Who said anything about simulation? I'm talking about fly-by-wire and/or fly-by-autopilot. The shuttle could be launched and landed almost entirely by computer, and that's a thirty-odd-year-old design. Most newer airplanes have autoland capabilities, and there are a few that can even automatically take off. There's simply no reason for experimental flights to have humans on board. Take it out in the middle of the desert somewhere, let the computer take it out and bring it back in, and if it crashes, odds are astronomically good that it won't hit anything of value.
I would interpret a 2% fatality rate to mean that 2% of flights resulted in fatalities. Feel free to redefine that based on the percentage of people who died, but that makes it a nearly useless metric that is almost entirely indicative of how many people are involved in the program rather than its actual safety.
That doesn't mean it should keep happening that way. These days, we have computers that can serve as test pilots. There's no longer a need to put human lives at risk until after the technology makes successful flights a reasonable certainty.
Given the patent portfolios of some of those dinosaurs, it's often more like sometimes they just have to die so someone else can wreck the whole world by burning their remains....
What you're missing is that a tablet is, by and large, an appliance. It has few user-serviceable parts, and its app ecosystem is intentionally locked down to make it hard for people to stray outside the lines of safe computing. This isn't true for any PC.
The reason this matters is that the average person is not that great at safely using a PC. Not everybody is a sysadmin; not everybody knows how to check the checksums of a downloaded piece of software against a known source of checksum info to determine if the app is a legitimate copy, read reviews of the app on various trusted download sites to make sure it isn't spyware, and so on. And a lot of people who do know how still don't want to have to bother with it. For folks in either category, the limited app ecosystem means that they don't have to worry about viruses, spyware (for the most part), or any of the other nasties that accompany the more flexible full-blown PC.
For people like you and me, tablets can be somewhat limiting. For the vast majority of my friends who don't work for a major computer company (and even a lot of the folks who do), tablets are a godsend. They free the user from having to think about the computer itself so that they can focus on getting the job done. Up until they need to do something that the tablet can't do (whether because the software doesn't exist or the OS doesn't allow it), the locked-down tablet will always be preferred to the PC simply because it doesn't break as often. More importantly, outside of niche markets, the majority of computer users never run into significant things that the tablet can't do.
And this is why in 2011, at 40.7 million units according to ComputerWorld, sales of a single tablet—the iPad—were almost 12% as big as the entire computer market by themselves, and growing. Turns out that the killer app is not being able to get killed by a killer app.
What percentage of people taking the drugs in question have to exhibit the effect before they consider it a product of drug interaction?
Forty-two.
Just kidding. There is no single percentage. You need to know what percentage of people with the same disorders would exhibit that particular symptom while taking one or zero of those drugs, and compare the various percentages using a T-test or similar.
The minimum statistically significant difference in those percentages further depends on the sample size, and whether you report it or not depends on the margin of error you're willing to tolerate. If you're willing to tolerate a 20% probability that the adverse reaction was due to chance, you're going to get a lot more "hits" than if you are only willing to tolerate a 1% false hit rate. This is particularly problematic if your sample size is small, which when a large number of genetic factors are factored in, it almost always will be.
It does mean that. It also is a class of vertebrates. Both definitions are correct according to the dictionary. Further, the word amphibian can also refer to an amphibious vehicle. In other words, in a science context, the term is very narrow, but in general usage, it is not.
All these "unlimited" hosting plans have been scams from day-1 and we're glad someone is finally getting held to task for the dumbing down of the market.
I have an unlimited hosting plan from DreamHost, and it has always worked quite well for me (currently in my second or third year, I forget). It works because they pay attention to what you're doing and assign you to a server based on how you use the service, e.g. poor-performing WordPress instances live in a festering cesspool all to themselves so that their search doesn't cause half-minute delays on other sites, static-only or nearly static-only sites are on servers with other static-only sites, high-bandwidth sites get sandboxed away from low-bandwidth sites, they limit the number of sites per Apache instance, etc. To be fair, if a site uses excessive CPU, they may ask them to move to a virtual private server, so I suppose it's not quite unlimited, but at least where bandwidth and storage are concerned, it is, and that's what most people mean when they call a hosting provider "unlimited".
You see that as evil. Most see it as proper application of the free market. We see this all the time. Companies sell *under* cost, to bring in sales. For places like retail stores, they'll sell particular items at a loss, to make a higher profit on others. Look at places like Best Buy. They'll sell some electronics at or under cost, but sell you cables for 1000% over cost.
The problem is that if everybody played by those rules, you'd end up with a bunch of monopolies and nothing else.
The largest company would dump products at a ridiculously low price until the last competitor died, then crank prices up. As that monopoly became entrenched, they would get significantly lower prices on components than any new competitor could get because of their volume. At that point, it would be nearly impossible for anyone else to enter the market unless they were already a huge company that could weather the inevitable dumping campaign by the monopolist.
Any market that allows such unfair competition can only have one end result, and that is a permanent one-company market. The company wins, but everybody else loses. So yes, I see that as evil. When you cross the line from "I want to be the best" to "I want to destroy the competition so that I'll be the only seller", you're squarely in evil territory, no matter how you try to spin it. (Mind you, I'm not saying it's never acceptable to want to destroy a competitor, but it's never acceptable to want to destroy all of your competitors.)
I did not say that $19 was an ideal price point. Reread what I said. I said that if my novels sold only the average number of copies for an indy novel, I would have to sell them for that amount of money to cover my up-front costs without turning a penny in profit. Clearly, I would never actually sell them for that much, which means my goal is to sell a heck of a lot more copies than the average. That doesn't mean I'm crazy enough to assume that I'll sell enough copies to cover my costs at a buck apiece. If they sell well, I can always reduce the price later after I cover my costs.
Also, the plural of anecdote is not data. It's easy for an established writer with an existing reputation to get the sort of sales that make $.99 e-books profitable. Remember that for every one established writer who does that, there are ten thousand indy writers who sell thirty copies.
BTW, the main reason I'm considering going with a normal publisher is that I want a hardcover edition of my novels. The availability of on-demand hardcover printing in the U.S. is basically zero, and I can even count the number of short-run hardcover printers on one hand. Some of us still like to read on paper. I'm well aware that traditional publishers take a lot and don't provide that much in return. I'm aware that they do very little editing, and often do a pretty half-assed job of art and book design as well. That's why I'm doing all the work myself, regardless of whether I self-publish or go through a publishing house. When I'm finished editing and incorporating those edits, approximately five minutes later, I'll have camera-ready PDFs in hardcover and paperback trim sizes, camera-ready covers in hardcover (dust jacket), paperback, and EPUB trim sizes, and electronic editions in EPUB, Kindle, and KF8 formats. I've even made significant design changes to a number of OFL-licensed fonts for use in the books so that I can precisely control every aspect of their look and feel. The content design has taken up most of my free time for the better part of a year, but when they're done, I'll have a really well-designed series of books.
Whether I go with a traditional publisher or a POD service, I'm not expecting anything from them other than paying for the print runs, encouraging bookstores to carry the books, and handling all the financial details so I don't have to deal with it. I have pretty low expectations when it comes to publishers, so it would pretty hard for them to fall short....:-)
You're not accounting for the extra friction caused by the wall of snow that your tires are only pushing out of the way when the wheel is locked up. I'd expect much of that extra sliding mass to go away when the wheels start rolling over the top of it.
Remember, tires skidding in snow are considered to exhibit fluid friction, not sliding friction. In other words, whether rolling or sliding is better likely depends on such factors as how thick the snow is, how packed the snow is, and how wide your tires are. It's not a black-and white answer like it is for hydroplaning (which is what anti-lock brakes are designed for). Thus, the computer might do better, but it might do a lot worse, too.
Because our leaders didn't care about your complaints any more than your leaders will care about ours. Our leaders only cared that Google said YouTube might have to shut down if the law was passed, and that their constituents would burn down Washington D.C. if they couldn't get their videos of cats playing ping-pong.
Once per airport, maybe, assuming people are already paying close attention to you in the first place. Besides, it would have to be a pretty small airport for that to be noticed even if several people did it. At an airport with a hundred or more gates, you're not likely to be seen by any of the same people, statistically speaking. The larger the crowd, the easier it is to get lost in it, yet for the same reason, the larger the crowd, the better a target it is. This fundamental truth is a big part of what makes real security hard.
Besides, if you want to guarantee that nobody notices, you could just do a handoff in a busy men's restroom. The first law of men's rooms is that nobody looks at or pays attention to anyone else.:-D
So yes, you're technically right that more people and/or more handoffs increases the risk, but in practice, increasing the risk from almost zero to a bigger almost zero is immaterial. If potentially dangerous substances get through security in any quantity, from a security perspective, that is effectively equivalent to allowing the substance through in an arbitrary quantity.
I can only conclude, then, that if an actual terrorist attack were prevented in the United States, it would be more a matter of luck than an actual indication that the system is working.
Translation: if you want to find books that are likely to be well written, you should ignore the books that cost less than about three bucks apiece. Books that cost less than that are usually cheap for good reason.
Think about it this way: If you sell an eBook at 99 cents through Amazon, you get a paltry 34.65 cents apiece. It generally takes a minimum of two or three months to write and polish a good novel even if you treat the writing process like a full-time job (8 hour days, 5 days a week or more). Assuming you spend three months, you have to make $3480 on that book just to make the equivalent of minimum wage. That's over ten thousand copies. Most indy books do not sell anywhere near that many copies. Heck, most commercially published books don't sell that many copies. Less than 1% of all books sell over half that many copies. The average number of copies of self-published books sold is a meager 150 copies.
To put it in perspective, I'm writing a trilogy of novels and am debating between self publishing and traditional publishing. Either way, I would never consider pricing my novels at 99 cents (even if I did not intend to make paper copies available) because if I didn't beat that average, my profits wouldn't even cover the money I've spent on paper draft copies alone, even if my time were completely worthless. I've gone through about five or six drafts of all three books, which comes to about eleven reams of paper, plus three notebooks that are thoroughly worn out and will be thrown away when I finish my last editing pass, plus toner, plus a hundred bucks for banner paper to print hardcover dust jacket drafts, plus about another thirty or forty dollars for glossy card stock to use for paperback cover drafts. To cover just those costs without earning a cent, I'd have to sell 150 copies of all three books at about $1.60.
And that isn't even counting the fact that none of the local print shops can print wide-format color banners, which meant that I also had to buy a wide-format color laser printer. (Yes, I probably could have bought a wide carriage inkjet for less money, but I've had nonstop problems with inkjet printers clogging, and I just couldn't justify going that route knowing that I'd have to replace it in a year or two, whereas I'll probably pass the Konica Minolta laser printer on to one of my great-grandkids when I die....)
With hardware costs included, at 35% profit, at 150 copies per book times three books, I'd have to charge about $19 per copy to break even. Of course, that's amortizing the cost over three books. It's not nearly as bad if I write five or six more. Still, this should put into perspective the difference in cost between somebody serious about writing a book and somebody who is just dabbling, and should illustrate clearly why good books cost money.
In other words, the only people who would realistically price a novel at 99 cents are those who either wrote it entirely for fun without taking the time to polish the text (editing and editing and editing...) or those who wrote it with the intent to publish it, were told that it wasn't good enough, and decided to self-publish it out of desperation to try to at least get something out of their hard work. Neither of these is generally a sign of a high quality work. I'm sure there are some gems in there from writers who are either bad at math or are deliberately eating the cost of their first book to establish a fan base for a series, but you'll have to wade through an awful lot of crap to find it. And I'm pretty sure that selling a book as a loss leader (below cost, with the intent to never turn a profit) would be considered unfair competition under California law, so the publishers have every right to be mad about anyone who is doing that.
I always thought you should name servers after former employees. As an added bonus, if you're working a startup and you run out of names, that's a good indication that layoffs are coming, and you should start printing your résumé.
I didn't believe most of Obama' rhetoric even during the election season. I voted for him because he seemed equivalent to or marginally better than the alternative, and his running mate was markedly better than the alternative. Both candidates were career politicians, though, so it was clear from the very beginning that neither candidate could realistically provide a significant change from the status quo.
The same goes for all of the Republican challengers this round. The only one who is even remotely on the right side of this issue is Ron Paul, and he's so far off on everything else that I couldn't possibly vote for him. Chertoff is apparently one of Romney's campaign advisors, and Santorum advocates illegal racial and ethnic profiling.
Like I said, the ballot box hasn't been tried because we haven't had any real alternatives. Be the alternative.
What scares me is that the TSA is wasting our time looking for imaginary threats like multi-part non-nitrate liquid explosives while obviously volatile substances are ignored en masse, one right after the next.
It's like having police with uzis to protect against criminals with guns and then finding out that a woman was raped with a knife right in front of them and they didn't pay any attention because the rapist wasn't carrying a gun.
First, boxcutters were not illegal at the time, and second the terrorists didn't actually carry ANY currently prohibited items through security.
Actually, they were, in fact, prohibited in the sterile area, along with swords, straight razors, and knives over a certain length... three inches, I think.
You are probably correct that they did not pass through the security checkpoint, though.
You'd have to secrete it somewhere, 9 times, without being spotted.
How many people are going to notice one person handing another person a bottle of hand cream, or notice that the person later goes into a bathroom with the bottle and walks out without it (or, more precisely, with it in his or her luggage)?
Slashdot Mirror
To be fair, they weren't certain about that until just now.
Who said anything about simulation? I'm talking about fly-by-wire and/or fly-by-autopilot. The shuttle could be launched and landed almost entirely by computer, and that's a thirty-odd-year-old design. Most newer airplanes have autoland capabilities, and there are a few that can even automatically take off. There's simply no reason for experimental flights to have humans on board. Take it out in the middle of the desert somewhere, let the computer take it out and bring it back in, and if it crashes, odds are astronomically good that it won't hit anything of value.
I would interpret a 2% fatality rate to mean that 2% of flights resulted in fatalities. Feel free to redefine that based on the percentage of people who died, but that makes it a nearly useless metric that is almost entirely indicative of how many people are involved in the program rather than its actual safety.
A less than 2% fatality rate puts it on par with the shuttle (2/135). Not exactly a glowing endorsement....
That doesn't mean it should keep happening that way. These days, we have computers that can serve as test pilots. There's no longer a need to put human lives at risk until after the technology makes successful flights a reasonable certainty.
Given the patent portfolios of some of those dinosaurs, it's often more like sometimes they just have to die so someone else can wreck the whole world by burning their remains....
What you're missing is that a tablet is, by and large, an appliance. It has few user-serviceable parts, and its app ecosystem is intentionally locked down to make it hard for people to stray outside the lines of safe computing. This isn't true for any PC.
The reason this matters is that the average person is not that great at safely using a PC. Not everybody is a sysadmin; not everybody knows how to check the checksums of a downloaded piece of software against a known source of checksum info to determine if the app is a legitimate copy, read reviews of the app on various trusted download sites to make sure it isn't spyware, and so on. And a lot of people who do know how still don't want to have to bother with it. For folks in either category, the limited app ecosystem means that they don't have to worry about viruses, spyware (for the most part), or any of the other nasties that accompany the more flexible full-blown PC.
For people like you and me, tablets can be somewhat limiting. For the vast majority of my friends who don't work for a major computer company (and even a lot of the folks who do), tablets are a godsend. They free the user from having to think about the computer itself so that they can focus on getting the job done. Up until they need to do something that the tablet can't do (whether because the software doesn't exist or the OS doesn't allow it), the locked-down tablet will always be preferred to the PC simply because it doesn't break as often. More importantly, outside of niche markets, the majority of computer users never run into significant things that the tablet can't do.
And this is why in 2011, at 40.7 million units according to ComputerWorld, sales of a single tablet—the iPad—were almost 12% as big as the entire computer market by themselves, and growing. Turns out that the killer app is not being able to get killed by a killer app.
Forty-two.
Just kidding. There is no single percentage. You need to know what percentage of people with the same disorders would exhibit that particular symptom while taking one or zero of those drugs, and compare the various percentages using a T-test or similar.
The minimum statistically significant difference in those percentages further depends on the sample size, and whether you report it or not depends on the margin of error you're willing to tolerate. If you're willing to tolerate a 20% probability that the adverse reaction was due to chance, you're going to get a lot more "hits" than if you are only willing to tolerate a 1% false hit rate. This is particularly problematic if your sample size is small, which when a large number of genetic factors are factored in, it almost always will be.
It does mean that. It also is a class of vertebrates. Both definitions are correct according to the dictionary. Further, the word amphibian can also refer to an amphibious vehicle. In other words, in a science context, the term is very narrow, but in general usage, it is not.
Except that you aren't. Ever try to return a DVD because you didn't agree to the copyright warning at the beginning of the disc?
I have an unlimited hosting plan from DreamHost, and it has always worked quite well for me (currently in my second or third year, I forget). It works because they pay attention to what you're doing and assign you to a server based on how you use the service, e.g. poor-performing WordPress instances live in a festering cesspool all to themselves so that their search doesn't cause half-minute delays on other sites, static-only or nearly static-only sites are on servers with other static-only sites, high-bandwidth sites get sandboxed away from low-bandwidth sites, they limit the number of sites per Apache instance, etc. To be fair, if a site uses excessive CPU, they may ask them to move to a virtual private server, so I suppose it's not quite unlimited, but at least where bandwidth and storage are concerned, it is, and that's what most people mean when they call a hosting provider "unlimited".
As always, YMMV.
The problem is that if everybody played by those rules, you'd end up with a bunch of monopolies and nothing else.
The largest company would dump products at a ridiculously low price until the last competitor died, then crank prices up. As that monopoly became entrenched, they would get significantly lower prices on components than any new competitor could get because of their volume. At that point, it would be nearly impossible for anyone else to enter the market unless they were already a huge company that could weather the inevitable dumping campaign by the monopolist.
Any market that allows such unfair competition can only have one end result, and that is a permanent one-company market. The company wins, but everybody else loses. So yes, I see that as evil. When you cross the line from "I want to be the best" to "I want to destroy the competition so that I'll be the only seller", you're squarely in evil territory, no matter how you try to spin it. (Mind you, I'm not saying it's never acceptable to want to destroy a competitor, but it's never acceptable to want to destroy all of your competitors.)
Sprint resellers are sometimes even cheaper, e.g. DataJack, though you lose the ability to roam on Verizon's network.
I did not say that $19 was an ideal price point. Reread what I said. I said that if my novels sold only the average number of copies for an indy novel, I would have to sell them for that amount of money to cover my up-front costs without turning a penny in profit. Clearly, I would never actually sell them for that much, which means my goal is to sell a heck of a lot more copies than the average. That doesn't mean I'm crazy enough to assume that I'll sell enough copies to cover my costs at a buck apiece. If they sell well, I can always reduce the price later after I cover my costs.
Also, the plural of anecdote is not data. It's easy for an established writer with an existing reputation to get the sort of sales that make $.99 e-books profitable. Remember that for every one established writer who does that, there are ten thousand indy writers who sell thirty copies.
BTW, the main reason I'm considering going with a normal publisher is that I want a hardcover edition of my novels. The availability of on-demand hardcover printing in the U.S. is basically zero, and I can even count the number of short-run hardcover printers on one hand. Some of us still like to read on paper. I'm well aware that traditional publishers take a lot and don't provide that much in return. I'm aware that they do very little editing, and often do a pretty half-assed job of art and book design as well. That's why I'm doing all the work myself, regardless of whether I self-publish or go through a publishing house. When I'm finished editing and incorporating those edits, approximately five minutes later, I'll have camera-ready PDFs in hardcover and paperback trim sizes, camera-ready covers in hardcover (dust jacket), paperback, and EPUB trim sizes, and electronic editions in EPUB, Kindle, and KF8 formats. I've even made significant design changes to a number of OFL-licensed fonts for use in the books so that I can precisely control every aspect of their look and feel. The content design has taken up most of my free time for the better part of a year, but when they're done, I'll have a really well-designed series of books.
Whether I go with a traditional publisher or a POD service, I'm not expecting anything from them other than paying for the print runs, encouraging bookstores to carry the books, and handling all the financial details so I don't have to deal with it. I have pretty low expectations when it comes to publishers, so it would pretty hard for them to fall short.... :-)
You're not accounting for the extra friction caused by the wall of snow that your tires are only pushing out of the way when the wheel is locked up. I'd expect much of that extra sliding mass to go away when the wheels start rolling over the top of it.
Remember, tires skidding in snow are considered to exhibit fluid friction, not sliding friction. In other words, whether rolling or sliding is better likely depends on such factors as how thick the snow is, how packed the snow is, and how wide your tires are. It's not a black-and white answer like it is for hydroplaning (which is what anti-lock brakes are designed for). Thus, the computer might do better, but it might do a lot worse, too.
Don't worry. You'll still get a DUI if you get pulled over even if the car is doing the actual driving....
Because our leaders didn't care about your complaints any more than your leaders will care about ours. Our leaders only cared that Google said YouTube might have to shut down if the law was passed, and that their constituents would burn down Washington D.C. if they couldn't get their videos of cats playing ping-pong.
Once per airport, maybe, assuming people are already paying close attention to you in the first place. Besides, it would have to be a pretty small airport for that to be noticed even if several people did it. At an airport with a hundred or more gates, you're not likely to be seen by any of the same people, statistically speaking. The larger the crowd, the easier it is to get lost in it, yet for the same reason, the larger the crowd, the better a target it is. This fundamental truth is a big part of what makes real security hard.
Besides, if you want to guarantee that nobody notices, you could just do a handoff in a busy men's restroom. The first law of men's rooms is that nobody looks at or pays attention to anyone else. :-D
So yes, you're technically right that more people and/or more handoffs increases the risk, but in practice, increasing the risk from almost zero to a bigger almost zero is immaterial. If potentially dangerous substances get through security in any quantity, from a security perspective, that is effectively equivalent to allowing the substance through in an arbitrary quantity.
I can only conclude, then, that if an actual terrorist attack were prevented in the United States, it would be more a matter of luck than an actual indication that the system is working.
Translation: if you want to find books that are likely to be well written, you should ignore the books that cost less than about three bucks apiece. Books that cost less than that are usually cheap for good reason.
Think about it this way: If you sell an eBook at 99 cents through Amazon, you get a paltry 34.65 cents apiece. It generally takes a minimum of two or three months to write and polish a good novel even if you treat the writing process like a full-time job (8 hour days, 5 days a week or more). Assuming you spend three months, you have to make $3480 on that book just to make the equivalent of minimum wage. That's over ten thousand copies. Most indy books do not sell anywhere near that many copies. Heck, most commercially published books don't sell that many copies. Less than 1% of all books sell over half that many copies. The average number of copies of self-published books sold is a meager 150 copies.
To put it in perspective, I'm writing a trilogy of novels and am debating between self publishing and traditional publishing. Either way, I would never consider pricing my novels at 99 cents (even if I did not intend to make paper copies available) because if I didn't beat that average, my profits wouldn't even cover the money I've spent on paper draft copies alone, even if my time were completely worthless. I've gone through about five or six drafts of all three books, which comes to about eleven reams of paper, plus three notebooks that are thoroughly worn out and will be thrown away when I finish my last editing pass, plus toner, plus a hundred bucks for banner paper to print hardcover dust jacket drafts, plus about another thirty or forty dollars for glossy card stock to use for paperback cover drafts. To cover just those costs without earning a cent, I'd have to sell 150 copies of all three books at about $1.60.
And that isn't even counting the fact that none of the local print shops can print wide-format color banners, which meant that I also had to buy a wide-format color laser printer. (Yes, I probably could have bought a wide carriage inkjet for less money, but I've had nonstop problems with inkjet printers clogging, and I just couldn't justify going that route knowing that I'd have to replace it in a year or two, whereas I'll probably pass the Konica Minolta laser printer on to one of my great-grandkids when I die....)
With hardware costs included, at 35% profit, at 150 copies per book times three books, I'd have to charge about $19 per copy to break even. Of course, that's amortizing the cost over three books. It's not nearly as bad if I write five or six more. Still, this should put into perspective the difference in cost between somebody serious about writing a book and somebody who is just dabbling, and should illustrate clearly why good books cost money.
In other words, the only people who would realistically price a novel at 99 cents are those who either wrote it entirely for fun without taking the time to polish the text (editing and editing and editing...) or those who wrote it with the intent to publish it, were told that it wasn't good enough, and decided to self-publish it out of desperation to try to at least get something out of their hard work. Neither of these is generally a sign of a high quality work. I'm sure there are some gems in there from writers who are either bad at math or are deliberately eating the cost of their first book to establish a fan base for a series, but you'll have to wade through an awful lot of crap to find it. And I'm pretty sure that selling a book as a loss leader (below cost, with the intent to never turn a profit) would be considered unfair competition under California law, so the publishers have every right to be mad about anyone who is doing that.
I always thought you should name servers after former employees. As an added bonus, if you're working a startup and you run out of names, that's a good indication that layoffs are coming, and you should start printing your résumé.
I didn't believe most of Obama' rhetoric even during the election season. I voted for him because he seemed equivalent to or marginally better than the alternative, and his running mate was markedly better than the alternative. Both candidates were career politicians, though, so it was clear from the very beginning that neither candidate could realistically provide a significant change from the status quo.
The same goes for all of the Republican challengers this round. The only one who is even remotely on the right side of this issue is Ron Paul, and he's so far off on everything else that I couldn't possibly vote for him. Chertoff is apparently one of Romney's campaign advisors, and Santorum advocates illegal racial and ethnic profiling.
Like I said, the ballot box hasn't been tried because we haven't had any real alternatives. Be the alternative.
What scares me is that the TSA is wasting our time looking for imaginary threats like multi-part non-nitrate liquid explosives while obviously volatile substances are ignored en masse, one right after the next.
It's like having police with uzis to protect against criminals with guns and then finding out that a woman was raped with a knife right in front of them and they didn't pay any attention because the rapist wasn't carrying a gun.
Actually, they were, in fact, prohibited in the sterile area, along with swords, straight razors, and knives over a certain length... three inches, I think.
You are probably correct that they did not pass through the security checkpoint, though.
Translation, it's okay for airport employees to have committed murder, arson, or hijacking, just so long as they weren't convicted.
I feel safer already.
How many people are going to notice one person handing another person a bottle of hand cream, or notice that the person later goes into a bathroom with the bottle and walks out without it (or, more precisely, with it in his or her luggage)?