They use live chicken embryos (eggs) to grow the flu virus to manufacture flu vaccines. There's still a lot of egg protein left after they process the virus for the vaccine. Since influenza is an avian virus, this makes sense. You could use a human host to grow your virus, but then you'd risk transmitting a whole host of other diseases. Chickens don't have a lot of diseases in common with people.
They used to use human passage to create the vaccine for smallpox (transmitting the vaccinia virus). They figured out that this caused other diseases to get transmitted. Using cows to grow the virus greatly reduced the risk, so they outlawed using the human derived virus for vaccination.
Originally all vaccines were done using live, attenuated or killed virus that was grown in a living host organism. These days viruses are increasingly grown in cell culture or antigenic epitopes are cloned and grown in recombinant cell cultures. These techniques will have fewer contaminating host proteins, reducing the risk of unintended allergic response.
The Chinese "middle class" surpassed the population of the entire United States or Europe several years ago. Sure, that still leaves roughly a billion poor people, but with nearly a half-billion doing well, they have some serious internal market power. This also bodes well for political change within China.... a half-billion people with iPhones (or clones) and cars are going to start asking why they don't have more control over their lives at some point.
Of course, with twice as many people stuck in rural poverty while seeing a growing bourgeoisie, there's another potential road to political change....
I do want to draw a moral equivalency because he was only fined instead of killed because the fascists didn't have enough power to kill him. Had the fine gone through then the fascists would have demanded more and more until they got the death penalty for insulting their made up friend. Don't think for a second that the Republican fascists don't want to kill non-believers, they just know it's politically unpalatable at this point to say so, they are attempting to gain power little by little until they DO have enough power to murder non-believers. The only difference between the Republicans and the Saudi mullahs is the amount of power they currently wield,.
Learn some history before you try to cite it for your petty team red / team blue partisan politics.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
Nah, you're not being nearly creative enough. Ellison has no income, you see, so he can't pay back his loan, so the bank collects on the collateral, cancels the loan, and now Ellison has $1 billion and the bank has $ 1.05 billion in stock (or whatever). Easy peasy.
At that point Ellison is in constructive receipt of the billion bucks. So he owes the income tax at that moment. I'm not privy to the loan docs, but I would assume that the banks are aware of the tax implications of this transfer, as well as the risks of stock valuations. So I doubt that he was able to get a billion dollar loan on a billion dollars worth of stock.
Re:Such systems have been proposed before
on
The Zuckerberg Tax
·
· Score: 1
I was going to say the same thing. It works the same way in the USA. Jobs in no way escaped paying taxes on deferred income by dying. It should all be paid by his estate before any dispersal happens. Of course, the recipients get to pay more taxes on the inheritance at that point.
If there was only one autographed Babe Ruth baseball bat in existence, how much would that be worth? More than a million bucks? Maybe, perhaps even likely. Now, suppose that I have a secret stash of 50,000 Babe Ruth autographed baseball bats. If I mark-to-market them based on the sale of the only known bat at Southeby's, you'd say I have a $50,000,000,000.00 collection. But as soon as I open that vault to convert my vast wealth into hard cash, the value of that million dollar bat will plummet - perhaps by more than 90%, or even 99%. So did I ever in fact have 3rd world dictator levels of wealth? Or did I have a room full of old baseball bats?
Still don't get it? Ok, why do you suppose the diamond cartel withholds a large percentage of their stash from the market? Why do you suppose they work so hard to prevent new mines from being opened? How about OPEC? Why do you suppose they set production quotas? Does holding diamonds cause the value of those assets to go up? How about withholding oil production? Does that make the value of oil go up?
Let's make it real: Two years ago I had stock options ostensibly worth about $2 million. After the financial collapse and a corporate merger those warrants are not worth the paper they were written on. Literally... they would be worth more if the paper had just been left blank, because then I'd have a few sheets of blank paper. Now all I have is some used paper. Taxing me as if I had $2 million would not only have been criminal, it would have been a silly and impossible idea, as I had nowhere near the amount of money needed to pay the tax on $2 million worth of options that I never got paid for. You can't get blood from a turnip. Although I suppose you could have thrown me in debtor's prison and forced my children to work off a half-million dollar debt to get me out.
He's using an argument that I first heard from Penn Jillette. It goes like this: a Theist believes in God. It is this faith that defines his status. An atheist does not believe in God. The state is defined by the absence of faith. If you do not have faith in the existence of God, you are an atheist. (there are believers and non-believers, there is no middle ground).
Now, you may be a fully convicted atheist who is completely confident in his non-faith, or someone who is not sure either way (an agnostic in your vernacular). But either way, the label "atheist" applies, all agnostics are among the group of non-believers.
That's his argument. I don't really care either way..... I'm an agnostic on the agnostic issue.....
How can a universe have an omniscient being and free-will? It just makes no sense at all.
I'll leave the rest of it to greater minds, but this one is easy. An all-knowing being does not require "all-controlling" or a fixed fate. All it requires is existence outside of time. Existing outside of our universe (and therefore outside of space-time) one could posit a being that can see all of the universe, from beginning to end at the same time. Perhaps our fluid, evolving universe looks like an 11 dimensional solid crystal to a 14 dimensional being. Whatever.... the point being, knowing everything is not the same thing as controlling everything. I know everything that happens in "The Princess Bride", but I didn't control any of it.
Along the same lines, one has to wonder if free will truly exists. As physics becomes more clearly understood, the interactions of matter in the universe come to be understood as ever more deterministic, even as we wrestle with quantum phenomena. Even including quantum uncertainties, it is difficult to see how proton decay or other random phenomena could significantly impact chemical reactions in the brain to the extent that we truly have "free will" in the sense that we are able to make a truly unpredictable decision. Imagine if you will a super-scanner that can tell you the exact state of every neuron and molecule in your brain. Add an input (say a lunch menu).... will you ever get a different decision given the same initial starting state of the brain and the identical inputs? Will you sometimes go for the steak, and others the salad? It is hard to imagine that outcome being possible.
It certainly feels like we have free will though.....
I found out just how accessible information can be several years ago when I worked on a project involving a collections/skiptracing firm. For a quarter you could get conglomerations of various data sources that would pinpoint most targets current location - including address and phone number. One guy they were looking for while I was in the office was tough enough to find they sent it out to one of their private investigators. For $75 he not only found the guy's location (a secluded island only reachable by boat), he also found his mailbox number and the schedule that he followed for checking mail.... and most scary of all, he managed to get the combination to the guy's front gate. And word to the wise: the PI didn't use any leet computer hacking skills, he used a telephone and a little pretexting to get all the info he wanted and more.
This one is easy... the language is (mostly) irrelevant. You need a project. You want to program an arduino? Then define a real project that you really want to accomplish... that's the key. Whether you want to build an automated DVD library or build a microcomputer controlled sock knitting machine, you need a clear goal to learn how to program as a hobby.
Once you do that, find a nice IDE that people have used for things related to your project, buy a couple of reference books and dive in. You'll be surprised how easy it is to learn when you are trying to make something rather than fill in a requirement in a class.
It all depends on who you are working for. In my shop I look for 3 things... attitude, aptitude and integrity. Nothing else is really relevant to most jobs. If you don't have the right attitude - which to me requires that you are doing what you love to do - you will fail. If you have superior ability to combine with the love of the job, you'll succeed beyond anyone's wildest dreams even if you've never used that particular tool set before. The final criterion is the most difficult to interview - integrity. How do you measure someone's character? Anecdotes are great, but can be faked... nobody gives real recommendations any more...
Still, I've built one of the best IT shops you could imagine using this mantra. I've got all sorts of people that don't have the proper credentials - chemists, biologists, physicists, mathematicians - even a former stock broker (sales). There's very few IT certifications in the group. But they all are fantastic at what they do because they are doing what they love to do. And most of them are top 10% types, which doesn't hurt. And they all care about doing things the right way and making the company successful. That last one is sometimes tough - business types don't like it when some developer or system admin trashes their stupid idea. But 99 times out of 100 my guys are right and you ignore their advice at your own peril.
The punchline? We just went through a merger and it looks like they are going to trash my beautiful team and move to an outsourcing based model to save on payroll. I could just cry thinking about it - it is like tossing out the Mona Lisa because you really wanted that frame for something else. And when I'm done mourning I guess I'll be out there looking with the rest of you.... Anybody need a 40 man IT team that can do just about anything that a mid-sized white collar company might need?
HuffPo recently hired Radley Balko, probably the best investigative criminal justice reporter in the country right now. He may be a token, but he's worth visiting HuffPo to read.
Yeah, MD is a real prize. They have magical disappearing video to help ensure that the bad guys are always brought to justice.
For those too lazy to read linked articles, in Prince Georges County Maryland they've had quite a few incidents with police "caught on tape".... or not. In the most remarkable coincidence in recent history, all 7 dashboard cameras at the scene simultaneously malfunctioned while the police were allegedly roughing up a TV reporter. Another case had a student beaten and arrested for assaulting police only to find that the surveillance video mysteriously malfunctioned at that exact moment. Fortunately for him some random passers-by happened to capture the whole thing on his cell phone video camera. It turns out that the official version of events had a few holes in it.
Seconded. And since cost is not the main consideration, I'd toss in a commercial online backup/storage solution as an added offsite protection. You might not want to rely on commercial online storage for your sole backup as the vendor might go out of business, but as a part of a tiered backup solution, it is a pretty nice option.
That's just patently ridiculous. Acknowledging that it is the de-facto law anywhere there is an armed officer of the state, actually taking the time to codify Cartman's "Respect my au-thor-a-tai" quip as law is crazy.
In the US the crime of "contempt of cop" is usually prosecuted under "disorderly conduct", "resisting arrest", "failure to comply with a lawful order", "assault on a police officer"... they can rack up as much of an offense for you as they'd like. So perhaps just giving them the ability to enforce their petty vendettas with an "insulting an officer" ticket would be an improvement.
You'd think so. But you'd be wrong. In Illinois you'd be really, really, crazy wrong. Illinois has a special law that makes it illegal to record police, even in public. Even if they are already being recorded by their own dash-cam. And it only works one way. They can record you all they'd like. They passed the law because they were shocked, shocked to learn that someone was able to prove police misconduct by having a video as evidence. Things are all better, now that they've closed that little loophole. No more police misconduct in Illinois.
. If you say something in your role as prosecutor about a defendant that turns out not to be true, even stating that the defendant is guilty if they are acquitted, you should have to serve time. How many people's lives have been ruined because of public perception brought on by a mouthy prosecutor? There should be punishments for doing that.
Hey that's exactly how it works! Ok, not really. They've granted themselves something called "absolute immunity". It doesn't really exist in law, per se. But the courts have codified it for us. A prosecutor can actually frame someone for murder and face no recrimination from the justice system whatsoever. Not even civil liability. Strangely, some of the latest case law on this was provided by singer Harry Connick Jr.'s dad. Seems his office was involved in some pretty egregious violations in more than one case. But the supreme court ruled that they couldn't be held liable - even though one of their prosecutors (Deegan) admitted the frame-up before he died.
I'll take that bet. "Proper procedures were followed" is the normal conclusion to these situations. Even when they shoot and kill an unarmed man on video the finding is always "the officer acted withing proper police procedures". In this case they were classy enough to also arrest Mr. Turner's children for yelling at the police (who had just killed their father). You'd think having just attacked their father from behind and then killing him they'd be a little charitable about the kids being upset. But no, they've been charged with making criminal threats and participating in a criminal street gang for yelling at the people they see as their father's murderers.
Don't worry though, the system works. The video evidence from the store will show what really happened. Oh, darn! It seems that the video cuts out just a second before the police shoot and kill Mr. Turner. Don't worry though... it picks up again a few seconds later. So, nothing to worry about here. Everyone did a great job!
Evidence of what? Evidence of him having videotaped officers? This makes as much sense as when the police arrest someone on the sole charge of "resisting arrest." He was resisting arrest. Why were you arresting him? For resisting arrest. Do they really think anyone buys that?
Yes. They are called prosecutors and judges. If they are feeling generous they'll just string you along for a while and then drop the charges. That way you only lose a little time and a few thousand dollars defending yourself. But on their books, nothing happened to you at all. See? The system works!!
Or you just make the security and the airport a privately run enterprise. Then there is no government search or seizure. Not that it matters... they can also assert their authority under the commerce clause and railroad act to make you do anything they damn well please when traveling on interstate mass transit.
I'm with you, rtb61! Except I've got somewhere to be... so instead I say: grope away you poor wage slave, grope away.
At least the TSA agents haven't learned to react with extreme violence and felony charges if you fail to respect their a-thor-a-tai. Usually you just get hassled until you miss your plane for that. Of course the growing use of cell phone video to watch the watchers may be changing that equation... it is one thing to be disrespected. It is entirely another thing to be held up to ridicule on youtube.
Slashdot Mirror
They use live chicken embryos (eggs) to grow the flu virus to manufacture flu vaccines. There's still a lot of egg protein left after they process the virus for the vaccine. Since influenza is an avian virus, this makes sense. You could use a human host to grow your virus, but then you'd risk transmitting a whole host of other diseases. Chickens don't have a lot of diseases in common with people.
They used to use human passage to create the vaccine for smallpox (transmitting the vaccinia virus). They figured out that this caused other diseases to get transmitted. Using cows to grow the virus greatly reduced the risk, so they outlawed using the human derived virus for vaccination.
Originally all vaccines were done using live, attenuated or killed virus that was grown in a living host organism. These days viruses are increasingly grown in cell culture or antigenic epitopes are cloned and grown in recombinant cell cultures. These techniques will have fewer contaminating host proteins, reducing the risk of unintended allergic response.
The Chinese "middle class" surpassed the population of the entire United States or Europe several years ago. Sure, that still leaves roughly a billion poor people, but with nearly a half-billion doing well, they have some serious internal market power. This also bodes well for political change within China.... a half-billion people with iPhones (or clones) and cars are going to start asking why they don't have more control over their lives at some point.
Of course, with twice as many people stuck in rural poverty while seeing a growing bourgeoisie, there's another potential road to political change....
I do want to draw a moral equivalency because he was only fined instead of killed because the fascists didn't have enough power to kill him. Had the fine gone through then the fascists would have demanded more and more until they got the death penalty for insulting their made up friend. Don't think for a second that the Republican fascists don't want to kill non-believers, they just know it's politically unpalatable at this point to say so, they are attempting to gain power little by little until they DO have enough power to murder non-believers. The only difference between the Republicans and the Saudi mullahs is the amount of power they currently wield,.
The fascists your are drawing moral equivalencies with were Democrats.
Learn some history before you try to cite it for your petty team red / team blue partisan politics.
Nah, you're not being nearly creative enough. Ellison has no income, you see, so he can't pay back his loan, so the bank collects on the collateral, cancels the loan, and now Ellison has $1 billion and the bank has $ 1.05 billion in stock (or whatever). Easy peasy.
At that point Ellison is in constructive receipt of the billion bucks. So he owes the income tax at that moment. I'm not privy to the loan docs, but I would assume that the banks are aware of the tax implications of this transfer, as well as the risks of stock valuations. So I doubt that he was able to get a billion dollar loan on a billion dollars worth of stock.
I was going to say the same thing. It works the same way in the USA. Jobs in no way escaped paying taxes on deferred income by dying. It should all be paid by his estate before any dispersal happens. Of course, the recipients get to pay more taxes on the inheritance at that point.
There is no such thing as "the real value of the asset". Only a price a willing seller and willing buyer agree to.
What is the "real value" of Elvis Presley's pink jumpsuit? Well, for me it is pretty much exactly zero. But somebody paid ten grand for the thing.
If there was only one autographed Babe Ruth baseball bat in existence, how much would that be worth? More than a million bucks? Maybe, perhaps even likely. Now, suppose that I have a secret stash of 50,000 Babe Ruth autographed baseball bats. If I mark-to-market them based on the sale of the only known bat at Southeby's, you'd say I have a $50,000,000,000.00 collection. But as soon as I open that vault to convert my vast wealth into hard cash, the value of that million dollar bat will plummet - perhaps by more than 90%, or even 99%. So did I ever in fact have 3rd world dictator levels of wealth? Or did I have a room full of old baseball bats?
Still don't get it? Ok, why do you suppose the diamond cartel withholds a large percentage of their stash from the market? Why do you suppose they work so hard to prevent new mines from being opened? How about OPEC? Why do you suppose they set production quotas? Does holding diamonds cause the value of those assets to go up? How about withholding oil production? Does that make the value of oil go up?
Let's make it real: Two years ago I had stock options ostensibly worth about $2 million. After the financial collapse and a corporate merger those warrants are not worth the paper they were written on. Literally... they would be worth more if the paper had just been left blank, because then I'd have a few sheets of blank paper. Now all I have is some used paper. Taxing me as if I had $2 million would not only have been criminal, it would have been a silly and impossible idea, as I had nowhere near the amount of money needed to pay the tax on $2 million worth of options that I never got paid for. You can't get blood from a turnip. Although I suppose you could have thrown me in debtor's prison and forced my children to work off a half-million dollar debt to get me out.
He's using an argument that I first heard from Penn Jillette. It goes like this: a Theist believes in God. It is this faith that defines his status. An atheist does not believe in God. The state is defined by the absence of faith. If you do not have faith in the existence of God, you are an atheist. (there are believers and non-believers, there is no middle ground).
Now, you may be a fully convicted atheist who is completely confident in his non-faith, or someone who is not sure either way (an agnostic in your vernacular). But either way, the label "atheist" applies, all agnostics are among the group of non-believers.
That's his argument. I don't really care either way..... I'm an agnostic on the agnostic issue.....
How can a universe have an omniscient being and free-will? It just makes no sense at all.
I'll leave the rest of it to greater minds, but this one is easy. An all-knowing being does not require "all-controlling" or a fixed fate. All it requires is existence outside of time. Existing outside of our universe (and therefore outside of space-time) one could posit a being that can see all of the universe, from beginning to end at the same time. Perhaps our fluid, evolving universe looks like an 11 dimensional solid crystal to a 14 dimensional being. Whatever.... the point being, knowing everything is not the same thing as controlling everything. I know everything that happens in "The Princess Bride", but I didn't control any of it.
Along the same lines, one has to wonder if free will truly exists. As physics becomes more clearly understood, the interactions of matter in the universe come to be understood as ever more deterministic, even as we wrestle with quantum phenomena. Even including quantum uncertainties, it is difficult to see how proton decay or other random phenomena could significantly impact chemical reactions in the brain to the extent that we truly have "free will" in the sense that we are able to make a truly unpredictable decision. Imagine if you will a super-scanner that can tell you the exact state of every neuron and molecule in your brain. Add an input (say a lunch menu).... will you ever get a different decision given the same initial starting state of the brain and the identical inputs? Will you sometimes go for the steak, and others the salad? It is hard to imagine that outcome being possible.
It certainly feels like we have free will though.....
I found out just how accessible information can be several years ago when I worked on a project involving a collections/skiptracing firm. For a quarter you could get conglomerations of various data sources that would pinpoint most targets current location - including address and phone number. One guy they were looking for while I was in the office was tough enough to find they sent it out to one of their private investigators. For $75 he not only found the guy's location (a secluded island only reachable by boat), he also found his mailbox number and the schedule that he followed for checking mail.... and most scary of all, he managed to get the combination to the guy's front gate. And word to the wise: the PI didn't use any leet computer hacking skills, he used a telephone and a little pretexting to get all the info he wanted and more.
This one is easy... the language is (mostly) irrelevant. You need a project. You want to program an arduino? Then define a real project that you really want to accomplish... that's the key. Whether you want to build an automated DVD library or build a microcomputer controlled sock knitting machine, you need a clear goal to learn how to program as a hobby.
Once you do that, find a nice IDE that people have used for things related to your project, buy a couple of reference books and dive in. You'll be surprised how easy it is to learn when you are trying to make something rather than fill in a requirement in a class.
It all depends on who you are working for. In my shop I look for 3 things... attitude, aptitude and integrity. Nothing else is really relevant to most jobs. If you don't have the right attitude - which to me requires that you are doing what you love to do - you will fail. If you have superior ability to combine with the love of the job, you'll succeed beyond anyone's wildest dreams even if you've never used that particular tool set before. The final criterion is the most difficult to interview - integrity. How do you measure someone's character? Anecdotes are great, but can be faked... nobody gives real recommendations any more...
Still, I've built one of the best IT shops you could imagine using this mantra. I've got all sorts of people that don't have the proper credentials - chemists, biologists, physicists, mathematicians - even a former stock broker (sales). There's very few IT certifications in the group. But they all are fantastic at what they do because they are doing what they love to do. And most of them are top 10% types, which doesn't hurt. And they all care about doing things the right way and making the company successful. That last one is sometimes tough - business types don't like it when some developer or system admin trashes their stupid idea. But 99 times out of 100 my guys are right and you ignore their advice at your own peril.
The punchline? We just went through a merger and it looks like they are going to trash my beautiful team and move to an outsourcing based model to save on payroll. I could just cry thinking about it - it is like tossing out the Mona Lisa because you really wanted that frame for something else. And when I'm done mourning I guess I'll be out there looking with the rest of you.... Anybody need a 40 man IT team that can do just about anything that a mid-sized white collar company might need?
My uncle has a country place, that no one knows about. He says it used to be a farm before the motor law....
Justice Thomas in particular seems to take the view that children are chattel and have no direct rights.
Amen, brother...
HuffPo recently hired Radley Balko, probably the best investigative criminal justice reporter in the country right now. He may be a token, but he's worth visiting HuffPo to read.
Yeah, MD is a real prize. They have magical disappearing video to help ensure that the bad guys are always brought to justice.
For those too lazy to read linked articles, in Prince Georges County Maryland they've had quite a few incidents with police "caught on tape".... or not. In the most remarkable coincidence in recent history, all 7 dashboard cameras at the scene simultaneously malfunctioned while the police were allegedly roughing up a TV reporter. Another case had a student beaten and arrested for assaulting police only to find that the surveillance video mysteriously malfunctioned at that exact moment. Fortunately for him some random passers-by happened to capture the whole thing on his cell phone video camera. It turns out that the official version of events had a few holes in it.
Seconded. And since cost is not the main consideration, I'd toss in a commercial online backup/storage solution as an added offsite protection. You might not want to rely on commercial online storage for your sole backup as the vendor might go out of business, but as a part of a tiered backup solution, it is a pretty nice option.
That's just patently ridiculous. Acknowledging that it is the de-facto law anywhere there is an armed officer of the state, actually taking the time to codify Cartman's "Respect my au-thor-a-tai" quip as law is crazy.
In the US the crime of "contempt of cop" is usually prosecuted under "disorderly conduct", "resisting arrest", "failure to comply with a lawful order", "assault on a police officer"... they can rack up as much of an offense for you as they'd like. So perhaps just giving them the ability to enforce their petty vendettas with an "insulting an officer" ticket would be an improvement.
You'd think so. But you'd be wrong. In Illinois you'd be really, really, crazy wrong. Illinois has a special law that makes it illegal to record police, even in public. Even if they are already being recorded by their own dash-cam. And it only works one way. They can record you all they'd like. They passed the law because they were shocked, shocked to learn that someone was able to prove police misconduct by having a video as evidence. Things are all better, now that they've closed that little loophole. No more police misconduct in Illinois.
. If you say something in your role as prosecutor about a defendant that turns out not to be true, even stating that the defendant is guilty if they are acquitted, you should have to serve time. How many people's lives have been ruined because of public perception brought on by a mouthy prosecutor? There should be punishments for doing that.
Hey that's exactly how it works! Ok, not really. They've granted themselves something called "absolute immunity". It doesn't really exist in law, per se. But the courts have codified it for us. A prosecutor can actually frame someone for murder and face no recrimination from the justice system whatsoever. Not even civil liability. Strangely, some of the latest case law on this was provided by singer Harry Connick Jr.'s dad. Seems his office was involved in some pretty egregious violations in more than one case. But the supreme court ruled that they couldn't be held liable - even though one of their prosecutors (Deegan) admitted the frame-up before he died.
I'll take that bet. "Proper procedures were followed" is the normal conclusion to these situations. Even when they shoot and kill an unarmed man on video the finding is always "the officer acted withing proper police procedures". In this case they were classy enough to also arrest Mr. Turner's children for yelling at the police (who had just killed their father). You'd think having just attacked their father from behind and then killing him they'd be a little charitable about the kids being upset. But no, they've been charged with making criminal threats and participating in a criminal street gang for yelling at the people they see as their father's murderers.
Don't worry though, the system works. The video evidence from the store will show what really happened. Oh, darn! It seems that the video cuts out just a second before the police shoot and kill Mr. Turner. Don't worry though... it picks up again a few seconds later. So, nothing to worry about here. Everyone did a great job!
Evidence of what? Evidence of him having videotaped officers? This makes as much sense as when the police arrest someone on the sole charge of "resisting arrest." He was resisting arrest. Why were you arresting him? For resisting arrest. Do they really think anyone buys that?
Yes. They are called prosecutors and judges. If they are feeling generous they'll just string you along for a while and then drop the charges. That way you only lose a little time and a few thousand dollars defending yourself. But on their books, nothing happened to you at all. See? The system works!!
Or you just make the security and the airport a privately run enterprise. Then there is no government search or seizure. Not that it matters... they can also assert their authority under the commerce clause and railroad act to make you do anything they damn well please when traveling on interstate mass transit.
Hey, you gotta pull in those campaign funds! Lobbyists for security equipment manufacturers are an excellent source of donations!
I'm with you, rtb61! Except I've got somewhere to be... so instead I say: grope away you poor wage slave, grope away.
At least the TSA agents haven't learned to react with extreme violence and felony charges if you fail to respect their a-thor-a-tai. Usually you just get hassled until you miss your plane for that. Of course the growing use of cell phone video to watch the watchers may be changing that equation... it is one thing to be disrespected. It is entirely another thing to be held up to ridicule on youtube.