If you've got the documentation (which you do - only a fucking idiot sends all the copies fo their documentation to an insurance company, government department or anyone), the minute the insurance company tries to fuck you in the ass, you're taking the matter upstairs to the ombudsman. Which is why, in your first call to check if the documents have arrived, you ask the insurance company telephone-answering idiot for the ombudsman's phone number. They parse this, correctly, as "I know what my rights are, and how to make a complaint which will bite, so choose someone else to fuck with".
Your country might use another word for "ombudsman" - they're the mandatory regulators for $INDUSTRY$ who enforce the industry's standards. Blame the Swedes for having a simple, specific word for this essential function. Fall foul of the ombudsman, and typically they can shut a company down, or fine it severely. And of course, they do. Worse, they can deliver bad publicity.
I ball-parked it at 1MOhm/m - pulled from the depths of my memory.
dry skin [...] but wet or pierced skin
It depends very much on the details of each case.
If you read the safety notices and press, being within several miles of a mains power outlet has a 10% chance of killing you per minute, regardless of your actions. Plugging and unplugging devices needs a professional in a fully-sealed rubber suit. OTOH, most people who fit this site's target audience ("nerds") will at some point have taken a belt off their mains, and ain't dead yet. It is highly variable, and you need to look at the details of every case. Still take care, but work things out first.
I once won the school's unofficial contest for the most imaginative excuse for not having completed my homework : it involved a Van de Graff generator, measurements of electrostatic force, and around a quarter megavolt. My excuse was that since I'd been ignoring the school rule on "no hair over the collar" for several years by then and had hair about 0.4m long, I couldn't get close enough to the equipment to actually pick up the charge without getting a belt of a hundred kV or so through the head. Oddly, I ain't dead yet.
Where's my resistance tester? Between my index fingers I get from 0.67 to 0.92 MOhm in a 30 second test. That would be 1-2 MOhm/m.
It's not like the biosphere has spent millions of years achieving a balance or that the balance is important.
Tell me, where is your evidence for there being a balance? I'm a geologist and I get paid (you know - cash, from businesses, for delivering useful product) for identifying the swings and surges in those reactions as the Earth's systems either fail to keep up with external changes to the conditions that determine that alleged "balance", or overshoot their adjustments.
You know how to balance a broom by resting it's handle in the palm of your hand, then jiggling your hand around to try to keep the broom head in the air. Yes? Done that? That's the sort of balance that nature has.
Or maybe that's a poor analogy. Try a double-pendulum : suspend one weight from an anchor, then a second weight from the first weight with either a rod (stiff, light, you remember the mechanics problems) or a cord (light, flexible) ; now agitate the anchor. Try to predict the motion of either mass in the pendulum.
Tectonic forces within the Earth (decreased heat flow as radioactive and construction heat decay) is one agitation to the system ; astronomical forces (the ~5%/ Gyr increase in heat flow from the Sun ; Milankovich orbital cycles) are other agitations to the system. There is no "balance, there never was, and until the heat death of the Solar System, there never will be. There are restoring forces, but there is no reason to think that they will be either large enough to stabilise the system, or small enough to not de-stabilise the system.
The best we can do is to try to reduce the forcings we are putting on Earth systems, or to apply the forcings we do control in directions that shift the current state in a direction that we want. We started to understand this (chemistry and thermodynamic systems) in the 19th century ; we started to understand the maths of deterministic chaotic systems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Poincare on orbits ; Mandlebrot in more general mathematics) ; we're still trying to get to grips with the wider implications.
The energy yield of a reaction is determined by the initial and final components. Both sets of components have an internal energy (mostly stored in the bonds that hold the atoms together in each molecule) and when you total that up for the reactants and the products, you find that energy is released to the products. (I'll gloss over the fact that all reactions are equilibria, and will go in both directions. Also the fact that the expansion of gasses and dissolution of solids in liquids also entail energy costs which you have to include in the calculation). However in the process of a reaction there is an activated energy state - for example where both molecules have deformed but not yet broken any bonds - and the energetic cost of getting into that state is the limit on the reaction rate. Catalysts (of which enzymes are a sub-group) reduce the energy of that intermediate state, which typically increases the rate of the reaction, sometimes by many orders of magnitude.
Were you off school that month? Or do you live in a country which doesn't value STEM training? It is a pretty basic part of chemistry.
All enzymes are catalysts. Some catalysts are organic. Enzymes are just one class of catalyst which are also organic materials and mostly work best at life-compatible temperatures.
One of the defining characteristics of catalysts (including enzymes) is that they increase the rate of a reaction but are not consumed by it. The killer for most natural and synthetic catalysts is side-reactions which do consume the catalyst.
We'd have problems with fires - which would get massive - before we had problems with crops dying off due to lack of CO2.
No, I don't see that connection. Fires die out because of lack of oxygen not increase in carbon dioxide (which is why underground coal seam fires can smoulder for decades, and in general firefighting the phenomenon of a fire re-igniting from smouldering debris is well known - which is why you spend a lot of effort on damping down a fire after the flames have died out.
Also, the ocean's pH would change and that'd be quite bad news indeed.
Hmmm, reduced CO2 ; would reduce the pH-lowering effect of the CO2 already in the seawater. So the pH would rise, becoming more alkaline. You wouldn't want that to go too far, but it wouldn't. As the pH rose, the oceans would become more effective at scavenging the remaining CO2 from the atmosphere, which would buffer the change considerably. (Which is what is happening at the moment in the other direction.)
Strange, MY "verified by Visa" card, when it asks for details, asks me for a password (distinct from the one for the online banking, which I've disabled every time the bank has set it up for me) not send me a text. Not that they know my phone number (any of them) anyway.
A smart man would have copied the software as he wrote it.
Or done some of the development of the scripts on his home machines, on his own time, thus considerably muddying the issue of who actually owns the software.
E.g. - if you see a need for software at work, then do some developing of ideas at home. Maybe ask around here (under an account you don't use at work) to generate some footprint. Get some preliminary work done. Only then take the idea to work.
Me, I'm still trying to work out how to get contouring to work for my former employer's data display package. I can generate the contours in an external package but to do it natively... well since I've worked out how to do it externally, and they've sacked their entire field staff including me... fuck them.
What the constitution says does not matter. Flight is governed by IATA rules, not the constitution of any one country. IATA rules have banned the carriage of loaded weapons all over the world for since decades before America's recent little difficulties.
If you want to enforce your "constitutional right" (disputed) to bear arms, and you want to travel, you're free to do it by any of the methods of travel that the constitution's writers understood - foot, horse, carriage (*). Have a nice day getting a refund from the airline, who will point you to the Ts+Cs where it's your responsibility to check that you're able to fly.
(*) Hot air balloon? Possible, but they may be under IATA rules too.
Once the search demand is made, leaving the laptop behind at security will just trigger the police hunting down the runner in the departure lounge and shutting down flight loading until they've found him. Or her.
What of armed crew? That might be helpful but since the powers that be don't like the idea the program that allowed flight crew to be armed after 9/11 has been lacking funds.
What makes you think that any significant proportion of flight crew have or desire weapons training?
I don't know the proportion of flight crew in America who are ex-military, and of them the proportion who have weapons training and have kept it up, and who want to keep it up. But in Britain the number of pilots leaving the military and going into passenger piloting is pretty low. The large majority of flight crew have never seen a weapon outside the hands of the police at international airports and few would want the difficulty of maintaining weapons certification for themselves. So you're putting the cost of the training and the weapons and the management of the weapons (lockers in the crew's briefing room ; what to do if a crew member leaves their issued weapon at the airport they've just left ; what responsibility does the airline have for the inevitable crew member who uses a works-issue weapon to kill or threaten another crew member on the ground ; what if a crew member gets arrested for carrying their works weapon to their hotel becaue they forgot to take it from their bags?
I don't hear any demand from the airlines to implement this, because they probably don't want it. Despite what some gun associations in some countries want.
To be honest, when my flights have got delayed, I'm already in the departure lounge after security. And that's where I stay until the flight has been cancelled and the air-side airline staff have given me my hotel details.
Precisely because of the hassle of getting back in through security.
But you should absolutely put the little tray with your shoes in front (along with any belt)
Any belt? ANY belt?
Yeah, I've had the occasional officious fuckwit who insists on me removing the plastic buckled nylon webbing straps which I've used as belts for nearly 30 years now. Then I remove the laces from my boots (blocking the line for several minutes), because they're as dangerous as any belt.
You probably mean "any metal belt buckle, or other large piece of metal" before going though the metal detector. That's perfectly reasonable, and is why I'm loading wallet, coin pouch, pens, watch, and all other asorted pocket contents into the zip-up pockets of my jacket before I even get to the loading belt for the X-ray machine.
TBH, by the time you get to larger airports, the staff know that they're talking about weapons and things that will trigger the metal detector, not belt buckles as belt buckles. But the ones that get 5 intra-country flights a day can have some real mouth-breathers at security. Sullom Voe/ Scatsta, I'm looking at you.
This precise topic comes up so often that it might be worthwhile just re-starting the thread every month or two and archiving the previous version so people can go back to old commments relatively easily (if there's any relevance to that).
Then carrying a plastic box with a vaguely Chthulu-a-like logo on its outside and some mashed potato inside, is a ticket to jail. If you're within 14000 km (2 Earth radii) of an airplane.
The paper under discussion is a theoretical study not an observational one. They don't claim to have fund - or even looked for - phosphorus. But since we know that phosphorus is produced in the "oxygen burning" phase of large stars (I don't think the Sun will ever get there), and is present in planets (direct analysis on Earth, Moon, Mars and less directly in some asteroids ; spectroscopy as phosphine in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, e.g. http://www.sciencedirect.com/s...) and in molecular clouds (spectroscopy again, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p...), the there is no reason to not expect to find phosphorus in our putative brown dwarf. More - from the abundance in molecular clouds, we can make reasonable estimates of how much there is.
Though there are a variety of non-volatile phosphorus species (e.g. metal phosphides), the presence of phosphorus in the upper atmosphere of Solar System gas giants sufficiently indicates to me that in hydrogen-helium dominated systems, appreciable amounts of phosphorus would be available. Phosphorus might be a limiting nutrient in such an environment, but it is also in some terrestrial environments (that's why farmers apply "NPK" - nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium - fertilizer by the tonne).
the hoopla over supposed replacement of it with arsenic in a certain bacteria has proven to be false.
That was indeed a false result.
Replace phosphorus with arsenic and you get dead organism.
That way of building life without phosphorus doesn't work. That is not a proof that no way of building life without phosphorus works. (But you'd probably have to do a lot more than just a straight swap of P for As.)
Oceans have life at different layers, so why not gaseous atmospheres of varying densities?
Except for very temporary, small-scale local "inversions", the density of atmospheres increases as you descend into them. Same physics from 100-odd Kelvin (Jupiter cloud tops) to many thousands of K (O-stars).
OTOH, we still can't spontaneously make life in the lab YET
FTFY
so we don't know all its secrets, and perhaps in reality, our knowledge is very limited (you don't know what you don't know).
We don't know what we don't know, but we do know what we do know in the laboratory - about how to construct enzymes and structures abiotically, in the beaker - and we do know what basal ("primitive") Bacteria and Archaea do in their metabolisms, and the gap is closing fast.
Speaking as a geologist with billion-year old fossils which I collected with my own hands, I'm more confident of seeing the biochemical gap closed than I am of a strong answer to the question "did life evolve a billion, or a half-billion, or a quarter-billion years after formation of the Earth?"
The Integral Trees is a free-falling environment, but it's in the accretion disc of a neutron star, not the atmosphere of a brown dwarf.
It's an interesting exercise in working out an environment, but TBH, far from my favourite bit of Niven. I can barely remember the plot(s), nor even if I've actually read more than a couple of the books.
What about brown dwarves makes you think that they've "failed" in some sense? What were their pre-construction design criteria that they've failed to achieve?
The device will include an astable oscillator (driven off the power lines), probably operating in the audio range (because components are cheap. So 1 second after you plug it in, your oscillator has done a couple of thousand cycles and is driving current into the capacitors at the highest voltage it can. How much charge the capacitors can handle will determine how much time it takes to fully charge, but you wouldn't need to plug/ unplug it multiple times.
(I had to repair a 1950s Geiger counter once, which needed a 120V DC battery which fitted into the footprint of a square "lantern battery" - about 65mm square by 120mm tall. These batteries haven't been made since the 1970s, so I had to build a standard rechargeable battery and DC-DC step-up converter into that footprint. Using 1950s technology. Bloody "authenticity" nuts.)
Getting caught Carrying one of these into an airplane may get you a few years behind bars though, as they are close in design to a stun-gun.
FTFY
Since it's full of RF-passive components (the design is inherently for a "physical access" attack, not a "remote access" attack), it's going to look like - a USB device full of blocky electronic components. Even on X-rays. So, you're down to having either a blanket ban on portable electronics air-side, or the judgement and experience of the security staff to recognise the "Chthulu-a-like" logo. So, no protection there then.
Scattering these in the taxi drop-off area of the airport - or even better in the smoker's corner - would provide plausible deniability for anyone caught carrying one. If Big Brother know that you actually brought one already... well, you've got bigger problems than getting caught with one of these.
Quick look in my flying bag - 9 USB devices of different makes all broadly similar in design to this. Including a couple of USB GSM modems for different countries.
Actually, rigging up an adaptor to turn one of these into a stun-gun... certainly should be doable. Though with only 220V, would it provide enough belt to actually stun someone? Hurt someone - sure. Be noticeable - well, who here hasn't take a few 240V belts off the mains? Died? Far fewer. It takes something like 40mA across the heart to reliably kill someone, which takes some care to set up. To get 40mA off 220V, you'd need a circuit resistance of less than 5k5 Ohms ; skin resistance is on the order of a megaOhm/m, so you'd need your contacts just a few mm apart. Which would give you penetration of the same sort of distance down into the conductive body tissues. You could annoy someone with this, but causing real damage would be pretty hard.
That's the way it is being used, as a proxy for race.
So when the USofTrump introduces apartheid laws registering people into "black", "white" and "coloured" races, banning miscegenation, defining the amount of "blood" content before you move into a "lower" race (e.g. 1 part in 8, or 1 part in 16 for one non-white great grandparent or great-great grandparent ; not important for combinations not involving white majority), defining the physical characteristics for initial characterisation of the elderly (their descendant's races then being defined)... have I forgotten any of the significant laws that will be necessary? The details can be found in the law codes of South Africa and several of the US states.
Anyway, once the racial apartheid laws have been passed, the fickleness problems of classification by religion simply won't be necessary.
I think they'll go directly to apartheid, and the "Muslim database" would simply become unnecessary. For example, Richard "Shoe Bomber" Reid would be prevented from flying for being 1 part in 2 black, not because of having converted to Islam in his 20s.
Slashdot Mirror
Your country might use another word for "ombudsman" - they're the mandatory regulators for $INDUSTRY$ who enforce the industry's standards. Blame the Swedes for having a simple, specific word for this essential function. Fall foul of the ombudsman, and typically they can shut a company down, or fine it severely. And of course, they do. Worse, they can deliver bad publicity.
It depends very much on the details of each case.
If you read the safety notices and press, being within several miles of a mains power outlet has a 10% chance of killing you per minute, regardless of your actions. Plugging and unplugging devices needs a professional in a fully-sealed rubber suit. OTOH, most people who fit this site's target audience ("nerds") will at some point have taken a belt off their mains, and ain't dead yet. It is highly variable, and you need to look at the details of every case. Still take care, but work things out first.
I once won the school's unofficial contest for the most imaginative excuse for not having completed my homework : it involved a Van de Graff generator, measurements of electrostatic force, and around a quarter megavolt. My excuse was that since I'd been ignoring the school rule on "no hair over the collar" for several years by then and had hair about 0.4m long, I couldn't get close enough to the equipment to actually pick up the charge without getting a belt of a hundred kV or so through the head. Oddly, I ain't dead yet.
Where's my resistance tester? Between my index fingers I get from 0.67 to 0.92 MOhm in a 30 second test. That would be 1-2 MOhm/m.
Tell me, where is your evidence for there being a balance? I'm a geologist and I get paid (you know - cash, from businesses, for delivering useful product) for identifying the swings and surges in those reactions as the Earth's systems either fail to keep up with external changes to the conditions that determine that alleged "balance", or overshoot their adjustments.
You know how to balance a broom by resting it's handle in the palm of your hand, then jiggling your hand around to try to keep the broom head in the air. Yes? Done that? That's the sort of balance that nature has.
Or maybe that's a poor analogy. Try a double-pendulum : suspend one weight from an anchor, then a second weight from the first weight with either a rod (stiff, light, you remember the mechanics problems) or a cord (light, flexible) ; now agitate the anchor. Try to predict the motion of either mass in the pendulum.
Tectonic forces within the Earth (decreased heat flow as radioactive and construction heat decay) is one agitation to the system ; astronomical forces (the ~5%/ Gyr increase in heat flow from the Sun ; Milankovich orbital cycles) are other agitations to the system. There is no "balance, there never was, and until the heat death of the Solar System, there never will be. There are restoring forces, but there is no reason to think that they will be either large enough to stabilise the system, or small enough to not de-stabilise the system.
The best we can do is to try to reduce the forcings we are putting on Earth systems, or to apply the forcings we do control in directions that shift the current state in a direction that we want. We started to understand this (chemistry and thermodynamic systems) in the 19th century ; we started to understand the maths of deterministic chaotic systems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries (Poincare on orbits ; Mandlebrot in more general mathematics) ; we're still trying to get to grips with the wider implications.
The energy yield of a reaction is determined by the initial and final components. Both sets of components have an internal energy (mostly stored in the bonds that hold the atoms together in each molecule) and when you total that up for the reactants and the products, you find that energy is released to the products. (I'll gloss over the fact that all reactions are equilibria, and will go in both directions. Also the fact that the expansion of gasses and dissolution of solids in liquids also entail energy costs which you have to include in the calculation). However in the process of a reaction there is an activated energy state - for example where both molecules have deformed but not yet broken any bonds - and the energetic cost of getting into that state is the limit on the reaction rate. Catalysts (of which enzymes are a sub-group) reduce the energy of that intermediate state, which typically increases the rate of the reaction, sometimes by many orders of magnitude.
Were you off school that month? Or do you live in a country which doesn't value STEM training? It is a pretty basic part of chemistry.
One of the defining characteristics of catalysts (including enzymes) is that they increase the rate of a reaction but are not consumed by it. The killer for most natural and synthetic catalysts is side-reactions which do consume the catalyst.
No, I don't see that connection. Fires die out because of lack of oxygen not increase in carbon dioxide (which is why underground coal seam fires can smoulder for decades, and in general firefighting the phenomenon of a fire re-igniting from smouldering debris is well known - which is why you spend a lot of effort on damping down a fire after the flames have died out.
Hmmm, reduced CO2 ; would reduce the pH-lowering effect of the CO2 already in the seawater. So the pH would rise, becoming more alkaline. You wouldn't want that to go too far, but it wouldn't. As the pH rose, the oceans would become more effective at scavenging the remaining CO2 from the atmosphere, which would buffer the change considerably. (Which is what is happening at the moment in the other direction.)
Strange, MY "verified by Visa" card, when it asks for details, asks me for a password (distinct from the one for the online banking, which I've disabled every time the bank has set it up for me) not send me a text. Not that they know my phone number (any of them) anyway.
Or done some of the development of the scripts on his home machines, on his own time, thus considerably muddying the issue of who actually owns the software.
E.g. - if you see a need for software at work, then do some developing of ideas at home. Maybe ask around here (under an account you don't use at work) to generate some footprint. Get some preliminary work done. Only then take the idea to work.
Me, I'm still trying to work out how to get contouring to work for my former employer's data display package. I can generate the contours in an external package but to do it natively ... well since I've worked out how to do it externally, and they've sacked their entire field staff including me ... fuck them.
For the UK, try these (which cover general lost property, including at airports) : http://www.greasbys.co.uk/ (London somewhere) https://www.thebcva.co.uk/ (Bristol) http://www.mulberrybankauction... (Glasgow) http://wellersofguildford.com/... (Near the shithole of the universe (Heathrow))
If you want to enforce your "constitutional right" (disputed) to bear arms, and you want to travel, you're free to do it by any of the methods of travel that the constitution's writers understood - foot, horse, carriage (*). Have a nice day getting a refund from the airline, who will point you to the Ts+Cs where it's your responsibility to check that you're able to fly.
(*) Hot air balloon? Possible, but they may be under IATA rules too.
Once the search demand is made, leaving the laptop behind at security will just trigger the police hunting down the runner in the departure lounge and shutting down flight loading until they've found him. Or her.
What makes you think that any significant proportion of flight crew have or desire weapons training?
I don't know the proportion of flight crew in America who are ex-military, and of them the proportion who have weapons training and have kept it up, and who want to keep it up. But in Britain the number of pilots leaving the military and going into passenger piloting is pretty low. The large majority of flight crew have never seen a weapon outside the hands of the police at international airports and few would want the difficulty of maintaining weapons certification for themselves. So you're putting the cost of the training and the weapons and the management of the weapons (lockers in the crew's briefing room ; what to do if a crew member leaves their issued weapon at the airport they've just left ; what responsibility does the airline have for the inevitable crew member who uses a works-issue weapon to kill or threaten another crew member on the ground ; what if a crew member gets arrested for carrying their works weapon to their hotel becaue they forgot to take it from their bags?
I don't hear any demand from the airlines to implement this, because they probably don't want it. Despite what some gun associations in some countries want.
Why wasn't your laptop switched off?
Precisely because of the hassle of getting back in through security.
Any belt? ANY belt?
Yeah, I've had the occasional officious fuckwit who insists on me removing the plastic buckled nylon webbing straps which I've used as belts for nearly 30 years now. Then I remove the laces from my boots (blocking the line for several minutes), because they're as dangerous as any belt.
You probably mean "any metal belt buckle, or other large piece of metal" before going though the metal detector. That's perfectly reasonable, and is why I'm loading wallet, coin pouch, pens, watch, and all other asorted pocket contents into the zip-up pockets of my jacket before I even get to the loading belt for the X-ray machine.
TBH, by the time you get to larger airports, the staff know that they're talking about weapons and things that will trigger the metal detector, not belt buckles as belt buckles. But the ones that get 5 intra-country flights a day can have some real mouth-breathers at security. Sullom Voe/ Scatsta, I'm looking at you.
This precise topic comes up so often that it might be worthwhile just re-starting the thread every month or two and archiving the previous version so people can go back to old commments relatively easily (if there's any relevance to that).
Then carrying a plastic box with a vaguely Chthulu-a-like logo on its outside and some mashed potato inside, is a ticket to jail. If you're within 14000 km (2 Earth radii) of an airplane.
Though there are a variety of non-volatile phosphorus species (e.g. metal phosphides), the presence of phosphorus in the upper atmosphere of Solar System gas giants sufficiently indicates to me that in hydrogen-helium dominated systems, appreciable amounts of phosphorus would be available. Phosphorus might be a limiting nutrient in such an environment, but it is also in some terrestrial environments (that's why farmers apply "NPK" - nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium - fertilizer by the tonne).
That was indeed a false result.
That way of building life without phosphorus doesn't work. That is not a proof that no way of building life without phosphorus works. (But you'd probably have to do a lot more than just a straight swap of P for As.)
Except for very temporary, small-scale local "inversions", the density of atmospheres increases as you descend into them. Same physics from 100-odd Kelvin (Jupiter cloud tops) to many thousands of K (O-stars).
FTFY
We don't know what we don't know, but we do know what we do know in the laboratory - about how to construct enzymes and structures abiotically, in the beaker - and we do know what basal ("primitive") Bacteria and Archaea do in their metabolisms, and the gap is closing fast.
Speaking as a geologist with billion-year old fossils which I collected with my own hands, I'm more confident of seeing the biochemical gap closed than I am of a strong answer to the question "did life evolve a billion, or a half-billion, or a quarter-billion years after formation of the Earth?"
It's an interesting exercise in working out an environment, but TBH, far from my favourite bit of Niven. I can barely remember the plot(s), nor even if I've actually read more than a couple of the books.
What about brown dwarves makes you think that they've "failed" in some sense? What were their pre-construction design criteria that they've failed to achieve?
Crown immunity, mate.
One of the reasons that some people want Britain to leave Europe. and on e of the reasons that some people want to leave Britain for Europe.
(I had to repair a 1950s Geiger counter once, which needed a 120V DC battery which fitted into the footprint of a square "lantern battery" - about 65mm square by 120mm tall. These batteries haven't been made since the 1970s, so I had to build a standard rechargeable battery and DC-DC step-up converter into that footprint. Using 1950s technology. Bloody "authenticity" nuts.)
FTFY
Since it's full of RF-passive components (the design is inherently for a "physical access" attack, not a "remote access" attack), it's going to look like - a USB device full of blocky electronic components. Even on X-rays. So, you're down to having either a blanket ban on portable electronics air-side, or the judgement and experience of the security staff to recognise the "Chthulu-a-like" logo. So, no protection there then.
Scattering these in the taxi drop-off area of the airport - or even better in the smoker's corner - would provide plausible deniability for anyone caught carrying one. If Big Brother know that you actually brought one already ... well, you've got bigger problems than getting caught with one of these.
Quick look in my flying bag - 9 USB devices of different makes all broadly similar in design to this. Including a couple of USB GSM modems for different countries.
Actually, rigging up an adaptor to turn one of these into a stun-gun ... certainly should be doable. Though with only 220V, would it provide enough belt to actually stun someone? Hurt someone - sure. Be noticeable - well, who here hasn't take a few 240V belts off the mains? Died? Far fewer. It takes something like 40mA across the heart to reliably kill someone, which takes some care to set up. To get 40mA off 220V, you'd need a circuit resistance of less than 5k5 Ohms ; skin resistance is on the order of a megaOhm/m, so you'd need your contacts just a few mm apart. Which would give you penetration of the same sort of distance down into the conductive body tissues. You could annoy someone with this, but causing real damage would be pretty hard.
So when the USofTrump introduces apartheid laws registering people into "black", "white" and "coloured" races, banning miscegenation, defining the amount of "blood" content before you move into a "lower" race (e.g. 1 part in 8, or 1 part in 16 for one non-white great grandparent or great-great grandparent ; not important for combinations not involving white majority), defining the physical characteristics for initial characterisation of the elderly (their descendant's races then being defined) ... have I forgotten any of the significant laws that will be necessary? The details can be found in the law codes of South Africa and several of the US states.
Anyway, once the racial apartheid laws have been passed, the fickleness problems of classification by religion simply won't be necessary.
I think they'll go directly to apartheid, and the "Muslim database" would simply become unnecessary. For example, Richard "Shoe Bomber" Reid would be prevented from flying for being 1 part in 2 black, not because of having converted to Islam in his 20s.