Comment by roamingryan
12 hours ago
I have never understood how this was effective against a determined adversary. An arbitrary limit like 100ml is pointless when there is no limit to the number of times you can pass through the checkpoint.
12 hours ago
I have never understood how this was effective against a determined adversary. An arbitrary limit like 100ml is pointless when there is no limit to the number of times you can pass through the checkpoint.
I'm sure that going through security 5 times for the same flight is bound to trigger some extra screening and even if it doesn't, each time you cross through increases the likelihood of getting caught by the normal process.
Don't get me wrong, I'm sure a large part of it is just security theatre, but part of it is also just to be enough of a deterrent that a would-be terrorist chooses a different target.
> An arbitrary limit like 100ml is pointless
Do you know that the 100 ml liquids gets scanned in the Heathrow airport? Many times they used to do a secondary scan too after the primary scan. I recall this very well because many times I was made to wait longer after my carry on arrived because they wanted to put the liquids through a secondary scan.
Oh. So it was a security measure? I honestly thought it was a way to force you to spend money on things on the airport or abroad. Like shampoo, water, etc.
It was a reaction to a foiled terrorist attack in the UK where terrorists planned to blow up planes using liquid explosives disguised as bottles of soda.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_transatlantic_aircraft_pl...
How about an undetermined adversary? Security is all about raising the cost of an attack, not about preventing one altogether
In many countries (Canada included) if you pass through security into the international terminal, you have to 're-enter the country' back through customs and immigration if you don't get on your flight.
It's also hilarious that the limit is the very metric 100ml, and not some even number of freedom units like 3 or 4 fluid ounces, like Jesus, George Washington, and bald eagles would have wanted.
TSA (at ohare) has a repeating thing that says 100ml or 3.2oz over the loudspeaker (never mind they are different amounts)
UK uses the metric system. Why would anyone expect UK to follow the imperial system in $CURRENT_YEAR?
I was referring to the fact that the TSA, the American government agency, also uses 100ml
The UK uses an odd mixture of both depending on context.
The use of "100ml" in airports is because using "3.519 fl oz" would be confusing to far more people. Even within the UK we use metric for small liquid measures like this (smaller liquid measures end up being weird stuff like "teaspoons" or "tablespoons").
And this isn't just because the UK uses a different fluid ounce to the US (100ml is 3.519 UK fluid ounces and 3.3814 US fluid ounces).
Anyone under the age of about 60 in the UK would had metric measurements taught to them at school as it became a mandatory to teach it in 1974. Many schools would have been teaching it already, and probably lots since the currency changed in 1971 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_Day).
The youth of today (as seen through the lens of my kids) are very metric, often defaulting to distances in meters and kilometers. Miles only seem to be used idiomatically, e.g. "he lives a few miles away".
I'm completely happy to switch between all of them not just because of my UK education covered them all, but I've lived for more than a year in the US, the UK and some European countries.
There are still plenty of examples of mixed measurement systems in the UK though.
Canned/bottled drinks are marked in ml, but a lot of that is due to the proximity to the EU and the previous ties to it. Open drinks are often sold in imperial measures (pints, etc) although spirits moved from fractions of a gill (imperial) to metric (25ml for a single, or 50ml for a double) in the mid 80s.
Of course the UK and US pints are different sizes (568ml and 473.176ml). Not just because the fluid ounces are different sizes as noted above, but also because the UK has 20 fluid ounces in a pint and the US 16 (of its) fluid ounces in a US pint.
For driving distances and speeds are based on miles, but for pedestrian distances you'll see a mixture of miles/yards or km/meters. Restricted heights (e.g. low bridges) or widths are covered in both feet/inches and meters given the number of European freight drivers on the roads here.
Occasionally you'll see some nonsense where a sign has displays both, and where the actual distance to something might be shown as "400 yards" it had almost certainly been rounded up/down to that whole number to make it simpler on the sign, but when it is converted to meters the converted value is used, so you see odd things like:
" Whatever it is 400 yards 365 meters "
(The UK traditionally used "metre" but that usage is quite rare now and we've mostly moved over to using "meter" like the US does.)
I'm surprised that the UK and US don't have different length miles (the US did have a different length "foot" but the "Survey foot" was discontinued in 2023).
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