I believe you're right as far as security checks intended to stop someone in the act. That's why I don't participate in the complaints about '80-year-old women being searched' -- if those women were excluded from random searches, I've just found my courier to get my fiberglass daggers through the checkpoint.
However, the profiling we're talking about is to monitor who's coming into the country. In this case, randomness doesn't do the trick...better to focus on the high-risk profiles in order to maximize the chances of catching the bad guys trying to get in.
1) Should U.S. authorities make any attempt to identify potentially dangerous travellers before they enter the U.S.?
2) If so, should they check out every single person? If they are unable for some reason to check out every single person, how should they decide who to check out?
It seems to me that people want to bitch and complain about any attempt identify possible security problems before they occur. I'm curious if these are the same people who criticize the U.S. government for not stopping the 9/11 attacks which, just as a side note, were committed by men who probably would not have eating pork on the way over here.
I was going to leave it at that, but let me throw out an example of why this complaining pisses me off so much: suppose you administered a mail server and wanted to make sure that your machine was not used to send spam. You have noticed in the past a pattern in which accounts were opened with similar information and from a particular IP block, and then those accounts were used to send huge blocks of spam. If one day you see a few new accounts opened following this pattern, is it really that unreasonable to take a few simple steps to check and see if those people start sending spam? Maybe check the logs a few days later, or write a simple script that monitors their port 25 traffic? You haven't kicked them out, you haven't blocked their port; you really haven't done anything other than keep an eye out, based on a known pattern.
The bottom line is, this information is a STARTING POINT. No one is in trouble. No one is prevented from travelling. But you have to start somewhere. Unless, that is, you want to sit back, do nothing, and complain about everything done by those who are actually responsible.
I've done a lot of flying all over southwest Arizona, and there are a ton of little airfields out there, many of them in a 3-runway triangle configuration, that apparently used to be used for military training. I've seen a bunch of them that had been turned into little neighborhoods. In a way it reminds me of those post-apocalypse movies where people make primitive use of old abandoned technology.
perhaps, they might offer to fax or mail the information on request.
This reminds me of Sturm, Ruger's approach. All their firearms have this message STAMPED into the steel barrel: "Before using gun, read warnings in instruction manual available free from Sturm, Ruger and Co, Southport, Conn." This is a sensible approach, although in the case of software I would prefer to see developers go back to selling a product rather than renting a service, as the trend has gone.
Luxury! When I was a kid kid we used to DREAM of floppies! We had to store the encyclopaedia same as you, only we did it on perforated computer paper. That's right, paper! But it wasn't in plain text, as you might expect. No sir, it was done in huge ASCII poster print, one letter per page. Now and then the old man would wake from his drunken nap and holler for us to fetch him some obscure reference, and we younger ones had to run out back and haul in a wheel barrow full of paper. But that was only the index!
I was in Japan for 6 months, and was able to spend a half hour on the phone with my new wife every day. She was in Maryland, U.S. I could lay on the couch with a headset jacked into my laptop. I used Net2Phone, which sold time by the block, but it was extremely cheap. There was an echo for the person being called, but it beat a $1300 phone bill. That was in 1999...I'm sure things have changed (probably for the better) since then.
when I was a kid. We took a used model rocket motor and duct-taped it to the top of a wooden gun, with the nozzle to the rear. We'd put a firecracker in the motor casing, with the fuse sticking back through the nozzle. We were fortunate enough to have an olive tree in our yard...fresh olives are about as hard as avacados. We put an olive down the tube, in front of the firecracker, and light the fuse. It could cause welts at 15 yards. Later improvements included a mounted lighter for ignition. Not one eye was put out that summer.
that this "technology" is nothing more than a common -sense application of the language that enabled it (HTML.) Since the HTML standard allows this type of design, it seems obvious that the designers of HTML contemplated this type of use. Why, then, is someone able to patent the use of a technology in a manner that was specifically contemplated by the designers?
Of all the ridiculous patent stories that appear on Slashdot, the ones that burn me (and scare me) most are those that involve common-sense use of a programming technique. If a programmer (including an HTML/javascript designer) comes up with a nifty way to make things work, within the confines of his chosen language, then there is no way that he or she should be able to patent it. I call bullshit, and it's got to stop.
Hi, it's Scratch at Amazon. The suits here would never think of sending you something for free, but your story touched my heart, and I'd like to help. If you could send me the username and password of your Amazon account, I'd be happy to slip the order in for you, without charging your credit card.
I think you will see that the number of violent crimes goes up with the number of weapons.
You will also find that most turbulence-related injuries occur in aircraft. The more flights, the more injuries. Yet most turbulence is not caused by aircraft.
We Americans have a violent society, and we own a lot of guns. We own the guns because we have a violent society; we are not a violent society because we own guns.
I wonder how many people who hold this view also hold the view that the drug problem can be "solved" by legalizing drugs. It's an interesting contradiction that I'm sure many on the left haven't considered.
My Quickbooks started bugging me about updating...it said I couldn't do any payroll functions until I updated. Unfortunately the update it download bombed every time. I was stuck. Turns out the.inf file had a 'check payroll update' line that I could change manually, and it stopped bugging me after that. I don't use the tax tables, but there might be a similar solution for your problem.
These are not crooks that give up after they find the door locked...
That's where the "influencing the directions of their attempts" part comes in. The philosophy expressed in your post is exactly the philosophy addressed in my post. The point of this and other measures is not to "stop terrorism." It's to greatly reduce the opportunity to carry out terrorism, and to narrow the field of desirable targets. The people who came up with this and similar ideas did not expect to put a halt to terrorism -- they expected to make commercial airliners very undesirable targets.
None of the 9/11 band of bad guys hid their identities.
That's because they knew they didn't have to choose between a security-related identification card or extra scrutiny at the gate.
People don't seem to understand, or they aren't willing to accept, that security and safety are games of hedging and probability. To use a tired old analogy, it's like locking your front door. Will that stop a determined criminal? No, but it will a) make your house a less attractive target, and b) force bad guys to look for other ways in. The big-picture goal behind any given measure is not to ensure absolute prevention, it's to force bad guys to work harder, and to influence the direction of their attempts to circumvent your defenses.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody has banned model rockets. Nobody has tried to ban model rockets.
I believe you're right as far as security checks intended to stop someone in the act. That's why I don't participate in the complaints about '80-year-old women being searched' -- if those women were excluded from random searches, I've just found my courier to get my fiberglass daggers through the checkpoint.
However, the profiling we're talking about is to monitor who's coming into the country. In this case, randomness doesn't do the trick...better to focus on the high-risk profiles in order to maximize the chances of catching the bad guys trying to get in.
1) Should U.S. authorities make any attempt to identify potentially dangerous travellers before they enter the U.S.?
2) If so, should they check out every single person? If they are unable for some reason to check out every single person, how should they decide who to check out?
It seems to me that people want to bitch and complain about any attempt identify possible security problems before they occur. I'm curious if these are the same people who criticize the U.S. government for not stopping the 9/11 attacks which, just as a side note, were committed by men who probably would not have eating pork on the way over here.
I was going to leave it at that, but let me throw out an example of why this complaining pisses me off so much: suppose you administered a mail server and wanted to make sure that your machine was not used to send spam. You have noticed in the past a pattern in which accounts were opened with similar information and from a particular IP block, and then those accounts were used to send huge blocks of spam. If one day you see a few new accounts opened following this pattern, is it really that unreasonable to take a few simple steps to check and see if those people start sending spam? Maybe check the logs a few days later, or write a simple script that monitors their port 25 traffic? You haven't kicked them out, you haven't blocked their port; you really haven't done anything other than keep an eye out, based on a known pattern.
The bottom line is, this information is a STARTING POINT. No one is in trouble. No one is prevented from travelling. But you have to start somewhere. Unless, that is, you want to sit back, do nothing, and complain about everything done by those who are actually responsible.
I've done a lot of flying all over southwest Arizona, and there are a ton of little airfields out there, many of them in a 3-runway triangle configuration, that apparently used to be used for military training. I've seen a bunch of them that had been turned into little neighborhoods. In a way it reminds me of those post-apocalypse movies where people make primitive use of old abandoned technology.
Just tell them to submit it as a story to /. That's what I do with information I don't want anybody else to see.
No, then everybody will see it twice.
Is she going to make money on this or what?
She'll get a coupon for $5 off her next purchase of the Full Version of Microsoft Office Professional.
perhaps, they might offer to fax or mail the information on request.
This reminds me of Sturm, Ruger's approach. All their firearms have this message STAMPED into the steel barrel: "Before using gun, read warnings in instruction manual available free from Sturm, Ruger and Co, Southport, Conn." This is a sensible approach, although in the case of software I would prefer to see developers go back to selling a product rather than renting a service, as the trend has gone.
Luxury! When I was a kid kid we used to DREAM of floppies! We had to store the encyclopaedia same as you, only we did it on perforated computer paper. That's right, paper! But it wasn't in plain text, as you might expect. No sir, it was done in huge ASCII poster print, one letter per page. Now and then the old man would wake from his drunken nap and holler for us to fetch him some obscure reference, and we younger ones had to run out back and haul in a wheel barrow full of paper. But that was only the index!
Hmmmm...not sure what you meant with the weighting down and exploding. The olive was fired from the tube in one piece, with nothing attached.
I was in Japan for 6 months, and was able to spend a half hour on the phone with my new wife every day. She was in Maryland, U.S. I could lay on the couch with a headset jacked into my laptop. I used Net2Phone, which sold time by the block, but it was extremely cheap. There was an echo for the person being called, but it beat a $1300 phone bill. That was in 1999...I'm sure things have changed (probably for the better) since then.
when I was a kid. We took a used model rocket motor and duct-taped it to the top of a wooden gun, with the nozzle to the rear. We'd put a firecracker in the motor casing, with the fuse sticking back through the nozzle. We were fortunate enough to have an olive tree in our yard...fresh olives are about as hard as avacados. We put an olive down the tube, in front of the firecracker, and light the fuse. It could cause welts at 15 yards. Later improvements included a mounted lighter for ignition. Not one eye was put out that summer.
I'll bet the engineers working on this haven't thought of that. Maybe you should hire on.
that this "technology" is nothing more than a common -sense application of the language that enabled it (HTML.) Since the HTML standard allows this type of design, it seems obvious that the designers of HTML contemplated this type of use. Why, then, is someone able to patent the use of a technology in a manner that was specifically contemplated by the designers?
Of all the ridiculous patent stories that appear on Slashdot, the ones that burn me (and scare me) most are those that involve common-sense use of a programming technique. If a programmer (including an HTML/javascript designer) comes up with a nifty way to make things work, within the confines of his chosen language, then there is no way that he or she should be able to patent it. I call bullshit, and it's got to stop.
Think anyone particularly thought Led Zepplin could dance the same cookie cutter coriographed way
Dude, now you've got me thinking of Plant, Bonham, Jones, and Page doing that synchronized robot crap. Very funny.
US Airways doesn't make airplanes.
Come on. We all know Bernie Shifman's lawyer was Bernie Shifman.
Dear Mr. Grub...
Hi, it's Scratch at Amazon. The suits here would never think of sending you something for free, but your story touched my heart, and I'd like to help. If you could send me the username and password of your Amazon account, I'd be happy to slip the order in for you, without charging your credit card.
I think you will see that the number of violent crimes goes up with the number of weapons.
You will also find that most turbulence-related injuries occur in aircraft. The more flights, the more injuries. Yet most turbulence is not caused by aircraft.
We Americans have a violent society, and we own a lot of guns. We own the guns because we have a violent society; we are not a violent society because we own guns.
I wonder how many people who hold this view also hold the view that the drug problem can be "solved" by legalizing drugs. It's an interesting contradiction that I'm sure many on the left haven't considered.
My Quickbooks started bugging me about updating...it said I couldn't do any payroll functions until I updated. Unfortunately the update it download bombed every time. I was stuck. Turns out the .inf file had a 'check payroll update' line that I could change manually, and it stopped bugging me after that. I don't use the tax tables, but there might be a similar solution for your problem.
You could just have a standard model, and buy the face separately.
who ftp'd a tarball somewhere after browsing this thread.
I mostly interact with Windows using 3 fingers.
These are not crooks that give up after they find the door locked...
That's where the "influencing the directions of their attempts" part comes in. The philosophy expressed in your post is exactly the philosophy addressed in my post. The point of this and other measures is not to "stop terrorism." It's to greatly reduce the opportunity to carry out terrorism, and to narrow the field of desirable targets. The people who came up with this and similar ideas did not expect to put a halt to terrorism -- they expected to make commercial airliners very undesirable targets.
None of the 9/11 band of bad guys hid their identities.
That's because they knew they didn't have to choose between a security-related identification card or extra scrutiny at the gate.
People don't seem to understand, or they aren't willing to accept, that security and safety are games of hedging and probability. To use a tired old analogy, it's like locking your front door. Will that stop a determined criminal? No, but it will a) make your house a less attractive target, and b) force bad guys to look for other ways in. The big-picture goal behind any given measure is not to ensure absolute prevention, it's to force bad guys to work harder, and to influence the direction of their attempts to circumvent your defenses.