What do you think is happening any time someone gets killed by disease? Heck, even when someone is run over by a semi.
Strictly, this is only true if the Darwin-Awardee has actually killed him/her self before sprogging brats.
Otherwise, a lot of stupid motherfuckkers still contribute *their* shit genes to *our* less-shit gene pool. Which is unfortunately the current state of affairs.
[I] remember the first car I drove with power steering was hard for me to master, as there was no feedback
That's quite weird. I'd have to go back and find the manuals to determine which of the models of vehicle I've used or owned have had power steering. I'm pretty sure that my first car (made in 1964, before I was born) didn't have power steering ; several of the lorries I've driven didn't (up to 7 tonnes laden weight) ; but for the other cars, I simply don't know. You just get into the vehicle and drive it. If it's really unfamiliar, practice a few reverse parks in the car park until you've got the measure of it, then go.
So many people I see drive "to" a specific vehicle and have great difficulty changing vehicles ; but the more, and more different, vehicles you drive, the more you have to learn each vehicle each time you get into one. These days, I'm not particularly bothered whether I'm in a left-hand or right-hand drive country. Mini-car (the last was a Fiat Seiciento) to fully-loaded 7-tonne lorry, doesn't make a difference.
As as adult I taught myself to write with my left hand,
In my second or third year at Uni, I taught myself to write in all orientations : left or right hand ; right to left or left to right ; upside up or upside down. I made attempts at doing a Houdini - writing with my feet - but that never really approached legibility. It wasn't too difficult . ..
I still cannot clean my teeth with my left hand, nor beat an egg though
. . . but learning to eat with knife in left hand and fork in right... I never got comfortable with that. A spork in either hand, that was no problem, but knife-left-fork-right just never worked. I'm sure that I could have broken the habit if I'd cared enough, but it was surprisingly persistent.
Like the Royal Navy still insisting on sails and sail drill in the mid to latter days of steam.
When you have a novel propulsion system which is still undergoing rapid development... wouldn't you include a backup propulsion system that all the crews would be familar with?
Next time you're on a commercial boat, take a look at the lifeboats. Most likely they'll have a diesel engine (more robust at low maintenance & usage than petrol) with a stored hydraulic pressure starting system. And oars. Yes, oars. Because the lifeboat carries 24 hours of fuel only, but up to a week of rations and water for the full compliment. (Check SOLAS'84 regs for the details.)
[SIGH] it'll be time for my offshore survival training refresher course soon. Again. Seventh or eighth time, I've lost count.
What's so difficult about "Xi bee star"? I mean, it even alternates most of it's consonants with vowels. As names go, it's not just a pussycat, but it's rolling in your lap, purring.
If ten pounds of anything can get onto a plane by the simple expedient of bribery, please explain again why adult travelers, but not children, must remove their shoes as they stand massed in an unsecured part of a typical U.S. airport.
Why, Johnny, it's to make them all look like dick-heads. Isn't that obvious. It's the entertainment part of "security theatre", and you're the entertainment.
Except you can't feed legally animal products to livestock in the US or Europe.
FTFY
It's a very important distinction ; where there is a profit-based system, then someone will be looking for improved profit margins, and that will lead to the use of the cheapest proteinaceous supplements available.
What stands between you are the governemnt's regulations, testing agencies etc. Or, in the words of one of your political parties, "big nasty scary BIG government."
So, you can now draw a direct line between local politics and threats to your health. Have a nice day now.
I was thinking more of Svante Arrhenius, who in 1896 showed that CO2 is a significant greenhouse gas ; Tyndall's work earlier showed (correctly) that H2O is a greenhouse gas, but changes in it's contribution are considerably constrained by the thermal inertia of the oceans, whereas anthropogenic production of CO2 (and therefore increase in it's greenhouse effect) is essentially independent of temperature.
Ah, the outrages sensibilities of the second member of the Bush Dynasty. What a good way to be remembered by history. "The War of Bush's Disgraced Dignity" will go down with the great ones like "The War of Jenkin's Ear".
There are onshore oilfields operating in the UK which are not part of the Wytch Farm complex, some of which I've worked on.
- In Nottinghamshire, around the village of Eakring (where Kenting used to have their rig-base, though I don't know if they're still there), they've been drilling and producing since approximately 1935.
- Wytch Farm is, as you say, the biggie.
- Across the valley from Goodwood racecourse, above a village called Singleton, on a wooded hilltop in a nature reserve, is a modest field producing from a single pad ; I've worked on that site, back when it had two slots in production with cellars cut for another two wells. I recently saw it on a TV news program (pointing out a bit of concrete to the wife and saying "I used to work *there*. Before they laid the concrete." Pointing at a bank of exposed Chalk and saying "*That* echinoid on the bookshelf came from *there*." Spot the geologist!), and it looks as if they'd put in a second skidway, presumably to take the site up to 8 wells. It was called "Singleton" when I was there, but it's changed owners several times since then and may have changed names.
- Along the strike of that South Downs cuesta there are a number of other prospects. Last year there was a call for tender for personnel to work on a couple of exploration wells in the Weald, but I took a project abroad instead.
Given the current good state of oil prices, I can see more prospects being dusted off along that coast. "Nimbys ahoy!"
since carbon dioxide was shown to be a greenhouse gas in the first half of the 19th century.
Second half, actually, and quite late.
You've got to be careful with the straw-clutchers of the climate change sceptics - they'll clutch at any trivial flaw to discount your entire argument.
my wife drive. Speed limit a lower limit, texting, and yelling at the kids.
From your nonchalance at the Darwin Award behaviour, I assume the kids are genetically someone else's problem. Or, you've got the genetic inheritance (that you give a shit about) stowed somewhere else?
Probably not directly. Truecrypt works at a pretty low level - all encryptions do - while I'd expect these services to work at the file level, or at least block-level streaming.
This study does lend wait to my hypothesis:
[SNIP]
Or I could be wrong.
Your English grammar fails, badly, stupidly and carelessly. On the basis of that alone, I am pretty sure that you are wrong. Such sloppiness and incompetence rarely confines itself to one aspect of cognition.
That's a pretty accurate one-word summary of the industry. Having done 4 wells onshore-UK, that makes me one of the more experienced people for the region.
has an admirable environmental record;
... two of those wells having been drilled in a Nature Reserve, but not the one at Wytch Farm.
Onshore can be done well.
That's not the right thing to say. Have you been boiling your babies before you eat them, or are you just eating them raw? It's patently obvious that you're using something invalid to inform you about these matters, instead of swinging an organic hand-knitted Tibetan tofu phalloform pointer over the Ouija board in the approved manner. Pickled eggs be thy penance!
Of course, in reality nobody drills their water wells that deep anyway,
Given that the article (which I haven't bothered to read - it's probably just a re-hash of the BGS report that was released a week or so ago, which I did read) is discussing the UK's potential reserves of offshore shale gas, then a couple of points are relevant : firstly, almost no-one in the UK operates private wells for water supplies, almost everyone is on the piped water system. Secondly, almost no-one in the UK lives offshore, where the reserves under discussion are.
but never made it to the Aberdeen office. I heard nothing but bad things about it, mainly from the weather. People would rather work in the Jakarta office (the one most often closed due to civil unrest).
I know what you mean about the weather - though I've lived there by choice for... 29 years, nearly. My wife, fresh from the frozen wastes of Central Siberia, finds Aberdeen to be uncomfortably cold. Or to be more precise, damp+cool simultaneously, and infuriatingly unpredictable.
For the reasons you first gave, Shared Services wouldn't take a standby.
I can see that potentially being a problem. OTOH, since people leaving Aberdeen need to go through the offshore check-in to get to find out if there's a standby (same searches, same liability to a breathalyser (we had 3 people bumped yesterday for failing breath tests ; things seem to be tightening up a lot!) then wait in the offshore terminal (no bar, at all) if you're going to get a flight, there's few drunks even consider trying it. Coming back... not claiming that Shetlanders are the world's most sober, but with the (present) airport being a half-hour drive from the nearest habitation, and further from a bar... it doesn't turn out to be a problem.
Then again, if you were on such a plane and tried arsing around like that with 50-odd (sometimes very odd) hairy-arsed oilfield trash grumpily on their way to work, or joyfully on their way home... well you might just find that the cabin cameras stop working and you fall down the plane's stairs as often as necessary to make you comply. And if you're mad enough to try it after a gentle talking to, then you are clinically, dangerously insane and will be restrained.
~500 million years ago was around the time of the Cambrian explosion here on earth, after a big snowball event.
The Cambrian explosion was around 550 to 540Ma. The "snowball event" is less well founded, and it's significance, intensity, duration and global simultaneity are more open to disagreement than Discovery and NatGeo Channels would lead you to think.
The (approximate) time limits I proposed for the re-surfacing of Venus go back as far as 500 million years, but to connect the Cambrian explosion and the resurfacing would require dragging both events out of their credible time periods to get an overlap. The Permian-Triassic extinction event also falls into the "re-surfacing window", at it's nearer end. As do the end-Devonian and Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction events. The P-T event and the end-Dev event are closely associated with large impacts (Manicougain, Canada and Bedout, Australia ; IIRC), though it's not terribly clear if the impacts came before the extinctions or after. Or if they're just coincidences.
To get a clear signal of a Venusian impact causing secondary impacts on Earth, you'd need to collate the ages of all the recorded impacts on the Earth, line them up, and then look for a particular peak. The problem is, a lot of the ages are not very well recorded. The data simply isn't there. a +/-100Ma accuracy on an age is nothing unusual. That's going to make it very difficult to acquire data to support your concept.
That's part of the reason that it's easier to check a concept for ways it couldn't be possible than for ways that it could be possible. It would be perfectly possible for there to have been 32 distinct gunmen on the Grassy Knoll, but for it to still have been Lee Harvey Oswald who was the killer. OTOH, if the angle of fire and penetration make it impossible for LHO to have been the shooter, then Jack Ruby was wrong. (I may be mangling the analogy - I don't follow the Keneddy conspiracy nuts any further than finding the remote and moving to something interesting.)
It's been proposed that Triton is a captured satellite as well, I believe. Maybe something Neptune picked up as it migrated outward.
Perhaps, shading towards "probably". The further out we get, the less orderly the solar system becomes. Which doesn't terribly surprise me.
Wonder what the ratio of captures to collides to ejects is when these bodies encounter each other during solar system formation. Would be interesting if you could also determine how much big stuff either slammed into the gas giants or was ejected from the solar system (or spun into the sun).
Certainly good questions. Some of them we can estimate the answer by modelling studies of the sort that Prof Minton is involved in. (And many others, it should be said.)
The composition question has I think been addressed by spectroscopy on the gas giants, and is pretty minor for Jupiter and Saturn. From a different direction, there was a report last year of a star detected with evidence of having just swallowed a "terrestrial" planet - again spectroscopy. The logic in their argument is a moderately long inference chain, but seems solid to me. Worth digging out from Arxiv.
In that case there's no meaningful distinction between charter and commercial carrier. I don't work in the aviation industry and have no interest in it's internal details beyond what I need to know to get me to work. (And I so, so, so hate flying that I really prefer to avoid it for vacations, though the wife differs and is welcome the nightmare of trying to sort out schedules for the vacations she wants us to go on.)
And Shared Services is an operation run mainly by BP for getting employees and contractors of oil companies to the oil fields. I'm surprised a roughneck wouldn't have made it up there at some point.
Sort of like they've been running to Baltasound and/ or Scatsta and/ or Sumburgh for the last 30 years, and occasionally run to Donegal and Cork too. The name of the company changes every 3 or 4 years and isn't worth keeping track of. On those services, the general public can get standby tickets. No point in a seat going un-filled, but they're not allowed to compete with the un-subsidised carriers for non-standby traffic. They're fixed-wings ; the helicopters are industry passengers only.
That said - I'm not a roughneck, along with 94 of the 100 other people on board this rig who aren't roughnecks either. And while I've worked in (at least) 11 countries on three continents, it's just coincidence that I've not yet worked for BP anywhere in the world.
Oh no, tell a lie - I did some work for BP Venuzuela in 1994.But I never left the office in Aberdeen to do it.
Where are you flying where they'll turn a flight around for someone not wearing a seatbelt?
To and from work, on various oil rigs for various companies on various continents. The logic is this : you are not on your time ; you are on work's time ; you have been instructed to wear your seatbelt at all times ; you have not complied ; after being requested, once, to don your seatbelt, if you are still not complying then it is obvious that you have developed insanity and are a danger to the crew and rest of the passengers. Flight emergency is declared, it's off to the nearest landing spot and you'll be removed, forcibly if necessary. If you're landed on another oil installation, a coastguard helicopter with police officers will be sent out to collect the lunatic, sedated if necessary.
It doesn't sound like a commercial carrier.
The carriers are commercial. They're not serving the general public though. Unless the general public wants to book flights for 12-25 PAX at a time.
First thing that popped into my head is the Shared Services flights in Alaska, a charter operation.
No idea. But considering that a forced landing into Central Alaska is likely to be as unwelcome as a forced landing into freezing seawater... I wouldn't be surprised if they've got pretty strict policies too.
And why is an e-book treated differently from a regular book?
e-books typically contain more electronics than ink-on-paper books. Unless you've found an e-book that has been accepted by today's particular carrier as type-safe for today's particular model of aircraft (none have ever been accepted TTBOMK; none have ever been tested TTBOMK. It's expensive.). But even then, it's very unlikely to get past the search before donning your flight suit, because the security guards have big signs saying "no e-books, no MP3s", and that's what they follow. You can try to argue it with them, but they'll spend about 3 seconds on it before asking of you want to remove yourself from the flight. You've lost.
It's not a democracy. It's work. If you don't like the rules, quit. Decide now because you're holding up the queue of other people joyfully waiting to get to work.
FWIW, I did get out to work today - after being put back 4 times in the last week. MP3 player in my hold baggage ; Kindle, house keys and mobile phone on the living room table at home. Charlie Stross novel in coat pocket. Clothing that conforms to the "3 Layer Policy" (for in-water insulation, if we go in). A delightful half-hour of videos pre-flight, watched by security guards to make sure we're awake. What to do if the flight crashes. Where and how to deploy the liferafts. It's the sort of thing that makes you ask yourself - "Do I really want to take this flight? Do I really want to do this job?"
Well, the specifics of your virginia situation aside... generally there is a lot of twaddle spouted by idealists of all stripes, including (for example) those who want to live in an agrarian utopia "like our grandsires did". They conveniently choose to forget about the other things their grandsires had - far more infectious diseases, a perinatal death rate for both mothers and children that would make today's women really think twice about getting pregnant (not that there was effective contraception for the grandsires, which is probably why they had 20 children per male, and several wives in series).
Security is just another thing that utopians don't like to think about : the idea that people who live next door to you might be perfectly happy to steal everything that's not welded in place if they think they'll get away with it.
Oh damn, I forgot to log in. But I worked round it anyway.
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Strictly, this is only true if the Darwin-Awardee has actually killed him/her self before sprogging brats.
Otherwise, a lot of stupid motherfuckkers still contribute *their* shit genes to *our* less-shit gene pool. Which is unfortunately the current state of affairs.
That's quite weird. I'd have to go back and find the manuals to determine which of the models of vehicle I've used or owned have had power steering. I'm pretty sure that my first car (made in 1964, before I was born) didn't have power steering ; several of the lorries I've driven didn't (up to 7 tonnes laden weight) ; but for the other cars, I simply don't know. You just get into the vehicle and drive it. If it's really unfamiliar, practice a few reverse parks in the car park until you've got the measure of it, then go.
So many people I see drive "to" a specific vehicle and have great difficulty changing vehicles ; but the more, and more different, vehicles you drive, the more you have to learn each vehicle each time you get into one. These days, I'm not particularly bothered whether I'm in a left-hand or right-hand drive country. Mini-car (the last was a Fiat Seiciento) to fully-loaded 7-tonne lorry, doesn't make a difference.
In my second or third year at Uni, I taught myself to write in all orientations : left or right hand ; right to left or left to right ; upside up or upside down. I made attempts at doing a Houdini - writing with my feet - but that never really approached legibility. It wasn't too difficult . . .
. . . but learning to eat with knife in left hand and fork in right ... I never got comfortable with that. A spork in either hand, that was no problem, but knife-left-fork-right just never worked. I'm sure that I could have broken the habit if I'd cared enough, but it was surprisingly persistent.
When you have a novel propulsion system which is still undergoing rapid development ... wouldn't you include a backup propulsion system that all the crews would be familar with?
Next time you're on a commercial boat, take a look at the lifeboats. Most likely they'll have a diesel engine (more robust at low maintenance & usage than petrol) with a stored hydraulic pressure starting system. And oars. Yes, oars. Because the lifeboat carries 24 hours of fuel only, but up to a week of rations and water for the full compliment. (Check SOLAS'84 regs for the details.)
[SIGH] it'll be time for my offshore survival training refresher course soon. Again. Seventh or eighth time, I've lost count.
What's so difficult about "Xi bee star"? I mean, it even alternates most of it's consonants with vowels. As names go, it's not just a pussycat, but it's rolling in your lap, purring.
Why, Johnny, it's to make them all look like dick-heads. Isn't that obvious. It's the entertainment part of "security theatre", and you're the entertainment.
OK ; I'm comfortable. Entertain us!
This really, really scary guy.
With a pig farm.
FTFY
It's a very important distinction ; where there is a profit-based system, then someone will be looking for improved profit margins, and that will lead to the use of the cheapest proteinaceous supplements available.
What stands between you are the governemnt's regulations, testing agencies etc. Or, in the words of one of your political parties, "big nasty scary BIG government."
So, you can now draw a direct line between local politics and threats to your health. Have a nice day now.
Until we boil the oceans.
At which point, "game" is very much "over".
It was developing science at the time.
So, it's not a little problem, and it's not a big problem ; it's that best of classes of problem, Someone Else's Problem.
Unless, of course, you've got a TV with WiFi.
Ah, the outrages sensibilities of the second member of the Bush Dynasty. What a good way to be remembered by history. "The War of Bush's Disgraced Dignity" will go down with the great ones like "The War of Jenkin's Ear".
Given the current good state of oil prices, I can see more prospects being dusted off along that coast. "Nimbys ahoy!"
Second half, actually, and quite late.
You've got to be careful with the straw-clutchers of the climate change sceptics - they'll clutch at any trivial flaw to discount your entire argument.
From your nonchalance at the Darwin Award behaviour, I assume the kids are genetically someone else's problem. Or, you've got the genetic inheritance (that you give a shit about) stowed somewhere else?
Probably not directly. Truecrypt works at a pretty low level - all encryptions do - while I'd expect these services to work at the file level, or at least block-level streaming.
Your English grammar fails, badly, stupidly and carelessly. On the basis of that alone, I am pretty sure that you are wrong. Such sloppiness and incompetence rarely confines itself to one aspect of cognition.
That's a pretty accurate one-word summary of the industry. Having done 4 wells onshore-UK, that makes me one of the more experienced people for the region.
That's not the right thing to say. Have you been boiling your babies before you eat them, or are you just eating them raw? It's patently obvious that you're using something invalid to inform you about these matters, instead of swinging an organic hand-knitted Tibetan tofu phalloform pointer over the Ouija board in the approved manner. Pickled eggs be thy penance!
Given that the article (which I haven't bothered to read - it's probably just a re-hash of the BGS report that was released a week or so ago, which I did read) is discussing the UK's potential reserves of offshore shale gas, then a couple of points are relevant : firstly, almost no-one in the UK operates private wells for water supplies, almost everyone is on the piped water system. Secondly, almost no-one in the UK lives offshore, where the reserves under discussion are.
Which would explain why Iraq was made into a giant hole in the ground?
I know what you mean about the weather - though I've lived there by choice for ... 29 years, nearly. My wife, fresh from the frozen wastes of Central Siberia, finds Aberdeen to be uncomfortably cold. Or to be more precise, damp+cool simultaneously, and infuriatingly unpredictable.
I can see that potentially being a problem. OTOH, since people leaving Aberdeen need to go through the offshore check-in to get to find out if there's a standby (same searches, same liability to a breathalyser (we had 3 people bumped yesterday for failing breath tests ; things seem to be tightening up a lot!) then wait in the offshore terminal (no bar, at all) if you're going to get a flight, there's few drunks even consider trying it. Coming back ... not claiming that Shetlanders are the world's most sober, but with the (present) airport being a half-hour drive from the nearest habitation, and further from a bar ... it doesn't turn out to be a problem.
Then again, if you were on such a plane and tried arsing around like that with 50-odd (sometimes very odd) hairy-arsed oilfield trash grumpily on their way to work, or joyfully on their way home ... well you might just find that the cabin cameras stop working and you fall down the plane's stairs as often as necessary to make you comply. And if you're mad enough to try it after a gentle talking to, then you are clinically, dangerously insane and will be restrained.
Oh well, morning call !
The Cambrian explosion was around 550 to 540Ma. The "snowball event" is less well founded, and it's significance, intensity, duration and global simultaneity are more open to disagreement than Discovery and NatGeo Channels would lead you to think.
The (approximate) time limits I proposed for the re-surfacing of Venus go back as far as 500 million years, but to connect the Cambrian explosion and the resurfacing would require dragging both events out of their credible time periods to get an overlap. The Permian-Triassic extinction event also falls into the "re-surfacing window", at it's nearer end. As do the end-Devonian and Ordovician-Silurian mass extinction events. The P-T event and the end-Dev event are closely associated with large impacts (Manicougain, Canada and Bedout, Australia ; IIRC), though it's not terribly clear if the impacts came before the extinctions or after. Or if they're just coincidences.
To get a clear signal of a Venusian impact causing secondary impacts on Earth, you'd need to collate the ages of all the recorded impacts on the Earth, line them up, and then look for a particular peak. The problem is, a lot of the ages are not very well recorded. The data simply isn't there. a +/-100Ma accuracy on an age is nothing unusual. That's going to make it very difficult to acquire data to support your concept.
That's part of the reason that it's easier to check a concept for ways it couldn't be possible than for ways that it could be possible. It would be perfectly possible for there to have been 32 distinct gunmen on the Grassy Knoll, but for it to still have been Lee Harvey Oswald who was the killer. OTOH, if the angle of fire and penetration make it impossible for LHO to have been the shooter, then Jack Ruby was wrong. (I may be mangling the analogy - I don't follow the Keneddy conspiracy nuts any further than finding the remote and moving to something interesting.)
Perhaps, shading towards "probably". The further out we get, the less orderly the solar system becomes. Which doesn't terribly surprise me.
Certainly good questions. Some of them we can estimate the answer by modelling studies of the sort that Prof Minton is involved in. (And many others, it should be said.)
The composition question has I think been addressed by spectroscopy on the gas giants, and is pretty minor for Jupiter and Saturn. From a different direction, there was a report last year of a star detected with evidence of having just swallowed a "terrestrial" planet - again spectroscopy. The logic in their argument is a moderately long inference chain, but seems solid to me. Worth digging out from Arxiv.
Sort of like they've been running to Baltasound and/ or Scatsta and/ or Sumburgh for the last 30 years, and occasionally run to Donegal and Cork too. The name of the company changes every 3 or 4 years and isn't worth keeping track of. On those services, the general public can get standby tickets. No point in a seat going un-filled, but they're not allowed to compete with the un-subsidised carriers for non-standby traffic. They're fixed-wings ; the helicopters are industry passengers only.
That said - I'm not a roughneck, along with 94 of the 100 other people on board this rig who aren't roughnecks either. And while I've worked in (at least) 11 countries on three continents, it's just coincidence that I've not yet worked for BP anywhere in the world.
Oh no, tell a lie - I did some work for BP Venuzuela in 1994.But I never left the office in Aberdeen to do it.
To and from work, on various oil rigs for various companies on various continents. The logic is this : you are not on your time ; you are on work's time ; you have been instructed to wear your seatbelt at all times ; you have not complied ; after being requested, once, to don your seatbelt, if you are still not complying then it is obvious that you have developed insanity and are a danger to the crew and rest of the passengers. Flight emergency is declared, it's off to the nearest landing spot and you'll be removed, forcibly if necessary. If you're landed on another oil installation, a coastguard helicopter with police officers will be sent out to collect the lunatic, sedated if necessary.
The carriers are commercial. They're not serving the general public though. Unless the general public wants to book flights for 12-25 PAX at a time.
No idea. But considering that a forced landing into Central Alaska is likely to be as unwelcome as a forced landing into freezing seawater ... I wouldn't be surprised if they've got pretty strict policies too.
e-books typically contain more electronics than ink-on-paper books. Unless you've found an e-book that has been accepted by today's particular carrier as type-safe for today's particular model of aircraft (none have ever been accepted TTBOMK; none have ever been tested TTBOMK. It's expensive.). But even then, it's very unlikely to get past the search before donning your flight suit, because the security guards have big signs saying "no e-books, no MP3s", and that's what they follow. You can try to argue it with them, but they'll spend about 3 seconds on it before asking of you want to remove yourself from the flight. You've lost.
It's not a democracy. It's work. If you don't like the rules, quit. Decide now because you're holding up the queue of other people joyfully waiting to get to work.
FWIW, I did get out to work today - after being put back 4 times in the last week. MP3 player in my hold baggage ; Kindle, house keys and mobile phone on the living room table at home. Charlie Stross novel in coat pocket. Clothing that conforms to the "3 Layer Policy" (for in-water insulation, if we go in). A delightful half-hour of videos pre-flight, watched by security guards to make sure we're awake. What to do if the flight crashes. Where and how to deploy the liferafts. It's the sort of thing that makes you ask yourself - "Do I really want to take this flight? Do I really want to do this job?"
Security is just another thing that utopians don't like to think about : the idea that people who live next door to you might be perfectly happy to steal everything that's not welded in place if they think they'll get away with it.
Oh damn, I forgot to log in. But I worked round it anyway.