The number of people supporting racial or other profiling always scares me.
Especially given that it effectivly reduces security, since not only does it create holes these holes are easily visible.
ake this bust, for instance. "Most" of the people in the bust were of Pakistani descent. What about the rest of them? Is limiting ourselves to getting "most" of the terrorists an acceptable goal?
Assuming that these people are terrorists. Given some recent high profile "busts" on both sides of the Atlantic a large pinch of salt appears to be required.
Meanwhile some white guy in Oklahoma tried to get on a plane with a pipe bomb. Good thing nobody just waved him by, right?
Which currently makes him more deserving on the lable "terrorist" than any of the people recently arrested.
Iran is not going to trust America, period. And really, I don't blame them. But from a purely realist standpoint, Iran is not the biggest threat in the Middle East. Israel is. To date, Israel has caused more instability in the region than any other nation, and its destruction would probably do more to stabilize the region than anything else would--in the short-term.
How long would Israel survive without outside support?
(Realistically, it would only take a few years before radical Muslims found an excuse to begin killing again.) But even if we remove Israel from the "threat" list, the next up are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Pakistan is by far the largest source of terrorism in the world. Every crazy fuck we hear about on the news has trained in a madrasa in Pakistan--and they get their funding from rich Wahabbis from Saudi Arabia.
Without "the West" (primarily the USA) trying to manipulate the politics of the region would these people be so dangerous to Europe and North America though?
I am not talking about ending or deterring terrorism with millitary force. I am talking about total and complete annihilation of terrorists. But the force has to be terrible, like what was used in Japan 60 years ago.
The only use "in anger" of nuclear weapons has been by a military superpower against another military superpower. Apparently to avoid the situation of the fight against Japan becoming that of a guerilla war. If nuclear weapons were effective here then why did the USA not use them against Vietnam or the USSR against Afghanistan?
The rest of the post is ignorant rubbish and the fact that people still believe that you can end terrorism by increasing pressure and military force is one of the main reasons why people who disagreed with terrorism suddenly become supporters when they get hit by these "terror fighters" increasing the pressure.
The problem is that those who advocate such pressure and force appear to be unaware that they are enguaging in positive feedback.
Terrorism is a mind game, not a power game.
It's also a tactic of warfare.
Guerilla wars cannot be won by normal military structures.
Guerilla tactics also tend to be very effective against occupying foreign armies.
None of this is new, but a lot of people are unwilling to accept that all their power still leaves them powerless when facing these problems.
There's also a strong element of "those who refuse to learn from history are destined to repeat it". Even though just this week we have seen a military superpower outfought by guerillas.
IMO, so long as we expect "someone else" to protect us, we will always be vulnerable. On the other hand, if every last one of us was willing to take a stand and fight back, like the passengers on Flight 93 did, we would be more secure than ever, even if (especially if?) everyone on board was carrying pocket knives, box cutters, bottles of gel, and so on. But for that to work, the airlines, and especially our government, has to trust that the majority of people 1) will, in fact, take action when necessary, and 2) will act responsibly when given the freedom to do so.
From the POV of government the risks are that this could render government provided security redundent to some extent. Together with members of the public making up their own minds about what action is necessary and when. (Especially if people reach the conclusion that government officials are a bigger problem than "terrorists".)
This is insane. Terrorism isn't even one of the top ten problems we face as a nation.
Nor is all terrorism directed at commercial aviation.
I bet our airport security checkpoint insanity alone probably does more damage to our economy than terrorism itself ever will on a per-capita and per-year basis.
It may even have a greater cost in life. Increased stress for passengers and aircrew combined with persuading people to use cars instead of planes.
perhaps we should be looking at ways to detect new weapons and stop the shoe-checking, the milk-checking, etc etc, which only serves to inconvenience the 99.99999% of people who are legitimate travellers.
The problem with trying to detect "new weapons" is that you need to correctly guess what weapons the bad guys will choose. Which isn't really a practical possibility.
I would prefer to hand out daggers to each passenger, then who cares if a terrorist smuggles a box cutter on the plane. The majority of people on the plane don't want to die and will eventually prevail in a knife fight.
Along similar lines people have suggested issuing every passenger with a gun...
But the problem was never the weapons that were allowed on, it was the tactics. So why not just change the tactics and nothing else? (oh, and I'd personally install a separate bathroom just for the pilots and make the cockpit inaccessable from the cabin so that no one could ever get in there - sure one out of every 1,000,000,000 flights they'll both eat the fish, but that's so rare I'll take that chance with my flights)
Subsitute "both eat the fish" with "both incapacitated by anoxia" and you have Helios 522. Had Dennis Fitch not been able to get into the cockpit of United 232 it is most likely that fewer people would have survived. (Interestingly the one in a thousand million was also the odds the designers estimated for a total hydraulic failure on a DC 10. AFAIK total hydraulic failures on airliners have never happened as the only fault...) It's also possible that the captain of BA 5390 would have died had the cabin crew been unable to get into the cockpit to hold onto him. The problem with the idea of sealing the pilots in their own compartment is that there are many more situations where people being able to get into the cockpit is positive. Consider the possibility of such a "two compartment plane" having both pilots incapacitated and crashing into a city. Especially if one or more pilots (qualified for type) were in the passenger section...
A quick glance at the Wikipedia list of well-know hijackings reveals that many passengers have died as the result of previous hijackings. This was just the first time that the hijackers were overtly suicidal.
The hijackers of Air France 8969 appear to have planned to use the plane as a weapon in Paris. David Burke murdered both pilots of PSA 1771, put the plane into a steep dive the shot himself. The "new" thing on the 9th of September 2001 was multiple hijackings.
Before 9/11, every hi-jacking, EVERY ONE, ended up landing peacefully at some airfield and we dealt with without any danger to the plane or passengers.
It's not a good idea to shout "every one" without checking your facts. Ethiopian Airlines 961 crash landed in to shallow water destroying the aircraft and killing most on board. Malaysia Airlines 653 crashed killing all on board. Several hijackings have ended with military forces boarding the plane too.
Remember, standard procedure for hijackings until 9/11 was to cooperate, fly the plane to whatever airport the hijacker wanted, and negotiate for safe return of plane, passengers and crew.
IIRC the captain of Ethiopian Airlines 961 did (unsucessfully) try to persuade the passengers to fight the hijackers.
Technology: Make it more difficult to EXECUTE acts of terrorism. Facial recognition, bomb detection, etc... are all important tools in combatting terrorists (disclaimer: It is definitely important to balance privacy and security, that's not what this post is about). By increasing the costs of subverting the technological barriers to terrorism, we can eliminate a HIGH percentage of potential terrorists. Most terrorists lack the money or the smarts needed to subvert technological solutions.
Assuming that that it isn't possible for them to trivially choose another target. When employing "technological barriers" it is important to ensure than you don't do the equivalent of putting a bank vault door on a tent. (Or even the lock from a bank vault on a tent...) It is all to easy for designers to technologically sophisticated systems to fail to consider "low tech" counter measures. e.g. it's a good idea to talk to a makeup artist before spending too much time and money of computer based facial recognition. It's also only going to be of any use if you know exactly who you are looking for in the first place.
Politics: Make it more difficult to WANT to be a terrorist. Do this by working with other governments to crack down on terrorist cultures within their borders (which the U.S. has done fairly effectively) and create a geo-political climate which removes the incentive to be a terrorist (whith the U.S. has failed miserably at).
This really should be the first item on the list. Also when it comes to cracking down on "terrorist cultures" governments tend to be highly selective about exactly which terrorists they go after. In the case of many countries (definitly including all five permenant members of the UNSC) some terrorists are actually supported. This weakens any kind of "crack down". Especially when law enforcement happens to capture the "wrong" type of terrorists.
With proper biofeedback training, you can learn to control your own biometric responses (heart rate, galvanic skin response, etc). If anything like this were put into place, the terrorists would simply resort to that kind of training.
Assuming they need to, self confidence and belief might be all that is needed...
Airport security already has a seemingly insurmountable task of finding the handful of bad guys out of those millions who travel. Every tool they can add to their arsenal to help in this job is a welcome one.
Only if it actually does something useful. Plenty of "tools" are utterly useless, some are actually worst that useless. Where "security" is politically driven highly visible methods tend to be pushed. Which includes using machines to screen passengers and aircrew. Whilst other people with easy access to aircraft may not be. The requirement for pilots and flight attendents to be subject to the same kind of "screening" as passengers was a "response" to PSA 1771. Even though David Burke boarded the flight as a passenger.
Heck, we don't even know for sure that humans cannot breed with chimps: it's just that we haven't really tried as hard as we did with other species and aren't likely to try.
There's always Human/Bonobo given that Bonobos are genetically closer to humans than chimps.
I'm curious how often you buy any kind of guitar tabs or music books from a store. In my experience, probably 80% of the guitar books are worthless, sound awful, and aren't anywhere close to being correct. I highly doubt the artists are directly involved in the publishing process and it's probably the exact same process as the online sites, with the only difference being that these books aren't free and aren't corrected by others.
The addition of corrections (which could easily also include derivations) adds value to the product. It almost looks as though someone is deploying a legal weapon to protect a poor product. Wonder which would actually be the cheaper option "buying" new laws keeping lawyers well paid or putting out a decent product.
So would you argue that the many many artists who are singers and performers only, not song writers, are not really artists?
It dosn't really make much sense trying to work out if a performer conforms to some intellectual definition of "artist". The test is more along the lines of "do they have an audience/will people specifically go to their performance?"
That rules out the VAST majority of musicians. Not only the cookie-cutter pop artists, either. How many symphony violinists spend their time performing their own music? There's been a very traditional divide between composer and performer.
Different performers may well create a very different performance of the same piece of music. Either vocally or instramentally. e.g. it's not unknown for full orchestra to play "pop music".
For music in general, I think your viewpoint is extremely rare.
Similarly you don't find too many actor-writers...
Still, there's a lot more to playing someone else's song than just hitting the notes. Interpretation is often more important than technical ability, and can completely rewrite a song, even with the same basic melodies and lyrics.
"Trivial" changes such as tempo, key, instrement(s) can make a huge difference.
Despite all this the content industry middlemen (RIAA etc...) will lose.
But they will probably try to "fight to the last man".
The reasons are simple:
1) A new medium, the internet allows anyone to connect with customers.
2) A number of users are no longer interested in working with
the content industry middlemen.
What the existing industry is fighting is a paradigm shift in the economics of distributing music recordings. Copyright originated with the technology of mechanised printing. Which produced cheap books, newspapers, etc in large quantities. The deveopment of copyright law is tied up with the business model of having a middleman to publish/print/distribute, etc. When music recordings were invented the business models already in use for books were taken and adapted. Originally copyright was a permission granted by the state to publishers. In the 18th century things were changed to make copyright something authors had. Ironically it's the likes of the RIAA and MPAA trying hardest to modify copyright "back" into something held by publishers. Whilst they have had considerably sucess in modifying copyright in the last few decades of the 20th century into something more "publisher friendly" something else has happened. Machines have appeared that can copy information and transport it anywhere on the planet have appeared. Not only can a single copy be produced and transported cheaply the machines are themselves cheap enough for a substantial proportion of people to own (at least) one.
3) A large number of users are willing to share their content for free.
The industry's method to tackle this is to bend the law in such a way that authors, poets, playwrites, song writers, etc. do not "own" their works (preferably that their members do). They do this by using the "derived work" part of copyright laws. There is, in practice, no such thing as an original work (no doubt the RIAA and MPAA are trying to work out a way to own plotlines which are at least half a million years old).
Or let's turn this on its head. You can breed a kingsnake with a cornsnake (separate genuses, let alone species) and get fertile offspring. Does that mean they're the same species?
Many classifications were originally based on phenotype. If you went only by phenotype you might well classify a Great Dane and a Chuaua as being from different species.
Very few parasites are noticed by the immune system; the ones that are are the ones that are either there briefly, presumably to eat, or the ones which are strong enough to fight off the host's immune system, which is rare.
Potential parasites which do get noticed are unlikely to be sucessful in the first place.
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The number of people supporting racial or other profiling always scares me.
Especially given that it effectivly reduces security, since not only does it create holes these holes are easily visible.
ake this bust, for instance. "Most" of the people in the bust were of Pakistani descent. What about the rest of them? Is limiting ourselves to getting "most" of the terrorists an acceptable goal?
Assuming that these people are terrorists. Given some recent high profile "busts" on both sides of the Atlantic a large pinch of salt appears to be required.
Meanwhile some white guy in Oklahoma tried to get on a plane with a pipe bomb. Good thing nobody just waved him by, right?
Which currently makes him more deserving on the lable "terrorist" than any of the people recently arrested.
Iran is not going to trust America, period. And really, I don't blame them. But from a purely realist standpoint, Iran is not the biggest threat in the Middle East. Israel is. To date, Israel has caused more instability in the region than any other nation, and its destruction would probably do more to stabilize the region than anything else would--in the short-term.
How long would Israel survive without outside support?
(Realistically, it would only take a few years before radical Muslims found an excuse to begin killing again.) But even if we remove Israel from the "threat" list, the next up are Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. Pakistan is by far the largest source of terrorism in the world. Every crazy fuck we hear about on the news has trained in a madrasa in Pakistan--and they get their funding from rich Wahabbis from Saudi Arabia.
Without "the West" (primarily the USA) trying to manipulate the politics of the region would these people be so dangerous to Europe and North America though?
I am not talking about ending or deterring terrorism with millitary force. I am talking about total and complete annihilation of terrorists. But the force has to be terrible, like what was used in Japan 60 years ago.
The only use "in anger" of nuclear weapons has been by a military superpower against another military superpower. Apparently to avoid the situation of the fight against Japan becoming that of a guerilla war.
If nuclear weapons were effective here then why did the USA not use them against Vietnam or the USSR against Afghanistan?
The rest of the post is ignorant rubbish and the fact that people still believe that you can end terrorism by increasing pressure and military force is one of the main reasons why people who disagreed with terrorism suddenly become supporters when they get hit by these "terror fighters" increasing the pressure.
The problem is that those who advocate such pressure and force appear to be unaware that they are enguaging in positive feedback.
Terrorism is a mind game, not a power game.
It's also a tactic of warfare.
Guerilla wars cannot be won by normal military structures.
Guerilla tactics also tend to be very effective against occupying foreign armies.
None of this is new, but a lot of people are unwilling to accept that all their power still leaves them powerless when facing these problems.
There's also a strong element of "those who refuse to learn from history are destined to repeat it". Even though just this week we have seen a military superpower outfought by guerillas.
IMO, so long as we expect "someone else" to protect us, we will always be vulnerable. On the other hand, if every last one of us was willing to take a stand and fight back, like the passengers on Flight 93 did, we would be more secure than ever, even if (especially if?) everyone on board was carrying pocket knives, box cutters, bottles of gel, and so on. But for that to work, the airlines, and especially our government, has to trust that the majority of people 1) will, in fact, take action when necessary, and 2) will act responsibly when given the freedom to do so.
From the POV of government the risks are that this could render government provided security redundent to some extent. Together with members of the public making up their own minds about what action is necessary and when. (Especially if people reach the conclusion that government officials are a bigger problem than "terrorists".)
This is insane. Terrorism isn't even one of the top ten problems we face as a nation.
Nor is all terrorism directed at commercial aviation.
I bet our airport security checkpoint insanity alone probably does more damage to our economy than terrorism itself ever will on a per-capita and per-year basis.
It may even have a greater cost in life. Increased stress for passengers and aircrew combined with persuading people to use cars instead of planes.
perhaps we should be looking at ways to detect new weapons and stop the shoe-checking, the milk-checking, etc etc, which only serves to inconvenience the 99.99999% of people who are legitimate travellers.
The problem with trying to detect "new weapons" is that you need to correctly guess what weapons the bad guys will choose. Which isn't really a practical possibility.
I would prefer to hand out daggers to each passenger, then who cares if a terrorist smuggles a box cutter on the plane. The majority of people on the plane don't want to die and will eventually prevail in a knife fight.
Along similar lines people have suggested issuing every passenger with a gun...
But the problem was never the weapons that were allowed on, it was the tactics. So why not just change the tactics and nothing else? (oh, and I'd personally install a separate bathroom just for the pilots and make the cockpit inaccessable from the cabin so that no one could ever get in there - sure one out of every 1,000,000,000 flights they'll both eat the fish, but that's so rare I'll take that chance with my flights)
Subsitute "both eat the fish" with "both incapacitated by anoxia" and you have Helios 522. Had Dennis Fitch not been able to get into the cockpit of United 232 it is most likely that fewer people would have survived. (Interestingly the one in a thousand million was also the odds the designers estimated for a total hydraulic failure on a DC 10. AFAIK total hydraulic failures on airliners have never happened as the only fault...) It's also possible that the captain of BA 5390 would have died had the cabin crew been unable to get into the cockpit to hold onto him.
The problem with the idea of sealing the pilots in their own compartment is that there are many more situations where people being able to get into the cockpit is positive. Consider the possibility of such a "two compartment plane" having both pilots incapacitated and crashing into a city. Especially if one or more pilots (qualified for type) were in the passenger section...
A quick glance at the Wikipedia list of well-know hijackings reveals that many passengers have died as the result of previous hijackings. This was just the first time that the hijackers were overtly suicidal.
The hijackers of Air France 8969 appear to have planned to use the plane as a weapon in Paris. David Burke murdered both pilots of PSA 1771, put the plane into a steep dive the shot himself.
The "new" thing on the 9th of September 2001 was multiple hijackings.
Before 9/11, every hi-jacking, EVERY ONE, ended up landing peacefully at some airfield and we dealt with without any danger to the plane or passengers.
It's not a good idea to shout "every one" without checking your facts. Ethiopian Airlines 961 crash landed in to shallow water destroying the aircraft and killing most on board. Malaysia Airlines 653 crashed killing all on board. Several hijackings have ended with military forces boarding the plane too.
Remember, standard procedure for hijackings until 9/11 was to cooperate, fly the plane to whatever airport the hijacker wanted, and negotiate for safe return of plane, passengers and crew.
IIRC the captain of Ethiopian Airlines 961 did (unsucessfully) try to persuade the passengers to fight the hijackers.
This is the part that I haven't figured out. Why do they keep attacking planes? Wouldn't it be smarter to attack the technology?
Either "they" are very stupid or "they" have rather different motives than those being attributed to the Al-Quaeda Global Conspiracy.
Technology: Make it more difficult to EXECUTE acts of terrorism. Facial recognition, bomb detection, etc... are all important tools in combatting terrorists (disclaimer: It is definitely important to balance privacy and security, that's not what this post is about). By increasing the costs of subverting the technological barriers to terrorism, we can eliminate a HIGH percentage of potential terrorists. Most terrorists lack the money or the smarts needed to subvert technological solutions.
Assuming that that it isn't possible for them to trivially choose another target. When employing "technological barriers" it is important to ensure than you don't do the equivalent of putting a bank vault door on a tent. (Or even the lock from a bank vault on a tent...) It is all to easy for designers to technologically sophisticated systems to fail to consider "low tech" counter measures. e.g. it's a good idea to talk to a makeup artist before spending too much time and money of computer based facial recognition. It's also only going to be of any use if you know exactly who you are looking for in the first place.
Politics: Make it more difficult to WANT to be a terrorist. Do this by working with other governments to crack down on terrorist cultures within their borders (which the U.S. has done fairly effectively) and create a geo-political climate which removes the incentive to be a terrorist (whith the U.S. has failed miserably at).
This really should be the first item on the list.
Also when it comes to cracking down on "terrorist cultures" governments tend to be highly selective about exactly which terrorists they go after. In the case of many countries (definitly including all five permenant members of the UNSC) some terrorists are actually supported. This weakens any kind of "crack down". Especially when law enforcement happens to capture the "wrong" type of terrorists.
With proper biofeedback training, you can learn to control your own biometric responses (heart rate, galvanic skin response, etc). If anything like this were put into place, the terrorists would simply resort to that kind of training.
Assuming they need to, self confidence and belief might be all that is needed...
Airport security already has a seemingly insurmountable task of finding the handful of bad guys out of those millions who travel. Every tool they can add to their arsenal to help in this job is a welcome one.
Only if it actually does something useful. Plenty of "tools" are utterly useless, some are actually worst that useless.
Where "security" is politically driven highly visible methods tend to be pushed. Which includes using machines to screen passengers and aircrew. Whilst other people with easy access to aircraft may not be.
The requirement for pilots and flight attendents to be subject to the same kind of "screening" as passengers was a "response" to PSA 1771. Even though David Burke boarded the flight as a passenger.
Not to mention the difference between a "role-acting" terrorist and a real terrorist.
There is also the problem of lumping "wrongdoers" such as smugglers with "terrorists". Smugglers being far more common than terrorists too.
Heck, we don't even know for sure that humans cannot breed with chimps: it's just that we haven't really tried as hard as we did with other species and aren't likely to try.
There's always Human/Bonobo given that Bonobos are genetically closer to humans than chimps.
Do you sit around trying to see who can come up with the most idiotic perversion of the English language, or are you really that stupid?
Given the origin of the document the language being perverted is more likely to be French.
Power adapters are low-tech, commodity devices.
Dispite just about every device using them coming with a lable stating that you should only use the right one...
I'm curious how often you buy any kind of guitar tabs or music books from a store. In my experience, probably 80% of the guitar books are worthless, sound awful, and aren't anywhere close to being correct. I highly doubt the artists are directly involved in the publishing process and it's probably the exact same process as the online sites, with the only difference being that these books aren't free and aren't corrected by others.
The addition of corrections (which could easily also include derivations) adds value to the product.
It almost looks as though someone is deploying a legal weapon to protect a poor product. Wonder which would actually be the cheaper option "buying" new laws keeping lawyers well paid or putting out a decent product.
So would you argue that the many many artists who are singers and performers only, not song writers, are not really artists?
It dosn't really make much sense trying to work out if a performer conforms to some intellectual definition of "artist". The test is more along the lines of "do they have an audience/will people specifically go to their performance?"
That rules out the VAST majority of musicians. Not only the cookie-cutter pop artists, either. How many symphony violinists spend their time performing their own music? There's been a very traditional divide between composer and performer.
Different performers may well create a very different performance of the same piece of music. Either vocally or instramentally. e.g. it's not unknown for full orchestra to play "pop music".
For music in general, I think your viewpoint is extremely rare.
Similarly you don't find too many actor-writers...
Still, there's a lot more to playing someone else's song than just hitting the notes. Interpretation is often more important than technical ability, and can completely rewrite a song, even with the same basic melodies and lyrics.
"Trivial" changes such as tempo, key, instrement(s) can make a huge difference.
Despite all this the content industry middlemen (RIAA etc...) will lose.
But they will probably try to "fight to the last man".
The reasons are simple:
1) A new medium, the internet allows anyone to connect with customers.
2) A number of users are no longer interested in working with the content industry middlemen.
What the existing industry is fighting is a paradigm shift in the economics of distributing music recordings. Copyright originated with the technology of mechanised printing. Which produced cheap books, newspapers, etc in large quantities. The deveopment of copyright law is tied up with the business model of having a middleman to publish/print/distribute, etc. When music recordings were invented the business models already in use for books were taken and adapted.
Originally copyright was a permission granted by the state to publishers. In the 18th century things were changed to make copyright something authors had. Ironically it's the likes of the RIAA and MPAA trying hardest to modify copyright "back" into something held by publishers. Whilst they have had considerably sucess in modifying copyright in the last few decades of the 20th century into something more "publisher friendly" something else has happened. Machines have appeared that can copy information and transport it anywhere on the planet have appeared. Not only can a single copy be produced and transported cheaply the machines are themselves cheap enough for a substantial proportion of people to own (at least) one.
3) A large number of users are willing to share their content for free.
The industry's method to tackle this is to bend the law in such a way that authors, poets, playwrites, song writers, etc. do not "own" their works (preferably that their members do). They do this by using the "derived work" part of copyright laws. There is, in practice, no such thing as an original work (no doubt the RIAA and MPAA are trying to work out a way to own plotlines which are at least half a million years old).
Or let's turn this on its head. You can breed a kingsnake with a cornsnake (separate genuses, let alone species) and get fertile offspring. Does that mean they're the same species?
Many classifications were originally based on phenotype. If you went only by phenotype you might well classify a Great Dane and a Chuaua as being from different species.
Very few parasites are noticed by the immune system; the ones that are are the ones that are either there briefly, presumably to eat, or the ones which are strong enough to fight off the host's immune system, which is rare.
Potential parasites which do get noticed are unlikely to be sucessful in the first place.