Gumballs: Tiny Terror Devices?

jordan, I like this story. It's good stuff.

because you, and Bruce Schneier, are totally right. This kind of waste of money, time, effort, etc., should be ridiculed by bringing it to light in public display. This is what could be described as "Terrorists Winning." If we become nations of "Senator Macarthies," we will have lost all sense of proportion and ... well, sense. i am an anti-conspiracy-theorist person, myself, even though i AM paranoid (look at what i've been going through - nuff said). Still, if we really wanted to go totally bonkers, we could list a million and three other seemingly harmless things that could be targets for terrorists. Should we not assault and investigate them ALL?  Like NOW??

Investigating something based on evidence is good. Investigating something on reasonable suspicion is okay. Investigating something out of sheer paranoia and ... well, the popularity of "fighting terrorism" is just... simply bad.

i get accused of being a lowlife by my "terrorist" at flickr because i have a disability and would like accommodation. You know the old meme: you're wasting our tax dollars (and he's not even a citizen of my country). What i fail to comprehend is why people don't have more animosity for stupidity of the organizations and institutions doing things like this gumball investigation because they are using money that a disabled person could live a year off of, forget the disability check's measely amount. Inspecting gumball machines, doing record searches of who is licensed to have them or not, doing lab work on the contents... that's bound to be expensive busy work for someone that needs to justify their position...

thanks for posting this, Jordan. i do have one question, which i would ask in forums if i could actually figure out how to post: what is the copyright rule around here? From my investigations of copyright law in the USA (my location), you can cite things, and you can do excerpts but not use more than a certain percentage (which i cannot remember now and it may differ in Canada... 'cause Canada is actually another country and all that...). i've seen entire stories posted. Even though they are attributed, i still find it confusing based on what i understood from my copyright law reading of a year or two ago (and believe me, i have no desire to dive back into those pages at the moment).