cavity search won't do a thing to detect explosives that are swallowed by the bomber. They don't even need to be in the bag, as long as they aren't too poisonous. A bomber with stomach (and bowels) full of explosives will be very destructive.
The only way to detect this and other implanted threats is to cut passengers open to look inside and take samples. Even a full X-ray will not tell what exactly material fills the digestive system.
If you vote for someone & they do, don't vote for them again.
Those lying politicians are expendable like ammo rounds in a belt-fed machine gun, and just as plentiful. Sure, you won't vote for that one any more, but there are twenty more waiting to replace him. And each politician chips another speck of freedom away. Give them time and nothing will remain.
If they do want to join the rest of us: shape up in the personal freedoms / democratic department first.
The most modern theory of political correctness, maintaned by those lying politicians, says that its not "them" who should shape up but it's "you" who has to shape down. Otherwise it would be unfair, or something.
they can take the freedoms that my ancestors fought for, from my cold, dead hands.
They don't care about the temperature of your hands. You probably will be more convenient to them dead. Not that I reject your choice, of course.
Yes, that's why I said that I don't trust TSA with anyone's safety. There are too many threats out there, and your example is just one out of hundreds. But TSA only knows of attacks that had been attempted. While we may criticize it (or not) for their lack of attention to future threats, at least it is understood that the TSA, being a bureaucracy, *will* be confiscating nail clippers and bottles of water - it's the nature of the beast.
Proposals to drop all this micro-screening and switch to profiling and questioning by trained detectives are met with screams about "betrayal of the soul of the country" and whatnot. But you have to do either the dumb confiscations of everything or allow whatever you want but pass profiling and interviews. At the moment the TSA is in favor of dumb things b/c they are easier to perform; but they are limited to just a few tools of terror and don't cover such a deadly thing as a piano string (possibly made today out of a polymer, totally undetectable.)
Some say that public liberty requires us to abandon all these checks and just allow the dice to fall however they may. But the public will never allow it - they "have to be protected." Well, they asked for it, and they got it. The public just doesn't want to think that you can never be safe; and in search of this unattainable goal they are willing to sacrifice everything they got.
Violent reactions when liquids mix happen where the liquids are in contact, so if they are explosive on contact you'd expect to get a rapidly expanding gas phase forming at that point which makes it even harder to mix because it keeps the liquids apart or liquid goes everywhere.
Two hair spray bottles, one for each hand, can become a pocket flamethrower. But all this is just an example; the original question was "why they are not allowing water" and by now it had been shown why - hopefully on purely logical and technical grounds.
On the other hand, there is no way for a reasonable person to "feel safe" in TSA hands and behind their checkpoints. TSA is a reactive organization; it can't foresee threats, and most importantly there is no physical way to protect from those threats, short of X-raying every passenger (through, not just backscatter.)
Once again, what would a chemist say about the subject? Can you mix them in an aircraft toilet without setting yourself on fire halfway through or poisoning yourself? A small fire is not going to bring the plane down.
I'm not a professional chemist, but I dabbled in chemistry in school. Certainly the quality of the mixture is a factor in the thermal efficiency of the reaction ... in most cases.
However this particular pair of liquids is hypergolic. That means that the mixture self-ignites once it is made. And that, in turn, not only makes pre-mixing of them unnecessary - it makes it impossible. My example ("put several bottles together and smash them") was not contrived; most of these liquids will react.
Once again I'm not denying that liquid explosives exist.
Technically, these liquids are not explosives, they are just highly active propellants. But the distinction will be lost, given enough of either substance. Besides, UDMH *is* explosive in presence of oxidizers.
"closing the door after the horse has bolted"
There are still plenty of horses left in that barn, unless you imply that there are no more passenger flights. A better expression would be "once burned, twice shy."
I'm writing about the liquid explosive plot that didn't work
As I recall, it "didn't work" because the police didn't wait to let them try it in the air. As you acknowledge, liquid (and solid, and gaseous) explosives exist, and once you establish that fact you, as a public servant, have to close that hole - otherwise you'd be crucified by the mob after that hole is exploited (and it will be, since there is seemingly no lack of willing suiciders.) You'd have no excuse; you are not Condi Rice, after all (I think :-)
My chiropractor can "grope" my ass to locate my tailbone for an x-ray. What makes that any different?
You aren't forced to go to the chiropractor, and even if you do you can tell them to not do certain things (and then they may not service you.) When you go to the chiropractor it's all voluntary, and you know that it is done with best intentions and for your benefit.
At the airport, however, you don't have much of a choice. Flying is not voluntary if it is job-related. Sure, you can quit the job but that's not realistic in most cases (esp. considering this job market.) Even if you are on a personal trip, there is no viable alternative to flying long distances or overseas. You can take a train across the USA, or you can buy a ticket on a container ship, but that is neither heaper nor faster; you will need to spend one or more weeks on the road. One can argue that that's the price you pay for speed, but this price doesn't seem to have a solid foundation - you know that the probing at the airport is not done for your benefit or for anyone's benefit, as matter of fact - it is done as a "do something!" measure out of Spaceballs movie.
Please note that they stop you bringing on water and not lighter fluid!
They can't tell the difference. Not all dangerous substances are distinctive enough to be recognized through the bottle's wall or to be safely opened and sniffed. The linked chemical - hydrazine - is a colorless liquid, and if someone opens the bottle then it's too late (someone is going to get badly burned, or poisoned, or both.) Nitrogen tetroxide is also a colorless liquid (if kept cold enough.) When those are mixed you get one of most efficient - and very poisonous - rocket fuels; and a terrorist can probably mix them by just putting several plastic bottles together and smashing them.
Can't believe the alternative is to have an entire body grope. How is that procedure even remotely decent enough to be considered for deployment in an airport?
The groping is better because it is a bad thing, and they can't hide that fact, and they know it. TSA would love you to walk through their pr0n booth because that indignity is "out of sight, out of mind." If you want a change then insist on groping. If sufficiently many people are patted down like that, the practice will be in the open, with daily horror stories about a [more than usual] nasty TSA employee doing a pat-down of a 5 y/o girl a bit more thoroughly than most. With enough lawsuits and enough convictions TSA will have to mend its ways, and will stop asking its employees to commit sex crimes as part of their job.
I'd say I was impressed that they're going on a hunger strike
Would you be equally impressed if 20 young men are walking around your house and chanting "Microlith, hire us or else our death will be your fault!" (Note that you don't need anything that those guys are selling.) Will you hire them? Will you hire them if your name is not Microlith but Google?
If you were sacked and not given a reason, you would probably be asking questions.
If you are a permanent employee in the USA you still can be sacked and not given a reason. If you are a contractor in the USA nobody will even think about giving you a reason. Contractors are specifically employed for temporary, special jobs that are not expected to be needed all the time. This is becoming even more popular in the USA because labor laws put more and more burden on employers for the privilege of employing people.
Those contractors in China are likely disappointed, but that's the nature of their job. In the USA contractors are supposed to work for several companies, own the tools, etc.
We finished and started lending them to friends and family who were more patient than we were.
I wrote a bit more on that possibility in another comment. Lending of physical books is still relatively rare, though being a cult book helps. You need a chain of people who are all interested in the book and want to read it and who know each other (or at least two other members of the chain.) Such a chain can be easily broken for a book that is not a bestseller.
For example, I may want to borrow one of your HP books. But I have no idea where you live, and even if you trust me with the item, it still will cost me some shipping and some standing in line at the post office.
As another example, I have a bunch of paperbacks that I have read and haven't forgotten yet. Do you want to borrow any? Perhaps, but I can't tell you what exactly they are, and even which box they are in.
E-books make sharing much, much easier. Ideally one would read the book and then enter it (as a GUID or something) into a global database of available books. This needs to be done once, and can be run by a small company that won't charge much for its services. For that you can check the book out and return when you are done, with zero shipping expenses. Will 10 cents per day break anyone's bank?
You also say that libraries bought dozens of certain books. Perhaps they did, for a given popular book - which was known to be a hit ahead of time. But as a personal anecdote, when I checked my local library for a certain Sword of Truth book, none were available for quite some time ahead. And that is a pretty known Fantasy title. The library maybe has 2-3 copies of this book, and with people checking them out for weeks they are going to be unavailable most of the time.
My point is that a book today is sold and priced with unwritten assumption that most books will have only one owner. Publishers *expect* that most books spend their lives on shelves, and not in hands of readers. This generates sales, and combined with the price of each copy they get a certain revenue from each publication. As you can see, the publishers are dead set to use this model with e-books.
You are offering examples of a different behavior, but it is not typical. Sure, bestsellers will be affected by borrowing because many people want to read them. But how many people would be standing in line to read Baxter's Titan? If one day I feel masochistic, who do I turn to to borrow that book? I don't know anyone, and the nearest library is about 10 miles away, and it's raining... e-borrowing would be just as convenient as an impulse buy at Apple store instead of driving for half an hour to some brick-and-mortar music store. And very few people would argue today that Apple's music store is a failure. The same thing for e-books would do amazingly well, if only publishers can buy into this technology. Music publishers did.
Why the hell would they do it? It's unbelievably stupid.
It isn't stupid, and they have their reasons.
When you are done with a HC book what do you do then? You can put it on a shelf, and that's what happens to 99% of books. Or perhaps you give it to a friend, and then he has a 99% chance to put it on his shelf. Hardly any physical book progresses beyond one or two owners, and that is simply because you need a physical contact for such a transfer (a loan or a gift - doesn't matter.)
Amazon has a facility for book owners to sell used books, but considering the cost of postage, and the labor to ship, it's not a very interesting proposition.
However e-books can be sold and bought online, and all you'd need to do is to enter some sort of a key that the buyer and seller can use together to effect the transfer. This is not difficult at all, and many people will be interested in selling books that they have read and are done with.
But then the publishers will be selling fewer "original" e-books because a "used" e-book is exactly the same. (This is not so with used physical books.) This is what prompted restrictions on transfer.
One can argue that availability of cheap e-books would let more people to read them, and in the end the market for e-books will still grow. This is because a legitimate, activated e-book is needed for every reader at any given moment. However publishers (of books, or of music, or of movies) are traditionally conservative, and they prefer to maintain their existing way of doing things, rather than go with a disruptive technology, hail Mary and hope for the best.
Its a total mind fuck that they would do that, knowing full well that doing so would just encourage DRM removal.
The publishers simply optimized for the profit. True, there will be 1-5% of pirates; but pirates will be there anyway, and not much you can do about that. The rest of the populace is either not 31337 enough to pirate, or scared enough by lawsuits to not even try. A large percentage of book readers are MILFs who aren't likely to torrent stuff, and as long as e-books are convenient and cheap enough they will be seen as a service, not as an investment. Apple pionereed this approach, and everyone now knows that it works pretty well.
I would think authors would be the first to stand up and object.
You are forgetting the golden rule.
That is what we want to do. Currently the two largest sellers are trying to block the type of lending we've been used to, the type of lending that Libraries operate on, and the type of lending the Doctrine of First Sale guarantees us.
The book sellers can't do that. They hate libraries already, but the libraries operate in the physical world. To borrow or return a book you need to go to the library, and there are only few copies available. So in the end libraries are just a drop in the ocean; if you want the latest Harry Potter or whatever, you'd better go and buy it, otherwise you won't see the book until the next year.
But e-books can be lent to anyone in the world, over the Internet, and they magically return to the owner. So in theory if the infinite lending is permitted you can lend your book - which you already have read - for $1 (or some other small money, or for free) per week. If you have 100 books and you lend them all the time you can have a nice $400/mo income out of nothing. The readers will be only spending $4/mo to read any number of books, which looks like a great deal. This is possible because your hardcopy library is not working for you, but your e-book library can work and bring you cash.
Of course this will result in fewer e-books sold. If there is a demand for 100,000 Harry Potters, today all 100,000 are sold in HC. However in the e-book world maybe only 10,000 will buy; the rest will just get in line to read. That may take 10 weeks to get a copy to read, but it's not a big deal - and if you are desperate, go and buy your own, read it and then start lending it to others.
A large number of book owners will be also lending their books for free; some will not want a hassle, other will do it from the charity POV, yet another just don't care about such a petty income. These people still will be competing with the publisher.
Because of that e-books aren't likely to be liberated. E-books are far smaller than HD movies, so they are actively pirated within the community of people who read them. If you want you can download tens of thousands of DRM-free e-books.
Frankly, I think the astronauts taking this tank into orbit have to be nuts.
Right you are. That's why they will not take the tank to the orbit. It separates at T + 8 minutes 50 seconds, which is about 69 miles.
Is there a market for these devices? There sure is.
In this very house I have two notebooks that only run a Web browser. This is because they are used to access news, Web-based email and nothing else. You can do a lot today with just a browser.
Less than 1% die in the line of duty.
I don't want to debate their pensions, but 1% attrition is not that low. Compare to writers, engineers, or sandwich makers. You graduate from the Police Academy with 99 other people and know that one of them will be killed. Oakland is hiring officers, I heard, so anyone who thinks 1% is a low enough ratio is welcome.
Even though only 1% may be killed, there are certainly other hardships of police work that are not that obvious to people with office jobs of "9 to 5" type. Police works 24/7/365.25, in any weather. I personally don't want to chase a drunk driver who is determined to kill himself (and others) on an icy 2-lane country road at 3:30am. Police officers have to do that if they have no better options. Also LEO's job brings him to worst places of cities, in worst circumstances. They are universally hated by their "clients," and in a sufficiently large city an officer has to watch his back - and his family's - at all times.
That said, you can certainly say that there are other jobs with similar hardships - sailors, oilmen, fishermen, even construction workers. I have no idea what, if any, benefits they have and how that compares to the police. My only point is that 1% of dying on the job is not something that I would dismiss out of hand. To compare, Shuttle astronauts have 2% chance of dying in any single flight.
That'd be like joining the army as a private at 20, serving for 20 years and then getting a colonel's salary until you die at 80 or so of old age. Soldiers don't get that
Sure soldiers don't get that. You need to be born as a colonel to become a colonel. There is absolutely no way for a soldier to become an NCO and then to study and become an officer. It's just so sad [/s]
You even got the 20 years term right:
The officer may request the retirement to be effective any date not later than 6 months from the date of PCS alert or the first day of the month after the officer attains 20 years of Active Federal Service, whichever is later.
Yes, I mentioned the removal of the "Labels" button. Only the "Move" button would remain. So here is the short list of changes that a billion-dollar company like Google would have to do:
Did I forget anything? As I said, these few simple changes should be enough to convert Gmail's virtual folders into "real" folders (or as real as they ever get; not like the .pst database has a file structure inside.) Absence of the "Label" button only allows you to file messages once, and if you do the "Move to Inbox" action then the internal label is removed.
With regard to how Google presented its Gmail system a few years ago, who cares. They did it that way for their reasons, but you should be free to do it your way for your own reasons. Technically there is no difference between a single label and a mail folder. GMail should be tweakable to work exactly like its main competitor.
But of course some people say, and I agree, that Google is still an immature company. They make too many stupid mistakes (no need to list them here, but this is one of them.) With their money and coding resources they could have rewritten the whole Outlook and Exchange for "the cloud". Instead they sat on their $body_part and did nearly nothing, apparently unable to see farther than their nose. MS, on the other hand, always was business-savvy, and it pays. MS's Exchange/Outlook system is huge and complex and not always stable, but it does everything. In particular, MS always paid attention to government sales; even NT 3.5x was tested, and accepted, for security requirements that allowed it to be sold to the US government.