RadioGirl

20 MPH is far too fast. A friend of a friend of my cousin's neighbor was killed by a car doing 12 MPH. There should be a man walking in front of every car carrying a red flag (lantern at night).

SUVs, trucks and semi-trailers are dangerous at any speed due to their mass. All vehicles larger than a standard passenger sedan should be banned. Think of the children.
Plus it's much easier to stay under your bed if you never leave the house. Although if you're allergic to dust you could die of an allergic reaction under there. Hmm, that's difficult.

(True: ) My company had a statistically insignificant run of accidents involving staircases some years ago. That is, a few of the accidents were very bad, but the fact that several happened over a few months did not represent a systematic problem or sudden increase in the danger of stairs per se. Nevertheless we got numerous emails and signs telling us how to properly climb stairs. In some buildings (not the ones where the accidents occurred) the staircases were renovated with more substantial handrails or lots of yellow-and-black tape.

People are stupid.

temecularedwing

The TSA was, is, and always will be little more than a jobs program. The intent being to demonstrate to squeamish, gullible flyers that we're doing "all we can" to combat terrorism. Waste of time, money, and significant loss of productivity. And, as usual, we have the gall to impose our standards on the rest of the world.

TheTravelingJ

If they don't deliver it, Amazon probably will. Check out their subscription service, it's amaaaazing.

bigbuy

if the TSA was in control on 9/11, it would have not made any difference as box cutters were legal on that day.

DeterminedToUpgrade

I thought that poster was being sarcastic. To your second point, I absolutely agree. I often find the agents very rude. I wouldn't necessarily expect the same nature of friendly service from a TSA employee, but I do expect service that isn't surly and an attempt at professionalism. I have a feeling I shouldn't hold my breath waiting.

WillCAD

Such attacks have already happened, going back to the 1960s, either by terrorists or as accidents in war zones, like the recent MH17.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...rcial_aircraft

I don't agree with the whole concept of "trusted travelers", as I believe that screening should be the same for all passengers, but I will say this - trust is not a binary proposition. It's more like an analog dial - it goes up and down on an infinite scale between "complete trust" and "no trust". Those in PreCheck are simply given a higher place on that dial by TSA than the rest of us.

I don't consider that a terrorist act. It was collateral damage in a war zone. It doesn't even rise to the level of a war crime, despite the fact that the target was a civilian airliner, unless those who fired the missile knew or suspected that it was a civilian airliner.

Beautiful! Absolutely beautiful! I have been searching for the perfect response to that particular load of cowflop for years, and this, I think, qualifies.

Loren Pechtel

12mph??

I read about a case where the speed wasn't measured but was probably well under 5mph. (Admittedly, a freak case. A little kid ran behind a backing car. A minor bump, the injuries amounted to a nosebleed and being knocked over. Unfortunately, he passed out from the fall. Observers did nothing because it's was a head injury, you leave those for the paramedics. The kid drowned.)

RadioGirl

Oh.

My "example" was hyperbole (c.f "friend of a friend...") to extend Mikeef's extreme example. Yours, however, is genuinely tragic.

There have been numerous recent events in Australia of toddlers and young children killed in school parking lots or household driveways; these presumably happened at low speed too. The overall point remains that - despite these tragic events - we as a society don't ban cars or insist on uniformly low speed limits.

ThinWallet

The lizard brain of a low qualification TSA agent who is running a "random selection" "algorithm" in his head does not work that way.

I think your estimate of 2 billion is a bit off. I don't think there are 2 billion brown males on planet earth.

ThinWallet

What I meant was completely different.

I agree with you that: the trusted traveler program is simply bogus. And agreed, that f(trust) >= threshold qualifies someone to be a TT.

However, I think, the vulnerability of the trusted traveler program does not come from the incorrect evaluation of the trust function, or the decay or trust of a particular traveler. I think the biggest vulnerability is that of a false positive: someone simply hi-jacking a trusted travelers identity.



Whoever fired that rocket did not have intent, if you assume that they lacked the capability to identify the plane.

However, intent may very well exist, and be attributed to a totally different party. A careful routing of a vulnerable civilian aircraft on a path that might cause rebels to confuse it with a military plane could be the intent.

WillCAD

I highly doubt that happened. However, I do believe that Malaysia Airlines is guilty of gross negligence in allowing its flights to fly over an active war zone in which both sides are equipped with surface to air missiles.

FlyingHoustonian

And I presume you have outrage at Virgin and Aeroflot and all the others that flew the same routes that day?

WillCAD

Absolutely. I think it's the height of irresponsibility to send commercial traffic through a war zone simply to save fuel.

Himeno

They did not send their flights through a "war zone" to "save fuel". They filed flight plans which were accepted by the aviation authorities of several countries and transited airspace which was open and not restricted.
The airlines did not do a single thing wrong.

WillCAD

I consider a place where people are shooting at each other with tanks and missiles to be, by definition, a war zone. What do you call it?

And maybe the government of Ukraine hasn't restricted the airspace over its territory in which people are shooting at each other with tanks and missiles, in a conflict in which both sides possess surface to air weapons capable of shooting down a civilian airliner, but that doesn't mean it's safe to fly through that zone.

There are plenty of things which are legal to do, but which are not safe or responsible behavior. Flying commercial airliners through a war zone is one of them.

The airlines should all be avoiding the region of Ukraine where the fighting is happening. They're not, or at least they weren't at the time when MH17 was shot down, which was pretty irresponsible. Why did they not route their flights around the combat zone? To save money on fuel, of course.