We had the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, the UK liquid bombers, all after everything got locked down after 9/11.

They are obsessed with airplanes. If they had any sort of body count quota and intelligence, they would clearly try other targets.Even just arriving at the airport, you'd think they would realize, "Hey if I drive a car through this line I can kill more people than with this stupid little bomb in my underwear," but they don't!

It's almost as if their end goal is to make air travel inconvenient.

Thats a good reason to ban aluminum foil, but they were actually just confiscating the boxes so you couldn't slowly saw the pilots to death over the course of a long flight with the dull edge that cuts sheets of foil for you. You could still blow up the plane with what was in the box once they confiscated it.

As for that particular explosion, I'm not ready to run the search here at work, but I recall the formula being aluminum foil + some liquids, which they already confiscate. I also remember the explosions from any reasonable quantity of the stuff to be so small as to be uninteresting to teenage boys.

Well, if you check reliable media outlets, a week after events, they usually do a better job of determining the source of the frustration. The protestors usually say something like: "U.S. is in our country replacing our interests with theirs, that's why I lost my job and my son is imprisoned for...what? No, I don't even get T.V. I've never heard of that movie."

There may be "triggers" that cause various groups to encourage protests to get started, but to motivate thousands of people to protest in areas where suspicion of subversive speech makes you disappear, you need some legitimate unhappiness. They get just as upset as you to hear, "someone far away did something improper," but when you are starving and unemployed, and you hear, "hey, were rioting to let them know we're unhappy, wanna join?" Then you might get moving.

Yeah, fuck all the remaking interesting cultures with american values! I've had some sort of class on Greek history every four years or so since grade school and it bothers me so much that they advertise period pieces and then erase all the culture of the time and replace it with some sort of sermon on idealized american values. I live in the US; I talk to my redneck neighbors; anyone can give me a sermon about freedom and it's a dialog I don't need to pay to see in 3D. Just get to the friggin pro wrestling + CGI part! Thats what I came to see dammit!

Yeah, but the Saudis give us oil and the Israelis make us feel better about WWII. What does N.K. give us?

If your going to starve your populace, at least produce something! Waste of cheap human capital is just accepted as the de facto worst abuse by everyone but yourself. I shouldn't have to be stated.

I agree, but when you pose a problem to nerds, we can't help but propose solutions.

I live in a touristy area and I'm pretty sure his purpose is to charge costumers for photos (this is unbelievably profitable), as well as having them available for his own purposes. Here, we use those photos for advertising, but the OP is so vague as to make me think he's doing this for blackmail, porn or preventing customers from being able prove how bad his service actually is.

I know he wants to set up a expensive fix to bleed customers just a little bit or maybe get downright nefarious, but I still can't help but try to think of solutions:

Customer's won't wear anti-paparazzi gear to stop their selfies, but what if you plastered the interior of the vehicle with it instead? Low-lighting + bouncy ride will force them to use flash while your own high powered cameras, statically mounted in optimal points can do longer exposures and be positioned to be least affected by anti-paparazzi coatings and devices.

EMPs will only destroy cameras with moving parts that are very sensitive. I think you should still consider firing off small disruptive bursts of energy with every flash detected; expensive to create, but it seems your client is willing to go pretty far when it comes to screwing over his costumers, so don't discount them!

The post also isn't clear whether we are trying to prevent costumers from taking pictures of landmarks outside the bus, or the puke stains on the floor of the bus. We've clearly assumed the latter. But if you lock all the windows up, you can clearly put coatings or lighting on them to screw with photos.

Most of the other comenters recommended you re-look into IR. You didn't really say what failed, maybe the contractor you tested out just sucked? You might want to try that again with different methods.

On the off chance the client is not up to no good, add a sign that says: "You'll enjoy your ride better if you let us handle the photos!" Or if he'll just fess up that he's being evil, just TSA style search customers and confiscate cameras and phones prior to the trip.

The other fact that you barely touched, is that the well educated who come to discuss this stuff on /. have a good overview of the whole situation. We were discussing these things as if we were suddenly body swapped with underprivileged teenagers, in which case, of course we would know optimal course to maneuver ourselves back into the middle class.

They guy you spoke of probably had no concept of the tiny slice of a career map that would be available to him. The unemployed that I've met, often don't even know how to start a coherent job search.

We middle-classers also think it's easy to find the optimal apartments and part time jobs given that we have reliable access phones, vehicles, nice clothes and the optimal sources to get the latest listings. When you don't have these things, it's nearly impossible to find even that low paying job. And if you think you might lose it, are you really going to invest your first few months salary in an apartment (plus security deposit and whatever fees the landlord charges you for not knowing your rental rights) and vehicle?

Plus, each of those needs is itself, a struggle to get without the unappreciated gifts of being middle class. You mentioned HUD, but a little known fact about renting, is that though owners legally have to accept HUD, if you mention it, they just stop returning your calls (assuming your alcoholic parents will take a coherent message for you, and don't scare the agent). I also learned, that at the last two places I rented, I beat out the other guys just by being a sharply dressed white guy* with sober contacts. Oh yeah, forgot to mention, you need three of your buddies to own phones, speak well formed English sentences and answer with polite sobriety for the entirety of your house and job search.

As for the vehicle (this is the US we are talking about, good luck without a vehicle). Some people are usually willing to part with their vehicles to anyone with money (which you have to find first, maybe once you've got that job you can sell your soul to payday loans), but I've had a friend ticketed for improperly disposing of a vehicle years after the sale; turned out the buyer decided to negate the transfer of ownership (illegally). To avoid these problems, many people also screen who they sell their cars to. I myself don't drive around to find you so you can test drive my car, so you also need to find a reliable friend with a car just to buy used (gas guzzling, mechanically unlucky) cars from rich folks like me (sorry).

*Like HUD, owners can't be caught screening against single women or minorities, but they do anyway.

Sorry, I don't usually point out minor spelling mistakes, but this one made me the picture athletes competing to be the most hardcore metal nation. The costumes would be awesome.

Except, the human forms at the olympics are not the fat, neckbearded types who sit around commenting on slashdot all day; the olympians are a collection of the fittest bodies the world has to offer. Nobody is going to have problems with those bodies.

And for your own body at nudist camps: I've been to a few nude resorts, and the main denominator of the attendees is their acceptance for all sorts of human forms. Of course there will be a couple pervs hanging around that you'll shock with your unbleached anus and your lack of a mutant monster cock, but the rest of us will gladly go naked ski-jumping with you.

Your right, I accept you're correction. I hope I didn't trigger you're obsessive compulsive disorder.

However, I find it strange that your taking note of such an error, because you're first sentence is a fragment in which you use the word 'near' in place of the word 'nearly'. You're second sentence ends with a preposition, and then you're third sentence is an inexcusable mess, with a spelling error ('clebrity') and misused semi-colon. Worst of all, in a crowd of nerds, you opened a parenthesis and didn't close it! To prevent widespread chaos, and you're inevitable lynching let me fix that:
)

Anyway, if your needing a ride down to the place where they take away nerd cards for grammar errors, I'm going that way anyway. It won't be all bad, maybe we can try to pick up some chicks afterward; I hear that's what non-nerds do.

7years and millions of dollars were spent to make sure that box staid checked. That's a good sized conspiracy in my book. It's a stupid, sucky conspiracy created apparently to protect the nationally damaging secret that we hire idiots to important agency roles and other agents will stand behind them for some sort of fellow agent brotherhood, but I'd still say the word conspiracy works. No offense to better conspiracies.
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I like you're sig; I haven't seen beta, but the whining has to be twice as bad.

I agree, that rabidreindeer oughta switch mechanics since private mechanics will usually do what you described, but he's also right that they don't have to do that.

Just as we have the option of working off the clock to do our debugging, mechanics can choose to do the same thing and in small shops they often choose to for the sake of costumer good will and personal pride. I suspect if you find a good private developer to contract some small coding projects to, he would come back and fix serious bugs for free as well. I'd certainly consider doing that if I was that developer.

Because they don't have to, big repair centers won't do this for you and their employees usually won't. The employee ran the standard diagnostic tools in the standard way; the tools indicated a problem that is to be fixed with X (even if his gut tells him Y), which he then installed precisely to specification. Didn't work? Not our problem; talk to the manufacturer about making better diagnostics. And the same goes for software development projects. In both cases, the employee got paid a rate to do X, like hell I'm coming back in to work for free and buying my own hardware because now my boss wants me to do Y.

Don't care. I still want to check the status of my dryer on via internet. And I'm still going to sell my neighbor on how great it is to sit upstairs and monitor the dryness of my clothes from my computer and so he should totally buy my tripped out dryer monitor project.

I, and I think "they," totally accept your fact. We just don't care. We like playing with computers and were going to continue to put them everywhere so we can play with them in new ways and we are going to talk on the internet about how fun it is to have them all. You don't have to join us.

As someone who has had to live with some pretty disgusting roommates, I would pay a premium for a fridge that automatically discarded moldy food and not have to argue about who gets to decided what's too moldy: the fridge decided and I threw it out!

Also, just last week I had something (I forget what, happens every few months) hidden behind some jars until it rotted and I had already bought another one. If it had had an RFID tag, I'd just ask my fridge if I had one, where it was and how long until it officially expired.

No, I don't want to study the arts of fridge organization, schedule regular fridge checkups and better vet my house guests or in general, do anything if I can just buy a piece of technology to make all of that easier. That's what technology does: make things easier.

Theoretically, but in reality, anything that looks too suspicious has to be investigated. Otherwise, if someone who actually wanted to build a bomb knew that fake data was discarded, they just run 10,000 random queries in the exact same manor as the few real ones they need and easily hide their intent. Or consider after a terrorism indecent, the report on why some beyond-obvious activity wasn't caught, "Well, they looked too much like terrorists, like they were some caricature perpetrated by someone trying to troll us so we ignored it."

Also, I know for a fact that once you check so many boxes, They have to come do an investigation. My random e-mailer pissed off the secret service right after 9-11*. Though in that case, my service provider passed on the unusual activity when they noticed I got their domain blacklisted by Yahoo for spam email; I wasn't caught by NSA spying.

The question you would be asking anywhere but slashdot would be: "why did you do that?" And the answer would be: in a course I was taking at college, internet monitoring came up, and I single handedly argued against the whole class and teacher that They would not show up for a few emails with the word bomb. So I went home to prove the class wrong and maybe the class was kinda right.

Your idea sounds really cool, kinda like what TOR does but more-so. I just wanted to point out that random activity does get noticed. Your welcome to try your own experiments though!