"True. But fails as a theory as it doesn't explain the observation that people now flock to FB. If it was only about communicating and sharing their photos, they could do it with plain oldfashioned email and ICQ. (MSN, whatsapp, whatever)"
How? Their friends don't use these tools anymore. Facebook has a monopoly on the social graph and the only way to stay in touch with all your friends is to use it. You can't make all your friends leave it for something new, because they'd need all their friends to leave it for something new too, who would need all their friends... and so on.
That#s circular reasoning. WHY did their first bunch of friends go to facebook? It explains as a network effect why fb is still growing and people still sign up and why it is so difficult to start a new service. But still: When everyone goes to facebook because everyone else is on facebook too, why did people go there when everyone else was on email and ICQ.
"But all that is not my original point: facebook data mining may or may not ne amoral, but if Zuckerberg should count as an amoral person, it shouldn't be for respecting court or administration orders. That's neither moral nor unmoral, it's plain normal."
I agree with you here but I don't think anyone was necessarily saying he was amoral for respecting court orders, but being amoral for having a reason to be issued court orders in the first place, again, as I say, by hoarding data on people, much of which is against their will or knowledge.
Yes. But still the wording "amoral" is a judgement that should not be part of a summery without further explanation.
"firefighters, cops, doctors, detectives". These work as role models because kids can easily relate to what these people do, even if they don't understand the details. Engineers? Not so much. Same goes for lawyers, managers and similar professions, but those grow more attractive as kids learn about the pay and social status associated with them.
Yes. That's what they see on TV.
Where are the McGyvers and Montgomery Scotts that show kids that in the end it's the engineers that save the day by making stuff work.
No they don't, people use Facebook to communicate with their friends sharing the data they provide.
True. But fails as a theory as it doesn't explain the observation that people now flock to FB. If it was only about communicating and sharing their photos, they could do it with plain oldfashioned email and ICQ. (MSN, whatsapp, whatever)
Whilst I agree it's utterly naive of them, most users are entirely unaware that masses more data about them is inferred from the very little data they provide.
M theory is that people want to have those data, too.
Girls want their picture to pop up their profile when that cute guy they spotted last night at the club searches the checkins for that cute girl he saw. And the other way round. (They even risk that the ugly guy/girl find their profile - but there's the ignore button for that)
Users want to hook up with the other handfull of users who actually listen to that obscure heavy-metal-polka band.
But all that is not my original point: facebook data mining may or may not ne amoral, but if Zuckerberg should count as an amoral person, it shouldn't be for respecting court or administration orders. That's neither moral nor unmoral, it's plain normal.
That discussion begins when such orders are disobeyed. THAT can be both, moral or amoral. I think we agree that disobeying orders would have been highly moral instead of saying "I was just following orders". On the other hand, following orders is what's expected from soldiers and what makes the military work.
Amoral because he harvests data and builds links from it that weren't explicitly provided and holds them in an easily searchable and mineable manner.
But that's the whole point of facebook and why people use it. People upload their addressbook to facebook for facebook to make those links. They're making links between their farmville crops, their face and their friends pictures, and links to their favourite music, movies, icecream..... Without those links, facebook would be as usefull and as much fun as a phonebook and an email client.
I won't comment on if this is a smart thing to do, but it's the users that shovel data into facebook - and expect it to be processed there!
And is anyone surprised by this? I don't think so. It was the US that insisted on all passports having biometric information for face recognition already on everyones passport.
Passport. You know? that thing you need to travel into countries other than Canada. Yes there ARE other countries somewhere out there. But I guess as most US citizens won't need one, that's the reason why they're mining driver's licencse photo databases.
Do those photos also be ready for biometric recognition as the ones in the passports?
THAT would indeed be a good idea. But it would still be easier to drop the walking payload off next to the plane and let it board itself than constructing pressure-proof trains.
Ok... so just assume that a typical cellphone battery has a capacity of 2000mAh and a voltage of 5V, then the power stored in it would be something around 0.01 kWh
So you would need the energy of TWO whole cellphone batteries to make a cup of tea.
The difference would be that browsing 20 hours with IE means that you have to go two charching cycles less within those 20 hours than with another browser.
Now we only would need to compare this to a typical number of recharching cycles for 20 hours nonstop-browsing.
But still, it's meaningless if it's only visible on dasktop machines and/or they don't know why IE uses less energy.
I'm not saying that tasters can't taste something. The question is: can they taste well enough to justify a difference in wine price between $2 for a bottle vs. $200 for a bottle? Given the evidence, I don't think their opinions are worth anywhere near that much.
I fully agree with you until here. But as you mention the $200 price range: Things become even worse here: Those rediciulous prices are usually paid for those veeeery old bottles. But talk to a wine producer: wine doesn't get better with long storage times. Even the wines that need time to fully develop their taste are done after a few years. Only a few types of wine aren't guaranteed to to be undrinkable after 20 years. You pay for the privilege to gulp something down that is very old and can't be reproduced. And you basically have to pay for all the bottles that turned to vinegar during those 20+ years. Or got that cork taste. Or saw a bright flash of light. Or whatever may happen to wine.
So -- I agree with most things you've said. And I agree that experts taste something. I just don't think their opinions are anywhere near exact enough to justify the kind of price increases that accompany high ratings.
Exactly. Espescially when the most important factor is still personal taste.
Wouldn't it be nice if, in addition to alcoholic content, the labels on wine bottles clearly displayed the amount of sweetness, acidity, and astringency ? I'm talking about real numbers with some kind of scale.
Yes, but misleading.
We tried this at a wineyard. The guideline we were given was to stay away from anything but "dry" wine. The measurable amount of sugar left is used to distinguish between dry and sweet wines, but a good dry wine can have fruity aromas that will lead to a perceived sweetness, even though the fermentation has been completed. (and hardly any sugar is left)
Other studies have even shown that professional tasters often fare pretty poorly even in tests like, "Taste 3 wines, tell me which 2 are identical," or that when given white wines dyed with red food coloring, they start spouting out the nonsense about "flavor notes" and "nose" that would be appropriate for red wines rather than whites.
I doubt that one. (at least within a neutral setting and no tampering with the subjects expectations like telling him about 2 identical wines when in fact all are the same or using food coloring.) Humans rely on ALL senses and ALL KIND of prior knowledge when they have to do a certain task. So the result of the experiment is NOT that professional tasters are quacks (at least most of them) but rather that the visual sense and the power of suggestion trumps the rather weak senses of taste and smell.
Do that test again and TELL them that the wines are manipulated to an identical color. That'll give you an example of how humans are able to ignore a specific sense.
here is some little experiment we did ourselfs. (Feel free to repeat it. It'll at least make for a nice evening)
3 people, each one buys and brings a different bottle of wine (Spain, France, Italy to increase the difference between them) Open one bottle, have a glass of it each and talk about it. Repeat with all three bottles. Now take rounds with everyone being served three unmarked glasses with each of the evenings wines. And now, from memory, match those glasses to the countries. It's not impossible, but hard, because you'll notice that you don't have a conscious memory for tastes!
Repeat that every month and you'll see that you get better at it, because during the "learning phase", you start to assign verbal "tags" to the taste. and in the second phase you can compare the taste of the unknown wine with the stored "tags".
So when someone says a certain wine tastes like cherry bubblegum, It doesn't. But the taste reminds that one someone of cherry bubblegum. That's a slight, but important diffrence.
You drink wine with added sugar? And sweeten your tea? Jeez. Maybe you think Jamie Oliver is a good cook, too? Again, for your benefit, double blind tests prove that people can't even tell white wine from red wine if they look the same. Yes, that includes you, too.
Wine can be sweet without ADDED sugar, just from natural sugar residues. So much for you knowledge regarding wine.
On the other hand. a blind test between red and white whine should be easy as pie as white wine is served chilled.:-P
But seriously, the results of this experiment of course varies with the wines you use. I know of at least one red wine (Trollinger) that is supposed to taste almost like a white wine (and should also be served a bit chilled). But if you have a little bit of practice, it shouldn't be hard if you use *typical* red and white wines.
On the other hand: a lot has changed in the wine market during the last 15 years. (at least over here) Around that time, some wine critics discovered that the most famous El Cheapo Supermarket (Aldi) secretly decided to act as a price breaker and offered wines with an amazingly great price/quality ratio. They didn't take their 2 Eur Chateu Hobo out of their shelves, but added good wine in the 5-8 EUR range. And good wine with such agressive pricing was unheard of.
In addition, the production of wine has been industrialised (Nappa Valley, I'm looking in your direction!) and new technologies (chipping or using destillation to reduce alcohol concentration) made it easier to produce cheap wine at greater volume and (even more important) constant quality.
So the key point of that linked article is: Good wine doesn't need to be expensive anymore. And objective metrics never made more that 50% of perceived wine quality anyways. The rest was always personal taste and a taste according to the expectations set by the type of wine.
So it's a quite common trick to foil wine buffs by good, non-expensive wine. And in the upper price regions, you get more unique tastes. But with the more "unique" a taste is, you'll find more people who simply don't like it.
It's the same with Budweiser. If you serve something without any taste, you'll hardly find anyone who doesn't like the taste of it. Simply there is no taste to dislike. Serve something with a distinctive taste, and people will be split between "yummy" and "ewww... what's THIS!"
It appears to follow the rationale advocated by some people around here that it's the person who should be considered by security, not the items that they are carrying.
It should be a healthy mixture.
I'm a bit sceptical about using background checks here: Suicide bombers usually don't have a criminal record of being one.
While you probably can gather intelligence on most suspects in advance, for attacking "high profile target", so specifically train (or brainwash or blackmail) a bomber to keep a low profile. I think most suspects ring the alarms of some three letter agency when travelling to an area with a n assumed "terror training camp". Those are fine for training rank terrorists. But if you want to have an "elite terrorist" to even pass a background check, you could do some "homeschooling". Tell him to keep away from meetings and mosques.
If I may remember: The 9/11 terrorists were identified in hindsight only because they didn't use fake passports, gained legit visas to travel to US and Germany, used genuine credit cards to pay for their flight training.
Background checks work be searching for patterns. The more singular something is, the harder it gets to find such patterns.
1. Ask for clarification on use case for a clock taking up space on a tv homepage 2. Put task on hold while waiting for feedback 3. Let task rot there.
or if #1 didn't work out or you're intrested in an actual solution
1. Show client RTC on website 2. link to ntp client below the clock. Text: make this clock more accurate
I learned enough about terror prevention by simply listening to Major Kira on Deep Space Nine to know that such an organisation is designed to work without leaders.
The biggest thing is to have lots of "helper" agents in the middle looking with eyeballs. The problem is that our airports were built like shopping malls, intended to be a destination to pickup/ drop off people and have dinner, etc. they have few "compartments" to their designs for the passenger spaces.
The main problem is that the people who build that security system rather had a administrative/military background instead of a system engineering / security background.
Anyone who ever designed a pice of software knows that backdors ALWAYS DECREASE the security. And that if you pile up enough unconvinient security measures (TSA) that need to rely on backdoors (signing up for TSA pre, "TSA approved" locks that are DESIGNED to be easily opend without the proper key) to be useable, you're doing something completly wrong.
Sometimes I really wonder who designed that stuff. They obviously didn't have the big picture in mind and obviously never thought of the impact and consequences. Like a really small example: Shoe scanning. For the sake of the argument I'll asume that it is in some way usefull. But no one ever thought of how you're supposed to put your shoes back on (or off before the scan) while holding your coat, cabin luggage, clear bag with toothpaste, and your laptop removed from your cabin luggage.
A bench or a footrest behind the x-ray machine would be a simple measure to ease most of the stress at that checkpoint. Or returning your stuff on a tray/table/conveyor belt compartment where you can re-pack it without holding up the line.
Or perhaps just not man the x-ray scanner with complete no-brainers!
Last time I flew out of PHL, the guy in front of me in the line was walking on crutches. I would have expected an approach along the lines of "would you please sit over here while we scan your crutches" or "May I assist you through the metal detector while we scan your crutches seperatly". What I heard was "Do you need these?" What answer did he expect? "No I just wear them to pick up girls. Here's your sign."
Well that's the old problem with rare events and statistics.
But considering that Israel suffers from suicide bombings on an almost weekly base until only a few years ago, hardly anything happend behind those checkpoints.
So instead of using the number of caught terrorists as a measure for airport security, I'd suggest using the ratio between attacks foiled by airport security to the number of attacks happening outside airport security.
So you're really telling me that we've put up a sometimes ridiciolously strict security system that you simply can skip (at least in parts) by SIGNING UP TO A WEBSITE??
Either shoe-scanning and bottle-ban are important to security, then they should be mandatory or they aren't important al all!
The only thing more stupid would be, if they'd force you to lock your baggae with special locks that anyone can open... oh wait.....
Or making a big fuss about not leaving your suitcase unattended before a flight - just minutes before you're forced to hand over said suitcase to a bunch of people with the authority and the tools to even access your baggage without your consent.
Slashdot Mirror
"True. But fails as a theory as it doesn't explain the observation that people now flock to FB. If it was only about communicating and sharing their photos, they could do it with plain oldfashioned email and ICQ. (MSN, whatsapp, whatever)"
How? Their friends don't use these tools anymore. Facebook has a monopoly on the social graph and the only way to stay in touch with all your friends is to use it. You can't make all your friends leave it for something new, because they'd need all their friends to leave it for something new too, who would need all their friends... and so on.
That#s circular reasoning. WHY did their first bunch of friends go to facebook? It explains as a network effect why fb is still growing and people still sign up and why it is so difficult to start a new service. But still: When everyone goes to facebook because everyone else is on facebook too, why did people go there when everyone else was on email and ICQ.
"But all that is not my original point: facebook data mining may or may not ne amoral, but if Zuckerberg should count as an amoral person, it shouldn't be for respecting court or administration orders. That's neither moral nor unmoral, it's plain normal."
I agree with you here but I don't think anyone was necessarily saying he was amoral for respecting court orders, but being amoral for having a reason to be issued court orders in the first place, again, as I say, by hoarding data on people, much of which is against their will or knowledge.
Yes. But still the wording "amoral" is a judgement that should not be part of a summery without further explanation.
Yes. Something is broken in a system that values a degree more depending on its cost instead of the work that went into obtaining it.
That would have been which cooperation?
"firefighters, cops, doctors, detectives". These work as role models because kids can easily relate to what these people do, even if they don't understand the details. Engineers? Not so much. Same goes for lawyers, managers and similar professions, but those grow more attractive as kids learn about the pay and social status associated with them.
Yes. That's what they see on TV.
Where are the McGyvers and Montgomery Scotts that show kids that in the end it's the engineers that save the day by making stuff work.
No they don't, people use Facebook to communicate with their friends sharing the data they provide.
True. But fails as a theory as it doesn't explain the observation that people now flock to FB. If it was only about communicating and sharing their photos, they could do it with plain oldfashioned email and ICQ. (MSN, whatsapp, whatever)
Whilst I agree it's utterly naive of them, most users are entirely unaware that masses more data about them is inferred from the very little data they provide.
M theory is that people want to have those data, too.
Girls want their picture to pop up their profile when that cute guy they spotted last night at the club searches the checkins for that cute girl he saw. And the other way round. (They even risk that the ugly guy/girl find their profile - but there's the ignore button for that)
Users want to hook up with the other handfull of users who actually listen to that obscure heavy-metal-polka band.
But all that is not my original point: facebook data mining may or may not ne amoral, but if Zuckerberg should count as an amoral person, it shouldn't be for respecting court or administration orders. That's neither moral nor unmoral, it's plain normal.
That discussion begins when such orders are disobeyed. THAT can be both, moral or amoral. I think we agree that disobeying orders would have been highly moral instead of saying "I was just following orders". On the other hand, following orders is what's expected from soldiers and what makes the military work.
Amoral because he harvests data and builds links from it that weren't explicitly provided and holds them in an easily searchable and mineable manner.
But that's the whole point of facebook and why people use it. People upload their addressbook to facebook for facebook to make those links. They're making links between their farmville crops, their face and their friends pictures, and links to their favourite music, movies, icecream..... Without those links, facebook would be as usefull and as much fun as a phonebook and an email client.
I won't comment on if this is a smart thing to do, but it's the users that shovel data into facebook - and expect it to be processed there!
I wouldn't call a person who respects a warrant/subpoena/wiretapping request that is deemed legal in his jurisdiction "amoral" per se.
On the other hand, there was a time when we called those who had the guts to stand up for his beliefes, even the authorities heroes and not traitors.
Well, I guess it's up to history to decide who was what.
And is anyone surprised by this? I don't think so. It was the US that insisted on all passports having biometric information for face recognition already on everyones passport.
Passport. You know? that thing you need to travel into countries other than Canada. Yes there ARE other countries somewhere out there. But I guess as most US citizens won't need one, that's the reason why they're mining driver's licencse photo databases.
Do those photos also be ready for biometric recognition as the ones in the passports?
same over here.
I know a town where they usually do exactly that when they find another roman coin in their garden.
THAT would indeed be a good idea. But it would still be easier to drop the walking payload off next to the plane and let it board itself than constructing pressure-proof trains.
Ok... so just assume that a typical cellphone battery has a capacity of 2000mAh and a voltage of 5V, then the power stored in it would be something around 0.01 kWh
So you would need the energy of TWO whole cellphone batteries to make a cup of tea.
The difference would be that browsing 20 hours with IE means that you have to go two charching cycles less within those 20 hours than with another browser.
Now we only would need to compare this to a typical number of recharching cycles for 20 hours nonstop-browsing.
But still, it's meaningless if it's only visible on dasktop machines and/or they don't know why IE uses less energy.
The energy needed to brew a cup of tea is definitly NOT small compared to the energy that is available in your cellphone battery.
I'm not saying that tasters can't taste something. The question is: can they taste well enough to justify a difference in wine price between $2 for a bottle vs. $200 for a bottle? Given the evidence, I don't think their opinions are worth anywhere near that much.
I fully agree with you until here. But as you mention the $200 price range: Things become even worse here: Those rediciulous prices are usually paid for those veeeery old bottles. But talk to a wine producer: wine doesn't get better with long storage times. Even the wines that need time to fully develop their taste are done after a few years. Only a few types of wine aren't guaranteed to to be undrinkable after 20 years. You pay for the privilege to gulp something down that is very old and can't be reproduced. And you basically have to pay for all the bottles that turned to vinegar during those 20+ years. Or got that cork taste. Or saw a bright flash of light. Or whatever may happen to wine.
So -- I agree with most things you've said. And I agree that experts taste something. I just don't think their opinions are anywhere near exact enough to justify the kind of price increases that accompany high ratings.
Exactly. Espescially when the most important factor is still personal taste.
Wouldn't it be nice if, in addition to alcoholic content, the labels on wine bottles clearly displayed the amount of sweetness, acidity, and astringency ? I'm talking about real numbers with some kind of scale.
Yes, but misleading.
We tried this at a wineyard. The guideline we were given was to stay away from anything but "dry" wine. The measurable amount of sugar left is used to distinguish between dry and sweet wines, but a good dry wine can have fruity aromas that will lead to a perceived sweetness, even though the fermentation has been completed. (and hardly any sugar is left)
Other studies have even shown that professional tasters often fare pretty poorly even in tests like, "Taste 3 wines, tell me which 2 are identical," or that when given white wines dyed with red food coloring, they start spouting out the nonsense about "flavor notes" and "nose" that would be appropriate for red wines rather than whites.
I doubt that one. (at least within a neutral setting and no tampering with the subjects expectations like telling him about 2 identical wines when in fact all are the same or using food coloring.) Humans rely on ALL senses and ALL KIND of prior knowledge when they have to do a certain task. So the result of the experiment is NOT that professional tasters are quacks (at least most of them) but rather that the visual sense and the power of suggestion trumps the rather weak senses of taste and smell.
Do that test again and TELL them that the wines are manipulated to an identical color. That'll give you an example of how humans are able to ignore a specific sense.
here is some little experiment we did ourselfs. (Feel free to repeat it. It'll at least make for a nice evening)
3 people, each one buys and brings a different bottle of wine (Spain, France, Italy to increase the difference between them) Open one bottle, have a glass of it each and talk about it. Repeat with all three bottles. Now take rounds with everyone being served three unmarked glasses with each of the evenings wines. And now, from memory, match those glasses to the countries. It's not impossible, but hard, because you'll notice that you don't have a conscious memory for tastes!
Repeat that every month and you'll see that you get better at it, because during the "learning phase", you start to assign verbal "tags" to the taste. and in the second phase you can compare the taste of the unknown wine with the stored "tags".
So when someone says a certain wine tastes like cherry bubblegum, It doesn't. But the taste reminds that one someone of cherry bubblegum. That's a slight, but important diffrence.
difficult, yes. But it was so thousand years ago. but it's not impossible, just really really expensive. and nowadays pretty useless.
This just goes to show that you simply can't make good bourbon, no matter how much money you throw at it.
You drink wine with added sugar? And sweeten your tea? Jeez. Maybe you think Jamie Oliver is a good cook, too? Again, for your benefit, double blind tests prove that people can't even tell white wine from red wine if they look the same. Yes, that includes you, too.
Wine can be sweet without ADDED sugar, just from natural sugar residues. So much for you knowledge regarding wine.
On the other hand. a blind test between red and white whine should be easy as pie as white wine is served chilled. :-P
But seriously, the results of this experiment of course varies with the wines you use. I know of at least one red wine (Trollinger) that is supposed to taste almost like a white wine (and should also be served a bit chilled). But if you have a little bit of practice, it shouldn't be hard if you use *typical* red and white wines.
On the other hand: a lot has changed in the wine market during the last 15 years. (at least over here) Around that time, some wine critics discovered that the most famous El Cheapo Supermarket (Aldi) secretly decided to act as a price breaker and offered wines with an amazingly great price/quality ratio. They didn't take their 2 Eur Chateu Hobo out of their shelves, but added good wine in the 5-8 EUR range. And good wine with such agressive pricing was unheard of.
In addition, the production of wine has been industrialised (Nappa Valley, I'm looking in your direction!) and new technologies (chipping or using destillation to reduce alcohol concentration) made it easier to produce cheap wine at greater volume and (even more important) constant quality.
So the key point of that linked article is: Good wine doesn't need to be expensive anymore. And objective metrics never made more that 50% of perceived wine quality anyways. The rest was always personal taste and a taste according to the expectations set by the type of wine.
So it's a quite common trick to foil wine buffs by good, non-expensive wine. And in the upper price regions, you get more unique tastes. But with the more "unique" a taste is, you'll find more people who simply don't like it.
It's the same with Budweiser. If you serve something without any taste, you'll hardly find anyone who doesn't like the taste of it. Simply there is no taste to dislike. Serve something with a distinctive taste, and people will be split between "yummy" and "ewww... what's THIS!"
It appears to follow the rationale advocated by some people around here that it's the person who should be considered by security, not the
items that they are carrying.
It should be a healthy mixture.
I'm a bit sceptical about using background checks here:
Suicide bombers usually don't have a criminal record of being one.
While you probably can gather intelligence on most suspects in advance, for attacking "high profile target", so specifically train (or brainwash or blackmail) a bomber to keep a low profile. I think most suspects ring the alarms of some three letter agency when travelling to an area with a n assumed "terror training camp". Those are fine for training rank terrorists. But if you want to have an "elite terrorist" to even pass a background check, you could do some "homeschooling". Tell him to keep away from meetings and mosques.
If I may remember: The 9/11 terrorists were identified in hindsight only because they didn't use fake passports, gained legit visas to travel to US and Germany, used genuine credit cards to pay for their flight training.
Background checks work be searching for patterns. The more singular something is, the harder it gets to find such patterns.
I have two simple solutions:
1. Ask for clarification on use case for a clock taking up space on a tv homepage
2. Put task on hold while waiting for feedback
3. Let task rot there.
or if #1 didn't work out or you're intrested in an actual solution
1. Show client RTC on website
2. link to ntp client below the clock. Text: make this clock more accurate
It's a cop-out, nothing more.
It's a fit of common sense.
What is the use case of a clock on a website?
I learned enough about terror prevention by simply listening to Major Kira on Deep Space Nine to know that such an organisation is designed to work without leaders.
The biggest thing is to have lots of "helper" agents in the middle looking with eyeballs. The problem is that our airports were built like shopping malls, intended to be a destination to pickup/ drop off people and have dinner, etc. they have few "compartments" to their designs for the passenger spaces.
The main problem is that the people who build that security system rather had a administrative/military background instead of a system engineering / security background.
Anyone who ever designed a pice of software knows that backdors ALWAYS DECREASE the security. And that if you pile up enough unconvinient security measures (TSA) that need to rely on backdoors (signing up for TSA pre, "TSA approved" locks that are DESIGNED to be easily opend without the proper key) to be useable, you're doing something completly wrong.
Sometimes I really wonder who designed that stuff. They obviously didn't have the big picture in mind and obviously never thought of the impact and consequences. Like a really small example: Shoe scanning. For the sake of the argument I'll asume that it is in some way usefull. But no one ever thought of how you're supposed to put your shoes back on (or off before the scan) while holding your coat, cabin luggage, clear bag with toothpaste, and your laptop removed from your cabin luggage.
A bench or a footrest behind the x-ray machine would be a simple measure to ease most of the stress at that checkpoint. Or returning your stuff on a tray/table/conveyor belt compartment where you can re-pack it without holding up the line.
Or perhaps just not man the x-ray scanner with complete no-brainers!
Last time I flew out of PHL, the guy in front of me in the line was walking on crutches. I would have expected an approach along the lines of "would you please sit over here while we scan your crutches" or "May I assist you through the metal detector while we scan your crutches seperatly". What I heard was "Do you need these?" What answer did he expect? "No I just wear them to pick up girls. Here's your sign."
Well that's the old problem with rare events and statistics.
But considering that Israel suffers from suicide bombings on an almost weekly base until only a few years ago, hardly anything happend behind those checkpoints.
So instead of using the number of caught terrorists as a measure for airport security, I'd suggest using the ratio between attacks foiled by airport security to the number of attacks happening outside airport security.
So you're really telling me that we've put up a sometimes ridiciolously strict security system that you simply can skip (at least in parts) by SIGNING UP TO A WEBSITE??
Either shoe-scanning and bottle-ban are important to security, then they should be mandatory or they aren't important al all!
The only thing more stupid would be, if they'd force you to lock your baggae with special locks that anyone can open... oh wait.....
Or making a big fuss about not leaving your suitcase unattended before a flight - just minutes before you're forced to hand over said suitcase to a bunch of people with the authority and the tools to even access your baggage without your consent.