Somehow, this reminds me of the ‘Sum of all fears’-movie. After a nuclear bomb destroys an American city, they find out that the stuff came from their own army stocks…

How about not selling arms in the first place?

Ding!  We have a winner!  Yeah!

The Saddams and Bin Ladens of the future world will always get arms from greedy or short-sighted nations…

It’s a test.  If we’re dumb enough to sell weapons to the likes of Saddam or bin Laden…

Well, decrepit, I agree with the gist of your posts, but still think it would be wasted money.

How about not selling arms in the first place?

Oh well, forget that. Pure fantasy, I know. The Saddams and Bin Ladens of the future world will always get arms from greedy or short-sighted nations…

If you’re smart you can hack anything that you have your physical hands on

Surely you’re right but why make it easy for them? I’ve never heard of any efforts to make our weapons “cancellable.”

Pretty damn hard to hack a circut that is 1) cast in epoxy, 2) only receives, does not send, 3) has kill-wires cast into the epoxy around it, and 4)is set to launch unarmed and unguided (or just explode) if any rivets are drilled. 

At least we could make them use up a lot of electronics experts trying to figure it out.

If you’re smart you can hack anything that you have your physical hands on, decrepit. So they would have simply asked around a little in their circles until they found a few computer/electronics people.

As for tampering makes it useless – how? The only reasonable way I could think of would be a bomb or an acid pellet in the electronic parts. But THAT can be dismantled too. Once you find out that they do tend to self-destruct…

Heck, people who can build bombs can disarm them too, especially if they have lots of time.

Now if the stinger used WinXP, THAT might solve the problem

Stinger-types would be a lot worse, but I guess that the Afghanis used up most of the ones the CIA gave them against the Russians. Some of them must be banging their heads in frustration now (If we could just have saved SOME for the OTHER infidels…)

When we give sophisticated arms to other countries, why don’t they have an expiration date?  Good for six months, at which time we transmit codes or give them smart cards to make them good for another six months.  No code means the thing erases its eeproms or whatever.

Or: when the device is armed, it queries a satellite: “I am device number such-and-such – can I go?”  All encrypted, of course.

Of course you’d want to involve some clever hackers in the development project to make sure that attempting to tamper with the weapon would make it useless right away and permenantly.

> I’m pretty sure it’s fairly hard to carry
> around a shoulder launched SAM around an
> airport without someone noticing, except for
> maybe around Detroit Metro as Les pointed out.

Around an airport? Well maybe. But those suckers are *small* and light nowadays (at least the more modern ones), and they can be fired a mile or more away from the airport, while the plane is still gaining height.

> Sure make me paranoid now.  Next time I’m on an
> airliner during take off and landing I won’t be
> able to fight the urge of looking for smoke
> trails.  Actually, I probably will.

You won’t see them. They are too fast (gotta catch an airplane after all) and are best fired from behind the plane so to home in on the engine heat. I hope I could calm you down with that

> Melbourne airport is surrounded by open spaces,
> a forest and a highway…another “good

Latest news is that someone by the name of Youssef Islam is the person on the watch-list. Someone must have thought, “Yusef Islam? Close enough!”

Israel deported him (the first time?) in 1990 for allegedly hand-delivering a couple ten thousand bucks to Hamas. No idea if there’s any substance to this.

Elwed, I somehow missed your last comment when it was posted yesterday. Damn near made me snort my coffee.

Tish, I saw that on the news this morning. They didn’t say why his name is on the watchlist or why they think he needs to be kept from entering the country. Have you heard anything on the reasoning behind this?