Publicity play. Can anyone please tell me.......if the extra publicity makes you any more likely to program in Business BASIC or for the BlackBerry?
I worked for a company that provided terminal emulation software for use by BBX on Xenix machines (among other places). While I'm not as surprised as some people to hear they are still around in some form, both companies are now marginal at best.
I wonder how many people cashed in their $100 worth of free applications for BlackBerry after their (effectively) global outage? I think they are quickly losing relevance to just about everyone at this point.
Every time we make progress in the field of AI......it becomes commercially useful, we spin it off as another discipline and rename it to something other than AI.
The reason it's a good example is that the book you refer to has been professionally editted.
I average a book a day, and have since I was 4 years old. As far as I'm concerned eReaders are cool only because you can hack them to run other software. They are certainly not for reading books. Copyright law exists in exchange for getting rid of book licenses, and here we are, back to books as licensed content.
I've seen a number of eBooks that were effectively self-published like the Amazon model, and they were very much crap. Duplicated words at the end of a line and the start of the next line, obvious grammatical errors, spelling errors, and in one case, a character name change after chapter 3 that wasn't a plot point, it was just sloppy search and replace.
I've gone away from eBooks because of crappy editing practices. About the only good eBooks I've seen are all retroactively eBooks, rather than original release as eBook. If it comes from Project Gutenberg, yeah, I'll maybe use it in a eReader, but new books? Almost every one I've ever gotten has been The Suck as far as editing has been concerned. I read a book to read a book, not to come away from the experience wanting to claw my eyes out to retroactively edit the thing.
My only regret is that I don't live in the UK so I can opt in to the filtering and then go looking for something they failed to block so I can sue them for damaging my delicate psyche by failing to block it.
People really need to give of on this idea of a G-rated Internet, not that I think that having all Internet traffic running through a governments filtering/monitoring/blocking center is actually going to end up being about filtering to make the Internet G-rated.
I'm going to guess they have the same issues as other clones, to wit: shortened telomeres resulting in a shortened Hayflick limit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit and therefore a shortened lifespan. Subtract out the age of the dog at the time the samples used for cloning were taken.
They're an AdSense competitor, so they are a direct competitor with Google's advertising. In addition to their FaceBook association, they are also the company Yahoo pointed users to when they closed down Yahoo Publisher Network Online.
They are also the only company the FTC has gone after for having deceptive opt-out for behavioural tracking cookies.
To specifically answer your question about companies offering Business Income Insurance policies without exclusions foir acts of God. Google is your friend.
The patent on the laser would have been granted to someone other than the inventor due to the inventors mistaken belief that there was still a "reduction to practice" requirement.
You have to grant that that particular case would have unfairly gone the other way under the first to file standard.
First to file is going to favor large corporate interests with the ability to pay for the work necessary to complete filings, and disfavor individual inventors and entrepreneurs.
I say this as someone who has spent most of the last two decades working at the companies who are favored under he new state of affairs (IBM, Apple, Google).
The main developers doing the heavy lifting there get newer toys so they don't play with the older ones, and SE gets positive credit with the community. The blog comments in the blog referenced above are largely about the x10 bootloader not being unlockable.
The x10 is running a straight Snapdragon processor, which means it's using T-Zones in order to run the baseband firmware on the same chip as the OS. The reason it's not unlockable is because of that, since it would require exposing the Qualcomm hypervisor internals. This is the same reason the HP Touchpad wasn't really as much of a deal as it seemed. You don't know what code Qualcomm is running in there.
The newer phones have a Snapdragon for the baseband, and a separate application processor, similar to the iPhone design with a separate baseband, so the unlock is for the application processor without exposing the baseband firmware to similar tampering (i.e. they get to provide the carriers with the assurance of carrier lock, in the same vein as the iPhone carrier lock).
The only real question is whether they've moved the carrier lock t user space on the application processor, where it should have been on the iPhone, or if there's still an incentive to do baseband hacking to unlock the device from a particular carrier. That's the part of jailbreaking that Apple objected to for legal reasons. There was a real risk of losing FCC/country equivalent certification and contractual obligations to carriers for disallowed options such as tethering or pushing large amounts of data around, which is why there was a limit on the size of an app you could buy over the air instead of sync'ed via iTunes and downloaded to your (non-tehthered) desktop/laptop.
Nonlinear Dynamics, Mathematical Biology, and Social Science (Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Lecture Notes) by Joshua Epstein Westview Press ISBN: 9780201419887 (if you know enough math for partial differential equations, this book is a must-have, since it's directly applicable to mathematically modelling open source software projects)
The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration by Robert Axelrod Princeton University Press ISBN 978-0691015675
Game Theory and the Social Contract, Vol. 1: Playing Fair by Ken Binmore MIT Press ISBN 978-0262023634
Game Theory and the Social Contract, Vol. 2: Just Playing (Economic Learning and Social Evolution) by Ken Binmore MIT Press ISBN 978-0262024440
Analyzing Policy: Choices, Conflicts, and Practice by Michael C. Munger W. W. Norton & Company ISBN 978-0393973990
Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up (Complex Adaptive Systems by Joshua M. Epstein, Robert L. Axtell MIT Press ISBN 978-0262550253
The Brookings Institute is also active in this area (it was their math that led most of the U.S. Cold War policy and kept everyone out of a nuclear exchange with the Soviets).
The problems with wide-scale adoption of ARM for anything but higher cost or full SoC embedded systems (like the baseband radios on a cell phone) are:
(1) Economies of scale have a high impact on x86 architecture based systems costing less
(2) For comparable cost CPUs, the performance of ARM is less than Intel (see #1)
(3) Almost all ARM based designs end up with more discrete parts for comparable functionality x86 designs, due to lack of an ISA for ARM leading to something similar to the x86 ISA's common bridge chipset functionality
(4) Per The Innovator's Dilemma: peripherals continue to march up-market
That last one is really the kicker: what did a bottom-end laptop cost in 2001? 2006? What does it cost in 2011? It's the same inflation-adjusted cost inflection point; only now, the CPU is faster, there's more RAM, and more storage. You simply can't buy 16M of DRAM these days or a 1G disk, unless you are willing to pay _more_ than you would pay to get a higher amount of resources at the lowest saddle point in the COGS.
It doesn't MATTER if you need less resources, the cheapest commodity price at which you can get a particular TYPE of resource is almost never achieved by getting the smallest capacity. You can't take advantage of decreased cost per resource unit, because you simply can't obtain the same number of units as you did 10 years ago.
You can try to design SoC's to get around the bridging problem, although a quick look at the Linux kernel source tree to inventory lines of code dedicated to system-specific x86 ISA features vs. board level features will quickly disabuse you of the notion that cost will be driven lower by taping out new ARM-based SoCs to try to achieve integration. There are a bazillion "board this" and "board that" files in there to handle random gpio and i2C/SMBus/PMBus/IPMB/we-are-more-cleve-so-we-invented-our-own/etc. peripherals.
This is without even getting into other issues, like the graphics engines being optimized for different operations than most Intel graphics people are comfortable with, or companies that want to run TZones to effectively get a hypervisor-like control so that can reduce cost by running baseband code on the same CPU, and you have to trust them not to put in back doors and not make coding errors which could result in you being vulnerable because they're vulnerable.
The bottom line is that, at the present time, comparable ARM hardware to x86 hardware generally results in similar COGS, even without the so-called "Intel tax", and throwing out everything you think is not necessary to try and reduce costs just gets you down to about the same COGS as an x86 solution.
This might not always be the case; maybe the ARM vendors will call off the SoC-defacto-standard-vs-ISA war they are currently engaged in, and give in, in much the same way that there are no longer 120 versions of UNIX, like there were in the late 1980's/early 1990's. However, I would not hold my breath, as it's not showing signs of happening any time soon.
Jamming GPS doesn't make them bulletproof. Lack of GPS was a matter of the standing orders being to abort in the event of GPS failure, not even a matter of the navigator being able to use/trust their inertial systems alone.
Android has tons of units out there: yes. Android has an approachable market: no.
The problem with Android is that there isn't the same capabilities to lead to uniform software on all the Android platforms. They don't have any of the following:
o Uniform touch interface o Uniform accelerometer o Uniform screen resolution (or scalable via x2 with black bars, like the iPad) o Uniform CPU horsepower o Uniform GPU horsepower o Uniform Sound interface o Uniform applications API...which boils down to needing to chase a bunch of minority devices, each of which represents a tiny fraction of the market, even if the market penetration of Android as a device OS happens to be huge, in aggregate.
Apple on the other hand has all of those things, and they have a huge buyer market for a write-once (or write-once, do graphics twice) application because of it.
It's absolutely no wonder Apple is kicking Android's butt, and *that's* what the article should have taken away from the HP Touchpad failure, rather than just a generic "needs developers".
I respectfully disagree. Why are most air ambulance / life flight helicopters in the US manufactured by Eurocopter (French) and Agusta Westland (Anglo/Italian), rather than Bell (US) these days, even though there are a few Bell helicopter models that are CAMTS certified?
when was the last time you even saw an air ambulance that didn't use a ducted fan tail rotor, i.e. one that wasn't an EC-135 (Eurocopter)?
It doesn't [make a difference to advertisers]. It maters to the real people looking for your profile because they know your real name:
That's incorrect.
If a photo shows you with a particular eye color, hair color, skin pigmentation, or disability, this is all information that can be used to target you for special attention for certain products.
If it shows artifacts, you might be targeted for other products; for example, if you wear eye glasses, have a visible hearing aid, have a TTY device in the background, bachelor shelves (Ikea might like to know that one), a poster for a movie or a band, etc.. If it's a boy band and you're a guy, well, perhaps you'd get a different kind of marketing.
Information leakage in what you'd expect to be "non-useful" data you present on social sites can be phenominal.
I see no reason for them to exist, following the passage of the fair labor relations act. The CWA routinely harrased a number of IBM facilities, as if by using networking we were also communications workers, even though we were all salaried engineers and therefore exempt, according to the department of labor.
That said, I see the unions actions in this case as being no different than having a sit-in at a diner at the height of the civil rights movement, or a protest by the UAW blocking entry of workers into a manufacturing facility.
Now THAT said, sit-ins were civil disobedience, specifically in violation of the law, in order to DOS the court system into forcing a change in law (and which were successful in that). However, in accordance with law at the time, many of the protesters involved were in fact arrested, since the only way to try a point of law is to violate it, and then go to court over it to demonstrate why a reasonable person would do the same.
Whether the tactics used in this case constitute legal tactics of protest as a matter of process for collective bargaining, or if they constitute acts of criminal trespass on the effected communications systems really remains to be seen.
People below the age of 18 aren't entering into legally binding contracts with the cellular providers, including RIM, so they are either cast-offs or they are otherwise cheap devices, on pay-as-you-go plans. Or the phones actually still belong to the parents. Or they're stolen, or grey-market, which would make them black-listed to the network as soon as the theft was discovered.
People aged 18 or older are going to be able to enter into the necessary contracts to obtain the phones in the first place, but they'd be legally liable as adults for participating in the rioting.
I think the articles pegging them as disaffected youth are probably the most likely to be correct.
Given the problems in Greece and elsewhere in Europe, and the US unwillingness to do what any normal human being do when their income goes down, and freaking spend less, I imagine being disaffected that the nominal adults are mortgaging your future might piss some people off.
American Revolutionary War soldiers were as young as 7. One Congressional Medal of Honor recipient was 11.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 38, which only came into being in 1989 puts a cut-off limit of 15. but allows people 15-17 to voluntarily take the part of a soldier on the battlefield.
The US in large part today owes its existence to disaffected youth and some rabble-rousing "old" men -- the Boston Tea Party, which could not be said to be other than rioting, from the British perspective, was largely laid at the feet of several people, including the then-27 year old Benjamin Rush (1773). Other "founding fathers" were younger than that; Alexander Hamilton was 18 at the time.
I'm not saying that this is happening again, but the British have some track record here, and with communications blackouts being threatened, or at least the communications anonymity that was afforded the authors of the Federalist Papers, which shielded them from retaliation by the British crown at the time, it's unlikely that the real story has made it outside Great Britain.
I'm sure we'll have more information as the situation continues to develop (or not develop).
Slashdot Mirror
Publicity play. Can anyone please tell me.... ...if the extra publicity makes you any more likely to program in Business BASIC or for the BlackBerry?
I worked for a company that provided terminal emulation software for use by BBX on Xenix machines (among other places). While I'm not as surprised as some people to hear they are still around in some form, both companies are now marginal at best.
I wonder how many people cashed in their $100 worth of free applications for BlackBerry after their (effectively) global outage? I think they are quickly losing relevance to just about everyone at this point.
-- Terry
Every time we make progress in the field of AI... ...it becomes commercially useful, we spin it off as another discipline and rename it to something other than AI.
-- Terry
That's actually a good example.
The reason it's a good example is that the book you refer to has been professionally editted.
I average a book a day, and have since I was 4 years old. As far as I'm concerned eReaders are cool only because you can hack them to run other software. They are certainly not for reading books. Copyright law exists in exchange for getting rid of book licenses, and here we are, back to books as licensed content.
I've seen a number of eBooks that were effectively self-published like the Amazon model, and they were very much crap. Duplicated words at the end of a line and the start of the next line, obvious grammatical errors, spelling errors, and in one case, a character name change after chapter 3 that wasn't a plot point, it was just sloppy search and replace.
I've gone away from eBooks because of crappy editing practices. About the only good eBooks I've seen are all retroactively eBooks, rather than original release as eBook. If it comes from Project Gutenberg, yeah, I'll maybe use it in a eReader, but new books? Almost every one I've ever gotten has been The Suck as far as editing has been concerned. I read a book to read a book, not to come away from the experience wanting to claw my eyes out to retroactively edit the thing.
-- Terry
Personally I think it's a brilliant idea.
My only regret is that I don't live in the UK so I can opt in to the filtering and then go looking for something they failed to block so I can sue them for damaging my delicate psyche by failing to block it.
People really need to give of on this idea of a G-rated Internet, not that I think that having all Internet traffic running through a governments filtering/monitoring/blocking center is actually going to end up being about filtering to make the Internet G-rated.
-- Terry
I'm going to guess they have the same issues as other clones, to wit: shortened telomeres resulting in a shortened Hayflick limit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit and therefore a shortened lifespan. Subtract out the age of the dog at the time the samples used for cloning were taken.
I made this same point (to NBC) as a possibility in early 1997 when Dolly the sheep was announced, and it turned out I was correct in my assertion; see this report: http://www.liebertonline.com/doi/abs/10.1089/15204559950020003
-- Terry
Chitika is even more of a troll than that...
They're an AdSense competitor, so they are a direct competitor with Google's advertising. In addition to their FaceBook association, they are also the company Yahoo pointed users to when they closed down Yahoo Publisher Network Online.
They are also the only company the FTC has gone after for having deceptive opt-out for behavioural tracking cookies.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chitika for more complaintsand details about this company.
-- Terry
Prudential, Safeco, and The Redwoods Group
To specifically answer your question about companies offering Business Income Insurance policies without exclusions foir acts of God. Google is your friend.
-- Terry
I respectfully disagree about first to file
The patent on the laser would have been granted to someone other than the inventor due to the inventors mistaken belief that there was still a "reduction to practice" requirement.
You have to grant that that particular case would have unfairly gone the other way under the first to file standard.
First to file is going to favor large corporate interests with the ability to pay for the work necessary to complete filings, and disfavor individual inventors and entrepreneurs.
I say this as someone who has spent most of the last two decades working at the companies who are favored under he new state of affairs (IBM, Apple, Google).
-- Terry
I see this being an end run on x10 hacking.
The main developers doing the heavy lifting there get newer toys so they don't play with the older ones, and SE gets positive credit with the community. The blog comments in the blog referenced above are largely about the x10 bootloader not being unlockable.
The x10 is running a straight Snapdragon processor, which means it's using T-Zones in order to run the baseband firmware on the same chip as the OS. The reason it's not unlockable is because of that, since it would require exposing the Qualcomm hypervisor internals. This is the same reason the HP Touchpad wasn't really as much of a deal as it seemed. You don't know what code Qualcomm is running in there.
The newer phones have a Snapdragon for the baseband, and a separate application processor, similar to the iPhone design with a separate baseband, so the unlock is for the application processor without exposing the baseband firmware to similar tampering (i.e. they get to provide the carriers with the assurance of carrier lock, in the same vein as the iPhone carrier lock).
The only real question is whether they've moved the carrier lock t user space on the application processor, where it should have been on the iPhone, or if there's still an incentive to do baseband hacking to unlock the device from a particular carrier. That's the part of jailbreaking that Apple objected to for legal reasons. There was a real risk of losing FCC/country equivalent certification and contractual obligations to carriers for disallowed options such as tethering or pushing large amounts of data around, which is why there was a limit on the size of an app you could buy over the air instead of sync'ed via iTunes and downloaded to your (non-tehthered) desktop/laptop.
-- Terry
Good game theory books I keep on my shelf:
Nonlinear Dynamics, Mathematical Biology, and Social Science (Santa Fe Institute Studies in the Sciences of Complexity Lecture Notes)
by Joshua Epstein
Westview Press
ISBN: 9780201419887
(if you know enough math for partial differential equations, this book is a must-have, since it's directly applicable to mathematically modelling open source software projects)
The Evolution of Cooperation
by Robert Axelrod and William D. Hamilton
Paper: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.147.9644&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Book: ISBN 0-465-02122-2
Perspectives on Adaptation in Natural and Artificial Systems
Basic Books
ISBN: 9780195162929
The Complexity of Cooperation: Agent-Based Models of Competition and Collaboration
by Robert Axelrod
Princeton University Press
ISBN 978-0691015675
Game Theory and the Social Contract, Vol. 1: Playing Fair
by Ken Binmore
MIT Press
ISBN 978-0262023634
Game Theory and the Social Contract, Vol. 2: Just Playing (Economic Learning and Social Evolution)
by Ken Binmore
MIT Press
ISBN 978-0262024440
Analyzing Policy: Choices, Conflicts, and Practice
by Michael C. Munger
W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN 978-0393973990
Growing Artificial Societies: Social Science from the Bottom Up (Complex Adaptive Systems
by Joshua M. Epstein, Robert L. Axtell
MIT Press
ISBN 978-0262550253
See also:
http://www.santafe.edu/
http://www.youtube.com/user/santafeinst
The Brookings Institute is also active in this area (it was their math that led most of the U.S. Cold War policy and kept everyone out of a nuclear exchange with the Soviets).
-- Terry
ISA=Industry Standard Architecture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industry_Standard_Architecture
-- Terry
Sorry, but you are wrong about ARM and cost
The following is my personal experience:
The problems with wide-scale adoption of ARM for anything but higher cost or full SoC embedded systems (like the baseband radios on a cell phone) are:
(1) Economies of scale have a high impact on x86 architecture based systems costing less
(2) For comparable cost CPUs, the performance of ARM is less than Intel (see #1)
(3) Almost all ARM based designs end up with more discrete parts for comparable functionality x86 designs, due to lack of an ISA for ARM leading to something similar to the x86 ISA's common bridge chipset functionality
(4) Per The Innovator's Dilemma: peripherals continue to march up-market
That last one is really the kicker: what did a bottom-end laptop cost in 2001? 2006? What does it cost in 2011? It's the same inflation-adjusted cost inflection point; only now, the CPU is faster, there's more RAM, and more storage. You simply can't buy 16M of DRAM these days or a 1G disk, unless you are willing to pay _more_ than you would pay to get a higher amount of resources at the lowest saddle point in the COGS.
It doesn't MATTER if you need less resources, the cheapest commodity price at which you can get a particular TYPE of resource is almost never achieved by getting the smallest capacity. You can't take advantage of decreased cost per resource unit, because you simply can't obtain the same number of units as you did 10 years ago.
You can try to design SoC's to get around the bridging problem, although a quick look at the Linux kernel source tree to inventory lines of code dedicated to system-specific x86 ISA features vs. board level features will quickly disabuse you of the notion that cost will be driven lower by taping out new ARM-based SoCs to try to achieve integration. There are a bazillion "board this" and "board that" files in there to handle random gpio and i2C/SMBus/PMBus/IPMB/we-are-more-cleve-so-we-invented-our-own/etc. peripherals.
This is without even getting into other issues, like the graphics engines being optimized for different operations than most Intel graphics people are comfortable with, or companies that want to run TZones to effectively get a hypervisor-like control so that can reduce cost by running baseband code on the same CPU, and you have to trust them not to put in back doors and not make coding errors which could result in you being vulnerable because they're vulnerable.
The bottom line is that, at the present time, comparable ARM hardware to x86 hardware generally results in similar COGS, even without the so-called "Intel tax", and throwing out everything you think is not necessary to try and reduce costs just gets you down to about the same COGS as an x86 solution.
This might not always be the case; maybe the ARM vendors will call off the SoC-defacto-standard-vs-ISA war they are currently engaged in, and give in, in much the same way that there are no longer 120 versions of UNIX, like there were in the late 1980's/early 1990's. However, I would not hold my breath, as it's not showing signs of happening any time soon.
-- Terry
"...which was one of its intended benefits as claimed by proponents of the legislation."
There, fixed that for you...
-- Terry
NASA report contradicts publicity seeking artist
http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19980223621_1998381731.pdf ...and how surprising is that, really.
-- Terry
"slightly lower requirements for paleness"
'nuff said...
- Terry
Reentering warheads are completely ballistic
Jamming GPS doesn't make them bulletproof. Lack of GPS was a matter of the standing orders being to abort in the event of GPS failure, not even a matter of the navigator being able to use/trust their inertial systems alone.
-- Terry
That was my first thought. I'm still waiting for someone to build a city like Eureka with... well... slightly lower requirements for residence. ;)
I think they did, only it's called Mountain View... ;p
-- Terry
Developers: It's not price or unwilling buyers
Android has tons of units out there: yes.
Android has an approachable market: no.
The problem with Android is that there isn't the same capabilities to lead to uniform software on all the Android platforms. They don't have any of the following:
o Uniform touch interface ...which boils down to needing to chase a bunch of minority devices, each of which represents a tiny fraction of the market, even if the market penetration of Android as a device OS happens to be huge, in aggregate.
o Uniform accelerometer
o Uniform screen resolution (or scalable via x2 with black bars, like the iPad)
o Uniform CPU horsepower
o Uniform GPU horsepower
o Uniform Sound interface
o Uniform applications API
Apple on the other hand has all of those things, and they have a huge buyer market for a write-once (or write-once, do graphics twice) application because of it.
It's absolutely no wonder Apple is kicking Android's butt, and *that's* what the article should have taken away from the HP Touchpad failure, rather than just a generic "needs developers".
-- Terry
In other news, delays blamed on "failed router"
Testing?
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2011/08/09/bart-says-faulty-network-router-caused-massive-monday-night-delays/
-- Terry
"Companies will not pack up and leave"
I respectfully disagree. Why are most air ambulance / life flight helicopters in the US manufactured by Eurocopter (French) and Agusta Westland (Anglo/Italian), rather than Bell (US) these days, even though there are a few Bell helicopter models that are CAMTS certified?
when was the last time you even saw an air ambulance that didn't use a ducted fan tail rotor, i.e. one that wasn't an EC-135 (Eurocopter)?
-- Terry
Anything in the Peavy "Classic" series (see link)
http://www.peavey.com/products/instamplifiers/guitaramps/classic/
-- Terry
David Cameron is Prime Minister, not just an MP
He's the head of the executive branch of England's government.
-- Terry
Real picture WON''T be next? Are you kidding?
It doesn't [make a difference to advertisers]. It maters to the real people looking for your profile because they know your real name:
That's incorrect.
If a photo shows you with a particular eye color, hair color, skin pigmentation, or disability, this is all information that can be used to target you for special attention for certain products.
If it shows artifacts, you might be targeted for other products; for example, if you wear eye glasses, have a visible hearing aid, have a TTY device in the background, bachelor shelves (Ikea might like to know that one), a poster for a movie or a band, etc.. If it's a boy band and you're a guy, well, perhaps you'd get a different kind of marketing.
Information leakage in what you'd expect to be "non-useful" data you present on social sites can be phenominal.
-- Terry
I hate unions, and I still support the union here
I see no reason for them to exist, following the passage of the fair labor relations act. The CWA routinely harrased a number of IBM facilities, as if by using networking we were also communications workers, even though we were all salaried engineers and therefore exempt, according to the department of labor.
That said, I see the unions actions in this case as being no different than having a sit-in at a diner at the height of the civil rights movement, or a protest by the UAW blocking entry of workers into a manufacturing facility.
Now THAT said, sit-ins were civil disobedience, specifically in violation of the law, in order to DOS the court system into forcing a change in law (and which were successful in that). However, in accordance with law at the time, many of the protesters involved were in fact arrested, since the only way to try a point of law is to violate it, and then go to court over it to demonstrate why a reasonable person would do the same.
Whether the tactics used in this case constitute legal tactics of protest as a matter of process for collective bargaining, or if they constitute acts of criminal trespass on the effected communications systems really remains to be seen.
Either way, it's an interesting case.
-- Terry
Except the age of majority in the UK is 18...
People below the age of 18 aren't entering into legally binding contracts with the cellular providers, including RIM, so they are either cast-offs or they are otherwise cheap devices, on pay-as-you-go plans. Or the phones actually still belong to the parents. Or they're stolen, or grey-market, which would make them black-listed to the network as soon as the theft was discovered.
People aged 18 or older are going to be able to enter into the necessary contracts to obtain the phones in the first place, but they'd be legally liable as adults for participating in the rioting.
I think the articles pegging them as disaffected youth are probably the most likely to be correct.
Given the problems in Greece and elsewhere in Europe, and the US unwillingness to do what any normal human being do when their income goes down, and freaking spend less, I imagine being disaffected that the nominal adults are mortgaging your future might piss some people off.
American Revolutionary War soldiers were as young as 7. One Congressional Medal of Honor recipient was 11.
The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Article 38, which only came into being in 1989 puts a cut-off limit of 15. but allows people 15-17 to voluntarily take the part of a soldier on the battlefield.
The US in large part today owes its existence to disaffected youth and some rabble-rousing "old" men -- the Boston Tea Party, which could not be said to be other than rioting, from the British perspective, was largely laid at the feet of several people, including the then-27 year old Benjamin Rush (1773). Other "founding fathers" were younger than that; Alexander Hamilton was 18 at the time.
I'm not saying that this is happening again, but the British have some track record here, and with communications blackouts being threatened, or at least the communications anonymity that was afforded the authors of the Federalist Papers, which shielded them from retaliation by the British crown at the time, it's unlikely that the real story has made it outside Great Britain.
I'm sure we'll have more information as the situation continues to develop (or not develop).
-- Terry