I've been waiting for the franchise to recover ever since it fell off after 7. Some people like 9, but I'm tired of being an old fogey and insisting 7 is the last good one.
Every operating system i've ever come across makes it very easy to set up Dvorak keyboard layout.
Linux: setxkbmap dvorak XP: control panel-regional-add language-dvorak is the first on the keyboard layout list-apply apple: no idea but maybe setxkbmap works since it's just BSD anyway
I type dvorak on my work computer, all my home computers, but unfortunately I have to type visually on the shared terminals at work. I have not yet learned to touch-type Qwerty.
I'm not sure that he will go down in history as a disappointment. I think that history will be viewed through the same rose-colored glasses that people used when he was elected. There was absolutely no basis for putting any hope in Obama for the election, but that didn't stop people, the media, and the country as a whole from believing in him anyway. In a similar way, I think that history will NOT view Obama as a terrible failure of a president, even though it should.
This is already happening actually. Consider the fact that although Obama is, in fact, a lying corporatist corrupt statist failure of a president, and is not some Great Hope or Change, nobody is blaming him for anything. Nobody is blaming him for the economy, and most tellingly, nobody is blaming him for the TSA. The TSA, its continued existence, its increasing scope, its cancer-machines, and its other abuses, is practically the civil rights story of the decade, and practically everyone hates the TSA, but nobody blames the TSA on Obama, despite the fact that Obama can stop it whenever he wants to. When federal agents raided Gibson guitars, nobody blamed it on Obama, despite the fact that Obama wields enough power in the executive branch that the Fish and Wildlife service should be his responsibility.
Contrast this with the presidency of Bush Jr (another terrible president), where everything he did was rightfully blamed on him and his character. Patriot act? Blamed on Bush. Katrina? Basically blamed on Bush. Wars in the middle east? Rightfully blamed on Bush.
Now consider Obama. Failure to follow through on his campaign promise to end the wars? Mysteriously not blamed on Obama. Failure to follow through with his early-campaign promise to revisit marijuina laws? Forgotten, and not blamed on Obama. TSA installs scanner machines and gropes people, outraging the nation? Not blamed on Obama. Biggest economic collapse and funneling of trillions of dollars of wealth from the American middle class to the bankers? Not blamed on Obama. Increasing the national debt by a staggering amount and demanding an increase to the debt ceiling, while basically admitting that he intends to spend every penny of the increase? Not blamed on Obama. Obama signs the Patriot Act renewal? Nobody seems to notice or blame Obama.
I think the issue is that people elected him president but didn't actually want him as president; they just wanted a black wannabe Marxist in the white house for the novelty of it all. Therefore, they don't hold him responsible for what rightfully are his own failures as a president. It's as if people subconsciously have just accepted that Obama is a puppet, and therefore it doesn't make sense to hold him responsible for the abuses of the Federal government that should fall at his feet. Meanwhile the war on drugs continues, the TSA abuses continue, our economy continues to worsen, our spending continues to increase, and overall the executive branch is running around with a torch burning houses and Obama just continues getting away with the "these aren't the droids you are looking for" deflection that got him elected.
Your post reminds me of Thor Heyerdahl, who has put forth multiple theories that ancient people crossed basically all the oceans of the world at one time or other...he sailed across the Atlantic in a period-correct Egyptian reed boat to central America (where else did those pyramid-building Mayans come from?) and sailed across a big chunk of the Pacific in a period-correct balsa wood raft, to support his theory that the islands were populate by central Americans, or something. The general historical community has the basic attidude of the parent's post...they aren't sure whether to believe him and not sure if it matters if he's right. Columbus still goes down in history as the man who discovered America.
It's not as straightforward as that, because current multi-platter hard drives have all the read heads attached to the same "tonearm" (I don't know the proper term). So even with a 4-platter drive, you can only read 1 platter at a time, I assume, unless they somehow sync the platters together. With a 30-platter drive, your throughput would be much worse than with 10 3-platter drives, because you would have 10 times the usable read-heads at any given moment.
What's worse, is the grey area introduced by mixing police forces and school administration. This great swath of legal grey area is the delight of school administration, who basically get their own private police to enforce their rules. And the police are happy too, because they can get citizens to buckle due to the new source of leverage they have (in the form of academic sanctions should the student not comply).
Schools have rules, but they aren't laws. If you break the rules, the school may discipline you, but they can't charge you with any crime, and the only consequences of breaking the school's rules should be internal sanctions, or expulsion, or possibly some kind of breach of contract civil suit. However, when the police are enforcing those rules, the lines between school rules and 'real' laws becomes completely blurred, with police abusing their authority under color of law to use police power without legal backing, to enforce non-laws. When the police tell Johnny that he's not allowed to chew gum in the hallways, does Johnny know if that's a legal reality or just a school rule? If Johnny doesn't comply, does he get a pink slip or handcuffs? The result is that Johnny grows thinking that the police have unlimited authority. Which is probably fairly accurate, actually.
What are you supposed to do when the police stop you on campus for, say, skateboarding? Are they stopping you for some legal infraction or just an academic one? Are they acting as agents of the school or agents of the law? Do you have to listen to them at all? It's never clear, and they can decide later; you have to assume the worst.
When I was in college, the campus police would routinely be tasked with enforcing school policy such as housing policies, parking policies, and even policies on window decorations and dress code. They use their uniforms and fear of the out-of-control authority to force compliance on vulnerable students. The whole situation is one very clear case of abuse of authority.
When the school sends its private police force to crack down, what are you supposed to do, tell the police to get lost because you aren't breaking the law, just school policy? Often they will arrest you anyway. Even if they don't, good luck with your college career if you get a 'record' with the campus 'police', even if you have broken no laws. That kind of behavior is not viewed positively by school administration. Thus you have a wedge of out-of-control police officers and out-of-control administrators gleefully operating in this mini-environment of real abuse, with little visibility, and no outcry. Mommy and Daddy see the Campus Police SUV rolling around campus and get the warm and fuzzies, and that's the extent of public knowledge of campus police forces.
Actually, the opposite is the case. Being white and poor is about the worst you can do in America. Especially when it comes to education, poor and white is definitely a combination for hardship.
Sure I can, but the Ubuntu network manager does it all for me; stores my wifi passwords and auto-connects as long as I'm using the GUI. But if I don't log into my desktop for some reason, none of that configuration happens. Yes I understand that I can do my own network management with my own scripts, but why should I have to have two separate systems? Network is basic. It would be like my keyboard not working until/unless I logged into my desktop environment. I don't understand why the GUI network managers don't just act as a front end for those networking tools like ifconfig or whatever, and use a config file to store settings.
Here's a related question--why does network management in Linux have anything to do with the desktop environment? It never made sense to me that if I log in with Gnome, I get a different network management than if I log in with KDE, and if I don't log into ANY desktop environment and go straight to the console, my internet never connects, because there is no network manager running. WTF? Why don't they just have a daemon network manager with a config file like God intended, and let all the desktop environments write their own gui frontends for it if they want to?
Totally. I wish people would agree on what metrics are good for the "economy".
I mean, if jobs/MW is good for the economy, why not just hook up a bunch of treadmills to generators, chain them together electrically, and let people generate their 300W or whatever that a human is capable of outputting. Boom, massive jobs/MW.
Repeal the 17th Amendment (let states decide for themselves if they want to elect Senators by popular vote in their states, many will do so on their own and some will not)
Who is going to do that? What political structure could ever effect that change? Answer: None, because there is no benefit in that for any of powers that could possibly change it.
<quote><p>Get rid of the Federal Reserve system. Competitive banking instead of a monopoly cartel where the same commercial banks who in many circumstances have their CEO's running Federal Reserve regional banks that control the money.</p></quote>
Again, who is going to do this? Everyone on the government side of the fence, who could change this, would never do so, because it's a conflict of interest. It would be like a corporation taking steps to increase its competition. It takes a special, ideological, principled kind of person to go into government to reduce the power of government. Any time someone tries, he gets laughed out as unelectable (see: Ron Paul 2008).
We basically are in a conflict between The People (common rights of man) and The State (divine right of kings). The People have essentially no tools with which to increase their own power and influence. There is the oft-mentioned 3-boxes: The jury box rarely functions as designed because ignorant, public-educated people don't exercise it. The ballot box does not function as designed due to an inefficient voting system, which has been socially usurped as anyone can see and is no longer functioning to empower The People. The ammunition box is the only one left, and that doesn't seem to be doing us much good right now, and it's unlikely to do so either. It's unlikely that the same ignorant populous that fails to exercise the Jury and Ballot box would ever do any better with the ammunition box.
Yes, but both easy and hard degrees serve the function of laundering classicsm. The unstated value of college degrees, in my estimation, is that they provide the corporate world a politically-correct avenue for helping them select candidates that are 'the right kind of people'.
In fact, joke liberal arts majors serve this function very well, because the knowledge itself is useless, thereby providing even stronger evidence that the degree holder comes from a well-off background.
Also, suppose they do trace back to the thief. Isn't it possible that they just find an identity or address which is itself anonymous? I mean, a lot of this stuff goes over my head, but can't you actually create an anonymous identity, and then have the identity do the actual bitcoin transactions?
Even the military can't break the laws of physics. Diffraction limiting ensures that it's impossible to read "wash me" written on someone's car from space.
This is why car radiators and most heat exchangers are painted black. They EMIT heat better. In the case of radiators, you always know they will be hotter than the surroundings so black is the correct color to choose. When an item may either be tasked to either emit or absorb heat, the choice of color is not straightforward as has been pointed out. Black colors may absorb more heat but they also emit more. There is no free lunch; you can't have one without the other. If it were true that black absorbed heat more than white, and not also true that heat emits heat better than white, it would be possible to make a perpetual motion machine just by sticking a black panel and white panel next to each other and putting a heat engine between them.
Many of us don't watch an hour a night. I at the old price, I could justify "having it available", but since I watch my Roku much less than 1 hour per night, my per-hour cost becomes much more than.26 per hour.
If Netflix really charged $.26 per hour, that would be great. Heck, they should have a charge-by-the-hour or charge-by-the MB rate. Such a rate would be perfect for low-watchers like me.
The proper way to use tax code to influence behavior is to tax electricity, and let the consumers and markets decide where to save and spend electricity according to their means, needs, and values. Those that want to burn electricity with incandescent bulbs would be allowed to. Or is the bulb ban not really about reducing energy usage, and really is about control and moral imposition?
Not to mention, Japanese has 100-some syllables, where English has 50,000-some. I'm not a linguist or a speech recognition guy but it would seem much easier to make a japanese-speaking robot than an English one. I don't think there would be much difference in terms of actually understanding the language or translating it, but in dictating it and transcribing it.
Re:Tau is used everywhere. I prefer k_k
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 1
You have never heard of this notation because we invented it. We wanted/needed a better way to express 2pi because, as TFA states, pi is a stupid choice for a constant and when you are doing physics you end up writing 2pi constantly; having a constant for 2pi leads to more intuitive notation that helps to clarify relationships that are less obvious when you have stray factors of two which by rights ought to belong to their pi instead getting loose and wandering about your analysis.
There seems to be some momentum behind using Tau but guess what, Tau is used 3 billion other places in physics so it's a poor choice for a constant that should have a fairly unique name.
All in all, though, the pi thing isn't as bad as people make it out to be. Eventually you just start considering 2pi to be a quantity all its own. If you really want to get riled up over something, I suggest the fact that electrons are negative
Tau is used everywhere. I prefer k_k
on
Happy Tau Day
·
· Score: 1
Tau is already super overloaded. In grad school, we always wrote "2pi" as k_k, that is, k with a subscript k (it doesn't look as weird in handwriting, because the subscript).
If they really thought she had explosives...would they have let her on the plane? Of course not.
A lot of people seem to miss this simple point through, I guess, conditioning.
By letting the old lady get on the plane, they admit that they are extremely confident that she is NOT a terrorist and whatever was in her pants is completely harmless. Otherwise they would never let her on the plane. And this goes for all the people who have their play-doh, baby bottles, cheese, etc confiscated. If TSA had even a small reason to believe those things were actual explosives, you would not be flying that day, no fucking way. I mean, what do they do with the supposed possible-explosives they confiscate? If they are possibly explosives, shouldn't they put them in some explosion-safe location and have a bomb expert examine them to determine the danger? They don't do any of that, because they known goddam well that the baby bottles and cheese they confiscate is perfectly harmless. They just confiscate it anyway, because they are thugs and they can.
If I try to get on a plane and they honest-to-god find explosives on me, and honest-to-god think that I'm going to blow up the fucking plane, do they just let me leave the line, dispose of my explosives, and then get back on the plane? Of course not. They would never do that. Honestly, I don't know what they would do--I don't think they would know what to do with a real bomb or a terrorist if they actually caught one--but they would probably shut the whole terminal down, call the bomb squad, and arrest me. The fact that they do none of those things when the confiscate my cheese is proof that they know I'm harmless, but they steal my shit anyway. In this case, they knew that this old lady was harmless--you know this--but they just bullied her anyway, because they are thugs and they can.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been waiting for the franchise to recover ever since it fell off after 7. Some people like 9, but I'm tired of being an old fogey and insisting 7 is the last good one.
MRI subjects are often lying down, but I don't know what they would be laying down.
Every operating system i've ever come across makes it very easy to set up Dvorak keyboard layout.
Linux: setxkbmap dvorak
XP: control panel-regional-add language-dvorak is the first on the keyboard layout list-apply
apple: no idea but maybe setxkbmap works since it's just BSD anyway
I type dvorak on my work computer, all my home computers, but unfortunately I have to type visually on the shared terminals at work. I have not yet learned to touch-type Qwerty.
I'm not sure that he will go down in history as a disappointment. I think that history will be viewed through the same rose-colored glasses that people used when he was elected. There was absolutely no basis for putting any hope in Obama for the election, but that didn't stop people, the media, and the country as a whole from believing in him anyway. In a similar way, I think that history will NOT view Obama as a terrible failure of a president, even though it should.
This is already happening actually. Consider the fact that although Obama is, in fact, a lying corporatist corrupt statist failure of a president, and is not some Great Hope or Change, nobody is blaming him for anything. Nobody is blaming him for the economy, and most tellingly, nobody is blaming him for the TSA. The TSA, its continued existence, its increasing scope, its cancer-machines, and its other abuses, is practically the civil rights story of the decade, and practically everyone hates the TSA, but nobody blames the TSA on Obama, despite the fact that Obama can stop it whenever he wants to. When federal agents raided Gibson guitars, nobody blamed it on Obama, despite the fact that Obama wields enough power in the executive branch that the Fish and Wildlife service should be his responsibility.
Contrast this with the presidency of Bush Jr (another terrible president), where everything he did was rightfully blamed on him and his character. Patriot act? Blamed on Bush. Katrina? Basically blamed on Bush. Wars in the middle east? Rightfully blamed on Bush.
Now consider Obama. Failure to follow through on his campaign promise to end the wars? Mysteriously not blamed on Obama. Failure to follow through with his early-campaign promise to revisit marijuina laws? Forgotten, and not blamed on Obama. TSA installs scanner machines and gropes people, outraging the nation? Not blamed on Obama. Biggest economic collapse and funneling of trillions of dollars of wealth from the American middle class to the bankers? Not blamed on Obama. Increasing the national debt by a staggering amount and demanding an increase to the debt ceiling, while basically admitting that he intends to spend every penny of the increase? Not blamed on Obama. Obama signs the Patriot Act renewal? Nobody seems to notice or blame Obama.
I think the issue is that people elected him president but didn't actually want him as president; they just wanted a black wannabe Marxist in the white house for the novelty of it all. Therefore, they don't hold him responsible for what rightfully are his own failures as a president. It's as if people subconsciously have just accepted that Obama is a puppet, and therefore it doesn't make sense to hold him responsible for the abuses of the Federal government that should fall at his feet. Meanwhile the war on drugs continues, the TSA abuses continue, our economy continues to worsen, our spending continues to increase, and overall the executive branch is running around with a torch burning houses and Obama just continues getting away with the "these aren't the droids you are looking for" deflection that got him elected.
Your post reminds me of Thor Heyerdahl, who has put forth multiple theories that ancient people crossed basically all the oceans of the world at one time or other...he sailed across the Atlantic in a period-correct Egyptian reed boat to central America (where else did those pyramid-building Mayans come from?) and sailed across a big chunk of the Pacific in a period-correct balsa wood raft, to support his theory that the islands were populate by central Americans, or something. The general historical community has the basic attidude of the parent's post...they aren't sure whether to believe him and not sure if it matters if he's right. Columbus still goes down in history as the man who discovered America.
It's not as straightforward as that, because current multi-platter hard drives have all the read heads attached to the same "tonearm" (I don't know the proper term). So even with a 4-platter drive, you can only read 1 platter at a time, I assume, unless they somehow sync the platters together. With a 30-platter drive, your throughput would be much worse than with 10 3-platter drives, because you would have 10 times the usable read-heads at any given moment.
What's worse, is the grey area introduced by mixing police forces and school administration. This great swath of legal grey area is the delight of school administration, who basically get their own private police to enforce their rules. And the police are happy too, because they can get citizens to buckle due to the new source of leverage they have (in the form of academic sanctions should the student not comply).
Schools have rules, but they aren't laws. If you break the rules, the school may discipline you, but they can't charge you with any crime, and the only consequences of breaking the school's rules should be internal sanctions, or expulsion, or possibly some kind of breach of contract civil suit. However, when the police are enforcing those rules, the lines between school rules and 'real' laws becomes completely blurred, with police abusing their authority under color of law to use police power without legal backing, to enforce non-laws. When the police tell Johnny that he's not allowed to chew gum in the hallways, does Johnny know if that's a legal reality or just a school rule? If Johnny doesn't comply, does he get a pink slip or handcuffs? The result is that Johnny grows thinking that the police have unlimited authority. Which is probably fairly accurate, actually.
What are you supposed to do when the police stop you on campus for, say, skateboarding? Are they stopping you for some legal infraction or just an academic one? Are they acting as agents of the school or agents of the law? Do you have to listen to them at all? It's never clear, and they can decide later; you have to assume the worst.
When I was in college, the campus police would routinely be tasked with enforcing school policy such as housing policies, parking policies, and even policies on window decorations and dress code. They use their uniforms and fear of the out-of-control authority to force compliance on vulnerable students. The whole situation is one very clear case of abuse of authority.
When the school sends its private police force to crack down, what are you supposed to do, tell the police to get lost because you aren't breaking the law, just school policy? Often they will arrest you anyway. Even if they don't, good luck with your college career if you get a 'record' with the campus 'police', even if you have broken no laws. That kind of behavior is not viewed positively by school administration. Thus you have a wedge of out-of-control police officers and out-of-control administrators gleefully operating in this mini-environment of real abuse, with little visibility, and no outcry. Mommy and Daddy see the Campus Police SUV rolling around campus and get the warm and fuzzies, and that's the extent of public knowledge of campus police forces.
Actually, the opposite is the case. Being white and poor is about the worst you can do in America. Especially when it comes to education, poor and white is definitely a combination for hardship.
http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html
Sure I can, but the Ubuntu network manager does it all for me; stores my wifi passwords and auto-connects as long as I'm using the GUI. But if I don't log into my desktop for some reason, none of that configuration happens. Yes I understand that I can do my own network management with my own scripts, but why should I have to have two separate systems? Network is basic. It would be like my keyboard not working until/unless I logged into my desktop environment. I don't understand why the GUI network managers don't just act as a front end for those networking tools like ifconfig or whatever, and use a config file to store settings.
Here's a related question--why does network management in Linux have anything to do with the desktop environment? It never made sense to me that if I log in with Gnome, I get a different network management than if I log in with KDE, and if I don't log into ANY desktop environment and go straight to the console, my internet never connects, because there is no network manager running. WTF? Why don't they just have a daemon network manager with a config file like God intended, and let all the desktop environments write their own gui frontends for it if they want to?
Totally. I wish people would agree on what metrics are good for the "economy".
I mean, if jobs/MW is good for the economy, why not just hook up a bunch of treadmills to generators, chain them together electrically, and let people generate their 300W or whatever that a human is capable of outputting. Boom, massive jobs/MW.
Repeal the 17th Amendment (let states decide for themselves if they want to elect Senators by popular vote in their states, many will do so on their own and some will not)
Who is going to do that? What political structure could ever effect that change? Answer: None, because there is no benefit in that for any of powers that could possibly change it.
<quote><p>Get rid of the Federal Reserve system. Competitive banking instead of a monopoly cartel where the same commercial banks who in many circumstances have their CEO's running Federal Reserve regional banks that control the money.</p></quote>
Again, who is going to do this? Everyone on the government side of the fence, who could change this, would never do so, because it's a conflict of interest. It would be like a corporation taking steps to increase its competition. It takes a special, ideological, principled kind of person to go into government to reduce the power of government. Any time someone tries, he gets laughed out as unelectable (see: Ron Paul 2008).
We basically are in a conflict between The People (common rights of man) and The State (divine right of kings). The People have essentially no tools with which to increase their own power and influence. There is the oft-mentioned 3-boxes: The jury box rarely functions as designed because ignorant, public-educated people don't exercise it. The ballot box does not function as designed due to an inefficient voting system, which has been socially usurped as anyone can see and is no longer functioning to empower The People. The ammunition box is the only one left, and that doesn't seem to be doing us much good right now, and it's unlikely to do so either. It's unlikely that the same ignorant populous that fails to exercise the Jury and Ballot box would ever do any better with the ammunition box.
It's been a while since I left the airplane scene, but from what I remember, the FAA requires small-engine airplanes to have reciprocating engines.
I've never seen a reciprocating electric motor, so are electric airplanes even legal?
Yes, but both easy and hard degrees serve the function of laundering classicsm. The unstated value of college degrees, in my estimation, is that they provide the corporate world a politically-correct avenue for helping them select candidates that are 'the right kind of people'.
In fact, joke liberal arts majors serve this function very well, because the knowledge itself is useless, thereby providing even stronger evidence that the degree holder comes from a well-off background.
Also, suppose they do trace back to the thief. Isn't it possible that they just find an identity or address which is itself anonymous? I mean, a lot of this stuff goes over my head, but can't you actually create an anonymous identity, and then have the identity do the actual bitcoin transactions?
Even the military can't break the laws of physics. Diffraction limiting ensures that it's impossible to read "wash me" written on someone's car from space.
This is why car radiators and most heat exchangers are painted black. They EMIT heat better. In the case of radiators, you always know they will be hotter than the surroundings so black is the correct color to choose. When an item may either be tasked to either emit or absorb heat, the choice of color is not straightforward as has been pointed out. Black colors may absorb more heat but they also emit more. There is no free lunch; you can't have one without the other. If it were true that black absorbed heat more than white, and not also true that heat emits heat better than white, it would be possible to make a perpetual motion machine just by sticking a black panel and white panel next to each other and putting a heat engine between them.
Many of us don't watch an hour a night. I at the old price, I could justify "having it available", but since I watch my Roku much less than 1 hour per night, my per-hour cost becomes much more than .26 per hour.
If Netflix really charged $.26 per hour, that would be great. Heck, they should have a charge-by-the-hour or charge-by-the MB rate. Such a rate would be perfect for low-watchers like me.
How daring of you to attempt to point out the obvious to those who have proven oblivious to it. I applaud your persistence.
The proper way to use tax code to influence behavior is to tax electricity, and let the consumers and markets decide where to save and spend electricity according to their means, needs, and values. Those that want to burn electricity with incandescent bulbs would be allowed to. Or is the bulb ban not really about reducing energy usage, and really is about control and moral imposition?
http://xkcd.com/605/
Not to mention, Japanese has 100-some syllables, where English has 50,000-some. I'm not a linguist or a speech recognition guy but it would seem much easier to make a japanese-speaking robot than an English one. I don't think there would be much difference in terms of actually understanding the language or translating it, but in dictating it and transcribing it.
You have never heard of this notation because we invented it. We wanted/needed a better way to express 2pi because, as TFA states, pi is a stupid choice for a constant and when you are doing physics you end up writing 2pi constantly; having a constant for 2pi leads to more intuitive notation that helps to clarify relationships that are less obvious when you have stray factors of two which by rights ought to belong to their pi instead getting loose and wandering about your analysis.
There seems to be some momentum behind using Tau but guess what, Tau is used 3 billion other places in physics so it's a poor choice for a constant that should have a fairly unique name.
All in all, though, the pi thing isn't as bad as people make it out to be. Eventually you just start considering 2pi to be a quantity all its own. If you really want to get riled up over something, I suggest the fact that electrons are negative
Tau is already super overloaded. In grad school, we always wrote "2pi" as k_k, that is, k with a subscript k (it doesn't look as weird in handwriting, because the subscript).
Of course, it's pronounced "cake".
If they really thought she had explosives...would they have let her on the plane? Of course not.
A lot of people seem to miss this simple point through, I guess, conditioning.
By letting the old lady get on the plane, they admit that they are extremely confident that she is NOT a terrorist and whatever was in her pants is completely harmless. Otherwise they would never let her on the plane. And this goes for all the people who have their play-doh, baby bottles, cheese, etc confiscated. If TSA had even a small reason to believe those things were actual explosives, you would not be flying that day, no fucking way. I mean, what do they do with the supposed possible-explosives they confiscate? If they are possibly explosives, shouldn't they put them in some explosion-safe location and have a bomb expert examine them to determine the danger? They don't do any of that, because they known goddam well that the baby bottles and cheese they confiscate is perfectly harmless. They just confiscate it anyway, because they are thugs and they can.
If I try to get on a plane and they honest-to-god find explosives on me, and honest-to-god think that I'm going to blow up the fucking plane, do they just let me leave the line, dispose of my explosives, and then get back on the plane? Of course not. They would never do that. Honestly, I don't know what they would do--I don't think they would know what to do with a real bomb or a terrorist if they actually caught one--but they would probably shut the whole terminal down, call the bomb squad, and arrest me. The fact that they do none of those things when the confiscate my cheese is proof that they know I'm harmless, but they steal my shit anyway. In this case, they knew that this old lady was harmless--you know this--but they just bullied her anyway, because they are thugs and they can.