The big difference is that in the UK and EU there's an excellent chance that this is illegal. Strange as it may seem, unlike the US we actually require adverts to be somewhat true - and not just by tacking on a timestretched disclaimer sped up to a garble at the end. For example, the Budweiser "Fresh Beer Tastes Better" ad campaign was ultimately sunk because fresh beer does not, in fact, taste better. Although the ASA eventually cleared the advert on the basis that Bud tastes so bad it actually becomes worse as it ages, the damage was done.
I would urge as many of you that summon up the enthusiasm to send a polite email to the Advertising Standards Authority. Since this portion of the Dell website is aimed at UK customers, they must abide by UK laws.
Bear in mind that Mototrbo is just one implementation of the open DMR standard. You could write your own DMR stack if you were so inclined, but it does require the patent-encumbered AMBE 2+ codec.
So far the only two manufacturers making significant inroads into DMR are Motorola and Hytera. Motorola's software is more mature and offers things like single-site trunking, but Hytera's hardware platform has rather more life left in it.
The big problem is trunking. No-one has a proper multi-site trunking DMR product yet. Both Motorola and Hytera offer single-site trunking, wich are "almost but not quite" compatible, and multi-site single-channel working where both timeslots can be used on repeaters linked across a network. The "Site Connect" functions work okay between the two manufacturer's radios but the repeaters won't talk. It doesn't look like there's a massive difference between them, and maybe they will both address this in later firmware updates.
Until they get the multi-site trunking nailed, DMR isn't really going to oust TETRA. Over here in the UK and Europe, P25 is just about totally unheard of.
The other big problem with TETRA in the UK is that in the mid-90s when the licences were issued, the big-government big-monopoly Conservative government handed over responsibility for the TETRA frequency allocation to one single company and then required all blue-light services to begin moving to TETRA. It is now prohibitively expensive to get a private TETRA licence and Airwave charge an obscene amount for contract airtime.
If you're in band and within your power limit, who cares what the radio is? There's certainly no problem with converting CBs for 10m operation - in fact, many of the 10m mobiles are essentially "factory-converted" CBs. The FCC may get upset, but they aren't important to me.
I'll use whatever equipment I damn well please, and the FCC can stay in their own garden.
Poke around the junk sales and hamfests. You can pick up an old 80s 2m rig for next to nothing, and construct an aerial in ten minutes.
My "office" 2m radio for a long time was an old Icom IC2E that I picked up for £2 at a junk sale, and built a j-pole aerial for. It didn't come with a battery, so I just ran it off a mains adaptor. It's pretty old and a bit limited, but perfectly fine for hitting the local 2m repeaters or listening to S20.
I know that on two VW vans fitted with automatic gearboxes (very uncommon though they are) the gear selector is blocked by a solenoid in P and N unless you put your foot on the brake.
Did you miss the bit where it said it was in the Daily Telegraph, though? Remember that this is a right-wing tabloid, and staunch supporter of the Conservative Party's big-government thinking.
It's the same in the US, though. You have to hand over your encryption keys if some representative of the US Government asks you, particularly if you don't think you're going to suit wearing an orange boilersuit and living in an outdoor dog cage.
We already have weird weather. It's the end of November and it's 15C outside (I can't put a degree symbol because the slashdot janitors have made an arse od input parsing). It reached a deep low of about 8C earlier in the month. During the summer, the temperature varied between -2C and 26C in July.
Yesterday I was seeing wind speeds of up to 90mph in gusts and 60mph sustained, and today it is flat calm. In January we normally see sustained 120mph winds, but this year they were only about 90mph.
Although it's flat calm and warm and sunny now, in as little as ten minutes the weather could go to a hailstorm with high winds and the cloudbase at about treetop height, then clear up just as soon as it came.
Up here, this is all perfectly normal. It's just what it's like here.
Yes, that's kind of the whole point of pebble-bed reactors. The "pebbles" are designed so that when they get hot, they expand and move the fissionable materials apart from each other, limiting the maximum reaction rate. If you're pulling heat out of the system then the reaction will increase in an attempt to reach this stable state. As soon as you stop blowing dry nitrogen through the reactor it will heat up and idle.
In theory, you could handle the pebbles with thick gardening gloves and not actually die if it was a real MacGyver-level emergency.
This is the thing, though. Iran would benefit from having a nuclear weapon not because it could defend itself *directly* from the US but because they can start waving it at Israel if the Yanks start getting mouthy.
The Iranian government is presumably nervous about the US coming over and "liberating" them with the same level of wholesale destruction and slaughter as in Iraq and Afghanistan. They've also got the Israelis who just love to herd Arabs into ghettos and kill them. Why *wouldn't* you want a nuke, with neighbours like that?
Exactly. If you live a vegan lifestyle, you are using an unacceptable amount of energy and petrochemicals. You need to eat a diet that is both ecologically and nutritionally balanced, and that includes meat.
For the same reason we have tax discs. They replace the whole plate every year, we replace a small piece of paper.
You'd still really have to fail the attitude test in a big way to be arrested for an out-of-date tax disc. The vehicle licensing authority post out a reminder about a month before it expires in any case, and it takes about two minutes to renew online.
"Drunk On A Bus". Paramedics often get called to them because bus companies have tend to have policies where drivers aren't allowed to wake up "sleeping" passengers in case they become violent, or are actually ill.
What kind of dystopian hell-hole do you live in where you can be jailed for having traces of drug metabolites in your system? Even Iran isn't *that* bad...
I mean, I wish they'd stick a tracker on the bottom of my elderly Citroen. They've got about ten seconds after I press the remote central locking, before it drops the suspension on them. Is tracking someone really worth having two and half tonnes of very solid steel dropped on you?
Slashdot Mirror
The big difference is that in the UK and EU there's an excellent chance that this is illegal. Strange as it may seem, unlike the US we actually require adverts to be somewhat true - and not just by tacking on a timestretched disclaimer sped up to a garble at the end. For example, the Budweiser "Fresh Beer Tastes Better" ad campaign was ultimately sunk because fresh beer does not, in fact, taste better. Although the ASA eventually cleared the advert on the basis that Bud tastes so bad it actually becomes worse as it ages, the damage was done.
I would urge as many of you that summon up the enthusiasm to send a polite email to the Advertising Standards Authority. Since this portion of the Dell website is aimed at UK customers, they must abide by UK laws.
Bear in mind that Mototrbo is just one implementation of the open DMR standard. You could write your own DMR stack if you were so inclined, but it does require the patent-encumbered AMBE 2+ codec.
So far the only two manufacturers making significant inroads into DMR are Motorola and Hytera. Motorola's software is more mature and offers things like single-site trunking, but Hytera's hardware platform has rather more life left in it.
The big problem is trunking. No-one has a proper multi-site trunking DMR product yet. Both Motorola and Hytera offer single-site trunking, wich are "almost but not quite" compatible, and multi-site single-channel working where both timeslots can be used on repeaters linked across a network. The "Site Connect" functions work okay between the two manufacturer's radios but the repeaters won't talk. It doesn't look like there's a massive difference between them, and maybe they will both address this in later firmware updates.
Until they get the multi-site trunking nailed, DMR isn't really going to oust TETRA. Over here in the UK and Europe, P25 is just about totally unheard of.
The other big problem with TETRA in the UK is that in the mid-90s when the licences were issued, the big-government big-monopoly Conservative government handed over responsibility for the TETRA frequency allocation to one single company and then required all blue-light services to begin moving to TETRA. It is now prohibitively expensive to get a private TETRA licence and Airwave charge an obscene amount for contract airtime.
If you're in band and within your power limit, who cares what the radio is? There's certainly no problem with converting CBs for 10m operation - in fact, many of the 10m mobiles are essentially "factory-converted" CBs. The FCC may get upset, but they aren't important to me.
I'll use whatever equipment I damn well please, and the FCC can stay in their own garden.
73s de MM0YEQ
Poke around the junk sales and hamfests. You can pick up an old 80s 2m rig for next to nothing, and construct an aerial in ten minutes.
My "office" 2m radio for a long time was an old Icom IC2E that I picked up for £2 at a junk sale, and built a j-pole aerial for. It didn't come with a battery, so I just ran it off a mains adaptor. It's pretty old and a bit limited, but perfectly fine for hitting the local 2m repeaters or listening to S20.
Now it's the receiver for my APRS igate.
I know that on two VW vans fitted with automatic gearboxes (very uncommon though they are) the gear selector is blocked by a solenoid in P and N unless you put your foot on the brake.
Did you miss the bit where it said it was in the Daily Telegraph, though? Remember that this is a right-wing tabloid, and staunch supporter of the Conservative Party's big-government thinking.
It's the same in the US, though. You have to hand over your encryption keys if some representative of the US Government asks you, particularly if you don't think you're going to suit wearing an orange boilersuit and living in an outdoor dog cage.
Deep fried mars bars? That sounds disgusting, who the hell does that?
We already have weird weather. It's the end of November and it's 15C outside (I can't put a degree symbol because the slashdot janitors have made an arse od input parsing). It reached a deep low of about 8C earlier in the month. During the summer, the temperature varied between -2C and 26C in July.
Yesterday I was seeing wind speeds of up to 90mph in gusts and 60mph sustained, and today it is flat calm. In January we normally see sustained 120mph winds, but this year they were only about 90mph.
Although it's flat calm and warm and sunny now, in as little as ten minutes the weather could go to a hailstorm with high winds and the cloudbase at about treetop height, then clear up just as soon as it came.
Up here, this is all perfectly normal. It's just what it's like here.
"Weird weather", is it? Well, we'll see.
Heh, I keep forgetting that I don't need to couch it all in "Simple English Wikipedia" terms for /.ers ;-)
The "lies to children" answers work best around less clueful people, like journalists.
I haven't got the time or the inclination to debate this with you. Have it your way.
You're wrong, but I can't fix everyone's stupidity.
RAID won't save you from the ohnosecond when you realise that you actually typed "rm -rf / tmp/*" though.
It comes from installing radiation detectors in coal-fired power plants, and fly-ash handling sites.
Yes, that's kind of the whole point of pebble-bed reactors. The "pebbles" are designed so that when they get hot, they expand and move the fissionable materials apart from each other, limiting the maximum reaction rate. If you're pulling heat out of the system then the reaction will increase in an attempt to reach this stable state. As soon as you stop blowing dry nitrogen through the reactor it will heat up and idle.
In theory, you could handle the pebbles with thick gardening gloves and not actually die if it was a real MacGyver-level emergency.
That'll be why coal-fired power stations have radiation detectors all over the place, then. Do you know how "hot" the ash coming from these plants is?
This is the thing, though. Iran would benefit from having a nuclear weapon not because it could defend itself *directly* from the US but because they can start waving it at Israel if the Yanks start getting mouthy.
The Iranian government is presumably nervous about the US coming over and "liberating" them with the same level of wholesale destruction and slaughter as in Iraq and Afghanistan. They've also got the Israelis who just love to herd Arabs into ghettos and kill them. Why *wouldn't* you want a nuke, with neighbours like that?
Exactly. If you live a vegan lifestyle, you are using an unacceptable amount of energy and petrochemicals. You need to eat a diet that is both ecologically and nutritionally balanced, and that includes meat.
Neither do I... You don't need any sort of licence to own a TV in the UK.
For the same reason we have tax discs. They replace the whole plate every year, we replace a small piece of paper.
You'd still really have to fail the attitude test in a big way to be arrested for an out-of-date tax disc. The vehicle licensing authority post out a reminder about a month before it expires in any case, and it takes about two minutes to renew online.
"Drunk On A Bus". Paramedics often get called to them because bus companies have tend to have policies where drivers aren't allowed to wake up "sleeping" passengers in case they become violent, or are actually ill.
What kind of dystopian hell-hole do you live in where you can be jailed for having traces of drug metabolites in your system? Even Iran isn't *that* bad...
To be fair you can usually identify a genuine collapse from a DOAB. The empty Stella tins and unkempt appearance are sufficient.
Hey, not my fault if they stick their head into something dangerous. Not in the UK, at least. We have rather more freedom than the US.
I mean, I wish they'd stick a tracker on the bottom of my elderly Citroen. They've got about ten seconds after I press the remote central locking, before it drops the suspension on them. Is tracking someone really worth having two and half tonnes of very solid steel dropped on you?
Yeah, I mean can you believe that people think that you can't melt steel with jet fuel, and that Apple ever "lose" prototyps by accident?