Anthrax To Kill Snail Mail 522
omnirealm writes "Steven Levy over at NBC expressed his opinion that the new anthrax thread in our snail-mail is going to be a major catalyst to a general switch to e-mail as the primary means of written communication."
What about representatives (Score:3, Interesting)
Could be a good thing. (Score:4, Interesting)
Most government officials would likely right this off as paranoia, and unnecessary because *nobody* would EVER want to wiretap its citizens and steal their credit card information.
With all the talk of a new police state..... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it is pretty damn scary that they can ignore something like this for as long as they did.
FBI did not test suspect NBC package for 2 weeks
NEW YORK: The FBI failed to test the suspicious powder sent to an NBC employee in New York for two weeks and it was a private doctor who raised the alarm over the new case of anthrax, the New York Times reported on Saturday.
The report said that the FBI was notified about the powder on September 25, picked it up a day later but did not do any laboratory tests on the powder or take skin samples from the NBC employee who handled the package.
The report said that it was only after the NBC staffer - identified as 38-year-old Erin O' Connor - developed a sore on her chest, visited several doctors and was diagnosed with skin anthrax that the powder was tested.
The powder was eventually found to be negative. New York FBI chief Barry Mawn said that it was "unfortunate" the tests were not conducted immediately. Mawn said that the FBI had investigated dozens of suspicious substances since the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Unfortunate, yes but for the first few days that this was coming up they really tried to downplay it like it was not going on. On 'Politically Incorrect' a replublican strategist said they were thinking of suing CNN for falsly creating a Anthrax scare.
Doesnt look false to me.
Hysteria (Score:2, Interesting)
So far, we have reports of three letters supposedly laced with Anthrax. One death has resulted, and no more deaths seem likely. These are hardly numbers warranting an end to snail mail.
The news media seriously needs to stop trying to incite hysteria in the American public.
feh. (Score:5, Interesting)
I send or respond to hundreds of emails a day, as I am sure quite a few of us do, personally I find it is the differences between email and snail mail that make it cornerstone of society.
Email lets me communicate to someone using electronic representations of words or images. Powerful stuff, certainly powerful enough to conduct business and maintain strong lines of communication with family and friends.
But snail mail allows my kids, my wife, to create something for me physically and to send it thousands of miles away for me to hold in my hands, if you ever got a perfumed letter from your woman when you have been jonesing for her for weeks, you realize why email is not a final postal solution.
Never mind that I do 60% of my shopping online and receive parcels in a timely fashion from all four corners of this country and from a couple others. Never mind that if an old acquaintance wants to contact me the odds of him finding my physical address is greater then him stumbling into my email address. Never mind that letters written by pen usually have greater value both in terms of the thought that went into them and to the appreciation of the reader.
Yeah junk mail sucks ass and needs to be addressed and destroyed. I am not saying snail mail is not silly with flaws. What I am saying is this is horseshit. We lived through the unibomber and if you are old enough you might remember that in the early seventies mail-bombs were flying around in a near epidemic. Unibomber-boy (teddy K) did not invent it. And hey look, the problem is so bad most of the kids on slash dot won't have a clue about it.
Man when bored journalists with deadlines write shitty pieces I don't get upset, I know a job is a job. But responding/reacting to it is just plain stupid.
I'm sick of this anthrax bullshit..... (Score:5, Interesting)
The fact of the matter is that biological and chemical weapons just aren't practical. They are pretty fucking dangerous, I won't argue that. But they are very impractical as weapons of mass destruction.
For example, out of the thousands of people in the subway in tokyo where a bunch of wacko's sprayed sarin gas only 12 people were killed. 12 out of thousands. A success? I say no.
You see, first of all it takes a lot of money and people with very huge educations just to produce the stuff. Then it is incredibly hard and dangerous to transport it. You run the risk of infecting yourself.
But the real reason that we aren't going to see a whole lot of these attacks is because the payload just isn't high enough. After spending millions of dollars to produce the stuff, expending a couple chemists who died in the shitty-ass lab in afghanistan producing it you've only killed a couple people. It's much cheaper, easier and kills a lot more people to just set off a bomb in some building.
But what about just making people sick? After all there was something like 5500 people pooring into the hospitals in tokyo after the sarin gass. Well what they didn't tell you is that 90% of those people were just people who panicked because they were in the subway that day and wanted to get checked out.
And don't forget that before that incident the same terrorist group had tried to use anthrax. They sprayed the shit off a building onto a group of civilians and no one was infected by it.
I read a good article about this written by a phd in microbiology. It contains many more facts that I haven't discussed. You can read it here [villagevoice.com].
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Garett
It's a conspiracy!!! (Score:2, Interesting)
So when you add everything up, we'll have armed military guards in the street to "keep the peace", we'll have flying video cameras to record our every move, our phone conversations can be tapped, and now they want to force everyone to use e-mail. So it seems that the government will be able to know your every move if they want to.
It wouldn't be hard to play off a terrorist thing in order to get political power over everyone. Hitler did the same thing. Those who don't learn from history are bound to repeat it they say, it's just too bad most people didn't learn.
Re:I thought this was supposed to happen years ago (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't *choose* what medium communications *TO* you take. If I get a CC bill in the mail, I mail a check. If I get a phonecall, I return the call. if I get an email I send an email. You can only choose the medium of conversations you initiate :) So the only way sending e-mail instead of snail mail is going to reduce your risk of getting anthrax is if you are the person mailing antrax to people :)
The only thing that could help would be for potential victims (companies apparently) to declare they only will accept email.
What if the diseases were on paper money? (Score:1, Interesting)
Not implausable though..
Solution: irradiate all snail-mail (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What about representatives (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What about representatives (Score:2, Interesting)
That's what Ashcroft wants... (Score:3, Interesting)
...because now he can use his new super powers to deploy carnivore to your ISP (without a warrant, by the way) and spy on *all* your correspondence.
This terrorist hysteria is far too convenient for the reactionary elements of our country. I smell a rat.
Re:I'm sick of this anthrax bullshit..... (Score:2, Interesting)