Because that approach has worked so well on the war on drugs....

But don't you have to actively defend your patent or you lose the right to? You can't just let some people get away with "stealing" it and not others. Or can you? :(

Surgeons don't wear scrubs outside of the O.R. As soon as they step out of surgery, the scrubs come off and they're back in their nice preppy clothes. The reason for their scrubs is because they're cheap and sterile which is required to keep their patients alive. Airline pilots wear officer's uniforms which signify rank and authority. I seriously doubt that the management intends to give the helpdesk guys ultimate power to dictate over everyone else in the building. So neither of these applies in this case. This is much more comparable to a janitor or fast food worker.

Taping a bullseye to your back on a battlefield shouldn't be a problem at all actually.

If it's a problem, it's either because you're screwing up so badly that your own guys want to kill you, or you're a coward and you're retreating, presenting the enemy with something nice to aim at. Either way, problem solved. ;)

I've said for several years now that IT people are looked upon as basically labor workers akin to fast food workers. I *HAD* argued about them being similar to plumbers or auto mechanics, but nobody seems to balk over their car needing expensive maintenance every 15,000 miles, whereas if you tell someone that they need to pay you $75 once every year or so to clean off the garbage adware/spyware/viruses they get in their computers while preserving their files no less, it's considered highway robbery.

I find it ironic that adding the word "assless" would imply that there be a visible ass whereas leaving out the word "assless" would imply that there is no ass in sight. Only in America.

It's usually between 1/3 and 1/2, but that's if you also count suicide-- both self-inflicted suicide as well as "suicide by cop."

This along with a layer of behavioral analysts who can access the scan history to also flag people (and yes a good analysts can tell a person who is worried about flying over being nervous about something else)

No they can't. What they CAN do is spot someone who doesn't fit an ordinary profile of someone about to board a flight for some reason, i.e. someone who's displaying signs of malicious intent (or who is displaying behavior indicitive of malicious intent but for a perfectly benign reason). There has not been enough scientific research done to date to be able to do what you suggest here with the capability that you're claiming, and certainly not enough to train the massive number of "good" analysts that would be required to use them to screen millions of passengers per day at airports throughout the country.

The research behind this IS being done today, but there is quite a lot of work yet to do before what you're suggesting could be deployed on a wide scale. And the training for behavioral screeners is being created and tested as we speak. What has been done and has been tested, has had pretty positive results so far; so we are at least headed in the direction you're suggesting.

I'm sure you're aware that Dr. Paul Ekman (among probably a handful of others equally qualified in these fields) are among the driving forces behind these new security models. But if you read any of what he writes about it, it's very nearly filled with more caveats and cautions than it is with actual applicable knowledge. And there are still that small number of individuals who have a natural ability to walk right by ANY of these people without raising any red flags, and it would necessarily fall upon other technologies such as the body scanners, puffers, and trained dogs to pick up the slack.

I'm not denying that what you envision as the future of airport security is on the way, and would perhaps even be the ideal scenario, just that this one point really stuck out at me based on all that I've been able to read and learn about it over the past 2 years.

In what way is security an "afterthought" on these systems? ...
...something Windows users have to worry about while Linux and Mac users just sit back and shake heads....

Really? Do you need it spelled out to you? Because you summed it up quite succinctly right there in your own post.

Especially when the updates break functionality that previous versions had, or when the newer versions are a lot more bloated and gobble up significantly more system resources as seen with Flash 10 vs. Flash 9. If so many sites didn't explicitly deny themselves to work properly without Flash 10, I'd be much happier still running Flash 9 as 10 doesn't really add anything that I as a user care about. Nearly every popular site that requires Flash 10 today would work perfectly fine with Flash 9 if it didn't explicitly check and deny itself from working.

This will definitely make it easier and slightly cheaper to meet and communicate with my future wife! Maybe. Or not.

I do feel I have to point out that there aren't ANY high performance sports cars that will run a 300 horsepower engine at its peak power output for a few hundred miles. At peak output a 300HP engine will most likely run out of fuel within maybe 120 miles, most likely much less. At least that was the case for my TBird SC with an 18 gallon tank. ;)

Boy howdy is that the truth! My roommate one time had a catastrophic server failure where he works and had to restore from backups. The system was backed up nightly, with weekly and monthly backups preserved separately. Unfortunately they only kept the backups for each day of the prior week, each week of the prior month, and each month of the prior 6 months, and it seems that their backup software had been malfunctioning for over 6 months, so he had to spend 2 and a half days rebuilding their servers, patches, reinstalling software and reconfiguring user and group accounts COMPLETELY BY HAND and FROM MEMORY.

Thankfully at that time his company only had about 60 employees using computers, but that is still a lesson that too many people seem to have to learn the hard way.

Because from an aesthetic standpoint, that particular Iwo Jima flag raising photo has a lot of problems with it. It's very contrasty, the highlights are badly blown, the composition isn't ideal and so forth. The so-called "rules" of photography aren't rules because someone said so, they've demonstrated themselves over time to be things that most people, far more often than not, find appealing in a photograph or image. Things such as the rule of thirds, good exposure, contrasting or complementary elements and so forth.

What makes the Iwo Jima flag raising photo a Pulitzer Prize winning photo are the circumstances surrounding the event itself, and what the photo represents on a more historic and emotional level to the viewer. That's something this algorithm would never be able to rank, because it's got no basis on the elements that make up the photo themselves, but rather their context and meaning.

This sort of algorithmic photo rating system would likely rank a guy crossing the street as being as high or higher than the iconic photo of "Tank Guy" of Tienanmen square as well. Some photos are great not because they're great photos, but because they represent something to the viewer. These are two wholly different things.

You and the poster below should ask a gay friend where they shop. I don't mean that as a slight, but the handful of gay guys I know don't seem to have much trouble finding a much wider variety of clothing than my straight guy friends do. I've never thought to ask them where they shop myself so I can't help.