Suspicious occurrences.
So I went to another one of those IEEE dinners with my dad. They're closest replacement to all the cool lecturers who were easily available for free in Oberlin. Sad thing was, this one wasn't nearly as good as the space-based previous ones. It was on Intrusion Detection & Countermeasures. I thought this would have to do with stuff like hacking into the nation's computers. Turned out it was much more about old-fashioned physical intrusion. He first started with an extremely cursory overview of previous terrorist assault and trends in them with practically no detail ("USS Cole. Maritime assault. Beirut, truck bomb, improperly secured perimeter."). Then he actually got into his work, which was an incredibly narrow part of counter-terrorism: a detection system for the "Do Not Enter!" passages going the wrong way at airports. First off, most of those allow traffic going the other way, putting this system as rather useless to begin with unless it can differentiate. Secondly, few really serious terrorists are going to be risky enough to try walking down one of those corridors- there's too much potential for bad luck, a random person seeing you and informing a guard, a guard turning around at an inopportune moment... sure, you can stop people trying to evade the security checkpoint so they can get on without a ticket- a time where you can safely take that risk since you aren't carrying anything dangerous and can claim you got confused- but terrorists are unlikely to try it.
That said, it still wouldn't hurt to have a good system, so they had fun testing it by shooting microwaves at it, lasers, and so on trying to mess it up while having a pitching machine toss 90 mph terrorist baseballs through the corridor. This is fun from a sheer "mess with the engineering and see what it can take!" perspective, but he couldn't actually tell us any results, since it was all classified. Dang.
Anyway, while on the subject of terrorism, I heard on NPR yesterday that the entire Philadelphia police radio system crashed for two hours. They had tried to send out an "everybody get here!" bulletin from one police officer who was allegedly in trouble, but it sank the system instead. And even afterwards, it was still scratchy and buggy for hours after some functionality was restored. The police have no clue why this happened.
Now, tell me this, people who are on my friends list... does that not sound like something right out of an RPG?! Come on! This kinda stuff happens all the time for the protagonists! System mysteriously crashes disabling communications while sending all police to one part of town while the Shadowrunners/renegade Virtual Adepts/supervillains do their deeds.
(Ah, thanks Google News, here's a link: http://pennlive.com/newsflash/pa/index.ssf?/base/news-16/1085045640174120.xml )
P.S. Will not jinx self. Will only announce happy news if it turns out to work rather than go nowhere.
P.P.S. Some have surely already seen this, but it seems that Al-Jazeera was working with the Zionists after all! The conspiracy goes deeper than we thought...
That said, it still wouldn't hurt to have a good system, so they had fun testing it by shooting microwaves at it, lasers, and so on trying to mess it up while having a pitching machine toss 90 mph terrorist baseballs through the corridor. This is fun from a sheer "mess with the engineering and see what it can take!" perspective, but he couldn't actually tell us any results, since it was all classified. Dang.
Anyway, while on the subject of terrorism, I heard on NPR yesterday that the entire Philadelphia police radio system crashed for two hours. They had tried to send out an "everybody get here!" bulletin from one police officer who was allegedly in trouble, but it sank the system instead. And even afterwards, it was still scratchy and buggy for hours after some functionality was restored. The police have no clue why this happened.
Now, tell me this, people who are on my friends list... does that not sound like something right out of an RPG?! Come on! This kinda stuff happens all the time for the protagonists! System mysteriously crashes disabling communications while sending all police to one part of town while the Shadowrunners/renegade Virtual Adepts/supervillains do their deeds.
(Ah, thanks Google News, here's a link: http://pennlive.com/newsflash/pa/index.ssf?/base/news-16/1085045640174120.xml )
P.S. Will not jinx self. Will only announce happy news if it turns out to work rather than go nowhere.
P.P.S. Some have surely already seen this, but it seems that Al-Jazeera was working with the Zionists after all! The conspiracy goes deeper than we thought...