You complain about old men being frisked, and then immediately complain about your friend being selected based on his appearance. Do you not see the massive contradiction there? Either it's reasonable to search people based on their appearance, or it's not. If it is, then why shouldn't your mixed-race, bearded friend be searched more? If it's not, then why shouldn't old men be searched too?
Personally, I am on the "not" side simply because it's good security: nothing stops attackers from recruiting old white men, and any appearance-based profiling you do can be exploited.
You complain about old men being frisked, and then immediately complain about your friend being selected based on his appearance. Do you not see the massive contradiction there?
Yes, I do. See "farce", referenced in my first sentence.
While I think your response is justified in this specific case given the small sample size, I don't think making two "contradictory" complaints is necessarily wrong in this context. If you make a lot of Type I errors, it might be the cost for reducing Type II errors, and if you make a lot of Type II errors, it might be the cost of reducing Type I errors, but if you make a lot of Type I and Type II errors, then maybe whatever you're doing just sucks.
They don't completely contradict each other. He's pointing out what he considers two examples of an unreasonable search, one is about racial profiling the other is about what he seems to consider common sense.
So called "common sense" encourages [racial] profiling. That's the problem with it, and why the two comments are at odds.
The only way that you remove the profiling, incidentally, is to remove discretion from agents and/or have some level of accountability for each stop. If they had to publish statistics detailing the profiles of everyone who went through additional security searches and why it was done I think you'd see a lot of action
so to him- its common sense to not search a demographic due to it being unreasonable, but also common sense not to search a demographic when it actually is reasonable?
Wasn't that precisely the first complaint - observing a pair of incidents which make no sense as a consistent policy? (the second complaint being that even a senator had trouble clearing up a mistake). Both the original comment and reply are consistent with that reading.
The "random" algorithm in a media player is not supposed to be "random pick with replacement". It is meant to be shuffle, and that's indeed what it is called instead of "random". A shuffle algorithm that plays the same song twice is indeed a broken shuffle algorithm (except if, of course, the playlist actually contains two instances of the same song).
Yes, but that's not what the GP was talking about. Sometimes shuffle will play two consecutive songs from the same album consecutively, just from randomness, and people will complain.
Incidentally, I prefer random pick with replacement, at least when selecting from a set of tracks greater than one album.
Personally, I am on the "not" side simply because it's good security: nothing stops attackers from recruiting old white men, and any appearance-based profiling you do can be exploited.