So the parent's options for their kids are have someone feel the kids up or let someone take a nude picture of them and hope that the government isn't lying about the images not being saved (and hope that the person in the booth has their pants on and no camera phone)? What the fuck kind of option is that? Why the fuck is this not immediately shot down by anyone with a brain? (answer: there probably isn't anyone in the TSA with a brain)
I flew out of Norfolk a week ago. I was taken aside for the "enhanced pat down". They don't have the backscatter machines, so no, I really didn't have a choice even between getting strip searched or getting sexually assaulted. At the end of it the agent who had felt me up said "that's not so bad is it?". I said that it was bad. He said "that's why we give you the choice of a private room". Apparently these people don't get that it's not whether or not it's public or private, it's that THEY'RE TOUCHING MY GODDAMN BALLS. Seriously, I don't like people I don't know (and even most people I do know) invading my personal space, let alone feeling every square inch of my skin, regardless of if it's front of the hand or back of the hand.
And the worst part is that it won't stop someone from shoving a bomb up their ass and going to the lavatory on the plane. But they can't do a body cavity search on everyone (until the public at large gets used to this new indignity), so they'll just keep tossing more and more levels of privacy invading but useless "security". I'm fucking sick of flying now. If I want the same experience, I'll pay a hooker to finger fuck me in the ass and spend a couple hours sitting in a chair that's two feet in front of a wall.
What probably helps here is that these places have endowment funds in the 10s of billions of dollar ranges. The places that don't have that kind of endowment (or that kind of ratio of endowment to number of students) can't afford to offer free schooling to many of the people that get in.
The long term health effects of the backscatter are not known. This is effectively a low dose of radiation, applied over your entire body.
As we all know, machines designed to transmit radiation have never malfunctioned and caused death. [/sarcasm]
I agree with you, we've got a radiation machine operated by McDonalds level employees which, if it works 100% properly, exposes a large number of people to unnecessary radiation (yes, flying also gives you a dose of radiation, but you never want to give radiation without a good reason), and gives them a view of the naked bodies of everyone, even kids. But it's ok, because you have the "option" of getting molested (or having your kids get molested). This sounds like either the nightmares of dystopian literature or the wet dreams of some sex story author.
Clearly, what offends people here is the invasive nature of the screening. But is it really all that invasive? They get what's essentially a contour map of your body. Big deal.
Whenever someone says that they should have to provide a link to photographs of themselves naked.
The really invasive alternative is the pat down, or worse, the strip search. With these screeners, you just walk through, no clothing removal necessary.
A) None of these options are acceptable.
B) Not having to remove clothes just hides the fact that they're still strip searching you with technology.
C) If I get a pat down, I can at least be sure that there won't be some database containing a naked scan of me getting leaked in a few years (I doubt anyone wants to see it, but that's not the point). Despite the protests of "we can't save the data.", I just have to ask "How did you provide pictures for news articles then?".
I'd love to know how Democrats who were elected in November of 2008 and took office in January of 2009 caused a recession that started in 2007 (caused by a widespread repeal of regulations a few years before that).
Oh they'll post signs... in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory behind a door that says "Beware of the tiger".
Or they'll just micro-etch them onto your tickets in size.0000001 font. What, you didn't bring your electron microscope to the theater? Well, too bad, you agreed to the terms and conditions, paragraph 3, subsection 4, clause 2 which clearly states "The ticket purchaser (hereafter referred to as 'the loser') agrees to be bound to all terms and conditions on this ticket, including, but not limited to, turning over all worldly and otherworldly goods, services, souls, image rights, copy rights, human rights, cloning rights, and a pony to the management of this theater (hereafter referred to as
'your new god')."
(Some) Kids are encouraged to read the Bible, a book containing genocide, intolerance, favorable references to slavery, sex (there's an awful lot of begatting going on), murder, general cruelty, unreasonable actions, statements that contradict known reality, statements that are logically impossible, and statements that contradict the Bible itself. By comparison, even if you go on mass murdering sprees in GTA, you still won't reach the kill count of the Bible.
Sorry, the TSA is short on hotties. Looks like you get to be patted down by Gertrude, the 300 pound 50 year old former circus bearded lady sideshow. And (s)he's awfully handsy.
Long term we're probably better off with one of the systems of natural units (Planck units are probably the best choice). SI units are based off very Earth-centric measurements (the meter being 1/10,000,000th of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator. Mass and temperature based off of water. Most egregiously the candela is based off of the burn properties of a particular type of candle.), so when we meet aliens, the units be seen as just as quaint as most of the world sees US Customary Units now.
What do you expect when businesses stopped being loyal to their employees? There used to be things like pension plans and long term job security. Now companies might match some portion of your 401k and at a slight downturn in the economy they might lay off hundreds or thousands so that their numbers look a little bit better. If they're willing to toss workers overboard for slight profit, workers are well within reason to toss their company overboard for their own slight profit. Give people a good reason to stay and you'll get loyal employees, otherwise you get what coming to you.
Exactly. Remember the days where ads were just one or two brightly colored static images per page? They were annoying, but fairly harmless and would've left adblockers to be used by an obscure niche. But they've gotten more and more insistent on you seeing their ads: pop ups, gif animations, sounds, flash animations, pop unders, video advertisements, and now basically forcing you to glue your eyeballs open to play "find the capcha". Isn't it enough that we've got advertisements everywhere else? Do we need to keep finding new ways to advertise when people are already fatigued enough by advertising? Hell, do some companies even really need to advertise anymore? Is there anyone in the world who hasn't heard of Coke or Pepsi? Is their anyone who's preference in the matter is going to be changed by seeing another polar bear getting a bottle of Coke from Santa or seeing whatever the hell new Pepsi commercial is out? What about McDonalds? Is anyone seeing a commercial for the arches and saying "hmm, well last time I went it was a greasy mess, but this time I'm sure they mean it when they say it's good!"? Sure, the ads stick in my head, but that just pisses me off about their companies. I don't want your fucking 5 note guitar hook caught in my head as an earworm.
Most citizens can't make that claim - they either have to admit they know what pot smells like from illegal use, or all they can say is they thought whatever they smelled might be pot.
Does anyone use much of anything after they graduate? Have you ever needed to point out Italy on a map, or write a poem about beauty, or solve a kinematics problem? Hell, I'm a software engineer, and I doubt that there's any math that I use on a daily basis beyond what I knew in elementary school. But that doesn't mean that the growth in general abstract thinking hasn't greatly improved my ability to visualize how the code flows, or how to word a comment, or just generally make my life a fuller experience. I don't think that the problem is that we're not pounding enough concrete math into students, but that we're not encouraging them to learn (and we're especially not encouraging them to learn for the sake of just knowing more). "Ivory tower intellectual" has come to mean practically anyone who actually remembers what they learned in high school, and that's the problem. I've got no problem with the idea that some people are more suited towards blue collar work, and that those jobs are worth respect, but that does not mean that we shouldn't encourage everyone (even the blue collar workers) to learn. We are all better off in life knowing more about the world around us.
Anyway, long story short, the terrorism expert asks us that hypothetically, if we had $500 and a desire to cause as much damage and chaos as possible, with no regard for our own lives, how much damage we could cause. He gave us only a minute or so to think about it, and if you yourself think about it now, the damage would be significant. Then he says that terrorists are much, much more motivated, better funded, and spend all of their time, day and night, figuring out how to kill us.
But that's sort of my point. If there's this supposed huge ring of well financed, well trained, militant group that thinks of nothing but killing us, then how do they suck so much at it? With so many completely unprotected targets (malls, metro stations, concerts, etc), it's surprising that we aren't attacked more. It's not like you need 20 people to set off even a large bomb, one or two will suffice (See the Oklahoma City bombing), so where is it? We've had a couple people with bombs that don't work and plans that sound like a mad libs game. (We're going to blow up a [vehicle] by putting a bomb in our [article of clothing] in [city].) It just seems like our fear of a terrorist group out to destroy America is overblown. I'd be more scared of a stiff breeze knocking over buildings than anything Al Qaeda has.
Seriously, they're going to end up doing cavity searches. As it is, your choices are get strip searched or get fondled, and that's fucking nuts (no pun intended). The sad part is that even if they did do a cavity search on everyone from 3 years to 103 years, they still wouldn't be able to stop terrorists from attacking us (hell, what's stopping a terrorist from chartering a private flight out of some rural airstrip that doesn't have any real security?). If we don't want them to hijack major airliners, we just needed the reinforced cockpit doors and instruct pilots that as soon as terrorists take the plane over they should land (or otherwise contact the FAA for guidance). 9/11 can't happen again. Our actions were based off the premise that the terrorists would fly the plane to Cuba, land, get some money, and everyone goes home happy, end of story. We know what happens now, so we adjust those plans and the rest of us go about our business. Instead we get people freaking out and others saying we need more and more security to fight a problem that quite frankly doesn't exist in any real sense. Al Qaeda are like The Matix of terrorists. Their first attempt was unexpected and really hit us hard, but their sequels just kinda fizzled.
I don't think it's completely insane for the family of the victim to want to be heard in court.
If you get stolen from, you probably want to beat the thief to a pulp. We don't let that happen because we're a civilized society who realizes that the desires for revenge by the victim aren't a good idea to actually practice.
No, no, you're supposed to consult with GeneJack Genetic Industries to insert all the right genes in your kid so that they are born as adults with a suit and a job. Having actual kids who have to learn motor and cognitive skills is so yesterday. Now, just sign over a few million dollars to GeneJack and we'll be right on our... oh, you don't have a million dollars? Well, tsk tsk, no making babies for you then.
It is right (though when you take into account the mass of gasoline+O2, it's only about 2.5 times the energy density). What's more, if you eat 2000 Calories a day, you're eating the energy equivalent of 4.4 pounds of TNT.
Nah, nowadays the job of management is to go golfing with their buddies, cash large bonus checks, and tell people they're not good enough (so that there's a "paper trail" if someone has to get fired to meet the quarterly bottom line). If you've got salaried employees, giving them so much that they need to work extra time is the same as lowering their pay. It falls under the mantra of work life balance: what kind of lazy employee needs to spend twice as many hours away from work as they do in work? Selfish bastards.
No, he means Canada. They're our first target, and if these missiles were down, they wouldn't have been able to hit that third caribou on the left in Saskatchewan. He's been looking a bit shifty, and we've got to make sure he isn't up to something.
The game is out of print, and in licensing hell. It will never be distributed again, and if it is, not one cent will end up in the hands of anyone who had anything to do with the original game. Hell, maybe the game is distributed, but not in your region, because it "doesn't fit the demographics" (I hear Australia gets this a lot, but really, Japan has kept a lot of really cool games from even the US over the years). So what's the option here? If a title isn't profitable enough to sell, should we feel bad about not buying it (and when they start selling it, would they please not gauge us into paying $5 for 10+ year old games?).
There are citizens who don't speak English (or would at least be much more comfortable with Spanish. They might be Cubans who made it to Florida (automatic citizenship for them), they might be children of illegal immigrants (automatic citizenship when born on US soil), or they might be descendants of groups that were on land that the US took over (see Mexican-American war). Like it or not, these are citizens too, and they get to vote.
Slashdot Mirror
So the parent's options for their kids are have someone feel the kids up or let someone take a nude picture of them and hope that the government isn't lying about the images not being saved (and hope that the person in the booth has their pants on and no camera phone)? What the fuck kind of option is that? Why the fuck is this not immediately shot down by anyone with a brain? (answer: there probably isn't anyone in the TSA with a brain)
I flew out of Norfolk a week ago. I was taken aside for the "enhanced pat down". They don't have the backscatter machines, so no, I really didn't have a choice even between getting strip searched or getting sexually assaulted. At the end of it the agent who had felt me up said "that's not so bad is it?". I said that it was bad. He said "that's why we give you the choice of a private room". Apparently these people don't get that it's not whether or not it's public or private, it's that THEY'RE TOUCHING MY GODDAMN BALLS. Seriously, I don't like people I don't know (and even most people I do know) invading my personal space, let alone feeling every square inch of my skin, regardless of if it's front of the hand or back of the hand.
And the worst part is that it won't stop someone from shoving a bomb up their ass and going to the lavatory on the plane. But they can't do a body cavity search on everyone (until the public at large gets used to this new indignity), so they'll just keep tossing more and more levels of privacy invading but useless "security". I'm fucking sick of flying now. If I want the same experience, I'll pay a hooker to finger fuck me in the ass and spend a couple hours sitting in a chair that's two feet in front of a wall.
What probably helps here is that these places have endowment funds in the 10s of billions of dollar ranges. The places that don't have that kind of endowment (or that kind of ratio of endowment to number of students) can't afford to offer free schooling to many of the people that get in.
The long term health effects of the backscatter are not known. This is effectively a low dose of radiation, applied over your entire body.
As we all know, machines designed to transmit radiation have never malfunctioned and caused death. [/sarcasm]
I agree with you, we've got a radiation machine operated by McDonalds level employees which, if it works 100% properly, exposes a large number of people to unnecessary radiation (yes, flying also gives you a dose of radiation, but you never want to give radiation without a good reason), and gives them a view of the naked bodies of everyone, even kids. But it's ok, because you have the "option" of getting molested (or having your kids get molested). This sounds like either the nightmares of dystopian literature or the wet dreams of some sex story author.
Clearly, what offends people here is the invasive nature of the screening. But is it really all that invasive? They get what's essentially a contour map of your body. Big deal.
Whenever someone says that they should have to provide a link to photographs of themselves naked.
The really invasive alternative is the pat down, or worse, the strip search. With these screeners, you just walk through, no clothing removal necessary.
A) None of these options are acceptable.
B) Not having to remove clothes just hides the fact that they're still strip searching you with technology.
C) If I get a pat down, I can at least be sure that there won't be some database containing a naked scan of me getting leaked in a few years (I doubt anyone wants to see it, but that's not the point). Despite the protests of "we can't save the data.", I just have to ask "How did you provide pictures for news articles then?".
I'd love to know how Democrats who were elected in November of 2008 and took office in January of 2009 caused a recession that started in 2007 (caused by a widespread repeal of regulations a few years before that).
Oh they'll post signs... in a locked filing cabinet in a disused lavatory behind a door that says "Beware of the tiger".
.0000001 font. What, you didn't bring your electron microscope to the theater? Well, too bad, you agreed to the terms and conditions, paragraph 3, subsection 4, clause 2 which clearly states "The ticket purchaser (hereafter referred to as 'the loser') agrees to be bound to all terms and conditions on this ticket, including, but not limited to, turning over all worldly and otherworldly goods, services, souls, image rights, copy rights, human rights, cloning rights, and a pony to the management of this theater (hereafter referred to as
'your new god')."
Or they'll just micro-etch them onto your tickets in size
(Some) Kids are encouraged to read the Bible, a book containing genocide, intolerance, favorable references to slavery, sex (there's an awful lot of begatting going on), murder, general cruelty, unreasonable actions, statements that contradict known reality, statements that are logically impossible, and statements that contradict the Bible itself. By comparison, even if you go on mass murdering sprees in GTA, you still won't reach the kill count of the Bible.
Sorry, the TSA is short on hotties. Looks like you get to be patted down by Gertrude, the 300 pound 50 year old former circus bearded lady sideshow. And (s)he's awfully handsy.
Long term we're probably better off with one of the systems of natural units (Planck units are probably the best choice). SI units are based off very Earth-centric measurements (the meter being 1/10,000,000th of the distance from the North Pole to the Equator. Mass and temperature based off of water. Most egregiously the candela is based off of the burn properties of a particular type of candle.), so when we meet aliens, the units be seen as just as quaint as most of the world sees US Customary Units now.
What do you expect when businesses stopped being loyal to their employees? There used to be things like pension plans and long term job security. Now companies might match some portion of your 401k and at a slight downturn in the economy they might lay off hundreds or thousands so that their numbers look a little bit better. If they're willing to toss workers overboard for slight profit, workers are well within reason to toss their company overboard for their own slight profit. Give people a good reason to stay and you'll get loyal employees, otherwise you get what coming to you.
Exactly. Remember the days where ads were just one or two brightly colored static images per page? They were annoying, but fairly harmless and would've left adblockers to be used by an obscure niche. But they've gotten more and more insistent on you seeing their ads: pop ups, gif animations, sounds, flash animations, pop unders, video advertisements, and now basically forcing you to glue your eyeballs open to play "find the capcha". Isn't it enough that we've got advertisements everywhere else? Do we need to keep finding new ways to advertise when people are already fatigued enough by advertising? Hell, do some companies even really need to advertise anymore? Is there anyone in the world who hasn't heard of Coke or Pepsi? Is their anyone who's preference in the matter is going to be changed by seeing another polar bear getting a bottle of Coke from Santa or seeing whatever the hell new Pepsi commercial is out? What about McDonalds? Is anyone seeing a commercial for the arches and saying "hmm, well last time I went it was a greasy mess, but this time I'm sure they mean it when they say it's good!"? Sure, the ads stick in my head, but that just pisses me off about their companies. I don't want your fucking 5 note guitar hook caught in my head as an earworm.
Most citizens can't make that claim - they either have to admit they know what pot smells like from illegal use, or all they can say is they thought whatever they smelled might be pot.
Or they've been to a Phish concert.
If only a few people know the language of science, then those who don't will try to control it.
Fixed that for you.
Does anyone use much of anything after they graduate? Have you ever needed to point out Italy on a map, or write a poem about beauty, or solve a kinematics problem? Hell, I'm a software engineer, and I doubt that there's any math that I use on a daily basis beyond what I knew in elementary school. But that doesn't mean that the growth in general abstract thinking hasn't greatly improved my ability to visualize how the code flows, or how to word a comment, or just generally make my life a fuller experience. I don't think that the problem is that we're not pounding enough concrete math into students, but that we're not encouraging them to learn (and we're especially not encouraging them to learn for the sake of just knowing more). "Ivory tower intellectual" has come to mean practically anyone who actually remembers what they learned in high school, and that's the problem. I've got no problem with the idea that some people are more suited towards blue collar work, and that those jobs are worth respect, but that does not mean that we shouldn't encourage everyone (even the blue collar workers) to learn. We are all better off in life knowing more about the world around us.
Anyway, long story short, the terrorism expert asks us that hypothetically, if we had $500 and a desire to cause as much damage and chaos as possible, with no regard for our own lives, how much damage we could cause. He gave us only a minute or so to think about it, and if you yourself think about it now, the damage would be significant. Then he says that terrorists are much, much more motivated, better funded, and spend all of their time, day and night, figuring out how to kill us.
But that's sort of my point. If there's this supposed huge ring of well financed, well trained, militant group that thinks of nothing but killing us, then how do they suck so much at it? With so many completely unprotected targets (malls, metro stations, concerts, etc), it's surprising that we aren't attacked more. It's not like you need 20 people to set off even a large bomb, one or two will suffice (See the Oklahoma City bombing), so where is it? We've had a couple people with bombs that don't work and plans that sound like a mad libs game. (We're going to blow up a [vehicle] by putting a bomb in our [article of clothing] in [city].) It just seems like our fear of a terrorist group out to destroy America is overblown. I'd be more scared of a stiff breeze knocking over buildings than anything Al Qaeda has.
Seriously, they're going to end up doing cavity searches. As it is, your choices are get strip searched or get fondled, and that's fucking nuts (no pun intended). The sad part is that even if they did do a cavity search on everyone from 3 years to 103 years, they still wouldn't be able to stop terrorists from attacking us (hell, what's stopping a terrorist from chartering a private flight out of some rural airstrip that doesn't have any real security?). If we don't want them to hijack major airliners, we just needed the reinforced cockpit doors and instruct pilots that as soon as terrorists take the plane over they should land (or otherwise contact the FAA for guidance). 9/11 can't happen again. Our actions were based off the premise that the terrorists would fly the plane to Cuba, land, get some money, and everyone goes home happy, end of story. We know what happens now, so we adjust those plans and the rest of us go about our business. Instead we get people freaking out and others saying we need more and more security to fight a problem that quite frankly doesn't exist in any real sense. Al Qaeda are like The Matix of terrorists. Their first attempt was unexpected and really hit us hard, but their sequels just kinda fizzled.
I don't think it's completely insane for the family of the victim to want to be heard in court.
If you get stolen from, you probably want to beat the thief to a pulp. We don't let that happen because we're a civilized society who realizes that the desires for revenge by the victim aren't a good idea to actually practice.
No, no, you're supposed to consult with GeneJack Genetic Industries to insert all the right genes in your kid so that they are born as adults with a suit and a job. Having actual kids who have to learn motor and cognitive skills is so yesterday. Now, just sign over a few million dollars to GeneJack and we'll be right on our... oh, you don't have a million dollars? Well, tsk tsk, no making babies for you then.
It is right (though when you take into account the mass of gasoline+O2, it's only about 2.5 times the energy density). What's more, if you eat 2000 Calories a day, you're eating the energy equivalent of 4.4 pounds of TNT.
But in this, you are still neglecting that corporations are not sentient beings and they cannot make decisions or operate on their own.
Which is why corporate personhood is bullshit to begin with.
Nah, nowadays the job of management is to go golfing with their buddies, cash large bonus checks, and tell people they're not good enough (so that there's a "paper trail" if someone has to get fired to meet the quarterly bottom line). If you've got salaried employees, giving them so much that they need to work extra time is the same as lowering their pay. It falls under the mantra of work life balance: what kind of lazy employee needs to spend twice as many hours away from work as they do in work? Selfish bastards.
[/sarcasm], in case it was needed
No, he means Canada. They're our first target, and if these missiles were down, they wouldn't have been able to hit that third caribou on the left in Saskatchewan. He's been looking a bit shifty, and we've got to make sure he isn't up to something.
Heck, what about option 3:
The game is out of print, and in licensing hell. It will never be distributed again, and if it is, not one cent will end up in the hands of anyone who had anything to do with the original game. Hell, maybe the game is distributed, but not in your region, because it "doesn't fit the demographics" (I hear Australia gets this a lot, but really, Japan has kept a lot of really cool games from even the US over the years). So what's the option here? If a title isn't profitable enough to sell, should we feel bad about not buying it (and when they start selling it, would they please not gauge us into paying $5 for 10+ year old games?).
There are citizens who don't speak English (or would at least be much more comfortable with Spanish. They might be Cubans who made it to Florida (automatic citizenship for them), they might be children of illegal immigrants (automatic citizenship when born on US soil), or they might be descendants of groups that were on land that the US took over (see Mexican-American war). Like it or not, these are citizens too, and they get to vote.