Most comments have neglected to note that for the students in question, "port" includes their home base, i.e. the docking area of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI). It's a huge inconvenience to not have your research assistant be able to run ashore to grab something.

Also, note that the designation "security threat" in the US means that it automatically brands the WHOI international students as being suspicious to the TSA, even when they're not near their ships. Yeah, because clearly these oceanographers are more worthy of airport searches because they applied for a TWIC.

The article in MIT's The Tech is more thorough:

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V128/N25/whoi.html

Just to be correct, most spam you'll get in asian characters (as opposed to asian script) is in simplified chinese. Kanji refers to the Japanese variety.

Bet no one else here gets Malay spam.

... This was absolutely amazing. I merely clicked on the names that I recognized and I ended up spending over three hours on this stuff. I can't get enough of it, and I can't wait to watch the Ayn Rand videos. It's one thing to read books, to hear stories. It's another entirely to watch the men and women speak for themselves.

One of the few experiences I have that can compare to this to the difference I felt the first time I heard a Sylvia Plath reading of her poetry. I believe the first one I heard was "Daddy," and later, "Lady Lazarus." It completely changed my view on her - and understand how someone can get away with talking for an hour on a single 8 stanza poem.

I feel most of what can be said has been said.

Captain Planet: "Protect the environment, or I'll f*cking kill you!"

That always works.

@ #4, it is true that "Anonymous" as a group was known before its Scientology protests for its griefing exploits, such as the compromising of thousands of myspace accounts.

However, if you doubt their intentions with regards to Scientology, then instead of making claims try to refute their reasons directly on their organizing sites. They're wikis, just go and read. Just google "Project Chanology" and you'll find it. Not one of the thousands of people getting their information from that site have changed the message. The scope, breadth, and intent of the material portrayed on that site can't all be fake. I think the battle against Scientology has fundamentally changed Anonymous - they went from their traditional DDoS attacks to open, legal, peaceful protests.

It's more than likely an unrelated group (or Scientologists, I wouldn't put it past them) put up the epilepsy-inducing pictures.

This confuses me; I'll buy that we can pin a definite volume on the amount of water on Earth, since water is relatively incompressible, but I won't for air.

Air is compressible basically until the critical point of either oxygen or nitrogen, whichever is lowest, at which point it goes supercritical. This appears to calculate the volume of the air based on weight and the density of air at atmospheric pressure. Conceivably, though, You could compress the air to the same volume as the water with no problem.

I don't feel bad about eating GMO foods in general, as long as they are kept the way they were intended. That last caveat is important, since real practice and studies suggest other things happen.

In particular, you have to remember that natural reproduction of plants still occurs with GMO foods, which means that if a farmer chooses to reuse some of his or her crop as seed, or if the crop's product carries characteristics of its parents (i.e. corn maize), then there's a high likelihood that some gene scrambling happened. In particular, say two farmers have neighboring plots, and one of them is using GMO corn to say, produce pharmaceuticals (Greenpeace went nuts over a place like this), and another is just trying to bring fresh crops to market. Natural hybridization of GMO and non-GMO crops has been found to occur between neighboring 1-acre fields with a near 70% rate.

Corn on drugs!

My personal reaction was that since lithium ion batteries are pretty high voltage, the TSA banned them because they could be used as a trigger for incendiaries, such as detonating wire. Hook them up in series and it's enough to light a fire.

My intro psych classes a while back told me about a similar case, of a kid in France called the "wild child of Aveyron" that was a seminal case in this field. Might be worth looking into.

It was the same in Taiwan until a few years ago, when a lot of that kind of labor moved to the mainland. Manufacturing just shuffles around. Ask any Taiwanese person about what you can buy at the "Under the Bridge place."

I got sick of Windows the day before I left home for college, when I had to spend hours repairing a computer after the bloody OS imploded when it didn't like my phone's 'hotsync' software. A week later I was running ubuntu.

I'm sorry to all you haters, the *only* thing I use Windows for is to play games, and even though I've stripped down the XP partition to not even contain an email client, it's still slower, flakier, and more fragile than my ex-girlfriend. Ubuntu provides me with excellent word processing, music support, and reading the web... and I really don't want to go to a store to get the software I need. I don't want to pay $70 for something that works slower and dies whenever it encounters something new.

As for corporate support, well, let's just say I wish all corporations offered as much support as the people on ubuntu forums.

Funny, the author of the Anarchist's Cookbook is the former superintendent of a rival school of my high school. I just confirmed it with a friend still in high school; it seems for a few years he ran the International School of Kuala Lumpur, in Malaysia. Weird.

As for the book, it's pretty crappy. Much of the research for it was done using dated knowledge from a public library. As for arresting someone based on possession of materials that might be made into a bomb... reminds me of an incident in which an American company was fined for selling glucose syrup to Singapore because it "might have been converted into biological weapons." In other news, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia.

I wonder how they're accounting for the effects of painting decay. A friend of mine, who dabbles in painting and other arts, told me that different kinds of paints, and in particular bright colors, degrade with age. All of them also degrade at different rates. I'd like to see how these guys managed to account for that.

... I like how you omitted the part of my sentence that implied that we were mad at the felony charge, not the police reaction.

Heh, Poweroid, you clearly are not reading.

The consensus I've gathered from the MIT mailing lists (yes, I am an MIT student, sue me) and from this thread in general is the view that while the actions of the airport kiosk worker and subsequently that of the state police in the detaining of Star Simpson were the right thing to do, given the information available to them. If some woman calls the cops saying "I think there's a bomb on this girl," then the Staties acted in the best way possible given the situation.

What has ticked off MIT students and much of the public is the way the State Police, instead of recognizing an LED breadboard and releasing her, arrested Star Simpson, and that the DA charged her with possession of a hoax device.

That implies intent to cause panic, and carries a maximum sentence of 5 years. Way to try to ruin a young girl's life just to not look silly when you respond to a harmless "threat." The DA has a habit of trying to overstate the crime to do just this - and the fact that Star's bail was only $750 indicates that the judge agreed.

If you remember the Mooninite scare, for which Boston attracted national ridicule, then you'll remember that the DA tried to pin malicious intent to cause panic on the advertising firm in question then, too, and failed. They're trying to do it again.

This is the point of the campaign, Poweroid, not to tell airport security to ignore suspicious devices. From a distance, who can tell play-doh from SEMTEX? Not many, and causing one person inconvenience on the off chance that we catch someone with plastic explosive is worth it. Most of us would just prefer that a false positive is treated graciously, not turned into a publicity stunt and thrown to the wolves of the anti-intellectual Boston press.

The "clay" was play-doh that she had gotten the day before as free stuff from the MIT career fair. Also, it wasn't "near the circuit board" per se, but carried in Star's hands. There were no wires connected to it (this would certainly imply the presence of a bomb trigger).

I can understand an airport worker thinking it's suspicious, but it was definitely not intended to look like plastic explosive.

While MIT is a little bit of an ivory tower, as I can definitely attest, I don't think self-centeredness enters into the equation at all. Most people, especially students who do not travel often or follow the news, are frankly surprised at the paranoia and unforgiving nature of airport security.

I was going to mention that it couldn't possibly be filmed backwards, but ernie got there first.

Dice stacking, like cup stacking, card manipulation, and pen spinning, is a recognized (if somewhat fringe) form of performance. I'm sure some of you have seen or heard of the pen spinning communities. If you haven't, try looking for UCPSB collaborative videos on YouTube.

And yeah, my brother is one of those crazy people who make pen spinning videos, so I should know about this stuff.

I didn't actually make that connection, but now that I remember, there were about three or four cosplayers dressed up as Cory Doctorow.

Randall Munroe told some of the MIT students to bring boffing weapons, so we obliged. And yeah, I can now say that I got to lead a charge against a raptor with a foam spear in my hand. Call that an achievement, heh.

Fun stuff.