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UK Government to Shut Down GSM Networks
An anonymous reader writes "Mobile Gazette is reporting that the British government wants to shut down the UK's GSM networks next year and re-use the frequencies for gambling terminals and a new citizen surveillance program extending the use of the new compulsory ID cards. Although we should perhaps welcome the move away from old-style 2G mobile phone networks, there are perhaps a few worrying things about the new "Big Brother" citizen monitoring that the government is proposing to put in."
Or someone needs to go V for Vendetta on those guys.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
good way to show how much you know about the UK.... firstly, we do not have an American flag as a representation of our government (that's only for a section of North America), secondly due to British summer time (that's right, we made a system of time that the rest of the world falls around and then opted out) its gone 12 noon and as such april fools day jokes are redundant (owing to the custom of stopping at noon)... tut tut tut.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
Funny, I don't remember anything too obvious or lame on 4th of January this year.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
This has to be another april fools joke.....
Access Point Live Mapping Access Points with Google
I know this is Truthday, and Big Brother tells me the Prollies will love this doubleplusalot.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
The worrying thing is, I didn't bat an eyelid, and totally expected this from my government, until I got to the comments reminding me that it was April Fools Day... (Despite a full knowledege that it was April Fools Day, when I saw the words UK and Government in the same sentance I entered paranoia mode)
My 3D Texturing Skinning work (under construction)
Me neither, grandparent poster? What are you on about?
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
Ha Ha! This is an American based website. You may not have known that in America, people commonly say April 1st, or shorten that to 4/1. This is also the convention used in China, India, and throughout most of the world.
This is exactly the kind of garbage that our government are enacting, if there was a joke, I must have missed it.
They'll never beat the ol' Spaghetti Tree Hoax of '57...
a pril/1/newsid_2819000/2819261.stm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/
Apparently the supermarkets sold out for fear of a shortage.
yep. I think I'll go back to bed until tomorrow.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
So it isn't true?
Damn, 8th time that happened to me today
Throughout most of the world? Like in Iraq and Afghanistan? Duhamerica != most of the world. Troll.
Ha ha! Aren't you smug... and wrong! I'm not sure about China, but in India it would would always be written 1/4, and not the other way round.
It's you... because as far as I know, it's not the 4th of January in the UK.
return 0; }
April First is "No news day".
Don't listen to this Eurasian spy, comrades! I saw him reading Goldstein!! I saw him with my own eyes! Don't let him get away, comrades!
Stop it.
April Fools Day is a nice, fun day on which you can be irreverant. It's fun to say or publish something that seems plausible, slipped in amongst everything else, and see how many people fall for it. That's great, it's traditional, it's a fun thing to do.
This is beyond stupid. No-one with half a brain in their head would fall for this. Everyone in the UK has a mobile phone. (Ok, not everyone, but those who don't are negligible in number compared to those who do) There have been BBC news stories about mobiles marketed at five year olds for fuck's sake, that's how saturated the market is here.
There are currently tens of millions of GMS phones in daily use in the UK. It will be practically impossible to switch off the network for a good few years yet. Hell, cable and satellite TV has been around for a decade or more, digital broadcasts have been available for free (yes, yes, licence fee, whatever) for anyone with a compatible TV or (cheap) set-top box for years, and still we can't switch off analogue TV broadcasts yet because too many people rely on them. The situation is exactly the same for phones.
As I say, April Fool's Day is fun. But you're meant to run with one or two plausible-sounding stories, not a glut of them all so far out as to be instantly recognisable. I appreciate that slashdot is essentially a news aggregation service, but that doesn't mean that you have to aggregate all the jokes.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
subject.
It's a boring game called "find the real news". It's probably better to stay away from all media and take the day off. April fools is so silly.
Of course not! India has always been using the dd/mm/yyyy format, and 4/1 means 4th of January.
It is true that in China, 4/1 means 1th of April, but that's because they use the yyyy-mm-dd format, which is a logical order (most significant–least significant), unlike your American mm-dd-yyyy order which makes no sense.
The ISO standard (ISO 8601) is to use yyyy-mm-dd (as you see in dates on Slashdot and all websites that actually realise it's the World Wide Web).
To prevent ambiguity, it is best to spell out the name of the month in full, when you are not specifying the year, and there is no way of telling whether month/date or date/month is being used.
Just for the record, I know for a fact that China is always Month/day, living here and all (here's an example. And I've seen the month/day used in India, you can see an example of such here.
a "stupid" moderation option ? I would love to just for once, mod people stupid when they actually reply seriously on any story on slashdot today. Please Taco ? (Jupp, this reply could also be seen as a "serious" reply, but bear with me)
Doolittle :
Bomb no.20 : To explode of course.
No one is giving us any karma :(
It wouldn't surprise me if I saw this story in a couple of years time, but not on april fool's day. We really are the lobsters slowly being boiled.
If you're going to make up an April Fools hoax at least make it remotely plausible. Only a total muppet could believe this story.
oKAy HeReZ tHe pLAn kiDzZzZz: We pReTenD tHiS iSn't aN aPRiL FooLz JoKe. GoT iT??
Stopping at noon? That sounds like and April fools joke. Here in the states, April fools lasts all day. Not everyone can get their fool on by Noon.
And to quote Alan Jackson, "It's five o'clock somewhere." So at a minimum, us GMT-5 folks could get another joke on until it's 5am in the UK. And at a max, we could follow our western most time zone at GMT-10 in Hawaii and get one more fool in when you're having your April 2nd morning tea.
The pirate says, "Aaaaarrgh!"
Peace and Hare Grease
No, really, that should be the new standard.
+5 insightful
Ha Ha! This is a story about the UK.
The title was believable. Well... I belived it :(
doesn't tagging a story april fools kind of give it away.
come on... British are miles behind... In America the Big Brother system work 25/8 and there aro no GSM phones... Only GTA (General Theft Audible)
http://polaralex.blogspot.com http://www.polaralex.tk *Define Reality*..*
And follow the link at the bottom!
Kernel Krunch - Part of a Complete OS
How do you pronounce that exactly? 1th of April? Sounds like a tard with a lisp trying to say once of april.
Throughout most of the world? Like in Iraq and Afghanistan? Duhamerica != most of the world. Troll.
If it included those, then it would been all of the world.
" [+] aprilfools, uk, gay, bigbrother, lame (tagging beta)"
this kinda defeats the purpose of making a joke... at least hide the beta tags for today.
root@127.0.0.1
I like the new design, but then again, I also thought it was funny to fill water balloons with urine.
This is just like that famous book, Fahrenheit 1987 by Joel Chandler Harris.
/.
I love it when governments get ideas from my favorite Sci Fi! But I think a lot of other people on slashdot really like that book, so I'm sure I'm not the only one who can't wait for this to become a reality!
Ok, gotta run, my gf is calling me back to bed...
--
Happy AF
> And I've seen the month/day used in India, you can see an example of such here.
That's because Indiatimes Blogs haven't configured their system properly. Many Indian PCs (and servers) use the en-us locale (including mm/dd dates and $ as the currency symbol) because Windows even upto XP SP2 does not have a English en-in preset locale -- so most people end up using the US locale since the English edition is most widely sold there, and en-us is the default.
Most Indians can deal with mm/dd dates on their directory listings but the country does use dd/mm -- show 4/1/2006 to any Indian and he'll think of 4th Jan first.
Why are we even here.. this gets old fast.
And pink? Dear god.. hell of a color to wake up to in the morning.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Has officially jumped the shark.
"Obscenity is the crutch of the inarticulate motherfucker." - cloak42
>lobsters slowly being boiled.
you're thinking of frogs, dude. lobsters don't get slowly boiled, they get thrown right in the pan of boiling water.
frogs, however, apparently don't notice they're being boiled if you turn the heat up on them very slowly. hence the expression 'like a frog in a pot'.
my password really is 'stinkypants'
April fool's day is a good day to bury bad news.
-- Cheer, Cheer, The Red and the White.
One example of this is the Texas State lottery, which exist under the guise of increasing funding to education. Of course funding for education, as a percentage of the Texas budget, has fallen considerable over the past 15 years even as lottery revenue has grown. So what is the new proposal? Well a official named Strayhorn want gambling machines. Now this is the lady that attempted to start the process of a state religion for Texas by attempting to rescind the tax exempt status of a church, the denomination of which has existed from the birth of the United States and in many ways reflects the values of our founding fathers, as many of these men had input in it's creation. Combine this with the fact that the demonination has no profit motive, unlike the megachurches that infest Texas, and one wonders if Strayhorn is primarily concerned with well being of the average Texan or the a personal campaign of religious zelotry in which those that disagree with her liberal view of gambling are ignored.
To be clear I am not concerned if people gamble or not. I do not see how we can justify lottery machines in an time when we no longer have cig machines. How can one say that we can enforce the 18+ limit on tickets any more that cigs? I am not sure that having gambling machines in every corner is a net benifit. Like illegal drugs it take money to feed the habit. But, at the end of the day, in a capatilist conservative country like ours, built on a the standards of minimal government and private enterprise, I suppose the government is in the best position to effecintly run a gambling bussiness.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Margaret Thatcher, former UK PM, is believed to be behind the plot to shut down GSM netwroks in the UK. We've received word that Miss Thatcher is apparently doing this after years of planning -- since her impeachment -- to get back at the british public, and further her goal to start her own fashionable cellular phone company... Ass. Press 2006
I know everything, I just don't remember it all..
Blair lied, cellphones died!
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
That it didn't even occur to me that it culd possibly be a joke at first because it is so in line with the escalating kind of behavior we're seeing from western fascist leaning governments these days.
/. got me.
What can I say...
I had an American Maths teacher in high school, and he got caught out by this. The class was after lunchtime, and a member of staff had come in and told him something rather implausible that was actually true. He didn't believe it, and thought it was an April Fool. Trying to persuade him that it finished at noon was rather difficult.
This story is a somewhat less worrying than the Government's compulsory weighing and enforced fitness regime that is under discussion. Seems that many kids of an age to be called up are too fat and wouldn't be able to handle the assault course at boot camp. Each school / college is to provide a list of overweight students on request.
The UK thing is that if you are unprepared enough not to have played your joke before 12 noon, then you are yourself the fool.
Its all part of the tradition here in the UK, and why breakfast jokes are some of the most common, ie switching the salt and sugar and watching some poor b*stard spit their salty coffee. Mwahahahah!
Look it up on WikiPedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/April_fool
OrionRobots.co.uk - Robots From sol
I love the 'lame' tag! Sums the whole story up really.
spoonerize "magic trackpad"
Nonsense. Middle-endian dates are pretty much unique to the USA (which despite what some of the inhabitants seem to think is not "most of the world").
Apart from the USA, the rest of the world uses either DD-MM-YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD, both of which are much more sensible than the USA format.
APRIL FOOLS!
sic
Stopping at noon? That sounds like and April fools joke. Here in the states, April fools lasts all day. Not everyone can get their fool on by Noon.
Actually April Fool's Day is now held on April 3rd, in line with new EU standards. Didn't you see that on the news yesterday?
Please dont give those brain dead pratts any more ideas it's already living hell dealing with the constant dog shite that erupts every time one of them TRY'S to think (note i did say try's ) the best April fools day gift would be total ,economic scroungers (yes that means you the poeple that try to slip in the back door front door side door and get paid once they get in leaving people like me dissabled by one of the aforementioned life forms with nowt to live on but a few handouts .. thanks pal.
thermo necular(SP) evaporation of the entire Labour party and all it's hangers one
Pete .
If you don't believe me feel free to click on the links posted above. Or perhaps talking out of your ass is more informative?
"switching the salt and sugar"
You Limeys sure have some real original AF jokes. Wow. Switching the salt and sugar. That's the most imaginative thing that I've ever heard. It beats replacing a co-worker's Vaseline Intensive Care with yellow wood glue hands down.