Once many years ago, long before the current terror terror, a traveller at the Stockholm airport got fed up with an overly pedantic search and held up his small bunch of keys saying bitterly "Aren't you going to analyze this? It's a bomb." As a result they emptied the entire airport, with its several thousand employees, and its tens of thousands of passengers. They stopped all flights for several hours. The cost was astronomical.
Why bother with a real bomb when a bomb threat is just as (if not more) effective...
The question you need to ask is "Why is a drivers license treated as an ID document in my country ?". In the rest of the civilized world, that's not the case.
This problem is spreading to other parts of the world. Fortunatly few places are as daft as to make driving documents almost required to purchase alcohol.
You have documents that are an ID and you have documents that allow you to drive a vehicle on public roads. And you cannot use one type for the purpose of the other.
AFAIK there is nowhere that a passport is an acceptable document to drive on public roads.
That does kind of suggest that they had valid visas at some point.
The logical follow on from that is that if they'd timed what they were doing more carefully, their visas would not have been expired.
Or "they" knew that US authorities were lax in dealing with people who's visas expired so they didn't much care about the length of their visas/getting them renewed.
A couple of the 9/11 hijackers are believed to have gotten their passports from family members who worked in the passport office.
If people can get hold of documents in such a way you can't trust anything you might think you know from those documents.
If you've got friends on the inside, it doesn't matter what border you enter the country from -- Canada, Mexico, Sweden, or a direct flight from Kabul.
Depending exactly what the "inside" is they might never have entered in the first place.
Actually, they didn't all have valid visas, some had expired. Others bought ID at the 7-11 in Falls Church down near Seven Corners shopping center. Bought from the same kind folks that sell fake IDs to illegal aliens.
Considering that several of the alleged hijackers turned up alive, together with such obviously planted evidence as the "magic passport". It would be quite likely that all of the IDs involved were either stolen or fraudlant. Together with it being unclear where the names came from and the lack of a proper investigation at the time really means that the whole Al Quada thing would best be simply filed under "daft conspiracy theories" than treated as anything to set any kind of policy by.
And our current "security theater" is as absurd as the "tollbooth scene" in "Blazing Saddles".
You could probably make a lot of movies for the same amount of money. Especially since the plots would probably come gratis.
Terrorists kill less people in the US than cars, smoking, the war on drugs, just about anything actually.
With the "War on Terror" only being concerned about a minority of terrorists too.
And yet we are still spending more and more money and making everyday life a pain in the ass for more and more people all just to score a few cheap political points.
Actually very expensive political terms. Both in terms of dollers spend and making the US the laughing stock of the planet...
How the fuck did we get stuck with this pathetic government anyway?
Having too many career politicans, which is not just a problem in the US.
Thirteen of the terrorists had Florida driver's licenses or ID cards, seven had Virginia driver's licenses, at least two had California licenses and two had New Jersey driver's licenses. WHY? Why do we give licenses to foreigners to begin with?
Presumably they passed the appropriate driving tests. The real question is more along the lines of "Why treat a machine operators permit as an identity document".
are you also aware that there were enough facts and analyses and at least a few low level FBI personnel that "connected the dots" all with existing systems before 9/11? The only problem was the institutional behavior of mid-level managers ignoring what subordinates push up.
The interesting question being exactly why these people "ignored"...
So I really think these new data collection schemes are the administration's goal to check up on the domestic populace and weed out the real enemies (in their eyes anyway), which are Democrats, libertarians, and any other non-neocon or non-Republican.
This is the kind of thing which "state security" has historically been very interested in doing. More disturbing is that with this sort of mentality "terrorist attacks" can actually be to the advantage of the security agency...
Even if you closed the borders entirely, the terrorists would try to recruit people who were already in the country...
Assuming they needed to. Terrorists associated with "Animal Rights" and "anti-abortion" are typically "domestic" in the first place. Foreign, even foreign corrected, terrorists are probably very much the minority in Europe and North America. This obsession with "Islamic Terror" (and it's associated conspiracy theories) is probably very helpful to the vast majority of terrorists.
There was a book written a while back (of which I wish I could remember the name) where the author basically argued that anti-terrorism measures were basically useless because any measure to mitigate threat we put in, they would think some way around it.
There may be effective "anti-terrorism" measures but they may well be completly different from those governments frequently appear to jump to. In places such as the US all terrorism is actually very uncommon. e.g. smuggling is far more of an issue at border crossings than terrorism.
Want to fix terrorism - maybe we should fix or foreign policy. These people honestly believe they are fighting for a cause and their freedom.
That might actually initially create more terrorist acts in the US. The only meaningful change that the US could make in respect of South West Asia would be to stop financially and militarily supporting Israel. With terrorism being an obvious way for US Zionists to react. It's also undoubtedly the case that many terrorists and potential terrorists in the US are native citizens.
Canadian and Mexican borders were closed after 9/11. You have to have a passport to cross them now.
IIRC parts of the US/Canadian border run though the middle of buildings. Also there are plenty of parts of both borders which might be a fence in the middle of nowhere.
It seems that more and more often we're returning to the good old days of caveat emptor. In the past few months I've seen quite a few number of shady advertisements that, if not exactly illegal, certainly push the boundaries of the law.
Not just in the computer field. Recently I have noticed quite a few soft drinks which proclaim in big letters "No artificial flavourings", then state (in much smaller letters) that they contain Saccharin and/or Aspartame.
Well that is totally odd compared to US companies who charge you comparatively more for texting then from voice calls to get the same information across... The 300 some character limit is annoying....
They charge what the maket will put up with. The charges for making telephone calls havn't had much relationship to the actual cost for some time, if indeed they ever did.
Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if half the human race did have cell phones. In the developing world, they're actually more practical than landlines, because they require less physical infrastructure.
Especially if you can power the base stations using solar cells or a wind turbine (together with some batteries to handle when there isn't enough light and/or wind). Then you don't even need any power infrastructure. Similarly you don't actually need a power grid to keep the handset batteries charged.
You're correct. The cost of copper is at a point where it's cheaper to just put towers up and let wireless be the last mile (or several miles, depending on topography).
Copper is also vulnerable to people stealing the cables to sell as scrap metal.
The best thing about their website is that they charge a $25 investigation fee if you dispute your charge with your credit card company.
I'm sure that this really impresses the credit card companies. Presumably they have the ability to block any attempts to charge your card from a specific merchant account....
First, I doubt very much this (there are no circuses any more).
Presumably "circuses" in the Roman sense. The modern equivalent would be motor racing, which is a lot safer even to the racers. Not that the other form of Roman popular entertainment involved people fighting with real weapons, not infrequently to the death. In more recent times public executions were considered "entertainment".
If we were basing our judgments based upon actual harm done, we would be trying very hard to get alcohol off the market and make distributors pay huge fines. Even if we ignore the much larger toll on the people drinking excessively, the harm done to other people by alcohol still beats tobacoo in terms of societal damage.
Thing is that the harm done to society by alcohol prohibition was considerably worst than than caused by alcohol itself. Indeed there dosn't appear to be any recreational drug where prohibition actually results in less harm to society. Most drugs, especially when subject to regulation and quality control, are nowhere near as dangerous as well armed gangsters running a black market.
Numerical Recipes (in C, C++, etc), has a restrictive license that only allows you to use the code for personal non-commercial uses. There doesn't seem to be any provision for using those samples in commercial products.
If you want to use the code for commercial purposes then you need to negotiate with the copyright holder of the code. Who might be the publisher of the book, the author(s) of the book or even some other party who actually wrote the code. You always have this option with any copyrighted work.
About 10 years ago, a woman who lived in her Van did a good number on a gas station in my home town, Grand Forks, BC, Canada...
She pulled up to the gas station and started filling up her gas tank.
She did NOT put out the fire in her makeshift home made wood stove that was installed in her Van!
The fumes ignited and luckily no one was hurt, but the gas station was destroyed.
Were there no warnings on the pumps about no naked flames (and no smoking)? Hope she got sent the bill for the damage.
The last time I set a pump lock and walked away from the nozzle to clean my window, there was some odd jolt in the line and the nozzle jumped out of the side of the car and spewed about a quart of gasoline under my car before I could stop the pump. I pushed the car away from the puddle hoping the catalytic converter was not going to ignite the vapors.
I didn't think I was being sloppy at the time.
That'll be why in most cases there is no such thing as a "pump lock". Instead you have a trigger which when depressed allows fuel to flow, when released fuel stops flowing.
Mythbusters actually did good work on this one. You've got to have the fuel-air mix just right, or even a spark plug won't light it. There are really only two places where the cell could ignite fumes. One is right next to the fuel port, and the other is on the ground in a puddle of gasoline.
Or from the filling nozzle if it has fuel coming out of it... The Mythbusters have actually tried quite a few times to get car fuel tanks to explode. The most recent was with the "Trail of Fire" where even deliberatly trying to get the right fuel/air mix in the tank nothing much happened. Unlike in the movies it is very hard to make a tank explode...
Slashdot Mirror
The Bush Administration routinely lies about the Guantanamo detainees, characterizing them all as "terrorists".
:)
This would be prefectly accurate with only the first 5 words
Once many years ago, long before the current terror terror, a traveller at the Stockholm airport got fed up with an overly pedantic search and held up his small bunch of keys saying bitterly "Aren't you going to analyze this? It's a bomb." As a result they emptied the entire airport, with its several thousand employees, and its tens of thousands of passengers. They stopped all flights for several hours. The cost was astronomical.
Why bother with a real bomb when a bomb threat is just as (if not more) effective...
The question you need to ask is "Why is a drivers license treated as an ID document in my country ?". In the rest of the civilized world, that's not the case.
This problem is spreading to other parts of the world. Fortunatly few places are as daft as to make driving documents almost required to purchase alcohol.
You have documents that are an ID and you have documents that allow you to drive a vehicle on public roads. And you cannot use one type for the purpose of the other.
AFAIK there is nowhere that a passport is an acceptable document to drive on public roads.
That does kind of suggest that they had valid visas at some point.
The logical follow on from that is that if they'd timed what they were doing more carefully, their visas would not have been expired.
Or "they" knew that US authorities were lax in dealing with people who's visas expired so they didn't much care about the length of their visas/getting them renewed.
A couple of the 9/11 hijackers are believed to have gotten their passports from family members who worked in the passport office.
If people can get hold of documents in such a way you can't trust anything you might think you know from those documents.
If you've got friends on the inside, it doesn't matter what border you enter the country from -- Canada, Mexico, Sweden, or a direct flight from Kabul.
Depending exactly what the "inside" is they might never have entered in the first place.
Actually, they didn't all have valid visas, some had expired. Others bought ID at the 7-11 in Falls Church down near Seven Corners shopping center. Bought from the same kind folks that sell fake IDs to illegal aliens.
Considering that several of the alleged hijackers turned up alive, together with such obviously planted evidence as the "magic passport". It would be quite likely that all of the IDs involved were either stolen or fraudlant.
Together with it being unclear where the names came from and the lack of a proper investigation at the time really means that the whole Al Quada thing would best be simply filed under "daft conspiracy theories" than treated as anything to set any kind of policy by.
And our current "security theater" is as absurd as the "tollbooth scene" in "Blazing Saddles".
You could probably make a lot of movies for the same amount of money. Especially since the plots would probably come gratis.
Terrorists kill less people in the US than cars, smoking, the war on drugs, just about anything actually.
With the "War on Terror" only being concerned about a minority of terrorists too.
And yet we are still spending more and more money and making everyday life a pain in the ass for more and more people all just to score a few cheap political points.
Actually very expensive political terms. Both in terms of dollers spend and making the US the laughing stock of the planet...
How the fuck did we get stuck with this pathetic government anyway?
Having too many career politicans, which is not just a problem in the US.
Thirteen of the terrorists had Florida driver's licenses or ID cards, seven had Virginia driver's licenses, at least two had California licenses and two had New Jersey driver's licenses. WHY? Why do we give licenses to foreigners to begin with?
Presumably they passed the appropriate driving tests. The real question is more along the lines of "Why treat a machine operators permit as an identity document".
are you also aware that there were enough facts and analyses and at least a few low level FBI personnel that "connected the dots" all with existing systems before 9/11? The only problem was the institutional behavior of mid-level managers ignoring what subordinates push up.
The interesting question being exactly why these people "ignored"...
So I really think these new data collection schemes are the administration's goal to check up on the domestic populace and weed out the real enemies (in their eyes anyway), which are Democrats, libertarians, and any other non-neocon or non-Republican.
This is the kind of thing which "state security" has historically been very interested in doing. More disturbing is that with this sort of mentality "terrorist attacks" can actually be to the advantage of the security agency...
Even if you closed the borders entirely, the terrorists would try to recruit people who were already in the country...
Assuming they needed to. Terrorists associated with "Animal Rights" and "anti-abortion" are typically "domestic" in the first place. Foreign, even foreign corrected, terrorists are probably very much the minority in Europe and North America.
This obsession with "Islamic Terror" (and it's associated conspiracy theories) is probably very helpful to the vast majority of terrorists.
There was a book written a while back (of which I wish I could remember the name) where the author basically argued that anti-terrorism measures were basically useless because any measure to mitigate threat we put in, they would think some way around it.
There may be effective "anti-terrorism" measures but they may well be completly different from those governments frequently appear to jump to. In places such as the US all terrorism is actually very uncommon. e.g. smuggling is far more of an issue at border crossings than terrorism.
Want to fix terrorism - maybe we should fix or foreign policy. These people honestly believe they are fighting for a cause and their freedom.
That might actually initially create more terrorist acts in the US. The only meaningful change that the US could make in respect of South West Asia would be to stop financially and militarily supporting Israel. With terrorism being an obvious way for US Zionists to react.
It's also undoubtedly the case that many terrorists and potential terrorists in the US are native citizens.
Canadian and Mexican borders were closed after 9/11. You have to have a passport to cross them now.
IIRC parts of the US/Canadian border run though the middle of buildings. Also there are plenty of parts of both borders which might be a fence in the middle of nowhere.
They came carrying Israeli diplomatic passports.
Why would they need to be diplomatic? The US Government appears to treat any Israeli as more important than US Citizens anyway.
It seems that more and more often we're returning to the good old days of caveat emptor. In the past few months I've seen quite a few number of shady advertisements that, if not exactly illegal, certainly push the boundaries of the law.
Not just in the computer field. Recently I have noticed quite a few soft drinks which proclaim in big letters "No artificial flavourings", then state (in much smaller letters) that they contain Saccharin and/or Aspartame.
Well that is totally odd compared to US companies who charge you comparatively more for texting then from voice calls to get the same information across... The 300 some character limit is annoying....
They charge what the maket will put up with. The charges for making telephone calls havn't had much relationship to the actual cost for some time, if indeed they ever did.
Actually, it wouldn't surprise me if half the human race did have cell phones. In the developing world, they're actually more practical than landlines, because they require less physical infrastructure.
Especially if you can power the base stations using solar cells or a wind turbine (together with some batteries to handle when there isn't enough light and/or wind). Then you don't even need any power infrastructure.
Similarly you don't actually need a power grid to keep the handset batteries charged.
You're correct. The cost of copper is at a point where it's cheaper to just put towers up and let wireless be the last mile (or several miles, depending on topography).
Copper is also vulnerable to people stealing the cables to sell as scrap metal.
I'd carry a celphone distruptor before I'd cary a celphone. No plans to hassle with, no monthly bills. Just the occasional battery
:)
Together with a free ride in a real police car and a free tour of parts of a real police station if you should happen to get caught with it
The best thing about their website is that they charge a $25 investigation fee if you dispute your charge with your credit card company.
I'm sure that this really impresses the credit card companies. Presumably they have the ability to block any attempts to charge your card from a specific merchant account....
First, I doubt very much this (there are no circuses any more).
Presumably "circuses" in the Roman sense. The modern equivalent would be motor racing, which is a lot safer even to the racers. Not that the other form of Roman popular entertainment involved people fighting with real weapons, not infrequently to the death. In more recent times public executions were considered "entertainment".
If we were basing our judgments based upon actual harm done, we would be trying very hard to get alcohol off the market and make distributors pay huge fines. Even if we ignore the much larger toll on the people drinking excessively, the harm done to other people by alcohol still beats tobacoo in terms of societal damage.
Thing is that the harm done to society by alcohol prohibition was considerably worst than than caused by alcohol itself. Indeed there dosn't appear to be any recreational drug where prohibition actually results in less harm to society. Most drugs, especially when subject to regulation and quality control, are nowhere near as dangerous as well armed gangsters running a black market.
Numerical Recipes (in C, C++, etc), has a restrictive license that only allows you to use the code for personal non-commercial uses. There doesn't seem to be any provision for using those samples in commercial products.
If you want to use the code for commercial purposes then you need to negotiate with the copyright holder of the code. Who might be the publisher of the book, the author(s) of the book or even some other party who actually wrote the code.
You always have this option with any copyrighted work.
About 10 years ago, a woman who lived in her Van did a good number on a gas station in my home town, Grand Forks, BC, Canada...
She pulled up to the gas station and started filling up her gas tank.
She did NOT put out the fire in her makeshift home made wood stove that was installed in her Van!
The fumes ignited and luckily no one was hurt, but the gas station was destroyed.
Were there no warnings on the pumps about no naked flames (and no smoking)? Hope she got sent the bill for the damage.
The last time I set a pump lock and walked away from the nozzle to clean my window, there was some odd jolt in the line and the nozzle jumped out of the side of the car and spewed about a quart of gasoline under my car before I could stop the pump. I pushed the car away from the puddle hoping the catalytic converter was not going to ignite the vapors. I didn't think I was being sloppy at the time.
That'll be why in most cases there is no such thing as a "pump lock". Instead you have a trigger which when depressed allows fuel to flow, when released fuel stops flowing.
Mythbusters actually did good work on this one. You've got to have the fuel-air mix just right, or even a spark plug won't light it. There are really only two places where the cell could ignite fumes. One is right next to the fuel port, and the other is on the ground in a puddle of gasoline.
Or from the filling nozzle if it has fuel coming out of it...
The Mythbusters have actually tried quite a few times to get car fuel tanks to explode. The most recent was with the "Trail of Fire" where even deliberatly trying to get the right fuel/air mix in the tank nothing much happened. Unlike in the movies it is very hard to make a tank explode...