So the actual "right" being violated is the property right of the airline's owners/stockholders.
Which I suppose isn't much different than the government not letting criminals operate checking accounts at a privately owned bank, or let a car dealer let you drive off the lot without government-vetted insurance.
If they really thought that the confiscated liquids were potentially dangerous, you'd think they'd handle them a little more carefully, no?
No. They don't think that anyone is walking on board with explosives. They're worried about what the people in the UK were planning: walking on board with multiple people carrying the separate, and individually benign, components that - when combined - make a volatile substance that could damage the plane. The uncombined components of a peroxide bomb aren't dangerous at all, and even the ready-to-go goo is something the bad guys were planning on detonating using spark/charge sources like the small strobes in a digital camera. But, since ALL of this is being talked to death on the news, you already know all of that, which means you're just grinding some idealogical axe, not talking about the realities of the situation.
So the coffin corner is you can't pack lunch, and they won't serve you lunch, so you can sit there and be hungry and thirsty.
TSA says you can bring all the lunch you want, and flight attendants will almost always bring you all the water you ask for. It's bringing your own liquid payload into the passenger cabin that's currently a no-no. Sandwiches are not liquid, and I just listened to the director of DHS say that you can bring your carry-on luggage as always, just no liquids beyond a select few.
The airlines are probably already loading an extra skid or two of bottled water in every galley-load, as you'd expect. You can bring your own food.
Be very willing to talk to any nations and groups who want to open dialogue -- as long as they renounce terrorism. Truly work with them to address their concerns. (Reducing our dependence on military action to keep the oil flowing would help here.) On the other hand, be very forceful when dealing with terrorism. Determine the responsible parties, and make them and their supporters pay. No theatrics -- just quick, effective measures with an absolute minimum of so-called "collateral damage".
OK, so Saddam was writing checks to the families of suicide bombers, and loudly proclaiming his support for groups like Hamas that were willing to use terror against western interests. He refused to alter this position, even as he continued to shoot at the patroling aircraft that were keeping him from continuing to slaughter people in the north and south of Iraq. Since (using your standard) he wasn't willing to change, was a "responsible party," and had a large armed force at his disposal, even after they got spanked while being run out of the last country he invaded, which effective measure would you have used? Let me guess... perhaps an "oil for food" program so that his people could continue to eat while he realized the error of his ways? Oh, wait - he scams it, makes other scammers rich through the UN program, builds more weapons and palaces, and starves out his citizens. You'll need another idea.
Truly work with them to address their concerns.
Iran's concerns are that, for example, the US is the Great Satan, and Israel should be wiped from the face of the earth (to quote their charming leader). He's an apocolyptic-minded loon who's trying his hardest to build nukes, and who is pumping money and weapons to groups like Hezbollah. Which of his concerns are you willing to address in one of your earnest chats, Mr. Chamberlain?
The Ninth Amendment doesn't address your boarding of a private carrier in a mutually agreed upon transactional/contractual way. Now, if it's YOUR plan (or horse or boat, back in the days that amendment was written), that's a different matter.
This isn't any different, in principle, than states requiring you to have insurance, or pass a driver's license, or operate a vehicle with bumpers at the right height. But none of that matters, since you're getting onboard an airplane owned by someone else, because you want to, so all bets are off.
Thank you for not just talking crap like so many other people here today. It's almost like you... thought about it for a moment and a little damn perspective or something.
I want to bring my own freakin toothpaste when I travel
So put it in your suitcase, and take it with you. They're not saying you can't have your freakin' toothpaste. It's liquids/pastes/gels in the passenger cabin that's being considered, here - because they are vehicles for multi-part peroxide explosives that can be assembled in-flight. They're not worried about you putting it in your checked bags, so just do that, and quit bitching about something that's a reasonable immediate reaction to the disclosure of a destructive tactic that a couple dozen people were about to use against hundreds of passengers.
I'm wondering at such a big story. Don't automatically believe everything you're told, suckerboy.
And if they'd stopped the 9/11 crews before that happened, and saw that all they had were some boxcutters, what would you have said?
As for you, don't assume the opposite of what you're telling me just because your preferred political camp doesn't happen to be in power this week. MI-5's been watching these people - dozens of them - for months, now. This isn't Mr. Insane Shoe Bomber Guy (though, really if he and the people operating him had taken that whole plane full of people down, that would still be under your threshold of "big deal"?).
Worry about Iran being on U.N. Human Rights council or what's going to happen on the third season of Lost. Something important.
It's funny you should mention that. ABC's season synopsis says that the upcoming episodes of Lost actually include plot elements that revolve around Iran's suppression of human rights on Pluto through the use of giant, underground, volcano-powered uber-magnets. Although it turns out that everyone's arthritis feels better, so it's sort of a wash.
Does anyone know the minimal diameter that these astronomers proposed for a revolving body to be a planet?
It has to be at least 8.2kAG
That's kilo-AlGores.
Though, like so many other cosmological units these days, it's not even a constant. Seems to be expanding (and making movies) under the pressure of hot gasses.
They didn't even have to pull off a successful attack, and here we are shitting ourselves about shampoo.
No, here we are recognizing that a couple dozen people were preparing multi-part explosive recipes, stored in hair gel and baby milk containers, specifically to kill people on airplanes. That means changing how we deal with containers that people bring into the cabin of an aircraft. Would you rather just not worry about, and let a few planes come down every month?
all of these announcements and military actions happen to occur within 48 months prior to a major national election
Yes! Knowing that another presidential election (never mind the coming one) will happen within a decade, we can definitely expect counter-terrorism victories sometime during the coming decade for the sole purpose of securing the election. It's elementary, Watson.
*sigh*
Honestly, I think some people actually buy that sort of crap. But they're also the same people that think it's their personal body's "electrical field" that causes some street lights to go out when they personally happen to be driving by.
The election manipulation aspect of the Madrid attack is overblown. If the government hadn't immediately pointed to Basque terrorists, the result may not have been the same. Furthermore, what did AQ really gain? The withdrawl of Spanish troops from Iraq? Yeah, that *really* changed the situation in Iraq. Spain had a whole fucking 1,300 troops there. That's 1% of the troops that the US has there.
You're missing the point. It isn't whether or not 1300 troops might or might not help add another spot in Iraq to the list of towns that don't have people getting blown up by other Muslims and which are now being policed by locals. It isn't even about whether or not the previous administration in Spain bungled their immediate response to the Madrid bombings (from a political-response point of view). The problem is that A.Q. now points to what they did in Madrid as an example of their power and ability to "command" western countries. This is a recruiting talking point, and a propoganda coup because of how they can portray it when doing interviews on Al Jazeera. The Spanish voters played right into it.
No, it's part of their tactics. What "they" (the Islamic extremists behind this stuff) want is the restoration of the "Caliphate" that used to span territories from the Middle East to Spain, and the resumption of that theocracy's growth and eventual rule of the world. That's the stated goal of these groups, and of course getting the West out of their way is central to that purpose. Reducing western willingness to halt those efforts is the current effort, and they're hoping that making the rest of the west act like Spain (caving in the face of murdered civilians) is going to get them farther along towards their goals.
That is what they want. Annoying you at the airport isn't nearly as effective as actually killing you a thousand other passengers on the same day. They don't "want" to annoy you, they want to accomplish much larger things, and wear you down to make it easier.
Nope, this won't play too well on Al Jazeera. Fox News will love it, though. Those are the interests this will serve.
Come now. Are you so tweeked that a particular news outlet will find the prevention of hundreds of deaths to be a good thing that you're willing to ignore that it's a good thing for everyone that hundreds of people didn't get killed? The "interests" served by the disruption of this attack extend well beyond one particular (and minority) media outlet. Do you find that the UK's action to stop these jerks somehow runs counter to the interests of the other people that would have been on those planes? Counter to the interests of their families, their businesses, their communities? What are you thinking, exactly?
I thought a terrorist's goal is to spread terror which, by the code Red, they've accomplished. Blowing up the planes would've been just gravy.
Still backwards. Do you really think (really?) that the current level of inconvenience while using aircraft represents a level of personal terror and fright that is more than, or even equal to, that which people would feel while boarding a plane having just watched coverage of a dozen planes being destroyed in flight? Complete BS, and you know it.
Gotta love it.. absofreakinglutely nothing happens until election time. Whatever happened to the Florida terrorist group that made headlines last time the prezs numbers were hitting the floor?
Has it ever occurred to you that election time is exactly when these clowns would deliberately seek to launch such an attack? Have you completely forgotten how Al Qaeda directly, and in their own favor, manipulated Spanish elections by being willing to slaughter Spaniards?
The trick is to be a bit smarter, and thinking ahead of the Ali BAbas, not reacting to reported threats in both over and under thorough ways.
I'd say that the fact these people were arrested before they even carried their explosives through airport doors is pretty good indication that their actions/plans are being anticipated and prevented. But that doesn't mean they've got every last possible bad actor on the radar screen. It's an incredibly difficult task to handle this in process - only advance intel is going to really deal with these larger, more sophisticated actions. But a single loon (like Richard Reid) is always going to be an issue, and until the latest flavor of carry-on threat is well understood, it's not like there's a lot of choice about whether or not to eyeball people coming on board with containers. The checked bags are subject to explosive sniffers and high-power x-rays, and a device already pre-configured to explode would presumable appear a little different than the sort of thing (as appears to be the case here) that's intended to be assembled in-flight by someone willing to die doing it.
I am shocked the US voted in Bush. I mean the US was never a target of Terrorism when Clinton was president
I guess you weren't born, yet, when the World Trade Center was first attacked, injuring over 1000 people and killing several? Or how about the deaths of Naval personnel when the USS Cole (under C-in-C Clinton) was attacked? Or the destruction of two US embassies and hundreds of lives in Africa? Since you are distinctly unfamiliar with actual facts, your "shock" isn't, well, very shocking at all.
One attack every 5 years. Sounds to me (and I guess everyone who lives in an area that deals or dealt with terrorist attacks on a daily base) not too threatening.
What calendar, exactly, are you using? The UK has broken up a number of such plots, and very obviously did not stop the one that slaughtered trainloads of people in London. Much more recently than 5 years ago.
The people in Madrid might disagree with you, as well.
Mind you, it might actually serve some interests better for tens of millions of people to be worried, inconvienced, or annoyed than for airliners to explode.
Nah. They'd rather that the planes had exploded. That plays much, much better on Al Jazeera. This cannot be cited as a "victory" by the jihaddis backing it, and if they had knocked the planes down, they'd also have the extra inconvenience and worry, as frosting on that cake. No... this is a win for the good guys, and probably really frustrating to the backers that obviously put a lot of time and effort into recruiting all of these would-be suicide bombers, training them, supplying them, etc. You can bet that there are some pre-recorded Zawahiri video tapes that will now not be seeing airtime since this attack was stopped.
And, like with falsifying creationism, there is no way to be certain the plot was genuine -- at most, you can prove a given plot was staged up.
And, given the repeated circumstances in which plots that were "staged up" actually ended up in shredded bodies in London, Madrid, and elsewhere, you don't see people who have actually chosen their flights and are in possesion of actual explosives to be worth stopping?
In this case, I would rather believe the conspiracy theorists -- no sane intelligence agency would wait until the terrorists are about to board the planes.
As you've perhaps noticed, they were not walking up to or sitting down on airplanes at the time. They made the arrests before that stage, but only after they were comfortable with having as many of the people in the cell as possible accounted for. If they'd acted sooner, they may have lost more of the cell. There are thousands of variables at play here, and the number of people in intel and law enforcement that have to coordinate on such a thing (including the ones who have to be ready to capitalize on the international communications and other business that would have immediately erupted the moment this hit the news) is enormous.
when are "Sheeple" in the west going to wake up to themselves this is a loosing
battle.
You're confusing "battle" with "war." This was battle that was just won. A couple dozen people who had already chosen their flights, and were in possesion of liquid explosives with electronic detonation devices in a form that would not be detected by routine inspection, were just prevented from killing hundreds of people.
Is the larger conflict with the people that think that's an appropriate way to demonstrate what they think Allah wants something that can be turned around? Hard to say. But I'd be curious about how you'd be addressing this issue if the morning's news included a dozen airliners in pieces in the ocean.
$5500 a month? For software to manage the garage? That's roberry, plain and simple.
Based on what? Do you know if they charged anything for the software up front? Perhaps the operators of the garage preferred to consider the software as part of their monthly overhead instead of as a large up-front purchase. And most likely they get some sort of NON-billed support time as part of that monthly tab. There's probably some other services tangled up in that, too - like off-site backups and mirroring.
When it somes down to brass tacks, this $5500 fee was cooked up arbitrarily by the Robotic.
What, but, say... $2500 would not have been arbitrary? How do you know that their closest competition isn't very close in price because of the costs and the business model? Do you consider your salary or hourly rate to be arbitrary?
That works out to $66,000 a year. They could pay their own devel to make software to keep that place running AND add new functionality as needed
No way. Not even close. Unless you're saying that $66k would pay for ALL of the overhead of keeping that person around. Salary. Benefits. Infrastructure. Dev platform. Backups. Documentation. And if so, the net take-home for a person whose entire overhead is $66k would be about $25k, tops. Is that the person that you think is going to be able to live in the mid-Atlantic area and, with good worldly experience, be trusted to keep that system in good shape, let along change it? Even if you could hire such a person for so little, why on earth would they stay? And then you have the cost of training and replacing and retaining someone else. $66k doesn't even come close.
don't think it's not cost effective to have in-house development in this case.
Start factoring in the disruptive costs of losing/firing someone, of mitigating risk so that only one person isn't dealing with the code that moves cars around and deals with people's money, and I think that's actually exactly wrong. I say this from the perspective of having been on both ends of buying/providing coding and integration services, and of being a consultant on projects before, during, and after all of this stuff finally gets looked at (by the end users) with a rational eye. There's more to it than you think.
Slashdot Mirror
So the actual "right" being violated is the property right of the airline's owners/stockholders.
Which I suppose isn't much different than the government not letting criminals operate checking accounts at a privately owned bank, or let a car dealer let you drive off the lot without government-vetted insurance.
If they really thought that the confiscated liquids were potentially dangerous, you'd think they'd handle them a little more carefully, no?
No. They don't think that anyone is walking on board with explosives. They're worried about what the people in the UK were planning: walking on board with multiple people carrying the separate, and individually benign, components that - when combined - make a volatile substance that could damage the plane. The uncombined components of a peroxide bomb aren't dangerous at all, and even the ready-to-go goo is something the bad guys were planning on detonating using spark/charge sources like the small strobes in a digital camera. But, since ALL of this is being talked to death on the news, you already know all of that, which means you're just grinding some idealogical axe, not talking about the realities of the situation.
So the coffin corner is you can't pack lunch, and they won't serve you lunch, so you can sit there and be hungry and thirsty.
TSA says you can bring all the lunch you want, and flight attendants will almost always bring you all the water you ask for. It's bringing your own liquid payload into the passenger cabin that's currently a no-no. Sandwiches are not liquid, and I just listened to the director of DHS say that you can bring your carry-on luggage as always, just no liquids beyond a select few.
The airlines are probably already loading an extra skid or two of bottled water in every galley-load, as you'd expect. You can bring your own food.
Be very willing to talk to any nations and groups who want to open dialogue -- as long as they renounce terrorism. Truly work with them to address their concerns. (Reducing our dependence on military action to keep the oil flowing would help here.) On the other hand, be very forceful when dealing with terrorism. Determine the responsible parties, and make them and their supporters pay. No theatrics -- just quick, effective measures with an absolute minimum of so-called "collateral damage".
OK, so Saddam was writing checks to the families of suicide bombers, and loudly proclaiming his support for groups like Hamas that were willing to use terror against western interests. He refused to alter this position, even as he continued to shoot at the patroling aircraft that were keeping him from continuing to slaughter people in the north and south of Iraq. Since (using your standard) he wasn't willing to change, was a "responsible party," and had a large armed force at his disposal, even after they got spanked while being run out of the last country he invaded, which effective measure would you have used? Let me guess... perhaps an "oil for food" program so that his people could continue to eat while he realized the error of his ways? Oh, wait - he scams it, makes other scammers rich through the UN program, builds more weapons and palaces, and starves out his citizens. You'll need another idea.
Truly work with them to address their concerns.
Iran's concerns are that, for example, the US is the Great Satan, and Israel should be wiped from the face of the earth (to quote their charming leader). He's an apocolyptic-minded loon who's trying his hardest to build nukes, and who is pumping money and weapons to groups like Hezbollah. Which of his concerns are you willing to address in one of your earnest chats, Mr. Chamberlain?
The Ninth Amendment doesn't address your boarding of a private carrier in a mutually agreed upon transactional/contractual way. Now, if it's YOUR plan (or horse or boat, back in the days that amendment was written), that's a different matter.
This isn't any different, in principle, than states requiring you to have insurance, or pass a driver's license, or operate a vehicle with bumpers at the right height. But none of that matters, since you're getting onboard an airplane owned by someone else, because you want to, so all bets are off.
What's that I hear? A voice in the wilderness?
Thank you for not just talking crap like so many other people here today. It's almost like you... thought about it for a moment and a little damn perspective or something.
I want to bring my own freakin toothpaste when I travel
So put it in your suitcase, and take it with you. They're not saying you can't have your freakin' toothpaste. It's liquids/pastes/gels in the passenger cabin that's being considered, here - because they are vehicles for multi-part peroxide explosives that can be assembled in-flight. They're not worried about you putting it in your checked bags, so just do that, and quit bitching about something that's a reasonable immediate reaction to the disclosure of a destructive tactic that a couple dozen people were about to use against hundreds of passengers.
I'm wondering at such a big story. Don't automatically believe everything you're told, suckerboy.
And if they'd stopped the 9/11 crews before that happened, and saw that all they had were some boxcutters, what would you have said?
As for you, don't assume the opposite of what you're telling me just because your preferred political camp doesn't happen to be in power this week. MI-5's been watching these people - dozens of them - for months, now. This isn't Mr. Insane Shoe Bomber Guy (though, really if he and the people operating him had taken that whole plane full of people down, that would still be under your threshold of "big deal"?).
Worry about Iran being on U.N. Human Rights council or what's going to happen on the third season of Lost. Something important.
It's funny you should mention that. ABC's season synopsis says that the upcoming episodes of Lost actually include plot elements that revolve around Iran's suppression of human rights on Pluto through the use of giant, underground, volcano-powered uber-magnets. Although it turns out that everyone's arthritis feels better, so it's sort of a wash.
Does anyone know the minimal diameter that these astronomers proposed for a revolving body to be a planet?
It has to be at least 8.2kAG
That's kilo-AlGores.
Though, like so many other cosmological units these days, it's not even a constant. Seems to be expanding (and making movies) under the pressure of hot gasses.
They didn't even have to pull off a successful attack, and here we are shitting ourselves about shampoo.
No, here we are recognizing that a couple dozen people were preparing multi-part explosive recipes, stored in hair gel and baby milk containers, specifically to kill people on airplanes. That means changing how we deal with containers that people bring into the cabin of an aircraft. Would you rather just not worry about, and let a few planes come down every month?
Listen, I knew Bocskai István, and you, Mr. Colbert, are no Bocskai István.
Tip of the hat to Lloyd Bentson for his single meaningful - and truly eternal - contribution to political discourse.
all of these announcements and military actions happen to occur within 48 months prior to a major national election
Yes! Knowing that another presidential election (never mind the coming one) will happen within a decade, we can definitely expect counter-terrorism victories sometime during the coming decade for the sole purpose of securing the election. It's elementary, Watson.
*sigh*
Honestly, I think some people actually buy that sort of crap. But they're also the same people that think it's their personal body's "electrical field" that causes some street lights to go out when they personally happen to be driving by.
The election manipulation aspect of the Madrid attack is overblown. If the government hadn't immediately pointed to Basque terrorists, the result may not have been the same. Furthermore, what did AQ really gain? The withdrawl of Spanish troops from Iraq? Yeah, that *really* changed the situation in Iraq. Spain had a whole fucking 1,300 troops there. That's 1% of the troops that the US has there.
You're missing the point. It isn't whether or not 1300 troops might or might not help add another spot in Iraq to the list of towns that don't have people getting blown up by other Muslims and which are now being policed by locals. It isn't even about whether or not the previous administration in Spain bungled their immediate response to the Madrid bombings (from a political-response point of view). The problem is that A.Q. now points to what they did in Madrid as an example of their power and ability to "command" western countries. This is a recruiting talking point, and a propoganda coup because of how they can portray it when doing interviews on Al Jazeera. The Spanish voters played right into it.
its still what they want
No, it's part of their tactics. What "they" (the Islamic extremists behind this stuff) want is the restoration of the "Caliphate" that used to span territories from the Middle East to Spain, and the resumption of that theocracy's growth and eventual rule of the world. That's the stated goal of these groups, and of course getting the West out of their way is central to that purpose. Reducing western willingness to halt those efforts is the current effort, and they're hoping that making the rest of the west act like Spain (caving in the face of murdered civilians) is going to get them farther along towards their goals.
That is what they want. Annoying you at the airport isn't nearly as effective as actually killing you a thousand other passengers on the same day. They don't "want" to annoy you, they want to accomplish much larger things, and wear you down to make it easier.
Nope, this won't play too well on Al Jazeera. Fox News will love it, though. Those are the interests this will serve.
Come now. Are you so tweeked that a particular news outlet will find the prevention of hundreds of deaths to be a good thing that you're willing to ignore that it's a good thing for everyone that hundreds of people didn't get killed? The "interests" served by the disruption of this attack extend well beyond one particular (and minority) media outlet. Do you find that the UK's action to stop these jerks somehow runs counter to the interests of the other people that would have been on those planes? Counter to the interests of their families, their businesses, their communities? What are you thinking, exactly?
I thought a terrorist's goal is to spread terror which, by the code Red, they've accomplished. Blowing up the planes would've been just gravy.
Still backwards. Do you really think (really?) that the current level of inconvenience while using aircraft represents a level of personal terror and fright that is more than, or even equal to, that which people would feel while boarding a plane having just watched coverage of a dozen planes being destroyed in flight? Complete BS, and you know it.
Gotta love it.. absofreakinglutely nothing happens until election time. Whatever happened to the Florida terrorist group that made headlines last time the prezs numbers were hitting the floor?
Has it ever occurred to you that election time is exactly when these clowns would deliberately seek to launch such an attack? Have you completely forgotten how Al Qaeda directly, and in their own favor, manipulated Spanish elections by being willing to slaughter Spaniards?
The trick is to be a bit smarter, and thinking ahead of the Ali BAbas, not reacting to reported threats in both over and under thorough ways.
I'd say that the fact these people were arrested before they even carried their explosives through airport doors is pretty good indication that their actions/plans are being anticipated and prevented. But that doesn't mean they've got every last possible bad actor on the radar screen. It's an incredibly difficult task to handle this in process - only advance intel is going to really deal with these larger, more sophisticated actions. But a single loon (like Richard Reid) is always going to be an issue, and until the latest flavor of carry-on threat is well understood, it's not like there's a lot of choice about whether or not to eyeball people coming on board with containers. The checked bags are subject to explosive sniffers and high-power x-rays, and a device already pre-configured to explode would presumable appear a little different than the sort of thing (as appears to be the case here) that's intended to be assembled in-flight by someone willing to die doing it.
I am shocked the US voted in Bush. I mean the US was never a target of Terrorism when Clinton was president
I guess you weren't born, yet, when the World Trade Center was first attacked, injuring over 1000 people and killing several? Or how about the deaths of Naval personnel when the USS Cole (under C-in-C Clinton) was attacked? Or the destruction of two US embassies and hundreds of lives in Africa? Since you are distinctly unfamiliar with actual facts, your "shock" isn't, well, very shocking at all.
One attack every 5 years. Sounds to me (and I guess everyone who lives in an area that deals or dealt with terrorist attacks on a daily base) not too threatening.
What calendar, exactly, are you using? The UK has broken up a number of such plots, and very obviously did not stop the one that slaughtered trainloads of people in London. Much more recently than 5 years ago.
The people in Madrid might disagree with you, as well.
Mind you, it might actually serve some interests better for tens of millions of people to be worried, inconvienced, or annoyed than for airliners to explode.
Nah. They'd rather that the planes had exploded. That plays much, much better on Al Jazeera. This cannot be cited as a "victory" by the jihaddis backing it, and if they had knocked the planes down, they'd also have the extra inconvenience and worry, as frosting on that cake. No... this is a win for the good guys, and probably really frustrating to the backers that obviously put a lot of time and effort into recruiting all of these would-be suicide bombers, training them, supplying them, etc. You can bet that there are some pre-recorded Zawahiri video tapes that will now not be seeing airtime since this attack was stopped.
And, like with falsifying creationism, there is no way to be certain the plot was genuine -- at most, you can prove a given plot was staged up.
And, given the repeated circumstances in which plots that were "staged up" actually ended up in shredded bodies in London, Madrid, and elsewhere, you don't see people who have actually chosen their flights and are in possesion of actual explosives to be worth stopping?
In this case, I would rather believe the conspiracy theorists -- no sane intelligence agency would wait until the terrorists are about to board the planes.
As you've perhaps noticed, they were not walking up to or sitting down on airplanes at the time. They made the arrests before that stage, but only after they were comfortable with having as many of the people in the cell as possible accounted for. If they'd acted sooner, they may have lost more of the cell. There are thousands of variables at play here, and the number of people in intel and law enforcement that have to coordinate on such a thing (including the ones who have to be ready to capitalize on the international communications and other business that would have immediately erupted the moment this hit the news) is enormous.
when are "Sheeple" in the west going to wake up to themselves this is a loosing battle.
You're confusing "battle" with "war." This was battle that was just won. A couple dozen people who had already chosen their flights, and were in possesion of liquid explosives with electronic detonation devices in a form that would not be detected by routine inspection, were just prevented from killing hundreds of people.
Is the larger conflict with the people that think that's an appropriate way to demonstrate what they think Allah wants something that can be turned around? Hard to say. But I'd be curious about how you'd be addressing this issue if the morning's news included a dozen airliners in pieces in the ocean.
$5500 a month? For software to manage the garage? That's roberry, plain and simple.
Based on what? Do you know if they charged anything for the software up front? Perhaps the operators of the garage preferred to consider the software as part of their monthly overhead instead of as a large up-front purchase. And most likely they get some sort of NON-billed support time as part of that monthly tab. There's probably some other services tangled up in that, too - like off-site backups and mirroring.
When it somes down to brass tacks, this $5500 fee was cooked up arbitrarily by the Robotic.
What, but, say... $2500 would not have been arbitrary? How do you know that their closest competition isn't very close in price because of the costs and the business model? Do you consider your salary or hourly rate to be arbitrary?
That works out to $66,000 a year. They could pay their own devel to make software to keep that place running AND add new functionality as needed
No way. Not even close. Unless you're saying that $66k would pay for ALL of the overhead of keeping that person around. Salary. Benefits. Infrastructure. Dev platform. Backups. Documentation. And if so, the net take-home for a person whose entire overhead is $66k would be about $25k, tops. Is that the person that you think is going to be able to live in the mid-Atlantic area and, with good worldly experience, be trusted to keep that system in good shape, let along change it? Even if you could hire such a person for so little, why on earth would they stay? And then you have the cost of training and replacing and retaining someone else. $66k doesn't even come close.
don't think it's not cost effective to have in-house development in this case.
Start factoring in the disruptive costs of losing/firing someone, of mitigating risk so that only one person isn't dealing with the code that moves cars around and deals with people's money, and I think that's actually exactly wrong. I say this from the perspective of having been on both ends of buying/providing coding and integration services, and of being a consultant on projects before, during, and after all of this stuff finally gets looked at (by the end users) with a rational eye. There's more to it than you think.