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USPS Irradiation Damages Electronics
meehawl writes: "Bummer. Turns out the USPS's new Electron Beams anthrax zappers can erase and sometimes permanently damage CompactFlash cards. I wonder what other sensitive electronics will get wiped, not to mention seeds, film, some plastics, and so on. I guess it's more reason to use Fedex and UPS, at least unless and until they deploy these beam weapons as well. All this disruption for a campaign that killed five people? Some people think using the beams will lead to more deaths and injuries among operators. Meanwhile, electron beam makers, SureBeam, just got an analyst upgrade." Err, and be careful what you irradiate.
All this disruption for a campaign that killed five people?
Although the self-righteous amoung us have pounced on this statement, it's not out of line. We can't substantially change our way of life every time someone dies.
Look at automobiles. A 1981 VW Rabbit (Golf in Europe) weighed about 1,800lbs. A modern Golf weighs in at about 2,800lbs. Most of that weight gain is because of safety regulations requiring everything from stronger bumpers to airbags to bracing in the doors. In another 50 years, will economy cars weigh as much as Chevy Suburbans due to ever-increasing safety regulation?
What if it could be shown that taking people's guns away wuld prevent deaths? In the U.S. in 1998, there were 30,708 deaths from firearms: Suicide 17,424; Homicide 12,102; Accident 866; Undetermined 316. And no rational person could possibly claim that self-defense uses of firearms saved anywhere near that many lives. So does that death toll justify repealing the Second Amendment (right to bear arms)?
We are slowly paralyzing ourselves as a country. We need to realize that we can't legislate or regulate death out of existence. People are going to die, sometimes tragically before their time, no matter how many laws, procedures, rules, and regulations we put into place.