Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Don't Fly During Ramadan

varnull.adityamukerjee.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

941–950 of 986 posts

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#941

Post by rfnslyr »

chiph wrote: post #778
rfnslyr wrote: post #685

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Yeah can you give me about two weeks? I'm going to take my RV." -1 client. How bout no.

Three possible replies to this. #1. I have a MiFi device, so I can get started with the preliminaries as my spouse drives. And of course, once I arrive I'll be on-site with your team. #2. Because I provide my own living arrangements, my expenses will be much lower. I'll charge you diesel from my current location instead of a round-trip business-class airline ticket, and the RV park is $300 a month, vs. $150 a night a…

When I pay someone $3000 for the day, I expect them to arrive in two hours in a fucking G6.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#942

Post by hyperbovine »

nrivadeneira wrote: post #844
hyperbovine wrote: post #838

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see--so only the victims and families were emotionally traumatized by this incident? That does not even merit refutation.

Truthfully, I don't see why you'd be significantly more traumatized by this event than any other act of terrorism that happens across the globe unless you lost loved ones. To that end, I don't see why anyone else on this globe should have been any less affected, thus making the point that you happened to be an American at the same time that 9/11 occurred more or less moot. If the pain is simply an empathy to the inno…

I am not going to sit here and explain to you the concept of (emotional, geographic) proximity. If I am correct in surmising that you are trying to pick a fight about Americans feeling "special" compared to the rest of the world (which I sure don't), you'll need to find some other sparring partner. Cheers.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#943

Post by thomaslangston »

Sincerely, what can I, someone not involved directly in this incident, do to prevent incidents like this one from happening to other people?

Sending messages to airlines and congresspeople seems ineffectual. What are my other options?

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#944

Post by mistercow »

wfunction wrote: post #877
corresation wrote: post #352

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't have to have direct knowledge of the impossibly specific situation you've constructed. Instead we have people saying "I am white and I set one off in 2003 in Australia and they let me through, therefore that demonstrates that this is racism" (ignore every case where non-whites got a couple of quick questions and went through). And how utterly provincial are so many people on here? What backwaters do they liv…

>> they wouldn't even tell him what they had found > Because they believe in the flawed concept of security through obscurity No, it's rather common sense actually. If a suspect wanted to blow something up, he would never admit he has the chemicals he has with him (because he wouldn't be sure that the cops have actually detected that chemical, and not made some other mistake that will let him go through). But if the…

I find your reasoning that the terrorist "would never admit" anything about the real chemicals. If he used ammonium nitrate, he can easily say "I was using some fertilizer in my garden". If he used gunpowder, he can say "I was at the shooting range earlier", or "I was setting off fireworks with friends last night". If neither of those are what they found, they're still normal-sounding excuses that a person might give. He can give a long list of innocuous chemicals with those thrown in, and you won't have any way of distinguishing his story from that of an innocent person.

But if the terrorist hasn't thought this far ahead, then his excuse is probably not going to be very good. Tell a person exactly what you found, and you might catch the terrorist off guard and be able to tell that they're lying from the weird excuse, while a normal person will either say "I don't know where that would have come from", or would actually have a plausible excuse.

It's still not a very useful question even in that latter case, but it's marginally more useful if you actually name the chemical.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#945

Post by ejk314 »

jcc80 wrote: post #758
foobarbazqux wrote: post #686

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of those criteria, plus I think an extra criterion that they have to happen to so many people that it reaches some kind of tipping point where there's a mass consensus that things are authoritarian. Just to be clear, I'm not excusing the abuses you've listed.

Exactly. Right now the "in your face" abuse is happening to a relatively small portion of people (privacy of millions being violated but they don't all feel it yet). Easy for everyone else to sit back in comfort and think it won't happen to them or the others somehow deserved it. When it happens to more people then an outrageous edge case can serve as the tipping point.

First they came for the brown people, but I did not speak out because I was not a brown person...

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#946

Post by etler »

jwr wrote: post #73

The land of the free. As I read more and more of those stories I can't help but wonder at how things changed. I am from a formerly-eastern-europe-soviet-bloc country (Poland) and these kinds of oppressive techniques sound very familiar. The haziness of procedures, lack of basic rights, intimidation, no accountability of state officials -- we've seen all that until 1989. At the time, while the communist regime was imp…

Just from my experience, the Snowden thing was the best thing to happen for getting people to notice government abuses of power. Before him, if you were to say something like "the government is tracking everything we do on the internet", everyone would call you a conspiracy theorist. Now it's treated like common knowledge, and I even hear it taken even further than what has been verified.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#947

Post by chiph »

rfnslyr wrote: post #941
chiph wrote: post #778

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Three possible replies to this. #1. I have a MiFi device, so I can get started with the preliminaries as my spouse drives. And of course, once I arrive I'll be on-site with your team. #2. Because I provide my own living arrangements, my expenses will be much lower. I'll charge you diesel from my current location instead of a round-trip business-class airline ticket, and the RV park is $300 a month, vs. $150 a night a…

When I pay someone $3000 for the day, I expect them to arrive in two hours in a fucking G6.

Winston Wolfe arriving in an NSX. Gotcha.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#948

Post by dkersten »

mpyne wrote: post #695
icambron wrote: post #665

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing that there is a sequence of things that happens here: 1. he sets off the chemical detector 2. he is pulled aside for questioning 3. in that questioning, they discover he has a background that makes them nervous 4. they hold him for a great deal more questioning 1->2 is standard and would happen to anyone. As other people have pointed out in this thread, it generally takes 15 minutes and is no b…

I believe the issue with the alarm is that most people don't repeatedly flag the same alarm. E.g. if a given test were to generate a false positive, you would expect that it wouldn't generate a false positive the next time if run on the same article, especially if the machine correctly doesn't alert on other innocuous articles. So in the normal situation someone sets of the chemical detector, once , gets pulled aside…

> if a given test were to generate a false positive, you would expect that it wouldn't generate a false positive the next time if run on the same article

The last time I was travelling, I set of the metal detector in an airport in Germany. They took me aside and used the hand metal detector. It also went off. So they patted me down and scanned me again - the alarm still went off. So they patted me down a second time and scanned me again and the alarm still went off.

They then sent me on my way and I had no further hassle for the rest of the trip.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#949

Post by blablabla123 »

I once moved into an apartment with bed bugs. So this is what I learned:

- at least in Germany you cannot buy bed bug spray in a regular store

- if you have bed bugs, it's recommended to contact an exterminator that will cost you hundreds (or even thousands)

- you can still buy spray against bed bugs. The warning sign on the spray is one level below "explosive". As you can imagine, the stuff you get in the store says that you mustn't use it indoors.

Sorry mate, not sure which Spray Brand you used, but using bed bug spray is really dangerous.

You say that the TSA, FBI etc. are ignorant. You are ignorant too by not reading the spray bottles you use.

Re: Don't Fly During Ramadan

#950

Post by blablabla123 »

Zimahl wrote: post #280
toddmorey wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If events like Oklahoma City, Boston, and Sandy Hook have taught us anything, it's that terrorism doesn't have an ethnic profile. It's not only insulting, but also extremely unsafe to assume otherwise. I'm surprised and embarrassed by how representatives of my country treated him. I'm embarrassed by their cultural ignorance. There should at least be some better training. However, this should be a technology discussio…

First, Sandy Hook/Newtown wasn't terrorism. By definition it was not 'the use of violence and threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.'[1]. It was more of a random spree killing. As for Boston, that's a terrible example because it was committed by Chechen Muslims. Second, we don't know if there was a false positive. Maybe some cleaner or the bed bug spray do have legitimate bomb-making uses…

> Maybe some cleaner or the bed bug spray do have legitimate bomb-making uses.

With bed bug spray you can set up a decent fire, maybe even blast an apartment, cf. my other comment. This is why it's not easy to buy it and that's why you should read the manual. Lovely to hear how many people use highly flammable chemicals without reading the manual.

Post reply on HN