It's not irrational to consider a pressure cooker and propane tank parked near the US Capitol to be sufficiently unusual as to merit further investigation, particularly given the recent history of those two items being used as components for improvised explosive devices.

It's too damn complicated for level 1 techs, let alone end users and the general public, to attempt to opt of surveillance, or even intelligently express their dissatisfaction with government and corporate policies.

Politicians don't care and corporations do. These policies will persist until people's lives are strongly negatively affected. Will it require significant damage as a result of foreign powers hacking into the industrial grid? Probably. God knows we aren't in the streets protesting TSA security theater, and its difficult to get more privacy invasive than seeing folks naked.

Finland lost 10% of her territory, had to relocate 15% of her population, and pay reparations for a war she didn't start. Despite all that, they've built one of the most successful countries on the planet, by any metric.

It's truly sad to see how far the cradle of western civilization has fallen. On the bright side, tourism there will be dirt cheap when they finally get booted out of the Eurozone.

Were you paying attention to what two idiots did with pressure cookers in Boston a few years ago? Or what another idiot tried to do with a propane tank, which this story says may also have been in the vehicle?

I own both of those items. I've transported them within my vehicle many times. What I haven't done is parked my fucking car outside the local Federal building and left it unattended with those items inside. Should I have to think that way? No. Is that the sad reality of the world we live in today? Yes.

Jesus Fucking Christ, look up what "common sense" means sometime. Stop trying to rationalize this as some sort of oppressive Governmental action. This is called an "abundance of caution," and is perfectly understandable to anyone that hasn't been living under a rock for the last twenty years.

Which he'll likely be reimbursed for, notwithstanding the fact that he was illegally operating the vehicle immediately prior to this happening. A pressure cooker costs ~$30, a rear window ~$400, and a propane cylinder ~$30. We're not even talking one thousand dollars worth of damages here.

Do you think quoting my post line by line makes you sound like less of an absolutist idiot?

Gasoline doesn't explode, it burns. Of course, as our resident expert in IEDs and Constitutional Law, you already knew that, right?

In New York State you can get expired registration and/or inspection citations while your car is parked. There ain't nothing to see here. Drive without a license and you'll get cited for driving without a license. If you have proof they made up that charge or revoked his license for political reasons why don't you present it? Otherwise you're just making shit up to fit your narrative.

You people really are something. Have you ever heard the expression, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should?"

I can legally put every single firearm I own into the trunk of my car with thousands of rounds of ammunition and drive through Washington DC on my way to Virginia. That doesn't mean cruising past the White House on this little road trip is a sensible decision, never mind parking nearby while I grab a bite to eat or take a few photos.

Fucking common sense says don't park your fucking car a block away from the United States Capitol with anything inside that could be misidentified as an explosive device. It also says you should keep your drivers license current and in good standing. You think they just cited him for that offense without checking to see that he was actually operating the vehicle? You are familiar with traffic cameras right? Hell, he probably admitted that he was driving when they interviewed him.

He's not getting the book thrown at him in any of the media accounts I've read, he's getting the same treatment he would have received if he was pulled over for a routine traffic stop. If it's his first offense he'll probably get off with a small fine and a conviction for a violation rather than a misdemeanor. There's no fucking miscarriage of justice here.

To the best of my recollection, there is no legal parking on that section of 3rd Street, NW or SW, near the National Mall. If you illegally park your car near the US Capitol Building you should probably expect some scrutiny. If you have a pressure cooker inside in the day and age of improvised explosive devices you should expect further scrutiny. Is the latter bit "fair?" Maybe not. But it's reality in this era.

If the police don't investigate an illegally parked car near a sensitive structure they're grossly negligent. If the investigation reveals you broke the law to get the car there, well, you're going to get charged. If this gentleman was driving on a suspended license it was only a matter of time before he got charged anyway; he just managed to do it in a high profile fashion, vs. the thousands of idiots doing the exact same thing that get picked up in a more mundane fashion every day of the week.

Not to burst your paranoid bubble, but the cops can't just revoke drivers licenses in the United States. Generally speaking, your drivers license can only be revoked or suspended after convictions for certain serious traffic offenses, a combination of convictions for minor traffic offenses, or failure to pay renewal fees when your license expires. A handful of jurisdictions allow the cops to physically take your license when you're cited for DWI; the actual suspension thereof generally occurs at your first court appearance.

In this instance they haven't released any of the back story, but it would seem that the guy was driving on a suspended or revoked license, which is a crime most everywhere in the World. It's a tough one to get away with in the day and age of license plate readers but if you're gonna attempt it you're probably best advised not to park your car on the Mall in Washington DC.....

Maybe they should shake down Italy and Turkey too.

Funny how Poland isn't flat broke; anyone that thinks Greece came out of WW2 worse off than Poland is delusional or a member of the Greek Parliament. Oh, wait, I'm being redundant. :)

I am Information Security practitioner and not an expert in this field, because nobody is. My experiences is that nobody knows what they are doing, most information systems are not secure in mistaken belief that nobody would bother breaking them, others are just secure enough to deter low-knowledge attacks. Almost everyone practices what is known proportional value deterrent, but treat high-value systems as truly isolated when so many side-channels exist.

If malicious AI ever shows up, we are screwed. We have zero hope of securing any information system from it. The only hope is that it won't end us because there is a good chance that a lot of hardware that AI might need will go dark.

Extending on this, there is at least one book where time travel is invented following the discovery of a recipe for unscrambling eggs.

No, it's something slashdot did, since I never had the scroll before and didn't change any settings.

Java was designed to make it possible for an army of mediocre programmers to not mess up too badly and to actually produce something. That is according to Gosling himself. It is hell on earth for much better programmers. It also brought in or at least accentuated the cookie cutter coder drone model of software development and ideal teams so popular for much too long with many a software manager. They didn't want any "heroes" or any that were 10x to 100x more productive. So Java makes is nearly impossible to be that productive.

Now the "rebellion" builds clojure, scala, jruby etc. to drain this swamp.

LAN Manager was multiuser. The client wasn't but that doesn't make much difference as the non-multiuser smartphones phones using apps and websites today proves quite well.