as they're flying to Amsterdam I'd venture a guess they will be using hash-oil
sorry -- couldn't resist it

I fly to and from the EU on a fairly regular basis. Because I perform laptop music I try to make my kit as compact and accessible as possible.

All my cables, adapters, audio cards, controllers, etc. pretty much fit into my carry-on backpack and a plastic snap lid box in my checked baggage.

It's the chaotic dance of shoes off, jacket off, belt off, coins out, cellphone out, laptop out, electronics out and having about $5k worth of goodies sailing into the maw of xray hell only to wonder if someone snatched it and took off on the other end while you wait for the lady with the baby in a stroller, diaper bag and carry-on struggling in front of you. (I don't know how women traveling with kinders do it. They need some sort of award for this!) And then having to reassemble one's person on the other side of the energy portal while taking inventory on all said items.

The other thing you realize straight away when being 'processed' by the TSA is that the people hired to the TSA teams are not the brightest bulbs on the xmas tree - if you catch my drift.

That being said they make up for this lack of general intelligence with a ironclad adherence to self appointed (albeit misguided) authority. Reich called it 'little man syndrome.' The thing to realize is that you can't win against this so trying to outsmart them is useless and only leads to them going further out on the irrational axis and enforcing even more absurd 'rules' with sadistic pleasure. Not good for your serenity.

Travel Tip1: remain silent and adopt a 'deer-in-the-headlights' look when asked or commanded to do something.

Travel Tip2: adapt or die.

Safe travels!

I met this artist while teaching a workshop in Aarhus.DK:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=xAhmVus62S4

not CC but still way better than 'Tone' IMHO

this is amazing and it is sad more people in public aren't doing exactly this!

Can you imagine if we had a small army of Joel's on TV politely taking politicians to task for their thieving hypocritical behavior?

way to go Joel!!

@ANTINOUS: true, but Schiphol has an huge space outfitted with loungers for people to lie down on – I often check email on my laptop and catch 40 winks there between flights...more airports should be like this...

this is a common discovery for me in most EU airports and is sad to see that Heathrow (the worst airport ever IMO and one I try to avoid transferring through like the plague) doesn't take traveling laptoppers comfort into account while designing a new airport terminal.

If only all airports were as nice as Schiphol!

//Takuan (13), had you not run into anarcho-capitalists before? The "sell the post office, privatize the streets" contingent? They've been around a long time. Back in the old days, they constituted a larger percentage of the total online population.

are you sure you aren't confusing 'anarcho-capitalists' with 'crypto-anarchists'?

I really don't remember the internet circa 1993 being overrun with anarcho-capitalists...?

@dculberson
go to the doctor much? or did I hit a soft spot with the obesity jibe?
FWIW: I hear 'Obesity for Dummmies' is written on a 6th grade level - so you should be able to handle it.

@ZUZU: LOL -- being an ex-New Yorker who lived in the Mission in San Francisco for 15 years I can vouch for this!

But that 'pizza' is merely an armful of heart-clogging belt-widening deli meats tossed onto some doughy bio-hazard substance and ordered by some obese person driving an F-350 to their local drive-in pizza hut.

All the while a copy of 'Obesity for Dummies' lies unread on the passenger seat next to them.

@ZUKU: LOL -- being an ex-New Yorker who lived in the Mission in San Francisco for 15 years I can vouch for this!

But that 'pizza' is merely an armful of heart-clogging belt-widening deli meats tossed onto some doughy bio-hazard substance and ordered by some obese person driving an F-350 to their local drive-in pizza hut.

All the while a copy of 'Obesity for Dummies' lies unread on the passenger seat next to them.

did anyone happen to notice that he pulls up in a frickin' Porsche before he starts caterwauling about whirled peas? Oh the heartfelt angst of privileged white boys!

leave it to bb comments to flip the idiot switch in its readers

this reminds me of the book 'Remainder' by Tom McCarthy

Anechoic (12), please don't call people anarcho-capitalist weenies in so many words.

wow...ru a moderator or schoolmarm?

anarcho-capitalist weenie...yawn...

too bad DUB won't sell too many of these before they are illegal in California.

I wonder what Jennifer Steinkamp could do with these? :))
http://jsteinkamp.com/quicktime/html/reel.html

mp3 - as all compression schemes - satisfy the need to reduce bandwidth and storage consumption in part due to a demand for portability

as these constraints fall away (due to bigger and cheaper transmission/storage media) and no longer pose an impediment we will see a proliferation of the higher fidelity formats

imagine 96kHz/24bit instead of mp3

I know I do

@COAXIAL
agreed about there being multiple reasons...I just tried to sum it up by pointing to our behavior there i.e. it being more or less a symptom of what you enumerated

w/r/t ME totalian regimes: why does it matter one whit what WE want in SA or anywhere for that matter?
They have the right to self-determination so long as they abide by basic humanitarian rules of the world community

//the Al Qaeda leader's main objection is that the American military has Christians, Jews, and women in it, all of whom are supposed to be forbidden from being in the Holy Land, according to his bigoted nutbag salafist version of Islam.

oy veh, this view is so naive and dangerous

their objection has far more to do with the fact that the US has inflicted its materialist, wasteful, hyper-consumer 'culture' upon their society with our corporate and military presence.

we are pigs at the trough and they are sick of it

//The US national security concern is that a disruption in those nation's oil supply will devastate their economies and subsequently ours, and that these countries would then get involved militarily in the region.

Re: the 'US national security concern':
- 'those who control the oil, control global politics'

check out Robert Newman's DVD:
The History of Oil:
http://www.robnewman.com/shop.html

this thing is kinda like the iPhone: it will be an expensive doorstop by this time next year...
give me a pda/mobile running linux and foss any day

yawn, next...

does wearing a $120 art LE hoodie really say 'I'm cool'? or does it say I'm a bourgeois, privileged wannabe?
hmmm