Right, but I was responding to Just Asking Questions who said that it seemed like a lot of work for a small payoff; my point being that the payoff may be a large financial payoff rather than just the satisfaction of pranking a few thieves.
This is what he does. If you look at the other videos on his page, many of them are very large projects that I’m sure take a lot of time/engineering/money to get done.
I understand the visceral satisfaction of seeing a thief getting what’s coming to him, but I can’t get behind this. There’s a reason why booby traps are illegal – because you can’t be sure that an innocent party won’t be harmed. What if the thief is the passenger in a moving car and sets this off, causing the driver to plow into oncoming traffic? That seems like a significant possibility, given how these jackasses seem to work in teams.
More importantly, the video and the entirely positive reception it’s getting is likely to encourage other, dumber package vigilantes to cook up their own exploding boxes. I doubt that the imitators will have the same NASA engineering background.
Am I the only one that feels like this is fake? The engineering seems solid but it would only work if you have the box upright and slide it open in a very specific manner otherwise it would spill not launch. Except for the one time it worked perfectly and the cameras remained in a perfectly upright position to get the best shot.
I thought it might be, too. The images looked too pat, too perfect. Nothing you could quantify, but it looked “off”.
And in answer to the question, what else would he be doing? How about designing another Mars probe?
When it comes to viral videos I trust my gut. When something feels off it almost always is.
I think that’s a tribute to the design. The packaging is a sleeve outside a box. Opening one of those naturally leads to you set the box upright, pull the sleeve upwards and let gravity do the rest.
We also don’t know if there were any other complete failures that he didn’t include.
I’m not saying I’d be shocked it was fake, but I also don’t see the reason for skepticism.
The dartboard that calculates the trajectory of your dart and moves itself to give you an automatic bullseye all in the time it takes the dart to hit the board is pretty inspired, actually. A few points deducted for using a commercial motion capture solution instead of rolling his own, but still.
At least some of Loach’s suspicions were valid. Internet sleuths have picked apart the video and determined that at least some of the “thieves” were actually friends or neighbors. The creator has now edited the video to remove the reactions of a couple of the people, but he says the rest are really truly for realz. :dubious:
And yet, people still believe and support him. A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest, mmm hmm hmm.
This brings to mind the “Thirteenth Strike Rule,” which says, If a clock strikes thirteen, not only is it by itself false, but it casts doubt on the other twelve.
I hate being right all the time. It’s a burden.
But it is a really cool thing he built. I have to give him that. My fear for the guy was that a disgruntled burglar would come back for revenge.
Aw, shoot. Too good (and too satisfying) to be true, I guess.
I don’t think I’d be too concerned about that. People who steal packages from doorsteps are unlikely to be hardcore gangsters; and if I saw that package I’d assume that the guy who designed it would be the type to have surveillance cameras all over the place.
I read his apology. He said that he asked friends to host the package, and in order to compensate them for their time, he would pay them for successful recoveries. It appears one of his friends staged a few incidents to boost returns. He had removed those from the video. I can accept his story. It’s plausible.
It may be that he was worried about the liability of leaving the package for real. That’s also a possibility.
Given that he has posted the plans for building, I’m willing to accept that he did it for real, and one of his friends t took advantage.