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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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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.
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
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
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
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.