Slashdot Mirror
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."
Electricity wants to be free!
Je ne parle pas francais.
I see you have posted AC...not DC.
-- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.
Sounds like he already did the community service.
- The easy way: Vamp the cables before they go into the meter. Carefully poke needles into them, solder cable to the needles. Careful not to draw too much current, or they get hot - but British power is 230V, so a little current goes a long way. There is a risk of a meter reader noticing, but if you have a remotely-monitored smart-meter then this is an option. Popular with intensive pot-growers - not to avoid the fee, but because a house that suddenly spikes by several kilowatts and stays there will raise a suspicion notice at the utility, and may result in police going around to see if someone is operating hundreds of day-bulbs.
- The hard way: Find a cable someone else has paid for and splice in. Good targets are outbuildings. If your garage is next to theirs, a little breaking-and-entering is all you need.
- The insane way: Tap into the actual mains distribution cables under the roads or on utility poles. I think this is what he was doing. High effort, high risk of detection, high risk of electrocution. Only a real electrician could do this, like the person of the article. Allows access to great amounts of power, for running large buildings.
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.
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.
You can even see this in judgements we would now disagree with.
The famous "end of slavery" judgement in England is very narrowly written, it holds that slavery is a repugnant institution, and so could only exist in England if it was the law, then it says the law doesn't provide for slavery in England, and so the plaintiff, who is in England, is not a slave and may go free.
But it carefully says nothing about slavery outside England. There were in practice essentially no slaves in England, which is why this chap (brought there from a colony and unwilling to return) was chosen as a test case. Everything was paid for by anti-slavery advocates. So the intention was to secure a judgement that slavery as a whole was illegal, and the judge did not do that. He didn't want to cause chaos by spontaneously freeing huge numbers of slaves.
Campaigners still called this an end to slavery, but England continued to operate slave ships, and to control colonies whose commercial viability depended on slavery. The only thing that had changed was a man who found himself in England could be sure he wasn't a slave - though as a servant he might be little better off. It would take many more years before English rulers instructed their colonies to cease buying new slaves and grant their existing slaves freedom.
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.