This was done! It created terrible publicity incidents like the TSA forcing women to drink their own breast milk to prove it was safe. And not all liquids subject to this are things a person should swig even if they aren’t explosives. The extremely negative PR rightly stopped this practice.
Is that practice not really common? I’ve seen that done as a matter of course on lots of international airports with baby food / liquid and no one seems to get too fussed about it.
People travel with liquids they don't intend to eat. Shampoo and all that.
There is also nothing that precludes explosives from being non-toxic. Presumably your demise is near if you are carrying explosives through security. What do you care about heavy metal poisoning at that point?
But also you can fill up a water bottle after security. Wouldn't it be fairly easy to make a pen or similar innocuous item out of sodium, and drop it in a bottle of water to make an explosion?
My point is that security can never be strict enough to catch someone who's truly motivated and funded, without making it impossible to admit people at a reasonable pace, and the current rules don't really help with that except for cutting down on the riff raff terrorists. But maybe those are more common than a trained professional with high tech weapons, I don't know.
FWIW, sodium in water is such a pathetic explosion that it would mostly be an embarrassment for the would-be bomber. It wouldn’t do any meaningful damage.
An explosion with real gravitas is far more difficult to execute than people imagine. (see also: people that think ANFO is a viable explosive) This goes a long way in explaining why truly destructive bombings are rare.
The USA mostly used .50 caliber machine guns, usually with a mix of ammunition including incendiary bullets so that a hole in a fuel tank meant a large fire. Fighters from the other major combatants usually had 20mm autocannons in addition to smaller machine guns.
Allied fighters were also equipped with self-sealing fuel tanks, so a hit doesn't automatically mean it burns. I don't have any stats on it, but they wouldn't have added the self-sealing if it didn't improve the survivability.
The sensitive part for a P-51 was the cooling system. Any hit on that, and you're done.
B-17s famously endured a lot of battle damage. The usual vector of attack on them was head on, and they aimed for the cockpit. (Attacks on fighters usually aimed for the cockpit, too.)
I know that tracers were used in WW1 to set observation balloons (filled with hydrogen) afire. Tracers in WW2 were used so the gunner could direct his aim. I haven't read that they were intended for the fuel tanks, but that could be true.
109's would frequently sneak up from the rear, and if the tail gunner was not paying attention, it was an easy kill. My dad (B17 navigator) said the tail gunners, once they spotted a 109, would fire a few rounds of tracers long before the 109 was in range - just to let the pilot know they were awake and aware. It usually meant the 109 would veer off.
Incendiary ammunition is distinct from tracer, though some projectiles have both functions, and tracers have a chance of causing a fire. Incendiary projectiles usually ignite or explode after impact.
> My point is that security can never be strict enough to catch someone who's truly motivated and funded, without making it impossible to admit people at a reasonable pace, and the current rules don't really help with that except for cutting down on the riff raff terrorists.
This is the classic HN developer arrogance and oversimplification, but let's accept this as true for argument's sake. It turns out that "riff raff terrorists" are the only ones we needed to stop as there's been no successful bombings of Western airlines in 25 years, and there have been foiled attempts.
The existence of master locksmiths (and door breaching charges) doesn't mean you shouldn't lock your door at night.
Literally none of these were foiled by the security circus we all have to go through.
If anything, they are evidence that serious attempts are foiled by intelligence services long before the perpetrators get anywhere near an airport, and the others were just incompetent idiots.
Nonetheless, I hope you recognise that incompetent idiots beget more incompetent idiots, if they think they'll get away with it. You don't want e.g. a spate of bank robberies, by idiots who've heard that rubbing lemon juice on your face makes you invisible to cameras. It doesn't matter that they'll get obviously get caught, the problem is a spate of idiots attempting bank robberies (because they're filled with confidence they'll succeed) could easily get people killed.
I don't like security theatre either, and clearly the whole thing is a job creation program and an excuse for vendors to sell flashy scanner devices. But you need visible deterrents, even if most people know they're theatre.
They also act as reassurance for idiots who wouldn't fly otherwise. Idiots' money spends just as well as clever people's money, and there's a lot more idiots out there than clever people.
Because we live in a society with a free press, we have the chattering classes asking "what can we do about this threat?", and government is expected to respond. People don't like to hear from the politician "you're idiots, we don't need that, you are no less safe if we do nothing", they like to hear "we're doing XYZ to address this threat, how clever and wonderful you all are, dear citizens, for recognising it. Your safety is my top priority", then we get the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politician%27s_syllogism
I wish I'd missed it. We had 12 feet of snow in 3 weeks where I live in the Sierra, and we're only at 4,500 feet above sea level. We average several feet a year, so we know snow, but not 12 feet in 3 weeks. We couldn't see out of our windows. I spent 3-8 hours a day for 3 weeks clearing snow from our driveway and cul-de-sac, only to have to wait longer for the county to clear the road beyond. We were running out of places to put the snow we cleared. Towards the end, people could no longer clear their roofs because the snow on the ground was so high. Decks collapsed everywhere, as did several roofs. There was no getting out for supplies, emergencies, etc. The ski resort nearest us closed because it was too difficult to get there.
Immediately after, we had a foot of rain in two weeks. That took care of much of the snow. But it also washed away significant roads (along with several feet of earth beneath them), some of which took a year or more to get back open.
The ground was so saturated that many septic systems failed in my neighborhood, some with water running into the houses through toilets/drains because the underground water table on the high side of their property was above those drains (artesian springs aren't so charming when they are coming through your septic system and out of your toilet). Most of those folks have installed one-way valves now, but that still means you can't flush in such scenarios because the water has nowhere to go. Ours didn't flow in reverse, but our drains/toilets stopped draining for ~2 months.
I like winter weather, but I'd be happy to never relive Feb/Mar of 2023 in the Sierra. I'll still take it over the floods that happen in valleys and flat lands as a result of such events.
Maybe, but I think it could have made a small team very wealthy and successful much more than it did a large company.
It was obviously pitched as an ecosystem/platform play, like "the next vmware" or something, but there was never anything close to a real moat there. Running a registry involved a lot of storage and transfer costs plus spam/abuse management, and private registry was always going to be a better fit for being integrated with CI platforms and the like more than a standalone service with its own auth and billing concerns.
That's a good point. I do remember doing problems related to extending formulae outside the radius of convergence in my final year before university, but I don't think it's fair to ask for proper complex analysis from 17-year-olds.
