Good call. I started following this issue in the mid-'70s in relation to the chicken factory-style of raising them. That, and doctors prescribing antibiotics for virus infections to please their insistent patients who were unwilling or unable to listen to reason. To be sure, some docs simply didn't give a rat's patoot when it came to making an extra buck.
The wholesale introduction of antibiotics into the totality of the food stream is a new thing in human existence and it is having consequences. Resistant bacteria are showing up, well, just about everywhere. Moreover, these are not just typical resistant critters. Some have been shown to be able to pass their resistance along to different species, for instance. Others are developing what you might call "omni-resistance" - they have adapted so well that the mechanisms for resistance are generalized.
This is not some alarmist bullshit - the data are out and about and much of it easily available, at least in summary form. Some of the complete studies are behind pay- or elite- walls, the rest are open.
For all the anti-GMO stuff, some of it richly deserved, quite a few of the big players in agri-biz have seen this situation coming for a long time and have been working on genetic resistance to disease - flora and fauna as an alternative to drug use - and as what we'll need to have in place when the anti-biotics no longer work.
Well and good, and mechanically (oops - algorithmically) spoofing someone's login strokes rather than a short reply on/. is a lot easier to deal with. Thing is, tho, that humans don't - cannot, actually - do a thing precisely the same way twice. We can get very, very close for a short, simple something, but it's still not exact. (Van Cliburn comes to mind.)
So even for the short sequence of matching a login and introducing a wee bit of random variation, that may not match the user's not-quite random variation. (Each person's muscle memory variation will be distinctive, and I suspect matching it algorithmically won't be entirely trivial.)
Not saying it negates the possibility you raise, at all, only that it might complicate things; to what extent would have to be examined and tested. At any rate, if you've a keylogger or someone monitoring your connection, you've already got other problems as well.
"If the height matches, the weight matches, the skin tone matches, the clothing style matches, the hair length matches, the hair color matches, the hair style (curly, straight, etc.) matches, and she says "hey baby", that's probably your spouse."
Or one heckuva stunt double or stand-in. Or one of twins, triplets, etc. Once in motion, tho, I can see that as being quite a bit more distinctive, and a clincher, all else being equal. From what I gather, from the article and what you've said, it's the full combination sieved by walking the parameters.
There's a decidedly creepy aspect to this - the capability of being tracked everywhere and everywhen - but I can see the utility when fairly used. Being able to put a severe crimp in identify theft alone would be golden.
Well, I've long wondered about your handle, always had an inkling, but mos' def appreciate your filling in, fleshing out the story. The scope's story alone is worth a write-up in Popular Electronics (at least as it was in the old days, say circa '70s.) The stick time makes me envious - had the flight bug since knee-high.
The guts shot is a thing of beauty. Not that I can follow most of the specs - all that's far past my knowledge, and I feel kinda sorry that you had to type all that out. But what I can see is some mighty clean design and execution, and that you paid goodly attention to lead and connector length. Makes me half-drool and not knowing but a fraction of what I'm looking at. Last time I was inside an amp was helping a guy track down a bad connection and replacing a switch - and that's further back than I care to think about. I miss having hands on with stuff - I used to mostly do woodwork and get hoodwinked into doing a variety of small appliance and engine repairs.
"but there is always some dubiously competent OEM screwing around on the sharp edge of the line between 'automagic' and 'apparently nondeterministic hatred of all users'."
Oh, oh, oh, enshrine that, carve it in stone; track them down and drive a stake through their beastly carapaced hearts.
The memory lane stuff and up to now stuff is great, but can lead to ulcers as well. I've been really lucky, having to deal with Linux on only a few laptops, and luckily all the hardware was standard enough, so stuff just worked. Some years back had to deal with Jack/Alsa on a desktop and spent three days online hell deciphering lingo, separating wheat from chaff, the lot. Finally yanked the offending app, replaced it with another, told the chap the one he'd picked didn't work with his hardware. Not my finest moment in the tech support arena, but I'd had it; still bothers me a bit, but I have my own limits.
That's a weird and funny MIDI tale (well, not funny for you, of course) As it happened, back when I worked with it, the best stuff was from the Codeheads for the Atari ST, lack of pass-through channel nothwithstanding.
You're right, and it's a broader thing. Tracking down a news story from even a few years ago is hit and miss; for things such as apps and files it can be worse. Sometimes universities maintain some odds and ends - last I looked, U of Mich (I think) still had probably the largest cache of Atari ST stuff, for instance. Websites come and go (yeah, such a wise observation, wasn't trying to be sage about it.)
My usual thing is to be reading, going about the day's agenda, follow a chain of links, find a neat site and say to self gotta go back there soon and read or download - then promptly forget. Some time later, maybe while organizing bookmarks, going back and... it's gone.
Grab it while you can. If you've the drive space, download the whole damn site. There's quite a gap between what the Archive can manage and what vanishes entire.
Three cheers for Audacious. I've only around 7GB on drives, wanted a simple low-resource player that just works, and after trying the standards that came with a half-dozen distros and a few from the repos, settled on it for desktop listening. I don't need or use complicated playlists, catalogues, album art, none of it. For me it's the perfect player through my Sennheiser 130s (audio out and the headphones is all what I have for playback, not counting the "speakers" in my old laptop.)
R.I.P. Winamp. For most of a decade it was one of the earlier 'for me' installs on Windows, after all the protective and maintenance programs. It served my needs well, dependably and politely.
Aye, and it's been downhill since. On most law books is the requirement when stopped by a peace officer "to give an accounting of oneself" - which up until recently has meant one only needed to supply minimal information. "I'm going over town." or the like was considered sufficient. Then it expanded to giving name and perhaps address. Now I believe in many jurisdictions one must show ID as well, at least as a practicality if not interpretation at court.
There were some oddities - Virginia didn't have photos on driver licenses until sometime in the '70s, IIRC, it was a white-on-black photostat giving name and address, and when I lived there recall some people grumbling about the address.
As someone below points out, we're reaching the Panopticon State. It's planet-wide and varies only in kind and degree. It's been in my mind recently that what this is doing to our individual and collective mental health and sense of being is probably bad, and will have a slew of consequences. Proponents of the surveillance state have been variously unaware, uncaring, or apologetic of this. The nominatively powerful continue to believe they're above it - something I suspect people in the U.S. Congress are finding out isn't so.
There also used to be considered a separation of real world and that online which is now being blurred and merged.
The entire idea of who we are inside our own heads is undergoing a sea change. What the long-term effects on the psyche will be of being nigh totally knowable are to me an open and disturbing question.
More like a dollar at 400 level. Your penultimate sentence is the pith. Tnx. It's a wonder you've still your sanity. (No offense, it's a conversational presumption, not an accusation. [grin])
So, BP paid this PR firm; what did the trolls get paid? Tank of guzmoline?
You get the "wow" for the thread. I'm guessing SAC? Glad to know there's some folks still wanting decent amps. Last place I knew, years back, was Marshall down in Lansing.
My high school's chem/physics room (small school; my grad class was 52) had an old scope - manufacturer forgotten, and at the time I wasn't much into electronics - my bad. Size of an old dorm fridge, and had a USN number. Previous instructor had brought it with him from the War. Even using it to follow stuff around on a Bell telephone was cool, tho. Room also had a signal generator and power supply; one guy used to fix TV's and radios using all the stuff. Looking back, I really wish I'd had my own 'stuff' better together, I could have learned more.
My God, someone here who can read and comprehend. Even the summary stated things well enough. Congratulations. For a while I was wondering if anyone here could follow simple prose.
So, also, the issue of long-term effects for phlebotomists would not apply either. The matter might be with proper focusing and composition of the image so as to avoid eyestrain. At my local hospital, from what I gathered, they typically might spend a couple of hours in the morning and another in the afternoon collecting blood.
At any rate, the device would be used in those instances where finding and using a good enough vein is problematic. Depending on the patient, and with enough time in hospital, finding such, whether for a draw or shunt, and being mindful of not damaging a given vein, can be troublesome. This gizmo seems like it might help.
Apart from grunts, gestures, and body language, words are what we have. The better we know them and use them, the better the possibility of arriving at communication.
I notice a shift just here on/. the past five years to increasing illiteracy. Language and reason are tied.... People don't seem to read much anymore; their comprehension deteriorates. Then there are the teeth-grinders: where/were; our/are; it's/its and the like.
(I mis-use and abuse the language badly enough without meaning to, but I can't fathom not even trying to use well the tools available. And no, I'll forego the pleasure of totting up my errors here. "It's late" is my excuse and I'm sticking to it.)
No, actually not - they spent nigh five years analyzing the ever-loving shit out of all it - the 22 separate departments, the specialized VB macros in each department's use of Excel, the lack of easy exchange of documents withing the city government, the creaky and idiosyncratic nature of a hodge-podge of hardware from desktops to servers, and so on. It really helps to read TFA, btw.
After, and all the while, looking at what they had, they focused on what they wanted to end up with - a government able to talk inter-departmentally, a supportable environment of existing hardware and new OS and office software with the rather obvious desire to get the job done, not just to have a neat project to play with. The accompanying theme was to have the freedom from licensing constraints, the flexibility to tailor everything to their needs, and the ability to support everything as much as reasonable in-house. Saving money, while certainly a consideration, was not the driver, but rather a pleasant consequence of good thinking put well into practice. The freedom of being in charge of their own IT infrastructure was not a trivial consideration.
I say they did an admirable job of all of it. Heresy or no, the article is worthy of the reading.
Or more to the point, the number of apps downed and used that do what they say they will and not something other, as distinct from any other apps downed and used. Given the history of the PC since IBM-clone days, I'd be unsurprised at a significant percentage of bogus apps being used. (Didja ever see the real-life pic of an instance of IE with toolbars takiing up the top half of the screen? Feature that, and the millions of people who did similar - not to that extent, of course, but the utilities, rafts of cute games, etc. and now extend that behavior to the Android space.)
This from the illiterate who can't spell testicle. Oh, and SCOTUS is an acronym, not an abbreviation. But hey, who's to quibble? Now then, where was that mote I was looking for...
If the government gives this at least a tacit pass, then I foresee a rise in electricity consumption. Those with non-electric heat should do well while they're crunching.
You're quite right; it would make far less sense than what is now in place.
"bound to be deeply flawed in execution due to budgetary limitations" unlike the TSA.
What civil rights issues? How is a metal scanner a civil right violation and giga-hertz scanners are not?
This whole thing has gone sideways. This started with the simple idea of scrapping the bulk of what TSA does and returning to what the airlines used to do - metal detectors, with the added fillip of locked cockpit doors. The bit about checking guns at the door was an add-on, since it would likely be something that happened as a matter of course. None of this shit is new, yet y'all been reacting as though it's something cooked up alongside an opium pipe. Sheesh.
Look, I'm not saying that there are not ways to screw it up; I contend only that it is, or ought not be, so difficult to do it well. At any rate, if there are metal scanners used somewhere, whether at the entrance to the airport building(s) or to each airline's concourse, wherever, there will likely need to be provision for such item check-in and temporary storage. I've been told that the military manages to do this fairly well, or used to.
Yeah, I can think of ways to mess this up; as my boss at a photo-lab once told me after one of my more memorable gaffes, "______, you could screw up a wet dream." Bad architecture, shoddy building, inept or bribed attendants, or even a blob of Semtex on a timer in the magazine well of an auto-loader come readily to mind. I've little doubt you can expand the list.
None of this is novel; we can quibble and cavil until the cows come home and get no forrarder.
Thanks, AC - for the clarification and the discussion. (I appreciate and respect your situation as a sailboat captain; I once had ambitions in that area, and so had to try to learn some of the basics of what goes on. A friend now contracts with oil companies for transport, he's licensed for about everything but passenger liners; we've talked a bit about some of the realities viz. liabilities and responsibilities.)
History shows that usually politicians get around to dealing with things after they're already somewhere between a mess and outright conflict with casualties and damage - not a good portent in my book, but it's likely what we'll see happen yet again.
Right now we're left with laissez-faire and that the Moon has a lot of real estate, so in early efforts there's probably plenty of room for all for a while. OTOH, some areas could quickly bring things to a head - ice deposits at the poles comes to mind.
The situation you bring up regarding corps and China is really interesting, now, isn't it? Somewhere in dim memory comes a discussion a year or so back where there've been some situations with large economic combines - the East India Company, I think, and some others. Where you have multi-nationals taking unto themselves positions and powers formerly known only for nations... United Fruit, the Seven Sisters, Bechtel, et al come to mind. Fold in shadow banking, shown to be at minimum thrice the activity of known banking flows.
So until things get codified in a hopefully congenial way we're left with the hopes that in the interest of smooth flow of return conflict will be avoided. China will have a base. Bigelow or someone will have a hotel. Science will be done. Extraction and manufacture will happen.
Timeline is open, but twenty years ought to see some kind of at least semi-permanent structure; I place no bets on permanent human habitation - for many things it's simply not needed, at least early on.
Ah, crap. Y'know, was a time I had hopes of seeing a few what I thought reasonable things - repairing the soil, cleaning up our mess a bit and not further contributing to it, exploring the depths and at least cis-Lunar space - a bit of flowering, if you will. What I and so many others overlooked was the continuing sheer blind power of greed. Lot more hope than reality, the '60s. I remain intensely curious but not so happily as before.
So, ok, who watches the cameras? How do you vet them? Oh - have an algorithm do the watching? Ok, fine. How do you write a routine that can tell a good guy from a bad guy? How do you vet his identity? Use a badge that can be switched? Well, that can be avoided by using a password pill, I guess. But still, who's good and bad? Ah, catch the keystrokes and distinguish between proper maintenance and improper access. That might do it, right? Next...
So, machines watching machines and humans watching the watching machines. Set that up, please.
Please note, I'm not saying that the need might not be there. Saying only that it might well be non-trivial to deal with it.
Yes, thank you. And yes, the several Treaties are in need of revision or re-writing - which is the point I was trying to make, given the examples you give and others that have arisen; look at the couple of centuries leading to what's now lumped as maritime law. I know I'm a real feather-weight in the brains department around here, but I did kinda think a bit on this.
My contention was that we need to be doing effective thinking leading to practical policies now, not some other when.
I do understand that it generally always comes down to a money equation or such some where/when. My point was trying to make the point that not all the relevant and important issues involved are readily evaluated in definitive, specific monetary terms.
That being so, it does in no wise negate the need for getting to useful policies soonest. I suspect the need will likely arise long before the politicians get around to it.
There are more than a few ways to do reasonably secure check-in of whatever. Hat-check style, with lock boxes, for instance. This is really simple stuff. So, yes I have though about it; two minutes was enough to come up with a half dozen or so ways of arranging things. I bet you could think of a few as well. Keep it simple, keep it fast, keep it un-ambiguous.
Never happen. It's largely the politicians who are scared shitless that something will happen when they're in office and so get blamed - thus being not re-elected. Can't have that, can we? So all the crap flows from that - the controls, the deliberate inflamation of unfounded fears, the lot.
Expecting the general populace to grow up, let alone with "a pair", is as fruitful as seeking unicorns, but not nearly so fun.
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Good call. I started following this issue in the mid-'70s in relation to the chicken factory-style of raising them. That, and doctors prescribing antibiotics for virus infections to please their insistent patients who were unwilling or unable to listen to reason. To be sure, some docs simply didn't give a rat's patoot when it came to making an extra buck.
The wholesale introduction of antibiotics into the totality of the food stream is a new thing in human existence and it is having consequences. Resistant bacteria are showing up, well, just about everywhere. Moreover, these are not just typical resistant critters. Some have been shown to be able to pass their resistance along to different species, for instance. Others are developing what you might call "omni-resistance" - they have adapted so well that the mechanisms for resistance are generalized.
This is not some alarmist bullshit - the data are out and about and much of it easily available, at least in summary form. Some of the complete studies are behind pay- or elite- walls, the rest are open.
For all the anti-GMO stuff, some of it richly deserved, quite a few of the big players in agri-biz have seen this situation coming for a long time and have been working on genetic resistance to disease - flora and fauna as an alternative to drug use - and as what we'll need to have in place when the anti-biotics no longer work.
That's a paper I'd like to read.
Well and good, and mechanically (oops - algorithmically) spoofing someone's login strokes rather than a short reply on /. is a lot easier to deal with. Thing is, tho, that humans don't - cannot, actually - do a thing precisely the same way twice. We can get very, very close for a short, simple something, but it's still not exact. (Van Cliburn comes to mind.)
So even for the short sequence of matching a login and introducing a wee bit of random variation, that may not match the user's not-quite random variation. (Each person's muscle memory variation will be distinctive, and I suspect matching it algorithmically won't be entirely trivial.)
Not saying it negates the possibility you raise, at all, only that it might complicate things; to what extent would have to be examined and tested. At any rate, if you've a keylogger or someone monitoring your connection, you've already got other problems as well.
"If the height matches, the weight matches, the skin tone matches, the clothing style matches, the hair length matches, the hair color matches, the hair style (curly, straight, etc.) matches, and she says "hey baby", that's probably your spouse."
Or one heckuva stunt double or stand-in. Or one of twins, triplets, etc. Once in motion, tho, I can see that as being quite a bit more distinctive, and a clincher, all else being equal. From what I gather, from the article and what you've said, it's the full combination sieved by walking the parameters.
There's a decidedly creepy aspect to this - the capability of being tracked everywhere and everywhen - but I can see the utility when fairly used. Being able to put a severe crimp in identify theft alone would be golden.
Well, I've long wondered about your handle, always had an inkling, but mos' def appreciate your filling in, fleshing out the story. The scope's story alone is worth a write-up in Popular Electronics (at least as it was in the old days, say circa '70s.) The stick time makes me envious - had the flight bug since knee-high.
The guts shot is a thing of beauty. Not that I can follow most of the specs - all that's far past my knowledge, and I feel kinda sorry that you had to type all that out. But what I can see is some mighty clean design and execution, and that you paid goodly attention to lead and connector length. Makes me half-drool and not knowing but a fraction of what I'm looking at. Last time I was inside an amp was helping a guy track down a bad connection and replacing a switch - and that's further back than I care to think about. I miss having hands on with stuff - I used to mostly do woodwork and get hoodwinked into doing a variety of small appliance and engine repairs.
Thanks.
"but there is always some dubiously competent OEM screwing around on the sharp edge of the line between 'automagic' and 'apparently nondeterministic hatred of all users'."
Oh, oh, oh, enshrine that, carve it in stone; track them down and drive a stake through their beastly carapaced hearts.
The memory lane stuff and up to now stuff is great, but can lead to ulcers as well. I've been really lucky, having to deal with Linux on only a few laptops, and luckily all the hardware was standard enough, so stuff just worked. Some years back had to deal with Jack/Alsa on a desktop and spent three days online hell deciphering lingo, separating wheat from chaff, the lot. Finally yanked the offending app, replaced it with another, told the chap the one he'd picked didn't work with his hardware. Not my finest moment in the tech support arena, but I'd had it; still bothers me a bit, but I have my own limits.
That's a weird and funny MIDI tale (well, not funny for you, of course) As it happened, back when I worked with it, the best stuff was from the Codeheads for the Atari ST, lack of pass-through channel nothwithstanding.
You're right, and it's a broader thing. Tracking down a news story from even a few years ago is hit and miss; for things such as apps and files it can be worse. Sometimes universities maintain some odds and ends - last I looked, U of Mich (I think) still had probably the largest cache of Atari ST stuff, for instance. Websites come and go (yeah, such a wise observation, wasn't trying to be sage about it.)
My usual thing is to be reading, going about the day's agenda, follow a chain of links, find a neat site and say to self gotta go back there soon and read or download - then promptly forget. Some time later, maybe while organizing bookmarks, going back and... it's gone.
Grab it while you can. If you've the drive space, download the whole damn site. There's quite a gap between what the Archive can manage and what vanishes entire.
Nice link. All I get is "Forbidden."
Three cheers for Audacious. I've only around 7GB on drives, wanted a simple low-resource player that just works, and after trying the standards that came with a half-dozen distros and a few from the repos, settled on it for desktop listening. I don't need or use complicated playlists, catalogues, album art, none of it. For me it's the perfect player through my Sennheiser 130s (audio out and the headphones is all what I have for playback, not counting the "speakers" in my old laptop.)
R.I.P. Winamp. For most of a decade it was one of the earlier 'for me' installs on Windows, after all the protective and maintenance programs. It served my needs well, dependably and politely.
Aye, and it's been downhill since. On most law books is the requirement when stopped by a peace officer "to give an accounting of oneself" - which up until recently has meant one only needed to supply minimal information. "I'm going over town." or the like was considered sufficient. Then it expanded to giving name and perhaps address. Now I believe in many jurisdictions one must show ID as well, at least as a practicality if not interpretation at court.
There were some oddities - Virginia didn't have photos on driver licenses until sometime in the '70s, IIRC, it was a white-on-black photostat giving name and address, and when I lived there recall some people grumbling about the address.
As someone below points out, we're reaching the Panopticon State. It's planet-wide and varies only in kind and degree. It's been in my mind recently that what this is doing to our individual and collective mental health and sense of being is probably bad, and will have a slew of consequences. Proponents of the surveillance state have been variously unaware, uncaring, or apologetic of this. The nominatively powerful continue to believe they're above it - something I suspect people in the U.S. Congress are finding out isn't so.
There also used to be considered a separation of real world and that online which is now being blurred and merged.
The entire idea of who we are inside our own heads is undergoing a sea change. What the long-term effects on the psyche will be of being nigh totally knowable are to me an open and disturbing question.
More like a dollar at 400 level. Your penultimate sentence is the pith. Tnx. It's a wonder you've still your sanity. (No offense, it's a conversational presumption, not an accusation. [grin])
So, BP paid this PR firm; what did the trolls get paid? Tank of guzmoline?
You get the "wow" for the thread. I'm guessing SAC? Glad to know there's some folks still wanting decent amps. Last place I knew, years back, was Marshall down in Lansing.
My high school's chem/physics room (small school; my grad class was 52) had an old scope - manufacturer forgotten, and at the time I wasn't much into electronics - my bad. Size of an old dorm fridge, and had a USN number. Previous instructor had brought it with him from the War. Even using it to follow stuff around on a Bell telephone was cool, tho. Room also had a signal generator and power supply; one guy used to fix TV's and radios using all the stuff. Looking back, I really wish I'd had my own 'stuff' better together, I could have learned more.
Props.
My God, someone here who can read and comprehend. Even the summary stated things well enough. Congratulations. For a while I was wondering if anyone here could follow simple prose.
So, also, the issue of long-term effects for phlebotomists would not apply either. The matter might be with proper focusing and composition of the image so as to avoid eyestrain. At my local hospital, from what I gathered, they typically might spend a couple of hours in the morning and another in the afternoon collecting blood.
At any rate, the device would be used in those instances where finding and using a good enough vein is problematic. Depending on the patient, and with enough time in hospital, finding such, whether for a draw or shunt, and being mindful of not damaging a given vein, can be troublesome. This gizmo seems like it might help.
Thanks, Jane, for speaking up.
Apart from grunts, gestures, and body language, words are what we have. The better we know them and use them, the better the possibility of arriving at communication.
I notice a shift just here on /. the past five years to increasing illiteracy. Language and reason are tied.... People don't seem to read much anymore; their comprehension deteriorates. Then there are the teeth-grinders: where/were; our/are; it's/its and the like.
(I mis-use and abuse the language badly enough without meaning to, but I can't fathom not even trying to use well the tools available. And no, I'll forego the pleasure of totting up my errors here. "It's late" is my excuse and I'm sticking to it.)
No, actually not - they spent nigh five years analyzing the ever-loving shit out of all it - the 22 separate departments, the specialized VB macros in each department's use of Excel, the lack of easy exchange of documents withing the city government, the creaky and idiosyncratic nature of a hodge-podge of hardware from desktops to servers, and so on. It really helps to read TFA, btw.
After, and all the while, looking at what they had, they focused on what they wanted to end up with - a government able to talk inter-departmentally, a supportable environment of existing hardware and new OS and office software with the rather obvious desire to get the job done, not just to have a neat project to play with. The accompanying theme was to have the freedom from licensing constraints, the flexibility to tailor everything to their needs, and the ability to support everything as much as reasonable in-house. Saving money, while certainly a consideration, was not the driver, but rather a pleasant consequence of good thinking put well into practice. The freedom of being in charge of their own IT infrastructure was not a trivial consideration.
I say they did an admirable job of all of it. Heresy or no, the article is worthy of the reading.
Or more to the point, the number of apps downed and used that do what they say they will and not something other, as distinct from any other apps downed and used. Given the history of the PC since IBM-clone days, I'd be unsurprised at a significant percentage of bogus apps being used. (Didja ever see the real-life pic of an instance of IE with toolbars takiing up the top half of the screen? Feature that, and the millions of people who did similar - not to that extent, of course, but the utilities, rafts of cute games, etc. and now extend that behavior to the Android space.)
"and yes, good eye there Einstein"
This from the illiterate who can't spell testicle. Oh, and SCOTUS is an acronym, not an abbreviation. But hey, who's to quibble? Now then, where was that mote I was looking for...
If the government gives this at least a tacit pass, then I foresee a rise in electricity consumption. Those with non-electric heat should do well while they're crunching.
You're quite right; it would make far less sense than what is now in place.
"bound to be deeply flawed in execution due to budgetary limitations" unlike the TSA.
What civil rights issues? How is a metal scanner a civil right violation and giga-hertz scanners are not?
This whole thing has gone sideways. This started with the simple idea of scrapping the bulk of what TSA does and returning to what the airlines used to do - metal detectors, with the added fillip of locked cockpit doors. The bit about checking guns at the door was an add-on, since it would likely be something that happened as a matter of course. None of this shit is new, yet y'all been reacting as though it's something cooked up alongside an opium pipe. Sheesh.
Mag fields, yes, a few times.
Look, I'm not saying that there are not ways to screw it up; I contend only that it is, or ought not be, so difficult to do it well. At any rate, if there are metal scanners used somewhere, whether at the entrance to the airport building(s) or to each airline's concourse, wherever, there will likely need to be provision for such item check-in and temporary storage. I've been told that the military manages to do this fairly well, or used to.
Yeah, I can think of ways to mess this up; as my boss at a photo-lab once told me after one of my more memorable gaffes, "______, you could screw up a wet dream." Bad architecture, shoddy building, inept or bribed attendants, or even a blob of Semtex on a timer in the magazine well of an auto-loader come readily to mind. I've little doubt you can expand the list.
None of this is novel; we can quibble and cavil until the cows come home and get no forrarder.
Thanks, AC - for the clarification and the discussion. (I appreciate and respect your situation as a sailboat captain; I once had ambitions in that area, and so had to try to learn some of the basics of what goes on. A friend now contracts with oil companies for transport, he's licensed for about everything but passenger liners; we've talked a bit about some of the realities viz. liabilities and responsibilities.)
History shows that usually politicians get around to dealing with things after they're already somewhere between a mess and outright conflict with casualties and damage - not a good portent in my book, but it's likely what we'll see happen yet again.
Right now we're left with laissez-faire and that the Moon has a lot of real estate, so in early efforts there's probably plenty of room for all for a while. OTOH, some areas could quickly bring things to a head - ice deposits at the poles comes to mind.
The situation you bring up regarding corps and China is really interesting, now, isn't it? Somewhere in dim memory comes a discussion a year or so back where there've been some situations with large economic combines - the East India Company, I think, and some others. Where you have multi-nationals taking unto themselves positions and powers formerly known only for nations... United Fruit, the Seven Sisters, Bechtel, et al come to mind. Fold in shadow banking, shown to be at minimum thrice the activity of known banking flows.
So until things get codified in a hopefully congenial way we're left with the hopes that in the interest of smooth flow of return conflict will be avoided. China will have a base. Bigelow or someone will have a hotel. Science will be done. Extraction and manufacture will happen.
Timeline is open, but twenty years ought to see some kind of at least semi-permanent structure; I place no bets on permanent human habitation - for many things it's simply not needed, at least early on.
Ah, crap. Y'know, was a time I had hopes of seeing a few what I thought reasonable things - repairing the soil, cleaning up our mess a bit and not further contributing to it, exploring the depths and at least cis-Lunar space - a bit of flowering, if you will. What I and so many others overlooked was the continuing sheer blind power of greed. Lot more hope than reality, the '60s. I remain intensely curious but not so happily as before.
"...having cameras on your racks..."
I thought that was what the porn sites were for.
So, ok, who watches the cameras? How do you vet them? Oh - have an algorithm do the watching? Ok, fine. How do you write a routine that can tell a good guy from a bad guy? How do you vet his identity? Use a badge that can be switched? Well, that can be avoided by using a password pill, I guess. But still, who's good and bad? Ah, catch the keystrokes and distinguish between proper maintenance and improper access. That might do it, right? Next...
So, machines watching machines and humans watching the watching machines. Set that up, please.
Please note, I'm not saying that the need might not be there. Saying only that it might well be non-trivial to deal with it.
Yes, thank you. And yes, the several Treaties are in need of revision or re-writing - which is the point I was trying to make, given the examples you give and others that have arisen; look at the couple of centuries leading to what's now lumped as maritime law. I know I'm a real feather-weight in the brains department around here, but I did kinda think a bit on this.
My contention was that we need to be doing effective thinking leading to practical policies now, not some other when.
I do understand that it generally always comes down to a money equation or such some where/when. My point was trying to make the point that not all the relevant and important issues involved are readily evaluated in definitive, specific monetary terms.
That being so, it does in no wise negate the need for getting to useful policies soonest. I suspect the need will likely arise long before the politicians get around to it.
"Logan...." So? Fix the lax security.
There are more than a few ways to do reasonably secure check-in of whatever. Hat-check style, with lock boxes, for instance. This is really simple stuff. So, yes I have though about it; two minutes was enough to come up with a half dozen or so ways of arranging things. I bet you could think of a few as well. Keep it simple, keep it fast, keep it un-ambiguous.
"The USA needs to grow a pair...."
Never happen. It's largely the politicians who are scared shitless that something will happen when they're in office and so get blamed - thus being not re-elected. Can't have that, can we? So all the crap flows from that - the controls, the deliberate inflamation of unfounded fears, the lot.
Expecting the general populace to grow up, let alone with "a pair", is as fruitful as seeking unicorns, but not nearly so fun.