Nuke 'em from orbit... it's the only way to be sure....
That said, non-nuclear EMP weapons are possible, at least in theory. http://www.howstuffworks.com/e-bomb3.htm A simple Google search for "non-nuclear EMP" reveals that the Internet thinks that most of the conventional nuclear-armed nations have them already, and apparently Israel thinks Syria has them, and the UN thinks that the Russians sold them to the Koreans....
those high-powered NSA satellites can do this from orbit. No, this is NOT meant to be a troll post. I wonder if a country could actually orbit a satellite with enough power and a spot beam to stop cars in an entire city... in the name of anti-terrorism, of course.
Seems like a whole lot of trouble to go to, when an EMP would have exactly the same effect, and is a problem that was solved decades ago....
Even in TFS, this device doesn't target cars specifically, it zapped all of the electronics *in* the car, too.
Let's be honest, they were the only choices people had anyway. GNU/X.org/Linux has never really been quite "there yet" for the desktop...
Really? I have several family members and friends who are quite happy with it... my current go-to distro for somebody who's new to it is Mint 15... with the updated Mint Menu, the learning curve is next to zero for somebody coming from a Windows environment. For somebody coming from Apple, it's a little more work to customize it, but there's plenty of good dock replacements.... still looking for a good replacement for the Finder though.
And yes... I do have about 100 games in my Steam library that I can't play natively on Linux. I still have about 50 that I can play native versions on steam (there's several hundred that've been ported on the store, with more added every day)... I can boot up a virtual machine or a dual boot if I find myself wanting to play the 3 or 4 games that don't actually run under WINE.
It's often not a case of "won't buy an new one" but a case of "can't buy a new one". smartphones are expensive gadgets, and for a lot of people, $400+ is a lot of money and something people can't afford to spend every 6 months.
So don't buy a $400 phone.
Added bonus, I don't think I've ever broken the screen on multiple phones in the $150-300 range, and some of those phones have suffered some serious abuse. One of them was dropped from a 3rd floor balcony, winged off the edge of a swimming pool, and into the drink. I had to change into my swim suit, and go down the stairs to fish it out... it *still* works... my dad's using it now. The only scar it has from its ordeal was that I needed to buy a new battery, and there's a small divot on one of the edge bezels. (That was an LG Shine Plus).
I would like to see the iPhone that could survive a drop like that....
They didn't say that there's a drop in overall computing devices sales, only in PC sales. They actually say that tablet sales are up... If anything, this suggests *more* in landfills, because a number of PC's that would otherwise be donated to a charity like Computers for Schools are no longer happening, meanwhile tablets that can't be upgraded/repurposed are being tossed.
Case in point, I've owned two tablets in the last 18 months. The first one turned out to be a piece of junk, and I gave it to a friend who was looking for something for the kids. There are people who would, in the same situation, simply toss it.
A few users even use password reset tools every time they access services without even trying a password first.
I don't see that as a bad thing... choose an arbitrarily long password that you have no hope of remembering, don't write it down, and instead of logging in every time, send a one time use key to an e-mail address that, theoretically, I'm the only person who can access. Makes a certain sense, really....
That being said, I use a keyring app instead. I just have to remember the master password, and the keyring does the work for me. I have the arbitrarily long password (most of my passwords are at least 30 characters long, though some systems won't take passwords that long), and don't really worry about the physical access thing, because my disks are encrypted. There's a copy of the master file kept in an offsite location (gmail, because let's face it -- anybody who could access my gmail could subpoena access to any sites/systems in question anyway), and if my computer gets stolen I'll have plenty of time to change the passwords before they break the crypto. And honestly, they wouldn't bother to break the crypto, they'd just wipe the drive and start fresh.
As in this story, the ban on Google glass should be countered by Google handing these things out in large numbers to volunteers who will go places which are known to be hostile to such things. When the public sees the hostility, they will respond in much the same way I have to Denny's restaurants -- the gun-free kill zones. I won't go there any longer. And the reasons are exactly the same.
Denny's is a gun-free zone? Good. I think I know where I'm going for breakfast....
Most people, if they knew they were being filmed, would be very uncomfortable with the idea. They can accept CCTV as a necessary evil, but some random fuck on the street with a camera on his face? Not a chance.
There's an easy fix to all of this- make a version of Google glass without a camera. Make a read-only device. I want the Internet instantly accessible. That's far less intimidating that saying I want to upload everything you say and do around me.
And how would I tell, as a casual passer-by, that this is the version you've bought, and not the one with a camera embedded?
Short of making it a completely different colour, I don't think there's an easy way to accomplish this, and I doubt very much that Glass buyers are going to want to buy something that's even more obvious than it currently is.
Yep. The telephone, electrical, and other utility lines should have been underground a decade ago. But companies are too short-sighted.
In new neighbourhoods they are, for the most part. Though I will point out that it's a bitch to maintain a buried network, and that when you run into situations where it's damaged sometimes you can be waiting months for permission to dig (or for the ground to thaw if you're in an area that's cold enough).
You need to convince Xavier Niel to wage war on the American operators like he's been doing to the French ones.
Probably won't happen in this country... we have Canadian ownership laws that restrict the percentage stake in a telecomm company that can be held out of the country. We've had a few smaller competitors try to rock the boat already, but it mostly seems to have been unsuccessful... most of the challengers are in talks with one or more of the incumbents in order to sell out, sadly.:(
You can't get a plan like that in Canada.. but for comparison with Bell Canada (one of the 3 big players in the market) --
$95/mo "Data Lite" plan -- Unlimited Canadian LD, Unlimited minutes, Unlimited Canadian SMS, 6GB of LTE data (which will fall back to 3G where LTE isn't available). This plan does not include unlimited at EDGE speeds, it's 6GB, end of discussion. $15/mo US calling addon -- This adds the US long distance to the above plan. Total == $110/mo for a plan similar to what you have for 20 EUR. And with the $95/mo plan, there are certain phones you can't get them to subsidize... if you want them to subsidize more expensive phones like an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy 4, you need to buy a more expensive plan... the 6GB equivalent on *that* plan is $120/mo, plus $15/mo for the US calling.
Now, your plan has some things that this plan wouldn't, like unlimited EDGE data, but this plan has a few things yours doesn't -- it doesn't care whether you're calling a land line or a cellular phone in its calculation of the minutes. At the end of the day, I'd rather your plan.
But even then $100 seems high, is that the average in America?
For a heavy plan in the states or Canada, yes. That's about accurate. You *can* get plans for less, but the incumbents usually throw around arguments about the geography involved in rolling out a network when challenged on their pricing and how it compares to Europe or Japan. We'll ignore the fact that 90% of Canada's population lives within 100mi of the US border, and that 81% of our population is urban, clearly we need to roll out a cellular network that can provide service to the caribou up on Baffin Island, and so we need to charge the folks living in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, etc., to subsidize the coverage for the caribou... but I'm not bitter.....
More realistically, I don't think it's that people can't work out that $2400 is more than the cost of buying the phone outright. It's a combination of factors. First, the poor tax. If you don't happen to have $500 kicking around to buy a phone, then you will probably not be able to get that phone unless you sign up for a subsidized contract. The smart answer would be to buy a cheaper phone that you *can* afford, but there's a lot of money being poured into the advertising and marketing for the latest and greatest devices, and a lot of pressure on people to upgrade to a phone they shouldn't really be able to afford.
The second reason is that the incumbent cellular carriers, in Canada at least, don't really give you a significant discount for bringing your own phone rather than subsidizing it. Most of them will give you 10% off the price of the monthly contract... wowee... you save $10/mo on a $100 contract, which adds up to $240 over a 2-year contract. And you have to ask for it at the point of sale... if you don't ask for the discount, then the price of a subsidized contract is the same as the price for an unsubsidized contract, so there's no real savings for not letting them subsidize your phone, as long as you plan to stay with the same carrier and phone for the duration of the contract. The problem comes when somebody comes along with a better deal... which happens fairly regularly. Because you've signed on to a contract, it'll often cost you more to switch than you stand to save over the life of the contract... but people don't tend to think of cellular service in those terms, at least in this country.
No offense intended... but either you're bonkers, or I'm missing something here....
Looking at the hardware, the device sports a 1.4GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor, 1GB memory and 16GB of flash storage, plus a 4.5in 960x540 IPS touchscreen with Gorilla 2 Glass. It has the usual mobile network support, including GSM/3G/4G, 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth, 8MP autofocus rear camera and 2MP front camera. SIM-free pricing is expected to be €399.
On reading this, from TFS, my immediate reaction was "so, basically like the HTC Desire 601 I have, only for about $200 more than I paid"... sure, the Desire only has a 5MP rear camera, but otherwise on paper appears to be almost identical in every way.
While I appreciate that these folks are trying to do something important, and I do think that having a viable alternative to IOS and Android is a good thing, I honestly don't see the benefit to buying this one over mid-range Android devices that can be had at retail (no subsidy/contract) for about $300 CAD.
Rules laid out by professors/instructors do not carry over into the adult world - how you do things in class is not how they should be done outside of class.
One of my coworkers just got dinged a couple hours ago for using comic sans in an official e-mail....
I have. There's a dedicated bike path along the river in this city, and it's got speed limits (25km/h) and stop signs, and I've seen people get traffic tickets for not obeying those rules....
Define cycling pace? There's people who struggle to go faster than 10mph, and there's people who can hit 40 or 50mph on a good road bike. My personal record is about 35.
Also, even at 10mph, looking at a map while you're moving isn't a very bright move. When I was learning the bike route to get to work, I would stop to check maps. Not sure why people can't do that... seems a perfectly sane way to navigate on a bike.
If crime rates are going down, then why is my local police getting military grade equipment and gear?
Because people like you seem to think there's a need. They need military gear because they need military gear. Tautology, yes, but no less the truth in this case. Crime rates have been going down across the board since the 70's: lower rates of violent crime, less non-violent crime, less white collar crime, everything. The only reason you may get the impression it's happening more frequently is because channels like CNN didn't exist in the 70's.
I have a feeling they're including it because a 13.3" 1920x1080 screen with touch is cheaper than one without, due to economies of scale, and the fact that Windows is going in the direction of touch screen mandatory.
Besides, if it's being marketed as a developper system, having the touch as an option for one more thing you can test before your users do is a good thing.
For those who don't want to click the link (or if the link is geo-locked).... Core i5 4200U (2.6GHz) 13.3" 1920x1080 touchscreen display 8GB DDR3 memory (1600MHz) 128GB SSD Intel HD 4400 graphics Ubuntu 12.04 Weight: 3.04lbs Warranty: 1 year Next Business Day onsite support (after remote diagnosis, also 1 year). You can extend that to 3 years, and you can also buy up to 3 years of accidental damage coverage.
That's not a low end laptop. You are getting your money's worth, and it's in the same price range as Windows-based laptops with similar spec.
If you really want a cheap laptop with Linux on it, buy a chromebook. You can unlock them and replace the Chrome OS with a standard Linux distro if you want.
Even while cumbersome I much prefer sitting in an airplane where people had to pass a check than one without. Honestly, what would be your preference?
Checkpoints that actually work. If they were serious about stopping acts of terror, they'd go back to metal detectors (which had a *much* higher catch rate than the current backscatter x-ray machines, Google for the number of times people have gotten stuff past the backscatter x-rays, it's kinda scary), and make everybody in line have a once-over from bomb sniffing dogs. Much cheaper, much less of an invasion of privacy, and much more effective.
You can bet that terrorists would find it an easy attack vector if there were no checks anymore.
Actually, the checkpoint itself is probably going to be the next attack vector. A large group of people waiting in line to be screened, who haven't had to go through any checkpoints/security to get to that point? Perfect place for a suicide bomber. Has already been attempted in Russia, actually. Anything that gets people through the security faster is a good thing, which brings us back to my suggestion about a metal detector and bomb-sniffing dogs... more effective, and faster.
It is true that they may now start to resort to tactics that were not imaginable just a few years ago, like implanting in their body - but no security checks would make their attempts so much easier.
Nobody's seriously suggesting no security. Getting rid of the TSA and going back to what we had before 9/11 would be the right step. The existing fortifications that are required for the cockpit are effective enough, and would prevent another 9/11 from happening.
That really depends on what road you're driving on.
10km/h over the limit when the limit is 40km/h is a pretty significant difference. The places where the limit is 40 are usually that way for a reason, which makes it even more dangerous. 10km/h over the limit when the limit is 120km/h, however, is not nearly as bad.
Or if you prefer mph... 35 in a 25 zone versus 85 in a 75 zone. Argument's the same, even though the numbers may be different.
The road isn't a racetrack, and you don't score points for being the lead.
You also don't score points if you plow into the person who turned right in front of you without accelerating when you were 10 feet away from the intersection. You might even be judged "at fault" for the ensuing accident, because you hit him.
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Nuke 'em from orbit... it's the only way to be sure....
That said, non-nuclear EMP weapons are possible, at least in theory. http://www.howstuffworks.com/e-bomb3.htm
A simple Google search for "non-nuclear EMP" reveals that the Internet thinks that most of the conventional nuclear-armed nations have them already, and apparently Israel thinks Syria has them, and the UN thinks that the Russians sold them to the Koreans....
those high-powered NSA satellites can do this from orbit. No, this is NOT meant to be a troll post. I wonder if a country could actually orbit a satellite with enough power and a spot beam to stop cars in an entire city... in the name of anti-terrorism, of course.
Seems like a whole lot of trouble to go to, when an EMP would have exactly the same effect, and is a problem that was solved decades ago....
Even in TFS, this device doesn't target cars specifically, it zapped all of the electronics *in* the car, too.
Let's be honest, they were the only choices people had anyway. GNU/X.org/Linux has never really been quite "there yet" for the desktop...
Really? I have several family members and friends who are quite happy with it... my current go-to distro for somebody who's new to it is Mint 15... with the updated Mint Menu, the learning curve is next to zero for somebody coming from a Windows environment. For somebody coming from Apple, it's a little more work to customize it, but there's plenty of good dock replacements.... still looking for a good replacement for the Finder though.
And yes... I do have about 100 games in my Steam library that I can't play natively on Linux. I still have about 50 that I can play native versions on steam (there's several hundred that've been ported on the store, with more added every day)... I can boot up a virtual machine or a dual boot if I find myself wanting to play the 3 or 4 games that don't actually run under WINE.
It's often not a case of "won't buy an new one" but a case of "can't buy a new one". smartphones are expensive gadgets, and for a lot of people, $400+ is a lot of money and something people can't afford to spend every 6 months.
So don't buy a $400 phone.
Added bonus, I don't think I've ever broken the screen on multiple phones in the $150-300 range, and some of those phones have suffered some serious abuse. One of them was dropped from a 3rd floor balcony, winged off the edge of a swimming pool, and into the drink. I had to change into my swim suit, and go down the stairs to fish it out... it *still* works... my dad's using it now. The only scar it has from its ordeal was that I needed to buy a new battery, and there's a small divot on one of the edge bezels. (That was an LG Shine Plus).
I would like to see the iPhone that could survive a drop like that....
They didn't say that there's a drop in overall computing devices sales, only in PC sales. They actually say that tablet sales are up... If anything, this suggests *more* in landfills, because a number of PC's that would otherwise be donated to a charity like Computers for Schools are no longer happening, meanwhile tablets that can't be upgraded/repurposed are being tossed.
Case in point, I've owned two tablets in the last 18 months. The first one turned out to be a piece of junk, and I gave it to a friend who was looking for something for the kids. There are people who would, in the same situation, simply toss it.
A few users even use password reset tools every time they access services without even trying a password first.
I don't see that as a bad thing... choose an arbitrarily long password that you have no hope of remembering, don't write it down, and instead of logging in every time, send a one time use key to an e-mail address that, theoretically, I'm the only person who can access. Makes a certain sense, really....
That being said, I use a keyring app instead. I just have to remember the master password, and the keyring does the work for me. I have the arbitrarily long password (most of my passwords are at least 30 characters long, though some systems won't take passwords that long), and don't really worry about the physical access thing, because my disks are encrypted. There's a copy of the master file kept in an offsite location (gmail, because let's face it -- anybody who could access my gmail could subpoena access to any sites/systems in question anyway), and if my computer gets stolen I'll have plenty of time to change the passwords before they break the crypto. And honestly, they wouldn't bother to break the crypto, they'd just wipe the drive and start fresh.
As in this story, the ban on Google glass should be countered by Google handing these things out in large numbers to volunteers who will go places which are known to be hostile to such things. When the public sees the hostility, they will respond in much the same way I have to Denny's restaurants -- the gun-free kill zones. I won't go there any longer. And the reasons are exactly the same.
Denny's is a gun-free zone? Good. I think I know where I'm going for breakfast....
Most people don't care one way or another.
Most people, if they knew they were being filmed, would be very uncomfortable with the idea. They can accept CCTV as a necessary evil, but some random fuck on the street with a camera on his face? Not a chance.
There's an easy fix to all of this- make a version of Google glass without a camera. Make a read-only device.
I want the Internet instantly accessible. That's far less intimidating that saying I want to upload everything you say and do around me.
And how would I tell, as a casual passer-by, that this is the version you've bought, and not the one with a camera embedded?
Short of making it a completely different colour, I don't think there's an easy way to accomplish this, and I doubt very much that Glass buyers are going to want to buy something that's even more obvious than it currently is.
Yep. The telephone, electrical, and other utility lines should have been underground a decade ago. But companies are too short-sighted.
In new neighbourhoods they are, for the most part. Though I will point out that it's a bitch to maintain a buried network, and that when you run into situations where it's damaged sometimes you can be waiting months for permission to dig (or for the ground to thaw if you're in an area that's cold enough).
Shear ignorance
I agree. Their lack of knowledge about animal grooming techniques is criminal.
You need to convince Xavier Niel to wage war on the American operators like he's been doing to the French ones.
Probably won't happen in this country... we have Canadian ownership laws that restrict the percentage stake in a telecomm company that can be held out of the country. We've had a few smaller competitors try to rock the boat already, but it mostly seems to have been unsuccessful... most of the challengers are in talks with one or more of the incumbents in order to sell out, sadly. :(
You can't get a plan like that in Canada.. but for comparison with Bell Canada (one of the 3 big players in the market) --
$95/mo "Data Lite" plan -- Unlimited Canadian LD, Unlimited minutes, Unlimited Canadian SMS, 6GB of LTE data (which will fall back to 3G where LTE isn't available). This plan does not include unlimited at EDGE speeds, it's 6GB, end of discussion.
$15/mo US calling addon -- This adds the US long distance to the above plan.
Total == $110/mo for a plan similar to what you have for 20 EUR. And with the $95/mo plan, there are certain phones you can't get them to subsidize... if you want them to subsidize more expensive phones like an iPhone or a Samsung Galaxy 4, you need to buy a more expensive plan... the 6GB equivalent on *that* plan is $120/mo, plus $15/mo for the US calling.
Now, your plan has some things that this plan wouldn't, like unlimited EDGE data, but this plan has a few things yours doesn't -- it doesn't care whether you're calling a land line or a cellular phone in its calculation of the minutes. At the end of the day, I'd rather your plan.
But even then $100 seems high, is that the average in America?
For a heavy plan in the states or Canada, yes. That's about accurate. You *can* get plans for less, but the incumbents usually throw around arguments about the geography involved in rolling out a network when challenged on their pricing and how it compares to Europe or Japan. We'll ignore the fact that 90% of Canada's population lives within 100mi of the US border, and that 81% of our population is urban, clearly we need to roll out a cellular network that can provide service to the caribou up on Baffin Island, and so we need to charge the folks living in Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, etc., to subsidize the coverage for the caribou... but I'm not bitter.....
More realistically, I don't think it's that people can't work out that $2400 is more than the cost of buying the phone outright. It's a combination of factors. First, the poor tax. If you don't happen to have $500 kicking around to buy a phone, then you will probably not be able to get that phone unless you sign up for a subsidized contract. The smart answer would be to buy a cheaper phone that you *can* afford, but there's a lot of money being poured into the advertising and marketing for the latest and greatest devices, and a lot of pressure on people to upgrade to a phone they shouldn't really be able to afford.
The second reason is that the incumbent cellular carriers, in Canada at least, don't really give you a significant discount for bringing your own phone rather than subsidizing it. Most of them will give you 10% off the price of the monthly contract... wowee... you save $10/mo on a $100 contract, which adds up to $240 over a 2-year contract. And you have to ask for it at the point of sale... if you don't ask for the discount, then the price of a subsidized contract is the same as the price for an unsubsidized contract, so there's no real savings for not letting them subsidize your phone, as long as you plan to stay with the same carrier and phone for the duration of the contract. The problem comes when somebody comes along with a better deal... which happens fairly regularly. Because you've signed on to a contract, it'll often cost you more to switch than you stand to save over the life of the contract... but people don't tend to think of cellular service in those terms, at least in this country.
No offense intended... but either you're bonkers, or I'm missing something here....
Looking at the hardware, the device sports a 1.4GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor, 1GB memory and 16GB of flash storage, plus a 4.5in 960x540 IPS touchscreen with Gorilla 2 Glass. It has the usual mobile network support, including GSM/3G/4G, 802.11b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth, 8MP autofocus rear camera and 2MP front camera. SIM-free pricing is expected to be €399.
On reading this, from TFS, my immediate reaction was "so, basically like the HTC Desire 601 I have, only for about $200 more than I paid"... sure, the Desire only has a 5MP rear camera, but otherwise on paper appears to be almost identical in every way.
While I appreciate that these folks are trying to do something important, and I do think that having a viable alternative to IOS and Android is a good thing, I honestly don't see the benefit to buying this one over mid-range Android devices that can be had at retail (no subsidy/contract) for about $300 CAD.
Rules laid out by professors/instructors do not carry over into the adult world - how you do things in class is not how they should be done outside of class.
One of my coworkers just got dinged a couple hours ago for using comic sans in an official e-mail....
He deserved it. Comic sans must die.
I have. There's a dedicated bike path along the river in this city, and it's got speed limits (25km/h) and stop signs, and I've seen people get traffic tickets for not obeying those rules....
Define cycling pace? There's people who struggle to go faster than 10mph, and there's people who can hit 40 or 50mph on a good road bike. My personal record is about 35.
Also, even at 10mph, looking at a map while you're moving isn't a very bright move. When I was learning the bike route to get to work, I would stop to check maps. Not sure why people can't do that... seems a perfectly sane way to navigate on a bike.
If crime rates are going down, then why is my local police getting military grade equipment and gear?
Because people like you seem to think there's a need. They need military gear because they need military gear. Tautology, yes, but no less the truth in this case. Crime rates have been going down across the board since the 70's: lower rates of violent crime, less non-violent crime, less white collar crime, everything. The only reason you may get the impression it's happening more frequently is because channels like CNN didn't exist in the 70's.
So don't use it.
I have a feeling they're including it because a 13.3" 1920x1080 screen with touch is cheaper than one without, due to economies of scale, and the fact that Windows is going in the direction of touch screen mandatory.
Besides, if it's being marketed as a developper system, having the touch as an option for one more thing you can test before your users do is a good thing.
It's available in Canada too, at $1289.99 to start....
http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/xps-13-9333/pd?oc=cax13u1238&model_id=xps-13-9333
For those who don't want to click the link (or if the link is geo-locked)....
Core i5 4200U (2.6GHz)
13.3" 1920x1080 touchscreen display
8GB DDR3 memory (1600MHz)
128GB SSD
Intel HD 4400 graphics
Ubuntu 12.04
Weight: 3.04lbs
Warranty: 1 year Next Business Day onsite support (after remote diagnosis, also 1 year). You can extend that to 3 years, and you can also buy up to 3 years of accidental damage coverage.
That's not a low end laptop. You are getting your money's worth, and it's in the same price range as Windows-based laptops with similar spec.
If you really want a cheap laptop with Linux on it, buy a chromebook. You can unlock them and replace the Chrome OS with a standard Linux distro if you want.
Even while cumbersome I much prefer sitting in an airplane where people had to pass a check than one without. Honestly, what would be your preference?
Checkpoints that actually work. If they were serious about stopping acts of terror, they'd go back to metal detectors (which had a *much* higher catch rate than the current backscatter x-ray machines, Google for the number of times people have gotten stuff past the backscatter x-rays, it's kinda scary), and make everybody in line have a once-over from bomb sniffing dogs. Much cheaper, much less of an invasion of privacy, and much more effective.
You can bet that terrorists would find it an easy attack vector if there were no checks anymore.
Actually, the checkpoint itself is probably going to be the next attack vector. A large group of people waiting in line to be screened, who haven't had to go through any checkpoints/security to get to that point? Perfect place for a suicide bomber. Has already been attempted in Russia, actually. Anything that gets people through the security faster is a good thing, which brings us back to my suggestion about a metal detector and bomb-sniffing dogs... more effective, and faster.
It is true that they may now start to resort to tactics that were not imaginable just a few years ago, like implanting in their body - but no security checks would make their attempts so much easier.
Nobody's seriously suggesting no security. Getting rid of the TSA and going back to what we had before 9/11 would be the right step. The existing fortifications that are required for the cockpit are effective enough, and would prevent another 9/11 from happening.
Cat Eyes around here....
Usually it's a rumble strip that wakes people up though, not hitting a cat eye....
That really depends on what road you're driving on.
10km/h over the limit when the limit is 40km/h is a pretty significant difference. The places where the limit is 40 are usually that way for a reason, which makes it even more dangerous. 10km/h over the limit when the limit is 120km/h, however, is not nearly as bad.
Or if you prefer mph... 35 in a 25 zone versus 85 in a 75 zone. Argument's the same, even though the numbers may be different.
The road isn't a racetrack, and you don't score points for being the lead.
You also don't score points if you plow into the person who turned right in front of you without accelerating when you were 10 feet away from the intersection. You might even be judged "at fault" for the ensuing accident, because you hit him.