Baah!

Yeah Right!!
They asked about 10,000 people worldwide, 977 from Britain (I think)
Not exactly a "valid statistical sample" is it??

yes it is

Whether it's a valid statistical sample or not will depend on the point it is used to back up. If it's used by the UK government to suggest high acceptance within the UK then would be patently not true and it wouldn't be a valid statisical sample.

I don’t get how 977 people can be anything like representative or how it is acceptable that such small “samples” can be used to suggest that it represents the whole population (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UK_population - UK population at last census = 58,789,194).

So 977 people is a tiny, tiny fraction of the population.

The comment that Zippy and I were driving at is that there were 977 British people out of 10,000, so less than 10% of the sample were British. That was the key flaw, a simple matter of mean error due to sample size would be realistically expected on a sample of 977 people.

I don't mind full body scanners, I've got nothing to hide...

++;

It'll actually make things easier for me, and I'll hopefully get searched less often.

Can i operate the scanner?

Tbh, it's not about having something to hide. I have nothing to hide (and have no problem with them on that front) it's the background stuff, what's happening to the images? where is the information likely to turn up next? It's not even *just* that it's the body scanners, it's the body scanners now, what next?

For me it's the gradual erosion of civil liberties, one little "nothing to hide" at a time, until one day we turn around and every single step we take, everything we do, everywhere we go and everyone we go with will be monitored, measured, photographed, recorded by people I wouldn't trust to wash my dishes.

Everytime something like this comes up, an NHS central database, id cards. etc etc it makes my skin crawl. Every little bit of control "they" try to exert, the more desperately I wish I could live off the grid.

As Edd said, if it makes it faster and smoother to run, and people with bits of metal in their body get less bugged, it's not too bad.
and for the images produced by the scanner, i really don't see what would happen to them.... with all you find free on the internet why would you want a blurry body scan?

But the point is nobody knows. You can't think of a reason for them to be used, but that doesn't mean there isn't one?! The fact that we don't even know who's controlling the images, what's happening to them afterwards etc is quite alarming to me. Don't you care what *could* be done with intimate pictures of you without your knowledge or consent?

As I said, I'm not particularly down on the body scanners individually, it's the combination of ways that are being created to record and control individuals that bothers me. I've just printed out the forms to opt-out of the NHS care records thing, since I don't know who's collating the information, who's controlling it and what they're doing with it, I don't want them to have it.

Edit: I also don't believe for one second it will speed the process up at all, there will still only be one body scanner for each baggage scanner, it'll be just as big a queue as there is now.

I am not a war criminal or a mass murderer.

I have done nothing to deserve having my privacy constantly invaded for others' monetary gain and the illusion of safety.

I believe that my body and images of it belong to me and me alone.

I believe that the incessant march of the state has made us less safe not more.

I say that Labour can kiss my rusty metal ass

I've opted out of the NHS thing, too. Advised to by my GP no less. If I could avoid it, I wouldn't be renewing my driving licence to one of those new-fangled photo ID ones.

Body scanners. I object to them on several levels. They've been foisted on us in the name of this bugaboo "terrorism". There's no evidence such scanners would have detected any of the attempted attacks in the past few years. Let's not even go to the bit about who gets to leer at the images, or even if the published sample images are real or not...

Like CCTV on every street corner, it's being run by unaccountable nameless operatives. We're being pummelled by this repeated mantra that "they're" out to get us, and we need all this surveillance to protect "us" from "them", whoever the feck "they" are.

All it ends up doing is alienating innocent citizens in their own country. We've seen more and more of our accepted liberties being chipped away in the name of the "war" on "terror" over the past decade or so, and it's got to stop.

Apologies for the overused speech marks!