Darn that "Security First" hangup...

There is so much important stuff to do -- when can we get Congress to stop regulating things just to get PR? Leave it to the private sector, and let the airlines themselves react to the consequences. For example, airlines could allow a section for cell phone lovers and let the assignment occur at seat selection time.

The only legislation we need is to make all congress critters sit with them -- since they are so fervent in having the government listening in to everything..

It's not really a private company decision. US financial control authorities merely disallow any money transaction company that flouts their political controls. It is not allowed to have a non US based credit card network.

Wow! According to radiumsoup we only have to stay better than Stalin before we start to worry about our freedoms eroding. I have heard about setting an impossibly high bar to surmount. Only due to lack of imagination have I never dreamed that setting an almost impossibly low bar to crawl under could be just as difficult.

Sitting here in the Amtrak station, waiting for the Empire Builder to start it's journey from PDX to the my prairie home far east of here, I have to give a wry smile to the article. I finally stopped flying a few years ago, after the body and soul crushing lineups during a change of planes in DC coming in from Europe. I don't think I will take a plane again unless Rand Paul gets his way. 2 days travel to Sacramento, 2 days back again. But I just pretend that things are further away, like they used to be, and make travel decisions accordingly. There are wonderful moments of letting time slow down when traveling by train. Now, I am almost glad for the excuse. For overseas there are boats for that. I still have fond memories of booking a spare berth on a tramp freighter first time I crossed the Atlantic. Bye bye, TSA, rot in H....

An oxymoron is something that disproves itself, just like Evolution does. If Evolution could have worked we wouldn't still be having this debate.

What is your answer to self-referential proofs of the existence of God? (The set of all positive attributes necessarily includes the attribute of "existence" [rather than non-existance], so therefore it exists, We call that set God.)

Do you have some dogma from the Theory of Types in your anti-God catechism to throw back at us deists?

While on the topic, note the new book by Michael Lucas:
http://www.michaelwlucas.com/nonfiction/ssh-mastery

Richard Aborn is such a wimp. The answer is staring him in the face and he just doesn't get it. Point is, there is one and only one source of all known criminals, and that's the only people that need to have their DNA collected. Duh! Get those samples right away and problem solved. The one and only source of all known criminals is all the non-criminals. Known criminals we can keep an eye on, but all those others, they are the ones who are scary, because you never know....

We can start with Aborn, with the only hiccup we probably face, as I read his character, is that he already is a criminal and so we better first check if he is already on file, so as not to waste taxpayer's money.

What Ravi did was a mean prank. Sharing it as he did was even worse. But worse and sicker than anything he did is the kind of revenge that the US legal system is prepared to inflict However if the sentence is reasonable, given the circumstances, then the result will be justice done fair and square. We are a bit over hyped by focusing on the maximum possible sentence, before sentence is given. Patience everyone!

I noticed over the years that in a number of cases in the US, the politicians
who were most publicly anti-gay, turned out to be gay themselves, but
because of other beliefs, felt so guilty about it they figured they could
deal with their own contradictions by pushing an anti-gay agenda in the
government. Each time the truth came out it was a mind blower.

Say Mr. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, is there anything bothering your conscience? Can we have a complete browsing history on you since the Internet began? I hope you get a clean bill on all your browsing habits, so we can at least consider your outrageous comments on their merits.

Using what is supposed to be a kind of utility, a cloud service, does not qualify as "trying to hide behind", or else that applies to everyone else who uses it, nor does it mean that Amazon was involved in the mess any more than a phone company is, when they carry whatever communications, nor does it mean that it puts any of Amazon's customers at risk. An army of straw men will not make a point more valid. On the contrary, it is an implied threat against any of Amazon's customers, that if they are not politically popular the same fate may befall them too. It was an act of political censorship, pure and simple, and serves notice that anyone else that does not toe the establishment line will have their toes stepped upon. What gutless wonders are these Amazon folks, in a world where people are dying every day to protest censorship.

"Amazon is a personification of the spirit of the Internet, which is one of true democracy"

Isn't Amazon one of those nasty companies that banned Wikileaks from their servers? Qaddafi could explain democracy this way, but who else would be so innocent?

I don't see much news on charging anti-Wikileaks DDoS'ers.