The requiring it be unlocked was technically illegal, a felony even. It's just that when you're dealing with the massive upheaval of low paid jobs that is the TSA, they get their 'rules', missing the exception of firearm containers.
Well, yeah. When you're looking for an absolutely huge amount of land with no occupants to drop explosive things in, a desert makes sense - it's cheap land, easy to spot stuff in, generally pretty stable, available most of the year.
Maybe I shouldn't have used the words 'be an ass' and said 'assert what you believe to be your rights'.
Generally speaking, I'd prefer our constitutional court cases to be carefully selected to not have any factors to make the decision to restrict our freedoms easy. So you pick, as best as you can, a white knight type - both willing to fight and clean enough that he won't be easy to smear into irrelevance.
Right now, I'm protesting the TSA in the forms of letters to politicians and boycotting flying as much as practicle. I'm not independently wealthy to fight something like this in the court system.
And you've run into the problem. The US Military has the ability to kill anything in the world. We have the ability to guide weapons down smokestacks.
Accuracy wise, we're very good.
Target discrimination is where we're lagging a bit - thus the 'friendly' fire incidents, other mistaken hits. The convoy was hit as directed, in a fashion to minimize collateral damage. The fact that it wasn't a convoy of what we thought it was is the problem, exasperated because we're fighting an enemy that deliberately attempts to hide itself as/with civilians.
I'm in the military, I work out 5 hours a week. 3 hours of that is on the military's time(official duty hours).
I'd likely take the 75% version - that'd make my workouts as effective as 8.75 hours working out a week. I am NOT one of the fortunate types that gains muscle easily(why I work out extra).
The military has a big problem right now with fitness - not enough hours in the day for people that are expected to work while maintaining an excellent level of fitness, and needing personel numbers such that we can only afford to eliminate limited numbers of candidates based on their fitness. A pill that increases workout efficiency 75%?
Assuming that the side effects are managable/limited, sign me up!
Well, even if it's mirrored to reflect the laser, you'd be protected by the fact that the laser would no longer be focused, and relatively few people should be looking at it when it's actually being hit by the laser, which is only a few seconds of time. So the old 'proximity, duration, and Concentration' thing for radiation and chemical hazards remains true - you want to minimize all of them. Maximize your distance - rockets don't generally fly that low, Shorten the time you're exposed - blink reflex, turning away, and a multimach rocket isn't going to be in your field of view for long. Can't do much about the concentration. Maybe protective goggles if the risk of exposure is high enough.
High energy lasers might well become the worst weapon since bio-chemical or nuclear weapons when it comes to hurting civilians.
Not likely, I think HE lasers are going to be cleaner than bullets and conventional explosives.
By 'acceptable level' I meant hitting the city/town it's pointed at. A rocket hitting a farmer's field 50 miles away from the target is no big deal except for the farmer losing some crops. Crop value isn't incredibly high for a few hundred square feet.
A rocket failing and not exploding because of the sandstorm is a job for EOD, a hazard if anybody plays with it. But that's already a known issue(as the rockets currently used are cheap and have a relatively high failure rate).
Worst case for the terrorists would be to have the rocket fail and explode in their own territory, pissing off the locals against them. Then again, they'll likely blame it on Israel and the Jews anyways.
Or how about the special exceptions made at an American university for school-funded foot baths for the Muslim facility? I ought to go all Wikipedia and cite my references, but if you've not heard about these things, then you're not paying attention.
They have an actual Muslim facility? Note, while I consider myself an 'agnostic with atheistic leanings', I believe that the 1st is 'freedom OF religion', not 'freedom FROM religion'. If a college, the military, publicly funding hospital chooses to have a chapel because a good portion of it's population/users want one, then they can have one. It should be executed fairly, though.
So, if you have a college where 90% of the population is 'christian' and 50% would additionally describe themselves as 'catholic', it might make sense to have a couple churches - one Catholic, one non-denominational that also handles miscellaneous other faiths.
Expand it out such that you're looking at 6 religious facilities, and muslims have enough people to get one themselves, especially if they're willing to independantly support it financially to at least some extent, and yes, they can get foot-baths if they want.
Of course, I've had a number of times that I would have liked to have a foot bath available - there's no real way to clean your feet in regular bathrooms, and I sometimes get only my feet dirty.
would add one further refinement to this by saying that there should not be anything stored on the laptop.
Nothing important, certainly. However, this in and of itself would be considered suspicious. If your goal is unimpeded travel, you're better off having a laptop that looks 'normal'.
IE have a windows machine(cause that's 'normal' atm), some family pictures, and email client with a bunch of those joke/junk emails. Some games, maybe a bit of mild porn(cause that's 'normal').
Keep a vpn client for the important stuff, or encrypt it if it's too large to leave on the net.
If your goal is to generate a lawsuit, like Mr. Hellar, then go ahead and be an ass - just be aware that you're going to suffer pain for your goal.
I'm not saying that TSA shouldn't have these powers, but even when you tell them that you're carrying spent pistol/rifle casings, they don't always give you a hard time.
I haven't even been given a hard time the various times I've flown with firearms and LIVE ammunition.
Some suggestions: 1. Don't fly to/from some of the more gun-phobic areas. NYC, Chicago, and Washington DC are the biggest ones I've heard. I've even flown into NY with a rifle no problem(went hunting with my dad and grandfather). Note: this was outside NYC, during hunting season, with a scoped lever-action 30-30. 2. Ammunition should be in origional packaging. The actual rule is more or less that ammunition shall not be loose or loaded into a magazine. Still, I've heard of problems with the aftermarket plastic ones reloaders are fond of. Reloaders - I'm sure you have some commercial boxes around. Stuff your custom rounds in there. 3. Case must be hardsided, and in a departure from normal TSA rules, must be LOCKABLE. NOTE: TSA doesn't make a deal out of this, but TSA locks are actually illegal/violate policy. The law predates 9/11 and the TSA, and the OWNER is the only one supposed to know the combo or possess a key to the case. TSA locks have the overide - so it'd violate the policy. 4. Shouldn't have to mention this, but the gun must be unloaded. I normally either pull the bolt/remove the slide. Or have the slide pulled back with the chamber up. Ammunition should be in a different bag. 5. On check in declare to the agent 'I need to declare a firearm'. I personally want to get the declare out first so they don't think I'm threatening them or anything. There's a form you sign and stuff in the case that says the firearm is unloaded. Then you take it to the TSAs, they should recognize a gun case and inspect it right there, then you lock it up, and it goes on.
I have flown with: CZ75BD - 9mm semiautomatic handgun, multiple times. Marlin.30-30 - lever action rifle Remington 7mm - bolt action rifle M1 Garand - WWII Battle rifle, semi-automatic internal magazine Colt M16A2 - assault rifle, with 'da switch'. Government owned.
Given these powers exist, and as an alien travelling through the TSA "interested" lane, I can say that they don't always use them. I would imagine that they are like any other police officer: Give them a hard time and they will make your life hard, because they can. Treat them like they are doing a necessary job and help them if at all possible and they will appreciate your "cooperation" and not waste your time and theirs.
I call this the 'good neighbor policy'. You don't be a dick unnessesarily and you'll find life much smoother. Applies with pretty much anybody, not just TSA and police.
I frequently fly with a full size laptop, portable HD, and memory stick. Never been hassled beyond the standard 'put computer in bin, take shoes off, put in bin, run everything through the machine'. Been in the blow machine a few times. Have been surprised that I didn't set it off(very active shooter).
I still think that the TSA needs to be dialed back a few notches - I might consider flying a bit more often then. As is, I'll only fly for emergencies(like my grandmother dying), or work.
And what happens to 'for a reasonable time' when they find an encrypted file on your computer, with an estimated brute-force crack time in the centuries?
I don't even trust our government with hard time limits, you frequently have to drag the agency to court to get your stuff back. I certainly don't trust them with soft limits.
haha, except the laser operators aty the other station will saturate the ground troops. Huh?
Of course, a laser can fire a lot farther the morters.
Depends, a laser is a LOS(Line Of Sight) weapon, mortars, especially the bigger ones, can target stuff over the horizon. Part of the reason for building the laser into a plane - 30k feet gives you a lot more LOS.
If the hook a battery of lasers to a nuclear power plant, then what? Would we blow up a nuke plant and irradiate all the nearby by countries?
Our best lasers are much less than 50% efficient, the most powerful are still chemical. So, even if we hooked enough lasers up to a gigawatt power plant, you'd probably get less than a 100Mw out of the laser. Point that at a nuclear plant's containment dome and you're still going to be there a while before you start to penetrate, while the operators of the plant under attack can do things like pump water to the point the laser's attacking. Expect to be there a while. Even if you start overwhelming the plant's ability to dissipate heat, a slight decrease will give them plenty of cooling capacity.
If you are talking about insurgents, they just turn a corner and suddenly they are civilians. So who is this ground attack going to move against?
You piss them off enough, everybody. Firing off hundreds of mortars or rockets will likely take long enough that they'll have good intel on your movements, so they'll probably have targets. They won't care about catching up civilians in the mess, and if you have a gun you're dead.
Someone dropped the ball and didn't get jets up there.
With all the various drawdowns, that continue today despite us being effectively at war, we no longer had(and still don't have) fighters placed to offer the necessary response times. The USAF inventory, even with the retiring of the F-117 and introduction of F-22s, still has the oldest average fleet age EVER. We're literally still flying planes where the pilot's grandfather flew the same plane.
We'd be better off with ground to air missiles - they're faster, easier to have on alert, and can be placed in more areas.
But the most crucial aspect was that we felt more or less invulnerable in our own country, and the perception that people hijacked planes to make demands, not turn them into massive guided missiles. Today neither is as true, so the likelyhood of a duplicate attack is slim. Even if we didn't have all the TSA security theater.
We've been in the middle east killing people for 50 years. Their attack on us on 9/11, or during the first WTC bombing, or the USS Cole, was all the EXACT SAME THING WE'VE DONE in response to 9/11.
Examples of us attacking them? I tend to think that you'd have had a better example talking about south and central american countries, where we have pulled lots of downright stupid in hindsight stuff*. There is some arguement about our support of Israel - but by the same token, we've also privided lots of aid to various countries of the middleast anyways.
Keep in mind that this stuff has been going on for centuries. Though you could consider the start of 'modern' terrorists targeting US interestes to have started in the late '70s.
They're still civilians, and they're still not legitimate targets, but you're now allowed to consider them 'collateral damage' when you go after the equipment/people at the launch point.
The geneva convention answers the problem of civilian shields by making hitting them acceptable as long as you weren't aiming at them.
Short answer: Don't hang around military people/equipment when there's a war on.
The 'oops' you refer to isn't a military issue - it's a CIA issue. The CIA is NOT part of the military. It was CIA intel, CIA planes, CIA operators, CIA guidance.
When I consider military - I consider organizations under the DoD, the CIA isn't.
From that oops I can see a number of problems that would of had the US Military going 'hold up'.
A: Pakistani village - we're not at war with Pakistan(that I've heard), and lacking presidential authorization, we're not going to be shooting there. B: Proportionality - Is Ayman WORTH attacking while he's in a village in a neutral country, occupied by it's citizens? C: FOUR hellfires? A hellfire isn't the largest missile by any means, but it's still got a good warhead on it.
Now, don't get me wrong. The military WILL make attacks that WILL kill civilians. Especially when the opponent is a ass that mingles military and civilians - like parking AA guns on schools and hospitals. Though I do know of one such case where we pulled a trainer bomb that had concrete instead of explosive, put a guidance package on it and dropped it on the tank that had been parked next to an occupied school. The idea that 2k pounds of concrete dropped from 30k feet, with a terminal velocity over the speed of sound would bust the seams a bit and render the tank unusable.
Or, had we the system on 9/11, we shoot down the airliners with the laser before they can hit the towers. You balance the higher mass/damage resistance of a plane against the slower speed/easier targeting of the laser.
But yeah, we're facing a lot of covert agent/unconventional warfare today. But that's because we'd slaughter pretty much anybody else. The only non-allies that might be able to stand up to us would be China and Russia. China mostly because of their manpower advantage(at this point), Russia because of their still existant nuke supplies.
Militarily wise, it's important to keep the advantages in conventional warfare, because even at it's worst, unconventional warfare tends to be capable of only limited damage. Look at Israel - they're still around despite decades of unconventional warfare against it.
I'm not saying we shouldn't improve in the areas of covert/unconventional warfare - it's just that even now it shouldn't be our sole objective.
Or better yet, launch during an actual sandstorm? The problem here is that they're using unguided rockets, and a sandstorm involves high winds and solid particulates in the atmosphere. That's not nice to a multi-mach rocket, either.
In short, I figure that launching during a sand storm to degrade the effectiveness of the lasers would also degrade the accuracy and reliability of the rockets, reducing effectiveness to an unacceptable level.
As effective as that strategy may be, it does raise the cost of the mission quite a bit. With any luck, it will keep the US gov't from wiping entire villages on the cheap 'just to be sure' and moving on to precision strikes.
Are you talking about enemy forces using laser weapons against US ones? Because if so one valid solution would be saturation - you can only shoot down so many bombs/rockets/morters.
So having an effective anti-munition laser is probably going to encourage saturation attacks - with the attendant misses, whether by failed guidance, poor aim, and munitions still armed that lose guidance due to the laser.
They just prefer to use (cheap) unguided weapons, which might miss a bit but makes up for it with a bigger bang.
Uh, no. We use the guided stuff all the time, matter of fact I believe that the majority of the bombs we drop today a precision guided. The guidance system doesn't always work, but we try. Even our dumb bombs are dropped on a rather precise basis today.
As for bigger bang - even the MOAB is technically guided, the difference between a 'dumb' unguided bomb and a guided one is simply the addition of a guidance package.
And, quite frequently, the guidance package costs more than the bomb.
Laser defenses work better against opponents with relatively limited assets - palestinians, for example, can only get ahold of so many rockets. They currently choose to mostly stutter them out, producing a more or less constant presence, effect on israeli morale. The damage to life/infrastructure is actually pretty insignificant. The same deal with insurgents/terrorists in Iraq/Afghanistan.
With some laser systems, a soletary rocket becomes a non-issue, even three-six might be handled by a single laser depending on the laser's attributes. So they'd have to switch to mass attacks. Morters and rockets don't need expensive, hard to hide tubes like artillery does, so that's handlable, but having to warehouse rockets until you get enough to penetrate the laser defenses in a meaningful way hurts in a number of ways.
First would be that both Isreal and US Forces have active intel agencies - the stockpile of rockets is more likely to be found and subsequently bombed or otherwise eliminated. This results in NO rocket attacks(bad for them). Second would be that many of these rockets are built on the cheap - their stability isn't the best, so stockpiling them for an effective attack increases the chance of an accident, again costing the terrorists/insurgents casualties and supplies. Third would be that while a trickle of rockets damages morale, it doesn't generally get Isreal or US Forces on the warpath. An attack of a couple hundred after no attacks for months might. By warpath I don't mean a flyby attack with a fighter or chopper. I'm talking about ground assault, massive retaliation.
Last time I saw a specification for the laser mounted in a modified 747, it had 30 seconds of firing capacity, and was capable of being turned on and off at will.
That 30 seconds was considered sufficient to engage something like 5-15 targets.
Doesn't necessarily work as well as it does in scifi. Mirrors aren't perfect, and tend to gather things like dust, which reduce their efficiency even more. Not to mention different mirrors vary in their effectiveness with different spectrum lasers.
Shouldn't matter much, but at the high powers weaponized lasers operate at, they quickly destroy mirrors.
As for working on anti-laser stuff, well, it's best to keep three steps ahead militarily wise - tends to keep your casualties down.
Heh, when I went to school it was 7. During the summer, depending on how large of a course load you're willing to take, probably 3-4, actually.
Of course, I only ever had to take 1 summer class. Failed a semester of English, due to what I'll call 'extreme incompatibility with the teacher'. She assigned a book called 'A thousand acres'. Now, keep in mind that back then I could read a book in under an hour, and frequently went through 2-3 books a day. I tended to read the textbooks the first week of school. That book I could not read. After the first chapter, even a paragraph was enough to make me physically ill. It was written from the viewpoint of a woman who managed to piss away the thousand acres of farm her father collected - whining and moaning the entire time. If she'd taken an ounce of responsibility, she wouldn't have been in that situation. That summer class I ended up tutoring the vietnamese kids.
Anyways, back on subject... You have to realize that most of the 'tracks' were still 50% or so in common. The only courses you really had to worry about were english and math. The rest were putz courses that gave you credits you needed to graduate, but individually didn't mean much. PE? Required, and I agree with the requirement(especially with today's fatty population), but not something you could really fall behind in. I took some history classes - but they were pretty generic. Citizenship issues was a universal class, but again, pretty basic. Science classes taught a lot of basics, were interesting, but not essential for most degrees. Same with history and such.
Do you jump right in as though you had the previous years material under you belt? Isn't that...crazy?
That's what I did. Fun, huh? The trick is that the previous year's stuff isn't directly related to this years, and they assume you've forgotten half of it anyways. So you work harder, at least in the beginning. Some get tutors.
For example, Algebra-Trig-Calculus. It's possible to get into Calculus without trig, but it helps. Everybody gets Algebra, it's just that the advanced class stuffs more into there. Less route, more methods.
In my area, advanced courses weren't generally taught in the summer - but you could take next years, so I guess it'd even out.
Nothing, PERIOD, is 100% safe. Hundreds, thousands die each year on average from earthquakes, floods, natural fires, tornados, hurricanes. What I'm trying to say is that nuclear power is at an acceptable level of security.
we only need ONE major accident.
Like Bhopal? Like the coal mines? Chernobyl is the worst nuclear accident in history. Pretty much a worst case scenario, combining both poor design that wouldn't have been approved in the United States or pretty much anywhere BUT the USSR, and incompetent management/operation/testing. It's peanuts compared to various other man made disasters. More people die in car accidents each day in the USA than died in Chernobyl. More people die per kwh of coal power in the world than nuclear power, even including Chernobyl. More people die from complications from the pollution of coal power! Heck, more people die per kwh of hydroelectric.
Risk management is risk management. I suggest that if you're concerned about potential casualties from a nuclear incident, that proper risk management(IE remediating greater dangers first) dictactes that you move out of the city and always stay at least 100 meters from any roadway. Live in a house with no electricity(411/year) or gas. Don't forget to avoid tornado alley, the coasts(hurricanes), and any faultlines.
I take it you've never seen two cars sliding towards each other on glare ice with nothing the drivers can do about it.
No, but I DO think that there's something to do with how every winter I see ~10 SUVs in the ditch for every car, when the actual proportion is about 50-50. Hardly see any trucks in the ditch, but they aren't everywhere on the road either.
Hint: 4 wheel drive vehicles don't brake any better than a 2 wheel drive one. A front wheel drive car will stop just as quickly in limited traction conditions as a SUV, assuming similar tires and speed. A car with studs will stop far more quickly than a SUV with all-seasons.
You'd have a better arguement about getting stuck in the snow is more likely for a small agile car compared to a 4WD SUV.
Finally, the US hasn't really adjusted to a strong dollar.
Don't you mean the weak dollar? We're used to the dollar being strong.
Still, kinda like the housing market bust, it's a mixed bag - I can't buy overseas stuff as cheap, but the trade deficit is narrowing, US exports are increasing. Kinda like how many people can now find houses much more affordable now that there isn't a 8X price increase between a manufactured house and said house on a slab somewhere nice.
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The requiring it be unlocked was technically illegal, a felony even. It's just that when you're dealing with the massive upheaval of low paid jobs that is the TSA, they get their 'rules', missing the exception of firearm containers.
Basically, education is lacking.
Well, yeah. When you're looking for an absolutely huge amount of land with no occupants to drop explosive things in, a desert makes sense - it's cheap land, easy to spot stuff in, generally pretty stable, available most of the year.
Maybe I shouldn't have used the words 'be an ass' and said 'assert what you believe to be your rights'.
Generally speaking, I'd prefer our constitutional court cases to be carefully selected to not have any factors to make the decision to restrict our freedoms easy. So you pick, as best as you can, a white knight type - both willing to fight and clean enough that he won't be easy to smear into irrelevance.
Right now, I'm protesting the TSA in the forms of letters to politicians and boycotting flying as much as practicle. I'm not independently wealthy to fight something like this in the court system.
And you've run into the problem. The US Military has the ability to kill anything in the world. We have the ability to guide weapons down smokestacks.
Accuracy wise, we're very good.
Target discrimination is where we're lagging a bit - thus the 'friendly' fire incidents, other mistaken hits. The convoy was hit as directed, in a fashion to minimize collateral damage. The fact that it wasn't a convoy of what we thought it was is the problem, exasperated because we're fighting an enemy that deliberately attempts to hide itself as/with civilians.
I'm in the military, I work out 5 hours a week. 3 hours of that is on the military's time(official duty hours).
I'd likely take the 75% version - that'd make my workouts as effective as 8.75 hours working out a week. I am NOT one of the fortunate types that gains muscle easily(why I work out extra).
The military has a big problem right now with fitness - not enough hours in the day for people that are expected to work while maintaining an excellent level of fitness, and needing personel numbers such that we can only afford to eliminate limited numbers of candidates based on their fitness. A pill that increases workout efficiency 75%?
Assuming that the side effects are managable/limited, sign me up!
Given that we're talking about the military looking at some sort of coating to provide protection, it could be.
The reason you wouldn't want to use the space ship cover is mass and durability. Extra mass results in a heavier or less effective weapon.
Well, even if it's mirrored to reflect the laser, you'd be protected by the fact that the laser would no longer be focused, and relatively few people should be looking at it when it's actually being hit by the laser, which is only a few seconds of time. So the old 'proximity, duration, and Concentration' thing for radiation and chemical hazards remains true - you want to minimize all of them. Maximize your distance - rockets don't generally fly that low, Shorten the time you're exposed - blink reflex, turning away, and a multimach rocket isn't going to be in your field of view for long. Can't do much about the concentration. Maybe protective goggles if the risk of exposure is high enough.
High energy lasers might well become the worst weapon since bio-chemical or nuclear weapons when it comes to hurting civilians.
Not likely, I think HE lasers are going to be cleaner than bullets and conventional explosives.
By 'acceptable level' I meant hitting the city/town it's pointed at. A rocket hitting a farmer's field 50 miles away from the target is no big deal except for the farmer losing some crops. Crop value isn't incredibly high for a few hundred square feet.
A rocket failing and not exploding because of the sandstorm is a job for EOD, a hazard if anybody plays with it. But that's already a known issue(as the rockets currently used are cheap and have a relatively high failure rate).
Worst case for the terrorists would be to have the rocket fail and explode in their own territory, pissing off the locals against them. Then again, they'll likely blame it on Israel and the Jews anyways.
They have an actual Muslim facility? Note, while I consider myself an 'agnostic with atheistic leanings', I believe that the 1st is 'freedom OF religion', not 'freedom FROM religion'. If a college, the military, publicly funding hospital chooses to have a chapel because a good portion of it's population/users want one, then they can have one. It should be executed fairly, though.
So, if you have a college where 90% of the population is 'christian' and 50% would additionally describe themselves as 'catholic', it might make sense to have a couple churches - one Catholic, one non-denominational that also handles miscellaneous other faiths.
Expand it out such that you're looking at 6 religious facilities, and muslims have enough people to get one themselves, especially if they're willing to independantly support it financially to at least some extent, and yes, they can get foot-baths if they want.
Of course, I've had a number of times that I would have liked to have a foot bath available - there's no real way to clean your feet in regular bathrooms, and I sometimes get only my feet dirty.
would add one further refinement to this by saying that there should not be anything stored on the laptop.
Nothing important, certainly. However, this in and of itself would be considered suspicious. If your goal is unimpeded travel, you're better off having a laptop that looks 'normal'.
IE have a windows machine(cause that's 'normal' atm), some family pictures, and email client with a bunch of those joke/junk emails. Some games, maybe a bit of mild porn(cause that's 'normal').
Keep a vpn client for the important stuff, or encrypt it if it's too large to leave on the net.
If your goal is to generate a lawsuit, like Mr. Hellar, then go ahead and be an ass - just be aware that you're going to suffer pain for your goal.
I haven't even been given a hard time the various times I've flown with firearms and LIVE ammunition.
Some suggestions:
1. Don't fly to/from some of the more gun-phobic areas. NYC, Chicago, and Washington DC are the biggest ones I've heard. I've even flown into NY with a rifle no problem(went hunting with my dad and grandfather). Note: this was outside NYC, during hunting season, with a scoped lever-action 30-30.
2. Ammunition should be in origional packaging. The actual rule is more or less that ammunition shall not be loose or loaded into a magazine. Still, I've heard of problems with the aftermarket plastic ones reloaders are fond of. Reloaders - I'm sure you have some commercial boxes around. Stuff your custom rounds in there.
3. Case must be hardsided, and in a departure from normal TSA rules, must be LOCKABLE. NOTE: TSA doesn't make a deal out of this, but TSA locks are actually illegal/violate policy. The law predates 9/11 and the TSA, and the OWNER is the only one supposed to know the combo or possess a key to the case. TSA locks have the overide - so it'd violate the policy.
4. Shouldn't have to mention this, but the gun must be unloaded. I normally either pull the bolt/remove the slide. Or have the slide pulled back with the chamber up. Ammunition should be in a different bag.
5. On check in declare to the agent 'I need to declare a firearm'. I personally want to get the declare out first so they don't think I'm threatening them or anything. There's a form you sign and stuff in the case that says the firearm is unloaded. Then you take it to the TSAs, they should recognize a gun case and inspect it right there, then you lock it up, and it goes on.
I have flown with: .30-30 - lever action rifle
CZ75BD - 9mm semiautomatic handgun, multiple times.
Marlin
Remington 7mm - bolt action rifle
M1 Garand - WWII Battle rifle, semi-automatic internal magazine
Colt M16A2 - assault rifle, with 'da switch'. Government owned.
I call this the 'good neighbor policy'. You don't be a dick unnessesarily and you'll find life much smoother. Applies with pretty much anybody, not just TSA and police.
I frequently fly with a full size laptop, portable HD, and memory stick. Never been hassled beyond the standard 'put computer in bin, take shoes off, put in bin, run everything through the machine'. Been in the blow machine a few times. Have been surprised that I didn't set it off(very active shooter).
I still think that the TSA needs to be dialed back a few notches - I might consider flying a bit more often then. As is, I'll only fly for emergencies(like my grandmother dying), or work.
And what happens to 'for a reasonable time' when they find an encrypted file on your computer, with an estimated brute-force crack time in the centuries?
I don't even trust our government with hard time limits, you frequently have to drag the agency to court to get your stuff back. I certainly don't trust them with soft limits.
haha, except the laser operators aty the other station will saturate the ground troops.
Huh?
Of course, a laser can fire a lot farther the morters.
Depends, a laser is a LOS(Line Of Sight) weapon, mortars, especially the bigger ones, can target stuff over the horizon. Part of the reason for building the laser into a plane - 30k feet gives you a lot more LOS.
If the hook a battery of lasers to a nuclear power plant, then what? Would we blow up a nuke plant and irradiate all the nearby by countries?
Our best lasers are much less than 50% efficient, the most powerful are still chemical. So, even if we hooked enough lasers up to a gigawatt power plant, you'd probably get less than a 100Mw out of the laser. Point that at a nuclear plant's containment dome and you're still going to be there a while before you start to penetrate, while the operators of the plant under attack can do things like pump water to the point the laser's attacking. Expect to be there a while. Even if you start overwhelming the plant's ability to dissipate heat, a slight decrease will give them plenty of cooling capacity.
If you are talking about insurgents, they just turn a corner and suddenly they are civilians.
So who is this ground attack going to move against?
You piss them off enough, everybody. Firing off hundreds of mortars or rockets will likely take long enough that they'll have good intel on your movements, so they'll probably have targets. They won't care about catching up civilians in the mess, and if you have a gun you're dead.
With all the various drawdowns, that continue today despite us being effectively at war, we no longer had(and still don't have) fighters placed to offer the necessary response times. The USAF inventory, even with the retiring of the F-117 and introduction of F-22s, still has the oldest average fleet age EVER. We're literally still flying planes where the pilot's grandfather flew the same plane.
We'd be better off with ground to air missiles - they're faster, easier to have on alert, and can be placed in more areas.
But the most crucial aspect was that we felt more or less invulnerable in our own country, and the perception that people hijacked planes to make demands, not turn them into massive guided missiles. Today neither is as true, so the likelyhood of a duplicate attack is slim. Even if we didn't have all the TSA security theater.
We've been in the middle east killing people for 50 years. Their attack on us on 9/11, or during the first WTC bombing, or the USS Cole, was all the EXACT SAME THING WE'VE DONE in response to 9/11.
Examples of us attacking them? I tend to think that you'd have had a better example talking about south and central american countries, where we have pulled lots of downright stupid in hindsight stuff*. There is some arguement about our support of Israel - but by the same token, we've also privided lots of aid to various countries of the middleast anyways.
Keep in mind that this stuff has been going on for centuries. Though you could consider the start of 'modern' terrorists targeting US interestes to have started in the late '70s.
*cleaned up language.
They're still civilians, and they're still not legitimate targets, but you're now allowed to consider them 'collateral damage' when you go after the equipment/people at the launch point.
The geneva convention answers the problem of civilian shields by making hitting them acceptable as long as you weren't aiming at them.
Short answer: Don't hang around military people/equipment when there's a war on.
The 'oops' you refer to isn't a military issue - it's a CIA issue. The CIA is NOT part of the military. It was CIA intel, CIA planes, CIA operators, CIA guidance.
When I consider military - I consider organizations under the DoD, the CIA isn't.
From that oops I can see a number of problems that would of had the US Military going 'hold up'.
A: Pakistani village - we're not at war with Pakistan(that I've heard), and lacking presidential authorization, we're not going to be shooting there.
B: Proportionality - Is Ayman WORTH attacking while he's in a village in a neutral country, occupied by it's citizens?
C: FOUR hellfires? A hellfire isn't the largest missile by any means, but it's still got a good warhead on it.
Now, don't get me wrong. The military WILL make attacks that WILL kill civilians. Especially when the opponent is a ass that mingles military and civilians - like parking AA guns on schools and hospitals. Though I do know of one such case where we pulled a trainer bomb that had concrete instead of explosive, put a guidance package on it and dropped it on the tank that had been parked next to an occupied school. The idea that 2k pounds of concrete dropped from 30k feet, with a terminal velocity over the speed of sound would bust the seams a bit and render the tank unusable.
Or, had we the system on 9/11, we shoot down the airliners with the laser before they can hit the towers. You balance the higher mass/damage resistance of a plane against the slower speed/easier targeting of the laser.
But yeah, we're facing a lot of covert agent/unconventional warfare today. But that's because we'd slaughter pretty much anybody else. The only non-allies that might be able to stand up to us would be China and Russia. China mostly because of their manpower advantage(at this point), Russia because of their still existant nuke supplies.
Militarily wise, it's important to keep the advantages in conventional warfare, because even at it's worst, unconventional warfare tends to be capable of only limited damage. Look at Israel - they're still around despite decades of unconventional warfare against it.
I'm not saying we shouldn't improve in the areas of covert/unconventional warfare - it's just that even now it shouldn't be our sole objective.
Or better yet, launch during an actual sandstorm? The problem here is that they're using unguided rockets, and a sandstorm involves high winds and solid particulates in the atmosphere. That's not nice to a multi-mach rocket, either.
In short, I figure that launching during a sand storm to degrade the effectiveness of the lasers would also degrade the accuracy and reliability of the rockets, reducing effectiveness to an unacceptable level.
As effective as that strategy may be, it does raise the cost of the mission quite a bit.
With any luck, it will keep the US gov't from wiping entire villages on the cheap 'just to be sure' and moving on to precision strikes.
Are you talking about enemy forces using laser weapons against US ones? Because if so one valid solution would be saturation - you can only shoot down so many bombs/rockets/morters.
So having an effective anti-munition laser is probably going to encourage saturation attacks - with the attendant misses, whether by failed guidance, poor aim, and munitions still armed that lose guidance due to the laser.
They just prefer to use (cheap) unguided weapons, which might miss a bit but makes up for it with a bigger bang.
Uh, no. We use the guided stuff all the time, matter of fact I believe that the majority of the bombs we drop today a precision guided. The guidance system doesn't always work, but we try. Even our dumb bombs are dropped on a rather precise basis today.
As for bigger bang - even the MOAB is technically guided, the difference between a 'dumb' unguided bomb and a guided one is simply the addition of a guidance package.
And, quite frequently, the guidance package costs more than the bomb.
Laser defenses work better against opponents with relatively limited assets - palestinians, for example, can only get ahold of so many rockets. They currently choose to mostly stutter them out, producing a more or less constant presence, effect on israeli morale. The damage to life/infrastructure is actually pretty insignificant. The same deal with insurgents/terrorists in Iraq/Afghanistan.
With some laser systems, a soletary rocket becomes a non-issue, even three-six might be handled by a single laser depending on the laser's attributes. So they'd have to switch to mass attacks. Morters and rockets don't need expensive, hard to hide tubes like artillery does, so that's handlable, but having to warehouse rockets until you get enough to penetrate the laser defenses in a meaningful way hurts in a number of ways.
First would be that both Isreal and US Forces have active intel agencies - the stockpile of rockets is more likely to be found and subsequently bombed or otherwise eliminated. This results in NO rocket attacks(bad for them). Second would be that many of these rockets are built on the cheap - their stability isn't the best, so stockpiling them for an effective attack increases the chance of an accident, again costing the terrorists/insurgents casualties and supplies. Third would be that while a trickle of rockets damages morale, it doesn't generally get Isreal or US Forces on the warpath. An attack of a couple hundred after no attacks for months might. By warpath I don't mean a flyby attack with a fighter or chopper. I'm talking about ground assault, massive retaliation.
Last time I saw a specification for the laser mounted in a modified 747, it had 30 seconds of firing capacity, and was capable of being turned on and off at will.
That 30 seconds was considered sufficient to engage something like 5-15 targets.
Doesn't necessarily work as well as it does in scifi. Mirrors aren't perfect, and tend to gather things like dust, which reduce their efficiency even more. Not to mention different mirrors vary in their effectiveness with different spectrum lasers.
Shouldn't matter much, but at the high powers weaponized lasers operate at, they quickly destroy mirrors.
As for working on anti-laser stuff, well, it's best to keep three steps ahead militarily wise - tends to keep your casualties down.
Heh, when I went to school it was 7. During the summer, depending on how large of a course load you're willing to take, probably 3-4, actually.
Of course, I only ever had to take 1 summer class. Failed a semester of English, due to what I'll call 'extreme incompatibility with the teacher'. She assigned a book called 'A thousand acres'. Now, keep in mind that back then I could read a book in under an hour, and frequently went through 2-3 books a day. I tended to read the textbooks the first week of school. That book I could not read. After the first chapter, even a paragraph was enough to make me physically ill. It was written from the viewpoint of a woman who managed to piss away the thousand acres of farm her father collected - whining and moaning the entire time. If she'd taken an ounce of responsibility, she wouldn't have been in that situation. That summer class I ended up tutoring the vietnamese kids.
Anyways, back on subject... You have to realize that most of the 'tracks' were still 50% or so in common. The only courses you really had to worry about were english and math. The rest were putz courses that gave you credits you needed to graduate, but individually didn't mean much. PE? Required, and I agree with the requirement(especially with today's fatty population), but not something you could really fall behind in. I took some history classes - but they were pretty generic. Citizenship issues was a universal class, but again, pretty basic. Science classes taught a lot of basics, were interesting, but not essential for most degrees. Same with history and such.
Do you jump right in as though you had the previous years material under you belt? Isn't that...crazy?
That's what I did. Fun, huh? The trick is that the previous year's stuff isn't directly related to this years, and they assume you've forgotten half of it anyways. So you work harder, at least in the beginning. Some get tutors.
For example, Algebra-Trig-Calculus. It's possible to get into Calculus without trig, but it helps. Everybody gets Algebra, it's just that the advanced class stuffs more into there. Less route, more methods.
In my area, advanced courses weren't generally taught in the summer - but you could take next years, so I guess it'd even out.
NOTHING ever built by humans is 100% safe.
Nothing, PERIOD, is 100% safe. Hundreds, thousands die each year on average from earthquakes, floods, natural fires, tornados, hurricanes. What I'm trying to say is that nuclear power is at an acceptable level of security.
we only need ONE major accident.
Like Bhopal? Like the coal mines? Chernobyl is the worst nuclear accident in history. Pretty much a worst case scenario, combining both poor design that wouldn't have been approved in the United States or pretty much anywhere BUT the USSR, and incompetent management/operation/testing. It's peanuts compared to various other man made disasters. More people die in car accidents each day in the USA than died in Chernobyl. More people die per kwh of coal power in the world than nuclear power, even including Chernobyl. More people die from complications from the pollution of coal power! Heck, more people die per kwh of hydroelectric.
Risk management is risk management. I suggest that if you're concerned about potential casualties from a nuclear incident, that proper risk management(IE remediating greater dangers first) dictactes that you move out of the city and always stay at least 100 meters from any roadway. Live in a house with no electricity(411/year) or gas. Don't forget to avoid tornado alley, the coasts(hurricanes), and any faultlines.
I take it you've never seen two cars sliding towards each other on glare ice with nothing the drivers can do about it.
No, but I DO think that there's something to do with how every winter I see ~10 SUVs in the ditch for every car, when the actual proportion is about 50-50. Hardly see any trucks in the ditch, but they aren't everywhere on the road either.
Hint: 4 wheel drive vehicles don't brake any better than a 2 wheel drive one. A front wheel drive car will stop just as quickly in limited traction conditions as a SUV, assuming similar tires and speed. A car with studs will stop far more quickly than a SUV with all-seasons.
You'd have a better arguement about getting stuck in the snow is more likely for a small agile car compared to a 4WD SUV.
Finally, the US hasn't really adjusted to a strong dollar.
Don't you mean the weak dollar? We're used to the dollar being strong.
Still, kinda like the housing market bust, it's a mixed bag - I can't buy overseas stuff as cheap, but the trade deficit is narrowing, US exports are increasing. Kinda like how many people can now find houses much more affordable now that there isn't a 8X price increase between a manufactured house and said house on a slab somewhere nice.