At least one has looked like a shoe. Therefore, if ever a shoe is found by the side of the road or hanging from power lines we must call out the bomb squad.
Heh. I just now watched the “interview,” and… that is extremely funny. Not so much the guys themselves (who seem like they might be a couple of annoying pricks) or what they’re saying—the “hairstyles” thing isn’t all that clever in itself—but the fact that it’s utterly, irredeemably ridiculous, and yet the machine of the national news media has no choice but to report on it anyway and give them airtime. The palpable anger in the reporters’ voices as it goes on just makes it all the better.
Everything about this incident and the way it’s been covered has been absurd. The fact that some sources (including MSN, in this image I just noticed) feel obligated to censor/blur the character’s “middle finger.” For fuck’s sake, it’s just a few Lite Brite bulbs, only recognizable as a “bird” in the abstract. Do people really need to be protected from seeing that?
Insanity. I don’t see how it can possibly be parodized.
Troll.
Will you two get a room, fer chrissakes? All this lovey-dovey shit has no place in the Pit!
Heh. Good one.
Bad-nose-breath daughter of a platypus.
Your turn. 
We’re having some trouble getting a room with two singles for a reasonable price anywhere out of Chelsea and Somerville. We’ve found a place where they leave mint-flavored fake pipe bombs on the pillows, but…
Eh, I got nothin’.
Have some smilies.
:dubious: 
:rolleyes: :mad:
Maybe RogueRacer can correct me if I’m wrong here, but aren’t bombs made to destroy structures usually detonated right away?
A bomb made to be triggered by a person, like say a mail bomb, could be intercepted and dealt with before detonation. A bomb designed to destroy a structure would, it sems to me, be best detonated as soon as the bomber were a safe disctance away from the bomb.
Obviously this would not be something any layperson would be expected to consider, but wouldn’t the bomb squad wonder why there was a device just sitting there on a bridge?
Granted, if it were a bomb, it could be a dud, or not yet detonated, so caution would be expected.
It just seems to me that if someone were going to try to blow up a bridge, they would a) not make it conspicuous or affix lights to the bomb, and b) detonate it before it can be disarmed.
The google ads are so helpful.
I would say one of those might come in handy.
Video posted on YouTube of the building and setting up of the ‘fake bombs’ in Boston.
It seems (among other things) a great many people are making the point that a Lite-Brite display is small and could not contain much explosive. Fine, I’ll grant you the display was thin, looked pretty harmless and displayed a great many “non-bomb” characteristics.
What if it wasn’t a bomb but a trigger for a bomb located elsewhere?
Please visit a graphic I drew up:
http://i5.photobucket.com/albums/y151/wolf_meister/RControl.gif
Now let’s suppose the huge bomb receiving the radio waves is set to explode when the Lite Brite display is moved some distance away from the bomb. If the display is blown up or shot at, the bomb would also explode because the radio signal is no longer present. Gee, I guess that incredibly harmless LiteBrite display would do a Hell of a lot of damage wouldn’t it?
Dnooman made an interesting point. If someone wanted to blow up a large structure, they usually would do it as quickly as possible but from a safe distance. Let’s suppose someone wanted to create some serious problems though. The trigger / display could be kept relatively simple maybe just one steady bulb glowing and of course a radio transmitter. Why not build a hundred of those and distribute those in a hundred different locations. Let’s suppose of those 100 trigger /displays only 3 were connected to a real bomb and the other 97 were just duds? Wouldn’t that seriously tie up a city for quite a while and wouldn’t the panic be tremendous? (oh and the actual bombs would be well-hidden, and have all kinds of tamper switches connected to it.)
I believe I am giving terrorists much more ingenuity than they could muster but if those Lite-Brites were devised in such a manner do you see why Boston wasn’t over-reacting?
Rube Goldberg thought of that years ago. The problem with your scenario is that it’s too simple.
Of course it *could * be a bomb. Or a trigger, or full of anthrax, or whatever. And as the IED’s in Iraq have shown - practically anything *could * be a bomb. They’ve used everything from garbage to fake curbs to dead animals.
The question is at what point do we stop shutting down the city every time something that *could * be a bomb - but almost certainly isn’t - shows up?
That was obvious the first time you posted.
I think you’re close, but it was actually set up to trigger Lucille Ball’s teeth, which radio the communists, who alert Osama bin Laden, who emails his operatives in Boston, who then throw rocks at the real bomb until one of them hits the trigger.
Anyone else remember this fuckwit?
Oh for goodness sake. A handbag or a backpack could be a bomb, or a trigger for a bomb. Are you in favour of sending every schoolkid or grandmother who forgets something at the bustop to the big house for 5-10 without parole?
For the last 15 years, I have been listening to the same recorded announcements on the trains and tubes - “keep your personal belongings with you at all times, in order to avoid unecessary security alerts which will cause delays to your journey”. And still, with monotonous regularity, we go through pretty much exactly the scenario described above, which starts with some ninimum-wage transport peon asking people nearby “is this your bag?”, and then gradually escalates, possibly up to evacuating the station, stopping all trains running through it, and having the EOD robot shotgunning someone’s packed lunch into a million fragments. This happens hundreds of times a year (sometimes hundreds of times per day) and still people aren’t being arrested for it, unless there is some reasonable grounds to believe they were intending to cause trouble. Because, you know, shit happens and sometimes you just have to accept that.
I think The Register sum this up pretty well.
All I want to know is, has the sky stopped falling yet…?
If you take such convoluted scenarios as significant possibilities, there’s pretty much no object on Earth that is visible or takes up space that wouldn’t be considered a threat.
RogueRacer, I think we’re in basic agreement here. If the police do the right thing and investigate, it launches a cascade of events – given that this all happened at rush hour – that ends up with the mayor getting steamed and raging. No doubt he was embarrassed, and he’s certainly gotten, if not his pound of flesh, at least a half a pound, since Time Warner has agreed to stump up about a million dollars, and apologized with a full-page ad in the Globe.
As to the felony hoax charge against the perps, I agree that it’ll be tough – though not impossible – to sustain. I see it as a warning shot across the bow to the next people who want to try a similar stunt.
They’re not perps.