Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The forgotten war on beepers

newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 405 posts

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#301

Post by prmoustache »

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?

Usually pagers were used to ask people to call back so I don't think that is a big issue. It is like shooting at someone you recognize far away in the street so he can look back and meet you. Everybody will hear that but not the actual content of the conversation afterwards.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#302

Post by consp »

8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #277
bruce511 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I resisted having a phone at all until 2013. People were amazed even then. I ended up getting one for development. It proved useful enough that I used it myself, but I've managed to limit usage to WhatsApp (and SMS), web reading (like HN now) and not much else. Lots of Web stuff (especially financial stuff) requires 2FA so SMS is now more-or-less required. People have learnt though that my phone is always on silent,…

Mines usually on silent too because certain individuals abuse it and I don't like hearing it ping and boop and beep every 30 seconds. None of this is urgent stuff.

I'd very much like if everyone was forced to use buzzer only. The annoyance of people having to let everyone know they have a phonecall which cannot wait is borderline insulting.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#304

Post by cyberax »

Faaak wrote: post #293
cyberax wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, but YOU are wrong. Go on, do the experiment I mentioned. Plea deals don't change anything, the vast majority of takers are guilty. It's just a method of cutting down on the cost of the trial. Wrongful convictions certainly exist, but they are not even close to the main reason for the prison population.

Bystander here, but I think you should open your horizon a bit.. or maybe you're a troll, who knows?

And have you tried to open _your_ horizon past the usual slogans ("mass imprisonment", "school-to-prison pipeline", etc.)?

Try it. It might help you. Or not.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#305

Post by gambiting »

cyberax wrote: post #284
asveikau wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can keep believing this and being confidently wrong. Seems like my point about plea deals blew past you. Repeat: Innocent people often plead guilty to lesser charges because they fear wrongful convictions for something more serious. The system is set up around this. When wrongfully convicted, it's also very common to get denied parole because you don't admit to doing something wrong. From what I've heard it's ver…

Sorry, but YOU are wrong. Go on, do the experiment I mentioned. Plea deals don't change anything, the vast majority of takers are guilty. It's just a method of cutting down on the cost of the trial. Wrongful convictions certainly exist, but they are not even close to the main reason for the prison population.

>>Plea deals don't change anything, the vast majority of takers are guilty.

So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends months waiting for trial, then the DA comes around and says "look you can go to trial and maybe get few years in prison, or you can plead guilty and we'll count your time in jail as time served so you can go home tomorrow"

1) Do you think these stories are wrong? Or rare?

2) If you were in that situation as an innocent person, can you not imagine yourself being tempted to accept just to go home to your family?

Edit: just to be clear - I don't think anyone is disputing the "majority" part. But I definitely don't think it's so insignificant to be completely ignored either.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#306

Post by MrVandemar »

droopyEyelids wrote: post #164
hughesjj wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuck 'em.

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

Grow a back bone. You can paraphrase "fuck off" in a nice but firm way, which is called setting a boundary. And if you dont' set them yourself, others will set them for you.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#307

Post by kanbara »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #115
cookie_monsta wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Pagers and phones are MY devices, and I get to decide how I will respond to them. Oh, so you've never had the "why didn't you pick up/ call back/ answer my text/ etc" conversation with your partner? Lucky...

Not at our house. We decided early on that the phone was for the owner not everybody else. One of my sons even leaves it in a drawer, takes it out once a day to check.

“we” — you mean that you decided for your family, removing agency from other humans

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#308

Post by atoav »

throw_pm23 wrote: post #138
munchler wrote: post #96

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…

I had the same thought process in the 90s, and it is the reason why I still don't have a smartphone :)

In my organization all people have work phones, but they are rarely used to call people. When I get a call from coworkers it is usually emergency stuff where it makes sense for them to call me — rarely outside of my work hours. All the rest are emails or chat messages, which I can read when I decide to do so.

I am okay with that.

Although a smartphone related work horror story I heard once, was somebodies boss who communicated the plans for the week for 12 employees in one 40 minute rambling speech message, which may or may not involve crucial need-to-know information at minute 35 and 30 seconds of information that affected you.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#309

Post by kanbara »

shermozle wrote: post #253
dogmatism wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

ah yes, the beeper, more high power than the top end 5g UC flagship phones. because that makes so much sense
Post reply on HN