Then the answer for Time Warner (and other big American media companies) is to start republishing everything from places that refuse to honor international copyright treaties. Movies, TV shows, music, books, et cetera.
And not pay a dime for it.
The use of the term "Piracy" to describe "Copying a protected work without permission of the copyright owner" is misleading, pejorative and dishonest....except that this usage has been common for at least a quarter of a century, and was popularized by the pirates themselves in the first place.
No, this is why thousands COULD HAVE died from anthrax, if there had been (and still might be) a major attack. Those five people died because they didn't get treated fast enough. A whole lot more people were exposed, but got treated fast enough to stop the infection.
You see, if a hundred thousand people are exposed to anthrax, many of the ones who get exposed get very, very sick, and a huge number would die - if there wasn't a fairly large stockpile of the stuff handy, enough to treat everyone exposed for a month or more.
You can't call up a pharmaceutical company and order up a bunch of the stuff and have them make it and deliver it in five minutes.
The only company that could make it under license could only make a certain amount per year, and had no capacity to ramp up. They screwed around, claiming they could (but did nothing in particular). If they'd stepped forward and produced enough for the need, the US government would have happily paid the price.
The compulsory license wasn't about cost. It was about capacity. And the US DID pay a license fee to the company, instead of outright theft, as Brazil is doing.
On the other hand, with the amounts involved, if it was just a matter of a billion dollars to develop an AIDs drug, why didn't Brazil create their own and license it for free?
Oh, yeah - that billion dollars was for a SUCCESSFUL drug. They kinda left out the other hundred compounds they looked at, and the ten to twelve they actually tested, before the drug companies found that one drug that worked.
Then you get the ones that work, but turn up side effects when they get past trials. Vioxx, for example. major drug, well-liked by 99% of its users, and it wasn't until after they got it out into the open market that the (theoretical) side effects were noticed - and they were, truly, minor for pretty much everyone (tiny increases in health risks, and no actual deaths or injuries tied to the drug). And it was banned. Huge loss for the company.
Total actual cost to find a high-quality, high RISK new drug for a major disease, with full trials and liability coverage? Closer to five or TEN billion dollars...
Cost to produce some of these drug combinations? That's another story. Some of these chemicals take huge investments in machinery to even make, and the precursor chemicals alone put the price at ten to twenty cents per pill. Actual manufacturing can push the cost to simply produce one pill for some drugs into the multi-dollar range.
I was doing some consulting a long time ago, and went into a little publishing company to set up a new computer.
I was checking out the network (AppleTalk), and noticed the print server.
What print server? I asked them about it, and they didn't know they had one. So I traced the cables, and found (on the other side of a partition) a door with cables running underneath it. So I moved the partition, opened the door, and found an original Macintosh II, plugged into some ancient UPS, chugging away, with (literally) a half inch of dust on top of it. It had been sitting in the room, doing nothing but print server stuff, for over seven years (I checked - no reboots - seven years of continuous uptime).
It had been in the closet two years before anyone who was currently working there had been hired...
I have to say, that really galls me. Any criticism of what the Bush administration does
Then let's call the article "Things That Happened in the US Last Year That Annoyed the Left (even if Bush and his folks had nothing to do with some of them)."
That "any criticism" bit is so very, very weak. It implies that there's very little criticism of the Bush administration going on, instead of the daily, incessant, inaccurate sort of thing we see in the article.
Aside from that, please name the serious wrongs missing from the list and the petty wrongs that are added to it.
Well, there's the Duke rape case (as someone else posted right before your comment, apparently).
The pseudo-science dietary restriction laws are another good case, since the studies they used to justify them are pretty weak to begin with, and the end result is going to have much more negative impact on Americans than most of the things on the list.
A couple of the things on the list ("slagging") are just someone complaining because someone else was complaining about something they support. Note the lack of actual "crimes" in those examples.
The Moussaoui death penalty example is silly, because it's common in major cases to ask for a too-high penalty and then negotiate down to what you wanted to get in the first place. If they hadn't asked for the death penalty, people would be complaining that the case was weak, or they would have asked for it.
(Don't bother hitting the link, here's the text from the page - the author who collected and organized the posts is Richard Harter, and everything from here on down is his effort, with some minor edits to make it past the filter on Slashdot):
Santa Claus: Lord of the Rings
In the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup there was a disturbingly plausible thread connecting Santa Claus and the Lord of the Rings. Learn about fruitcake as mathoms, the sinister Tom Bombadil, Silmarils on the Christmas tree, reindeer as ringwraiths, and other horrors. The gruesome details follow:
Chad Irby How do you think Santa got all of his workers?
He ended up with all of the Elven rings, and centuries of malnourishment and mistreatment has resulted in a flock of miniscule elf-slaves.
George Williams "One ring to rule them all, and unto Christmas bind them."
Sea Wasp The One wasn't destroyed... Santa got a hold of it.
Makes sense. All those paranoia-inducing lyrics... "He sees you when you're sleeping... he knows when you're awake... he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake!"
Kyle Haight Wonderful. Now I'm going to dream about Santa's terrible jolly red eye.
aRJay I've just realised, it's worse than that, the books lied. Santa didn't get the ring. The ability to see everything he has an all seeing eye.
Santa is Saur...
*NO CARRIER*
Mark Atwood "There is, in a tower, far to the north, an Eye, unblinking."
Niall McAuley As to who Santa really is, which jolly character in LOTR actually gets to *hold the ring in his hand* at one point?
So, old Tom Bombadil does a little ring-palming and sends Frodo off with a lesser ring, then clears off to the ruins of Angband beneath the North Polar ice cap, there to use the power of the One Ring to draw the surviving Orcs to him, to toil beneath the ice in his grim, satanic toy mills.
Sea Wasp Now THAT is a stroke of genius. And with Bombadil's power PLUS the One's, BombaSauron is able to cause Barad-Dur to topple, etc., at the appropriate time. This implies that Sauron himself WILL come back one day, since his Ring is still intact, though.
Michael S. Schiffer Of course. "[T]he children know he'll be back again someday." Though that song reflects the conflation of multiple Dark Lords. The magic hat is, of course, the Iron Crown ("he began to dance around" is a memory of when Luthien sang for him in Thangorodrim), and the association with cold and snow is similarly obvious. But the "eye[s] made out of coal" are, of course, Sauron's, which glowed red and fiery like a live coal. And the pipe is, as you'd guess, from Saruman.
Andrew Plotkin But there were only nine Nazgul -- oh, no, wait, Sauron also brought three of the dwarven rings to himself during the Third Age. Total: twelve tiny reindeer. (Three smaller than the others.)
The Christmas Tree is the sign of Bombadil's power, of course, but... um, why do we traditionally put a Silmaril at the top?
Sea Wasp Morgoth's Crown, you fool.
Liz Broadwell Specifically, it's a propitiation ritual -- we act out returning the one that Beren and Luthien stole, in the hope that nobody will blame *us* for the deed of some idiot hero. What'd they want it for, anyway? Not like they did anything useful with it once they'd got it...
Jouni Karhu No. Instead, when the Christmas Tree dies and we carry it outside, it symbolizes the felling of the Trees of Valinor.
John David Galt Does that mean the Christmas feast celebrates the Kinslaying? As a sort of evil Miracle of Transsubstantiation?
Michael S. Schiffer Swords and swan-ships, carving knives and turkeys (or geese)... the correspondences aren't exactly subtle. (And we probably shouldn't even get started on the fruitcake-- but think the Haudh-en-Ndengin.)
Good luck getting your bank to handle transactions with a company that loses that case in a US court.
If VISA and MasterCard and AmEx pay anything to AllOfMP3, they suddenly get to look down the barrel of a really expensive lawsuit.
Ditto for PayPal and the rest.
When AOMP3 loses this one (and they will), a huge chunk of their revenue stream goes away, and not just in the US. Anyone, anywhere, using a major financial institution to pay for those songs will be shutting down, fast.
Someone tells you that, if you don't take drastic action right now, your house will catch on fire some time in the next 100 years. A while back, the same guy was telling you the house was going to be flooded due to the same actions that will now, supposedly cause that fire.
The current "fire prediction panel" has downgraded the actual fire risk, to boot, since all of their previous predictions of fire have not come true, and it turns out that some of the evidence they were using to predict the fire was actually made up. It seems that the computer model they were using also predicts fire if you put random noise into the input hopper.
Meanwhile, the people who scream most about how the fire will destroy the house are going to bed while smoking, while insisting that you need to turn out all of your lights and sleep on the floor.
It's not like the guys pointing the beams will just aim them at a crowd and let it run. For one thing, you can bet that part of the training in use for this will be at least a short exposure to the pain, so you know what's really being done to the people in front of you (they do that with tear and pepper gas training, as well as the other non-lethal weapons).
For another, if you have a somewhat pissed-off crowd that you successfully turn away with one of these, yet you push it too far, you end up with a crowd that's partially scared and partially Really Pissed Off.
It seems that the best use of this would be in very, very short bursts at lower power, just enough to make people go "crap, let's not do that again!"
High-power use, or extended use that causes actual physical harm? That's the sort of thing that would get the beam-mount vehicles targeted for some real damage, or the operators on the "get them first" list...
It doesn't work that way over there. When he's executed from the current sentence, all of the other cases will leave him out of consideration, since he'll be, you know, dead.
A nice bit of difference between our system and theirs.
The United States government has so much control over the Iraqi court system that they managed to set up the verdict and sentencing of Saddam Hussein to happen right before this election, but they couldn't manage to get him tried and sentenced a year or more ago, so we would have had a good solid year of the Baathist loyalists realizing that they really, really lost.
We also arranged the deaths of various people involved with the case (judges, lawyers, et cetera), just to delay it enough to influence these Congressional elections, because we knew all of the scandals the Democrats are pushing would be breaking right about now.
On the other hand, we couldn't manage to get Hussein murdered in prison by a family member of one of the victims of his crimes, because that would be too easy (even though it would play really well with most of the Muslim world).
And the verdict? We obviously fixed it, since nobody in their right mind would believe Saddam Hussein was a murdering, genocidal dictator.
Our next trick: Rovian Mind Control Rays are going to make a whole bunch of people vote Republican, when everyone knows that 99% of the population would vote for the Democrats if they had any freedom of choice at all...
Yeah, it was pretty awful of those Democrats in 1941 to start things off by attacking Pearl Harbor.
And the author kinda forgot Iraq War I (non-unified administration).
You see, "initiated" kinda requires the US to have actually started the war, not just responding to an attack on one of our allies (which is the situation in the other wars mentioned).
"Quick," in the case of previous tests, was "the next day or so."
Nowadays, "quick" means "we have to spend a few minutes looking at the data, some more time figuring out how big the thing was (and if it's really a nuke test, as opposed to someone just setting off a bunch of explosives off in a cavern), and then typing out the press release for somebody to read at the press conference."
There's not that many teenagers online in North America (sure, there's some from Europe and other places, but the vast majority are American and Canadian).
"Except Nitro Glycerine would most likely detonate the second you had any turbulence, or even upon takeoff, given how unstable it is."
Nitro, while not being something you'd want to carry around, isn't as Hollywood-dramatic touchy as people seem to think. Keep it cool enough or even freeze it, and you're not going to run into anything in flying that would set it off. Unfreezing, of course, can make it detonate, but that's not a problem for this use.
People who are used to handling TATP wouldn't worry about using nitro. It's just a lot harder to make and store.
Note also that the Bojinka bombs were designed for non-suicide use. Without that, all you needed to do was fill a bottle full of something nasty and slam it against the inside of the plane.
People keep saying "they couldn't use nitroglycerine," but nitro is actually *less* touchy than TATP, and is pretty stable if you keep it cool enough (freeze it and pretend it's water ice, then let it melt on a long flight). It's just harder to make correctly, which is why TATP is the choice of so many bad guys. You can also dissolve TATP in some liquids, but still keep some of its power, while losing some sensitivity.
Generally, if you treat the sensitive explosives like you treat a new laptop, you're safe enough. Relatively speaking.
The other binary explosives also tend to have at least one component which sets off scanners, or which is banned already (acetone has been a banned substance for years, for example).
...except that almost everyone reading this story on Slashdot heard it from a non-network source, with added commentary and direct feedback, and you know there's going to be a lot of fact-checking in the comments below.
Ditto for most of the predigested/fake news we get. Used to, it just went unchallenged, but now it's a lot harder to get newsoids out without someone putting up a site about the Emperor's New Press Release.
Slashdot Mirror
Then the answer for Time Warner (and other big American media companies) is to start republishing everything from places that refuse to honor international copyright treaties. Movies, TV shows, music, books, et cetera.
...except that this usage has been common for at least a quarter of a century, and was popularized by the pirates themselves in the first place.
And not pay a dime for it.
The use of the term "Piracy" to describe "Copying a protected work without permission of the copyright owner" is misleading, pejorative and dishonest.
Note, for example, "Pirate Bay."
No, this is why thousands COULD HAVE died from anthrax, if there had been (and still might be) a major attack. Those five people died because they didn't get treated fast enough. A whole lot more people were exposed, but got treated fast enough to stop the infection.
You see, if a hundred thousand people are exposed to anthrax, many of the ones who get exposed get very, very sick, and a huge number would die - if there wasn't a fairly large stockpile of the stuff handy, enough to treat everyone exposed for a month or more.
You can't call up a pharmaceutical company and order up a bunch of the stuff and have them make it and deliver it in five minutes.
The only company that could make it under license could only make a certain amount per year, and had no capacity to ramp up. They screwed around, claiming they could (but did nothing in particular). If they'd stepped forward and produced enough for the need, the US government would have happily paid the price.
The compulsory license wasn't about cost. It was about capacity. And the US DID pay a license fee to the company, instead of outright theft, as Brazil is doing.
On the other hand, with the amounts involved, if it was just a matter of a billion dollars to develop an AIDs drug, why didn't Brazil create their own and license it for free?
Oh, yeah - that billion dollars was for a SUCCESSFUL drug. They kinda left out the other hundred compounds they looked at, and the ten to twelve they actually tested, before the drug companies found that one drug that worked.
Then you get the ones that work, but turn up side effects when they get past trials. Vioxx, for example. major drug, well-liked by 99% of its users, and it wasn't until after they got it out into the open market that the (theoretical) side effects were noticed - and they were, truly, minor for pretty much everyone (tiny increases in health risks, and no actual deaths or injuries tied to the drug). And it was banned. Huge loss for the company.
Total actual cost to find a high-quality, high RISK new drug for a major disease, with full trials and liability coverage? Closer to five or TEN billion dollars...
Cost to produce some of these drug combinations? That's another story. Some of these chemicals take huge investments in machinery to even make, and the precursor chemicals alone put the price at ten to twenty cents per pill. Actual manufacturing can push the cost to simply produce one pill for some drugs into the multi-dollar range.
You didn't tell it right.
Might as well tell him to go naked, with no money or food.
How long will it take until some radial environmentalist group decide that this is the result of man's interference there?
About five minutes, apparently...
Another possibility: we infected Mars
(Score:2)
by Tablizer (95088) Alter Relationship on Saturday March 03, @11:05PM (#18223238)
You need a better source than Realclimate.
For example, talk to some actual global warming scientists.
I have, and I'm still stunned by the number of them who think that "insolation is a constant."
At best, they tend to underestimate its effects, or assume (!) that it's not important.
Meanwhile, they're busy trying to pretend the Medieval Warm Period didn't happen...
...newbie.
Print the mug upside down.
...they don't have a microphone on the lander.
That way, all they have to do is run the same tests, and listen for millions of tiny little screams.
I was doing some consulting a long time ago, and went into a little publishing company to set up a new computer.
I was checking out the network (AppleTalk), and noticed the print server.
What print server? I asked them about it, and they didn't know they had one. So I traced the cables, and found (on the other side of a partition) a door with cables running underneath it. So I moved the partition, opened the door, and found an original Macintosh II, plugged into some ancient UPS, chugging away, with (literally) a half inch of dust on top of it. It had been sitting in the room, doing nothing but print server stuff, for over seven years (I checked - no reboots - seven years of continuous uptime).
It had been in the closet two years before anyone who was currently working there had been hired...
I have to say, that really galls me. Any criticism of what the Bush administration does
Then let's call the article "Things That Happened in the US Last Year That Annoyed the Left (even if Bush and his folks had nothing to do with some of them)."
That "any criticism" bit is so very, very weak. It implies that there's very little criticism of the Bush administration going on, instead of the daily, incessant, inaccurate sort of thing we see in the article.
Aside from that, please name the serious wrongs missing from the list and the petty wrongs that are added to it.
Well, there's the Duke rape case (as someone else posted right before your comment, apparently).
The pseudo-science dietary restriction laws are another good case, since the studies they used to justify them are pretty weak to begin with, and the end result is going to have much more negative impact on Americans than most of the things on the list.
A couple of the things on the list ("slagging") are just someone complaining because someone else was complaining about something they support. Note the lack of actual "crimes" in those examples.
The Moussaoui death penalty example is silly, because it's common in major cases to ask for a too-high penalty and then negotiate down to what you wanted to get in the first place. If they hadn't asked for the death penalty, people would be complaining that the case was weak, or they would have asked for it.
From http://home.tiac.net/~cri/2002/santaring.html
... "He sees you when you're sleeping... he knows when you're awake... he knows if you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake!"
...
(Don't bother hitting the link, here's the text from the page - the author who collected and organized the posts is Richard Harter, and everything from here on down is his effort, with some minor edits to make it past the filter on Slashdot):
Santa Claus: Lord of the Rings
In the rec.arts.sf.written newsgroup there was a disturbingly plausible thread connecting Santa Claus and the Lord of the Rings. Learn about fruitcake as mathoms, the sinister Tom Bombadil, Silmarils on the Christmas tree, reindeer as ringwraiths, and other horrors. The gruesome details follow:
Chad Irby
How do you think Santa got all of his workers?
He ended up with all of the Elven rings, and centuries of malnourishment and mistreatment has resulted in a flock of miniscule elf-slaves.
George Williams
"One ring to rule them all, and unto Christmas bind them."
Sea Wasp
The One wasn't destroyed... Santa got a hold of it.
Makes sense. All those paranoia-inducing lyrics
Kyle Haight
Wonderful. Now I'm going to dream about Santa's terrible jolly red eye.
aRJay
I've just realised, it's worse than that, the books lied. Santa didn't get the ring. The ability to see everything he has an all seeing eye.
Santa is Saur...
*NO CARRIER*
Mark Atwood
"There is, in a tower, far to the north, an Eye, unblinking."
Niall McAuley
As to who Santa really is, which jolly character in LOTR actually gets to *hold the ring in his hand* at one point?
So, old Tom Bombadil does a little ring-palming and sends Frodo off with a lesser ring, then clears off to the ruins of Angband beneath the North Polar ice cap, there to use the power of the One Ring to draw the surviving Orcs to him, to toil beneath the ice in his grim, satanic toy mills.
Sea Wasp
Now THAT is a stroke of genius. And with Bombadil's power PLUS the One's, BombaSauron is able to cause Barad-Dur to topple, etc., at the appropriate time. This implies that Sauron himself WILL come back one day, since his Ring is still intact, though.
Michael S. Schiffer
Of course. "[T]he children know he'll be back again someday." Though that song reflects the conflation of multiple Dark Lords. The magic hat is, of course, the Iron Crown ("he began to dance around" is a memory of when Luthien sang for him in Thangorodrim), and the association with cold and snow is similarly obvious. But the "eye[s] made out of coal" are, of course, Sauron's, which glowed red and fiery like a live coal. And the pipe is, as you'd guess, from Saruman.
Andrew Plotkin
But there were only nine Nazgul -- oh, no, wait, Sauron also brought three of the dwarven rings to himself during the Third Age. Total: twelve tiny reindeer. (Three smaller than the others.)
The Christmas Tree is the sign of Bombadil's power, of course, but... um, why do we traditionally put a Silmaril at the top?
Sea Wasp
Morgoth's Crown, you fool.
Liz Broadwell
Specifically, it's a propitiation ritual -- we act out returning the one that Beren and Luthien stole, in the hope that nobody will blame *us* for the deed of some idiot hero. What'd they want it for, anyway? Not like they did anything useful with it once they'd got it
Jouni Karhu
No. Instead, when the Christmas Tree dies and we carry it outside, it symbolizes the felling of the Trees of Valinor.
John David Galt
Does that mean the Christmas feast celebrates the Kinslaying? As a sort of evil Miracle of Transsubstantiation?
Michael S. Schiffer
Swords and swan-ships, carving knives and turkeys (or geese)... the correspondences aren't exactly subtle. (And we probably shouldn't even get started on the fruitcake-- but think the Haudh-en-Ndengin.)
Good luck getting your bank to handle transactions with a company that loses that case in a US court.
If VISA and MasterCard and AmEx pay anything to AllOfMP3, they suddenly get to look down the barrel of a really expensive lawsuit.
Ditto for PayPal and the rest.
When AOMP3 loses this one (and they will), a huge chunk of their revenue stream goes away, and not just in the US. Anyone, anywhere, using a major financial institution to pay for those songs will be shutting down, fast.
The real case:
Someone tells you that, if you don't take drastic action right now, your house will catch on fire some time in the next 100 years. A while back, the same guy was telling you the house was going to be flooded due to the same actions that will now, supposedly cause that fire.
The current "fire prediction panel" has downgraded the actual fire risk, to boot, since all of their previous predictions of fire have not come true, and it turns out that some of the evidence they were using to predict the fire was actually made up. It seems that the computer model they were using also predicts fire if you put random noise into the input hopper.
Meanwhile, the people who scream most about how the fire will destroy the house are going to bed while smoking, while insisting that you need to turn out all of your lights and sleep on the floor.
It's not like the guys pointing the beams will just aim them at a crowd and let it run. For one thing, you can bet that part of the training in use for this will be at least a short exposure to the pain, so you know what's really being done to the people in front of you (they do that with tear and pepper gas training, as well as the other non-lethal weapons).
For another, if you have a somewhat pissed-off crowd that you successfully turn away with one of these, yet you push it too far, you end up with a crowd that's partially scared and partially Really Pissed Off.
It seems that the best use of this would be in very, very short bursts at lower power, just enough to make people go "crap, let's not do that again!"
High-power use, or extended use that causes actual physical harm? That's the sort of thing that would get the beam-mount vehicles targeted for some real damage, or the operators on the "get them first" list...
It doesn't work that way over there. When he's executed from the current sentence, all of the other cases will leave him out of consideration, since he'll be, you know, dead.
A nice bit of difference between our system and theirs.
The United States government has so much control over the Iraqi court system that they managed to set up the verdict and sentencing of Saddam Hussein to happen right before this election, but they couldn't manage to get him tried and sentenced a year or more ago, so we would have had a good solid year of the Baathist loyalists realizing that they really, really lost.
We also arranged the deaths of various people involved with the case (judges, lawyers, et cetera), just to delay it enough to influence these Congressional elections, because we knew all of the scandals the Democrats are pushing would be breaking right about now.
On the other hand, we couldn't manage to get Hussein murdered in prison by a family member of one of the victims of his crimes, because that would be too easy (even though it would play really well with most of the Muslim world).
And the verdict? We obviously fixed it, since nobody in their right mind would believe Saddam Hussein was a murdering, genocidal dictator.
Our next trick: Rovian Mind Control Rays are going to make a whole bunch of people vote Republican, when everyone knows that 99% of the population would vote for the Democrats if they had any freedom of choice at all...
Yeah, it was pretty awful of those Democrats in 1941 to start things off by attacking Pearl Harbor.
And the author kinda forgot Iraq War I (non-unified administration).
You see, "initiated" kinda requires the US to have actually started the war, not just responding to an attack on one of our allies (which is the situation in the other wars mentioned).
"Quick," in the case of previous tests, was "the next day or so."
Nowadays, "quick" means "we have to spend a few minutes looking at the data, some more time figuring out how big the thing was (and if it's really a nuke test, as opposed to someone just setting off a bunch of explosives off in a cavern), and then typing out the press release for somebody to read at the press conference."
That last part probably took most of the time.
There's not that many teenagers online in North America (sure, there's some from Europe and other places, but the vast majority are American and Canadian).
"Except Nitro Glycerine would most likely detonate the second you had any turbulence, or even upon takeoff, given how unstable it is."
Nitro, while not being something you'd want to carry around, isn't as Hollywood-dramatic touchy as people seem to think. Keep it cool enough or even freeze it, and you're not going to run into anything in flying that would set it off. Unfreezing, of course, can make it detonate, but that's not a problem for this use.
People who are used to handling TATP wouldn't worry about using nitro. It's just a lot harder to make and store.
Note also that the Bojinka bombs were designed for non-suicide use. Without that, all you needed to do was fill a bottle full of something nasty and slam it against the inside of the plane.
People keep saying "they couldn't use nitroglycerine," but nitro is actually *less* touchy than TATP, and is pretty stable if you keep it cool enough (freeze it and pretend it's water ice, then let it melt on a long flight). It's just harder to make correctly, which is why TATP is the choice of so many bad guys. You can also dissolve TATP in some liquids, but still keep some of its power, while losing some sensitivity.
Generally, if you treat the sensitive explosives like you treat a new laptop, you're safe enough. Relatively speaking.
The other binary explosives also tend to have at least one component which sets off scanners, or which is banned already (acetone has been a banned substance for years, for example).
Nail polish remover and other volatile liquids were banned before the "liquid explosive" panic.
...except that almost everyone reading this story on Slashdot heard it from a non-network source, with added commentary and direct feedback, and you know there's going to be a lot of fact-checking in the comments below.
Ditto for most of the predigested/fake news we get. Used to, it just went unchallenged, but now it's a lot harder to get newsoids out without someone putting up a site about the Emperor's New Press Release.