I'd like to point out that I was, indeed, using a computer (with privacy tools) in an Internet Cafe in California (an airport, no less!) only last month, after having traveled an illogical distance and despite having robust residential Internet access.
You didn't travel an illogical distance to use an Internet cafe. You traveled an illogical distance and also used an Internet cafe. Totally different.
Not only that, the flyer says that if you're downloading news coverage of terrorism, you're a terrorist! So apparently anyone who watches the news at all is a terrorist.
Either that, or you're (perhaps deliberately) misinterpreting the flyer.
Use of third-party-collected data is touchy, although your communications on the Internet have fairly little 4th-Amendment protection.
They're probably simply trying to keep overenthusiastic baristas from breaking the law by spying on their customers. It's a fairly common problem that people will get overenthusiastic about these lists (and make a terrible mistake like thinking that the flyer says that anyone using Tor must be a terrorist) and then either getting themselves hurt or breaking the law.
People on Slashdot don't understand what an indicator is. Perhaps they could benefit from Socrates. "This flyer says that terrorists download news coverage of terrorist activities, therefore they think that all people who download news coverage of terrorist activities must be terrorists." No, that's... that's not what they're saying at all.
In general, the design of a game cannot be copyrighted. Graphical elements and the text of the rules can, but not the overall game. This is why there are so many board-game knockoffs online.
Not only that, but 2,4,5-T is only moderately toxic and is not a dioxin. The greater problem is that it often is contaminated with the dioxin TCDD, which is highly toxic. TCDD is thought to be responsible for most of the ill effects of Agent Orange.
While mentioning Agent Orange here is a certainly an emotional appeal, it's not entirely inappropriate. Agent Orange was a mixture of two herbicides, used as an herbicide. It caused health problems in people. Here, one of the two herbicides that made up Agent Orange is being used as an herbicide. It's the one that was, more or less, responsible for Agent Orange's health problems. The lawsuit is about health problems as a result of the use of this chemical. The comparison to Agent Orange is apt.
I wouldn't really call that an "energy weapon", but yes, chemical explosives are in a completely different league from nuclear explosives. The only reason to develop better conventional explosives is because we want to avoid actually using nuclear weapons -- not because they have any hope of ever being better.
2. It doesn't matter where [Country] gets its oil from as everyone pays market price, which is highly influenced by world events. See Point #1
It doesn't matter in terms of determining the overall price. It matters if you actually want to get your hands on the oil in an undisrupted supply. Oil is fungible in terms of price, but actual contracts for the delivery of oil are less so.
I don't really have a comment on that. It's standard and, I think quite reasonable, procedure to redact the names of individual employees for released materials -- privacy and all that. I don't know if there are reasonable auditing controls in place where you could obtain information that would determine whether the testers were qualified or not. (I think it's fairly unreasonable to claim that they wouldn't be qualified, since APHC does a lot of health physics work, but it is interesting to wonder if there's a way of auditing that.)
They actually contain tests of the human scanners, they're just on a badly-labeled page. if you look at the individual reports, you can find the human-scanner sections pretty easily. (I realize after the fact that the page is poorly named: you don't have the benefit of the TSA body-scanner safety FAQ that links to this -- and, to be fair, is a pretty well-written and informative page.)
That's a completely different point. It's also wrong, though. Even with only ~2 mm deposition, the dosage is well below the acute-exposure threshold. In that region, you're treating risk (cancer incidence rate) as linear in total dosage anyway, so only the total, not the distribution, matters. If you assert that more cancer-sensitive organs are concentrated near the skin, you could claim that the rad-to-rem conversion factor is wrong. They actually have models for that, though. The tests I've seen only run the numbers for occupational exposure using different models, since you're potentially dealing with a much larger dose, and you can see that the concentrated-at-the-skin model is pretty close to the whole-body-dose model.
You know that the Army Public Health Command is a different organization than the TSA, right?
Nobody at the TSA is qualified to perform these measurements. Getting someone qualified would be a waste of money, since the government has a number of different labs that are experts at this stuff (other reports have been done by NIST and by a department at Johns Hopkins that routinely does government-contract work). So they have labs that are experts do the testing.
Keep in mind that the dosage per volume or per mass of a backscatter device is very low. So regardless of whether the absorbed radiation is throughout the body or in a few-millimeter-thick layer, the dosage per volume is still low. (The difference between "the whole body" and "a few millimeters thick" is something like 3-4 orders of magnitude. Yes, the backscatter dosage is so low that 4 orders of magnitude higher is still "low".) Low dosage here means that there are no acute radiation effects -- things like sunburn or radiation poisoning. Long-term radiation effects (cancer) are generally held to be linear with the total dose. This behavior is actually extrapolated downward from measurements of the effects of radiation at much higher doses -- we don't know exactly how dangerous very low doses of radiation are. We suspect that it can't be worse than linear (1/10 the dose means 1/10 the rate of cancer), so the linear model is used. Since the cancer rate is linear, it depends only on total dose, not the distribution of the dose. There are some subtle points -- this may change what kind of cancer you get, and it would make it marginally more dangerous for some people and less dangerous for others, depending on their susceptibility to different kinds of cancer -- but roughly this is the reason.
The type of radiation received while flying is different than the type of received from the scanners, so a direct comparison of levels is meaningless.
This is why we convert radiation dosage measures (which are directly measured in rad or something similar) into rem, which are adjusted for the effectiveness of the particular "type" of radiation in damaging a human.
It's playing a stupid game of semantics that people were already failing.
Light of all frequencies is radiation, period. It's electromagnetic radiation. At frequencies below the ionization threshold, it's radiation. At frequencies above the ionization threshold, it's radiation. Alpha and beta particles are also radiation, but they're not electromagnetic.
Non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation is essentially safe. Ionizing EM radiation has both short-term and long-term effects, though we're usually only interested in the long-term effects. Just because it's called "radiation" and has potential negative long-term effects does not magically make it particularly dangerous. The details of an exposure are critical to determining if it's dangerous and how dangerous it is.
The Therac-25 was actually a boundary-case software error. These are nearly impossible to systematically test for. There are approaches for mitigating that risk, many of which are routinely used in X-ray devices.
If you're all that worried about rare and difficult-to-find software errors putting your life at risk, I would start by looking elsewhere. The backscatter scanners take many minutes of active scanning to expose you to an appreciable amount of radiation, so even slow, stupid humans have time to realize something has gone wrong. That's not the case for many other places that software can put you at risk: like cars, airplanes, power plants...
Despite the section title ("Baggage Screening Technology Reports"), each report on the page I linked to has a substantial section about the body scanners. They are all, as far as I can tell, Rapiscan 1000 SP model. In the reports they are referred to as AIT X-ray Systems.
I don't think they're all that unreadable, though I have some background in this. The dose-per-screening is measuring the dosage for the person being screened.
I haven't seen much specific about the intensities in the scanning vans, but the major problem I see with them (aside from potential fourth-amendment issues) is that the scan is not obviously constrained in time and space. In a backscatter machine in an airport, the scan obviously only takes place within the confines of the device and for as long as your are within the device (in practice, much shorter). It is clear when someone is being scanned and when they're not, so dosing is easy to determine. Without strict controls on the vans, it's very difficult to tell how much a person is being exposed to, since it's not clear who they are scanning and for how long.
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You know, he did say what was going to be done with *both* halves, right?
I'd like to point out that I was, indeed, using a computer (with privacy tools) in an Internet Cafe in California (an airport, no less!) only last month, after having traveled an illogical distance and despite having robust residential Internet access.
You didn't travel an illogical distance to use an Internet cafe. You traveled an illogical distance and also used an Internet cafe. Totally different.
Not only that, the flyer says that if you're downloading news coverage of terrorism, you're a terrorist! So apparently anyone who watches the news at all is a terrorist.
Either that, or you're (perhaps deliberately) misinterpreting the flyer.
Use of third-party-collected data is touchy, although your communications on the Internet have fairly little 4th-Amendment protection.
They're probably simply trying to keep overenthusiastic baristas from breaking the law by spying on their customers. It's a fairly common problem that people will get overenthusiastic about these lists (and make a terrible mistake like thinking that the flyer says that anyone using Tor must be a terrorist) and then either getting themselves hurt or breaking the law.
People on Slashdot don't understand what an indicator is. Perhaps they could benefit from Socrates. "This flyer says that terrorists download news coverage of terrorist activities, therefore they think that all people who download news coverage of terrorist activities must be terrorists." No, that's... that's not what they're saying at all.
In general, the design of a game cannot be copyrighted. Graphical elements and the text of the rules can, but not the overall game. This is why there are so many board-game knockoffs online.
Not only that, but 2,4,5-T is only moderately toxic and is not a dioxin. The greater problem is that it often is contaminated with the dioxin TCDD, which is highly toxic. TCDD is thought to be responsible for most of the ill effects of Agent Orange.
While mentioning Agent Orange here is a certainly an emotional appeal, it's not entirely inappropriate. Agent Orange was a mixture of two herbicides, used as an herbicide. It caused health problems in people. Here, one of the two herbicides that made up Agent Orange is being used as an herbicide. It's the one that was, more or less, responsible for Agent Orange's health problems. The lawsuit is about health problems as a result of the use of this chemical. The comparison to Agent Orange is apt.
Assuming they haven't changed their number of shares substantially, it was valued at about $35B, though it fairly rapidly rose to a $65-70B valuation.
No, according to their numbers, the average Facebook profile earns $3.70 / year.
Market capitalization tends to be based on everything they own, not just the most obvious item, plus investors' predictions of future growth.
We in this case is strictly the people making decisions about what weapons to field and develop.
Yes, yes, everything is 1984. Apparently it was the only political or dystopian book ever written.
I wouldn't really call that an "energy weapon", but yes, chemical explosives are in a completely different league from nuclear explosives. The only reason to develop better conventional explosives is because we want to avoid actually using nuclear weapons -- not because they have any hope of ever being better.
2. It doesn't matter where [Country] gets its oil from as everyone pays market price, which is highly influenced by world events. See Point #1
It doesn't matter in terms of determining the overall price. It matters if you actually want to get your hands on the oil in an undisrupted supply. Oil is fungible in terms of price, but actual contracts for the delivery of oil are less so.
I don't really have a comment on that. It's standard and, I think quite reasonable, procedure to redact the names of individual employees for released materials -- privacy and all that. I don't know if there are reasonable auditing controls in place where you could obtain information that would determine whether the testers were qualified or not. (I think it's fairly unreasonable to claim that they wouldn't be qualified, since APHC does a lot of health physics work, but it is interesting to wonder if there's a way of auditing that.)
They actually contain tests of the human scanners, they're just on a badly-labeled page. if you look at the individual reports, you can find the human-scanner sections pretty easily. (I realize after the fact that the page is poorly named: you don't have the benefit of the TSA body-scanner safety FAQ that links to this -- and, to be fair, is a pretty well-written and informative page.)
That's a completely different point. It's also wrong, though. Even with only ~2 mm deposition, the dosage is well below the acute-exposure threshold. In that region, you're treating risk (cancer incidence rate) as linear in total dosage anyway, so only the total, not the distribution, matters. If you assert that more cancer-sensitive organs are concentrated near the skin, you could claim that the rad-to-rem conversion factor is wrong. They actually have models for that, though. The tests I've seen only run the numbers for occupational exposure using different models, since you're potentially dealing with a much larger dose, and you can see that the concentrated-at-the-skin model is pretty close to the whole-body-dose model.
You know that the Army Public Health Command is a different organization than the TSA, right?
Nobody at the TSA is qualified to perform these measurements. Getting someone qualified would be a waste of money, since the government has a number of different labs that are experts at this stuff (other reports have been done by NIST and by a department at Johns Hopkins that routinely does government-contract work). So they have labs that are experts do the testing.
Keep in mind that the dosage per volume or per mass of a backscatter device is very low. So regardless of whether the absorbed radiation is throughout the body or in a few-millimeter-thick layer, the dosage per volume is still low. (The difference between "the whole body" and "a few millimeters thick" is something like 3-4 orders of magnitude. Yes, the backscatter dosage is so low that 4 orders of magnitude higher is still "low".) Low dosage here means that there are no acute radiation effects -- things like sunburn or radiation poisoning. Long-term radiation effects (cancer) are generally held to be linear with the total dose. This behavior is actually extrapolated downward from measurements of the effects of radiation at much higher doses -- we don't know exactly how dangerous very low doses of radiation are. We suspect that it can't be worse than linear (1/10 the dose means 1/10 the rate of cancer), so the linear model is used. Since the cancer rate is linear, it depends only on total dose, not the distribution of the dose. There are some subtle points -- this may change what kind of cancer you get, and it would make it marginally more dangerous for some people and less dangerous for others, depending on their susceptibility to different kinds of cancer -- but roughly this is the reason.
The type of radiation received while flying is different than the type of received from the scanners, so a direct comparison of levels is meaningless.
This is why we convert radiation dosage measures (which are directly measured in rad or something similar) into rem, which are adjusted for the effectiveness of the particular "type" of radiation in damaging a human.
It's playing a stupid game of semantics that people were already failing.
Light of all frequencies is radiation, period. It's electromagnetic radiation. At frequencies below the ionization threshold, it's radiation. At frequencies above the ionization threshold, it's radiation. Alpha and beta particles are also radiation, but they're not electromagnetic.
Non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation is essentially safe. Ionizing EM radiation has both short-term and long-term effects, though we're usually only interested in the long-term effects. Just because it's called "radiation" and has potential negative long-term effects does not magically make it particularly dangerous. The details of an exposure are critical to determining if it's dangerous and how dangerous it is.
The Therac-25 was actually a boundary-case software error. These are nearly impossible to systematically test for. There are approaches for mitigating that risk, many of which are routinely used in X-ray devices.
If you're all that worried about rare and difficult-to-find software errors putting your life at risk, I would start by looking elsewhere. The backscatter scanners take many minutes of active scanning to expose you to an appreciable amount of radiation, so even slow, stupid humans have time to realize something has gone wrong. That's not the case for many other places that software can put you at risk: like cars, airplanes, power plants...
Despite the section title ("Baggage Screening Technology Reports"), each report on the page I linked to has a substantial section about the body scanners. They are all, as far as I can tell, Rapiscan 1000 SP model. In the reports they are referred to as AIT X-ray Systems.
Useful projects are the "bread" in "bread and circuses".
I don't think they're all that unreadable, though I have some background in this. The dose-per-screening is measuring the dosage for the person being screened.
I haven't seen much specific about the intensities in the scanning vans, but the major problem I see with them (aside from potential fourth-amendment issues) is that the scan is not obviously constrained in time and space. In a backscatter machine in an airport, the scan obviously only takes place within the confines of the device and for as long as your are within the device (in practice, much shorter). It is clear when someone is being scanned and when they're not, so dosing is easy to determine. Without strict controls on the vans, it's very difficult to tell how much a person is being exposed to, since it's not clear who they are scanning and for how long.