Yeah, in that article everyone was banging on about how they shouldn't use mobile networks, they should use PMR frequencies. Right, because inventing your own half-assed network is going to be just so quick and easy and utterly reliable.
That said, maybe if they had the trackers transmit on VHF lowband it would make it easier to spot tagged offenders - the metre-long aerial sprouting from their ankle would give them away...
Well, here's the acceptable tradeoff. You have a phone, which is effectively a computer more powerful than the size-of-a-fridge-cost-more-than-a-car graphics workstations of a decade ago, and runs for two days off a battery that takes two hours to charge, and is connected to other computers by a global network. It fits in your pocket, and it fits in your life, and you can afford it because it subsidised by the information sold on to marketing companies that are trying to sell you stuff you probably don't care about.
You could pay full price, but you probably don't want to.
Why would you waste time getting the phone to report RSSI back? You already know the RSSI that the BTS is seeing and can tie that to the phone's IMEI number.
So now we can have a filtered ISP for the weirdy religious types, and they can stick to that and leave the other ISPs alone for normal people.
It also means that detecting people who spend a worrying amount of time looking at the wikipedia pages for explosives, ebay auctions for chemical equipment and downloading illegal copies of the talmud can be spotted and chucked into Broadmoor before they hurt someone.
So, use X then. Most people (myself included) don't want to know how the stuff gets onto the screen, and don't see the attraction in being able to run xclock on a computer in Venezuela and have the display pop up on their local screen.
I don't know if you remember what X was like before Xorg? Or indeed, even earlier than that, when (in the early 90s) you had to sit down with the workshop manual for your graphics card to work out exactly what to poke into the registers so you could get a display *at all*, never mind avoiding modes like 749x376 at 35Hz. All that is gone now, and good riddance!
My real name is fairly uncommon and I use it on social networking sites, because I'm not a tinfoil-hat-wearing secrecy wonk. Despite this, the only images of me that come up for my name are my github and facebook "avatar".
Even searching for my nick that I use everywhere and have done since the early 90s, I only show up twice on the first page of results - one of those being the aforementioned avatar, and one taken years ago at a barbecue. My cat has better google juice than me.
which must be introduced into every home in the UK within the next seven years,
I'm fine with the power company fitting a smart meter to my house. Perfectly okay with that, I'd love them to do it in fact.
It means they'd have to hook it up to the pole transformer 500m away, without charging me 8 grand for the privilege. In the meantime I suspect a smart meter hooked to a diesel genny is going to do shit all for them.
It's a very high-level language that ultimately compiles to machine code - and you can stop anywhere in between if you want to look at how it looks with the macros expanded out, or if you want to look at how the resulting high-level macro assembler code looks, all the way down to how the machine code looks.
You've got total control over the code right down to the binary that the CPU runs.
I've half a mind to fit a 24V alternator, deep-cycle battery system and properly large inverter in my car. There are a pair of chunky brackets helpfully provided for an air conditioning compressor that Citroen clearly felt wasn't required in the UK climate - not to mention that the pipes get in the way of the rest of the right-hand drive stuff.
You can automate them just as easily as you can automate any other form of music.
Listen to 1950s rock'n'roll. Much of it is skill-less, soulless mass-produced pap. Listen to a lot of the shite that came out in the 1960s - most of that was just crap. The 1970s didn't fare any better. Things started to improve in the 1980s, when recording equipment and instruments - particularly synthesizers and drum machines - became cheap enough for ordinary people to afford to buy, and set up home studios.
It wasn't until the late 1980s to early 1990s when it became possible for just about anybody with 50 quid in their pocket and some ideas to get the equipment together to produce a storming floor-filling acid house track, that we start to see real skill and passion in music.
Anything done by professionals in a recording studio is just music-by-numbers, filtered and sweetened for maximum mass appeal.
"Oh you've got evidence that this person was infringing? Well, it's a dynamic IP, so we can't guarantee that's the same person..." (a week goes by) "Oh right, so you've somehow worked out that it is? Yeah, I guess it does look like it fits a pattern of a single user. Is that definitely copyright-infringing material?" (a week goes by) "Yeah fair enough, you can apply for the anonymised details. Just sign here... and here... and here... and have your solicitor sign here... here... and, uh, here... Good. And how do you want to pay for that admin fee? Ah, we don't take Amex." (a week goes by) "Right here's your anonymised data" (a month goes by, while the court paperwork gets filed, lost, refiled, buried in a peat bog, posted to Azerbaijan and eventually found in the ruins of a disused hospital somewhere near Glasgow) "Oh, the contact details? Sure, just need you to sign here, here, and here... cool, and your solicitor needs to sign here, here, here, here and here... Lovely. Now, how would you like to pay the admin fee?" (a week goes by) "Oh, the contact details? Sorry, it's run over its time limit and we've wiped them. Would you like me to send out new forms?"
Well no, because that's like fining people for talking on their mobile phones while driving.
There is a certain mindset of people that will do it anyway and think "Oh it's okay for me to do it, I'm a good driver anyway, and I won't get caught". Then they *do* get caught, and fined, and will then moan to anyone they see "oh it's unfair, I'm being singled out, why am I getting fined, everyone does it" - no, they don't. You did it, you got caught, man the hell up.
Well, part of the problem is taking core services out of the government. If you force people to only have privately run schools, hospitals and so on, then you rapidly end up with the worst possible service at the highest possible price.
Since the service providers are trying to compete on profit margin rather than price or service, the idea is to keep the price as high as people will stand, with the barest minimum of service to the "customer". Since there are no alternatives, there's no incentive to improve service and lower prices.
Unfortunately here in the UK the government is trying to get private industry into more and more of the core services - so things like the NHS is becoming woefully inefficient as they are increasingly forced to bring in private cleaning firms that cost ten times as much as paying someone in-house, and *don't actually do a good job of cleaning*. Or schools that are forced to hire in private catering companies to handle school meals, that then charge £2 for a piece of cheap crappy pizza the size of a playing card, a single potato croquette and a spoonful of sweetcorn.
Really, private industry needs to be banned from core services. Get the government busy fixing the roads, water supplies, schools and hospitals, and get them to stop dicking about with everything else.
They are willing to work for very low wages, which pulls wages down for everyone. Companies are then forced to pay those lower wages to compete against the other companies that already pay low wages, thus pulling wages down for the entire working class.
So, make it trivially easy for them to be in the country legally, and thus entitled to the same workplace requirements as everyone else - minimum wage, etc.
That way they can't get tossed out of the country and they can't be exploited by dodgy companies who expect them to put up with ridiculously low wages if they don't want to be grassed up. This then means that they're no longer cheaper to hire than locals, so you may as well hire locals instead of giving the job to immigrants.
A couple of years ago I had to sort out the dodgy electrics on an imported Chevy Blazer - anyone who reckons Lucas electrickery is bad has never worked on a Yank Tank - and in among the normal quality issue gremlins there were some spectacular "features".
I think the best was that the starter was locked out unless you were sitting in the driver's seat, with the seatbelt fastened, the door closed, the handbrake on and your foot on the clutch. That was one of the first things that got a date with the Big Green Snips of Doom.
Public schools wouldn't put a saw or hammer in a child's hand.
You certainly wouldn't get pupils from a private school doing that either. If it doesn't involve getting them in, getting them through some exams, collecting the money and kicking them out, it's not in the business model.
I've never met anyone privately educated who had anything else than a rudimentary grasp of English and Mathematics, a keen interest in sports, and any kind of intellect thoroughly beaten out of them.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, yeah, I guess if you're a third party then you'd need some way to report the information back.
Incidentally, have you seen OpenCellID?
Yeah, in that article everyone was banging on about how they shouldn't use mobile networks, they should use PMR frequencies. Right, because inventing your own half-assed network is going to be just so quick and easy and utterly reliable.
That said, maybe if they had the trackers transmit on VHF lowband it would make it easier to spot tagged offenders - the metre-long aerial sprouting from their ankle would give them away...
Well, here's the acceptable tradeoff. You have a phone, which is effectively a computer more powerful than the size-of-a-fridge-cost-more-than-a-car graphics workstations of a decade ago, and runs for two days off a battery that takes two hours to charge, and is connected to other computers by a global network. It fits in your pocket, and it fits in your life, and you can afford it because it subsidised by the information sold on to marketing companies that are trying to sell you stuff you probably don't care about.
You could pay full price, but you probably don't want to.
Why would you waste time getting the phone to report RSSI back? You already know the RSSI that the BTS is seeing and can tie that to the phone's IMEI number.
So now we can have a filtered ISP for the weirdy religious types, and they can stick to that and leave the other ISPs alone for normal people.
It also means that detecting people who spend a worrying amount of time looking at the wikipedia pages for explosives, ebay auctions for chemical equipment and downloading illegal copies of the talmud can be spotted and chucked into Broadmoor before they hurt someone.
So, use X then. Most people (myself included) don't want to know how the stuff gets onto the screen, and don't see the attraction in being able to run xclock on a computer in Venezuela and have the display pop up on their local screen.
I don't know if you remember what X was like before Xorg? Or indeed, even earlier than that, when (in the early 90s) you had to sit down with the workshop manual for your graphics card to work out exactly what to poke into the registers so you could get a display *at all*, never mind avoiding modes like 749x376 at 35Hz. All that is gone now, and good riddance!
Does anyone in the real world actually care about network transparency?
I have to admit, I'm curious as to who thought the parent post was a troll and why. Maybe we need dope testing for moderators...
My real name is fairly uncommon and I use it on social networking sites, because I'm not a tinfoil-hat-wearing secrecy wonk. Despite this, the only images of me that come up for my name are my github and facebook "avatar".
Even searching for my nick that I use everywhere and have done since the early 90s, I only show up twice on the first page of results - one of those being the aforementioned avatar, and one taken years ago at a barbecue. My cat has better google juice than me.
So, again, why not live somewhere with decent weather?
I don't really know how much those temperatures are. It could be cold or hot.
Here on the west coast of Scotland it rarely gets below 5C and rarely gets above 25C, so it's pretty much t-shirt weather all year round.
Don't live in a part of the world where you have to keep your house refridgerated.
which must be introduced into every home in the UK within the next seven years,
I'm fine with the power company fitting a smart meter to my house. Perfectly okay with that, I'd love them to do it in fact.
It means they'd have to hook it up to the pole transformer 500m away, without charging me 8 grand for the privilege. In the meantime I suspect a smart meter hooked to a diesel genny is going to do shit all for them.
It's a very high-level language that ultimately compiles to machine code - and you can stop anywhere in between if you want to look at how it looks with the macros expanded out, or if you want to look at how the resulting high-level macro assembler code looks, all the way down to how the machine code looks.
You've got total control over the code right down to the binary that the CPU runs.
This can only work if you have a DB of precise locations of wireless signals. Even assuming that is viable, it cannot replace GPS as is.
You're right. Maybe they should make it illegal to plonk high-powered broadcast transmitters just anywhere without some sort of a licence.
We (collective we) hoped that we could trust Cisco to be trustworthy as well.
Speak for yourself. It's an American company, what makes you think it's trustworthy?
It's a closed-source binary blob. What makes you think that it's trustworthy at all?
I've half a mind to fit a 24V alternator, deep-cycle battery system and properly large inverter in my car. There are a pair of chunky brackets helpfully provided for an air conditioning compressor that Citroen clearly felt wasn't required in the UK climate - not to mention that the pipes get in the way of the rest of the right-hand drive stuff.
You can automate them just as easily as you can automate any other form of music.
Listen to 1950s rock'n'roll. Much of it is skill-less, soulless mass-produced pap. Listen to a lot of the shite that came out in the 1960s - most of that was just crap. The 1970s didn't fare any better. Things started to improve in the 1980s, when recording equipment and instruments - particularly synthesizers and drum machines - became cheap enough for ordinary people to afford to buy, and set up home studios.
It wasn't until the late 1980s to early 1990s when it became possible for just about anybody with 50 quid in their pocket and some ideas to get the equipment together to produce a storming floor-filling acid house track, that we start to see real skill and passion in music.
Anything done by professionals in a recording studio is just music-by-numbers, filtered and sweetened for maximum mass appeal.
"Oh you've got evidence that this person was infringing? Well, it's a dynamic IP, so we can't guarantee that's the same person..."
(a week goes by)
"Oh right, so you've somehow worked out that it is? Yeah, I guess it does look like it fits a pattern of a single user. Is that definitely copyright-infringing material?"
(a week goes by)
"Yeah fair enough, you can apply for the anonymised details. Just sign here... and here... and here... and have your solicitor sign here... here... and, uh, here... Good. And how do you want to pay for that admin fee? Ah, we don't take Amex."
(a week goes by)
"Right here's your anonymised data"
(a month goes by, while the court paperwork gets filed, lost, refiled, buried in a peat bog, posted to Azerbaijan and eventually found in the ruins of a disused hospital somewhere near Glasgow)
"Oh, the contact details? Sure, just need you to sign here, here, and here... cool, and your solicitor needs to sign here, here, here, here and here... Lovely. Now, how would you like to pay the admin fee?"
(a week goes by)
"Oh, the contact details? Sorry, it's run over its time limit and we've wiped them. Would you like me to send out new forms?"
Well no, because that's like fining people for talking on their mobile phones while driving.
There is a certain mindset of people that will do it anyway and think "Oh it's okay for me to do it, I'm a good driver anyway, and I won't get caught". Then they *do* get caught, and fined, and will then moan to anyone they see "oh it's unfair, I'm being singled out, why am I getting fined, everyone does it" - no, they don't. You did it, you got caught, man the hell up.
Well, part of the problem is taking core services out of the government. If you force people to only have privately run schools, hospitals and so on, then you rapidly end up with the worst possible service at the highest possible price.
Since the service providers are trying to compete on profit margin rather than price or service, the idea is to keep the price as high as people will stand, with the barest minimum of service to the "customer". Since there are no alternatives, there's no incentive to improve service and lower prices.
Unfortunately here in the UK the government is trying to get private industry into more and more of the core services - so things like the NHS is becoming woefully inefficient as they are increasingly forced to bring in private cleaning firms that cost ten times as much as paying someone in-house, and *don't actually do a good job of cleaning*. Or schools that are forced to hire in private catering companies to handle school meals, that then charge £2 for a piece of cheap crappy pizza the size of a playing card, a single potato croquette and a spoonful of sweetcorn.
Really, private industry needs to be banned from core services. Get the government busy fixing the roads, water supplies, schools and hospitals, and get them to stop dicking about with everything else.
They are willing to work for very low wages, which pulls wages down for everyone. Companies are then forced to pay those lower wages to compete against the other companies that already pay low wages, thus pulling wages down for the entire working class.
So, make it trivially easy for them to be in the country legally, and thus entitled to the same workplace requirements as everyone else - minimum wage, etc.
That way they can't get tossed out of the country and they can't be exploited by dodgy companies who expect them to put up with ridiculously low wages if they don't want to be grassed up. This then means that they're no longer cheaper to hire than locals, so you may as well hire locals instead of giving the job to immigrants.
Simple enough.
Makes perfect sense, I thought.
Oh ghod, don't...
A couple of years ago I had to sort out the dodgy electrics on an imported Chevy Blazer - anyone who reckons Lucas electrickery is bad has never worked on a Yank Tank - and in among the normal quality issue gremlins there were some spectacular "features".
I think the best was that the starter was locked out unless you were sitting in the driver's seat, with the seatbelt fastened, the door closed, the handbrake on and your foot on the clutch. That was one of the first things that got a date with the Big Green Snips of Doom.
Public schools wouldn't put a saw or hammer in a child's hand.
You certainly wouldn't get pupils from a private school doing that either. If it doesn't involve getting them in, getting them through some exams, collecting the money and kicking them out, it's not in the business model.
I've never met anyone privately educated who had anything else than a rudimentary grasp of English and Mathematics, a keen interest in sports, and any kind of intellect thoroughly beaten out of them.