USPS Irradiation Damages Electronics 341
meehawl writes: "Bummer. Turns out the USPS's new Electron Beams anthrax zappers can erase and sometimes permanently damage CompactFlash cards. I wonder what other sensitive electronics will get wiped, not to mention seeds, film, some plastics, and so on. I guess it's more reason to use Fedex and UPS, at least unless and until they deploy these beam weapons as well. All this disruption for a campaign that killed five people? Some people think using the beams will lead to more deaths and injuries among operators. Meanwhile, electron beam makers, SureBeam, just got an analyst upgrade." Err, and be careful what you irradiate.
Am I reading this right? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Oh goodie. (Score:1, Insightful)
Well, there's no way of telling what the genetical manipulation will do to our crops in the long run.
There may not be harmful effects but then again there might be catastrophic effects. Therefore it is wiser not to risk modifying the genetic structure the nature has spent billions of years perfecting. We can very well feed the world without resorting to genetics. The real problem is a political and economical (=greed).
What scares me most... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is rapidly getting ridiculous. And I feel no safer.
- A.P.
Re:Are you mad? (Score:4, Insightful)
If someone dies from eating french fries, it is probably because they choked to death or it was the last LDL placed on the cholesterol camel's back. In both cases, it was likely the fault of the person eating the fries, for either eating too quickly or eating too much fatty food.
The anthrax was thrust upon the postal workers, and the mail recipients, without their consent. If you are weighing the lives of 5 people against the blanking of a few memory cards and the people come up light, you need your scale calibrated.
"Death (even so-called "unnatural" death) is a consequence of life. If everytime someone dies, we remove or restrict what ever killed that person, this planet would be a boring place."
I couldn't agree more. If it ever became socially acceptable to hunt down and kill personal injury lawyers, I would be the first to lock and load. However, this is a process to remove anthrax from the world, not fries. Or diving boards. Or 'dangerous' toys. Or hot McDonald's coffee.
Though I mostly agree with your sentiment, I don't think it applies to this case.
Knunov
Re:Am I reading this right? (Score:1, Insightful)
The over-the-top security measures that have been introduced are such a massive pain in the ass that I, along with tens of thousands of other US citizens, have little interest in flying while they're in place. If you haven't noticed, the security measures and third-world airport wait times have done, and will continue to do, far more to destroy the US airline industry than they will do to keep retards with plastic explosives in their shoes from boarding planes.
Re:Am I reading this right? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can anyone find out how many federal workers have been killed in traffic "accidents" since September 11? I bet it's more than five.
Re:Five people almost became 200,000+ (Score:5, Insightful)
I hate it when I see statistics like that in the media. Sure, it was enough to kill hundreds of thousands if you lined them up and administered a minuscule bit to each, but it's not likely that that would happen. You might as well say that a terrorist had enough knives (one) to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
a lot more than 5 die (Score:1, Insightful)
People die for MANY [disastercenter.com]reasons.
How many kids die from drugs every day?
How many people die from poverty?
etc...
Without defending the original statement, what we are doing here is deciding where to spend time, money and energy preventing deaths. Effectively though are we deciding who is more important to save? How many Americans would give up cheap gas and larger and larger SUVs so people in the Middle East, Africa, and South America could eat decent meals, get affordable medication, and learn to read? How many Americans would essentially take a hit to their checkbook for an implementation aimed to save lives other then their own (be it the people in their town, state, ethnic group, country, intl alliance), and not because said plan didn't aim to protect them too, but because there was no threat to them in the first place. For instance, would an affluent suburb support inner-city sports or reading programs aimed to reduce crime and dropout rates. Not likely. They would most likely brush it off as "not my [city's, state's, neighborhood's] problem". I would hope that many Americans would support these things, but I have my doubts. We have no attention span (50 yrs TV, 100 yrs marketing), we don't know our own history (one thats both bloody and brutal but heroic and rich), we are short-sighted (oops, we trained those guys?).
Re:Oh goodie. (Score:2, Insightful)
Look pilgrim, for all I care you can stuff all the dreck that you want into your body.
I for my part only ask for a declaration of genetically engineered organisms on the food that I purchase.
Now, as a so much determined lobyist for a brave new world, I'm sure you can explain why the Monsantos of this world so vehemently fight such obligations.
Could it be that they know that I and hundreds of millions of people feeling the same way won't buy this shit?
Anxiously awaiting your answer...
Re:Are you mad? (Score:1, Insightful)
Actually, they ARE consenting, by continuing to work at the postal service, and even though anthrax is what's been in the news by now, I'd bet there are MANY greater job hazards. Out of the hundreds of thousands of postal workers, I'm sure more than 5 get killed in vehicle accidents every year, probably more than 5 get bitten to death by dogs.
If you are weighing the lives of 5 people against the blanking of a few memory cards and the people come up light, you need your scale calibrated.
How about weighing the lives of 5 postal workers killed by anthrax a year against 100 postal workers killed by irradiation every year. It's not just memory cards that are being affected by irradiation.
This seems like a situation where someone really needs to do a cost-benefit and see if this is the best use of our resources. Yes, we all want to save lives, and no, we can't save every life, so maybe we should waste millions on something ineffective if the money could be better spent elsewhere.
Problem Solved (Score:5, Insightful)
Please. Most of the threads here are just (forgive me for saying) moronic. "All this for just 5 deaths", "This is the last nail being hammered into our coffin", "Oh dear me... my rights have been violated". Please.
How many people buy a hard drive and expect it to be shipped in an envelope without padding or an anti-static bag? None. You ship me a drive like that, I'll send it right back without testing it. Sure, it might work; but that's not the point. It may or may not work very long. Not worth the risk.
Similarly, now when you ship a compact flash card, you'll have to protect it properly. Duh. A hard drive isn't susceptible to this beam because it is surrounded by the plastic case... which is covered on both sides with about 2 or maybe 3 mil of aluminum. So, from now on, ship compact flash cards wrapped in aluminum foil or, once "professional" baggies are available, use those.
An electron beam needn't be harmful, folks. I can't remember the exact equation of how far the electrons will penetrate, but in my work with Auger Electron Spectroscopy, a 3keV beam only gets me about a nanometer into the surface of a material. Going to higher energy proportionally increases the depth--but really this isn't something that's difficult to shield against. This isn't nearly as big a deal as people are making it out to be.
Re:Only five deaths... (Score:1, Insightful)
Look at automobiles. A 1981 VW Rabbit (Golf in Europe) weighed about 1,800lbs. A modern Golf weighs in at about 2,800lbs. Most of that weight gain is because of safety regulations requiring everything from stronger bumpers to airbags to bracing in the doors. In another 50 years, will economy cars weigh as much as Chevy Suburbans due to ever-increasing safety regulation?
So you're saying that the safety improvements to automobiles are not needed, that they should never have been done (because they WERE done due to people getting killed or maimed). And you're saying that the lives being saved to this very day are not worth it because look at all that extra weight on the car!
How does this crap get modded up anyway?
Re:Problem Solved (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Am I reading this right? (Score:3, Insightful)
Howmany would you have liked to see die?
Consider that in many areas, 10 or so people (or one celebrity) have to be killed in an intersection before a traffic light will be put up. Many more people have died from contaminated food, but inspections of processing plants remain a joke (Why not spend the millions there and protect everyone, not just federal employees?)
In other words, it's not that the 5 deaths don't matter, it's just that 5 deaths matter less than 10 or 100 in the big picture.
Problem changed. (Score:4, Insightful)
Gee, now I feel safe.
If what you're saying is right, what this means is that we're all just going to have to pay for more expensive wrapping for our mail, particularly for film, medicine, or electronics, for no actual benefit.
Re:Oh goodie. (Score:3, Insightful)
The biggest outrage is that the food makers want the right to not tell us that the food contains genetically modified material. What are they hiding? If they weren't doing anything wrong, they wouldn't have to lie about it.
Re:So what happens when... (Score:5, Insightful)
In that case, it would explode inside the e-beam machine (possibly injuring nearby workers, depending on the size of the explosive and how well shielded the machine was). Then the investigators would attempt identify the source of the package, and prosecute the sender. It wouldn't be too hard to have a camera taking pictures of each package as it went into the e-beam machine so they'd know exactly which package went boom.
I don't really see the point of this question. Anyone could send an explosive designed to go off at some point in the mail-delivery chain. E-beam treatment doesn't really add to this risk, and it does reduce the risk of people receiving biological agents through the mail. Conceptually, it's a pretty good idea. However, as these stories show, the actual implementation leaves something to be desired.
If it turns out that "normal" mail (paper, common plastics, ink, etc) will survive a radiation level that's high enough to be useful in killing the biological agents, then all that has to be added is a new "do not irradiate" option for the sensitive packages. Mail in this category would be screened more heavily, hand-inspected, require a verified return address, etc.
However, if it turns out that the level of irradiation needed to be useful against biological agents is so high that "normal" mail will always be toasted, then the whole idea is dead in the water.
Re:Only five deaths... (Score:2, Insightful)
Any person so determined could commit suicide without a gun. The same goes for homicide. The only deaths clearly attributable to guns here are accidental deaths. You could also include some of the indeterminate deaths and homicides, as some no doubt would not have happened without the immediacy and "convenience" of a gun.
Still, that it no argument that none of those 30,708 deaths would not have happened witout firearems. In fact, I'd venture a guess most of those would still have happened - with a different weapon.