Yeah, I saved a good $300 by ordering the parts for my new rig from Amazon as opposed to NewEgg, since 2/3rds of it was Prime and I didn't have to pay that ridiculous 9.75% Los Angeles county sales tax.
Plus if anything goes horribly wrong, I've dealt with Amazon's returns center before, and they're completely painless. They'll cross-ship replacements at no charge provided they get the defective item back within 30 days.
Funny thing about the "hacking incident" is that it isn't the first time RB has had one. It only made news cuz the idiots attempted to hack their way into good universities.
I have to figure the computational power that is "barely adequate" for the sole purpose of sending and receiving voice over a cellular connection is nowhere near as complex as the computational power needed to drive the touch screen, or for that matter, the raw power needed to drive the backlight, especially as the last thing you'd be doing with the phone while making an emergency call is looking at the fucking screen.
Incidentally, CDMA phones usually have a freely accessible (yet hidden) programming menu that, among other things, let you specify whether you want the phone to run in HDR or 1X only. 1X only disables most advanced functionality of the phone, yet you can still place calls and you can still send txt messages, and contextually-important, the phone consumes much less power. HDR-only I've found is only really useful in places like Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where the town is served by a county-wide municipal cellphone company that doesn't support Verizon HDR applications, yet portions of the city are just close enough to pick up a Verizon tower from a very long distance. Can't place calls in HDR-only mode, nor send txt messages, but applications like assisted GPS and web browsing are doable.
A new treatment or cure for a fatal disease is also life-saving, but few would argue that drugs should not be patentable.
No, many regular joes would argue that drugs should not be patentable, but that's in reaction to pharmaceutical companies engaged in the act of price-gouging as a standard practice.
I have turned off the AC in my car and reduced my speed in the hopes that I could get to a gas station before running out of gas. Isn't that about the same thing?
Nope. Getting to a gas station with gas still in the tank is not an emergency, and I dare you to call 911 to bitch about your car running out of bangwater.
How about a car with an emergency reserve gas tank that is activated by a lever inside the car?
Prone to breakage, also if that fuel is rarely used then you run the risk of screwing something up, as gasoline gets rather nasty the longer it sits unused. Ran into this with an old Chevy Camaro that sat on the driveway for several years. Had a full tank, new battery and ran fine before it was declared non-op (to save on annual registration fees, obviously), and attempting to start it seriously fucked shit up cuz the gas was several years old. How do you reconcile bricking the engine to be all that useful in an "emergency?"
Cellphones already go into a special emergency mode. All phones definitely scan for more towers beyond those in the PRL list (preferred roaming list). I believe phones may also increase Tx power if battery is good and the CDMA noise floor is high.
Of course they do. Get access to the phone's programming menu and anyone can see this for themselves. Also, there is the AOC to consider, my understanding being 0-9 is determined by phone number and is effectively random, whereas 10-14 is reserved for governmental use and 15 is reserved for emergency calls. I must say the temptation is always there to bump up my aircard's AOC to 15.
Nationalizing the brilliance of invention for the good of the State? Doesn't that seem rather counterproductive if the State is to have the unfettered power to screw over everyone who has a good idea just so that they don't have to pay licensing fees? I think the reason why the US government, assuming it has this power, exercises it so seldomly is that it's much less hassle to just pay the licensing fee.
Buy them on the OEM market. Regular-capacity batteries are only a couple of bucks for the vast majority of phones, and extended-capacity batteries run around the same price OEM as the regular ones do at retail.
If your intent is to be crazy prepared, buy them OEM off of Amazon in bulk. I do this moreso because the damn batteries are so cheaply made in the first place that they lose their capacitance after about a year's worth (or less) of use anyways.
Especially as the regular-capacity batteries run for a couple bucks (or less) on the OEM market (and extended-capacity batteries tend to run for the same price on the OEM market as regular batteries do at the retail outlets), one could feasibly buy up several batteries in bulk and store them for after-emergency use, or just for whenever the battery itself no longer seems willing to hold a charge.
LoJack Early Warning keyfobs have a similar problem. They have a "Low Battery" LED that blinks, supposedly to indicate that the battery charge is low, but it actually blinks when the battery has a charge. If it stops blinking, the battery is dead, but since the LED is labeled "Low Battery," it's easy to assume the battery is fine if the "Low Battery" light isn't blinking.
I've already reported this to LoJack as a design flaw.
No, Verizon's business model is to take perfectly working phones and operating firmware, cripple them, then sell them for 150% market value unless you sign up for an expensive, binding, 2-year contract.
Not that I know of, but practically all the cellphone providers have means of sending txt and pix messages to phones via email. For Verizon it's phonenumber@vtext.com (without dashes).
Phone providers are already required to provide full service to calls made from any cell phone, include phones where the customer has had their account canceled, closed, or terminated.
For emergency calls, yes. For regular calls, no. Again, it seems ripe for abuse if the user is given the capacity to modify the cellphone's emergency numbers list.
I could accomplish nearly the same thing on my Verizon aircard by setting the Access Overload Class to 15, which is supposedly reserved for emergency calls (calling 911, for example, already sets the highest AOC, so it seems to me that the aspect of reducing the possibility of dropping the call is already covered, at least in CDMA phones), but I'm unsure of the legality of doing this. How would the cellphone networks cope with people setting practically every "important" number they have to emergency mode just so that they never get a dropped call?
For some reason I'm reminded of an analogy involving a tambourine jam session in a lion's den, but I forgot exactly how it goes. The underlying point is that if you call attention to yourself knowing damn well that you stand a healthy chance of eliciting a hostile reaction, then you can't claim to be surprised when you actually get that hostile reaction. Wave a flag of the Star of David in the midst of a crowd of rock-throwing Palestinians and, assuming you survive long enough to tell the story, criticize them all you damn well please for their "bad behavior." The rest of us will just dismiss you as an idiot.
Therein lies the most hilarious part about attention whores: they get what they deserve, but not necessarily what they want. It's always an even split between aggravating and hilarious when they react with shock over reactions they never expected to solicit.
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More like a griefer, which made his antics instant win.
MMOs are nothing but overglorified IRC clients.
Yeah, I saved a good $300 by ordering the parts for my new rig from Amazon as opposed to NewEgg, since 2/3rds of it was Prime and I didn't have to pay that ridiculous 9.75% Los Angeles county sales tax.
Plus if anything goes horribly wrong, I've dealt with Amazon's returns center before, and they're completely painless. They'll cross-ship replacements at no charge provided they get the defective item back within 30 days.
I doubt it. San Diego water is nasty, and everyone here knows it.
Funny thing about the "hacking incident" is that it isn't the first time RB has had one. It only made news cuz the idiots attempted to hack their way into good universities.
Consuming battery power unnecessarily?
I have to figure the computational power that is "barely adequate" for the sole purpose of sending and receiving voice over a cellular connection is nowhere near as complex as the computational power needed to drive the touch screen, or for that matter, the raw power needed to drive the backlight, especially as the last thing you'd be doing with the phone while making an emergency call is looking at the fucking screen.
Yup, the phones are typically defaulted to 911-only.
Incidentally, CDMA phones usually have a freely accessible (yet hidden) programming menu that, among other things, let you specify whether you want the phone to run in HDR or 1X only. 1X only disables most advanced functionality of the phone, yet you can still place calls and you can still send txt messages, and contextually-important, the phone consumes much less power. HDR-only I've found is only really useful in places like Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where the town is served by a county-wide municipal cellphone company that doesn't support Verizon HDR applications, yet portions of the city are just close enough to pick up a Verizon tower from a very long distance. Can't place calls in HDR-only mode, nor send txt messages, but applications like assisted GPS and web browsing are doable.
No, many regular joes would argue that drugs should not be patentable, but that's in reaction to pharmaceutical companies engaged in the act of price-gouging as a standard practice.
Nope. Getting to a gas station with gas still in the tank is not an emergency, and I dare you to call 911 to bitch about your car running out of bangwater.
Prone to breakage, also if that fuel is rarely used then you run the risk of screwing something up, as gasoline gets rather nasty the longer it sits unused. Ran into this with an old Chevy Camaro that sat on the driveway for several years. Had a full tank, new battery and ran fine before it was declared non-op (to save on annual registration fees, obviously), and attempting to start it seriously fucked shit up cuz the gas was several years old. How do you reconcile bricking the engine to be all that useful in an "emergency?"
Of course they do. Get access to the phone's programming menu and anyone can see this for themselves. Also, there is the AOC to consider, my understanding being 0-9 is determined by phone number and is effectively random, whereas 10-14 is reserved for governmental use and 15 is reserved for emergency calls. I must say the temptation is always there to bump up my aircard's AOC to 15.
That is assuming the batteries are manufactured with the possibility of overriding those safety electronics in the first place.
Nationalizing the brilliance of invention for the good of the State? Doesn't that seem rather counterproductive if the State is to have the unfettered power to screw over everyone who has a good idea just so that they don't have to pay licensing fees? I think the reason why the US government, assuming it has this power, exercises it so seldomly is that it's much less hassle to just pay the licensing fee.
Buy them on the OEM market. Regular-capacity batteries are only a couple of bucks for the vast majority of phones, and extended-capacity batteries run around the same price OEM as the regular ones do at retail.
If your intent is to be crazy prepared, buy them OEM off of Amazon in bulk. I do this moreso because the damn batteries are so cheaply made in the first place that they lose their capacitance after about a year's worth (or less) of use anyways.
Whoops, wrong thread.
Especially as the regular-capacity batteries run for a couple bucks (or less) on the OEM market (and extended-capacity batteries tend to run for the same price on the OEM market as regular batteries do at the retail outlets), one could feasibly buy up several batteries in bulk and store them for after-emergency use, or just for whenever the battery itself no longer seems willing to hold a charge.
LoJack Early Warning keyfobs have a similar problem. They have a "Low Battery" LED that blinks, supposedly to indicate that the battery charge is low, but it actually blinks when the battery has a charge. If it stops blinking, the battery is dead, but since the LED is labeled "Low Battery," it's easy to assume the battery is fine if the "Low Battery" light isn't blinking.
I've already reported this to LoJack as a design flaw.
No, Verizon's business model is to take perfectly working phones and operating firmware, cripple them, then sell them for 150% market value unless you sign up for an expensive, binding, 2-year contract.
Not that I know of, but practically all the cellphone providers have means of sending txt and pix messages to phones via email. For Verizon it's phonenumber@vtext.com (without dashes).
For emergency calls, yes. For regular calls, no. Again, it seems ripe for abuse if the user is given the capacity to modify the cellphone's emergency numbers list.
I could accomplish nearly the same thing on my Verizon aircard by setting the Access Overload Class to 15, which is supposedly reserved for emergency calls (calling 911, for example, already sets the highest AOC, so it seems to me that the aspect of reducing the possibility of dropping the call is already covered, at least in CDMA phones), but I'm unsure of the legality of doing this. How would the cellphone networks cope with people setting practically every "important" number they have to emergency mode just so that they never get a dropped call?
Why not pay jurors enough to give a damn?
I'm not worried. Who said I'm worried? I'm finding the whole situation hilarious.
For some reason I'm reminded of an analogy involving a tambourine jam session in a lion's den, but I forgot exactly how it goes. The underlying point is that if you call attention to yourself knowing damn well that you stand a healthy chance of eliciting a hostile reaction, then you can't claim to be surprised when you actually get that hostile reaction. Wave a flag of the Star of David in the midst of a crowd of rock-throwing Palestinians and, assuming you survive long enough to tell the story, criticize them all you damn well please for their "bad behavior." The rest of us will just dismiss you as an idiot.
Therein lies the most hilarious part about attention whores: they get what they deserve, but not necessarily what they want. It's always an even split between aggravating and hilarious when they react with shock over reactions they never expected to solicit.