Did they fire a guy who lied to his bosses about the state of his product? (And remember, Steve Jobs, much as I loathe him, would have done a demonstration with this app on stage, it would have gone through a ringer of testing for the man with the kool-aid to talk about, so there's a change in testing procedure here). That would be strongly legitimate grounds to be rid of someone.
Or did they fire him because they screwed up, and want someone to blame?
Or did they just want rid of him for whatever reason, and this seemed like as good an excuse as any?
Thanks for the blanket statement, but I'm 24 and pay for all of my media (games, music, books, movies, etc.), at least that which is not freely distributed by the creators. With only maybe one or two exceptions, all of my friends and associates do the same. Crappy people are crappy people; age makes no difference except that in previous generations, one had to be technically inclined to even know how to pirate media, whereas now it's common knowledge.
thanks for the self reflection in assuming you and your immediate experience are evidence of how an entire generation behaves. There are some people who want to pay higher taxes too, that doesn't mean, on average, people want to pay higher taxes. We haven't lost 100% of the 15-25 crowd, if that happened we would have all been out of business. But we lost a lot of it, and have to figure out how to get it back, unless the broader software industry solves this problem for us.
There are a lot of smart people in the industry who are very worried about this going forward, but there are potential solutions being stuffed in your face whether you wanted them or not.
Diablo 3 is an online game. It's not a single player game. You're bitch about not being able to play an online game as single player. You may not like that it's an online game, but it's an online game at its core. That in many senses was a bad choice, but that's still the game they made. At its essence is that your character that you can work on by yourself or in a group can always group up with other players, and can expect to buy things from the online auction house. You don't like it.... well it's not the game you think it is, so tough. It's not DRM, that's the game. They took their cue from diablo 2 multiplayer communities living forever, it might have been the wrong message, but that was definitely what they wanted.
You realize Torchlight 2 will connect to a giant DRM service right? It requires steamworks, that's steams entire shtick is to be a giant DRM service. Just like the PSN etc. You have an account. If you do something they don't like to the game they ban your account from multiplayer, if someone hacks your account well.. you have to fight to get it back and can't play your games until you get it back. Uplay and Ubisoft built their DRM store as this odd standalone thing. But steam, steam is different. Steam covers up the fact that it's a giant DRM platform by being a store and an anti cheating platform (and by the way, anti cheating is a form of DRM), but it's still a giant DRM. You activate a product on steam, it's on steam, you can't resell it, you can't lend it out, you can't do anything steam doesn't approve of without suffering the consequences.
But that's the trick of it all isn't it? We tricked you. You though "oh uplay is bad because the/. hive mind says it's bad" but Torchlight, those guys who are kinda indie, kinda anti daiblo 3, they're like me, they don't like DRM right? No. They're using DRM, they tie their game to steamworks (even when the game isn't bought through steam, e.g. on gamersgate, and the game has an unlock code). But you thought that was acceptable DRM, because that's just what steam is, there's no pretense about it, you buy stuff, it unlocks it. So you are prepared to go out and pay money for a game on a giant DRM platform, because you hate DRM. And every outlet you can buy stuff from is becoming a giant DRM platform. The apple app store, XBL, steam, PSN, Microsoft app store etc (and no side loading touch interface apps). So we have one convert to the legal way of doing things. That's progress. Other than for the fact that I just gave up the great industry secret, that they're all DRM platforms in one way or another, so maybe you aren't a convert anymore.
That's divorced for reality, anyone who's on/. and tried to sell software for a living knows better.
And my point on solutions what exactly that, it's putting in consumers faces where you pay for the product, and how you pay for it.
The problem is an industry that is devoting its attention to eliminating piracy, not to maximising sales.
nonsense, these are not mutually exclusive. Uplay might have been a disaster, but selling DLC is not DRM, it's trying to, to use your phrase maximize sales, and people bitch about that too. Because people bitch about anything that we charge money for.
While this may be true for some subset of what pirates pirate, its demonstrably not true for the majority.
Sure, but I'm never going to make any money from users in China or india as long as their GDP is a small per capita fraction of US or european GDP on a nominal basis. They're too poor to pay for it, but they're in the habit of pirating. And if you look at china, they've been in the habit with counterfeits for years, it's very hard to break into the legitimate market.
Don't confuse worldwide sales with US/EU ones. Picking up sales 10% in places where it counts is the difference between making money and not.
What isn't clear from the articles what is the sequence here. And sequence matters, a lot.
If a court ruled that the content was libelous and needs to be taken down *then* the person contacted google and asked them to remove the offending links, and they said no, then I see the sense in the ruling.
If the person requested they remove allegedly libelous content and they said no, talk to the content providers that's a different problem.
Google should be (isn't, but should be) and honest broker of information. They should have negotiated a situation where an australian court can submit a link to google with a judgment about a libelous statement made on that link. Search results would then bring up (in lieu of 'this might be a scam') this link has been ruled libelous by a court in australia (link to ruling) continue anyway?
If the person reposts the same content elsewhere, on a different link that is now a second case of libel. Which goes through the same process.
A court can basically demand google do whatever the hell it (the court) wants, and if google wants to stay in australia it is obliged to follow. The court needs to recognize that that power doesn't mean they get to abuse google for doing its job - which is supposed to be a neutral algorithm arbiter of information - and google needs to not be stupid about going along with what they should be reasonably expected to go along with from a court.
Indeed it is. Although assembling your own computer is more of a 1 month of post high school college training level than say, building your own car which is more like a year worth.
There isn't a high end Ivy bridge, the high end sandy bridges are still 130W TDP. And a good GPU can easily be in the 200 -250 range (that's not a straight comparison to CPU because the GPU has its own board and ram being powered as well).
The future still looks like 45W or less mobile, 65W mainstream and 130W high end.
Windows 7 and windows Vista are basically the OS on the backend. And it gets the job done. The problem is all about useability and Vista is inferior to 7, (incidentally, 8 is inferior to 7 as well).
It a mostly wrong headed attempt to solve a serious problem, which is that a huge number of users aren't paying for your product, and could be setting themselves up for a lifetime of going to thepiratebay rather than the local retail shop.
Take the Hulu example, (or CD's), Hulu seemed great, until people realized the piratebay was still better. It was too late for Hulu, and a lot of potential customers permanently lost.
With games we have an entire generation of gamers coming up who will probably expect to be able to pirate. So what's happening? Apple App store, the PSN, XBL, the Microsoft App store, Steam etc. Putting right in peoples faces that this is where you pay for the product, and on the gaming side of things, if we catch you pirating we can just lock down your account. But of course we should have had those online stores in 2001, 2002 era. Young kids now expect to have to pay, 30+ year olds expect to pay and pirated when they were poor, but the 15-25 year old crowd is a lost decade of potential customers. Fortunately they'll have the next set of app stores in their faces enough that they might come around, but who knows.
A bit like the lock on your front door isn't actually an impediment to criminals. But the person who got past the lock has no defence of 'oh but I thought I was just free to walk in and take things'. No. No you aren't. Hopefully eventually we can turn pirates into paying customers. Because you can't run an industry where the accepted norm is not paying for the thing you produce.
Of course. I wasn't suggesting it's necessarily worth the cost savings to build your own. If you're going to save 50 or 100 bucks you might be happier to have a pre-built with a warranty. If the first thing you do when it gets to your door is void the warranty though, there isn't much point.
You also have to know what components you want, that requires research and time. I build probably half a dozen PC's a week for people on the side, and I do requirements for each one so I tend to stay current, but if you build one PC every 3 years and don't know the difference between GPU's and don't know where to find the difference buying a pre-built will get the job done.
Depends how long it takes. I usually charge 100 bucks an hour for IT work and 200 for consulting or research related stuff (PhD candidate in comp sci). I can build a machine in about 30-45 minutes. And I typically charge 50 bucks for it. If I take 45 minutes it's usually because I forgot something and have to run to the shop to buy a SATA cable or something stupid.
I price this stuff out on a weekly basis. Sometimes, especially really low end or really high end machines I recommend a pre built. If you want to spend under 400 bucks I usually can't match the component costs. If you want to spend 3000-20 000 I usually can't source the components because they ~10-15k runs and almost all of that inventory goes to the big guys first.
The 700-2500 dollar price point is almost always cheaper to build yourself, but of course you don't get a warranty with that, but you also can get more sensible combinations of components. Putting a 70 dollar graphics card in a 700 dollar machine is not doing the buyer any favours.
Granted I live one block from a tigerdirect so I don't have to pay shipping costs.
Laptops are trickier because of the thermals though, you can't throw whatever into a case and if you need more cooling add a fan later. With a laptop you have very narrow limits on how much heat you can get out of the case, and more than that and you're going to cause yourself no end of grief, and most of us can't do that maths.
Swapping a hard drive is one thing, but the GPU/CPU combo can be a big problem.
I agree, there are cases where people do buy them separately. But that's becoming much more rare. I don't profess to know the right answer, but it would not surprise me if the number of problems from incompatible firmware and swapping boards is outdone by the risk of failure of one of the two parts.
Building your own, if you know what you're doing and know what you want is usually cheaper. But it does require work on your part, and while most of building a computer is pretty trivial some stuff (like correctly wiring a case to a mobo, or properly applying contact paste for a cooling fan) can really hold people back. Also, time and space.
Notice how Qualcomm setup an office at the 407 and leslie industrial park in markham? The same industrial park that has ATI in it? Notice how Qualcomm are hiring a bunch of graphics drivers people to work at this office?
You know that snapdragon and adreno were originally AMD and ATI parts respectively?
See where I'm going with this? The vultures are circling.
Besides that, AMD basically make their own boards the same way intel does (reference designs that the 3rd party types only slightly modify), there's not a lot of opportunity for AMD here even if they weren't on the verge of death.
It might actually be a good thing to - you won't have to worry about a board having the right firmware for your CPU, and if they match them up well, enthusiast boards will come with enthusiast CPUs etc.
Especially with the way things are now, where you need to usually buy all new RAM to go with it, I suspect the market for people who buy a mobo + CPU combo, and then buy a slightly better mobo or CPU later as an upgrade is a small market. Even the repair market is probably quite limited for that sort of thing, because fuck it, just put in a new motherboard and be done with it. Especially it's going to be a non enthusiast grade part.
Now that the main Intel mobo maker is well, intel, (and all of the 3rd party guys just modify reference designs) I don't see a huge motivation to make them separate, if anything making them one part might limit what can go wrong.
Depends on what they have and what they do. Especially patents.
One would need to think more abstract that the current product, but bear with me a moment.
ICOA designs and installs wifi setups. They do this in all sorts of different areas (metro, hotels, airports etc.). Now lets say they have a patent on some tech that's only critical to one of those different areas.
Now lets say you're google, and you want to offer wifi service in mountain view, or the bay area, or all of california, all of the US, whatever. ICOA is a nothing company. But if you ignore their patent (which is particularly useful) you could find yourself on the hook for a few thousands of dollars per site, times thousands of sites. Or you could do both the decent thing and the useful thing, and buy them up.
Now I'm talking more in general than ICOA in specific. According toOTC exchange info on ICO , which includes their half year filing to june 30, they have 10.5 million dollars in debt, and 850 000 in outstanding shares, with 285 shareholders. So to buy them outright would be about 11 million dollars. Unless of course you want to price in some asset they haven't yet taken advantage of.
Think about an AMD, who have a market cap of a billion dollars if they're lucky, a penny stock like ICOA might be next to worthless if you include debt, but if you want to buy the company you need to take it all on, and AMD has projected future value of some number that is hopefully a lot more than a billion dollars, if they can just get the cash to make products people want to buy.
The right to bear arms (if you interpret that as either the right to have and serve in an army/militia, or a personal right to own a gun) doesn't mean you just get to shoot people for the hell of it, or because you disagree with their religion though. If you're using a gun for that purpose your gun (and your freedom) can and should be taken way.
Cell phones aren't speech, at least not in the constitutionally protected sense of being able to say what you want, no matter how vile, without the government stopping you. Without a cell phone you can still say whatever you want, you just can't use a mobile to do so.
Anything after that is a far more serious discussion than presented here, because cell phones being used to murder people, and a lot of people, is a very serious problem. If you cannot find the people behind the cell phones then as a matter of public policy you may need to block cell phones, or change the rules about acquiring cell phones, or both, or any number of other things. Just like guns. No one in the world looks at gun ownership without reflection on just what types of guns, what they're being used for, and what the cost benefit analysis really is. The rest of the world generally disagrees with the US assessments, but the US do think about this a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
And that's the question.
Did they fire a guy who lied to his bosses about the state of his product? (And remember, Steve Jobs, much as I loathe him, would have done a demonstration with this app on stage, it would have gone through a ringer of testing for the man with the kool-aid to talk about, so there's a change in testing procedure here). That would be strongly legitimate grounds to be rid of someone.
Or did they fire him because they screwed up, and want someone to blame?
Or did they just want rid of him for whatever reason, and this seemed like as good an excuse as any?
Thanks for the blanket statement, but I'm 24 and pay for all of my media (games, music, books, movies, etc.), at least that which is not freely distributed by the creators. With only maybe one or two exceptions, all of my friends and associates do the same. Crappy people are crappy people; age makes no difference except that in previous generations, one had to be technically inclined to even know how to pirate media, whereas now it's common knowledge.
thanks for the self reflection in assuming you and your immediate experience are evidence of how an entire generation behaves. There are some people who want to pay higher taxes too, that doesn't mean, on average, people want to pay higher taxes. We haven't lost 100% of the 15-25 crowd, if that happened we would have all been out of business. But we lost a lot of it, and have to figure out how to get it back, unless the broader software industry solves this problem for us.
There are a lot of smart people in the industry who are very worried about this going forward, but there are potential solutions being stuffed in your face whether you wanted them or not.
Diablo 3 is an online game. It's not a single player game. You're bitch about not being able to play an online game as single player. You may not like that it's an online game, but it's an online game at its core. That in many senses was a bad choice, but that's still the game they made. At its essence is that your character that you can work on by yourself or in a group can always group up with other players, and can expect to buy things from the online auction house. You don't like it.... well it's not the game you think it is, so tough. It's not DRM, that's the game. They took their cue from diablo 2 multiplayer communities living forever, it might have been the wrong message, but that was definitely what they wanted.
You realize Torchlight 2 will connect to a giant DRM service right? It requires steamworks, that's steams entire shtick is to be a giant DRM service. Just like the PSN etc. You have an account. If you do something they don't like to the game they ban your account from multiplayer, if someone hacks your account well.. you have to fight to get it back and can't play your games until you get it back. Uplay and Ubisoft built their DRM store as this odd standalone thing. But steam, steam is different. Steam covers up the fact that it's a giant DRM platform by being a store and an anti cheating platform (and by the way, anti cheating is a form of DRM), but it's still a giant DRM. You activate a product on steam, it's on steam, you can't resell it, you can't lend it out, you can't do anything steam doesn't approve of without suffering the consequences.
But that's the trick of it all isn't it? We tricked you. You though "oh uplay is bad because the /. hive mind says it's bad" but Torchlight, those guys who are kinda indie, kinda anti daiblo 3, they're like me, they don't like DRM right? No. They're using DRM, they tie their game to steamworks (even when the game isn't bought through steam, e.g. on gamersgate, and the game has an unlock code). But you thought that was acceptable DRM, because that's just what steam is, there's no pretense about it, you buy stuff, it unlocks it. So you are prepared to go out and pay money for a game on a giant DRM platform, because you hate DRM. And every outlet you can buy stuff from is becoming a giant DRM platform. The apple app store, XBL, steam, PSN, Microsoft app store etc (and no side loading touch interface apps). So we have one convert to the legal way of doing things. That's progress. Other than for the fact that I just gave up the great industry secret, that they're all DRM platforms in one way or another, so maybe you aren't a convert anymore.
There was no piracy prior to 2001?
No, the number of customers prior to 2001 was very small, and the barrier to entry for piracy was much higher.
That's divorced for reality, anyone who's on /. and tried to sell software for a living knows better.
And my point on solutions what exactly that, it's putting in consumers faces where you pay for the product, and how you pay for it.
The problem is an industry that is devoting its attention to eliminating piracy, not to maximising sales.
nonsense, these are not mutually exclusive. Uplay might have been a disaster, but selling DLC is not DRM, it's trying to, to use your phrase maximize sales, and people bitch about that too. Because people bitch about anything that we charge money for.
While this may be true for some subset of what pirates pirate, its demonstrably not true for the majority.
Sure, but I'm never going to make any money from users in China or india as long as their GDP is a small per capita fraction of US or european GDP on a nominal basis. They're too poor to pay for it, but they're in the habit of pirating. And if you look at china, they've been in the habit with counterfeits for years, it's very hard to break into the legitimate market.
Don't confuse worldwide sales with US/EU ones. Picking up sales 10% in places where it counts is the difference between making money and not.
What isn't clear from the articles what is the sequence here. And sequence matters, a lot.
If a court ruled that the content was libelous and needs to be taken down *then* the person contacted google and asked them to remove the offending links, and they said no, then I see the sense in the ruling.
If the person requested they remove allegedly libelous content and they said no, talk to the content providers that's a different problem.
Google should be (isn't, but should be) and honest broker of information. They should have negotiated a situation where an australian court can submit a link to google with a judgment about a libelous statement made on that link. Search results would then bring up (in lieu of 'this might be a scam') this link has been ruled libelous by a court in australia (link to ruling) continue anyway?
If the person reposts the same content elsewhere, on a different link that is now a second case of libel. Which goes through the same process.
A court can basically demand google do whatever the hell it (the court) wants, and if google wants to stay in australia it is obliged to follow. The court needs to recognize that that power doesn't mean they get to abuse google for doing its job - which is supposed to be a neutral algorithm arbiter of information - and google needs to not be stupid about going along with what they should be reasonably expected to go along with from a court.
Indeed it is. Although assembling your own computer is more of a 1 month of post high school college training level than say, building your own car which is more like a year worth.
There isn't a high end Ivy bridge, the high end sandy bridges are still 130W TDP. And a good GPU can easily be in the 200 -250 range (that's not a straight comparison to CPU because the GPU has its own board and ram being powered as well).
The future still looks like 45W or less mobile, 65W mainstream and 130W high end.
not in usability it isn't.
Windows 7 and windows Vista are basically the OS on the backend. And it gets the job done. The problem is all about useability and Vista is inferior to 7, (incidentally, 8 is inferior to 7 as well).
It a mostly wrong headed attempt to solve a serious problem, which is that a huge number of users aren't paying for your product, and could be setting themselves up for a lifetime of going to thepiratebay rather than the local retail shop.
Take the Hulu example, (or CD's), Hulu seemed great, until people realized the piratebay was still better. It was too late for Hulu, and a lot of potential customers permanently lost.
With games we have an entire generation of gamers coming up who will probably expect to be able to pirate. So what's happening? Apple App store, the PSN, XBL, the Microsoft App store, Steam etc. Putting right in peoples faces that this is where you pay for the product, and on the gaming side of things, if we catch you pirating we can just lock down your account. But of course we should have had those online stores in 2001, 2002 era. Young kids now expect to have to pay, 30+ year olds expect to pay and pirated when they were poor, but the 15-25 year old crowd is a lost decade of potential customers. Fortunately they'll have the next set of app stores in their faces enough that they might come around, but who knows.
A bit like the lock on your front door isn't actually an impediment to criminals. But the person who got past the lock has no defence of 'oh but I thought I was just free to walk in and take things'. No. No you aren't. Hopefully eventually we can turn pirates into paying customers. Because you can't run an industry where the accepted norm is not paying for the thing you produce.
Of course. I wasn't suggesting it's necessarily worth the cost savings to build your own. If you're going to save 50 or 100 bucks you might be happier to have a pre-built with a warranty. If the first thing you do when it gets to your door is void the warranty though, there isn't much point.
You also have to know what components you want, that requires research and time. I build probably half a dozen PC's a week for people on the side, and I do requirements for each one so I tend to stay current, but if you build one PC every 3 years and don't know the difference between GPU's and don't know where to find the difference buying a pre-built will get the job done.
Depends how long it takes. I usually charge 100 bucks an hour for IT work and 200 for consulting or research related stuff (PhD candidate in comp sci). I can build a machine in about 30-45 minutes. And I typically charge 50 bucks for it. If I take 45 minutes it's usually because I forgot something and have to run to the shop to buy a SATA cable or something stupid.
I price this stuff out on a weekly basis. Sometimes, especially really low end or really high end machines I recommend a pre built. If you want to spend under 400 bucks I usually can't match the component costs. If you want to spend 3000-20 000 I usually can't source the components because they ~10-15k runs and almost all of that inventory goes to the big guys first.
The 700-2500 dollar price point is almost always cheaper to build yourself, but of course you don't get a warranty with that, but you also can get more sensible combinations of components. Putting a 70 dollar graphics card in a 700 dollar machine is not doing the buyer any favours.
Granted I live one block from a tigerdirect so I don't have to pay shipping costs.
Laptops are trickier because of the thermals though, you can't throw whatever into a case and if you need more cooling add a fan later. With a laptop you have very narrow limits on how much heat you can get out of the case, and more than that and you're going to cause yourself no end of grief, and most of us can't do that maths.
Swapping a hard drive is one thing, but the GPU/CPU combo can be a big problem.
Agreed, shouldn't be -1 on that comment.
I agree, there are cases where people do buy them separately. But that's becoming much more rare. I don't profess to know the right answer, but it would not surprise me if the number of problems from incompatible firmware and swapping boards is outdone by the risk of failure of one of the two parts.
If they started selling any serious number of linux machines they almost certainly would. Money is money.
And they mark up for it.
Building your own, if you know what you're doing and know what you want is usually cheaper. But it does require work on your part, and while most of building a computer is pretty trivial some stuff (like correctly wiring a case to a mobo, or properly applying contact paste for a cooling fan) can really hold people back. Also, time and space.
Notice how Qualcomm setup an office at the 407 and leslie industrial park in markham? The same industrial park that has ATI in it? Notice how Qualcomm are hiring a bunch of graphics drivers people to work at this office?
You know that snapdragon and adreno were originally AMD and ATI parts respectively?
See where I'm going with this? The vultures are circling.
Besides that, AMD basically make their own boards the same way intel does (reference designs that the 3rd party types only slightly modify), there's not a lot of opportunity for AMD here even if they weren't on the verge of death.
It might actually be a good thing to - you won't have to worry about a board having the right firmware for your CPU, and if they match them up well, enthusiast boards will come with enthusiast CPUs etc.
Especially with the way things are now, where you need to usually buy all new RAM to go with it, I suspect the market for people who buy a mobo + CPU combo, and then buy a slightly better mobo or CPU later as an upgrade is a small market. Even the repair market is probably quite limited for that sort of thing, because fuck it, just put in a new motherboard and be done with it. Especially it's going to be a non enthusiast grade part.
Now that the main Intel mobo maker is well, intel, (and all of the 3rd party guys just modify reference designs) I don't see a huge motivation to make them separate, if anything making them one part might limit what can go wrong.
Depends on what they have and what they do. Especially patents.
One would need to think more abstract that the current product, but bear with me a moment.
ICOA designs and installs wifi setups. They do this in all sorts of different areas (metro, hotels, airports etc.). Now lets say they have a patent on some tech that's only critical to one of those different areas.
Now lets say you're google, and you want to offer wifi service in mountain view, or the bay area, or all of california, all of the US, whatever. ICOA is a nothing company. But if you ignore their patent (which is particularly useful) you could find yourself on the hook for a few thousands of dollars per site, times thousands of sites. Or you could do both the decent thing and the useful thing, and buy them up.
Now I'm talking more in general than ICOA in specific. According toOTC exchange info on ICO , which includes their half year filing to june 30, they have 10.5 million dollars in debt, and 850 000 in outstanding shares, with 285 shareholders. So to buy them outright would be about 11 million dollars. Unless of course you want to price in some asset they haven't yet taken advantage of.
Think about an AMD, who have a market cap of a billion dollars if they're lucky, a penny stock like ICOA might be next to worthless if you include debt, but if you want to buy the company you need to take it all on, and AMD has projected future value of some number that is hopefully a lot more than a billion dollars, if they can just get the cash to make products people want to buy.
Edit: Specifically, NDS (before being bought by cisco) had bought a company that specializes in just this sort of thing.
Call Cisco, ask for their just bought NDS subsidiary.
They have offices in the UK, Canada, and Israel that all do development and support teams scattered around.
They're who you want to talk to.
Expect to have to spend real money, but the alternative of doing your own in house development is likely to cost even more money.
The right to bear arms (if you interpret that as either the right to have and serve in an army/militia, or a personal right to own a gun) doesn't mean you just get to shoot people for the hell of it, or because you disagree with their religion though. If you're using a gun for that purpose your gun (and your freedom) can and should be taken way.
Cell phones aren't speech, at least not in the constitutionally protected sense of being able to say what you want, no matter how vile, without the government stopping you. Without a cell phone you can still say whatever you want, you just can't use a mobile to do so.
Anything after that is a far more serious discussion than presented here, because cell phones being used to murder people, and a lot of people, is a very serious problem. If you cannot find the people behind the cell phones then as a matter of public policy you may need to block cell phones, or change the rules about acquiring cell phones, or both, or any number of other things. Just like guns. No one in the world looks at gun ownership without reflection on just what types of guns, what they're being used for, and what the cost benefit analysis really is. The rest of the world generally disagrees with the US assessments, but the US do think about this a lot.