Also, a social observation -

This event demonstrates the fuzzy boundary between web publisher and web reader, particularly when blog comments and blog links are factored in.

In a sense, the deletion seems like a more old-school media answer than a new media aware response. The new media environment is that the readers and commenters feel part of a community related to the blog and posts. The participation of readers creates a feeling of ownership. Old-school media responses make some or many of those participating readers feel like a social contract was broken.

Actions done in public may be argued over, but actions done in secret are more likely to be seen as betrayal.

Again, sort of incongruous for this set of bloggers to have missed / neglected / not predicted that.

Without knowing the underlying issue, I can't comment on whether some reaction was necessary or appropriate. But BBers being surprised by the response when it finally became public seems odd.
It seems entirely predictable to me...

Two comments.

One - This is an excellent example of the law of unintended consequences. An action that was clearly legal, and presumably well founded, has turned around and completely backfired. If your goal was to remove yourselves from participation in any discussion of or promotion of Violet Blue, it seems that you have ultimately suffered an epic fail event.

It seems strange that this set of bloggers (BB contributors) would make that particular mistake. You all seem to be more aware than average of how events can get spun back on people on the web and net, and the dangers of appearances.

Two - While your unpublishing permit is in order, Mr Fagan will be remaining with us for the time being. Your license to unmake is hereby revoked. Unseemly public display of eldrich powers by public figures is a Class 3 Infraction, punishable by indefinite suspension of unmaking privileges and a fine of $13 and 400 blogs of community service. Unmaking privileges may be restored upon completion of a tactile public good such as production of an article demonstrating a creation event in "Make Magazine" or the like, or contribution of similar tactile object or construct to Burning Man or Maker Faire.

I think Lakoff is pretty insightful but narrowminded. Let me explain...

His methods are useful, for analyzing how minds and brains interact with ideas, communications, society, media etc. Not uniquely insightful, but useful.

But he can't break out of his own ideology when trying to apply those ideas.

Around the time of Desert Storm he wrote "Metaphor of War". I was at Berkeley at the time. I tried to engage him by asking him to apply the same methodology he'd applied to pro-war commentary / media / rhetoric / psychology to the anti-war crowd, to see how both sides behave when analyzed with the same tools.

He really didn't seem to appreciate my asking.

I think he's a nice guy, and a bright guy. And he has some insight into mental processes. But he's got the mental fault of having the conceit of thinking that his personal biases are obviously right, and therefore he only has to use his analytical tools to belittle his opponents, not introspectively on his own beliefs and political spectrum. In this, he fails the test for greatness.

You can buy large quantities of 90% peroxide if you know where to go. You can buy 70% in 55 gallon drums, or tanker car loads worth, with no more paperwork than the billing. It's not really a particularly well guarded chemical in the US, and is used in hundred thousand ton a year quantities in many industries.

Can we keep bombs off aircraft? No. Liquid explosives in carry-on containers was at the top of the list of low-hanging fruit things to try and prevent, if you seriously want to prevent them. But you can't entirely prevent them.

The list is rather long. A wide variety of things can be made to explode with enough energy to do fatal damage to an airliner. They can be disguised or carried on in a wide variety of manners. There are plenty of explosives with no nitrogen (the usual detection mechanism) and with density outside the usual range looked for with most X-ray equipment. There are places they can be put that nobody looks, and myriad ways to bypass security checkpoints that are extremely poorly guarded today.

I travel on airline flights. I do so because even though I know more ways to bring them down than I can conveniently count, I very much don't want to, and the odds that someone else is going to try seem to be far far lower than the odds that someone will kill me in a fatal auto accident getting to or from the plane. The odds that if they do try something they'll try something dumb rather than clever are high. A large portion of suicide bombers (airline and otherwise) are detectable by mere observation, which TSA is trying to learn from the Israelis. There's other stuff which helps reduce their odds of success.

So the risk is low.

But not zero, and there's no credible way to prevent the long tail of the risk function from being there. It's going to eventually happen again, when by random luck eventually a competent enough bomber with competent enough operational skill gets something on board. It may be a decade or more down the line. But it will happen again.

Argh...

If you read the story carefully, you note that the HTP wasn't mixed with Tang for the explosive, but with "other chemicals which the Daily Mail is not naming". Go down to the bottom, sixth para from the bottom.

The dye and tang were to disguise the mixture.

The various discussions about making something in-flight with HTP are a red herring. There are chemicals available which when mixed with sufficient concentration peroxide form a cap-sensitive or more sensitive high energy brissant liquid high explosive. Pre-mixing and carrying it on in that form was the risk.

This is not new - people aware of the mixtures have been trying to get airline security experts and the screeners to look for these things for years before 9/11.

@27 -

The W-62 is actually a 1970s production run. 1970-76.

Steampunk is somewhat appropriate for the field. It's taken until this year for anyone to publically post accurate diagrams on 1950s two-point air-gap lens systems for nuke warheads. The 1960s designs (70s deployed warheads and bombs), folded path inert wave shaper lens systems, still aren't much being publically discussed...

There are still people who gripe about Fat Man and Little Boy diagrams being public.

@27

Fine powder has lower density than normal metal, so you'd need more of it.

If you for example fabricated two cylindrical slugs each with 5.25 or so kilograms, put one in the bottom of the mug, and dropped the second one on top, you'd replicate the Godiva and Slotkin criticality excursions.

To actually make a large explosion you need a lot more than one critical mass (a lot of compression, reflection, or more than one critical mass to start with). But assembling one full critical mass has typically been lethal to anyone nearby in the room.

Assuming the cup's marked in milliliters, the "enough plutonium to make a bomb" level (about 580 ml, it looks like) is actually 11 kilograms worth, the unreflected standard density spherical critical mass.

In other words, not "enough to make a bomb" (which is actually 4-6 kg depending on model), but "Fill to this level and kaboom".

In #120, Merc writes:

Of all the people here who is saying "it looks like what a suicide bomber wears", how many have you have actually seen a suicide bomber wearing a bomb... and no, I don't mean in a movie or on some show like 24, I mean a real-life suicide bomber? If all you've seen is TV shows are you sure you're qualified to judge. Do you also believe that getting shot makes you sail backwards through the air? Do you believe that tires make a screeching sound when someone skids on a dirt road? Do you believe that high explosives create big orange fireballs?

Get a grip.

I haven't had the experience firsthand of seeing a suicide bomber, no. I've seen quite a lot of photos and videos of them. It's not like nobody's ever documented what they were doing.

In a small portion of the cases, there was something obvious and visible before the detonation, and people start reacting to it before the bomber is set off.

In Israel, they went from being poorly concealed to reasonably well concealed after security forces spotted and shot several would-be bombers. But there have been exceptions in other locations, and there have been non-terrorist crazy people bombers in the US and Europe and...

No, you don't fly backwards after being shot; most people go "Huh?", or "Ow", or simply fall down where they're standing, more often forwards than backwards. I kept on running.

No, skidding tires on dirt roads sound like a ... well, it's a low pitch VRRP more than a high pitch SCREEE you get on pavement. Really uncomfortable feeling as the driver, too.

Yes, explosions do make big orange fireballs, but usually that's only for a few tens or low hundreds of milliseconds and then you get a big black cloud as the gases cool down. If they stay bright and orange, it's either hollywood, or some SOB blew up a gasoline tanker on purpose or by accident (watched one of those happen from about a mile away up on a hill, in the US, on the 4th of July a few years ago... freeway offramp accident, tanker full of gasoline... large fireball rising out of the flatland below us, all of us going "Uh...").

Ack.

I've been around HW labs and built breadboard stuff... Up close, I'd see that, note no further wires going out to what might be detonators/real explosive elsewhere, and wonder what sort of art project it was.

From 20-30 feet away, it would look rather much like actual suicide bombs.

Yes, most suicide bombers wear the bombs concealed. No, not all of them. Yes, it's reasonable for someone who sees something at a moderate distance that they take for a suicide bomb device to freak out about it.

By analogy - cops shoot kids or adults with squirt guns rather regularly. It's the reason that real squirt guns are now brightly colored. But even so, in the dark, there are still mistakes.

In the light, some of the squirt guns look pretty silly. That doesn't mean that the officers didn't have completely legitimate and honest and well founded fear for their life at the time they fired.

I have no problem with this having been an honest mistake on her part. But... lesson learned for the geek squad. Some of the stuff we play with can be mistaken for bad things by normal reasonable people. We are under a social obligation to not cause widespread panic by doing things which are trivially misinterpreted as terrorist acts in progress. Even if what we're doing is otherwise not illegal, doing something that is easy to or likely to be misinterpreted in a significantly bad way is bad. Don't carry things in normal-people public that normal-people may think are bombs, guns, etc.

Wearing something like that to a sci-fi con, art thing, around campus? Context ok. Airport? Context DUMB.

The reason for the DMCA requiring formal notifications is that you have to hold people responsible for takedown requests. Without a formalized and verifyable process, no end of vandalism could result from miscreants sending out fake unverifyable takedowns for works or material which are legitimately posted or hosted.

This is a protection for authors and copyright owners, not a hindrance. If you want your legitimately hosted and posted online material to STAY online, you want anyone claiming there's a problem to have to have jumped through a bunch of hoops and be identifyable.

Jerry Pournelle would no doubt be livid if someone emailed his ISP with a takedown of his columns because of a one-email fake claimed copyright violation. But things like that have happened in areas where there aren't protections. Anyone long familiar with the Internet will know the risks here.

The DMCA is a balancing act. If the balance is set wrong, time will show that. People need to use it in good faith before claiming it's broken, though.