My experience of jeeps is that they're usually the cars beached or rolled on the side of the road during snowstorms, or stranded at the side of the road on steep hills whilst I drive past in my lightweight french FWD rustbucket with chains fitted.
People seem to think that 4WD means that the steering or braking works better than other cars.
No FOAF here. It happened to a close friend of mine - for some reason her daughter had the fob when dropped off at school.
Shortly after this event (her husband was a marketing VP at Renault), Renault cars acquired a dashboard telltale warning of the fob moving out of the vehicle whilst running.
Normally I'd say this was FIAT's legendary reliability(*), but the reality is that they've sorted their technical and mechanical issues a long time ago.
This is 100% on Chrysler and is more or less the same reason that Daimler got shot of them (the daimler-chrysler merger did nasty things to Mercedes reliability)
(*) Italian - looks good, handles badly, dies quickly.
It's worth nothing that SMART-1 went to the moon with ion thrusters. It just took a while to get there.
As long as your cargo isn't perishable (meatbags), you don't need top use inefficient chemical thrusters once you've established LEO. From there all you need to do is steadily add kinetic energy.
Whitelisting is the logical endgame. Except it doesn't work.
Scammers have been grabbing phone addressbooks for a long time and sending messages/making calls to those addressbooks using the number of the victim phone (or simply hijacking the phone to send messages/calls without the owner knowing)
It's the same problem as spoofed email, where spammers have been pulling the same trick for over a decade.
"There is a good chance the call centers are not in the US, and therefor NOT subject to US law."
The USA has "long arm" statutes on the books. Basically, if you do business in the USA or the breach happens in the USA (calling a USA number counts) then yes, you are subject to US law.
That usually requires an application to courts for enforcement in the target country but these are seldom refused for cases like this.
Political calls are exempted from the TCPA - except for calls made to emergency services and specific other life-critical lines (such as extensions within a hospital). If you answer the call and indicate you're a ward phone they'll probably stop, especially given they're highly identifiable.
The FTC has been lobbying to ban pollitical robocalls for 10 years, on the same basis that loudspeaker trucks are heavily controlled.
The basic problem is that the entire global phone number routing system (which operates a bit like BGP4) is setup on the basis that only trusted entities have access to it.
This is obviously untrue and egrarious examples include an entire unallocated Chilean numbering range being used without authorization by a London UK based porn operation after they were chased off Niuean ranges they'd purchased (The scam there was that people were charged high international rates for calls which should have been terminated at very low rates)
Telephony fraud investigators have their work cut out for them. The operators behind many of these scams are quite willing to resort to high levels of violence when identified (and yes, funding/returned profits for much of this comes from organised crime or terrorist orgs)
"They know that the worst thing the FCC or even a state attorney general would do is after a 3 year investigation announce a $110k fine and a promise they wouldn't do it again."
That's the FTC.
The FCC has the power to levy a charge of $11,500 _per call_ for breaches of the TCPA and have used it to drop multiple $10million fines on the likes of Fax.com
_You_ have the ability to collect $500 per call in small claims from both the caller and the company which hired them - trebled for wilful violations - which includes all robocalls and DNC violations.
Your state AG usually has the power to go after both for DNC violations. I believe Indiana charges up to $54,000 per call and is quite willing to eexpend the resources to do so on single complaints. Willingness to do this varies but it means that scammers do avoid certain states.
A large part of the telco reluctance to get mixed up in blocking is the common carrier issue.
If they can defend it on the basis that _they_ are being defrauded on termination fees then they're on much more solid ground. The issue is proving it.
The USPS did when it stopped handling mail from Nigeria due to the sheer number of counterfeit postage stamps on inbound mail (it was over 2/3) and finally started accepting mail again when the Nigerian postal system agreed to pay based on actual items received rather than what was on their (clearly compromised) systems. At that point from the USPS point of view the fraud had stopped, no matter what the actual contents of the letters were.
There are 2 origin numbers in a phone call. The CID (which you see) and the ANR (which is used for billing purposes). It's hard to block based on CID if the ANR is valid and billable (even if forged) without jeopardising the common carrier status.
If the FTC and FCC rewrote the rules specifically allowing them to block on these issues then they'd be in the clear but such a rewrite would leave the doors open to corrupt state-level politicians forcing blocking on other issues, so it's a matter of being careful what you wish for.
"you know who knows exactly who the spammers are? The phone company,"
20 years ago this was true. Not anymore.
The scammers are running VoiP systems and several levels of misdirection. The ANR details are forged in most cases so there's a further scam in terms of fraudulent cross telco charges being incurred.
The best way to calm down a religious crusade is to make the potential recruits well enough off that they're not going to throw everything away and join it.
IE: The vast majority of recruits to such organisations are there because they feel they have nothing left to lose. ("radicalisation" recruits are down in the noise, more easily mopped up when the other 95-00% are gone and unlikely to do anything anyway in such a case)
USA foreign policy is currently the best recruiting tool that islamic terrorist organisations have. Someone who's just seen his wife and kids killed in a mis-directed drone strike is perfect fodder for them.
"The FBI has done this repeatedly for suspected non-Muslim domestic terrorists."
What makes you think they don't for muslim ones? The facts are that some slip through the mesh (McVeigh and Koersh being two examples)
The bigger problem is the USA mentality of refusing to pay taxes, which in turn leads to inadequate pay for good people and bad people using that as an opportunity to rise in the ranks. Think of this problem as a symptom of poor government and poor oversight.
Yes we have these same problems in Europe (I get semi regular calls on my mobile, always using bogus CID and I'm on the DNC lists) but there's a much greater will to track them down and deal with them (German police have been particularly willing to go into other countries and arrest people, with cooperation of local LEO - which is why germany is generally left alone by scammers)
FWIW other than the DNCs, I have 2 other weapons - on my home line I use a Fritz Box (with a couple of mods) to blacklist unknown and known scam CID, and on my mobile I use the "Call Control" app - paid - which crowdsources scam CID reports. It blocks about 20 calls (and SMS) a week.
My current mobile started getting scam calls less than 20 minutes after the number was first activated. Call Control went live on it after the 2nd one.
Robocalls (recorded) are specifically illegal under the TCPA.
The robocallers AND THE PEOPLE WHO HIRE THEM are both legally liable for the calls.
if you have the necessary patience, listen to the calls, find out who's paying for them and take them to Small Claims - because it's a robocall it's a $1500 wilful violation - per call - for each of the offenders. (The FCC can bill $11,500 per call on top)
You don't shut down robocalls by going after the call centres. They'll just fold their tents and move (see Fax.com and how many years it took to shut them down, but morphs still exist). Going after the people who hire them is the most effective method.
The robocallers might take steps to cover their tracks, but you should always be able to follow the money.
"The English NHS aims for an ambulance response time in urban areas of 9 minutes. "
If the ambulances will go out (See the SECAMB scandal)
I had a suspected DVT (precursor to pulmenory embolism) and the local ambulance service told me to make my own way to hospital. When I arrived the necessary blood tests were triaged at high priority, past a queue of 40 other people and I was berated for walking in instead of... calling an ambulance.
" Climate models have NOT managed to predict future climate with 95% accuracy. "
Climate modelling over decades is hard. Over less than that it's nigh-on impossible.
Climate observations are normally averaged over _centuries_ or longer periods.
Given the constraints they work under and the political pressure brought to bear, the IPCC is doing pretty well.
If you want to see where things are likely to be going, ignore governments. Look at what the US military is planning for and what insurance actuaries are predicting (hint: both are significantly worse than published IPCC predictions - which are under _severe_ political pressure to be as rosy as possible)
When you are boiling water you might want to give thought to the factoid that transforming any given mass of ice at 0C to water at 0C takes the same amount of energy as it does to take that water from 0C to just over 80C
It's something to think about when waiting for your cup of tea.
Slashdot Mirror
The best reason for securing your doors is that if anyone sees your stuff exiting via the windows they're more likely to call the cops.
My experience of jeeps is that they're usually the cars beached or rolled on the side of the road during snowstorms, or stranded at the side of the road on steep hills whilst I drive past in my lightweight french FWD rustbucket with chains fitted.
People seem to think that 4WD means that the steering or braking works better than other cars.
No FOAF here. It happened to a close friend of mine - for some reason her daughter had the fob when dropped off at school.
Shortly after this event (her husband was a marketing VP at Renault), Renault cars acquired a dashboard telltale warning of the fob moving out of the vehicle whilst running.
"parked in public places (carparks, street parking, etc"
They have _a_ key lock. You just have to know where to look for it.
Normally I'd say this was FIAT's legendary reliability(*), but the reality is that they've sorted their technical and mechanical issues a long time ago.
This is 100% on Chrysler and is more or less the same reason that Daimler got shot of them (the daimler-chrysler merger did nasty things to Mercedes reliability)
(*) Italian - looks good, handles badly, dies quickly.
"It's probably physically impossible to ever build a rocket that could reach the moon on a single fuel tank."
You could with Orion, but nuclear detonations within the atmosphere are frowned upon.
It's worth nothing that SMART-1 went to the moon with ion thrusters. It just took a while to get there.
As long as your cargo isn't perishable (meatbags), you don't need top use inefficient chemical thrusters once you've established LEO. From there all you need to do is steadily add kinetic energy.
Whitelisting is the logical endgame. Except it doesn't work.
Scammers have been grabbing phone addressbooks for a long time and sending messages/making calls to those addressbooks using the number of the victim phone (or simply hijacking the phone to send messages/calls without the owner knowing)
It's the same problem as spoofed email, where spammers have been pulling the same trick for over a decade.
"The FCC employee was taken aback. Press charges? We don't do that."
They don't have the power to do that.
The IRS does - and they will. Your call after notifying the FCC/FTC should have been to the local branch.
https://www.irs.gov/uac/newsro...
https://www.treasury.gov/tigta...
"There is a good chance the call centers are not in the US, and therefor NOT subject to US law."
The USA has "long arm" statutes on the books. Basically, if you do business in the USA or the breach happens in the USA (calling a USA number counts) then yes, you are subject to US law.
That usually requires an application to courts for enforcement in the target country but these are seldom refused for cases like this.
"It gets tons of political calls"
Political calls are exempted from the TCPA - except for calls made to emergency services and specific other life-critical lines (such as extensions within a hospital). If you answer the call and indicate you're a ward phone they'll probably stop, especially given they're highly identifiable.
The FTC has been lobbying to ban pollitical robocalls for 10 years, on the same basis that loudspeaker trucks are heavily controlled.
The basic problem is that the entire global phone number routing system (which operates a bit like BGP4) is setup on the basis that only trusted entities have access to it.
This is obviously untrue and egrarious examples include an entire unallocated Chilean numbering range being used without authorization by a London UK based porn operation after they were chased off Niuean ranges they'd purchased (The scam there was that people were charged high international rates for calls which should have been terminated at very low rates)
Telephony fraud investigators have their work cut out for them. The operators behind many of these scams are quite willing to resort to high levels of violence when identified (and yes, funding/returned profits for much of this comes from organised crime or terrorist orgs)
"It's amazing the terrorists haven't adopted some of the tricks the telemarketers use to mask the source of their calls."
What makes you think they haven't?
"They know that the worst thing the FCC or even a state attorney general would do is after a 3 year investigation announce a $110k fine and a promise they wouldn't do it again."
That's the FTC.
The FCC has the power to levy a charge of $11,500 _per call_ for breaches of the TCPA and have used it to drop multiple $10million fines on the likes of Fax.com
_You_ have the ability to collect $500 per call in small claims from both the caller and the company which hired them - trebled for wilful violations - which includes all robocalls and DNC violations.
Your state AG usually has the power to go after both for DNC violations. I believe Indiana charges up to $54,000 per call and is quite willing to eexpend the resources to do so on single complaints. Willingness to do this varies but it means that scammers do avoid certain states.
I have a POTS line. It's the only way to get my (80/20Mbps) ADSL service.
The actual monthly number of inbound calls on that line can be counted on one hand.
A large part of the telco reluctance to get mixed up in blocking is the common carrier issue.
If they can defend it on the basis that _they_ are being defrauded on termination fees then they're on much more solid ground. The issue is proving it.
The USPS did when it stopped handling mail from Nigeria due to the sheer number of counterfeit postage stamps on inbound mail (it was over 2/3) and finally started accepting mail again when the Nigerian postal system agreed to pay based on actual items received rather than what was on their (clearly compromised) systems. At that point from the USPS point of view the fraud had stopped, no matter what the actual contents of the letters were.
There are 2 origin numbers in a phone call. The CID (which you see) and the ANR (which is used for billing purposes). It's hard to block based on CID if the ANR is valid and billable (even if forged) without jeopardising the common carrier status.
If the FTC and FCC rewrote the rules specifically allowing them to block on these issues then they'd be in the clear but such a rewrite would leave the doors open to corrupt state-level politicians forcing blocking on other issues, so it's a matter of being careful what you wish for.
"you know who knows exactly who the spammers are? The phone company,"
20 years ago this was true. Not anymore.
The scammers are running VoiP systems and several levels of misdirection. The ANR details are forged in most cases so there's a further scam in terms of fraudulent cross telco charges being incurred.
The best way to calm down a religious crusade is to make the potential recruits well enough off that they're not going to throw everything away and join it.
IE: The vast majority of recruits to such organisations are there because they feel they have nothing left to lose. ("radicalisation" recruits are down in the noise, more easily mopped up when the other 95-00% are gone and unlikely to do anything anyway in such a case)
USA foreign policy is currently the best recruiting tool that islamic terrorist organisations have. Someone who's just seen his wife and kids killed in a mis-directed drone strike is perfect fodder for them.
The FTC and FCC have used TCPA provisions to go after numerous non-USA offenders.
One case in 1999 resulted in a UK-based spam-fax outfit being hit with $4million in fines. UK courts upheld the request.
"The FBI has done this repeatedly for suspected non-Muslim domestic terrorists."
What makes you think they don't for muslim ones? The facts are that some slip through the mesh (McVeigh and Koersh being two examples)
The bigger problem is the USA mentality of refusing to pay taxes, which in turn leads to inadequate pay for good people and bad people using that as an opportunity to rise in the ranks. Think of this problem as a symptom of poor government and poor oversight.
Yes we have these same problems in Europe (I get semi regular calls on my mobile, always using bogus CID and I'm on the DNC lists) but there's a much greater will to track them down and deal with them (German police have been particularly willing to go into other countries and arrest people, with cooperation of local LEO - which is why germany is generally left alone by scammers)
FWIW other than the DNCs, I have 2 other weapons - on my home line I use a Fritz Box (with a couple of mods) to blacklist unknown and known scam CID, and on my mobile I use the "Call Control" app - paid - which crowdsources scam CID reports. It blocks about 20 calls (and SMS) a week.
My current mobile started getting scam calls less than 20 minutes after the number was first activated. Call Control went live on it after the 2nd one.
Robocalls (recorded) are specifically illegal under the TCPA.
The robocallers AND THE PEOPLE WHO HIRE THEM are both legally liable for the calls.
if you have the necessary patience, listen to the calls, find out who's paying for them and take them to Small Claims - because it's a robocall it's a $1500 wilful violation - per call - for each of the offenders. (The FCC can bill $11,500 per call on top)
You don't shut down robocalls by going after the call centres. They'll just fold their tents and move (see Fax.com and how many years it took to shut them down, but morphs still exist). Going after the people who hire them is the most effective method.
The robocallers might take steps to cover their tracks, but you should always be able to follow the money.
"The English NHS aims for an ambulance response time in urban areas of 9 minutes. "
If the ambulances will go out (See the SECAMB scandal)
I had a suspected DVT (precursor to pulmenory embolism) and the local ambulance service told me to make my own way to hospital. When I arrived the necessary blood tests were triaged at high priority, past a queue of 40 other people and I was berated for walking in instead of... calling an ambulance.
Yes, SECAMB.
You don't need engineered steel. Foil-backed gypsum wallboards tend to work as a brutally effective faraday shield without even needing grounding.
" Climate models have NOT managed to predict future climate with 95% accuracy. "
Climate modelling over decades is hard. Over less than that it's nigh-on impossible.
Climate observations are normally averaged over _centuries_ or longer periods.
Given the constraints they work under and the political pressure brought to bear, the IPCC is doing pretty well.
If you want to see where things are likely to be going, ignore governments. Look at what the US military is planning for and what insurance actuaries are predicting (hint: both are significantly worse than published IPCC predictions - which are under _severe_ political pressure to be as rosy as possible)
When you are boiling water you might want to give thought to the factoid that transforming any given mass of ice at 0C to water at 0C takes the same amount of energy as it does to take that water from 0C to just over 80C
It's something to think about when waiting for your cup of tea.