[QUOTE=E-Sabbath]
I can think of at least two ways to take out a bridge with a thousand phone batteries.
[/QUOTE]
Does one of them involve reverse electroplating?
It occurs to me that they haven’t banned fake boobs yet. Why not?
It’d be easy to replace the saline in those things with liquid explosive.
And this years SDMB Award for Teeing Up the Straight Line goes to…envelope please…
Best defense: drivers lisence pictures taken topless. I want the job of taking those pictures, but I won’t pay more than five dollars an hour. OK, six.
Can you blow up a bridge with a potato battery?
[QUOTE=Squink]
Does one of them involve reverse electroplating?
[/QUOTE]
Yep. I don’t know if it’d work, but if you took out the welds it might get interesting.
The other one was just creating a battery bomb.
[QUOTE=El_Kabong]
What would be wise and reasonable is that after I, and other persons who are not in fact terrorists, not be subjected to humiliating treatment every time we get aboard a plane. If that means a national database of persons vetted to fly without repeated, pointless and unnecessary screenings, that’s fine with me.
[/QUOTE]
Would you subscribe to a national database of drivers who have never shown a predisposition for DUI to be waved through roadside checkpoints? They’ve been vetted, so further sobriety checks are pointless and unnecessary, right? After all, no one ever changes their personal habits, political party affiliation, or other sympathies. :dubious:
[QUOTE=Squink]
Does one of them involve reverse electroplating?
[/QUOTE]
What, in the simplest terms, is reverse electroplating?
[QUOTE=Rilchiam]
What, in the simplest terms, is reverse electroplating?
[/QUOTE]
When you pass current down one metal rod, through liquid and up and out of another metal rod, then one rod is eroded, and the other is electroplated.
The joke was quite a good one, electrically erode the bridge.
Actually those 1000 batteries are almost certainly Lithium Ion, when early Mac laptops started using them, they had a habit of catching fire.
Pure Lithium is normally kept under oil, it ignites in water, a rather spectacular chemistry experiment.
Realistically it would probably have been a lot cheaper buying the batteries on their own.
[QUOTE=danceswithcats]
Would you subscribe to a national database of drivers who have never shown a predisposition for DUI to be waved through roadside checkpoints? They’ve been vetted, so further sobriety checks are pointless and unnecessary, right? After all, no one ever changes their personal habits, political party affiliation, or other sympathies. :dubious:
[/QUOTE]
Sorry, I don’t get it. Why are you suspicious of people who change their personal habits or political affiliation? Aren’t those a couple of the freedoms we’re supposed to have?
Anyway, I gave up on this subject a while ago. magellan01 has made me see the error of my ways, and for that I’m forever grateful. With his help, I’ve come to realize that I’m a dangerous character that absolutely needs to be frisked every time I get on a plane, and certainly could never be trusted with a tube of toothpaste, much less an opinion. I’m right with ya. Really.
[QUOTE=Squink]
Unfortunately, the article doesn’t say if plotting to wreck the bridge is what they were actually arraigned for, or how a thousand cell phones can be used to do that.
Are TracFones unusually heavy or something?
[/QUOTE]
Configured properly, 1000 cell phones become 1000 detonators.
[QUOTE=Evil One]
Configured properly, 1000 cell phones become 1000 detonators.
[/QUOTE]
Do they light the bridge up for Christmas? Without an appropriate cover story the terrorists would look darn silly trying to festoon the span with 1000 detonator phones.
Getting back to the OP, I believe there is a possibility that the Brits uncovered a real plot, but I don’t have all tht much FAITH in their (and our) honesty as I used to. The civil authorities will have to offer good, solid evidence of a plot before I’ll buy into it. I’ve been lied to enough that the US and British governments (especially the US government) aren’t credible sources to me. They’re more like people who come on the Dope and make all sort of wild claims and then when people call them on it, they continue to maintain they’re so or refuse to return to the thread where they made the claims to support their contentions.
If they were Dopers, they would be jokes. So, yeah, I suspect 'em.
[QUOTE=El_Kabong]
Anyway, I gave up on this subject a while ago. magellan01 has made me see the error of my ways, and for that I’m forever grateful. With his help, I’ve come to realize that I’m a dangerous character that absolutely needs to be frisked every time I get on a plane, and certainly could never be trusted with a tube of toothpaste, much less an opinion. I’m right with ya. Really.
[/QUOTE]
Evidently not. Look, all I did was ask you what steps to protect us that might encroach on our liberties that YOU would find reasonable. All you keep doing is cavalierly dismissing the precautions that people who know more than you and I have deemed worthy. And when asked, repeatedly what you would do, you sarcastically opine that you shouldn’t be subjected to such inconveniences and indignities because “you are not a terrorist”.
Oh, well then how about we just subject terrorists to to these precautionary measaures. Wouldn’t that be better. If you would be kind enough to submit a list of said terrorists to the D of HS, I’m sure they would be grateful.
I’ve not attempted to defend any of the steps that you dismiss. All I’ve asked you is to share what precautionary measures that might encroach on our liberties that you would consider reasonable. On a debate board, especially in GD, this is a perfectly reasonable request. Why don’t you finally answer the question?
Are you of the opinion that the D of HS should never ask us to do anything that might on any of our civil liberites? Or have some of their policies simply gone to far? What policies that might encroach on your liberties do you think would be wise or resonable.
Now, please answer.
[QUOTE=Evil Captor]
Getting back to the OP, I believe there is a possibility that the Brits uncovered a real plot, but I don’t have all tht much FAITH in their (and our) honesty as I used to. The civil authorities will have to offer good, solid evidence of a plot before I’ll buy into it. I’ve been lied to enough that the US and British governments (especially the US government) aren’t credible sources to me. They’re more like people who come on the Dope and make all sort of wild claims and then when people call them on it, they continue to maintain they’re so or refuse to return to the thread where they made the claims to support their contentions.
If they were Dopers, they would be jokes. So, yeah, I suspect 'em.
[/QUOTE]
That is a fair point
However they have had six guys in captivity for 12 months
- 4 from 21/7/06 (UK date)
- Richard Reid the shoebomber
- an obscure Pakistani who hid his shoe bomb - they got him via Reid
Even with those, they would have had a nice catch of contacts.
Personally I don’t trust the UK police, in my personal experience they tend to lie and manipulate evidence, but with six little canaries (probably in competent hands) it is likely that they were onto something.
It does not exactly help, that one of the key ways of doing this sort of thing, is by spreading mis-information
The latest seems to be muslim women who are prepared to blow up themselves 9with their children). Even a bottle of baby formula could be a bomb in disguise. 
[QUOTE=ralph124c]
The latest seems to be muslim women who are prepared to blow up themselves 9with their children). Even a bottle of baby formula could be a bomb in disguise. 
[/QUOTE]
Well there was a Palestinian guy who put a bomb in the luggage of his pregnant Irish girlfriend …
This point gets lost in all the noise but there WAS some timing involved to maximize the political fodder that could be derived from this.
[QUOTE=vibrotronica]
Bush seeks political gains from foiled plot
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=BobLibDem]
No, they translate into “we are not going to allow terrorists to transform the US into a fascist state the way that some want us to.”
No- we believe that it is possible to fight terrorism while preserving freedom and principles. You, on the other hand, think that the perpetual victimhood of the US allows it to commit war crimes.
People that think that 9/11 provided carte blanche to run roughshod over the Constitution and turn the US into a torture-loving police state are a bigger threat to America than al-Qaeda could ever dream of being.
[/QUOTE]
What some people don’t realize is that there are despotic regimes all over the world that have constitutions that look almost identical to ours but in almost every case, there is also a national security issue (real or contrived) that allows the despot to ignore that constitution. Terrorists are never going to destroy America, but the elimination of civil liberties could. Of course terrorists can blow sh*t up and we have to ask ourselves if it is necessary to eliminate some civil liberties to prevent terrorism?