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This article is just a little interesting. In fact the NG911 is being worked out and will eventually developed. http://www.911dispatch.com/911/nextgen_911.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Next_Generation_9-1-1

For someone with a sneering tone about someone else, you really have an astonishingly tiny brain. Dispatchers *are* the people who answer 911. They answer the 911 calls and then "dispatch" the firefighters or police officers to the scene. You can read all about it here:
http://www.911dispatch.com/jobs/JobDescriptions.html

Its the american 911 system that I find odd , it just seems to be a number chosen at random or perhaps as a left over dial code.

In the states, dialing the operator, dialing "0," in an emergency was drilled into kids for the better part of one hundred years.

"911" was easily recognized by AT&T's switching logic as needing special handling. The History of 911

The "9" may have been suggested by the British "999" system adopted in 1937.

You seem to think it's somehow natural that 911 should be used.

911 was not the first number used, nor was the US the first country to use such a system. 911 was only announced as the number in 1968.

http://www.911dispatch.com/911/history/

All new cell phones in the U.S. produced 2005 and beyond are reading real GPS satellite signals, noting your location, and transmitting it to the cell phone company. A 2001 federal law mandates the GPS. You cannot opt out.

Linky..?

This seems to contradict your statement, is all (assuming it's the same law/regulation under discussion).

Well, it looks like /. is definitely now working to reduce those numbers further...

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=181150&cid=149 84537

That said, the 5% reale-emergency statistic seems awfully low. However, I'm sure 911 does get a lot of general "I need the police because my car was stolen" type calls.

In some municipalities there is NO other number other than 911 to reach police at. Case in point, baltimore, prior to implementing 311 as a non-emergency number:
http://www.911dispatch.com/info/311_page.html

However, even the above website, reporting on a city which had NO other way to reach police (not even an ordinary telephone number!) there was still only 60% non-emergency call volume.

Part of me wonders if there's a discrepancy here because of a third category.. "dropped call"...

A breakdown like this might not be too unrealistic in some areas:

5% answered, emergency
35% unanswered due to overloaded lines
60% answered, non-emergency

However, I'd be a little surprised if any area had 5% of it's answered calls as emergencies and 95% of the answered calls being non-emergency.. That's kind of crazy high.

Now I do see one reference that says "depending on time and locality, from 20 to 95 percent of calls to 911 are nonemergency calls".. However, that's also "depending on time"...

I can certainly see there being some random days that it gets as high as 95%... But not a sustained average of 95%...

http://changela.com/oped_311.htm

...like the new rules governing safety at sea which followed the sinking of the Titanic?

What "we all know" is often wrong.

In any event, 911 and its predecessors have been around for quite some time now. The first 999 emergency call was made in Britain in 1937, the first 999 call in North America, in Winnepeg, in 1959, the first 911 call in the U.S. in 1968. The History of 911

You have be close to fifty years old to clearly remember a time when 911 did not exist.

Who are "The 911" people? Do you have any idea how 911 works?

Educate thyself, brother: http://www.911dispatch.com/911_file/history/911his tory.html. Scroll to the bottom for more info.

:)

Yes.

Enhanced 911 Services, or 911 trunks to each PSAP in markets served by $VoIP_Company both solve this problem. Neither is manditory, but many providers offer it to achieve parity with POTS features.

E911 is not just for wireless anymore. Here's another good link:

http://www.911dispatch.com/information/voip.html

911 does have other meanings... In the US, 911 is the phone number to call in the event of an emergency (ie, need the police, the fire dept, an ambulence, etc), and has been for over 35 years...

http://www.911dispatch.com/911_file/history/911his tory.html

oh, and by the way... its a star wars (Obi-Wan Kenobi, episode IV) reference, not a matrix reference.

Federal Law requires the telcos to provide dial tone and 911 service even if the customer is not a customer i.e. not paying. Any phone that has dial tone does have 911 access.

So turn off the telco and make use of that bandwidth.

-Telco Socialist Tax free since 2003-

I was raised in rural MS, where we only received 911 service a few years ago, after the phone company got the OK to charge us $1 per month, per phone bill, to cover the cost. The government refused to pay for the unnecessary feature, citing the relatively low number of crimes or emergencies that would be serviced by such a number.

It's a service most /.'s would never imagine having, yet I'll bet rural Mississippi is not the only place in the nation that self-pays for 911 service, and rather happily did without it for many years and gripped to no end when it was added to their bill.

This suggests two points counter to our progressive /.ers--first, it's not a necessary service--necessary is in the eye of the beholder, at least in this case. Second, it's not always funded by the government nor does the government even care to fund it in some circumstances.

For an interesting history of 911-ish systems, see: http://www.911dispatch.com/911_file/history/911his tory.html

That means '911' takes more time to dial then '112'. My god, and the English picked '999'.

Check them out here.

The small town of Wallendorf (on the right wing ), located across the Luxembourg-German border on the confluence point of the Sûre (Sauer) and Our rivers, made the headlines in the wire services and the press, when shortly after the first U.S. troops had reached the borders of the "Third Reich" on September 11, 1944, strong elements of CCR (Combat Command R) of the 5th U.S. Armored Division , supported by sub units of the 112th Infantry Regiment (28th U.S. Infantry Division), pierced the "Siegfried" line and pushed in direction of Bitburg (Germany), capturing a number of villages, as of September 14, 1944.

In many communities, there is no non-emergency number for police/fire dispatch. If you call the local station, they will tell you to call 911, because they have centralized all of their assets in the 911 operations center.

Some communities have added a three digit number (311) for non-emergencies. See here for more information.

<a href="http://www.911dispatch.com/web_graphic/graph ic1.html">emergency numbers for different countries</a>

I also think that cyber terrorism is a bad thing

But for now CyberTerrorism is still a fiction, we haven't yet seen any. At most all we've seen is CyberVandalism and CyberPettycrime.

This article brings to mind the hacker crackdown of the late 1980s and early 1990s (Bruce Sterling wrote a fairly good book about this) when the Secret Service was arresting kids for distributing publicly available documents, raiding game publishers and seizing thier computers, and spreading rumor and inuendo about the crash of AT&Ts long distance service that occurred on Martin Luter King Day in 1990.

While the graver danger we face as individuals is the potential loss of our privacy, freedom, civil liberties, and access to (accurate, non-biased) information to an ever growing government/corporate power structure, the media and our elected officials churn out statements such as the Baio's in order to create paranoia and a feeling of powerlessness among the general public, and to engender acceptance of oppressive regulation, control over the distribution of information, and the removal of privacy protections.

The author of the article is helping to set the stage for acceptance of Microsoft's "Trusted Computing" infrastructure, when the real problem is (as it was on MLK day in 1990) the growing monoculture of the internet (and general computing) infrastructure (which in turn is necessary for effective manditory DRM, manditory centralized personal data collection, and un-circumventable user monitoring).