The TSA is only treating Port Security in a manner consistent with the way nearly all commercial datacenters are run. Only employees are allowed access to the datacenter - visitors are allowed with an authorized guest. In some (many?) CoLo facilites, even leasing rackspace won't get you access to anywhere you want to go, and escorts may be required to access some areas...

Though it isn't made particularly explicit in the TSA's TWIC materials, it looks to me like the TWIC is not an "all access pass", but rather a standardized ID/access card that is to be used as a credential for access control systems. There's no reason why a pass that gets you into the Port of Seattle as an employee would get you into the Port of Tacoma, let alone a facility in Boston.

As for your suggestion that they be made employees: they're on student visas, so I'm not sure that they can be "employed" as such. I'm also less convinced than you are that "employee" is some kind of back-door password to the approval process....

I see that Ken Hansen still believes that the TSA can do no wrong.

Ken quotes the TSA:

TWICs are tamper-resistant biometric credentials that will be issued to workers who require unescorted access to secure areas of ports, vessels, outer continental shelf facilities and all credentialed merchant mariners.

(Emphasis added.)

Ken:

If that is a truely unbearable demand on the researchers, they should then try and establish a non-commercial port where TWICs or escorts are not needed for unfettered access to all areas of the port.

More from the TSA:

we will continue to define the entire vessel as a “secure area,” making exception only for those special passenger and employee access areas which are discussed above

Perhaps they should also try and establish a way to do oceanography without using a "vessel". I hope those students are very strong swimmers.

(The exceptions only apply to passenger vessels and ferries, so claiming that WHOI should just "define secure areas" is a non-starter.)

Tom (#11): Boeing owns the Hughes satellite operation now, and I'd expect that they acquired the patent as part of that.

"In 2000, the Hughes satellite organization became a welcome addition to the Boeing family."

Our local alternative weekly newspaper, the Boston Phoenix, had a very nice article on filk just last week.

In the Looney Labs card game Chrononauts, killing Hitler (or saving him, if someone else has already killed him) is, unsurprisingly, the one Linchpin card that affects the most Ripplepoints.

Perhaps they should be asking for two fingers to get prints from.

Promethean (#1): it looks like CogNet is done by MIT Press, not the MIT Libraries. As in many large institutions, different groups may have different policies, procedures, and/or mindsets.

Check out Cory's lapel pin. Good thing he's not running for President, because the media would have yet another irrelevant controversy to manufacture.

What, London's no longer Secure Beneath the Watchful Eyes?

Late last year, a hack at MIT turned campus maps into Risk boards, the Media Lab into a Scrabble game, and this grassy area into the island of Catan.

Wait, isn't it a standard Bush administration talking point that they don't want universal health care because medical decisions should be made by doctors, not government bureaucrats[1]?

[1] Offer void if you want an abortion or are named Schiavo.

Nelson.C (#31): But does Choplifter run on your cell phone? (I suppose there might be a port.)

My cell phone has a better CPU, more RAM, almost as much storage (only because I haven't upgraded the 512MB Memory Stick M2 that came with it), and better bandwidth to the Internet (without the expensive leased line, and usable nearly anywhere) than the machine running eff.org had when I started as a sysadmin for the EFF in 1991. It also makes phone calls.

Glossolalia Black (#10): Ah yes, but what is it in 1988 dollars? One inflation calculator I found says that $2553 (2007) == $1416 (1988). When you allow for the monitor, stand, and AppleWorks that total doesn't sound so bad.

When those iPods were originally sold, they couldn't be used with rented videos, only purchased ones. Now, they can't be used with rented videos, only purchased ones.

In other words, Apple has taken away a feature these iPods never had to start with.

Look at it from the other side: people who upgraded to an iPod classic (the only way to get an iPod larger than 80GB) found out that their "Made for iPod" video accessories no longer worked unless they had Apple's new Magic Pixie Dust Chip inside. You spent a few hundred bucks on those virtual-screen glasses to watch movies on the plane? Too bad. That dock you bought to use with your stereo receiver? At least you can still listen to music through it.

Personally, if Apple offered me a firmware "down"grade for my iPod that removed rental videos but let me use old accessories, I'd install it.

So I'm sure that their fans will be happy to buy U2 songs through iTunes (remember the U2 iPod?).

After all, when U2 18 came out it had two new songs, and the beauty of digital is that you don't need to buy a hunk of plastic to get two new songs, and you can get just the ones you don't already own.

Except, of course, that those new songs are "Album Only" at iTunes. That's a great way to encourage people to just get copies of those songs (without DRM) from a filesharing network, and to "thank" (by which I mean "annoy") fans who already own the previous albums.

Jeopardy-style answer-in-the-form-of-a-question:

What is Chinese for 'Alberto Gonzales said this wasn't torture'?

bcsizemo (#8): If posting an image on the Internet makes it public domain, then what does sending video through my house using RF energy do to its copyright? Make that public domain? Somehow, I doubt Fox would like that particular line of reasoning.

Plainfeather (#22): Yes. You may remember him as "Brandon" in GalaxyQuest.

I think my favorite Hugo base is still the 2004 design by Scott Lefton.

It's a rocket; it should launch.

While I love the Cog ad, it's not 2007-vintage by any means; it aired in 2003 or so, I think. (The Sunday Observer included a DVD with the ad on it when we were in the UK in early 2003.)

Xopl (#4): You forgot an option.

3. The US Govt decides that this is just a few activists making a loud noise, and ignores them.

Pablissimo (#5): tvtropes.org has a great time pointing out the glowing spines issue. "In the miniseries and the first few episodes, it is shown that Cylon spines glow during sex. However, this was officially retconned by producers when it was pointed out that Dr. Baltar would then have a 100% accurate Cylon detector. In his pants."

There's a New York Times article on tourist shoppers taking advantage of the cheap dollar.

They bury the key bit in the third-from-last paragraph, though:

Most surprising, despite the visible increase of European tourists in places like New York, overall travel to the United States is still below pre-Sept. 11 levels, according to Cathy Keefe of the American Travel Industry Association. Overseas travel is down 17 percent from its peak in 2000. Without the positive effects of the weak dollar, “we can’t imagine what the numbers would be right now,” she said.

Yes, despite the dollar being so weak that people are having to wear some of their purchases to stay below the baggage limit on their return, we still can't get as many people to visit as we did back then. This sort of treatment, and the milder forms, are the reason.

Cory mentions the "hilariously dumb" calculus behind the $79,449 number. More details can be found in this old EFF newsletter.

There's a chunk listing the labor expenses (200 hours for a contract writer and another 200 hours for a "Paygrade 3 Project Mgr"), typing and editing time, "Order Labels (Cost) = $5.00", and so forth.

But here's the really fun part:

HARDWARE EXPENSES
VT220 $850
Vaxstation II $31,000
Printer $6,000
Maintenance 10% of costs

SOFTWARE EXPENSES
Interleaf Software $22,000
VMS Software $2,500
Software Maintenance 10% of costs

Yes, they included the entire cost of the hardware and software used to write the document (and the maintenance contracts). After all, don't we all throw away our computers after each word processing document we create?

DGallardo (#30): A DC-9 ditched in the Caribbean in 1970, and 40 of the 63 on board survived. One advantage it had over most jetliners, though, is that with rear-mounted engines there were no engines under the wings to act as huge brakes upon hitting the water. The NTSB report says that the aircraft floated for approximately 10 minutes before sinking.

It's difficult to tell if the Ethiopian Airlines flight that was hijacked in 1996 would have had a successful ditching without the difficulty of fighting the hijackers while trying to land a fuel-less aircraft on the water. (That was also not "the open sea", unlike the ALM DC-9.)

Jere7my (#20): No, the transparent "STOP" signs on the label would be normally oriented unless you were looking at the sticky side of the label.

Clearly we need to aggressively question anyone who might have destroyed these tapes. And by aggressively question I mean, well, that's what they've been calling it, so how can they object?

Ill Lich (#4): I've seen urinals with engraved pictures of flies as "aim points"; Amsterdam Schiphol Airport seems to be the usual reference, though I think I've seen them in one of the newer terminals at JFK as well (either T1 or T4, the latter replacing the old IAB).

C1Josh: Based on their comments in this 2005 article, Cambridge is likely too dense with too many multi-unit residences for Verizon to roll out FiOS.

I don't remember too many high-rise apartments in Bedford.

Population density of Tokyo: about 5800/km².

Population density of Cambridge, MA: about 6000/km².

At-home Internet options in Cambridge: Comcast cable, Verizon or Covad-over-Verizon-copper DSL. No FiOS.

It's not as if Cambridge is some Luddite stronghold, either.

I'm with Yamara; sucking all the fun out of Monopoly is about as difficult as sucking all the liquid out of one of those wax candy bottles. (And that's assuming you're playing with the actual rules rather than "put all the money on Free Parking" and similar nonsense; that's a recipe for an interminable game of tedium.)

I'll second the recommendation of Puerto Rico, but if you really want to use the market to crush the other players, try Power Grid. Creating a shortage of houses so they can't build is one thing; grabbing that one extra coal so they can't power their big power plant is much more interesting.

Most if not all of those sign photos were taken in the south Puget Sound area, where I lived in the 70s and 80s; I recognize some of the locations and even the signs (the Baydo's dealership at S. 72nd and South Tacoma Way) as having still been there in the mid to late 1980s. I suspect some of them are still there today.

Welcome to the War on Tourism.

I'm sure this was one of the factors in the Worldcon voting for 2009, especially since this year's was also outside the US. People who are unwilling to put up with US entry procedures will probably continue to vote for non-US bids where possible.

Maybe he's waiting for the levees to collapse, resulting in a flood that will put out the fires.

I have his Metro Maps of the World; it's an absolutely wonderful book. Transit Maps of the World sounds like a (possibly expanded, certainly updated) US edition.

It's organized in "zones", with the more major systems getting four pages, second-tier systems two, then one, then half a page, and on into the small ones that get a paragraph or two.

For real fun, though, see this map of the world's metro systems as stations on the London Underground. It's a shame you can't actually take the subway from Boston to London (with changes at New York and Rotterdam).

Note the description of the situation at Qualcomm Stadium in this New York Times article.

Hundreds of volunteers and city workers stacked up towers of pizza boxes, water bottles and blankets. Steaming cups of coffee were on offer as well as free massages and reflexology sessions.

A clown twisted balloons for children, several autism specialists were available to give parents of disabled children a break, and an electric guitarist jammed with his speaker turned low.

Compare this to the amenities provided at the Astrodome to people who'd been evacuated to Houston after Katrina, as covered in several posts here on Boing Boing. (Lockouts, blocking the low power FM folks for a few days for no apparent reason, etc.) And yet in that situation we had Barbara Bush assuring us that "so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this, this is working very well for them."

Thorzdad (#6): It's apparently because iChat (trying to be as auto-configuring as possible, like many Apple products) checks the end-to-end bandwidth at the start of the conference and tunes its settings appropriately. Then, a few minutes later when Comcast starts whomping your throughput with their traffic shaping, you're trying to shove 500kbps through a "192kbps" connection...and your video quality goes to hell.

The "fix" is to tell iChat to use a bandwidth limit of 200kbps (it's in Preferences → Video) so that it doesn't think it has a fast pipe.

The fix is to get a different Internet provider, if you can; between cable monopolies and Verizon yanking copper pairs during FiOS installs, you may not have much of an option....

The movie may be great, or it may stink.

Either way, I'm glad that Jumper and Reflex exist, and that Steven Gould is getting (what I hope is an egregiously large amount of) money out of the movie folks.

A good movie would be a bonus.

[Aside: why does the comment system filter out the <cite> tag?]

Pepsi_Max2K (#1): Airbus has been using sidesticks since the A320, and that shot isn't wide enough to show them. See these images from AVING, particularly the first and fifth photos.

Note that whether you fly with your left or right hand depends on the seat you're sitting in, so when you transition from a first officer slot to a captain's position, you are going to also be switching hands.

Jake Boone (#4): As often seems to happen, science fiction writers had the same idea a while ago, though in a different context. Larry Niven's teleportation "flash crowds" anticipated the Slashdot Effect; Isaac Asimov's "The Dead Past" makes the same point you do, but in reference to a time viewer.

There are some pictures of the device here.

Wouldn't it be most suspicious if you were bringing along "The Pet Goat"? That's such a powerful story that it can distract the Executive Branch for several minutes during a crisis, so imagine what it could do to a flight crew!

Teresa: SWFA is a line of cleaning products that will remove dirt from your kitchen floor, but may also rip up the linoleum in places after mistaking it for more dirt.

Popular products in the line include the SWFA Dusta (guaranteed to blow the dust off even the crustiest old author) and the SWFA NetJet (known far and wide for its ability to engender online discussions; warning, contents are highly inflammable).

Jere7my (#4): ObSF: Rainbows End.

Which is, as far as I can tell, not available as an e-book (unlike both Zones books, the short fiction collection, or The Peace War). It's like rain on my wedding day, or a free ride when I've already paid, or something.

Instead of buying microwave popcorn, I bought a Nordic Ware microwave popcorn popper. It's really basic: take the bowl, put in popcorn and optionally a little oil, then zap it. I then throw a little salt-free lemon pepper or something on it for flavor.

Unpopped kernels are cheaper than the nuke-a-bags and don't need to be prepackaged with "rich butter-oid goodness" or the like. The bowl's less than $10, so the payback period isn't too long.

Anonymous (#152): "My vote would be to have SFWA go after Scribd in court much as RIAA did to Napster. I think we all know what happened there and what the likely outcome would be here."

Yes, we do. Napster shut down its centralized file sharing system, and the legend of the Hydra was recapitulated as several decentralized file sharing systems sprang up to replace it. Instead of having a single well-known site that might have been willing to become a subscription service (paying royalties based on the number of copies made and giving record labels a vast amount of marketing data as well), the RIAA forced file sharing systems to evolve into forms that had no vulnerable central point. That was ever so productive, wasn't it?

I definitely like the new look, though I wouldn't mind the comments link going at the bottom of each post; I generally want to read the post first, then the comments.

One nitpick: it's "Nielsen Hayden" (i-before-e); it's part of the Making Light "spelling reference" section because it's often misspelled.