What ethnicity are you? I went through an airport -- and nobody else got screened except me. What was special about me? I was the only non-white person in the airport. Upon complaining, this was the response:
> Random selection by our screening technology prevents terrorists from attempting to defeat the security system by learning how it operates. Leaving out any one group, such as senior citizens, persons with disabilities, or children, would remove the random element from the system and undermine security. We simply cannot assume that all terrorists will fit a particular profile.
I used to have a Sikh manager who wore a turban. Whenever we traveled together, he would get "randomly" stopped. While they were patting him down, he would inevitably chuckle and say something like "So what are the odds of being 'randomly' selected 27 times in a row?"
I don't know the specifics of the process for selection, but I can confidently say that the process is bigoted.
Same thing used to happen to me when I had dreadlocks. Made the same joke too. "what are the odds I'd get randomly selected 100% of the time I go through a checkpoint..."
Besides being racist this is kind of dumb. If you’re going to bring down the plane you’re defo not going to look like someone who gets randomly selected 100% of the time. Even the 9/11 terrorists knew this and shaved their beard instead of looking like the fundamentalists scumbags they were.
In proper English usage it would only be a bigoted
(obstinately or unreasonably attached to a belief, opinion, or faction, in particular prejudiced against or antagonistic towards a person or people on the basis of their membership of a particular group)
check if it was unreasonable to suspect a Sikh of carrying a Kirpan.
The Rehat Maryada would suggest that is in no way whatsoever an unreasonable suspicion.
Sure, your manager likely didn't carry one on airplanes .. but that still falls short of being an unreasonable check.
As a white guy who was caught accidentally carrying a large knife once through security, at the bottom of a carry-on backpack I'd had since high school, I don't think it's in any way essential to use racial or ethnic markers to figure out whether someone is taking something dangerous onto a plane. I didn't even know I was trying to bring a knife onto a plane at a regional airport. There's no reason to think that Sikhs are explicitly going out of their way to hide something.
Interesting that none of these comments seem to be questioning why we can’t just carry a small pocketknife on the plane. We used to be able to before 9/11. The 9/11 hijackings only worked because the policy was comply, land, and let the negotiators do their work. Suicide attacks using commercial airlines just wasn’t a thing. We now have armored locking cockpit doors and no airplane would give up control to hijackers anymore. United Flight 93 was already taken over and heard about the World Trade Center and they revolted.
Now, knives could only be used to commit a crime i.e. assaulting another passenger or crew. Banning liquids does more to prevent terrorists than banning knives. I can see banning them for the same reason concerts ban them, that it is a lot of people in a small space, but that is very different than “national security” or “preventing terrorism”.
Welcome to the club. I inadvertently traveled with not one, but two large box cutters in my carryon satchel for at least 20 flights before I discovered them while searching for some swag. I put them in there for a booth setup in Vegas years prior. Sent a completely calm, even sympathetic report to the powers that be, got put on the DNF list for my troubles.
Still screened and detained 100 percent of the time, sometimes for hours, sometimes having to surrender personal devices, decades later.
> Sent a completely calm, even sympathetic report to the powers that be, got put on the DNF list for my troubles.
What were you hoping to achieve by sending that report?
Most people would have just thought "wow, lucky I wasn't caught with that", taken it out of the bag so it didn't happen again and carried on with their lives.
Deviating from that normal response makes it look like you're just trying to cause trouble.
Yeah, if I had a "Crap, what was that doing in there?" I'd be very quiet about it.
As I wrote in a very different thread, I avoid putting anything in baggage that I might carryon that is even marginally prohibited. I used to do a lot more travel and it's inevitable that knives and the like would inevitable get left in a pocket.
Some of us genuinely believe all that "cops are there to help you, so try to be helpful to cops" stuff we were raised on. Right up until the point when you actually try to do it and find out how things really work...
You sent a report saying you were not searched for 20 times and now you are searched all the time? Has it been over 20 times that you have been searched?
Honestly, I would just give them a pass to carry a ceremonial knife, if they could prove they were Sikhs and not someone pretending to be. But I guess that's why we can't have nice things and why the same rules have to apply to everyone. I think most reasonable people understand that they can't preserve every aspect of their personal beliefs or pride in a situation involving the safety of millions of people flying daily. Carrying a weapon is certainly a bit unusual as a pillar of faith, but there are plenty of others that could also be deemed antipathetic to the well functioning order of a modern society trying to move people safely from A to B. And the same way I would consider trained and licensed gun owners to be a relatively low threat and a rule-abiding group of citizens, that's how I would view Sikhs with their blades (or even more so). So if you're Amish, take a horse. If it's Shabbat, wait til Sunday. If you're the TSA and you want to be more efficient by discriminating, look at people who have no discrenable ideology, or those whose ideology actively conflicts with your mission of preventing attacks.
Sikh's carrying a knife, a bracelet, a comb, etc. has never bothered me in the slightest in all the decades I've known about this - the Khalistan movement in a particular location during a particular time aside, they're not exactly actual postcards for terrorism (despite what some might think when faced with people and turbans).
They always had a pass here in Australia for many years until things tightened up.
Not that I'm a fan, but in general Rules are Rules and making exceptions while fair in some senses will be unfair in others <shrug>.
Circling back to my initial comment- it is the case that there is an actual reason rather than a made up bit of bullshit, to reasonably suspect that a Sikh might be carrying a knife ... if they are they're almost certain to also have a comb .. so that's handy.
okee yeah, and rules are rules, and there's a reason to think that. It would be nice if we lived in a world where rules could be bent in some cases for individuals if they actually posed no theeat, but we all have to deal with the lowest common denominator wanting to cause the most damage, so here we are.
I must say, one thing that this reminds me of is what happens if you board an El Al flight. They don't racially profile you, they just ask you some fairly innocuous questions and watch your responses. I assume they have some way of monitoring your blood pressure, heart rate, and pupil dilation at a distance... but this hasn't really changed since the 1980s, when those things had to be read or guessed in realtime by a trained human. They have a phenomenally safe record, for a country under constant terror attacks.
My takeaway from flying El Al is that there is a much better way to deal with security, that analyzes and addresses the potentially bad individual motives of anyone getting on a plane, and mostly lets everyone else pass. Which is to say that security in its best form should be almost transparent to people without malicious intentions. Having good intelligence coupled with treating each person as their own potential bomb threat is far superior to superficially treating everyone as a threat and having no real security, and far better than just creating security theater around certain people because they're of one race or ethnicity. But El Al's methods probably don't scale well to the size of US or European air travel, because you need highly trained people to stand there in the airport make those calls on the fly for every single passenger.
If I were to guess - I'd guess El Al would let a Sikh bring a blade if they looked him in the eye for 10 seconds and decided he was okay.
The issue isn't really whether a Sikh might be carrying a knife (as Sikhs generally advocate non-violence and pacifism), but if an exemption is afforded to give Sikhs the right to carry weapons on a plane, whether a terrorist might then impersonate being a Sikh in order to get a weapon onboard.
The Sikh blade is ornamental, and usually blunted. There's no reason why they shouldn't be able to carry a blunted blade that basically isn't even a knife. There is no concern of a terrorist using it anymore than any other blunted object, as Sikhs could be required to bring the blunted blade and the blade checked at security.
This is completely absurd and backwards. Violence on planes (at least, phsycial, weapon-assisted) is basically exclusively the purview of organized ideological groups, it's not like crime in the streets. While I'm not aware of any Sikh group who has ever attempted to hijack a plane, the extremely well established general pattern is exactly that extremist sincere believers in a religion or cause are the most dangerous people on a plain.
Not a hijacking, but also maybe a reason not to give all Sikhs a pass on airport security.
> The bombing of Air India Flight 182 is the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history and was the world's deadliest act of aviation terrorism until the September 11 attacks in 2001. It remains the deadliest aviation incident in the history of Air India, and the deadliest no-survivor hull loss of a single Boeing 747
I think you misunderstood me. That's exactly what I'm saying. And I'm saying that Sikhs with or without ceremonial blades are no more of a threat than Mormons wearing special underwear.
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To be more specific: An individual with an extreme belief about anything is as dangerous as an extremist member of a group with extreme beliefs. So the smart thing is to look at the beliefs and extramicy of each person. If you find someone trying to board an aircraft who doesn't care if they make it to the end of their flight, that is a security problem.
I think the best and easiest idea is to prevent people from carrying weapons on airplanes. Taking over an airplane with special underwear is not a realistic threat.
In contrast, trying to interview and run background checks on every person boarding a plane to figure out if they are an extremist on a mission or not is (a) much more invasive, and (b) much less likely to work out. Especially when you actually don't want to prevent fundamentalists from flying on planes (I don't think preventing some major evangelical church leader or some radical rabbi from flying would even be constitutional, and clearly not a popular move if attempted).
Note that I am not at all advocating for extra security targeting of Sikhs or any other such religious or ethnic targeting. I am just saying that no one should be allowed to carry a weapon on board a commercial airplane, for any reason.
Notably in India, there have been a few times where Sikhs have been at the head of violent revolts - and a few times where they have been targeted by violent purges/genocides.
They’re generally pretty chill, but they aren’t pacifists.
I'd say that incident falls under political extremism, not religious extremism. Which is all the more reason to check people's individual beliefs rather than their race or ethnicity. Anyone from any background can be radicalized; some formatting is more prone to it than others. Sikhs, as you say, are pretty chill. Not being pacifist doesn't mean you want to go out and kill anyone.
Indeed, I didn't know about this incident, thanks for sharing it.
Anyway, I wasn't trying to say that Sikhs are more or less likely than any other group to be pacifist. I was saying we shouldn't even be having this discussion, and simply scan people for weapons, and use things like actual random screening to help as needed. And that religious reasons for carrying weapons are not a valid excuse.
scuse me, is there another major religion in modern times whose popular leaders sanctify taking the lives of disbelievers to get to heaven? I'm waiting, I'd love to hear about another one.
@defrost: I apparently can't respond directly to you. It's a mistake to ascribe a singular focus to someone you don't know. There may be one out of ten thousand people in any group who might want to cause chaos or violence, and they may very well have their own reasons. It would be absurd, though, to not acknowledge that there are some "gospels", if you will take that term in the broadest sense possible, or sub-religions, which preach that violence is a path to salvation, and which tend to recruit people for the purpose of violence. There are also some political movements which fill the same vacuum for an aimless, angry human soul without religion.
It is not that I have a singular focus on one religion nor one political movement, so much as that the evidence suggests that, currently, some movements have more violent offshoots and a more violent profile. There are a handful of political and religious ideologies in the world that lead to more suicide bombings and hijackings per year than, say, the total number done by believers in Zoroastrianism, Sikhs, Confucians, Hindus, Yazidis, Jews, Buddhists, Libertarians, Democratic Socialists, Freemasons and Christians combined.
If you had, for instance, Jim Jones's cult or the Aum Shinrikyo boarding airplanes and blowing them up on a regular basis, and your response was that a person had to be a single-minded bigot to notice the fact that most airplane bombings originated with this particular ideology, then I'd say you were ignoring facts or willfully making excuses for ideologies which brainwashed people into doing those things. Possibly for reasons related to disliking your own society, which is perfectly fair, but certainly not neutral or scientific.
No, not at all. I was simply combating the idea that the kinds of reasons that lead to people being less likely to become regular criminals (a religious reason to carry a weapon, being licensed and trained with a weapon) would apply to their risk profile on airplanes.
Isn’t that what the scanners are for? To find large metallic objects? Why do you need additional “random” screenings behind that? Or are you saying the scanners don’t work to find even obvious weapons? If so, we should get rid of the scanners.
Err, not that I know of, I generally use the OED to look up the various recorded uses of words.
> To find large metallic objects?
The OED is for finding words, "scanners" that I've used or made are for mapping background geological structures via seismic waves, gravitational waves, magnetic waves, gamma waves. Medical scanners I've worked with have generally not bee used for finding large metallic objects and some should not be used if a patient has large metal objects attached or within.
> Why do you need additional “random” screenings behind that?
In 40+ years of scanning things there's not been a single time I've needed an additioan "random" scan - a few times scans have been repeated due to various failures to save data.
> Or are you saying the scanners don’t work to find even obvious weapons?
In the comment you responded to I said that it is not unreasonable to think that a Sikh you meet, anywhere, might be carrying a knife, a comb, a bracelet, etc. I did not mention anything about scanners. No, seriously, go and recheck the comment.
> If so, we should get rid of the scanners.
We? All scanners? Okay, well, thanks for sharing that opinion.
I figure various groups of scanner users will want to keep using them, of course. I personally am in favour of scanners for exploration and medical work.
A person can get mistakenly (or not) flagged for special screening and get it over and over again - it happened to me many years ago.
I fixed it by filling out a form requesting a review, after which I received a “redress number” which could be entered into my booking information. It reliably stopped after that.
Not defending the practice but the Mohammed thing has a possible origin that isn't directly racist. The common names among Muslims and their propensity to appear on various watch lists lead to a lot of false alarms on those with those names.
It may be a racist result but there is a pretty reasonable and understandable reason it happens, ignoring the legality and morality of that kind of tracking as well.
Same. Every border crossing. Every flight. Every interaction with police. I always get checked. I always get flagged. I always have by bags opened and my car searched coming back from Canada with officers holding large powerful machine guns and rifles in case I twitch to hard.
I haven't so much as gotten a speeding ticket in nearly a decade but law enforcement and border guards break out the microscope every time they see me.
I am a white male and have TSA pre-check and after walking through the metal detector, maybe one out of several times I get randomly selected for the body scanner. I've never gotten the dreaded SSSS though. I've very rarely traveled alone not on a work trip and never alone on a one way ticket so maybe that helps.
I get it not infrequently when travelling from europe. It's annoying that they pretend that "oh this is random" .. I'm even going up to the airport employees at hte gate and telling them "I'm told I'm here to make new friends today"
It's screwed up that skin color is a marker that would lead an ignorant provincial quasi-cop to assume someone is of a particular ethnicity, and even more so that that ethnicity would lead them to believe an individual adheres to a belief system that might lead them to blow up an aircraft. Very poor set of assumptions and flawed tooling, to say the least.
When all you see is color, everything different is racism.
I'm the whitest white person you'll find, white bread and turkey sandwich. I get screened all the time. Most of the time the agents are not white, WTF would I blame the color of their skin?
Many ICE agents are Latino but it doesn't stop them racially profiling other Latinos.
When it comes to customs & border, it's more about being "ethnically terrorist", which is more so Middle Eastern than Black in US at this particular moment in time.
I once found myself in the "random extra screening" waiting room in LHR before boarding an El Al flight to Tel Aviv, everyone else in the room was Muslim. Random indeed...
I was so confused last time I traveled as I watched this brown skinned family getting shaken down for ID by TSA and they literally just waived me past and said didn't need ID. Mind you I've never not been asked to show ID to TSA before this.
Curious about the downvotes here, it's 100% relevant to the conversation and is personal experience. I imagine it's tone policing to ensure we don't criticize the techo-facist edgelord take over?
I have wondered why the likes of McKinsey, KPMG, and PWC do not put up candidates (don't even sponsor them, just say you're electing _well known consultancy_).
1. Why would McKinsey etc be interested in a well-functioning government? Best argument I have is that if the economy grows then government (and private) spending on consulting may grow.
2. Note that the consulting firms already managed to get the legislation they most cared about – creation of the LLP as a kind of entity – despite not having any candidates
3. If the government is too associated with a big consultancy then (a) they may be pressured out of giving them contracts (not good for McKinsey!) and (b) failures by that consultancy will be highlighted more than usual in the news (also not good!)
4. I mean plenty of people would go through the consultancy meat-grinder before becoming politicians. If you are training juniors to think similarly then that may carry over after they leave.
That was basically Rishi Sunak, but going beyond that voters really hate it when you make the corporate control obvious.
However, they don't ask questions, so one layer of money laundering is completely fine. Nobody asks where the funding for Farage's various projects comes from, for example.
The author (Cong Wang) is building all sorts of neat stuff. Recently, they built kernelscript: https://github.com/multikernel/kernelscript -- another DSL for BPF that's much more powerful than the C alternatives, without the complexity of C BPF. Previously, they were at Bytedance, so there's a lot of hope that they understand the complexities of "production".
It appears the patent is for "User-Worn Device for Noninvasively Measuring a Physiological Parameter of a User". So Apple is simply moving the logic to a non user-worn device - like a phone - to get around the problem. (this is my quick read / conjecture)
Yeah, prob because one cannot patent an algorithm itself, but only a specific implementation. The patent was about a wearable device so i guess the workaround was to do the computations in a non-wearable device.
I really like the manycores approach, but we haven’t seen it come to fruition — at least not on general purpose machines. I think a machine that exposes each subset of cores as a NUMA node and doesn’t try to flatten memory across the entire set of cores might be a much more workable approach. Otherwise the interconnect becomes the scaling limit quickly (all cores being able to access all memory at speed).
Erlang, at least the programming model, lends itself well to this, where each process has a local heap. If that can stay resident to a subsection of the CPU, that might lend itself better to a reasonably priced many core architecture.
> think a machine that exposes each subset of cores as a NUMA node and doesn’t try to flatten memory across the entire set of cores might be a much more workable approach. Otherwise the interconnect becomes the scaling limit quickly (all cores being able to access all memory at speed).
Epyc has a mode where it does 4 numa nodes per socket, IIRC. It seems like that should be good if your software is NUMA aware or NUMA friendly.
But most of the desktop class hardware has all the cores sharing a single memory controller anyway, so if you had separate NUMA nodes, it wouldn't reflect reality.
Reducing cross core communication (NUMA or not) is the key to getting high performance parallelism. Erlang helps because any cross process communication is explicit, so there's no hidden communication as can sometimes happen in languages with shared memory between threads. (Yes, ets is shared, but it's also explicit communication in my book)
> Erlang, at least the programming model, lends itself well to this, where each process has a local heap.
That loosely describes plenty of multithreaded workloads, perhaps even most of them. A thread that doesn't keep its memory writes "local" to itself as much as possible will run into heavy contention with other threads and performance will suffer a lot. It's usual to try and write multithreaded workloads in a way that tries to minimize the chance of contention, even though this may not involve a literal "one local heap per core".
Yes, but in Erlang, everything on every process is immutable and nothing is ever trying to write anywhere besides locally. Every variable assignment leaves the previous memory unchanged and fully accessible to anything directly referencing it.
Paraphrasing the late great Joe Armstrong, the great thing about Erlang as opposed to just about any other language is that every year the same program gets twice as fast as last year.
Manycores hasn't succeeded because frankly the programming model of essentially every other language is stuck in 1950. I, the program, am the entire and sole thing running on this computer, and must manually manage resources to match its capabilities. Hence async/await, mutable memory, race checkers, function coloring, all that nonsense. If half the effort spent straining to get the ghost PDP-11 ruling all the programming languages had been spent on cleaning up the (several) warts in the actor model and its few implementations, we'd all be driving Waymos on Jupiter by now.
I'm curious, which actor model warts are you referring to exactly?
[The obvious candidates from my point of view are (1) it's an abstract mathematical model with dispersed application/implementations, most of which introduce additional constraints (in other words, there is no central theory of the actor model implementation space), and (2) the message transport semantics are fixed: the model assumes eventual out-of-order delivery of an unbounded stream of messages. I think they should have enumerated the space of transport capabilities including ordered/unordered, reliable/unreliable within the core model. Treatment of bounded queuing in the core model would also be nice, but you can model that as an unreliable intermediate actor that drops messages or implements a backpressure handshake when the queue is full.]
I don't think either of those are particularly problematic. The actor model as implemented by Erlang is concrete and robust enough. The big problems with the actor model are, in my opinion, around (1) speed optimizations for immutable memory and message passing (currently, there's a great deal of copying and pointer chasing involved, which can be slow and is a ripe area for optimization), (2) (for Erlang) speed and QOL improvements for math and strings (Erlang historically is not about fast math or string handling, but both of those do comprise a great deal of general purpose programming), (3) (for Erlang) operational QOL misc improvements (e.g. existing distribution, ets, amnesia, failover, hot upgrade, node deployment, build process range from arcane (amnesia, hot upgrades, etc.all the way up to covered-in-terrifying-spiders (e.g. debugging queuing issues, rebar3))
There is no lineage between The Actor Model and Erlang. The creators of Erlang are on record as having never heard of the Actor Model (as developed by Hewitt, Agha and colleagues at MIT). None of the points you make (including the first one) are a part of any formal definition or elaboration of the Actor Model that I have seen, which was one of my points: there is no unified theory of the Actor Model that addresses all of the practical issues.
With respect to your point (1), you might be interested in Pony, which has been discussed here from time to time, most recently: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44719413 Of course there are other actor-based systems in wide use such as Akka.
Erlang's runtime system, the BEAM, automatically takes care of scheduling the execution of lightweight erlang processes across many cpus/cores. So a well written Erlang program can be sped up almost linearly by adding more cpus/cores. And since we are seeing more and more cores being crammed into cpus each year, what Joe meant is that by deploying your code on the latest cpu, you've doubled the performance without touching your code.
> Erlang, at least the programming model, lends itself well to this, where each process has a local heap. If that can stay resident to a subsection of the CPU, that might lend itself better to a reasonably priced many core architecture.
I tend to agree.
Where it gets -really- interesting to think about, are concepts like 'core parking' actors of a given type on specific cores; e.x. 'somebusinessprocess' actor code all happens on a specific fixed set of cores and 'account' actors run on a different fixed set of cores, versus having all the cores going back and forth between both.
Could theoretically get a benefit due to instruction cache being very consistent per core, giving benefits due to the mechanical sympathy (I think Disruptors also take advantage of this).
On the other hand, it may not be as big a benefit, in the sense that cross process writes are cross core writes and those tend to lead to their own issues...
Who knows what will really happen, but there have been rumours of significant core-count bumps in Ryzen 6, which would edge the mainstream significantly closer to manycore.
Investment gap is what I'd say too. While Rust, Go, Python, etc... have had massive backers that have managed to invest a ton more into things like static analysis, type checking, and developer ergonomics, the Erlang ecosystem hasn't necessarily had the same love, and instead the major users have typically chosen to pivot, or build something outside of the BEAM.
Energy. Creating a single anti-hydrogen atom requires an absurd amount of energy to first create a collision in a particle accelerator and then capture that anti-hydrogen before it eliminates against another atom.
Only about 0.01% of the energy used to operate the particle collider creates antimatter, the vast majority of which is impossible to capture. All in all, the efficiency of the entire process - if you were to measure it in the e^2=(pc)^2+(mc^2)^2 sense - is probably on the order of 1e-9 or worse.
Has there been research on more efficient ways to generate antiprotons? (By the way anti-hydrogen isn't how you would store it as anti-hydrogen can't be trapped.)
Nothing we do creates it at any kind of scale, and it's a pain in the ass to store.
Not to mention the only way to create it is with energy (it doesn't exist on Earth), and we can only do so at terrible efficiencies. So even theoretically it's pretty bad.
> Random selection by our screening technology prevents terrorists from attempting to defeat the security system by learning how it operates. Leaving out any one group, such as senior citizens, persons with disabilities, or children, would remove the random element from the system and undermine security. We simply cannot assume that all terrorists will fit a particular profile.
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