This kind of service doesn't help at all with future planning of finances, as would what you'd expect with a mobile phone plan. Sure, these services help with the immediate case, but if I have a recurring payment of $20, say, every month, what good is that to me if XBT have just tanked yet again and I have less than half in my wallet than I had planned for?
The stability is the biggest (one of the only?) problems left with bitcoin to solve before it could see wider use, and this right now is just a novelty way to pay the odd bill or two for a slim margin of customers, from a company that has made its name with similar novel marketing tactics.
Slashdot continuing its trend of giving away free front-page adverts for trendy companies that are starting some random scheme that is vaguely tech-related, but wildly impractical (like most advertising-centric schemes are.)
Okay, we get it, everything is related to Bitcoin and we must hear about it daily. Including this patent which barely has anything to do with how Bitcoin operates on a technical or design level, other than whatever the submitter could pretend to find while glancing over the patent abstract.
I really wish the Slashdot love affair with Bitcoin would end, already.
No, you're just devaluing the word slavery by using it in that ridiculous way, because there's already a term for what you're trying to describe: vendor lock-in.
Your truly important rights will disappear in the loss of the rights protected by the 2nd amendment. Don't believe it? What will YOU do when they pass a law that allows them to arrest you for no reason? Oh wait, they already have. OK, what will YOU do when they pass a law that allows them to pass judgement on you and execute you without a trial? Oh... ermm... they did that too.
OK, what will you do when they tell you that you have to worship a religion not of your choosing? Or that you aren't allowed to bitch about what a shitty government we have? Or that you can't say the president is a douchebag?
The whole point to the 2nd Amendment is that it gives the people the ability to defend their unalienable rights if need be. Its not about hunting or sporting clays as our current leadership would have plebs like you believe. Its to give the people the ability to cast down a tyrannical government if ever the need arises.
This is what Americans actually believe.
Good luck taking down an armed military with your plinkers, if they actually WANT to get rid of you. Or they could, you know, keep doing the slow-boil that they've been doing for years. That seems to be working pretty well - as you already note yourself. Why fight them when you can just make them agree with you?
Most of us wanted to move away from the whole 'needs a PC to store anything once the batteries die' thing when we ditched the Palm devices.
Okay, it's not exactly the same, but I don't like the idea of needing to bring a laptop that I otherwise simply don't need in case I'm away from home longer than the battery lasts in one go and when I'm between power points. That's just absurd to me.
I've only ever done MSP as a stop on the way to somewhere else and you pointed out in another post that I must clearly have ignored/missed an exit to the unsecured area immediately after its customs barrier and just before security. So I have to apologise for my assertions in the thread. My destination is usually Kansas - short of hopping in a Greyhound or hiring a car or something equally horrible, I have no way of making a direct flight there so it's as good as an arrival scan to me, probably why I didn't think it through properly for people that were actually stopping at MSP.
Well, I'm glad I never had to use Manchester. Screw that noise.
I travel all over the world, although I haven't flown TATL since November. Obviously you'll have scanners on connections. That's not arrivals. Admittedly I tend to fly into JFK/EWR/BWI/IAD, and on from Washington/NY a few days later. I've never heard of any of my colleagues being scanned on arrival, only on connections (which is to be expected)
I thought you were being pedantic but the only time I can remember arriving without needing a connection was landing direct in Detroit, and I didn't need them then. That being said, that was August 2008 and there's a chance it predates them being installed in Detroit (I don't buy this for a major airport but as I don't know I won't comment) but from the shape of MSP's layout from immigration I can't see how you could skip the extra TSA check even if you weren't connecting. I recall being railroaded into the TSA.
So the scanners are before immigration? For my last entry (day before Sandy hit), into EWR, I wasn't even asked if I was there for business or leisure.
For her that was a layover, she was heading to Wichita, perhaps that made a difference. And in MSP as I described above, I think you don't have a choice.
Hmm, do you fly TATL on American carriers (or worse, El Al)? I've heard they have silly extra rules that you don't get on VS/BA etc, but if you route via AMS I'm guessing you're a KLM flyer. Your experiences do not sound normal. I arrived into America 4 times last year, 3 times the year before. I've never seen any security present for people getting off the planes. Add the other 60 flights last year, and the only country where I have seen security on arrival is Israel, where they occasionally ask a few questions (the Erez border being the non-flight exception)
KLM/Delta flyer. MSP immediately parks you in front of the immigration desk, the customs desk and then pushes you though TSA to get into the main arrivals lounge. I'm not a fan of MSP. My fiancee has used other intermediate connecting airports like Atlanta and Memphis and I don't know what she needed to do for those, except that she had to go through the X-Ray at Memphis. She is sickly girl and air flight doesn't sit well with her, and security likes to badger her because she looks 'suspicious and nervous' for that reason.
I've landed in Girona in Spain, Amsterdam, Birmingham, Gatwick and Heathrow in London, and Seoul in South Korea over the last six years or so in various amounts, and it's only my layover in MSP that has ever done this.
You're just looking for a flamewar. One or two correct examples disproves an absolute statement of 'There are no scanners upon arrival to the US'. Please go away.
I've discovered for myself that the fact that G4s employees at the UK flight gate means sweet eff-all as they run security for Schiphol - I didn't make the distinction because I've only flown to the USA and the UK from Amsterdam, and I'm too busy being annoyed by inane questions and people who can't understand people changing their appearance from a passport to look at the uniforms of the folk on the USA flight gates. So scratch that paragraph and sorry about that.
Where I do think I have caused misunderstanding is that I used the word 'scanner' to mean both the X-Ray scanners that are the topic of the article and the millimetre wave ones as I don't like either of them, and it is the latter which are present in Amsterdam and mostly everywhere in the UK now (except Manchester unless they've finally scrapped the X-Ray ones, I don't know personally.) At the very least the millimetre wave ones don't generate nude images, for Gods sake. So I admit I misunderstood the GGP there, but at the same time, he made the same mistake because there are only millimetre wave scanners in the UK now, only Manchester had the X-Ray ones and they were optional, and even then you don't need to use the millimetre wave ones to fly out of Birmingham airport. So it's safe to say our friend the GGP is not a British resident and doesn't know what he's talking about there, but I guess the police state reputation of the UK has to be reinforced somehow.
I have had to use the X-Ray scanners on arrival to the USA, sorry but it's true. I wonder if you or the GGP actually do any transatlantic flying and know this or are just parroting what you've heard (as I suspect) because I was flying through Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, and they damn well have full security on arrival, even for connections, although millimetre wave ones. My fiancee flew to America once landing in Memphis, and they scanned with the X-Ray scanners for all landing people to boot. So that's two places where the assumption that you don't get scanned on arrival is outright crap.
X-Ray'd/millimetre scanned, an interview, all fingerprints taken... it's not an inviting country to fly to.
As an aside I find it hard to believe that the TSA doesn't deliberately ensure that international arrivals from airports including Amsterdam require that the gates used are the ones armed with millimetre wave scanners. After all, they have their guys at the gate asking you dumb questions. Airport security, especially transatlantic, is an end-to-end affair and usually your destination country has their guys running security in the host airport. Even inside the EU my flight back from Amsterdam to the UK had G4s employees setting up the gate and running security.
There are no scanners on the way into the U.S. You were either in the U.S. leaving (or an internal flight), or you encountered the scanner in the UK.
Didn't know Schipol, Amsterdam was really in the U.S.A. That's some good-ass weed, right there.
No, seriously, they had them and they had people choosing not to use them, but the representatives just prior to that had refused to believe my passport photo and my drivers license photo, so I wasn't going to press it.
It's a shame that nothing will really change despite having this validate almost everything that was ever said by the anti-crowd against these things. Health and privacy concerns, a nice double-whammy.
I was tempted to skip these the last time I flew, but I'm a Brit and I was trying to get into the USA, and I was already having trouble with people not believing my passport photograph (oh no, new hair styles, you're a different person!!!) and I think I would have just gotten immense grief from security if I'd have asked for the extended groping session. Plus, my balls are for my fiancée only.
Oh for goodness SAKE. I'm undoing my mod points here because your analogies sucked so bad.
Nobody has bought this and got something they didn't expect to pay for, unlike all of your examples. Instead, people are getting angry that they are being *offered* the chance to buy something. If it's not to their taste, they can ignore it. Instead they're throwing a hilarious shit fit like you and going on about 'betrayal'.
Are Western geeks so absolutely full of themselves that now they are getting offended because something is being offered for sale that they don't like? Is that what we've come down to?
Slashdot Mirror
The whole debate about what is actually 'free' software is hilarious and comes down to miniscule differences in dogma. It's pathetic.
Because he stayed on duty after starting leaking until he was arrested.
That made it right to torture him, did it? Do you not see how that proves his point?
What was that in response to? My post? Because it didn't address it.
Single-issue poster somehow manages to make a thread about Dubai, about the USA and Obama. Go away.
This kind of service doesn't help at all with future planning of finances, as would what you'd expect with a mobile phone plan. Sure, these services help with the immediate case, but if I have a recurring payment of $20, say, every month, what good is that to me if XBT have just tanked yet again and I have less than half in my wallet than I had planned for? The stability is the biggest (one of the only?) problems left with bitcoin to solve before it could see wider use, and this right now is just a novelty way to pay the odd bill or two for a slim margin of customers, from a company that has made its name with similar novel marketing tactics.
Thanks for your post!
Slashdot continuing its trend of giving away free front-page adverts for trendy companies that are starting some random scheme that is vaguely tech-related, but wildly impractical (like most advertising-centric schemes are.)
Okay, we get it, everything is related to Bitcoin and we must hear about it daily. Including this patent which barely has anything to do with how Bitcoin operates on a technical or design level, other than whatever the submitter could pretend to find while glancing over the patent abstract.
I really wish the Slashdot love affair with Bitcoin would end, already.
No, you're just devaluing the word slavery by using it in that ridiculous way, because there's already a term for what you're trying to describe: vendor lock-in.
Your truly important rights will disappear in the loss of the rights protected by the 2nd amendment. Don't believe it? What will YOU do when they pass a law that allows them to arrest you for no reason? Oh wait, they already have. OK, what will YOU do when they pass a law that allows them to pass judgement on you and execute you without a trial? Oh... ermm... they did that too.
OK, what will you do when they tell you that you have to worship a religion not of your choosing? Or that you aren't allowed to bitch about what a shitty government we have? Or that you can't say the president is a douchebag?
The whole point to the 2nd Amendment is that it gives the people the ability to defend their unalienable rights if need be. Its not about hunting or sporting clays as our current leadership would have plebs like you believe. Its to give the people the ability to cast down a tyrannical government if ever the need arises.
This is what Americans actually believe.
Good luck taking down an armed military with your plinkers, if they actually WANT to get rid of you. Or they could, you know, keep doing the slow-boil that they've been doing for years. That seems to be working pretty well - as you already note yourself. Why fight them when you can just make them agree with you?
Most of us wanted to move away from the whole 'needs a PC to store anything once the batteries die' thing when we ditched the Palm devices.
Okay, it's not exactly the same, but I don't like the idea of needing to bring a laptop that I otherwise simply don't need in case I'm away from home longer than the battery lasts in one go and when I'm between power points. That's just absurd to me.
I've only ever done MSP as a stop on the way to somewhere else and you pointed out in another post that I must clearly have ignored/missed an exit to the unsecured area immediately after its customs barrier and just before security. So I have to apologise for my assertions in the thread. My destination is usually Kansas - short of hopping in a Greyhound or hiring a car or something equally horrible, I have no way of making a direct flight there so it's as good as an arrival scan to me, probably why I didn't think it through properly for people that were actually stopping at MSP.
Wow, CDG can burn for all I care. It's a pretty-looking mess of an airport. AMS is a great airport, I agree.
Ahh right, I do recall that now you say it. Strange that I've never seen anyone use them in all my flights. Consider me thoroughly told.
They were optional in the sense you could choose not to go through, and you wouldn't be allowed to fly, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/road-and-rail-transport/8608337/Doctor-barred-from-flying-after-refusing-body-scan-on-health-grounds.html et. al
Well, I'm glad I never had to use Manchester. Screw that noise.
I travel all over the world, although I haven't flown TATL since November. Obviously you'll have scanners on connections. That's not arrivals. Admittedly I tend to fly into JFK/EWR/BWI/IAD, and on from Washington/NY a few days later. I've never heard of any of my colleagues being scanned on arrival, only on connections (which is to be expected)
I thought you were being pedantic but the only time I can remember arriving without needing a connection was landing direct in Detroit, and I didn't need them then. That being said, that was August 2008 and there's a chance it predates them being installed in Detroit (I don't buy this for a major airport but as I don't know I won't comment) but from the shape of MSP's layout from immigration I can't see how you could skip the extra TSA check even if you weren't connecting. I recall being railroaded into the TSA.
So the scanners are before immigration? For my last entry (day before Sandy hit), into EWR, I wasn't even asked if I was there for business or leisure.
For her that was a layover, she was heading to Wichita, perhaps that made a difference. And in MSP as I described above, I think you don't have a choice.
Hmm, do you fly TATL on American carriers (or worse, El Al)? I've heard they have silly extra rules that you don't get on VS/BA etc, but if you route via AMS I'm guessing you're a KLM flyer. Your experiences do not sound normal. I arrived into America 4 times last year, 3 times the year before. I've never seen any security present for people getting off the planes. Add the other 60 flights last year, and the only country where I have seen security on arrival is Israel, where they occasionally ask a few questions (the Erez border being the non-flight exception)
KLM/Delta flyer. MSP immediately parks you in front of the immigration desk, the customs desk and then pushes you though TSA to get into the main arrivals lounge. I'm not a fan of MSP. My fiancee has used other intermediate connecting airports like Atlanta and Memphis and I don't know what she needed to do for those, except that she had to go through the X-Ray at Memphis. She is sickly girl and air flight doesn't sit well with her, and security likes to badger her because she looks 'suspicious and nervous' for that reason.
I've landed in Girona in Spain, Amsterdam, Birmingham, Gatwick and Heathrow in London, and Seoul in South Korea over the last six years or so in various amounts, and it's only my layover in MSP that has ever done this.
From Amsterdam. ACs are cute when they're still learning to read.
No, it's just crap. Scanned on arrival to the US at MSP, 26th December 2012.
You're just looking for a flamewar. One or two correct examples disproves an absolute statement of 'There are no scanners upon arrival to the US'. Please go away.
I've discovered for myself that the fact that G4s employees at the UK flight gate means sweet eff-all as they run security for Schiphol - I didn't make the distinction because I've only flown to the USA and the UK from Amsterdam, and I'm too busy being annoyed by inane questions and people who can't understand people changing their appearance from a passport to look at the uniforms of the folk on the USA flight gates. So scratch that paragraph and sorry about that.
Where I do think I have caused misunderstanding is that I used the word 'scanner' to mean both the X-Ray scanners that are the topic of the article and the millimetre wave ones as I don't like either of them, and it is the latter which are present in Amsterdam and mostly everywhere in the UK now (except Manchester unless they've finally scrapped the X-Ray ones, I don't know personally.) At the very least the millimetre wave ones don't generate nude images, for Gods sake. So I admit I misunderstood the GGP there, but at the same time, he made the same mistake because there are only millimetre wave scanners in the UK now, only Manchester had the X-Ray ones and they were optional, and even then you don't need to use the millimetre wave ones to fly out of Birmingham airport. So it's safe to say our friend the GGP is not a British resident and doesn't know what he's talking about there, but I guess the police state reputation of the UK has to be reinforced somehow.
I have had to use the X-Ray scanners on arrival to the USA, sorry but it's true. I wonder if you or the GGP actually do any transatlantic flying and know this or are just parroting what you've heard (as I suspect) because I was flying through Minneapolis-St. Paul Airport, and they damn well have full security on arrival, even for connections, although millimetre wave ones. My fiancee flew to America once landing in Memphis, and they scanned with the X-Ray scanners for all landing people to boot. So that's two places where the assumption that you don't get scanned on arrival is outright crap.
X-Ray'd/millimetre scanned, an interview, all fingerprints taken... it's not an inviting country to fly to.
As an aside I find it hard to believe that the TSA doesn't deliberately ensure that international arrivals from airports including Amsterdam require that the gates used are the ones armed with millimetre wave scanners. After all, they have their guys at the gate asking you dumb questions. Airport security, especially transatlantic, is an end-to-end affair and usually your destination country has their guys running security in the host airport. Even inside the EU my flight back from Amsterdam to the UK had G4s employees setting up the gate and running security.
There are no scanners on the way into the U.S. You were either in the U.S. leaving (or an internal flight), or you encountered the scanner in the UK.
Didn't know Schipol, Amsterdam was really in the U.S.A. That's some good-ass weed, right there.
No, seriously, they had them and they had people choosing not to use them, but the representatives just prior to that had refused to believe my passport photo and my drivers license photo, so I wasn't going to press it.
It's a shame that nothing will really change despite having this validate almost everything that was ever said by the anti-crowd against these things. Health and privacy concerns, a nice double-whammy. I was tempted to skip these the last time I flew, but I'm a Brit and I was trying to get into the USA, and I was already having trouble with people not believing my passport photograph (oh no, new hair styles, you're a different person!!!) and I think I would have just gotten immense grief from security if I'd have asked for the extended groping session. Plus, my balls are for my fiancée only.
Oh for goodness SAKE. I'm undoing my mod points here because your analogies sucked so bad.
Nobody has bought this and got something they didn't expect to pay for, unlike all of your examples. Instead, people are getting angry that they are being *offered* the chance to buy something. If it's not to their taste, they can ignore it. Instead they're throwing a hilarious shit fit like you and going on about 'betrayal'.
Are Western geeks so absolutely full of themselves that now they are getting offended because something is being offered for sale that they don't like? Is that what we've come down to?
That's bollocks. Windows key + R brings up the Run box. I've been using it.
They did not fire the woman mostly responsible for the Metro UI. Guess again.