Both Sprint and T-Mobile have been losing subscribers by the bucketloads (only last quarter did Sprint finally turn the corner). The balance sheets of both companies bleed red ink. Sprint's story is especially tragic: they completely bungled the NEXTEL merger, which should have guaranteed them "second place" status. Sprint's heavy investment in WiMAX (via Clear) may only be a long-term win IF the equipment they purchased can be rolled into an LTE deployment as easily as it has been claimed, and there's still a lot of big question marks on how that will look long-term.
Most of the analysts only gave T-Mobile until the end of this year before their German parents pulled the plug. Many of the same analysts are cautious about Sprint's health as a company: while the short term picture looks much better, the company has a serious long-term cash flow problem and a hefty debt service.
There are the bit players: the small PCS providers like Cricket and MetroPCS, the MVNOs like Tracfone, and the few remaining small regional providers (who are also merging left and right). Tracfone is doing okay, but.. MVNO, baby. Everybody else is in a serious debt/cash-flow negative position.
So there aren't four "healthy" players. By the end of 2012, I wouldn't be shocked if we effectively have a duopoly in the United States for cellular coverage.
In all seriousness. DHS would do us all a whole better if they concentrated on conventional "police work" investigations, and less on fancy shit like warrantless wiretaps and X-ray backscatter arrays that don't work.
Our security apparatus had all the details they needed to make the connection before, and failed to see it not because they lacked some fancy algorithm, but people "in charge" didn't listen to the street operatives, and political infighting between organizations: which (hey, guess what Interplanet Janet!) DHS' very existance was supposed to solve.
So what she's saying is, "we suck, give us more money." Sorry, fix what you have first, Janet.
Increasingly, there aren't enough ham radio operators in some areas to really depend upon when the fit hits the shan.
I've seen it in my own community here in Oregon. The RACES/ARES group that helps out at our Renaissance Faire with emergency comms now does not have enough healthy bodies to man a station 24 hours a day for three days. And you can't get enough young people interested: it's worth noting that between myself and a handful of other young folk, there are more hams on the staff of this Faire than the emergency comms group has in its active membership (side note: I'd be a volunteer for this emergency comms group, but I live 80 miles away). But we're too busy actually doing Faire things to have our hands on radios... we can barely keep up with our "day jobs" on site and the radio traffic relevant to our immediate Faire Guild.
The past few disasters locally have largely been worked by a handful of dedicated hams, many of them working to exhaustion. As these men (many of whom are in their 60s or older) age, their ability to man a radio for 16 hours a day is rapidly declining. Soon, there may not be enough active, well trained hams with ready-to-go equipment to respond.
If you are a tech geek and don't have a license, get one. If you have a license and don't have at least a "scram kit" with at least an HT and some basic tools for building antennas, making electroncis repairs, and a couple of good maps (plus all the "usual" recommended disaster supplies) you are part of the problem.
"Losers weepers; finders keepers." "Posession is nine-tenths of the laws," and so on. Balls thrown into my yard become my property - same applies with GPS devices found in my driveway.
I hope for your sake you aren't a lawyer, because the law says differently. It technically becomes "abandoned property", and depending on the state there are obligations you must fulfill before it is legally "yours."
5b) Employee sues employer, but employer points out that employee was only fired after refusing a reasonable check, so the whole "can they demand your facebook login and/or fire you if you don't provide it" issue would not be handled in court.
A lot would depend on the venue that would hear the case, but I don't think it's that simple.
The fact that you agree in specificity to Facebook's User Agreement, which clearly states that you will not disclose your password to anybody else, creates a point of controversy over your termination that would at minimum require a hearing. You would state clearly in your filing that your employer asked you to violate a legal agreement that you had with a third party (that the employer was not a party to and was separate from your employment), and your termination was unjust. In just about every state I've ever read the case law in, an employer cannot terminate you solely on you refusing to comply with act that is contrary to the law or legal agreement. As a result of this (as both "trespass of chattel" [as your agreement with Facebook involves your intelectual property] and "estoppel" violations of your agreement with Facebook), even a bad lawyer could write up a pretty good filing that the actions of the employer terminating you over refusal to violate your agreement with Facebook that would probably result in an injunction restoring your position while the case is argued.
IANAL. But I think to simply dismiss this with a handwave is not how this would go down, unless the employee did not have adequate legal representation. Any two-bit lawyer could create enough "legal controversy" just on these issues alone to ensure a nice, expensive, and probably "unwinnable" lawsuit.
I actually grew up in Anaheim. And I often ditched class. If I was a kid today in Anaheim, I'd probably have one of these devices.
Funny. I'm a fully functional member of society, making a good wage and don't have so much as a traffic ticket on my record.
This has more to do with revenue, I'd gather. I understand that in California school districts get so much money for each student that's in class each day. Kid doesn't come to school, school doesn't get paid.
I tried to read it. I got about 30 pages into Dreamweaver's Dilemma (the compilation containing the short story of the same name) and literally fell asleep in my easy chair. (irony: it's the only book of his NOT published by Baen)
It wasn't a bad story, and I can perhaps understand why somebody would read it. In the end, I felt it was no better than the average Star Trek pulp, which contains characters I'm already familiar with and "care about."
Yeah, I'm getting old. Increasingly, I don't want to be "bowled over" by my entertainment. Tell me a good compelling story with characters I can identify with, and you'll have me hooked. The Bujold I read just didn't engage me, personally.
The process is not transparent to authors, and requires a small amount of technical savviness.
I know a good number of authors, a few of them you may have even heard of. None of them understand the technology enough to effectively use Amazon's self-publishing platform. Amazon's self-published e-books section are filled with books with typesetting problems. Hell, you could say the same thing about the professionally edited and published books: there are few eBooks I've purchased from Amazon that didn't have some oddity in the typesetting when read on the Kindle.
Even the most piss-poor publishing house offers a lot to an author: editing, illustration, typesetting, and promotion. They get none of that if they self-publish through Amazon.
The average consumer doesn't understand that. The average consumer has already purchased their copy of "Neverending Story" on video tape and now DVD, and is waiting in queue for their copy on BluRay. Yes, they've bought the same movie three times over the last 20 years (four if they paid for a movie ticket).
Yes, you and I know (as geeks) that today's current crop of monochrome-display eInk readers are almost identical to tomorrow's crop of color display ones, or today's tablets. Being as the latter can run Kindle/nook/Border's store, that's not a big issue.
Most people don't honestly care about library retention, and they never have in any other mass electronic medium to any large degree. Most consumers expect tomorrow's technology to not play today's media. Very few consumers who invested in large Laserdisc libraries yelled very loudly when they had to repurchase their libraries on DVD.
Plain text eBooks (or ones using open unDRMed formats) represent a threat. However, book publishers have found a way to have their cake and eat it too with DRM.
Through DRM, they eliminate the used market and lending, make it a challenge to share, and through obsolescence of the hardware will "get old and fall apart." Also, authors can't self-publish as easily, because while there's nothing stopping anybody from making a.mobi file that will load on just about everybody's platform, it won't have any of the DRM protections and none of the distribution advantage.
With DRM, eBook readers are a publisher's wet dream./Disclaimer: I actually own and read books on a Kindle. I'm part of the problem.
A lot of Baen's catalog is dry, hard sci-fi and fantasy, and a lot of it is sold in used bookstores for 25 cents to $1 a copy.
There's not a lot in Baen's catalog I'd really be interested in reading as a casual sci-fi/fantasy reader. Most of their stuff I find to be impenetrable and/or very dry reading. I'm sure the hardcore fan base will mod this down, but there's a lot to be said for "Baen's content is DRMed by being completely inaccessible to the mass market."
I've "opted out" on Comcast, and yet if I use their DNS servers I still get Comcast's crappy page about 10% of the time. Nobody at Comcast can even figure out what the problem is, let alone fix it.
I gave up and just started resolving against Google.
Where I presently live, there is no DSL-based service available, only cable modem. If you are fortunate to live on the right side of the building, you can get Clear's WiMAX service, but that has issues.
While I can't say it takes two minutes, the handoff between the WiMAX network and 3G is very rough.
For starters, since they're literally two separate networks, you will lose any open TCP connections because the IP address changes. If you are in a marginal 4G coverage area, you can have it bounce between the (poor) 4G signal and 3G network. The Overdrive hotspot has settings for fine-tuning how quickly it will try to switch and how often, but most of the time unless I'm in a known-strong 4G coverage area it's better to just lock the device at 3G and not even let it try to swap. Similarly, if you're in a strong 4G area the reverse is true.
Secondarily, I have nothing but problems trying to use any Sprint 4G device in Seattle. Both my hotspot and my Evo 4G phone do weird things (often crashing entirely), but only in that market (I've had no trouble in other markets, especially my home market of Portland). The Evo 4G will actually crash about 20% of the time I switch the 4G on up there.
I think that they really need to work on making the two networks as seamless as possible. I know that's not going to be easy from a technical perspective, but it kinda shows that the technology is not quite ready for prime time.
Yes, for VOICE CELL PHONE calls it will typically route you to the designated PSAP for CELLULAR phones in the geographical area the cell tower(s) that handled the call are in.
However, SMS messages don't work the same way as cell phone calls. They are, in fact, handled differently by the network, and devices other than cell phones can originate SMS messages (such as E-mail gateways and VoIP devices). In that case, a hypothetical E911 SMS network would need to make a determination as to what type of device originated the message (completely feasable, BTW) and make decisions based upon the best likely route for the call ("fixed" VoIP device = local PSAP, cellular device = cellular PSAP). It is likely that the state-level regulatory body would make those rules.
Note that almost all cellular E911 calls are routed to a state police agency or a large county sheriff's office, not necessarily the same place a landline E911 call would land. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but almost everywhere I've ever worked with this is the case. In most situations, the state/county dispatcher has the ability to either directly dispatch or get a local agency dispatcher on the line within seconds.
DISCLAIMER: I have actually integrated E911 solutions on both VoIP and landline networks, and this is oversimplified. It varies widely depending on local jurisdictions and tariffs. Even two landline companies operating in the same city might have different E911 handling rules...
Also, googie is only deleting the payload data. I do not believe that Google is in fact deleting ALL the information, such as the geolocation information, just the PAYLOAD data that it did not intend to collect.
Google isn't the only source for that data, nor is it the source most people use.
And my practical experience is that cell phone triangulation, at least in the United States on CDMA networks, is in fact accurate enough to provide +-100 ft. targeting, which is more than precise enough for E911's purposes.
You do realize that E911 has to know the phone number to know what dispatch center to route the "call" to. So, I suspect that it would likely cause a different problem: if you texted 911 from a phantom number, the text would simply be dropped because it would not know how to route the call.
Slashdot Mirror
"Healthy" players?
Both Sprint and T-Mobile have been losing subscribers by the bucketloads (only last quarter did Sprint finally turn the corner). The balance sheets of both companies bleed red ink. Sprint's story is especially tragic: they completely bungled the NEXTEL merger, which should have guaranteed them "second place" status. Sprint's heavy investment in WiMAX (via Clear) may only be a long-term win IF the equipment they purchased can be rolled into an LTE deployment as easily as it has been claimed, and there's still a lot of big question marks on how that will look long-term.
Most of the analysts only gave T-Mobile until the end of this year before their German parents pulled the plug. Many of the same analysts are cautious about Sprint's health as a company: while the short term picture looks much better, the company has a serious long-term cash flow problem and a hefty debt service.
There are the bit players: the small PCS providers like Cricket and MetroPCS, the MVNOs like Tracfone, and the few remaining small regional providers (who are also merging left and right). Tracfone is doing okay, but.. MVNO, baby. Everybody else is in a serious debt/cash-flow negative position.
So there aren't four "healthy" players. By the end of 2012, I wouldn't be shocked if we effectively have a duopoly in the United States for cellular coverage.
Actually, while Sprint (via their part-ownership of Clear) has WiMAX, Sprint's CEO has stated quite clearly that the future is LTE, even for Sprint.
In all seriousness. DHS would do us all a whole better if they concentrated on conventional "police work" investigations, and less on fancy shit like warrantless wiretaps and X-ray backscatter arrays that don't work.
Our security apparatus had all the details they needed to make the connection before, and failed to see it not because they lacked some fancy algorithm, but people "in charge" didn't listen to the street operatives, and political infighting between organizations: which (hey, guess what Interplanet Janet!) DHS' very existance was supposed to solve.
So what she's saying is, "we suck, give us more money." Sorry, fix what you have first, Janet.
I wouldn't defend WiMAX so strongly. We're all going to be on LTE eventually, even Sprint.
Increasingly, there aren't enough ham radio operators in some areas to really depend upon when the fit hits the shan.
I've seen it in my own community here in Oregon. The RACES/ARES group that helps out at our Renaissance Faire with emergency comms now does not have enough healthy bodies to man a station 24 hours a day for three days. And you can't get enough young people interested: it's worth noting that between myself and a handful of other young folk, there are more hams on the staff of this Faire than the emergency comms group has in its active membership (side note: I'd be a volunteer for this emergency comms group, but I live 80 miles away). But we're too busy actually doing Faire things to have our hands on radios... we can barely keep up with our "day jobs" on site and the radio traffic relevant to our immediate Faire Guild.
The past few disasters locally have largely been worked by a handful of dedicated hams, many of them working to exhaustion. As these men (many of whom are in their 60s or older) age, their ability to man a radio for 16 hours a day is rapidly declining. Soon, there may not be enough active, well trained hams with ready-to-go equipment to respond.
If you are a tech geek and don't have a license, get one. If you have a license and don't have at least a "scram kit" with at least an HT and some basic tools for building antennas, making electroncis repairs, and a couple of good maps (plus all the "usual" recommended disaster supplies) you are part of the problem.
(N0DOS)
"Losers weepers; finders keepers." "Posession is nine-tenths of the laws," and so on. Balls thrown into my yard become my property - same applies with GPS devices found in my driveway.
I hope for your sake you aren't a lawyer, because the law says differently. It technically becomes "abandoned property", and depending on the state there are obligations you must fulfill before it is legally "yours."
5b) Employee sues employer, but employer points out that employee was only fired after refusing a reasonable check, so the whole "can they demand your facebook login and/or fire you if you don't provide it" issue would not be handled in court.
A lot would depend on the venue that would hear the case, but I don't think it's that simple.
The fact that you agree in specificity to Facebook's User Agreement, which clearly states that you will not disclose your password to anybody else, creates a point of controversy over your termination that would at minimum require a hearing. You would state clearly in your filing that your employer asked you to violate a legal agreement that you had with a third party (that the employer was not a party to and was separate from your employment), and your termination was unjust. In just about every state I've ever read the case law in, an employer cannot terminate you solely on you refusing to comply with act that is contrary to the law or legal agreement. As a result of this (as both "trespass of chattel" [as your agreement with Facebook involves your intelectual property] and "estoppel" violations of your agreement with Facebook), even a bad lawyer could write up a pretty good filing that the actions of the employer terminating you over refusal to violate your agreement with Facebook that would probably result in an injunction restoring your position while the case is argued.
IANAL. But I think to simply dismiss this with a handwave is not how this would go down, unless the employee did not have adequate legal representation. Any two-bit lawyer could create enough "legal controversy" just on these issues alone to ensure a nice, expensive, and probably "unwinnable" lawsuit.
I actually grew up in Anaheim. And I often ditched class. If I was a kid today in Anaheim, I'd probably have one of these devices.
Funny. I'm a fully functional member of society, making a good wage and don't have so much as a traffic ticket on my record.
This has more to do with revenue, I'd gather. I understand that in California school districts get so much money for each student that's in class each day. Kid doesn't come to school, school doesn't get paid.
By most First World democracies standards: the use and application of the death penalty is a great example.
I tried to read it. I got about 30 pages into Dreamweaver's Dilemma (the compilation containing the short story of the same name) and literally fell asleep in my easy chair. (irony: it's the only book of his NOT published by Baen)
It wasn't a bad story, and I can perhaps understand why somebody would read it. In the end, I felt it was no better than the average Star Trek pulp, which contains characters I'm already familiar with and "care about."
Yeah, I'm getting old. Increasingly, I don't want to be "bowled over" by my entertainment. Tell me a good compelling story with characters I can identify with, and you'll have me hooked. The Bujold I read just didn't engage me, personally.
The process is not transparent to authors, and requires a small amount of technical savviness.
I know a good number of authors, a few of them you may have even heard of. None of them understand the technology enough to effectively use Amazon's self-publishing platform. Amazon's self-published e-books section are filled with books with typesetting problems. Hell, you could say the same thing about the professionally edited and published books: there are few eBooks I've purchased from Amazon that didn't have some oddity in the typesetting when read on the Kindle.
Even the most piss-poor publishing house offers a lot to an author: editing, illustration, typesetting, and promotion. They get none of that if they self-publish through Amazon.
The average consumer doesn't understand that. The average consumer has already purchased their copy of "Neverending Story" on video tape and now DVD, and is waiting in queue for their copy on BluRay. Yes, they've bought the same movie three times over the last 20 years (four if they paid for a movie ticket).
Yes, you and I know (as geeks) that today's current crop of monochrome-display eInk readers are almost identical to tomorrow's crop of color display ones, or today's tablets. Being as the latter can run Kindle/nook/Border's store, that's not a big issue.
Most people don't honestly care about library retention, and they never have in any other mass electronic medium to any large degree. Most consumers expect tomorrow's technology to not play today's media. Very few consumers who invested in large Laserdisc libraries yelled very loudly when they had to repurchase their libraries on DVD.
You might be looking at the wrong end of the dog.
Plain text eBooks (or ones using open unDRMed formats) represent a threat. However, book publishers have found a way to have their cake and eat it too with DRM.
Through DRM, they eliminate the used market and lending, make it a challenge to share, and through obsolescence of the hardware will "get old and fall apart." Also, authors can't self-publish as easily, because while there's nothing stopping anybody from making a .mobi file that will load on just about everybody's platform, it won't have any of the DRM protections and none of the distribution advantage.
With DRM, eBook readers are a publisher's wet dream. /Disclaimer: I actually own and read books on a Kindle. I'm part of the problem.
Came here to say exactly this.
A lot of Baen's catalog is dry, hard sci-fi and fantasy, and a lot of it is sold in used bookstores for 25 cents to $1 a copy.
There's not a lot in Baen's catalog I'd really be interested in reading as a casual sci-fi/fantasy reader. Most of their stuff I find to be impenetrable and/or very dry reading. I'm sure the hardcore fan base will mod this down, but there's a lot to be said for "Baen's content is DRMed by being completely inaccessible to the mass market."
I've "opted out" on Comcast, and yet if I use their DNS servers I still get Comcast's crappy page about 10% of the time. Nobody at Comcast can even figure out what the problem is, let alone fix it.
I gave up and just started resolving against Google.
Believe it or not, sometimes you have no choice.
Where I presently live, there is no DSL-based service available, only cable modem. If you are fortunate to live on the right side of the building, you can get Clear's WiMAX service, but that has issues.
Imagine that. A man who was convicted of several felonies, one of them obstruction of justice, is... obstructing justice.
Except, by all indications, Tron Legacy has been a financial success for Disney.
There goes your theory.
Gee. That sounds exactly like what happened to the US telecom market.
While I can't say it takes two minutes, the handoff between the WiMAX network and 3G is very rough.
For starters, since they're literally two separate networks, you will lose any open TCP connections because the IP address changes. If you are in a marginal 4G coverage area, you can have it bounce between the (poor) 4G signal and 3G network. The Overdrive hotspot has settings for fine-tuning how quickly it will try to switch and how often, but most of the time unless I'm in a known-strong 4G coverage area it's better to just lock the device at 3G and not even let it try to swap. Similarly, if you're in a strong 4G area the reverse is true.
Secondarily, I have nothing but problems trying to use any Sprint 4G device in Seattle. Both my hotspot and my Evo 4G phone do weird things (often crashing entirely), but only in that market (I've had no trouble in other markets, especially my home market of Portland). The Evo 4G will actually crash about 20% of the time I switch the 4G on up there.
I think that they really need to work on making the two networks as seamless as possible. I know that's not going to be easy from a technical perspective, but it kinda shows that the technology is not quite ready for prime time.
There are other companies doing what PayPal does. Squareup and Google Checkout just to name two.
Nobody _HAS_ to use PayPal.
Yes, for VOICE CELL PHONE calls it will typically route you to the designated PSAP for CELLULAR phones in the geographical area the cell tower(s) that handled the call are in.
However, SMS messages don't work the same way as cell phone calls. They are, in fact, handled differently by the network, and devices other than cell phones can originate SMS messages (such as E-mail gateways and VoIP devices). In that case, a hypothetical E911 SMS network would need to make a determination as to what type of device originated the message (completely feasable, BTW) and make decisions based upon the best likely route for the call ("fixed" VoIP device = local PSAP, cellular device = cellular PSAP). It is likely that the state-level regulatory body would make those rules.
Note that almost all cellular E911 calls are routed to a state police agency or a large county sheriff's office, not necessarily the same place a landline E911 call would land. There are a few exceptions to this rule, but almost everywhere I've ever worked with this is the case. In most situations, the state/county dispatcher has the ability to either directly dispatch or get a local agency dispatcher on the line within seconds.
DISCLAIMER: I have actually integrated E911 solutions on both VoIP and landline networks, and this is oversimplified. It varies widely depending on local jurisdictions and tariffs. Even two landline companies operating in the same city might have different E911 handling rules...
Also, googie is only deleting the payload data. I do not believe that Google is in fact deleting ALL the information, such as the geolocation information, just the PAYLOAD data that it did not intend to collect.
Google isn't the only source for that data, nor is it the source most people use.
And my practical experience is that cell phone triangulation, at least in the United States on CDMA networks, is in fact accurate enough to provide +-100 ft. targeting, which is more than precise enough for E911's purposes.
You do realize that E911 has to know the phone number to know what dispatch center to route the "call" to. So, I suspect that it would likely cause a different problem: if you texted 911 from a phantom number, the text would simply be dropped because it would not know how to route the call.