I think he is saying that we shouldn't have been there in the first place. You must have forgotten about the lack of "undeniable proof of WMDs!" huh?
Tell that to clinton, clinton, kerry, kennedy, schumer, berger...all those. Read what Snopes has to say about it, at this link. It disgusts me that democrats such as most of those are now exhibiting memory problems and pretending this was all George's idea.
Oh, and not to mention the fact that it was the Supreme Court that handed Bush the win in 2000, stopping a recount that we now know would have resulted in a Gore win.
Really? I don't suppose you can provide a cite for that? I don't recall that any of the counts, recounts, rerecounts, or rererecounts had Gore on top. The boy's tactical mistake was in asking for recounts in just specific counties where he thought he could get an edge, the SC saw through the tactic, spanked him, and told him to sit down. But, do you have an actual cite showing that one of the rererererecounts had him on top?
I Googled. Daylight Savings Time? Dynamic Stress Test? Data Systems Test? Data Storage and Transfer?
Lovely. So now this is google and boolean lesson time? You may have noticed, that daylight savings time was changed this year in the US. Or maybe you didn't. It's kicking in on a different time than planned, you see. Systems know when they _think_ it is to change, and that's not the right week based on the recent legislation.
It's _fine_ if someone doesn't understand an acronym. Really, it is. What is pointless and a waste of time, is posting a snarky comment whining that they don't know what it is, or which acronym it is, etc etc etc. Context of the thread either makes it clear, or makes it clear that that's not the central point of the post.
In this case, it obviously doesn't matter what DST means. Sure, it's the timezone thing, but it doesn't matter. Dude in question has 7000 boxes to patch, and is looking for suggestions on how to manage it. The answer doesn't change depending on what DST stands for, does it?
Sorry, but a snarky comment rather than 10 seconds typing "dst acronym" and "sla acronym" into google, well, I don't see what positive thing it accomplishes to do that.
I think if I had to do this, I'd establish a priority ranking of the systems, taking into consideration critical path and cascading dependances, and then assign the highest priority ones first. When you finish that, come back to the pool for the next high priority job. When you're out of high priority jobs in the pool, move on to mid-priority, and so on. Trying to keep a bunch of inter-related steps in synch will drive you, and your sysadmins, crazy. Set priorities and let the big boys and girls do their job.
But in the Solaris case, I was able to download the new timezone files from ftp://elsie.nci.nih.gov/pub/tzdata2007a.tar.gz and extract the contents (the only file I needed was northamerica), and ran "zic northamerica" -- all was taken care of.
Right. But this is coming from nih, not the vendor. So as much as it's fun to bash microsoft, in this case...I'd rather my OS vendor of choice spend development effort on something fairly current, rather than back-porting fixes forever. At some point, ya gotta let go. Thanks for the URL by the way, you just saved me finding it.
Why would anyone do business with a vendor that treats people this way?
Or at a minimum treats their own products with some respect? They already have a fix. It's clearly broken. And they're not fixing it!?! It's not like it'd cost them anything to do so. My bet is that they avoid fixing bugs on purpose just so they can charge suckers more for upgrades. The only real fix is to get a vendor that doesn't act like such an asshole. Anything else is just a workaround.
I'm the LAST person do defend Microsoft, but...Sun also isn't patching Solaris 7 and earlier for the same bug. At some point, you just have to bite the bullet and either upgrade, or (gasp!) change your damn clock by hand. Twice. Big deal.
OK, so Cisco may or may not have a legit claim here. If they do, write the check Steve, and get on with bidness. If not, get into a pissing contest for years and more money. Cheaper to do just what Apple did with Apple (Beatles), write the check, and move forward. You want the name, someone else owns it, pay for it. End of discussion. Not complicated. Jobs isn't a fool, he knows this. It's budgeted for already, and might eat even a few percent of the whole deal.
Good point, though I still have the naivety to doubt that happens often.
Then you, my friend, are a fool. There will always be idiots who judge your ability by your appearance. It's wrong, it's stupid, and it's farking insulting, but it's _real_. So if some bozo manager wants you wearing a button shirt? Wear the damn shirt and get on with the techie stuff. Stay under the radar, keep Mister Uppity happy, and get on with life. Pretending you're the only guy who can do something, won't get you far. You know, and I know, that nobody really is replacable, but the idiot who signs our checks doesn't know that. So keep the idiot boss happy and wear whatever he wants within reason and get on with the fun techie stuff.
That might be the case, but the reason for the delay is that the iPhone hasn't been authorized by the FCC yet.
Yeah, about that...so how did Jobs use it to make his Starbucks call then, if it's not approved for use? Or is it just approved for _sale_? How does that work exactly?
Can I have some of what you're drinking because it is obviously pretty damned strong.
Um, Starbucks "whatever flavor is free" in the machine at work.
Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Washington Mutual... that's just a few of the big-name banks and if you think for a minute that a handful of people asking when they're going to support Firefox is going to cause them to change their sites then you're out of your mind. You missed my point. In _my_ experience, a call and some polite questioning got me to the right guy. He was aware of the problem, we discussed a few things, and he fixed his site. Direct personal experience, you see, nothing imaginary about it.
I work with all three banks on a daily basis developing direct intergrations in to my company's systems. These companies take 4 - 6 months to add a single new feature to any of their systems.
That may be, I believe, you, I've worked with Wells, Fifth Third, Chase, the other Chase, the other other Chase, and so on. But I'm not saying all banks will change when they're doing something stupid, I'm saying it's worth _trying_, and if they won't, they don't meet your needs so switch. Is one phone call from one guy likely to change a big bank? No, but in the case of the one I deal with, my call was at the right time, to the right person, and the outcome I wanted was released. In their case they were simply checking user-agent strings and blocking based on that. The thinking was "well, old versions of IE don't support the proper encryption." Which is true. So we talked about SSLCipherSuite settings, and the techie explained to the decision makers that doing it by crypto level made more sense than guessing at a system's crypto standard based on a browser's own identification of what it is. So if you get the right person, who knows what you're talking about and can make decisions and changes, go for it. If you can't, and they won't talk to you, (shrug) banking is a commodity product, plenty of others out there.
Can you buy an i[FillInTheBlank] from Apple and have it delivered without a Mac OS? Can you get a refund if you don't want the included Mac OS?
iTunes, sure. Free download from Apple's site. iOtherStuff? Not so much. They ported iTunes to windows, you see, to sell more product. I'm guessing they can do, you know, math and stuff, and decided not to port iPhoto and friends over there. Could be hardware limitations (or randomness) on the PC side, could be OS integrations and a closed API (ahem), or it could be because they're focusing their efforts on developing for the people who buy hardware from them. I'm fine with that. In fact, I prefer it. Did you have a point though, or is this just a reflexive reaction on your part?
Have you ever tried contacting these management types? You'll find that all you get is a condescending form letter about them being unable to support anything but IE, and how Firefox doesn't matter. If that.
My direct personal experience differs from your speculation. I called my bank when I got online banking, complaining that I didn't want to have to run IE just to access their site, and that I was considering switching banks as a result of their problems. They got me in touch with the developer, and we spent maybe 30 minutes chatting about stuff, and couple weeks later, they released a new version of the site that didn't break firefox. Not complicated. If you don't ask, you'll never know. Assuming the answer will be "no" or "pound sand" without asking, is unfair to your bank _and_ to the other customers. Once they tell you to go away, sure, follow up by doing so; if they hear it enough they just might get it. Or not. But, there's plenty who do, and I've switched banks over less.
If someone could give me a rational discussion of why I should be bothered that we're recording fingerprints of foreign visitors when they come to our country, I'd love to read it.
You might start by asking yourself why you are endorsing a statement that begins "I am 100% against fingerprinting CITIZENS of this country". Clearly you must think that fingerprinting is a bad thing, or you would not have any reason to object to fingerprinting citizens.
Um no. See, that was some other guy, you can tell because, unlike you, we both posted with some sort of identity. So take _that_ up with him.
Your government is planning to do something to foreigners that you personally would not want it to do to citizens, and you don't care. Why not? Are you just invoking your perfectly natural right to be apathetic about bad things happening to people you don't identify with, or do you actually have a rational argument for why fingerprinting foreigners will do more good than bad, but fingerprinting citizens would do more bad than good?
Because, you see, our government has decided what proof of identity is needed for US passports, and I'm fine with that. The government of, say, Sealand, doesn't have such tight regulations, and forged passports are common. It was even mentioned on Slashdot, er, today. "country for sale" thread. So, here's the deal. If your passport, from wherever, isn't up to our standards of "we can tell you aren't someone else", then we'll record your prints so we can check ourselves. Why is that a problem exactly? And, any chance you'll put an identity behind your comments? They _do_ mean so much more that way, you know.
Well, would you like it if the rest of the world decided to fingerprint you and turn the results over to the FBI? That's what you're doing to us. If you don't mind, then why not just institute an immediate program to fingerprint all Americans?
Yeah, actually, I'm just fine with that. (shrug) your country, your rules, y'know? If I don't like it, I'm free to decide not to visit, after all. Works both ways.
I'm not disagreeing that using the method in the article is completely foolish. In fact, I'm mostly disagreeing with the fact that you got modded up for not reading the article.
Assume much? I _read_ the article. In my other posts, I pointed out that I don't trust an emulated environment to validate anything and quite honestly, if you do, you're foolish. So how about instead of assuming what I haven't or have read, you address the point of how exactly you feel you can trust a combination of 3 or 4 things which are from different teams, to end up giving you exactly what J. Random User gets on his shiny-new Vista box running IE7? If you're _THAT_ confident in Wine, well, I think you're overconfident. Too many variables.
And of course, you get modded +4 Insightful for being an idiot. Only on/. would we give someone karma for not opening his bloody eyes, and simply spouting off anti-Microsoft bile.
Please show me where in my question I spouted any bile. I asked a straightforward question, and even mentioned I was looking for serious responses, many of which I got. Unlike yours.
As it's been said a few times, this is for developers (something you would of noticed had you, you know, read the article).
And if you had read the thread, you'd see that several people have proposed valid reasons why this setup wouldn't be trusted, at least by them, to validate anything. Again, hence my questions.
Why is this a good thing? Because Mircosoft's browser still has easily over 50% market share, that's why. The thing may suck, but it's still here and we have to deal with it.
That's fine, _really_. But I'm still staying with the thought that using an emulated environment to run a browser to validate a website you're developing, is the _wrong_ reason to do something like this. Accessing b0rken websites that some developer wrote only for IEsomething, yeah, OK. Validation, I don't think so.
So there's a well reasoned, non-ranting response to your post. Where are you going to take it now, I wonder?
As well as the development reasons noted above, there are still some websites that only work correctly in IE. I normally use Firefox, but occasionally I need to switch to IE to get a website to work. Now if I don't care that much, I don't bother, but if you really want something (info, a product whatever) from these sites you pretty much need to have IE available.
Good point. My employer's timesheet website for instance. I use IE for that and one other poorly written app (the trouble ticket system, as it happens). Everything else plays fine. OK I can see the "b0rken website you have to use" purpose then, thanks.
If you do your main development on a Linux box, and want to test minor changes in IE as you make them (major changes and final testing should still be done on a native system if possible), it's a lot more convenient to fire up a copy of IE in WINE than to move over to another box or reboot into Windows. OK, right, I see that, but - how much confidence are you _really_ going to have in an artificially constructed pretty-good-emulation running a Windows binary under Linux? I mean, fine for "does it look OK", but to really validate, I think anything other than the real thing running on the real thing, is iffy at best. In the QA environments I've set up, we had a stable of systems in our QA lab, initially each with a different version of 'doze and IE on them. Later, we went to a vmware setup with virtual machines running the OS and browser to be tested, all repeatable golden clean builds and so on. If it were up to me to design something, I'd rather go with a vmware solution and different OS images to boot into.
But, I suppose, if it's just to keep on eye on the site as you go along, fine. So is IE7 really _that_ broken that this is needed? Again not trying to flame, it just boggles the fark out of me that they're still doing that.
Do you think that 200 "unarmed" people could take down 5 people armed with box cutters? If so, then why didn't they? And since they obviously didn't, how would guns have changed anything?
Because until that day, if your airplane was hijacked, you'd land somewhere, sit in the plane for a week or so, and either get out or die. Nobody was doing the "crash plane full of people into a building" trick, you see, until then. The SOP was "cooperate and let the experts deal with it". That only stayed SOP for the first 2 planes, the people on the third decided there was a new process.
Now, to the hypothetical "if there had been armed whomever on the flight". Look at the power balance. Bad guys armed, good guys unarmed, = bad things happen. Good guys armed, bad guys unarmed,= no problem. Good guys armed, bad guys armed, = fighting chance. I'd rather take my chance with a random CCW holder (who, as a self-selecting group of people who by definition are law abiding) or an Air Marshall, than with an armed terrorist.
Seriously. WHY? Why would I want to do that? What is so compelling about IE7 that I'd want to go through any effort at all? I'm using Firefox 2.0something, it meets my needs. If I were to jump through hoops to install this on my linux box, what would that get for me?
> With a US-issued passport, we have a reasonable comfort level that the person is who they say they are. And, we already have those fingerprints on file.
I never gave them my fingerprints in order to get a passport, unless I badly misremember the process.
As for comfort level, I honestly worry more about my fellow Americans causing harm these days than any random foreigner:/ Hm, could be. I was doing a clearance thing at the same time I got my passport, now that I think about it, so I could have confused which was for what. However, I guess that doesn't change my fundamental point - we have a certain confidence level that a person with a valid US passport has passed the confidence level established as being who they claim to be. All I see this doing, is using _our_ mechanism to track them, instead of (random mechanism) from (random place).
So, J. Random Visitor comes in, claims to be George Schmitt from Germany. OK, great, paperwork looks fine, come on in. Next time, J. Random Visitor comes in, this time his papers say he's Gunnar Ljungstrom from Stockholm. But he's got the same fingerprints. Something, as they say, is up. I'm not pretending to know that/if there is a mechanism for instantaneous database scans while J. Random is there, but without the raw data, you can't do _any_ search based on it. Now, if J. Random, either as George or as Gunnar, does something wrong here and we get prints, well, we have a face to go with the prints, and can play paperwork chase games, all that detective stuff. Without it, all we know is, well, not a damn thing. I don't see how asking people who want to visit our country, to identify themselves in a way which is actually based on hard documentation that's difficult or impossible to fake, is a bad thing. Anyone can come up with a foreign passport.
> I didn't realize that "not being fingerprinted" is a basic human right.
I don't think it's a basic human right, but aren't you the least bit disturbed that we have two standards, one for citizens and another for others? I, for one, think it's shamefully hypocritical. Have you ever gone through customs and immigration coming into the US? Citizens go through one set of lines, non citizens go through a different set. Each set of lines has a different process, because the identification provided is different. I don't see why that's a problem. If you want to come in to this country, we want to know who you are. With a US-issued passport, we have a reasonable comfort level that the person is who they say they are. And, we already have those fingerprints on file. What this is doing, is saying "You can come in with a passport from wherever, Sealand or whatever, doesn't matter, but we'll ID you our way in addition to your way". I don't see a double-standard, and I don't see a problem.
While I am 100% against fingerprinting CITIZENS of this country, I couldn't give a shit less if someone from outside of the US is fingerprinted. It's their choice to travel to the US and cross our borders. I would certainly avoid leaving the US to travel to another country that wanted to fingerprint me on arrival.
I'm with you. Can someone PLEASE, without frothing at the mouth, insulting, or discussing my possible party affiliation, tell me why I should be bothered by this? I'm not looking for a conspiracy theory rant, the thread is full of those. If someone could give me a rational discussion of why I should be bothered that we're recording fingerprints of foreign visitors when they come to our country, I'd love to read it.
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Tell that to clinton, clinton, kerry, kennedy, schumer, berger...all those. Read what Snopes has to say about it, at this link. It disgusts me that democrats such as most of those are now exhibiting memory problems and pretending this was all George's idea.
Really? I don't suppose you can provide a cite for that? I don't recall that any of the counts, recounts, rerecounts, or rererecounts had Gore on top. The boy's tactical mistake was in asking for recounts in just specific counties where he thought he could get an edge, the SC saw through the tactic, spanked him, and told him to sit down. But, do you have an actual cite showing that one of the rererererecounts had him on top?
Lovely. So now this is google and boolean lesson time? You may have noticed, that daylight savings time was changed this year in the US. Or maybe you didn't. It's kicking in on a different time than planned, you see. Systems know when they _think_ it is to change, and that's not the right week based on the recent legislation.
It's _fine_ if someone doesn't understand an acronym. Really, it is. What is pointless and a waste of time, is posting a snarky comment whining that they don't know what it is, or which acronym it is, etc etc etc. Context of the thread either makes it clear, or makes it clear that that's not the central point of the post.
In this case, it obviously doesn't matter what DST means. Sure, it's the timezone thing, but it doesn't matter. Dude in question has 7000 boxes to patch, and is looking for suggestions on how to manage it. The answer doesn't change depending on what DST stands for, does it?
Sorry, but a snarky comment rather than 10 seconds typing "dst acronym" and "sla acronym" into google, well, I don't see what positive thing it accomplishes to do that.
1. Stop using acronyms that nobody knows, slashdotters hate that!
DST? SLA? I don't think either of those are obscure... but I manage servers in a LSDC so maybe it's just part of that world.
I think if I had to do this, I'd establish a priority ranking of the systems, taking into consideration critical path and cascading dependances, and then assign the highest priority ones first. When you finish that, come back to the pool for the next high priority job. When you're out of high priority jobs in the pool, move on to mid-priority, and so on. Trying to keep a bunch of inter-related steps in synch will drive you, and your sysadmins, crazy. Set priorities and let the big boys and girls do their job.
Right. But this is coming from nih, not the vendor. So as much as it's fun to bash microsoft, in this case...I'd rather my OS vendor of choice spend development effort on something fairly current, rather than back-porting fixes forever. At some point, ya gotta let go. Thanks for the URL by the way, you just saved me finding it.
Or at a minimum treats their own products with some respect?
They already have a fix. It's clearly broken. And they're not fixing it!?! It's not like it'd cost them anything to do so. My bet is that they avoid fixing bugs on purpose just so they can charge suckers more for upgrades.
The only real fix is to get a vendor that doesn't act like such an asshole. Anything else is just a workaround.
I'm the LAST person do defend Microsoft, but...Sun also isn't patching Solaris 7 and earlier for the same bug. At some point, you just have to bite the bullet and either upgrade, or (gasp!) change your damn clock by hand. Twice. Big deal.
OK, so Cisco may or may not have a legit claim here. If they do, write the check Steve, and get on with bidness. If not, get into a pissing contest for years and more money. Cheaper to do just what Apple did with Apple (Beatles), write the check, and move forward. You want the name, someone else owns it, pay for it. End of discussion. Not complicated. Jobs isn't a fool, he knows this. It's budgeted for already, and might eat even a few percent of the whole deal.
Then you, my friend, are a fool. There will always be idiots who judge your ability by your appearance. It's wrong, it's stupid, and it's farking insulting, but it's _real_. So if some bozo manager wants you wearing a button shirt? Wear the damn shirt and get on with the techie stuff. Stay under the radar, keep Mister Uppity happy, and get on with life. Pretending you're the only guy who can do something, won't get you far. You know, and I know, that nobody really is replacable, but the idiot who signs our checks doesn't know that. So keep the idiot boss happy and wear whatever he wants within reason and get on with the fun techie stuff.
Yeah, about that...so how did Jobs use it to make his Starbucks call then, if it's not approved for use? Or is it just approved for _sale_? How does that work exactly?
Um, Starbucks "whatever flavor is free" in the machine at work.
Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Washington Mutual... that's just a few of the big-name banks and if you think for a minute that a handful of people asking when they're going to support Firefox is going to cause them to change their sites then you're out of your mind.
You missed my point. In _my_ experience, a call and some polite questioning got me to the right guy. He was aware of the problem, we discussed a few things, and he fixed his site. Direct personal experience, you see, nothing imaginary about it.
I work with all three banks on a daily basis developing direct intergrations in to my company's systems. These companies take 4 - 6 months to add a single new feature to any of their systems.
That may be, I believe, you, I've worked with Wells, Fifth Third, Chase, the other Chase, the other other Chase, and so on. But I'm not saying all banks will change when they're doing something stupid, I'm saying it's worth _trying_, and if they won't, they don't meet your needs so switch. Is one phone call from one guy likely to change a big bank? No, but in the case of the one I deal with, my call was at the right time, to the right person, and the outcome I wanted was released. In their case they were simply checking user-agent strings and blocking based on that. The thinking was "well, old versions of IE don't support the proper encryption." Which is true. So we talked about SSLCipherSuite settings, and the techie explained to the decision makers that doing it by crypto level made more sense than guessing at a system's crypto standard based on a browser's own identification of what it is. So if you get the right person, who knows what you're talking about and can make decisions and changes, go for it. If you can't, and they won't talk to you, (shrug) banking is a commodity product, plenty of others out there.
iTunes, sure. Free download from Apple's site. iOtherStuff? Not so much. They ported iTunes to windows, you see, to sell more product. I'm guessing they can do, you know, math and stuff, and decided not to port iPhoto and friends over there. Could be hardware limitations (or randomness) on the PC side, could be OS integrations and a closed API (ahem), or it could be because they're focusing their efforts on developing for the people who buy hardware from them. I'm fine with that. In fact, I prefer it. Did you have a point though, or is this just a reflexive reaction on your part?
My direct personal experience differs from your speculation. I called my bank when I got online banking, complaining that I didn't want to have to run IE just to access their site, and that I was considering switching banks as a result of their problems. They got me in touch with the developer, and we spent maybe 30 minutes chatting about stuff, and couple weeks later, they released a new version of the site that didn't break firefox. Not complicated. If you don't ask, you'll never know. Assuming the answer will be "no" or "pound sand" without asking, is unfair to your bank _and_ to the other customers. Once they tell you to go away, sure, follow up by doing so; if they hear it enough they just might get it. Or not. But, there's plenty who do, and I've switched banks over less.
Um no. See, that was some other guy, you can tell because, unlike you, we both posted with some sort of identity. So take _that_ up with him.
Your government is planning to do something to foreigners that you personally would not want it to do to citizens, and you don't care. Why not? Are you just invoking your perfectly natural right to be apathetic about bad things happening to people you don't identify with, or do you actually have a rational argument for why fingerprinting foreigners will do more good than bad, but fingerprinting citizens would do more bad than good?
Because, you see, our government has decided what proof of identity is needed for US passports, and I'm fine with that. The government of, say, Sealand, doesn't have such tight regulations, and forged passports are common. It was even mentioned on Slashdot, er, today. "country for sale" thread. So, here's the deal. If your passport, from wherever, isn't up to our standards of "we can tell you aren't someone else", then we'll record your prints so we can check ourselves. Why is that a problem exactly? And, any chance you'll put an identity behind your comments? They _do_ mean so much more that way, you know.
Yeah, actually, I'm just fine with that. (shrug) your country, your rules, y'know? If I don't like it, I'm free to decide not to visit, after all. Works both ways.
Assume much? I _read_ the article. In my other posts, I pointed out that I don't trust an emulated environment to validate anything and quite honestly, if you do, you're foolish. So how about instead of assuming what I haven't or have read, you address the point of how exactly you feel you can trust a combination of 3 or 4 things which are from different teams, to end up giving you exactly what J. Random User gets on his shiny-new Vista box running IE7? If you're _THAT_ confident in Wine, well, I think you're overconfident. Too many variables.
Please show me where in my question I spouted any bile. I asked a straightforward question, and even mentioned I was looking for serious responses, many of which I got. Unlike yours.
As it's been said a few times, this is for developers (something you would of noticed had you, you know, read the article).
And if you had read the thread, you'd see that several people have proposed valid reasons why this setup wouldn't be trusted, at least by them, to validate anything. Again, hence my questions.
Why is this a good thing? Because Mircosoft's browser still has easily over 50% market share, that's why. The thing may suck, but it's still here and we have to deal with it.
That's fine, _really_. But I'm still staying with the thought that using an emulated environment to run a browser to validate a website you're developing, is the _wrong_ reason to do something like this. Accessing b0rken websites that some developer wrote only for IEsomething, yeah, OK. Validation, I don't think so.
So there's a well reasoned, non-ranting response to your post. Where are you going to take it now, I wonder?
Good point. My employer's timesheet website for instance. I use IE for that and one other poorly written app (the trouble ticket system, as it happens). Everything else plays fine. OK I can see the "b0rken website you have to use" purpose then, thanks.
But, I suppose, if it's just to keep on eye on the site as you go along, fine. So is IE7 really _that_ broken that this is needed? Again not trying to flame, it just boggles the fark out of me that they're still doing that.
Because until that day, if your airplane was hijacked, you'd land somewhere, sit in the plane for a week or so, and either get out or die. Nobody was doing the "crash plane full of people into a building" trick, you see, until then. The SOP was "cooperate and let the experts deal with it". That only stayed SOP for the first 2 planes, the people on the third decided there was a new process.
Now, to the hypothetical "if there had been armed whomever on the flight". Look at the power balance. Bad guys armed, good guys unarmed, = bad things happen. Good guys armed, bad guys unarmed,= no problem. Good guys armed, bad guys armed, = fighting chance. I'd rather take my chance with a random CCW holder (who, as a self-selecting group of people who by definition are law abiding) or an Air Marshall, than with an armed terrorist.
Seriously. WHY? Why would I want to do that? What is so compelling about IE7 that I'd want to go through any effort at all? I'm using Firefox 2.0something, it meets my needs. If I were to jump through hoops to install this on my linux box, what would that get for me?
Jokes aside here guys, but what's the point?
I never gave them my fingerprints in order to get a passport, unless I badly misremember the process.
As for comfort level, I honestly worry more about my fellow Americans causing harm these days than any random foreigner
So, J. Random Visitor comes in, claims to be George Schmitt from Germany. OK, great, paperwork looks fine, come on in. Next time, J. Random Visitor comes in, this time his papers say he's Gunnar Ljungstrom from Stockholm. But he's got the same fingerprints. Something, as they say, is up. I'm not pretending to know that/if there is a mechanism for instantaneous database scans while J. Random is there, but without the raw data, you can't do _any_ search based on it. Now, if J. Random, either as George or as Gunnar, does something wrong here and we get prints, well, we have a face to go with the prints, and can play paperwork chase games, all that detective stuff. Without it, all we know is, well, not a damn thing. I don't see how asking people who want to visit our country, to identify themselves in a way which is actually based on hard documentation that's difficult or impossible to fake, is a bad thing. Anyone can come up with a foreign passport.
I don't think it's a basic human right, but aren't you the least bit disturbed that we have two standards, one for citizens and another for others? I, for one, think it's shamefully hypocritical. Have you ever gone through customs and immigration coming into the US? Citizens go through one set of lines, non citizens go through a different set. Each set of lines has a different process, because the identification provided is different. I don't see why that's a problem. If you want to come in to this country, we want to know who you are. With a US-issued passport, we have a reasonable comfort level that the person is who they say they are. And, we already have those fingerprints on file. What this is doing, is saying "You can come in with a passport from wherever, Sealand or whatever, doesn't matter, but we'll ID you our way in addition to your way". I don't see a double-standard, and I don't see a problem.
While I am 100% against fingerprinting CITIZENS of this country, I couldn't give a shit less if someone from outside of the US is fingerprinted. It's their choice to travel to the US and cross our borders. I would certainly avoid leaving the US to travel to another country that wanted to fingerprint me on arrival.
I'm with you. Can someone PLEASE, without frothing at the mouth, insulting, or discussing my possible party affiliation, tell me why I should be bothered by this? I'm not looking for a conspiracy theory rant, the thread is full of those. If someone could give me a rational discussion of why I should be bothered that we're recording fingerprints of foreign visitors when they come to our country, I'd love to read it.