Good for them for doing this, but it's worth pointing out that the upcoming FirstNet infrastructure (and AT&T won the contract) should hopefully mitigate the chances of this affecting responders like this again in the years to come.
It was bad (and bad PR) for Verizon to let this happen in the first place; given that alone, hopefully it won't happen again.
The legal idea that committing a felony that risks others and thus constitutes murder is called "felony murder". As best I can tell, every state acknowledges felony murder as equivalent to the most deliberate and most punishable forms of deliberate murder.
Correct. However neither going over 100 nor reckless driving are felonies in California, so "felony murder" doesn't count here. In California, vehicular manslaughter is its own thing, and it in and of itself can be either charged as a felony or a misdemeanor, depending on if the defendant was negligent or "grossly negligent". Vehicular manslaughter can separately be upgraded to murder (usually in the second degree) if there was what CA calls "implied malice". This is a bit vague, but:
“Implied malice contemplates a subjective awareness of a higher degree of risk than does gross negligence, and involves an element of wantonness which is absent in gross negligence.” (Cal. Penal Code 187; People v. Watson, 30 Cal. 3d 290 (1981).)
If hypothetically he had survived, it would probably be on the State to prove that he was acting with malice. A possible defense might be a witness testimony that he had tried to swerve out of the away or avoid hitting a car before the accident, or that he had somehow intended to (grossly negligently) "safely" make it through rather than take someone out. A defense lawyer might also try to plea deal down by arguing his mental state and age tips it back into manslaughter ("violent passion") rather than murderous intent.
IANAL - but this happened about a mile from where I work Thursday.
In any case, none of the big manufacturers make flagships with replaceable batteries (LG G5 possibly excepted) and even then, it is not one of the true flagship smartphones out there,
The LG V20 has a removable battery as well. Privacy isn't the primary reason I use it (extended batteries are awesome), but it's a nice benefit.
Gee, I can't imagine why some techies get bad reputations as complete douchebags *eyeroll*
The douchebags are the ones demanding to search rooms that people paid for - douchebag.
Yes. People paid for. And if the people can't read the contracts they've signed and look at the hotel's own policies (in accordance with the innkeepers' laws for that state), it's their own damn fault.
The point is that if EVERYONE treats the employees dismissively, there will be fewer people willing to do the job. And they'll do it poorly or pretend to do it just to avoid confrontation. (i.e. "here's the damn code, dial it yourself and don't tell anyone").
No employee in Las Vegas (Strip or Freemont at least) would ever do that. Not until there's a personnel generation or two from the October shootings. And in fact, employees are becoming *more* security aware even aside from that. The recent housekeeper's strike threat (and initial welfare checks are usually done by managers or other personnel, not housekeeping or security -- at first) involved making sure that they had panic buttons issued to them by management precisely for any sort of unsafe perceived situation.
Google security engineer Maddie Stone tweeted that a man wearing a light-blue shirt and a walkie-talkie entered her Caesars Palace room with a key, but without knocking, while she was getting dressed.
Before I saying anything, to be clear: 1. Ms. Stone did nothing wrong. 2. The man entering the room was absolutely criminal in entering a room like that without knocking.
I'd bet dollars to donuts that the Caesars Entertainment employee (assuming he was one) actually did knock and she didn't hear him. I've had dozens of security checks over the past year, and I've never had one not knock, announce, and pause before entering.
Secondly, while I'm sure that Ms. Stone is a fine Google engineer, the fact that a security engineer would fail to put the deadbolt on their own door while occupying it is a sad indictment of the entire tech industry. Billions of dollars of investment in fancy tech while leaving the more obvious simple bits of physical security by the wayside. smh,
You can let them in, but you don't have to be nice or polite. "You done yet, guy?" "OK, now get the fuck out of my room." "See you tomorrow, lady."
If everyone was abrasive and abusive to hotel suckurity "just doin' their jobs, doot de doot de doot" then there would be fewer people willing to do the job. Or at least they'd make the checks more cursory and faster, since no one enjoys being the target of rudeness and anger.
Gee, I can't imagine why some techies get bad reputations as complete douchebags *eyeroll*
Just because someone has a job you dislike, doesn't mean being a complete dick about it is the proper response. I stay in Vegas a lot and I've *never* had an unprofessional experience, nor one that lasted longer than 30 seconds at most. Long enough to look around, confirm I hadn't trashed the place, confirm I didn't have 10 suitcases with me for no apparent reason, and confirm wasn't currently recreating Lain Iwakawa's bedroom, then dial a code to confirm entry and that was that.
If you have a problem, bring it up with management maybe. Don't bring it up with the lady just doing her job. Do you yell at Chick-fil-A drive-through employees too?
My first and maybe last def con. If I can't find an alternative hotel that doesn't pull this bull shit I won't be back. I'm not a gun enthusiast, but would agree that shooting an employee entering when a DND sign was hung does justify murder.
It probably should be your last DefCon if you're incapable of reading the door hanger that you yourself put out. It explicitly at Harrah's does NOT say "DND" -- it says "Room Occupied". Below that, it states that Caesars reserves the right to knock and enter at least once a day for security, wellness, or any other check. You can use the deadbolt and latch to physically prevent entry (for example, if you're changing), but not indefinitely.
They "barged" into that room, yes, but they evacuated via check/entry rooms surrounding it and for levels above and below in the course of it (since they didn't know for sure that that was the room).
Excellent reason to move it out of Vegas and to a place with a more reasonable view of civil liberties. Maybe San Antonio or Dallas.
All the major chains are doing this everywhere, although perhaps enforced less often in some places, and nothing in Texas innkeepers' case law (or at common law) indicates otherwise.
What if the government requires the private entity to search the rooms, for "safety?" Are private entities coerced to perform searches by a government entity covered by the 4th Amendment?
In an imminent danger situation, even the police can directly enter and get a warrant later. During the Vegas shooting hotel security was working with police carefully and, frankly, it took too long. Anyone who stays on the Strip regularly knows how beefed up security has been across the board since then. Security used to be mainly about loss prevention, cheating, and the occasional fight/assault. Staying at the Strip in December you had teams of five roaming around in tactical gear all over the place at all locations. If someone thinks there's a security situation going on, check and entry will occur.
Innkeepers can generally enter so long as they announce themselves -- being a tenant does not make you a transient resident (eg, extended stay) where you *do* have more specific privacy rights in most jurisdictions. If you're staying there for three days, it's not like the hotel is your landlord.
JFC... DefCon attendees should be among those most aware of security policy changes, and this has been going on since last Winter. Changes are everywhere, but it's especially prevalent in "soft target" vacation destination areas, such as Las Vegas or Orlando.
"This is a growing trend, and not just a response to the Las Vegas shooting," Grimes said. "All types of incidents occurring in hotel rooms, including room damage, illegal drugs, excessive drinking and sexual assault, make it prudent for hotels to reserve the right to check rooms.
"From a legal perspective, the hotels are not exercising a new right, since most states always allow hotels to enter rooms at reasonable times for legitimate purposes such as cleaning and protecting hotel property," Grimes continued. "The new policies by Disney and others are just highlighting these rights to enter for guests who might otherwise be unaware. The effect of this notice to guests may serve a dual purpose of reducing guest complaints when a hotel staff member insists on entering a room for a proper purpose, and also cutting down on wrongful acts by guests during their hotel stays, since the guests are aware the hotel may see what they're doing in the room.
"It's important to consider that not all hotels will apply these new policies the same way," he added. "Some hotels may insist on daily entry to each room for housekeeping, inspections and other purposes. Other hotels may consider that their guests are not likely to be performing harmful activities, and they will not enter rooms except in the event of unusual circumstances."
The few attendees who s tweet bloody murder about this were in rooms with signs "Don't disturb" hanging for days, and had gotten in with large cases of who knows what. In modern Murricah, that's an invitation for a check. Nobody wants to be the next place where the mass murderer shoots from.
So many comments from people who don't go to Las Vegas often.
After the shooting, hotel policies changed at ALL hotels on the Strip, among all companies. As someone who stays at Caesars properties heavily and at MGM properties occasionally, I can tell you that the "Do Not Disturb sign is a thing of the past. DefCon attendees in particular should be aware of this, and caterwauling on Slashdot is a sign of their own obliviousness. The Strip hotel I'm staying at now says "Room Occupied" on the front -- not "Do Not Disturb". No one has "Do Not Disturb" any more, and it says right there on the sign in not-quite-fine-print:
Please note that Caesars Entertainment and its staff reserve the right to enter this room daily, even if this sign is displayed on your door, for maintenance, safety, security or any other purpose. Hotel staff will knock and announce their presence before entering.
While you are actively in the room, if you wish for privacy, you should lock the deadbolt and engage the latch. If security is making a check, that allows you to have them not walk in on you naked, but it doesn't mean they won't ask to be let in to do a verification.
As with police (who don't have a warrant), if you have concern about their identification, call down to the Operator/Front Desk to verify that they're an employee before letting them in.
To re-iterate, after the Vegas shooting this is standard policy across the board at ALL HOTELS. In case anyone missed it, MGM got a lot of flack for missing the signs here, where a security check might have caught something obvious. One might argue that they should have made this more explicit via a press release, but if you're here a lot it's obvious already what's changed. As to whether DefCon attendees were more singled out in particular, it would be hard to say. If I were hotel security, I'd have more reason to suspect them of ripping apart the Ethernet jacks or something and trying to hack into the hotel security system than anything with weapons -- an elevated stance is probably expected.
Exactly, imagine being caught in a forest fire somewhere without anybody's knowledge and that you have managed to find a sweet spot to stay alive and then the bombs come at you. Now you really get the battlefield experience!
Seriously, wild forest fire areas are hard to clear of human presence in advance due to their unpredictable nature. One might also think of animal casualties.
Cox (not Comcast) only really has competition from the ILEC for CO-based DSL (I know, I used to work for multiple ISP's here in San Diego), and DSL speeds are well behind what you can get in most areas of the county. Also, my experience with Cox dates back to 1998 -- and while DSL was viably competitive into the early 2000's, by 2005-2007 DSL really couldn't match what cable was able to provide speedwise, and was going to be less reliable the further from the CO you were.
Webpass (Google Fiber) is only available in a tiny number of buildings in the relatively small downtown area. San Diego is very low density; this simply isn't an option for the vast majority of residences. There are alternative business ISPs out there (I used to work at one doing point-to-point wireless to office parks from backhauls), and metro-Ethernet from certain specialized carriers, but for the general market Cox (and Spectrum, in their half of the county) and AT&T have a duopoly on wired broadband. I've rarely heard major complaints about either of our cable providers, available competition or not.
When it comes to customer service, you either get "So large it runs Big Data on everything to try to predict your needs but when you call in you get India" or "Small enough to care because every customer is an important revenue source despite the monopoly".
From an ISP perspective, cable companies either work well or they don't. I've lived in Cox areas of San Diego (the other regional monopoly in North County was TWC, now Spectrum) and have had cable modems since the @Home days and have generally always been satisfied with them. The one recurring issue I did have was eventually traceable to bad internal wiring in a house I was renting. Now I dual-uplink between Webpass (now owned by Google Fiber, but still operationally distinct) and Cox both to my residence and I couldn't really be happier.
I certainly understand where some of the rest of the country is coming from, but the angst about Comcast (which seems to be near-universal) doesn't really affect me, and so emotionally-fueled arguments about network restructuring that seem to be based primarily about how horrible they are only go so far.
Out of band control using simple 2G or 3G service for message passing was how quite a number of things worked back in the day. I'm sure this will be news to the Kids Today that don't remember life before pervasive LTE, but for commercial/industrial purposes this isn't especially new.
SMS is reliable enough in these situations, but for truer independence they'd want to look into mesh relays using other spectrum.
America has become a country where if you are rich life is good, and if you're not rich, you have the freedom to die in the streets.
If you're dying in the streets you're either homeless and are living on the streets (in which case, you could just as easily be "dying at home" or you're intentionally choosing to do so. An ER has to take you in if you're in a critical condition, regardless of ability to pay, so long as it accepts Federal funding. And "street" implies you're in some sort of vaguely urban area.
I think what you really mean is "you have the freedom to go off and die in the woods", which is absolutely true and has been so since the Founding.
That's changed then. 30ish years ago when I worked for food, you had to pay for your burger just like everyone else.
I'd be surprised if that changed among the chains. My kids did get meals in the dining centers for working there while in college though.
Grandparent post is tripping. Both QSR (fast food) and full service restaurants only give discounts to regular employees nowadays. The QSR standard is still 50% off, while some full service restaurants have either a fixed low-cost menu, a 20-40% discount, or one which varies depending on the item ("no discounts on market fish or steak", for example).
Managers at QSRs still typically get free meals, AFAIK. I was working as a manager at the McDonalds adjacent to my college for the first year and a half and probably spent about $40 a month on groceries when I did thanks to all the free meals. (Side note: Nothing bothers me more than Super Size Me. I literally ate nothing but McD for waaaaay longer than he did, but since I wasn't trying to make a propaganda point, I barely gained a pound.)
Anyway... yes. If you're having problems making food ends meet and you don't have a job in food service, that's one way to help. It's also a great learning opportunity. My later positions in IT/tech support were helped by the customer service skills and management skills I learned at McD.
Phoenix is a grid, probably because it had planning from early on, while San Diego is quite a mess, probably because it lacked planning.
There's a little bit of truth to this, but mostly in San Diego it's because of the large number of hills and canyons within the urban area. The original San Diego ("old town") is just as irregular as any other part of the urban bits of Greater San Diego. Alonzo Horton's "New Town" development by the bay -- which is the current Downtown San Diego -- is grid-like, but the urban core only extends about 20-25 blocks outward from the bay.
After that, despite there still being numbered streets going eastward here and there, San Diego is a curvy, canyon-top mishmash of street layouts, with only a few places in the entire city (and most surrounding cities in the county) where you actually drive straight and true for more than a mile or two at a time.
Google is attempting to leverage a much-desired feature (i.e., Play store) to insert their other services (e.g., YouTube, GMail, Drive, etc) along side it by forcing manufacturers who want Play Store to make those apps one-tap away at most, punishing OEMs and ODMs who are Play-licensed to not produce any vanilla Android without Play (see Amazon) and of course, defaulting to Google search.
Nokia a few years ago wanted to do just that - replace Google Maps with their HERE Maps. Google slapped them down - they could not license Play unless Google Maps was a part of it, and it had to be default - you can't bundle your product in and have it be default.
This is exactly it. It's not the underlying Android OS, it's the Google Play Services -- the middleware that enables smartphone ecosystem functionality -- that's the key issue. Google's been moving more and more functionality into that, and then locks manufacturers down in the exact same way Microsoft used to do with various hardware manufacturers vis-a-vis Windows licenses.
Frankly, we would be a in a much healthier place if Android OS was strong and it was forced to allow a choice of various middleware systems. Don't like Google Services? Use something else. True freedom even if you're not compiling your own smartphone OS yourself.
To do this will require serious anti-trust work, DOJ oversight, demands that non-Google-Inc functions be placed in the OS layer, and a removal of restrictions on hardware makers by Google.
Slashdot Mirror
Good for them for doing this, but it's worth pointing out that the upcoming FirstNet infrastructure (and AT&T won the contract) should hopefully mitigate the chances of this affecting responders like this again in the years to come.
It was bad (and bad PR) for Verizon to let this happen in the first place; given that alone, hopefully it won't happen again.
The legal idea that committing a felony that risks others and thus constitutes murder is called "felony murder". As best I can tell, every state acknowledges felony murder as equivalent to the most deliberate and most punishable forms of deliberate murder.
Correct. However neither going over 100 nor reckless driving are felonies in California, so "felony murder" doesn't count here. In California, vehicular manslaughter is its own thing, and it in and of itself can be either charged as a felony or a misdemeanor, depending on if the defendant was negligent or "grossly negligent". Vehicular manslaughter can separately be upgraded to murder (usually in the second degree) if there was what CA calls "implied malice". This is a bit vague, but:
“Implied malice contemplates a subjective awareness of a higher degree of risk than does gross negligence, and involves an element of wantonness which is absent in gross negligence.” (Cal. Penal Code 187; People v. Watson, 30 Cal. 3d 290 (1981).)
If hypothetically he had survived, it would probably be on the State to prove that he was acting with malice. A possible defense might be a witness testimony that he had tried to swerve out of the away or avoid hitting a car before the accident, or that he had somehow intended to (grossly negligently) "safely" make it through rather than take someone out. A defense lawyer might also try to plea deal down by arguing his mental state and age tips it back into manslaughter ("violent passion") rather than murderous intent.
IANAL - but this happened about a mile from where I work Thursday.
In any case, none of the big manufacturers make flagships with replaceable batteries (LG G5 possibly excepted) and even then, it is not one of the true flagship smartphones out there,
The LG V20 has a removable battery as well. Privacy isn't the primary reason I use it (extended batteries are awesome), but it's a nice benefit.
No, because Chick-Fil-A drive-through employees don't sneak into my home and rummage through my shit.
It's your home when you're a tenant, dipshit. When you're renting a hotel room for a short duration you're a guest.
So unless you think hotels need to start doing bag checks or xraying everything there's not much they can do.
After October, the x-raying of bags was mentioned as a possible solution to me, unprompted, by more than one cabbie here in Vegas, FYI.
The douchebags are the ones demanding to search rooms that people paid for - douchebag.
Yes. People paid for. And if the people can't read the contracts they've signed and look at the hotel's own policies (in accordance with the innkeepers' laws for that state), it's their own damn fault.
Forum Tower; definitely "Room Occupied" and not DND. I stay at CET properties and haven't seen a DND one hanging at any of them since March.
The point is that if EVERYONE treats the employees dismissively, there will be fewer people willing to do the job. And they'll do it poorly or pretend to do it just to avoid confrontation. (i.e. "here's the damn code, dial it yourself and don't tell anyone").
No employee in Las Vegas (Strip or Freemont at least) would ever do that. Not until there's a personnel generation or two from the October shootings. And in fact, employees are becoming *more* security aware even aside from that. The recent housekeeper's strike threat (and initial welfare checks are usually done by managers or other personnel, not housekeeping or security -- at first) involved making sure that they had panic buttons issued to them by management precisely for any sort of unsafe perceived situation.
Google security engineer Maddie Stone tweeted that a man wearing a light-blue shirt and a walkie-talkie entered her Caesars Palace room with a key, but without knocking, while she was getting dressed.
Before I saying anything, to be clear:
1. Ms. Stone did nothing wrong.
2. The man entering the room was absolutely criminal in entering a room like that without knocking.
I'd bet dollars to donuts that the Caesars Entertainment employee (assuming he was one) actually did knock and she didn't hear him. I've had dozens of security checks over the past year, and I've never had one not knock, announce, and pause before entering.
Secondly, while I'm sure that Ms. Stone is a fine Google engineer, the fact that a security engineer would fail to put the deadbolt on their own door while occupying it is a sad indictment of the entire tech industry. Billions of dollars of investment in fancy tech while leaving the more obvious simple bits of physical security by the wayside. smh,
You can let them in, but you don't have to be nice or polite. "You done yet, guy?" "OK, now get the fuck out of my room." "See you tomorrow, lady."
If everyone was abrasive and abusive to hotel suckurity "just doin' their jobs, doot de doot de doot" then there would be fewer people willing to do the job. Or at least they'd make the checks more cursory and faster, since no one enjoys being the target of rudeness and anger.
Gee, I can't imagine why some techies get bad reputations as complete douchebags *eyeroll*
Just because someone has a job you dislike, doesn't mean being a complete dick about it is the proper response. I stay in Vegas a lot and I've *never* had an unprofessional experience, nor one that lasted longer than 30 seconds at most. Long enough to look around, confirm I hadn't trashed the place, confirm I didn't have 10 suitcases with me for no apparent reason, and confirm wasn't currently recreating Lain Iwakawa's bedroom, then dial a code to confirm entry and that was that.
If you have a problem, bring it up with management maybe. Don't bring it up with the lady just doing her job. Do you yell at Chick-fil-A drive-through employees too?
My first and maybe last def con. If I can't find an alternative hotel that doesn't pull this bull shit I won't be back. I'm not a gun enthusiast, but would agree that shooting an employee entering when a DND sign was hung does justify murder.
It probably should be your last DefCon if you're incapable of reading the door hanger that you yourself put out. It explicitly at Harrah's does NOT say "DND" -- it says "Room Occupied". Below that, it states that Caesars reserves the right to knock and enter at least once a day for security, wellness, or any other check. You can use the deadbolt and latch to physically prevent entry (for example, if you're changing), but not indefinitely.
They "barged" into that room, yes, but they evacuated via check/entry rooms surrounding it and for levels above and below in the course of it (since they didn't know for sure that that was the room).
Excellent reason to move it out of Vegas and to a place with a more reasonable view of civil liberties. Maybe San Antonio or Dallas.
All the major chains are doing this everywhere, although perhaps enforced less often in some places, and nothing in Texas innkeepers' case law (or at common law) indicates otherwise.
What if the government requires the private entity to search the rooms, for "safety?" Are private entities coerced to perform searches by a government entity covered by the 4th Amendment?
In an imminent danger situation, even the police can directly enter and get a warrant later. During the Vegas shooting hotel security was working with police carefully and, frankly, it took too long. Anyone who stays on the Strip regularly knows how beefed up security has been across the board since then. Security used to be mainly about loss prevention, cheating, and the occasional fight/assault. Staying at the Strip in December you had teams of five roaming around in tactical gear all over the place at all locations. If someone thinks there's a security situation going on, check and entry will occur.
Innkeepers can generally enter so long as they announce themselves -- being a tenant does not make you a transient resident (eg, extended stay) where you *do* have more specific privacy rights in most jurisdictions. If you're staying there for three days, it's not like the hotel is your landlord.
JFC... DefCon attendees should be among those most aware of security policy changes, and this has been going on since last Winter. Changes are everywhere, but it's especially prevalent in "soft target" vacation destination areas, such as Las Vegas or Orlando.
https://www.meetingstoday.com/newsevents/industrynews/industrynewsdetails/articleid/31803/title/-do-not-disturb-policy-updates-spark-debate
The few attendees who s tweet bloody murder about this were in rooms with signs "Don't disturb" hanging for days, and had gotten in with large cases of who knows what. In modern Murricah, that's an invitation for a check. Nobody wants to be the next place where the mass murderer shoots from.
So many comments from people who don't go to Las Vegas often.
After the shooting, hotel policies changed at ALL hotels on the Strip, among all companies. As someone who stays at Caesars properties heavily and at MGM properties occasionally, I can tell you that the "Do Not Disturb sign is a thing of the past. DefCon attendees in particular should be aware of this, and caterwauling on Slashdot is a sign of their own obliviousness. The Strip hotel I'm staying at now says "Room Occupied" on the front -- not "Do Not Disturb". No one has "Do Not Disturb" any more, and it says right there on the sign in not-quite-fine-print:
While you are actively in the room, if you wish for privacy, you should lock the deadbolt and engage the latch. If security is making a check, that allows you to have them not walk in on you naked, but it doesn't mean they won't ask to be let in to do a verification.
As with police (who don't have a warrant), if you have concern about their identification, call down to the Operator/Front Desk to verify that they're an employee before letting them in.
To re-iterate, after the Vegas shooting this is standard policy across the board at ALL HOTELS. In case anyone missed it, MGM got a lot of flack for missing the signs here, where a security check might have caught something obvious. One might argue that they should have made this more explicit via a press release, but if you're here a lot it's obvious already what's changed. As to whether DefCon attendees were more singled out in particular, it would be hard to say. If I were hotel security, I'd have more reason to suspect them of ripping apart the Ethernet jacks or something and trying to hack into the hotel security system than anything with weapons -- an elevated stance is probably expected.
Exactly, imagine being caught in a forest fire somewhere without anybody's knowledge and that you have managed to find a sweet spot to stay alive and then the bombs come at you. Now you really get the battlefield experience!
Seriously, wild forest fire areas are hard to clear of human presence in advance due to their unpredictable nature. One might also think of animal casualties.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0708838/quotes/qt0341840
[Odell has complained about "lightning bolts" falling from the ceiling]
Danilo Odell: Yeah, what the hell was that thing?
Lieutenant Worf: Automated fire system. A force field contains the flame until the remaining oxygen has been consumed.
Danilo Odell: Ah, yeah, w-what if I had been under that thing?
Lieutenant Worf: You would have been standing in the fire.
Danilo Odell: Yeah, well, leaving that aside for the moment, I mean, what would have happened to me?
Lieutenant Worf: You would have suffocated and died.
Cox (not Comcast) only really has competition from the ILEC for CO-based DSL (I know, I used to work for multiple ISP's here in San Diego), and DSL speeds are well behind what you can get in most areas of the county. Also, my experience with Cox dates back to 1998 -- and while DSL was viably competitive into the early 2000's, by 2005-2007 DSL really couldn't match what cable was able to provide speedwise, and was going to be less reliable the further from the CO you were.
Webpass (Google Fiber) is only available in a tiny number of buildings in the relatively small downtown area. San Diego is very low density; this simply isn't an option for the vast majority of residences. There are alternative business ISPs out there (I used to work at one doing point-to-point wireless to office parks from backhauls), and metro-Ethernet from certain specialized carriers, but for the general market Cox (and Spectrum, in their half of the county) and AT&T have a duopoly on wired broadband. I've rarely heard major complaints about either of our cable providers, available competition or not.
When it comes to customer service, you either get "So large it runs Big Data on everything to try to predict your needs but when you call in you get India" or "Small enough to care because every customer is an important revenue source despite the monopoly".
From an ISP perspective, cable companies either work well or they don't. I've lived in Cox areas of San Diego (the other regional monopoly in North County was TWC, now Spectrum) and have had cable modems since the @Home days and have generally always been satisfied with them. The one recurring issue I did have was eventually traceable to bad internal wiring in a house I was renting. Now I dual-uplink between Webpass (now owned by Google Fiber, but still operationally distinct) and Cox both to my residence and I couldn't really be happier.
I certainly understand where some of the rest of the country is coming from, but the angst about Comcast (which seems to be near-universal) doesn't really affect me, and so emotionally-fueled arguments about network restructuring that seem to be based primarily about how horrible they are only go so far.
Yeah, I was almost going to bring that up :)
I wouldn't be surprised if AMPS is still out there somewhere...
Out of band control using simple 2G or 3G service for message passing was how quite a number of things worked back in the day. I'm sure this will be news to the Kids Today that don't remember life before pervasive LTE, but for commercial/industrial purposes this isn't especially new.
SMS is reliable enough in these situations, but for truer independence they'd want to look into mesh relays using other spectrum.
America has become a country where if you are rich life is good, and if you're not rich, you have the freedom to die in the streets.
If you're dying in the streets you're either homeless and are living on the streets (in which case, you could just as easily be "dying at home" or you're intentionally choosing to do so. An ER has to take you in if you're in a critical condition, regardless of ability to pay, so long as it accepts Federal funding. And "street" implies you're in some sort of vaguely urban area.
I think what you really mean is "you have the freedom to go off and die in the woods", which is absolutely true and has been so since the Founding.
That's changed then. 30ish years ago when I worked for food, you had to pay for your burger just like everyone else.
I'd be surprised if that changed among the chains. My kids did get meals in the dining centers for working there while in college though.
Grandparent post is tripping. Both QSR (fast food) and full service restaurants only give discounts to regular employees nowadays. The QSR standard is still 50% off, while some full service restaurants have either a fixed low-cost menu, a 20-40% discount, or one which varies depending on the item ("no discounts on market fish or steak", for example).
Managers at QSRs still typically get free meals, AFAIK. I was working as a manager at the McDonalds adjacent to my college for the first year and a half and probably spent about $40 a month on groceries when I did thanks to all the free meals. (Side note: Nothing bothers me more than Super Size Me. I literally ate nothing but McD for waaaaay longer than he did, but since I wasn't trying to make a propaganda point, I barely gained a pound.)
Anyway... yes. If you're having problems making food ends meet and you don't have a job in food service, that's one way to help. It's also a great learning opportunity. My later positions in IT/tech support were helped by the customer service skills and management skills I learned at McD.
Phoenix is a grid, probably because it had planning from early on, while San Diego is quite a mess, probably because it lacked planning.
There's a little bit of truth to this, but mostly in San Diego it's because of the large number of hills and canyons within the urban area. The original San Diego ("old town") is just as irregular as any other part of the urban bits of Greater San Diego. Alonzo Horton's "New Town" development by the bay -- which is the current Downtown San Diego -- is grid-like, but the urban core only extends about 20-25 blocks outward from the bay.
After that, despite there still being numbered streets going eastward here and there, San Diego is a curvy, canyon-top mishmash of street layouts, with only a few places in the entire city (and most surrounding cities in the county) where you actually drive straight and true for more than a mile or two at a time.
See https://www.google.com/maps/@32.7305042,-117.0840683,13z
This is exactly it. It's not the underlying Android OS, it's the Google Play Services -- the middleware that enables smartphone ecosystem functionality -- that's the key issue. Google's been moving more and more functionality into that, and then locks manufacturers down in the exact same way Microsoft used to do with various hardware manufacturers vis-a-vis Windows licenses.
Frankly, we would be a in a much healthier place if Android OS was strong and it was forced to allow a choice of various middleware systems. Don't like Google Services? Use something else. True freedom even if you're not compiling your own smartphone OS yourself.
To do this will require serious anti-trust work, DOJ oversight, demands that non-Google-Inc functions be placed in the OS layer, and a removal of restrictions on hardware makers by Google.