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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.
...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
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.
"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!
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.