Slashdot Mirror
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''
What a short-sighted thing to say. You're whining that protections against the launch of a biological attack might erase your digital camera pictures? Firstly, it is the postal service's precautions that have limited the death toll to five; and secondly, if you mean to imply that a mere five deaths doesn't warrant this astounding level of inconvenience, then what death toll would be needed to justify these measures? ie, how long would you wait? This isn't like holding secret military tribunals or any of the other civil-liberty-violating measures that have been discussed -- this is a simple, safe, effective, and prudent thing to do. I'm sure that the first time a UPS package or FedEx package is found to contain Anthrax or anything similar, then the private couriers will immediately begin irradiating their packages too. In fact, it might even become required by law.
If you're sending something by mail that could perhaps be damaged by certain handling in the mail, you can write a message on the outside of the package requesting special handling. ``Photographs: do not bend.'' ``Perishable: do not freeze.'' Sensitive materials ranging from high speed film to live queen bees are routinely sent through the mail, and it works just fine. I'm sure ``Sensitive: Do not irradiate'' or something of that nature would work just fine. Your mail might be ever so slightly delayed due to the alternate handling, but you'll live.
...is what is going to happen when someone smuggles C4 onto a plane in his ass, and gets caught. Full-body-cavity searches for all passengers!
This is rapidly getting ridiculous. And I feel no safer.
- A.P.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
"I am willing to bet that more than five people died last year from eating frensh fries. Why havn't this product that obviously kills people been removed from the market?"
If someone dies from eating french fries, it is probably because they choked to death or it was the last LDL placed on the cholesterol camel's back. In both cases, it was likely the fault of the person eating the fries, for either eating too quickly or eating too much fatty food.
The anthrax was thrust upon the postal workers, and the mail recipients, without their consent. If you are weighing the lives of 5 people against the blanking of a few memory cards and the people come up light, you need your scale calibrated.
"Death (even so-called "unnatural" death) is a consequence of life. If everytime someone dies, we remove or restrict what ever killed that person, this planet would be a boring place."
I couldn't agree more. If it ever became socially acceptable to hunt down and kill personal injury lawyers, I would be the first to lock and load. However, this is a process to remove anthrax from the world, not fries. Or diving boards. Or 'dangerous' toys. Or hot McDonald's coffee.
Though I mostly agree with your sentiment, I don't think it applies to this case.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
It's the old "import an animal to destroy a local pest" problem all over again.
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
Oh I love this argument. The "value" of a single human life... how "noble" of you to feel that way.
...because we happen to be alive! You don't hear dead people commenting on the sanctity of life do you?
First of all, we still don't know why we are here. Don't get religious on me now. We can't and don't really know anything about ourselves, just that we are typically afraid to die. That's all. Nothing more.
Who was it commenting on the "Sanctity of Life." Some comedian guy. More of a standup philosopher than a comedian. Well, I happen to agree with him on that issue. The ideal of the sanctity of life is all skewed.
Finally, and more seriously, if we valued human life, we wouldn't smoke. We wouldn't drink and drive. We wouldn't drive for that matter. The notion here is "acceptable risk."
Again, the motivation for all this "protecting human life" crap isn't about protecting lives as much as it is about protecting asses. They want to avoid being sued.
So get off your high horse and have a look at reality. We do not value life as much as you might think. We value the lives of foreign and faceless people even less. More people die on the freeways than did in the WTC. Okay, maybe not all at once but still!
And besides that, we die anyway. Nothing can stop that from happening.
...oh it's too early in the morning for this...
I wonder if the irradiation process degrades latex?
We could be blameing the government for a rash of unwitting pregnancies.
Course, it won't affect the slashdot crowd. Slashdotters don't have sex, they fsck.
~z
sig?
Can anyone find out how many federal workers have been killed in traffic "accidents" since September 11? I bet it's more than five.
you should read everything on the internet as if it had "but I'm probably talking out of my ass" appended to it.
I hate it when I see statistics like that in the media. Sure, it was enough to kill hundreds of thousands if you lined them up and administered a minuscule bit to each, but it's not likely that that would happen. You might as well say that a terrorist had enough knives (one) to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
There's good and bad in everything, I guess.
"If the existence of the entire universe, including your happiness, necessitated the torture of even one little girl, would you want it?"
Either way, the girl's a goner... (or am I misreading the question?)
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.
Please. Most of the threads here are just (forgive me for saying) moronic. "All this for just 5 deaths", "This is the last nail being hammered into our coffin", "Oh dear me... my rights have been violated". Please.
How many people buy a hard drive and expect it to be shipped in an envelope without padding or an anti-static bag? None. You ship me a drive like that, I'll send it right back without testing it. Sure, it might work; but that's not the point. It may or may not work very long. Not worth the risk.
Similarly, now when you ship a compact flash card, you'll have to protect it properly. Duh. A hard drive isn't susceptible to this beam because it is surrounded by the plastic case... which is covered on both sides with about 2 or maybe 3 mil of aluminum. So, from now on, ship compact flash cards wrapped in aluminum foil or, once "professional" baggies are available, use those.
An electron beam needn't be harmful, folks. I can't remember the exact equation of how far the electrons will penetrate, but in my work with Auger Electron Spectroscopy, a 3keV beam only gets me about a nanometer into the surface of a material. Going to higher energy proportionally increases the depth--but really this isn't something that's difficult to shield against. This isn't nearly as big a deal as people are making it out to be.
Long, cute, or funny Sigs are just another form of over compensation, used by geeks, nerdz, etc.
I can see this being a really big deal to the type of people who'll have conniptions over anything sciencey and scary-sounding... you know, the same ones who lobby against genetically-engineered foods with signs like "NO FRANKENFOODS!".
I normally don't bother feeding the trolls (even with genetically-modified foods), but here I'll make an exception.
Ever hear of Monsanto?
They're a corporate giant thats a big player in the GM field. Based on their track record, I wouldn't trust them to provide food for my dog or cat...never mind for my own consumption.
Here are a few lowlights:
Monsanto recently sued canadian canola farmer Percy Schmeiser for patent infringement. The reason? His neighbour had been sowing Monsanto GM canola seed and some of the seed blew onto his property.
The Washington Post recently published this article detailing how for decades Monsanto dumped PCBs into streams in a small Alabama town despite having studies from the '60s describing the damage that was being done.
Monsanto is the parent company of Nutrasweet, one of the nastiest substances approved for human consumption.
Monsanto is also involved with a GM seed technology known as terminator. Terminator involves producing seeds that grow sterile plants, requiring the farmer to aquire new seeds from the company every growing season. It shouldn't take much imagination to realise that if these plants cross-polinate with unmodified plants, the results could be catastrophic.
Is this a company you would trust and whose products you want to be putting in your mouth?
Maybe next time you see people waving signs that that say "NO FRANKENFOODS", you might ask why before pointing the finger and screaming "Conspiracy nut!"
With other technologies, there's an element of trust involved. Break the trust and you will get flak every time you try to introduce something new...good or bad. Have the individuals making these sorts of decisions shown themselves to be responsible, looking out for our best interests? Here's your answer: After approving Nutrasweet for use in carbonated beverages, the Commissioner of the FDA, Arthur Hull Hayes, Jr left his post and went to work for Nutrasweet's PR division.
You're using her as bait, Master!
And even more surprising is that 25,000 people die silently of starvation every day.
Yet the government doesn't take notice of them.
*Not a Sermon, Just a Thought
*/
However, the original comment, about all the fuzz for five lives is still relevant. The reason why it is important is that people tend to be scared about things they have no reason to fear, but pay no attention to things that are really dangerous. Things that are spectacular, things that go boom and go on the news are generally considered more dangerous than deaths that go unnoticed.
This leads to a bizarre situation: Big resources are invested in something that has very little effect, not because it makes people safer, only because it makes people feel safer.
Spending something like $40 billion on war on terror, is it going to make you safer? It is certainly not making the number of people who may want to attack the US smaller. And, does it really affect their abilities? Really?
Resources are finite, so if you really love somebody, anybody then you should make sure that they are used wisely. That they are indeed used to promote safety, not used to promote a feeling of safety. For example, bringing armed guards on planes sounds like an idea that makes people feel safer, but to me, it sounds like what hijackers need to do is get the guards gun, making it even easier.
Well, while radiation may be bad to computer chips, being a physicist, I'm not really that concerned about radiation anymore. It's rarely a health issue.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
Howmany would you have liked to see die?
Consider that in many areas, 10 or so people (or one celebrity) have to be killed in an intersection before a traffic light will be put up. Many more people have died from contaminated food, but inspections of processing plants remain a joke (Why not spend the millions there and protect everyone, not just federal employees?)
In other words, it's not that the 5 deaths don't matter, it's just that 5 deaths matter less than 10 or 100 in the big picture.
So what you're saying is, this electron beam will kill anthrax, but it's easily blocked... so we all start using electron-beam-proof wrapping... and so does whoever has been mailing anthrax.
Gee, now I feel safe.
If what you're saying is right, what this means is that we're all just going to have to pay for more expensive wrapping for our mail, particularly for film, medicine, or electronics, for no actual benefit.
you know, the same ones who lobby against genetically-engineered foods with signs like "NO FRANKENFOODS!".
The biggest outrage is that the food makers want the right to not tell us that the food contains genetically modified material. What are they hiding? If they weren't doing anything wrong, they wouldn't have to lie about it.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
No. We're whining that the compactflash card that we pay $250 for online could show up damaged at our homes and never work right in the first place, because the postal service chose to do interesting things to its package en route. We're whining that our prescription-by-mail medicine may have been altered in unknown ways and may no longer make us well or may in fact be toxic.
I haven't been to a post office in a couple of weeks. Have they posted large safety orange "WARNING, WE IRRADIATE YOUR MAIL, YOUR FILM AND ELECTRONICS WILL BE DAMAGED AND YOUR MEDICINE WILL BECOME TOXIC" signs everywhere yet? How many dozens or hundreds of people die in the United States every year from slipping in the bathtub? what death toll are you waiting for to justify the banning of bathtubs?
You can't legislate away death. Living has risks. Tell the folks at the commerce department whose paper gave off toxic gas because it was irradiated that it's safe. I'm sure that'll be very comforting to the terrorists who have been mailing anthrax, to know that they can just write "do not irradiate" on their envelopes full of death. Look, if this is such a wonderful thing like you say it should be done to everything. If it can't be safely done to everything, maybe it shouldn't be done at all: creating a false sense of security is much worse than being insecure and knowing it.
Bullshit. Pure and utter bullshit. Have you ever stopped to consider that some folks, just maybe, smoke because they actively want to? I love tobacco. I love smoking a pipe. I enjoy the occasional cigar. Even a good cigarette every couple of months (sadly, there aren't many good brands--I think it must be the paper). Very infrequently I'll have some chewing tobacco.
I smoke because I value my life. I want to enjoy the time I have. I like the taste of the tobacco as it swirls up the stem and out the mouthpiece. I love the feel of the smoke. I enjoy blowing smoke-rings.
And you know something? Far from being addicted, I often forget to smoke. As in, for a week or two at a time. I've been smoking for six years now--more than half a decade--and I have never been addicted. That's the nice thing about pipesmoking.
You know something else? Oddly enough, pipesmokers live longer, as was found in the '64 Surgeon General's report. The '70 Surgeon General's report found that pipesmokers who smoke 4 or fewer bowls a day live longer than nonsmokers.
It seems to me that the stupid ones are those who do not engage in a pleasurable, enjoyable and safe activity which prolongs their lifespans. It seems to me that the weaklings are those without the self-will to disbelieve that lies which are crammed down their throats.
Smokers of the World Unite! In Fumo Veritas!