The difference being that Sprint's doesn't let you choose a list of phone numbers; rather, it gives you unlimited calling to any mobile phone number (Any MOBILE, Any Time). If most of your calls are going to be to landlines, Sprint's deal won't be very beneficial.
but it's all in unsearchable proprietary code that may or may not have been deleted years ago
In this case, that might not be necessary.
The '985 Patent is a continuation of the '906 patent, and allows websites to add fully-interactive embedded applications to their online offerings through the use of plug-in and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) web development techniques. The Patent Office issued the '985 Patent in October 2009.
Microsoft inventedAJAX in 1999 to be used with Outlook Web Access.
Uh, with 8 million requests in a year I'd say it's already very 1984ish.
Not really. Consider the length of time any one person is tracked is 60 days. You will be making multiple requests for this person's position every hour. Let's say you make 4 requests per hour (one every 15 minutes). In one day you will have already made 96 requests for this one person alone. By 60 days you will have made 5,760 requests. Divided into a little over 8 million requests in 12 months, you have only tracked about 1390 people in a year's time. This is not unrealistic and certainly not horribly 1984ish, although TFA is clearly written to make you think so.
Of course, it's also entirely possible that investigators would prefer a more accurate tracking of a person's movements. Let's say you make 20 requests per hour (one every 3 minutes). You get 480 requests per day over 60 days, meaning 28,800 requests per person. This works out to only 277 people in 12 months.
The actual number of people tracked is probably somewhere between the above results, and finding out that police were able to accurately track a few hundred people's movements in a 12 month period isn't really very exciting.
Wonder if this overrides the '911 only' setting on many handsets?
Even without overriding the "911 only" setting, it is entirely possible to accurately determine a phone's location within a cell to within several hundred meters (see Shakrai's post below). Having location services enabled on the handset only makes the process a little easier.
And if you try to modify/etc/hosts under Linux without admin privileges, you won't get very far either. You will need to elevate your text editor with sudo first. Or on Windows, you can run your editor as an administrative user by using the "Run as administrator" context menu item.
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The difference being that Sprint's doesn't let you choose a list of phone numbers; rather, it gives you unlimited calling to any mobile phone number (Any MOBILE, Any Time). If most of your calls are going to be to landlines, Sprint's deal won't be very beneficial.
but it's all in unsearchable proprietary code that may or may not have been deleted years ago
In this case, that might not be necessary.
The '985 Patent is a continuation of the '906 patent, and allows websites to add fully-interactive embedded applications to their online offerings through the use of plug-in and AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) web development techniques. The Patent Office issued the '985 Patent in October 2009.
Microsoft invented AJAX in 1999 to be used with Outlook Web Access.
Uh, with 8 million requests in a year I'd say it's already very 1984ish.
Not really. Consider the length of time any one person is tracked is 60 days. You will be making multiple requests for this person's position every hour. Let's say you make 4 requests per hour (one every 15 minutes). In one day you will have already made 96 requests for this one person alone. By 60 days you will have made 5,760 requests. Divided into a little over 8 million requests in 12 months, you have only tracked about 1390 people in a year's time. This is not unrealistic and certainly not horribly 1984ish, although TFA is clearly written to make you think so.
Of course, it's also entirely possible that investigators would prefer a more accurate tracking of a person's movements. Let's say you make 20 requests per hour (one every 3 minutes). You get 480 requests per day over 60 days, meaning 28,800 requests per person. This works out to only 277 people in 12 months.
The actual number of people tracked is probably somewhere between the above results, and finding out that police were able to accurately track a few hundred people's movements in a 12 month period isn't really very exciting.
Wonder if this overrides the '911 only' setting on many handsets?
Even without overriding the "911 only" setting, it is entirely possible to accurately determine a phone's location within a cell to within several hundred meters (see Shakrai's post below). Having location services enabled on the handset only makes the process a little easier.
Seriously, does this surprise anyone?
What's happening on the Now Network
Anyone else have the commercial's traditional piano tune playing in their head while they read this?
And if you try to modify /etc/hosts under Linux without admin privileges, you won't get very far either. You will need to elevate your text editor with sudo first. Or on Windows, you can run your editor as an administrative user by using the "Run as administrator" context menu item.