Be is part of O2 not the other way around. And you can have a cancellation free contract with Be, you just pay a set up fee. You also get a free fixed IP address, free modem and up to 24 Mbit ADSL2. All for £17.50/month with no usage cap.
You also need rubber tracks so you don't rip up the road. And it's a licence for a tracked vehicle, not "the same as a JCB licence". JCB is a brand name not a class of vehicle. When I think JCB I think of farm tractors or diggers with wheels not tracked vehicles.
Image search on google JCB machinery only shows 3 tracked vehicles out of 20 images.
I say he was not so familiar because when I went to high school, he was painted as the hero who started the industrial revolution. What they didn't tell me in school was that Watt pretty much spent the entire 17 year life of the patent in litigation. Real advances in the steam engine weren't introduced until after the patent expired.
Rubbish. He didn't invent the steam engine, but he did introduce real advances in the technology. Before his contributions, the cylinder was open at the top and had no separate condenser. The only major changes after his patents expired were higher pressure systems. He did not hold back progress, he made that progress available to anybody who paid for it and more than 500 factories and mines had his engines by the time his patents expired. You could argue that others could have made different improvements but they would have been standing on his shoulders. If he had withheld the product you could have argued patents were preventing progress, but he didn't. He also ended up a wealthy man, so the litigation is irrelevant.
I don't believe that's true. I can click on an ok button in windows and it just does it. That is hardly the same as opening a terminal to type some text in. And even if you use the GUI to click on an executable file in linux, if it tries to do something that is outside your permissions, it won't ask for the password, just tell you you don't have permission. Under the command line, it would say only root can do this. Your password and the root password are not the same (or shouldn't be). You would have to have insufficient brain to breathe if you just copied and pasted text from an unknown origin into your computer and then gave it super user permission to ruin your life. You don't see many exploits on windows where people follow a how-to to modify their registry to allow malware to operate.
Mao's policies are believed to have resulted in the death of some 20 million Chinese (as many people as are in entire countries like Australia and Taiwan) during the Great Chinese Famine, yet Mao's portrait still hangs in an honored place at the entrance to the Forbidden City.
That's a very glib way of stating the matter. In fact it was not Maos policies that caused so many deaths, it was the local party members implementation of those policies that did the damage. Because each areas party tried to outdo its neighbours, too much emphasis was placed on looking busy rather than producing results. The big push for iron resulted in deforestation of wide areas around towns and villages as every household had their own foundry. But of course without firewood, people could not cook. The push for food resulted in rival villages competing to produce the biggest animals, like the apocryphal pig as big as a cow. This was obviously not sustainable, and because part of the deal was to send a proportion of the food and iron to the cities, any village who had overstated their output to impress the central party and outdo their neighbours, was left with nothing for the local people to eat.
Mao did not do this, the people did it to themselves. And by and large they were happy to do so, as they were more free than they had ever been in history since Maos revolutionaries destroyed the ancient feudal emperors hold over them.
I recommend reading Wild Swans (ISBN 0-00-637492-1), which tells the story of the women in a family starting with the grandmother down to the grand-daughter. It begins in 1909 but from the descriptions, you would think it was the 1500s. By the end of the book, China was a superpower (1978). In less than 70 years they went from medieval to modern contemporary.
The idea was that Israel should be removed from the map. Israel is a country, a country that in certain quarters is regarded as illegitimately occupying arab lands. You could quite easily remove Israel from the map without hurting a single inhabitant. It's merely the reverse of its creation. Of course the Israelis wouldn't stand still and let that happen so there probably would be a war. But the Iranian president did not suggest wiping out every Israeli, just getting rid of Israel as an entity.
And the holocaust is not a scientific fact, it is a historical fact.
Maybe you should wipe the spittle off your chin now, you look silly.
Continental expansionism (the so-called Manifest Destiny) was the impetus for much technological innovation in North America, including the telegraph, the steam locomotive, etc.
Neither of which were invented by Americans. Is this an example of your higher standards in college education ? The Chinese built the trans-continental railway, Irish and Eastern Europeans dug most of the gold out of them thar hills, the British started the plantations and the Africans worked them, the Italians organised your crime and the Dutch were a large proportion of the homesteaders. Oh and an Englishman invented the revolver and standardised engineering methods.
And your country is getting hysterical about immigration.
I get about 100 spams a day in my gmail account. All of them are obvious, bad spelling, oddly capitalised letters, promising wondrous things. There are maybe 10 of those 100 that the filter doesn't catch. On the odd day it will miss maybe 50. I do think the filter has become less effective over the last few months.
I strikes me that in both these solutions, they are using a lot of vulnerable wiring to either transmit the current somewhere it can be used or to actually generate the current. Why not stick to the same principle as hydro-electric ? If you build 2 tall chimneys, one shorter than the other, and join them at the base via a turbine, the pressure difference between the two will turn the turbine. The higher the taller chimney, the greater the pressure difference. This works with or without a jet stream type phenomenon.
Implement a similar scheme in the ocean, where either a deep underwater current or just the simple pressure difference will suck (or blow) water down from (or up to) a higher level, turning a turbine. The turbine can be onshore for easy maintenance and repair. Drop one end of a rigid pipe to the bottom of the Marianas trench and you will have a pressure difference of 1000 times sea level. I realise you wouldn't see the full 1000x pressure at sea level but by gradually reducing the diameter of the pipe as it ascends you can maintain a considerable pressure difference. With both ends under water it creates a circuit with a turbine in the loop. You could even take the top end through a desalinisation plant for an agricultural or potable water supply. The pipe won't be crushed because the pressure at depth will be equalised inside and outside the pipe. The only problem might be crap being sucked into the pipe, but I'm sure there are technical solutions for that. Ocean currents are basically giant hydraulic systems anyway.
Yes I know you still have to get the power to where it will be used, but the current situation isn't much different anyway. You already have power lines stretching hundreds of miles, you already have trans-continental oil and gas pipelines.
Apart from saying should when I think you meant shouldn't you are correct but misguided (as are a lot of posts on this thread). Evolution is not just biology, or just culture or just mutation. It is a process. Much like describing computing. Is cpu design computing ? Are hard drives computing ? No, computing is the umbrella term for all that and more. Under the umbrella term "evolution", biology is the physical way it presents itself, mutation is one of the ways the biology is affected such that changes occur. Culture also provides a driving force within evolution. Culture supports evolution. If we lived in a world which was covered in water to a depth of 3 feet, everything smaller than 3 feet would be a fish, or other aquatic creature. Anything taller would have an advantage as long as it had extremely strong legs to withstand predation from below. The point is, culture is surroundings. We as humans create our own surroundings rather than leaving it to nature.
In the earliest times of humanity, you always had the alpha males who drove a colony in a specific direction. As we developed as social animals, the concept of respected elders took hold, and those respected elders were the repository of acquired learning which the younger members of a group looked to, to avoid making past mistakes. Fast forward to the present. The respected elders have been (are being) replaced by the internet which can act as a repository of a far greater sum of knowledge. The problem with the internet is that anybody can get involved and so you do not have a natural filter on what is correct and what is stupid. Respected elders were valuable because they were elders - the mere fact that they had survived provided a solid reference and proof of validity to their information. These days there is no such filter. We need to have actual experts in the various fields to constantly edit and maintain the store of knowledge to prevent it being tainted by adolescent bullshit.
But the internet and other tools of information definitely represent a culture, and so do affect evolution, given enough time. Of course the pace of rapid change in our culture does not give our biological components time to visibly change to a specific event, but over many generations we will begin to see that change occurring. This is only the first internet generation after all. My generation didn't have it until we were already over the average spawning age. Come back in 300 years and see how things have changed. My guess is brain size will have shrunk, with everything that represents being obvious. Already shop counter staff either cannot or do not need to be able to mentally calculate totals. When I was a kid calculators were not allowed in exam rooms. Hell, when I was a little kid, there were no electronic calculators. Unless you use it you lose it. That is part of evolution.
Your surroundings drive what you do, and what you need to do to survive. And survival IS evolution in action. If the main food source for an organism is wiped out, any evolutionary changes that that organism had undergone to specialise in collecting or digesting that food source would suddenly become useless, and would not be naturally selected for in future generations. If plankton and krill disappeared, would whales continue to produce baleen or would they have to use a different method ? Most likely they would die out, and the non-baleen whales would dominate. Evolution in action. So yes we have entered a new stage of evolution. The post transistor stage. Whether this means idiocracy comes true or not is down to the strength and power of the elders I spoke of. Quibbling over scientific differences between culture and evolution is senseless as they are part and parcel of the same process - the ability to survive and procreate.
It used to be the case that children would follow their parents into a certain line of work. The children of buggy whip manufacturers are now few and far between. If they want to survive long enough to procreate, they will have to find another me
The entire way interactive web pages are written now seems like a giant kludge, when for many things it seems like it'd be simpler to just write an app in C++ or Java or whatever, run it on the remote server, and display it remotely on the user's computer.
What do you think is going on now ? You CAN write your app in whatever language will run on the server. HTTP is merely the popular protocol that's used to transmit data back and forth. The clue is in its name. It is tolerant of delays and dropouts (due to its underlying transport mechanism) and has the concept of sessions. Apache isn't written in HTTP, it's C. MySQL is written in C and C++. Java is Java. What do you suggest instead ? A networked X session ? HDMI over continental distances ? RDP ?
Web browsers are web browsers, not dedicated to your proprietary application. So get on with it and write your server app. But write a client too, don't try to shoehorn an application meant for interpreting and displaying text into being your perfect client. Google Earth is a client server app, that seems to work just fine. There are a myriad of FPS games that work just fine too. Just let everybody else know what port you'll be using for your dedicated app, and be prepared for a fight if something else is already using it. There aren't unlimited ports, there are a lot, but there was a big IP space when IPv4 started. Look how that's turning out. So you would be sensible to use an existing protocol for transporting your data. This has nothing to do with what language your client server app is written in.
No, because it is the only free and legal option open to all users and manufacturers. No one's saying it should ONLY be Theora, but as a base implementation, Theora should be specified. They can then add H264 or whatever as well if they wish, but for those who cannot use H264, Theora is a fallback available so that they can meet the standard. What good is a standard if you automatically prevent certain manufacturers from meeting it ? Oh that's right, it's not about creating a standard, it's about protecting someones IP and profits.
There are poor cyclists out there, just as there are poor drivers. That doesn't mean that they should not be respected, though.
Respect should be earned. Why should I respect people who ignore stop lights, treat the pavement and road as interchangeable, stick to the middle of the main road when there is an empty bus lane next to them, ride up the inside of stationary traffic and then wonder when they get squeezed, turn right without looking behind them, ride without lights, or with stupid flashing lights which are NOT legal* in the UK, and without minute 1 of any training. With no insurance, no licence, no official inspection of their machine they are pretty much free to do what they want, and they do.
* Flashing rear lights can be used as supplementary lights, but there is a legal requirement for a FIXED red light to be shown at the rear of the vehicle. The same regulation calls for a FIXED white light at the front of the vehicle. Fixed means not flashing. There is also a legal requirement for mudguards, rear reflectors, a bell or horn, and adequate brakes on both wheels. I would say 90% of bikes in the UK do not meet these requirements. Blame the mountain bike craze for that. They were sold as off-road vehicles and have infested the roads as well. Personally I don't see the point of having 21 gears when I used to do perfectly well with 5. Just takes a bit more effort that's all. Oh, but we don't actually want to work hard when we get fit, do we.
The credit card companies probably charge £3000 but I know for a fact that the paypoint machines are free. My local shopkeeper has one and I asked him. They probably take a percentage of total sales, but the bank does that for cash, let alone cheques or credit cards.
The British intelligence services are not part of the government and are probably not going to sell your data to advertising firms, baliffs, insurance companies - take your pick. And the govt. are subject to the DPA and always have been subject to rules regarding accessing private data between departments. My mother worked for the inland revenue for many years, and they couldn't even access a persons data from other departments in the same agency.
The ID card was a bad idea, probably sold to a gullible minister by a dodgy software salesman similar to the NHS database fiasco. It's probably been scrapped because the company who had tendered has financial problems and can't promise to deliver on target or in budget. Even the new Borders agency can't get their act together, as there seems to be too many differing criteria on what they can legally do with respect to ferries, airports etc. They can see no way through so have no plan to implement tougher border controls, and don't foresee having one. One example being a ferry. The customs officials have to process 70 coaches an hour coming off the ferries. It takes 7 minutes to process 1 coach using biometric passports which have to be scanned into a reader. You do the math. All in all it is a waste of money and resources. The bad guys will always get through, and yet history shows that bad things very rarely happen. Why fight a losing battle, especially one that costs the public their freedom and privacy ?
Bollocks. You can easily make calls using the phone from the computer. If a headset can do it, what makes you think a computer can't ? I can make calls with one touch from my earpiece. Or do you mean YOUR cellphone doesn't ? Get a decent phone or provider than.
That's the account where Columbus came from New Jersey - in other words, it's bollocks. As usual, the US inferiority complex stealing from other peoples history and legend to create their own.
Slashdot Mirror
Be is part of O2 not the other way around. And you can have a cancellation free contract with Be, you just pay a set up fee. You also get a free fixed IP address, free modem and up to 24 Mbit ADSL2. All for £17.50/month with no usage cap.
You also need rubber tracks so you don't rip up the road. And it's a licence for a tracked vehicle, not "the same as a JCB licence". JCB is a brand name not a class of vehicle. When I think JCB I think of farm tractors or diggers with wheels not tracked vehicles.
Image search on google
JCB machinery only shows 3 tracked vehicles out of 20 images.
Rubbish.
He didn't invent the steam engine, but he did introduce real advances in the technology. Before his contributions, the cylinder was open at the top and had no separate condenser. The only major changes after his patents expired were higher pressure systems. He did not hold back progress, he made that progress available to anybody who paid for it and more than 500 factories and mines had his engines by the time his patents expired. You could argue that others could have made different improvements but they would have been standing on his shoulders. If he had withheld the product you could have argued patents were preventing progress, but he didn't. He also ended up a wealthy man, so the litigation is irrelevant.
I don't believe that's true. I can click on an ok button in windows and it just does it. That is hardly the same as opening a terminal to type some text in. And even if you use the GUI to click on an executable file in linux, if it tries to do something that is outside your permissions, it won't ask for the password, just tell you you don't have permission. Under the command line, it would say only root can do this. Your password and the root password are not the same (or shouldn't be). You would have to have insufficient brain to breathe if you just copied and pasted text from an unknown origin into your computer and then gave it super user permission to ruin your life. You don't see many exploits on windows where people follow a how-to to modify their registry to allow malware to operate.
There is also Audio Description on some digital streams. Closed captions are supported in VLC but not apparently under Windows or BeOS. LOL
http://www.videolan.org/vlc/features.html
That's a very glib way of stating the matter. In fact it was not Maos policies that caused so many deaths, it was the local party members implementation of those policies that did the damage. Because each areas party tried to outdo its neighbours, too much emphasis was placed on looking busy rather than producing results. The big push for iron resulted in deforestation of wide areas around towns and villages as every household had their own foundry. But of course without firewood, people could not cook. The push for food resulted in rival villages competing to produce the biggest animals, like the apocryphal pig as big as a cow. This was obviously not sustainable, and because part of the deal was to send a proportion of the food and iron to the cities, any village who had overstated their output to impress the central party and outdo their neighbours, was left with nothing for the local people to eat.
Mao did not do this, the people did it to themselves. And by and large they were happy to do so, as they were more free than they had ever been in history since Maos revolutionaries destroyed the ancient feudal emperors hold over them.
I recommend reading Wild Swans (ISBN 0-00-637492-1), which tells the story of the women in a family starting with the grandmother down to the grand-daughter. It begins in 1909 but from the descriptions, you would think it was the 1500s. By the end of the book, China was a superpower (1978). In less than 70 years they went from medieval to modern contemporary.
The idea was that Israel should be removed from the map. Israel is a country, a country that in certain quarters is regarded as illegitimately occupying arab lands. You could quite easily remove Israel from the map without hurting a single inhabitant. It's merely the reverse of its creation. Of course the Israelis wouldn't stand still and let that happen so there probably would be a war. But the Iranian president did not suggest wiping out every Israeli, just getting rid of Israel as an entity.
And the holocaust is not a scientific fact, it is a historical fact.
Maybe you should wipe the spittle off your chin now, you look silly.
Neither of which were invented by Americans. Is this an example of your higher standards in college education ?
The Chinese built the trans-continental railway, Irish and Eastern Europeans dug most of the gold out of them thar hills, the British started the plantations and the Africans worked them, the Italians organised your crime and the Dutch were a large proportion of the homesteaders. Oh and an Englishman invented the revolver and standardised engineering methods.
And your country is getting hysterical about immigration.
If I photoshop GWBs head onto a wanking bonobo, I'm guilty of homo-erotic bestiality ?
BTW I suck at maths.
I get about 100 spams a day in my gmail account. All of them are obvious, bad spelling, oddly capitalised letters, promising wondrous things. There are maybe 10 of those 100 that the filter doesn't catch. On the odd day it will miss maybe 50. I do think the filter has become less effective over the last few months.
Dick [1]
[1] Head.
I strikes me that in both these solutions, they are using a lot of vulnerable wiring to either transmit the current somewhere it can be used or to actually generate the current. Why not stick to the same principle as hydro-electric ? If you build 2 tall chimneys, one shorter than the other, and join them at the base via a turbine, the pressure difference between the two will turn the turbine. The higher the taller chimney, the greater the pressure difference. This works with or without a jet stream type phenomenon.
Implement a similar scheme in the ocean, where either a deep underwater current or just the simple pressure difference will suck (or blow) water down from (or up to) a higher level, turning a turbine. The turbine can be onshore for easy maintenance and repair. Drop one end of a rigid pipe to the bottom of the Marianas trench and you will have a pressure difference of 1000 times sea level. I realise you wouldn't see the full 1000x pressure at sea level but by gradually reducing the diameter of the pipe as it ascends you can maintain a considerable pressure difference. With both ends under water it creates a circuit with a turbine in the loop. You could even take the top end through a desalinisation plant for an agricultural or potable water supply. The pipe won't be crushed because the pressure at depth will be equalised inside and outside the pipe. The only problem might be crap being sucked into the pipe, but I'm sure there are technical solutions for that. Ocean currents are basically giant hydraulic systems anyway.
Yes I know you still have to get the power to where it will be used, but the current situation isn't much different anyway. You already have power lines stretching hundreds of miles, you already have trans-continental oil and gas pipelines.
Call me back when nature uses photosynthesis to create electricity.
I think lightning already took care of that.
Apart from saying should when I think you meant shouldn't you are correct but misguided (as are a lot of posts on this thread). Evolution is not just biology, or just culture or just mutation. It is a process. Much like describing computing. Is cpu design computing ? Are hard drives computing ? No, computing is the umbrella term for all that and more. Under the umbrella term "evolution", biology is the physical way it presents itself, mutation is one of the ways the biology is affected such that changes occur. Culture also provides a driving force within evolution. Culture supports evolution. If we lived in a world which was covered in water to a depth of 3 feet, everything smaller than 3 feet would be a fish, or other aquatic creature. Anything taller would have an advantage as long as it had extremely strong legs to withstand predation from below. The point is, culture is surroundings. We as humans create our own surroundings rather than leaving it to nature.
In the earliest times of humanity, you always had the alpha males who drove a colony in a specific direction. As we developed as social animals, the concept of respected elders took hold, and those respected elders were the repository of acquired learning which the younger members of a group looked to, to avoid making past mistakes. Fast forward to the present. The respected elders have been (are being) replaced by the internet which can act as a repository of a far greater sum of knowledge. The problem with the internet is that anybody can get involved and so you do not have a natural filter on what is correct and what is stupid. Respected elders were valuable because they were elders - the mere fact that they had survived provided a solid reference and proof of validity to their information. These days there is no such filter. We need to have actual experts in the various fields to constantly edit and maintain the store of knowledge to prevent it being tainted by adolescent bullshit.
But the internet and other tools of information definitely represent a culture, and so do affect evolution, given enough time. Of course the pace of rapid change in our culture does not give our biological components time to visibly change to a specific event, but over many generations we will begin to see that change occurring. This is only the first internet generation after all. My generation didn't have it until we were already over the average spawning age. Come back in 300 years and see how things have changed. My guess is brain size will have shrunk, with everything that represents being obvious. Already shop counter staff either cannot or do not need to be able to mentally calculate totals. When I was a kid calculators were not allowed in exam rooms. Hell, when I was a little kid, there were no electronic calculators. Unless you use it you lose it. That is part of evolution.
Your surroundings drive what you do, and what you need to do to survive. And survival IS evolution in action. If the main food source for an organism is wiped out, any evolutionary changes that that organism had undergone to specialise in collecting or digesting that food source would suddenly become useless, and would not be naturally selected for in future generations. If plankton and krill disappeared, would whales continue to produce baleen or would they have to use a different method ? Most likely they would die out, and the non-baleen whales would dominate. Evolution in action. So yes we have entered a new stage of evolution. The post transistor stage. Whether this means idiocracy comes true or not is down to the strength and power of the elders I spoke of. Quibbling over scientific differences between culture and evolution is senseless as they are part and parcel of the same process - the ability to survive and procreate.
It used to be the case that children would follow their parents into a certain line of work. The children of buggy whip manufacturers are now few and far between. If they want to survive long enough to procreate, they will have to find another me
What do you think is going on now ? You CAN write your app in whatever language will run on the server. HTTP is merely the popular protocol that's used to transmit data back and forth. The clue is in its name. It is tolerant of delays and dropouts (due to its underlying transport mechanism) and has the concept of sessions. Apache isn't written in HTTP, it's C. MySQL is written in C and C++. Java is Java. What do you suggest instead ? A networked X session ? HDMI over continental distances ? RDP ?
Web browsers are web browsers, not dedicated to your proprietary application. So get on with it and write your server app. But write a client too, don't try to shoehorn an application meant for interpreting and displaying text into being your perfect client. Google Earth is a client server app, that seems to work just fine. There are a myriad of FPS games that work just fine too. Just let everybody else know what port you'll be using for your dedicated app, and be prepared for a fight if something else is already using it. There aren't unlimited ports, there are a lot, but there was a big IP space when IPv4 started. Look how that's turning out. So you would be sensible to use an existing protocol for transporting your data. This has nothing to do with what language your client server app is written in.
Damn, I just lost my leotard too ...
My Firefox (on linux) reads it fine. Except of course that it should be Anonymous Coward at.
No, because it is the only free and legal option open to all users and manufacturers. No one's saying it should ONLY be Theora, but as a base implementation, Theora should be specified. They can then add H264 or whatever as well if they wish, but for those who cannot use H264, Theora is a fallback available so that they can meet the standard. What good is a standard if you automatically prevent certain manufacturers from meeting it ? Oh that's right, it's not about creating a standard, it's about protecting someones IP and profits.
Respect should be earned. Why should I respect people who ignore stop lights, treat the pavement and road as interchangeable, stick to the middle of the main road when there is an empty bus lane next to them, ride up the inside of stationary traffic and then wonder when they get squeezed, turn right without looking behind them, ride without lights, or with stupid flashing lights which are NOT legal* in the UK, and without minute 1 of any training. With no insurance, no licence, no official inspection of their machine they are pretty much free to do what they want, and they do.
* Flashing rear lights can be used as supplementary lights, but there is a legal requirement for a FIXED red light to be shown at the rear of the vehicle. The same regulation calls for a FIXED white light at the front of the vehicle. Fixed means not flashing.
There is also a legal requirement for mudguards, rear reflectors, a bell or horn, and adequate brakes on both wheels. I would say 90% of bikes in the UK do not meet these requirements. Blame the mountain bike craze for that. They were sold as off-road vehicles and have infested the roads as well. Personally I don't see the point of having 21 gears when I used to do perfectly well with 5. Just takes a bit more effort that's all. Oh, but we don't actually want to work hard when we get fit, do we.
You forgot to mention your precious bodily fluids.
And vodka.
The credit card companies probably charge £3000 but I know for a fact that the paypoint machines are free. My local shopkeeper has one and I asked him. They probably take a percentage of total sales, but the bank does that for cash, let alone cheques or credit cards.
The British intelligence services are not part of the government and are probably not going to sell your data to advertising firms, baliffs, insurance companies - take your pick. And the govt. are subject to the DPA and always have been subject to rules regarding accessing private data between departments. My mother worked for the inland revenue for many years, and they couldn't even access a persons data from other departments in the same agency. The ID card was a bad idea, probably sold to a gullible minister by a dodgy software salesman similar to the NHS database fiasco. It's probably been scrapped because the company who had tendered has financial problems and can't promise to deliver on target or in budget. Even the new Borders agency can't get their act together, as there seems to be too many differing criteria on what they can legally do with respect to ferries, airports etc. They can see no way through so have no plan to implement tougher border controls, and don't foresee having one.
One example being a ferry. The customs officials have to process 70 coaches an hour coming off the ferries. It takes 7 minutes to process 1 coach using biometric passports which have to be scanned into a reader. You do the math. All in all it is a waste of money and resources. The bad guys will always get through, and yet history shows that bad things very rarely happen. Why fight a losing battle, especially one that costs the public their freedom and privacy ?
Bollocks. You can easily make calls using the phone from the computer. If a headset can do it, what makes you think a computer can't ? I can make calls with one touch from my earpiece. Or do you mean YOUR cellphone doesn't ? Get a decent phone or provider than.
That's the account where Columbus came from New Jersey - in other words, it's bollocks.
As usual, the US inferiority complex stealing from other peoples history and legend to create their own.