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iPod: This Season's Must-Have for Muggers
KH writes "West Midlands police have issued a stark warning to iPod users: ditch the white headphones or pay the price." Apparently, muggers recognize the headphones and target passersby for muggage.
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You can always tell the Neuros users by their headphones. The headphones have the distinctive Neuros orange on the outside. It's a lot more discreet than all white, but it's noticable.
If he lives in NYC, he doesn't have a CCW. The only people who carry there are cops and criminals.
Just a quick note to let you know -- they DO in fact have a unique identifier. All Apple products (computer-wise, anyway) do. My powerbook and iPod both have serial numbers that I registered with Apple when I bought them.
Mmmm......sacrelicious.
An iPod can be loaded with music without using iTunes.
Check ephPod.
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Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
As a resident in Birmingham UK (The West Midlands) i might add that people world wide probably don't really need to worry to much. Birmingham has quite high crime rates and a lot of rich boroughs surrounding it - people are prime targets. People need only remember the shootings that took place over new years eve last year.
My understanding is that they work mainly with pain compliance (despite what the dreck^H^H^H^H^Hmarketting literature says), and pain compliance is not a tool I would choose to use on a mugger.
Then you misunderstand them. It paralyzes you. Your muscles cramp up and you can't move. It's not that the pain is so bad, it's that the signals coming from your brain telling your muscles to move are being drowned out by the signals coming from the tazer.
Tazers work.. even on people pumped up on PCP.
Concealed carry requires a license. In any case, it's not impossible for a mugger to get shot by his intended victim, and this scares a lot of people off from mugging in the first place. And they don't necessarily take the gun, they don't always know you have it.
In Repressive Burma, it's not just your connection that dies. slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=314547&cid=20819199
Anecdotal evidence says otherwise. I've talked to cops that use them, and have had them used on themselves, and the comments are that it hurts - not that it paralyzes. Of the commonly available "stun" weapons, the Tazer is indeed the best, but they aren't reliable stoppers.
I've talked to so many people who have been zapped from everything from garden variety stun guns like gramma had in "Die Hard II" to the much ballyhooed Myotron and the common denominator is that they hurt.
I'd personally be more than willing to get "stunned" by any available electrical "paralysis" garbage on the market, and I'd be willing to bet that I could close in on the stunner and clinch them while they stun me. I'd be willing to be that I could fully demonstrate ability and motive to continue an assault, and prove that if I were an assailant the "stun gun" would be a meaningless tool for self-defence.
really disabling the nervous system is also capable of stopping the heart and killing the attacker. Thus, you might as well use a weapon that is designed to do just that.
I can get to Washington State, so if anyone wants to take me up on this you provide the stun weapons and I'll provide the flesh.
Pierre
really disabling the nervous system is also capable of stopping the heart and killing the attacker.
The ACLU agrees with you.
But your anecdotal evidence doesn't impress me. I've seen enough articles like this and enough TV news to see that they're consistant. I've never seen anyone tased that can continue to move. Everyone describes it the exact same way.
In fact the only people who I've heard say tasers don't work are anonymous people on bulletin boards who want to place bets that they wouldn't be effected.
Great, Pudge didn't do his homework on this one.
I considered submitting this story, but I was busy and now I regret it because according to this MacWorld UK article, this is just an unsubstantiated media frenzy. The proof of how widespread these muggings are is still pretty sketchy.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
5) Watch Mythbusters
:-)
(FYI: The rail test proved very negative... And their setup more closely resembled an electric fence than anything).
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
almost right. You have a right to use reasonable force to defend yourself or others from harm. You do not have a right to use force to defend your property. You can attempt a citizens arrest and THEN use appropriate levels of force if they violently resist you, but if you kill someone who had broken into your house but was not threatening you then you might well face arrest.
The alternative, that intruders leave their rights at the door, is essentially that if someone breaks in, you have the right to torture them to death.
You can't win Darth. If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine
That's why I moved north from Atlanta to Kennesaw a few years ago. I have MUCH less need of a sidearm now. Something to do with the local ordinance requiring gun ownership, I suppose.
THE GOOD HUMOR MAN CAN ONLY BE PUSHED SO FAR
Bart Simpson on chalkboard in episode 2F18
No, no they don't. As a law enforcement officer, at least in our city, we have to get tazed to know what it feels like. The 3 times I have been tazed by one, was by a 500,000 volt one, and I didn't fall or become paralyzed. It would still be easy to attack after.
Free stuff without getting the referrals? http://referralaccelerated.com
Here it is, but I think paid subscription to the Economist is required.
Drill baby drill - on Mars
You remember it wrong. That's not suprising. You were six.
Electric fences on farms cycle -- off, briefly on, off, briefly on, etc. You put the hook on, the fence went on, you were shocked, the fence went off, you let go.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
Actually I use Ephpod to upload music to my ipod. I have itunes but have never been able to get itunes to recognize my ipod.
http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/493636. html
Unfortunatly this would appear to be the typical attitude of so called UK 'Sports' Shooters. UK shooters sites such as Cybershooters (http://www.cybershooters.org/) and the Sportsman's Association (http://www.shootersweb.co.uk/boards/) apparently do little else but prompt agitation for RKBA among their members. Fortunatly this dangerous group of potential psychopathic killers were disarmed in 1997 after one of their number went AWOL in the school gymn in Dunblane.
It probably predeces even the usenet.
From the Jargon file, under "Hacker Writing Style":
There is also an accepted convention for 'writing under erasure'; the text
Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's visiting from corporate HQ.
reads roughly as "Be nice to this fool, er, gentleman...", with irony emphasized. The digraph ^H is often used as a print representation for a backspace, and was actually very visible on old-style printing terminals. As the text was being composed the characters would be echoed and printed immediately, and when a correction was made the backspace keystrokes would be echoed with the string '^H'. Of course, the final composed text would have no trace of the backspace characters (or the original erroneous text).
Accidental writing under erasure occurs when using the Unix talk program to chat interactively to another user. On a PC-style keyboard most users instinctively press the backspace key to delete mistakes, but this may not achieve the desired effect, and merely displays a ^H symbol. The user typically presses backspace a few times before their brain realises the problem -- especially likely if the user is a touch-typist -- and since each character is transmitted as soon as it is typed, Freudian slips and other inadvertent admissions are (barring network delays) clearly visible for the other user to see.
Deliberate use of ^H for writing under erasure parallels (and may have been influenced by) the ironic use of 'slashouts' in science-fiction fanzines.
A related habit uses editor commands to signify corrections to previous text. This custom faded in email as more mailers got good editing capabilities, only to take on new life on IRCs and other line-based chat systems.
charlie: I've seen that term used on alt.foobar often.
lisa: Send it to Erik for the File.
lisa: Oops...s/Erik/Eric/.
The s/Erik/Eric/ says "change Erik to Eric in the preceding". This syntax is borrowed from the Unix editing tools ed and sed, but is widely recognized by non-Unix hackers as well.
Given the choice, I'd go for 2-3 years. I don't earn 300-500K per annum.
Erm, the police don't carry guns in the UK, the only people with guns are a few armed police and criminals. Oh and you never see the police on teh street, they're too busy filling in forms and re-filling speed cameras. I walk 5 miles to and from work every day, quite late at night. There were several thousand football fans drinking cans of beer on the way last night, not a single policeman in sight.