Hmmm. If they come round my house, they will find several hundred Doctor Who-inspired drawings, by my 7 year old son. If I scan them and put them up on Flickr, will I get a snotty BBC threat letter too? Lame.

flamingphonebook,

The point is, this item (article, blog post, link, whatever you call it) is the latest in a extraordinary line of absurdities reported from the front line of the "war on terror".

In these stories we see a nation tying itself in knots trying to fight an unwinnable "war" against a largely imaginary foe, and in the process wasting billions of dollars, causing unbelievable inconvenience to its own citizens and alienating much of the rest of the world, which looks on in amazement.

You ask: "What configuration of government is necessary for you to say, "OK, the terrorism problem is being handled in a fair and efficient manner."?

Ok, well, there are many countries in the world that suffer terrorist attacks from time to time. It's nothing new. Planes got hijacked in the '70's. Bits of London got blown up every couple of years, people died. Hundreds of people died in the Bali bombing. Madrid, etc. None of these countries decided that "everything changed" Because you know what - when you say that, and when you screw up again and again like the US is now, in attempting to perpetrate this absurd "war" - THE TERRORISTS WIN! The best way to "fight" terrorism is quietly. Without panicking. Without allowing any noticable change to your way of life. Any maybe, just maybe, finding a way to give the terrorists a voice that reduces their desire to kill your citizens (are you thinking that's unacceptable? - well, it's working pretty well in Northern Ireland right now).

And finally - having a manhunt for a couple of guys taking pictures in a ferry as an effective way of spending your tax dollars on reducing the risks of terrorist attacks? Nah.

I was assaulted, in the London Underground, twice, on two separated occasions, by the same guy. Under the gaze of the CCTV cameras. When I had my interview with a transport police officer after the second occasion, I asked if they could get anything to help them with identifying the psycho. He said that it would be too much trouble for them to look through the tapes.

"Not only is it disrespectful, but distasteful and offensive, particularly to children who may have been exposed to this nonsense."

Fool. A child would laugh. Children don't find anything much in language "offensive". Only a Daily Mail reading pompous ass would say something like that.

Great letter Cory. At some point I may change my ISP. Whether Virgin is anywhere on the list of possibles, depends on how they respond to you. If it's not good enough, then bollocks to them.

Not sure about #102, saying that ID is a step in the right direction, away from full-on creationism.

Some proponents of ID might be attempting to "reason in good faith."

However, I still see it as a pretty sinister and calculated attack on reason, and reasonableness. A slip backwards down the slope to superstition, and, frankly, the medieval.

But in the end, I guess I agree with you, that the way to get rid of ID is to attack it as science. As science, it's up there with healing crystals and alchemy.

I suspect that it's Brimley that resembles cats (generic) rather than individual cats resembling him (individual).

This idiotic no-fly list has got to be a stalking horse for universal biometrics, right?

I mean, a basic list of suspicious NAMES is so clearly not going to work, that they must have instituted it, just so that it could be seen to fuck up royally, and then give them a justification for finger printing/retina scanning everyone on the planet. Maybe insert RFID chips in our brains.

Right?

There was terrorism in the 70's, and 80's and '90's. And we dealt with it, kind of OK. We even got the IRA to agree to stop it. What is it about nowadays, that causes such absurd spasms in the US and UK?

I grew up on the early Heinleins (Red Planet, Tunnel in the Sky etc), and also a couple of Clarke's ones for kids (Dolphin Island, Islands in the Sky). I re-read every decade or so. Quality! I'm glad to hear the field is flourishing.

I'm not keen on daft religious practices, but this is rather sweet. I do wonder what would happen, however, if the baby was dropped with an accidental rotation, and landed either on his/her head, or on an outstretched arm? But then again - life is full of risk!

Caustics, refracted through a glass ornament or something. You can see a similar effect (much more complex) in the title sequence for My Stepmother is and Alien.

In this case, SO easy to find what's causing it.

Just find a place where your arm blocks the light, and then follow "up stream". Or, another way to do the same thing, go put your head where the "alien" image is, turn round to look outwards away from the wall, and where is the blinding light coming from? A glass bowl on the window sill? A building across the street?

Anyway - cute, and pretty.

If science leads us to genocide, then what does religion lead us to?

I propose taking Mr Stein, stripping him of all products of science (eg, leave him naked) and drop him in the middle of Gaza. Or maybe the Congo. Darfur? The choices are endless.

@ #24 posted by Antinous:

"But even films with multi-million dollar budgets have crappy special effects. You don't really see good special effects until you get into blockbuster budgets."

I'm sorry, that's balls. If the visual effects are good, you won't notice them; you only notice the bad stuff. Plenty of sub-blockbuster budget films have good vfx. Plenty.

And as for your second point: that "Script, acting, directing, editing are all cheap. They just require talent." Getting these things right generally takes time. Time costs money. Talent also costs, unless you really luck out with someone at the start of their career.

Lock them up! Put them in care. They're probably terrorists.

Good idea. Quite poetic. Anything that makes drivers realize that bike riders have a right to road space is good.

@JEFF #27

Jeff, your ignorance never fails to amaze me.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=389519&in_page_id=1770

Just one example from 30 years of terrorist bombings carried out in the UK. Not to mention the fact that we had several simultaneous bus and metro bombs just a few years ago. Didn't they bother to report that on Fox News?

Wake up sunshine - some of us are able to deal with terrorist nonsense without constant pant-wetting. Or should I say WERE.

@ihamadryad #30

I did NOT say that. You took someone else's nonsense and put it in my mouth. VERY bad ettiquette.

Mind your attributions, sir.

"it would be two days before the state of Michigan allowed Ratte's wife, U-M architecture professor Claire Zimmerman, to take their son home, and nearly a week before Ratte was permitted to move back into his own house."

Un...fucking...believable.

What is WRONG with security people, police, state authorities, if they really acted in this way? Have they totally lost their grip of reality? To take a 7 year old kid away from his family for that length of time over a simple harmless mistake? If this had been my child, I'd like to think I would take them apart over this.

That security guard should have quietly pointed out the error, everyone would have had a laugh, and that would have been the end of it.

Doesn't Canada have a monopolies commission?

What's up with the moaners? The front page says that they are waiting for substantiation. If you want news that locked down (and a day old), go watch CNN.

Re Dr Hofmann - thanks for the memories!

#42 fbrusca - love the sound of your project. I'd buy a copy. That's the George R Stewart that wrote "Storm" and "Earth Abides", right?

Another soviet-style trick US (and UK) law enforcement departments might like to try is the intentional distortion of maps. I mean - there's no knowing what those evil terrorists would do with accurate plans and maps. Better to be safe than sorry. Ban all maps, I say!

#36 -

Well, whiteness/brownness isn't necessarily a good indicator of the likelihood of one's being a terrorist, in the US.

Ask Timothy McVeigh or the Unabomber.

Jonathan:

How about organzing those groups of inconvenienced pedestrians? Groups of them could run out into the stream of cyclists, forcing them to stop. You might even get a juicy pile up!

I'm a cycle commuter (11 miles a day through rush hour London traffic), and a pedestrian, and I even drive a car (not often in town though).

I'm broadly on the side of the cyclists and their protest. Cities need to wise up and make cycling a lot easier and safer.

But then again, I do find mass cycle demos a bit intimidating, and there are a LOT of arsehole cyclists out there (single-gar bikes, reluctance to ever put a foot on the ground resulting in absurd wobbling around at intersections in everybody else's way, exceedly bad attitude - you know who you are)

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/allen.conquest/gallery/vulcan1.jpg

... if yer interested.

Tell me that's not one incredible-looking bit of military hardware.

Beautiful.

I remember, as a child, being taken to air shows, where the star turn would be taken by the nuclear-capable Vulcan bomber. INCREDIBLY noisy! But what a beautiful design.

An oldie-but-goodie:

...the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.
H. L. Mencken (1880-1956)

If anyone knows the date Mencken wrote this, and in which context I'd be grateful.

Anything that serves to promote fear is a winner.

Our own authorities have become the "terrorists". Quite literally.

Is this the girl (er - I mean female scientist) from Quatermass and the Pit?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/poletti/2446568492/in/set-72157604767547323/

Well, it's a grab bag from all over the place, but I like his taste. Really, really funny pictures.

I wonder if the person who dialled 999 and reported this guy as a dangerous paedo has posted his/her own photos of his/her kids on Flickr?

Interesting touch, to make the size of the type proportional (with upper and lower end compressions) to the populations of the countries. Reflects, one could say, the potential of the countries. Hmmm. UK is doing OK, but I have to swallow a bit of post-imperial hubris. And, I'm fascinated to see US sinking back into the background. I'm not anti-american, but, like much of the population of the world, am a bit weary of the assumption that the US has some special place in the scheme of things. Go Brazil. Go India. Etc.

Geek Out!!!!!

@REBDAV

Do you really think a gunfight in an airplane, or a crowded airport terminal is a good idea?

The more deadly weapons around, held by twitchy amateurs, the more likely it is that bad things will happen, and the more - er - deadly the situation will be.

OK - you think that if all the good people have guns, then they will be able to outgun the bad guy?

Wrong - all it means is that there is a vastly increased change of serious bad shit happening.

And please don't quote the US constitution. When that bit was drafted they were thinking about a very different situation, in another age.

Need a few of those in Soho.

C'mon Ken!

The Congo is a deeply screwed up place. Anyone who's heard the reports of BBC Radio 4 lately will know that. Very sad.

"Looking at someone funny" is classified as a form of assault in the US?

Wow.

#115 - amen to that, brother!

#100 "But, some people need that 'crutch of faith' that darwinism demands, so - look! santy claus too!"

*tsk* Talk about twisted things round. Darwinism Is Not Faith! It's a beautiful hypothesis, supported by overwhelming evidence, everywhere you look for it. It's by far the best theory we have. It makes predictions that turn out to be right. Over and over again.

As a working theory, to be frank, it craps all over anything anyone else has offered. Even those jewish scribe guys back in the Iron Age.

Or was God just trying to trick us when he planted all those fossils in the ground? Oh wait - he was testing our faith, right? My god (no caps). The lengths evolutionists go to to wriggle away from the obvious.

The earth is flat. Black is white. Evolution doesn't happen.

Now we have almost omni-present cameras, and the internet, I think it's really important to use these to push back against... well, against authority.

"The Man" now has cctv and linked databases.

"We" now have a video camera in every cellphone, and the ability to turn any misbehaviour by a public servant into a cause celebre.

GAME ON!!!!

@#67 "I guess all the "Brit" cops are skinny little waifs?"

In comparision to this example - yes, they are.

I really don't believe someone would be able to stay in the job of police officer in the UK at that level of obesity. I expect a desk job would beckon, if the condition was judged to be glandular or something.

Being able to stay on one's feet much of the day, move fast if necessary, is considered to be part of the job.

Wow, that ol' Intelligent Designer sure keeps hisself busy.

#61 Wow, does anyone else find it disturbing that the cops weight gets so much attention. How does what she weighs have anything to do with it,"

... well, being so unfit that you aren't able to do your job might be a concern. And the fact that she'd parked as close as possible to a restaurant - well, you get the point.

As a Brit, I gaze at the sheer colossal bulk of some US police officers, and marvel.

Well, respect to Tuymans for agreeing to this.

But the work itself is hardly attention-grabbing. And you could say - pages from a fabulous best selling novel, if scattered on the floor somewhere, would probably receive just as little attention. Doesn't mean the novel is bad.

So, yes, it's about context. People probably thought this was a particularly dull bit of half-erased graffiti, and therefore ignored it.

In this setting - give me Banksy any day of the week.

I saw Underworld at the Camden Roundhouse a few months ago, and they had a whole bunch of giant turgid inflatable tubey things with lights in them at the back of the stage. Pretty effective!

Wow. Do you think I could make a living doing this? I could do a better composite than any of these in about 30 seconds.

weird weird weird.

There's something a bit Roger Dean about it all, too. Suitable cover material for that Yes comeback album?

Wow, that was weird. Hard work, but quite funny. I've had acid trips like that. But not for many years, oh no.

This is exactly why I always buy the hard copy. And will for the foreseeable.

What's most frightening is the backstory -

1) government, for whatever reason, encourages climate of fear and suspicion

2) every jumped up little security guard sees an opportunity to relieve his boredom by hassling anyone with a camera.

OK - so far, not earth-shattering. But I wonder if this is actually how fascism gets up to speed? Every dictator (or similarly inclined government) needs a hoard of puffed up little dragoons to do the dirty work. Seems as if there's be plenty of applicants.

MAMMAL - why don't you apologize for being an idiot, and getting all your facts wrong?

Mammal has no other postings that I can see.

Suggest he is disemvoweled, as a stooge, attempting to manipulate a story for his employers.

#50 - you're joking, surely?

Most of this crap was invented in the States.

Astonishing. So why isn't this on the front age of the broad sheets? What can one do? I doubt if I email my MP a link she will look at it. Hmmm.

Heh - their site is totally buggered.

Maybe protocol/etiqette should be that BoingBoing writers give commercial sites like this a few days' warning of an upcoming blog entry, so they can upgrade their servers/pipe.

OK, I'm as against this ridiculous scare mongering anti-camera nonsense as the next bongboinger.

But, reading between the lines, this is about someone taking photos of a band on stage with a pro-looking camera:

"The 49-year-old started by firing off a few shots of the warm-up act on stage. But before the main attraction showed up, Mr Smith was challenged by a police officer who asked if he had a licence for the camera."

If you go to a concert (and this seems to be something of the sort) and stand by the stage and take pics with a big SLR-type camera, there's a really good chance you will be stopped - usually by venue security. Nothing to do with anti-terrorist absurdities. It's more about venue photo licences (which exist), band PR rights and the like.

My 2p.

"Across Chinese society, parents appear completely at sea when it comes to raising their children."

Shouldn't that read "across the industrialized world"?

Item went Buy It Now for $14.95. Similar one is now under bidding at $152.20.

The first guy had a bargain, eh?

Poor kid.

Now he has had a taste of "authority" fail I hope he doesn't get addicted.

All the situation needed was for the teacher to say that sniffing pens (Snopake, etc) isn't a good idea, and to explain why, and the class would have had some useful education, and everyone would've gained something.

As it is, the idiot teacher and principle have, by the looks of it, humiliated a child, and made the entire class *really* interested in the idea of solvent abuse.

Stupid stupid stupid. A failure to educate responsibly.

You want Cubism and computers, you should look here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-DqZ8jAmv0

Unbelievable arrogance! And (some) Americans wonder why their country is feared and hated across much of the world.

But then again, we (Brits) did firebomb Dresden, and toy with Anthrax during WW2. But then yet again, that was a real war, not a hysterical over-reaction to a single terrorist incident.

Cubism an influence on GUI design? Hmm - I'd take a lot of convincing. But then again, cubism always left me totally cold.

Very far-sighted.

What worries me is how accepting people are. Not only of giant databases that are starting to link up. But also of cctv cameras everywhere, companies snooping on employees etc etc. It's all building up into a rather frightening picture. Orwellian, indeed.

If you said to someone, in say 1948, that your bank details, private letters, and personal movements were known to, and recorded by various goverment agencies, thay would have been horrified. Yet we calmly accept it. Or that your employer might expect to take blood samples from you, open any mail sent to you at work etc. Sheeeesh.

My employers are sending out new contracts to people soon. I'm going to be taking a real close look at mine. If it includes an corporate nazi shit, I may well tell them to shove it up their arses.

I have a great deal of respect for this guy, but what the video doesn't address is that fact that his method for transporting the stones woudn't have worked for Stonehenge, as far as I can see, as it relies on very hard ground. From Wales to Wiltshire is a few hundred miles of very soft earth!

Why why why didn't they slowly ramp up?

I read that they ran dummy runs with fake passengers etc, and they didn't run at 100% projected capacity from day 1, but really: - wouldn't it have been sensible to open with maybe 20% capacity passenger load - do the big opening fanfare, have people say "Oh, it's so lovely and quiet and tranquil etc etc etc" and then, when the publicity has faded and people are happy, ramp up gently (shaking out bugs in the inter-related systems all the way) to full capacity over a few months. Totally bloody obvious, isn't it?

Can I have a £100,000 a year consultancy gig, please?

What's wrong with just playing the "God Save Our Queen" and standing to attention? "Oldest TV station sign-off in existence", my arse.

Not great.

Blinks are way off. And the lip movements.

But something about it is quite compelling.

I think, CGI-wise, there are quite a few cheats going on. I suspect it's just projected photo textures on quite a primitive rig. But something about the bold simplicity of the facial expressions, and the soft skin texture hits a nerve.

Certainly, it's right at the bottom of uncanny valley.

EMP.

Might as well do the job properly.

Yet another example of why having a gun around your house is a dangerous and usually stupid thing to do. Would you feel safer if you had a few grenades too, gun fans?

Great for sealing out the sound of crackling flames as your house burns around you.

Where is the logic that ingesting all these substances actually makes the body function better (or longer)? Seems unlikely to me, somehow. In terms of evolutionary biology.

Would anyone care to define "mysticism"?

Seems to me that "mysticism" and the scientific method are mutually exclusive.

Now, if by "mysticicism" you mean the warm fuzzy feeling you might get from looking at some Hubble images, or thinking about, like, sexy wierd quantum stuff then, yeah. Maybe. Whatever.

Oh shit. There was I, thinking of sacking my yahoo mail account (for being slow and lame) in favour of gmail, and now I see that I should have neither. Can't major web compaies that are essentially transnational set themselves up somewhere like Sealand, that doesn't have ludicrous US-style information laws?

I'm off to bed to read a Clarke short story or two, from one of my lovely dusty old 1950's and '60's paperbacks. Maybe "The Star" or "If I forget thee, oh Earth". Or "The Sentinel" or "The Nine Billion Names of God". What an imagination, what a great mind.

Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke: all gone. Only Ray Bradbury left!

wikipedia is all over it:

----
In December 2007, the occasion of his 90th birthday, Clarke recorded a video message to his friends and fans, bidding them "good-bye".

Clarke died on the morning of March 19, 2008, after suffering from breathing problems, according to Rohan de Silva, one of his aides.
----

It's strange to see that, from my point of view, he is going to die "tomorrow". Clarke would've liked that, I think.

Oh no!

Rest in peace, voyager! You've always been an inspiration.

I have to bitch about yet another bit of stuck-together steampunk decoration.

So what would I rather see?

How about a story about the old guy who modded his 1960's Morris Minor car with water injection, thereby improving his fuel consumption by 25% (he says).

Or how about a real "clacker" computer display, with wooden pixels?

Now THAT would be interesting!

Buy Indian.

Given a choice between the two emerging super powers I know who I'd rather send my business to.

I just bought one! Perfect geek birthday present.

I just hope they can cope with the glut of orders they get, now they've been Boing Boinged.

So... if you are black, from single-parent family, Mum is a drug addict, etc etc - you are on the DNA database from the age of 5. And if you are white, middle class, blah blah, you aren't.

So, automatically, the former kid, *no matter what he does in life*, is more likely to be a suspect, hauled in etc etc. Further disadvantage, resentment, social exclusion. F*cking great. A vicious circle.

I note that the idiot that came up with this proposal was pulled with a hour's notice from a planned appearance on Radio 4's Today programme this morning.

Excellent use of your tax dollars, people.

Yk yk yk. Rplsv ncrsttns f pntlss rstz nnsns.

Now I've seen the actual pics, in situ on the pottery, I'd say it's highly debatable whether the intention is to show a sequence of actions. I don't buy it.

Can you do it with drops of molten sugar?
Instant icing sugar!

Up for interperatation.

Is it really an attempt to show a sequential action (goat jumping up to bite leaves off a tree) - or just some sloppy painting, with the goat drifting off centre? I'd be interested to see the actual bowl, with goat images in context. Not this animated gif.

The main moneter robot heading for the international space station is Europe's "Jules Verne" space truck.

Go Europe! Someone had to step up and replace that antiquated, expensive and unreliable shuttle!!! ;)

I heard about a Dad that told his kids that when an ice cream van plays music, it means it has run out of ice cream. Is that evil, or is it genius?

#15 - As the grateful recipient of a tax-funded national heathcare system, I'd say that it's one of the pinnacles of our civilization. I really fail to see how one could effectively argue against it.

@11JODDEHA

That is exactly right. Thatcher (or one of her speechwriters) coined the phrase "the oxygen of publicity".

The whole point of terrorism is that you can't fight it. But you can ignore it.

More people die on the roads of the US every year than die in decades of global terrorism. Is our entire transport infrastructure paralysed with road traffic safety checks? No. Business as usual. Society has decided that it's prepared to pay the price for doad transport convenience.

But - air travel is made into a living nightmare by pointless security checks. Has been for decades. Airport security is nothing to do with saving lives. It's to do with money, nationalism and short-term politics.

Hmm. Let's hope that celebrity culture doesn't permeate any deeper into Boing Boing. Or am I being a miserable old killjoy?

Life imitates art? NO!

The cool-looking imperial hardware in the Star Wars films is so clearly inspired by Nazi-tech that this new mine-tank thingie's Vaderness should come as no surprise.

"He cited recent research on the ability of Russian speakers to detect shades of blue [pdf] that English speakers classify as a single color."

Hmm - RECENT research? I did Russian at school for a few years in the early '80s, and I distinctly remember my teacher telling me that Russians don't have a "blue" as such, but rather two colours which we English-speakers would call light blue and dark blue.

Recent research indeed!

An otherwise intelligent friend of mine swears by expensive little inserts for his CD player tray that supposedly reduce static on CDs. Yes, optical CDs. How the hell would static affect a reflected laser beam? Sadly, "high-end" audio is a hotbed of over-priced nonsense.

That... is... REPULSIVE! Every design-sensitive gene and synapse is crying out in pain. Bleugh.

You know, I considered keeping my children "off net". Not seriously, but it was actually a bit of a sad moment when it came time to "register".

How easy would it be to have a child, that was never "known" to the authorities? Probably easier if you live in Deliverance country, I suppose.

Cop was acting liked a Meth-head. Should've been tazed to the floor, and then given a good kicking just to be sure.

But to be serious - I'm AMAZED at the people who think this cop was acting admirably. What are YOU people on?

What kind of place do you want to live in? Seems like you'd just love Burma, or Afganistan under the Taliban, or maybe even Nazi Germany. In those places people really know how to fear and respect authority. And that's a good thing in itself, right?

I love the fact that it says "The following reputation level was assigned to it: Neutral"

It's NEUTRAL! Better block it then! Can't be too sure in this world!

I could tell you a story about David Byrne told to me by a friend of a friend. But it's far too filthy and shocking for BoingBoing. Tut, tut, David.

So, so dumb.

Right - if a terrorist WAS stupid enough to pick an airliner as a target (when there are so many much juicier, unguarded targets lying around), he has a new option: get info on who the marshall is, identify him on the flight, and take his gun. I consider that a far likelier scenario that the marshal actually being able to do anything useful with that gun.

Good old fun-loving Saudis. Yes, maybe culture and morality is all relative, but I know which kind of place I'd rather live in. Who gains, exactly, from this kind of loony control-freakery?

Makes me wonder how we Brits (and Irish!) just got on with things through several decades of occasional (US-funded) terrorist bombings...

No one lost their minds and started a war on an abstract noun. No one decided you couldn't take baby milk on a plane. No one decided to go pick on a random foreign country and destroy it just because we felt a bit peeved. Tsk.

"Home taping is killing music. And it's illegal!"

Remember that stupid logo - cassette tape as skull and crossbones? God knows how many bands I got into via "illegal" tapes made of their records by friends, and how many purchases ensued. Kuh!

I consider it none of anyone's business but my own what travels down the wires or waves into my computer. What's next? A ban on any encrypted data?

Jeff - would it be OK for the authorities to go through all your snailmail, just in case there was - oh, I dunno, child porn or bomb-making instructions in there? Go on, you've got nothing to hide. Oh, and while you're at it, strip off and bend over so the nice policeman can check there's no drugs up your backside.

@NikFromNYC:

Well, yes, all your points are very valid. But then again, such arguments were also probably put to every long distance voyager/colonist in history. Why bother exploring the new world when 16th century Spain is so lovely? Why get on that longship to England, when 9th century continental Europe is full of empty fields that just need a bit of draining?

Exploration and colonisation aren't a purely rational exercise. So while your points are solid - yes, Antarctica is certainly an easier place to live than Earth orbit, the Moon or Mars - the non-terrestrical options at least have the benefit of being away from Earth-bound political interference. And history shows, a lot of the time people dodn't just want land, they want freedom.

@jlbraun

"Gun control is fundamentally a bigoted, racist, sexist, ageist, statist idea that is *so* 20th century. Get with the program."

What program would that be? The one that results in God-knows how many injuries and fatalities a year in the US, and elsewhere? Guns are nasty little machines, fundamentally designed for killing, and they cause untold misery. No matter how much some people like to have them round as a (twisted) hobby.

Is he an alien from a planet with extremely high gravity?

NikFromNYC:

You can make great scrambled eggs in a microwave. I do it all the time. So do most of the cafes I know of. You just have to know HOW.

People could Google "Dubai Tourist Board" or suchlike, find someone to email (the place I found has a form) and tell them that the chances of you vacationing or accepting employment in Dubai have just dropped to zero. A few thousand emails telling them they are embarrassing themselves by acting like nazis and treating visitors like criminals might piss them off enough to lighten up. Or maybe not.

Mind you, US immigration is pretty bloody scary at the best of times.

Oh for a world with no borders. But then of course, most governments would be out of a job, so that ain't gonna happen.

Nicely done. Excellent! You have my full support - and the more people that step up and say "enough" to these creeps the better.

Oh - now I can see it. Sorry!

No longer available on YouTube, as far as I can see. Why was it taken down?

The Quiet Earth: Interesting film, about a guy who wakes up to find everyone else in the world gone. Well almost everyone. And, inevitably, the movie starts well and slips fast, down towards suckdom. But still, worth renting if you can find it. Some fun scenes and ideas.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089869/

Earth Abides: if only someone would make a good, honest film of that. Set in the late 1940's like the book, in San Francisco. And allowing itself to be pretty damned depressing, like the book. I like an open, dark ending, me.

Hmmm. Putting a faux victorian sleeve on a modern (and therefore semi-disposible) gadget seems to me like a bizarre waste of time. Inelegant. It's just - FAKE! A little smirking joke. I... just... don't... get it! But I guess that's my problem.

But talking of steampunk - I hope everyone that digs that particular sub-genre has read Keith Roberts's Pavane. Beautiful book.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pavane-Millennium-SF-Masterworks-S/dp/1857989376/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198621039&sr=1-1

Ridiculous crap like this, happening at US airports just makes people less likely to visit the US (= spend money, etc). I get VERY nervous when travelling to the US, and I have absolutely nothing whatsoever to hide. I'd rather go through customs into almost any country in the world rather than US, where you are pretty well guaranteed to run into some humourless, ignorant, pompous, heavily armed arsehole with a really bad attitude. Truly, it's a thing to behold, and it really damages the reputation of Amerika.

You... pathetic... dirty... ignorant... old man.

Religion - truly, a cancer on humanity.