They certainly do miss some dangerous items, including weapons; but they also do catch thousands of people per year trying to take firearms on planes.

How many of these people intended political violence against civilians (i.e. terrorism) is not determined. Some may intend ordinary nonpolitical violent crime. Some may be really stupid hunters who don’t read the signs that are all over airports telling hunters not to try to carry on firearms. Some may be really incompetent gun smugglers. Some may have just forgotten which backpack they put their handgun in.

https://www.tsa.gov/news/press/releases/2024/07/09/tsa-stopped-3269-firearms-airport-security-checkpoints-nationwide

Jury nullification is a real thing, but it is often misunderstood … mostly because right-wing libertarians and sovereign-citizen kooks have spent decades pushing conspiracy theory about it.

It isn’t an affirmative right of individual citizens to get onto juries and individually block the enforcement of the law. An individual juror cannot nullify. Rather, jury nullification is a logical consequence of two important rules in our legal system:

1. Double jeopardy: if a defendant gets a “not-guilty” verdict from a jury, that defendant cannot be retried for that same crime.
2. Juror independence: the judge cannot order the jury to return a particular verdict, nor punish them for the verdict they return.

Double jeopardy is in the US Constitution. Juror independence is inherited from English common law, where it was established in 1670 in an infamous case where a judge imprisoned and tortured jurors for not returning the verdict the judge wanted.

Because of these two principles, if a jury returns a “not-guilty” verdict, the defendant goes free; even if the verdict seems blatantly contrary to the facts and the law. Even if the jury is blatantly wrong, nobody in the system has any authority to do anything about it — not the judge, not the prosecutor, not the cops.

If you are summoned to be on a jury and you make it clear that you do not intend to judge the case on the facts and the law, you will be dismissed from the jury in voir dire. If you preach nullification to your fellow jurors, you might cause a mistrial: the defendant will not be freed; the court will just get a new jury, and the defendant will go back to jail in the meantime.

A mistrial does not free the defendant. A hung jury (refusing to come to a consensus) does not free the defendant. Only a not-guilty verdict frees the defendant.

That’s a fake.

“… and he was aiming for John Connally.”

Here’s my peace proposal: Putin goes out a window, and Zelenskyy gets to be Tsar of the traditional territory of the Kyivan state.

Are you saying he’s a Keir Blair?

Yep. I was thinking of Heinlein’s 1952 The Rolling Stones, where the person doing the timing calls out commands to the person controlling the engines, like an old-timey sea captain. (And in German, despite being an English-speaking family, because rocketry is German, donchaknow: Brennschluss!)

In some mid-20th-century science-fiction novels, people in the 21st century are piloting rockets by manual control, using slide rules to calculate trajectories.

There was the original 1947 UN plan for the partition of Palestine, for one. You can read in that article about which groups accepted and rejected it.

aggressive shouting, insults and humiliation in front of others

It’s worth noting that these acts may be “violence” in someone’s estimation, but are not within the typical description of “violent crime” or “domestic violence” in a criminal sense.

aggressive shouting, insults and humiliation in front of others

It’s worth nothing that these acts may be “violence” in someone’s estimation, but are not within the typical description of “violent crime” or “domestic violence”.

Bill & Ted is “Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes!”

Either Thomas Jefferson had two first names, or Jefferson Davis had two last names.

“What the user needed” / “What management demanded”

Blahblahrians!

Anyone with even one level in monk automatically counters this with an Ānāpānasati save.

Trade is ancient. Consider: People have been ordering products from abroad, relying on promises and reputations, since the days of Ea-nāṣir. It’s always depended on trust, which is why we still know the name Ea-nāṣir.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog … until you tell them.

Good catch! Typo. Fixed.

Regex is good for a few very specific things, and sysadmins used to use it for goddamn everything. If all your server logs are in lightly-structured text files on a small number of servers, being able to improvise regex is damn useful for tracking down server problems. Just write a shell loop that spawns an ssh logging into each server and running grep over the log files, to look for that weird error.

These days, if you need to crunch production server logs you probably need to improvise in SQL and jq and protobufs or systemd assmonkery or something.

But if you actually need a parser, for goodness sake use a parser combinator toolkit, don’t roll your own, especially not with regex. Describing your input language in plain Haskell is much nicer than kludging it.

(This is the “totally serious software engineering advice” forum, right?)