Either that or he gets called by acquaintances wanting to know how they can switch over to FOSS quickly, taking delight in being able to help them. But yeah, the grin is unlikely even in this case. Maybe something in his office is leaking nitrous oxide.
In a way, I think Chrome proves that users really don't care that much about the UI looking and feeling "native", but care much more about it being themable.
Until you try to penetrate the Mac user market where "looks and behaves like a native app as much as possible" is considered a very important feature. This is one of the things that make Chrome/OS X unattractive for me. At least they included proper menus (although not including a traditional menu bar on OS X is pure idiocy so it's not surprising they did).
For an example of how important integration is, I think that Thunderbird 3 isn't nearly as good as its predecessor but I still keep it around for one reason: It implements scrolling the same was as every Cocoa app does (Thunderbird 2 didn't process scrolling if it didn't have focus). For that I'm willing to tolerate its insipid habit of starting up full-screen and its occasional infinite "processing this folder".
One of the things I really, really like about switching to OS X is that it got me away from the nonsense of every app looking and feeling completely different. I don't care whether my app uses Java or was written by Google, I want it to behave exactly like every other app. When I use a new app I want to do so with the absolute minimum of relearning possible. Make me learn the things your app does that others don't; don't make me learn your exciting new way of reading the window title or locating the tools menu or how to tell apart the buttons and the window decoration.
The problem with D3d is that Microsoft only offers it for their own platform. Seeing that 3D-capable smartphones/media players are getting increasingly common (and many of them don't run Windows, Nokia's and Apple's devices being prominent examples), Microsoft only offering it for their own OS is a drawback.
If I want to write a game for mobile platforms, OpenGL ES allows me to target the iPhone/iPod touch, the N900, some or all Android devices, newer BlackBerry models and even portable consoles like the Pandora (NDS and PSP use OGL derivatives and require more porting work). D3D allows me to target the Zune HD and... well, I actually can't think of another high-profile 3D capable WinMo device right now.
Microsoft can try to release an XBox equivalent for the portable market - but their attempt with the Zune HD hasn't shaken up the market much and the hottest items are still based on either Linux or Mac OS. While D3D might be a no-brainer if you target X360 and/or Windows it's fairly useless if you want to target one ore more of the most important portable devices.
NSA agent 1: They have what? NSA agent 2: A radioactive toy train. NSA agent 1: That's... hardly scary. How radioactive is it? NSA agent 2: I guass if you licked it for a few days straight you might get a measurable dose. NSA agent 1: What are they going to do wth it, run it into a squirrel? NSA supervisor: HAVE YOU HEARD? THE TERRORISTS HAVE RADIOACTIVE TRAINS NOW! GO TO SEVERE TERROR ALERT LEVEL! CLOSE ALL AIRPORTS! NSA agent 2: *sigh* That's what they're going to do: Tell us about it.
Meanwhile in a cave somewhere in the Middle east: Osama bin Laden: *watches radioactive toy train run on an elaborate course* Wheee! Best birthday present ever!
Much as I appreciate the science going on with what we have, it sure would be nice if mankind was a little bolder.
Well, the USA are already working on it, increasing the average weight of mankind all the time - and given that many Americans are already heavy and a sizable number of them are black I think they're making good progress.
Plus, and I know this is a fairly oblique statement, for everyone tracking the progress of spaceflight it's justified to say that the leading position of the States is actually because they're careful not to overshoot the cap height of what's possible. Even though the Space Shuttle has a poor track record of blowing up due to minuscule damage during the ascender and descender parts of the missions, leaving behind orphans and widows, the safety margins on those things are still pretty impressive, given that they manage to get most astronauts safely into space riding what amounts to a column of fire. Still, it's way past its prime mark and nowhere near as good as initial expectations suggested. I wouldn't call it a capital failure, though.
I think the whole point of the next-generation vehicle should be to counter small parts punchcutting through the hull in a catastrophic way just because they were out of alignment, providing a measure of safety (yes, I'm hinting at the Shuttle having bad baseline safety here).
Well, Europe has sane work laws so you can't just have someone work 120 hours a week and pay them for 40.
Except in academia; a friend of mine is working towards his PHD, which of course involves doing the professor's job. Unfortunately he's expected to put in his 40 and generate reliable data and write his thesis at the same time while keeping up a steady stream of papers that make it into top-of-the-field journals. While getting paid for 20 hours a week (this has since improved to 40, still without overtime). And the fact that he's the only IT-savvy worker in the office means that he spends as much time doing his coworkers' work as his own because his work depends on theirs and "I couldn't do my work because I had no data" is not seen as a valid excuse by the professor.
I'd tell him to get out of that hellhole but his workaholic professor is apparently well-respected in his field, has a lot of connections and is vengeful enough to significantly hinder my friend's chances of getting another postgrad position in Germany if he leaves. My friend could probably sue him to hell and back for work law violations except that would also ruin his chances at a postgrad position and lose him the work of the last few years.
Hearing his sordid tales every few weeks I'm so happy I'm not shooting for a PHD...
Well, we already were within the context of luggage bombs. I suggested that putting the bomb in someone else's luggage might be more workable than checking in your bombed luggage and then "missing" the flight.
Actually, most games nowadays are Halo clones. Regenerating health and the restriction to very few carried weapons came from there (CS had the player carry few weapons before and I'm certain someone else came up with the regenerating health first but Halo made them popular).
Re:Perpetual calendar anyone ?
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Except that the World Calendar still doesn't do anything about this year having a different number form last year. In fact, it makes computational handling of dates more complex as we suddenly have one or two days a year that don't have a number.
I'm a Christian, complete with confirmation and all the jazz. I don't particularly care about religion (mine or others') but hey, you customarily get money from your relatives upon confirmation and I was perfectly happy with learning about a subset of the values the western world was built on and getting paid for it.
Did I hear a lot of the gorier stories in the bible? Nope. The "we're better than everyone else" stuff was notably absent as well; instead the lectures focused on the nicer parts of the bible. Same in church: The sermons were usually about things of relevance to the community or general uplifting stuff but never about how condemning in any way.
Granted, we're talking about a small town church with a very liberal pastor but still it shows that it's prefectly possible to have religion without having a narcistic circlejerk denigrating someone else.
The problem is not religion but singlemindedness. You'll always have people who believe their way to be the only correct one. If they're religiously oriented you get bible-thumpers and jihad-screaming islamic fundamentalists. If they're politically oriented you get people like George W. Bush. If they're in business you get every other story on The Daily WTF.
If we want to make the world a better place we don't need to rabidly oppose religion. That's just as single-minded as portraying all Muslims as jihadists. We need to find a way to make people actually think. No, religion is not opposed to critical thought even about itself; a particular instance of organized religion might be but you have just as many churches that encourage you to evaluate their merits for yourself as ones that declare infallibility.
Find a way to make people critically think about themselves and give them the tools to do so. That's how you make the world a better place, not through yet another misguided crusade.
We are actually in full accord on this. I also don't think that "looks exactly like a book" is much of a feature but hey, it happens to be the one they tout. To them it appears to be pretty important. Maybe they will convince the market that they're right, most likely they won't.
Only let people on who are nude, renounce religions, eat a piece of bacon and kiss someone of the same gender.
That would be the most safest airplane in the world.
Until the terrorists launch a biological attack using Herpes simplex.
Smuggle the bomb into someone else's luggage. Sure, you can't guarantee that one particular flight goes boom but with patience you can hit some flight. If the bomb doesn't make it past the checkpoint just blow up the checkpoint. If you get apprehended you'll go to some Gitmo-style camp anyway so you can just blow up yourself and take a couple guards and travellers with you.
There is no safe form of travel. In fact, there is no safe form of living. If someone wants to kill you they can always find a way.
Especially since it makes the security checkpoints look like death traps. The only way to fix that would be to provide so many security checkpoints that a bomb could only reach a few travellers - but then you'd have something to the tune of 100 parallel security checkpoints per gate, which is clearly absurd.
You simply can't make an airport secure. As long as a lot of people are in a small space they're vulnerable. If it's not a bomb it might be a car. And if it's not a car it might be a laser pointer near the landing strip. And even if they make all airports extremely secure there's a whole number of exposed targets you simply can't plausibly cover without installing multiply redundant security checkpoints in every single building (which would probably require 500% of the population of the United States to staff).
OTOH you can't even change the font size. I mean, who developed the customization interface for that thing, the GNOME developers? Even the personalization is just the annotation feature applied to a blank page!
Except that this "Blio" format touts as its big advantage that the pages look exactly like in the real book. You can't reliably do that with reflowing. So yes, this new format sounds exactly like PDF or PostScript.
The problem with botox and similarly lethal substances is that it's not just easy to kill yourself, it's just as easy to kill other people, even by accident. Granted, it's perfectly posible for someone without formal training to safely handle the stuff but I think relatively heavy restrictions for some of the most deadly substances are acceptable as long as we don't go overboard.
Okay, given the kind of politicians everywhere tends to have we can safely expect them to take all of five minutes to demand that cocaine, pornography and storage media containing pirated movies are declared "extremely lethal substances" with a "very large amount" being defined as 1 femtogram.
How about this approach: There are various types of restricted drugs (you need restrictions to prevent random over-the-counter sale of antibiotics anyway) but all of the restrictions only apply to the seller.
Type 1 restricted drugs can only be sold by pharmacies and only if a medical doctor prescribed them. This applies to antibiotics and other medical drugs that shouldn't be handed out willy-nilly. Possession is legal as long as acquisition was. In case of an illegal sale proving it's a valid defense to prove that it was reasonable to assume the legitimacy of the seller.
Type 2 restricted drugs are drugs likely to cause damage to the user or people around him when consumed. Tobacco, alcohol and similar recreational drugs apply. These can only be sold by a licensed dealer to adults and are likely to have additional taxes tacked onto them to offset the cost to society they create. Again, even in the case of an illegal sale, you're likely to get off the hook if it was unreasonable to doubt the legality of the transaction.
Type 3 restricted drugs are drugs with a strong negative effect that can't be expected to be handled by laymen without killing themselves. Botox might be an example. These can only be sold by licensed dealers to licensed professionals. Possession by unlicensed people should usually be dealt with by something to the tune of confiscation; stronger measures should only be taken if large amounts (defined as, for example, N usual doses) are found.
In general, people should be able to possess most things but there should be responsibility and, to a certain degree, accountability. You can do to your body what you want but you still have to pay the taxes put on the stuff you want to waste yourself with (this should still lead to higher quality at lower prices even with high taxes). Licensed dealers ensure that the trade proceeds in a sane way and minors don't get direct access to the goods.
Everyone wins: You get to do whatever you want to without being criminalized. You also get access to drugs of a controlled high quality (as quality control laws are likely to be implemented). Society as a whole gets money to offset the damaging effects of recreational drugs. Everyone gets a bit of safety as controlled sale of the drugs allows certain threats to be reduced.
That type of bomb is, according to the TSA themselves, virtually impossible to build correctly in a plane or an airport secure area. Plus, the stuff was in plastic containers and wouldn't have built up pressure either way. The man was an idiot who would've ended up setting himself alight anyway - if he had mixed the stuff better he might have injured someone else but I still doubt he would've made a hole in anything.
It should be. I know it's tragic but it shouldn't have been turned into the media extravaganza it was. Hell, there even was an official song. The proper response to terrorism is to non-hastily look into measures that allow that particular attack to be prevented in the future (such as, in this case, making the cockpit inaccessible from the passenger room during the flight) and nothing else.
The exact point of terrorism is to disrupt the target country. Now look at the situation - not only have the USA ruined their image over two wars, they (and everyone else) spend lots of money on harrassing innocent travellers in a way that doesn't even do anything, breeding contempt all the while. A few thousand deaths in an act that is extremely unlikely to ever be successfully repeated again should not be enough to let the most well-armed country in the world tumble head-first into raging paranoia against anyone and everyone, including its own citizens.
Regardless of the "if we don't X the terrorists have already won" rhethoric, the government of the States has done exactly what the terrorists wanted and it's still continuing to do so. The terrorists have already won and they keep wining because at the moment they and the government are working in the same direction: Away form the citizens towards ever greater surveillance and power concentration at the top. They're essentially using each other as PR agencies.
Ther's a difference between not advertising religiousness and advertising not-religiousness. Video games tend to avoid putting religion front and center because it's not relevant to the gameplay or wouldn't fit into the narrative.
Anything set in a world different from our own wouldn't make sense with one of our own religions. At best you could posit that YHWH also created that world etc. but you'd have to add a lot of differences simply because the world is a different one. You'd end up with what feels like a completely different religion with God's name tacked on.
Anything set in our world or one derived from it also should avoid playing up religion too much. Few people are going to enjoy it when the character plays up what a devout Christian he is before he goes out to kill three dozen people because, um, they're in the way. It doesn't get much better if you kill three dozen aliens or demons.
Even if we take a fairly harmless scenario we run into problems. Let's assume that there's a new addon for The Sims 5 which allows your sims to observe one of various religions and even pursue various clerical careers. Now you get angry calls from people who are pissed why Catholicism is represented but the Mormons aren't. Or who don't agree with the precise way you depicted their faith. Or who are offended that the game allows you to violate some tenet they hold, even if it's neccessary from a gameplay perspective. Maybe you forgot to distinguish between Sunnite and Shiite Islam or thirty different American churches are angry that you can't have your sim attend a gospel sermon. And God help you if your nun doesn't follow the mutually contradictory rules of all orders on Earth.
The best you can hope to get away with is to make short mentions of religiousness as an aside. For instance, Final Fantasy Tactics opens with a prayer (to a somewhat different but still monotheistic god) - although I have to be honest and also note that the game shows the church to be highly corrupt and has its world's equivalent of Jesus (not actually a good guy) as the final boss.
It's hard to make religion an important part of your game without making statements about that religion. Statements many people might not appreciate - gamers because they want to play and not hear a sermon, publishers because they might turn off some players and believers because they might show the religion in a way they don't agree with. FFT is a good example - it makes the statement that power corrupts anyone. Few people complain because the religion is only roughly similar to Christianity.
As another post has pointed out, the TSA (according to their own report) could barely get this kind of explosive to work under laboratory conditions and the containers he transported them in were so weak that most of the damage caused would have been by causing a fire anyway.
We're talking about someone who's plan had a best case scenario of "I set not only my pants but also my seat on fire". Granted, that's worse than a firecracker but still not particularly impressive, especially given that airplanes come equipped with fire extinguishers. It does illustrate, though, that the current security theater is fairly useless.
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Either that or he gets called by acquaintances wanting to know how they can switch over to FOSS quickly, taking delight in being able to help them. But yeah, the grin is unlikely even in this case. Maybe something in his office is leaking nitrous oxide.
If your computer becomes usuable because Firefox consumed megabytes of memory you might want to switch to lynx.
Until you try to penetrate the Mac user market where "looks and behaves like a native app as much as possible" is considered a very important feature. This is one of the things that make Chrome/OS X unattractive for me. At least they included proper menus (although not including a traditional menu bar on OS X is pure idiocy so it's not surprising they did).
For an example of how important integration is, I think that Thunderbird 3 isn't nearly as good as its predecessor but I still keep it around for one reason: It implements scrolling the same was as every Cocoa app does (Thunderbird 2 didn't process scrolling if it didn't have focus). For that I'm willing to tolerate its insipid habit of starting up full-screen and its occasional infinite "processing this folder".
One of the things I really, really like about switching to OS X is that it got me away from the nonsense of every app looking and feeling completely different. I don't care whether my app uses Java or was written by Google, I want it to behave exactly like every other app. When I use a new app I want to do so with the absolute minimum of relearning possible. Make me learn the things your app does that others don't; don't make me learn your exciting new way of reading the window title or locating the tools menu or how to tell apart the buttons and the window decoration.
The problem with D3d is that Microsoft only offers it for their own platform. Seeing that 3D-capable smartphones/media players are getting increasingly common (and many of them don't run Windows, Nokia's and Apple's devices being prominent examples), Microsoft only offering it for their own OS is a drawback.
If I want to write a game for mobile platforms, OpenGL ES allows me to target the iPhone/iPod touch, the N900, some or all Android devices, newer BlackBerry models and even portable consoles like the Pandora (NDS and PSP use OGL derivatives and require more porting work). D3D allows me to target the Zune HD and... well, I actually can't think of another high-profile 3D capable WinMo device right now.
Microsoft can try to release an XBox equivalent for the portable market - but their attempt with the Zune HD hasn't shaken up the market much and the hottest items are still based on either Linux or Mac OS. While D3D might be a no-brainer if you target X360 and/or Windows it's fairly useless if you want to target one ore more of the most important portable devices.
NSA agent 1: They have what?
NSA agent 2: A radioactive toy train.
NSA agent 1: That's... hardly scary. How radioactive is it?
NSA agent 2: I guass if you licked it for a few days straight you might get a measurable dose.
NSA agent 1: What are they going to do wth it, run it into a squirrel?
NSA supervisor: HAVE YOU HEARD? THE TERRORISTS HAVE RADIOACTIVE TRAINS NOW! GO TO SEVERE TERROR ALERT LEVEL! CLOSE ALL AIRPORTS!
NSA agent 2: *sigh* That's what they're going to do: Tell us about it.
Meanwhile in a cave somewhere in the Middle east:
Osama bin Laden: *watches radioactive toy train run on an elaborate course* Wheee! Best birthday present ever!
rocamargo wants the Shuttle to end its lifespan with a bang, not a whimper.
Thank you, I'll be here all week. Tip your waitress.
Well, the USA are already working on it, increasing the average weight of mankind all the time - and given that many Americans are already heavy and a sizable number of them are black I think they're making good progress.
Plus, and I know this is a fairly oblique statement, for everyone tracking the progress of spaceflight it's justified to say that the leading position of the States is actually because they're careful not to overshoot the cap height of what's possible. Even though the Space Shuttle has a poor track record of blowing up due to minuscule damage during the ascender and descender parts of the missions, leaving behind orphans and widows, the safety margins on those things are still pretty impressive, given that they manage to get most astronauts safely into space riding what amounts to a column of fire. Still, it's way past its prime mark and nowhere near as good as initial expectations suggested. I wouldn't call it a capital failure, though.
I think the whole point of the next-generation vehicle should be to counter small parts punchcutting through the hull in a catastrophic way just because they were out of alignment, providing a measure of safety (yes, I'm hinting at the Shuttle having bad baseline safety here).
Well, Europe has sane work laws so you can't just have someone work 120 hours a week and pay them for 40.
Except in academia; a friend of mine is working towards his PHD, which of course involves doing the professor's job. Unfortunately he's expected to put in his 40 and generate reliable data and write his thesis at the same time while keeping up a steady stream of papers that make it into top-of-the-field journals. While getting paid for 20 hours a week (this has since improved to 40, still without overtime). And the fact that he's the only IT-savvy worker in the office means that he spends as much time doing his coworkers' work as his own because his work depends on theirs and "I couldn't do my work because I had no data" is not seen as a valid excuse by the professor.
I'd tell him to get out of that hellhole but his workaholic professor is apparently well-respected in his field, has a lot of connections and is vengeful enough to significantly hinder my friend's chances of getting another postgrad position in Germany if he leaves. My friend could probably sue him to hell and back for work law violations except that would also ruin his chances at a postgrad position and lose him the work of the last few years.
Hearing his sordid tales every few weeks I'm so happy I'm not shooting for a PHD...
Well, we already were within the context of luggage bombs. I suggested that putting the bomb in someone else's luggage might be more workable than checking in your bombed luggage and then "missing" the flight.
Actually, most games nowadays are Halo clones. Regenerating health and the restriction to very few carried weapons came from there (CS had the player carry few weapons before and I'm certain someone else came up with the regenerating health first but Halo made them popular).
Except that the World Calendar still doesn't do anything about this year having a different number form last year. In fact, it makes computational handling of dates more complex as we suddenly have one or two days a year that don't have a number.
I'm a Christian, complete with confirmation and all the jazz. I don't particularly care about religion (mine or others') but hey, you customarily get money from your relatives upon confirmation and I was perfectly happy with learning about a subset of the values the western world was built on and getting paid for it.
Did I hear a lot of the gorier stories in the bible? Nope. The "we're better than everyone else" stuff was notably absent as well; instead the lectures focused on the nicer parts of the bible. Same in church: The sermons were usually about things of relevance to the community or general uplifting stuff but never about how condemning in any way.
Granted, we're talking about a small town church with a very liberal pastor but still it shows that it's prefectly possible to have religion without having a narcistic circlejerk denigrating someone else.
The problem is not religion but singlemindedness. You'll always have people who believe their way to be the only correct one. If they're religiously oriented you get bible-thumpers and jihad-screaming islamic fundamentalists. If they're politically oriented you get people like George W. Bush. If they're in business you get every other story on The Daily WTF.
If we want to make the world a better place we don't need to rabidly oppose religion. That's just as single-minded as portraying all Muslims as jihadists. We need to find a way to make people actually think. No, religion is not opposed to critical thought even about itself; a particular instance of organized religion might be but you have just as many churches that encourage you to evaluate their merits for yourself as ones that declare infallibility.
Find a way to make people critically think about themselves and give them the tools to do so. That's how you make the world a better place, not through yet another misguided crusade.
We are actually in full accord on this. I also don't think that "looks exactly like a book" is much of a feature but hey, it happens to be the one they tout. To them it appears to be pretty important. Maybe they will convince the market that they're right, most likely they won't.
Until the terrorists launch a biological attack using Herpes simplex.
Smuggle the bomb into someone else's luggage. Sure, you can't guarantee that one particular flight goes boom but with patience you can hit some flight. If the bomb doesn't make it past the checkpoint just blow up the checkpoint. If you get apprehended you'll go to some Gitmo-style camp anyway so you can just blow up yourself and take a couple guards and travellers with you.
There is no safe form of travel. In fact, there is no safe form of living. If someone wants to kill you they can always find a way.
Especially since it makes the security checkpoints look like death traps. The only way to fix that would be to provide so many security checkpoints that a bomb could only reach a few travellers - but then you'd have something to the tune of 100 parallel security checkpoints per gate, which is clearly absurd.
You simply can't make an airport secure. As long as a lot of people are in a small space they're vulnerable. If it's not a bomb it might be a car. And if it's not a car it might be a laser pointer near the landing strip. And even if they make all airports extremely secure there's a whole number of exposed targets you simply can't plausibly cover without installing multiply redundant security checkpoints in every single building (which would probably require 500% of the population of the United States to staff).
OTOH you can't even change the font size. I mean, who developed the customization interface for that thing, the GNOME developers? Even the personalization is just the annotation feature applied to a blank page!
Except that this "Blio" format touts as its big advantage that the pages look exactly like in the real book. You can't reliably do that with reflowing. So yes, this new format sounds exactly like PDF or PostScript.
The problem with botox and similarly lethal substances is that it's not just easy to kill yourself, it's just as easy to kill other people, even by accident. Granted, it's perfectly posible for someone without formal training to safely handle the stuff but I think relatively heavy restrictions for some of the most deadly substances are acceptable as long as we don't go overboard.
Okay, given the kind of politicians everywhere tends to have we can safely expect them to take all of five minutes to demand that cocaine, pornography and storage media containing pirated movies are declared "extremely lethal substances" with a "very large amount" being defined as 1 femtogram.
How about this approach: There are various types of restricted drugs (you need restrictions to prevent random over-the-counter sale of antibiotics anyway) but all of the restrictions only apply to the seller.
Type 1 restricted drugs can only be sold by pharmacies and only if a medical doctor prescribed them. This applies to antibiotics and other medical drugs that shouldn't be handed out willy-nilly. Possession is legal as long as acquisition was. In case of an illegal sale proving it's a valid defense to prove that it was reasonable to assume the legitimacy of the seller.
Type 2 restricted drugs are drugs likely to cause damage to the user or people around him when consumed. Tobacco, alcohol and similar recreational drugs apply. These can only be sold by a licensed dealer to adults and are likely to have additional taxes tacked onto them to offset the cost to society they create. Again, even in the case of an illegal sale, you're likely to get off the hook if it was unreasonable to doubt the legality of the transaction.
Type 3 restricted drugs are drugs with a strong negative effect that can't be expected to be handled by laymen without killing themselves. Botox might be an example. These can only be sold by licensed dealers to licensed professionals. Possession by unlicensed people should usually be dealt with by something to the tune of confiscation; stronger measures should only be taken if large amounts (defined as, for example, N usual doses) are found.
In general, people should be able to possess most things but there should be responsibility and, to a certain degree, accountability. You can do to your body what you want but you still have to pay the taxes put on the stuff you want to waste yourself with (this should still lead to higher quality at lower prices even with high taxes). Licensed dealers ensure that the trade proceeds in a sane way and minors don't get direct access to the goods.
Everyone wins: You get to do whatever you want to without being criminalized. You also get access to drugs of a controlled high quality (as quality control laws are likely to be implemented). Society as a whole gets money to offset the damaging effects of recreational drugs. Everyone gets a bit of safety as controlled sale of the drugs allows certain threats to be reduced.
That type of bomb is, according to the TSA themselves, virtually impossible to build correctly in a plane or an airport secure area. Plus, the stuff was in plastic containers and wouldn't have built up pressure either way. The man was an idiot who would've ended up setting himself alight anyway - if he had mixed the stuff better he might have injured someone else but I still doubt he would've made a hole in anything.
It should be. I know it's tragic but it shouldn't have been turned into the media extravaganza it was. Hell, there even was an official song. The proper response to terrorism is to non-hastily look into measures that allow that particular attack to be prevented in the future (such as, in this case, making the cockpit inaccessible from the passenger room during the flight) and nothing else.
The exact point of terrorism is to disrupt the target country. Now look at the situation - not only have the USA ruined their image over two wars, they (and everyone else) spend lots of money on harrassing innocent travellers in a way that doesn't even do anything, breeding contempt all the while. A few thousand deaths in an act that is extremely unlikely to ever be successfully repeated again should not be enough to let the most well-armed country in the world tumble head-first into raging paranoia against anyone and everyone, including its own citizens.
Regardless of the "if we don't X the terrorists have already won" rhethoric, the government of the States has done exactly what the terrorists wanted and it's still continuing to do so. The terrorists have already won and they keep wining because at the moment they and the government are working in the same direction: Away form the citizens towards ever greater surveillance and power concentration at the top. They're essentially using each other as PR agencies.
Ther's a difference between not advertising religiousness and advertising not-religiousness. Video games tend to avoid putting religion front and center because it's not relevant to the gameplay or wouldn't fit into the narrative.
Anything set in a world different from our own wouldn't make sense with one of our own religions. At best you could posit that YHWH also created that world etc. but you'd have to add a lot of differences simply because the world is a different one. You'd end up with what feels like a completely different religion with God's name tacked on.
Anything set in our world or one derived from it also should avoid playing up religion too much. Few people are going to enjoy it when the character plays up what a devout Christian he is before he goes out to kill three dozen people because, um, they're in the way. It doesn't get much better if you kill three dozen aliens or demons.
Even if we take a fairly harmless scenario we run into problems. Let's assume that there's a new addon for The Sims 5 which allows your sims to observe one of various religions and even pursue various clerical careers. Now you get angry calls from people who are pissed why Catholicism is represented but the Mormons aren't. Or who don't agree with the precise way you depicted their faith. Or who are offended that the game allows you to violate some tenet they hold, even if it's neccessary from a gameplay perspective. Maybe you forgot to distinguish between Sunnite and Shiite Islam or thirty different American churches are angry that you can't have your sim attend a gospel sermon. And God help you if your nun doesn't follow the mutually contradictory rules of all orders on Earth.
The best you can hope to get away with is to make short mentions of religiousness as an aside. For instance, Final Fantasy Tactics opens with a prayer (to a somewhat different but still monotheistic god) - although I have to be honest and also note that the game shows the church to be highly corrupt and has its world's equivalent of Jesus (not actually a good guy) as the final boss.
It's hard to make religion an important part of your game without making statements about that religion. Statements many people might not appreciate - gamers because they want to play and not hear a sermon, publishers because they might turn off some players and believers because they might show the religion in a way they don't agree with. FFT is a good example - it makes the statement that power corrupts anyone. Few people complain because the religion is only roughly similar to Christianity.
Weak agnostics don't believe stamps have a collector's value.
Strong agnostics don't believe that stamps actually exist.
Ignostics use e-mail.
As another post has pointed out, the TSA (according to their own report) could barely get this kind of explosive to work under laboratory conditions and the containers he transported them in were so weak that most of the damage caused would have been by causing a fire anyway.
We're talking about someone who's plan had a best case scenario of "I set not only my pants but also my seat on fire". Granted, that's worse than a firecracker but still not particularly impressive, especially given that airplanes come equipped with fire extinguishers. It does illustrate, though, that the current security theater is fairly useless.