Gail Shaw wrote:
> "Doctor John" <doc### [at] gmailcom> wrote in message
> news:48459a58$1@news.povray.org...
> 
>>Gail Shaw wrote:
>>
>>>Never? Have you ever had the pleasure of a chat with the Border
> 
> Protection
> 
>>>people at a US airport?
>>
>>Yup. Several times and don't ask ...
> 
> 
> Twice for me. I found the guys in Seattle OK, and even willing to joke a
> bit. The 'person' in Denver on the other hand...
> Let's just say I don't like interregations at (for me) 2am after I've been
> travelling for 28 hours
> 
> 
>>You'll have to offer me serious money to get me to visit again
> 
> 
> There's a conference I would like to attend in Seattle in November. At least
> it's before the registration becomes compulsary.
> 
> Hmmm. Anyone know what the Canadian border's like on that side of the
> continent?
> 
> 
Recently when RETURNING to Canada, (that would be the country of my 
citizenship,) from the US, I had to endure a close screening by a crew 
of smarmy homeland security agents.  My mistake was that I was riding on 
a bus rather than in a car.  Now, while I consider it invasive, I can 
understand that these freaks feel the need to monitor who is crossing 
the border in either direction.  But the complexion of the 'interview' 
was that I somehow had to meet the approval of these American agents, 
before I would be allowed to return to my own country.

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Jim Charter <jrc### [at] msncom> wrote:
> Recently when RETURNING to Canada, (that would be the country of my 
> citizenship,) from the US, I had to endure a close screening by a crew 
> of smarmy homeland security agents.  My mistake was that I was riding on 
> a bus rather than in a car.  Now, while I consider it invasive, I can 
> understand that these freaks feel the need to monitor who is crossing 
> the border in either direction.  But the complexion of the 'interview' 
> was that I somehow had to meet the approval of these American agents, 
> before I would be allowed to return to my own country.

  Well, it makes sense. We can never know what those Canadians are up to.
Ever seen the South Park movie?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Warp wrote:
> Doctor John <doc### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
>> ...That this is not a good way to win friends and influence people?
> 
>   Call me nationalistic or whatever you want, but IMO the main
> responsibility of a government is to protect its own people. The
> intricacies of foreign relationships is always second to that (at
> least when it doesn't directly affect the first responsibility).
> 
>   Europe has dug somewhat of a hole for itself with its generally
> lenient immigration policy, and some people, such as the US, are
> wary of that.
> 
>   I think it's rather telling that the people who performed the London
> bombings were not foreign terrorists who had entered the country
> illegally. They were British citizens. I believe that has had at least
> some effect on the foreign policies of the US with respect to Europe.
> (That is, it's no longer just "ah, an European citizen, thus not a
> terrorist, welcome" as it may have been in the past, because nowadays
> even European citizens can be muslim radical terrorists thanks to these
> immigration policies.)

It's not as if the recent spate of terrorism was the first time that a 
European citizen harbored wishes of blowing up Americans.  During the 
80's the Soviet Union sponsored quite a few terrorist groups in Europe, 
and it was European citizens who took the cash and blew up Americans 
where they could.

Regards,
John

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Warp a écrit :
> Vincent Le Chevalier <gal### [at] libertyallsurfspamfr> wrote:
>> You can take some comfort in the idea that within a few years kerosen 
>> will be so costly that all the problems of air travel will disappear :-p
> 
>   In a way it might be a blessing that the ending of fossil fuels and
> global warming problems are coincidentally happening at the same time,
> as the former will help alleviate the latter.
> 
Sadly even if fossil fuels were abruptly out of use, the effects on 
climate could last for some time. There will probably be a length of 
time where we'll have the inconvenience from climate change while not 
having the benefits of fossil fuels any longer...

-- 
Vincent

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Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Tue, 03 Jun 2008 14:52:32 -0400, Warp wrote:
> 
>>   Call me nationalistic or whatever you want, but IMO the main
>> responsibility of a government is to protect its own people.
> 
> You don't protect the people of a nation by pissing off the rest of the 
> world, though.

And you don't protect them by letting your policies be limited by the 
opinions foreigners have about those policies.

Let's be frank.  Every nation on the planet that is run by anyone with 
any brains at all makes protection of its own interests the first 
priority of its foreign policy.  The French government does what it 
thinks is best for France, and if the Americans don't like it, the 
French really don't care.  Same goes for the Spaniards with regard to 
Spain, the British with regard to the UK, the Germans with regard to 
Germany, the Russians with regard to Russia, and so on.

The only real difference is that much of the world has this notion that 
the US, and another nation I will not name here, are somehow not 
entitled to place their own interests first, but must, for reasons that 
never bear close scrutiny, place other nations first.

Regards,
John

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On Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:24:43 +0100, Doctor John <doc### [at] gmailcom>
wrote:

>
>You'll have to offer me serious money to get me to visit again

Me too.
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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4845fdf0$1@news.povray.org...
> We must've read the same article - bbc.co.uk?  I do think that there's
> more to the story than was there.  The scary thing is that even as
> written, it's believable.

Here's the pic of the guy.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1023560/Man-threatened-arrest-Heathrow-wearing-Transformers-T-shirt.html

Note that he has a sri lankan name. Since Sri Lanka is home to one of the 
most ferocious terrorist organisations (they had cornered the whole "suicide 
bombing" market until Al Qaeda came along, and they have tried to claim the 
title back since) I wouldn't be surprised that people with this background 
are special targets for the authorities. Perhaps this works like some spam 
filters.

X-Terror-Report:
        *  0.4 M_30 Young male below thirty
        *  2.5 DK_SKIN Person with dark skin
        *  4.5 FROM_TRR_CTRY From: country with lots of terrorists
        *  4.3 CLTH_OFFENS Clothes: wearing potentially offensive message
        *  8.1 BNN_IMG Image: contains banned images including guns, bombs 
and nail clippers

X-Terror-Status: Yes, score=19.8 required=4.0 tests=BAYES_99,M_30 ,DK_SKIN, 
FROM_TRR_CTRY ,CLTH_OFFENS,BNN_IMG

G.

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Invisible wrote:
> 
> AMD Athlon XP 1700+, 256 MB RAM, Windoze XP SP2, Firefox 2.0.0.9.
> 
Gordon Bennett! My spare laptop's more powerful than that
:-)

John

-- 
I will be brief but not nearly so brief as Salvador Dali, who gave the
world's shortest speech. He said, "I will be so brief I am already
finished," then he sat down.

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>> AMD Athlon XP 1700+, 256 MB RAM, Windoze XP SP2, Firefox 2.0.0.9.
> 
>   Terrific state-of-art specs for a gamer and computer programmer?-)

This is the PC I have *at work*. :-P

The PC I have *at home* is an AMD Athlon64 X2 4200+ with 3 GB RAM and an 
nVidia GeForce 7900GT. And it works very nicely too. :-D

[It *was* a pretty good system back when I bought it. Obviously several 
years on it's been superceeded by better things...]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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Gail Shaw wrote:

> You're kidding, right?

Why would the people I work for bother spending money on the guy who 
swaps the backup tapes?

Put simply: I am not considered important.

I should perhaps point out that I only got *this* PC because somebody 
else got a better one, so I had their old one. My previous machine was 
an AMD Duron 800 MHz with 128 MB RAM. (Running Windows NT, obviously.)

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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