Unless Joe Terrorist steals a business jet somehow, he's not going to kill many people flying a typical Cessna 172 into a sporting event. Sure, it'll be world news and all, but the death toll really won't be very high; terrorists don't want to go to all that trouble just to kill a dozen or two people at the most. Just think about all the effort they have to put into it: they have to go to flight school and learn how to fly the thing in the first place (which is even worse if they try to steal a business jet, as those are much more complicated to fly), then they have to figure out where to steal one from and how, and time it so it happens when a major event is underway, and then avoid being shot down by F16s when the plane is reported stolen and the nearest airbase scrambles their fighters.
It'd much easier for them to just get some assault rifles and go to a mall on black friday and shoot hundreds of people, much like they did in Mumbai, India several years ago. Americans would be terrified of just going to the mall. Honestly, after the enormous success they had in Mumbai, I'm surprised they haven't done this here yet.
I've done a lot of traveling in the past year. Interestingly, one thing I've seen a lot is that I frequently don't have to go though the scanner; if they're "recalibrating" it or whatever it is they're doing, they just let everyone walk through the metal detector. At really busy times, they'll pick people randomly to go through the metal detector instead of the irradiators, to reduce the line.
Also, being an engineer, I carry a LOT of electronics with me in my carry-on bags: laptop (sometimes 2), WiFi sniffer with dual detached antennae, routers, power supplies, ARM development boards, prototype PCBs, etc. They've never hassled me about all this, despite surely being able see many yards of wiring coiled up in my bad in the scanner. However, if I forget to take my toiletries bag out and scan that separately, they grab it and re-scan it or hand-search it.
Actually, there are trans-atlantic cruise ships still. But they're fairly slow, and quite expensive. Basically, to live up to Hatta's ideals, you have to be quite wealthy and independently so, with no job.
But the problem, as I see it, is that if less than half the population doesn't see something as a problem, it's simply not going to be addressed in this political climate, especially when we have two very bad, and and very similar (to each other) parties in power. The only way unpopular stuff gets changed in this country any more is if a very large majority is pissed off about it. A significant minority is mad about something? Too bad. They're not enough to count at the polls.
Heck, let's look at this very issue. Are any candidates talking about it? The only one I've heard recently was Rand Paul, and he's just a senator from one (not terribly large) state, and doesn't really represent any party or group, and is kinda on the fringe. Romney isn't talking about it at all, and given the Republican party position (aside from Rand of course, who with his father basically disagree with the other Republicans on nearly everything), is likely to be a big proponent of TSA, despite his lame claims of being in favor of "small government". And Obama certainly isn't talking about it, since all the recent TSA abuses have been under his authority. So it's not like you're going to be able to elect someone who'll make a change. If you tell Obama you don't like how the TSA is operating, he'll just laugh in your face and say "what are you going to do, vote for Romney?"
I think the point is, the Israelis are (probably quite justifiably) rather paranoid, so they're an extreme case. So if they, of all people, think the TSA is a joke, then they really are a joke. If anyone is going to go to extremes for anti-terrorism security, it's the Israelis, so if you're doing something to avoid terrorism that the Israelis aren't doing, then you're going too far.
Ok, you got me on the funneling money bit; how exactly does that work? I know how it works with some big projects like NASA: they spread various parts of the projects to different districts (a launch site in this state, and mission control center in another state, a rocket engine testing facility in a different state, etc.). But with the TSA, there isn't anything to it, it's just a bunch of goons hired to act like security guards, and stationed in every single commercial airport around the country. The goons are going to be stationed wherever the airports are, and obviously more goons are needed at the bigger airports (Dallas, Atlanta, NYC, Chicago, LAX, etc.). The TSA (nor congresscritters) don't determine who gets more TSA presence, the size of the already-existing airport determines that.
The only other thing I can think of is that the companies getting lots of federal money for bogus "scanners" may be located in key places.
The one thing I wonder about with regard to those locked cockpit doors is: how do the pilots use the lavatory? While they probably try to get it all out before the flight, what if they need to go during the flight anyway, esp. during a long flight? Sometimes I have days where I seem to need to urinate at least every hour for some odd reason. And a lot of those pilots aren't young guys either.
Holy crap this is pretty scary. Also interesting, while I certainly knew about Michael Jackson's "Beat It" (I'm old enough to remember when it came out and young enough that I cared at the time, as I was a kid then), I have absolutely no idea who Jon and Kate Gosselin are.
Or better yet, say that it's just too expensive to bother with, and do nothing. Engage in a public program of portraying any efforts to deflect the asteroid as "socialism". Call this project "Nero".
Don't be ridiculous. Seattle's a great city. Its largest downside is that Microsoft is located there, but it'd really suck to lose the city otherwise. If an asteroid needs to strike an American city, I vote for Phoenix. The only thing of value that would be lost is an Intel fab.
Ok, I'm a little ignorant about the details of a mass driver, but don't they require energy to actually shoot the pieces of mass away? Unless you're getting the energy from the asteroid's material itself, if you have that much energy stored up, wouldn't it be easier to use some other method, such as ion engines, to push the asteroid directly, instead of bothering to carve piece after piece from the asteroid?
I don't know about this. Depending on the composition of the asteroid, a bomb placed inside might possibly split it in half, and the force of that explosion would cause the two halves to move in opposite directions. If the bomb isn't powerful enough (quite likely with the size of a giant asteroid, and the size of our bombs), it won't cause the asteroid to be broken into "millions of smaller rocks", just two or so (again, this depends on the rock's composition). The problem is that it's unlikely the halves would be pushed apart enough to matter, so the whole thing is certainly quite unrealistic.
Yes, diverting the asteroid early is obviously a far better scenario. But there's a big problem here: doing this requires that you actually know about the asteroid well ahead of time, and it requires that you take measures well ahead of time to divert it. This requires a lot of funding. We humans are too cheap and stupid to do this. There's no telling how many asteroids are out there that might collide with us in the next two centuries, because we don't put much effort into looking for them (it seems to be mostly amateur astronomers that look for these, and their equipment isn't all that great). Heck, we even know about one sizable asteroid, named Apophis, that's going to make a close fly-by in 2029, and then depending on exactly how the gravitational interaction goes in that fly-by, might come around again in 2036 for a direct 510 megaton impact, but we aren't doing anything at all about it even though that's only 24 years away. Granted, the impact possibility is still quite low, but if we're wrong, we're looking at some pretty catastrophic effects, either tens of millions dead if it hits land, or who knows how many dead if it hits the ocean and causes a massive tsunami.
Except that we've never built anything like that before, so it'd take a lot of time to design, build, and test it. If you have that much time, you'd be better off using an existing rocket and deflecting the asteroid early. Basically, with giant asteroids, if you've stupidly waited until the last minute (perhaps because you stupidly didn't bother to keep an eye out for them in the first place), then you're already screwed.
Not only that, but you've identified another problem with judging quality: software usually does not stand on its own; it's part of a larger system. What if a piece of software is well-written, but the libraries it links to are shit? A programmer may not have much choice if he's required to use system libraries, or some special vendor-provided libraries. He can add in workarounds for some of the bugs in the libraries, but that's it.
While obviously the average and the mean in your set are very different, I'm wondering if that's not the case for very large populations. For instance, the frequent adage that half of the human population has "below-average intelligence". The population is over 7 billion, a much larger set than your five numbers there, and likely follows a gaussian curve. While I don't know, wouldn't it be a fairly safe assumption that the median and the average are very close to each other? I'm thinking software is the same way; there's a countless number of software programs out there now.
I think you're a little confused. Gnome started out (in version 1) looking a lot like KDE, with a bar on the bottom, a foot icon that was like the K icon and the Windows "Start" button, etc. Then ver2 came out in the 2000s after a bunch of "usability studies" and it was much more minimalistic. Then ver3 came out and it just went off the deep end catering to idiots and trying to be touch-friendly on machines that don't have touchscreens. It's been a constant downhill slide. It's not "stuck in the 1990s", because UIs never looked like Gnome3 in the 90s; this touch-friendly crap is all brand new.
And we need to stick with PulseAudio unfortunately, because Linux audio is fundamentally broken. However, there's hope: some guy is writing an all new audio layer for the kernel (called "KLANG", IIRC), which promises to obsolete PulseAudio and JACK and replace ALSA, fixing all the problems Linux has with audio.
If you're downloading, you don't need a CD at all, just do the net install so you only install the things you want/need. The only reason you should want a CD is because you're buying it and having it shipped to you in the mail, or your friend is burning it for you and sending it to you, because you have no net access, or very slow access, and don't want to even bother with the net install.
And if someone is actually mailing you a physical disc, then why bother limiting yourself to a CD? Have them send you a DVD instead. Or even a USB thumb drive.
Maybe I'm misremembering things WRT reiserfs, but I thought that reiserfs was adopted by many distros because it was better than ext2, but when ext3 came out, it eliminated most of the performance problems of ext2 so the distros started switching to that, even before reiser committed murder. I seem to remember ext3 already being the standard, and reiser3 being considered old and obsolete, when the murder case came up. At that time, reiser had been working a lot on ReiserFS4, which was supposed to greatly improve the performance and be competitive with ext4, but it was never included in the kernel because of his conflicts with the kernel maintainers.
Yeah, I'll bet this will go over great with your users: "I know it's very different from what you're used to, but try it out for a few weeks and you'll like it." "But I need to print this document NOW! Not a few weeks from now."
That doesn't surprise me. When I was at Intel, I frequently didn't agree with their strategy: Itanic, x86-64, the consumer devices, etc. and frequently talked about this stuff to coworkers (ones I trusted to not blab to management).
Hmm. Maybe there's some different dynamics there with some of these women postgraduate students. From what you describe, it sounds like they can be rather choosy about which clients they accept, unlike at a brothel, for instance, where they have to take any client that management requires them to. I can see how this arrangement (being picky about clients) would make the profession much more attractive.
Slashdot Mirror
Yep, this is one of the reasons I don't even bother signing any of those whitehouse.gov petitions.
Unless Joe Terrorist steals a business jet somehow, he's not going to kill many people flying a typical Cessna 172 into a sporting event. Sure, it'll be world news and all, but the death toll really won't be very high; terrorists don't want to go to all that trouble just to kill a dozen or two people at the most. Just think about all the effort they have to put into it: they have to go to flight school and learn how to fly the thing in the first place (which is even worse if they try to steal a business jet, as those are much more complicated to fly), then they have to figure out where to steal one from and how, and time it so it happens when a major event is underway, and then avoid being shot down by F16s when the plane is reported stolen and the nearest airbase scrambles their fighters.
It'd much easier for them to just get some assault rifles and go to a mall on black friday and shoot hundreds of people, much like they did in Mumbai, India several years ago. Americans would be terrified of just going to the mall. Honestly, after the enormous success they had in Mumbai, I'm surprised they haven't done this here yet.
I've done a lot of traveling in the past year. Interestingly, one thing I've seen a lot is that I frequently don't have to go though the scanner; if they're "recalibrating" it or whatever it is they're doing, they just let everyone walk through the metal detector. At really busy times, they'll pick people randomly to go through the metal detector instead of the irradiators, to reduce the line.
Also, being an engineer, I carry a LOT of electronics with me in my carry-on bags: laptop (sometimes 2), WiFi sniffer with dual detached antennae, routers, power supplies, ARM development boards, prototype PCBs, etc. They've never hassled me about all this, despite surely being able see many yards of wiring coiled up in my bad in the scanner. However, if I forget to take my toiletries bag out and scan that separately, they grab it and re-scan it or hand-search it.
Actually, there are trans-atlantic cruise ships still. But they're fairly slow, and quite expensive. Basically, to live up to Hatta's ideals, you have to be quite wealthy and independently so, with no job.
But the problem, as I see it, is that if less than half the population doesn't see something as a problem, it's simply not going to be addressed in this political climate, especially when we have two very bad, and and very similar (to each other) parties in power. The only way unpopular stuff gets changed in this country any more is if a very large majority is pissed off about it. A significant minority is mad about something? Too bad. They're not enough to count at the polls.
Heck, let's look at this very issue. Are any candidates talking about it? The only one I've heard recently was Rand Paul, and he's just a senator from one (not terribly large) state, and doesn't really represent any party or group, and is kinda on the fringe. Romney isn't talking about it at all, and given the Republican party position (aside from Rand of course, who with his father basically disagree with the other Republicans on nearly everything), is likely to be a big proponent of TSA, despite his lame claims of being in favor of "small government". And Obama certainly isn't talking about it, since all the recent TSA abuses have been under his authority. So it's not like you're going to be able to elect someone who'll make a change. If you tell Obama you don't like how the TSA is operating, he'll just laugh in your face and say "what are you going to do, vote for Romney?"
I think the point is, the Israelis are (probably quite justifiably) rather paranoid, so they're an extreme case. So if they, of all people, think the TSA is a joke, then they really are a joke. If anyone is going to go to extremes for anti-terrorism security, it's the Israelis, so if you're doing something to avoid terrorism that the Israelis aren't doing, then you're going too far.
Ok, you got me on the funneling money bit; how exactly does that work? I know how it works with some big projects like NASA: they spread various parts of the projects to different districts (a launch site in this state, and mission control center in another state, a rocket engine testing facility in a different state, etc.). But with the TSA, there isn't anything to it, it's just a bunch of goons hired to act like security guards, and stationed in every single commercial airport around the country. The goons are going to be stationed wherever the airports are, and obviously more goons are needed at the bigger airports (Dallas, Atlanta, NYC, Chicago, LAX, etc.). The TSA (nor congresscritters) don't determine who gets more TSA presence, the size of the already-existing airport determines that.
The only other thing I can think of is that the companies getting lots of federal money for bogus "scanners" may be located in key places.
The one thing I wonder about with regard to those locked cockpit doors is: how do the pilots use the lavatory? While they probably try to get it all out before the flight, what if they need to go during the flight anyway, esp. during a long flight? Sometimes I have days where I seem to need to urinate at least every hour for some odd reason. And a lot of those pilots aren't young guys either.
Holy crap this is pretty scary. Also interesting, while I certainly knew about Michael Jackson's "Beat It" (I'm old enough to remember when it came out and young enough that I cared at the time, as I was a kid then), I have absolutely no idea who Jon and Kate Gosselin are.
I wonder what portion of that 54% of Americans, who thinks the TSA is doing a great job, has never even traveled by air in the last 10 years?
Or better yet, say that it's just too expensive to bother with, and do nothing. Engage in a public program of portraying any efforts to deflect the asteroid as "socialism". Call this project "Nero".
Don't be ridiculous. Seattle's a great city. Its largest downside is that Microsoft is located there, but it'd really suck to lose the city otherwise. If an asteroid needs to strike an American city, I vote for Phoenix. The only thing of value that would be lost is an Intel fab.
Ok, I'm a little ignorant about the details of a mass driver, but don't they require energy to actually shoot the pieces of mass away? Unless you're getting the energy from the asteroid's material itself, if you have that much energy stored up, wouldn't it be easier to use some other method, such as ion engines, to push the asteroid directly, instead of bothering to carve piece after piece from the asteroid?
This is Slashdot; we don't do such things. You should know this already, having a low six-digit UID.
I don't know about this. Depending on the composition of the asteroid, a bomb placed inside might possibly split it in half, and the force of that explosion would cause the two halves to move in opposite directions. If the bomb isn't powerful enough (quite likely with the size of a giant asteroid, and the size of our bombs), it won't cause the asteroid to be broken into "millions of smaller rocks", just two or so (again, this depends on the rock's composition). The problem is that it's unlikely the halves would be pushed apart enough to matter, so the whole thing is certainly quite unrealistic.
Yes, diverting the asteroid early is obviously a far better scenario. But there's a big problem here: doing this requires that you actually know about the asteroid well ahead of time, and it requires that you take measures well ahead of time to divert it. This requires a lot of funding. We humans are too cheap and stupid to do this. There's no telling how many asteroids are out there that might collide with us in the next two centuries, because we don't put much effort into looking for them (it seems to be mostly amateur astronomers that look for these, and their equipment isn't all that great). Heck, we even know about one sizable asteroid, named Apophis, that's going to make a close fly-by in 2029, and then depending on exactly how the gravitational interaction goes in that fly-by, might come around again in 2036 for a direct 510 megaton impact, but we aren't doing anything at all about it even though that's only 24 years away. Granted, the impact possibility is still quite low, but if we're wrong, we're looking at some pretty catastrophic effects, either tens of millions dead if it hits land, or who knows how many dead if it hits the ocean and causes a massive tsunami.
Except that we've never built anything like that before, so it'd take a lot of time to design, build, and test it. If you have that much time, you'd be better off using an existing rocket and deflecting the asteroid early. Basically, with giant asteroids, if you've stupidly waited until the last minute (perhaps because you stupidly didn't bother to keep an eye out for them in the first place), then you're already screwed.
You think any kind of fast-food delivery pizza is even worth eating? WTF is wrong with you?
Not only that, but you've identified another problem with judging quality: software usually does not stand on its own; it's part of a larger system. What if a piece of software is well-written, but the libraries it links to are shit? A programmer may not have much choice if he's required to use system libraries, or some special vendor-provided libraries. He can add in workarounds for some of the bugs in the libraries, but that's it.
While obviously the average and the mean in your set are very different, I'm wondering if that's not the case for very large populations. For instance, the frequent adage that half of the human population has "below-average intelligence". The population is over 7 billion, a much larger set than your five numbers there, and likely follows a gaussian curve. While I don't know, wouldn't it be a fairly safe assumption that the median and the average are very close to each other? I'm thinking software is the same way; there's a countless number of software programs out there now.
I think you're a little confused. Gnome started out (in version 1) looking a lot like KDE, with a bar on the bottom, a foot icon that was like the K icon and the Windows "Start" button, etc. Then ver2 came out in the 2000s after a bunch of "usability studies" and it was much more minimalistic. Then ver3 came out and it just went off the deep end catering to idiots and trying to be touch-friendly on machines that don't have touchscreens. It's been a constant downhill slide. It's not "stuck in the 1990s", because UIs never looked like Gnome3 in the 90s; this touch-friendly crap is all brand new.
And we need to stick with PulseAudio unfortunately, because Linux audio is fundamentally broken. However, there's hope: some guy is writing an all new audio layer for the kernel (called "KLANG", IIRC), which promises to obsolete PulseAudio and JACK and replace ALSA, fixing all the problems Linux has with audio.
If you're downloading, you don't need a CD at all, just do the net install so you only install the things you want/need. The only reason you should want a CD is because you're buying it and having it shipped to you in the mail, or your friend is burning it for you and sending it to you, because you have no net access, or very slow access, and don't want to even bother with the net install.
And if someone is actually mailing you a physical disc, then why bother limiting yourself to a CD? Have them send you a DVD instead. Or even a USB thumb drive.
Maybe I'm misremembering things WRT reiserfs, but I thought that reiserfs was adopted by many distros because it was better than ext2, but when ext3 came out, it eliminated most of the performance problems of ext2 so the distros started switching to that, even before reiser committed murder. I seem to remember ext3 already being the standard, and reiser3 being considered old and obsolete, when the murder case came up. At that time, reiser had been working a lot on ReiserFS4, which was supposed to greatly improve the performance and be competitive with ext4, but it was never included in the kernel because of his conflicts with the kernel maintainers.
Yeah, I'll bet this will go over great with your users: "I know it's very different from what you're used to, but try it out for a few weeks and you'll like it." "But I need to print this document NOW! Not a few weeks from now."
That doesn't surprise me. When I was at Intel, I frequently didn't agree with their strategy: Itanic, x86-64, the consumer devices, etc. and frequently talked about this stuff to coworkers (ones I trusted to not blab to management).
Hmm. Maybe there's some different dynamics there with some of these women postgraduate students. From what you describe, it sounds like they can be rather choosy about which clients they accept, unlike at a brothel, for instance, where they have to take any client that management requires them to. I can see how this arrangement (being picky about clients) would make the profession much more attractive.