The whole point of the tags is that it's not possible to track people without them. The tracking is what the tags are for. I think the idiots who designed this simply forgot about the possibility that people would take the tags off.
There's likely to be a considerable difference in battery life.
Just as an example, you can now buy a wind-up digital radio in the UK. One minute turning the handle will give you an hour of reception of analog broadcasts, or 3 minutes reception of digital.
Digital reception is not very resilient, either. It it works, it's fine. But if the signal is weak, you don't get static. You just get nothing.
Most places have got laws against things like "causing a public nuisance" or noise pollution.
On the other hand, if I were the sort of teenager who hangs around street corners, and I were annoyed by a thing like this, I would think smashing it with a brick would be my first line of defence.
Suppose there are 10 headless corpses each week, and the police can't explain 5 of them. That's a rate of 50%. All they need to do is to issue tickets to 3 bastards who park in the wrong place, and now they've solved 8 crimes out of 13, so the rate is over 60%, which is more than 15% up.
So yes, I would think that you are probably in luck.
That's very nearly what is happening in the UK. Basically anyone who has any dealings with the police has a DNA sample taken, even if they are never charged with anything. And there are plans to fingerprint the entire population.
According to this cost breakdown, the production and marketing costs of a £12.99 CD total about £1.60. The retailer and wholesaler between them take £5.97. I couldn't find figures for a DVD but I should think they would be similar.
On a million units, that would be nearly £6 million delivery costs. I can't believe that distribution via (say) bittorrent would be only one order of magnitude cheaper then this.
So someone stole a phone, and now it is making a very loud unpleasant noise. So they have dumped it near my house and it is still making the noice and I am very annoyed. So I hit it with a brick until it stops.
Question: who gets taken to court? The phone manufacturer, for creating a noise nuisance? Or the thief, for stealing the phone? Or me, for damaging someone else's property?
No, don't use it on your lap, unless you want to suffer the fate of this man, who burned a... er... sensitive part of his anatomy.
If the battery bursts into flames, you definitely don't want it on your lap.
So what did people do in your town before Walmart came? Did they literally do nothing? Or was there something else to do, and Walmart sucked the life out of it?
It is even worse when people confuse silicon (the base material for computer chips) with silicone (a polymer material used in breast implants).
Does that explain why this idiot is always having computers implanted into his flesh?
This doesn't work for me (Opera 9 with the user agent set to emulate Internet Explorer). So I get a crappy-looking page that I suppose is intended to be viewed on a mobile phone.
Since the page is utterly devoid of useful content, all they've done they've convinced me that browing from a mobile phone is going to be an unpleasant experience.
Actually, you don't have to destroy anything in order to incur a cost.
The IRA bombing campaign that we had here in the UK a few years ago showed this nicely. The terrorists would put a bomb in a crowded place (airport, railway station, shopping centre) and then phone the police and tell them exactly where it was, and when it would go off. The economic damage was all done by the resultant closure of a major piece of infrastructure while the bomb was found and disarmed.
Thanks to the reaction of the authorities, we now have exactly the same effect, only without the need for the bombs.
Actually, suicide bombers tend to be amateurs without access to such sophisticated technology. The ones arrested in the UK recently did not even have bombs, or airline tickets, or even (in most cases) passports.
You're right, we should all be deferential to authority. If customs agents tell us to strip, we should strip. If police tell us to bend over, we should bend over. We should never say anything that might remind such people that they are our paid servants and that they are not above the law.
Illegal or not, customs officers do not usually spend such time and effort searching and interrogating one person. Given the circumstances, it is pretty clear that they had no particular reason to believe that he was a smuggler. So they were picking on him in order to displace onto him their feelings of guilt and annoyance for having caused such an uproar for no valid reason.
Another explanation may be that this sort of Christianity makes people think that they are morally superior to other people who are not "born again", and therefore they begin to feel (perhaps subconsciously) that other people do not matter. This would fit in with the observation that highly-paid managers are also more likely to steal, as they also regard themselves as superior.
Given that incidents like this have started to happen, screwing up air traffic worldwide has become much easier. You don't need bombs any more. Just put some ipods in a few toilets, or scribble something in Arabic on some sickbags, and then sit back and let the security industry do the screwing-up for you.
Of course it could have been any one of hundreds of things. But, given that it looked like an ipod, and that a passenger claimed that it was his ipod, there was no reason to think that it's anything else.
If you've just planted a cunningly-disguised bomb, and someone finds it, you don't jump up and say "it's mine".
Of course, the police had their own reasons to behave as though they did not believe it was an ipod. If you've been stuck in a boring job like that all your life, suddenly being given the excuse to interrogate a whole planeload of "suspected terrorists" without any fear of comeback from higher authority must make them feel like they've died and gone to heaven.
If they have to go to these lengths to investigate an ipod device in a toilet (where, after all, it is likely to be wet and no longer functioning) then what should they do in order to investigate all the hundreds of ipods and telephones and laptops that are taken on every airline flight?
If it's really impossibly to be reasonably certain that something is harmless without all this performance, then we should shut down the entire commercial airline industry at once, and for ever, because it is clearly impossible to make it safe.
On the other hand, if it is possible to discover that this ipod is safe just by passing it through an xray machine and giving it a cursory examination (as is done with every other ipod taken on a plane), then all this theatrical performance of questioning the passengers has got to have nothing to do with security: it is just the police and customs having a power trip.
No, the issue here is violation of copyright. The judgement explicitly states that the defendant is being given the maximum possible penalty for the copyright infringement because the evidence has been destroyed. No criminal charges were mentioned. My point is that the penalty for copyright infringement should not be so severe.
This is exactly the opposite of what has happened in the UK.
When British Telecom was the only ADSL supplier, it didn't bother to invest anything in competing with the cable companies. And the cable companies (which are also regional monopolies) didn't bother to invest anything in competing with BT. So we all had a choice of 512k broadband from either supplier.
Then the government forced BT to lease equipment to competitors. Suddenly we have 24M broadband from those competitors, and BT has suddenly discovered that its own equipment can do 8M instead of 512k.
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The whole point of the tags is that it's not possible to track people without them. The tracking is what the tags are for. I think the idiots who designed this simply forgot about the possibility that people would take the tags off.
There's likely to be a considerable difference in battery life.
Just as an example, you can now buy a wind-up digital radio in the UK. One minute turning the handle will give you an hour of reception of analog broadcasts, or 3 minutes reception of digital.
Digital reception is not very resilient, either. It it works, it's fine. But if the signal is weak, you don't get static. You just get nothing.
A 1,000 ton device for a midsized potato chip company?
I wonder how many potato chips will that process per day? How much "undisclosed material" will they need to make that monster?
No wonder that the video does not help to explain it very well. TFA says "it is almost impossible for anyone else to observe"
Most places have got laws against things like "causing a public nuisance" or noise pollution.
On the other hand, if I were the sort of teenager who hangs around street corners, and I were annoyed by a thing like this, I would think smashing it with a brick would be my first line of defence.
Suppose there are 10 headless corpses each week, and the police can't explain 5 of them. That's a rate of 50%. All they need to do is to issue tickets to 3 bastards who park in the wrong place, and now they've solved 8 crimes out of 13, so the rate is over 60%, which is more than 15% up.
So yes, I would think that you are probably in luck.
That's very nearly what is happening in the UK. Basically anyone who has any dealings with the police has a DNA sample taken, even if they are never charged with anything. And there are plans to fingerprint the entire population.
According to this cost breakdown, the production and marketing costs of a £12.99 CD total about £1.60. The retailer and wholesaler between them take £5.97. I couldn't find figures for a DVD but I should think they would be similar.
On a million units, that would be nearly £6 million delivery costs. I can't believe that distribution via (say) bittorrent would be only one order of magnitude cheaper then this.
So someone stole a phone, and now it is making a very loud unpleasant noise. So they have dumped it near my house and it is still making the noice and I am very annoyed. So I hit it with a brick until it stops.
Question: who gets taken to court? The phone manufacturer, for creating a noise nuisance? Or the thief, for stealing the phone? Or me, for damaging someone else's property?
I know the answer: it will be me, won't it?
No, don't use it on your lap, unless you want to suffer the fate of this man, who burned a ... er ... sensitive part of his anatomy.
If the battery bursts into flames, you definitely don't want it on your lap.
So what did people do in your town before Walmart came? Did they literally do nothing? Or was there something else to do, and Walmart sucked the life out of it?
It is even worse when people confuse silicon (the base material for computer chips) with silicone (a polymer material used in breast implants).
Does that explain why this idiot is always having computers implanted into his flesh?
How about the UK: see for example here
Also, in the UK someone was fined £1000 and lost his job just for typing in a URL with "../../.." on the end of it. Story here.
This doesn't work for me (Opera 9 with the user agent set to emulate Internet Explorer). So I get a crappy-looking page that I suppose is intended to be viewed on a mobile phone.
Since the page is utterly devoid of useful content, all they've done they've convinced me that browing from a mobile phone is going to be an unpleasant experience.
Actually, you don't have to destroy anything in order to incur a cost.
The IRA bombing campaign that we had here in the UK a few years ago showed this nicely. The terrorists would put a bomb in a crowded place (airport, railway station, shopping centre) and then phone the police and tell them exactly where it was, and when it would go off. The economic damage was all done by the resultant closure of a major piece of infrastructure while the bomb was found and disarmed.
Thanks to the reaction of the authorities, we now have exactly the same effect, only without the need for the bombs.
Actually, suicide bombers tend to be amateurs without access to such sophisticated technology. The ones arrested in the UK recently did not even have bombs, or airline tickets, or even (in most cases) passports.
What if it was the ipod that was blocking the toilet, but there was a bomb in the toilet of some other plane that had flushed without any problems?
According to your logic, we should now ground every other plane in the world and examine their toilets closely because of this incident.
You're right, we should all be deferential to authority. If customs agents tell us to strip, we should strip. If police tell us to bend over, we should bend over. We should never say anything that might remind such people that they are our paid servants and that they are not above the law.
Illegal or not, customs officers do not usually spend such time and effort searching and interrogating one person. Given the circumstances, it is pretty clear that they had no particular reason to believe that he was a smuggler. So they were picking on him in order to displace onto him their feelings of guilt and annoyance for having caused such an uproar for no valid reason.
Another explanation may be that this sort of Christianity makes people think that they are morally superior to other people who are not "born again", and therefore they begin to feel (perhaps subconsciously) that other people do not matter. This would fit in with the observation that highly-paid managers are also more likely to steal, as they also regard themselves as superior.
Given that incidents like this have started to happen, screwing up air traffic worldwide has become much easier. You don't need bombs any more. Just put some ipods in a few toilets, or scribble something in Arabic on some sickbags, and then sit back and let the security industry do the screwing-up for you.
Of course it could have been any one of hundreds of things. But, given that it looked like an ipod, and that a passenger claimed that it was his ipod, there was no reason to think that it's anything else.
If you've just planted a cunningly-disguised bomb, and someone finds it, you don't jump up and say "it's mine".
Of course, the police had their own reasons to behave as though they did not believe it was an ipod. If you've been stuck in a boring job like that all your life, suddenly being given the excuse to interrogate a whole planeload of "suspected terrorists" without any fear of comeback from higher authority must make them feel like they've died and gone to heaven.
If they have to go to these lengths to investigate an ipod device in a toilet (where, after all, it is likely to be wet and no longer functioning) then what should they do in order to investigate all the hundreds of ipods and telephones and laptops that are taken on every airline flight?
If it's really impossibly to be reasonably certain that something is harmless without all this performance, then we should shut down the entire commercial airline industry at once, and for ever, because it is clearly impossible to make it safe.
On the other hand, if it is possible to discover that this ipod is safe just by passing it through an xray machine and giving it a cursory examination (as is done with every other ipod taken on a plane), then all this theatrical performance of questioning the passengers has got to have nothing to do with security: it is just the police and customs having a power trip.
No, the issue here is violation of copyright. The judgement explicitly states that the defendant is being given the maximum possible penalty for the copyright infringement because the evidence has been destroyed. No criminal charges were mentioned. My point is that the penalty for copyright infringement should not be so severe.
This is exactly the opposite of what has happened in the UK.
When British Telecom was the only ADSL supplier, it didn't bother to invest anything in competing with the cable companies. And the cable companies (which are also regional monopolies) didn't bother to invest anything in competing with BT. So we all had a choice of 512k broadband from either supplier.
Then the government forced BT to lease equipment to competitors. Suddenly we have 24M broadband from those competitors, and BT has suddenly discovered that its own equipment can do 8M instead of 512k.