Not only does it not work, but it gives a false sense of security. I highly doubt this scanner is more effective than traditional methods but it does put even more emphasis on equipment at the expense of people. Pay your staff better, attract good quality people to the work and you'll be safer but the public can't SEE better training, they can SEE high tech whiz-bang gizmos.

The real reasons why this system is being adopted are:

1) It gives a sense of security to dumb passengers.

2) It costs a lot of money. The company making them will make a lot of money. They've already borrowed against this future earning potential to bribe lawmakers. Ahem I mean 'lobby' lawmakers.

Big business wins at the expense of everyone else, that's the system.

Well, it's a rant for sure... but one that frankly echoes the fear so many of us feel today. At least someone's saying it. And I've gotten so used to my own daily institutionalized fear in the past decade. It's nice to hear someone actually shaken enough not to disassociate the whole feeling (yet again) and let themselves boil over.

Solutions? Well Olbermann doesn't propose anything (he asks us to instead) because who the f-ck knows what to do? Not him. Not anyone.

The elephant standing in the china shop is this: those very same corporations are keeping us very, very 'happy.' In addition to the loss of rights/power/voice that Olber bemoans, he neglects to mention that the future will also be filled with amazingly addictive computer gizmos (probably eventually wired into your cortex); video entertainment that will make the holodeck seem like a prediction; and enough flashy distractions and infotainment (soon to be so pervasive in modern life, it will make the early 2000's seem quaint) to completely numb us to the frog getting boiled in the soup pan.

Truth is, if all of us were bored enough, we would never have let this happen.

Trout (also ranting)

Great review! I want to know how people feel about new gizmos, and what they miss from their old phones. Not boring old specs, that doesn't really tell me anything. This guy gets it!

I think there's a pretty clear and obvious reason why "where no one has gone before" describes this gizmo. You'd be hard put to find a less efficient method of propulsion, which implies that you need to have an incredibly overpowered motor and prop to get anywhere (as he found out).

RC props turn at ungodly speeds (11-20K rpm), and I just don't see how you could possibly use one that close to your body in a safe manner. On a plane, they'll literally shred anything resembling flesh, and there's just no way that flimsy little wire cage is going to be any protection when a blade breaks for any reason.

Not a video, but I just saw this today, and Conspiracy is the perfect channel for it. Alongside Fail

http://people.csail.mit.edu/rahimi/helmet/

It seems that instead of blocking what goes on in your head from evil government brain-reading gizmos, wearing aluminium-foil hats actually increase the signal strength.

>> ^rottenseed:
Would definitely improve my workout routine...
Your routine of getting off the couch to get more cheez-its and masturbating profusely to midget porn?

You forgot my egg-shaped masturbation gizmos.

Time for some self promotion *promote

I would love to be able to do this, but how would one even learn? lots of skydiving, rock climbing, base jumping... Probably too much effort, by the time I've learnt all that I could probably just buy a VR gizmo and plug it into my cranium and do it that way

Tags for this video have been changed from 'onion, onn, sony, pos, gizmo, blinking' to 'onion, onn, sony, pos, gizmo, blinking, time vampire' - edited by burdturgler

Luckily I wrote this out for somebody a few days ago:

When I was still fairly new in the air and about 22 years old, I was flying from Montreal to Winnipeg by myself in a rented Cessna as part of my pilot training. Because a Cessna 172 goes about 200 KPH and has enough fuel for four hours maximum, and the total distance was over 2,000 km, this meant many hours of flight and a lot of fuel stops.

Nearing the Quebec-Ontario border, I landed in Val d'Or to refuel and get a new weather briefing for my route. I called the weather service and they said I could probably expect to get to Timmins, ON, an hour away, without the three thousand foot ceiling coming down on me. I took off and flew west, and after about half an hour, it sure as hell did.

A hard rain drummed so intensely on my wings that it drowned out the loud drone of the engine and the cloudbase fell rapidly so that I couldn't see far at all. I had just passed Rouyn-Noranda with its airport and I turned back towards it, but by the time I was over downtown the weather made it so I couldn't see the airport anymore even though it was only four miles away. At the time I wasn't qualified to fly by instruments only and I was already in a pickle, and if the weather lowered much more then I would be basically blind and with diminishing hopes of getting to terra firma since only helicopters can land without at least a bit of forward visibility.

I was on the radio with the unicom operator at the airport, but as with most medium-small airports, he was no air-traffic controller, basically just a guy with a radio and a couple other gizmos but no radar and no real training when it came to helping a pilot in trouble -- which I was on the verge of becoming.

I was beginning to fly a sort of ersatz search pattern looking for the airport and I was starting to just head for whatever lights I could see through the darkening fog but they kept turning out to be this farm or that one and the weather seemed to be getting worse, with its attendant visibility loss and my odds slowly but steadily falling off more yet. It was a bit like going 100 on the freeway in fog when you can only see one second in front of you but no way to really slow down or otherwise make things safer. The rainclouds were creeping into the cockpit, damp and cold, and I couldn't help thinking it was the kind of air you find in a tomb.

Then all at once the next cluster of lights turned out to be the Noranda airport and I shouted my glee and relief over the radio. The landing itself was utterly simple and I taxiied to the apron and got out and got wet in the steady rain as I tied the airplane down. As I was finishing up, the rain came down much harder and the sky fell much more and I thanked God I wasn't still up there because getting down without a crash would've been twice as hard. I visited the stubby aerie where the unicom guy sat alone -- we were about the same age -- and I thanked him for his help and hung out for a little while, unwinding, before I called a cab to take me to a hotel in town.

That cat has some Gizmo ears

First of all, it was ONLINE for everyone to read at 10PM. Maybe if Ronnie wasn't a thousand years old he'd have one of those computer gizmo's and could download it and read it, instead of waiting for a paper version to come to him over 14 hours later.

And let's see, five days before he signed it. It was actually four days. Congress had about three months to be involved in the process, but the GOP thought grandstanding and theatrics were more important, or else they would've known what was in the bill.


Second, we know what Ronnie would think of it. If the money is being spent on anything other than COINS!!! he votes no.


Third: "If that was the only thing we'd be doing, that'd be fine". And guess what? He was talking about... yep, TAX CUTS!!! Just like Rush, Hannity, Boehner, Gingrich and all the rest of em. Nice one Ronnie!!


Last: "we need to get money into the hands of the people and out of the control of the congress"... Awesome Ronnie! What in the fuck do you actually mean?


This guy has gone from someone who I used to respect, to a fucking joke of a broken record.

Tags for this video have been changed from 'weird machines, silly people, lots of fun, 30s' to 'weird machines, silly people, lots of fun, 30s, gizmo' - edited by fissionchips

In reply to this comment by moonsammy:
That's such a painful pun I can't not upvote it. Well played.

Originally, I added "They just couldn't see any point." But he's got that needle gizmo so that wouldn't really fly. (groan)

full movie is here:
http://video.google.com/videosearch?q=gizmo%20movie%20old%20inventions&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS243US244&um=1&sa=N&tab=wv#

I watched this in science class as a kid and loved it. Glad to see it made it to the sift.

They were aiming for a Bones-Spock type of relation between Pulaski the stern woman and Data the android. Basically... she sees him as just another Starfleet gizmo.