I know you're just trying to be funny, but I think you've hit onto something here. I don't remember FORTRAN at all anymore; I think C++ crowded it out. I'm afraid to learn Ruby because I'll almost certainly forget BASIC. Then I realize that might not be a bad thing.
Note that 'criminal activity' can include protesting without a permit, or across the street from an unapproved protest zone, or -- if the bill they're talking about passes -- protesting while wearing a hoodie.
You're not listening to me, so I'm done. Go on, keep trying to blame this on a specific incident and individual. I'll just hope that someday people will understand that it's a symptom of a problem in society, and the individuals involved are interchangeable.
I think we're talking at cross purposes, and apparently it's getting me labeled as a troll. (shrug; I have karma to burn.) I'm not trying to cause an argument. I am trying to show that the riots were inevitable given the conditions of the disadvantaged people in the area and the triggering incidents, and they are exactly analogous to the revolutionary movements of the Arab spring.
Whether Mike Duggan was in a drug gang or not, it appears that he was shot without cause. They found a gun in his car, in a sock, so it's not plausible that he aimed it at the police. That's a triggering incident -- police should not kill people without adequate provocation.
The girl threw a stone, there's no question about that. She threw it at a line of riot shields, and was severely beaten in response. That's a triggering incident -- police response needs to be proportionate to the threat against them. A little girl with a rock is not a threat to a line of policemen in riot gear.
Was Mike Duggan a criminal? Probably. Did the girl commit attempted assault? Almost certainly yes. But the overbearing response to their actions sparked this riot. Once sparked, it exploded because the area is so underprivileged and so distrustful of authority.
I don't care who was in the right and who was in the wrong. I don't even care about these incidents in particular. If they incidents hadn't triggered something, a later incident would have. From a sociological point of view this area was primed to explode, and eventually something would have made it gone up. These particular triggers could have been avoided if the police had more self control, but the real cause is poverty. Democracy wasn't helping them with that, just as the dictatorship in Egypt wasn't helping the people there.
You're right, there's a lot of question about whether Mike Duggan was armed or not. Police say he had a gun and fired at them, but he didn't hit a thing. (A single bullet found in a police radio turns out to have come from a police weapon.)
That caused a protest. When a 16 year old girl threw a stone at a line of riot shields and was beaten, that caused the riot.
If you treat people with this much disrespect, they're going to lash back violently, especially if the government has been making their lives miserable for generations already.
Not all protests are peaceful. The triggering incident in this case was the shooting of an unarmed man, and the beating of a teenage girl by the police. These protestors want the police and the government to respect them, and they are showing that by disrespecting the laws they have been forced to live under.
From a sociological perspective, any group of people who are disadvantaged enough will eventually revolt. In that light there is no difference between the London riots and the Egyptian revolution. The people in both cases were mistreated, and have grown up in poverty, and it does not matter whether it was democratic programs or dictatorship that did it to them.
I applaud any technology that helps the disadvantaged send a message to the people in power. Sometimes it's going to be violent. That's not the fault of the technology; it's the fault of the leaders who allowed their country to have such disparity in wealth and civil rights.
So you're saying that I, with my non-jailbroken, non-tethering phone, can get my service disconnected by using a SSH app?
Considering SSH is about the lowest-bandwidth service I can think of, I find this hard to believe. But it's something I'll be testing tonight. I use SSH on my Android phone all the time when I'm away from home.
Does anyone on/. know of any purely CGI acted movies? I'm not talking about anime, or even rotoscoped like "scanner darkly" but a movie where all the actors are "realistic looking computer generated human beings"? Like all tech, I'm sure the pr0n industry will implement it first...
The best example is probably James Cameron's Avatar. All the aliens were computer-generated, and the acting for them is pretty good. Of course it's not as good as Andy Serkis in 'Rise'....
Most of the naysayers who haven't seen this film are complaining that they don't believe a handful of apes could take over the entire planet.
Well, they don't. Get over that. This is a prison breakout movie. They do eventually own the planet, through a twist that's telegraphed in advance and completely plausible. But the main action is a couple hundred apes against the San Francisco PD.
Just go see the movie. It's very, very good, completely plausible, with no plot holes. (Although as mentioned, some of the humans in it do act stupidly evil.) And Serkis deserves an Oscar nod for the role.
The 2008 economic shock was the greatest in over 80 years. The stimulus that was passed was marginal. It failed not because it was the wrong approach, it failed because it was a drop in a very large bucket with a hole in it.
Patch the hole (with real market regulation, and for god's sake get the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau off the ground), and give the economy a better boost, and you'll see results.
I realize that prescription is politically impossible, but it is the only way out. All other paths out of our troubles lead through a generation-long recession, or through war. (And this time, my money would be on civil war.)
Step 1: Recycle human waste into drinkable water. Step 2: Privatize the water recycling business. Step 3: Because human waste is now a commodity, pass laws forbidding anyone to pee anywhere but in a restroom with an approved capture facility. Step 4: Charge people for entry into the restrooms. Step 5: Profit!
Congratulations, you've started down the road to Urinetown!
"Those who made dough from debasing / Need erasing, need the knife / Let their blood flow like Campari, / We're not sorry - Hey that's life! They're not sorry! I'm not sorry! No one's sorry, no one's sorry, 'til they get to Urinetown!"
Let me break it down to the most basic of concepts:
Democrats want the government to spend more. The TEA Party wants the government to spend less.
Who do you think is right here?
In a global recession on the verge of depression? The Democrats, hands down.
Although 'the Democrats' misrepresents that side of the argument. Sane economists and a few lawmakers want to increase government stimulus. Some Democrats are stupid, however, and want to spend less, just not as much less as the Tea Party. The president, unfortunately, is among the latter.
The only problem is that congress has an insatiable appetite for spending money. If we increased taxes 11.6% what would stop government from spending it and then some. No this isn't a R or D thing as they both just spend on different things.
This is the essential problem -- do you trust government? It does break down into R and D, though. Ds, in general, do trust government, and Rs in general do not. Personally, I feel that government got us into this mess and we need it to get out, but I do want watchmen and safeguards in place to keep it on the right focus.
Additionally there are probably lots of cuts that could be done
No, there really aren't. Look, we essentially need to add 11.6% in revenues, or cut the equivalent, or both, to eliminate the deficit. Look at the federal budget. We spend a total of 19% of it on discretionary spending -- corn subsidies, food stamps, education, highway spending, food inspection, etc. You would have to eliminate 60% of all federal discretionary programs in order to save enough money. It can't be done, not without destroying the republic.
Where you have to cut is where the fat is. That means defense -- our defense spending is way out of whack, 40% of the world total and more than six times the second-largest spender (China). If we cut defense in half we would still be the biggest spender in the world, and we'd nearly eliminate the deficit. There's also fat in Medicare/Medicaid -- our health care system is horrible and much more expensive than it should be, and it could be cleaned up and trimmed.
Social Security does *not* need reform. It's 20% of the money going out, but it's 40% of the money coming in. Social Security is flush, a net positive in our national budget, until at least 2037. Anyone who says they want to reform Social Security is trying to raid your paycheck to get tax breaks for the rich.
But even if you clean up Medicare and decimate Defense spending, you're still only going to eliminate the deficit. To dig away at the debt, we need a surplus. There's no way to get that without revenue increases. I'd be willing to pay 12% more in taxes to make this entire debate go away, or even just to shut up some of the morons on TV bloviating about it.
The debt is a one-time sum. (It keeps growing, but it's not an annual accruance.) Income is annual, and repeats. So if you take all the income from every American, they would pay off the debt in 1.17 years -- one year's worth of income, plus about two months from the next year's income. Then we'd have no debt and everyone would get their income back.
If you want to compare apples to apples, then compare personal income to the deficit, which is the amount that the debt is growing each year. The deficit is about 1.4 T. If we tax incomes an average of 11.6% higher then the deficit disappears and we start shrinking the debt.
You missed the third part of their announcement: No mods. They won't enable them, they won't allow them, and they won't stand by while the community creates them.
I don't care because I never used many mods, but I expect this to cause a bigger uproar than the auction house announcement.
So I'm reading that there are three parts to what Blizzard revealed today.
1. D3 players must be always connected to the internet. I don't much care about this, as long as I can play single-player. All my Steam games are always connected already; I'm getting used to it. As long as I can have a game that outsiders cannot join and that is balanced for a single person, I don't care if my internet connection has to be on to play it. (Two years ago my answer would have been different, as I only had a flaky dialup connection, but they brought DSL out to my rural area so I'm good now.)
2. No mods. I understand the modding community was a big part of that game, but I wasn't into it very much. I played one mod: After I sucked all the enjoyment out of D2 that I could, I used a mod that gave me the ability to create max-level characters with perfect ability scores and infinite cash, just to wring a little more out of the game. I got bored of that mod in a week. I won't miss mods in D3.
3. The real money auction house. This is an add-on; there will still be an in-game gold auction house and market, just like in D2. So...I don't care. I can ignore it if I choose, as long as it's an addition to the game and not a replacement for one of the existing features. And if I want to sell some crap then I might have the option of selling it for real pennies instead of gold. I'll probably never take the option but I don't mind having it.
These announcements don't bother me at all. I can understand them bothering people with poor internet connections, or serious modders, or gold farmers. I don't fall into any of those categories, so it's a big yawn for me.
If anyone *is* bothered by the way D3 is shaping up, they may have an alternative -- the co-op enabled Torchlight 2. Since they now have competition I doubt that Blizzard will screw up D3 too badly. But if they do I'll yawn again and go play the competing product.
Worth noting (for anyone curious) that every one of the six main characters has at least a short scene where they suffer some severe problem of that sort. Looked like quiet, sweet, loving, friend-to-all-animals Fluttershy was going to get away without one. And then the season finale happened and she earned the nicknames "Flutterrage" and "Psychoshy".
Fluttershy was well on her way to a reputation as the secretly most-dangerous pony in the show after the episodes 'Stare Master' and 'Dragonshy'.
What I love about this show is that, despite it ostensibly being for little girls, it's actually a show about a superhero team. The analogues to the X-Men and Avengers are so obvious I'm convinced they were deliberately planted. (Twilight's powers were activated in 'Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns', in a scene very much like how Professor X restrained Jean Grey.) The subtext of the show is meaty and compelling. Kids can accept the surface story, that Twilight Sparkle accidentally met the perfect ponies to activate the Elements of Harmony. But adults put the clues together and notice that Celestia engineered all those events, for some purpose that is, if not sinister, at least well-calculated and subtle.
This show has adult male fans because it's a superhero show, with characterization and plotlines that are surprisingly deep. Hasbro gets credit for allowing the fans to go nuts and be creative.
"Reasonable person" I understand. I can even accept "fair-usey enough" as a description. But what do you mean by "anything more than a parody"?
Does a parody have to be also a work of art or a political statement in order to be legally acceptable? Or are those bad things? Is a parody supposed to look like an original work? You seem to be saying that the more original the parody, the less legal it is, which frankly just breaks my brain.
Whatever. I may not understand copyright law, but I know when a company is behaving well, and Hasbro deserves a lot of kudos for their acceptance of the brony fandom.
I'm pretty sure they will tie that in with the Hulk, to bring all the Avengers origins together.
"Vita rays? We call those Gamma rays, now. And the supersoldier serum we used was similar to what you were playing with, Doctor Banner. Your father was on the project, Mister Stark, and we stopped the Nazis from using Asgardian technology."
Voila, a single piece of dialogue turns them into one big superhero family.
These x-ray scanners give you a much smaller ionizing radiation dose than you'll get from the flight itself.
This is true. However, the harder radiation you get from high-altitude travel is full-body radiation -- it passes through your entire body. The radiation from the TSA scanners are concentrated on the skin. This negates any chance of deep tissue cancers, but raises the chance of skin cancer.
Personally, I won't get in one of those machines. I like a good pat-down or two on my vacations, anyway.
Yes, but they've failed the Art of the Star. Maybe they can Giggle at the Gas Giants, but they're no more than Cupcakes compared to other stars who are At the Galactic mean size.
Most importantly, what these brown dwarfs are are MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects), which is a competitor to the WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particle) theory of dark matter. So with this discovery we may begin a WIMPy Wrap-Up.
How much information do you think they don't already know?
Whenever I fly the airline already knows my name, address, email address, phone number and credit card information. Often (especially if I'm flying for business) they also have a phone number for my destination, the name of anyone traveling with me, and my driver's license number. I don't know what other information they could want or need.
In fact, I don't know what the TSA could want to know that the airline doesn't already. My height and weight? My medical history? My (lack of) criminal record? I have an FBI case file, but they could pull that up with just my name. As long as they're not asking for my passwords or my porn preferences, I have no trouble giving them information that every other company I do business with already has.
The other side of that, of course, is that it's not going to help the security problem one whit. Any terrorist who can come up with a reasonable enough cover to buy an airplane ticket is going to have all the data that the TSA needs to be 'trusted'. It's still security theater.
Slashdot Mirror
I know you're just trying to be funny, but I think you've hit onto something here. I don't remember FORTRAN at all anymore; I think C++ crowded it out. I'm afraid to learn Ruby because I'll almost certainly forget BASIC. Then I realize that might not be a bad thing.
Note that 'criminal activity' can include protesting without a permit, or across the street from an unapproved protest zone, or -- if the bill they're talking about passes -- protesting while wearing a hoodie.
You're not listening to me, so I'm done. Go on, keep trying to blame this on a specific incident and individual. I'll just hope that someday people will understand that it's a symptom of a problem in society, and the individuals involved are interchangeable.
I think we're talking at cross purposes, and apparently it's getting me labeled as a troll. (shrug; I have karma to burn.) I'm not trying to cause an argument. I am trying to show that the riots were inevitable given the conditions of the disadvantaged people in the area and the triggering incidents, and they are exactly analogous to the revolutionary movements of the Arab spring.
Whether Mike Duggan was in a drug gang or not, it appears that he was shot without cause. They found a gun in his car, in a sock, so it's not plausible that he aimed it at the police. That's a triggering incident -- police should not kill people without adequate provocation.
The girl threw a stone, there's no question about that. She threw it at a line of riot shields, and was severely beaten in response. That's a triggering incident -- police response needs to be proportionate to the threat against them. A little girl with a rock is not a threat to a line of policemen in riot gear.
Was Mike Duggan a criminal? Probably. Did the girl commit attempted assault? Almost certainly yes. But the overbearing response to their actions sparked this riot. Once sparked, it exploded because the area is so underprivileged and so distrustful of authority.
I don't care who was in the right and who was in the wrong. I don't even care about these incidents in particular. If they incidents hadn't triggered something, a later incident would have. From a sociological point of view this area was primed to explode, and eventually something would have made it gone up. These particular triggers could have been avoided if the police had more self control, but the real cause is poverty. Democracy wasn't helping them with that, just as the dictatorship in Egypt wasn't helping the people there.
You're right, there's a lot of question about whether Mike Duggan was armed or not. Police say he had a gun and fired at them, but he didn't hit a thing. (A single bullet found in a police radio turns out to have come from a police weapon.)
That caused a protest. When a 16 year old girl threw a stone at a line of riot shields and was beaten, that caused the riot.
The best citations for these is at the Guardian's blog about the riots. Here's a good report of the Mike Duggan incident; here's one about the girl.
If you treat people with this much disrespect, they're going to lash back violently, especially if the government has been making their lives miserable for generations already.
Not all protests are peaceful. The triggering incident in this case was the shooting of an unarmed man, and the beating of a teenage girl by the police. These protestors want the police and the government to respect them, and they are showing that by disrespecting the laws they have been forced to live under.
From a sociological perspective, any group of people who are disadvantaged enough will eventually revolt. In that light there is no difference between the London riots and the Egyptian revolution. The people in both cases were mistreated, and have grown up in poverty, and it does not matter whether it was democratic programs or dictatorship that did it to them.
I applaud any technology that helps the disadvantaged send a message to the people in power. Sometimes it's going to be violent. That's not the fault of the technology; it's the fault of the leaders who allowed their country to have such disparity in wealth and civil rights.
So you're saying that I, with my non-jailbroken, non-tethering phone, can get my service disconnected by using a SSH app?
Considering SSH is about the lowest-bandwidth service I can think of, I find this hard to believe. But it's something I'll be testing tonight. I use SSH on my Android phone all the time when I'm away from home.
Does anyone on /. know of any purely CGI acted movies? I'm not talking about anime, or even rotoscoped like "scanner darkly" but a movie where all the actors are "realistic looking computer generated human beings"? Like all tech, I'm sure the pr0n industry will implement it first...
I think one of the first was Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. Not a great film, but the tech is impressive for its era (2001).
The best example is probably James Cameron's Avatar. All the aliens were computer-generated, and the acting for them is pretty good. Of course it's not as good as Andy Serkis in 'Rise'....
Most of the naysayers who haven't seen this film are complaining that they don't believe a handful of apes could take over the entire planet.
Well, they don't. Get over that. This is a prison breakout movie. They do eventually own the planet, through a twist that's telegraphed in advance and completely plausible. But the main action is a couple hundred apes against the San Francisco PD.
Just go see the movie. It's very, very good, completely plausible, with no plot holes. (Although as mentioned, some of the humans in it do act stupidly evil.) And Serkis deserves an Oscar nod for the role.
The 2008 economic shock was the greatest in over 80 years. The stimulus that was passed was marginal. It failed not because it was the wrong approach, it failed because it was a drop in a very large bucket with a hole in it.
Patch the hole (with real market regulation, and for god's sake get the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau off the ground), and give the economy a better boost, and you'll see results.
I realize that prescription is politically impossible, but it is the only way out. All other paths out of our troubles lead through a generation-long recession, or through war. (And this time, my money would be on civil war.)
Step 1: Recycle human waste into drinkable water.
Step 2: Privatize the water recycling business.
Step 3: Because human waste is now a commodity, pass laws forbidding anyone to pee anywhere but in a restroom with an approved capture facility.
Step 4: Charge people for entry into the restrooms.
Step 5: Profit!
Congratulations, you've started down the road to Urinetown!
"Those who made dough from debasing / Need erasing, need the knife / Let their blood flow like Campari, / We're not sorry - Hey that's life!
They're not sorry! I'm not sorry! No one's sorry, no one's sorry, 'til they get to Urinetown!"
Let me break it down to the most basic of concepts:
Democrats want the government to spend more. The TEA Party wants the government to spend less.
Who do you think is right here?
In a global recession on the verge of depression? The Democrats, hands down.
Although 'the Democrats' misrepresents that side of the argument. Sane economists and a few lawmakers want to increase government stimulus. Some Democrats are stupid, however, and want to spend less, just not as much less as the Tea Party. The president, unfortunately, is among the latter.
The only problem is that congress has an insatiable appetite for spending money. If we increased taxes 11.6% what would stop government from spending it and then some. No this isn't a R or D thing as they both just spend on different things.
This is the essential problem -- do you trust government? It does break down into R and D, though. Ds, in general, do trust government, and Rs in general do not. Personally, I feel that government got us into this mess and we need it to get out, but I do want watchmen and safeguards in place to keep it on the right focus.
Additionally there are probably lots of cuts that could be done
No, there really aren't. Look, we essentially need to add 11.6% in revenues, or cut the equivalent, or both, to eliminate the deficit. Look at the federal budget. We spend a total of 19% of it on discretionary spending -- corn subsidies, food stamps, education, highway spending, food inspection, etc. You would have to eliminate 60% of all federal discretionary programs in order to save enough money. It can't be done, not without destroying the republic.
Where you have to cut is where the fat is. That means defense -- our defense spending is way out of whack, 40% of the world total and more than six times the second-largest spender (China). If we cut defense in half we would still be the biggest spender in the world, and we'd nearly eliminate the deficit. There's also fat in Medicare/Medicaid -- our health care system is horrible and much more expensive than it should be, and it could be cleaned up and trimmed.
Social Security does *not* need reform. It's 20% of the money going out, but it's 40% of the money coming in. Social Security is flush, a net positive in our national budget, until at least 2037. Anyone who says they want to reform Social Security is trying to raid your paycheck to get tax breaks for the rich.
But even if you clean up Medicare and decimate Defense spending, you're still only going to eliminate the deficit. To dig away at the debt, we need a surplus. There's no way to get that without revenue increases. I'd be willing to pay 12% more in taxes to make this entire debate go away, or even just to shut up some of the morons on TV bloviating about it.
The debt is a one-time sum. (It keeps growing, but it's not an annual accruance.) Income is annual, and repeats. So if you take all the income from every American, they would pay off the debt in 1.17 years -- one year's worth of income, plus about two months from the next year's income. Then we'd have no debt and everyone would get their income back.
If you want to compare apples to apples, then compare personal income to the deficit, which is the amount that the debt is growing each year. The deficit is about 1.4 T. If we tax incomes an average of 11.6% higher then the deficit disappears and we start shrinking the debt.
You missed the third part of their announcement: No mods. They won't enable them, they won't allow them, and they won't stand by while the community creates them.
I don't care because I never used many mods, but I expect this to cause a bigger uproar than the auction house announcement.
So I'm reading that there are three parts to what Blizzard revealed today.
1. D3 players must be always connected to the internet. I don't much care about this, as long as I can play single-player. All my Steam games are always connected already; I'm getting used to it. As long as I can have a game that outsiders cannot join and that is balanced for a single person, I don't care if my internet connection has to be on to play it. (Two years ago my answer would have been different, as I only had a flaky dialup connection, but they brought DSL out to my rural area so I'm good now.)
2. No mods. I understand the modding community was a big part of that game, but I wasn't into it very much. I played one mod: After I sucked all the enjoyment out of D2 that I could, I used a mod that gave me the ability to create max-level characters with perfect ability scores and infinite cash, just to wring a little more out of the game. I got bored of that mod in a week. I won't miss mods in D3.
3. The real money auction house. This is an add-on; there will still be an in-game gold auction house and market, just like in D2. So...I don't care. I can ignore it if I choose, as long as it's an addition to the game and not a replacement for one of the existing features. And if I want to sell some crap then I might have the option of selling it for real pennies instead of gold. I'll probably never take the option but I don't mind having it.
These announcements don't bother me at all. I can understand them bothering people with poor internet connections, or serious modders, or gold farmers. I don't fall into any of those categories, so it's a big yawn for me.
If anyone *is* bothered by the way D3 is shaping up, they may have an alternative -- the co-op enabled Torchlight 2. Since they now have competition I doubt that Blizzard will screw up D3 too badly. But if they do I'll yawn again and go play the competing product.
Worth noting (for anyone curious) that every one of the six main characters has at least a short scene where they suffer some severe problem of that sort. Looked like quiet, sweet, loving, friend-to-all-animals Fluttershy was going to get away without one. And then the season finale happened and she earned the nicknames "Flutterrage" and "Psychoshy".
Fluttershy was well on her way to a reputation as the secretly most-dangerous pony in the show after the episodes 'Stare Master' and 'Dragonshy'.
What I love about this show is that, despite it ostensibly being for little girls, it's actually a show about a superhero team. The analogues to the X-Men and Avengers are so obvious I'm convinced they were deliberately planted. (Twilight's powers were activated in 'Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns', in a scene very much like how Professor X restrained Jean Grey.) The subtext of the show is meaty and compelling. Kids can accept the surface story, that Twilight Sparkle accidentally met the perfect ponies to activate the Elements of Harmony. But adults put the clues together and notice that Celestia engineered all those events, for some purpose that is, if not sinister, at least well-calculated and subtle.
This show has adult male fans because it's a superhero show, with characterization and plotlines that are surprisingly deep. Hasbro gets credit for allowing the fans to go nuts and be creative.
"Reasonable person" I understand. I can even accept "fair-usey enough" as a description. But what do you mean by "anything more than a parody"?
Does a parody have to be also a work of art or a political statement in order to be legally acceptable? Or are those bad things? Is a parody supposed to look like an original work? You seem to be saying that the more original the parody, the less legal it is, which frankly just breaks my brain.
Whatever. I may not understand copyright law, but I know when a company is behaving well, and Hasbro deserves a lot of kudos for their acceptance of the brony fandom.
What's the difference human beings and parasitic worms?
The endorsement of the RNC?
I'm pretty sure they will tie that in with the Hulk, to bring all the Avengers origins together.
"Vita rays? We call those Gamma rays, now. And the supersoldier serum we used was similar to what you were playing with, Doctor Banner. Your father was on the project, Mister Stark, and we stopped the Nazis from using Asgardian technology."
Voila, a single piece of dialogue turns them into one big superhero family.
If making catgirls becomes illegal in Britain, we'll just make them in Japan. That would be disastrous. The Japanese are already years ahead of us in catgirl technology. We cannot afford a greater catgirl gap.
These x-ray scanners give you a much smaller ionizing radiation dose than you'll get from the flight itself.
This is true. However, the harder radiation you get from high-altitude travel is full-body radiation -- it passes through your entire body. The radiation from the TSA scanners are concentrated on the skin. This negates any chance of deep tissue cancers, but raises the chance of skin cancer.
Personally, I won't get in one of those machines. I like a good pat-down or two on my vacations, anyway.
Hear that? That's the sound of in-jokes making a sonic rainboom as they fly over your head.
Yes, but they've failed the Art of the Star. Maybe they can Giggle at the Gas Giants, but they're no more than Cupcakes compared to other stars who are At the Galactic mean size.
Most importantly, what these brown dwarfs are are MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects), which is a competitor to the WIMP (Weakly Interacting Massive Particle) theory of dark matter. So with this discovery we may begin a WIMPy Wrap-Up.
How much information do you think they don't already know?
Whenever I fly the airline already knows my name, address, email address, phone number and credit card information. Often (especially if I'm flying for business) they also have a phone number for my destination, the name of anyone traveling with me, and my driver's license number. I don't know what other information they could want or need.
In fact, I don't know what the TSA could want to know that the airline doesn't already. My height and weight? My medical history? My (lack of) criminal record? I have an FBI case file, but they could pull that up with just my name. As long as they're not asking for my passwords or my porn preferences, I have no trouble giving them information that every other company I do business with already has.
The other side of that, of course, is that it's not going to help the security problem one whit. Any terrorist who can come up with a reasonable enough cover to buy an airplane ticket is going to have all the data that the TSA needs to be 'trusted'. It's still security theater.