WARNING. It is unlawful for any person under 18 years of age to have in this vehicle any spray paint container or any permanent marker with a tip one-half inch or larger.
Counting the votes is meaningless. 'No' votes were symbolic since they knew the act would pass. Both parties are exactly equally to blame, because as a whole they both supported the Patriot Act, just as both Bush and Obama renewed it (and Obama made it permanent), just as both parties voted for the Iraq War Resolution, against the closure of Guantanamo, etc. etc. Democrats could have blocked any of those things if they wanted.
Then why did so few republicans cast "No" votes? Apparently they voted how their constituents wanted them to vote, otherwise they could have just voted "no" since they were assured that their votes wouldn't make a difference anyway.
Every day you probably break dozens of laws without knowing it.
I call BS on that. Give us some examples of dozens of laws that a normal person might break every day.
Some obvious ones are:
1. Exceeding the speed limit, even by a small amount, even only for a second 2. Turning without using signals 3. Not stopping before the limit line painted on intersections 4. Jaywalking between intersections or stepping into an intersection before the walk signal is on, or after "don't walk" has started flashing even if you know you'll clear the intersection before the don't walk signal is on 5. Connecting to an open Wifi network without permission of the owner 6. Playing music loudly enough for others to hear (that's a public performance and needs to be licensed) 7. Signing on a website with a fake identity and/or various TOS violations 8. Private gambling (office football pools, betting a friend that you can run down the block faster than him, etc) 9. Riding transit with a "wide" marker (sometimes only if you're underage) 10. Possessing "child erotica" - scantily clothed children (i.e. a Sears catalog showing children in bathing suits) 11. Letting oil from your car drip on your driveway and wash into the storm drains 12. letting trash accidentally blow from your car (or fall from your pocket), even pocket lint or an apple seed 13. Eating or drinking while driving or other distracting activity 14. Taking a pen or paperclip from the office for use at home 15. Finding a penny on the ground and keeping it instead of turning it in 16. Drinking alcohol outside of your home in some jurisdictions 17. Moving prescription medications from the prescription bottle to another bottle or container
And those are only the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
There are somewhere between 10,000 and 300,000 federal regulations that you can violate, no one can possibly know them all.
"There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime," said John Baker, a retired Louisiana State University law professor who has also tried counting the number of new federal crimes created in recent years. "That is not an exaggeration."
I hope most US slashdotters are not too rankled by this reality because this is what they voted for. Bush and Nixon, two presidents modern leftists love to vilify, HAVE NOTHING on the monster currently in office...NOTHING.
Before you try to pin this on the left, take a look at who voted for the Patriot Act:
2001:
Senate: 98 voted for the act, a single democrat voted against
House: 357 voted for the act, 66 voted against (62 democrats, 3 republicans) 2006: Patriot act renewal
Senate: 89 voted for the act, 10 against (9 democrats, 0 republicans)
House: 280 voted for the act, 138 against (124 democrat, 13 republican) 2011: Patriot act renewal
Senate: 72 Yes, 23 against (18 democrat, 4 republican)
House: 275 Yes, 144 no (117 democrat, 27 republican)
If the leftist monster in the whitehouse is solely responsible for this, then why didn't our republican saviors in Congress do anything to stop it, not even back before Obama was even in office?
Will you also stop using your bank, email, IM, your credit card, etc? The government can (and probably is) monitoring everything you do that has an electronic trail.
The Internet needs to be policed. There are bad men and evildoers actively plotting to do us harm. These nefarious activities now are increasingly being planned and coordinated using the Internet. I don't think this is so bad that the authorities are mining and searching and seeking out these dastardly terrorists.
Are you sure you're ok with the US Government scrutinizing your private life?
Right now there are so many laws and regulations in the USA that not even the US Government can tell you how many there are (criminal law alone is 23,000 pages across 50 volumes, and that doesn't include thousands of federal regulations that you're expected to abide by). Every day you probably break dozens of laws without knowing it.
How will you feel if the government starts mining your data and issuing violations automatically: "Citizen: on June 3, 2013 you told your aunt that you fixed your backyard fence. We found no record of a proper building permit, therefore you must tear down your fence and build it again" "Citizen: On September 9, 2013 your daughter said she planted a dandelion in front of your house. That plant has been determined to be a noxious weed, we will be sending a drone to eradicate your front yard". "Citizen: In Jan 10th, 2003 you had lunch with a Tea Party leader. The Tea Party has been determined to be a terrorist organization. Come quietly and we'll go easy on your family".
Even if you trust the current administration with the data, do you trust all future administrations since the data will likely be retained beyond your lifetime? How would you feel if they selling profiles about yourself to private corporations? (first to the credit rating agencies, then maybe to insurance companies, then to anyone that wants to buy a profile on you).
My life and my family's lives are more important than whatever privacy I had on these sites. I know Apple, Google, Facebook have the data anyway, so I see know harm on giving this up so that I feel safer. Just my two cents, I know its not the majority viewpoint in this current uproar.
Why do you assume that you have to give up all privacy to ensure the safety of your family? Do you think terrorism is something new that can only be stopped by scrutinizing the personal lives of everyone?
If you're so open with your privacy, why post as Anonymous Coward? Why not post your Facebook Profile, LinkedIn Profile, Twitter name, etc here for us all to see? What are you trying to hide?
“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.
I'm pretty sure I'd notice a keylogger on my network sending every keystroke out to elsewhere...
As for the leap from idea to typing, that technology is the sole purview of the NSA it seems...
Oh, so you've turned off auto-complete predictions in Chrome's address bar, and never use any cloud based apps like Google Docs that send keystrokes to the cloud? Though you might not notice a good keylogger that could queue up data and send it periodically as innocent looking DNS queires, ajax queries, etc.
Regardless, one needn't watch keystrokes to watch ideas form as you type - that statement is just as true if they watch you type facebook posts, slashdot comments, IM's, etc in real time.
There's already an option to require a blink during authentication so that photo's won't work. Your wife should probably enable that.
That sounds only moderately more secure, so instead of a static picture of her, I'd just need a video of her blinking, perhaps with my finger poised on the "play" button so I can make it blink when the phone asks for it.
Plus, I think her phone is still on ICS, so she doesn't have the liveness check option.
The existing face unlock handles those fine as long as you do additional captures.
And in the real world? Crashed on a mountainbike the other day and had to call the mountain crew for an extraction. Ooops I forgot to do an additional capture with a bad facial cut and blood and sand/gravel embedded on my face. Phone doesn't recognize me. (Yes full face helmet was on... and very likely saved the face, teeth, jaw... but you can still scrape and cut up your face a bit.)
And if all else fails, there's the pattern/pin/password backup lock it requires you to have.
Which I won't have committed to memory since I haven't used it since purchasing the phone 11 months ago and setting up facial recognition.
My phone lets me make an emergency call without unlocking it. I believe there are some apps that allow additional numbers (i.e. Mountain Rescue, your wife, etc) to be set as emergency contacts that can be dialed without unlocking.
Easier to take a static photo of someone with a good optical zoom than to film them while they're doing the facial expression in question.
The easy way to film someone's unlock gesture would be swap their phone with one that looks just like theirs, and have the decoy phone record them when they do the unlock gesture to unlock it. The decoy phone can prompt the user with several fake authentication attempts to get them to cycle through several different expressions and build up a library of the appropriate expressions to play back. A 3D camera on the phone would make this much harder (but not impossible since you could record in 3D and rig something up to play back the separate stereo images to the phone's cameras). The colored laser beam mentioned in TFA seems even harder to spoof especially if it's modulated with different codes for each authentication attempt.
My wife has camera unlock set up on her Android phone. I can never remember her PIN, so since I have a photo of her in my phone, when I want to unlock her phone, I just load up her picture on my phone and hold it up to her phone and it unlocks for me.
Maybe not misinformation, but lack of information - if they are going to claim 25 hour battery life, they should include the weight, size and price of the battery.
You can lie by omission but I don't see what you're complaining about here, they say it's a sheet battery accessory. It obviously has a weight, bulk and a price tag even if it's not stated. The point of a press release is to reach people who go "Hey, a 25 hour battery life sounds like something I could need... maybe I should check it out" to your selling points, the rest you can tell them about later. I know/. hates marketing and sales with a vengeance, but really... first you have to get them interested in what you're offering in the first place, then you can start talking specs and prices.
How could I have been more clear about what I'm complaining about? How could I have been more clear than "if they are going to claim 25 hour battery life, they should include the weight, size and price of the battery". Otherwise, *any* manufacturer could claim a 25 hour battery life with appropriate battery. My 3 year old Thinkpad T520 offers 25 hour battery life with "9-cell plus slice battery", but the slice battery adds 1.5 pounds and $150 - $200 to the price of the laptop.
If the 25 hour battery life is a big selling point of the laptop, they should include the specs to show how big, heavy and expensive the laptop will cost with that battery.
There`s no misinformation on the part of Sony here. The article makes it clear how much battery life they are claiming with - and without - the extra battery.
And frankly, if the 11`` gets anything close to 11-h, I count that as pretty good. And depending on how much the extra battery weighs and how big it is, being able to work for 25-h - heck, even 15-h - gets all the way to awesome for me.
Maybe not misinformation, but lack of information - if they are going to claim 25 hour battery life, they should include the weight, size and price of the battery.
No brownouts or blackouts for the last 1.5 years here (north of Tokyo), I assure you! (and before that in the 60Hz-half of Japan).
None in the past year or so in Western Japan that I'm aware of either. (which is mostly electrically isolated from the Eastern Fukushima half due to the frequency difference (except for one HVDC interconnect))
The trouble is coal-fired power stations emit more radiation than nuclear reactors do. From the article: "fly ash emitted by a power plant [...] burning coal for electricity carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy." That statistic is from 1978, and nuclear reactor technology has greatly improved since then (and continues to improve).
Coal plant ash filtering has improved since 1978 as well, it would be interesting to see more recent numbers.
I agree. But by that logic we don't need the TSA either so...
I don't follow that logic.
Just because a passenger won't be able to use a small weapon to coerce the pilot and passengers to let him take over the plane does not mean that TSA can't be useful in preventing someone from taking a bomb or other device on board that can take down the plane (which would be just about as bad as taking over a plane).
That doesn't mean that I agree that TSA's security theater is the best way to prevent this.
There was a company called ReturnKey that did the same thing (I linked to an Engadget article that mentions them in another post), but their domain is dead, so they seem to have gone out of business.
If they allowed knives back on, and any kind of terrorist attack occurred with knives, then someone would be held responsible for that decision, no matter how wise it seemed at the time. If they disallow knives, people will kick and scream, but won't actually change their flying behavior much, and everyone's job will be safe.
Be serious - TSA is a government agency, there's no such thing as holding someone accountable.
They should just charge a $5 fee and mail it to you if you don't want it destroyed.
It is kind of silly, though. Post 911, nobody can take over a plane with a few knives. The only reason to not allow them is that they can result in more injuries on a plane, but that seems so unlikely as to not be terribly persuasive.
I once walked into a secure federal building with a knife by accident; the guards thought about it and then didn't care. Which is really the right result.
I've seen self-service mail kiosks in some airports where you can mail your prohibited items to yourself. You still would have to get back out of the security line to get back to the Kiosk, but if you have something valuable it's probably worth it. So far I've only lost 99 cent nail clippers but I think those are allowed now.
Indeed. But they confirmed 5 cases out of 174.000 tested children... when the prevalence rate of thyroïd cancer is less than 2 in 1.000.000 in this area of Japan and age range, according to the article you are citing. Smells fishy to me.
When you screen 100% of a population for a disease there's going to be a higher incidence rate than when only those showing obvious symptoms are found... especially for a disease like thyroid cancer, which is typically slow growing so it may not be discovered for years.
The 2 in a million rate is for "those aged 10 to 14 in Japan", while the screenings were for "174,000 people aged 18 or younger". A big difference in age range.
Something seems maybe not quite right; wasn't there an engineer(s) who inadvertantly stepped in a pool of radioactive water, and got enough exposure to get skin burns? My google-fu is lacking, I can find references to the incident, but I can't find their estimated doses - I remember it being a big deal at the time, though...
Q: What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?
A: Assuming you’re a reasonably good swimmer, you could probably survive treading water anywhere from 10 to 40 hours. At that point, you would black out from fatigue and drown. This is also true for a pool without nuclear fuel in the bottom.
I think the XKCD case is quite different than what the grandparent poster said -- the XKCD case is talking about a purified water tank, while a random "pool of radioactive water" in a disaster zone is likely full of radioactive contaminants (not that the water itself is radioactive).
However, I haven't heard of the "stepped in a pool of radioactive water" cases. There were some reports early in the disaster of workers taken to the hospital with radiation exposure, but without enough detail or followup to know if it really was radiation exposure, electrical arc flash burns, conventional fire exposure, etc. Information is muddled in a disaster and even official spokesman don't always have the correct information. Are there any other sources that verify that the workers suffered from radiation exposure?
FUKUSHIMA – An ongoing study on the impact of radiation on Fukushima residents from the crippled atomic power plant has found 12 minors with confirmed thyroid cancer diagnoses, up from three in a report in February, with 15 other suspected cases, up from seven, researchers announced Wednesday.
The figures were taken from about 174,000 people aged 18 or younger whose initial thyroid screening results have been confirmed.
Researchers at Fukushima Medical University, which has been taking the leading role in the study, have said they do not believe the most recent cases are related to the nuclear crisis.
Anyone know how they made up the slack besides conservation? More coal? The article mentions "electric power companies have been looking to thermal power generation for their supplies", but it's not clear what that means - geothermal?
Entire divisions of intelligence agencies are devoted to stealing secrets from other countries (including "friendly" countries and allies). If the data was readily available, they wouldn't be doing their jobs if they ignored it.
Very true. However they're not supposed to get caught doing it. That's historically been considered a casus belli.
I don't believe anyone has been "caught" - the thefts may have been traced back to Chinese IP addresses, but everyone here knows that the source IP address of an attack means nothing (despite what RIAA may tell the courts). And even if it was a Chinese citizen that executed the attack(s), in a country of a billion people, it's hard to prove that it was an officially sanctioned theft.
Slashdot Mirror
Please elaborate on 9.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jon_gilbert/1085416756/
WARNING.
It is unlawful for any person under 18
years of age to have in this vehicle any
spray paint container or any permanent
marker with a tip one-half inch or larger.
Counting the votes is meaningless. 'No' votes were symbolic since they knew the act would pass. Both parties are exactly equally to blame, because as a whole they both supported the Patriot Act, just as both Bush and Obama renewed it (and Obama made it permanent), just as both parties voted for the Iraq War Resolution, against the closure of Guantanamo, etc. etc. Democrats could have blocked any of those things if they wanted.
Then why did so few republicans cast "No" votes? Apparently they voted how their constituents wanted them to vote, otherwise they could have just voted "no" since they were assured that their votes wouldn't make a difference anyway.
I call BS on that. Give us some examples of dozens of laws that a normal person might break every day.
Some obvious ones are:
1. Exceeding the speed limit, even by a small amount, even only for a second
2. Turning without using signals
3. Not stopping before the limit line painted on intersections
4. Jaywalking between intersections or stepping into an intersection before the walk signal is on, or after "don't walk" has started flashing even if you know you'll clear the intersection before the don't walk signal is on
5. Connecting to an open Wifi network without permission of the owner
6. Playing music loudly enough for others to hear (that's a public performance and needs to be licensed)
7. Signing on a website with a fake identity and/or various TOS violations
8. Private gambling (office football pools, betting a friend that you can run down the block faster than him, etc)
9. Riding transit with a "wide" marker (sometimes only if you're underage)
10. Possessing "child erotica" - scantily clothed children (i.e. a Sears catalog showing children in bathing suits)
11. Letting oil from your car drip on your driveway and wash into the storm drains
12. letting trash accidentally blow from your car (or fall from your pocket), even pocket lint or an apple seed
13. Eating or drinking while driving or other distracting activity
14. Taking a pen or paperclip from the office for use at home
15. Finding a penny on the ground and keeping it instead of turning it in
16. Drinking alcohol outside of your home in some jurisdictions
17. Moving prescription medications from the prescription bottle to another bottle or container
And those are only the ones I can think of off the top of my head.
There are somewhere between 10,000 and 300,000 federal regulations that you can violate, no one can possibly know them all.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304319804576389601079728920.html?mod=googlenews_wsj
"There is no one in the United States over the age of 18 who cannot be indicted for some federal crime," said John Baker, a retired Louisiana State University law professor who has also tried counting the number of new federal crimes created in recent years. "That is not an exaggeration."
I hope most US slashdotters are not too rankled by this reality because this is what they voted for. Bush and Nixon, two presidents modern leftists love to vilify, HAVE NOTHING on the monster currently in office...NOTHING.
Before you try to pin this on the left, take a look at who voted for the Patriot Act:
2001:
Senate: 98 voted for the act, a single democrat voted against
House: 357 voted for the act, 66 voted against (62 democrats, 3 republicans)
2006: Patriot act renewal
Senate: 89 voted for the act, 10 against (9 democrats, 0 republicans)
House: 280 voted for the act, 138 against (124 democrat, 13 republican)
2011: Patriot act renewal
Senate: 72 Yes, 23 against (18 democrat, 4 republican)
House: 275 Yes, 144 no (117 democrat, 27 republican)
If the leftist monster in the whitehouse is solely responsible for this, then why didn't our republican saviors in Congress do anything to stop it, not even back before Obama was even in office?
Sources:
http://educate-yourself.org/cn/patriotact20012006senatevote.shtml
http://politics.nytimes.com/congress/votes/112/senate/1/84
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2011/roll036.xml
Don't use these services I guess...
Those are the services you know of.
Will you also stop using your bank, email, IM, your credit card, etc? The government can (and probably is) monitoring everything you do that has an electronic trail.
The Internet needs to be policed. There are bad men and evildoers actively plotting to do us harm. These nefarious activities now are increasingly being planned and coordinated using the Internet. I don't think this is so bad that the authorities are mining and searching and seeking out these dastardly terrorists.
Are you sure you're ok with the US Government scrutinizing your private life?
Right now there are so many laws and regulations in the USA that not even the US Government can tell you how many there are (criminal law alone is 23,000 pages across 50 volumes, and that doesn't include thousands of federal regulations that you're expected to abide by). Every day you probably break dozens of laws without knowing it.
How will you feel if the government starts mining your data and issuing violations automatically: "Citizen: on June 3, 2013 you told your aunt that you fixed your backyard fence. We found no record of a proper building permit, therefore you must tear down your fence and build it again" "Citizen: On September 9, 2013 your daughter said she planted a dandelion in front of your house. That plant has been determined to be a noxious weed, we will be sending a drone to eradicate your front yard". "Citizen: In Jan 10th, 2003 you had lunch with a Tea Party leader. The Tea Party has been determined to be a terrorist organization. Come quietly and we'll go easy on your family".
Even if you trust the current administration with the data, do you trust all future administrations since the data will likely be retained beyond your lifetime? How would you feel if they selling profiles about yourself to private corporations? (first to the credit rating agencies, then maybe to insurance companies, then to anyone that wants to buy a profile on you).
My life and my family's lives are more important than whatever privacy I had on these sites. I know Apple, Google, Facebook have the data anyway, so I see know harm on giving this up so that I feel safer. Just my two cents, I know its not the majority viewpoint in this current uproar.
Why do you assume that you have to give up all privacy to ensure the safety of your family? Do you think terrorism is something new that can only be stopped by scrutinizing the personal lives of everyone?
If you're so open with your privacy, why post as Anonymous Coward? Why not post your Facebook Profile, LinkedIn Profile, Twitter name, etc here for us all to see? What are you trying to hide?
“They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type,” the officer said.
I'm pretty sure I'd notice a keylogger on my network sending every keystroke out to elsewhere...
As for the leap from idea to typing, that technology is the sole purview of the NSA it seems...
Oh, so you've turned off auto-complete predictions in Chrome's address bar, and never use any cloud based apps like Google Docs that send keystrokes to the cloud? Though you might not notice a good keylogger that could queue up data and send it periodically as innocent looking DNS queires, ajax queries, etc.
Regardless, one needn't watch keystrokes to watch ideas form as you type - that statement is just as true if they watch you type facebook posts, slashdot comments, IM's, etc in real time.
There's already an option to require a blink during authentication so that photo's won't work. Your wife should probably enable that.
That sounds only moderately more secure, so instead of a static picture of her, I'd just need a video of her blinking, perhaps with my finger poised on the "play" button so I can make it blink when the phone asks for it.
Plus, I think her phone is still on ICS, so she doesn't have the liveness check option.
The existing face unlock handles those fine as long as you do additional captures.
And in the real world? Crashed on a mountainbike the other day and had to call the mountain crew for an extraction. Ooops I forgot to do an additional capture with a bad facial cut and blood and sand/gravel embedded on my face. Phone doesn't recognize me. (Yes full face helmet was on... and very likely saved the face, teeth, jaw... but you can still scrape and cut up your face a bit.)
And if all else fails, there's the pattern/pin/password backup lock it requires you to have.
Which I won't have committed to memory since I haven't used it since purchasing the phone 11 months ago and setting up facial recognition.
My phone lets me make an emergency call without unlocking it. I believe there are some apps that allow additional numbers (i.e. Mountain Rescue, your wife, etc) to be set as emergency contacts that can be dialed without unlocking.
Easier to take a static photo of someone with a good optical zoom than to film them while they're doing the facial expression in question.
The easy way to film someone's unlock gesture would be swap their phone with one that looks just like theirs, and have the decoy phone record them when they do the unlock gesture to unlock it. The decoy phone can prompt the user with several fake authentication attempts to get them to cycle through several different expressions and build up a library of the appropriate expressions to play back. A 3D camera on the phone would make this much harder (but not impossible since you could record in 3D and rig something up to play back the separate stereo images to the phone's cameras). The colored laser beam mentioned in TFA seems even harder to spoof especially if it's modulated with different codes for each authentication attempt.
My wife has camera unlock set up on her Android phone. I can never remember her PIN, so since I have a photo of her in my phone, when I want to unlock her phone, I just load up her picture on my phone and hold it up to her phone and it unlocks for me.
Maybe not misinformation, but lack of information - if they are going to claim 25 hour battery life, they should include the weight, size and price of the battery.
You can lie by omission but I don't see what you're complaining about here, they say it's a sheet battery accessory. It obviously has a weight, bulk and a price tag even if it's not stated. The point of a press release is to reach people who go "Hey, a 25 hour battery life sounds like something I could need... maybe I should check it out" to your selling points, the rest you can tell them about later. I know /. hates marketing and sales with a vengeance, but really... first you have to get them interested in what you're offering in the first place, then you can start talking specs and prices.
How could I have been more clear about what I'm complaining about? How could I have been more clear than "if they are going to claim 25 hour battery life, they should include the weight, size and price of the battery". Otherwise, *any* manufacturer could claim a 25 hour battery life with appropriate battery. My 3 year old Thinkpad T520 offers 25 hour battery life with "9-cell plus slice battery", but the slice battery adds 1.5 pounds and $150 - $200 to the price of the laptop.
If the 25 hour battery life is a big selling point of the laptop, they should include the specs to show how big, heavy and expensive the laptop will cost with that battery.
Are you saying that part of Japan is 50 Hz and part is 60Hz? I'd never heard that before.
Yes.
There`s no misinformation on the part of Sony here. The article makes it clear how much battery life they are claiming with - and without - the extra battery.
And frankly, if the 11`` gets anything close to 11-h, I count that as pretty good. And depending on how much the extra battery weighs and how big it is, being able to work for 25-h - heck, even 15-h - gets all the way to awesome for me.
Maybe not misinformation, but lack of information - if they are going to claim 25 hour battery life, they should include the weight, size and price of the battery.
No brownouts or blackouts for the last 1.5 years here (north of Tokyo), I assure you! (and before that in the 60Hz-half of Japan).
None in the past year or so in Western Japan that I'm aware of either. (which is mostly electrically isolated from the Eastern Fukushima half due to the frequency difference (except for one HVDC interconnect))
The trouble is coal-fired power stations emit more radiation than nuclear reactors do. From the article: "fly ash emitted by a power plant [...] burning coal for electricity carries into the surrounding environment 100 times more radiation than a nuclear power plant producing the same amount of energy." That statistic is from 1978, and nuclear reactor technology has greatly improved since then (and continues to improve).
Coal plant ash filtering has improved since 1978 as well, it would be interesting to see more recent numbers.
I agree. But by that logic we don't need the TSA either so...
I don't follow that logic.
Just because a passenger won't be able to use a small weapon to coerce the pilot and passengers to let him take over the plane does not mean that TSA can't be useful in preventing someone from taking a bomb or other device on board that can take down the plane (which would be just about as bad as taking over a plane).
That doesn't mean that I agree that TSA's security theater is the best way to prevent this.
They should just charge a $5 fee and mail it to you if you don't want it destroyed.
Most major airports have kiosks for explicitly this purpose.
Which ones? I've never seen one.
Here's a list of airports for one company's checkpoint mailers, there are probably other companies that do the same thing in other airports:
http://www.airportmailers.com/airportlist.php
There was a company called ReturnKey that did the same thing (I linked to an Engadget article that mentions them in another post), but their domain is dead, so they seem to have gone out of business.
If they allowed knives back on, and any kind of terrorist attack occurred with knives, then someone would be held responsible for that decision, no matter how wise it seemed at the time. If they disallow knives, people will kick and scream, but won't actually change their flying behavior much, and everyone's job will be safe.
Be serious - TSA is a government agency, there's no such thing as holding someone accountable.
They should just charge a $5 fee and mail it to you if you don't want it destroyed.
It is kind of silly, though. Post 911, nobody can take over a plane with a few knives. The only reason to not allow them is that they can result in more injuries on a plane, but that seems so unlikely as to not be terribly persuasive.
I once walked into a secure federal building with a knife by accident; the guards thought about it and then didn't care. Which is really the right result.
I've seen self-service mail kiosks in some airports where you can mail your prohibited items to yourself. You still would have to get back out of the security line to get back to the Kiosk, but if you have something valuable it's probably worth it. So far I've only lost 99 cent nail clippers but I think those are allowed now.
http://www.engadget.com/2005/05/04/airport-kiosks-let-travelers-mail-off-limits-items/
Indeed. But they confirmed 5 cases out of 174.000 tested children... when the prevalence rate of thyroïd cancer is less than 2 in 1.000.000 in this area of Japan and age range, according to the article you are citing.
Smells fishy to me.
When you screen 100% of a population for a disease there's going to be a higher incidence rate than when only those showing obvious symptoms are found... especially for a disease like thyroid cancer, which is typically slow growing so it may not be discovered for years.
The 2 in a million rate is for "those aged 10 to 14 in Japan", while the screenings were for "174,000 people aged 18 or younger". A big difference in age range.
Something seems maybe not quite right; wasn't there an engineer(s) who inadvertantly stepped in a pool of radioactive water, and got enough exposure to get skin burns? My google-fu is lacking, I can find references to the incident, but I can't find their estimated doses - I remember it being a big deal at the time, though...
Q: What if I took a swim in a typical spent nuclear fuel pool? Would I need to dive to actually experience a fatal amount of radiation? How long could I stay safely at the surface?
A: Assuming you’re a reasonably good swimmer, you could probably survive treading water anywhere from 10 to 40 hours. At that point, you would black out from fatigue and drown. This is also true for a pool without nuclear fuel in the bottom.
http://what-if.xkcd.com/29/
I think the XKCD case is quite different than what the grandparent poster said -- the XKCD case is talking about a purified water tank, while a random "pool of radioactive water" in a disaster zone is likely full of radioactive contaminants (not that the water itself is radioactive).
However, I haven't heard of the "stepped in a pool of radioactive water" cases. There were some reports early in the disaster of workers taken to the hospital with radiation exposure, but without enough detail or followup to know if it really was radiation exposure, electrical arc flash burns, conventional fire exposure, etc. Information is muddled in a disaster and even official spokesman don't always have the correct information. Are there any other sources that verify that the workers suffered from radiation exposure?
This story is not true.
12 people have a cancer by radiation.
If you look at enough people anywhere, you'll find cancer cases, but not necessarily from radiation:
Thyroid cancer found in 12 minors in Fukushima
FUKUSHIMA – An ongoing study on the impact of radiation on Fukushima residents from the crippled atomic power plant has found 12 minors with confirmed thyroid cancer diagnoses, up from three in a report in February, with 15 other suspected cases, up from seven, researchers announced Wednesday.
The figures were taken from about 174,000 people aged 18 or younger whose initial thyroid screening results have been confirmed.
Researchers at Fukushima Medical University, which has been taking the leading role in the study, have said they do not believe the most recent cases are related to the nuclear crisis.
They have more than enough power projected to meet summer demand despite having only 2 of 50 nuclear power plants online:
http://japandailypress.com/no-electricity-austerity-measures-for-japan-this-summer-0926652
Anyone know how they made up the slack besides conservation? More coal? The article mentions "electric power companies have been looking to thermal power generation for their supplies", but it's not clear what that means - geothermal?
Depends on the neighborhood...
The data was stolen through the internet -- the worst neighborhood imaginable.
Entire divisions of intelligence agencies are devoted to stealing secrets from other countries (including "friendly" countries and allies). If the data was readily available, they wouldn't be doing their jobs if they ignored it.
Very true. However they're not supposed to get caught doing it. That's historically been considered a casus belli.
I don't believe anyone has been "caught" - the thefts may have been traced back to Chinese IP addresses, but everyone here knows that the source IP address of an attack means nothing (despite what RIAA may tell the courts). And even if it was a Chinese citizen that executed the attack(s), in a country of a billion people, it's hard to prove that it was an officially sanctioned theft.