2012 London Olympics

TRX
April 29, 2012
13:
>Diego Garcia

Poor little Diego Garcia never bothered anyone. Why do something nasty to it?

How about a place that *deserves* the Olympics? Pyongyang in North Korea would be a good place.

TRX
April 29, 2012
16:
> the London Olympics will be forgotten
> in five years.

Forgotten, but not without influence. I think the taxpayers in Atlanta are still paying for the huge amount of infrastructure that was built with funds stolen from other purposes.

To anyone responsible for a city's budget and revenue, learning the Olympics are coming to down must be like finding the rajah has just sent you a whole herd of white elephants.

Meanwhile, what money comes in, usually runs right back out again. Hotels, chain restaurants, fuel, department stores, security consultants, major communications contractors... most of those are going to have their HQs somewhere else, and that's where the money is going, less some temporary hires and a handful of local businesses. I imagine hookers and dope dealers would be doing quite well, but they usually don't show up in the city's accounting books.

TRX
April 29, 2012
58:
It's "The Rapture of the Sports."

I've seen Southern Baptist revivals, with shouting preachers, people screaming "Hallelujah", and others having seizures while possessed by the Holy Spirit.

The fans, on the other hand, are much more numerous, and even crazier. Feetball and NASCAR seem to be the big ones, with basketball trailing along there somewhere. They don't care if their coaches are porking children or their players are fighting dogs or selling cocaine; they're just minor eccentricities to the True Supporters, of little consquence to the Game.

TRX
April 30, 2012
139:
@122:
I don't remember any Surface-to-air missile systems being set up on apartment buildings.
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No, but there was still plenty of security theater. Georgia Tech's physics department had to shut down its reactor "because terrorists might use it as a weapon." About the only way that thing could have been used as a weapon was if you unscrewed parts and beat someone over the head with them.

I just went and searched through a dozen news articled and failed to find the answer to a question I asked way back then - *who* ordered them to shut down the reactor? (If anyone knows, I'm still curious)

I'm tending toward the theory that GT felt the maintenance funds could be better put to something else, like their feetball team, and used the Olympics as an excuse to shut it down while blaming some unstated "them" for the action.

TRX
April 30, 2012
140:
@133:
But on reflection I'm not sure it would matter. One two meter tube looks pretty much like another from fifty meters away.
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A Denial of Service attack would be trivially simple.

The more elaborate and extreme your security measures are, the simpler and cheaper it is to set them off. And past some minimal point, "security" becomes counterproductive.

Likewise, as security systems become more sensitive, the cost of setting them off often becomes smaller. Even a child could use some cardboard and spray paint... and they text each other, too.

"It is hard to defend against a highly distributed enemy."

TRX
May 1, 2012
205:
Okay, you have an airliner orbiting, waiting for its landing slot at a given London airport. It wanders out of its assigned area and starts heading off toward the target of your choice.

Normally, the tower would radio the aircraft and alert the pilot he was out of position. Then he'd wait for acknowledgement, and then he'd wait to verify the aircraft was moving back into position, and he'd keep waiting until it was either there, or he'd call again and give the flight crew the what-for.

Too late, all your intercept time is gone. Actually, it was gone before the plane even entered the airport's local zone; even if your missiles fired the second they saw a flight deviation, bypassing the air traffic controllers and military authorization, they're still going to be too late.

A big airliner can weigh over half a million pounds when landing. It's going to come down like the hammer of God on some of the highest-density urban real estate on the planet; the only difference would be that it would come down in some random place(s) instead of a particular sports venue.

Small single-engine aircraft and light helicopters, by comparison, simply don't weigh enough to be a big problem. They also don't have enough cargo capacity to hold a bomb big enough to be a major problem.

Your only credible threat would be larger twin-engine business jets and light transport aircraft, which could be bought or rented easily enough. Unlike big airliners, business planes can come in from anywhere, at any time. And since many of them are owned or operated by the ruling elite, it's difficult to simply order them out of the sky for months at a time.

You also have the other problem - even if you somehow managed to determine the plane needed to be shot down, and the pieces miraculously didn't fall on valuable real estate or citizens, you're still talking about up to 800-odd mostly-foreign civilian noncombatants being killed by the British military. The political blamestorm would be spectacular.

TRX
May 1, 2012
226:
@217:
A BBJ or A318 carries at most a third the fuel load of the 767s used on 9/11; they're a lot smaller, and you're aiming at an Olympic stadium, which is spread-out.
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You don't actually have to kill anyone. All you have to do is establish a credible threat to shut the Games down. With a little more work, you could create a panic and then tally up the number of people who got crushed to death in the melee.

Heck, just tweet someone - anyone - asking if they know anything about the nerve gas attack at the stadium a few minutes ago, and see how fast the "speed of rumour" really is.