My first thought on that is... I don't believe them.
If all you can see is a "silhouette", then why can't I hide a low-density weapon flat against my body, visible only as part of the silhouette?? Hell, just fit it to my ass crack or my cock and it should be hidden along with the biological "detail".
The problem is that either it *has* to see these "details", or it is not effective (and someone is selling us a line of snake oil).
Yes, it's their plane. The airline can make whatever the hell rules it wants about what I can carry aboard.
BUT -- it's not the *airline* making the rules; it's the *government*.
Since we have the implicit right of freedom of movement, if the gov't imposes rules on airlines that restrict freedom of movement, then the airlines are being used as the government's hand in restricting our rights, and the airlines' ownership of the planes becomes irrelevant to the argument.
If there were no federal rules about what people could carry aboard, and it was all done entirely at the airlines' behest, *then* I'd agree with you that if a person doesn't like it, they can travel by some other method.
Assuming that all other methods won't eventually be subject to scrutiny. One can easily imagine a future version of this tech being used to scan vehicles entering a freeway. Hell, why not just put scanners on the doors of every private residence, so there's no chance that you can carry a weapon out the door at all?!
It's the buzzword effect. It turns off the parts of the brain responsible for critical analysis. "Terrorism" is probably the most powerful buzzword ever invented, edging out even "for the children".
As to relative odds, your chance of dying in an accident in your own home is far greater than your chance of being murdered (in your bed or elsewhere). So with safety in mind, lets ban individual houses, and all live in nice safe enclosures... crap, I think I just invoked Godwin's Law:/
As to your high-contrast message (an excellent idea! Do come back and let us know when you do it!) I suggest putting it square across your ass, so they're forced to take a good close look if they want to read it.;)
[Wondering if metallic "temporary tattoo" ink would work]
I had the same thought. This scanning IS in effect a strip search with full body-cavity probes.
What are the current legalities regarding strip searches -- in ordinary circumstances, can they be done without an arrest and/or warrant? What about probable cause? (Any criminal lawyers here??)
IMO the gender and/or sexual interest of the person operating the machine is irrelevant; it would still BE a strip search even if it were fully mechanized.
BTW check out my post below, where I rant about sheep vs terrorists aboard airliners.
How many sheep does it take to keep their heads down while one nut holds a knife to someone's throat?
Yeah, if the passengers jump the perps, chances are SOMEONE will get killed. But as 9/11 demonstrated, the stakes have become the lives of everyone aboard (plus however many on the ground), it's not just one hostage's life at stake anymore.
And as the plane that went down in Pennsylvania demonstrated, a dozen strapping lads armed with only their fists can trump half a dozen nuts armed with knives. One has to wonder -- if the passengers had tackled the perps IMMEDIATELY, would the plane have gone down at all?
The fact is, we've become too accustomed to being safe, and we're no longer willing to take risks. So one skinny terrorist with a knife CAN hold hostage a plane full of grown men, despite that just 2 or 3 passengers could take him down.
Ants come in several flavours, which vary by species and probably by what they're eating too.
The best ones are mildly sweet with a hint of acidity. These are good raw or fried. Ordinary "big brown ants" (common throughout the American midwest) are of this type. The main problem is that by the time you've collected enough ants for a meal, you've starved to death.
The worst... well, there are ants that smell like rotting socks, and I imagine they taste much the same. You'll have to check those out for yourself.:)
Having lived in ND (1955-1960), MN (1960-1964) and MT (1964-1984)... MT gets considerably colder, but ND/MN has a contiguous winter -- once the snow comes, it stays til spring, and you won't see the ground for 4 months or longer. Whereas in MT only January is continuous; the rest of the season gets regular "chinooks" (warm wind down the east slope of the Rockies) that can reach 70F in February, tho typically only for 3 days at a time, then you get another storm and hard freeze cycle, so you're always switching between your snowshoes and your high waders!! especially since the last big snowfall is always in June!
SoCal sucks in just about every other way, but man, the weather is SO much better... OTOH, a good climate fails to select against idiots, so we have more than our fair share!
The random occasional pigs we see in SoCal tend to be the old type, or at least have that look (but no one here seriously breeds pigs, either). But yeah, I've heard that the old breeds are getting rare to unheard-of in commercial operations.
As to the quality of meat... it mostly sucks here in SoCal, except at Costco and Sam's Club (only places you can get really fresh meat, and even then not on weekends). Sam's has pork that, like your Fareway's stuff, is right on a par with the best beef. Some sort of very meaty rib-chops, with hardly any bone and minimal fat, were offered at $1.79 (which is about as cheap as something you'd call "meat" gets here). Never saw pork like that when I was a kid!
[And I'd rather be in North Dakota, if it weren't for the weather]
"Now we just preload it and act like, w00t, our bloat loads instantly. We're so l33t. Too bad the user's machine now swaps, but now it's suddenly the user's problem, not ours. We can just call the user an idiot and move on."
Right on! Much like I've been bitching since WinApp development moved almost entirely to XP -- no one bothers conserving the resource heaps anymore, because the OS is expected to do it. If that means your app crashes the non-NT user's machine, well, those stupid users should upgrade to a MODERN operating system anyway.
Programmers used to have more pride in their ability to create lean, clean, and stable code.:(
Not much dressing up here in Lancaster CA either, in fact none at all despite there being a short line of campers (maybe 100 or so). Tho there was one guy in full Stormtrooper regalia signing autographs [??!] out front, but he appeared to be a publicity dude, not a patron.
But unless every factor is in perfect sync (highly unlikely in a high-speed 3-dimensional space battle, where both parties are dodging debris to boot), merely ticking one another is enough -- witness what has happened to precision-sync flying teams when one jet has barely nudged another. Yeah, it can be done, but it's a long ways from a "safe" stunt.
And in the original film, there is more concession to reality -- when two fast-moving objects doink one another, the less-massy one gets bounced or damaged.
As to the "sound in space" thing, that's become the convention simply because (as ST's producers realised back in 1966) otherwise it "looks dull" on the 2D screen, tho I think Lucas overdoes it. -- But I've had the notion were space battles reality, our combat computers might produce simulated "passing traffic" sounds, to alert us to where other craft are at without needing visuals.
You're right -- most people here do not grok that space opera is really its own genre, more akin to westerns and historical epics than to "pure" science fiction. And personally, I'm willing to blow off small details of discontinuity. Hell, some of them can be chalked up to, frex, Obi-Wan's demonstrated penchant for telling things "from a certain point of view".
As to Hayden Christensen's acting -- given that he's young (just turned 24 last month) and probably not very experienced at coping with bad directing, I think he did quite well (in ROTS, at least -- I haven't seen Eps.1 and 2). I had no trouble *believing* in him as Anakin Skywalker, to the point that he's seamlessly replaced whatever image I previously had.
As to the directing, I'm convinced there must have been a shadow director who did most of the real work (this isn't uncommon when a Big Name has creative control and gets the directing credit), but that certain critical scenes were under Lucas' immediate control.
Hence these critical scenes, most especially Anakin's fall to the Dark Side, were *rushed*. What should have been played as a developing torment of uncertainty and doubt was reduced to a one liner -- "then he fell to the Dark Side, and we all went on to the next set" (which pointed out the accompanying hokey dialog). ROTS could have been a vastly stronger movie if only these scenes had been allowed to develop at their own pace.
Indeed, the scenes that went at their own pace managed to deal quite well with said hokey dialog, as they had MUCH better acting.
I agree -- the lightsabre fights, while pretty and exciting, don't hold up well under analysis. Of course, they didn't have Bob Anderson choreographing them this time, either.
I'd also whine about how the laws of physics seem to be entirely negated with respect to the small starfighters. We're zipping along at several thousand meters per second, yet we can scrape our S-foils together without being instantly pulverized?
Lucas based his original space duels on footage of World War (1? 2?) dogfights, but apparently he never updated his understanding beyond the prop-plane era.
Back in 1977, I made some "reasonable assumptions" about the evident speed of X-Wings vs. the apparent size of the Death Star, and concluded that it was something like 500 kilometers in diameter.
The Death Star is not in my old Star Wars Sourcebooks, but for comparison, the Super Star Destroyer is listed at 8000 meters in length (with a crew of 280,000, which sounds a little cramped in persons per cubic meter, compared to mundane aircraft carriers -- they're what, about 1000 meters and a crew of 5000 or so?)
As to mass, remember that it's largely framework for living and working spaces, thus mostly hollow.
As to how long it took to build -- the Death Star was perhaps double the size of the Los Angeles subway system, which (with various gov't boondoggles) took what, 10 or 12 years to get to somewhere near complete? So I don't find it at all unbelieveable that a prototype Death Star took nearly two decades to reach operational status.
Yep, about right, tho different types of fat vary a little as to calories per gram. (I didn't look up the numbers, and don't swear to the integrity of any data in my brain storage, which seriously needs defragging:)
As to Atkins, why it works is flamingly obvious to anyone with a smattering of biochemistry. Tho it didn't have a catchy name back in 1973, when my first-year univ. biochem class covered the topic.
No, that just means that most of the CALORIES are from fat. This is true of most foods that contain any fat (including butter and veg.oils) at all, because fat is the most caloric-dense ingredient.
Fat runs around 170 calories per ounce (vs. something like 60 cal/oz for meat).
So if a 2-ounce serving contains 140 cal. from fat, that means the product is around 20% fat.
Which is about the same as ordinary hamburger.
As to changes over the years, pork itself has become a fairly lean meat, so there is less fat in the average processed pig than there was 30 years ago. But the canning process is rather finicky about what can be in the can and still come out at the desired texture, so it's more likely changes in your tastes with maturity that make it seem different. Lots of kids think many things are gross that these same kids gobble wholeheartedly as adults.
John Williams and ROTS: Did you notice the foreshadowing done BY the music? there are points early on where you can hear an echo of Vader's respirator -- IN the music itself. Creepy! I was very impressed.
ROTS's main problem is that critical scenes, most notably when Anakin gets converted to the Dark Side, are RUSHED. It would have been much better if they'd been allowed to play out naturally (thus allowing the actors to flesh out the scene, too). But Lucas thinks we're all 3-year-olds who have to be kept "entertained" ALL the time, and aren't interested in *gasp* THINKING about a critical character-development scene as it unfolds at its own pace.
The wonder wasn't that the rushed scenes had poor acting, but that the actors managed as well as they DID, given the material and directing they had to cope with. When they weren't overly-rushed, the acting is very good and even the hokey lines worked in context.
Because the dichotomy there is so strong, I did get the feeling that there were two directors involved, even if only one is credited.
And by attempting to shift the balance entirely toward the Good, and FAILING because of their own blindness, the Jedi themselves helped fulfill the prophecy.
Actually, the Zahn novels would probably benefit from being compacted for film. They're good in terms of plot, and some of the characters are very good, but whenever we're on the New Republic side of things, or following Luke or Mara Jade around, the books tend to drag. Take away all that filler, and you've got a rip-roaring space epic... probably 2 or 3 good hours worth per book.
Side note: Zahn's writing generally has more git-up-and-go than his SW books do; I get the feeling that they were somewhat constrained by LucasArts' rules.
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To furhter nit what was probably a typo, a mile is 5280 feet. Unless you're somewhere that feet are longer than normal :)
My first thought on that is... I don't believe them.
If all you can see is a "silhouette", then why can't I hide a low-density weapon flat against my body, visible only as part of the silhouette?? Hell, just fit it to my ass crack or my cock and it should be hidden along with the biological "detail".
The problem is that either it *has* to see these "details", or it is not effective (and someone is selling us a line of snake oil).
I have a bicklebrush growing in my front yard. Yeah, its spines rip your clothes every time you go by, but it keeps the tigers away.
You don't see any tigers in my yard, do you??
Yes, it's their plane. The airline can make whatever the hell rules it wants about what I can carry aboard.
BUT -- it's not the *airline* making the rules; it's the *government*.
Since we have the implicit right of freedom of movement, if the gov't imposes rules on airlines that restrict freedom of movement, then the airlines are being used as the government's hand in restricting our rights, and the airlines' ownership of the planes becomes irrelevant to the argument.
If there were no federal rules about what people could carry aboard, and it was all done entirely at the airlines' behest, *then* I'd agree with you that if a person doesn't like it, they can travel by some other method.
Assuming that all other methods won't eventually be subject to scrutiny. One can easily imagine a future version of this tech being used to scan vehicles entering a freeway. Hell, why not just put scanners on the doors of every private residence, so there's no chance that you can carry a weapon out the door at all?!
I've never seen a grey ant. Are you sure it wasn't a termite?
:)
The more-acidic ants (without any sweetness) aren't any good unless fried, which takes the sting out of 'em.
The ants in SoCal are all kindof icky tasting, which is a shame because finally I'm somewhere there are enough ants to make a meal
It's the buzzword effect. It turns off the parts of the brain responsible for critical analysis. "Terrorism" is probably the most powerful buzzword ever invented, edging out even "for the children".
... crap, I think I just invoked Godwin's Law :/
;)
As to relative odds, your chance of dying in an accident in your own home is far greater than your chance of being murdered (in your bed or elsewhere). So with safety in mind, lets ban individual houses, and all live in nice safe enclosures
As to your high-contrast message (an excellent idea! Do come back and let us know when you do it!) I suggest putting it square across your ass, so they're forced to take a good close look if they want to read it.
[Wondering if metallic "temporary tattoo" ink would work]
I had the same thought. This scanning IS in effect a strip search with full body-cavity probes.
What are the current legalities regarding strip searches -- in ordinary circumstances, can they be done without an arrest and/or warrant? What about probable cause? (Any criminal lawyers here??)
IMO the gender and/or sexual interest of the person operating the machine is irrelevant; it would still BE a strip search even if it were fully mechanized.
BTW check out my post below, where I rant about sheep vs terrorists aboard airliners.
How many sheep does it take to keep their heads down while one nut holds a knife to someone's throat?
Yeah, if the passengers jump the perps, chances are SOMEONE will get killed. But as 9/11 demonstrated, the stakes have become the lives of everyone aboard (plus however many on the ground), it's not just one hostage's life at stake anymore.
And as the plane that went down in Pennsylvania demonstrated, a dozen strapping lads armed with only their fists can trump half a dozen nuts armed with knives. One has to wonder -- if the passengers had tackled the perps IMMEDIATELY, would the plane have gone down at all?
The fact is, we've become too accustomed to being safe, and we're no longer willing to take risks. So one skinny terrorist with a knife CAN hold hostage a plane full of grown men, despite that just 2 or 3 passengers could take him down.
Ants come in several flavours, which vary by species and probably by what they're eating too.
... well, there are ants that smell like rotting socks, and I imagine they taste much the same. You'll have to check those out for yourself. :)
The best ones are mildly sweet with a hint of acidity. These are good raw or fried. Ordinary "big brown ants" (common throughout the American midwest) are of this type. The main problem is that by the time you've collected enough ants for a meal, you've starved to death.
The worst
I still use BBSs (one telnet, one dialup). For some things they still work great. I'm happy to see their history preserved like this.
Do you know which Creative Commons license he used??
Having lived in ND (1955-1960), MN (1960-1964) and MT (1964-1984) ... MT gets considerably colder, but ND/MN has a contiguous winter -- once the snow comes, it stays til spring, and you won't see the ground for 4 months or longer. Whereas in MT only January is continuous; the rest of the season gets regular "chinooks" (warm wind down the east slope of the Rockies) that can reach 70F in February, tho typically only for 3 days at a time, then you get another storm and hard freeze cycle, so you're always switching between your snowshoes and your high waders!! especially since the last big snowfall is always in June!
SoCal sucks in just about every other way, but man, the weather is SO much better... OTOH, a good climate fails to select against idiots, so we have more than our fair share!
Hmm, I'd heard they were bigger than that, but it's not something I keep up on, either. Anyway, thanks for the info.
The random occasional pigs we see in SoCal tend to be the old type, or at least have that look (but no one here seriously breeds pigs, either). But yeah, I've heard that the old breeds are getting rare to unheard-of in commercial operations.
As to the quality of meat... it mostly sucks here in SoCal, except at Costco and Sam's Club (only places you can get really fresh meat, and even then not on weekends). Sam's has pork that, like your Fareway's stuff, is right on a par with the best beef. Some sort of very meaty rib-chops, with hardly any bone and minimal fat, were offered at $1.79 (which is about as cheap as something you'd call "meat" gets here). Never saw pork like that when I was a kid!
[And I'd rather be in North Dakota, if it weren't for the weather]
"Now we just preload it and act like, w00t, our bloat loads instantly. We're so l33t. Too bad the user's machine now swaps, but now it's suddenly the user's problem, not ours. We can just call the user an idiot and move on."
:(
Right on! Much like I've been bitching since WinApp development moved almost entirely to XP -- no one bothers conserving the resource heaps anymore, because the OS is expected to do it. If that means your app crashes the non-NT user's machine, well, those stupid users should upgrade to a MODERN operating system anyway.
Programmers used to have more pride in their ability to create lean, clean, and stable code.
Didn't you see his bumper sticker..??
"Lord of the Sith on board... NOW how's my driving?"
Not much dressing up here in Lancaster CA either, in fact none at all despite there being a short line of campers (maybe 100 or so). Tho there was one guy in full Stormtrooper regalia signing autographs [??!] out front, but he appeared to be a publicity dude, not a patron.
But unless every factor is in perfect sync (highly unlikely in a high-speed 3-dimensional space battle, where both parties are dodging debris to boot), merely ticking one another is enough -- witness what has happened to precision-sync flying teams when one jet has barely nudged another. Yeah, it can be done, but it's a long ways from a "safe" stunt.
And in the original film, there is more concession to reality -- when two fast-moving objects doink one another, the less-massy one gets bounced or damaged.
As to the "sound in space" thing, that's become the convention simply because (as ST's producers realised back in 1966) otherwise it "looks dull" on the 2D screen, tho I think Lucas overdoes it. -- But I've had the notion were space battles reality, our combat computers might produce simulated "passing traffic" sounds, to alert us to where other craft are at without needing visuals.
You're right -- most people here do not grok that space opera is really its own genre, more akin to westerns and historical epics than to "pure" science fiction. And personally, I'm willing to blow off small details of discontinuity. Hell, some of them can be chalked up to, frex, Obi-Wan's demonstrated penchant for telling things "from a certain point of view".
As to Hayden Christensen's acting -- given that he's young (just turned 24 last month) and probably not very experienced at coping with bad directing, I think he did quite well (in ROTS, at least -- I haven't seen Eps.1 and 2). I had no trouble *believing* in him as Anakin Skywalker, to the point that he's seamlessly replaced whatever image I previously had.
As to the directing, I'm convinced there must have been a shadow director who did most of the real work (this isn't uncommon when a Big Name has creative control and gets the directing credit), but that certain critical scenes were under Lucas' immediate control.
Hence these critical scenes, most especially Anakin's fall to the Dark Side, were *rushed*. What should have been played as a developing torment of uncertainty and doubt was reduced to a one liner -- "then he fell to the Dark Side, and we all went on to the next set" (which pointed out the accompanying hokey dialog). ROTS could have been a vastly stronger movie if only these scenes had been allowed to develop at their own pace.
Indeed, the scenes that went at their own pace managed to deal quite well with said hokey dialog, as they had MUCH better acting.
I agree -- the lightsabre fights, while pretty and exciting, don't hold up well under analysis. Of course, they didn't have Bob Anderson choreographing them this time, either.
I'd also whine about how the laws of physics seem to be entirely negated with respect to the small starfighters. We're zipping along at several thousand meters per second, yet we can scrape our S-foils together without being instantly pulverized?
Lucas based his original space duels on footage of World War (1? 2?) dogfights, but apparently he never updated his understanding beyond the prop-plane era.
Back in 1977, I made some "reasonable assumptions" about the evident speed of X-Wings vs. the apparent size of the Death Star, and concluded that it was something like 500 kilometers in diameter.
The Death Star is not in my old Star Wars Sourcebooks, but for comparison, the Super Star Destroyer is listed at 8000 meters in length (with a crew of 280,000, which sounds a little cramped in persons per cubic meter, compared to mundane aircraft carriers -- they're what, about 1000 meters and a crew of 5000 or so?)
As to mass, remember that it's largely framework for living and working spaces, thus mostly hollow.
As to how long it took to build -- the Death Star was perhaps double the size of the Los Angeles subway system, which (with various gov't boondoggles) took what, 10 or 12 years to get to somewhere near complete? So I don't find it at all unbelieveable that a prototype Death Star took nearly two decades to reach operational status.
Yep, about right, tho different types of fat vary a little as to calories per gram. (I didn't look up the numbers, and don't swear to the integrity of any data in my brain storage, which seriously needs defragging :)
As to Atkins, why it works is flamingly obvious to anyone with a smattering of biochemistry. Tho it didn't have a catchy name back in 1973, when my first-year univ. biochem class covered the topic.
No, that just means that most of the CALORIES are from fat. This is true of most foods that contain any fat (including butter and veg.oils) at all, because fat is the most caloric-dense ingredient.
Fat runs around 170 calories per ounce (vs. something like 60 cal/oz for meat).
So if a 2-ounce serving contains 140 cal. from fat, that means the product is around 20% fat.
Which is about the same as ordinary hamburger.
As to changes over the years, pork itself has become a fairly lean meat, so there is less fat in the average processed pig than there was 30 years ago. But the canning process is rather finicky about what can be in the can and still come out at the desired texture, so it's more likely changes in your tastes with maturity that make it seem different. Lots of kids think many things are gross that these same kids gobble wholeheartedly as adults.
John Williams and ROTS: Did you notice the foreshadowing done BY the music? there are points early on where you can hear an echo of Vader's respirator -- IN the music itself. Creepy! I was very impressed.
ROTS's main problem is that critical scenes, most notably when Anakin gets converted to the Dark Side, are RUSHED. It would have been much better if they'd been allowed to play out naturally (thus allowing the actors to flesh out the scene, too). But Lucas thinks we're all 3-year-olds who have to be kept "entertained" ALL the time, and aren't interested in *gasp* THINKING about a critical character-development scene as it unfolds at its own pace.
The wonder wasn't that the rushed scenes had poor acting, but that the actors managed as well as they DID, given the material and directing they had to cope with. When they weren't overly-rushed, the acting is very good and even the hokey lines worked in context.
Because the dichotomy there is so strong, I did get the feeling that there were two directors involved, even if only one is credited.
And by attempting to shift the balance entirely toward the Good, and FAILING because of their own blindness, the Jedi themselves helped fulfill the prophecy.
Actually, the Zahn novels would probably benefit from being compacted for film. They're good in terms of plot, and some of the characters are very good, but whenever we're on the New Republic side of things, or following Luke or Mara Jade around, the books tend to drag. Take away all that filler, and you've got a rip-roaring space epic... probably 2 or 3 good hours worth per book.
Side note: Zahn's writing generally has more git-up-and-go than his SW books do; I get the feeling that they were somewhat constrained by LucasArts' rules.