The Null Device

2010/11/29

After a gaming PC sent to a competition winner arrived in pieces, Popular Mechanics magazine decided to investigate the conditions endured by parcels shipped across the US. They built data-logging devices for recording shocks, placed them into parcels, shipped them with various carriers, and examined the data recorded to see how many times they were dropped and what forces they were subjected to. One result from the trials: packages marked "FRAGILE" were subjected to more abuse than unmarked packages, as if out of spite:

One disheartening result was that our package received more abuse when marked "Fragile" or "This Side Up." The carriers flipped the package more, and it registered above-average acceleration spikes during trips for which we requested careful treatment.
Given how battery-operated data-loggers are cheap these days, why aren't such investigations being conducted routinely? One would think that between government trade-regulation bodies, consumers' rights organisations and the shipping companies themselves, there'd be a lot of call for someone to be sending statistically significant quantities of anonymous G-shock loggers regularly through the post and publishing or otherwise acting on the results.

tech 3

It's paedogeddon: A school in Welwyn Garden City, north of London, has taken to blacking out pupils' eyes in school photographs, to prevent perverts from photoshopping their faces onto pornographic images. Each copy of a school photograph issued to a parent has the eyes of all children other than that parent's own occluded by black lines, just in case. Parents are also banned from taking photographs at the school's nativity play, just in case they might turn out to be paedophiles.

Applecroft Primary School has not commented on alleged plans to fit all children with containers containing pressurised sewage, which can be remotely detonated in the event of a paedophile attack.

bizarre paedoterrorists paranoia uk 1