The truth is that exactly two things have made air travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing cockpit doors and convincing passengers they need to fight back. The TSA should continue to screen checked luggage. They should start screening airport workers. And then they should return airport security to pre-9/11 levels and let the rest of their budget be used for better purposes. Investigation and intelligence is how we’re going to prevent terrorism, on airplanes and elsewhere. It’s how we caught the liquid bombers. It’s how we found the Yemeni printer-cartridge bombs. And its our best chance at stopping the next serious plot.

Because if a group of well-planned and well-funded terrorist plotters makes it to the airport, the chance is pretty low that those blue-shirted crotch-groping water-bottle-confiscating TSA agents are going to catch them. The agents are trying to do a good job, but the deck is so stacked against them that their job is impossible. Airport security is the last line of defense, and it’s not a very good one.

We have a job here, too, and it’s to be indomitable in the face of terrorism. The goal of terrorism is to terrorize us: to make us afraid, and make our government do exactly what the TSA is doing. When we react out of fear, the terrorists succeed even when their plots fail. But if we carry on as before, the terrorists fail — even when their plots succeed.

via Schneier on Security: Full Body Scanners: Whats Next?.

…

The “paywall problem” isn’t particularly complex, either in economic or technological terms. General-interest papers struggle to make paywalls work because it’s hard to raise prices in a commodity market. That’s the problem. Everything else is a detail.

The classic description of a commodity market uses milk. If you own the only cow for 50 miles, you can charge usurious rates, because no one can undercut you. If you own only one of a hundred such cows, though, then everyone can undercut you, so you can’t charge such rates. In a competitive environment like that, milk becomes a commodity, something whose price is set by the market as a whole.

Owning a newspaper used to be like owning the only cow, especially for regional papers. Even in urban markets, there was enough segmentation–the business paper, the tabloid, the alternative weekly–and high enough costs to keep competition at bay. No longer.

…

One way to escape a commodity market is to offer something that isn’t a commodity. This has been the preferred advice of people committed to the re-invention of newspapers. It is a truism bordering on drinking game material that anyone advising newspapers will at some point say “All you need to do is offer a product so relevant and valuable the consumer is willing to pay for it!”

This advice is well-meaning. It’s just not much help. The suggestion that newspapers should, in the future, create a digital product users are willing to pay for is merely a restatement of the problem, by way of admission that the current product does not pass that test.

Most of the historical hope for paywalls assumed that through some combination of reader desire and supplier persuasiveness, the current form of the newspaper could survive the digital transition without significant alteration.

Payalls, as actually implemented, have not accomplished this. They don’t expand revenue from the existing audience, they contract the audience to that subset willing to pay. Paywalls do indeed help newspapers escape commodification, but only by ejecting the readers who think of the product as a commodity. This is, invariably, most of them.

via The Times’ Paywall and Newsletter Economics « Clay Shirky.

The death toll is not small. The UK, despite having an excellent road safety record, sees more people killed on the roads every year than died during the entire duration of the Troubles in Northern Ireland; "According to the World Health Organization motor vehicle collisions are the 6th most common cause of death in developed nations, with an average rate of 20.8 per 100,000 populations in the year 2000 (30.8 for males, 11.0 for females). African nations have the world's highest road traffic injury mortality rates." (Wikipedia on traffic-related death rates.) 1.2 million were killed and 50 million injured in road traffic accidents in 2004.

Want a yardstick to put that last figure in perspective?

During the first world war, there were 9.7 million military deaths, 6.8 million civilian deaths, and 21.2 million surviving casualties, over a 4.5 year period. That's an average of 2.15 million dead per year … but today we have better medical care, and a much higher probability of surviving a bullet or a car crash. If you compare the total casualty rates, then we have one and a half times as many people injured in road traffic accidents every year than were wounded or killed during the entire first world war.

via Cars (again) – Charlie’s Diary.

I'm in Chinatown, on my way to somewhere not Chinatown. Chinatowns, in whatever city, or China-strip-malls, in whatever small city or town, are a great place to land before going elsewhere, because they are a zone that exists outside of the context of the neighboring contexts. Good for a deep breath. I take the opportunity to grab a plate of fried dumplings, or “dollar dumplings” as I call them, because in my Chinatown they cost a dollar. They are fast and cheap, plus also they are more delicious than they have any right to be. It's a dumpling house in a quiet corner, and it's a beautiful evening, with the setting sun just so and a volleyball tourney on the school tennis courts across the street just wrapping up, and I wonder to myself, “Should I Tweet how awesome this is? Should I Yelp this particular dumpling shop? Do I Digg it?” And before I can swallow what I'm chewing (awesome delicious fried dumplings) I check myself: “And ruin it?”

This is a tiny philosophical problem: when you find the hidden treasure, the off-the-beaten-path-gem, and you are a digital citizen, do you pimp the hidden treasure, or do you keep your trap shut? The cost/benefit analysis is not clear-cut. Publicize the hidden treasure, and you benefit the proprietor of the hidden treasure, but you run the risk of the hidden treasure, through success bought with this publicity, losing some of its hidden-ness and eventually some of its treasurability. Withhold the information, and then you get to have the hidden treasure to yourself, but the proprietor, who surely could benefit from an elevation from hiddenness, does not benefit at all. Plus you pass up the opportunity to claim to have discovered a hidden treasure.

…

via The Dumpling Effect: The Trouble with Coolhunting your Dinner – The Awl.

I called an Apple Store, just for kicks, to see how things were going during the launch, and if he thought they might have any phones ever. He described the line to me, the one outside of his store, as something like a human Möbius strip – a warping tendril folded in, a thing without earthly end.

"I'm looking at eternity," he said. "I can see the tail of The Beast."

via Penny Arcade – The Shipment.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jun/12/anthony-bourdain-war-fast-food

…

And since then it’s all been about the little girl. Because I am acutely aware of the fact that she’s a blank page, her brain a soft surface waiting for the irreversible impressions of every raised voice, every gaffe and unguarded moment.

I’m not against hamburgers. But I believe that a burger should be made of “beef” (not necessarily the best beef, but definitely recognisable as something that was, before grinding, mostly red, reasonably fresh, presumably from a steer or cow, something that your average doberman would find enticing). I don’t believe my hamburger should have to come with a warning to cook it well done to kill off any potential contaminants or bacteria.

It is repugnant, in principle, to me – the suggestion that we legislate against fast food. We will surely have crossed some kind of terrible line if we are infantilised to the extent that the government has to step in and take the Whoppers out of our hands. It is dismaying – and probably inevitable. When we reach the point where we are unable to raise a military force of physically fit specimens, or public safety becomes an issue after some lurid example of a large person blocking a fire exit, they surely shall.

But if you are literally serving shit to children, then I’ve got no problem with a jury of your peers wiring your nuts to a car battery and feeding you the accumulated sweepings of the bottom of a monkey cage. In fact, I’ll hold the spoon.

In this way, me and the PETA folks and the vegetarians have something in common. They don’t want us to eat any meat. I’m beginning to think, in light of recent accounts, that we should, on balance, eat a little less meat. PETA doesn’t want stressed animals to be cruelly crowded into sheds, ankle deep in their own crap, because they don’t want any animals to die – ever – and basically think that chickens should, in time, gain the right to vote. I don’t want animals stressed or crowded or treated cruelly or inhumanely because that makes them provably less delicious. And, often, less safe to eat.

…

This is what we call an unalloyed piece of good, if LONG !@#$ OVERDUE, news. The Supreme Court has affirmed that those pesky rights and protections in the Constitution that some of us still think might be sorta, maybe, kinda important to apply equally to everyone, well, they even apply to people our government alleges have committed heinous crimes.

<Samuel L. Jackson>
THE U.S. CONSTITUTION, MOTHERF-CKERS — DID YOU READ IT?
</Samuel L. Jackson>

This is going to put a spring in my step all day. Sad comment that simply reaffirming rights that are unambiguously spelled out in our country’s founding documents can cheer me up like this, but there you go.

Also, as of this writing, CNN.com’s link for this story off their front page says “Gitmo detainees win round at Supreme Court.” I’m pretty sure that when you win a decision at the “Supreme” Court, that’s not just winning a “round.”

After all, what’s the government going to do? Come up with some other flimsy legal pretext to keep a bunch of detainees acquired under dubious circumstances from having private conversations with their lawyers, having the same access to evidence as their prosecution, or having any chance of seeing as fair and impartial a trial as America can provide before the next administration comes in to deal with the legal mess left behind by this one?

… Naaaaah.

But I’ll relish this small reminder that we might just live in a nation of laws after all.

Suspected terrorists and foreign fighters held by the U.S. military at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to challenge their detention in federal court, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

The decision marked another legal blow to the Bush administrations war on terrorism policies.

In a 5-4 ruling, the justices said the U.S. military lacks the legal autonomy to prosecute as many as 300 prisoners.

At issue were the rights of the detainees to contest their imprisonment as well as the rules established to try them in military tribunals.

A congressional law passed in 2006 would limit court jurisdiction to hear such challenges.

It is a legal question the justices have tackled three times since 2004, including Thursdays ruling.

Each time the high court ruled against the governments claim that it has the authority to hold people it labels “enemy combatants.”

Neat service pulling intriguing Tweets by how many times they’ve been marked as someone’s favorite — something like Flickr’s “interestingness” algorithm. I went to check out the page (at the above link) and noted this little gem, from Twitter user hotdogsladiesкомпютри:

Clinton fans tell us they’ll protest by supporting McCain. Many also vow to protest gas prices by shitting in their cars. Back to you, Tom.

The frequently-sagacious Rands on why he likes Twitter — struck a chord with me.

[...]

Twitter is a social network, yes, but it’s a social network without the superpoke scrabtaculous zombie noise and, for that, I’m thankful, because I’ve got work to do. Yes, I could spend days tidying my profile and scrubbing my friends list, but to what end? I want to know more people, and sure, it’s interesting to see what they’re up to, but what I really want to know is what is going on inside their heads with a minimum of fuss.

I want to see how they see the world. This is why I follow people on Twitter. This is why they follow me.

[...]

and, from another post of his on Twitter:

Twitter is an informational yard sale. You simply never know when that off-the-cuff comment you toss will alter a person’s day.

Via the inimitable Warren Ellis, of course.