They could probably do that better if they broadened their scope. We're coming up against the upper limits of what we're spending on airplanes. There are only a small set of airports.
Blow up one shopping mall, though, and you'll have tens of thousands of potential targets to spend money on. And Americans will certainly react with their last dollar, plus more they could borrow.
What I did say, though, was that a rudimentary system would have approximately the same effectiveness simply because there are so few attackers to bother protecting against.
And there's the rub, one to which I do not have a good answer. There have indeed been very few attacks in the US, plus a few more in Europe. And yet there are clearly plenty of people willing to blow themselves up to strike at somebody. Look at the attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or today in Sweden, for that matter. Why haven't they tried much simpler and effective attacks against something other than airplanes.
The biggest difference is that it's not within the US. It may simply be that those familiar enough with the culture to fake its manners to avoid getting nabbed aren't going to have enough rage to do something this unproductive.
Some, certainly. They had nearly two dozen involved in 9/11; surely they didn't blow up their entire stock all at once? Or maybe they did. It's the biggest open question, one on which the complete set of tactics really hinges.
Personally, I think you're absolutely right to bring up Northern Ireland. I think Americans have grown used to having no serious enemies on the border and cries like babies at relatively minor wounds. It's been a decade since 9/11 and Americans still feel the need to ratchet up defenses against an attack that can't happen again.
the TSA has been unsuccessful in preventing the (very few) attempted bombings in the recent past yet the attacks still failed.
Arguably, the failures were caused by the fact that they had to go to such great lengths to conceal the explosives. If they had brought on a nice, simple stick of dynamite, they'd almost certainly have succeeded.
You don't actually have to prevent 100% of attacks for security to be useful. A few foiled attacks are extremely handy in providing information and causing your opponents to waste time and energy. But when an attack is partially successful, you do need to increase security to some degree to foil a repetition.
It may not perfectly foil repetitions, but forces your opponents to change tactics, and that doesn't happen instantaneously.
It's not enough to posit that there's something both less intrusive and more effective. You have to actually show such a thing. I don't know if backscatter is optimal for the purpose, but I know it's more effective than taking no action.
Borrowing a library book isn't really "free", in the libre sense. It's due back at a certain date. You can only get it during the hours that the library open. If you lose it, you are REQUIRED to pay for another copy, so it's not even really gratis. And there are only a finite set of copies, so if the book is popular, you may not be able to get it at all.
Finally, I dunno what library you go to, but my library is far from having every book I want.
People buy books because they want to be more free with them. They're willing to pay for the convenience of having it any time they want. Even to loan it out, but it's still only a single copy: when you loan it out, you don't have it.
If unrestricted digital copies were allowed, none of that would apply. It may be that this is what the world is coming to regardless, so we may have to deal with it. But it's ridiculous for a famous author to claim that you can give it away free and somehow make it up in volume.
People may well pay for the convenience of print, something that still requires a real printing and binding machine. But if the text is given away, nobody will have reason to pay for anything above the printing cost.
Non-famous authors have problems getting noticed even if their books are free. Especially if their books are free, since they don't stand out from the millions of others. Print on demand doesn't change that. A commitment to pre-printed paper copies in a bookstore is something that helps an author stand out, and it's self-serving for Doctorow to forget about that.
It's not the only route, but the key is the investment of money: things that require no investment will always have to compete with the vast world of other free things, mostly junk.
Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you?
Wow, that's so deeply misleading as to count as an argument the other way. The obvious followup is, "And how many of you would have paid for it if it were available for free?"
Obscurity is the biggest problem of the vast majority of artists, but free downloads don't change that. Now you're just free among everybody else who's free. Publishing a book on paper or a CD in a music store makes you less obscure: you're among the handful of artists picked to do that. Somebody bothered to invest in a physical artifact. That's how you get famous enough that a non-trivial number of people share your work.
That model is failing fast, and yes, we need to find a new model. But artists who are already famous from the old model have less than zero experience with the new model; they have a deceptive and misleading opinion based on a position that very few artists ever get.
Very much so. On the one hand, it's not really correct to dub string theory "not science" just because it's so far from testable. They're doing what theoretical physicists down when presented with a conundrum: they formulate equations and push them around hoping to find something that does give them a testable result.
The other hand, though, is that it's not anywhere near far advanced enough to merit the kind of attention it gets from the general public. There's a notion that they're looking for The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything, and are portrayed as if they're just about there. For most people it's simply far beyond the pale, when there is much excellent science that's more testable but no less perplexing in quantum mechanics.
The theoreticians should be largely left to themselves. At least, needing only pencils and computers, they're fairly cheap.
There's a difference between "testable in theory" and "testable in practice". Science proceeds from both ends towards the middle, where theoreticians and experimenters meet.
Theoreticians work on things that may not be testable in practice, now. They may be testable one day, and that actually happens: particle physicists build bigger colliders, astronomers get to see the views they couldn't before, paleontologists dig up the fossil they expected but didn't have.
It leaves the realm of science utterly when it's not testable even in theory. Between the two there's a gray area, where something may not be practical in the forseeable future, or may require so much time and space and energy that it's absurd to think it would ever become practical. Theoreticians run a minefield here, but it would be invalid to forbid them from going there. They might well find a way to take something absurd and make it realistic; it happens.
I'm glossing over a lot of epistemic niceties here, but the point is that a theory does not have to be testable at the moment to be science. If this one happens to be testable now or in the near future, yay; that lets us exclude a lot of territory that's currently in the mine field. But it likely would not have happened without other theoreticians having explored that space.
To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
It's called the "Elastic Clause" for a reason... you can use it to justify practically anything. From there it's a matter of what "necessary" and "proper" really mean, which is arbitrarily difficult, but it should suffice to shut down the "but it ain't in the Constitution" meme.
(If, of course, that meme were actually applied rationally, rather than intermittently trotted out for powers of government you disagree with and conveniently ignored for those you like. In the absence of a rational argument, evidence is pointless, and the meme can continue indefinitely.)
I exaggerated, but the point is valid. There is nothing in the fashion industry that compares to the teams of coders, designers, music editors, and others, working on a multi-year cycle, to create a new video game. Big software projects require man-decades of effort.
Designing a good new piece of fashion takes a lot of years to learn, but so does learning good software design. I didn't mean to denigrate the skills of the fashion designers, who are both gifted and hard-working. I was just pointing out that the business models are necessarily different and that lessons from one are not trivially applied to the other.
I concur, but it's still not buying them anything. Yeah, Americans are busily making themselves miserable, but "step 3. Profit" is elusive for al Qaeda.
If all you want is to make people unhappy, it's not that hard to do, and by that standard, they're failing miserably. US airports are more demeaning than they used to be, but the US is still pretty much ticking along. People still shop, go on business trips, and generally live their lives. If we're bringing ourselves down economically, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
If they were hoping to bring themselves some sort of actual benefits, they've achieved less than zilch. Yeah, 9/11 cost the US a lot, but it cost them even more: they no longer have safe refuge in a country where they could institute their barbaric ideas and provide safe refuge to plan small-scale attacks. Even our stupidly-planned wars there and in Iraq are gradually winding down.
It has all cost the US a good deal, but we're very, very rich and can absorb even that. And they don't seem to be making much of a dent in that, not more than we're doing to ourselves. It just seems a huge stretch to call it a "win" for them, even if it is clearly a loss for us.
If they're happy with lose-lose, there's little anybody can do about it, but no real point, either.
The cycles are different there. Cranking out a new dress takes only a few hours. A new piece of software or a movie is an investment of millions of dollars before you see a dime of return. Copying a dress takes nearly as long as designing it, and just as long to mass-produce. Copying software or a movie takes moments.
You can now make professional-grade music for about the same time and money investment, and the financial matters there are more about the immense marketing effort to stand out from the throngs. The RIAA is seeing real declines, because there is a genuine alternative to them.
The MPAA and software industries, however, do not. Those industries can't just take up a fashion-industry model and have it work for them. If copying were really, truly, genuinely free, such that people weren't even subject to guilt for making an illegal copy, or if they were available for a price that took only trivial profit because they were competing, they really wouldn't make profits. Nor would they make it up on volume by doing it again next year.
When they do succeed, it puts a serious hurt on the nation. The whole country comes to a stop for a few days. It's not just the immediate loss of life and property, it's the fact that everybody becomes fearful about the loss of more life and more property.
I don't think they're necessarily stupid, though we have thwarted a lot of the attempts due more to their own foolishness than our cleverness. I assume that sooner or later they'll stop being so stupid.
When they do, I'll be interested in seeing how the country reacts. Just dismissing it as, "Yeah, you blew up a cafe today, but more people died of smoking" seems unlikely. It's not the American way.
I wouldn't mock your upbringing. This does seem to cross a line which was invisible, but real. A lot of people feel that they're being personally violated in a way that stuff up until now hasn't.
But it seems to me that there is an essential choice to make: your modesty (very real) or your safety. If you defend the former, al Qaeda will find a way to use it do damage to the latter. I'm surprised that they haven't already.
I'm personally fine with that, either way. I feel like I don't have a dog in this fight, or rather, I lose either way, in roughly comparable ways. (One daily and demeaning, one occasional and deadly.) I personally would rather move on to trying to solve the root problem.
I think it's an excellent question of how many suicide bombers there might be. The fact is that it wouldn't even require a suicide attack to do widespread damage in a hard-to-prevent attack. There are security announcements about packages left in airports, but if they were left at crowded events or on mass transit, you wouldn't even have to die yourself to trigger it.
I'm genuinely perplexed about why they haven't. If DHS keeps ratcheting airport security up so high to distract al Qaeda from more productive opportunities, that's an essential liberty I'm pretty willing to forgo. But I darkly suspect that one of these days al Qaeda will broaden its thinking, and then so will we.
If any attack were to be successful, the methods would presumably be repeated until we changed something to prevent it. The 9/11 attacks are unrepeatable for the simple expedient of a locked door and an aware populace. The rest of the security measures are actually largely unnecessary in preventing the thing of which people are most afraid: a large plane being used as a weapon in itself.
Beyond that, both al Qaeda and the FBI seem obsessed with blowing up planes. There have been a few attacks where the got an explosive on board, and it was bad luck that prevented deaths. There's no reason they shouldn't try again, with more success. And if there was success, they would continue to try it again.
That makes past analysis of the odds of attack unsuccessful: if you took no effort, they'd bring explosives on every day. Some effort is appropriate. How much effort is a matter of degree and subject to debate, but I feel as if the debate isn't being held on rational grounds. It's all gut reactions and noise.
People seem to have picked an odd point at which to become suddenly outraged. This has been going on for years, and I've been hearing the "trade essential liberty" quote to the point that it's tattooed on my retinas.
This one seems to have provoked especial outrage, and I can't help but see it as politically driven. Your average civil-liberties-minded Slashdotter has been roughly consistent, but I feel as if for much of the population it was different when The Last Guy was in charge. Now that The Other Guy is in charge, gosh, those other civil liberties violations were Necessary to the Security of a Free State, but this one's too much.
Or maybe it's just the prurience of it all: oooooh... nekkid pictures and groping. Sounds like headline news to me.
I just don't feel like we've suddenly crossed some line, where the other rights we gave up weren't Fundamental, but these are. Americans threw a hissy fit when the Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber and the Toner Cartridge Bomber managed to almost cause serious harm, but you've got two choices: either accept the occasional death-by-bombing, or the occasional massive personal intrusion. (There's also the Israeli option of spending ten times as much on security and standing in line while they quiz everybody, another unpopular stance.)
My point being... if all you've got to offer me is "I hate this", well, yeah, I knew that. When you've got an option that doesn't also generate "I hate this" from practically everybody, you've got News. Until then I feel like this story has been about biting dogs for way longer than is of any interest.
There's a kind of hereditary stupidity that can only be cured by forcibly removing the children. Creationists are not "uneducated". They were forcibly indoctrinated as children into a system of anti-intellectualism which cannot be removed from them, and one tenet of that indoctrination is that they must spread this same misinformation to their own children. They have all been given a chance at real education in school, but they were deliberately mis-educated to the contrary.
Forcibly removing the children is neither legal nor ethical, so we're stuck with their benighted existence. So I'm all for taxing the stupidity as the only humane way to cope with it.
The lottery and slot machines are even more clearly taxes on stupidity. If transferring money from the dim-witted to the state helps close budget gaps, I guess I'm reluctantly for it. You can't ban the stupidity itself, so maybe you can tax it into nonexistence. Or at least bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy for the individually stupid, unfortunately. For the parks, I'm sure it's immensely profitable, which profits they then turn into creating more stupidity ex nihilo. The perpetuum mobile of stupidity. A Von Neumann machine that passes the Anti-Turing Test of Artificial Idiocy.
Look at me... I'm reduced to just calling it names. It's such an obvious fallacy on the face of it that there's simply no way to reason with it; reason itself has been chucked as premise #1 of the argument. All I can do is fiddle while Rome burns, trying to keep myself amused while the barbarians build themselves amusement parks, reducing me to mixing my metaphors.
To a small degree, yes. Your body has tools for removing heavy metals like arsenic, and if you take some it will trigger buildup of those tools.
But it's just removing the arsenic, not incorporating it into the system wholesale. And the amount you can tolerate is still pretty limited. It's not like building up a resistance to iocaine.
That's correct. The carbons (and hydrogens and oxygens and nitrogens) are all where they should be. It's only the phosphorus that has been swapped out, for arsenic (right below it on the periodic table).
In fact arsenic is toxic to you precisely because it takes the place of phosphorus so easily, without doing all of the jobs. Except for this little guy, who manages to work around the differences and survive nearly phosphorus-free.
it is no more an indication that the US is lost than religious leaders announcing that 9/11 is a sign of God's displeasure.
I don't think it's lost yet, but it feels as if it is on its way out. This one statement isn't the only thing I had in mind. Conservative leaders have been rushing to defend American "exceptionalism", the idea that rules that apply to the rest of the world don't apply to us.
Even if that were true during the Cold War (during which America led the opposition to the Soviet Union), even if that were true during the post-Cold War peace (during which America led globalization and technological advance), it feels less and less true. America's leadership is declining, and statements like this and others make me feel as if we're resting on our laurels.
I don't think it's gone yet. This country may have some backbone to it yet. But it feels to me as if it feels entitled to its leadership because of who it is, not because of what it does, and gets touchy every time somebody questions that. In this case, it's equating a relatively minor crime with mass murder, more because it mocks us than because of its costs.
The Taliban is responsible, directly and demonstrably, for a great many deaths, both in the US and abroad.
The number of deaths that can be traced to Assange is... how many? How indirectly?
If he is in fact guilty of the actual physical crimes of which he's accused, he should be pursued and prosecuted proportionally to them. But when you equate "taking America down a peg" with mass murder... it makes you realize why Assange is doing what he's doing.
It feels as if America has lost its glory, pursuing its reputation like a bully. I think we're still better than that. But the last election didn't tell me so as clearly as I'd like, and the next election may explicitly contradict me.
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They could probably do that better if they broadened their scope. We're coming up against the upper limits of what we're spending on airplanes. There are only a small set of airports.
Blow up one shopping mall, though, and you'll have tens of thousands of potential targets to spend money on. And Americans will certainly react with their last dollar, plus more they could borrow.
What I did say, though, was that a rudimentary system would have approximately the same effectiveness simply because there are so few attackers to bother protecting against.
And there's the rub, one to which I do not have a good answer. There have indeed been very few attacks in the US, plus a few more in Europe. And yet there are clearly plenty of people willing to blow themselves up to strike at somebody. Look at the attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. Or today in Sweden, for that matter. Why haven't they tried much simpler and effective attacks against something other than airplanes.
The biggest difference is that it's not within the US. It may simply be that those familiar enough with the culture to fake its manners to avoid getting nabbed aren't going to have enough rage to do something this unproductive.
Some, certainly. They had nearly two dozen involved in 9/11; surely they didn't blow up their entire stock all at once? Or maybe they did. It's the biggest open question, one on which the complete set of tactics really hinges.
Personally, I think you're absolutely right to bring up Northern Ireland. I think Americans have grown used to having no serious enemies on the border and cries like babies at relatively minor wounds. It's been a decade since 9/11 and Americans still feel the need to ratchet up defenses against an attack that can't happen again.
the TSA has been unsuccessful in preventing the (very few) attempted bombings in the recent past yet the attacks still failed.
Arguably, the failures were caused by the fact that they had to go to such great lengths to conceal the explosives. If they had brought on a nice, simple stick of dynamite, they'd almost certainly have succeeded.
You don't actually have to prevent 100% of attacks for security to be useful. A few foiled attacks are extremely handy in providing information and causing your opponents to waste time and energy. But when an attack is partially successful, you do need to increase security to some degree to foil a repetition.
It may not perfectly foil repetitions, but forces your opponents to change tactics, and that doesn't happen instantaneously.
It's not enough to posit that there's something both less intrusive and more effective. You have to actually show such a thing. I don't know if backscatter is optimal for the purpose, but I know it's more effective than taking no action.
Borrowing a library book isn't really "free", in the libre sense. It's due back at a certain date. You can only get it during the hours that the library open. If you lose it, you are REQUIRED to pay for another copy, so it's not even really gratis. And there are only a finite set of copies, so if the book is popular, you may not be able to get it at all.
Finally, I dunno what library you go to, but my library is far from having every book I want.
People buy books because they want to be more free with them. They're willing to pay for the convenience of having it any time they want. Even to loan it out, but it's still only a single copy: when you loan it out, you don't have it.
If unrestricted digital copies were allowed, none of that would apply. It may be that this is what the world is coming to regardless, so we may have to deal with it. But it's ridiculous for a famous author to claim that you can give it away free and somehow make it up in volume.
People may well pay for the convenience of print, something that still requires a real printing and binding machine. But if the text is given away, nobody will have reason to pay for anything above the printing cost.
Non-famous authors have problems getting noticed even if their books are free. Especially if their books are free, since they don't stand out from the millions of others. Print on demand doesn't change that. A commitment to pre-printed paper copies in a bookstore is something that helps an author stand out, and it's self-serving for Doctorow to forget about that.
It's not the only route, but the key is the investment of money: things that require no investment will always have to compete with the vast world of other free things, mostly junk.
Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you?
Wow, that's so deeply misleading as to count as an argument the other way. The obvious followup is, "And how many of you would have paid for it if it were available for free?"
Obscurity is the biggest problem of the vast majority of artists, but free downloads don't change that. Now you're just free among everybody else who's free. Publishing a book on paper or a CD in a music store makes you less obscure: you're among the handful of artists picked to do that. Somebody bothered to invest in a physical artifact. That's how you get famous enough that a non-trivial number of people share your work.
That model is failing fast, and yes, we need to find a new model. But artists who are already famous from the old model have less than zero experience with the new model; they have a deceptive and misleading opinion based on a position that very few artists ever get.
Very much so. On the one hand, it's not really correct to dub string theory "not science" just because it's so far from testable. They're doing what theoretical physicists down when presented with a conundrum: they formulate equations and push them around hoping to find something that does give them a testable result.
The other hand, though, is that it's not anywhere near far advanced enough to merit the kind of attention it gets from the general public. There's a notion that they're looking for The Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything, and are portrayed as if they're just about there. For most people it's simply far beyond the pale, when there is much excellent science that's more testable but no less perplexing in quantum mechanics.
The theoreticians should be largely left to themselves. At least, needing only pencils and computers, they're fairly cheap.
There's a difference between "testable in theory" and "testable in practice". Science proceeds from both ends towards the middle, where theoreticians and experimenters meet.
Theoreticians work on things that may not be testable in practice, now. They may be testable one day, and that actually happens: particle physicists build bigger colliders, astronomers get to see the views they couldn't before, paleontologists dig up the fossil they expected but didn't have.
It leaves the realm of science utterly when it's not testable even in theory. Between the two there's a gray area, where something may not be practical in the forseeable future, or may require so much time and space and energy that it's absurd to think it would ever become practical. Theoreticians run a minefield here, but it would be invalid to forbid them from going there. They might well find a way to take something absurd and make it realistic; it happens.
I'm glossing over a lot of epistemic niceties here, but the point is that a theory does not have to be testable at the moment to be science. If this one happens to be testable now or in the near future, yay; that lets us exclude a lot of territory that's currently in the mine field. But it likely would not have happened without other theoreticians having explored that space.
Article I section 8 goes on to say:
To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.
It's called the "Elastic Clause" for a reason... you can use it to justify practically anything. From there it's a matter of what "necessary" and "proper" really mean, which is arbitrarily difficult, but it should suffice to shut down the "but it ain't in the Constitution" meme.
(If, of course, that meme were actually applied rationally, rather than intermittently trotted out for powers of government you disagree with and conveniently ignored for those you like. In the absence of a rational argument, evidence is pointless, and the meme can continue indefinitely.)
I exaggerated, but the point is valid. There is nothing in the fashion industry that compares to the teams of coders, designers, music editors, and others, working on a multi-year cycle, to create a new video game. Big software projects require man-decades of effort.
Designing a good new piece of fashion takes a lot of years to learn, but so does learning good software design. I didn't mean to denigrate the skills of the fashion designers, who are both gifted and hard-working. I was just pointing out that the business models are necessarily different and that lessons from one are not trivially applied to the other.
I concur, but it's still not buying them anything. Yeah, Americans are busily making themselves miserable, but "step 3. Profit" is elusive for al Qaeda.
If all you want is to make people unhappy, it's not that hard to do, and by that standard, they're failing miserably. US airports are more demeaning than they used to be, but the US is still pretty much ticking along. People still shop, go on business trips, and generally live their lives. If we're bringing ourselves down economically, we have nobody to blame but ourselves.
If they were hoping to bring themselves some sort of actual benefits, they've achieved less than zilch. Yeah, 9/11 cost the US a lot, but it cost them even more: they no longer have safe refuge in a country where they could institute their barbaric ideas and provide safe refuge to plan small-scale attacks. Even our stupidly-planned wars there and in Iraq are gradually winding down.
It has all cost the US a good deal, but we're very, very rich and can absorb even that. And they don't seem to be making much of a dent in that, not more than we're doing to ourselves. It just seems a huge stretch to call it a "win" for them, even if it is clearly a loss for us.
If they're happy with lose-lose, there's little anybody can do about it, but no real point, either.
The cycles are different there. Cranking out a new dress takes only a few hours. A new piece of software or a movie is an investment of millions of dollars before you see a dime of return.
Copying a dress takes nearly as long as designing it, and just as long to mass-produce. Copying software or a movie takes moments.
You can now make professional-grade music for about the same time and money investment, and the financial matters there are more about the immense marketing effort to stand out from the throngs. The RIAA is seeing real declines, because there is a genuine alternative to them.
The MPAA and software industries, however, do not. Those industries can't just take up a fashion-industry model and have it work for them. If copying were really, truly, genuinely free, such that people weren't even subject to guilt for making an illegal copy, or if they were available for a price that took only trivial profit because they were competing, they really wouldn't make profits. Nor would they make it up on volume by doing it again next year.
Well said. Sorry I can't mod you up.
When they do succeed, it puts a serious hurt on the nation. The whole country comes to a stop for a few days. It's not just the immediate loss of life and property, it's the fact that everybody becomes fearful about the loss of more life and more property.
I don't think they're necessarily stupid, though we have thwarted a lot of the attempts due more to their own foolishness than our cleverness. I assume that sooner or later they'll stop being so stupid.
When they do, I'll be interested in seeing how the country reacts. Just dismissing it as, "Yeah, you blew up a cafe today, but more people died of smoking" seems unlikely. It's not the American way.
I wouldn't mock your upbringing. This does seem to cross a line which was invisible, but real. A lot of people feel that they're being personally violated in a way that stuff up until now hasn't.
But it seems to me that there is an essential choice to make: your modesty (very real) or your safety. If you defend the former, al Qaeda will find a way to use it do damage to the latter. I'm surprised that they haven't already.
I'm personally fine with that, either way. I feel like I don't have a dog in this fight, or rather, I lose either way, in roughly comparable ways. (One daily and demeaning, one occasional and deadly.) I personally would rather move on to trying to solve the root problem.
I think it's an excellent question of how many suicide bombers there might be. The fact is that it wouldn't even require a suicide attack to do widespread damage in a hard-to-prevent attack. There are security announcements about packages left in airports, but if they were left at crowded events or on mass transit, you wouldn't even have to die yourself to trigger it.
I'm genuinely perplexed about why they haven't. If DHS keeps ratcheting airport security up so high to distract al Qaeda from more productive opportunities, that's an essential liberty I'm pretty willing to forgo. But I darkly suspect that one of these days al Qaeda will broaden its thinking, and then so will we.
If any attack were to be successful, the methods would presumably be repeated until we changed something to prevent it. The 9/11 attacks are unrepeatable for the simple expedient of a locked door and an aware populace. The rest of the security measures are actually largely unnecessary in preventing the thing of which people are most afraid: a large plane being used as a weapon in itself.
Beyond that, both al Qaeda and the FBI seem obsessed with blowing up planes. There have been a few attacks where the got an explosive on board, and it was bad luck that prevented deaths. There's no reason they shouldn't try again, with more success. And if there was success, they would continue to try it again.
That makes past analysis of the odds of attack unsuccessful: if you took no effort, they'd bring explosives on every day. Some effort is appropriate. How much effort is a matter of degree and subject to debate, but I feel as if the debate isn't being held on rational grounds. It's all gut reactions and noise.
People seem to have picked an odd point at which to become suddenly outraged. This has been going on for years, and I've been hearing the "trade essential liberty" quote to the point that it's tattooed on my retinas.
This one seems to have provoked especial outrage, and I can't help but see it as politically driven. Your average civil-liberties-minded Slashdotter has been roughly consistent, but I feel as if for much of the population it was different when The Last Guy was in charge. Now that The Other Guy is in charge, gosh, those other civil liberties violations were Necessary to the Security of a Free State, but this one's too much.
Or maybe it's just the prurience of it all: oooooh... nekkid pictures and groping. Sounds like headline news to me.
I just don't feel like we've suddenly crossed some line, where the other rights we gave up weren't Fundamental, but these are. Americans threw a hissy fit when the Shoe Bomber and the Underwear Bomber and the Toner Cartridge Bomber managed to almost cause serious harm, but you've got two choices: either accept the occasional death-by-bombing, or the occasional massive personal intrusion. (There's also the Israeli option of spending ten times as much on security and standing in line while they quiz everybody, another unpopular stance.)
My point being... if all you've got to offer me is "I hate this", well, yeah, I knew that. When you've got an option that doesn't also generate "I hate this" from practically everybody, you've got News. Until then I feel like this story has been about biting dogs for way longer than is of any interest.
If there were any justice, Ayn Rand would be paying the tax.
There's a kind of hereditary stupidity that can only be cured by forcibly removing the children. Creationists are not "uneducated". They were forcibly indoctrinated as children into a system of anti-intellectualism which cannot be removed from them, and one tenet of that indoctrination is that they must spread this same misinformation to their own children. They have all been given a chance at real education in school, but they were deliberately mis-educated to the contrary.
Forcibly removing the children is neither legal nor ethical, so we're stuck with their benighted existence. So I'm all for taxing the stupidity as the only humane way to cope with it.
The lottery and slot machines are even more clearly taxes on stupidity. If transferring money from the dim-witted to the state helps close budget gaps, I guess I'm reluctantly for it. You can't ban the stupidity itself, so maybe you can tax it into nonexistence. Or at least bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy for the individually stupid, unfortunately. For the parks, I'm sure it's immensely profitable, which profits they then turn into creating more stupidity ex nihilo. The perpetuum mobile of stupidity. A Von Neumann machine that passes the Anti-Turing Test of Artificial Idiocy.
Look at me... I'm reduced to just calling it names. It's such an obvious fallacy on the face of it that there's simply no way to reason with it; reason itself has been chucked as premise #1 of the argument. All I can do is fiddle while Rome burns, trying to keep myself amused while the barbarians build themselves amusement parks, reducing me to mixing my metaphors.
To a small degree, yes. Your body has tools for removing heavy metals like arsenic, and if you take some it will trigger buildup of those tools.
But it's just removing the arsenic, not incorporating it into the system wholesale. And the amount you can tolerate is still pretty limited. It's not like building up a resistance to iocaine.
That's correct. The carbons (and hydrogens and oxygens and nitrogens) are all where they should be. It's only the phosphorus that has been swapped out, for arsenic (right below it on the periodic table).
In fact arsenic is toxic to you precisely because it takes the place of phosphorus so easily, without doing all of the jobs. Except for this little guy, who manages to work around the differences and survive nearly phosphorus-free.
Seriously, it ought to be criminal to allow people like that in office.
Strictly speaking, she isn't.
it is no more an indication that the US is lost than religious leaders announcing that 9/11 is a sign of God's displeasure.
I don't think it's lost yet, but it feels as if it is on its way out. This one statement isn't the only thing I had in mind. Conservative leaders have been rushing to defend American "exceptionalism", the idea that rules that apply to the rest of the world don't apply to us.
Even if that were true during the Cold War (during which America led the opposition to the Soviet Union), even if that were true during the post-Cold War peace (during which America led globalization and technological advance), it feels less and less true. America's leadership is declining, and statements like this and others make me feel as if we're resting on our laurels.
I don't think it's gone yet. This country may have some backbone to it yet. But it feels to me as if it feels entitled to its leadership because of who it is, not because of what it does, and gets touchy every time somebody questions that. In this case, it's equating a relatively minor crime with mass murder, more because it mocks us than because of its costs.
The Taliban is responsible, directly and demonstrably, for a great many deaths, both in the US and abroad.
The number of deaths that can be traced to Assange is... how many? How indirectly?
If he is in fact guilty of the actual physical crimes of which he's accused, he should be pursued and prosecuted proportionally to them. But when you equate "taking America down a peg" with mass murder... it makes you realize why Assange is doing what he's doing.
It feels as if America has lost its glory, pursuing its reputation like a bully. I think we're still better than that. But the last election didn't tell me so as clearly as I'd like, and the next election may explicitly contradict me.