I'm undecided about that. When it comes to this kind of information, at this time, public is probably safer than would-be anonymous.
If anything happens to Assange, the entire world knows where to look. Even the Mossad can't make public figures disappear without leaving a trail. Whereas a would-be anonymous leaking organization can be easily disappeared or infiltrated.
The problem with being anonymous is that you never actually are.
I'm always interested to see a new discovery like this in the Eocene.
The Eocene is such a cool epoch (and by cool I mean hot, followed by less hot) that I get excited whenever there's something newly discovered. In part because through modern technology, it really isn't so remote.
Through the miracle of anthropomorphic global warming the kind of world in which creatures like this thrived is within reach of our descendants, possibly within living memory.
Tropics replacing deserts. Habitable northern latitudes and even poles. Longer growing seasons. Greater biodiversity, and greater biological productivity on the whole.
The ability of our species to bring about a radical change in climate should be incredibly compelling to us. It presents an amazing opportunity to transform our world for the better. How many of us read and dreamt about terraforming other worlds as youth? Our generation has the capacity to terraform our own.
We are really at a turning point as a species. Either we can continue to wallow in the current ice age or we can take the reigns of destiny and propel ourselves and our world to a better future.
We didn't say it was capricious. We said it was corrupt and stupid, and it was.
The equitable resolution would have been to remember that the point of the rule was to give credit based on the merit of the contribution, and allow a joint credit because in this case it was merited.
The corrupt and stupid decision would be to turn on your own member, ignore the merit of the situation, and basically say my way or the highway purely for the sake of the power of the institution, which is the decision that was made here.
Corporations and unions are both institutions. Fuck institutions. Fuck them especially when they want to control creativity.
Only SEVEN states have a primary cell phone driving ban for licensed adult drivers, and only ONE has a secondary ban.
You might not be aware of it, but life does exist outside California. There are cities and towns and people live in them. Many of us even drive cars. Something new every day, eh?
Having a college degree makes you statistically more likely to have a job, and to be more highly compensated, but it's not at all clear to me that having a degree makes you part of a "creative class", whatever the fuck that is. Having a college degree also means you are statistically more likely to be white and to come from an affluent family. The transition from "educational attainment" to "smarter people" to "creative class" sounds great while sipping an $8 coffee and listening to indie rock, but in the real world it's pretty fucking condescending.
Carpenters are creative. Mechanics are creative. Landscapers are creative. Welders are creative. Stonemasons are creative....
Not all. Maybe not most. But probably not a great deal more or less than are coders, analysts, lawyers, doctors, accountants (maybe I'll give you that one!), and economists.
Thomas is not the intellectual that Scalia is, but my praise isn't for being an intellectual. My praise is for refusing to substitute personal beliefs on social policy for the clear an unambiguous language, or lack of language, of the constitution. Thomas in his own writing and speaking has his constitutional principles right on.
That's saying more than I can for any of the other justices, including Roberts and Alito.
Give me the federalism enshrined in the constitution any day. Sure, that might mean that Texas has fucked up state laws for one generation longer than the rest of the country, but it also strips the federal government of the power that is becoming our undoing.
And with good reason. It is at the federal level where our representation is weakest that today the power and wealth of government is greatest. The reverse of this was the intent. Here today we see just one illustration of why.
I'm not sure it's possible to praise justices Scalia and Thomas on Slashdot without be marked as a Troll, but I'm about to.
There is a lesson in this to be learned by all of those who rail against justices like Scalia and Thomas when they vote contrary to your personal beliefs about social issues.
This is at the core of the difference between tyranny and a constitutional republic.
As Edward Kennedy recently put it, are we a nation of laws, or a nation of men? Today we see again that we are merely a nation of men, ruled by the arbitrary will of an unelected few, rather than by a constitution designed to protect at all costs the liberty of the few from the will of the many.
If you don't like the constitution, we have process in place to change it for exactly that reason. We have many times before. That's the agreement you and I have as members of a civilized, free society. If you think you can walk all over the peoples' document when it becomes an obstacle to your social agenda: FUCK YOU.
And what apps are these unnamed, always on the horizon iPad competitors going to run?
Well, if they're Windows-based, not a hell of a lot. If they're Android based, the same knock offs and ports of iPhone apps and iPad apps that the Apple platform already has.
You see, by the time these devices come out, and none of them have unless you count Archos tilting at windmills, Apple apps will outnumber their apps 10:1, Apple apps will be 2nd and 3rd gen, and Apple hardware will be at least a generation ahead.
Until someone delivers a $99 consumer tablet, I put the iPad on top. And who's to say that Apple won't be the one who does?
Apple has built a robust and vibrant software ecosystem around mobile devices that has generated more excitement among consumers and developers alike than we've seen in 5 years.
The thing that has got to be eating Microsoft execs up is that even if Microsoft entered the revived consumer tablet space tomorrow, they would be starting years behind.
I've known a lot of microsofties over the years, most of them former; I don't think the Microsoft corporate culture today is capable of delivering successful consumer products in this space.
Please stop using the words "brown people" like that. I don't care if you think you're being snide or ironic.
As one of those "brown people" I can tell you that to our ears it's your own racism you're projecting, not the alleged racism of anyone else. In fact, I've never heard a US politician in favor of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan use those words. It's always those who oppose them.
Speaking of education, while war is horrible and I would not wish it on anyone, at least now as a side effect the girls and young women in Afghanistan are returning to schools, still with great risks, but have been empowered to take some small measure of their future into their own hands. That, in the scale of human progress, is in my opinion at least no less an achievement than 5% more scientists coming out of the US.
Fucking brilliant. What could be more fair than one person, one vote, majority rule, world wide?!
Just think, instead of arrogant Westerners and their so-caled human rights running the show, we could have a truly democratic world government dominated 2nd and 3rd world fascists sharing their enlightened values with us! Oh blessing of blessings!
Why, we could bring about a truly egalitarian society in a generation! A whole fucking planet living in mud huts, herding goats.
And what relational algebra languages "of all the alternatives" other than SQL are database professionals such as yourself using to query RDBMSes? Tutorial D?
So-called NoSQL DBMSes started out by requiring you to use object oriented facilities of your preferred client language to painfully build up queries.
It's no surprise to me that so-called NoSQL DBMSes are now developing SQL or SQL-derived query languages upon finding, as we seem to go through this same cycle every few years for the past 30, that SQL is pretty good at what it does.
When you tie yourself to Microsoft Office you have physical possession of the software and they can't change it from under you. When you buy a copy of Microsoft Office and use it to script your business and finance operations, you can count on it continuing to work for 10 years, no question, as long as you can keep the hardware running, and then as long as you can run the OS in a VM.
With Google, they can change the software and scripting interfaces right under your nose and there's nothing you can do about. It's not even vendor lock-in, it's customer SOL, because unless you are willing and able to update your solution to use the new interface, that changes every 6 months or a year, knowing Google, you are SOL.
And the problem is largest for the customers who are most likely to want to take advantage of this: home and small businesses. They're the ones who are least able to take on 3 months of development on short notice to update their scripts to Google App Script x.x++. That will put a home or small business under.
Advance warning: do not allow another company to control your software upgrade cycle for critical business infrastructure, or they will control you.
And I see that our options as developers for interacting with this stunning new invention are still limited to one: Javascript.
With application development increasingly moving to the browser, we as developers are going to find ourselves locked into a one language platform.
The browser platform should standardize on a VM, not on a language. Say goodbye to traditional paths of evolution of programming languages driven by competition. Want to innovate by using a functional language to bring your solution to market faster? No can do. It's JavaScriptway or the highway.
Congratulations, you've developed a framework for client-server application development. Welcome to 1990. But wait, it's different this time because it's lightweight? Only it's not. Your framework runtime (the browser) consumes many times the resources that existing client-server applications ever did, and you still can't provide the same level of functionality.
Progress in the software industry today looks like this: - 2003: Microsoft releases Office 2003 - 2008: Google releases quirky, limited-functionality clone of Office 2003 that runs in the browser - 2016: Google releases quirky but fully functional clone of Office 2003 that runs in the browser, only it's progress because it's Web 5.0!!!
Microsoft is Washington's 3rd largest employer, behind only the university and the Seattle international.
Washington can: a) take money from successful companies and redistributing it to less productive members of society b) take and redistributing it according to the whims and interests of politicians who think they can make better investment decisions than a successful company like Microsoft c) let Microsoft keep the money it earned to create jobs and increase wages,
I will take (c) every time. It's not a difficult decision if you aren't living on the government dole.
I doubt, however, that Washington will see it that way. There's a reason Washington's economy is in the crapper.
But if you are a casual reader like most people here, you don't have any need to carry thousands of books with you. You carry one book with you, or if you're going on a trip, you carry a few.
Not to mention, the environmental impact of that entire bookcase of books is still far less than the environmental impact of the manufacture and operation of a single Kindle.
The day I have to recharge the battery in my books is the day I stop reading books.
Firefox/Chrome/Operate are not alternatives only in environments managed by fucking incompetent MSCEs who think being a system administrator means being really good at clicking around in group policy editor.
Firefox will run from read-only binaries on a network mounted volume, and will store its profile in a network mounted user home directory.
You can't figure out how to deploy and manage Firefox in your environment? Doesn't bring any update tools for large enterprises? THAT'S YOUR FUCKING JOB, to deploy the apps to your users that are best for them, not the ones that give you the most shiny integration with group policy editor. Hands down, by every independent assessment, any of these browsers beat the pants off of IE in meeting the needs of end users.
Educate and apply yourself, man. How do you think we got by before group policy editor and deep freeze? If you can't deploy and manage Firefox, you're doing something wrong.
I just showed her this video and she is very interested.
Let me tell you why. What I hear from her is that the biggest problem is the kids who sit through the lessons and the material just goes in one ear and out the other. It's not necessarily that they're stupid or that they don't care, it's that they aren't engaged. What you need for those students is either massive support from the parent(s), or you need to interact with them on a one-to-one basis. My wife doesn't have the bandwidth as a teacher to provide that one-on-one interactivity while still teaching the material to the rest of the children who are on track and are learning in the traditional model.
This sort of technology can provide that one-on-one interactivity. What it needs, and what she's looking into, is whether it also provides some way that she as a teacher can monitor progress live while the children are using the devices.
But your assumption is dubious. While you will likely make more money selling your proven apps to publishers than by marketing them yourselves, you will likely not make money from your platform in that way, especially an unproven platform.
Publishers don't want to buy a platform. Publishers want to buy existing games with proven popularity for an initial capital investment that they can a profit on over time. Publishers fund development of games primarily through paying the original developer of a game to extend it, to port a game, to build another game, or to build a game with a product tie-in on behalf of another company.
If you want to sell the rights to your apps, start cold calling and the online equivalent. When you don't have connections, that's how it's done. There are plenty of social media game publishers out there, and if you have multiple games with proven popularity you shouldn't have any problem getting their attention. It's a publishers market, and it's put up or shut up.
Only don't expect them to be interested in your platform. If you're that confident that your platform is where it's at, then attract other developers to it first, get proven apps on it, and put your platform where your mouth is, so to speak. Then you might have something.
Their work here has already been discredited in academic circles. Stop misinforming the public by giving it traction in the popular press. Had these neuroscientists had the sense to review their hypotheses with current scientists in anthropology and evolutionary biology they would have saved themselves a great deal of embarrassment.
There is no science occurring here. There is no new discovery here. This is simply two scientists in a completely unrelated field (neuroscience), looking at very old, discredited data, and pulling a headline grabbing book and promotional magazine article out of their asses. However well meaning they were, they failed to do their footwork here, and the result is embarrassing. I guess we should ask snopes to start writing an article on this now before this nonsense spreads.
No, that is not the logical conclusion. What we're talking about are measures to ensure that terrorists do not take down a plane over a populated area or gain control of a plane. Strangling a fellow passenger with your underwear will not accomplish either and is not the object of these measures.
Simple intrusive screening techniques will give us a very high level of assurance that terrorists with the ability to take down or gain control of planes are not allowed on board.
The sky is not falling just because some dude at the screening station sees the profile of your dick and tighty whities on a little black and white monitor for 10 seconds.
Planes have been demonstrated to be used as weapons of mass destruction. Laugh at that if you want, but you'd have to be one sick, narcissistic fuck to think that's humorous. Should we really allow airlines to pickup lightly screened passengers out of Yemen by the busload and fly them into our country just because that's the business model they chose? Should we really outlaw intrusive screening because you're uptight about the possibility that some dork behind the scanner will chuckle at your beer gut and your low hanging balls?
Get real. There is absolutely an overriding state interest in ensuring that planes are not commandeered by terrorists and are not taken down by terrorists over densely populated areas, if nothing else because it is charged with the protection of the life and property of those on the ground in the paths of these flights. Requiring intrusive screening techniques and requiring that passengers keep their hands visible and their laps unobstructed are entirely reasonable as short-term measures until a full reevaluation can be completed.
Flying is a privilege, not a right. Security of life and property, is a right, and you do not get to endanger my life and property for your own preference for convenience or privacy in exercise of the privilege of flying.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm undecided about that. When it comes to this kind of information, at this time, public is probably safer than would-be anonymous.
If anything happens to Assange, the entire world knows where to look. Even the Mossad can't make public figures disappear without leaving a trail. Whereas a would-be anonymous leaking organization can be easily disappeared or infiltrated.
The problem with being anonymous is that you never actually are.
Google phone: Failure
Sony PSP: Marketshare loser
But what if we combined them?!
Why, we'd have a Nokia N-Gage gaming phone. Brilliant.
Hey clueless analysts, 2003 called and they want their shitty ideas back.
Enthusiastically. Let me tell you why.
I'm always interested to see a new discovery like this in the Eocene.
The Eocene is such a cool epoch (and by cool I mean hot, followed by less hot) that I get excited whenever there's something newly discovered. In part because through modern technology, it really isn't so remote.
Through the miracle of anthropomorphic global warming the kind of world in which creatures like this thrived is within reach of our descendants, possibly within living memory.
Tropics replacing deserts. Habitable northern latitudes and even poles. Longer growing seasons. Greater biodiversity, and greater biological productivity on the whole.
The ability of our species to bring about a radical change in climate should be incredibly compelling to us. It presents an amazing opportunity to transform our world for the better. How many of us read and dreamt about terraforming other worlds as youth? Our generation has the capacity to terraform our own.
We are really at a turning point as a species. Either we can continue to wallow in the current ice age or we can take the reigns of destiny and propel ourselves and our world to a better future.
We didn't say it was capricious. We said it was corrupt and stupid, and it was.
The equitable resolution would have been to remember that the point of the rule was to give credit based on the merit of the contribution, and allow a joint credit because in this case it was merited.
The corrupt and stupid decision would be to turn on your own member, ignore the merit of the situation, and basically say my way or the highway purely for the sake of the power of the institution, which is the decision that was made here.
Corporations and unions are both institutions. Fuck institutions. Fuck them especially when they want to control creativity.
Not most.
Only SEVEN states have a primary cell phone driving ban for licensed adult drivers, and only ONE has a secondary ban.
You might not be aware of it, but life does exist outside California. There are cities and towns and people live in them. Many of us even drive cars. Something new every day, eh?
Having a college degree makes you statistically more likely to have a job, and to be more highly compensated, but it's not at all clear to me that having a degree makes you part of a "creative class", whatever the fuck that is. Having a college degree also means you are statistically more likely to be white and to come from an affluent family. The transition from "educational attainment" to "smarter people" to "creative class" sounds great while sipping an $8 coffee and listening to indie rock, but in the real world it's pretty fucking condescending.
Carpenters are creative. ...
Mechanics are creative.
Landscapers are creative.
Welders are creative.
Stonemasons are creative.
Not all. Maybe not most. But probably not a great deal more or less than are coders, analysts, lawyers, doctors, accountants (maybe I'll give you that one!), and economists.
Thomas is not the intellectual that Scalia is, but my praise isn't for being an intellectual. My praise is for refusing to substitute personal beliefs on social policy for the clear an unambiguous language, or lack of language, of the constitution. Thomas in his own writing and speaking has his constitutional principles right on.
That's saying more than I can for any of the other justices, including Roberts and Alito.
Give me the federalism enshrined in the constitution any day. Sure, that might mean that Texas has fucked up state laws for one generation longer than the rest of the country, but it also strips the federal government of the power that is becoming our undoing.
And with good reason. It is at the federal level where our representation is weakest that today the power and wealth of government is greatest. The reverse of this was the intent. Here today we see just one illustration of why.
I'm not sure it's possible to praise justices Scalia and Thomas on Slashdot without be marked as a Troll, but I'm about to.
There is a lesson in this to be learned by all of those who rail against justices like Scalia and Thomas when they vote contrary to your personal beliefs about social issues.
This is at the core of the difference between tyranny and a constitutional republic.
As Edward Kennedy recently put it, are we a nation of laws, or a nation of men? Today we see again that we are merely a nation of men, ruled by the arbitrary will of an unelected few, rather than by a constitution designed to protect at all costs the liberty of the few from the will of the many.
If you don't like the constitution, we have process in place to change it for exactly that reason. We have many times before. That's the agreement you and I have as members of a civilized, free society. If you think you can walk all over the peoples' document when it becomes an obstacle to your social agenda: FUCK YOU.
And what apps are these unnamed, always on the horizon iPad competitors going to run?
Well, if they're Windows-based, not a hell of a lot. If they're Android based, the same knock offs and ports of iPhone apps and iPad apps that the Apple platform already has.
You see, by the time these devices come out, and none of them have unless you count Archos tilting at windmills, Apple apps will outnumber their apps 10:1, Apple apps will be 2nd and 3rd gen, and Apple hardware will be at least a generation ahead.
Until someone delivers a $99 consumer tablet, I put the iPad on top. And who's to say that Apple won't be the one who does?
Apple has built a robust and vibrant software ecosystem around mobile devices that has generated more excitement among consumers and developers alike than we've seen in 5 years.
The thing that has got to be eating Microsoft execs up is that even if Microsoft entered the revived consumer tablet space tomorrow, they would be starting years behind.
I've known a lot of microsofties over the years, most of them former; I don't think the Microsoft corporate culture today is capable of delivering successful consumer products in this space.
Until she shifted to the domestic propaganda wing.
Once a spook, always a spook.
Why yes ma'am, I should be grateful for the government to use my tax money to gather and mine my personal data! Why didn't I see this before!
Please stop using the words "brown people" like that. I don't care if you think you're being snide or ironic.
As one of those "brown people" I can tell you that to our ears it's your own racism you're projecting, not the alleged racism of anyone else. In fact, I've never heard a US politician in favor of the US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan use those words. It's always those who oppose them.
Speaking of education, while war is horrible and I would not wish it on anyone, at least now as a side effect the girls and young women in Afghanistan are returning to schools, still with great risks, but have been empowered to take some small measure of their future into their own hands. That, in the scale of human progress, is in my opinion at least no less an achievement than 5% more scientists coming out of the US.
Fucking brilliant. What could be more fair than one person, one vote, majority rule, world wide?!
Just think, instead of arrogant Westerners and their so-caled human rights running the show, we could have a truly democratic world government dominated 2nd and 3rd world fascists sharing their enlightened values with us! Oh blessing of blessings!
Why, we could bring about a truly egalitarian society in a generation! A whole fucking planet living in mud huts, herding goats.
And what relational algebra languages "of all the alternatives" other than SQL are database professionals such as yourself using to query RDBMSes? Tutorial D?
So-called NoSQL DBMSes started out by requiring you to use object oriented facilities of your preferred client language to painfully build up queries.
It's no surprise to me that so-called NoSQL DBMSes are now developing SQL or SQL-derived query languages upon finding, as we seem to go through this same cycle every few years for the past 30, that SQL is pretty good at what it does.
When you tie yourself to Microsoft Office you have physical possession of the software and they can't change it from under you. When you buy a copy of Microsoft Office and use it to script your business and finance operations, you can count on it continuing to work for 10 years, no question, as long as you can keep the hardware running, and then as long as you can run the OS in a VM.
With Google, they can change the software and scripting interfaces right under your nose and there's nothing you can do about. It's not even vendor lock-in, it's customer SOL, because unless you are willing and able to update your solution to use the new interface, that changes every 6 months or a year, knowing Google, you are SOL.
And the problem is largest for the customers who are most likely to want to take advantage of this: home and small businesses. They're the ones who are least able to take on 3 months of development on short notice to update their scripts to Google App Script x.x++. That will put a home or small business under.
Advance warning: do not allow another company to control your software upgrade cycle for critical business infrastructure, or they will control you.
And I see that our options as developers for interacting with this stunning new invention are still limited to one: Javascript.
With application development increasingly moving to the browser, we as developers are going to find ourselves locked into a one language platform.
The browser platform should standardize on a VM, not on a language. Say goodbye to traditional paths of evolution of programming languages driven by competition. Want to innovate by using a functional language to bring your solution to market faster? No can do. It's JavaScriptway or the highway.
Congratulations, you've developed a framework for client-server application development. Welcome to 1990. But wait, it's different this time because it's lightweight? Only it's not. Your framework runtime (the browser) consumes many times the resources that existing client-server applications ever did, and you still can't provide the same level of functionality.
Progress in the software industry today looks like this:
- 2003: Microsoft releases Office 2003
- 2008: Google releases quirky, limited-functionality clone of Office 2003 that runs in the browser
- 2016: Google releases quirky but fully functional clone of Office 2003 that runs in the browser, only it's progress because it's Web 5.0!!!
Thanks but no thanks.
Microsoft is Washington's 3rd largest employer, behind only the university and the Seattle international.
Washington can:
a) take money from successful companies and redistributing it to less productive members of society
b) take and redistributing it according to the whims and interests of politicians who think they can make better investment decisions than a successful company like Microsoft
c) let Microsoft keep the money it earned to create jobs and increase wages,
I will take (c) every time. It's not a difficult decision if you aren't living on the government dole.
I doubt, however, that Washington will see it that way. There's a reason Washington's economy is in the crapper.
Woosh.
But if you are a casual reader like most people here, you don't have any need to carry thousands of books with you. You carry one book with you, or if you're going on a trip, you carry a few.
Not to mention, the environmental impact of that entire bookcase of books is still far less than the environmental impact of the manufacture and operation of a single Kindle.
The day I have to recharge the battery in my books is the day I stop reading books.
Firefox/Chrome/Operate are not alternatives only in environments managed by fucking incompetent MSCEs who think being a system administrator means being really good at clicking around in group policy editor.
Firefox will run from read-only binaries on a network mounted volume, and will store its profile in a network mounted user home directory.
You can't figure out how to deploy and manage Firefox in your environment? Doesn't bring any update tools for large enterprises? THAT'S YOUR FUCKING JOB, to deploy the apps to your users that are best for them, not the ones that give you the most shiny integration with group policy editor. Hands down, by every independent assessment, any of these browsers beat the pants off of IE in meeting the needs of end users.
Educate and apply yourself, man. How do you think we got by before group policy editor and deep freeze? If you can't deploy and manage Firefox, you're doing something wrong.
I just showed her this video and she is very interested.
Let me tell you why. What I hear from her is that the biggest problem is the kids who sit through the lessons and the material just goes in one ear and out the other. It's not necessarily that they're stupid or that they don't care, it's that they aren't engaged. What you need for those students is either massive support from the parent(s), or you need to interact with them on a one-to-one basis. My wife doesn't have the bandwidth as a teacher to provide that one-on-one interactivity while still teaching the material to the rest of the children who are on track and are learning in the traditional model.
This sort of technology can provide that one-on-one interactivity. What it needs, and what she's looking into, is whether it also provides some way that she as a teacher can monitor progress live while the children are using the devices.
But your assumption is dubious. While you will likely make more money selling your proven apps to publishers than by marketing them yourselves, you will likely not make money from your platform in that way, especially an unproven platform.
Publishers don't want to buy a platform. Publishers want to buy existing games with proven popularity for an initial capital investment that they can a profit on over time. Publishers fund development of games primarily through paying the original developer of a game to extend it, to port a game, to build another game, or to build a game with a product tie-in on behalf of another company.
If you want to sell the rights to your apps, start cold calling and the online equivalent. When you don't have connections, that's how it's done. There are plenty of social media game publishers out there, and if you have multiple games with proven popularity you shouldn't have any problem getting their attention. It's a publishers market, and it's put up or shut up.
Only don't expect them to be interested in your platform. If you're that confident that your platform is where it's at, then attract other developers to it first, get proven apps on it, and put your platform where your mouth is, so to speak. Then you might have something.
Their work here has already been discredited in academic circles. Stop misinforming the public by giving it traction in the popular press. Had these neuroscientists had the sense to review their hypotheses with current scientists in anthropology and evolutionary biology they would have saved themselves a great deal of embarrassment.
There is no science occurring here. There is no new discovery here. This is simply two scientists in a completely unrelated field (neuroscience), looking at very old, discredited data, and pulling a headline grabbing book and promotional magazine article out of their asses. However well meaning they were, they failed to do their footwork here, and the result is embarrassing. I guess we should ask snopes to start writing an article on this now before this nonsense spreads.
No, that is not the logical conclusion. What we're talking about are measures to ensure that terrorists do not take down a plane over a populated area or gain control of a plane. Strangling a fellow passenger with your underwear will not accomplish either and is not the object of these measures.
Simple intrusive screening techniques will give us a very high level of assurance that terrorists with the ability to take down or gain control of planes are not allowed on board.
The sky is not falling just because some dude at the screening station sees the profile of your dick and tighty whities on a little black and white monitor for 10 seconds.
Planes have been demonstrated to be used as weapons of mass destruction. Laugh at that if you want, but you'd have to be one sick, narcissistic fuck to think that's humorous. Should we really allow airlines to pickup lightly screened passengers out of Yemen by the busload and fly them into our country just because that's the business model they chose? Should we really outlaw intrusive screening because you're uptight about the possibility that some dork behind the scanner will chuckle at your beer gut and your low hanging balls?
Get real. There is absolutely an overriding state interest in ensuring that planes are not commandeered by terrorists and are not taken down by terrorists over densely populated areas, if nothing else because it is charged with the protection of the life and property of those on the ground in the paths of these flights. Requiring intrusive screening techniques and requiring that passengers keep their hands visible and their laps unobstructed are entirely reasonable as short-term measures until a full reevaluation can be completed.
Flying is a privilege, not a right. Security of life and property, is a right, and you do not get to endanger my life and property for your own preference for convenience or privacy in exercise of the privilege of flying.