When you borrow USD10000 from someone, you have a problem.
When you borrow USD9 trillion from someone, they have a problem.
AND when you are able to create US dollars (directly or having your "right hand" lend your "left hand" money - google for Federal Reserve trillions), and borrow USD9 trillion from someone, that someone is in a hole so deep that it goes all the way to China.
The US might be in deep dodo, but as long as the rest of the world holds or are owed trillions of US dollars, or trade huge amounts of stuff in US dollars (like oil for instance), the US is in less trouble than the rest.
Because the USA can always create US dollars and by doing so immediately "tax" the rest of the world who have net positive US dollars on their balance sheet. Of course if they inflated on a massive scale, many of the US citizens would also be hurt. Think of it as "Mutually Assured Destruction Of Financial Funds" (MADOFF).
BUT, the US voters are pretty much 97% in support of the US Government. 97% of them keep voting for one of the Two Parties. Over and over and over again. The "Two Parties" represent 97% of the voters.
The rest of the eligible voters that don't vote, don't count. Because if they really cared and all voted for some other party that party would win. Even if they voted for different parties it would be a significant statement, but they don't care to make it.
As it is, with 97% of the votes why should the Two Parties change their policies? What do you expect them to do? Aim for 80% of the votes between the two of them instead of >97%?
> Any of these services has the potential to provide tracking on your usage of the web if they really catch on. Sometimes a bit of paranoia isn't a bad thing.
Does goo.gl have a "preview" setting?
tinyurl allows you to set a cookie so that you don't get redirected to the long url. You actually get to see the long url first.
This sort of thing would also allow the service to track you. So there are various tradeoffs involved.
Maybe he thought you got disgusted with what you bought;).
I wonder how many 911 calls that lady would have made if she went away for a minute to wash her hands or fetch ketchup etc, and they threw away her stuff before she could eat it:).
She ordered nuggets, paid for them, and they say they're out, refuse to refund her and they offer her a mcdouble with small fries.
They were stealing from her or trying to defraud her. When that happens, calling the cops is a valid response.
It may not be a 911 case, but it's not like they tell everyone who to call in that situation.
Where she went wrong was calling 911 three times when they already told her an officer is on the way.
But wow, that's a really crappy McD. When was the last time you went to place where they were out of something and they still insisted on keeping your money and offered you something else instead. I'm not surprised she got so pissed off.
You miss my point. A space station could be more human friendly than a lunar city - it is much easier to have artificial gravity in a space station than on the moon.
It's been proven that humans can live for decades and reproduce in 1g conditions. It's not proven that they can do that in 1/6 g.
A space station could have areas with low g and higher g. Closer to the spinning center = low g. Further away = high g. These could be for recreation, therapy or fitness training.
What would be the advantage of being on a moon base as opposed to the space station? The vast expanses of moon terrain outside a moon base would just be as inhospitable as the vast expanses of space outside a space station.
As for mining resources I have already pointed out that asteroids have water. Some have even more water than the moon, and some suspect that Ceres might even have more freshwater than the Earth!
You can move a mining module (or even the entire space station) from one asteroid to another to mine it more easily than you can move a moon based mining module from one mining spot to another. Same for getting the materials to where they are needed.
The 1/6 gravity doesn't help. It's too low for human health but it's high enough to make transportation harder than "zero g".
Once we have decent space stations why would the moon be so important? (except as a spot to start a war with Earth;) ).
You'd need very similar tech to keep humans alive sustainably on the moon and on space stations. It's easier and cheaper to develop those technologies in low orbit space stations near the earth than on the moon. Once you've done it, you move those space stations further out (the tech to do that would be required for space travel anyway).
Furthermore, it'll be much easier to do artificial gravity in space than on the moon, so that's a major plus for space stations. It's not certain that safe drugs will be found that will stop humans from having health problems due to low g environments. Better to do it the "physics" way.
Launching spacecraft from a space station in space would be cheaper than launching it from the moon. In space you can use a launcher with tethers. Not so simple to do that on the moon.
There are plenty of resources from asteroids. Scientists already are pretty sure there's water in some asteroids. In contrast it sure didn't seem as easy for them to find water on the moon[1] or mars.
The asteroids are further away so that's a problem. But once you can stay in space sustainably without dying (being able to grow/make food, recycle water, oxygen, radiation protection, energy source etc), the time it takes to get to the asteroids might be less of a problem - about a year (yes it's not trivial, but it won't be like those ridiculous suicide Mars missions they're talking about now).
Another thing, once you're already at the asteroid belt area, it could be cheaper to travel from one asteroid to another to mine different important resources (e.g. water and ore) than it would be to travel from one spot on Mars/Moon to another to do the same thing.
I suspect it would be cheaper and easier to move an entire mining and extraction facility/module from mine to mine, in space, than it would be on the Moon. On the moon, the oxygen rich rocks might not be close to the water rich places and so on. If you're planning to stay on the moon, you better do some good surveying and sampling to find a spot on the moon that has everything really close by. Otherwise extracting and transporting significant quantities of critical raw materials will be a problem.
"I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit; we found a significant amount" -- about a dozen, two-gallon bucketfuls, he said, holding up several white plastic containers.
But if the goal is to send people to space sustainably and for the long term, then NASA should be doing things like building and testing space stations that can spin and thus create artificial "gravity", and have decent radiation shielding. The long term goal should be creating space colonies, in _space_. Colonies where future generations of humans can live and reproduce. Thus the target would be developing technologies that would make it possible.
Not working on sending people to Mars or the Moon. Getting to the moon has already been done.
Getting people stuck on other gravity wells in the Solar System is silly and expensive. And talks of expensive, rushed (because of poor shielding and other issues), potentially one way trips to Mars are even more ridiculous.
What's so great about living on the Moon or Mars? It's not like they are human friendly places. What can you get from Mars or Moon that you can't get from asteroids?
There are plenty of asteroids to mine out there. Asteroids have a lot of water:
You might even be able to hollow out an asteroid and turn it into a space station.
Just because we're living on a decent planet doesn't mean that getting stuck on other gravity wells should be our goal. We should only get stuck in one if it's as good as Earth (or almost as good). And the other planets and moons in the Solar System are far from meeting that mark.
Half of that is probably due to the winsxs folder which has the same files with different names (so it really isn't using as much space as it appears).
If they introduced PDO earlier (and didn't create the aforementioned stupid stuff) you wouldn't have this problem.
As it is, lots of PHP hosting sites will either be prone to SQL injection, or prone to data corruption (or both), and be a pain to people (like you) trying to get things safe and working correctly.
The right way of doing things is: you filter inputs to your program so that your program can cope with the data, THEN your program has different filters for each output from your program to a different destination (database, browser etc) so that those destinations can handle the data correctly.
Unfortunately PHP idioms encourage programmers to combine the filtering (e.g. magic_quotes), which is wrong and doesn't even work (against SQL injection) for some UTF cases.
But it used to be very difficult to do the right thing with PHP.
The PHP developers were either incompetent or malicious. Evidence: they created insane stuff like addslashes, magic_quotes and even mysql_real_escape_string.
AFAIK Friendster's like that (or used to be anyway) - if you try to add someone as a friend, that someone gets to see your info temporarily. To me it makes more sense that way.
With Facebook you get people trying to add you as a friend, and they have a short name and a picture of a fluffy toy or some other useless crap as their profile pic.
FWIW, my bro bought a pirate version of GTA3 from the local "unauthorized distributor". Yes he didn't download it, it's just more convenient to just buy it.
So after playing many hours of it, he decides that the GTA bunch (Rockstar/Take Two Interactive) deserve some money, so he tries to buy a legit copy of GTA3 but it was banned (in this country) so there was no legit copy around to buy.
So when he was in another country, he tried buy it, but it was banned there too:).
I figure if the GTA bunch had made it easier to pay them, they'd have the money.
We preferably don't want to pay for shipping, distribution, shop's margin and all the other crap - the pirate shop has already done that for us, just let us pay the difference? That's fair right? They get what they'd normally get from the sale, and we get what we want (the game).
It'll be interesting if list price from pirate + GTA bunch's normal cut < list price from legit shop.
Of course that could be because the pirate shop sells more than a legit shop (cheper) and people don't necessarily pay the normal cut to the game makers. BUT, if it turns out to be much cheaper, perhaps the game makers might make more by working better with the pirate shops and other "unauthorized distributors":).
Many of the "pirates" are already happy users of the software. Just make it easy for them to pay, and don't make it annoying - just have the link present on the main menu - obvious but not annoying. For example have something that says "If this game is a nonlegit copy, but you really like it, click here to pay us a discounted price". Not all will pay, but the more they play the game, the more likely many of them will just go "this game is great, I guess they deserve X bucks (which should be a _lower_ price than RRP).
Years ago, one of the Microsoft bosses in my country scolded subordinates for going hard on people that were using pirated Microsoft Software (reporting them to BSA/courts _immediately_). Told them in effect "These people are already happy Microsoft users, all you have to do is get them to pay". And it's an easy sale - just go to the users and say, pay us "$$$"/copy now or have the court tell you to pay far more per copy. I'm sure they did give some discounts/special payment terms in some cases (many businesses just don't have all that cash available to go legit immediately). But they've already got all the software installed and configured - no cost to Microsoft, get the money, give them the license keys. Pure profit. No need for sales talks, presentations and "expense account spending". In contrast I've heard some cases in USA where Microsoft went hard on companies and those companies just completely stopped using Microsoft as a result (and as long as the CEOs are still around their companies will never buy Microsoft).
Do it right and it's an opportunity for you, do it wrong and it's an opportunity for someone else:).
I've bought stuff from the local pirate shop aka "unauthorized distributor", and they usually allow you to swap something that doesn't work with something else. I've even got a refund before for something that just didn't work fully (some stuff worked, but the stuff that I wanted didn't work).
In contrast, there was no refund when my bro bought a legit copy of Ultima Collection, Ultima 2 (and I believe some others) didn't work. And he bought it twice - one from overseas just in case it was just a dud. And no he didn't manage to get a refund. My bro also tried to buy a legit copy of GTA3 (after playing with the pirate version and being happy with it), but it was banned so there was no legit copy around. He even went to a neighboring country to try to buy it, but it was banned there too:), I figure if the GTA bunch had made it easier to pay them, we'd have got the money to them. We preferably don't want to pay for shipping, distribution and all the other crap - the pirate shop has already done that for us, just let us pay the difference= fair right?
> But any ID is backed up with a readily accessible database to confirm photos/details
No need. Just digitally sign the credentials, photos and other biometrics.
Stick card in to reader. If the signature is OK, and the card is not on the revocation list (which can be updated daily or monthly depending on how paranoid;) ), and the pic looks like the person, then the ID is valid.
> You can make something just as sharp as any box cutter and much easier to hide.
Sure but, they already let you carry stuff like pens on board. Some of those pens are pretty lethal by themselves, add a few modifications and they'll become even more effective weapons.
I can think of other very dangerous things that you'd probably be able to sneak onboard. Stuff that can jeopardize an entire plane. And stuff that can allow you to kill a fair number of people.
I'm not going to post it here though.
Anyway, you did behave out of the ordinary and that gets you flagged. You're lucky your colleague didn't have child porn on the laptop...
Slashdot Mirror
That just reinforces my point in my very first line: "the US voters are pretty much 97% in support of the US Government"
Cuttlefish can also communicate (and hide) by changing their body patterns (and they can do it very very quickly):
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1134/is_3_109/ai_61524425/
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2007/06/cephalopod_camouflage_or_turni.php
> USA is in deep dodo financially.
When you borrow USD10000 from someone, you have a problem.
When you borrow USD9 trillion from someone, they have a problem.
AND when you are able to create US dollars (directly or having your "right hand" lend your "left hand" money - google for Federal Reserve trillions), and borrow USD9 trillion from someone, that someone is in a hole so deep that it goes all the way to China.
The US might be in deep dodo, but as long as the rest of the world holds or are owed trillions of US dollars, or trade huge amounts of stuff in US dollars (like oil for instance), the US is in less trouble than the rest.
Because the USA can always create US dollars and by doing so immediately "tax" the rest of the world who have net positive US dollars on their balance sheet. Of course if they inflated on a massive scale, many of the US citizens would also be hurt. Think of it as "Mutually Assured Destruction Of Financial Funds" (MADOFF).
BUT, the US voters are pretty much 97% in support of the US Government. 97% of them keep voting for one of the Two Parties. Over and over and over again. The "Two Parties" represent 97% of the voters.
The rest of the eligible voters that don't vote, don't count. Because if they really cared and all voted for some other party that party would win. Even if they voted for different parties it would be a significant statement, but they don't care to make it.
As it is, with 97% of the votes why should the Two Parties change their policies? What do you expect them to do? Aim for 80% of the votes between the two of them instead of >97%?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Senate_elections,_2008#Results
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2008#Election_results
If the US voters don't support their Government they sure have a very strange way of showing it.
> Any of these services has the potential to provide tracking on your usage of the web if they really catch on. Sometimes a bit of paranoia isn't a bad thing.
Does goo.gl have a "preview" setting?
tinyurl allows you to set a cookie so that you don't get redirected to the long url. You actually get to see the long url first.
This sort of thing would also allow the service to track you. So there are various tradeoffs involved.
You don't have to drill till its hot enough for your drillbit to melt.
You just have to drill till it's hot enough to turn pressurized water into superheated steam. Then you have a source of energy.
The other option of course is to drill without a drillbit:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/09/090912144809.htm
Did you manage to stop him in time?
;).
:).
Maybe he thought you got disgusted with what you bought
I wonder how many 911 calls that lady would have made if she went away for a minute to wash her hands or fetch ketchup etc, and they threw away her stuff before she could eat it
> > Profiting from someone else's innovation without payment is fundamentally unfair. All we want is what's fair.
;).
> There is ridiculous dishonesty in this assertion.
I bet they didn't pay Tim Berners-Lee anything
> because it's smaller than main menu + default set of toolbars in Office 2003.
:).
You're right. I guess I'm wrong about the ribbon being worse
The ribbon is bad in many cases because displays have got wider more than they have got taller.
See: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2009/0303091mcnugget1.html
She ordered nuggets, paid for them, and they say they're out, refuse to refund her and they offer her a mcdouble with small fries.
They were stealing from her or trying to defraud her. When that happens, calling the cops is a valid response.
It may not be a 911 case, but it's not like they tell everyone who to call in that situation.
Where she went wrong was calling 911 three times when they already told her an officer is on the way.
But wow, that's a really crappy McD. When was the last time you went to place where they were out of something and they still insisted on keeping your money and offered you something else instead. I'm not surprised she got so pissed off.
And: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20090304/odd-mcnuggets-911/
> A McDonald's spokesman says Goodman should have been given a refund, and she's being sent a gift card for a free meal.
Wow if I tried to cheat someone and failed, I can get away just by offering a gift card for a free meal? Oh only corporations can do that?
Ah I see.
You miss my point. A space station could be more human friendly than a lunar city - it is much easier to have artificial gravity in a space station than on the moon.
It's been proven that humans can live for decades and reproduce in 1g conditions. It's not proven that they can do that in 1/6 g.
A space station could have areas with low g and higher g. Closer to the spinning center = low g. Further away = high g. These could be for recreation, therapy or fitness training.
What would be the advantage of being on a moon base as opposed to the space station? The vast expanses of moon terrain outside a moon base would just be as inhospitable as the vast expanses of space outside a space station.
As for mining resources I have already pointed out that asteroids have water. Some have even more water than the moon, and some suspect that Ceres might even have more freshwater than the Earth!
You can move a mining module (or even the entire space station) from one asteroid to another to mine it more easily than you can move a moon based mining module from one mining spot to another. Same for getting the materials to where they are needed.
The 1/6 gravity doesn't help. It's too low for human health but it's high enough to make transportation harder than "zero g".
Once we have decent space stations why would the moon be so important? (except as a spot to start a war with Earth ;) ).
You'd need very similar tech to keep humans alive sustainably on the moon and on space stations. It's easier and cheaper to develop those technologies in low orbit space stations near the earth than on the moon. Once you've done it, you move those space stations further out (the tech to do that would be required for space travel anyway).
Furthermore, it'll be much easier to do artificial gravity in space than on the moon, so that's a major plus for space stations. It's not certain that safe drugs will be found that will stop humans from having health problems due to low g environments. Better to do it the "physics" way.
Launching spacecraft from a space station in space would be cheaper than launching it from the moon. In space you can use a launcher with tethers. Not so simple to do that on the moon.
There are plenty of resources from asteroids. Scientists already are pretty sure there's water in some asteroids. In contrast it sure didn't seem as easy for them to find water on the moon[1] or mars.
The asteroids are further away so that's a problem. But once you can stay in space sustainably without dying (being able to grow/make food, recycle water, oxygen, radiation protection, energy source etc), the time it takes to get to the asteroids might be less of a problem - about a year (yes it's not trivial, but it won't be like those ridiculous suicide Mars missions they're talking about now).
Another thing, once you're already at the asteroid belt area, it could be cheaper to travel from one asteroid to another to mine different important resources (e.g. water and ore) than it would be to travel from one spot on Mars/Moon to another to do the same thing.
I suspect it would be cheaper and easier to move an entire mining and extraction facility/module from mine to mine, in space, than it would be on the Moon. On the moon, the oxygen rich rocks might not be close to the water rich places and so on. If you're planning to stay on the moon, you better do some good surveying and sampling to find a spot on the moon that has everything really close by. Otherwise extracting and transporting significant quantities of critical raw materials will be a problem.
[1] Compare:
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/space/11/13/water.moon.nasa/index.html
"I'm here today to tell you that indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn't find just a little bit; we found a significant amount" -- about a dozen, two-gallon bucketfuls, he said, holding up several white plastic containers.
With: http://www.universetoday.com/2009/10/08/more-water-out-there-ice-found-on-asteroid/
Together, the two teams' findings reveal that the asteroid's entire surface is coated with frozen water, Campins says.
But if the goal is to send people to space sustainably and for the long term, then NASA should be doing things like building and testing space stations that can spin and thus create artificial "gravity", and have decent radiation shielding. The long term goal should be creating space colonies, in _space_. Colonies where future generations of humans can live and reproduce. Thus the target would be developing technologies that would make it possible.
Not working on sending people to Mars or the Moon. Getting to the moon has already been done.
Getting people stuck on other gravity wells in the Solar System is silly and expensive. And talks of expensive, rushed (because of poor shielding and other issues), potentially one way trips to Mars are even more ridiculous.
What's so great about living on the Moon or Mars? It's not like they are human friendly places. What can you get from Mars or Moon that you can't get from asteroids?
There are plenty of asteroids to mine out there. Asteroids have a lot of water:
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/050907_ceres_planet.html
http://www.universetoday.com/2009/10/08/more-water-out-there-ice-found-on-asteroid/
You might even be able to hollow out an asteroid and turn it into a space station.
Just because we're living on a decent planet doesn't mean that getting stuck on other gravity wells should be our goal. We should only get stuck in one if it's as good as Earth (or almost as good). And the other planets and moons in the Solar System are far from meeting that mark.
Half of that is probably due to the winsxs folder which has the same files with different names (so it really isn't using as much space as it appears).
See:
http://www.winvistaclub.com/f16.html
Then another 2+GB is the installer files.
If they introduced PDO earlier (and didn't create the aforementioned stupid stuff) you wouldn't have this problem.
As it is, lots of PHP hosting sites will either be prone to SQL injection, or prone to data corruption (or both), and be a pain to people (like you) trying to get things safe and working correctly.
The right way of doing things is: you filter inputs to your program so that your program can cope with the data, THEN your program has different filters for each output from your program to a different destination (database, browser etc) so that those destinations can handle the data correctly.
Unfortunately PHP idioms encourage programmers to combine the filtering (e.g. magic_quotes), which is wrong and doesn't even work (against SQL injection) for some UTF cases.
Only easy when using sane languages.
But it used to be very difficult to do the right thing with PHP.
The PHP developers were either incompetent or malicious. Evidence: they created insane stuff like addslashes, magic_quotes and even mysql_real_escape_string.
See: http://php.net/manual/en/function.mysql-real-escape-string.php
Fortunately they eventually introduced stuff like PDO (but there was some confusion in the days of PEAR::DB).
And we didn't get stuff like "mysql_definitely_the_real_escape_string_now_no_really" ;).
But why didn't they just copy other people and introduce stuff like PDO right at the start?
AFAIK Friendster's like that (or used to be anyway) - if you try to add someone as a friend, that someone gets to see your info temporarily. To me it makes more sense that way.
With Facebook you get people trying to add you as a friend, and they have a short name and a picture of a fluffy toy or some other useless crap as their profile pic.
FWIW, my bro bought a pirate version of GTA3 from the local "unauthorized distributor". Yes he didn't download it, it's just more convenient to just buy it.
:).
:).
:).
So after playing many hours of it, he decides that the GTA bunch (Rockstar/Take Two Interactive) deserve some money, so he tries to buy a legit copy of GTA3 but it was banned (in this country) so there was no legit copy around to buy.
So when he was in another country, he tried buy it, but it was banned there too
I figure if the GTA bunch had made it easier to pay them, they'd have the money.
We preferably don't want to pay for shipping, distribution, shop's margin and all the other crap - the pirate shop has already done that for us, just let us pay the difference? That's fair right? They get what they'd normally get from the sale, and we get what we want (the game).
It'll be interesting if list price from pirate + GTA bunch's normal cut < list price from legit shop.
Of course that could be because the pirate shop sells more than a legit shop (cheper) and people don't necessarily pay the normal cut to the game makers. BUT, if it turns out to be much cheaper, perhaps the game makers might make more by working better with the pirate shops and other "unauthorized distributors"
Many of the "pirates" are already happy users of the software. Just make it easy for them to pay, and don't make it annoying - just have the link present on the main menu - obvious but not annoying. For example have something that says "If this game is a nonlegit copy, but you really like it, click here to pay us a discounted price". Not all will pay, but the more they play the game, the more likely many of them will just go "this game is great, I guess they deserve X bucks (which should be a _lower_ price than RRP).
Years ago, one of the Microsoft bosses in my country scolded subordinates for going hard on people that were using pirated Microsoft Software (reporting them to BSA/courts _immediately_). Told them in effect "These people are already happy Microsoft users, all you have to do is get them to pay". And it's an easy sale - just go to the users and say, pay us "$$$"/copy now or have the court tell you to pay far more per copy. I'm sure they did give some discounts/special payment terms in some cases (many businesses just don't have all that cash available to go legit immediately). But they've already got all the software installed and configured - no cost to Microsoft, get the money, give them the license keys. Pure profit. No need for sales talks, presentations and "expense account spending". In contrast I've heard some cases in USA where Microsoft went hard on companies and those companies just completely stopped using Microsoft as a result (and as long as the CEOs are still around their companies will never buy Microsoft).
Do it right and it's an opportunity for you, do it wrong and it's an opportunity for someone else
I've bought stuff from the local pirate shop aka "unauthorized distributor", and they usually allow you to swap something that doesn't work with something else. I've even got a refund before for something that just didn't work fully (some stuff worked, but the stuff that I wanted didn't work).
:), I figure if the GTA bunch had made it easier to pay them, we'd have got the money to them. We preferably don't want to pay for shipping, distribution and all the other crap - the pirate shop has already done that for us, just let us pay the difference= fair right?
In contrast, there was no refund when my bro bought a legit copy of Ultima Collection, Ultima 2 (and I believe some others) didn't work. And he bought it twice - one from overseas just in case it was just a dud. And no he didn't manage to get a refund. My bro also tried to buy a legit copy of GTA3 (after playing with the pirate version and being happy with it), but it was banned so there was no legit copy around. He even went to a neighboring country to try to buy it, but it was banned there too
This sort of thing might be called "bad faith" by the courts.
But I am not a judge or lawyer. Check with your lawyer.
And that is why physical keys are better.
;).
Just buy insurance for the stolen car.
While insurance might compensate you for your lost finger, most people are more attached to their fingers than they are to their car
And even if you're more attached to your car, this sort of system will cause you to lose both.
> But any ID is backed up with a readily accessible database to confirm photos/details
;) ), and the pic looks like the person, then the ID is valid.
No need. Just digitally sign the credentials, photos and other biometrics.
Stick card in to reader. If the signature is OK, and the card is not on the revocation list (which can be updated daily or monthly depending on how paranoid
> At some point, there is a first checkpoint.
;).
The first checkpoint is in a different country
> You can make something just as sharp as any box cutter and much easier to hide.
Sure but, they already let you carry stuff like pens on board. Some of those pens are pretty lethal by themselves, add a few modifications and they'll become even more effective weapons.
I can think of other very dangerous things that you'd probably be able to sneak onboard. Stuff that can jeopardize an entire plane. And stuff that can allow you to kill a fair number of people.
I'm not going to post it here though.
Anyway, you did behave out of the ordinary and that gets you flagged. You're lucky your colleague didn't have child porn on the laptop...