'Profoundly stupid' Dubliner's hoax call lost Intel 6,000 hours of production A Dublin man who lost Intel 6,000 hours of production after making a hoax bomb threat has been hit with 200 hours of community service, after the judge, and practically everyone else in court, agreed he was not the brains of the operation. Colin Hammond, a 21-year-old of Bath Road, Dublin, made two calls to Intel’s Leixlip …
And as we all know, Leixlips sink ships.
Oh, put a Cork in it. Though I have to admit that was Halfway amusing.
Unless you fancy Dublin your chances with another pun, but don't make me Cross Barry.
(sorry, early morning, not enough coffee, weak puns are the best I can offer)
yeah, it went Scottish at one stage too. best i could do given the circumstances.
Ah, I feel your pain. Whenever I try to do any accent at all to impress people - say, a Sean Connery-like Scots brogue - it usually regresses inevitably and against my best efforts to Peter-Sellers-level, goodness-gracious-me comic Indian. Which confuses people. Haven't caused an international incident yet but it's been close.
But if you're claiming that your impression was of Sergeant Shadwell of the Witchfinder Army, then it was a very good one.
I don't agree. I think it's very proportionate and the court considered the circumstances.
The guy has been given a public bollocking by a court and a minor sentence and now has a criminal record as a result.
Branding someone who pulls a dumb stunt to get off work a terrorist and giving him a totally insane sentence, as would be the case in the US is just indicative of a paranoid society that blows minor offences out of all proportion.
This is school boy stuff and the Irish court has been intelligent and sophisticated enough to recognise that and hand down a very civilised sentence rather than some kind of disproportionate, medieval, revenge punishment.
Also it costs a fortune to hold people in prison. It's a gross misuse of state finances to throw crazy custodial sentences at non-violent offenders who are basically just acting the muppet.
"But how does that amount to 6000 hours of lost production? Did they close the plant for a whole year?"
(time of closure + time to restart all lines) X number of production lines
Problem is a semi-conductors line doesn't start in 10 mins, takes hours. And I think this factory was big, if 4000 staff is anything to go by, therefore the 6000 hours. Probably 500 production lines, there.
There are 3 separate fabs at Leixlip runing 24hrs/day. Each one will take days to settle after a shutdown. It's not 6000 hours of production though so I think that number is made up by multiplying the number of employees standing in the car parks by the number of hours spent standing in the car parks.
As for the motorway being blocked, it's usually partly blocked by thge odd tractor anyway.
Also the knock-on effect if production lines not shut down cleanly (which they may not be in an event such as this).
True story - there was a fire in one part of a car plant here and they evacuated the whole factory. After an hour the all clear came and the workforce trooped back in. The one small part that was in the galvaniser was now a 2-tonne lump of zinc, as the machine had been running all during the evacuation.
No, CCTV, call box, DNA etc.
Original news 02/04/2015
"The phone box on Bath Road in Balbriggan from which the call was made was identified and sealed off just hours after the call"
""They were identified within hours of the investigation from phone records and CCTV."
Now the prosecution of one is complete
"Hammond made the calls from a public phone box 50m from his house at the instigation of a friend with whom he had been “drinking and taking tablets” and who didn’t want to go to work at the factory the following day."
How did Hammond's best pill popping mate get a job in the factory in the first place?
"So that explains the F00F bug then."
FOOF - you really don't want that around.
Wiki:
Dioxygen difluoride is a compound of fluorine and oxygen with the molecular formula O2F2. [...]It is an extremely strong oxidant and decomposes into oxygen and fluorine even at −160 °C (113 K) [...] Dioxygen difluoride reacts with nearly every chemical it encounters – even ordinary ice – leading to its onomatopoeic nickname "FOOF"
...
It reacts even with gold.
Great reading for anyone with an interest in chemistry and humour:
http://pipeline.corante.com/archives/2010/02/23/things_i_wont_work_with_dioxygen_difluoride.php
Have any actual terrorists ever called in an actual bomb threat where there was indeed an actual explosive device ready to go off? Seems that all I ever hear about is chumps like these two idiots who are just having a laugh at everyone else's expense.
I'd think that a serious terrorist would announce the bomb by detonating it and claiming responsibility afterward. What would be the point in warning everyone?
Because it's more effective to shut down an airport/train station/shopping center with a call rather than an actual bomb.
An actual bomb risks you getting caught or accidentally blowing up a photogenic disabled child which would look bad on the news. The official terrorists have code words registered with the police so that both sides know it's a real call.
The IRA's policy on warnings was a bit more subtle than that. When bombing a 'military target', such as a pub often used by British servicemen, or a military band playing to a public audience in Regents Park, no warning needed to be given. Likewise, a 'political' target, such as the hotel in Brighton where the Conservative Party was holding a Conference, deserved no warning. When bombing an ordinary 'civilian' target, a telephone warning was given, but so vague as to be be almost useless. A typical example would be a warning that there was 'a bomb in a London railway station'. As London has about a dozen central stations, and hundreds of suburban ones, with many places to plant a bomb, the only practical response for the authorities was (a) to ignore the warning, in which case 'the authorities' would be blamed if a bomb did actually kill people, or (b) to shut down large areas of economic activity (e.g. the rail network, or an entire city centre), and waste time searching for a possibly non-existent bomb. In many cases there was in fact no bomb at all, but the IRA planted real bombs just often enough to make option (a) too risky. You have to admire the ingenuity of the policy: for a minimum of risk, cost, and effort, the IRA inflicted a huge amount of fear and inconvenience, while maintaining the pretence of wishing to avoid 'innocent civilian' casualties, and not alienating their sympathisers, apologists, and funders in America.
Yes.
Sometimes they give wrong bomb location resulting in more deaths. (Omagh).
Personally, I'd never go to an evacuation point for a terror alert, a fire or natural disaster yes. But a terrorist is likely to put the bomb at the assembly point. Hint in the name. They are not attempting to take down infrastructure.
A 'Terrorist' is named as such by the State.
The objects of 'Terrorism' are to show the State as ineffectual in preventing such attacks to the General Public or to provoke an overreaction by the State in a security clampdown that alienates the General Public.
The first allows the State to be overthrown by the ballot box, the second by popular uprising. In both cases the 'Terrorist' organisation hopes to gain power in order to right wrongs that cannot be resolved in a more peaceful manner (in their view).
The General Public are not the target (although some collateral damage is inevitable), the 'Terrorists' need the General Public to overthrow the State for them as they cannot do it alone.
The crazies of ISIL are not 'Terrorists', they have no interest in overthrowing the State for political reasons, the Caliphate idea has been tacked on to try to give legitimacy to what is no more than a rapacious gang of thugs running riot, the murder/genocide of large swathes of population is to remove witnesses to their very unIslamic behaviour of rape and pillage.
The people carrying out these acts have been whipped into an orgy of destruction by others with their own agenda, it is The Screwfly Solution and it is emptying that part of the world.
Intel has fabs in Israel too - that's tenuous enough a link for a true rabid IS member to target them elsewhere.
The objective of terrorism is to create terror in order to achieve an aim or get publicity for their cause. The IRA were very effective at this, as another commenter has pointed out already. Have no doubt, if the NI peace talks had failed, then London (and the UK) would not be as prosperous as it is now.
You might moan at the economic cost of a day or two of tube strikes a year. But we used to have ten times that disruption in the past due to the actions of the IRA. And we couldn't attract all that international business with that still hanging over the country.
The only upside would be that the stupid Walkie Talkie building would never have been built.
Andy Grove is a Holocaust survivor. And, as that makes likely, he is in fact also a Jew. Given the attitudes of Islamic extremists towards Israel, yes, Intel is a highly plausible target of theirs. And, in fact, Intel has located some of its major facilities in Israel, benefiting its economy.
"Have any actual terrorists ever called in an actual bomb threat where there was indeed an actual explosive device ready to go off?"
Yes, I was one of many evacuated from Manchester on the morning of the 1996 Manchester bombing.
Admittedly at the time tho, 2 or 3 times a month the university was closed because a bomb threat had been phoned in. This was the first time I was turned back by police on the A6 Chapel Street going into Manchester centre. Normally we were being turned around as we reached the uni car park.
The thing that sticks out the most, is that we didn't bat an eyelid at it. Several times a month we'd be in a lecture, and a staff member would stick their head round the door and say "Bomb threat". There was no panic, or mad crush for the doors. Just a few cursed words, everyone packing up their bags, then we'd all go to the nearest pub for the remainder of the day, lecturers included. Nowadays the slightest mention of a bomb threat and everyone seems to go crazy.
In the US, it would have been 30 years to 250 years in the clink.
I've always wondered how that would work (and what the point of such a conviction is). Do the prisoners turn into zombies after they die which they then keep locked up? I can't see anyone actually finishing a 250 year sentence, not at present anyway.
"I can't see anyone actually finishing a 250 year sentence, not at present anyway."
Over here they have a tendency to release people from prison after 1/3 of the time, so judges counter that by giving them 3 times as much sentence, like 3 times life...
250 years is impressive, though
The point is that you're eligible for parole after (depending on the jurisdiction and the crime) one third to two thirds of the prison term is served. So if you get 30 years, that's really 10 or 20, depending. Certain judges drop long prison terms on people they don't like so as to keep 'em in prison for, effectively, life. (A 'life' term is usually considered to be 60 years, so you're eligible for parole after 20 to 40.) If a crim is handed several terms to be served concurrently, then the longest term is the one that counts for parole. If he's (and it's almost always he in cases like this) handed consecutive terms, then at least one has to be served _completely_ before the other(s) start, so no parole for you until you've done at least one full term. In the Federal system, there's no parole as such. You can get out early for various reasons usually having to do with being pardoned by the Prez as he leaves office or your lawyers being really good at sweet-talking a Federal judge or two. Al Capone was let out early, but only after it was clear even to Federal judges that his untreated syphilis had made him completely insane.
I once knew a judge (in Jamaica, not the US) who once handed down the following:
life for attempted murder of a police constable
life for attempted murder in the course of an armed robbery
life for use of a firearm during the course of an armed robbery
30 years for an armed robbery
to be served consecutively.
But the judge was merciful, he didn't bother to add anything for the aggravated assault of a police constable, aggravated assault during the course of an armed robbery, or the various other odds and ends that m'man got convicted of. I suspect that an American judge would not have been so lenient. (The jury took about three hours to convict, most of which was probably taken up eating the government paid for dinner. It's rare that someone is quite as guilty as m'man was.)
"In the US, it would have been 30 years to 250 years in the clink.
I've always wondered how that would work (and what the point of such a conviction is). Do the prisoners turn into zombies after they die which they then keep locked up?"
Only with gentle Jeebus and the invention of Christianity came the threat of torment and torture after the earth had closed over you. (Source: C.Hitchens) A little later, Islam borrowed the idea, e.g
"If you believe in only part of the Scripture, you will suffer in this life and go to hell in the next. 2:85"
bigoted would-be-atheist nonsense, like most of hitchens' output ... evry wiki ful kno that --
Hades - The Fields of Punishment was a place for those who had created havoc on the world and committed crimes specifically against the gods. Hades himself would make the individual's punishment of eternal suffering based on their specific crime.
-- and a whole bunch of other religions have some version of hell. you (along with the dead drunk) will get reincarnated as a chicken for your willful ignorance
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