In other news, gun proliferation is great (despite murder rates two orders of magnitude higher than civilised countries) but terminate a foetus and you're going to Hell.
Citation please? I believe Switzerland would tend to disagree with you.
If the TSA is supposed to prevent hijackings, they are useless. I spent years as a locksmith. If I give some random Jihadi asshole a paperclip and a drill, he's not getting in to the cockpit before the pilot makes an emergency landing/crashes the plane. This is true even if the lock is a Kwikset simply because a simple privacy latch solves the problem entirely. The threat is a "The Shining" axe murderer scenerio where the attacker realized the door/lock/frame is significantly stronger than the barrier wall they are mounted in.
Kicking down a door is completely possible and happens all the time. Locks are a moot point. Drilling out a lock will take 5-10 minutes max. Sure the pilot could crash the plane, but you are ignoring any human element. Pilots do not want to crash their own plane. You're assuming a 100% logical and thought-out response like the pilot is a computer.
Your ceramic knife example is a total and complete joke. This is reality, not a Quentin Tarantino film. In your fantasy world, a single defender can overcome 40-1 odds in CQC using a kitchen given strategic positioning and a kitchen knife. In practice, the hijackers would be as fucked as a bouncer at a Great White concert.
Odds would be 40-1, assuming that everyone on the plane is an able-bodied individual. What about kids, the disabled, elderly, and the cowards (Anonymous type)? In reality, only 7% of the country has ever served in the military, i.e. trained at some point to prevent this sort of threat. Was unable to find numbers for police officers, but it would be a safe assumption to say police officers make up a smaller percentage, and there is significant overlap. For argument's sake, assume 10% of the population has police/military experience. That means 20 people trained to defend themselves against 5 who are armed. Also keep in mind you must remove the elderly and disabled, disabled category = 20% of US population and elderly ~ 10%. So now we have 5 armed hijackers fighting against 14 properly trained individuals who are unarmed. Since the percentage of the US population serving in the military since 2001 is actually 0.45%, we can also safely assume that of the 14 veteran military and police, that only one will have served since 2001. Due to the makeup of the military, there is a roughly 30% that servicemember has actually served in direct combat. So the final tally is....
5 armed hijackers versus 1 servicemember (30% chance of direct combat experience) who has served since 2001 and 13 police/veterans who have not.
Also, BTW metal detectors are not looking for strongly magnetic objects, They look for objects above a certain density threshold which most/all ceramic knives will still set off. These detectors are least sensitive near the floor which is why the shoe bomber hid the detonator in his shoe, and why I suspect many metal detectors now have traction plate ramps preventing you from shuffling your feet through the scanner. Thanks for buying in to the urban legend though.
Citation please? Have not found a single article to back up anything which you have said.
If the TSA is supposed to prevent airline bombings(a threat of questionable merit relative to hundreds of softer targets where 300 deaths would be easier to achieve) then they are doing a shitty job. The plane is most vulnerable on takeoff and landing, but because of the economics of the situation(real estate is expensive), practically every airport in the world leaves their landing strips exposed to the effective range of traditional man-portable weapons.
So how many American planes have been shot down with a MANPAD?
So where did I say I was too scared to get on a plane? Oh right.... I didn't. All the attempted hijacking since 9/11 have been amateur hour. Get a few guys that have been trained and know how to fight (not many left, all got killed by drones) and there would be a problem.
Common house locks can be opened with little training. So-called "secure" locks are even worse, false sense of security. I've seen $1,000 locks be opened with 5 dollars of stuff from Wal-Mart. Same goes for so-called "secure facilities," which have locks that can be bypassed in under 5 minutes.
And tell me more about the security of 10-digit passcodes. So lets go with that password, with a $2,000 dollar laptop could be cracked in about 20 minutes?
I've used aviation headsets before. They do not cancel EVERY noise. Mainly rhythmic noises (like jet engine) and are constant and stable. Voices are reduced in volume, but can still be heard.
So tell me, how many times have you stood by while people are murdered a few feet away from you? If people always thought of the long-term effects and consequences of their actions, why do people still smoke, use meth/cocaine/heroin/etc., and commit crimes like murder and rape? You're expecting a logical response 100% of the time from people, who are not necessarily logical.
And how many millions were spent on body scanners? How many intelligent people could you hire to become TSA agents instead? Each one costs $200,000 or so. So you could hire 2-4 people (depending on location) who would make a living wage. Assuming typical work schedule, that means for every body scanner installed at an airport, you could put one more person at the checkpoints 24/7. At BWI, there are 20+ body scanners. I'd rather have 20 intelligent people chatting with people in line than get rape-scanned every time I go to the airport.
So you expect a human being to sit by while 200 people are killed on the other side of a door. Are we going to start hiring sociopaths to be airline pilots?
We are profiled all the time. Look at car insurance. Men pay more than women. Single people pay more than married people. People who live in urban areas pay more than people that live in rural areas. How about life insurance? Same thing. "Profiling", as you put it, is merely assigning people a risk category based on specific parameters, like age, gender, marital status, race, etc.
An 89 year old woman in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank is less likely to hijack a plane than a nervous 19 year old man who bought a one-way ticket to Washington D.C.
And discrimination is not in the Constitution, it was an act passed by Congress and signed into law by the President.
I do not disagree at all. Ever read "The Teeth of the Tiger"? Terrorists walk into the U.S. through the Mexican border and cause havoc. Completely plausible.
I was responding to the AC poster thinking that a metal scanner and locked cockpit doors would do just fine for airline security. I believe that reactionary security is bad security. There's no point in adapting to the tactics used by the bad guys 10 YEARS AGO, when they can be just as creative as anyone else. It would be like figuring out how to patch Windows 98 to conform to present-day security threats. Pointless.
Well let's see. Using some common military tactical knowledge (READ: Battle of Thermopalyae), it is completely plausible for a smaller force to defeat a larger force when the larger force is only able to bring a limited number of people into the fray. An airplane is a great example of this. Sure there are 200 people, but each row will only allow for 1 person to fit. So the reality, is that the fight would not be 100 v 5, it would be 1 v 1 repeated over and over again. And out of those 200 people, using pure statistics, there may be 5 passengers who were police or military, with the necessary skills to defeat an attacker with a knife while they are unarmed.
Metal is not the only threat. Ever used a ceramic knife? I have one in my kitchen and cuts just as well as my sharpest metal knife. How about plastic explosives? All you would need to ignite them is a small cell phone battery (allowed on planes). Locking the cockpit doors only does so much good. Think about coercion, "open the doors or we start killing people." Or, the well-known fact that every lock can be broken with tools as simple as a paper clip or a drill. Before you get started, electronic locks are even more vulnerable, being in the air gives someone a lot of time to brute force a lock that often has a 10-digit numeric combination.
It's not just about the Carrier. Having a Carrier says "Our nation/military is so strong, we can put 6,000 people on a boat and blow up your country from 300 miles away."
The Carriers of today are not the Battleships of WWI. Carriers have multiple defense systems like CIWS (shoots 3,000+ RPM) and Sea Sparrow missiles. A Carrier Group will have some sort of Aegis defense mechanism on board a few ships as well. Not to mention the aircraft complement of 50+. Throw in an E-2C and not much will get within 100 miles of that Carrier.
Let me rephrase. What's the point of an emergency backup generator which has a fuel source that is dependent on a single public utility company? I'd rather have the ability to call around during some sort of emergency event and find someone to bring out a tanker truck full of diesel than wait around for a utility company to get around to fixing their infrastructure.
What's the point of an emergency backup generator that is dependent on a utility company? The whole point of a backup is to be able to run your own facility without their help. What if electricity and gas lines are down? Whatever a backup power supply, it should be 100% independent of any public infrastructure.
Actually I hope that more datacenters start using natural gas to power their backups. That means that the datacenter I work for will be able to run for months without being dependent on a public utility company.
Slashdot Mirror
In other news, gun proliferation is great (despite murder rates two orders of magnitude higher than civilised countries) but terminate a foetus and you're going to Hell.
Citation please? I believe Switzerland would tend to disagree with you.
Alright AC, here ya go.
If the TSA is supposed to prevent hijackings, they are useless. I spent years as a locksmith. If I give some random Jihadi asshole a paperclip and a drill, he's not getting in to the cockpit before the pilot makes an emergency landing/crashes the plane. This is true even if the lock is a Kwikset simply because a simple privacy latch solves the problem entirely. The threat is a "The Shining" axe murderer scenerio where the attacker realized the door/lock/frame is significantly stronger than the barrier wall they are mounted in.
Kicking down a door is completely possible and happens all the time. Locks are a moot point. Drilling out a lock will take 5-10 minutes max. Sure the pilot could crash the plane, but you are ignoring any human element. Pilots do not want to crash their own plane. You're assuming a 100% logical and thought-out response like the pilot is a computer.
Your ceramic knife example is a total and complete joke. This is reality, not a Quentin Tarantino film. In your fantasy world, a single defender can overcome 40-1 odds in CQC using a kitchen given strategic positioning and a kitchen knife. In practice, the hijackers would be as fucked as a bouncer at a Great White concert.
Odds would be 40-1, assuming that everyone on the plane is an able-bodied individual. What about kids, the disabled, elderly, and the cowards (Anonymous type)? In reality, only 7% of the country has ever served in the military, i.e. trained at some point to prevent this sort of threat. Was unable to find numbers for police officers, but it would be a safe assumption to say police officers make up a smaller percentage, and there is significant overlap. For argument's sake, assume 10% of the population has police/military experience. That means 20 people trained to defend themselves against 5 who are armed. Also keep in mind you must remove the elderly and disabled, disabled category = 20% of US population and elderly ~ 10%. So now we have 5 armed hijackers fighting against 14 properly trained individuals who are unarmed. Since the percentage of the US population serving in the military since 2001 is actually 0.45%, we can also safely assume that of the 14 veteran military and police, that only one will have served since 2001. Due to the makeup of the military, there is a roughly 30% that servicemember has actually served in direct combat. So the final tally is....
5 armed hijackers versus 1 servicemember (30% chance of direct combat experience) who has served since 2001 and 13 police/veterans who have not.
Also, BTW metal detectors are not looking for strongly magnetic objects, They look for objects above a certain density threshold which most/all ceramic knives will still set off. These detectors are least sensitive near the floor which is why the shoe bomber hid the detonator in his shoe, and why I suspect many metal detectors now have traction plate ramps preventing you from shuffling your feet through the scanner. Thanks for buying in to the urban legend though.
Citation please? Have not found a single article to back up anything which you have said.
If the TSA is supposed to prevent airline bombings(a threat of questionable merit relative to hundreds of softer targets where 300 deaths would be easier to achieve) then they are doing a shitty job. The plane is most vulnerable on takeoff and landing, but because of the economics of the situation(real estate is expensive), practically every airport in the world leaves their landing strips exposed to the effective range of traditional man-portable weapons.
So how many American planes have been shot down with a MANPAD?
So where did I say I was too scared to get on a plane? Oh right.... I didn't. All the attempted hijacking since 9/11 have been amateur hour. Get a few guys that have been trained and know how to fight (not many left, all got killed by drones) and there would be a problem.
If the Navy can track whales and dolphins with their systems, they can track a rowboat.
Common house locks can be opened with little training. So-called "secure" locks are even worse, false sense of security. I've seen $1,000 locks be opened with 5 dollars of stuff from Wal-Mart. Same goes for so-called "secure facilities," which have locks that can be bypassed in under 5 minutes.
And tell me more about the security of 10-digit passcodes. So lets go with that password, with a $2,000 dollar laptop could be cracked in about 20 minutes?
I've used aviation headsets before. They do not cancel EVERY noise. Mainly rhythmic noises (like jet engine) and are constant and stable. Voices are reduced in volume, but can still be heard.
Exactly. Nobody "sneaks" across the border into the United States.
So tell me, how many times have you stood by while people are murdered a few feet away from you? If people always thought of the long-term effects and consequences of their actions, why do people still smoke, use meth/cocaine/heroin/etc., and commit crimes like murder and rape? You're expecting a logical response 100% of the time from people, who are not necessarily logical.
AC talks like a scared little girl hiding in her parents basement. 'nuff said
So tell me, how many wars have you fought?
1.5 Soundproof the cockpit.
And how many millions were spent on body scanners? How many intelligent people could you hire to become TSA agents instead? Each one costs $200,000 or so. So you could hire 2-4 people (depending on location) who would make a living wage. Assuming typical work schedule, that means for every body scanner installed at an airport, you could put one more person at the checkpoints 24/7. At BWI, there are 20+ body scanners. I'd rather have 20 intelligent people chatting with people in line than get rape-scanned every time I go to the airport.
So you expect a human being to sit by while 200 people are killed on the other side of a door. Are we going to start hiring sociopaths to be airline pilots?
We are profiled all the time. Look at car insurance. Men pay more than women. Single people pay more than married people. People who live in urban areas pay more than people that live in rural areas. How about life insurance? Same thing. "Profiling", as you put it, is merely assigning people a risk category based on specific parameters, like age, gender, marital status, race, etc.
An 89 year old woman in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank is less likely to hijack a plane than a nervous 19 year old man who bought a one-way ticket to Washington D.C.
And discrimination is not in the Constitution, it was an act passed by Congress and signed into law by the President.
I do not disagree at all. Ever read "The Teeth of the Tiger"? Terrorists walk into the U.S. through the Mexican border and cause havoc. Completely plausible.
I was responding to the AC poster thinking that a metal scanner and locked cockpit doors would do just fine for airline security. I believe that reactionary security is bad security. There's no point in adapting to the tactics used by the bad guys 10 YEARS AGO, when they can be just as creative as anyone else. It would be like figuring out how to patch Windows 98 to conform to present-day security threats. Pointless.
You mean methods that require smart and highly trained screening personnel? Is the US government even allowed to hire those kinds of people?
FTFY
Well let's see. Using some common military tactical knowledge (READ: Battle of Thermopalyae), it is completely plausible for a smaller force to defeat a larger force when the larger force is only able to bring a limited number of people into the fray. An airplane is a great example of this. Sure there are 200 people, but each row will only allow for 1 person to fit. So the reality, is that the fight would not be 100 v 5, it would be 1 v 1 repeated over and over again. And out of those 200 people, using pure statistics, there may be 5 passengers who were police or military, with the necessary skills to defeat an attacker with a knife while they are unarmed.
You're crazy.
Metal is not the only threat. Ever used a ceramic knife? I have one in my kitchen and cuts just as well as my sharpest metal knife. How about plastic explosives? All you would need to ignite them is a small cell phone battery (allowed on planes). Locking the cockpit doors only does so much good. Think about coercion, "open the doors or we start killing people." Or, the well-known fact that every lock can be broken with tools as simple as a paper clip or a drill. Before you get started, electronic locks are even more vulnerable, being in the air gives someone a lot of time to brute force a lock that often has a 10-digit numeric combination.
Second generation != better
Maybe they should think about using the methods employed by countries like Israel which actually work.
New Eden is calling, they need you to go mine Veldspar.
It's not just about the Carrier. Having a Carrier says "Our nation/military is so strong, we can put 6,000 people on a boat and blow up your country from 300 miles away."
The Carriers of today are not the Battleships of WWI. Carriers have multiple defense systems like CIWS (shoots 3,000+ RPM) and Sea Sparrow missiles. A Carrier Group will have some sort of Aegis defense mechanism on board a few ships as well. Not to mention the aircraft complement of 50+. Throw in an E-2C and not much will get within 100 miles of that Carrier.
Let me rephrase. What's the point of an emergency backup generator which has a fuel source that is dependent on a single public utility company? I'd rather have the ability to call around during some sort of emergency event and find someone to bring out a tanker truck full of diesel than wait around for a utility company to get around to fixing their infrastructure.
Is going to hit 1000 comments no problem.
RTFA. This is not about primary power source for anything. This is about emergency backup power generation.
What's the point of an emergency backup generator that is dependent on a utility company? The whole point of a backup is to be able to run your own facility without their help. What if electricity and gas lines are down? Whatever a backup power supply, it should be 100% independent of any public infrastructure.
Actually I hope that more datacenters start using natural gas to power their backups. That means that the datacenter I work for will be able to run for months without being dependent on a public utility company.