human99 said:
That said, Beirut isn't the only place in the world with a large stockpile of AN near a population centre.
How does 8 tons of it in the middle of London grab you and its not uncommon for pallet loads of it to be found which have been sitting for years. The stuff we burnt had been sitting in a park store and they had found it when they were selling the storage shed land. The surveyor had taken one look at the pallets and phoned the police. Who brought the fire brigade in. Who had a TA member in the crew who said sod that phone EOD. Where we got called in and threw it in the back of a couple of 4 tonners and went to burn it.
From memory when we burned it. It was a rather hot flame. And it produced loads of gas. More so than artillery charge bags.
You might wonder why a pilot would know about the various areas and what you can see. Basically we are in multiple zones per day for DNS and networks. And if we want to talk to our family's and deal with financial stuff we have to. And of course netflix is different in ever country.
I worked in IT as well on the unix side of things and networks for 3 years to pay for my pilot training over Y2k coming from being the office guru for FEA ANSYS on the mech eng side of things. Like it or not there is restrictions in most countries when it comes to WWW. UK has them The USA has them and when you work in Saudi and the like there is even more of them. Apparently inverness city council website is an extremist anti Muslim website! Some places use selective DNS listings so you won't be able to resolve addresses but you will get through if they are in your local table or you input directly the IP address. Others you will need an encrypted VPN to get round. the lads in China have to go to great lengths. Those in Dubai also need to because skype or any other VOIP is illegal.
Some countries we don't take personal IT gear into because it may get taken away and stripped and you may end up in big trouble if they find anything they don't to the point of getting done for having porn having a pic of the wife in her bikini on a beach with your kid on her knee. A lot of places are demanding social media accounts names and passwords. Although when you turn up with a none smart phone or laptop you can into issues as well. Some company's even have local hardware which you get given in the taxi on the way to the hotel.
BTW we are advised by the union not to take a smart phone or computer into the USA if we have to go for sim there. That advise has been active for over 10 years now. And its the same advise if we go to another 26 countries and they are world wide from both extremes of the political systems. Touch wood I have never been pulled so far.
If you go searching for torrent websites in Russia you will have no problem finding the latest cracked versions of ANSYS and autocad. Do the same in the USA and you will struggle to find anything. Its the same for political subjects.
I suspect most on this thread will never go near any of the subjects that any country will take offenses to.
The subject I learned most about this was from having an interest in Chernobyl. There is some absolute cracking nuke websites out there which have a bit to much detail on all things nuclear. you just can't get to them through the UK. You can in France, you can't in the USA but you can in Sweden. This is a hard block not just a DNS table deletion.
