08:13 – Barbara spread about 3,058,180 mL of the mulch yesterday, leaving a gigantic 37 mL (2+ tablespoons) pile of the stuff in the driveway. While she was working, we had Colin on a tie-out in the front yard. Someone came down the street walking a dog, and Colin charged out to see them at a dead run. So much for that collar. The plastic quick-release snap connector fractured. We have a drawer full of old collars, and I was going to replace Colin’s collar with a very robust one that used a standard buckle instead of a quick-release plastic snap connector. Barbara pointed out that if Colin had been wearing one of those he might have broken his neck. So we replaced his collar with another snap connector model.
I finished up the bloodstains stuff yesterday and got started on the group of lab sessions on impression analysis. If I have time, I’m going to add a session to that group. Just about every recent cop show has the cops standing around a whiteboard in the squad room, using dry-erase markers to add information to it. Well, it may surprise some people to know that criminals are also big users of whiteboards and dry-erase markers. And, like most people, criminals usually use erasers to erase the stuff on those whiteboards.
But using an eraser on a whiteboard doesn’t actually erase what’s on it. All it does is remove the microscopically thin layer of dried ink powder, leaving traces of the carrier on the board. Those traces can be dusted with fingerprint powder to make them readable. Although I can’t find anything in the literature about using iodine fuming to make those latent traces visible, I suspect that might work at least as well as dusting. I’ll try it. Meanwhile, smart criminals use a paper towel soaked in isopropanol to wet-erase their dry-erase boards. I’ve already tried that, and found that it makes dusting useless to recover latent traces.
smart criminals
Conflict in terms.
Not at all. Most criminals who are caught are stupid, as evidenced by the fact that they were caught. There are plenty of criminals who are smart — smart enough to conceal the evidence or to just skirt the edges of the law or to work the system to avoid punishment.
Here’s a tip for would-be criminals: Forget working the law. Don’t bother studying up on forensics and concealing the evidence. Don’t waste your money buying a politician or judge. Just keep your mouth shut. You can get away with murder (meant methaphorically but also literally) if you just keep your big, flapping mouth shut.
There are just as many criminals who don’t get caught. Then there are the charismatic leaders who rob us blind while we cheer for them. They are the smartest of all, since they make the laws that define criminals.
Steve underestimates the value of modern forensic science. Prisons are full of people who committed serious crimes and never said a word about it to anyone.
That said, many of the people I know could literally get away with murder, because no one would ever suspect that the death was a homicide. (I would, for example, never want Mary Chervenak or Paul Jones to be seriously angry at me; everyone thinks physicians are the most likely people to be get away with murder, but it’s actually organic chemists and biochemists you have to watch out for.)
It’s commonly believed that there are no “undetectable” poisons. That’s crap. I can think of dozens of them off the top of my head. And “undetectable” has subtleties about it. For example, one woman was executed in North Carolina a few years ago. She was a serial murderer, and her choice of weapon was arsenic. Any forensic science textbook will tell you that arsenic is easily detectable, which it is. But only if you look for it. There are no tricorders; if you don’t look specifically for a particular poison, you won’t find it. So this woman got away with murdering a bunch of people over a couple decades or more, because arsenic mimics severe gastroenteritis, and no one ever thought to check for arsenic. Until a nurse happened to mention in passing to a physician, “could it possibly be arsenic poisoning?” It was, and this woman’s murder spree finally came to an end.
I can think of many deadly toxins that are lethal at levels that are difficult to detect even with instrumental analysis even if you’re looking for that specific toxin. The chances of any of them ever being found by forensic analysts is trivially small. But I wouldn’t use one of those, because there would be a possibility of it being detected, however small. Instead, I’d use something that kills slowly. Upon consumption, these toxins fatally damage the liver or other organs, but produce no immediate severe symptoms. By the time anyone realizes that the victim is seriously ill, the toxin has been completely eliminated from his system. It’s impossible for anyone to prove that the victim was murdered, let alone with what or by whom? Ricin, which is easily isolated from castor beans, is the most famous of these toxins, but there are many, many others.
Actually, I wouldn’t use one of these toxins to murder someone, at least in pure form, if only because it’s too easy for the murder to commit suicide unintentionally. When you’re dealing with something that’s lethal in literally microgram or smaller amounts, good lab procedure becomes a matter of life and death.
I wasn’t underestimating forensic science, nor even good old-fashioned police legwork. All I meant to say was that the biggest bang for the buck for the would-be criminal is keeping his big, flapping mouth shut. Sure, go ahead and read up on law and accounting and forensic science and what-not, but Rule One is Keep Your Mouth Shut.
My mom is a retired cop. (Yes, I know. The family shame.) Her last few years before retiring were as a guard in the county lockup. One year, when a spate of stupid criminals had made national news by blabbing after they’d gotten away clean with their crimes, I asked her to start keeping tabs on how many of the prisoners were in jail solely because they talked. It was about half, by informal count from chatting with the prisoners.
Oh, yeah. We’re in complete agreement there. I’d imagine that people running their mouths is the number one way that police departments solve crimes. Well, that and information received from their snouts. (Can you tell I read a lot of British mystery novels?)
Unlike most human endeavors, I’d guess that serious crime is bifurcated in terms of IQ. The really stupid ones do things like robbing liquor stores. (The really, REALLY stupid ones rob banks…) The really bright criminals (assuming they don’t go into law or politics or banking or the stock market, where crime is effectively legal) usually go into high-value crimes that involve little or no personal contacts and are not high priorities for the police.
And then there are the pure artists. Back 30 years ago or more, one of my friends was visited by a friend of his that working counterfeiting for the Secret Service. He showed us a counterfeit bill that they’d just confiscated from a guy they’d busted. The bill looked real to me, other than the tiny holes punched through it that spelled out “COUNTERFEIT”. The agent said that they hated counterfeiters, but they almost felt sorry for the guy. It was a $10 or $20 bill that the counterfeiter had *hand drawn*. The agent said it took the guy like a week to produce one bill. It was a crime, and they did bust him for it, but I suspect the judge wasn’t too harsh on him. His crime was actually more of a hobby.
I missed it, but Ubuntu has released the new LTS, 12.04. Happened on 26 April. Somehow I thought it was scheduled for July, but it is out now.
I am going to play around in Virtual Box with Lubuntu, which has an X-Windows very light desktop, is also officially in the Ubuntu family, and is on the same release schedule as Ubuntu. Claims are that it uses half the RAM of Ubuntu for desktop functions.
I have Deft (an Italian IT security customization) running via Lubuntu on my Lenovo Ideapad netbook right now, with 2GB RAM. No complaints here, and I can use the Officially Approved Wireless Network at my gigantic corporate network employer with it, no problemo.
My sister the defense attorney advises that when being interrogated by agents of the State, it’s imperative to keep in mind three rules:
1 Be quiet.
2 Don’t say anything.
3 SHUT THE F* UP!
Yeah–that’s why Martha Stewart went to jail. Not for doing anything wrong at all related to stock transactions or so-called ‘insider trading’ (it is NOT wrong for your stockbroker to tell you he has found out that some family members are unloading their shares in the former family business–in fact, he SHOULD tell you or you should fire him), but Martha got blabby and–for one reason or another–lied to federal agents about what she had done. I know a lot of people hate lawyers–some to an extreme–but it just ain’t smart to talk to ANY law enforcement official without an attorney present.
I loved George Carlin’s assessment: Here’s a woman who actually WANTS to cook, clean and redecorate the house, keep a garden and make sure the yard looks nice,–and she’s good at it. So what do we do? Throw her in jail!
A few weeks ago, I was in my favorite drug dealer, Walmart, getting some to take home. They said if I gave them my cell phone number, they would text me when they were ready. Sounded like a good deal, as I had to shop and was in a hurry. Actually, it was a good thing, because the fixes were ready in less than 10 minutes, and they told me 1/2 hour. I would have been wasting time needlessly otherwise.
However, I am now getting text ads, many of them waking me up in the middle of the night. I have never gotten spam phone text before in my life. Think Walmart is selling my phone number? or just a coincidence? My phone itself is not capable of banning phone numbers; any idea how to stop this? Since I am on pay-as-you-go, each of these messages is costing me 10¢.
OFD the ex-cop seconds the lawyer advice on dealing with agents of the State. STFU. Wait for the lawyer.
In immediate dealings with armed agents of the State, do not make any sudden moves, keep your hands in plain sight, do not yank metallic objects out of your pockets, do not sass the agent of the State, stay calm and reasonable and do not get excitable and angry no matter the provocation. If someone is with you and has a cell, they are hopefully recording the whole deal while it is going down.
If you are in fact arrested, STFU.
I seem to remember reading of a case in Australia a few years back when the cops told a man they wanted to ask him questions about his activities, which were questionable. The man said he wanted a lawyer, which made the cops all the more suspicious. That, to them, was tantamount to announcing he had something to hide.
Another story I heard was that a high ranking cop was out driving in his unmarked cop car, but he was in uniform. The occupants of a car gave him a glance, then gave him a second glance. That was a red rag to a bull. The cop pulled them over and found some quite interesting stuff in the car. Not sure what gave him that right. I give cops second, third and fourth glances all the time, but they never take any interest in me. Must be my kind, sweet natured look…
I’m very much afraid of having any but social dealings with cops and lawyers.
Chuck, take a close look at those text messages. There may be – however low the odds – an opt-out instruction at the end.
No opt-out instructions; I already checked for that. I think I’ll give T-Mobile a call and see what they say. One of the texts was from phone number “333”. I am thinking that is a T-Mobile inside number. They have lots of numbers that are 3-digit, like 233, to do things like start the process of recharging the phone with more time.
Speaking of cop encounters of the nearby kind, a couple months ago, I was driving from downtown Indy to the near northside, in order to drop off my video recordings for processing by my boss. Some of the neighborhoods one drives through are not exactly church parking lots, and as I was going north on one of the major one-way streets from downtown, a cop car sped past me and disappeared down the road. Turns out he stopped about 7 or 8 blocks down, right in the area of the back side of the TV station I used to work at, along with about 5 other cop cars, and they were all on one side of the street doing something urgent.
All the traffic made its way slowly around that incident, and I thought I was home free. Had to stop at an intersection for a stop light a few blocks further. I was the first car in line in the next-to-the-right lane. An SUV was stopped in the extreme right lane, also waiting on the light and traffic. All at once, a cop car pulled up on my right, switched on his gumballs, and got out of the car. I was unclear what was going on–whether he was after me, or what. Then he proceeded to get a long-barreled gun of some kind (automatic, I’m sure) out of his vehicle and approached the SUV. He motioned for the guy to open the door, which he did. It was someone older than me. The cop looked the guy over, lowered the business end of the rifle, and motioned him on. The light turned green and I anxiously moved on. The whole thing happened in less than the wait time for one cycle of the red light.
Need I say that the episode some blocks back was in a black neighborhood, and the guy in the SUV was white? No doubt the reason he was given a quick pass, with the cop knowing whoever he was after was not white. I criticize the police a lot, even though I have had close family members serving there. I don’t think law enforcement has the right goals or methods, nor does the legal system support sanity in determining what is legal and what is not. But the one thing I kept thinking as I was driving away from that scene, was how glad I was that there are actually people like that 40-something cop, no doubt with a wife and kids at home, willing to take the risk of whatever might come from an encounter like that.
Meanwhile, it is oppressively humid here in Tiny Town. So humid that as cars drive down the street, it looks like fog in their headlight beam. This is just way too early for that kind of humidity, which we usually see from late June to early August. I finally had to turn on the central air a couple days ago, but seeing the outside thermometer below 70°F, I opened up the house about an hour ago, and am sorry I did. Humidity spreads quickly and evenly, and now it is near 100% inside the house, but too cool to turn on the air again to dry it out.
I’ve been ticketed a few times for speeding (but not in the last 20 years), so I was irritated to be passed by a police van one night doing 20 km/h over the limit. I wondered if they were on their way to an emergency.
No, I saw that van in the MacDonalds parking lot a few minutes later.
Roolz only apply to us Mundanes; the cops do whatever they want. In general, there are about ten percent of cops who are the dregs of humanity, criminals themselves, or terminally corrupt and evil. Ten percent are genuine heroes and exemplars of goodness. And the eighty percent are just regular schmucks trying to get through their shifts in one piece and make it to another day, like many of us. But they all possess tremendous immediate power of life and death, and it is well to remember that in one’s dealings with them, and use one’s best awareness and common sense.
The 80% are just schmucks like us, except that they’re sworn to uphold the law. Every little bit of minor extortion, every little bit of letting friends slide on their offenses, every little disappearance of cool stuff from the evidence room, every little bit of planted evidence, every little bit of bullying while in uniform is a crime. Helping to conceal their “brothers'” crimes is a crime.
Even assuming you’re right about those proportions, it isn’t 10% of the pigs who make the rest look bad, it’s the bad 90% who give the rest a bad name.
“Since I am on pay-as-you-go, each of these messages is costing me 10¢.”
I’m not really up on the law, but… Advertising by sending faxes to people was outlawed because it cost the recipient money (paper and ink). I would assume that sending SMS adverts must surely fall into the same category. Regardless of what number the texts are coming from, you know the product/service they are advertising for. I expect a sharply worded letter might have an effect. If you have a buddy who is a lawyer, maybe a nice bottle of wine would buy you a letter on stationary.
The hell with the financial issue. Robert Heinlein said that waking someone unnecessarily shouldn’t be considered a capital offense. The first time. I’d extend that from waking to disturbing.
Friday, I got *four* calls from “Cardholder Services”. A day seldom passes when I don’t get at least one call from them. As I’ve said before, someone needs to track down this son of a bitch and kill him, literally. Preferably in as messy and public a manner as possible pour décourager les autres.
And that says nothing about the son-of-a-bitch politicians, who exempted themselves from the DNC regulations, not to mention “survey” companies and non-profits. Why the hell can’t we specify that we don’t want calls from any of these people? Almost no one *does* want calls from any of them. And companies with whom one has an “existing business relationship” should not be allowed to call other than specifically in regard to business that the callee initiated. Not to sell more products or services.
Chuck,
Have you checked your cell bill. Perhaps the text messages are “no fee” worked through a deal with your provider. I believe a lot of the text spam is like that.
Yo, are these all “smart phones” that get these calls here? I have a basic old piece of crap cell that I only use to make and receive calls; it probably has other capabilities but I don’t care; I will not surf the web, play games, shop, or do anything else on a tiny little screen with a tiny little keyboard and you will not catch me texting jack.
And if I got calls in the middle of the night like that and had to otherwise keep the thing on in case of emergencies or something, I’d have to track down the individuals responsible and do bad things to them.
Do you screen your calls? Are they coming to the landline or cell? I always screen now.
I don’t object to companies I have a business relationship e-mailing me with offers, but not by phone.
I don’t generally screen. By the time the phone rings, the damage is done. I really, really resent having my train of thought interfered with by these bastards. I think it was either Shaw or Wilde who said that he considered it the height of rudeness to cause a bell to ring in another man’s house.
We used to have a key-system unit and automated attendant here. If someone was calling me, they’d press one to ring my extension, 2 for Barbara’s, and so on. If the extension wasn’t answered, the system would transfer it back to the voicemail system and take a message in the appropriate voicemail box. We never heard the phone ring unless it was someone we wanted to talk to.
I put all that together with a $600 Panasonic KSU, a few feature phones, and a couple BigMOuth cards in an old 286 system. It worked fine for years, until we had a lightning strike that wiped out the KSU and some of the connected equipment. (That was despite the phone company’s lightning protection and behind it some premium Panamax protectors.) I never got around to rebuilding it.
Bob, there’s a simpler and more effective solution. The last time I got a call from them, I looked up in Google, and the Missouri Attorney General suggested their business model was to get people’s credit cards for fraudulent purchases. Wouldn’t it be much easier to hunt down and kill the people dumb enough to give a credit card number to a telemarketer who calls them? If there wasn’t anyone alive dumb enough to fall for the scam, there would be no profit in it. And it would go away.
If that is too much social dawinism for you, lets have credit card companies permanently revoke the credit cards of people dumb enough to fall for the scam.
I would be very surprised to find out there was only one Cardholder Services. I think it’s the template for a scam that multiple groups run.
RBT wrote:
“I never got around to rebuilding it.”
Your next “vacation” might be a good time. Perhaps after the current book is completed.
I don’t get enough SPAM calls to bother looking into this, but perhaps you could set your VM system to just take calls, and not ring. You could check it 2-3 times per day. Assuming your cell doesn’t get the nuisance calls you could tell friends to ring that.
There is no cure on my phone for those calls–for instance, I do not get a phone bill, I go the prepaid route (ever since my first cell phone in Deutschland). I pay an advance amount and I get so many minutes, and there are no other records that I receive, beyond the purchase on my credit card. Moreover, those spam texts ARE anonymous. “You have won a new iPad. Go to http://www.[blahblahblah] and enter the promo code “IWON” to claim your new iPad. From phone number 7777.”
I guess I really do not have to leave the phone on overnight. Used to do that in Germany because my kids were in the US, and once in a great while, texted or called me with an urgency of some sort in their evening, which was my early morning. Still, I do have elderly relatives in Tiny Town, and it is possible I could get an emergency call from them.
My phone is an old Motorola PEBL (which really works exactly like the Star Trek communicator–give it a slight push on the top and it flips open by itself, just like the communicator did–all done with tiny magnets and springs). Besides being made for Italy, it is not very user configurable. Even on computers, there still is not enough user configurability in most items. For instance, I can tell the phone to give me a more-or-less soft notice for text messages, but I cannot tell it to do that just once. Every 8 minutes, it tells me again–all through the night, until I read the message. I would also like for a phone to ring once and then stop ringing. But no, it continues to ring until the voicemail picks up (a good 15 to 20 seconds).
Anyway, I have no problems with technology, unlike a lot of folks. I think it is great that you can access maps in your car and GPS instructions from an iPhone or Android. Additionally, I have to sit for hours at a time in recording sessions, with little for me to do except at start, stop, and tape changes. Attorneys around me have Blackberrys or iPads, and are making good use of the time answering email, doing research and other things, while listening to long, long lines of questioning in our conference room–much of which may not necessarily be relevant to the particular client they represent (there are often 5 or 6 attorneys present). I don’t hate technology; I would actually like to be in that camp, getting something done, instead of facing 30 or 40 stacked up emails when I get home and am then too tired to deal with them.
Have my eyes on the Samsung Galaxy S3, due out this summer. I will likely move to that and abandon the PEBL. I know that with the smartphones, I can block calls, unlike the puny PEBL. It has been a great basic cell phone up to now, however–especially in Germany, where the quality of cell phone service is a quantum leap above what we have in the US. I never EVER had a dropped call in Germany, but have had 4 in the last 2 weeks–important calls, too.
Any thoughts here on why internet speed in this country is so behind about twenty others and why cell phone service sucks? And how is it the kids are so behind on maths and sciences? The country that fought two world wars and invented so much technology?
Yeah. The country is completely self-centered. They have no idea what is going on in the rest of the world–and the fact that we no longer manufacture to the world, exacerbates that even further. There is no motive for anybody to explore what other people are doing or what they like and use.
Geez, PAL pictures on TV’s in Europe are SO far superior and more pleasant to watch than US NTSC, and for over 40 years we watched the most inferior TV pictures in the world.
And privatizing stuff that should be delivered by government has not helped at all. There is no reason whatever that water, electricity,–especially Internet and telephone–should be delivered by anything but non-profit government, responsive to voters. A non-profit and for-profit have exactly the same costs, but the for-profit adds a handsome profit into your bill, and pays its executives exhorbitantly.
Not only that, but it is clear to me (I work with people inside the cell phone industry) that they have so little competition that there is no incentive whatever to upgrade equipment. All they want to do is to reap the maximum price for the equipment already in place. They don’t even take your phone calls anymore that might be critical of their crummy damned service, and if they do, you can be SURE it never makes its way outside the office of the people who take the call. Why upgrade? They will get just as much money out of your wallet whether they do or whether they don’t.
My son, who stays in touch with the IT buddies he worked with in college, says the latest big problem is so many people with iPhones and Androids wandering into Wi-Fi service areas that the bandwidth is fully occupied and choked. Think that is going to be sorted out by “free market capitalism” everyone here worships?
Not a chance. If they aren’t ordered to upgrade by government, it ain’t gonna happen.
Chuck, I live in heavily socialized Canada, and believe me, the execs in charge of the government run “businesses” still make massive salaries and benefits. And they have tenure.
There is middle ground, there has to be, but the Free Marketeers will never relent their pirate ways, and the socialists keep running out of everyone’s money.