For another thing the damn Cole had no business even being in Yemen.
Oh, I see. Our weapons systems are not intended to be versatile. The Cole wasn't where it was 'supposed to be'??!! So your concept of warfare holds that ships and soldiers should only be in certain spots and if their responsibilities require them to step outside those boundaries, you're writing them off. I sure hope these Coast Guard ships don't visit some place they're 'not supposed to be'.
So while in a foreign port, you've got these active watch guys stationed around the boat. There are two camera blind spots. Silenced sniper rifle head shot takes out one sentry. Scuba divers swim up to the ship, throw a grappling hook over the railing, climb on board, and take control of the ship. "Well, that boat wasn't supposed to be where that could happen."
Having been in the navy for 10 years with extensive knowledge of these systems.... although the cameras have blind areas one would have to first get passed base, port and pier security to even attempt to gain access to the boats
If nothing else he totally compromised any security that they did provide.
Oh, like how airline security since 9/11/2001 continued to allow passengers to bring liquids onboard airplanes. Your argument suggests that all airline security experts conspired to remain silent knowing that these liquids could very well be nitro glycerine, which would be undetectable by xray screening. After all, to have made a fuss about the vulnerability posed by explosive liquids would be to comprimise the security provided by xray equipment.
Finally, you must consider that these blind spots could be identified from external scruitiny of these vessels. While docked, foreign spys are shooting photos of these ships in great detail. Scrutinizing those photos would probably reveal the cameras' blindspots.
Welcome to a successful Roland Piquepaille slashdot bait. He's a master of re-explaining the basic. In this case, he's speaking down to the reader from his intellectual pulpit.
I see no reason why any company with enough money and ingenuity can't beat the iPod into second place, it's just a matter of time.
The bedevelling problem is that public companies have these annoying stock holders who have little patience waiting for a product line to turn a profit. With Dell in particular, they've got razor-thin margins on EVERYTHING, and a bunch of stockholders screaming for profits to double year-after-year. Dell has far less time than a company like Microsoft where they've got huge margins on the OS and office suites, so they frequently win the 'cut off the air supply' waiting game, even when they don't have this 'ingenuity' thing you speak of.
Look, I'm no mathematician, but everytime I think about the story of Adam, Eve, etc. I can't help but wonder how we're all descendents of those two people. Did Adam and Eve's children have sex with their mom? How did our population grow from just that one family?
I hope Mel Gibson sobers up enough to turn that story into a movie. It would be cool if he'd change the story around and cast Ashley and Jessica Simpson as the two daughters (instead of the sons). Probably would make more money than his "Jews beat the crap out of Jesus" movie. Oh, and there's an incest-ridden sequel built in with the story of Noah.
So instead of getting reputable ads they start getting penis enhancment products and the like.
Or, if spam email is any predictor, the hijackers will advertise their services promising to reduce the OS-planted ads. Oh, and also how you can get your ad planted in 10,000,000 people's OS.
Isn't it just like Microsoft. They rarely try to entice people to purchase their products because they're good. They always are looking for ways to MAKE people by their products because they have to. I'm saying this in relation to the likelihood that an ad-based windows OS would be the one bundled with OEM computers. It's doubtful the ad-OS would be in a box on a store shelf anywhere.
I've shot photos of cops several times and had them complain. Sometimes they'll be jerks and demand my cooperation simply because I have to do what they say or they will arrest me for 'disobeying a police officer.' In Cruz's case, there is some stupid law prohibiting people from photographing police officers. As the ACLU rep says in the article, the 4th ammendment protects our ability to photograph police officers on public property (i.e. the street).
In NYC, I shot a photo of under-cover police arresting two guys. They told me to stop taking pictures, but their hands were full with the suspects, so they couldn't come after me. here is the photograph.
The head of their antipiracy division is openly saying they're looking forward to a trial and verdict next summer.
The head of the anti-piracy division is given incentives to bring cases to trial, etc. It's the other executives in the organization that will look at the potential costs involved for the MPAA and decide to throw in the towel.
When Metallica sued Napster, it wasn't Lars Ulrich's idea. He's an utter moron. Instead, it was the record label's lawyers who convinced Lars to pony up the seed money to launch the suit against Napster. Because Lars is stupid, he convinced the band to go forward with suing Napster. Other entities hadn't sued because the legal outlook for a victory was doubtful. Metallica's lawyers had a client with more money than brains, so they were able to forge ahead. In a civil case like that, if Metallica were to lose, they would have had to pay their own lawyers AND Napster's legal fees. Same with this case. Either way, Metallica's lawyers would get paid for a lot of hours on the case. Same with the MPAA's lawyers.
In the Napster case, dumb luck prevailed and Metallica won. In this case, I agree with the GP. The business managers at the MPAA are going to see the conclusion pretty soon and throw in the towell on this lawsuit.
The other reason they'll abandon this lawsuit is to avoid the risk of setting a legal precedent. If this guy pushes the case to a victory, then it'll mean the MPAA won't be able to threaten the same legal action against other suspected movie downloaders. Even a newbie lawyer would be able to get these cases dismissed right off the bat by citing the decision in this case.
I ask you how you would interrogate someone without using scare tactics?
I would interrogate 'enemy combatants' the same way the police in America are authorized to interrogate American citizens. I might lie to them. I might coerce information out of suspects with exagerrated threats of harsh punishments.
I would ensure that the Red Cross is supervising my treatment of prisoners. I would showcase my fair and respectful treatment of prisoners as a demonstration that my cause is just and humane. I would deny my opponents the opportunity to use prisoner abuse as recruitment propaganda.
The coalition of the willing found both Saddam's sons and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi by information gleaned from paid informants... not by water boarding captured prisoners in secret overseas CIA prisons.
If I were ever tortured by a government entity and were released, I am certain that the rest of my life would be dedicated to visiting my abuse ten-fold on those who had mistreated me. And I'm not even a big 'eye-for-an-eye' proponent.
So long as people aren't really physically harmed, then scaring prisoners with dogs, or stripping them naked is fair game in interrogation as far as I'm concerned.
I hope you get to experience this shadowy margin between torture and hazing. I hope you realize that Americans won't stand for our soldiers to be treated the way we're treating Iraqis. At the center of this is why we're failing to win the hearts and minds of the country we're occupying.
Whether horsepower is going unused is not important for mission-critical systems. If you're running an Oracle database that manages data that the life of your company (or soldiers in the field) depends on, the thing that matters is if you lose data integrity. You'll assign a dozen redundant servers if it minimizes the chance that a hardware failure will mean downtime.
In military applications, you want to maintain operation of a computer through extreme duress. If a projectile punctures the hull of a tank and the motherboard of the communications device, you want it to at a minimum be able to send a distress signal with GPS coordinates. Fault tolerant systems can enable this.
Tandem used to demo its mainframes by opening up the case and whacking the circuit boards with a hammer. As they shattered, the system routed around them and maintained uptime.
Like you, I'm getting pretty fed up with this excuse for trampling on the constitution and human faces in secret prisons scattered worldwide. While 9/11 was certainly a horrific tragedy, it certainly doesn't represent a threat of such proportions that we need to sidestep the trivialities of the constitution to preserve the continued existence of America.
While it's a completely different conflict, consider the threat that the Civil War posed to the country. 9-11 was baby crap compared to how close America came to disolving during the Civil War.
So, yeah, America has been guided through some spectacularly difficult times by that Constitution. And these neocons who are second guessing the original authors of the document, well, I wouldn't exactly put them on the same shelf of great thinkers occupied by the likes of Ben Franklin.
nor do I want to have to trust that Microsoft employees won't leak the information to malevolent third parties.
I applaud this patriot. He's identifying breaches in our national security infrastructure which is being exploited by malevolent international organizations. This is a demonstrably greater threat to our national security (recent state department break-ins) than our porous southern border or our domestical phone call traffic.
Microsoft's foot-dragging on repairing these weaknesses is endangering our national security. Imagine if Congress wasn't having to approve hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars each year to fight a physical war in a country that hasn't attacked the United States. Just a small fraction of that money could be directed to develop a secure operating system that would be deployed to all US government offices. I mention the war budget because it dwarfs the financial holdings of even Microsoft, which suggests it would be feasible to replace Microsoft with a government-produced secure OS. Unfortunately, the development would probably still be offshored, which would result in all kinds of quality control issues and we'd still end up with something as insecure as Windows.
I agree that you can test a lot of trends by sampling your own friends. Is the iPod popular? Well, ten of my friends have them. But this is one of those things that is under the radar of your friends and widely embraced among the mainstream internet users. And of your friends who have these webmail accounts, I'm betting that they don't check their mail as often as mySpace addicts click on mySpace links. A visit to gMail is like one click to get there, a couple clicks to read mail, then maybe a log-off click. A visit to mYspace is a lot more clicks... hours of clicks.
There would be so much information flowing that anything of value would be lost in a flood of irrelevance.
A structured query tool that can parse spoken audio can easily sift this flood to find conversations of interest. If our taxes are being spent effectively at the NSA, they've got all sorts of databases cross-related. IRS employment data connects names to jobs. The phone listings connect the phone numbers to the names / addresses in the IRS records. You want to know what journalists might have found out something from a whistleblower?
SELECT names from IRS_table a, phone_conversation_table b where a.job = 'journalist' and b.conversation contains 'wiretap program' and a.phone_number = b.phone_number;
Our constitutional protections are not designed to be suspended during periods of extreme threats. As the foundation of our government, the framers of the Constitution promised that it would carry us through whatever turbulence we encounter. To claim that these threats require us to dispose of our protection against unreasonable search is to say the US Constitution is not sufficiently enlightened.
I recognize that there are receivers in other countries, they're still not going to inflict violence over some petty joke that cost a guy in Nigeria maybe at most $200 for a wood carving. They're making money off a con because it DOESN'T involve violence. If toughness was on their resumes, they'd be working in another type of crime.
These aren't even street-level thugs. If they were tough-guys, they'd find a way to get to a rich community in whatever country they could, then they'd just strong arm some loot. The very essence of this crime indicates they're not tough. The other reason it's not dangerous is the distance we're talking about. Is someone going to travel around the globe to punch you for making him look ridiculous on a web page? Rather unlikely. Especially not a poor guy from Nigeria.
This leads to a bigger question: does Billy actually get to work with his castmates?
Interesting that you bring up 'other castmates'. When Futurama was first developed, several other voice actors had created the sound of the different characters' voices. Then they went on strike demanding larger salaries. The producers found Billy West was versatile enough to imitate the other actors' voices for the characters, so they fired the other voice actors and hired Billy West. They had Billy and one of the other voice actors duke it out on the Howard Stern show a couple years back over this issue.
My post was saying it would be somewhat effective at identifying child porn traffickers. For other reasons, I believe this is a stupid scheme.
For instance, if the local police said they were going to conduct house-to-house searches for drug labs, they would probably catch a few meth chemists. I wouldn't endorse the technique, though.
I don't think this scheme is intended to catch all child porn traffickers. Just the easy-to-catch idiots. And there are plenty of them out there. Think of all the dudes you read about who get busted because they brought their laptop to CompUSA for repair and the techs found a folder titled 'young' on the hard drive.
Don't get me wrong.. I'm 100% opposed to this system.
These online companies were previously protecting themselves from liability for their customers' transmissions by claiming that filtering this data would be an expensive and prohibitive task. By volunteering this service, they've crossed that line. It should be possible for the music companies, MPAA, etc. to demand filtering as well.
It's a pretty stupid plan nonetheless. These digital fingerprints will only catch casual or newbie child porn traffickers. Encryption will easily render these fingerprints useless. The worrisome side effect is the false positives that will be triggered by this fingerprinting technique. As an example, try using one of those packages that tries to tag your mp3s by fingerprinting... Pretty unreliable stuff.
I agree. The pro memberships are a revenue stream along with the print services. The other opportunity here comes from the tagging. Through tagging, Flickr can know what the images are about. This enables contextual advertising beyond what images.google.com could ever hope for.
Because the non-pro memberships on Flickr limit users to 2 sets, users are encouraged to use tags to organize their own photos. So, Flickr has really created an incentive for users to perform data entry that Flickr can use to commercialize this content.
I am betting that high-ranking members of the nazi gestapo were also afforded generous priority treatment when they had forgotten to bring their travelling papers. The phone call check performed in the story would likely confirm that this guy was a member of homeland security and since he had his ticket, that pretty much confirmed this fellow was the person he claimed to be.
The control for this experiment would be to send a person through that does not have an entry in homeland security's personnel database. A manual laborer who has never flown before would be a better test.
Slashdot Mirror
For another thing the damn Cole had no business even being in Yemen.
Oh, I see. Our weapons systems are not intended to be versatile. The Cole wasn't where it was 'supposed to be'??!! So your concept of warfare holds that ships and soldiers should only be in certain spots and if their responsibilities require them to step outside those boundaries, you're writing them off. I sure hope these Coast Guard ships don't visit some place they're 'not supposed to be'.
So while in a foreign port, you've got these active watch guys stationed around the boat. There are two camera blind spots. Silenced sniper rifle head shot takes out one sentry. Scuba divers swim up to the ship, throw a grappling hook over the railing, climb on board, and take control of the ship. "Well, that boat wasn't supposed to be where that could happen."
Seth
Having been in the navy for 10 years with extensive knowledge of these systems.... although the cameras have blind areas one would have to first get passed base, port and pier security to even attempt to gain access to the boats
I'm going to assume you are not one of the 17 sailors killed aboard the USS Cole, which was moored and protected by port and pier security when it was attacked by a small boat packed with explosives.
If nothing else he totally compromised any security that they did provide.
Oh, like how airline security since 9/11/2001 continued to allow passengers to bring liquids onboard airplanes. Your argument suggests that all airline security experts conspired to remain silent knowing that these liquids could very well be nitro glycerine, which would be undetectable by xray screening. After all, to have made a fuss about the vulnerability posed by explosive liquids would be to comprimise the security provided by xray equipment.
Finally, you must consider that these blind spots could be identified from external scruitiny of these vessels. While docked, foreign spys are shooting photos of these ships in great detail. Scrutinizing those photos would probably reveal the cameras' blindspots.
Seth
Welcome to a successful Roland Piquepaille slashdot bait. He's a master of re-explaining the basic. In this case, he's speaking down to the reader from his intellectual pulpit.
Seth
I see no reason why any company with enough money and ingenuity can't beat the iPod into second place, it's just a matter of time.
The bedevelling problem is that public companies have these annoying stock holders who have little patience waiting for a product line to turn a profit. With Dell in particular, they've got razor-thin margins on EVERYTHING, and a bunch of stockholders screaming for profits to double year-after-year. Dell has far less time than a company like Microsoft where they've got huge margins on the OS and office suites, so they frequently win the 'cut off the air supply' waiting game, even when they don't have this 'ingenuity' thing you speak of.
Seth
Look, I'm no mathematician, but everytime I think about the story of Adam, Eve, etc. I can't help but wonder how we're all descendents of those two people. Did Adam and Eve's children have sex with their mom? How did our population grow from just that one family?
I hope Mel Gibson sobers up enough to turn that story into a movie. It would be cool if he'd change the story around and cast Ashley and Jessica Simpson as the two daughters (instead of the sons). Probably would make more money than his "Jews beat the crap out of Jesus" movie. Oh, and there's an incest-ridden sequel built in with the story of Noah.
Seth
So instead of getting reputable ads they start getting penis enhancment products and the like.
Or, if spam email is any predictor, the hijackers will advertise their services promising to reduce the OS-planted ads. Oh, and also how you can get your ad planted in 10,000,000 people's OS.
Isn't it just like Microsoft. They rarely try to entice people to purchase their products because they're good. They always are looking for ways to MAKE people by their products because they have to. I'm saying this in relation to the likelihood that an ad-based windows OS would be the one bundled with OEM computers. It's doubtful the ad-OS would be in a box on a store shelf anywhere.
I've shot photos of cops several times and had them complain. Sometimes they'll be jerks and demand my cooperation simply because I have to do what they say or they will arrest me for 'disobeying a police officer.' In Cruz's case, there is some stupid law prohibiting people from photographing police officers. As the ACLU rep says in the article, the 4th ammendment protects our ability to photograph police officers on public property (i.e. the street).
In NYC, I shot a photo of under-cover police arresting two guys. They told me to stop taking pictures, but their hands were full with the suspects, so they couldn't come after me. here is the photograph.
Seth
The head of their antipiracy division is openly saying they're looking forward to a trial and verdict next summer.
The head of the anti-piracy division is given incentives to bring cases to trial, etc. It's the other executives in the organization that will look at the potential costs involved for the MPAA and decide to throw in the towel.
When Metallica sued Napster, it wasn't Lars Ulrich's idea. He's an utter moron. Instead, it was the record label's lawyers who convinced Lars to pony up the seed money to launch the suit against Napster. Because Lars is stupid, he convinced the band to go forward with suing Napster. Other entities hadn't sued because the legal outlook for a victory was doubtful. Metallica's lawyers had a client with more money than brains, so they were able to forge ahead. In a civil case like that, if Metallica were to lose, they would have had to pay their own lawyers AND Napster's legal fees. Same with this case. Either way, Metallica's lawyers would get paid for a lot of hours on the case. Same with the MPAA's lawyers.
In the Napster case, dumb luck prevailed and Metallica won. In this case, I agree with the GP. The business managers at the MPAA are going to see the conclusion pretty soon and throw in the towell on this lawsuit.
The other reason they'll abandon this lawsuit is to avoid the risk of setting a legal precedent. If this guy pushes the case to a victory, then it'll mean the MPAA won't be able to threaten the same legal action against other suspected movie downloaders. Even a newbie lawyer would be able to get these cases dismissed right off the bat by citing the decision in this case.
Seth
I'm sorry to hear about the abuse you've endured.
I ask you how you would interrogate someone without using scare tactics?
I would interrogate 'enemy combatants' the same way the police in America are authorized to interrogate American citizens. I might lie to them. I might coerce information out of suspects with exagerrated threats of harsh punishments.
I would ensure that the Red Cross is supervising my treatment of prisoners. I would showcase my fair and respectful treatment of prisoners as a demonstration that my cause is just and humane. I would deny my opponents the opportunity to use prisoner abuse as recruitment propaganda.
The coalition of the willing found both Saddam's sons and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi by information gleaned from paid informants... not by water boarding captured prisoners in secret overseas CIA prisons.
If I were ever tortured by a government entity and were released, I am certain that the rest of my life would be dedicated to visiting my abuse ten-fold on those who had mistreated me. And I'm not even a big 'eye-for-an-eye' proponent.
Seth
So long as people aren't really physically harmed, then scaring prisoners with dogs, or stripping them naked is fair game in interrogation as far as I'm concerned.
I hope you get to experience this shadowy margin between torture and hazing. I hope you realize that Americans won't stand for our soldiers to be treated the way we're treating Iraqis. At the center of this is why we're failing to win the hearts and minds of the country we're occupying.
Seth
Emulate myspace?!?!? Slashdot is really missing a story-click headline opportunity here. Walmart is launching a mySpace-KILLER!
Seth
Whether horsepower is going unused is not important for mission-critical systems. If you're running an Oracle database that manages data that the life of your company (or soldiers in the field) depends on, the thing that matters is if you lose data integrity. You'll assign a dozen redundant servers if it minimizes the chance that a hardware failure will mean downtime.
In military applications, you want to maintain operation of a computer through extreme duress. If a projectile punctures the hull of a tank and the motherboard of the communications device, you want it to at a minimum be able to send a distress signal with GPS coordinates. Fault tolerant systems can enable this.
Tandem used to demo its mainframes by opening up the case and whacking the circuit boards with a hammer. As they shattered, the system routed around them and maintained uptime.
Seth
Like you, I'm getting pretty fed up with this excuse for trampling on the constitution and human faces in secret prisons scattered worldwide. While 9/11 was certainly a horrific tragedy, it certainly doesn't represent a threat of such proportions that we need to sidestep the trivialities of the constitution to preserve the continued existence of America.
While it's a completely different conflict, consider the threat that the Civil War posed to the country. 9-11 was baby crap compared to how close America came to disolving during the Civil War.
So, yeah, America has been guided through some spectacularly difficult times by that Constitution. And these neocons who are second guessing the original authors of the document, well, I wouldn't exactly put them on the same shelf of great thinkers occupied by the likes of Ben Franklin.
Seth
nor do I want to have to trust that Microsoft employees won't leak the information to malevolent third parties.
I applaud this patriot. He's identifying breaches in our national security infrastructure which is being exploited by malevolent international organizations. This is a demonstrably greater threat to our national security (recent state department break-ins) than our porous southern border or our domestical phone call traffic.
Microsoft's foot-dragging on repairing these weaknesses is endangering our national security. Imagine if Congress wasn't having to approve hundreds of BILLIONS of dollars each year to fight a physical war in a country that hasn't attacked the United States. Just a small fraction of that money could be directed to develop a secure operating system that would be deployed to all US government offices. I mention the war budget because it dwarfs the financial holdings of even Microsoft, which suggests it would be feasible to replace Microsoft with a government-produced secure OS. Unfortunately, the development would probably still be offshored, which would result in all kinds of quality control issues and we'd still end up with something as insecure as Windows.
Seth
SuperBanana,
I agree that you can test a lot of trends by sampling your own friends. Is the iPod popular? Well, ten of my friends have them. But this is one of those things that is under the radar of your friends and widely embraced among the mainstream internet users. And of your friends who have these webmail accounts, I'm betting that they don't check their mail as often as mySpace addicts click on mySpace links. A visit to gMail is like one click to get there, a couple clicks to read mail, then maybe a log-off click. A visit to mYspace is a lot more clicks... hours of clicks.
Nice sig!
Seth
There would be so much information flowing that anything of value would be lost in a flood of irrelevance.
A structured query tool that can parse spoken audio can easily sift this flood to find conversations of interest. If our taxes are being spent effectively at the NSA, they've got all sorts of databases cross-related. IRS employment data connects names to jobs. The phone listings connect the phone numbers to the names / addresses in the IRS records. You want to know what journalists might have found out something from a whistleblower?
Our constitutional protections are not designed to be suspended during periods of extreme threats. As the foundation of our government, the framers of the Constitution promised that it would carry us through whatever turbulence we encounter. To claim that these threats require us to dispose of our protection against unreasonable search is to say the US Constitution is not sufficiently enlightened.
Seth
I recognize that there are receivers in other countries, they're still not going to inflict violence over some petty joke that cost a guy in Nigeria maybe at most $200 for a wood carving. They're making money off a con because it DOESN'T involve violence. If toughness was on their resumes, they'd be working in another type of crime.
Seth
These aren't even street-level thugs. If they were tough-guys, they'd find a way to get to a rich community in whatever country they could, then they'd just strong arm some loot. The very essence of this crime indicates they're not tough. The other reason it's not dangerous is the distance we're talking about. Is someone going to travel around the globe to punch you for making him look ridiculous on a web page? Rather unlikely. Especially not a poor guy from Nigeria.
Seth
This leads to a bigger question: does Billy actually get to work with his castmates?
Interesting that you bring up 'other castmates'. When Futurama was first developed, several other voice actors had created the sound of the different characters' voices. Then they went on strike demanding larger salaries. The producers found Billy West was versatile enough to imitate the other actors' voices for the characters, so they fired the other voice actors and hired Billy West. They had Billy and one of the other voice actors duke it out on the Howard Stern show a couple years back over this issue.
Seth
They were probably testing to see if you were a replicant. It had nothing to do with the job you were applying for.
When they asked you about coming across a tortoise in the desert, did you tell the interviewer that you would flip it back onto its feet?
Seth
My post was saying it would be somewhat effective at identifying child porn traffickers. For other reasons, I believe this is a stupid scheme.
For instance, if the local police said they were going to conduct house-to-house searches for drug labs, they would probably catch a few meth chemists. I wouldn't endorse the technique, though.
Seth
I don't think this scheme is intended to catch all child porn traffickers. Just the easy-to-catch idiots. And there are plenty of them out there. Think of all the dudes you read about who get busted because they brought their laptop to CompUSA for repair and the techs found a folder titled 'young' on the hard drive.
Don't get me wrong.. I'm 100% opposed to this system.
Seth
These online companies were previously protecting themselves from liability for their customers' transmissions by claiming that filtering this data would be an expensive and prohibitive task. By volunteering this service, they've crossed that line. It should be possible for the music companies, MPAA, etc. to demand filtering as well.
It's a pretty stupid plan nonetheless. These digital fingerprints will only catch casual or newbie child porn traffickers. Encryption will easily render these fingerprints useless. The worrisome side effect is the false positives that will be triggered by this fingerprinting technique. As an example, try using one of those packages that tries to tag your mp3s by fingerprinting... Pretty unreliable stuff.
Seth
I agree. The pro memberships are a revenue stream along with the print services. The other opportunity here comes from the tagging. Through tagging, Flickr can know what the images are about. This enables contextual advertising beyond what images.google.com could ever hope for.
Because the non-pro memberships on Flickr limit users to 2 sets, users are encouraged to use tags to organize their own photos. So, Flickr has really created an incentive for users to perform data entry that Flickr can use to commercialize this content.
Seth
I am betting that high-ranking members of the nazi gestapo were also afforded generous priority treatment when they had forgotten to bring their travelling papers. The phone call check performed in the story would likely confirm that this guy was a member of homeland security and since he had his ticket, that pretty much confirmed this fellow was the person he claimed to be.
The control for this experiment would be to send a person through that does not have an entry in homeland security's personnel database. A manual laborer who has never flown before would be a better test.
Seth