Granted, I don't find the TSA extremely effective per-se, as they let a caught a relative with a pair of 4" scissors who accidentally left them in her sewing bag, but then let her on the plane with them anyway
The TSA does more than check passengers for box cutters. This incident (besides being anecdotal) says nothing about the TSA, other than that one TSA agent is not a droid and used some common sense. As many have pointed out, the era of small melee weapons being effective hijacking tools is over. Seriously, what do you think would happen if someone pulled out a pair of scissors and said "this is a hijacking"? Remember Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber?" They had that fucker hogtied and sedated within minutes of smelling a burning match. The 9-11 attacks were only successful because the "aircraft suicide bomb" gambit had never been done before and people were conditioned to go along with hijackers and wait it out.
Screw growing back teeth, I want to know when we can have the genetically modified Streptococcus Mutans. Like 5 years ago, researchers announced they'd developed a strain of s.mutans (the bacteria responsible for most tooth decay) that doesn't excrete lactic acid. Once subjects' mouths were inoculated, the modified s.mutans completely took over, pushing the damaging strain out. Once inoculated you're theoretically 99% cavity free for the rest of your life. Is the ADA lobbying to keep it off the market because fillings and such are such a big money maker? Wouldn't surprise me.
Motorhead rules. Back around '95 I did speed with Lemmy at the Rainbow in Hollywood. The bastard beat me at Ms Pac Man two dozen times, but he did buy me a drink. Class act all the way. My drug days are over, but I still rate all music I hear on "The Motorhead scale of 1 to 10, Motorhead being 10".
"Amtrak commenced operations in 1971 with $40 million in direct Federal aid, $100 million in Federally insured loans, and a somewhat larger private contribution.] Officials expected that Amtrak would break even by 1974"
Publicly-funded how? They've gotten government subsidies, but then again most things have. But doing business with the public isn't being publicly-funded.
Couldn't be bothered to type "Amtrak" into Wikipedia? From the entry:
"The National Railroad Passenger Corporation, doing business as Amtrak... is a government-owned corporation that was organized on May 1, 1971 to provide intercity passenger train service in the United States....
All of Amtrak's preferred stock is owned by the U.S. federal government. The members of its board of directors are appointed by the President of the United States and are subject to confirmation by the United States Senate. ...
Amtrak commenced operations in 1971 with $40 million in direct Federal aid, $100 million in Federally insured loans, and a somewhat larger private contribution.[49] Officials expected that Amtrak would break even by 1974, but those expectations proved unrealistic and annual direct Federal aid reached a 17-year high in 1981 of $1.25 billion...in 1997 Congress authorized $5.2 billion for Amtrak over the next five years...In fiscal 2004 and 2005, Congress appropriated about $1.2 billion for Amtrak..."
Amtrak hasn't turned a profit in any of its 37 years. It's not even self-funding, like the USPS. They made a show of it being a "corporation" when it was formed, but it might as well be named the Federal Bureau of Passenger Rail Service.
It's a serious mistake to allow prison guards to be that sort of material - the standards should be higher, not lower, for that job.
The trouble with raising standards for undesirable jobs is that you'd either have to pay ruinously high wages, or make do with far fewer workers. Prison guards (like my brother in law) already make upwards of $25/hr for being bonehead thugs. You'd probably have to push it to over $40/hr to get nothing but intelligent, professional people.
It all depends on what level of the profession you are at. There are plenty of doctors out there testing, theorizing, and working towards better treatments and prevention of all kinds of illnesses and injuries. That takes creativity. Some of them are designing better human beings through gene therapy, prosthetics, new surgical techniques and so on.
Sure a lot of them are doing routine work with nothing more exotic than poison oak, but there are lots of engineers in the same situation.
I would argue that the doctors you describe fall under the heading of "scientist". The vast majority of doctors walking the halls of hospitals do not fall in that category. I maintain that even the most junior engineer designing a headlight bezel for GM is working in a more creative capacity than any of the doctors at (say) the Kaiser-Permanente urgent care who spend all day mis-prescribing antibiotics.
In medicine you actually don't have axioms just raw data and very few theories on how things should work. So you must memorize that data.
But as a practicing doctor your daily life depends on the synthesis of that data. You must derive conclusions from much larger base of knowledge and be good at recognizing patterns.
None of that is creative work, just the ability to internally cross reference huge quantities of subtly different data in one's head. For some reason the US has elevated doctors to some sort of demi-god status, when in reality the profession is simply that of biological mechanic.
Usually several hundred ailments have similar symptoms. So the first step is always to make a differential diagnosis listing all possible things that might have those symptoms and then sorting the list by likelihood, and then you start eliminating the problems one by one by doing diagnostic tests and routing patients further to people who specialize in particular areas.
That's precisely the same thing an auto mechanic does, only with cars instead of people.
Needless to say mistakes can be costly both in terms of patients well being if you do not consider something in your differential diagnosis or economically if you suspect something whose elimination requires an expensive diagnostic test or invasive for the patient.
This only demonstrates that the difference between being an auto mechanic and a doctor is the degree of seriousness of the consequences of failure. I never said being a doctor was easy and care-free, only that it's a job that depends more on the ability to be a walking encyclopedia than a creative thinker.
It's just semantics. Nowadays, racism started to mean any kind of hate/intolerance against a group of people sharing a common homeland, religion, etc.
People may use "racism" that way, but they're wrong. "Race" is a reference to physical traits, to genetic heritage. Using "racism" to describe intolerance of people for the religion they choose is just illiteracy.
I think AirTran deserves a hefty lawsuit. This was very clear cut racism.
Not in a legal sense it isn't. Given that pilots have wide discretion to eject any passenger, even if all they had was a "suspicious" look on their face, without any documented assertion that their ethnicity or religious garb was the reason for their ejection, it'd be impossible to prove anything based on a single incident.
Kaffiyeh. They're fairly fashionable at the moment round where I am (Manchester UK).
And I wore a shemagh (same thing) I got from an SAS guy for two years in Afghanistan as a soldier in the US Army. I also sported a full beard and mustache* while there. You can bet your ass I shaved, got a haircut, and put that head-rag in my bag before flying home on commercial airliners. Everyone has the right to practice whatever damn fool religion they want, but the rest of the world should be under no obligation to ignore your chosen flavor of irrational belief in a magic sky man. It ain't Buddhists or Methodists strapping dynamite to their waists and blowing up people in crowded markets. If you want to avoid being seen as a threat, it might behoove you to not dress like one. Granted, it's idiotic to think a real terrorist would dress the part to get on an airplane (rather than showing up in a button-up shirt and slacks) but steadfastly sticking to your dang fool religious costume in the face of known public perception is asking for trouble.
Perhaps it's just my firm belief that organized religion is a dangerous habit that by all logic should be treated with the same disdain as any other self-indulgent delusion; that getting your lessons on morality and ethics from a 2000 year old book is as wise as getting your chemistry knowledge from writings of the same era; that the "bathwater" of religious dogma has long since drowned the "baby" of spiritual fulfillment. But whatever the reason, I think "tolerance" of religion is as silly a demand as tolerance of a belief that RED means GO and GREEN means STOP in traffic.
It'll be interesting to see how the mods go on this post. Most people here seem to agree that religion is bad when it says schoolbooks should contain christian fairy tales, but from the look of the mods so far here, it appears Islam is seen as some sort of underdog against the forces of ChimpyBUSHitler**.
* Locals don't take you seriously if you shave. Lack of facial hair symbolizes ignorance due to being young or female. Says a lot about their level of cultural sophistication, really. Most of those folks are the local equivalent of backwoods hillbillies.
** I won't pass on my full opinion of my former commander-in-chief, but I will say "not my favorite president"...
Word to the wise, if your girlfriend or wife is a nurse and you claim that your engineering degree was harder then their nursing degree because they never took calculus, be prepared to spend the night on the couch. Just a tip.
Still, my $TYPE engineering degree makes me more then qualified to do any profession. Why, with a few books from the library and maybe a couple Google searches I could probably give your friend that kidney transplant they need. How hard could it be anyway, those overpaid doctors never had to work with Laplace transforms!
Well, there is something to what you say. Having worked both in an engineering capacity and as a skilled tradesman, I've noticed that there is a distinct difference between between the two. Doctors and nurses are skilled tradespeople, like highly trained auto mechanics. No one is ever going to ask a doctor to design a better human being, any more than anyone is going to ask an auto mechanic to design a better car. This is not to say that it's easy to be able to instantly recognize the symptoms of disease (x), or the bad interaction of drugs (y) and (z); just that it's not a particularly creative field of endeavor. Engineering and the hard sciences (including programming) are less about being able to instantly reference huge volumes of memorized information, and more about taking a small amount of basic knowledge and putting it together in new ways.
'The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done.'
One of my favorite bits, to be sure, but one which becomes a lot less funny when you're being shot at by a couple [Germans|Japanese|*] with a machine gun through a tiny slit in a concrete bunker. That's about when being able to squirt a stream of flaming gasoline some arbitrary distance with some degree of accuracy begins to sound mighty useful...
heh. Yeah, because the world will end when the Mayan calender rolls over to 0, just like all cars stop when the odometer rolls over to 000000. I love doomsday nutters. They're so logical.
As a result, many people build themselves a "male to male" extension cord - a power line null modem, if you will - and plug one end into the generator, the other end into any house outlet. That reverse-powers the entire house.
Only half the house. Most houses have two phases and plugging into an outlet will only feed one of them. It's more complicated than it looks. That's why they invented transfer switches.
Seriously, it's better to consult an electrician than to back wire the whole house from the end of a branch circuit with a cobbled-together cord.
Those of us with for-real electrical backgrounds call such a contrivance a death trap.
What, you mean running two 12ga male-male cords to two outlets (to feed both phases) is a hazard? What's wrong with feeding a 100amp panel over 100 feet of 14ga 40's-era rag wire? (snort)
I have a neighbor a few miles away that has natural gas at his house. Now, I don't know if that's affected if the power to the area goes out.
Natural gas runs without electricity. Gas utility service runs at negligible pressure (3 psi nominal, down to 0.5 psi functional), so the available pressurized storage (gasholders, underground, or line packing) is unlikely to run out in the absence of electricity.
Very similar to how Public Broadcast System in the US used to work.
ie: "Sunkist Raisins proudly supports PBS programming and the development of young minds through proper nutrition"
Neutral and relevant to the theme of PBS and still gets advert message across.
I've never much cared for that stuff. "Sponsorship" where the advertiser still gets mentioned by name and function is just advertising to a different type of audience. In the early days of television and radio, the above is exactly how regular advertising was done.
Indeed, the greatest utility of Wikipedia comes from being able to post on Slashdot something like "What is wrong with [you|the submitter|*] that [you|they] couldn't even take 30 seconds to read the Wikipedia entry and get the basic facts right?"
Regarding capsules, you're not exactly going to survive uncontrolled re-entry if, say, a tile breaks off...
Capsules don't use tiles. They use an ablative metallic heat shield, and heat shields don't break off--- they're essentially foolproof. The use of delicate ceramic tiles for heat shielding is one of the shuttle's many shortcomings.
you don't even need active jamming. GPS satellites are in orbit, so the receiver is essentially trying to spot a candle in new jersey from manhattan (in a radio sense). You can block GPS with a 60-cent computer fan screen over the antenna.
Slashdot Mirror
Granted, I don't find the TSA extremely effective per-se, as they let a caught a relative with a pair of 4" scissors who accidentally left them in her sewing bag, but then let her on the plane with them anyway
The TSA does more than check passengers for box cutters. This incident (besides being anecdotal) says nothing about the TSA, other than that one TSA agent is not a droid and used some common sense. As many have pointed out, the era of small melee weapons being effective hijacking tools is over. Seriously, what do you think would happen if someone pulled out a pair of scissors and said "this is a hijacking"? Remember Richard Reid, the "Shoe Bomber?" They had that fucker hogtied and sedated within minutes of smelling a burning match. The 9-11 attacks were only successful because the "aircraft suicide bomb" gambit had never been done before and people were conditioned to go along with hijackers and wait it out.
Is there anyone (aside from crazies) who DOES want to die?
No, but I can say that for me, I don't have any particular fear of death, and I certainly don't want to live forever.
Screw growing back teeth, I want to know when we can have the genetically modified Streptococcus Mutans. Like 5 years ago, researchers announced they'd developed a strain of s.mutans (the bacteria responsible for most tooth decay) that doesn't excrete lactic acid. Once subjects' mouths were inoculated, the modified s.mutans completely took over, pushing the damaging strain out. Once inoculated you're theoretically 99% cavity free for the rest of your life. Is the ADA lobbying to keep it off the market because fillings and such are such a big money maker? Wouldn't surprise me.
Motorhead rules. Back around '95 I did speed with Lemmy at the Rainbow in Hollywood. The bastard beat me at Ms Pac Man two dozen times, but he did buy me a drink. Class act all the way. My drug days are over, but I still rate all music I hear on "The Motorhead scale of 1 to 10, Motorhead being 10".
c'mon, mods. A classic weasel-phrase from Obi Wan Kenobi is "-1, flamebait"?
No, but it was expected to be self-funding.
"Amtrak commenced operations in 1971 with $40 million in direct Federal aid, $100 million in Federally insured loans, and a somewhat larger private contribution.] Officials expected that Amtrak would break even by 1974"
Publicly-funded how? They've gotten government subsidies, but then again most things have. But doing business with the public isn't being publicly-funded.
Couldn't be bothered to type "Amtrak" into Wikipedia? From the entry:
...
All of Amtrak's preferred stock is owned by the U.S. federal government. The members of its board of directors are appointed by the President of the United States and are subject to confirmation by the United States Senate.
... ..in 1997 Congress authorized $5.2 billion for Amtrak over the next five years ...In fiscal 2004 and 2005, Congress appropriated about $1.2 billion for Amtrak..."
"The National Railroad Passenger Corporation, doing business as Amtrak... is a government-owned corporation that was organized on May 1, 1971 to provide intercity passenger train service in the United States.
Amtrak commenced operations in 1971 with $40 million in direct Federal aid, $100 million in Federally insured loans, and a somewhat larger private contribution.[49] Officials expected that Amtrak would break even by 1974, but those expectations proved unrealistic and annual direct Federal aid reached a 17-year high in 1981 of $1.25 billion.
Amtrak hasn't turned a profit in any of its 37 years. It's not even self-funding, like the USPS. They made a show of it being a "corporation" when it was formed, but it might as well be named the Federal Bureau of Passenger Rail Service.
It's a serious mistake to allow prison guards to be that sort of material - the standards should be higher, not lower, for that job.
The trouble with raising standards for undesirable jobs is that you'd either have to pay ruinously high wages, or make do with far fewer workers. Prison guards (like my brother in law) already make upwards of $25/hr for being bonehead thugs. You'd probably have to push it to over $40/hr to get nothing but intelligent, professional people.
It all depends on what level of the profession you are at. There are plenty of doctors out there testing, theorizing, and working towards better treatments and prevention of all kinds of illnesses and injuries. That takes creativity. Some of them are designing better human beings through gene therapy, prosthetics, new surgical techniques and so on.
Sure a lot of them are doing routine work with nothing more exotic than poison oak, but there are lots of engineers in the same situation.
I would argue that the doctors you describe fall under the heading of "scientist". The vast majority of doctors walking the halls of hospitals do not fall in that category. I maintain that even the most junior engineer designing a headlight bezel for GM is working in a more creative capacity than any of the doctors at (say) the Kaiser-Permanente urgent care who spend all day mis-prescribing antibiotics.
In medicine you actually don't have axioms just raw data and very few theories on how things should work. So you must memorize that data.
But as a practicing doctor your daily life depends on the synthesis of that data. You must derive conclusions from much larger base of knowledge and be good at recognizing patterns.
None of that is creative work, just the ability to internally cross reference huge quantities of subtly different data in one's head. For some reason the US has elevated doctors to some sort of demi-god status, when in reality the profession is simply that of biological mechanic.
Usually several hundred ailments have similar symptoms. So the first step is always to make a differential diagnosis listing all possible things that might have those symptoms and then sorting the list by likelihood, and then you start eliminating the problems one by one by doing diagnostic tests and routing patients further to people who specialize in particular areas.
That's precisely the same thing an auto mechanic does, only with cars instead of people.
Needless to say mistakes can be costly both in terms of patients well being if you do not consider something in your differential diagnosis or economically if you suspect something whose elimination requires an expensive diagnostic test or invasive for the patient.
This only demonstrates that the difference between being an auto mechanic and a doctor is the degree of seriousness of the consequences of failure. I never said being a doctor was easy and care-free, only that it's a job that depends more on the ability to be a walking encyclopedia than a creative thinker.
It's just semantics. Nowadays, racism started to mean any kind of hate/intolerance against a group of people sharing a common homeland, religion, etc.
People may use "racism" that way, but they're wrong. "Race" is a reference to physical traits, to genetic heritage. Using "racism" to describe intolerance of people for the religion they choose is just illiteracy.
I think AirTran deserves a hefty lawsuit. This was very clear cut racism.
Not in a legal sense it isn't. Given that pilots have wide discretion to eject any passenger, even if all they had was a "suspicious" look on their face, without any documented assertion that their ethnicity or religious garb was the reason for their ejection, it'd be impossible to prove anything based on a single incident.
Kaffiyeh. They're fairly fashionable at the moment round where I am (Manchester UK).
And I wore a shemagh (same thing) I got from an SAS guy for two years in Afghanistan as a soldier in the US Army. I also sported a full beard and mustache* while there. You can bet your ass I shaved, got a haircut, and put that head-rag in my bag before flying home on commercial airliners. Everyone has the right to practice whatever damn fool religion they want, but the rest of the world should be under no obligation to ignore your chosen flavor of irrational belief in a magic sky man. It ain't Buddhists or Methodists strapping dynamite to their waists and blowing up people in crowded markets. If you want to avoid being seen as a threat, it might behoove you to not dress like one. Granted, it's idiotic to think a real terrorist would dress the part to get on an airplane (rather than showing up in a button-up shirt and slacks) but steadfastly sticking to your dang fool religious costume in the face of known public perception is asking for trouble.
Perhaps it's just my firm belief that organized religion is a dangerous habit that by all logic should be treated with the same disdain as any other self-indulgent delusion; that getting your lessons on morality and ethics from a 2000 year old book is as wise as getting your chemistry knowledge from writings of the same era; that the "bathwater" of religious dogma has long since drowned the "baby" of spiritual fulfillment. But whatever the reason, I think "tolerance" of religion is as silly a demand as tolerance of a belief that RED means GO and GREEN means STOP in traffic.
It'll be interesting to see how the mods go on this post. Most people here seem to agree that religion is bad when it says schoolbooks should contain christian fairy tales, but from the look of the mods so far here, it appears Islam is seen as some sort of underdog against the forces of ChimpyBUSHitler**.
* Locals don't take you seriously if you shave. Lack of facial hair symbolizes ignorance due to being young or female. Says a lot about their level of cultural sophistication, really. Most of those folks are the local equivalent of backwoods hillbillies.
** I won't pass on my full opinion of my former commander-in-chief, but I will say "not my favorite president"...
Word to the wise, if your girlfriend or wife is a nurse and you claim that your engineering degree was harder then their nursing degree because they never took calculus, be prepared to spend the night on the couch. Just a tip.
Still, my $TYPE engineering degree makes me more then qualified to do any profession. Why, with a few books from the library and maybe a couple Google searches I could probably give your friend that kidney transplant they need. How hard could it be anyway, those overpaid doctors never had to work with Laplace transforms!
Well, there is something to what you say. Having worked both in an engineering capacity and as a skilled tradesman, I've noticed that there is a distinct difference between between the two. Doctors and nurses are skilled tradespeople, like highly trained auto mechanics. No one is ever going to ask a doctor to design a better human being, any more than anyone is going to ask an auto mechanic to design a better car. This is not to say that it's easy to be able to instantly recognize the symptoms of disease (x), or the bad interaction of drugs (y) and (z); just that it's not a particularly creative field of endeavor. Engineering and the hard sciences (including programming) are less about being able to instantly reference huge volumes of memorized information, and more about taking a small amount of basic knowledge and putting it together in new ways.
Mike Judge. Perhaps you are thinking of Matt Groening.
'The very existence of flame-throwers proves that some time, somewhere, someone said to themselves, You know, I want to set those people over there on fire, but I'm just not close enough to get the job done.'
One of my favorite bits, to be sure, but one which becomes a lot less funny when you're being shot at by a couple [Germans|Japanese|*] with a machine gun through a tiny slit in a concrete bunker. That's about when being able to squirt a stream of flaming gasoline some arbitrary distance with some degree of accuracy begins to sound mighty useful...
And Windows 2000 was just a rebadge of NT with a shiny desktop...
Yeah, as a user of NT since the 3.51 days, I can say that there was more than just a rebadge and polish from NT4 to 2K(NT5) and 2K to XP(NT5.1).
heh. Yeah, because the world will end when the Mayan calender rolls over to 0, just like all cars stop when the odometer rolls over to 000000. I love doomsday nutters. They're so logical.
As a result, many people build themselves a "male to male" extension cord - a power line null modem, if you will - and plug one end into the generator, the other end into any house outlet. That reverse-powers the entire house.
Only half the house. Most houses have two phases and plugging into an outlet will only feed one of them. It's more complicated than it looks. That's why they invented transfer switches.
Seriously, it's better to consult an electrician than to back wire the whole house from the end of a branch circuit with a cobbled-together cord.
* Most people just use a male to male plug, ...
Those of us with for-real electrical backgrounds call such a contrivance a death trap.
What, you mean running two 12ga male-male cords to two outlets (to feed both phases) is a hazard? What's wrong with feeding a 100amp panel over 100 feet of 14ga 40's-era rag wire? (snort)
I have a neighbor a few miles away that has natural gas at his house. Now, I don't know if that's affected if the power to the area goes out.
Natural gas runs without electricity. Gas utility service runs at negligible pressure (3 psi nominal, down to 0.5 psi functional), so the available pressurized storage (gasholders, underground, or line packing) is unlikely to run out in the absence of electricity.
Very similar to how Public Broadcast System in the US used to work.
ie: "Sunkist Raisins proudly supports PBS programming and the development of young minds through proper nutrition"
Neutral and relevant to the theme of PBS and still gets advert message across.
I've never much cared for that stuff. "Sponsorship" where the advertiser still gets mentioned by name and function is just advertising to a different type of audience. In the early days of television and radio, the above is exactly how regular advertising was done.
Indeed, the greatest utility of Wikipedia comes from being able to post on Slashdot something like "What is wrong with [you|the submitter|*] that [you|they] couldn't even take 30 seconds to read the Wikipedia entry and get the basic facts right?"
Regarding capsules, you're not exactly going to survive uncontrolled re-entry if, say, a tile breaks off...
Capsules don't use tiles. They use an ablative metallic heat shield, and heat shields don't break off--- they're essentially foolproof. The use of delicate ceramic tiles for heat shielding is one of the shuttle's many shortcomings.
you don't even need active jamming. GPS satellites are in orbit, so the receiver is essentially trying to spot a candle in new jersey from manhattan (in a radio sense). You can block GPS with a 60-cent computer fan screen over the antenna.