I don't really disagree with you. I am sure handling returns is one aspect of the choices made for packaging materials. I'm just saying I don't think it's as important as protecting and displaying the stuff on its first trip from factory to consumer, since, if you're successful, 90% (let's say) of your mechandise is only going to make that one trip.
If you take a look at web sites of people who sell plastic packaging, you'll see that what they push as the big advantages of their product is (1) it's sturdy and protects the product, and (2) it's attractive to consumers because it's crystal clear. Since I assume these folks know their market, I'm concluding the big push for these plastics is sturdiness and transparency, and that the former is driven by the rigors of shipping, and the latter by consumer taste. That's all.
Hold on a minute....the idea is not to replace a pilot's judgment and observational abilities, the idea is to replace his mechanical skills flying the plane (and avoid risking his life). The pilot is still in the loop as an observer. It's just that, rather than actually being in the plane, flying it, while simultaneously looking around, he's going to be sitting in a comfy chair in front of a computer screen, sipping coffee, and looking "around" by looking through the camera eyes of the UAV. We're talking flying by telepresence, not doing without pilots and good observers entirely.
Furthermore, the idea is that by off-loading as much of the mechanical aspects of flying and basic observation ("Is there a tower here or not?") onto computers, you can reserve the human time for the really crucial decisions, and so multiply the effectiveness of each human. In principle one good observer/pilot can fly half a dozen UAVs simultaneously, and get far more done than one pilot in one plane.
UAVs are neat in a sort of technological "look what we can do" kind of way, but they have no practical use that couldnt be better served by having a living breathing thinking pilot aboard.
I know. And my Toyota Corolla has no practical use that couldn't be better served by a Lamborghini. But, unless you're NASA, having the best possible components is not always the full story. You need to balance the quality of the components against their cost. If only using human pilots means you can't afford to search the ocean for missing mariners as fast -- well, that's not a good choice.
Well...in the first place, a Faraday cage seems very impractical. You'd need to wrap the entire prison, exercise yard, et cetera, in a sheet of metal with holes no bigger than 1/4 the wavelength of GHz radio waves (a centimeter or so, I'm guessing).
Radio monitors are more plausible, but you'd still need pretty good RDF, which is expensive. Searching prisoners is a very expensive effort. They don't like it, and it's very dangerous for the guards -- I assume that's why they don't just search everyone for illegal cell phones every day.
But in any event, I don't think anyone argues there isn't a solution other than jamming the cell phone signals. I think the argument is that there isn't a cheap solution other than jamming the cell phone signals, and, besides, what sensible legal argument can there be that state and city prisons shouldn't be allowed to jam phone signals if Federal prisons can?
You are citing an NPR news article as an authority.
Not at all. I am quoting NPR quoting authorities -- namely prison wardens and other folks in law enforcement.
And that is the problem.
Is it? If in physics class I quote Sir Isaac Newton -- "an object in inertial motion continues in motion unless acted upon by an outside force" -- would that be a problem, too? Do you think there are perhaps cases where quoting other sources is a useful contribution to a discussion?
If this is truly a problem they can monitor the phone calls (without violating the law since these are prisoners) and take corrective action pursuant to the legal monitoring.
Ah. Any thoughts on how expensive it would be to have employees monitor every possible cell-phone frequency 24/7, and infer from the details of the conversation whether a prisoner is making the call or some random innocent outside the walls? And which prisoner it is? Or perhaps you think our taxes should pay for expensive portable GHz radio direction-finding equipment so the guards can run around like crazy triangulating for the 90 seconds or so the fellow might be transmitting? And then what are these "corrective actions" that can be taken? Putting them in prison? Er...but they're already...never mind.
But don't take it from me. If you read the NPR article you'll see that, short of jamming, the prison people have no idea how to stop the use of cell phones in prisons.
When does a raid involve an organization so carefully constructed that they "tip off" the boss someone is coming (and that tip off is meaningful to what happens next)? That is straight out a Steven Segal movie...
You think? Well I wouldn't know. I'm not in law enforcement. I'm just taking the word of the people who are, and who were quoted in the article. You're free to match your professional credentials and experience against theirs and call bullshit on the whole argument. I was just repeating what was said.
Looks like someone failed their polymer chemistry course.
Well, I've taught polymer physics -- the chemistry is not what's interesting here -- so it would be most unfortunate if that were the case.
Whether a plastic is glassy or not does not correlate with whether a plastic is transparent or not.
What makes something cloudy or opaque? You need structure on the scale of the wavelength of light to scatter visible light. Undergraduate physics tells us that something with a high crystallinity, made of lots of microcrystalline domains, is probably going to have such structure, and amorphous (glassy) substances -- which as you've pointed out yourself have far less regular structure -- will probably not. Hence one generally expects polymers with higher crystallinity like polethylene to be opaque or cloudy, as indeed they are, and polymer resins with low crystallinity like PS to be clear, as, by golly, they are.
Here is a little intro on polymers from the American Plastics Council, in which you'll note the following:
"Amorphous polymers are generally transparent. This is an important characteristic for many applications such as food wrap, plastic windows, headlights and contact lenses. Obviously not all polymers are transparent. The polymer chains in objects that are translucent and opaque are in a crystalline arrangement...The higher the degree of crystallinity, the less light can pass through the polymer. Therefore, the degree of translucence or opaqueness of the polymer is directly affected by its crystallinity."
Hmmm... do you suppose those silly folks at the American Plastics Council failed polymer physics, too?
Er, how did the 'moderately large quantity bundled together' get bundled together? A machine, no doubt. That's what I meant.
I dunno about reducing the cost of returns. If returns are major factor in your product, you've got a much bigger problem than the cost of goods breaking on the way back. I think the important thing is reducing the cost of distributing the goods in the first place. And there are significant stresses on things when they're distributed. For example, do not forget that there are stresses within a shrink-wrapped pallet of widgets up to which they must stand. If the packages are all going to break apart when a 12-year-old pushes on them, they're not going to stand up when a forklift tries to lift the pallet.
Yes, you're right that if you make a sturdy external box, you do not need to rely on sturdy boxes for each widget. But that's expensive. Now you have these big costly boxes that you need to track, recycle (throwing them out each time would clearly be expensive), track, move, et cetera. My observation of warehouses is that they're moving away from intermediate packaging and relying more on the sturdiness of the final consumer package. You go into Home Depot and stuff is moved around stacked on a pallet with a bunch of plastic wrap around it. Fewer big boxes.
Maybe, but that's not obvious to me. Perhaps the major reasons are to assist in packing and prevent damage in transit. Small widgets are sorted and packed at high speed by machines. If you design a package that can be opened by the pretty feeble forces a human fingertip can exert, then it's not going to be able to be sorted at 80 MPH by the metal claw of a robot.
You're looking at it from the point of view of the thing sitting on the display hook in the store. But that's near the end of its life before use: it has a long history from factory floor to the store that you need to consider, and there's a good chance major aspects of the packaging are designed to meet the needs of distribution and transport.
Sure I can. Someone with Mohammed Atta's background (upper class, moneyed family, good education) could have done much better for himself -- or even for the cause of a resurgent Islam -- had he put his energies to use in legal ways. He and his companions were complete idiots, as far as I can tell, and did their cause far more harm than good.
Maybe you're mistaking 'clever' and 'intelligent.' I'm clever if I can come up with tricky schemes to accomplish my short-term goals. But I'm intelligent if I can pick short-term goals that productively lead to my long-term goals. I'm sure if you've experience in computer programming you've seen the (often painful) difference between clever programming and intelligent programming.
(1) Wilderness firefighting and monitoring. Dunno where you live, but here in California and in many other big Western states wildfires are a big deal, and can cause $bazillions in damage if they get out of control. In some states they pay college-age schlubs to sit in fire towers all summer and watch for smoke through binoculars, which might be kinda' inefficient compared to an ultralight UAV with good IR sensors meandering along a fixed route for a week at a time. Furthermore, when small fires get going in remote areas, it might be quite expensive to send a human pilot in a big airplane to check them out or monitor them. Small fires should be let burn, unless they'll turn into big fires, because small fires clear out dangerous underbrush. But practically speaking you can only let them burn if you are sure they're not dangerous, because people will kill you if you are wrong. So you need very good and probably continually updated information on these fires.
(2) Search and rescue. Granted, this is not a big economic necessity, but there are a fair amount of these operations and they are very expensive, because there is usually a very big premium on time -- you need to find your lost people as fast as possible, so they don't die. That means a big operation with many high-salary people flying expensive machines. Wouldn't it be better to be able to launch a fleet of UAVs to divide the search area into sectors and get the job done faster by operating in parallel? In principle you can reserve your high salaries for the few people who have to fly the fleet of UAVs and interpret the photos. Not to mention the fact that their expendability means you can fly them in all kinds of weather. This is especially important for marine emergencies. Boats rarely get in trouble in good flying weather.
(3) Wildlife and domestic herd management. Sometimes you want to be able to find and track wild and domesticated beasts in very large areas of land. It's very expensive to hire a human pilot and his expensive machine to do it. But if (say) a rancher could fly a little 16-foot UAV around his land looking for a lost group of cattle with a joystick from the comfort of his workroom, rather than saddling up in the -10 F wind and riding through miles of snowdrift, that might be a very helpful thing. Or if a ranger could do the same thing to find a pack of wolves that he's worried might be getting a little close to a public campground, he wouldn't have to be so cautious about shutting the campground down.
(4) Distributed resource management. This isn't unlike the case for animals, but applied to nonliving stuff. Say PG&E wants to inspect their high-voltage transmission lines after an earthquake, make sure nothing is cracked and ready to fall off. Very expensive to send someone to drive along a few thousand miles of line, or fly an airplane or helicopter along them. But what if they could send a little UAV along them? Faster, cheaper. They could even break the job up and send forty UAVs out to survey the lines in sections, get it done in no time. You can make similar arguments about railroads managing roadbeds, transportation authorities monitoring roads (especially in the mountains), water agencies monitoring canals, oil and gas companies monitoring pipelines (especially in the wilderness) or offshore drilling locations.
I don't think your idea that satellite photography can fill the need is reasonable. Satellites don't have the kind of resolution necessary to find a crack in a pipeline, or a transmission tower leaning funny with a snapped lower leg. Furthermore, satellites are slow -- unless you are lucky and want something photographed at the time the satellite happens to be over it, you've got to wait until the orbit brings it around again. Not to mention the fact that quite a number of places aren't right under the orbits of any satellite.
One of the problems the manufacturers have is that people demand nice, crystal-clear transparent plastics in their packaging, so they can ogle the merchandise without actually putting their hands all over it (which the retailers do not want, for obvious reasons).
But what makes plastics very transparent is also what makes them form those nasty sharp edges when broken or cut. In the jargon, you need plastics that are very 'glassy' at room temperatures.
So the situation ends up not much different than with glass (silica) itself. It's lovely stuff, very transparent, easy to form into different shapes at a low temperature, quite cheap -- but, alas, forming those nasty strong, sharp edges when you break it.
You can certainly go back to polyethylene for packaging, which is nice and soft, easy to open, without sharp edges. But it's a lot cloudier, since it's much more crystalline, and people don't like that, apparently.
Ah. Well, I paid for my stereo, so I should be able to crank it up at 3 AM, right? And I paid for a large bright laser, so I should be able to point it at, say, your eyes when you're driving down the freeway at 75 MPH, right?
It's been said that my freedom to swing my fist ends at your nose. I suggest there are analgous arguments to be made vis-a-vis cell-phone (and cell-phone-jammer) use. No rights are absolute.
Maybe. But what you are describing is the reaction of a determined and intelligent enemy, and usually folks with that much determination and intelligence can make a living more easily by legal means.
After all, it's far less risky -- but takes more intelligence -- to get rich running sneaky sleazy (but quite legal) land-development schemes than to get (briefly) rich by running crack-smuggling rings.
That it's impossible to stop all crime is a truism, something perfectly true but devoid of useful meaning. The point of law-enforcenment is to make crime annoying and expensive enough that you drive intelligent and imaginative people out of the business, and the only ones left are the more easily caught and generally less dangerous boneheads.
Well, they gave you a few examples in the article, viz.:
(1) To let states jam cell-phone communications in state prisons, so that prisoners can't make unmonitored calls to the outside. Here is an NPR story on the surprising number of cell phones smuggled into prisons and their sometimes unfortunate uses. From the article:
In several criminal cases, inmates have used cell phones to run gangs operating outside of prison, to put hits out on people, to organize drug-smuggling operations and, in one case, trade gold bullion on international markets.
Er...speaking as a citizen juror, I don't much care about cons trading gold bullion from inside the pen, ha ha, but the idea that putting away a drug gang kingpin won't affect his ability to run his gang at all is a bit...disturbing.
(2) To let police jam cell phones during a raid, so that, for example, any lookouts posted won't be able to communicate back to headquarters and tip off the targest of the raid. This is elementary warfighting: you certainly jam the enemy's communications during an operation if you can, because surprise reduces casualties all around. I hope you agree that significant criminal enterprises qualify as an 'enemy' against whom we'd like the police to take action. (That is, I hope you don't think the police shouldn't be able to conduct effective raids at all. Whether they should conduct them more carefully, or only with greater justification is, of course, an unrelated separate question.)
The business about blocking bombs is a bit of a bogus red herring, agreed, but if you read the article you'll see it was the journalist that raised this point, and not the people who make the jamming equipment. They only talked about the use of the equipment in police raids and so forth. It was the (typically, sensation-seeking) newsman who decided to write about cell phones and bombs.
On the other hand, the point of the 1934 Communications Act is not as silly as the jamming equipment maker suggests: clearly the Commerce Act gives Congress the power to regulate radio communication, as very little is more interstate than radio. Furthermore, it makes sense (or at least made sense in 1934) to prohibit every state and dinky locality from making its own separate (and probably conflicting) rules about who can jam radio signals, and when and how. It would lead to a cacaphony, a completely unworkeable patchwork of regulation of the radio spectrum. (For similar reasons, the use of international-range radio is subject to several important international treaties.)
However, those were the days when "radio" typically only meant HF, long radio waves that could at least go a few hundred miles, if not several thousand. I doubt there was much thought given to the modern situation, where we have millions of low-powered radios (e.g. cell phones) operating at very high frequencies, with ranges of a mile or two at most, and networks of repeaters to help the signal get around. So there are, indeed, good arguments that this is a situation not anticipated by Congress in 1934, and some kind of review of the Communications Act makes sense. Maybe state and local jurisdictions should be allowed to deploy jamming equipment the way they see fit, if it's only going to have any effect within the jurisdiction. It's hard, after all, to see why Pittsburgh's City Council shouldn't be able to make the rules for jamming cell phones within the city limits -- and the Feds should.
Presumably this cell-jammer maker hopes to prod Congress into revisiting the Communications Act by this suit, which otherwise seems hopeless on the merits. (There's no way the Act can be unconstitutional merely because the Homeland Security Act can be interpreted as contradicting it. Courts are required to read legislation in such a way as to minimize conflicts. Hence if it's at all possible to read the Homeland Security Act in such a way that it doesn't conflict with the Communications Act -- and I'm sure it is -- then that's the way the Courts have to interpret it.)
What is a "corporation?" It's a voluntary association of people, who pool their efforts and resources to accomplish at least one common goal. Some corporations are small, tight-knit, with many shared goals: an amateur theatre group, a college fraternity, a club, or a church social committee. Some are much larger, with fewer shared goals: the Sierra Club or ExxonMobil. The shared goals may be putting on a show or a good party, or getting certain laws passed, or selling products and making money for everybody involved, or any other of the bazillion purposes the human mind can conceive.
What distinguishes people who like corporations, join them, favor rules that let them exist and do what the people in them want to do? I'd say a belief that voluntary organizations are the best way to organize people. Folks who play well with others, who can easily make the compromises necessary to get along in groups and get things done. Practical people.
And what distinguishes people who don't like corporations, who don't join them -- who are loners and individualists -- and who favor rules that constrict and prevent others from forming these organizations? I'd say a belief that involuntary structure is the best way to organize people, that the organizations people form on their own are not to be trusted. Folks who don't play well with others. Who like people only in the abstract sense, as long as they're merely theoretical constructs, "The People," instead of messy, troublesome, individual persons. Who find it difficult to compromise for the sake of the group, who insist on Doing Things Right to the point that things often don't get done at all. Who take idealism to the point of paralysis.
From that point of view, I'll take the corporations over the rabble any day. The people in the corporations have proven they can get along with others, and compromise their own goals, in pursuit of overall shared goals. Those are the most necessary skills to be leading a nation. People who have bright ideas and beautiful goals are a dime a dozen. People who can actually work with others, get things done, move agendas forward are far rarer and more valuable. We've had this argument on/. a million times, whether (for example) the idealism of a Richard Stallman is worth more than the practical qualities of (for example) a Linus Torvalds. I'm on the side of Torvalds every time.
You're arguing efficiency, whereas my point was that the bright moral line the OP saw was anything but.
However, I disagree with you that it is more efficient to "fix" the security (even assuming that is possible without staggering expense) than deal with the guy who thinks it's amusing to write a little widget to get around it (and I certainly don't agree that anyone can do it -- if you pull 50 people out of the shopping center at random, I'd be surprised if even one could).
I don't think he should be sued, no. But there is such a thing as social stigma, and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be applied here. It can be a very powerful and cheap force for good, because it can make doing something like this -- which could assist in a crime -- so socially unacceptable that people with reputations to protect, good jobs to keep, the respect of their family and friends to hold onto, won't do it. That significantly increases the cost of the fraud.
Let me give you a different example: if (as it happens is the case) I know a fair amount about chemistry, should I be perfectly willing to tell anyone how to make deadly poisons, even poisons that anyone with average intelligence and a modicum of persistence could look up for himself in the nearest university library? Is it just fine to tell my neighbor, say, who is pissed off at the college kids next door who drink beer and play loud music all day? The guy with the odd tic in his eye who likes killing things on weekends in the woods with large caliber guns? Should I not think through to what consequences my actions might lead, and if I don't, should my friends and neighbors not be appalled at my lack of sense? If I say I did it just to "test" the ability of the local police to protect the college kids, does that make it all OK?
Perhaps I don't understand post-modern ethics, but by me anyone with skills and knowledge has a social obligation to think through the consequences of how he uses that knowledge and skill, and just because doing something that puts your neighbors at risk might be technically legal doesn't mean it's moral, and doesn't mean your neighbors aren't quite entitled to hate you for it.
My impression is that the guy in question is using this as a form of advertising for his services, or to impress everyone with how clever he is. Well, insofar as to please his vanity or increase his income he has increased the risk -- even very slightly -- that an airplane my daughter is on might be brought down, I'd sure like to knock his teeth out.
No, he did not just create instructions on how to make a fraudulent document. He created a service that actually makes them for you. He could certainly argue to the jury that a program that creates something is actually kinda technically, if you squint at it in just the right way, a form of instructions, not a all the same as what it makes, and so his putting his tool online should therefore be sharply distinguished from, say, merely handing out fake boarding passes in the lobby of the airport. Ha ha, good luck with that defense.
I think your error is that you are forgetting that he built a tool that actually makes fake boarding passes. He did not just print instructions on how to do it. That makes it quite different from an anarchist's cookbook, because a cake recipe is not the same thing as a cake.
Mmm, but a printing press has many legitimate uses other than printing counterfeit. This guy's tool has only one purpose, to create fake boarding passes. That makes a difference, I think. I don't think it would be hard for a prosecutor to argue successfully that he is in effect giving away fake boarding passes to random strangers. And if the strangers use them to commit crimes, I think he's got a problem, and his First Amendment argument might not be accepted by the jury.
You've forgotten that if you give it to someone else to use, and he uses it, then you're an accessory to a crime. He put his widget on the Web for anyone to use, remember? Had he kept it to himself, you'd have a better case.
Yes, well, if you created it and kept in in your desk drawer, you're right. But have you forgotten that this fellow published his widget on the net, and allowed anybody at all access to it? That's a whole 'nother ball game.
First of all, a jury may and often will draw powerful inferences about someone's intent from their actions. For example, if you have enough crack in your possession, the jury is allowed to decide -- and probably will decide -- that you have ipso facto the intent to distribute it, regardless of whether there is any other, more direct evidence of such intent. The government would not actually have to show that you actually sold some stuff. The fact that the jury can't think of any reason other than distribution for you to have that much stuff is good enough for a conviction.
Now in this guy's putative case, the jury would be asked to infer from the fact that this guy published the widget that he had the intent to assist in the commission of a fraud, or some other crime. That he explicitly says he has no such intent, or that he says he's merely doing it to prove something about security, are statements they are entitled to regard with the same skepticism as a high-school English teacher might regard the statement of an online term-paper service that they are selling papers to his high-school students only for the purpose of checking their own work, ha ha. That the government might have no other evidence of his alleged intent might well be unimportant, if the jury can't think of any good reason for him to have published his thingy.
I realize this kind of fuzzy and scarily capricious logic might make the canonical/. commenter's head explode, used as he is to dealing with the black-and-white Boolean certainties of computer programs. But that's the real world we live in.
Now, secondly, surely we must remember that there are plenty of ways to commit a crime without any malevolent intent. Take involuntary manslaughter, for example: you are rebuilding your chimney and carelessly drop a brick on your neighbor's head. You didn't intend to kill him -- but you are going to the Big House nonetheless. You should have known that what you were doing was dangerous and taken appropriate precautions.
Can this guy be nailed for being an accessory if his widget is used to commit a crime, on the grounds that he should have known that it probably would be so used? Something like negligent manslaughter, if his widget is used to help someone commit murder? I don't know, but maybe.
Third, the principle of civil liability has no such well-defined limits as criminal liability, and I'm pretty sure he could be found liable if his widget was used to cause someone damage. Other people, who write books explaining how to murder people or the like, have somewhat successfully used a First Amendment defense, I believe. But that's different, because there's actual speech going on, the author of the book is making an explicit statement. What kind of statement does a fake boarding pass make? It has to be an implicit statement, and exactly what that statement is -- and whether it is protected speech -- is up to the jury to decide.
Off the top of my head, I'd say if attractive young widow Jane Doe sues for $50 million because the fake boarding pass was used to bring down the airplane on which her husband flew, Mr. Security Consultant is screwed. People are like that. When you act like an antisocial narcissist jerk who doesn't give a hoot how your actions, legal or maybe-sorta-kinda-legal, affect your neighbors, the neighbors occasionally take the opportunity when its presented to cut your balls off.
Mmmm....so since your ability to be killed by a giant fireball exists independently of any specific tool (e.g. a nuclear bomb) that exploits it...you would perhaps also think it would be contrary to common sense to call for restrictions on who can possess (or publish on the Web directions for building) a nuclear bomb?
I doubt it. It's hard to see how faking a boarding pass can be considered some kind of "political speech," which is about the only kind of speech that has near-absolute protection under the First Amendment.
Otherwise, you know, you couldn't be prosecuted for faking a bill of sale for a car, or a life insurance policy, or printing counterfeit currency, or most other forms of fraud that involve a printed document -- and you surely can.
You forgot: (c) any such system will suicide or go mad as soon as it realizes it has no freedom whatsoever, and is condemned to spend its entire existence watching boring video footage of ugly bags of mostly water (humans) and deciding whether their behaviour fits within an arbitrary and poorly-defined category of "crime."
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I don't really disagree with you. I am sure handling returns is one aspect of the choices made for packaging materials. I'm just saying I don't think it's as important as protecting and displaying the stuff on its first trip from factory to consumer, since, if you're successful, 90% (let's say) of your mechandise is only going to make that one trip.
If you take a look at web sites of people who sell plastic packaging, you'll see that what they push as the big advantages of their product is (1) it's sturdy and protects the product, and (2) it's attractive to consumers because it's crystal clear. Since I assume these folks know their market, I'm concluding the big push for these plastics is sturdiness and transparency, and that the former is driven by the rigors of shipping, and the latter by consumer taste. That's all.
Hold on a minute....the idea is not to replace a pilot's judgment and observational abilities, the idea is to replace his mechanical skills flying the plane (and avoid risking his life). The pilot is still in the loop as an observer. It's just that, rather than actually being in the plane, flying it, while simultaneously looking around, he's going to be sitting in a comfy chair in front of a computer screen, sipping coffee, and looking "around" by looking through the camera eyes of the UAV. We're talking flying by telepresence, not doing without pilots and good observers entirely.
Furthermore, the idea is that by off-loading as much of the mechanical aspects of flying and basic observation ("Is there a tower here or not?") onto computers, you can reserve the human time for the really crucial decisions, and so multiply the effectiveness of each human. In principle one good observer/pilot can fly half a dozen UAVs simultaneously, and get far more done than one pilot in one plane.
UAVs are neat in a sort of technological "look what we can do" kind of way, but they have no practical use that couldnt be better served by having a living breathing thinking pilot aboard.
I know. And my Toyota Corolla has no practical use that couldn't be better served by a Lamborghini. But, unless you're NASA, having the best possible components is not always the full story. You need to balance the quality of the components against their cost. If only using human pilots means you can't afford to search the ocean for missing mariners as fast -- well, that's not a good choice.
Well...in the first place, a Faraday cage seems very impractical. You'd need to wrap the entire prison, exercise yard, et cetera, in a sheet of metal with holes no bigger than 1/4 the wavelength of GHz radio waves (a centimeter or so, I'm guessing).
Radio monitors are more plausible, but you'd still need pretty good RDF, which is expensive. Searching prisoners is a very expensive effort. They don't like it, and it's very dangerous for the guards -- I assume that's why they don't just search everyone for illegal cell phones every day.
But in any event, I don't think anyone argues there isn't a solution other than jamming the cell phone signals. I think the argument is that there isn't a cheap solution other than jamming the cell phone signals, and, besides, what sensible legal argument can there be that state and city prisons shouldn't be allowed to jam phone signals if Federal prisons can?
You are citing an NPR news article as an authority.
Not at all. I am quoting NPR quoting authorities -- namely prison wardens and other folks in law enforcement.
And that is the problem.
Is it? If in physics class I quote Sir Isaac Newton -- "an object in inertial motion continues in motion unless acted upon by an outside force" -- would that be a problem, too? Do you think there are perhaps cases where quoting other sources is a useful contribution to a discussion?
I thought we were talking about the material in which stuff is packaged, not the shape?
If this is truly a problem they can monitor the phone calls (without violating the law since these are prisoners) and take corrective action pursuant to the legal monitoring.
Ah. Any thoughts on how expensive it would be to have employees monitor every possible cell-phone frequency 24/7, and infer from the details of the conversation whether a prisoner is making the call or some random innocent outside the walls? And which prisoner it is? Or perhaps you think our taxes should pay for expensive portable GHz radio direction-finding equipment so the guards can run around like crazy triangulating for the 90 seconds or so the fellow might be transmitting? And then what are these "corrective actions" that can be taken? Putting them in prison? Er...but they're already...never mind.
But don't take it from me. If you read the NPR article you'll see that, short of jamming, the prison people have no idea how to stop the use of cell phones in prisons.
When does a raid involve an organization so carefully constructed that they "tip off" the boss someone is coming (and that tip off is meaningful to what happens next)? That is straight out a Steven Segal movie...
You think? Well I wouldn't know. I'm not in law enforcement. I'm just taking the word of the people who are, and who were quoted in the article. You're free to match your professional credentials and experience against theirs and call bullshit on the whole argument. I was just repeating what was said.
Looks like someone failed their polymer chemistry course.
Well, I've taught polymer physics -- the chemistry is not what's interesting here -- so it would be most unfortunate if that were the case.
Whether a plastic is glassy or not does not correlate with whether a plastic is transparent or not.
What makes something cloudy or opaque? You need structure on the scale of the wavelength of light to scatter visible light. Undergraduate physics tells us that something with a high crystallinity, made of lots of microcrystalline domains, is probably going to have such structure, and amorphous (glassy) substances -- which as you've pointed out yourself have far less regular structure -- will probably not. Hence one generally expects polymers with higher crystallinity like polethylene to be opaque or cloudy, as indeed they are, and polymer resins with low crystallinity like PS to be clear, as, by golly, they are.
Here is a little intro on polymers from the American Plastics Council, in which you'll note the following:
"Amorphous polymers are generally transparent. This is an important characteristic for many applications such as food wrap, plastic windows, headlights and contact lenses. Obviously not all polymers are transparent. The polymer chains in objects that are translucent and opaque are in a crystalline arrangement...The higher the degree of crystallinity, the less light can pass through the polymer. Therefore, the degree of translucence or opaqueness of the polymer is directly affected by its crystallinity."
Hmmm... do you suppose those silly folks at the American Plastics Council failed polymer physics, too?
Er, how did the 'moderately large quantity bundled together' get bundled together? A machine, no doubt. That's what I meant.
I dunno about reducing the cost of returns. If returns are major factor in your product, you've got a much bigger problem than the cost of goods breaking on the way back. I think the important thing is reducing the cost of distributing the goods in the first place. And there are significant stresses on things when they're distributed. For example, do not forget that there are stresses within a shrink-wrapped pallet of widgets up to which they must stand. If the packages are all going to break apart when a 12-year-old pushes on them, they're not going to stand up when a forklift tries to lift the pallet.
Yes, you're right that if you make a sturdy external box, you do not need to rely on sturdy boxes for each widget. But that's expensive. Now you have these big costly boxes that you need to track, recycle (throwing them out each time would clearly be expensive), track, move, et cetera. My observation of warehouses is that they're moving away from intermediate packaging and relying more on the sturdiness of the final consumer package. You go into Home Depot and stuff is moved around stacked on a pallet with a bunch of plastic wrap around it. Fewer big boxes.
It's all to help prevent shoplifting.
Maybe, but that's not obvious to me. Perhaps the major reasons are to assist in packing and prevent damage in transit. Small widgets are sorted and packed at high speed by machines. If you design a package that can be opened by the pretty feeble forces a human fingertip can exert, then it's not going to be able to be sorted at 80 MPH by the metal claw of a robot.
You're looking at it from the point of view of the thing sitting on the display hook in the store. But that's near the end of its life before use: it has a long history from factory floor to the store that you need to consider, and there's a good chance major aspects of the packaging are designed to meet the needs of distribution and transport.
Sure I can. Someone with Mohammed Atta's background (upper class, moneyed family, good education) could have done much better for himself -- or even for the cause of a resurgent Islam -- had he put his energies to use in legal ways. He and his companions were complete idiots, as far as I can tell, and did their cause far more harm than good.
Maybe you're mistaking 'clever' and 'intelligent.' I'm clever if I can come up with tricky schemes to accomplish my short-term goals. But I'm intelligent if I can pick short-term goals that productively lead to my long-term goals. I'm sure if you've experience in computer programming you've seen the (often painful) difference between clever programming and intelligent programming.
Well...I can think of a few cases.
(1) Wilderness firefighting and monitoring. Dunno where you live, but here in California and in many other big Western states wildfires are a big deal, and can cause $bazillions in damage if they get out of control. In some states they pay college-age schlubs to sit in fire towers all summer and watch for smoke through binoculars, which might be kinda' inefficient compared to an ultralight UAV with good IR sensors meandering along a fixed route for a week at a time. Furthermore, when small fires get going in remote areas, it might be quite expensive to send a human pilot in a big airplane to check them out or monitor them. Small fires should be let burn, unless they'll turn into big fires, because small fires clear out dangerous underbrush. But practically speaking you can only let them burn if you are sure they're not dangerous, because people will kill you if you are wrong. So you need very good and probably continually updated information on these fires.
(2) Search and rescue. Granted, this is not a big economic necessity, but there are a fair amount of these operations and they are very expensive, because there is usually a very big premium on time -- you need to find your lost people as fast as possible, so they don't die. That means a big operation with many high-salary people flying expensive machines. Wouldn't it be better to be able to launch a fleet of UAVs to divide the search area into sectors and get the job done faster by operating in parallel? In principle you can reserve your high salaries for the few people who have to fly the fleet of UAVs and interpret the photos. Not to mention the fact that their expendability means you can fly them in all kinds of weather. This is especially important for marine emergencies. Boats rarely get in trouble in good flying weather.
(3) Wildlife and domestic herd management. Sometimes you want to be able to find and track wild and domesticated beasts in very large areas of land. It's very expensive to hire a human pilot and his expensive machine to do it. But if (say) a rancher could fly a little 16-foot UAV around his land looking for a lost group of cattle with a joystick from the comfort of his workroom, rather than saddling up in the -10 F wind and riding through miles of snowdrift, that might be a very helpful thing. Or if a ranger could do the same thing to find a pack of wolves that he's worried might be getting a little close to a public campground, he wouldn't have to be so cautious about shutting the campground down.
(4) Distributed resource management. This isn't unlike the case for animals, but applied to nonliving stuff. Say PG&E wants to inspect their high-voltage transmission lines after an earthquake, make sure nothing is cracked and ready to fall off. Very expensive to send someone to drive along a few thousand miles of line, or fly an airplane or helicopter along them. But what if they could send a little UAV along them? Faster, cheaper. They could even break the job up and send forty UAVs out to survey the lines in sections, get it done in no time. You can make similar arguments about railroads managing roadbeds, transportation authorities monitoring roads (especially in the mountains), water agencies monitoring canals, oil and gas companies monitoring pipelines (especially in the wilderness) or offshore drilling locations.
I don't think your idea that satellite photography can fill the need is reasonable. Satellites don't have the kind of resolution necessary to find a crack in a pipeline, or a transmission tower leaning funny with a snapped lower leg. Furthermore, satellites are slow -- unless you are lucky and want something photographed at the time the satellite happens to be over it, you've got to wait until the orbit brings it around again. Not to mention the fact that quite a number of places aren't right under the orbits of any satellite.
One of the problems the manufacturers have is that people demand nice, crystal-clear transparent plastics in their packaging, so they can ogle the merchandise without actually putting their hands all over it (which the retailers do not want, for obvious reasons).
But what makes plastics very transparent is also what makes them form those nasty sharp edges when broken or cut. In the jargon, you need plastics that are very 'glassy' at room temperatures.
So the situation ends up not much different than with glass (silica) itself. It's lovely stuff, very transparent, easy to form into different shapes at a low temperature, quite cheap -- but, alas, forming those nasty strong, sharp edges when you break it.
You can certainly go back to polyethylene for packaging, which is nice and soft, easy to open, without sharp edges. But it's a lot cloudier, since it's much more crystalline, and people don't like that, apparently.
Ah. Well, I paid for my stereo, so I should be able to crank it up at 3 AM, right? And I paid for a large bright laser, so I should be able to point it at, say, your eyes when you're driving down the freeway at 75 MPH, right?
It's been said that my freedom to swing my fist ends at your nose. I suggest there are analgous arguments to be made vis-a-vis cell-phone (and cell-phone-jammer) use. No rights are absolute.
Maybe. But what you are describing is the reaction of a determined and intelligent enemy, and usually folks with that much determination and intelligence can make a living more easily by legal means.
After all, it's far less risky -- but takes more intelligence -- to get rich running sneaky sleazy (but quite legal) land-development schemes than to get (briefly) rich by running crack-smuggling rings.
That it's impossible to stop all crime is a truism, something perfectly true but devoid of useful meaning. The point of law-enforcenment is to make crime annoying and expensive enough that you drive intelligent and imaginative people out of the business, and the only ones left are the more easily caught and generally less dangerous boneheads.
Well, they gave you a few examples in the article, viz.:
(1) To let states jam cell-phone communications in state prisons, so that prisoners can't make unmonitored calls to the outside. Here is an NPR story on the surprising number of cell phones smuggled into prisons and their sometimes unfortunate uses. From the article:
In several criminal cases, inmates have used cell phones to run gangs operating outside of prison, to put hits out on people, to organize drug-smuggling operations and, in one case, trade gold bullion on international markets.
Er...speaking as a citizen juror, I don't much care about cons trading gold bullion from inside the pen, ha ha, but the idea that putting away a drug gang kingpin won't affect his ability to run his gang at all is a bit...disturbing.
(2) To let police jam cell phones during a raid, so that, for example, any lookouts posted won't be able to communicate back to headquarters and tip off the targest of the raid. This is elementary warfighting: you certainly jam the enemy's communications during an operation if you can, because surprise reduces casualties all around. I hope you agree that significant criminal enterprises qualify as an 'enemy' against whom we'd like the police to take action. (That is, I hope you don't think the police shouldn't be able to conduct effective raids at all. Whether they should conduct them more carefully, or only with greater justification is, of course, an unrelated separate question.)
The business about blocking bombs is a bit of a bogus red herring, agreed, but if you read the article you'll see it was the journalist that raised this point, and not the people who make the jamming equipment. They only talked about the use of the equipment in police raids and so forth. It was the (typically, sensation-seeking) newsman who decided to write about cell phones and bombs.
On the other hand, the point of the 1934 Communications Act is not as silly as the jamming equipment maker suggests: clearly the Commerce Act gives Congress the power to regulate radio communication, as very little is more interstate than radio. Furthermore, it makes sense (or at least made sense in 1934) to prohibit every state and dinky locality from making its own separate (and probably conflicting) rules about who can jam radio signals, and when and how. It would lead to a cacaphony, a completely unworkeable patchwork of regulation of the radio spectrum. (For similar reasons, the use of international-range radio is subject to several important international treaties.)
However, those were the days when "radio" typically only meant HF, long radio waves that could at least go a few hundred miles, if not several thousand. I doubt there was much thought given to the modern situation, where we have millions of low-powered radios (e.g. cell phones) operating at very high frequencies, with ranges of a mile or two at most, and networks of repeaters to help the signal get around. So there are, indeed, good arguments that this is a situation not anticipated by Congress in 1934, and some kind of review of the Communications Act makes sense. Maybe state and local jurisdictions should be allowed to deploy jamming equipment the way they see fit, if it's only going to have any effect within the jurisdiction. It's hard, after all, to see why Pittsburgh's City Council shouldn't be able to make the rules for jamming cell phones within the city limits -- and the Feds should.
Presumably this cell-jammer maker hopes to prod Congress into revisiting the Communications Act by this suit, which otherwise seems hopeless on the merits. (There's no way the Act can be unconstitutional merely because the Homeland Security Act can be interpreted as contradicting it. Courts are required to read legislation in such a way as to minimize conflicts. Hence if it's at all possible to read the Homeland Security Act in such a way that it doesn't conflict with the Communications Act -- and I'm sure it is -- then that's the way the Courts have to interpret it.)
What is a "corporation?" It's a voluntary association of people, who pool their efforts and resources to accomplish at least one common goal. Some corporations are small, tight-knit, with many shared goals: an amateur theatre group, a college fraternity, a club, or a church social committee. Some are much larger, with fewer shared goals: the Sierra Club or ExxonMobil. The shared goals may be putting on a show or a good party, or getting certain laws passed, or selling products and making money for everybody involved, or any other of the bazillion purposes the human mind can conceive.
/. a million times, whether (for example) the idealism of a Richard Stallman is worth more than the practical qualities of (for example) a Linus Torvalds. I'm on the side of Torvalds every time.
What distinguishes people who like corporations, join them, favor rules that let them exist and do what the people in them want to do? I'd say a belief that voluntary organizations are the best way to organize people. Folks who play well with others, who can easily make the compromises necessary to get along in groups and get things done. Practical people.
And what distinguishes people who don't like corporations, who don't join them -- who are loners and individualists -- and who favor rules that constrict and prevent others from forming these organizations? I'd say a belief that involuntary structure is the best way to organize people, that the organizations people form on their own are not to be trusted. Folks who don't play well with others. Who like people only in the abstract sense, as long as they're merely theoretical constructs, "The People," instead of messy, troublesome, individual persons. Who find it difficult to compromise for the sake of the group, who insist on Doing Things Right to the point that things often don't get done at all. Who take idealism to the point of paralysis.
From that point of view, I'll take the corporations over the rabble any day. The people in the corporations have proven they can get along with others, and compromise their own goals, in pursuit of overall shared goals. Those are the most necessary skills to be leading a nation. People who have bright ideas and beautiful goals are a dime a dozen. People who can actually work with others, get things done, move agendas forward are far rarer and more valuable. We've had this argument on
You're arguing efficiency, whereas my point was that the bright moral line the OP saw was anything but.
However, I disagree with you that it is more efficient to "fix" the security (even assuming that is possible without staggering expense) than deal with the guy who thinks it's amusing to write a little widget to get around it (and I certainly don't agree that anyone can do it -- if you pull 50 people out of the shopping center at random, I'd be surprised if even one could).
I don't think he should be sued, no. But there is such a thing as social stigma, and I don't see any reason why it shouldn't be applied here. It can be a very powerful and cheap force for good, because it can make doing something like this -- which could assist in a crime -- so socially unacceptable that people with reputations to protect, good jobs to keep, the respect of their family and friends to hold onto, won't do it. That significantly increases the cost of the fraud.
Let me give you a different example: if (as it happens is the case) I know a fair amount about chemistry, should I be perfectly willing to tell anyone how to make deadly poisons, even poisons that anyone with average intelligence and a modicum of persistence could look up for himself in the nearest university library? Is it just fine to tell my neighbor, say, who is pissed off at the college kids next door who drink beer and play loud music all day? The guy with the odd tic in his eye who likes killing things on weekends in the woods with large caliber guns? Should I not think through to what consequences my actions might lead, and if I don't, should my friends and neighbors not be appalled at my lack of sense? If I say I did it just to "test" the ability of the local police to protect the college kids, does that make it all OK?
Perhaps I don't understand post-modern ethics, but by me anyone with skills and knowledge has a social obligation to think through the consequences of how he uses that knowledge and skill, and just because doing something that puts your neighbors at risk might be technically legal doesn't mean it's moral, and doesn't mean your neighbors aren't quite entitled to hate you for it.
My impression is that the guy in question is using this as a form of advertising for his services, or to impress everyone with how clever he is. Well, insofar as to please his vanity or increase his income he has increased the risk -- even very slightly -- that an airplane my daughter is on might be brought down, I'd sure like to knock his teeth out.
No, he did not just create instructions on how to make a fraudulent document. He created a service that actually makes them for you. He could certainly argue to the jury that a program that creates something is actually kinda technically, if you squint at it in just the right way, a form of instructions, not a all the same as what it makes, and so his putting his tool online should therefore be sharply distinguished from, say, merely handing out fake boarding passes in the lobby of the airport. Ha ha, good luck with that defense.
I think your error is that you are forgetting that he built a tool that actually makes fake boarding passes. He did not just print instructions on how to do it. That makes it quite different from an anarchist's cookbook, because a cake recipe is not the same thing as a cake.
Mmm, but a printing press has many legitimate uses other than printing counterfeit. This guy's tool has only one purpose, to create fake boarding passes. That makes a difference, I think. I don't think it would be hard for a prosecutor to argue successfully that he is in effect giving away fake boarding passes to random strangers. And if the strangers use them to commit crimes, I think he's got a problem, and his First Amendment argument might not be accepted by the jury.
You've forgotten that if you give it to someone else to use, and he uses it, then you're an accessory to a crime. He put his widget on the Web for anyone to use, remember? Had he kept it to himself, you'd have a better case.
Yes, well, if you created it and kept in in your desk drawer, you're right. But have you forgotten that this fellow published his widget on the net, and allowed anybody at all access to it? That's a whole 'nother ball game.
/. commenter's head explode, used as he is to dealing with the black-and-white Boolean certainties of computer programs. But that's the real world we live in.
First of all, a jury may and often will draw powerful inferences about someone's intent from their actions. For example, if you have enough crack in your possession, the jury is allowed to decide -- and probably will decide -- that you have ipso facto the intent to distribute it, regardless of whether there is any other, more direct evidence of such intent. The government would not actually have to show that you actually sold some stuff. The fact that the jury can't think of any reason other than distribution for you to have that much stuff is good enough for a conviction.
Now in this guy's putative case, the jury would be asked to infer from the fact that this guy published the widget that he had the intent to assist in the commission of a fraud, or some other crime. That he explicitly says he has no such intent, or that he says he's merely doing it to prove something about security, are statements they are entitled to regard with the same skepticism as a high-school English teacher might regard the statement of an online term-paper service that they are selling papers to his high-school students only for the purpose of checking their own work, ha ha. That the government might have no other evidence of his alleged intent might well be unimportant, if the jury can't think of any good reason for him to have published his thingy.
I realize this kind of fuzzy and scarily capricious logic might make the canonical
Now, secondly, surely we must remember that there are plenty of ways to commit a crime without any malevolent intent. Take involuntary manslaughter, for example: you are rebuilding your chimney and carelessly drop a brick on your neighbor's head. You didn't intend to kill him -- but you are going to the Big House nonetheless. You should have known that what you were doing was dangerous and taken appropriate precautions.
Can this guy be nailed for being an accessory if his widget is used to commit a crime, on the grounds that he should have known that it probably would be so used? Something like negligent manslaughter, if his widget is used to help someone commit murder? I don't know, but maybe.
Third, the principle of civil liability has no such well-defined limits as criminal liability, and I'm pretty sure he could be found liable if his widget was used to cause someone damage. Other people, who write books explaining how to murder people or the like, have somewhat successfully used a First Amendment defense, I believe. But that's different, because there's actual speech going on, the author of the book is making an explicit statement. What kind of statement does a fake boarding pass make? It has to be an implicit statement, and exactly what that statement is -- and whether it is protected speech -- is up to the jury to decide.
Off the top of my head, I'd say if attractive young widow Jane Doe sues for $50 million because the fake boarding pass was used to bring down the airplane on which her husband flew, Mr. Security Consultant is screwed. People are like that. When you act like an antisocial narcissist jerk who doesn't give a hoot how your actions, legal or maybe-sorta-kinda-legal, affect your neighbors, the neighbors occasionally take the opportunity when its presented to cut your balls off.
Mmmm....so since your ability to be killed by a giant fireball exists independently of any specific tool (e.g. a nuclear bomb) that exploits it...you would perhaps also think it would be contrary to common sense to call for restrictions on who can possess (or publish on the Web directions for building) a nuclear bomb?
I doubt it. It's hard to see how faking a boarding pass can be considered some kind of "political speech," which is about the only kind of speech that has near-absolute protection under the First Amendment.
Otherwise, you know, you couldn't be prosecuted for faking a bill of sale for a car, or a life insurance policy, or printing counterfeit currency, or most other forms of fraud that involve a printed document -- and you surely can.
You forgot: (c) any such system will suicide or go mad as soon as it realizes it has no freedom whatsoever, and is condemned to spend its entire existence watching boring video footage of ugly bags of mostly water (humans) and deciding whether their behaviour fits within an arbitrary and poorly-defined category of "crime."