That link lacks detail. In particular, it is one thing to say "open the door or I blow this bomb". It is another to say "fly me to Cuba or I blow this bomb". Those are different negotiations, with different risks. In how many of those hijackings, did the hijacker demand access to the cockpit?
And the rest of us, will grab you. Dead is dead. Fewer dead is better, even if we are part of the unfortunate fewer. The guy with the bomb could be bluffing. He could have a faulty bomb. He could be standing in a place that will not actually take down the airplane (recall that airplanes can survive instant conversion into a convertible).
Let him at the controls, and the chances get worse.
And, furthermore, as long as it is made clear that the passenger policy is to fight hijackers no matter what, the fewer hijackers there will be. Appeasers like you just raise risks for the rest of us.
"Best"? Doing a little googling, trains appear to be about equal, with a depends-on-the-country caveat.
And (in today's or yesterday's paper, I read this) Amtrak is pushing hard on the whole inconvenience-and-delay thing in the Boston-NY travel market. Bike to T, T to South Station, with 20 minutes to spare, hop on train (Acela), go. Use my phone if I want to, wireless on the train (didn't work on the return trip, train was 100% full), go to the bathroom or get a beer whenever the heck I want to. And when I get there, walk to my hotel.
I don't think that's a valid conclusion to be drawn from that study.
I'm curious -- why not? It's straight from the abstract, not clear it would make it past the editors/reviewers if they did not think it was justified, and it appears (to me) to be justified by the paper. And, further, other studies in which large amounts of regular exercise are studied, show similar outcomes (there was one involving old Japanese men, and walking, and the benefits did not plateau -- lots more walking, led to lots more benefit).
If you're wearing a seat and shoulder belt, the additional benefit of an airbag is not large. The alternative may be merely bruises from the belts.
You also discount the role of incentives to get people to attend more careful to automobile maintenance, etc.:-)
As far as actual measured death rates go, the safest vehicle on the road is a bicycle -- even after adjusting for other risk factors, non-bicycle commuters have a 39% higher mortality rate, says this study: http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/160/11/1621 .
Apple Fanboi or not, the easiest way to learn to appreciate the genius of Jobs (and/or the people he hires) and the tough road of his competitors, is to try to design a real-world object yourself. For me, that's a "dynamo-driven bike LED light plus standlight". Cold, wet, vibration. Wires break. Static wakes up the microcontroller. And when you're done, it looks kinda dumpy.
Presumably everyone has a spike in their steering wheel. I was going to say, just like an airbag, when it occurred to me that the airbag is already a pretty dangerous beast -- if you drive with your hands high on the steering wheel, if the airbag fires, you are likely to end up with a broken something (arm or face, most likely).
If not everyone, then you drive very, very carefully. There's no particular reason that everyone have exactly the same incentives -- truck drivers, in particular, can drive into ordinary automobiles with much less fear of harm, and many people buy SUVs so that in a collision, they will get the better end of it (at the expense of the other guy).
Not necessarily. There's people I know who ride in urban areas, and they think that there's just too much stuff going on to be confident that drivers will notice a steady light -- if they never notice you, it doesn't matter that you're easier to track, is the logic, I think.
"Fault" is not the same as "mitigation." There may be steps that you can take to avoid accidents, or reduce their severity, where omitting those steps would not place you at "fault". That spike gives you an incentive to take those steps.
They just lack sufficient incentive to be careful.
A Famous Economist (or maybe it was a Famous Sociologist, can't recall which) proposed a giant steel spike from the steering wheel, aimed directly at the driver's heart. An incentive.
And this is what motivates people on bicycles to get the most godawful blinking-flashing-whoopie-ding-dong taillights, because an important fraction of the population is unable to see an entire f**king taxicab in front of them.
There are times I wonder, instead of all the gadgets, suppose we just said that there was a class of stupid mistakes, such that if you make them, you lose your license forever. Call it, "an incentive".
As opposed to having your bomb attract attention and get defused, possibly providing evidence that leads back to you? (Though happily, the police took care of that evidence in this case.)
So what? As many others above have said, any random piece of trash or roadkill, could be a bomb. What's so important about being cemented down?
The "war on terror" is turning into the "war on weird". If you don't conform (like the guy with bagpipes in his carry-on, or the woman with LEDs on her T-shirt here in Boston), you get special scrutiny. Terrorists don't put bombs in rare, weird things -- they put them in everyday things, like backpacks, or cars, or rental trucks. They work hard to make them look exactly like printer cartridges, to take a recent example.
This sort of thing is an appalling, ineffective waste of money, and infringes on our right to be weird.
No, this guy was acting wrong, and looked really terrible. I've seen coyotes, in wild places, and in not so wild places. Coyotes in this neck of the woods (Boston suburbs) look really, really buff, and they don't hang around. Only animals I've ever known to "loiter" in the presence of people, were skunks, and porcupines.
How does underwear fill of PETN hijack an airplane? The worst-case scenario we are currently preventing, is an airplane crash. That's bad, but that's not 9/11, and it doesn't even require that you be on the plane to make it happen, especially if the bad guy's survival is optional. (Which is to say, planes have been shot down in the past.)
A "next time" is vastly less likely. Reinforced cockpit doors, remember? There's a big difference between blowing a plane up, and turning a plane into a guided missile. Add to that, that passengers figured out THAT SAME DAY that terrorists were not to be negotiated with. When I hear about the shoe-bomber and the crotch-bomber coming off the plane in one piece, I am surprised.
This is part of the problem with all this TSA nonsense. Whatever they're preventing, it's not another 9/11 -- that's already taken care of, two different ways.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but I think wondering what produces terrorists, and maybe taking steps to produce fewer of them, and failing that, to identify them a little more accurately, would be a good thing.
I don't see that we need reeducation camps, given that we've got TV.
I'm not all that sure I buy this armed-society-polite-society thing. I know about guns, I grew up with guns, NOT in a locked cabinet, generally always loaded, and I know how to use them. I know how to aim them, too. The problem, in a dense area, is that sometimes you miss, and then there's something behind whatever you missed. I look out in my back yard and think how much fun it would be to plink a few squirrels (f**kers uproot my potted plants burying their f**king acorns), but whoops, there's my neighbor's house on the other side of that squirrel.
Saw a likely-rabid coyote years ago at a friend's house (*), my first reaction was "where can I get a gun", my second reaction was "as if". There was just no way I could safely shoot that animal, never mind that nobody had a gun. (*) Said coyote was barely recognizable as a coyote, out in broad daylight, and Not Acting Right. Occam's Razor says rabies.
That said, some years ago, there was a bank robbery in Harvard Square, and a security guard there pulled out a gun and fired it, and all the bullets landed in bad guys or their car. Awesome, and probably pretty lucky, too. (It's kind of a busy place.)
I'm curious when the deed was reported, just to figure out how old I was when I read it (I was born in 1960). I am almost certain I read it in Aviation Week.
PS -- and there is not just one person to blame for this; it was a team effort. It takes a busted design to make these decisions necessary, it takes a busted process to let this sort of pressure be put on an engineer, it takes an idiot to push that hard outside his or her area of expertise for a dangerous choice.
Reading some of TFAs (Henry Spencer, New Scientist), it is claimed that at the time, there was no spec for launch temperature, though the engineers had a clear idea that there was a problem. This is consistent with what I've read by Feynman and by Tufte (who discuses the role of poorly designed graphics in failing to make the point that the launch should not proceed).
As I read it, if there had been a spec prohibiting this, then the launch could have been stopped by-the-book.
If you've got a reference for your claim, I'd love to see it, because I could be wrong (but usually I'm not).
I recall, from reading Aviation Week as a wee lad (my dad was a guidance systems engineer), that the then-senators from Utah managed to get the SRBs for the Space Shuttle (mostly) built in Utah. The preferred design was a one-piece booster, built in Alabama, barged around to Florida, but because it was built in Utah and could not travel by barge, it was instead built in segments, with O-rings between the segments. O-rings, that get hard in the cold weather, and leak gasses.
I've been trying to confirm this for years, because hey, I could have remembered it wrong, but decades-old back issues of Aviation Week are still not online in searchable form.
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That link lacks detail. In particular, it is one thing to say "open the door or I blow this bomb". It is another to say "fly me to Cuba or I blow this bomb". Those are different negotiations, with different risks. In how many of those hijackings, did the hijacker demand access to the cockpit?
And the rest of us, will grab you. Dead is dead. Fewer dead is better, even if we are part of the unfortunate fewer. The guy with the bomb could be bluffing. He could have a faulty bomb. He could be standing in a place that will not actually take down the airplane (recall that airplanes can survive instant conversion into a convertible).
Let him at the controls, and the chances get worse.
And, furthermore, as long as it is made clear that the passenger policy is to fight hijackers no matter what, the fewer hijackers there will be. Appeasers like you just raise risks for the rest of us.
"Best"? Doing a little googling, trains appear to be about equal, with a depends-on-the-country caveat.
And (in today's or yesterday's paper, I read this) Amtrak is pushing hard on the whole inconvenience-and-delay thing in the Boston-NY travel market. Bike to T, T to South Station, with 20 minutes to spare, hop on train (Acela), go. Use my phone if I want to, wireless on the train (didn't work on the return trip, train was 100% full), go to the bathroom or get a beer whenever the heck I want to. And when I get there, walk to my hotel.
I don't think that's a valid conclusion to be drawn from that study.
I'm curious -- why not? It's straight from the abstract, not clear it would make it past the editors/reviewers if they did not think it was justified, and it appears (to me) to be justified by the paper. And, further, other studies in which large amounts of regular exercise are studied, show similar outcomes (there was one involving old Japanese men, and walking, and the benefits did not plateau -- lots more walking, led to lots more benefit).
If you're wearing a seat and shoulder belt, the additional benefit of an airbag is not large. The alternative may be merely bruises from the belts.
:-)
You also discount the role of incentives to get people to attend more careful to automobile maintenance, etc.
As far as actual measured death rates go, the safest vehicle on the road is a bicycle -- even after adjusting for other risk factors, non-bicycle commuters have a 39% higher mortality rate, says this study: http://archinte.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/160/11/1621 .
"I just need a designer".
Apple Fanboi or not, the easiest way to learn to appreciate the genius of Jobs (and/or the people he hires) and the tough road of his competitors, is to try to design a real-world object yourself. For me, that's a "dynamo-driven bike LED light plus standlight". Cold, wet, vibration. Wires break. Static wakes up the microcontroller. And when you're done, it looks kinda dumpy.
Presumably everyone has a spike in their steering wheel. I was going to say, just like an airbag, when it occurred to me that the airbag is already a pretty dangerous beast -- if you drive with your hands high on the steering wheel, if the airbag fires, you are likely to end up with a broken something (arm or face, most likely).
If not everyone, then you drive very, very carefully. There's no particular reason that everyone have exactly the same incentives -- truck drivers, in particular, can drive into ordinary automobiles with much less fear of harm, and many people buy SUVs so that in a collision, they will get the better end of it (at the expense of the other guy).
Not necessarily. There's people I know who ride in urban areas, and they think that there's just too much stuff going on to be confident that drivers will notice a steady light -- if they never notice you, it doesn't matter that you're easier to track, is the logic, I think.
"Fault" is not the same as "mitigation." There may be steps that you can take to avoid accidents, or reduce their severity, where omitting those steps would not place you at "fault". That spike gives you an incentive to take those steps.
They just lack sufficient incentive to be careful.
A Famous Economist (or maybe it was a Famous Sociologist, can't recall which) proposed a giant steel spike from the steering wheel, aimed directly at the driver's heart. An incentive.
And this is what motivates people on bicycles to get the most godawful blinking-flashing-whoopie-ding-dong taillights, because an important fraction of the population is unable to see an entire f**king taxicab in front of them.
There are times I wonder, instead of all the gadgets, suppose we just said that there was a class of stupid mistakes, such that if you make them, you lose your license forever. Call it, "an incentive".
As opposed to having your bomb attract attention and get defused, possibly providing evidence that leads back to you? (Though happily, the police took care of that evidence in this case.)
So what? As many others above have said, any random piece of trash or roadkill, could be a bomb. What's so important about being cemented down?
The "war on terror" is turning into the "war on weird". If you don't conform (like the guy with bagpipes in his carry-on, or the woman with LEDs on her T-shirt here in Boston), you get special scrutiny. Terrorists don't put bombs in rare, weird things -- they put them in everyday things, like backpacks, or cars, or rental trucks. They work hard to make them look exactly like printer cartridges, to take a recent example.
This sort of thing is an appalling, ineffective waste of money, and infringes on our right to be weird.
Swedish cars are moose-rated. The old ones had quite the built-in roll cage.
Deer's better eating. Shame about the car, though.
No, this guy was acting wrong, and looked really terrible. I've seen coyotes, in wild places, and in not so wild places. Coyotes in this neck of the woods (Boston suburbs) look really, really buff, and they don't hang around. Only animals I've ever known to "loiter" in the presence of people, were skunks, and porcupines.
How does underwear fill of PETN hijack an airplane? The worst-case scenario we are currently preventing, is an airplane crash. That's bad, but that's not 9/11, and it doesn't even require that you be on the plane to make it happen, especially if the bad guy's survival is optional. (Which is to say, planes have been shot down in the past.)
A "next time" is vastly less likely. Reinforced cockpit doors, remember? There's a big difference between blowing a plane up, and turning a plane into a guided missile. Add to that, that passengers figured out THAT SAME DAY that terrorists were not to be negotiated with. When I hear about the shoe-bomber and the crotch-bomber coming off the plane in one piece, I am surprised.
This is part of the problem with all this TSA nonsense. Whatever they're preventing, it's not another 9/11 -- that's already taken care of, two different ways.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not, but I think wondering what produces terrorists, and maybe taking steps to produce fewer of them, and failing that, to identify them a little more accurately, would be a good thing.
I don't see that we need reeducation camps, given that we've got TV.
I'm not all that sure I buy this armed-society-polite-society thing. I know about guns, I grew up with guns, NOT in a locked cabinet, generally always loaded, and I know how to use them. I know how to aim them, too. The problem, in a dense area, is that sometimes you miss, and then there's something behind whatever you missed. I look out in my back yard and think how much fun it would be to plink a few squirrels (f**kers uproot my potted plants burying their f**king acorns), but whoops, there's my neighbor's house on the other side of that squirrel.
Saw a likely-rabid coyote years ago at a friend's house (*), my first reaction was "where can I get a gun", my second reaction was "as if". There was just no way I could safely shoot that animal, never mind that nobody had a gun. (*) Said coyote was barely recognizable as a coyote, out in broad daylight, and Not Acting Right. Occam's Razor says rabies.
That said, some years ago, there was a bank robbery in Harvard Square, and a security guard there pulled out a gun and fired it, and all the bullets landed in bad guys or their car. Awesome, and probably pretty lucky, too. (It's kind of a busy place.)
I'm curious when the deed was reported, just to figure out how old I was when I read it (I was born in 1960). I am almost certain I read it in Aviation Week.
PS -- and there is not just one person to blame for this; it was a team effort. It takes a busted design to make these decisions necessary, it takes a busted process to let this sort of pressure be put on an engineer, it takes an idiot to push that hard outside his or her area of expertise for a dangerous choice.
"If you've got a reference for your claim, I'd love to see it, because I could be wrong (but usually I'm not)."
Reading some of TFAs (Henry Spencer, New Scientist), it is claimed that at the time, there was no spec for launch temperature, though the engineers had a clear idea that there was a problem. This is consistent with what I've read by Feynman and by Tufte (who discuses the role of poorly designed graphics in failing to make the point that the launch should not proceed).
As I read it, if there had been a spec prohibiting this, then the launch could have been stopped by-the-book.
If you've got a reference for your claim, I'd love to see it, because I could be wrong (but usually I'm not).
I recall, from reading Aviation Week as a wee lad (my dad was a guidance systems engineer), that the then-senators from Utah managed to get the SRBs for the Space Shuttle (mostly) built in Utah. The preferred design was a one-piece booster, built in Alabama, barged around to Florida, but because it was built in Utah and could not travel by barge, it was instead built in segments, with O-rings between the segments. O-rings, that get hard in the cold weather, and leak gasses.
I've been trying to confirm this for years, because hey, I could have remembered it wrong, but decades-old back issues of Aviation Week are still not online in searchable form.