This made me think of think of a recent wired article

http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_radioactivecargo/all/1

TL;DR The dirty bomb scanners at the port of Naples went ape shit over a container from Saudi Arabia. Turns out it was a container of scrap metal that an old radioactive element from a medical scanner had found its way into. Good times.

The apocryphal story is that of my old boss. When he started with my old employer (a medical testing lab) he was in the x-ray lab, and as such had to wear a radiation badge. After a while he began forgetting to take the badge off when he left for the day, and his walk home (always the same route) tended to take him past a couple of the busier streets. No big deal, since he'd just swap out his badge in the morning before starting a new shift. One morning he comes in and the lab is shut down, and everyone has their serious faces on.

Turns out the badge he'd turned in from the day before had come back as hot. Not the "bad badge" type of hot, but the "you were definitely exposed to a pretty solid dose of radiation" type of hot. Per protocol everything had to be shut down, tested, procedures reviewed, yadda yadda. In the end, everything in the lab tested fine, and his was the only bad badge found. Best guess was that a truck that went past him on his walk home that day was (knowingly or unknowingly) carrying something nasty.

There's a lot of pretty foul stuff out there. The boy scout who build his breeder reactor a few years ago used radium paint that he found when his gieger counter tripped when driving past an antiques store. One of the post Fukushima radioactivity scares in Tokyo was caused by stored bottles of radium paint that had been forgotten decades ago. We'll probably see more stories like this, and I don't feel that's a bad thing. When it comes to stuff like this, stuff that causes cancer (actually causes cancer. Not like Cell Phones or wifi.), fuck your civil liberties. Public health & safety wins, even if its getting bought in the name of fighting "the terrrrrer"

"Sad, sad world. Where's the next Steve Wozniak?"

Watching video's like this and saying to him or herself "I can do better than that!" then heading down to their work space and doing so.

That is by far my favorite design. Great for letting loose in the office, and it's easily customizable. You can easily add ailerons with just a couple of scissor snips.

This is the best possible news for freedom in the here in the US. What? You want to cut off parts of the internet, why that would make us just like Iran! We can't have that! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph!

There's a fine line between "these pedantic assholes who get off on correcting people" and people who disagree with you and are therefore wrong.

Grandparent has a decent point, but the fact that he whiffed on several key points detracts from his argument. No, the army doesn't have fighters. Also, No, the president can't declare war. You might call it a pendantic asshole point when I say that we haven't gone to "war" in 70 years. But, calling every military action a "war" is incorrect. Just as the president using the military as his personal pop-gun squad without the approval of the people (or more accurately, their elected representatives.) is incorrect. It's not that hard to double check something, especially here on ye olde intertubes. Doing so kinda fits with that whole "Do it right the first time" ethic that has died off in society these days.

If you want to make your point heard, don't run around screaming half-assed, half remembered sound bites. Make a simple, well thought out, perhaps even slightly researched point. It's harder to refute. You also find out interesting things like the fact that it costs a mere $2.5 million dollars per year to run the Allen Seti array (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/08/10/success-seti-array-back-on-track/), and that the government accounting office was estimating a cost of $412 million per unit for the F-22 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-22_Raptor#Production_and_procurement). So you could run the array for about 165 years on the cost of "one army fighter." 165 years vs. 1 year? Gosh, that argument just gained some interesting new perspective, and I did it without sounding like your drunk uncle who spent thanksgiving bleating out Rush Limbaugh's fascinating rhetoric and explaining how liberals are ruining the country.

But if you're not keeping the pendant on a Monster(tm) brand lanyard, you're missing out. I can offer you one with silver connectors for 69.99, Gold for 79.99, but for a true audiophile such as yourself I recommend the platinum connectors for 99.99 (with an extended warranty available for 19.99)

Right, but you get the idea. Airlines would blame safety limits imposed by the FAA, when they had no intention of following the rule in the first place. It was a dodge.

They *need* to pad the time. For many years, airlines didn't have to report (or weren't affected by. I'm going totally apocryphal here so forgive the lack of citations) delays that were the fault of the airport / FAA. So, if a particular field could only handle 60 takeoffs per hour and they airline scheduled 75 (as was legal), those 15 flights that left "late" didn't get counted against on time performance, since it wasn't the airline that dictated how many aircraft could leave in a given window, it was the FAA. Neither did the 30 flights that left late the next hour, or the 60 after that, and so on.

I believe this game finally got stopped with the recent overhaul of rules regarding time spent on the tarmac. The New York airports were supposedly notorious for overbooking runway capacity. This would cause cascade effects throughout the system, since short haul flights would leave New York late ("not our fault") and get to say, Pittsburgh, late. They'd be late getting out of Pittsburgh ("again, not our fault"), and arrive in Chicago, late. So on and so forth until you had one flight that was late five times as it skipped across the nation. But it wasn't the airlines fault the plane was late. It was those mean old fuddy duddies at the FAA that made it a rule that an A310 can't take off 10 seconds after a 747 leaves La Guardia. *shrug* "Rules are rules."

Out side of fuel bowsers, very little on the tarmac burns diesel. You're also in a heavily filtered aluminum tube. The air is cleaner inside than out.

On the plus side, once you're airborne, you get a higher dose of radiation, courtesy of the sun and a less effective magnetosphere.

Trendnet has a good supply of cameras as well. They're cheap, but I can say from experience the 110w, 121w, and 312w all do a perfectly decent job. They're not the best thing in the world, but they just work. Trendnet's "monitoring software" is crap however.

640 x 480 cameras don't get good faces. Even megapixel shots from any more than a couple feet away aren't that great. A better bet is to cover vehicle approaches. No one is going to steal your TV on foot, no one is going to loot ten minutes worth of your stuff on foot, and cops have a much better chance of spotting "Two white males 1998 red ford ranger with a dent on the left side of the bed" than they have of spotting "black male with a mustache and an earring in his left ear wearing a blue shirt." The guy in the shirt will have a chance to change shirts before the cops even show up at your door. The guys in the truck are going to use that truck in another break in.

In my experience, the two guys doing home invasions (one guy goes in, one guy keeps the car running and sits on lookout.) will hit a neighborhood a few times before things get hot. If you can ID the car, cops will have a *MUCH* better chance at nabbing the perps. I passed a couple frames I managed to get of a car that was involved at a break in near my home to the county sheriff. The cops were thrilled to have that more than a description, as it gave them a much narrower focus.