That's because we like you Canadians. Spend some time around the southern border checkpoints... I know a few white people that spend as much time going through checkpoints as I do, and they seem to have good luck not ever being screened. Get yourself some skin within a couple shades of brown like me and I tell you what...your odds shoot through the roof.

I roll thru two checkpoints between Phx and San Diego on a near weekly basis. Sometimes theres an extra 1 or 2 random checkpoints included between that route.

About 80% of my pass thru's have invloved a drug dog walking by the car.
They always ask citizenship, maybe some other questions like "Is this your car?" or "Could you state your birthdate?"
For me, I get selected for "Secondary screen" 1/3rd of the time. During the second screening they will ask you several questions to stress you or try to get you to trip up. They will then ask to see what is in your trunk. Other times they'll plain ask to search your entire vehicle. I've gotten this check so many times that I now say NO when they ask to search my car. You can say NO, just be prepared for them to haze you A LOT.

I'm of [mostly] Asian decent but 50% of people who first meet me say I look Mexican. This seems to factor into my high screening ratio. I feel this to be true because a family member of my girlfriend works BP. On the subject of profiling he has told me "Of course we don't profile! (WINK, WINK, Big Smile, Thumbs up)

The checkpoints, I assure you, are as deplorable as everyone here makes them out to be. The BP is a glorified social program to keep underachievers and ex military folks employed.

Which is PERFECT if you don't want things to work correctly in the first place! Good products delivered efficiently become cheap.

Its about profit maximization. More fuckups = more billable hours and expenses to pass on to the customer :)~

If you let them in your datacenter, it's your fault if anything goes wrong in there.
If your vendor botched a deployment or delivers a functionally useless product, it's your fault for buying into their marketing campaign and not understanding what you just got yourself into.

But mostly, I think the blame system was by design here...Hire someone else to do the job for everything possible. Fire them/drop contracts when they don't work for you, then file insurance claims to compensate (plus extra if you do it right) for the damages. The trick is to keep the damages rolling as expected--enough to keep insurance revenues up, but not enough so that your premiums adjust to make it unprofitable.

I can see how this is a problem for many. Driving, much like any activity, is dependent on preference and personal techniques, so tuning the specs can be very subjective...Anything that can gets the job done safely is good. That floating frame of reference is indeed difficult to get used to, but not impossible if you take a different perspective and put absolute trust in your intstruments.

If you point the mirrors out towards your blind spot until the body of your vehicle is JUST out of sight of the mirror, your frame of reference is a very real, very defined space--anything beyond the edge of that mirror is your car.
Now that you can't see your own vehicle, you naturally feel like you are flying blind. Thats ok. Pilots are trained to trust their instruments. Firefighters are trained to trust their suits and respirators will hold up in the heat. Without that trust, they'd be too scared or uninformed to do the right thing that saves lives in crisis. The same mindset could be applied to your trust in the mirrors, as those objects will always bend and reflect light the exact same way.

If your driving style is very "seat of the pants" or driven by feel, this technique is virtually worthless. Likewise if you share a vehicle with someone, or find yourself slouching or shifting your body position often while driving. tl;dr--Try it out if you are inclined to be a regimented driver or tend to treat yourself as an extension of the driving tool.

UGH, you don't know how much I want to hug you for pointing this out.
Just this week I had narrowly avoided a collision while backing out of a tight parking spot. Halfway out another car begins backing up. I can't reverse anymore because of a car waiting behind me, cant go forward or return to the parking spot because the other car had already backed out far enough to prevent me. I honked the horn continuously for several seconds until they correct themselves just inches before collision and return to their start position.

As I drive off I get a better look of the passenger, cursing to myself because the idiot wouldn't spend 2 seconds looking over her back. From a profile view I noticed the driver was an extremely obese woman crammed in a 2 door honda civic with chest fat so prominent you couldn't tell if her own chin was digging into her shoulders or her breasts. I doubt she had much more than 90 degrees of free head rotation.

THIS IS THE FUTURE, AMERICA.

Don't think parent should have been modded offtopic. The article cites people buying this sort of thing have a higher return percentage than others as a possible reason for the policy.

+1 Funny? or -1 Gross maybe...

...litigate.

True, however once those bad boys leave the silos nuke war is in full swing. No need for inventory security or accountability; just sit back and watch where they fall. I'm more concerned with those nukes being on an aircraft where the mission to strike did not proceed. When that happens on an unmanned aircraft, you've got unused nukes floating in airspace, outside the physical security of a base or ship.

the process of getting nukes fired off is VERY extensive. Positive control, two person control, as well as how launch codes get verified and such would make this a a very tough thing to do with unmanned aircraft. How do you maintain posession of an unmanned aircraft with nukes when comm links go down? At least pilots can attempt a navigation back, or use judgment and stop a mission when something has failed.
Not saying impossible, just that there would have to be a rewrite in the nuke procedures. I'd imagine thats something our military wouldn't like to do either, since 100% positive control of such destructive weapons would be mutually beneficial.

In summary. This sounds like pure sabre rattling. No major organization would risk a failure on this level.

Great post.Those that struggle the resources need only look to the foods and dishes created by the poor cultures of the world. Every civilization and society had a poor class that used the nasty bits as the main course. Re-learn some of those traditional dishes, and expose your kids to it at an early age!...before they develop a taste for pure sweets and fats.

The poor cooked great food because THEY HAD TO. You don't need cooking skills or fine ingredients to make a filet mignon taste good. But if a meal of beef tendon and coagulated pork blood in soup can be made palatable, you KNOW that stuff is gonna be delicious.

While we wait for nanobatteries, we could ditch the battery supply altogether and use external magnetic forces to propel it through the vessels. Maybe an MRI unit with some tweaks? Then harness the energy of rushing/flowing blood to power the sensors taking readings.

I've heard other discussions about rare earth mining here on /. and one factor that seemed to pop up all the time was China.

Specifically, China being so willing to mine without much regard to pollution or contanimation. They are the biggest suppliers of it now so they can set the price. If someone were to stand up a mining operation in say...california, all China would have to do is drop their asking price or ramp up production and watch the California mine collapse in bankruptcy.

It is my understanding that propping up a rare earth mining/refining operation requires tons of capital and an incredible amount of preparation for enviornmental concerns (at least in western nations where people don't like radioactive pools leaking into their ground water). Investors would be understandibly weary of putting money on the line when China could potentially kick the legs from under the entire enterprise.

Hard to compete when your competitor is willing to turn their backyard into a wasteland.

With so much of movement through space being dependent on gravitational forces, I'd imagine the FIRST era of space battles being fairly bleek and fatalistic...much like WWI, where waves of men went charging to their death because technology outpaced current warfare tactics. I imagine two sides launching missles at eachother from hundres of thousands of km away, with both sides making no attempt to change their trajectory, praying to the space gods that the other side's weapons failed or were inaccurate.

Lets say you have a ship going from earth to...Jupiter. Your flight course would be a rigid window because other planetary bodies will be pushing and pulling you in different directions.. Altering your ship's course would alter your ability to reach your intended destination. Moving out of the way of a weapon or slowing down might slingshot you out of an orbit, or pull you into another. Such gravitational forces would need serious power to counteract. Would a ship carry enough resources to do this?

I'm thinking of it similar to naval battles where large ships take immense power to change their direction or speed. A large ship can only turn so fast, and even then it's a fairly slow correction. Torpedos fired undetected or from a close enough distance with consideration to target's speed and direction could make maneuvering futile. Space battle could have similar problems to deal with. Can you detect a missle before it hits you? Could you change direction to avoid it without putting your trajectory at risk? Do you have the power and resources to do it at all?

If someone decided to use LASERS PEW PEW!, any space travel would be signing your own death warrant.

Maybe they should get some nukes and join the peace community like us!
/flamesuit