They found debris from the aircraft after the initial crash. This wasn't so much "finding the titanic after 70 some years" as it was "I know I parked my car in this lot where di....oh there it is, it was a couple rows over." They also found large pieces of the plane. They are still far complete.
As I said, they're still comparatively young as a museum. Getting a Shuttle would go a long way towards filling that otherwise empty(-ish) space hall.
I've been to better air museums; Fantasy of flight had a bit more of an overall theme, and the fact that they flew something everyday was fantastic (the day I was there they had a Fieseler Storch doing low speed flight and STOL demos). I've been to worse air museums; Pacific Aviation out at Pearl comes to mind. Evergreen's on a good track, they just need to keep the momentum going for another decade or so.
Supposedly (I can't find any reliable, from NASA themselves statements, only reporters saying) Discovery has already been promised to Udvar-Hazy (the Smithsonian), who will in turn loan out Enterprise.
I didn't find Evergreen to be all that different from the way Dayton, or most any other air museum, has their displays arraigned. (I remember sitting on the nose wheel of Bock's Car at Dayton). I was a bit bummed about the cost for the Spruce Goose, but that is their star attraction and earner, especially since their B-17 is no longer flyable due to the dreaded wing spar AD. They're also a pretty new facility, so I don't blame them for having a bit of fluff and filler. Didn't see much in the way of obvious replicas for that matter, just a collection that needs a bit of guidance and theme. Right now they're in the "here's a plane, here's another one, here's a helicopter, here's some stuff a guy gave us, here's some more stuff" hole that lots of museums end up in.
Here's my flickr set from my trip a while back. Judge for yourself:
Their space section was quite nice, but the area they have allocated was pretty bare. Excellent SR-71 display. Interesting they way they had the engine bay open and the start cart parked nearby. Much better than the usual "Ooooh, look at the pointy black thing" setup that most places use. Given that they're one of the few really nice facilities on the west coast, I don't doubt that they'll be getting a shuttle. They've shown that they're willing to spend, and they're well funded.
Blink is a *fantastic* episode (although, the later appearance of the weeping angels was a bit of a "Fry's dog" for me. Their first appearance was fantastic, they didn't need to be brought back and have their impact lessened), but it's not the best place to start. It's so good, that other episodes may have trouble living up to that bar. I personally liked "Silence in the library" as a good "out of the blue" starting point, but you really should sit through the 9th doctor to get a feel for the series, then let the really good episodes come to you.
The prize guarantees a modest (or, really, minimal) return on investment, and adds an element of competition to the overall goal. The X prize and lunar X-prizes are no different. Those prizes don't come remotely close to allowing a company to recoup what was invested to (or eventually, in the case of the Lunar X-prize) reach the goal. However, winning the prize ensures a little bit more publicity and some bragging rights for the folks who win.
Look at it this way: The Lombardi trophy (the trophy teams are awarded for winning the Super Bowl) is probably only worth 25-50,000 USD (it's sterling silver). The Stanley cup may be a bit more, if only for the historical provenance it carries. Yet teams spend tens, even hundreds of millions to capture those prizes. The element of competition is in some ways more rewarding that then old fashioned "give us money 'cuz we wanna do something cool that'll probably make you money in the future." business proposal.
"to charge that same price that costs you NOTHING to duplicate, NOTHING to store, NOTHING to ship, NOTHING to advertise is...hard to swallow"
Especially if you don't grasp the concept that bandwidth, server storage space, and advertising (with the same requisite bandwidth and storage costs) AREN'T FREE EITHER. But hey, keep thinking that the latest churning of Harry Potter or the Twilight series are hosted off some 20gig harddrive hooked up to a old PII in some guy's basement.
Amazon gets their cut *after the publishers*, the same scrupulous people that were at the root of the 1984 / book deletion mess in the first place (but who am I to get in the way of some perfectly good nerd rage?).
And where exactly do I say that? If and when he's convicted, lock him up and be done with him. He's as entitled to due process as anyone else, and that's what he's getting right now.
I don't hold any sympathy for anyone in the Meth food chain. If this were Joe the pot guy losing his collection, I'd be just a bit bummed. But this is an entirely different ballgame. There's a whole class of drugs out there that really are "bad" drugs, and meth is one of 'em. Show me someone who's been smoking pot for 30 years, then go and try to find someone who's been doing meth for 30 years. Aside from a lack of motivation and a glorious set of man boobs, the pot head's probably ok. The meth user has probably either been dead for twenty years or in jail. The incredible screw job that meth does to your neurochemistry makes anything Glaxo SmithKlien is doing look like two cups of coffee and a mountain dew chaser.
A couple of apocryphal internet stories for you; A friend of mine moonlighted as a prison shrink while stationed in the Pacific Northwest in the AF. He ended up dealing with a lot of the royally fucked up folks. Those who weren't either A. genuine psychopaths or B. the products of horribly fucked up situations were meth addicts. According to him, the nicest guy he dealt with was an actual axe murderer who hacked up a couple of people while tweaked. Once he was in prison and clean, he wasn't a bad person.
My wife is a librarian. When we lived in northern Indiana, one of the more common problems that rural libraries faced was the loss of children's books due to meth lab exposure. The kids would check the book out, take it home, and it would come back reeking of the various chemicals the poor kid was being exposed to at home. If this guy spent any time around production, these comics are toast.
In short, fuck this guy. You want to bitch about the big bad government and your civil liberties? You want to be all cool and snarky by throwing a (tm) after the phrase "war on drugs", go do it on a norml forum. When it comes to tweaks, fuck 'em, there ain't a hole deep enough.
When the root problem doesn't affect more than one person, it makes sense. When it affects everyone, it's likely not a client problem or there's a far easier solution that reimaging.
See, this is why you have A. images. B. Up to date images with windows updates. C. Images with the necessary programs already loaded so you don't have to go reloading. D. Anti-virus software that can be pushed automatically and E. backups.
....and his was the right answer. With XP, you're almost certainly talking about a client machine. Why bother dicking with it? It's a hundred dollar OS on a four hundred dollar piece of hardware. Wipe, reload, move on to big boy problems. Even if you're talking about a problem that ends up affecting a number of users, and it happens to be a client side problem, you're farther ahead to nuke and reload.
In my last position I was the only end user support guy for 150 to 200 people. If I sat around and fucked with every little nuance of XP and it's associated ills, I'd have ended up even farther behind than I was when I left. I wrote up a quick backup script that grabbed anything the user didn't (against company policy) store on the network drive, grabbed their local e-mail (Notes), then nuked the machine and reloaded. I could take a user who was dead in the water and have them back up and running in 15-20 minutes. If they had a lot of data to restore, maybe 35-45. Spending an hour 'troubleshooting' was a waste of company time, and my time.
Corporate policy dictates "costs are bad", ergo there's zero incentive to fix this until it's regulated.
Have a nice day.
Recovering from breaches are a cost. A huge cost. A cost that keeps on drawing, thanks to negative publicity, pissed off clients, lawsuits, turnover. Sadly, the only way to prove that for some folks is to get hacked. The nice thing is that, as more and more hype mach......media coverage gets out regarding large intrusions, the more likely the people in charge are to sit up and take notice.
Probably not, since they're at the whims of the content providers. Given that exclusivity == $$$, even when the content is shite, don't expect the current situation to improve any time soon. Same situation as music. If an artist, label, or studip doesn't want digital downloads, checking different endpoint providers won't change the selection.
Reboots are a nice test of "Oh shit" situations, such as complete power failures. There are a lot of admins out there who don't have the luxury of giant battery backups that will cover everything until the automatic generators kick in. There's something that's just a tiny bit comforting about watching the machine from push to post to prompt. You know if the CMOS or RAID controller batteries are bitching about needing to b replaced (even if SNMP *might* be able to tell you this). You know that there's an NFS mount that takes a ridiculous amount of time to complete, and there are precious few ways of verifying that a BIOS upgrade went though successfully without watching.
Have you ever read an e-paper screen? The backlit brightness has always been a problem for me, but not with a Kindle. No problem with eyestrain at all, other than the strain you get from reading for a few hours at a time.
True, a kindle needs electricity. But with the wireless off, you get huge battery life. I got mine as a christmas present, and other than a couple hookups to the USB port for data transfer, I've only actually charged the device three times since then, and it wasn't 'dead' when I put it on the charger.
Sit back and laugh at the entire e-reader industry until it figures out how to behave like a real business environment.
You mean like the publishing industry in general? Sounds good. I'll wait for e-publishers to writhe in agony as the impenetrable fiefdom they created and got fat off of dies a slow painful death, occasionally lashing out blindly at concepts they A. don't understand and B. could have used as means of maintaining profitability and relevance had they paid the slightest bit of attention to.
There are problems with e-readers and e-books. To me, they are offset by the advantages they have over traditional media.
NAT is the single greatest thing to happen to consumer networking hardware EVER.
Remember Sasser? Or Blaster? Self propagating worms that went screaming over the internet in part *because* of poorly firewalled networking and publicly exposed services such as RPC. That doesn't happen with NAT. It can't happen over NAT unless you're explicitly forwarding that service. It's a FANTASTIC, seemless layer of security for Joe User. Sure, NAT breaks stuff. But it breaks stuff for people who probably shouldn't be using NAT in the first place.
At its core, IPv6 is the technically superior solution. But the people who rag on NAT are also expecting companies that make consumer grade networking hardware (or as its better known; the cheapest crap Foxconn knockoff companies can cram out the door and into a shipping container) should ship their equipment with an exploit-free, well designed, easy to configure firewall. That's not an unreasonable request but, and please listen carefully; IT WILL NEVER FUCKING HAPPEN IN YOUR OR YOUR CHILDRENS LIFETIME. Look where we are *right now.* That very solution has been sitting under their noses for essentially a decade, and more practically five years, and no one has really stepped up to the plate. Instead they've chosen Fast & Cheap out of the holy trinity of Fast, Cheap, or Good.
Until ISP's make the decision to start using IPv6 on the gear they send out to consumers, these complaints are a moot point. Consumer hardware will support what the providers offer and, as of today, I can't just plug a router in and get an IPv6 lease from Comcast or AT&T and go to town right now (or at any time the foreseeable future, beyond a couple of potential-pending-limited test trial beta's.) Until that changes, bitching because the hardware makers aren't supporting it is just a case of wishing that a company would do something because it's the right thing to do. Well, you can take that particular wish and play the "Wish in one hand and sh*t in the other and see which one fills up first" game.
In my experience Home Depot / Lowe's tend to give out insanely high limits on their cards, usually in the five digit range depending on what you buy. Shafting a chain hardware store for 25 grand tends to draw a little more ire than shafting Best Buy for a laptop and a stereo.
If you get a card from one of them, pay it off and cancel it. At one point, over a third of my 'available credit' was on one of their cards.
One of the fundamental problems the prisons are probably having here is that there will be a few guards that are SELLING cell phones the inmates. That's another problem that has to be handled by other means.
You mean like, say, making it a crime for officers or others to smuggle a cell phone to an inmate? The game changes a bit when the punishment goes from "I might get fired from a job I already fucking hate" to "I might get sent to jail."
I personally don't see why a prison cell needs to have an AC outlet. They're like a hotel nowadays. But that's another rant in itself. If they had no place to charge the cell phones the problem wouldn't be a tenth of what it is now.
Unless you've got a 'green' prison that doesn't use 110 anywhere at all, your cunning plan has flaws. Put another way: Alcatraz didn't have a 'rubber boat manufacturing lab', and other prisons don't have a 'prison-approved improvised stabbing weapons shop' or 'office of alcohol distillation', yet these things still happen. Take something away and prisoners will find a way to do it. They've got 24/7/365 to figure out a way. They're like hackers, but without the distractions of WoW. Besides, Alcatraz made it a policy to offer good food and hot showers to inmates for a simple reason: It gave them something to take away. I don't doubt that electrical outlets are used much the same way.
Perfect plan, because nothing else inside a prison could possibly use 110v AC. Hell, all you need to know is what the charge controller is outputting to the phone. Then just spend some time in the prison library getting an education in basic electrical. Even if you get creative and do something like, say, change the lighting system to 12v DC, you just build yourself a handy little step up/down transformer.
When you spend 24/7/365 someplace, the cracks in the system become very evident. There are kitchens, laundries, rec areas, etc. You're in for a dime by having a cell phone in the first place, why not go in for a dollar by stealing some electrons for it?
Legislation tends to just add a force multiplier to an existing crime. For instance; Drug free school zones don't magically stop drugs from being sold, but they add a nice "and" to the existing charges, which in turn makes it harder to plead down.
In this case, legislation *is* needed. If I sneak a hundred cell phones into a prison at 800 bucks a pop, my only crime currently would be not declaring the additional $80,000 in income on my taxes. (Sorta like Al Capone. He was never nailed for bootlegging / extortion / murder, he was nailed for being a used furniture dealer who was making several hundred thousand dollars a year and not paying income tax on it.) As of now, the only person who gets punished is the inmate themselves. The smuggler did nothing illegal.
"there have been documented cases of escape attempts, drug deals and conference calls coordinated via smuggled cell phones."
Not conference calls! Anything but that! Isn't it bad enough that they're in jail? Now they're being subjected to conference calls. That is surely a violation of an inmate's rights against cruel and unusual punishment.
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They found debris from the aircraft after the initial crash. This wasn't so much "finding the titanic after 70 some years" as it was "I know I parked my car in this lot where di....oh there it is, it was a couple rows over." They also found large pieces of the plane. They are still far complete.
Still quite a feat.
As I said, they're still comparatively young as a museum. Getting a Shuttle would go a long way towards filling that otherwise empty(-ish) space hall.
I've been to better air museums; Fantasy of flight had a bit more of an overall theme, and the fact that they flew something everyday was fantastic (the day I was there they had a Fieseler Storch doing low speed flight and STOL demos). I've been to worse air museums; Pacific Aviation out at Pearl comes to mind. Evergreen's on a good track, they just need to keep the momentum going for another decade or so.
Supposedly (I can't find any reliable, from NASA themselves statements, only reporters saying) Discovery has already been promised to Udvar-Hazy (the Smithsonian), who will in turn loan out Enterprise.
I didn't find Evergreen to be all that different from the way Dayton, or most any other air museum, has their displays arraigned. (I remember sitting on the nose wheel of Bock's Car at Dayton). I was a bit bummed about the cost for the Spruce Goose, but that is their star attraction and earner, especially since their B-17 is no longer flyable due to the dreaded wing spar AD. They're also a pretty new facility, so I don't blame them for having a bit of fluff and filler. Didn't see much in the way of obvious replicas for that matter, just a collection that needs a bit of guidance and theme. Right now they're in the "here's a plane, here's another one, here's a helicopter, here's some stuff a guy gave us, here's some more stuff" hole that lots of museums end up in.
Here's my flickr set from my trip a while back. Judge for yourself:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tenthousandmarbles/sets/72157626254980751/
Their space section was quite nice, but the area they have allocated was pretty bare. Excellent SR-71 display. Interesting they way they had the engine bay open and the start cart parked nearby. Much better than the usual "Ooooh, look at the pointy black thing" setup that most places use. Given that they're one of the few really nice facilities on the west coast, I don't doubt that they'll be getting a shuttle. They've shown that they're willing to spend, and they're well funded.
DON'T START THERE!!!!!!
Blink is a *fantastic* episode (although, the later appearance of the weeping angels was a bit of a "Fry's dog" for me. Their first appearance was fantastic, they didn't need to be brought back and have their impact lessened), but it's not the best place to start. It's so good, that other episodes may have trouble living up to that bar. I personally liked "Silence in the library" as a good "out of the blue" starting point, but you really should sit through the 9th doctor to get a feel for the series, then let the really good episodes come to you.
The prize guarantees a modest (or, really, minimal) return on investment, and adds an element of competition to the overall goal. The X prize and lunar X-prizes are no different. Those prizes don't come remotely close to allowing a company to recoup what was invested to (or eventually, in the case of the Lunar X-prize) reach the goal. However, winning the prize ensures a little bit more publicity and some bragging rights for the folks who win.
Look at it this way: The Lombardi trophy (the trophy teams are awarded for winning the Super Bowl) is probably only worth 25-50,000 USD (it's sterling silver). The Stanley cup may be a bit more, if only for the historical provenance it carries. Yet teams spend tens, even hundreds of millions to capture those prizes. The element of competition is in some ways more rewarding that then old fashioned "give us money 'cuz we wanna do something cool that'll probably make you money in the future." business proposal.
"to charge that same price that costs you NOTHING to duplicate, NOTHING to store, NOTHING to ship, NOTHING to advertise is...hard to swallow"
Especially if you don't grasp the concept that bandwidth, server storage space, and advertising (with the same requisite bandwidth and storage costs) AREN'T FREE EITHER. But hey, keep thinking that the latest churning of Harry Potter or the Twilight series are hosted off some 20gig harddrive hooked up to a old PII in some guy's basement.
Amazon gets their cut *after the publishers*, the same scrupulous people that were at the root of the 1984 / book deletion mess in the first place (but who am I to get in the way of some perfectly good nerd rage?).
And where exactly do I say that? If and when he's convicted, lock him up and be done with him. He's as entitled to due process as anyone else, and that's what he's getting right now.
I don't hold any sympathy for anyone in the Meth food chain. If this were Joe the pot guy losing his collection, I'd be just a bit bummed. But this is an entirely different ballgame. There's a whole class of drugs out there that really are "bad" drugs, and meth is one of 'em. Show me someone who's been smoking pot for 30 years, then go and try to find someone who's been doing meth for 30 years. Aside from a lack of motivation and a glorious set of man boobs, the pot head's probably ok. The meth user has probably either been dead for twenty years or in jail. The incredible screw job that meth does to your neurochemistry makes anything Glaxo SmithKlien is doing look like two cups of coffee and a mountain dew chaser.
A couple of apocryphal internet stories for you; A friend of mine moonlighted as a prison shrink while stationed in the Pacific Northwest in the AF. He ended up dealing with a lot of the royally fucked up folks. Those who weren't either A. genuine psychopaths or B. the products of horribly fucked up situations were meth addicts. According to him, the nicest guy he dealt with was an actual axe murderer who hacked up a couple of people while tweaked. Once he was in prison and clean, he wasn't a bad person.
My wife is a librarian. When we lived in northern Indiana, one of the more common problems that rural libraries faced was the loss of children's books due to meth lab exposure. The kids would check the book out, take it home, and it would come back reeking of the various chemicals the poor kid was being exposed to at home. If this guy spent any time around production, these comics are toast.
In short, fuck this guy. You want to bitch about the big bad government and your civil liberties? You want to be all cool and snarky by throwing a (tm) after the phrase "war on drugs", go do it on a norml forum. When it comes to tweaks, fuck 'em, there ain't a hole deep enough.
When the root problem doesn't affect more than one person, it makes sense. When it affects everyone, it's likely not a client problem or there's a far easier solution that reimaging.
See, this is why you have A. images. B. Up to date images with windows updates. C. Images with the necessary programs already loaded so you don't have to go reloading. D. Anti-virus software that can be pushed automatically and E. backups.
....and his was the right answer. With XP, you're almost certainly talking about a client machine. Why bother dicking with it? It's a hundred dollar OS on a four hundred dollar piece of hardware. Wipe, reload, move on to big boy problems. Even if you're talking about a problem that ends up affecting a number of users, and it happens to be a client side problem, you're farther ahead to nuke and reload.
In my last position I was the only end user support guy for 150 to 200 people. If I sat around and fucked with every little nuance of XP and it's associated ills, I'd have ended up even farther behind than I was when I left. I wrote up a quick backup script that grabbed anything the user didn't (against company policy) store on the network drive, grabbed their local e-mail (Notes), then nuked the machine and reloaded. I could take a user who was dead in the water and have them back up and running in 15-20 minutes. If they had a lot of data to restore, maybe 35-45. Spending an hour 'troubleshooting' was a waste of company time, and my time.
Fact of the matter is:
- Maintaining security is a cost
- Security breaches are not a cost
Corporate policy dictates "costs are bad", ergo there's zero incentive to fix this until it's regulated.
Have a nice day.
Recovering from breaches are a cost. A huge cost. A cost that keeps on drawing, thanks to negative publicity, pissed off clients, lawsuits, turnover. Sadly, the only way to prove that for some folks is to get hacked. The nice thing is that, as more and more hype mach......media coverage gets out regarding large intrusions, the more likely the people in charge are to sit up and take notice.
Probably not, since they're at the whims of the content providers. Given that exclusivity == $$$, even when the content is shite, don't expect the current situation to improve any time soon. Same situation as music. If an artist, label, or studip doesn't want digital downloads, checking different endpoint providers won't change the selection.
Word.
Reboots are a nice test of "Oh shit" situations, such as complete power failures. There are a lot of admins out there who don't have the luxury of giant battery backups that will cover everything until the automatic generators kick in. There's something that's just a tiny bit comforting about watching the machine from push to post to prompt. You know if the CMOS or RAID controller batteries are bitching about needing to b replaced (even if SNMP *might* be able to tell you this). You know that there's an NFS mount that takes a ridiculous amount of time to complete, and there are precious few ways of verifying that a BIOS upgrade went though successfully without watching.
Uptime numbers are just penis wagging.
DONT! DATE! ROBOTS!
Have you ever read an e-paper screen? The backlit brightness has always been a problem for me, but not with a Kindle. No problem with eyestrain at all, other than the strain you get from reading for a few hours at a time.
True, a kindle needs electricity. But with the wireless off, you get huge battery life. I got mine as a christmas present, and other than a couple hookups to the USB port for data transfer, I've only actually charged the device three times since then, and it wasn't 'dead' when I put it on the charger.
Do what I do.
Sit back and laugh at the entire e-reader industry until it figures out how to behave like a real business environment.
You mean like the publishing industry in general? Sounds good. I'll wait for e-publishers to writhe in agony as the impenetrable fiefdom they created and got fat off of dies a slow painful death, occasionally lashing out blindly at concepts they A. don't understand and B. could have used as means of maintaining profitability and relevance had they paid the slightest bit of attention to.
There are problems with e-readers and e-books. To me, they are offset by the advantages they have over traditional media.
THIS.
NAT is the single greatest thing to happen to consumer networking hardware EVER.
Remember Sasser? Or Blaster? Self propagating worms that went screaming over the internet in part *because* of poorly firewalled networking and publicly exposed services such as RPC. That doesn't happen with NAT. It can't happen over NAT unless you're explicitly forwarding that service. It's a FANTASTIC, seemless layer of security for Joe User. Sure, NAT breaks stuff. But it breaks stuff for people who probably shouldn't be using NAT in the first place.
At its core, IPv6 is the technically superior solution. But the people who rag on NAT are also expecting companies that make consumer grade networking hardware (or as its better known; the cheapest crap Foxconn knockoff companies can cram out the door and into a shipping container) should ship their equipment with an exploit-free, well designed, easy to configure firewall. That's not an unreasonable request but, and please listen carefully; IT WILL NEVER FUCKING HAPPEN IN YOUR OR YOUR CHILDRENS LIFETIME. Look where we are *right now.* That very solution has been sitting under their noses for essentially a decade, and more practically five years, and no one has really stepped up to the plate. Instead they've chosen Fast & Cheap out of the holy trinity of Fast, Cheap, or Good.
Until ISP's make the decision to start using IPv6 on the gear they send out to consumers, these complaints are a moot point. Consumer hardware will support what the providers offer and, as of today, I can't just plug a router in and get an IPv6 lease from Comcast or AT&T and go to town right now (or at any time the foreseeable future, beyond a couple of potential-pending-limited test trial beta's.) Until that changes, bitching because the hardware makers aren't supporting it is just a case of wishing that a company would do something because it's the right thing to do. Well, you can take that particular wish and play the "Wish in one hand and sh*t in the other and see which one fills up first" game.
In my experience Home Depot / Lowe's tend to give out insanely high limits on their cards, usually in the five digit range depending on what you buy. Shafting a chain hardware store for 25 grand tends to draw a little more ire than shafting Best Buy for a laptop and a stereo.
If you get a card from one of them, pay it off and cancel it. At one point, over a third of my 'available credit' was on one of their cards.
One of the fundamental problems the prisons are probably having here is that there will be a few guards that are SELLING cell phones the inmates. That's another problem that has to be handled by other means.
You mean like, say, making it a crime for officers or others to smuggle a cell phone to an inmate? The game changes a bit when the punishment goes from "I might get fired from a job I already fucking hate" to "I might get sent to jail."
I personally don't see why a prison cell needs to have an AC outlet. They're like a hotel nowadays. But that's another rant in itself. If they had no place to charge the cell phones the problem wouldn't be a tenth of what it is now.
Unless you've got a 'green' prison that doesn't use 110 anywhere at all, your cunning plan has flaws. Put another way: Alcatraz didn't have a 'rubber boat manufacturing lab', and other prisons don't have a 'prison-approved improvised stabbing weapons shop' or 'office of alcohol distillation', yet these things still happen. Take something away and prisoners will find a way to do it. They've got 24/7/365 to figure out a way. They're like hackers, but without the distractions of WoW. Besides, Alcatraz made it a policy to offer good food and hot showers to inmates for a simple reason: It gave them something to take away. I don't doubt that electrical outlets are used much the same way.
Perfect plan, because nothing else inside a prison could possibly use 110v AC. Hell, all you need to know is what the charge controller is outputting to the phone. Then just spend some time in the prison library getting an education in basic electrical. Even if you get creative and do something like, say, change the lighting system to 12v DC, you just build yourself a handy little step up/down transformer.
When you spend 24/7/365 someplace, the cracks in the system become very evident. There are kitchens, laundries, rec areas, etc. You're in for a dime by having a cell phone in the first place, why not go in for a dollar by stealing some electrons for it?
"Hi Tommy, we're just waiting for a few more people to join."
"I've got time......"
Legislation tends to just add a force multiplier to an existing crime. For instance; Drug free school zones don't magically stop drugs from being sold, but they add a nice "and" to the existing charges, which in turn makes it harder to plead down.
In this case, legislation *is* needed. If I sneak a hundred cell phones into a prison at 800 bucks a pop, my only crime currently would be not declaring the additional $80,000 in income on my taxes. (Sorta like Al Capone. He was never nailed for bootlegging / extortion / murder, he was nailed for being a used furniture dealer who was making several hundred thousand dollars a year and not paying income tax on it.) As of now, the only person who gets punished is the inmate themselves. The smuggler did nothing illegal.
"there have been documented cases of escape attempts, drug deals and conference calls coordinated via smuggled cell phones."
Not conference calls! Anything but that! Isn't it bad enough that they're in jail? Now they're being subjected to conference calls. That is surely a violation of an inmate's rights against cruel and unusual punishment.