I agree entirely with the author's cause and I believe that the guilty-until-proven-innocent mindset of present airport security is wrong and should be unconstitutional.
However, upon reading the article I very much got the impression that the author was refusing to be scanned or searched just to make trouble. When asked why he was refusing to be searched, his answers (in his own writing) seemed to be along the lines of, "because I don't feel like it." I'm sorry, but that's just not really a valid defense. Whether you feel it's constitutional or not, the law says you have to go through these checkpoints when selected. If you're going to refuse, you need to have a much better reason than you don't feel like it.
Ultimately, it sounded to me like they escorted him out of the terminal simply because they were tired of dealing with him, not because he found a loophole in their logic or rules. Less well-mannered officials would have put him in jail for a judge to deal with in the morning.
>I very much got the impression that the author was refusing to be scanned or searched just to make trouble.
That's like saying, you are just making trouble when you resist a pick-pocket or robber. You are never "just making trouble" when you assert your rights. On the contrary, government is the one just making trouble.
The only legitimate purpose of government is to protect rights. However, government seems to be full of people who are eager to take away rights. Somehow, the institution of government appeals to people who like to force their will on others. If you value liberty, you must resist these people.
I, as European, always find fascinating when US people says: "The only legitimate purpose of government is to protect rights"... I feel the purpose of government is to protect and nurture the community and give the citizen common services.
Different personal opionions and exceptions apply of course, but I feel this is probably the biggest difference in culture between US and EU.
This was not about airport security - he had already de-planed and was trying to leave the airport, having already passed through immigration.
One of the things the US is supposed to be really big on is freedom from Big Brother. Having legally entered his own country, not attempting to get on another plane, and offerring to cooperate as long as someone, under color of authority, would verbally go on record that he was required by law to do so, with specifics. Nobody was willing or able to actually do this. Nobody was clear about jurisdiction. The police wouldn't do anything without the TSAs instructions.
The TSA didn't know what's up - and I for one would like the people in charge of security in the airport to know what's up, right?
EDIT: From the sounds of things this really was more about poor airport design and people flow as well as misunderstanding of policies.
I don't agree with Eil's comment at all, but that is no reason to vote his comment down. Comment voting is to make interesting comments more prominent and to remove noise, not to banish unpopular opinions. I don't interpret Eil's comment as a trolling attempt that warrents down-voting either.
Yes, he was purposely making trouble to test a theory that they don't have specific procedures in place, and that the laws contain holes that you can get through. You might say the law says you have to go through, but in this case nobody could come up with a law that says that. The guy himself asked how this conflates with his constitutional rights - also laws - and how the contradictions are resolved.
Like it or not, this kind of behaviour either strengthens the laws or removes poorly designed ones. Either way, it's important that people do this on a regular basis because laws and procedures are very rarely correct.
Roundabouts make a lot of sense when designed properly, and in the right place. I love them (they're just plain fun to drive through), but these are probably the top issues:
1. We mid-westerners, by and large, have never seen a roundabout before, let alone know how to properly drive through them. They weren't even so much as mentioned in driver's training classes around here until a few years ago. Whenever a new one goes up, there's a lot of confusion. The most common problem is misunderstanding or ignoring the yield sign: Some people treat the roundabout like a circular four-way stop and others just zoom in without yielding and cut off the traffic already in the circle.
2. Inconsistent entrance and lane rules. We have two major roundabouts in this town, both installed within the last five years. One of them prohibits lane changes inside the circle, one doesn't. At one of them, traffic entering the roundabout yields to traffic in the roundabout. In the other, vice versa.
3. Building roundabouts in an area for no good reason. On I-75 outside of Saginaw, there's an overpass with on and off ramps. A few years ago, they tore out the traditional traffic signal used on every single other on/off ramp in the state and instead put a roundabout on each end of the bridge. This was a very silly thing to do because the traffic volume was not that high in the first place. Moreover, it's a very industrial area with lots of big trucks and oversize loads that now have to navigate the roundabout very slowly and very carefully just to stay in the lane and not run into passenger vehicles whose drivers aren't paying attention.
Local storage is just key/value queries, IndexedDB allows you to make range queries against indexes you define, so you can get eg: recent blog posts, etc.
if I want to store persist objects using localStorage, I'd convert them to JSON and store key-value. However I cannot store whole object hierarchy as it'll soon become an overkill.
so I store separate objects, and recreate relations upon retrieval manually. But I also need to maintain my own index - to know which objects I have stored under what keys.
Chances are exceedingly good that Arch package maintainers will be checking their Python applications and updating them to use /usr/bin/python2 if they don't run under Python 3. Actually, this should have already happened since the change has apparently been in testing for awhile.
I'm not really familiar with what Arch package maintainers do but aren't package maintainer mainly packager and not coders ?
I imagine that someone could easily be packaging 10 Python apps or libraries. He can't be upgrading all that code to Python 3 as it is not always a trivial task and would require a lot of work and constant patching if the developing team keeps working with Python 2.X
But overall, I think this is a good way to push developers to upgrade or at least prepare more to move to Python 3.
You're misunderstanding. Arch is still shipping Python 2.7 with the python2 package.
So package maintainers don't need to rewrite upstream code if it's not compatible with Python 3; they just need to update dependencies and set paths to point to the /usr/bin/python2 binary.
It's not to do with shortage of labor. Their salaries are high because being a cop is a life-threatening and potentially psychologically damaging profession. Some go their entire careers unscathed, some get killed, almost all have close calls every now and then. Most of them have families that care about them and know the sacrifice they might have to make one day. They deserve good salaries for their service.
Believe you me, I have many gripes about the quality (or lack thereof) of law enforcement in this country. But how much they are paid isn't one of them.
When I see news reports about IEDs on California highways I will support you wholeheartedly. Until then, I think they're way overpaid in relation to the armed forces.
I'm very happy with my ARP Networks VPS. Their prices are very competitive, but it's definitely not a "managed" solution. They support just about any Linux distro as well as FreeBSD and OpenBSD. Once your VM is spun up, you just log in and go. Support seems to be email only, but I've never had a second of downtime in the 9 months or so I've been there.
My only gripe is that web-based management of the VPS is almost non-existent. Basically power on/off and reboot are all you get. I'd like to see bandwidth, disk I/O, CPU utilization, and so on. They have a text-based management interface with a few more options, including VNC console over SSH. I suppose the end result is that you basically get a low-end colo server experience at a VPS price. (Which is fine if you're like me and that's what you want.)
I also want to tip my hat to Liquid Web's cloud offering, Storm. (I'm biased because I helped build it.) Their prices are certainly not on the low end but the support team beats the snot out of any other hosting provider, period.
However, upon reading the article I very much got the impression that the author was refusing to be scanned or searched just to make trouble. When asked why he was refusing to be searched, his answers (in his own writing) seemed to be along the lines of, "because I don't feel like it." I'm sorry, but that's just not really a valid defense. Whether you feel it's constitutional or not, the law says you have to go through these checkpoints when selected. If you're going to refuse, you need to have a much better reason than you don't feel like it.
Ultimately, it sounded to me like they escorted him out of the terminal simply because they were tired of dealing with him, not because he found a loophole in their logic or rules. Less well-mannered officials would have put him in jail for a judge to deal with in the morning.