Omg, boston sucks now. Some people put up some L.E.D lights promoting Aqua Teen Hunger Force and they thought they were bombs, blew most of em up, and arrested the kids who were hired to put em up!!

Links...

http://www.g4tv.com/attackoftheshow/blog/index.html#673183

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4G-D0F4Q9yk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7kdP8WBB4lI

and heres some real news footage...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0PgnOZFKiY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLphNxgzrKk


....


Boston is abunch of scared noobs if u ask me. They put those things in 9 other cities and no1 cared but Boston...Oh boston had to be all "OH ITS THE CLOSEST TO NEWYORK THEY MUST BE BOMBS BLOW EM UP!!"

lol.

Yeah, saw this the other day. N00bs indeed! Unfackingbelievable! What's got into your country man? Seriously! Anything with a battery or light is now some kind of "ooh booga-booga" terrorist device. What next - raiding peoples' homes looking for marital devices and remote controls? What if you dropped your mobile phone on a train seat? Would they detonate it and send you to Cuba or just shoot you in the head right there on the platform? Hell, apparently even shampoo is a freakin' IED now (I've tried mixing shampoo and toothpaste to blow shit up - nothing but a gooey mess). Come on planet Earth, get a grip FFS. This terror hair-trigger is getting far beyond stupid and, quite frankly, a little disturbing. Who knows what our leaders may do in the future if they scare us all enough? I swear, some days, stories like 1984, V For Vendetta and Brazil don't seem all that far-fetched...

Brazil? dont think i've heard of that story before, just read 1984 2 months ago, good book (now im doing a project on it :S)

surely something else went on that we dont know about that caused all of this chaos (blackmail or something); i dont think this would all just start from a bunch of lightup signs that appeared out of nowhere

A guerilla marketing firm was hired to place these little LED boards in several cities in the states. Seems only Boston got hysterical - apparently the rest of the country can tell a suspicious device from an annoying little mini-billboard with LEDs on it


Seattle Times article

Love the response from the accused:

Quote :

Peter Berdovsky, 27, and Sean Stevens, 28, were released on $2,500 cash bond after each pleaded not guilty to placing a hoax device and disorderly conduct for a device found Wednesday at a subway station. They waved and smiled as they greeted people in court.

Outside, they met reporters and television cameras and launched into a nonsensical discussion of hair styles of the 1970s. "What we really want to talk about today -- it's kind of important to some people -- it's haircuts of the 1970s," Berdovsky said.

Cartoon Network and the Aqua Teen Hunger Force must be loving this shit though - they couldn't have imagined coverage like this in their wildest dreams

Seriously though: if you wanted to blow some stuff up and kill people, would you go to the trouble of sticking hundreds of LEDs all over your device (in a cute little pattern of course) and place it in several dozen highly visible locations all over the country? It might seem like the marketers didn't think this through, but that's probably because they never imagined the kind of utter stupidity required to mistake a silly marketing prank for terrorism.

man this is some great breakfast viewing, :munching_ rofl.. just gotta laugh.. really hard... HAHA..

Quote from Hankstar :

Seriously though: if you wanted to blow some stuff up and kill people, would you go to the trouble of sticking hundreds of LEDs all over your device (in a cute little pattern of course) and place it in several dozen highly visible locations all over the country? It might seem like the marketers didn't think this through, but that's probably because they never imagined the kind of utter stupidity required to mistake a silly marketing prank for terrorism.

LOL! exactly, make a bomb with a flashing warning

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Nevah forget!

Quote from Madman_CZ :

LOL! exactly, make a bomb with a flashing warning

Huh?! That's like all the bombs are, they have lights that blink and buzzer that goes beep beep beep faster and faster until it blows up. Don't you watch Hollywood movies AT ALL?!?! illepall

Quote from Hankstar :

What if you dropped your mobile phone on a train seat? Would they detonate it and send you to Cuba

That's the American way. Note that if you're a minor they'd tazer you first a few times to stop you hurting yourself.

Quote from Hankstar :

or just shoot you in the head right there on the platform?

Whereas us Brits would just shoot you in the head, that's right. Preferably 9 times just to be on the safe side - we don't know how many bullets it takes to kill people, we haven't used them much before (we prefer to kill people quietly with pills while they're out walking in the countryside pondering their part in the Hutton enquiry).

Quote from Hankstar :

Who knows what our leaders may do in the future if they scare us all enough? I swear, some days, stories like 1984, V For Vendetta and Brazil don't seem all that far-fetched...

Quote from XCNuse :

Brazil? dont think i've heard of that story before,

It's a sci-fi black comedy film by Terry Gilliam from the early '80s. The theme of terrorism drives the story, and the parallels to the post-9/11 world are pretty astonishing. It's an excellent film in its own right though - may be my favourite film ever.

lol i just got some more news about this on the radio; apparently Cartoon Network put up the signs to promote the show!!! ..dumb idea if you ask me lol, apparently the newscasters said "it was probably funny for everyone under the age of 35"

also, now Cartoon Network has to pay the $750,000 fine for the security "struggle"

... great scott thats alot of money

Quote from XCNuse :

lol i just got some more news about this on the radio; apparently Cartoon Network put up the signs to promote the show!!! ..dumb idea if you ask me lol, apparently the newscasters said "it was probably funny for everyone under the age of 35"

also, now Cartoon Network has to pay the $750,000 fine for the security "struggle"

... great scott thats alot of money

God bless America! Now [insert some terrorist faction, doesn't matter if it's fictional or not] knows they don't actually have to make bombs anymore - all it takes is a couple of LED lights and a middle finger to send a major city into chaos.

I love this planet.

Quote from spankmeyer :

I love this planet.

Me too, it's definitely in my top 100.

Can't speak for anyone else, but I'd rather they paid attention to something that turned out to be nothing, than ignored something that turned out to be a bomb.

Ok but how many times have the city been shutdown for animal carcasses, soft drink cans, and boxes found laying around? Those are most often used disguises for IEDs. Not some some bright LED light cartoon character sign giving you the finger.

Quote from Dajmin :

Can't speak for anyone else, but I'd rather they paid attention to something that turned out to be nothing, than ignored something that turned out to be a bomb.

Problem is that only makes the terrorism worse. Terrorism is designed to cause terror through fear and blowing everything out of proportion just acts as a catalyst, with the exception of 9/11 no terrorist attack has been significant enough to change anything if it weren't for the element of terror, it's far more likely that a large number of the people so terrified of terrorism are more at risk from being hit by a car/killed by their trousers/struck by lightning or global warming and the consequences of it (Tsunami, New Orleans etc.).

The only thing on that list that actually worries me is that of global warming which something needs to be done about IMO, terrorism has to be pretty near the bottom of the list but for some reason peoples fear makes it have a huge effect on the world.

Due to the excuse of terrorism the governments of the Western world have tried to scare us into blindly accepting new laws which ignore human rights, huge spending on pointless (and illegal) wars and have pushed oil prices through the roof.

I'd rather be as likely to be killed by a terrorist attack as I am by a flying pig if it saves me the inconvenience of having to wait everywhere when travelling and the ridiculous spending on wars and the knock on effect on the world

Quote from Dajmin :

Can't speak for anyone else, but I'd rather they paid attention to something that turned out to be nothing, than ignored something that turned out to be a bomb.

Agreed. I was glad they made that mother drink her own breast milk before she got on the plane too - you can't be too careful. illepall

The milk bottle thing is a bit silly. You'd need to empty the almost the entire bottle before you'd see if there was anything in there. It'd be easy enough to have the bottle doughnut-shaped and have a stash of drugs or something in the middle that wouldn't show up while it was full.

But surely the whole idea of calling in bomb squads over the little things is more likely to make potential bombers think twice, since you can't tell from a distance what a little electronic box is actually going to do, and I wouldn't be running up to it to check.

After the 7/7 bombs here in London (which I could've got caught up in but thankfully wasn't) I could feel the entire carriage tense up any time someone got on with a rucksack. It was crazy. And if extra police vigilance makes attacks less likely, I'm all for it. Like I said before, better to waste time on nothing than ignore something. I'd rather be late than dead.

Incidentally, I think the LED thing was a publicity stunt. It would've been really easy to get police permission to put them up, but look how much extra coverage the charity got because of it.

But "extra police vigilance" easily becomes an invasion of privacy, or worse. We've had an innocent Brazilian man shot dead on his way to work for doing nothing more than looking a bit like someone else. We've had an asian family's home broken into in the dead of night and one of them shot because it was "believed" they might have bomb-making equipment that they didn't have. The only terrorists in these scenarios are the police.

Well obviously that's not viligance. The police have gone a bit nuts, I assume because in the UK we're not as used to these kinds of terrorist attacks. The IRA stopped blowing stuff up here years ago, and even then it was easier to combat a hidden bomb than a moving person.

There's no reason to go busting someone's door down on a hunch. You can't justify that. But a collection of electronic devices dotted across the city? That's just asking for trouble

World is just going crazy and we just sit watching it from best seats.

Live and let live, when humans can really understand this?

Ridiculous. If someone wants tp plant a bomb under a bridge, he does it and blows up the end. What kind of idiot would put bright leds on it, well that's already mentioned. Do you guys ever get depressed to see world getting ****ed up in all ways and you can't do nothing but watch...I feel sad.

Quote from Blackout :

Ridiculous. If someone wants tp plant a bomb under a bridge, he does it and blows up the end. What kind of idiot would put bright leds on it, well that's already mentioned. Do you guys ever get depressed to see world getting ****ed up in all ways and you can't do nothing but watch...I feel sad.

Well, there is things you can do actually, just express your opinions from things to those who have power (kansanedustajat) and if we all do that they know what people think and they will direct politics to that direction, if every contry does this eventually world will change, worst thing to do is believe that you can't do anything. Just keep little noise and tell others to do same, that is all that is needed.

Oh noes they set us up teh bom! All those crazy hippies from the 60s are now old and paranoid lol 420 yo

They did look rather suspicious to me. And were they allowed to be there?

Quote from JTbo :

Well, there is things you can do actually, just express your opinions from things to those who have power (kansanedustajat) and if we all do that they know what people think and they will direct politics to that direction,

A classic example of that approach not working is the UK. In 1997 we elected the Labour party - a historically left-wing party. They have been moving to the right ever since, and the government we've got now is no different to the Conservative government we had before we elected Labour. Because our Liberal party (our "third option") is so poorly supported, we now have a choice between two right-wing parties at the next general election.