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The forgotten war on beepers

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Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#351

Post by lazide »

morsch wrote: post #289
lazide wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it shows no remorse. The reason for reduced sentences for juvenile offenders is the idea that they ‘didn’t know any better’. That they can learn and grow and NOT be a menace to society soon. If they still refuse to take any ownership or show any contrition even after being clearly shown something was a major problem (hence the court case), then why reduce the penalty? Who would it be helping, exactly?

Children might be incapable of determining certain actions are wrong or illegal. They might be able to do that, but unable to apply this knowledge to their own behavior. A trial won't fix immediately this, just like charging an 11 year old like an adult won't make him grow a beard.

The case involved an 11 yr old accused of 1st degree murder with a shotgun.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#352

Post by prmoustache »

firewolf34 wrote: post #281
nvy wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it difficult to exist in modern society without one?

The NUMBER 1 most annoying thing about not having a phone in the modern day is ticketing services / events. The second is Uber/Lyft/etc (though less of an issue in cities with public transit).

Thanksfully in many cities in the world regular taxis do still operate. In my city they aren't necessarily more expensive than Uber. It depends of the kind of route and time of the day/night. Sometimes you pay more, sometimes you pay less.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#354

Post by lxgr »

kotaKat wrote: post #349
lxgr wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I’m referring to the Iridium pager, which is just its own service and has been around longer than SBD, I believe. Messages were (are?) free to send on top of a monthly flat subscription rate per pager. GDB seems to be a successor to that, though.

GDB is just a branding for their own flavor of what they're selling which is Iridium Burst, which also appear to run on the 9602/9603 SBD modules, so... maybe Iridium Burst is just spicier Iridium SBD? https://www.iridium.com/services/iridium-burst/

SBD is bidirectional unicast (and mandatorily so; as you say, SBD can't transmit to devices before they initiate a mailbox exchange, with the exception of a "message waiting" indicator.

Iridium Burst seems to be multicast-capable, and optionally bidirectional or unidirectional, so "spicier SBD" makes sense!

But their paging service was definitely unidirectional and unicast. Here's an old talk on decoding the signal, if you're curious: https://media.ccc.de/v/31c3_-_6236_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201412281...

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#355

Post by cruffle_duffle »

kanbara wrote: post #309
shermozle wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It actually makes a lot of sense. A lot of pagers operate on lower frequencies (~100 mhz instead of 400 or 700) that can penetrate way deeper than the higher frequencies used by modern phones. Plus the data rate is substantially lower, which acts in the favor of getting reception.

So yeah it makes a ton of sense. These are very different devices operating using different frequencies and protocols.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#356

Post by TheCleric »

cyberax wrote: post #206
arp242 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In this case it's a white kid though, and a lot of the kids from "kids for cash" were white. If we look at the prison population and include just the white population (~60%), the US still incarcerates vastly more people than other comparable countries. It's not even close. While in general racism is certainly a contributing factor, I don't see it being the main factor. I don't have the impression the other factors yo…

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 your estimates are way off. A study in 2014 found that 4% of death row inmates were wrongly convicted[1]. This is likely to be the highest scrutiny cases in our system, so I'd expect that non-death penalty cases would have a wrongly convicted rate of >= 4%. And that's not even counting the people that have been leveraged into plea deals for crimes they didn't commit simply because the system is so weighted against them.

1: https://www.pnas.org/doi/full/10.1073/pnas.1306417111

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#357

Post by TheCleric »

drdaeman wrote: post #15
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.

> confiscated and held until the end of the school year. How things like that were even remotely legal?

Because the loophole was you could get it back at any time if your parents came down to claim it. And (for me) it was always easier to get it back at the end of the year than to tell my parent, where I would still lose the item (via my parent's revocation) AND catch an extra punishment on top of it.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#358

Post by dghughes »

There's a video on YouTube of a doctor showing his beeper/pagers how it works and why he still has one. He goes two or three floors down in the hospital into a shielded room. His phone utterly lost no bars but the beeper worked fine.

Found it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uAwW9arTxGo

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#359

Post by gambiting »

cyberax wrote: post #340
gambiting wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>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 wer…

> So all these stories where someone is put in jail, spends months waiting for trial At least in West Coast states, you are almost guaranteed to get a low bail or no bail at all. You'll likely be denied bail only if you are accused of something heinous, so your sentence will be longer than the time in pre-trial. Or if you have a history of skipping bail. So your scenario is highly unlikely, at least on the West Coast…

>>At least in West Coast states,

The stories I've read were mostly in New York where this kind of thing happens not infrequently, so I guess - I have no data to prove otherwise.

>>My personal philosophy is that laws must be written in such a way, that they don't require any prosecutorial discretion or plea deals.

Well, we 100% agree then.

>> Instead, we have people who want to "fix the root causes of crime" or "abolish incarceration". This is destructive, and it's not helping.

I also agree.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#360

Post by morsch »

lazide wrote: post #351
morsch wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children might be incapable of determining certain actions are wrong or illegal. They might be able to do that, but unable to apply this knowledge to their own behavior. A trial won't fix immediately this, just like charging an 11 year old like an adult won't make him grow a beard.

The case involved an 11 yr old accused of 1st degree murder with a shotgun.

Yeah? My point stands. Also: Throw the owner of the gun in jail.
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