The safety beacon of the present invention includes an arrangement of light emitting diodes controlled by a controller circuit and preferably powered by a rechargeable battery source. The apparatus includes a multi-state routing network comprising wiring to route a video sample stream. The engine includes a cylinder, a spark plug, and a muffler. The ancillary boot blocks can be virtually hardware locked using a programmable technique. The global object ID can be part of a multilevel object handle, which also can include a location ID indicating the specific location at which the data object is stored, and a policy ID identifying a set of data management policies associated with the data object.