If you don't know a breadboard with LEDs from a bomb there is NO HOPE you can understand any new technology.

It is really sad that a place where the east coast version of Silicon Valley once existed, Route 128, is now home to such technical ignorance.

Two strikes.

First the Cartoon Network devices that looked NOTHING LIKE bombs.

Second these LEDs in a star outline that looks NOTHING LIKE a bomb.

One more and they will have to move MIT.

You don't get it.

An innocent student gets ARRESTED and almost KILLED because a bunch of numb nuts think blinking lights = BOMB. This sort of paranoia is useful only to enlarging the security industry and if unchecked will kill our country. One would hope that a tech savvy area would have more intelligent people than this incident demonstrates.

In the US about 115 people die everyday in traffic accidents. However society has placed many resources on the EXTREMELY unlikely event of being killed by a terrorist bomb. The largest terrorist bombing in the US killed 168 people and DID NOT involve flashing lights. Only idiotic TV shows like 24 have bombs with flashing lights.

Why would a bomber want to alert victims?

One more of these and it is time to move MIT.

**** P.S. ****

Silenced - YES I blame people when their IRRATIONAL fears almost get someone killed. Screaming FIRE in a crowded theater when a cell phone lights up comes to mind. I would rather have them keep their MOUTH SHUT than to have their paranoid concepts hurt an innocent person or feed the security industrial complex.

hangin_off - You are an idiot and a racist.

"This student was almost killed because she misjudged the reactions of the people who aren't on her special gifted wavelength."

NO!!!

This student was almost killed because other people THOUGHT THEY WERE GIFTED enough to know what a bomb was. Some of these people should have known better. It is a sad day for Boston when this sort of madness happens.

She most likely didn't think anything of her attire because it was HARMLESS.

To take this idiocy to the terminal form police will be shooting red shirted people on Tuesdays because Fox News and 24 implied they might be dangerous. If you don't watch Faux then you will soon be dead.

Ms. Simpson DID NOTHING WRONG.

Hopefully she will sue the piss out of the Airport, City, Police, Jail and whatever employees of the above agencies were involved. At the very least those involved need to be reassigned to positions that don't require working with the public.

*** P.S. ***

"Asperger's is a dangerous syndrome"

Are a doctor? Able to diagnose via the news like Bill Frist? Then you must be on the "special gifted wavelength".

"MSNBC is reporting that the DHS and the FBI issued a warning to the Transportation Security Administration today stating that al-Qaida may attempt to use watches with cigarette lighters or Casio watches with built-in altimeters to detonate bombs on board US airliners."

Never mind that ANYONE with half a brain understands that a altimeter does not work in a pressurized airliner cabin. It will always read somewhere between 6,000 - 8,000 feet.

This gets more absurd every day.

The IBM Selectric introduced in 1961 and used EXTENSIVELY by the government was NOT clanky. Especially by the time these documents were written in 1972. The Selectric Composer introduced in 1966 used proportional fonts. If you didn't want fully justified margins you didn't have to type twice. By the early 70s these were not as uncommon as the blogosphere would have you believe.

Subscripts and superscripts were fairly easy to do on Selectrics in the 70s. Custom typeballs were available with any special character you wanted. It was just a question of $$$ which the military does not ever seem to have a problem with.

Does this mean that the actual documents in question were not done with a computer? Not at all. But the above assertion is not accurate as are the others stating that the documents COULD NOT have been done on a typewriter in use at the time. The poor quality of the documents preclude definitive analysis.

I have always found it incredible that a bunch of right wing he-men would be so well versed about 70s era typography as to create such a ruckus so fast. It makes you wonder...

How did it go from "downloading 1,700 files from Kazaa" at the top of the story to "stealing two CDs" at the end?

Killing Japanese didn't bother me very much at that time... I suppose if I had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal.

- General Curtis Lemay

To me this illustrates an important point, war is an immoral enterprise and those that participate may well commit illegal acts. After all losing may well result in their death either on the battlefield or later as the result of a war crimes trial.

The difference with Bush and Mukasey is that they apparently don't see any problem in dragging civilians far from the war zone directly into the hell of war.