My wife brought this up on our ride home yesterday, when we saw two officers get on our metro car. Basically said, we're not protected at all against people dressing up like cops and bringing a gun onto the metro.

My simplest explanation is this: We focus our resources on stopping groups from planning attacks. We basically have to write off the risk of a crazy loner acting alone. You're right, it is easy to buy a gun, bring it into a stadium/subway car/whatever, and start shooting. If someone wants to do that, there is very little to stop them. Our security counts on the idea that someone looking to do that is going to tell or tip someone in some way, or is already a strange enough character that friends/family have reported his/her behavior, or that if they're really serious they'll try to bring someone else in. Once communication starts, detection becomes much more likely. Someone would truly have to act alone. Otherwise, yes, it seems pretty easy.

Now outside of a few isolated incidents, how many terrorist attacks of this nature occur? Very few. It's mostly a group, or at least a few loosely organized individuals. So with the limited resources available for counter-terror, we probably need to cross our fingers and discount the former, focusing on the latter.

You definitely can't stop a true loner acting alone - especially one that does not fear for his own life.

Not to mention, Kyllo probably does not apply at border checkpoints. From the perspective of your constitutional rights, as my crim law prof always hammered home, border checkpoints are different.

I have absolutely no problem with using this technology at our borders, scanning cars parked on the departures curb at the airport, etc. I wouldn't want it roving through my neighborhood, though, and it probably won't because good luck prosecuting anything uncovered by this under normal circumstances (i.e. where Kyllo applies).

So do what many did when we switched to SERO from another Sprint/Nextel account -- if AT&T cannot or will not port the number to the new phone/contract, buy a cheap prepaid phone at 7-11, port the number there, cancel AT&T, then open the new contract and port the number back. Probably a $20 expense, totally worth it to keep your phone number. Gotta get creative here, folks.

I want some of whatever's in your PVC hyperpipe. Seriously, though, that's a pretty good explanation. I still don't fully understand it, and I've read as much as I can handle on the subject, but it's a good analogy that I haven't seen before.

Mr. Beckerman: I'm a law student (graduating this year, economy be damned). I still cant figure out how exactly the Doe D's are able to respond if the initial pleading doesn't identify them. Is it up to the service provider to pass through notice to the Does? Once a Doe receives notice, assuming he does before default judgment is entered, how does the Doe respond without identifying himself or entering an "appearance" and basically waiving jurisdiction? I'm sure I'm missing something procedurally here, hope you can point me in the right direction.

I haven't tried to contact the person on the tag, I should send a letter just to see. I suppose I can write it in Italian, 1 in 4 shot they can read it :) I've seen a few (on the internet, not in person) with diopters. It looks like that setup gets around the awkwardness of mounting a scope with the bolt positioned how it is. I'd love to get a set of those sometime, and maybe for ammo to drop below 50c a round. It's such a shame, it's by far the most fun rifle I've operated, yet so expensive to take out for the day. I'm with you, I love taking it apart to clean it, just because it's so well built. I still can't believe I paid $100 even for it. I'd love to get another, but they're hard to find anymore.

I take you own a good ol' K-31? Did yours come with a troop tag? I got lucky on that.

I believe the 6.5x55 was not used in Swiss issue rifles. I know it's a Swede and Carcano round, but I think the Swiss stuck to variations on the GP-90, which was a 7.5x55.

The real question is, does the word umlaut itself contain umlaut(s) over one or both u's? That would be sweet.

R isn't relatively new, it's a derivative of S/S-Plus. Not 1:1, but S code will run on R. Personally, though, I like SAS better than I like R.

Yes, Big Pharma can definitely afford it. They don't because the potential benefit is very, very overhyped with respect to the supposed "breakthroughs" that embryonic stem cells would provide. I have a pretty good contact at a big company who told me exactly that.

What they DO find promise in are adult stem cells. Research money is going into that, and will continue to do so. There are other challenges there, but in the researchers' opinions on average, they're more excited about ASC potential than ESC.