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Pirate Electrician Supplied Power To 1,500 Homes
fridaynightsmoke writes "A former electrical engineer for utility EDF has been prosecuted for illegally supplying power to some 1,500 homes in north London. Derek Brown, 45, was arrested in 2008 after being seen tampering with the electric grid in a manhole. He specialized in connecting separate supplies to houses that were split into apartments. One landlord involved, Haresh Parmar, was jailed for 9 months for stealing £30,000 worth of electricity for 22 of his apartments. Brown's assets will be seized and he has been sentenced to 8 months suspended, and 150 hours community service."
I believe it was the landlord doing this, not the tenants who probably paid the landlord for utilities. And people will always want free stuff.
No, electricity wants to be *grounded*.
What it really wants is for the first 20 posts to be a bunch of stupid puns! Readers just love scrolling through "crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, yup more crap, crap, crap, lame attempt to be funny, crap, crap, crap, dumbass slashdot meme, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, stupid puns, crap, crap, crap, crap, hey look an interesting post!"
Since I think the distinction between thieves and pirates can be a useful one in the debate on software piracy, I'd say we're dealing with a thief here - not a pirate.
Dear Anonymous Coward, That is why most stupid, crap-spewing dumbasses post as Anonymous Coward.
Dear Pseudononymous Coward,
I am glad to see you personally demonstrate that every rule has an exception.
Dear mwvdlee,
Apparently not only the ACs are crap-spewing dumasses...great post. I guess maybe it's a square-rhombus situation...All ACs are crap spewing dumbasses but not all crap-spewing dumasses are ACs? Thanks for providing me with a real thinking for this weak.
Yours truly,
Another AC
They almost certainly check how the power gets drained between certain stretches of cabling for maintenance purposes. If, for example, they notice a stretch of cable is losing 2KW of power more than they'd expect it could indicate damaged cable or that that the power is getting partially grounded somehow.
This is not piracy, its actual theft.
If you pirate a song, a computer program or a movie, you are merely making an unauthorized copy. You can't do that with electricity. It still has to be generated by burning fossil fuels and adding to the CO2 in the atmosphere.
Roads/Schools/Libraries are classified as public goods, which the free market does not allocate very efficiently. That's why we use taxes to pay for them and provide them for everyone. I think the parent understands that they aren't "free" in the sense that you mean.
Go take an introductory macroeconomics class and then get back to us when you're slightly more educated. We really don't have the time or patience to deal with you until then.
.. They wouldn't have stolen it that fast when it had DRM!
(I can't believe I've said pro-DRM crap; my low-uid must be tarnished for life now!)
--- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
I'd like to point out that this sort of thing is very common in third world countries. When it happens, it drives up prices for actual paying customers by making it exponentially more difficult for utilities to provide service and maintain infrastructure due to the uncompensated stress put on their systems. As the increased taxes and regulations of the modern socialist nanny state crushes entrepreneurship and throws ever larger numbers of people out of work and onto welfare, expect to see more of this as a harbinger of things to come.
Remember, there ain't no such thing as a free lunch.
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Yeah I hate how high taxes and over regulation created those third world countries... oh wait they are almost universally libertarian fantasies in which even local policing is "outsourced" to "entrepreneurs".
This sort of Libertarian fantasy wank gets modded insightful?
P.S. The freedom crushing is being done at the behest of under-regulated corporate behemoths that can buy laws. Which is the end result of Libertarian fantasy wank.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
Mythbusters sucks. They decided to try to make a gunpowder engine once and all their designs were horribly flawed; I corrected one of their non-working gunpowder engine designs (the hopper was of a severely flawed design) and it worked. They even tried pouring gunpowder directly into the cylinder of a regular petrol engine. These people are incompetent.
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Trickle-down: When an already wealthy entity receives money, it becomes more and more conservative with it. It invests it outside the core business (diversification) or it squirrels it away (hoarding), sometimes in the form of non-cash (art, land, etc.) What it doesn't do is turn around and shower that money on the workers, or the consumers, of the products it is currently selling. This trickle down idea is a myth, a myth started and maintained by those whose only goal is to collect as much of everyone else's money as possible.
Credit: The function of credit is to expand the gap between the wealthy and the poor, by transferring money from the poor to the wealthy. Here's how it works. At some interest rate, $100 is made available to the poor by the wealthy. The poor pays back $110. That $100 then is actually worth $90 to the poor, but $110 to the wealthy. At the end of the transaction, the wealthy have more money. The poor, however, have less, although they have $100 worth of goods, with a probable resale value of far less, should they try and exchange them for cash. It is worth noting that in general, they goods they purchase they also buy from the wealthy. The result of the credit process is a continuous transfer of money from the poor to the rich - never the other way, unless the debt repayment is defaulted, and even then, statistically speaking, this doesn't slow the process down much.
This is why the libertarian idea of corporate freedom is bunk. Corporations are not people; if we compare them honestly to persons, they're a lot more like psychopaths. No society that lets them run free can remain healthy; the US is one recent example; when unregulated, jobs are sent overseas, healthcare is not provided, products are not made to last, warranty and service are only given under profound duress, copy protection, software differentiation, IP hoarding and other anti-consumer practices become not just common, but the standard for behavior.
The libertarian outlook has major value in that area where it recognizes the liberties and freedoms of people, and says that government should have no authority there. When those freedoms are extended to corporations, the libertarian ideal turns immediately into a nightmare, one not all that unlike the one we're currently experiencing. Corporations are not people. They completely lack empathy, sympathy, compassion, courtesy, loyalty, and honor. They are, quite literally, psychopaths. Given the strengths of a legal person, they will act along the same lines of the worst criminals society has ever known. All the while smiling to your face.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So, if you pay 30% taxes, then you had to earn $142.85 to pay the plumber $100, for which you got less than $70 worth of services. In the end, $142 of your dollars bought something less than $70 worth of services.
But by your logic, I only had to do $100 of work to earn the $142.85 (you say the plumber does $70 of work for the $100). So there's no double dipping.