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The forgotten war on beepers

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Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#161

Post by op00to »

amputect wrote: post #93
mongol wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is funny, in a way that I feel hard to explain. Something about it being a simpler, more innocent time?

I love that too. You definitely don't see as many of them these days. By 2006 they were kind of a punchline (cf the TV series "30 Rock" and their portrayal as a goofy dead-end tech for weirdos, sold by Dennis Duffy). This might or might not be an interesting digression (apologies if it's the latter!) but many medical professionals still carry beepers or pagers of some kind. Not like "an app on their phone that will r…

Hospitals in my area of the US still use POCSAG pagers, totally unencrypted. They do mention patient information, but I guess the obscurity makes it ok.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#162

Post by KennyBlanken »

karma_pharmer wrote: post #106

It really upsets me that the VHF pager networks were shut down. VHF pagers were the last way you could recieve notifications without having to offer up your location to surveillance. All satellite pagers require transmit-before-receive, and of course LTE requires that plus actively cooperating with the towers' triangulation of the receiver. VHF POCSAG over large urban areas is something we never should have let go of…

"VHF pagers were the last way you could recieve notifications without having to offer up your location to surveillance"

...and instead anyone in your city can read every single text message with a trivial amount of hardware?

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#163

Post by lazide »

noodlesUK wrote: post #156
lazide wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might want to actually read my comment. He was arrested pending trial. They have to decide where to put him, pending trial. If the judge expects to try him as an adult for the reasons I listed, then they're going to put him in an adult jail. If the judge expects to try him as a juvenile for the reasons I listed, then they're going to put him in a juvenile jail. Either way, someone does have to make the call. And…

> What else do you propose is going to happen though? Not parent but I don’t think that we should be holding anyone pending trial when what they’re accused of is so minor, child or otherwise. Furthermore any decisions about pre-trial detention shouldn’t hinge on remorse or contrition, they should hinge on the alleged offenders risk of flight and their potential risk to the community.

The judge is supposed to consider severity. Obviously it went too far in this case.

Regarding remorse/contrition though - that is absolutely a factor of in potential risk to the community.

Example - Someone gets arrested for DUI. Who is higher risk? Someone who insists they didn’t do it and fuck anyone who thinks they did and they’ll do what they want, or someone who says ‘that was terrible, and I didn’t do exactly what the prosecution says, but I’m not going to be driving anytime soon until this all gets worked out’?

Because plenty of people in the first category end up driving drunk while pending trial and kill more people.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#164

Post by droopyEyelids »

hughesjj wrote: post #152
armada651 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them. Do you though? Because people on the other end will often demand you respond to them if you have your mobile phone with you. This is why people consider it a leash.

Fuck 'em.

Several of us are not the top dog in our hierarchies and can suffer consequences for telling our superiors to fuck off

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#165

Post by noodlesUK »

I’m sad that radio pagers are going away. They’re a much more reliable way of getting an emergency call out than a multifunction mobile phone. Their battery life is much longer and you won’t put it on do not disturb or silent mode.

Being on a separate radio network also means that in a real emergency when mobile signal is degraded, the pagers still work.

The other thing that’s convenient is that you can hand them off physically, so people know who is responsible for them at any time.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#166

Post by themadturk »

mttpgn wrote: post #10

In the late 1990s, my dad attended night classes with other adult learners to earn his MBA. Everywhere he went during those years, my dad had a beeper clipped to his belt for an on-call hospital rotation. During his first week of class, my dad's beeper loudly went off during the middle of the lecture. As my dad scrambled out of the lecture hall to call the number on the little screen, the professor accurately guessed…

A law firm I worked for in the mid-90s started a helpdesk rotation with five or six of us taking shift with a single beeper. The only real complain was from the three women on the team, who had no belts or pockets to hang the device from (skirts and dresses were mandatory for female employees at the time, and women's clothes rarely have pockets or belts).

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#167

Post by oxygen_crisis »

KennyBlanken wrote: post #162
karma_pharmer wrote: post #106

It really upsets me that the VHF pager networks were shut down. VHF pagers were the last way you could recieve notifications without having to offer up your location to surveillance. All satellite pagers require transmit-before-receive, and of course LTE requires that plus actively cooperating with the towers' triangulation of the receiver. VHF POCSAG over large urban areas is something we never should have let go of…

"VHF pagers were the last way you could recieve notifications without having to offer up your location to surveillance" ...and instead anyone in your city can read every single text message with a trivial amount of hardware?

There's nothing wrong with open communication when everyone understands that it's open and treats it accordingly.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#168

Post by op00to »

gorkish wrote: post #92
ok123456 wrote: post #13

The policy at my school was that any "electronic device," be it a cellphone or pager, would be confiscated and held until the end of the school year. I had this happen to a (not yet modified) Radio Shack tone dialer.

> (not yet modified) I just used a walkman

I used a recordable greeting card.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#169

Post by xs83 »

I remember when mobile phones started to become big, I still had a pager / beeper at the time and realised that you could SMS directly to the beeper number for them to appear - that was a pretty cool few months until everything went the way of mobile and 2 way texting!
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