...as with most things, but he is a hoot to read and makes a great deal more sense than mainstream prognosticators. If you want a wilder read, try Karl Bunday, and if you want more content-focussed stuff, try John Holt.
SPS needs an antenna 100m across in space from the get-go or you get no energy. That's 10s of billions right there, at the most optimistic. If that antenna's for bouncing energy from an ordinary (well, high-power but otherwise unremarkable) microwave horn, you could build it out of hardware-store bird mesh tensioned with fencing wire. I kid you not, it's quite different from building Parkes-in-space: you need naff-all structure for something like that.
You could even omit the fencing wire and just spin the reflector. It's not as if there's anything in space to slow it down. Or rust it.
It would be a money sink that would never pay back its construction costs
Complete bollocks. Specficially, if it cost $20G to build (they say $10G), it need only make $2G/a to handily beat bank loans and stuff as a payback means. So double the $100/kg lift costs to $200/kg, big deal in the face of the $10,000-$30,000/kg it is now. $2G / $100/kg extra profit == 20Mt/a, 55,000t/day, 2300t/hr, a 400t load every 10 minutes.
Need to halve that load? Triple the price instead of doubling it. Or use the elevator to build more, and amortise the costs between them.
It would be the worst sort of governmental monopoly
And we don't have one now? Go ahead, build your own Saturn V or Energia-Groza, be my guest.
Once they have half a dozen of these up, owned by 3 or 4 countries or consortia (I'd guess USA, EU, China, Russia, India, Brasil), that starts to break down anyway. If Australia wanted to build the first one, that would cost us $10,000 a head. If it built the 8th one, maybe $500 a head and every Australian gets their first 2kg hauled to space for free. If the people living in Perth pooled their gree kilograms, we could loft a 3000 tonne satellite.
It would be The Definitive Terrorist Target
Ever tried to hit something a meter wide from 10 km away? With defenses on the elevator shooting back at you and at your shells?
Clearing a corridor 10km wide around this would be no problem, and keeping it clear with SDI technology (near the ground, a perfectly ordinary Vulcan radar-guided cannon would do the job) relatively simple. Can you outfly a laser? Could your aircraft or missile survive several hundred unexpected megawatts of microwaves tuned to some vital dimension? How about a smart remote-targeted crowbar dropping in on you from LEO at mach 20?
It would be a murphys-law magnet
Any concievable replacement would be worse.
And that's even before an orbiting piece of space junk slams into it.
It would have to be a clever piece of space-junk, smaller than a peanut and yet more destructive than a nuke. You haven't had a look at the design, have you?
If they were kind enough to put the elevator up on the Equator (not necessary, but it helps), it (or more specifically the defenses on it) would actually make a pretty good street-sweeper for the space industry.
And it would be a catastrophe waiting to happen, when (not if) it snaps and rains megatons of carbon cable down upon the ground below.
That statement just betrayed your complete ignorance of how the elevator would work.
Of the 100,000km length, less than 100km would be in atmosphere. Take what is presumably the worst case: the cable snaps about 50km up. 50km of cable fall to earth, the top 30km or so burning up on re-entry, the balance stays in orbit. That's right, losing 0.05% of the cable makes very little difference to its orbit. Soon the lost 50km is replaced by shipping it out along another cable and unreeling it off the next segment above the damaged one.
But what about the bottom 20km? Even if it were heavy (did you read the line saying `paper-thin?'), it would fall into the ocean. Even if they anchored it at, say, Kununurra (in the far north of Western Australia) and it were heavy, you'd still only lose a stripe of desert a few m wide and 20km long. Big deal.
Now, important step, visit High Lift Systems and RTFM. Then come whinging back here.
The worst religion of the lot is materialism. More deaths directly attributable to that throughout history than any other single belief group (except possibly people who believe that smoking won't give them cancer).
Even the Cattleticks fall short, they only (directly) got somewhere between 60 and 100 million, not counting starting or provoking numerous world and `civil' wars. Materialism is evil, convert someone away from it today.
Charity vehicles are stolen (by both sides) for use as soldier transports in some parts of Africa. Which do they need most: food and shelter, or another war?
And yes, heterosexuality (or for that matter lesbianism) doesn't spread AIDS anywhere near as fast as male homosexual practice, but the only real blocker is the kind of social arrangement practiced by Christianity or Judiasm. Horrors! We'd much rather die slowly and painfully, taking others with us, than learn from the bigots!
Jews survived the black plague singularly well because they adhered to the `silly' rules in the books of Deuteronomy and Numbers, while their Catholic neighbours didn't. Those rules have reasons behind them. There's a lot that the ancients knew well, but we refuse to learn. At our cost.
would have to fly for roughly three years to tot up as many miles.
But I wasn't talking about miles.
Neither was I. My thinko. Read it as `hours'.
It takes 9 hours to cross the Atlantic [...]. If it hauls 466 people each time (I think that's about right for a Jumbo) then one round trip is the same number of passenger hours as the average passenger hours between shuttle crashes.
The two cases are still not equilavent because one jumbo crash loses 466/7 (==66) times as many people as one Shuttle crash.
OK, we've had our fun, time for some facts. The fatality rates I could find were: trains are roughly 4 per 100M hrs, coach/bus 1, private cars 171, motorbikes 382, pushbikes 57, pedestrian 22, air 3. For most modes of travel the casualty (permanent damage) to death ratio was roughly 10:1.
So... motorbikes are roughly 2.5 times as dangerous to their owners as cars!
On the same scale, using the 8400 hour figure to save dispute, the Shuttle has 12000 fatalities and a 1:1 ratio. Forty times as dangerous as a motorbike, and four times as dangerous as smoking.
read your EULA. There are some very interesting things in there. You essentially agree to the audit, especially in the case of MS software.
As I read the EULA, they have the right to audit, but there is no statement that you are liable for the costs of the audit itself, even if you've misappropriated software.
Another interesting point is: have you really agreed to the EULA? In some places, yes, in some places no. Maybe the company doing the installation agreed to it, but you didn't. Maybe you bought the machine with software pre-installed and the previous owner agreed to (and broke, in most cases) the terms. Even if you have agreed, is the agreement binding? If yes, are any parts of the agreement void by law (federal, state, local)? If they have no right to even demand an audit, you should sue the BSA(A) for harrassment and/or sool the local equivalent of Fair Trading onto them. The Australian law against their practice goes by the title `Letters demanding monies, with menaces', or simply extortion.
The EULA has termination clauses. It might be useful to exercise them before audit if all else fails.
...do you expect them to release such information? They're on a roll, a bankroll in fact, and anything which spoke against them pillaging businesses who normally can't be bothered with the overhead of tracking every box and download associated with them would be anathema.
Get a good installer by borrowing the Debian installer? You're kidding, right?
Wrong. There are several convergent efforts to build a simple, clean GUI installer for Debian along the lines of Mandrake's (have you tried Knoppix? That's Debian. And if they dither about it, I'll port Mandrake's installer myself!). The Debian system includes FreeBSD as one OS core (along with the GNU Hurd), so it would be close to trivial to include OpenBSD.
a big, looming space elevator wouldn't be a target for terrorists, would it?
Yes, but much harder than a building to hit and destroy, and fairly easy to mount defense ordinance on.
Also likely to have space-based lasers mounted at top end which could be brought on line in seconds, plus the ground-based propulsion lasers could be borrowed, ganged and focussed for the very brief occasion (a safer option IMESHO).
Near ground level, something like a bazooka shell would be easy to isolate automatically due to its trajectory, and a perfectly ordinary Vulcan Phalanx (50x20mm shells/second) would take care of those as it does for ships. Even if you completely flubbed that, and assuming that you could build enough brains into a bazooka shell to hit a terribly skinny target, and scored a direct hit on a ribbon, you won't necessarily have achieved anything. Firstly, each ribbon would be a wonderful shock-absorber, secondly, there would be many ribbons, so even if you got two or three of them, the results are unlikely to be catastrophic, thirdly, the elevator is in orbit, so severing it low down wouldn't achieve much (in fact, the plans include winding it up a few miles if a really nasty storm arrives).
You really should go read the site, they've obviously thought of this stuff.
Something that large will get hit by meteors and junk regularly, so facilities for repair would be routine. The ribbons are arranged in a semicircle (there's not really any such thing as an `edge on' hit) so anything hitting it would have to be seriously sizeable to cut more than one strand, in which case the lasers would get it. In fact, said lasers would become important and useful for cleaning up LEO.
A Jumbo jet racks up 8400 passenger-hours on every return trip to Europe.
Um, no?
Shuttle has racked up (at 100 missions, week each, figures worth checking), 16800 hours per average passenger, Jumbo racks up only 168 hours per average passenger per week, assuming it flew constantly (it does not, so call it 100 hours), so would have to fly for roughly three years to tot up as many miles.
Every shuttle down is 7 deaths, every Jumbo down is roughly 400 deaths (depends on model), some of the bigger airbuses will be 800 or more deaths, perhaps plus innocent bystanders (very unlikely that a falling Shuttle part would kill anyone), assuming that very few people survive hitting a hillside at over 500km/h, the typical scenario. So the passenger miles even out.
If you drove your car for an hour every single day, you would have to drive for 48 years to knock up as many hours.
Perhaps they should have priced it in terms of Shuttle missions. The shuttle has launched over 100 times, at a typical cost of about $500M per launch equals roughly $50G, so their elevator would be priced at 80 shuttle missions or under 4/5 of the money spent so far running the Shuttles.
Speaking of which: in terms of fatalities per passenger mile, they're much safer than jetliners, orders of magnitude better than your car. OTOH, you car doesn't cost billions of dollars to replace if you write it off. OT3H, I'd be really happy if I got that many miles out of any car, ever. (-:
How many refugees are we talking about here 20,000? 50,000? 100,000? NO!!! Less than 10,000!!!!!
Fifteen of these recently brutalised some guards; six of those vanished through the fence into the underworld. The very six Australia least needs, methinks.
I know lots of delightful New Australians, but the ones who do that kind of thing, and stuff like sewing their kids' lips together, worry me. I don't want to import nasty culture and criminals along with nice people.
Again, I think that these actions, and the incident at the top of this comment tree proves that there are dickheads in every country and culture. The trick is not to leave the dickheads in positions of power.
...and I think it just proves that there are shitheads of all sizes, colours and creeds in every society.
My apologies to you. I am Australian, and I think I know something about how you feel.
Some years ago, a computer shop I worked for was broken into, a few weeks after I stopped living on the premises. They used, would you believe, a circular saw on the lock of the (Al and glass) front door. A simple screwdriver or pry-bar would have forced any of the other windows or doors in the place almost silently, including ones opening on the side driveway, coneniently shielded from most prying eyes by a tall, opaque "super six" fence at the time. They stole a lot of old, non-moving stock, and a very few new computers (next shipment due soon).
Anyway, the CIB (sort-of the local FBI equivalent) came knocking at the door of the house I was sharing, scared the daylights out of the girl I was sharing it with, forced their way in and searched my room. Lo and behold, lots of boxes marked Apple (I'd used them to stack my gear in for the move), so they got all excited, opened and upended everything looking for the missing computers. Not having any luck, they shot through.
Some hours later, I came home to find my room a complete shambles. As I started tidying everything away again, the CIB dudes returned, knocked, asked me if I knew anything about it, and while I was answering (no) basically gathered around and forced me out to their car. They sped (illegal in Oz unless car has lights, siren and proximate cause) back to their office, locked me up in an interview room, and left me for an hour.
They came back in en masse, one carrying a wire coathanger, and started asking me questions while they did stuff like whack the coathanger down hard on a book, then tap me with it. They started shoving me around, and threatened to do stuff like wrap me in a blanket (showed me the blanket) and then kick me at random spots through a 'phone book (so it would hurt like hell but leave no bruises).
Instead of having the desired effect (cowing me), it made me really, really angry, and it became obvious to the leader (the only guy with any brains) that (1) I wasn't guilty; and (2) if they didn't stop, I was going to start hitting people really hard and bugger the consequences. So he called it quits and they drove me home. This made the rest of the thugs very angry.
The only feature of your story that's missing from mine is that I wasn't a long way from home.
The airport security at Perth is a joke. I strongly recommend that you don't, but if you wanted to blow up the Domestic terminal, you would just drive an old Tojo loaded with explosives, carefully but quickly, through the rent-a-car area on the north end of the terminal, through a pair of ordinary glass doors there, and you'd be right in the middle of the check-in queues. Blow your truck up there and you're assured of at least 400 deaths if there's a few flights due out. Same story at International, but it's the arrivals (East) end you'd be hitting - or you could make a smart left with same Tojo through the glass at the front. Even if those weaknesses were fixed, fly a light 'plane from Jandakot in low over the suburbs, pick a window, and fly through it - or play chicken with an inbound or outbound jetliner. There is nothing security could do about it.
I think at some level the security people are aware of the pointlessness of what they are doing, and the dickheads among them react as those who dealt with you did: by trying really hard to make enemies for Australia where none existed before.
If for any reason you need to come to Australia again, email ahead. One of our members is a lawyer who would gladly go through the rituals ahead of time for him to be there to escort you through Customs.
Oh, and contact the LCA people about a refund on your conference fee (I'm one of the lesser helpers). Once we know who you are so we can be certain you're not a hoaxer, we might also post a story (without your name) on our pages and do whatever following up we can do, locally.
Even if the police do nothing, we can hound politicians, tourism people and others until something positive gets done.
<rant>I personally am sick to the eyeballs of the stuffing around of peoples' lives that has happened since 911. The - well, I don't have a bad enough word to use - things that organised that little atrocity are winning. They've degraded life in Western countries, and degraded life for "their own" people as well. They've given a lot of previously underemployed mentally ill bullies an excuse to hurt people, and the USA has been pretty close to completely ineffective against them.
One has to wonder why. One has to wonder who in this tired old world would benefit from practically everyone else's misery.
Most of the major events in this world, pain suffering and death brought to millions, have been caused by political intrigue, by greedy people who sought to rule the world, thought they could do things better than everyone else, and always, always, "know" how to manage other people, what's good for those others, what sacrifices their subjects should make, but they think themselves different, aloof, special, exempt.
They are not special. And the day of reckoning will come, no matter what they do, no matter what I do.</rant>
I noticed many of the linux 'tech' guys were extremely ill dressed
Yah, including some from IBM. The Sun rep even dressed down for the event, so, yes, people do notice. One of the reporters turned up in basic black on Day -1, and she returned on Day 0 dressed in something geekier (including an appropriate backpack and shoes), and I might add looked much better for the effort. And you should have noticed that the guest of honour was wearing, horrors, casual shirt (sometimes tee) and shorts - and his family, too - and once even a penguin suit, the undisciplined cad!
Stanley Feinbaum, professional journalist and master debater!
Stimpy was right, there is an extra syllable there. You're a legend in your own mind... (-:
Can I recommend you sticking to shows festooned with bloatware, posterware, shiny sheilas with shiny smiles handing out rubbish, and loads of pinstripes but no content? We'll all be happier for such a move.
Slashdot Mirror
...as with most things, but he is a hoot to read and makes a great deal more sense than mainstream prognosticators. If you want a wilder read, try Karl Bunday, and if you want more content-focussed stuff, try John Holt.
Did you Google?
Let your fingers do the walking...
[if y'don't get it, look up the passage. And yes, archaeologists have indeed found the grain storage complex in question]
It showed in his choice of reward from the North Korean delegate.
If that antenna's for bouncing energy from an ordinary (well, high-power but otherwise unremarkable) microwave horn, you could build it out of hardware-store bird mesh tensioned with fencing wire. I kid you not, it's quite different from building Parkes-in-space: you need naff-all structure for something like that.
You could even omit the fencing wire and just spin the reflector. It's not as if there's anything in space to slow it down. Or rust it.
Complete bollocks. Specficially, if it cost $20G to build (they say $10G), it need only make $2G/a to handily beat bank loans and stuff as a payback means. So double the $100/kg lift costs to $200/kg, big deal in the face of the $10,000-$30,000/kg it is now. $2G / $100/kg extra profit == 20Mt/a, 55,000t/day, 2300t/hr, a 400t load every 10 minutes.
Need to halve that load? Triple the price instead of doubling it. Or use the elevator to build more, and amortise the costs between them.
And we don't have one now? Go ahead, build your own Saturn V or Energia-Groza, be my guest.
Once they have half a dozen of these up, owned by 3 or 4 countries or consortia (I'd guess USA, EU, China, Russia, India, Brasil), that starts to break down anyway. If Australia wanted to build the first one, that would cost us $10,000 a head. If it built the 8th one, maybe $500 a head and every Australian gets their first 2kg hauled to space for free. If the people living in Perth pooled their gree kilograms, we could loft a 3000 tonne satellite.
Ever tried to hit something a meter wide from 10 km away? With defenses on the elevator shooting back at you and at your shells?
Clearing a corridor 10km wide around this would be no problem, and keeping it clear with SDI technology (near the ground, a perfectly ordinary Vulcan radar-guided cannon would do the job) relatively simple. Can you outfly a laser? Could your aircraft or missile survive several hundred unexpected megawatts of microwaves tuned to some vital dimension? How about a smart remote-targeted crowbar dropping in on you from LEO at mach 20?
Any concievable replacement would be worse.
It would have to be a clever piece of space-junk, smaller than a peanut and yet more destructive than a nuke. You haven't had a look at the design, have you?
If they were kind enough to put the elevator up on the Equator (not necessary, but it helps), it (or more specifically the defenses on it) would actually make a pretty good street-sweeper for the space industry.
That statement just betrayed your complete ignorance of how the elevator would work.
Of the 100,000km length, less than 100km would be in atmosphere. Take what is presumably the worst case: the cable snaps about 50km up. 50km of cable fall to earth, the top 30km or so burning up on re-entry, the balance stays in orbit. That's right, losing 0.05% of the cable makes very little difference to its orbit. Soon the lost 50km is replaced by shipping it out along another cable and unreeling it off the next segment above the damaged one.
But what about the bottom 20km? Even if it were heavy (did you read the line saying `paper-thin?'), it would fall into the ocean. Even if they anchored it at, say, Kununurra (in the far north of Western Australia) and it were heavy, you'd still only lose a stripe of desert a few m wide and 20km long. Big deal.
Now, important step, visit High Lift Systems and RTFM. Then come whinging back here.
Quote, The space elevator would essentially allow the world to participate, time to found the Open Space Institute? (-:
The worst religion of the lot is materialism. More deaths directly attributable to that throughout history than any other single belief group (except possibly people who believe that smoking won't give them cancer).
Even the Cattleticks fall short, they only (directly) got somewhere between 60 and 100 million, not counting starting or provoking numerous world and `civil' wars. Materialism is evil, convert someone away from it today.
Charity vehicles are stolen (by both sides) for use as soldier transports in some parts of Africa. Which do they need most: food and shelter, or another war?
And yes, heterosexuality (or for that matter lesbianism) doesn't spread AIDS anywhere near as fast as male homosexual practice, but the only real blocker is the kind of social arrangement practiced by Christianity or Judiasm. Horrors! We'd much rather die slowly and painfully, taking others with us, than learn from the bigots!
Jews survived the black plague singularly well because they adhered to the `silly' rules in the books of Deuteronomy and Numbers, while their Catholic neighbours didn't. Those rules have reasons behind them. There's a lot that the ancients knew well, but we refuse to learn. At our cost.
Common sense isn't, is it?
Neither was I. My thinko. Read it as `hours'.
The two cases are still not equilavent because one jumbo crash loses 466/7 (==66) times as many people as one Shuttle crash.
OK, we've had our fun, time for some facts. The fatality rates I could find were: trains are roughly 4 per 100M hrs, coach/bus 1, private cars 171, motorbikes 382, pushbikes 57, pedestrian 22, air 3. For most modes of travel the casualty (permanent damage) to death ratio was roughly 10:1.
So... motorbikes are roughly 2.5 times as dangerous to their owners as cars!
On the same scale, using the 8400 hour figure to save dispute, the Shuttle has 12000 fatalities and a 1:1 ratio. Forty times as dangerous as a motorbike, and four times as dangerous as smoking.
Harelys have some parts made in Japan. How many of such does it take to make the bike in some way Japanese?
As I read the EULA, they have the right to audit, but there is no statement that you are liable for the costs of the audit itself, even if you've misappropriated software.
Another interesting point is: have you really agreed to the EULA? In some places, yes, in some places no. Maybe the company doing the installation agreed to it, but you didn't. Maybe you bought the machine with software pre-installed and the previous owner agreed to (and broke, in most cases) the terms. Even if you have agreed, is the agreement binding? If yes, are any parts of the agreement void by law (federal, state, local)? If they have no right to even demand an audit, you should sue the BSA(A) for harrassment and/or sool the local equivalent of Fair Trading onto them. The Australian law against their practice goes by the title `Letters demanding monies, with menaces', or simply extortion.
The EULA has termination clauses. It might be useful to exercise them before audit if all else fails.
`For what we are about to recieve...'
Seriously, they promise to be lenient if you fess up in that period, nasty if you don't. Do you trust them?
Much better to support one of their competitors.
...do you expect them to release such information? They're on a roll, a bankroll in fact, and anything which spoke against them pillaging businesses who normally can't be bothered with the overhead of tracking every box and download associated with them would be anathema.
Wrong. There are several convergent efforts to build a simple, clean GUI installer for Debian along the lines of Mandrake's (have you tried Knoppix? That's Debian. And if they dither about it, I'll port Mandrake's installer myself!). The Debian system includes FreeBSD as one OS core (along with the GNU Hurd), so it would be close to trivial to include OpenBSD.
Yes, but much harder than a building to hit and destroy, and fairly easy to mount defense ordinance on.
Also likely to have space-based lasers mounted at top end which could be brought on line in seconds, plus the ground-based propulsion lasers could be borrowed, ganged and focussed for the very brief occasion (a safer option IMESHO).
Near ground level, something like a bazooka shell would be easy to isolate automatically due to its trajectory, and a perfectly ordinary Vulcan Phalanx (50x20mm shells/second) would take care of those as it does for ships. Even if you completely flubbed that, and assuming that you could build enough brains into a bazooka shell to hit a terribly skinny target, and scored a direct hit on a ribbon, you won't necessarily have achieved anything. Firstly, each ribbon would be a wonderful shock-absorber, secondly, there would be many ribbons, so even if you got two or three of them, the results are unlikely to be catastrophic, thirdly, the elevator is in orbit, so severing it low down wouldn't achieve much (in fact, the plans include winding it up a few miles if a really nasty storm arrives).
You really should go read the site, they've obviously thought of this stuff.
Something that large will get hit by meteors and junk regularly, so facilities for repair would be routine. The ribbons are arranged in a semicircle (there's not really any such thing as an `edge on' hit) so anything hitting it would have to be seriously sizeable to cut more than one strand, in which case the lasers would get it. In fact, said lasers would become important and useful for cleaning up LEO.
...but I'm not a Motie.
Um, no?
Shuttle has racked up (at 100 missions, week each, figures worth checking), 16800 hours per average passenger, Jumbo racks up only 168 hours per average passenger per week, assuming it flew constantly (it does not, so call it 100 hours), so would have to fly for roughly three years to tot up as many miles.
Every shuttle down is 7 deaths, every Jumbo down is roughly 400 deaths (depends on model), some of the bigger airbuses will be 800 or more deaths, perhaps plus innocent bystanders (very unlikely that a falling Shuttle part would kill anyone), assuming that very few people survive hitting a hillside at over 500km/h, the typical scenario. So the passenger miles even out.
If you drove your car for an hour every single day, you would have to drive for 48 years to knock up as many hours.
Perhaps they should have priced it in terms of Shuttle missions. The shuttle has launched over 100 times, at a typical cost of about $500M per launch equals roughly $50G, so their elevator would be priced at 80 shuttle missions or under 4/5 of the money spent so far running the Shuttles.
Speaking of which: in terms of fatalities per passenger mile, they're much safer than jetliners, orders of magnitude better than your car. OTOH, you car doesn't cost billions of dollars to replace if you write it off. OT3H, I'd be really happy if I got that many miles out of any car, ever. (-:
Time for the Pope to start panicking? (-:
I can. Twice. Once in old Freo prison, and more recently in, surprise, an (note the next word carefully) illegal immigrant detention centre up north.
The problem I have with the recent escapees is that they just vanished. The escape was too well organised to have been just a few poor families.
Fifteen of these recently brutalised some guards; six of those vanished through the fence into the underworld. The very six Australia least needs, methinks.
I know lots of delightful New Australians, but the ones who do that kind of thing, and stuff like sewing their kids' lips together, worry me. I don't want to import nasty culture and criminals along with nice people.
Again, I think that these actions, and the incident at the top of this comment tree proves that there are dickheads in every country and culture. The trick is not to leave the dickheads in positions of power.
...and I think it just proves that there are shitheads of all sizes, colours and creeds in every society.
My apologies to you. I am Australian, and I think I know something about how you feel.
Some years ago, a computer shop I worked for was broken into, a few weeks after I stopped living on the premises. They used, would you believe, a circular saw on the lock of the (Al and glass) front door. A simple screwdriver or pry-bar would have forced any of the other windows or doors in the place almost silently, including ones opening on the side driveway, coneniently shielded from most prying eyes by a tall, opaque "super six" fence at the time. They stole a lot of old, non-moving stock, and a very few new computers (next shipment due soon).
Anyway, the CIB (sort-of the local FBI equivalent) came knocking at the door of the house I was sharing, scared the daylights out of the girl I was sharing it with, forced their way in and searched my room. Lo and behold, lots of boxes marked Apple (I'd used them to stack my gear in for the move), so they got all excited, opened and upended everything looking for the missing computers. Not having any luck, they shot through.
Some hours later, I came home to find my room a complete shambles. As I started tidying everything away again, the CIB dudes returned, knocked, asked me if I knew anything about it, and while I was answering (no) basically gathered around and forced me out to their car. They sped (illegal in Oz unless car has lights, siren and proximate cause) back to their office, locked me up in an interview room, and left me for an hour.
They came back in en masse, one carrying a wire coathanger, and started asking me questions while they did stuff like whack the coathanger down hard on a book, then tap me with it. They started shoving me around, and threatened to do stuff like wrap me in a blanket (showed me the blanket) and then kick me at random spots through a 'phone book (so it would hurt like hell but leave no bruises).
Instead of having the desired effect (cowing me), it made me really, really angry, and it became obvious to the leader (the only guy with any brains) that (1) I wasn't guilty; and (2) if they didn't stop, I was going to start hitting people really hard and bugger the consequences. So he called it quits and they drove me home. This made the rest of the thugs very angry.
The only feature of your story that's missing from mine is that I wasn't a long way from home.
The airport security at Perth is a joke. I strongly recommend that you don't, but if you wanted to blow up the Domestic terminal, you would just drive an old Tojo loaded with explosives, carefully but quickly, through the rent-a-car area on the north end of the terminal, through a pair of ordinary glass doors there, and you'd be right in the middle of the check-in queues. Blow your truck up there and you're assured of at least 400 deaths if there's a few flights due out. Same story at International, but it's the arrivals (East) end you'd be hitting - or you could make a smart left with same Tojo through the glass at the front. Even if those weaknesses were fixed, fly a light 'plane from Jandakot in low over the suburbs, pick a window, and fly through it - or play chicken with an inbound or outbound jetliner. There is nothing security could do about it.
I think at some level the security people are aware of the pointlessness of what they are doing, and the dickheads among them react as those who dealt with you did: by trying really hard to make enemies for Australia where none existed before.
If for any reason you need to come to Australia again, email ahead. One of our members is a lawyer who would gladly go through the rituals ahead of time for him to be there to escort you through Customs.
Oh, and contact the LCA people about a refund on your conference fee (I'm one of the lesser helpers). Once we know who you are so we can be certain you're not a hoaxer, we might also post a story (without your name) on our pages and do whatever following up we can do, locally.
Even if the police do nothing, we can hound politicians, tourism people and others until something positive gets done.
<rant>I personally am sick to the eyeballs of the stuffing around of peoples' lives that has happened since 911. The - well, I don't have a bad enough word to use - things that organised that little atrocity are winning. They've degraded life in Western countries, and degraded life for "their own" people as well. They've given a lot of previously underemployed mentally ill bullies an excuse to hurt people, and the USA has been pretty close to completely ineffective against them.
One has to wonder why. One has to wonder who in this tired old world would benefit from practically everyone else's misery.
Most of the major events in this world, pain suffering and death brought to millions, have been caused by political intrigue, by greedy people who sought to rule the world, thought they could do things better than everyone else, and always, always, "know" how to manage other people, what's good for those others, what sacrifices their subjects should make, but they think themselves different, aloof, special, exempt.
They are not special. And the day of reckoning will come, no matter what they do, no matter what I do.</rant>
100%
Yah, including some from IBM. The Sun rep even dressed down for the event, so, yes, people do notice. One of the reporters turned up in basic black on Day -1, and she returned on Day 0 dressed in something geekier (including an appropriate backpack and shoes), and I might add looked much better for the effort. And you should have noticed that the guest of honour was wearing, horrors, casual shirt (sometimes tee) and shorts - and his family, too - and once even a penguin suit, the undisciplined cad!
Stimpy was right, there is an extra syllable there. You're a legend in your own mind... (-:
Can I recommend you sticking to shows festooned with bloatware, posterware, shiny sheilas with shiny smiles handing out rubbish, and loads of pinstripes but no content? We'll all be happier for such a move.