I don't have the time for something like this, but it seems to me a good possibility would be to have all of your inputs that the clerk fills out be contiguous in memory, including the destination, have the algorithm to figure out what destination to go to scan through the whole destination string looking for matches (rather than looking for an exact match) and taking the last one it finds, and have a broken bounds check for the length of that string so that the algorithm looks into the comments section as well.

So, for example, if the clerk fills out the destination as "LAX" but writes in the comments section, "Do not confuse his bags with those owned by CID who is also going to a different final destination; they're very similar looking.", the bags would be routed to Cedar Rapids (CID) instead of Los Angeles (LAX).

Right. What a brilliant terrorist plot. Have three people involved, one to smuggle in a spade, another a whetstone, and another whetstone oil. And all the passengers just sit around while the people noisily sharpen the spade for 15 minutes. Versus, say, pre-sharpening frame components of electronics or breaking virtually anything rigid that will hold an edge.

FYI, the spade was a last-minute part of my camping gear.

How about something like this? Even if they embroidered "IT" onto it, that'd still be great ;)

(Waves hand) "This is not the operating system you are looking for."

Or for a similar style, perhaps this.

Just seems appropriate for the IT staff. ;)

Depends on what the uniform is like. What if it was an awesome henchman-of-an-evil-genius style uniform? Or perhaps something like the longcoats from Tin Man?

It's not just UI responsiveness -- Chrome has great Javascript performance. If only setting opacity through Javascript didn't occasionally break Chrome with an "Aw, Snap!" error...

Yeah, but every other flight would be blown up by terrorists.

Poor phrasing. We do not descend from dinosaurs. Birds do.

Except, as soon as you put measures in place to prevent one vector, the other vectors have an increased likelihood, because terrorists are not necessarily stupid.

That argument is fallacious. It argues for no action against any type of threat whatsoever in any circumstance in any field of discussion. Forcing people off easy vectors onto harder vectors is not an illogical course of action. What matters is that the vectors are properly prioritized and the bar on what to defend against set appropriately. We're currently not doing this; the telltale sign of that would be that security would be proactive rather than reactive. And once again, I argue for a lower bar on what we defend against, not a higher one.

That's not what Schneier is arguing at all, please go back and actually RTFA

I did RTFA, and I recommend you do the same. He opposes targeting very specific "movie plot threats", but supports broadly-applicable investigative resources. Not once does he argue against prioritizing threats (he even does so himself, talking about how some circumstances are more dangerous than others). He simply sets a very low bar, only supporting actions that cover a wide range of possible threats.

Of course, but they are only far removed cousins of the cool dinosaurs.

You don't think the raptors were "cool dinosaurs"?

BTW, even ratites have very advanced flight adaptations and aberrant skeletons for a dinosaur

Yes, they are not "living fossils". But they are their direct descendants, and are overall quite similar in most regards.

You could as well compare a kiwi with an echidna as they are both tetrapoda.

Tetrapoda is a superclass. Maniraptora is a clade under the suborder Theropoda. Not anywhere close to equivalent.

We do not share a common ancestor with dinosaurs. We are the descendants of synapsid reptiles, which were largely beaten out in the triassic by archosaurs (the ancestors of all dinosaurs, birds, and crocodilians).

There is nothing wrong with listing possible attack vectors -- that should be the goal. Each should be weighed in terms of order of likelyhood, and any that are justified to merit preventive action should be handled.

Now, the author is arguing that that bar on what merits action should be low. I agree. But if it's going to be high, as it currently is, it should not simply be based on "what they did last time".

The odds of airborne terror are so low it's ridiculous that we focus on it as much as we do. Here's an excellent post on the subject:

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Not going to do any editorializing here; just going to do some non-fancy math. James Joyner asks:

"There have been precisely three attempts over the last eight years to commit acts of terrorism aboard commercial aircraft. All of them clownishly inept and easily thwarted by the passengers. How many tens of thousands of flights have been incident free?"

Let's expand Joyner's scope out to the past decade. Over the past decade, there have been, by my count, six attempted terrorist incidents on board a commercial airliner than landed in or departed from the United States: the four planes that were hijacked on 9/11, the shoe bomber incident in December 2001, and the NWA flight 253 incident on Christmas.

The Bureau of Transportation Statistics provides a wealth of statistical information on air traffic. For this exercise, I will look at both domestic flights within the US, and international flights whose origin or destination was within the United States. I will not look at flights that transported cargo and crew only. I will look at flights spanning the decade from October 1999 through September 2009 inclusive (the BTS does not yet have data available for the past couple of months).

Over the past decade, according to BTS, there have been 99,320,309 commercial airline departures that either originated or landed within the United States. Dividing by six, we get one terrorist incident per 16,553,385 departures.

These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 miles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.

Assuming an average airborne speed of 425 miles per hour, these airplanes were aloft for a total of 163,331,261 hours. Therefore, there has been one terrorist incident per 27,221,877 hours airborne. This can also be expressed as one incident per 1,134,245 days airborne, or one incident per 3,105 years airborne.

There were a total of 674 passengers, not counting crew or the terrorists themselves, on the flights on which these incidents occurred. By contrast, there have been 7,015,630,000 passenger enplanements over the past decade. Therefore, the odds of being on given departure which is the subject of a terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past decade. By contrast, the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are about 1 in 500,000. This means that you could board 20 flights per year and still be less likely to be the subject of an attempted terrorist attack than to be struck by lightning.

Again, no editorializing (for now). These are just the numbers.

We do all of these stupid things to pretend to have security that even the most brain-dead terrorist could work around.

Can't bring liquids on board? Sure, but you can bring freeze-dried watermelon that you've reconstituted with a liquid of your choice onboard. Any sort of saturated porous or fibrous solid is fine. You can bring any sort of solid hydrate with you, too. Heck, on my way back from Christmas, I realized that I had reusable heat packs in my pockets, and that those were liquid. To keep them? I simply activated them so that they crystalized (releasing heat). Bam -- they're no longer liquids. But they're the exact same stuff.

Can't bring knives on board? Heck, I had a freaking dull garden spade confiscated from me, as though I was going to hijack a plane with a dull spade. But you can sure as heck bring a glass or ceramic plate or other such object and break it into long, heavy, surgically-sharp shards in a cloth towel. You can also bring any sort of electronics or other devices with you whose internal frame components are made of long, sharp pieces of metal. Even if you personally sharpened them.

Do they think terrorists are retarded? Do they think that they can't figure this sort of stuff out? No, they'd rather just put on this "Security Theatre" and inconvenience millions upon millions of travelers for no damned reason.

If they actually cared about security, it would be obvious: the approach to dealing with threats would be proactive, not reactive. It wouldn't be a case of, "someone tried to blow up a plane with shoes? Everyone has to take their shoes off". Taking shoes off would come before someone tried it. Same with liquids and all of these other ridiculous regulations. They're just trying to pretend that they're on top of it, when what they're doing isn't helping anyone. It's just making flying a pain in the arse.

One of these days, when I have enough time before a plane flight, I'm going to follow the letter of the rules while showing off (in a non-threatening manner) how easily they can be worked around: by attempting to cook a full four-course meal onboard a plane during the flight from my coach seat ;) Electric or allowed-chemical heat (no flames), minimal cook times, liquids pre-stored in dehydrated food or reconstituted from powders and water-fountain water past the security checkpoint, etc.

Dinosaurs still exist. We call them "birds".

In particular, they're the decendents of the clade Maniraptora, which includes velociraptor. Many are still remarkably similar to their ancestors -- for example, compare these reconstructed skull images of oviraptors with modern birds (for example, the cassowary)

The restrictions the airlines are using only make the paranoid yet stupid feel better, they don't stop anything.

"Security Theater"