You'll need a privilege-separated sshd (such as OpenSSH versions 3+) because chrooting daemons that run with high levels of access provides little or no security (which, I suspect, is the point Alan was making, but in grand/. tradition I haven't read his posts yet). You'll then need to patch the SFTP subsystem to provide the chroot function and rebuild it.
With a privsep'd sshd, a process with the uid/gid of the authenticated user will be spawned once authentication completes. Obviously, during authentication elevated access is required (though not necessarily root superuser) so that authentication data (LDAP, passwd file, shadow suite, NIS, whatever floats your boat) can be accessed for validating the password, but the communication stream from the user can be handed off to a less privileged process before anything other than user/password is processed. SSH isn't like telnet, you have to authenticate before you can get a real interactive session.
I'm not going to pretend this isn't hard. You should consider yourself pretty competent if you can whip up a chrooted sftp in less than a few hours. If you can do that and you also understand all the security implications without having to extensively study the mechanisms of SSH authentication, your chosen OS's chroot() implementation, and your specific application and user needs, you are a veteran security expert. If your system can be used in ways that would cause someone to be jailed or killed, you should have a veteran security expert on your staff.
The first major distribution to ship a chrootable SFTP with a priv-sep sshd will gain quite a bit of marketshare from HIPAA, SOX, and FDA regulated industries. There are costs associated with having to maintain your own packages outside distribution channels that corporations and hospitals would like to avoid.
The ESA article says, in part,
The reentry capsule for the Foton-M3 spacecraft, which has been in low-Earth orbit for the last 12 days, successfully landed this morning in an uninhabited area 150 km south of the town of Kustanay in Kazakhstan, close to the Russian border, at 09:58 CEST, 13:58 local time. I was under the impression that Russian vehicles do not so much land as plummet. That's why they generally aim for uninhabited portions of Kazakhstan.
I've set it to default to Windows, because windows boots over and over, sometimes for hours, before it finally relents and comes to life. I've suspected a BIOS setting it doesn't like, or that Windows wants its own FAT instead of LILO, but could it be that Windows is trying to phone home, even though my internet access has been shut off for a couple of months? Even though it's a fresh install and the PC hasn't been connected to the internet since before the install? Sounds like a hardware problem, to be honest. Like a bad bit or two in low memory, for example... do you have memory testing turned on in your BIOS? If it's set to "fast boot" it will skip nearly all useful testing, fast boot is just a way to generate money for PC repair shops.:)
And do thay have any idea what a pain in the ass it is to "register" that God damned OS without internet access? Don't remember if I've tried it with Windows, but for most windows programs that nag for registration you just tell it you'll register by snail mail, when it asks for a printer tell it to print the registration page to a file, and delete the file at your leisure.
If I could get the S-Video out to work with Linux, XP would be history on my PC. If you've got a Hauppage card, ivtv will probably do the job for you. If not, post your card type (preferably including video output chipset information, if you can figure out how to get that... sometimes it's in dmesg) in a MythTV forum. The myth guys are generally pretty helpful, if you are even minimally polite.
Never had anyone follow me around slashdot before... I feel honored. OK, maybe just amused. I had a bunch of Ayn Rand nutjobs follow me around the Internet once because I pointed out things in "The Fountainhead" that they didn't want to think about, but they didn't make libelous posts about me to third parties.
Just FYI, I haven't got any argument with the previous poster. He made several excellent points. I don't know why you think we are "arguing".
But please, continue to exercise your freedom of expression as you see fit...
By acting of my own volition to defuse a potential situation I am inherently proclaiming that individuals have the right and responsibility for the protection of themselves and others - I am more against totalitarianism of all forms than yourself! Rather than thinking "I'll just let someone else handle that" I seek to resolve problems myself before authority even becomes involved. Please stop trying to protect others. I do not want you to protect me, my family, my friends, or anyone else. We aren't scared, you are. You apparently imagine that any putty you might see at an airport has more than a 0.0000000001 percent chance of being explosive and are willing to react violently. I don't want you to protect me. I don't want the Boston cops to try to protect me either, since they do not appear to be competent to do so.
The problem is not so much that you are willing to attack people (and then hide, according to your post, for fear of being blown up) but that you have no judgment of when you should do so. Sane people don't want to be protected from imaginary threats. The "potential situation" you reference did not exist, and your insistence that it was justified to think so is incorrect, dangerous, and cowardly.
If you want to throw yourself in front of a bullet to save somebody, OK, but leave people who you think "look scary" alone, you (and the Boston cops) are clearly unqualified to make such a judgment. It was not a bomb, and therefore it was not correct to treat it as one, and there is no way to change that reality. People should be able to wear whatever they want, anyway.
Listen, I've got other things to do. I commend this book to you, it's sometimes been known to make people forsake fear.
I think you are confused about what slavery really is - being property, also means you are outside legal protections afforded by the rule of law. It means you are not a person.
Since I am in fact a person I have the ability and Freedom to do many things, some of which are indeed illegal. But that is a different matter for I can be tried by a jury and found not guilty for extenuating circumstances, or even have an unjust law changed if I am backed by enough people. As a slave you just get whipped, you have no recourse for bringing about change.
I hope that clarifies the issue for you. No, I'm afraid it doesn't. You seem to think a jury can resurrect you from the dead after the police have shot you and a dozen innocent bystanders. And you just stated that slaves aren't people. I can't get behind these lofty rhetorical statements that contradict reality. And incidentally, don't count on that jury trial; all that has to happen is for one man to say you are an "enemy combatant" (regardless of your citizenship) and you can kiss due process goodbye... in order to "fight terror", you know.
How did I state I am for other people taking responsibility for your person, when I am saying I am for taking responsibility of my own person? Curious interpretation. It's your whole argument. You've defended police over-reacting to a harmless individual based on mistaken perceptions - in order to "protect others", ostensibly including me since I use Logan Airport occasionally. You are defending your inclination to throw projectiles at innocent people "because they might hurt somebody", presumably including me if I'm in the crowd. I don't want any of that. I'm not afraid of light-up shirts. I'm not even afraid of terrorists, they don't kill as many people in the USA as police do (according to all published statistics I've seen). I want to be responsible for my own safety - like a free man, not like some piece of government property that has to be watched over by uniformed stooges. And if I die because of that, well, too bad for me. We'll all die eventually, it's perfectly normal and nothing to be afraid of.
From the ark-tickle: I recently attended an interesting seminar, titlted, "The Informed Science Journalist: How Much Science Do You Need to Know?" led by UBC journalism Professor and Director of the School of Journalism, Stephen Ward. During the discussion, one theme in particular caught my attention: you don't have to have any background in science to write about science. Anyone with a keen interest for a field and sharp mind can write about anything, from philosophy to advanced string theory to climate modeling.
Is this true? Is a keen interest sufficient?
Well, it's a good starting place, but I think that "sharp mind" bit is more important... and judging by the quality of most science journalism I read, there's not a lot of 'em in the trade. I imagine deadline pressures aren't helping the quality of science reporting, either.
The only way the device in the first picture "in no way appears threatening to you" is because you're not familiar with what improvised explosives and detonators can actually look like. Um, I've worked on thermonuclear weapon delivery systems. Several different ones. I've improvised a few explosive devices in my time, too (although that's more than 30 years in the past).
I will show your pictures to my spouse and children and let you know what a totally untrained eye sees.
Now, what criteria would you suggest that non-EEs use to tell the difference between the harmless LED display in the first picture, and the deadly explosive detonator in the second picture? Oooh, the first one has an exposed breadboard. Well, so does the second one. Exposed wiring on both. Exposed circuit components on both. Both have a battery and glowy lights (There's a cellphone there, so it's going to have at least one LED on it, and it even has a nice fancy LCD display). Using your pictures, I'd say the obvious tell is that the IED was found (probably unattended and surreptitiously placed) in a combat zone, and the shirt was found on a harmless co-ed going about her business. Was that supposed to be a hard question?
So what criteria would you suggest airport and security personnel use to evaluate such things that would allow them to accurately, at a glance, tell the difference between a hacked-together LED display, and a hacked-together IED? Especially when it's sitting there on the chest of someone who's walking into a crowded terminal. Well, given that in the year with the most terrorist activity since 1800 your chance of being killed by a terrorist was still far less than 0.001%, and your chance of being accidentally shot to death by police was significantly higher, (and in the last five years zero people have died in a terrorist attack inside the USA while hundreds of people have died falling down the stairs) the method should be to assume that it's NOT a bomb until conclusively proven to be a bomb by a bomb expert. That way, fewer people will be killed even if several bombs go off in crowded airports because we will limit the exposure of people to police with guns. People don't become cops because they are incapable of shooting people, you know. We probably wouldn't want cops incapable of violence.
Don't EE's do math anymore? I switched majors because I couldn't handle Calc 4, but that was in the days of the dinosaurs.
Look at these numbers and tell me if a strategy that "anything that could conceivably be a bomb, should draw massive armed response" makes sense. And think on this, too - any MIT student with half a brain can construct a bomb that's indistinguishable from a common household object. The Soviets could put a nuclear device in a cigarette pack! Why do you think there's any need or purpose served by "airport and security personnel" being able to detect bombs "accurately, at a glance"? If, in some fantasy world, this was actually possible, why should we spend money on superman IED-detecting glasses when spending the same amount of money on nearly any form of disease control would save far more lives? Terrorists are a non-threat compared to the family dog or lightning strikes, for cryin' out loud, why do we need to be so scared that we'd harass tens of thousands of innocent people?
You've been so manipulated in your perception of risk, that you think this girl was in the wrong. But really, I'd bet money that the people we hire to be the TSA are statistically more likely to be terrorists than a coed in a blinky t-shirt with wires hanging out. The goal of terrorising people is not the goal of a patriot or even a normal level-headed individual, it's the goal of terrorists. You win the war on terror when you stop being afraid... most successful religions and philosophies tell us to live our lives so that we don't have to fear our inevitable death, a strategy that every single person should seriously consider.
Let me guess: you've never been involved in security. Funniest comment so far! If you only knew.
If your life and the lives of all the innocents around you depended on you checking out everything then yeah I expect the security guards to get jumpy about someone showing up at an airport with wires coming out of their shirt and not being responsive. No. False. NOBODY was in ANY danger from people with wires coming out of a shirt. EVERYONE was endangered by the foolish over-reaction of people who are supposedly paid to know what is and isn't a threat. And spin it any way you want, THIS GIRL WAS NO THREAT. The security forces had a ring (think about the stupidity of THAT for a second) of people with fully automatic weapons out in a public place FOR A FALSE ALARM. It's total bullshit to claim they were just doing their jobs, their jobs are to either get people on planes or to stop violence - not to wave weapons around and make wild-assed claims about what somebody's shirt did or didn't look like.
But I suppose your 30 years of electronics experience makes you superior to anyone doing a menial job like security. Ah, nice ad hominem! No, my command of reason and lack of cringing fearfullness makes me superior to you, though.
What the kid did was asshattery. Think of the stress going through the TSA agent when seeing her do these sorts of actions. And that justifies brandishing full-auto weapons in the street? The "kid" was not the menace here. SHE WAS NOT CAPABLE OF HURTING ANYONE. Why are you willing to excuse the police for harassing the innocent? It's their job to know what a threat is, not to fly off the handle when someone does something totally harmless. Why do you support the restriction of individual freedom in order to reassure cowards of their non-existent safety?
Everybody dies, Mr. AC. Some of us will die on our feet, some will die licking the feet of the TSA and begging for another cavity search.
...if they spent a few hundred million less on untested bomb detectors and a few hundred million more on competent security forces we'd all be a lot better off. Most intelligent comment in this discussion! Giving undertrained adrenaline junkies expensive guns doesn't make people safer - quite the opposite, in fact. Highly trained and dedicated people would be a real investment in air safety.
Now they say she just had paint on her hands. Dude, there was also Play-Doh on the device. You can't wiggle your way out of this one. As can easily be inferred by my silly putty reference in the same post, I haven't got a problem with you (or anyone else) exercising your god-given right to Play-Doh. No need for wiggling. I am not afraid of Play-Doh and I grieve for those so terrorized that they fear Play-Doh. Incidentally, Play-Doh has an odor that is quite different from the major plastic explosives... maybe you can familiarize yourself with the scent and overcome this part of your irrational fears.
No, you are a coward. I see, I am a coward for potentially scarificing myself and letting scores of others live. Scarify yourself all you want, but please do not make the mistake of acting cowardly in the name of others. I do not wish you to play the coward for my sake.
And a violent one, at that. A reasonable person might have approached her and asked her why her shirt was lighting up. My approach left me with some possibility of being alive, and the idiot (who was going to be arrested anyway) only with a slight headache or other minor injories. In fact I might well save them from being shot through my actions. Perhaps you should think of the big picture, and of thew totality of repercussions. What, exactly, makes your life so precious that you can justify this behaviour based on your continued existence? You would put every principle of honor and society aside so that some incredibly vital work you are doing might be completed? You'd rather live on your knees than die standing up? Personally, I'll take my chance of being shot than be saved by totalitarian control over dress codes.
I am not violent at all, I take spiders outside for example rather than kill them. Hmm, yes I agree that spiders are our friends. I encourage wolf spiders to live in my basement and barn, to keep down the crickets. A litte off-topic, though, aren't we?
But I will not stand by while others are killed even if it imperils myself. Unlike you. That's rich. Your acceptance of totalitarianism is far more dangerous to others than my own insistence that harmless people be left alone.
I have the FREEDOM to shout fire in a crowded theater, or to wear a bomb-looking thing into an airport. No, you pretty clearly do not have the freedom to shout fire in a crowded theatre, at least in the USA, even though Schenck.v. United States was overturned and Holmes' opinions have been losing their appeal over the years.
"Freedom" can be concisely defined as the opposite of slavery. It is an American tradition, as far back as the 1700s when the distinction was more obvious, to define it this way; I'm not just making up my own semantics. Our founders read the classics and dug Aristotle. And unlike modern Americans, they were openly contemptuous of cowardice, and they had scorn for the idea that police should be more heavily armed than law-abiding people, and derision for sumptuary laws governing what you can and can't wear.
A slave has exactly as much ability to "shout fire in a crowded theater" as you do. You both will be punished by those who have set themselves above you as your masters. So that's not freedom. Get it?
And as for this:
And you are too stupid to understand the meaning of CONSEQUENCES and PERSONAL RESPONISIBLITY. I may be stupid, but I thoroughly understand consequences and I take personal responsibility - unlike you. You've already stated that you're in favor of other people (in this case, the Boston PD and TSA) taking responsibility for your person, and you clearly do not recognize the historically inevitable consequences of eliminating person freedoms.
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen." -- Sam Adams
I think your comments are remarkably sane and well balanced, but I personally don't think the Boston police should be trusted with machine guns. I mean, they blew up their own traffic monitor, and they spent $2 million dollars over-reacting to a advertising campaign. I think they need to be restricted to single-shot weapons like the competent cops generally use.
Even more importantly I'm not in favor of issuing fully automatic weapons with gigantic clips (and what appear to be silencers?) to people who have been repeatedly shown to have bad judgement. These guys blow up their own traffic monitors, you know... oh, wait, has Faux News deleted that video from their site? I can't find it any more.
A good cop - a competent cop - could take down a female MIT student with a single shot from a.32 snub nose. I cannot think of any valid reason for anyone to be carrying weapons like this in any airport. It's totally inappropriate, like equipping frame carpenters with jackhammers and degaussing coils.
You're too busy being sensationalist to realize how non-crazies think though, apparently. Good job. No, you are too chicken-shit to understand the concept of FREEDOM.
If the woman wasn't hurting anyone she should be free to do whatever the hell she wants. Your fear was not caused by her behaviour, it was caused by your fundamental cowardice! If you are being hurt by your fears, you are the cause, not this woman. You'd allow a bunch of jackbooted thugs to threaten her life and endanger everyone in the area because you are afraid to die? Do you think you're somehow going to escape death through inane sumptuary laws? News flash: You are going to die, and so is everyone else, and the odds of you dying due to terrorism are far less than the odds of you being shot by a policeman. LOOK THAT UP, IT'S NOT HYPERBOLE. You are defending a course of action that is more dangerous to the populace than terrorism, when you support armed response to totally unverified and highly unlikely threats.
Cowards like yourself are destroying the moral fiber of this country. How do you sleep at night? Don't you understand that we fought two world wars without tearing up the constitution? Are you too busying watching "survivor" to be bothered with fundamental issues of right and wrong? Why can't you admit that it's bad to live as terrorized sheep, and seek therapy for this ridiculous obsession with imaginary bombs?
Did you miss the part where she was also holding putty? Now they say she just had paint on her hands. I do too, right now, because I'm a sloppy painter. It'll come off eventually but in the meantime I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't TOTALLY FUCKING PANIC.
And it's a thick sweatshirt, easily able to hold enough material BEHIND THE BREADBOARD to do quite of bit of damage to the area. Yes, even possibly concealed in a bra. It's easy to say it looks harmless looking at pictures from the web!
I've done a fair amount of electronics and if I had seen her wandering into the airport I would have thrown my carryon at her head and dived to the floor from a distance. She's an idiot. No, you are a coward. And a violent one, at that. A reasonable person might have approached her and asked her why her shirt was lighting up. A timid person might have hurried away or gotten behind a thick pillar (look at the girl, if you totally hollowed her out and filled her with C4 a couple feet of concrete would shield you). Only a violent coward would throw his suitcase at a harmless person's head in a paroxysm of terror.
My young son has grown up around computers and electronics. He's generally not been exposed to TV or government-sponsored fear-mongering. It would not occur to him that he needs to protect himself from people like you, who would violently attack him if you saw him wandering about with silly putty in his hands and a breadboard hanging off his belt.
But I guess there is no "Land of the Brave" any more. I'm going to have to go home and explain to my son how your terror is restricting his totally harmless lifestyle. How's it feel to be working for Usama?
Hrmmmm.... looking at the "device" from the images on the link makes me think the police overreacted. Come on now.... holding her at gunpoint? I disagree, I think that even to people involved with electronics it could look like something threatening. I think the police did their job and this Star Simpson person was pretty stupid to try that. Speaking as a person who has been "involved with electronics" for over 30 years, I have to say you are quite wrong. Even turned inside out to show the breadboard (as in the pic) the device in no way looks threatening. Seen as worn normally, it's a light-up shirt and has zero threat value to anyone "involved with electronics".
There are people who want you to be afraid, who want you to be willing to accept any level of brutality in the name of "protecting you". Are you sure those people haven't curdled your brain with their scare talk?
Talk about no common sense. Yes, common sense says that the only people qualified to call foul on a supposed bomb are bomb experts. Not "people involved with electronics" and not airline ticket agents. Even so, the most brain-dead drop-out from cop school (giving the average undertrained TSA agent a break here) can tell that a light-up shirt is not something that calls for even the threat of lethal force. At most, the wearer should be politely asked to submit to a check for explosive materials or for other contraband. You can't have a bomb without explosives or at least a detonator and supposedly the TSA is capable of detecting those.
If you can telnet to the router's IP address and it doesn't block you (i.e. if there's any kind of remote administration), you get user exec mode. Good job. Um, seriously, if that works on your network, you need to fire your Cisco admin immediately.
But to permanently destroy them ("kill" the undead monster), you've got to expose them to sunlight. Stake 'em and bake 'em[...] And if their tech has made them immune to the Sun, then we're in pretty deep. Sever the head, fill the mouth with kosher rock salt, stitch it shut (difficult, even after the head's been removed, but necessary), encase the head and body separately in reinforced concrete, bury at two road intersections that are separated by running fresh water at all times (even during droughts). Don't let anyone see you or know about it, or they might put the damned thing back together. The concrete is to prevent wolf or dog allies from doing the same thing. Big pain in the ass, I tell ya.
One of the reasons these things are so successful on Mars is the lack of fresh water in the canals. It's just weak sulphuric acid up there, no barrier to undead locomotion at all.
If you feel that support of multiple languages somehow hurts GCC, then I welcome you to fork it and see how it works out. I don't think it hurts gcc, I think it hurts my brain. Trying to decipher the inner workings of complex software that's been written in multiple languages is fairly painful, especially when it's C, C++, Objective-C, and a million pre-processing directives.
On the other claw, you can't really blame a hammer for bad carpentry.
Don't you love how a totally whack comment on slashdot can provoke informative, insightful responses? (Unfortunately it works the other way too.)
Really? I don't have a BSD system handy, but I thought their cc was just a link to gcc. Hmm... I don't see a separate cc on the FreeBSD doc site but that doesn't necessarily prove anything.
HP-UX ships three compilers - the K&R compiler that they need to compile their crusty old kernel code, the GNU gcc (so they can build stuff like perl or gawk easily) and their expensive flagship HP C Compiler.
I was under the impression that all the free OSes were dependent on gcc... but I'd love to be wrong!:)
Slashdot Mirror
meta-meta-meta-meta....
"and I want... TWO THOUSAND DOLLARS!"
"Uh, really? OK, sure."
Do this Google search and see if it's any help.
/. tradition I haven't read his posts yet). You'll then need to patch the SFTP subsystem to provide the chroot function and rebuild it.
You'll need a privilege-separated sshd (such as OpenSSH versions 3+) because chrooting daemons that run with high levels of access provides little or no security (which, I suspect, is the point Alan was making, but in grand
With a privsep'd sshd, a process with the uid/gid of the authenticated user will be spawned once authentication completes. Obviously, during authentication elevated access is required (though not necessarily root superuser) so that authentication data (LDAP, passwd file, shadow suite, NIS, whatever floats your boat) can be accessed for validating the password, but the communication stream from the user can be handed off to a less privileged process before anything other than user/password is processed. SSH isn't like telnet, you have to authenticate before you can get a real interactive session.
I'm not going to pretend this isn't hard. You should consider yourself pretty competent if you can whip up a chrooted sftp in less than a few hours. If you can do that and you also understand all the security implications without having to extensively study the mechanisms of SSH authentication, your chosen OS's chroot() implementation, and your specific application and user needs, you are a veteran security expert. If your system can be used in ways that would cause someone to be jailed or killed, you should have a veteran security expert on your staff.
The first major distribution to ship a chrootable SFTP with a priv-sep sshd will gain quite a bit of marketshare from HIPAA, SOX, and FDA regulated industries. There are costs associated with having to maintain your own packages outside distribution channels that corporations and hospitals would like to avoid.
Eh, lunch break's over. Good luck!
Never had anyone follow me around slashdot before... I feel honored. OK, maybe just amused. I had a bunch of Ayn Rand nutjobs follow me around the Internet once because I pointed out things in "The Fountainhead" that they didn't want to think about, but they didn't make libelous posts about me to third parties.
Just FYI, I haven't got any argument with the previous poster. He made several excellent points. I don't know why you think we are "arguing".
But please, continue to exercise your freedom of expression as you see fit...
The problem is not so much that you are willing to attack people (and then hide, according to your post, for fear of being blown up) but that you have no judgment of when you should do so. Sane people don't want to be protected from imaginary threats. The "potential situation" you reference did not exist, and your insistence that it was justified to think so is incorrect, dangerous, and cowardly.
If you want to throw yourself in front of a bullet to save somebody, OK, but leave people who you think "look scary" alone, you (and the Boston cops) are clearly unqualified to make such a judgment. It was not a bomb, and therefore it was not correct to treat it as one, and there is no way to change that reality. People should be able to wear whatever they want, anyway.
Listen, I've got other things to do. I commend this book to you, it's sometimes been known to make people forsake fear.
Since I am in fact a person I have the ability and Freedom to do many things, some of which are indeed illegal. But that is a different matter for I can be tried by a jury and found not guilty for extenuating circumstances, or even have an unjust law changed if I am backed by enough people. As a slave you just get whipped, you have no recourse for bringing about change.
I hope that clarifies the issue for you. No, I'm afraid it doesn't. You seem to think a jury can resurrect you from the dead after the police have shot you and a dozen innocent bystanders. And you just stated that slaves aren't people. I can't get behind these lofty rhetorical statements that contradict reality. And incidentally, don't count on that jury trial; all that has to happen is for one man to say you are an "enemy combatant" (regardless of your citizenship) and you can kiss due process goodbye... in order to "fight terror", you know. How did I state I am for other people taking responsibility for your person, when I am saying I am for taking responsibility of my own person? Curious interpretation. It's your whole argument. You've defended police over-reacting to a harmless individual based on mistaken perceptions - in order to "protect others", ostensibly including me since I use Logan Airport occasionally. You are defending your inclination to throw projectiles at innocent people "because they might hurt somebody", presumably including me if I'm in the crowd. I don't want any of that. I'm not afraid of light-up shirts. I'm not even afraid of terrorists, they don't kill as many people in the USA as police do (according to all published statistics I've seen). I want to be responsible for my own safety - like a free man, not like some piece of government property that has to be watched over by uniformed stooges. And if I die because of that, well, too bad for me. We'll all die eventually, it's perfectly normal and nothing to be afraid of.
From the ark-tickle: I recently attended an interesting seminar, titlted, "The Informed Science Journalist: How Much Science Do You Need to Know?" led by UBC journalism Professor and Director of the School of Journalism, Stephen Ward. During the discussion, one theme in particular caught my attention: you don't have to have any background in science to write about science. Anyone with a keen interest for a field and sharp mind can write about anything, from philosophy to advanced string theory to climate modeling.
Is this true? Is a keen interest sufficient?
Well, it's a good starting place, but I think that "sharp mind" bit is more important... and judging by the quality of most science journalism I read, there's not a lot of 'em in the trade. I imagine deadline pressures aren't helping the quality of science reporting, either.
I will show your pictures to my spouse and children and let you know what a totally untrained eye sees. Now, what criteria would you suggest that non-EEs use to tell the difference between the harmless LED display in the first picture, and the deadly explosive detonator in the second picture? Oooh, the first one has an exposed breadboard. Well, so does the second one. Exposed wiring on both. Exposed circuit components on both. Both have a battery and glowy lights (There's a cellphone there, so it's going to have at least one LED on it, and it even has a nice fancy LCD display). Using your pictures, I'd say the obvious tell is that the IED was found (probably unattended and surreptitiously placed) in a combat zone, and the shirt was found on a harmless co-ed going about her business. Was that supposed to be a hard question? So what criteria would you suggest airport and security personnel use to evaluate such things that would allow them to accurately, at a glance, tell the difference between a hacked-together LED display, and a hacked-together IED? Especially when it's sitting there on the chest of someone who's walking into a crowded terminal. Well, given that in the year with the most terrorist activity since 1800 your chance of being killed by a terrorist was still far less than 0.001%, and your chance of being accidentally shot to death by police was significantly higher, (and in the last five years zero people have died in a terrorist attack inside the USA while hundreds of people have died falling down the stairs) the method should be to assume that it's NOT a bomb until conclusively proven to be a bomb by a bomb expert. That way, fewer people will be killed even if several bombs go off in crowded airports because we will limit the exposure of people to police with guns. People don't become cops because they are incapable of shooting people, you know. We probably wouldn't want cops incapable of violence.
Don't EE's do math anymore? I switched majors because I couldn't handle Calc 4, but that was in the days of the dinosaurs.
Look at these numbers and tell me if a strategy that "anything that could conceivably be a bomb, should draw massive armed response" makes sense. And think on this, too - any MIT student with half a brain can construct a bomb that's indistinguishable from a common household object. The Soviets could put a nuclear device in a cigarette pack! Why do you think there's any need or purpose served by "airport and security personnel" being able to detect bombs "accurately, at a glance"? If, in some fantasy world, this was actually possible, why should we spend money on superman IED-detecting glasses when spending the same amount of money on nearly any form of disease control would save far more lives? Terrorists are a non-threat compared to the family dog or lightning strikes, for cryin' out loud, why do we need to be so scared that we'd harass tens of thousands of innocent people?
You've been so manipulated in your perception of risk, that you think this girl was in the wrong. But really, I'd bet money that the people we hire to be the TSA are statistically more likely to be terrorists than a coed in a blinky t-shirt with wires hanging out. The goal of terrorising people is not the goal of a patriot or even a normal level-headed individual, it's the goal of terrorists. You win the war on terror when you stop being afraid... most successful religions and philosophies tell us to live our lives so that we don't have to fear our inevitable death, a strategy that every single person should seriously consider.
Everybody dies, Mr. AC. Some of us will die on our feet, some will die licking the feet of the TSA and begging for another cavity search.
...if they spent a few hundred million less on untested bomb detectors and a few hundred million more on competent security forces we'd all be a lot better off. Most intelligent comment in this discussion! Giving undertrained adrenaline junkies expensive guns doesn't make people safer - quite the opposite, in fact. Highly trained and dedicated people would be a real investment in air safety."Freedom" can be concisely defined as the opposite of slavery. It is an American tradition, as far back as the 1700s when the distinction was more obvious, to define it this way; I'm not just making up my own semantics. Our founders read the classics and dug Aristotle. And unlike modern Americans, they were openly contemptuous of cowardice, and they had scorn for the idea that police should be more heavily armed than law-abiding people, and derision for sumptuary laws governing what you can and can't wear.
A slave has exactly as much ability to "shout fire in a crowded theater" as you do. You both will be punished by those who have set themselves above you as your masters. So that's not freedom. Get it?
And as for this: And you are too stupid to understand the meaning of CONSEQUENCES and PERSONAL RESPONISIBLITY. I may be stupid, but I thoroughly understand consequences and I take personal responsibility - unlike you. You've already stated that you're in favor of other people (in this case, the Boston PD and TSA) taking responsibility for your person, and you clearly do not recognize the historically inevitable consequences of eliminating person freedoms.
"If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or your arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen." -- Sam Adams
I think your comments are remarkably sane and well balanced, but I personally don't think the Boston police should be trusted with machine guns. I mean, they blew up their own traffic monitor, and they spent $2 million dollars over-reacting to a advertising campaign. I think they need to be restricted to single-shot weapons like the competent cops generally use.
Even more importantly I'm not in favor of issuing fully automatic weapons with gigantic clips (and what appear to be silencers?) to people who have been repeatedly shown to have bad judgement. These guys blow up their own traffic monitors, you know... oh, wait, has Faux News deleted that video from their site? I can't find it any more.
.32 snub nose. I cannot think of any valid reason for anyone to be carrying weapons like this in any airport. It's totally inappropriate, like equipping frame carpenters with jackhammers and degaussing coils.
A good cop - a competent cop - could take down a female MIT student with a single shot from a
If the woman wasn't hurting anyone she should be free to do whatever the hell she wants. Your fear was not caused by her behaviour, it was caused by your fundamental cowardice! If you are being hurt by your fears, you are the cause, not this woman. You'd allow a bunch of jackbooted thugs to threaten her life and endanger everyone in the area because you are afraid to die? Do you think you're somehow going to escape death through inane sumptuary laws? News flash: You are going to die, and so is everyone else, and the odds of you dying due to terrorism are far less than the odds of you being shot by a policeman. LOOK THAT UP, IT'S NOT HYPERBOLE. You are defending a course of action that is more dangerous to the populace than terrorism, when you support armed response to totally unverified and highly unlikely threats.
Cowards like yourself are destroying the moral fiber of this country. How do you sleep at night? Don't you understand that we fought two world wars without tearing up the constitution? Are you too busying watching "survivor" to be bothered with fundamental issues of right and wrong? Why can't you admit that it's bad to live as terrorized sheep, and seek therapy for this ridiculous obsession with imaginary bombs?
I've done a fair amount of electronics and if I had seen her wandering into the airport I would have thrown my carryon at her head and dived to the floor from a distance. She's an idiot. No, you are a coward. And a violent one, at that. A reasonable person might have approached her and asked her why her shirt was lighting up. A timid person might have hurried away or gotten behind a thick pillar (look at the girl, if you totally hollowed her out and filled her with C4 a couple feet of concrete would shield you). Only a violent coward would throw his suitcase at a harmless person's head in a paroxysm of terror.
My young son has grown up around computers and electronics. He's generally not been exposed to TV or government-sponsored fear-mongering. It would not occur to him that he needs to protect himself from people like you, who would violently attack him if you saw him wandering about with silly putty in his hands and a breadboard hanging off his belt.
But I guess there is no "Land of the Brave" any more. I'm going to have to go home and explain to my son how your terror is restricting his totally harmless lifestyle. How's it feel to be working for Usama?
There are people who want you to be afraid, who want you to be willing to accept any level of brutality in the name of "protecting you". Are you sure those people haven't curdled your brain with their scare talk? Talk about no common sense. Yes, common sense says that the only people qualified to call foul on a supposed bomb are bomb experts. Not "people involved with electronics" and not airline ticket agents. Even so, the most brain-dead drop-out from cop school (giving the average undertrained TSA agent a break here) can tell that a light-up shirt is not something that calls for even the threat of lethal force. At most, the wearer should be politely asked to submit to a check for explosive materials or for other contraband. You can't have a bomb without explosives or at least a detonator and supposedly the TSA is capable of detecting those.
You just posted a day or two early, my friend.
One of the reasons these things are so successful on Mars is the lack of fresh water in the canals. It's just weak sulphuric acid up there, no barrier to undead locomotion at all.
On the other claw, you can't really blame a hammer for bad carpentry.
Don't you love how a totally whack comment on slashdot can provoke informative, insightful responses? (Unfortunately it works the other way too.)
Really? I don't have a BSD system handy, but I thought their cc was just a link to gcc. Hmm... I don't see a separate cc on the FreeBSD doc site but that doesn't necessarily prove anything.
:)
HP-UX ships three compilers - the K&R compiler that they need to compile their crusty old kernel code, the GNU gcc (so they can build stuff like perl or gawk easily) and their expensive flagship HP C Compiler.
I was under the impression that all the free OSes were dependent on gcc... but I'd love to be wrong!