I read an article that the TSA is considering software to either distort the back-scatter images or reduce them to stick-figure images, with any anomalies highlighted. If true and implemented, then this should reduce some of the complaints about the scans.
It shouldn't reduce it in the slightest. The mere fact that they are not displaying the information does not mean that they are not collecting it, nor that they are not storing it, nor that they are not sending it elsewhere to be displayed, collected, stored, whatever, nor that some hacker won't crack access to the machines and collect all those scans surreptitiously, nor does it mean that they cannot throw the switch back to showing full body detail after the furor dies down.
Anyone who accepts a mere software patch as a "solution" is a fool. Software can always be changed. Therefore, nothing protected by software outside your personal control is secure. Therefore, pictures of every single passenger who goes through one of these things are as good as posted on YouTube no matter what they do to the software. It's just a question of how long it takes before it happens. It's almost inevitable that it will eventually happen. It's only a matter of time.
Maybe, but generally speaking whenever the TSA has done something, they've pulled out every stop to try to justify their actions. It's telling that they decided to focus on trains and stuff after public sentiment turned against the new scanners, and after many security experts went on national TV commenting that the TSA is focusing too myopically on air and ignoring other easy targets. The timing of this statement makes it rather unlikely that it is based on an actual threat that just happened to pop up at the same time as the public uproar. Those sorts of coincidences, when they do occur, have a high probability of being false flags.
Yes, I'm aware of what the term plebe means. I was referring to proles in the 1984 sense, not the "short for proletariat" sense. If you haven't read it, go read it. It will make what's happening in the U.S. right now seem all the more disturbing. You have the party members, who are kept under strict dogmatic control and are not allowed to stray from the party's position (how very Republican) or to question anything the government does, and then you have the proles, who despite having no real freedom, are given enough of an illusion of freedom that they can't be moved to rebel. They believe whatever the government says even when the government is lying egregiously in ways that should be obvious to anyone who chooses to pay attention.
3. The most effective terror tool is to show that the government is unable to protect the people. It's a direct attack on not just the people, but also the government and the public's trust in it. Attacking trains and subways is thus much less effective because the government makes no real attempt to protect trains or subways.
1. there is no fence along the entire Mexico/USA border, only a small section in southern California and various main road checkpoints.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. They're proposing tightening up the border, and part of that proposal is to build a fence. I based my cost estimate on the per-mile cost for the portion they've built so far.
And someone should create one with a photo of Einstein and his famous quote: "Only two things are infinite---the universe and human stupidity---and I'm not sure about the former."
Amtrak is barely staying afloat and cannot afford any loss of passengers in the name of safety. As there is only one passenger rail company currently in operation in the U.S. (apart from regional rail carriers), there's no possibility of the sort of consolidation that kept the TSA from bankrupting the airline industry.
It's completely absurd. Anyone with half a brain can think of at least half a dozen reasons why they can't secure trains this way.
The average Amtrak station is a double wide about 100 feet of the tracks. They would have to build real thousands of real train stations at a cost of tens of billions of dollars.
Unlike planes, which leave the airport up in the air, trains leave the station on the ground. So all someone has to do to get around security is to walk along the tracks.
There has never been even one single case of a terrorist boarding any train in the United States with the intent to cause it harm. There has never even been intelligence suggesting that this is a credible threat.
The easiest, safest, and most effective way to target a train is not to target the trains themselves, but rather the approximately 233,000 miles of unsecured railroad tracks. If we want to make it at least as secure as the U.S. Mexico border fence (with fences along both sides of every track), it would cost approximately 1.8 Trillion dollars, or about 14% of the total U.S. national debt.
That's not counting the tens of trillions of dollars you would have to spend on adding bridges at every railroad crossing in the nation to allow cars to go over the fences.
In short, Ms. Napolitano clearly has not thought this through. Either that or she has thought it through and she's just the biggest idiot on the face of the planet. With political appointees, it's often hard to say. Either way, it's time to defund the TSA and Homeland Security. They're the biggest laughingstock of the security world since Windows XP.
Deter: Discourage (someone) from doing something, typically by instilling doubt or fear of the consequences. (Source: Google)
Screening does not instill doubt or fear of the consequences unless there is a realistic chance of getting caught. Therefore, screening that cannot capture terrorists cannot be an effective deterrent, period.
"In order to get through airport security, Abdulmutallab -- or, more precisely, whoever built the bomb -- had to construct a far less reliable bomb than he would have otherwise; he had to resort to a much more ineffective detonation mechanism. And, as we've learned, detonating PETN is actually very hard."
Put another way, this guy was working alone, and thus could not build a very good bomb. What made 9/11 significant was that it involved a number of attackers working together. That same approach would work just as easily today for smuggling explosives onto an aircraft. The only thing that prevented either of the two recent bombing attempts from succeeding is that they were both done by individuals working essentially in isolation with insufficient understanding of the materials involved.
The reason people keep convincing themselves that cameras with more pixels are "worse" is because they view the images from both cameras at 1:1 pixel ratio, which means that the image with more pixels is enlarged more, and will therefore look noisier.
I'd expect that, all things being equal, they should be noisier (even if you use the exact same exposure and gain settings). The amount of light gathered by a pixel is proportional to its area. Yes, in theory, if you have 2x the number of pixels in each direction, each one is half the area, and it comes out equal. In practice, however, a pixel cannot have zero border. Therefore, every time you double the number of pixels, you're also shaving off a small percentage of the total light gathering, so your SNR is reduced.
I've seen this argument before, and frankly, the cameras we have today (even the point and shoots) are MILES above the top of the line film cameras from even a couple decades ago. Yet, somehow, the photographers from that era (and earlier) managed to get these shots that people think are impossible on lower end models of today. All it takes is a little understanding of your in most cases.
No, they're really not. A good film SLR from a couple of decades ago would likely have metering and probably even auto-exposure, and probably even automatic focus. That camera, coupled with modern film, will take pictures that are roughly on par with as a modern DSLR, and the lenses from that era still generally spank the lenses built into point-and-shoot cameras in every way---the light gathering of the lens, the amount of chromatic aberration, the amount of barrel and/or pincushion distortion, the number of blades on the shutter, etc. All of these have a very real effect on the quality of photos, and there's really no way around it. Sure, you can take photos with great composition with any camera, but it will still be of noticeably lesser quality than an otherwise identical shot taken with a DSLR or even a thirty-year-old film SLR, assuming a good photographer who is familiar with the equipment.
And no...a good photographer doesn't need all these options on the flagship models.
It's not that good photographers need all the features of the high-end cameras, but rather, that they need the ability to disable all those features. A good photographer dealing with tricky lighting conditions will find him/herself wanting to throw a point-and-shoot within about a minute. Most of the point-and-shoot models I've used over the years were designed for people who only care about point-and-shoot photography. As soon as you need to put one of them into anything approaching full manual, it's an absolute pain in the backside. There's rarely a manual focus at all, and even the other manual controls---aperture, exposure, gain (ISO), etc.---are usually very clumsy to use when compared with a DSLR. It may sometimes be possible to get some of the same shots with lower end cameras, but it's as much fun as a root canal without anesthesia. Just about any film SLR ever made is easier to use as soon as you need to set up a shot manually.
Glad I'm not going to Kuwait. Um... ever. The day I spend my hard-earned money to buy some trashy point-and-shoot piece of crap camera to take photos with instead of a real camera just because some fascist regime decides my DSLR is a security threat is the day hell freezes over.
On the other hand, cats have strong spatial reasoning skills, which makes sense for solitary hunters. For example, if they're looking in the back window and they see you walk out the front door, even though they've never been inside the house, they can still recognize that it is the front door, and they run around the house to greet you (and the food you're carrying, to be fair).
Well, my insane idea involves ripping out the actual keyboard from a pipe organ, replacing it with a MIDI keyboard of the same size, and using it to drive a computer that translates the MIDI signals into commands for a series of controllers (one per rank). Because each keypress would send key velocity information, the harder you play, the louder the sound would be (like a piano). This could, of course, be enabled or disabled at will, since it's all done in software.
Each controller would consist of a controller like this with the output pins driving a bunch of crude DACs, one per key. Those per-key outputs would then drive some sort of variable flow gate valves to controlling the volume of each pipe individually. In addition, each stop knob would have a variable resistor instead of a switch, so you can control the relative volumes of the different stops independently. Those volume commands would drive an additional digital output on a particular rank's controller board, which would drive another DAC that in turn would drive a VCA on the output of all of the per-key outputs. Alternatively, this could be simplified by scaling in the digital domain, but with only five bits of precision per key, I'd hesitate to do that; MIDI provides seven bits of precision per key, and I'm assuming there's a reason for this.
The bottom line is that to do what I want, I'd need one breakout board with a chip like this per rank, but that's still better than having to put piles of external glue logic (a truckload of demuxes and data latches) just to cover a single rank like I would with most of the FPGA developer boards I've seen. Of course, depending on the cost, I still might have to use a pile of glue logic to get multiple ranks per board, but....
Oh, and if I can't find variable flow valves that respond quickly and accurately enough and are small enough, I could always do the DAC in the air pressure domain---five pipes of progressively smaller size, controlled individually with traditional on-off valves. Of course, that many electropneumatic valves would cost a small fortune, but....
Fair enough. I guess I had just remembered it being worse than it actually is. "Poor" is probably too strong a word. It's half again higher resistance per meter than copper or silver, so relative to copper or silver, it is a poor conductor. It's all relative, of course---they're both measured in double-digit nanoohms per meter, compared with... say carbon, which starts at two orders of magnitude more resistance and goes up from there. (Then again, we normally call carbon an insulator.) And even aluminum (at almost double the resistance of silver or copper) is still quite a bit better conductor than the tin and lead often used in solder.:-)
The point I was trying to make is that there are much, much cheaper metals that are significantly better as a shield/drain (copper, silver), and even cheaper metals that are almost as good (aluminum). A braided gold shield would cost a fortune (thousands of dollars per meter) and still wouldn't be as good as braided copper.
Gold shield? I've never seen any cable that used anything for the shield other than either aluminum foil (with a drain wire) or a braided copper or silver shield. Even the expensive cables almost invariably use copper in one form or another. Gold is a poor conductor and would make an awful shield. It's only used to coat connectors because it doesn't oxidize.
Cheap cables can degrade the sound, mostly by having too small a wire gauge for the main conductor. Thus, on average, judging cables by their diameter tends to result in a better metric for sound quality than any other factor you could pick....
Regarding the Motorola phone versus an iPod, that's probably an impedance matching issue. Different pieces of hardware are optimized for driving headphones with different impedance ratings. If the headphones have too low an impedance, you'll load the output down too much and sound quality will suffer. This suggests that the Motorola phone probably has lower output impedance. If you used a pair of higher impedance headphones, you probably wouldn't hear much, if any difference between the same two devices. (Either that or you have an EQ setting set wrong on your iPod.)
There's no way to fly without being exposed to that radiation. By contrast, it is possible to fly without going through these scans. There's also the issue of uniformity of exposure. The backscatter scanners concentrate exposure on your skin, emitted from a single point source (AFAIK), unlike cosmic rays that hit you in random places at random angles. The two aren't directly comparable by simple numerical comparison.
It's not an abuse of statistics at all. From an ethical perspective, the only difference between giving a thousand people a dose of radiation that will kill one of them in twenty years and giving one person a lethal dose in a single burst is that in the latter case, it's easier to prove legal liability.
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It shouldn't reduce it in the slightest. The mere fact that they are not displaying the information does not mean that they are not collecting it, nor that they are not storing it, nor that they are not sending it elsewhere to be displayed, collected, stored, whatever, nor that some hacker won't crack access to the machines and collect all those scans surreptitiously, nor does it mean that they cannot throw the switch back to showing full body detail after the furor dies down.
Anyone who accepts a mere software patch as a "solution" is a fool. Software can always be changed. Therefore, nothing protected by software outside your personal control is secure. Therefore, pictures of every single passenger who goes through one of these things are as good as posted on YouTube no matter what they do to the software. It's just a question of how long it takes before it happens. It's almost inevitable that it will eventually happen. It's only a matter of time.
Maybe, but generally speaking whenever the TSA has done something, they've pulled out every stop to try to justify their actions. It's telling that they decided to focus on trains and stuff after public sentiment turned against the new scanners, and after many security experts went on national TV commenting that the TSA is focusing too myopically on air and ignoring other easy targets. The timing of this statement makes it rather unlikely that it is based on an actual threat that just happened to pop up at the same time as the public uproar. Those sorts of coincidences, when they do occur, have a high probability of being false flags.
Yes, I'm aware of what the term plebe means. I was referring to proles in the 1984 sense, not the "short for proletariat" sense. If you haven't read it, go read it. It will make what's happening in the U.S. right now seem all the more disturbing. You have the party members, who are kept under strict dogmatic control and are not allowed to stray from the party's position (how very Republican) or to question anything the government does, and then you have the proles, who despite having no real freedom, are given enough of an illusion of freedom that they can't be moved to rebel. They believe whatever the government says even when the government is lying egregiously in ways that should be obvious to anyone who chooses to pay attention.
I think if there had been credible threats, they wouldn't be saying "We're thinking about doing this," but rather "We're doing this because...".
I think the word you're looking for is proles.
You forgot one other possibility:
3. The most effective terror tool is to show that the government is unable to protect the people. It's a direct attack on not just the people, but also the government and the public's trust in it. Attacking trains and subways is thus much less effective because the government makes no real attempt to protect trains or subways.
Sorry, I should have been more clear. They're proposing tightening up the border, and part of that proposal is to build a fence. I based my cost estimate on the per-mile cost for the portion they've built so far.
Many of the demotivator posters fit the bill here.
And someone should create one with a photo of Einstein and his famous quote: "Only two things are infinite---the universe and human stupidity---and I'm not sure about the former."
Actually, the very story you linked to puts the number down in the 60s and dropping fast.
Oh, I should have gone for half a dozen. Okay.
It's completely absurd. Anyone with half a brain can think of at least half a dozen reasons why they can't secure trains this way.
In short, Ms. Napolitano clearly has not thought this through. Either that or she has thought it through and she's just the biggest idiot on the face of the planet. With political appointees, it's often hard to say. Either way, it's time to defund the TSA and Homeland Security. They're the biggest laughingstock of the security world since Windows XP.
Nice straw man.
Deter: Discourage (someone) from doing something, typically by instilling doubt or fear of the consequences. (Source: Google)
Screening does not instill doubt or fear of the consequences unless there is a realistic chance of getting caught. Therefore, screening that cannot capture terrorists cannot be an effective deterrent, period.
Put another way, this guy was working alone, and thus could not build a very good bomb. What made 9/11 significant was that it involved a number of attackers working together. That same approach would work just as easily today for smuggling explosives onto an aircraft. The only thing that prevented either of the two recent bombing attempts from succeeding is that they were both done by individuals working essentially in isolation with insufficient understanding of the materials involved.
I'd expect that, all things being equal, they should be noisier (even if you use the exact same exposure and gain settings). The amount of light gathered by a pixel is proportional to its area. Yes, in theory, if you have 2x the number of pixels in each direction, each one is half the area, and it comes out equal. In practice, however, a pixel cannot have zero border. Therefore, every time you double the number of pixels, you're also shaving off a small percentage of the total light gathering, so your SNR is reduced.
No, they're really not. A good film SLR from a couple of decades ago would likely have metering and probably even auto-exposure, and probably even automatic focus. That camera, coupled with modern film, will take pictures that are roughly on par with as a modern DSLR, and the lenses from that era still generally spank the lenses built into point-and-shoot cameras in every way---the light gathering of the lens, the amount of chromatic aberration, the amount of barrel and/or pincushion distortion, the number of blades on the shutter, etc. All of these have a very real effect on the quality of photos, and there's really no way around it. Sure, you can take photos with great composition with any camera, but it will still be of noticeably lesser quality than an otherwise identical shot taken with a DSLR or even a thirty-year-old film SLR, assuming a good photographer who is familiar with the equipment.
It's not that good photographers need all the features of the high-end cameras, but rather, that they need the ability to disable all those features. A good photographer dealing with tricky lighting conditions will find him/herself wanting to throw a point-and-shoot within about a minute. Most of the point-and-shoot models I've used over the years were designed for people who only care about point-and-shoot photography. As soon as you need to put one of them into anything approaching full manual, it's an absolute pain in the backside. There's rarely a manual focus at all, and even the other manual controls---aperture, exposure, gain (ISO), etc.---are usually very clumsy to use when compared with a DSLR. It may sometimes be possible to get some of the same shots with lower end cameras, but it's as much fun as a root canal without anesthesia. Just about any film SLR ever made is easier to use as soon as you need to set up a shot manually.
Glad I'm not going to Kuwait. Um... ever. The day I spend my hard-earned money to buy some trashy point-and-shoot piece of crap camera to take photos with instead of a real camera just because some fascist regime decides my DSLR is a security threat is the day hell freezes over.
On the other hand, cats have strong spatial reasoning skills, which makes sense for solitary hunters. For example, if they're looking in the back window and they see you walk out the front door, even though they've never been inside the house, they can still recognize that it is the front door, and they run around the house to greet you (and the food you're carrying, to be fair).
Well, my insane idea involves ripping out the actual keyboard from a pipe organ, replacing it with a MIDI keyboard of the same size, and using it to drive a computer that translates the MIDI signals into commands for a series of controllers (one per rank). Because each keypress would send key velocity information, the harder you play, the louder the sound would be (like a piano). This could, of course, be enabled or disabled at will, since it's all done in software.
Each controller would consist of a controller like this with the output pins driving a bunch of crude DACs, one per key. Those per-key outputs would then drive some sort of variable flow gate valves to controlling the volume of each pipe individually. In addition, each stop knob would have a variable resistor instead of a switch, so you can control the relative volumes of the different stops independently. Those volume commands would drive an additional digital output on a particular rank's controller board, which would drive another DAC that in turn would drive a VCA on the output of all of the per-key outputs. Alternatively, this could be simplified by scaling in the digital domain, but with only five bits of precision per key, I'd hesitate to do that; MIDI provides seven bits of precision per key, and I'm assuming there's a reason for this.
The bottom line is that to do what I want, I'd need one breakout board with a chip like this per rank, but that's still better than having to put piles of external glue logic (a truckload of demuxes and data latches) just to cover a single rank like I would with most of the FPGA developer boards I've seen. Of course, depending on the cost, I still might have to use a pile of glue logic to get multiple ranks per board, but....
Oh, and if I can't find variable flow valves that respond quickly and accurately enough and are small enough, I could always do the DAC in the air pressure domain---five pipes of progressively smaller size, controlled individually with traditional on-off valves. Of course, that many electropneumatic valves would cost a small fortune, but....
I told them I had a rocket in my pocket, and they had me arrested.
Yes! Finally enough I/O pins to make my velocity-sensitive pipe organ idea viable....
Fair enough. I guess I had just remembered it being worse than it actually is. "Poor" is probably too strong a word. It's half again higher resistance per meter than copper or silver, so relative to copper or silver, it is a poor conductor. It's all relative, of course---they're both measured in double-digit nanoohms per meter, compared with... say carbon, which starts at two orders of magnitude more resistance and goes up from there. (Then again, we normally call carbon an insulator.) And even aluminum (at almost double the resistance of silver or copper) is still quite a bit better conductor than the tin and lead often used in solder. :-)
The point I was trying to make is that there are much, much cheaper metals that are significantly better as a shield/drain (copper, silver), and even cheaper metals that are almost as good (aluminum). A braided gold shield would cost a fortune (thousands of dollars per meter) and still wouldn't be as good as braided copper.
Depends on whether you are human or an android. An android was born a steel man, and a driving man. Therefore, it was born a steel, driving man.
Well, yeah. It means that some person, somewhere, will be killed by it, but there's no way to guess which one.
<spookyvoice>It could be YOU! Muahahahahahahahahahaha!</spookyvoice>
Gold shield? I've never seen any cable that used anything for the shield other than either aluminum foil (with a drain wire) or a braided copper or silver shield. Even the expensive cables almost invariably use copper in one form or another. Gold is a poor conductor and would make an awful shield. It's only used to coat connectors because it doesn't oxidize.
Cheap cables can degrade the sound, mostly by having too small a wire gauge for the main conductor. Thus, on average, judging cables by their diameter tends to result in a better metric for sound quality than any other factor you could pick....
Regarding the Motorola phone versus an iPod, that's probably an impedance matching issue. Different pieces of hardware are optimized for driving headphones with different impedance ratings. If the headphones have too low an impedance, you'll load the output down too much and sound quality will suffer. This suggests that the Motorola phone probably has lower output impedance. If you used a pair of higher impedance headphones, you probably wouldn't hear much, if any difference between the same two devices. (Either that or you have an EQ setting set wrong on your iPod.)
There's no way to fly without being exposed to that radiation. By contrast, it is possible to fly without going through these scans. There's also the issue of uniformity of exposure. The backscatter scanners concentrate exposure on your skin, emitted from a single point source (AFAIK), unlike cosmic rays that hit you in random places at random angles. The two aren't directly comparable by simple numerical comparison.
It's not an abuse of statistics at all. From an ethical perspective, the only difference between giving a thousand people a dose of radiation that will kill one of them in twenty years and giving one person a lethal dose in a single burst is that in the latter case, it's easier to prove legal liability.