It doesn't really matter whether the UK example would have worked. If you know that people are working on liquid attacks - even if the only ones you catch at it are undereducated nutters - it makes sense to restrict liquids at screening. Someone else out there will be smarter.

No problem Xopher - I thought I saw something like that earlier myself but couldn't remember who it was. I'm relieved it wasn't me. :)

I'm actually flattered that you find me repetitive - you can only do that by paying attention to what I'm saying! At least we are both engaging the topic.

"Rats, I forgot I was supposed to be ignoring all your posts, since you declared your intention to talk but not listen..."

I missed the posting where I made that declaration - can you provide a link?

In fairness to Bill, his character reference appears to be contingent on me being this guy, which I'm not.

The truth is that such "vouching" ought to have no place in a moderated discussion anyway. Criticism, praise, analysis etc, should stand on their own. The whole obsession with "yeah but who are you really" is one of the besetting sins here.

Whatever "someone about Boing Boing has gotten up your nose" means, it's not a factor. BB is great in its funny way. Its failures, such as they are, only reflect a higher standard that one is tempted to pine for given the brilliance of the principals.

The discussion feature is less successful. I frankly think it would strengthen the blog if they turned it off again, but I don't expect that to happen for other than technical reasons. Anyway, whatever these threads are, they are not "moderated," and whatever that thing at the top is, it is not a moderation policy.

"Joining up requires agreeing to the moderation policy/TOS, which is linked on the front page of any artist forum worth visiting."

Of course, no such agreement is required in order to create a BB account or to post a comment, and no TOS is displayed or indeed even available for the site, whether commenting is turned on or off.

As nearly as I can tell, the only thing any party has agreed to is the Creative Commons License which governs the whole of BB. Under the CCL, the "moderator's" disemvowelling would probably be considered a "remix" or adaptation of the CC licensed comment originally submitted. But it lacks the "adaptation label" that CC requires, e.g., "This posting was disemvowelled by the Moderator." Therefore BB arguably violates the CCL every time this is done.

I don't know what it is with Firefox, but there is some key combo that submits prematurely. I will let the previous "partial" stand on its own as there was nothing of substance to add.

I missed this from Takeshi:

"Even if it is bad faith, it would seem that plenty of people here have no faith in her abilities as moderator."

I have no reason to doubt her abilites as a moderator. I simply have never seen them. What she does is not moderating. She is a player/editor.

Moderators make sure all voices are heard noise-free for the sake of the debate or colloquium. They respect the text and do not add to the noise. They do not take sides because they know that doing so gives the appearance of a stacked deck.

I think even the primary Boingers would be surprised how useful a real moderator would be. That is a vain hope, but someone reading this will have a great blog in the future and I hope they remember it.

"The fact that Teresa disemvowels does not "keep her honest" as she can still delete posts and, obviously, edit them to say whatever she wants them to say. So there's no accountability in disemvoweling."

I doubt very much that she edits plaintext, but the delete option is real. Although she made labored sport of my Nashville filmmaker reference above, she had in fact asked me about this in an open thread back in November, when I posted something she didn't like, and she seemed worried that this other, more famous Tom Neff might have made a faux pas on her board. She had also gotten into a frenzy about "sock puppets" in that thread - a common theme on her ur-blog as well. You could see all this for yourself - but the entire discussion thread is deleted. I chalk her present denial up to work-overload memory loss rather than outright dishonesty, since she knows that the latter comes back to haunt.

There is no shame in BB having a comment threads regime in keeping with the rest of the site - quirky, headstrong, a bit off kilter, molto clubby, personality cultish. Makes perfect sense. And like the rest of BB, in exchange for the weirdness, you sometimes get exquisite things.

"You are clearly from Mars. I have never heard of any documentary filmmakers from Nashville, let alone Tom Neff..."

Men are from Mars, women are from Venus, and I just had a travel day. The exchange in question took place on 16 November 2007 under a BBtv synopsis article. I note that the entire discussion thread for that piece (and only that piece) is gone. I have the followup emails from 21 November, but not a record of the original thread.

Sorry if you don't remember it (as indicated later in your response). I was quite struck by the question, especially asked in a public message rather than email.

"I've also had run-ins with Kid (31, 48), Tom Neff (33/36), Kaiser (35, 51), and others to be named later."

[chortle]Run-ins???[/chortle]

Let's be clear, the only reason you ever deigned to communicate with me was because you thought I might be the Nashville-based documentary filmmaker who shares my name. When I disappointed you in that respect, and added (in polite detail) on the strength of 20-odd years of Internet moderation in all media, that what you are doing is not actually moderating, you disdained further response.

So be it. But it takes two to "run-in."

What I said then is equally true now. Your massive trove of one-line backatchas above is as good an example as any. When I posted in #40, primarily for your eyes as a putatively watchful "moderator," that #33 was an accidental partial post of #36, and invited you to delete the stub, you did nothing, instead citing me as (33/36) above. They both still sit there. Any actual moderator worth their salt would have fixed it in a jiffy. Instead, you're wasting time compiling position points on a policy that you've already claimed you didn't even decide.

Anyone who has really done it (including me) will agree that Internet moderating is a sh1t job - a thankless job. Anyone with a grain of intelligence would choose to do something else. So I am the last person in the world to second-guess you for doing what you do best instead, acting as an editor and/or a proxy Boinger. I would do the same - much more fun.

It's just this one little thing - that's not moderating. A moderator makes sure all honest conversants are fairly heard. A moderator makes sure the channels are clear of noise and easy to comprehend. A moderator serves the debate and the debaters, not one cause. A moderator holds the text sacred, occasionally correcting it, never defiling it. Of course moderators must occasionally "moderate from within" by performing their service within a context where they have a pre-existing place or opinion. They solve this problem by *suppressing their advocacy* for the sake of an honest exchange. Not by holding an eraser in one hand and a sword in the other.

That's why I use the word "moderator" in quotes. And if you really think we have a "run-in" between us - well, here's your thread. I stand at your service. Can you defend your methods? We understand you don't have to - but can you? If you can, I promise an honest ear and an open mind.

"i don't know what some of you guys are on about - this is the best comment and discussion moderation policy I've ever seen on the web. :D"

Yeah, I'll bet Huffington, BlogHerald, Gothamist, SFGate, DailyKos, et al., are just pooping their PJ's in envy of this masterpiece. Look for massive changes across the board. I'm hacking a patented Esperanto-to-Morse-Code translator applet we call BitFrown(TM) for use on comments in the DLD (Don't Love Domain).

As Eico points out, the "policy" (to the extent that one objectively exists in the first place) is capriciously and incompletely applied. Counterexamples to most of those mitzvot abound in threads which fail to excite the "moderator's" attention. But let a Boinger reopen a pet cause or controversy, and the comment leash will be shorter than a cheerleader's pleat at Hooters, while "moderate from within" is taken to its suffocating extreme - even as basic housekeeping languishes elsewhere.

Still, the BB culture values intense loyalty to an inner cadre of friends, favorites and protégées. They will never boot the comment-tsaritsa, and she will never change. It is what it is. Take the good parts, and surf on.

Somehow I got a double post on the reload there, you can delete the earlier one at leisure.

It's more like a disorganized and rambling hybrid of an actual moderation policy and an editorial stylebook. You can easily find lots of moderation policies online - google "comment moderation policy." Moderating using standard practices is hard work but it's not rocket science. Here (and in the "moderator's" other blog) we have the consonant trick, the thing with "sock puppets" and identity guessing games, the mid-thread smackdown anthology posts, one-line microsnarks at posts and posters, etc. Nothing will change because BB is what it is, and indeed when the "moderator" is too busy to get involved, BB still has good threads. But I would think twice about importing this mess to another forum.

It's a disorganized and rambling hybrid of an actual moderation policy and an editorial stylebook. You can easily find lots of moderation policies online - google "comment moderation policy." Moderating using standard practices is hard work but it's not rocket science. Here (and in the "moderator's" other blog) we have the consonant trick, the thing with 'sock puppets' and identity guessing games, the mid-thread smackdown anthology posts, one-line microsnarks at posts and posters, etc. Nothing will change because BB is what it is, and fortunately

Since it's not "Mary Kaye" and it's not 1977, is there any chance this wasn't a promotional film, so we can get the Everything Wrong trifecta into play?

"And I have to ask, where do you get off asking Cory whether he might have considered that a post was outside the scope of this blog?"

Fixed.

If we could just install the TSA at Disneyland, we'd have one of these posts every day!

"Amazingly, I predict that every person posting comments, as well as the submitter of the original article, will vote for a president and congressmen who continue the TSA debacle."

Why is this amazing? Do you normally never predict things?

In other words, even one stolen bag per year is unacceptable... as long as the TSA is there to blame for it. Luggage lost before the TSA punching-bag appeared... not interesting. Potential trends - improvement or the opposite - in loss rates during the TSA's tenure... not interesting. All that matters is that the TSA is there, and some stuff gets stolen. This makes perfect sense.

Open the bubble doors please, HAL...

Also, airport terminal food sucks... on the TSA's watch.

I have been unable to find an estimate of the average dollar value of checked luggage lost per year. Has it gone from $5 milion/year to $10? Or has it gone from $15 million/year to $10? Without context, it's not a useful statistic... except in the hermetically sealed bubble of TSA haters, for whom every sentence ending in a period is usable evidence of TSA perfidy.

As I recall, one of the old tricks was to mix naphtha and water and use that in the tank. The naphtha mostly fractionates to the top and has a smaller droplet size. Frighteningly dangerous in eleven different ways by today's standards, one need hardly add.

This kind of thing is frustrating.

If only there were a device that you could use to fix an optical image of the vandal's vehicle onto some sort of permanent storage medium. Then you could display that image, or reproduce it onto some portable material like paper, and show it to the authorities.

When they invent that device, I hope to read about it here in BB, at least when the steampunk version is released or someone knits a cover for it in the shape of a Pac Rim cartoon character.

In the meantime, this is your friend.

He lived a particularly sad life after the Stature Act of 3007. Eventually he relocated to Ganymede and scraped out a living doing interior dent work on ventilator ducts.

A later comment from a TSA'er in that EoS thread indicated that that the all-electronics removal was a kind of pilot program at several airports, and that TSA security operations management knew about it. It is not clear to me why blog postings would be used as a reason to terminate such a program, unless Hawley's approval is not needed for such things as long as SOM knows about them.

The whole blog is an interesting experiment. They've clearly insourced it to a customer-relations desk so it is somewhat afflicted with cheesy pr-speak. There are also a lot of TSA'ers chiming in anonymously (most comments from everyone are anonymous) with comments ranging from rant to sweet reason. Of course the spittle-flecked TSA haters are in steady attendance, along with pilots, stews, military, and other interesting constituencies. And a huge number of nuanced critical/supportive posts from reasonable passengers with specific gripes and concerns. I hope someone is reading those.

My pet undergoes the same screening I do - a walk through the metal detector. I've never been a selectee with the animal, so I don't know if they would wand her. They certainly fuss and coo over her (she's a calm little chocolate colored Burmese). The other day a big male TSO sheepishly (but unbidden) pulled out a little color picture of his cat to show me. It was pretty funny, but it reminded me that these guys feel the dehumanization of their job as much or more than we notice it in our periodic encounters.

Most Stingers (particularly most black market ones) are dumb passive IR; some advanced variants have a UV component to ignore flare countermeasures. They have the same problem with dim, cool civilian engine exhausts as other MANPADS. If you are genuinely interested in the issue (not clear from posting context) there is more information on proliferation available from the Federation of American Scientists.

Any mainstream candidate who proposed abolishing the TSA would soon cease to be a mainstream candidate - his or her opponents would commence shredding. Reform of the DHS in general has been discussed, although it doesn't poll as a leading issue of concern to the voters and therefore you probably won't hear too much about it.

Lilah mentioned the GE EntryScan3 "air puffer" machines - they are in at least sporadic use at quite a few airports around the country and have been since 2004. I believe it's still a pilot program, partly because it turns out that in steady production use they tend to break down a lot. And one symptom when they're nearing breakdown is that analysis (the part where you stand and wait for the doors to open after the puffin') gets slower and slooower. And they're not that fast when they're working perfectly. As a result, passenger throughput is really low with the puffer. So they can't afford to do what they do with metal detectors, namely share them across adjacent lines. Instead, when one breaks down they route around it until it can be removed for service. On the rare occasions where there are a lot of them working, I try to avoid them if I'm travelling with my cat, because I have to hold her on the walkthru and the puffs really freak her out. Takuan is right - if you go shooting at the range, go home and take a shower and change clothes before flying, or things will get interesting.

Takuan also asks about shoulder-fired missiles as a security threat. The general answer to this is that while the threat is taken seriously, and countermeasures are installed on El Al and some American flights and will probably be added to more planes in the future, it is important to remember that the passive infrared homing systems on most SAM's are designed to find and hit the extremely hot and compact exhaust of a military jet engine - a dazzling pinpoint to the missile's infrared "eye." By comparison, the big turbofans used in commercial airliners are cool, dim and wide. It is hard for a traditional SAM (which is what our corrupt and lazy friends have flooded the market with) to find and lock on to airliner exhaust. Al Qaeda stood right there at Mombasa airport and uncorked a pair of Strela-2's at a departing (and defenseless) Israeli charter jet. Both missed.

Laser guided missiles are of course a deadly threat. I think you would find that what happens is that a lot of people spend a lot of time finding the bad guys and the bad hardware before this happens.

Apparently TSA only closed that initial "open thread" in favor of posting in the new categories, which are accumulating plenty of postings (and there is a new de facto open thread at the top).

I think you can safely assume that the reason the first N posts were from TSA'ers is that TSA notified about the blog in-house and they got the word faster than we did.

I was a bit skeptical of Mark's "typical citizen posting" comment, so I started at the end (to avoid that in-house clump up front) and read every 8th message going backward, until I got tired of it. Here is my thumbnail of each:

- pro-tsa capslocked rant (user "tsa")
- lots of good stuff but how do we know they're reading?
- better way to get our stuff back
- site needs format change
- security is inconsistent airport to airport
- "post office rejects" slur
- dehumanizing - we're not cattle
- thanks to tsa - people should learn rules
- no credibility - airport inconsistency
- slip on shoes/baby shoes - airport inconsistency
- shoes/flip flops - airport inconsistency
- TSA doing its job, but railroads and borders?
- common sense - "touch that horn" overreaction
- site font and cookies
- need categories - inconsistency
- why my messages not appear?
- need expedited screening - better customer service

I hope this blog will give TSA some useful perspective. For example, many people seem to have far less problem with the procedures than with seeing them applied inconsistently from one airport to the next. That saps confidence in the fairness and effectiveness of the security screen.

Overall it's an excellent idea. I hope it doesn't become a political football and get shut down.

I had sat down to finish my sleep-interrupted posting from yesterday, but I notice that the "moderator" has draped a full set of pseudopods, so I'll wait till tomorrow after my (surprise!) airline flight.

FFB, I am just trying to think the problem through, which should not take balls but apparently does these days.

People who believe there should not be any airport security are certainly entitled to their beliefs, but it's not going to happen anytime soon, and if it did in the US, there are a lot of countries you couldn't fly to anymore.

People who think the airlines should take back the security job ought to take a look at the financial pages: most carriers are teetering on the brink of insolvency or have run off the edge of it and are windmilling frantically in space like Wile E. Coyote. They can't afford to clean their bathrooms every flight, let alone install state of the art security.

The TSA was created and staffed in response to a need for LOTS of checkers NOW, on a generous but hardly Pentagon-caliber budget. They got what you'd expect, a large workforce willing to work for fairly low wages either out of belief in the crisis - and some of those people generated the early horror stories - or because it was good money from their economic rung's vantage point.

Which reminds me of the lovely little class component in some of the TSA backlash. Watch how readily people call them "trash," "morons," "scum" and so forth, or say things like "go back to the shoe store." Bet they like Nasss Car huh?! That kind of thing really burns me.

These people aren't our inferiors. A lot of them are ex-police, ex-military. They take on thankless, grueling work where any slipup could mean a CNN headline, and they're treated like vermin by some of the people they're trying to protect.

I have to close for sleep, there will be more.

It seems the only specific suggestion (so far) is to use Israel's system, by which I presume is meant El Al's system. The distinction matters because it is implemented by the airline, not by the State of Israel MPS or IDF or other agency. If you want to use that system in the US you need to figure out whether the individual airlines are responsible for executing it, or whether some other agency is going to do it for all the airlines.

If the individual airlines are responsible, then we're back to pre-9/11 conditions and you have to hope that Ozark Redneck Air Express knows how to profile a terrorist. If you decide that's too inefficient and unpredictable and it makes more sense to have a separate agency implement the El Al system, then you effectively have the TSA back, which is a problem since you were hot on abolishing it rather than reforming it.

Whichever way you go, with your El Al system in place, you now have a bevy of measures that have hitherto driven Boing Boing posters into spluttering seizures of vein-popping rage. Longish interviews about where you are going and why. Complete bag checks under watchful eyes - including your 5 year old mascot, by the way. Racial and/or religious profiling. Armed men and women on every flight taking up seats you can't fly in.

Two final points: #1, every airline and law enforcement agency in the world already learns from El Al and implements that subset of its practices that would be (a) lawful and (b) stand a snowball's chance of being tolerated by the flying public - including the recently reported behavior profiling. #2, unless you want one official "Air USA" state run airline, you're not going to get the rest of it without something LIKE the TSA. Everybody agrees that TSA needs to improve. You should write your Congressperson urging them to help this happen. But the personally insulting, quasi-anarchic venom and "abolish it!" talk is not helping the discourse IMHO.

h, nd pc th sck-pppt-bsssd "mdrtr," n, m nt TS lwyr :)

I will repeat the question: If you abolished the TSA, what would you use for airline security?

If you abolished the TSA, would you like to have any airline security? Perhaps just the honor system?

I have not seen any other mention of this incident in any news source - have you? Neither the Seattle P-I or Seattle Times mention it. No other Seattle TV station mentions it. The only other mentions of it on the entire web seem to be blog postings pointing to anchorwoman Mimi Jung's KING5 video (or to each other). Although KING5 lists this "featured video" from two days ago, there is no corresponding news item in the feed from KING5's own news desk.

Ironically "Matthew Gardner" is very much in the Seattle news - he's a prominent local real estate honcho. You think he flies when he wants to?

This "story" is flying around the blogosphere almost hourly. How much basis in fact it has, I'm not sure.

Video's probably swamped, I can't load it, so a question: Did the kid and mom fly? The caption said they had trouble boarding. Was the trouble resolved? Is all this because they searched the kid? As far as I'm concerned they should be allowed to search a ham sandwich. They should be able to search every 38th person even if they're the Flying Frakking Nun. If the rule is that no kid can be searched, that's the next thing they'll try.

First of all, even by reality TV "standards," that's sketchy and lame. It's almost like they don't want to waste time on the "reality" anymore, just give you the game highlights and let you fill in the rest.

Secondly, when people say "Even if this is scripted, trust me, there are people like this out there" it misses the point. Scripting a show to conform to our fuzzy preconceptions only adds to the deep mulch of national self-illusion. What reality TV at its best can do (and you can rent FRONTIER HOUSE to remember) is show us that there are people out there who defy all preconception. That's gone, which is why the genre is dying.

Finally, if you want the real skinny on pageant mommas and the world's revulsion, see "Florida Girls" by playwright/actress Nancy Hasty. You will never laugh so hard.

The New York State lost and found property law simply requires you to turn in found property within ten days, and prescribes penalties if you fail to do so. It does not grant you a blanket license to run around scooping everything up, regardless of the prevalence of theft and thieves in a particular area, and hold it for ten days despite a cop standing right there. I am fairly sure that this point has specifically been tested.

The bottom line is that if you find a laptop in the seatback of a Greyhound bus in Syracuse, the ten day NYS law applies and you should get to work finding the owner or turning it in. If you see a Macy's bag sitting on a bench in Grand Central, you should save the theoretical fancies and show a little city street sense. Involve a witness before you touch or open it; stay with the bag; notify someone immediately. Remember, there could be bad stuff that has nothing to do with the NYPD.

"So let me get this straight, I see a bag on a bench with no-one around..and it's illegal to pick up that bag...?"

No, just moderately stupid given the likelihood that it's a plant - and I don't mean by the cops, although you can obviously now add that to the list of reasons.

If you really do see a bag on a bench with no-one around, here's a suggestion: wait until someone IS around before you do anything. There's clearly no further risk to you or the bag in the meantime. If your train happens to come during that wait, you can either skip a train - or leave the bag to its fate, which might include the owner coming back to get it rather than finding it vanished into some "Samaritan's" clutches.

As for what's "illegal," that's a matter for the courts and the legislature to decide. As a civilian commuter, your more immediate concern is trying not to behave like the kind of character the cops are looking for. Regardless of how it all finally settles out with the prosecutor and your lawyer and so forth, if you see that bag on the bench with no other witnesses around, and you grab it and run for your train, you are asking for a police stop.

Sorry if you don't like it; sorry if reading this makes you conclude I must be an "arresting officer" or something; sorry if you see it as an "argument" that must be "weak" without further explanation why. Nor is it inconceivable, knowing the Finest, that a few guys on the beat are overzealous - it sure happens in most other areas of enforcement. And they may have to dial back on this operation due to the publicity. But the basic common-sense rule of what you as a commuter should do with a lost bag remains the same. Stay there; get witnesses; ask a cop or other uniformed agent if they mind you taking a look. I know if I left my bag or wallet, I'd rather a "smart Samaritan" found it.

It's not necessary to GIVE the wallet or bag to the police - as I said, they don't run a Lost & Found department.

What you do is NOTIFY the police, booth clerk, driver or someone else in uniform. Hey look, someone dropped their wallet. Mind if I see who it is and try to call them? The average NYC cop will be happy to let you do it. Then you can have your success story to tell your friends, with zero percent chance that you'll be hassled for acting like a thief, of which there are plenty out there by the way.

What the cops are concerned with is the guy who, when you finish your shopping trip at Macy's or Circuit City and you're sitting on the bench waiting for the IRT and you turn to talk to your friend, you turn back and your bag is gone. Those guys exist and they operate every day but especially in the holiday season. That's who the cops want to get, they honestly have no interest in hassling ordinary law abiding citizens. But when you take a bag from a bench and head for the exit, yeah, they're going to stop you. Anyone who feels primordial outrage that such a thing could happen in Paradise should just get over it.

It's also important to understand that this "omg did you hear what the NYC cops are doing?" buzz is PART of the operation. The cops definitely want the average straphanger to know that there are decoy bags out there. Because they know that the average (honest) straphanger can afford to walk on by the bag, or at most be a "smart Samaritan" - notifying a witness, staying put and calling, etc - whereas the bad guys cannot. They need the money, it's how they make a living.

"Yeah, how dare anyone confuse the authorities, not to mention reasonable people, with unselfconscious altruism!!! Bust the bastards!!"

Bear in mind that the horror stories associated with this anticrime program (and I have heard a couple besides this one) tend to involve a "samaritan" who finds a wallet, purse, bag etc, picks it up and LEAVES post haste. Not someone who stands there, whips out their cell phone and calls some number they find in the bag - even though that might let the dropper backtrack 50 feet and get what they just dropped; not someone who hails the nearest cop or token booth clerk, says "Hey someone dropped this wallet" and gets on with their life; no, these mysterious "samaritans" are the ones who feel that what you do with a dropped wallet is pick it up and RUSH FOR THE D TRAIN. Then, when the cops emerge and stop them from acting *exactly like a thief would act*, they suddenly turn into wounded civil libertarians with blog pens poised. Well, color me unimpressed.

Like the OP, I have found three or four wallets, purses, and bags over the years in the city, usually in cabs. (My favorite was when I found someone's vial of antidepressants; I called the patient up and she said "Oh I reported them lost and reordered - you can have them." Heyyyyyy wowwwwww thanksssss!) Everthing else was returned except for one little vinyl purse with eighty bucks in it but no ID, which I tried to drop at the precinct and was politely told they were not a Lost & Found department. :)

As a NYer I will reiterate: If you see an unattended purse, wallet or bag in a park or an MTA or PATH facility, *leave it* unless you have specifically alerted the driver, clerk or cop as a witness. If you feel you must take action, get a witness for what you're doing, and DON'T LEAVE. Otherwise you're taking a foolish risk.

PS On preview: The police have no program I'm aware of where plainclothes officers pretend to drop their cell phones in crosswalks so the batteries come out. Knock yourself out on that bit of heroism.

There are a lot of cops in the subway these days. If you see an abandoned bag or wallet, tell the nearest cop. Don't force them to decide whether you're really a "samaritan" who just likes dashing onto trains after picking up wallets. If it's late and you don't see a cop and you really must try to help out, STAY THERE and get out your cell phone and call whoever's wallet it is. If a cop pops out of a nearby doorway, you can say exactly what you're doing.

By the way, there are a fair number of cons that start with a dropped bag - you REALLY might want to just walk on, and leave bloggers to their outrage.

It's a little like the guy who went to the doctor's office and said "Doc, it hurts when I do this." Doctor said (wait for it): "So don't do that!"

Anyone who allows themselves to be hubbed through O'Hare deserves their dice roll.

Always choose second-tier regional hubs (Minneapolis, Cincinnati etc) if humanly possible. And don't book a tight layover on a route you don't personally know tends to fly on time unless you have other options in case of failure.

That cockroach probably works for LiveUrinal.

>> Does this mean it is impossible to own open land, which you choose to leave fallow and allow wilderness to develop on? Is the implication that doing so is a 'wasteful' use of land, and should be punished as such (whoever grabs it first and uses it for development benefitting)?

No, it does not.

I mean, it *certainly* doesn't imply it in the case being reported on, which involves a few acres of land down a street that had houses on it already. Nothing remotely resembling wilderness is involved there.

But let's say you owned a vast tract of Montana or Alaska, and you wanted it to be 'wilderness' in the sense implied above. If you did nothing whatsoever, if you just sat there and owned it and ignored it and let whoever abuse it, you might indeed be hit with adverse possession down the line.

So don't do that, as the doctor told the man who said it hurt when he banged his head. If you want your land to be wilderness or open space, no matter where you live, contact the state or the Nature Conservancy and find out who does Conservation Easements in your area. Sometimes it's the town, sometimes the county, sometimes the state. Once a Conservation Easement has been placed on your property you are essentially immune from adverse possession, or so I've been told. At the very least, the legal tangle becomes the responsibility of the entity holding the easement, not you as landowner. But in practice easement holders tend to keep an eye on "their" properties and blow the whistle early when third parties seem to be using the land without permission.

Regardless of the merits of the Kirlin case, the lesson for BB readers is this: If your neighbor regularly drives his truck across your field to reach his back pasture, and you're absolutely fine with the idea, you should still write him a letter saying "I give you non-transferable permission to drive across the SW corner of the field to reach your pasture," sign it, and give your lawyer a copy. Otherwise that neighbor's son ten years later could claim a right of way by adverse possession, and you'd have to duke it out in court and you might lose. Adverse possession generally can't happen if you explicitly gave permission.

Ms. Le Guin has posted a followup on her website, accepting Cory's apology.

The people searching for Steve also choose risk consciously, and they are also paid for their work.

Let's just pray Steve is safe, and hold the hero-bashing for later in tonight's gala program.