251–260 of 405 posts
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How do they know if you have the phone if you don’t pick up?
Because they see you're active on WhatsApp or telegram :) I switched off the blue tickmarks in WhatsApp and even that really triggered people.
So, theoretically, what would happen if a student brought a retro beeper device to school today?
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 lot of doctors still prefer to carry beepers
In the 90's, I was a project manager for a software consulting company. I carried a beeper onsite so my superiors could reach me when needed (e.g. to discuss growing the account). During a lunch meeting one day, two of my bosses at the consulting company suggested that I upgrade to a cell phone, like they had done. I said I was reluctant to do that, because I valued my independence and didn't want to be on a short le…
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/15/1219737658/why-do-doctors-sti...
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A lot of doctors still prefer to carry beepers
More to do with the fact a pager will reach places a phone won't. Operating theatres are often in the basement or the middle of the building where mobile signals don't reach but pager signals do. They're super high power and lower frequency so they penetrate further.
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The thing is, the vast majority of convicts in jail are genuinely guilty. I'd put it at 99% at least, probably more. And even many of the "innocent" people there are more likely to be of the kind: "I did not rob and kill this guy, I only fenced his watch". What can be done with it? I now believe that the only way is more aggressive policing with almost zero tolerance. At the same time, the jail terms need to go _down…
I think you underestimate the rate of wrongly accused and wrongly convicted. Estimates vary, iirc I've seen some papers claiming 5% and others claiming as high as 20%. There is a lot of over-charging going on too. Then, most cases don't get to trial, so you have people pleading guilty to things they did not do because they fear wrongful conviction for something worse.
I volunteered as an unpaid IT support at a non-profit working with ex-cons who were trying to get back to normal life. So I got to speak with lots of people who were actively trying to get away from the prison life. Some of _them_ were saying that _they_ met no innocent people in jail.
And this is not really an exaggeration. You can pull up a roster of prisoners in your local jail and try to do a search for their names. You'll find that pretty much everyone there has a loooong rap sheet, with jail time merely being the "crowning achievement".
And it's always the same pattern: a long list of crimes that result in no punishment (ignored fines, ignored community service, probation, ignored bench warrants, etc.) until they get unlucky and encounter a prosecutor or a judge who is not willing to tolerate bullshit. Or if they commit a grave crime that can't be ignored.
That's why I think that we should absolutely make jail time one of the _first_ deterrents. And this also should absolutely apply to juveniles (yes, "jail our kids").
HOWEVER, the jail terms also need to go down. Especially for the first time offenders. Not years and months, but days or weeks.
And there is solid research backing that up. It's the _inevitability_ of punishment that is the best deterrent, not the strictness of it (that's also why the death penalty is useless, btw).
I remember this well. Crime, drug, and gang hysteria were very big in the 90s. "Gangs are using pagers to sell drugs to children" was a quick and easy way to demonize them and ensure that they get banned hastily, without a lot of questions. The funny thing is that in political discussion, drug, crime, and gang hysteria are back. Rates of crime and gangs are much lower than the 90s. With drugs, fentanyl and its diffic…
I remember learning about these in elementary school. We were sitting in assembly in a room called "The Pod". Listening to rules and administrative things. On the list of banned items never to bring to school, along with drugs, guns, and knives, beepers were listed. I wasn't sure what they were, but from the context and too many cartoons, I assumed they were an explosive device that beeped a few times before blowing…
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…
Plus, VHF signals can get where no LTE or satellite can arrive, even if you are two floors underground. Downside is that anybody can read POCSAG, especially nowadays with inexpensive SDR receivers...
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…
Yes!! This. I would totally carry a pager if the network still existed. Not all the time, but just sometimes when I'd like to feel free. Ps there is still the iridium paging service which is one way and is not transmit before receive. But they want to get rid of it and stopped selling hardware. It's really hard to find now second hand.
The only thing you can receive without transmitting is a one-bit "message waiting" indicator, so you don't waste uplink bandwidth polling the satellite unless there's something there for you. Basically the satellite broadcasts a list of terminals that have messages waiting for them. I recall there being some kind of bloom filter, so technically it's less than one bit.
You can't get anything else downstream unless you transmit first to ask for it. Also the only way to clear the "message waiting" bit is by transmitting to the satellite, so you can't even try to encode a message by flipping that bit on and off.