> German home-owners > who have chosen to opt out of Google’s Street View service appear > to have become the unsuspecting victims of anti-privacy > vandals. > > Local media report that homes in Essen, west Germany have been > pelted with eggs and had ‘Google’s cool’ notices pinned to their > doors. > > The properties involved have all chosen to be blurred on > Google’s Street View service. And people say Apple fans are zealots? Is Google becoming a religion, too?

Considering Germany’s history, it’s not surprising that many of its citizens would be a bit cautious about their right to privacy. I’m glad Google has made a statement denouncing these egg pelters.

Get a life, guys.

> It’s kind of creepy, and I wish they didn’t have to do any of > it,” Hanchak, 25, said while advancing in a security line on her > way to New York. “But they have to do what they have to do, even > though it’s an invasion of privacy. This kind of faulty logic is so infuriating to me. They don’t HAVE to do any of this. Worse, doing all of this doesn’t improve our safety at all, as has been demonstrated time and time again.

But fear turns otherwise intelligent people into morons.

> I sympathize with everyone who’s being screened or groped against their will, but there is some irony here. When male bodily autonomy is challenged, it’s a social emergency! A man’s junk is his castle. What did our ancestors fight and die for if not the right of the penis to be left alone? Women are expected to compromise whenever their bodily autonomy conflicts with someone else’s idea of the greater good. I’m thinking of bringing a “Don’t touch my junk!” sign to my next pro-choice protest. Empathy is catching. Allowing pilots to avoid these scans but not flight attendants is obviously sexist and should be remedied. But I doubt this was so much a question of “a man’s junk is his castle” as it was the pilot’s union having more money and influence to throw at a potential lawsuit than the flight attendant’s union did.

I’m following this story closely, as you may imagine, and I’m starting to see a trend of influential women crying foul about how this is a “white male” problem, and that’s the only reason it’s getting all this press. I don’t see the logic in this approach. If your goal is getting the much larger problem of females and minorities being groped and assaulted by authorities on a regular basis into the public view, why wouldn’t you take the opportunity to ally with your newly infuriated white male population? I mean, sure we’re only crying now that it involves us, too, but that’s no reason to call us crybabies. That’s call for celebration.

Alienating the white males who are upset about the TSA gains you what, exactly?

What your argument sounds like to a white male is “shut up, crybaby. We have it much worse,” rather than “I’m glad you’ve finally joined the party. We’ve been putting up with it for years. How about you help us out and we’ll help you out, too?”

Women, children, and minorities are subject to the same TSA rules as white males. It’s a common injustice, for once. So use that opportunity while you have our attention to drive awareness of the greater issue with your clueless male friends.

It never ceases to amaze me when I watch people who are being oppressed turn around and criticize others who are being oppressed, rather than focusing their energy on the oppressor. This is about the rich elite vs. the poor and middle class, not black or white, male or female. It’s about civil liberties.

> Now that iOS 4.2 is out and we’ve [lauded its best features](http://www.macworld.com/article/155677/2010/11/top_ten_ios_4_2_features.html), it’s time to take a look at its biggest omissions. (It’s only fair, right?) We took an informal survey of *Macworld* editors to determine the most-hoped-for features that still aren’t here, then whittled the list down to the top ten. I care more about some of these than others, but nothing on their list is a bad idea. Even the runners-up list has quite a few good items on it.

Notifications, in particular, are probably the biggest shortfall of the iPhone.

Looking forward to iOS 5 next year, where I’m sure Apple will address a good number of these.

> In 1986 a pregnant young Irish woman named Anne Marie Murphy was planning on flying to Israel to meet her fiance’s parents. Little did she know the fiance had hidden plastic explosives in her suitcase. Israeli security stopped what would have been a horrific terrorist attack because they did not rely on the profile alone. What Saunders fails to point out in her little example above is that Anne Murphy was stopped from flying not by an X-ray scanner or some other machine, but by trained behavioral experts who ended up finding the bomb in her suitcase after an interrogation.

So yes, profiling by sight alone doesn’t get you your criminal every time. But neither does taking naked pictures of everyone. What Israeli security did with Murphy is exactly what we should be doing here: they asked her some key questions, which then led to more questions, which then led to searching her bags. Not the bags of the 40,000 innocent people flying that day, but just HER bags.

The plastic explosives in Murphy’s suitcase would have made it onto a plane if she had been in the U.S. instead of Israel. Because, hard as it is to believe, the TSA still doesn’t scan everyone’s checked baggage. Only our carry-ons.

Why? Because in the U.S. we spend all of our money on theater. Scanning luggage happens out of public view, whereas the big X-ray machines are right there in front for all to see.

So no, we’re not a nation of whiners. We’re a nation of sheep like you, Ms. Saunders, who happily trade convenience and our constitutional rights for a fake, illogical feeling of safety.