I have a low rider site/blog. It pretty much covers ##KEYWORD## related stuff.

Come and check it out if you get time 🙂

See Ya There!!!

Ah, but that’s the hard part, isn’t it? How do we tell if it ain’t going so well. Say there’s been a major terrorist attack. Is that evidence of a failure (they didn’t prevent it!) or a victory (if they hadn’t worked so hard there would have been many more!)? I believe that to make an intelligent evaluation of our leaders, to be able to differentiate a good job from a bad job, we need to at the very least be involved in this way — reading the best information available and debating ideas.

Notice that I haven’t said “hey strpcy and camojack, let’s go to NYC and have a direct action where we install scanning devices ourselves!” Or even “let’s picket grand central station until they put them in!” No, it’s more just a matter of thinking a little about what might be the right course of action so that one can have an intelligent opinion about it come election time. And yeah, I’m self-important enough to feel I should have an intelligent opinion.

Because it is.

I’m just about the same age as the folks that frequent this blog. Used to be a leftist, too. Used to be involved.

The “I’ve got to change the world” mentality of the Boomers needs to be discarded. If for no other reason than that it is a pompous bore.

Obviously, I read sites like this. I do it to pass the time and to marvel at the self-importance of everybody involved.

Time for the era of social and political activism to come to an end. Everything has a shelf life. It’s been 60 years of obsessing about this stuff.

We elected some people. Let them deal with it. A few years from now, if it ain’t going so well, elect some other people. Drink a beer have a glass of wine.

I don’t think this is right. It’s not my field of expertise, though a few years back when I worked with people whose field it was, they felt it would be far into the future when it happened and would be VERY expensive.

The problem is that what appears to be possible, and what is possible, may be two totally different things.

Lets take my field of expertese for example: computer science. Lets say we have a program, any will do. Lets say we run it – will it ever finish? That is, given a specific input can I determine if it will run forever or quit? Obviously one can – it should be simple, no? Since this is true, shouldn’t deadlocks or livelocks never happen (and they do all the time)?

As it turns out, not only is *not simple*, it is *impossible*. You can not tell if any program out there will run forever or not. You can tell if a *specific* program will – but not the general case. It’s called “The Halting Problem” (do a search – lots of info out there) and is pretty famous in Comp Sci. Essentially you can set up a program where if it says it stops it runs forever, if it runs forever it actually stops. Since that can not be – there is a case where it fails. There are many problems that fall into this class, though many are hard to see. The last place I worked was a CS research institution and we actually got a paper out of proving that one of our ideas met the halting problem.

Maybe this case doesn’t, but given the amount of money involved, my knowledge of how people are fighting over it (if you think for a second you will come to a pretty close idea – govt isn’t that different from industry except that a publication is a “success”), if it was *that* easy it would be out there now. Heck, our project was eventually billed as a “Homeland Security Project” and that was a *real* stretch of the imagination.

OK, maybe not quite that simple, but it’s true a lot of the time…

No matter what system you set up, the sheer volume of riders and number of points of entry makes the proposition of any type of search extremely expensive and time-consuming. Still, there may be fixes.

I remember reading a while back about those machines that were the equivalent of x-ray specs. They bounced some low-energy beam off people and could see through their clothes, revealing objects, like for instance bombs, beneath. (I remember people got in a huff about these since they could be seen nearly naked.) Anyway, it’s possible that machines like these could be rigged to scan people entering. The price of the machines themselves might be high, but if they were coupled with good software that could identify suspicious objects then the whole system might operate with relatively few guards and with little to no time delay. (Salaries and wasted time of course being two of the most costly parts of normal search.)

Another, lower-tech alternative is, sadly, to modify the ratio of people searched randomly to people searched by profiling. Though random searches might deter the very odd case, I think (maybe?) most people agree that terrorists are more likely to be deterred (or caught) through the profiling end of things. If attacks continue, there may be more political will to jettison the random searches, which more serve to make us feel fair than to keep us safe, in favor of a more heavily profiling-based system. But the closer we get to pure profiling, the more people (including myself) who would become uncomfortable with it.

(Why? It is, after all, a difference in degree, not in kind. Yet somehow I just feel it’s wrong. And it certainly would get more people angry.)