If this does turn out to lead back to the feet of people working for the interests of Big Entertainment it will have been done for the same reasons the Sony Rootkit was put out. Their absolute and firm belief that YOU (the customer, citizen, etc.) have ZERO RIGHTS to any privacy or control over your own electronic equipment when their intellectual property is anywhere near it.
Whilst at the same time being perfectly prepared to infringe on the intellectual property rights of anyone not in their club/gang.
That's primarily because aircraft fuel - contrary to popular belief - is much "dirtier" than the fuel you'd put in your car.
It's also considerably cheaper.
Jet-turbine engines can burn just about anything, so they can tolerate a much higher level of impurity than your typical piston engine.
A gas turbine dosn't have any moving parts in the combustion area(s) also combustion happens as a continuious process. In many ways it is a much simpler engine than any of the piston engine variations.
Athletes foot wouldn't be next, but I can thing of another abundant biofuel source that we have a hard time eliminating and that nobody would eat: fecal waste. Everything from poultry litter and cow manure to even human sewerage. How is THAT for gross?
There already exist farms and sewerage treatment plants which use methane produced by the waste as fuel. Methane is also produced by landfill sites, especially where plastic and metal waste is recycled so a higher proportion of what goes in the ground is "biodegradable". IIRC there are even a few places where garbage trucks are fuelled by methane from rotting garbage.
Also, with biofuels, the PROCESSED end product is chemically similar or even identical to conventional hydrocarbon fuels.
Methane is methane regardless of if it comes out of an oil field or a garbage dump. Even if a biofuel isn't exactly the same as a petrofuel it's likely to have the same physical properties so it can go into existing pipelines and tankers.
If you run straight corn oil in your car of COURSE it'll smell like the fryer at the local burger joint,
Especially if you used Waste Vegetable Oil. i.e. that which has been previously used to fry food in, but is no longer considered fit for cooking purposed. However it will work perfectly well as a fuel.
Rail sucks for numerous reasons. Fast rail competitive with airlines really, really sucks; rail that can safely carry people at 500mph would be insanely, absurdly expensive, because you can't afford a single failure if you're going to kill hundreds of people in a derailment. Worse than that, rail is much harder to protect against even low-grade attackers because it only takes one whacko deliberately damaging the rails in the middle of nowhere to cause such a disaster.
Trains also work best on level ground, thus you can end up with all sorts of expensive engineering in order to keep the track as level as possible. (Sometimes taking the "long way around" is going to be method chosen too.) It's also rather hard to build tracks on water:)
A typical Boeing 747-400ER configuration has a maximum fuel capacity of 241140 liters of fuel, a maximum range (fully loaded) of 14205 km and a seating capacity of 416 passengers. This amounts to a fuel consumption of 0.04 liters of fuel per km per passenger, which translates to 59 passenger-miles per gallon of fuel.
Consider also that the plane can carry generous amount of baggage, 10's of kgs per passenger and quantity of commercial cargo. If the plane isn't carrying its full load of passengers more cargo will be loaded.
The real test will be whether the total energy efficiency exceeds that of creating hydrogen fuel via electrolysis as the MIT team that's been all over the news for the last year says they can now do cheaply and efficiently.
Hydrogen is a difficult fuel to handle. Compared with hydrocarbon gases it's much harder to ensure that there are no leaks. Most existing vehicles are designed to use liquid fuels. Switching to a gas fuel would require a complete redesign of fuel systems. In the case of jet transport aircraft the wing is typically the main place to carry fuel, but that isn't a sensible place to put a gas fuel.
Bio-fuel from algae is going to be an interesting field. It's easy to grow, difficult to harvest, and takes a lot of it to make into fuel. But it doesn't take up valuable cropland like corn does and really can be grown anywhere you're willing to build tanks.
Converting maize into ethanol isn't exactly a simple process anyway.
I don't think this is a valid criticism of the work the DHS is doing (and there is a lot of valid criticism). If you think that the only prevents attacks by stopping them at the gate, you are missing the point. Effective security should stop attacks in the planning stages when the terrorists realize their plan cannot work, not at the last possible moment. You can't really collect statistics on all the potential attacks which never got off the ground because of methods like these.
Terrorists are not that common in the first place, with only a minority being interested in attacking aircraft. How much of the DHS's resources are go into protecting abortion clinics, probably the most likely places in the US to come under terrorist attack.
That's kind of silly. It's called theater because it's not real. It's not actually secure, and it doesn't even really look all that secure except to people who don't think past, "Geeze this is inconvenient, it must be that way for a very good reason."
At best such things have no effect on actual security. It is however perfectly possible for doing the whatever to result in less security. Either because the big showy thing itself adds security holes or because it takes money away from other things (which arn't obvious and maybe don't inconvenience members of the public) which actually would improve security.
All that is needed to hijack a plane is the threat of a bomb. Give a note to a stewardess that you have a two-way radio (walkie talkie) connected to a bomb in the checked baggage; if she makes any sudden moves or calls out, boom. Your note indicates that all you have to do is activate it by pressing the button on the radio and BOOM the plane goes down.
You don't even have to have a real bomb, you only have to have the credible threat of a real bomb.
And even if you did want to have a real bomb, with current security measures this would be trivial. Why is it that you can't carry liquids on, but you can check them? It would be trivial to make a mix-on-demand device with the sort of materials which are permissible in checked baggage such as shampoo bottles and a butane lighter.
If the threat of a bomb is sufficent it's unlikely that any actual terrorist would waste their time making a real bomb. Making a bomb with you can relativly certain will go bang when you want it to and won't go bang before that point is a non trivial task.
The agencies need to get off their ass, get back to doing "real" intel and do HUMINT.
The only way you will get this is by having effective oversight. Which would include the likes of warrents requiring work to obtain and requiring to be renewed every few days.
Now only if the US can pass a privacy article like most civilized countries have.
Governments have a margin of error they can play within and still succeed, which is very large. Terrorists have none, they make a single error they're out.
It's not so simple. Since there are plenty of terrorists which many governments arn't especially interested in. As well as those which governments are activly supporting.
The patriot act and national security are more harmful to innocent people than to terrorists, for without them both there would be no reason for terrorism in the first place.
That in itself would not stop the US Government being a major sponsor of terrorism nor would it ensure that law enforcement would be equally interested in persuing all (or even all not backed by as major government) terrorists.
Comparing the UK to the US introduces too many variables.
Even comparing different parts of the US whould have this problem.
ou need to look at crime rates within the UK from before and after the gun ban. "Gun homicide" is a bullshit statistic. With fewer guns, of course gun homicide is going to go down. Is there anyone who disputes this? No.
Only if it's fewer guns in the hands of people apt to use them for homicide.
We need to look at the homicide rate to see if the gun ban has been effective. It hasn't. The homicide rate has been rising slightly but steadily. Not even a blip on the radar shows when the gun ban took affect.
Which would probably be the case were pointy kitchen knives to be banned.
As for other crimes? Up drastically beginning when the gun ban took affect. Robbery. Home invasion. Rape and other violent crime. Interestingly, robbery with a gun had quadrupled within the first five years of the gun ban! Statistics for Australia are similar.
Gun ban == explosion in crime. The reason why is pretty obvious: Criminals can act with impunity knowing their victims cannot fight back.
Without the criminal themselves necessarily needing a gun. Not that gun "bans" do much to restrict guns on the "black market". It's also interesting that mass shootings in the US have tended to take place in "gun free zones"...
Let's pretend tomorrow that they decide to ignore the UN and hey maybe they decide that the color of your hair or some part of your ancestry makes you unclean and you get to goto the gulag.
Or somewhere like Gaza or South African townships.
There's a Simpson's episode that comes to mind where they successfully ban all kinds of weapons. They then find a board with a nail in it and start chasing each other around with those.
Even lower tech would be a tree branch.
Seriously, even a big padded room and a white straight jacket require potentially deadly tools to produce, and that combination still won't protect you from everything.
All sorts of improvised weapons have been made in prisons tool.
Ok...I am being a little harsh. However, the point that Benjamin Franklin was making is that those who would trade their liberty for safety (commonly paraphrased as security) deserve neither.
In practice it's possible to surrender liberty with out any gain of safety/security. (It's perfectly possible that the result might be less safety.)
If you ban everything that causes death, all you have done is surrender liberty. The mere act of surrendering your liberty simply sets a precedent with which more liberties can be taken.
Especially when combined with the meme that if surrendering liberties dosn't improve things then it can only be because insufficent liberties were surrendered.
Uhh, and how exactly is taking the point off supposed to keep someone from killing somebody with it? Hello, a slit throat will kill them just as quick and will probably cut down on the risk of that pesky screaming. And criminals aren't going to care about your stupid laws anyway. That is why they are called criminals.
This is where the "ban it" brigade completly fail to get it...
15 years ago, after their big round of gun bans, we asked if there were to be a rash of stabbings would they try to ban knives. The response was "Don't be ridiculous.", now that there has been a rash of stabbings they are actually going to try to ban knives.
Assuming there has actually been a "rash of stabbings". Also "banning" guns didn't reduce gun use by criminals, it possibly even increased it.
ARE they legal investigators in other states? That was one of the whole points with Mediasentry, they where illegally doing what they where doing in a number of states the RIAA had cases in. If this new company does the same shit then guess what, nothing changes and the RIAA is again violating the law.
But did anything happen to the RIAA over this? It's unlikely that a company in Denmark would be a certified PI anywhere in North America too.
Slashdot Mirror
If this does turn out to lead back to the feet of people working for the interests of Big Entertainment it will have been done for the same reasons the Sony Rootkit was put out. Their absolute and firm belief that YOU (the customer, citizen, etc.) have ZERO RIGHTS to any privacy or control over your own electronic equipment when their intellectual property is anywhere near it.
Whilst at the same time being perfectly prepared to infringe on the intellectual property rights of anyone not in their club/gang.
That's primarily because aircraft fuel - contrary to popular belief - is much "dirtier" than the fuel you'd put in your car.
It's also considerably cheaper.
Jet-turbine engines can burn just about anything, so they can tolerate a much higher level of impurity than your typical piston engine.
A gas turbine dosn't have any moving parts in the combustion area(s) also combustion happens as a continuious process. In many ways it is a much simpler engine than any of the piston engine variations.
Athletes foot wouldn't be next, but I can thing of another abundant biofuel source that we have a hard time eliminating and that nobody would eat: fecal waste. Everything from poultry litter and cow manure to even human sewerage. How is THAT for gross?
There already exist farms and sewerage treatment plants which use methane produced by the waste as fuel. Methane is also produced by landfill sites, especially where plastic and metal waste is recycled so a higher proportion of what goes in the ground is "biodegradable". IIRC there are even a few places where garbage trucks are fuelled by methane from rotting garbage.
Also, with biofuels, the PROCESSED end product is chemically similar or even identical to conventional hydrocarbon fuels.
Methane is methane regardless of if it comes out of an oil field or a garbage dump. Even if a biofuel isn't exactly the same as a petrofuel it's likely to have the same physical properties so it can go into existing pipelines and tankers.
If you run straight corn oil in your car of COURSE it'll smell like the fryer at the local burger joint,
Especially if you used Waste Vegetable Oil. i.e. that which has been previously used to fry food in, but is no longer considered fit for cooking purposed. However it will work perfectly well as a fuel.
Basically there's no technical obstacles to using hydrogen. Heck it's low weight makes it the fuel of choice for many space based applications.
How many rocket fuel tanks are designed to used multiple times?
In many ways liquid hydrogen would be an ideal aviation fuel.
Except for the problem that in order to keep it liquid you need to have it under great pressure or very cold.
And, because it grows in tanks, it doesn't need good soil. You can grow algae in sunny locations where the soil is inadequate for farming.
You don't need any soil. It dosn't matter if what's under the tanks is sand, rock or concrete. Or even if the tanks are in fresh or salt water.
Rail sucks for numerous reasons. Fast rail competitive with airlines really, really sucks; rail that can safely carry people at 500mph would be insanely, absurdly expensive, because you can't afford a single failure if you're going to kill hundreds of people in a derailment. Worse than that, rail is much harder to protect against even low-grade attackers because it only takes one whacko deliberately damaging the rails in the middle of nowhere to cause such a disaster.
:)
Trains also work best on level ground, thus you can end up with all sorts of expensive engineering in order to keep the track as level as possible. (Sometimes taking the "long way around" is going to be method chosen too.) It's also rather hard to build tracks on water
A typical Boeing 747-400ER configuration has a maximum fuel capacity of 241140 liters of fuel, a maximum range (fully loaded) of 14205 km and a seating capacity of 416 passengers. This amounts to a fuel consumption of 0.04 liters of fuel per km per passenger, which translates to 59 passenger-miles per gallon of fuel.
Consider also that the plane can carry generous amount of baggage, 10's of kgs per passenger and quantity of commercial cargo. If the plane isn't carrying its full load of passengers more cargo will be loaded.
The real test will be whether the total energy efficiency exceeds that of creating hydrogen fuel via electrolysis as the MIT team that's been all over the news for the last year says they can now do cheaply and efficiently.
Hydrogen is a difficult fuel to handle. Compared with hydrocarbon gases it's much harder to ensure that there are no leaks. Most existing vehicles are designed to use liquid fuels. Switching to a gas fuel would require a complete redesign of fuel systems. In the case of jet transport aircraft the wing is typically the main place to carry fuel, but that isn't a sensible place to put a gas fuel.
Bio-fuel from algae is going to be an interesting field. It's easy to grow, difficult to harvest, and takes a lot of it to make into fuel. But it doesn't take up valuable cropland like corn does and really can be grown anywhere you're willing to build tanks.
Converting maize into ethanol isn't exactly a simple process anyway.
I don't think this is a valid criticism of the work the DHS is doing (and there is a lot of valid criticism). If you think that the only prevents attacks by stopping them at the gate, you are missing the point. Effective security should stop attacks in the planning stages when the terrorists realize their plan cannot work, not at the last possible moment. You can't really collect statistics on all the potential attacks which never got off the ground because of methods like these.
Terrorists are not that common in the first place, with only a minority being interested in attacking aircraft. How much of the DHS's resources are go into protecting abortion clinics, probably the most likely places in the US to come under terrorist attack.
That's kind of silly. It's called theater because it's not real. It's not actually secure, and it doesn't even really look all that secure except to people who don't think past, "Geeze this is inconvenient, it must be that way for a very good reason."
At best such things have no effect on actual security. It is however perfectly possible for doing the whatever to result in less security. Either because the big showy thing itself adds security holes or because it takes money away from other things (which arn't obvious and maybe don't inconvenience members of the public) which actually would improve security.
All that is needed to hijack a plane is the threat of a bomb. Give a note to a stewardess that you have a two-way radio (walkie talkie) connected to a bomb in the checked baggage; if she makes any sudden moves or calls out, boom. Your note indicates that all you have to do is activate it by pressing the button on the radio and BOOM the plane goes down.
You don't even have to have a real bomb, you only have to have the credible threat of a real bomb.
And even if you did want to have a real bomb, with current security measures this would be trivial. Why is it that you can't carry liquids on, but you can check them? It would be trivial to make a mix-on-demand device with the sort of materials which are permissible in checked baggage such as shampoo bottles and a butane lighter.
If the threat of a bomb is sufficent it's unlikely that any actual terrorist would waste their time making a real bomb. Making a bomb with you can relativly certain will go bang when you want it to and won't go bang before that point is a non trivial task.
Every job, like airport security, that can be done by a private company, will be done better by a private company than the government will.
Private companies are perfectly capable of doing a very poor job. Even outside of their being "government contractors".
The agencies need to get off their ass, get back to doing "real" intel and do HUMINT.
The only way you will get this is by having effective oversight. Which would include the likes of warrents requiring work to obtain and requiring to be renewed every few days.
Now only if the US can pass a privacy article like most civilized countries have.
Who's going to actually enforce that?
Governments have a margin of error they can play within and still succeed, which is very large. Terrorists have none, they make a single error they're out.
It's not so simple. Since there are plenty of terrorists which many governments arn't especially interested in. As well as those which governments are activly supporting.
The patriot act and national security are more harmful to innocent people than to terrorists, for without them both there would be no reason for terrorism in the first place.
That in itself would not stop the US Government being a major sponsor of terrorism nor would it ensure that law enforcement would be equally interested in persuing all (or even all not backed by as major government) terrorists.
It would probably also be a good idea to contact your local electorate MP to voice your concern.
Best not to try and email them since they are unlikely to have an ISP connection for much longer.
First become a valid copyright owner. Release a song you record and own the copyright to.
Current copyright law makes becoming a copyright holder trivial. So trivial that you'd have to take complex steps to avoid being one...
Too bad the shitface of a politician who added this clauses is out of office since the government change. Judith Tizard if anyones interested,
:)
In which case her Internet connection is no longer likely to have any special protection applied to it
Comparing the UK to the US introduces too many variables.
Even comparing different parts of the US whould have this problem.
ou need to look at crime rates within the UK from before and after the gun ban.
"Gun homicide" is a bullshit statistic. With fewer guns, of course gun homicide is going to go down. Is there anyone who disputes this? No.
Only if it's fewer guns in the hands of people apt to use them for homicide.
We need to look at the homicide rate to see if the gun ban has been effective. It hasn't. The homicide rate has been rising slightly but steadily. Not even a blip on the radar shows when the gun ban took affect.
Which would probably be the case were pointy kitchen knives to be banned.
As for other crimes? Up drastically beginning when the gun ban took affect. Robbery. Home invasion. Rape and other violent crime. Interestingly, robbery with a gun had quadrupled within the first five years of the gun ban! Statistics for Australia are similar.
Gun ban == explosion in crime. The reason why is pretty obvious: Criminals can act with impunity knowing their victims cannot fight back.
Without the criminal themselves necessarily needing a gun. Not that gun "bans" do much to restrict guns on the "black market". It's also interesting that mass shootings in the US have tended to take place in "gun free zones"...
Let's pretend tomorrow that they decide to ignore the UN and hey maybe they decide that the color of your hair or some part of your ancestry makes you unclean and you get to goto the gulag.
Or somewhere like Gaza or South African townships.
There's a Simpson's episode that comes to mind where they successfully ban all kinds of weapons. They then find a board with a nail in it and start chasing each other around with those.
Even lower tech would be a tree branch.
Seriously, even a big padded room and a white straight jacket require potentially deadly tools to produce, and that combination still won't protect you from everything.
All sorts of improvised weapons have been made in prisons tool.
Ok...I am being a little harsh. However, the point that Benjamin Franklin was making is that those who would trade their liberty for safety (commonly paraphrased as security) deserve neither.
In practice it's possible to surrender liberty with out any gain of safety/security. (It's perfectly possible that the result might be less safety.)
If you ban everything that causes death, all you have done is surrender liberty. The mere act of surrendering your liberty simply sets a precedent with which more liberties can be taken.
Especially when combined with the meme that if surrendering liberties dosn't improve things then it can only be because insufficent liberties were surrendered.
Uhh, and how exactly is taking the point off supposed to keep someone from killing somebody with it? Hello, a slit throat will kill them just as quick and will probably cut down on the risk of that pesky screaming. And criminals aren't going to care about your stupid laws anyway. That is why they are called criminals.
This is where the "ban it" brigade completly fail to get it...
15 years ago, after their big round of gun bans, we asked if there were to be a rash of stabbings would they try to ban knives. The response was "Don't be ridiculous.", now that there has been a rash of stabbings they are actually going to try to ban knives.
Assuming there has actually been a "rash of stabbings". Also "banning" guns didn't reduce gun use by criminals, it possibly even increased it.
ARE they legal investigators in other states? That was one of the whole points with Mediasentry, they where illegally doing what they where doing in a number of states the RIAA had cases in. If this new company does the same shit then guess what, nothing changes and the RIAA is again violating the law.
But did anything happen to the RIAA over this? It's unlikely that a company in Denmark would be a certified PI anywhere in North America too.