Pricey Ham, Evils of Playstation, and Airport Security

Selfridges has decided that there are some people out there who would pay an arm and a leg for a nice piece of ham. They have put up for sale a piece costing 1800 pounds. Yes, that's pounds, not pesetas...

Amongst all the worrying things that the current president of Venezuela has done (taking over anything and everything) is the attack on the Sony Playstation. Yes, that's right, Chavez has decided that this piece of technology is evil. A bit like the pot calling the kettle black...

So after the latest attempt to blow up an airliner it's become all the rage to bring in the nudity scanners in airports. You know the ones - you walk through and the attendant no longer asks you if you have a canoe in your pocket. Well, in principle, the better you get at detecting these things, the safer for us, right? Well, it would be if humans were not part of this equation. Just take Munich airport (go on, take it). They have the explosives detection in place to work on laptops, and the machine says that this laptop was probably in touch with explosive substance. Well that should be the end of it you may think. Inspect the guy thoroughly until you are sure it was just a false positive. Well, no. The human element lets this guy take his laptop and walk away into the (security cleared) area of the airport. Here he can board a plane, make a transit in another country and not get rechecked.
So it doesn't really matter if we have to pass through a scanner completely naked, get all our orifices checked and have sniffer dogs all over us. In the end the human element will allow mistakes to happen. So what should we do? Well, maybe we should just sit back and await all the status updates that these new scanner machines could generate on twitter...oh, nobody told you they were attached to a SIM card?...

Travel safely...