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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."
What a shocking development
Electricity wants to be free!
Je ne parle pas francais.
Can someone explain how the mains circuit is supplied.
TFA was so light on details its very difficult to understand what he did. I'm not sure how you can actually illegally tap into the power grid without someone noticing. Here an inspector literally reads the meter or in some cases a digital meter supplies information automatically. In fact, my gas is apparently wireless and merely requires someone to drive by to meter the usage. It would seem like something that would be very difficult to subvert in a suburban environment.
"You should always go to other people's funerals; otherwise, they won't come to yours." -- Yogi Berra
So I guess the charges he was brought up on were negative, am I right?
If people were willing to use this scheme to get cheaper electricity, I guess the electricity is too expensive.
Here in Denmark over 90% of the amount we pay for electricity is various taxes. No wonder people turn to alternative solutions because once you've done yours and switched bulbs, appliances and everything to the most environmentally friendly versions available, you still get a hefty bill and there's nothing (more) you can do about it - except perhaps to steal the electricity that is... ;)
"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong." -- H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) --
Tuttle, or was it Buttle? Anyhow, clearly a rogue handyman on the loose. Better arrest somebody.
Sounds like he already did the community service.
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.
He didn't steal the power, he just borrowed it. For every electron that went into his wires, he sent one right back to the electric company. So he just copied them. Or something.
#!/usr/bin/python
import electricity
#????
print 'profit'
Wait, so let me get this straight: You design an electric vehicle with special arms whose sole purpose is to reach up its arms at night to recharge, then sit there during the day as the battery drains out, then reach up again a night or so later and recharge again.
And you do this for years...
Brilliant!
coding is life
And yet it enabled him to supply more power than the average renewable power government project. I say we need more nuts and rocks !
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.
Do you forget that the term "piracy" had its origins before the digital age? When the ship with the Jolly Roger approached a vessel, overtook it, and stole the cargo, it was called "piracy". While originally describing theft at sea, its (vernacular) meaning can include any act of theft from a merchant or carrier before the "cargo" reaches the intended customer or destination.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
I think it's partially BS. An induction loop that provides useful power (enough to run a house) at a distance of 100 yards to the AC transmission line must be coupling to a big-scale high voltage line -- I'd presume something above 100kV. AFAIK, in those lines, change in losses due to changes in something as trivial as air humidity beats whatever consumption a house would have, by orders of magnitude. I doubt they would be able to measure whatever this man did. Now it's true that he did increase the load on their line, but the instantaneous power transmitted by such lines is such that one house's worth of load is below the capability of typical industrial measurement systems. So it's true that he was stealing power, but I doubt they came to him due to "extra load in their circuit". Besides, such lines are costly to maintain, so I presume it's rare that you would run such a line without normal loads attached to it. I'd think that leakage measurements with disconnected loads are rare: idling a big transmission line wastes lots of money.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
========
CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
The problem isn't that the 'corportate behemoths' are under-regulated. The problem is that any competition from smaller businesses are over-regulated. The government gets to pass laws and gets seen as 'doing something', while the big guys eat the cost of that regulation and make it up with all the additional business they squeeze out from the competition. Even worse, companies like GE and BP get to look at heroes for pushing legislation for things that sound good like 'Green Energy' while doing so simply to benefit themselves and harm the competition.
If government was smaller, and not as easily bought (as as wise man said, "When bying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things bought and sold are legislators"), you wouldn't have this incestuous relationship. It's a form of rent seeking, and you wouldn't have it as bad if the upper eschelon of both govt. and business weren't tag-teaming to screw the little guys.
They showed the coils of bailing wire didn't work with specific PG&E transmission lines to 'power a house'.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
If that's how you figure it, you're not even close.
For instance, if you pay $100 for plumbing, but the plumber has to give $30 of that to the feds for his taxes, do you think the plumber is going to do $100 worth of work for you? No. He's only getting $70, and so that is the very MOST he going to do for you -- he'll do less, in fact, because otherwise he will not make a profit.
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.
People are generally unaware of this, because we don't see the plumber's taxes; that info is hidden. Each purchase we make of goods and service has a significant, but variable, hidden siphon of funds going on to the government, directly affecting how much actual work your money does for us.
Sometimes they even manage to tax our purchases more than once; for instance, a death tax taxes funds and goods we already bought when we try to pass them on, making them that much more expensive, or, to look at it another way, devaluing your money even further.
So... perhaps you do know what taxes are doing to you. But most people really don't. It's because it isn't all that obvious. What some tax reformers want is that it be made obvious, generally by consolidating the process (taxation) into one event - for instance, a national sales tax that would replace the other taxes, or other, similarly transparent ideas. The trick to it all is making it fair, and determining what "fair" means in the context of people who are barely making it as compared to those at the other end to whom taxes are irrelevant to them making it, and all those in between, for whom taxes variously affect their lives.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.