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The forgotten war on beepers

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Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#371

Post by wa2flq »

wkat4242 wrote: post #220
mcmoor wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really know how beeper works, why is it not interfering with medical equipment like mobile phone does? Solely because of low power?

No they don't interfere because they only receive. They send nothing. At least the pagers of those days didn't, two way pagers did exist but they were super expensive and really uncommon. To be honest I wish I could still buy one because I'd love to be reachable but not trackable at times. Unfortunately Spain has no pager network in operation anymore. In regards to how they work, the messages were broadcast over the…

There were two way pagers (receive and send). The receive only ones rarely interfered with medical equipment. But occasionally the local oscillators on receive only pagers would interfere with medical or sensitive research equipment.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#372

Post by qwerpy »

exe34 wrote: post #344
qwerpy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the water gun in question though: https://abcnews.go.com/US/traumatizing-family-calls-justice-... Still sucks that the kid got shot for it, but I can see the confusion, compared to the usual colorful water guns.

That's the thing though, in the civilised world, if you see something like this in the hands of a child, you'd assume it's a toy.

Maybe this is more a reflection of the US being civilized or not, but there are teenage “children” the same size as the kid in this story, using actual guns to commit violent robberies in parts of my city. So it’s not trivial to determine whether an adult-sized human holding a black gun is a threat or not.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#373

Post by qwerpy »

mrguyorama wrote: post #362
qwerpy wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look at the water gun in question though: https://abcnews.go.com/US/traumatizing-family-calls-justice-... Still sucks that the kid got shot for it, but I can see the confusion, compared to the usual colorful water guns.

This is America; Owning a real gun should not be an acceptable reason to be shot by the police. What the fuck is the point of all the aggressive defense around the second amendment if the second a cop sees a gun they are free to murder people? Cops are not judge, jury, and executioners, and in fact have zero authority to hand down punishment. Being shot for holding a gun is absurd.

Is it that unreasonable? An adult-sized person was waving a realistic looking gun around and (allegedly) pointing it at houses. Some attempt at deescalation needs to be made, but if that fails, I wouldn’t want the cop to just shrug and leave. I’d expect him to do whatever it takes to remove the gun from this individual.

There’s a huge difference between simply owning a gun vs wandering around in public pointing it at people.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#374

Post by giantrobot »

eks391 wrote: post #287
8n4vidtmkvmk wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 have notifications disabled on everything except for when my credit cards are used, calls and texts. Even then, I have a whitelist for call notifications and a blacklist for text notifications, and silent hours at night that only my mother can bypass. I am no longer bothered by every nagging app or fake urgency.

I do the same. I hate "notifications" and very few things are so potentially important that I need to be interrupted by them. Effectively zero notifications have any real urgency. Also apps and websites treat notifications like an invitation to spam you. I default deny every request for notifications.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#375

Post by cubefox »

NoGravitas wrote: post #368
cubefox wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jonathan Haidt has a new book, The Anxious Generation, where he presents evidence that smartphones and social networking really do cause a decline in teenager mental health.

Haidt's claims are not supported by a preponderance scientific studies: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00902-2 > Two things need to be said after reading The Anxious Generation. First, this book is going to sell a lot of copies, because Jonathan Haidt is telling a scary story about children’s development that many parents are primed to believe. Second, the book’s repeated suggestion that digital technolog…

Here is Haidt's detailed rebuttal of the piece you cite: https://www.afterbabel.com/p/phone-based-childhood-cause-epi...

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#376

Post by autoexec »

ianburrell wrote: post #107
autoexec wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Children don't have property rights but their parents do and they own their children's things. If a parent went to the school and asked for the confiscated item that school would be insane to deny them.

Children own their stuff. Parents can control the child’s things like they control other aspects of child’s life. They give some of the control to schools. What happens when child becomes an adult? They own all their stuff from before, the parents do not keep it. It can be complicated since parents let child use stuff, but anything given to or bought by the child is theirs.

> What happens when child becomes an adult? They own all their stuff from before, the parents do not keep it.

I think that parents basically "gift" their adult children their old things. At 17 years and 364 days a parent can take everything their child "owns" and burn it/throw it in a wood chipper with zero legal issues (concerning specifically the destruction of property anyway, burning/chipping some things will get you in trouble), however once the adult child has been informally gifted their old "belongings" there's no take backs without legal repercussions.

Things do get more complicated with things the child bought with their own money... I'm guessing the law would be more willing to accept that those things should belong to the child, but even if a 15 year old kid buys an xbox with their own money I doubt the cops would arrest the kid's parents for smashing it with a bat.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#377

Post by Am4TIfIsER0ppos »

guenthert wrote: post #327
Symbiote wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't you print the tickets? Even here in Denmark that's still an option.

Here in Germany, the "Deutschlandticket", a country-wide public transportation ticket, is currently valid only via smartphone or "Chipkarte" (smart card). Unfortunately that smart card isn't available everywhere and won't be before early next year. It seems rather like a policy snafu then intended though [1]. [1] https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/niedersachsen/Deutschlandtick...

It is intended. The goal by all governments is to "encourage" smartphone usage. That ticket situation is both carrot and stick.

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#378

Post by fein »

op00to wrote: post #335
fein wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's over the air, not even phone lines. PDW, SDRSharp, and an rtl-sdr dongle is all that's needed. And yes, there is a lot of patient info in that traffic. It's not illegal for the hospital to broadcast this, and it's not illegal to listen in and decode the signals, but it is very much illegal to do anything with the information gathered.

There’s not much to do knowing that a patient pooped and needs to get cleaned up in room 604.

I don't think I have any logs of these any more, but when I was listening on the local hospital's pager traffic, I seem to recall messages that were along the lines of [last name][room number][sexually transmitted disease test is complete]. Surprised me at the time too because I used to do work dealing with processing CDA documents into fhir data and I know how crazy HIPAA can be with PHI/PII, but at the same time these legal frameworks often have carveouts or super serious adoption deadlines that keep getting pushed to next year (and then next year, and then next year).

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#379

Post by IIsi50MHz »

nicolas_t wrote: post #325
consp wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You might love Japanese trains where people have to use silent mode (so called māna mōdo), I've always loved this.

Yes, also understandable as "Manner Mode". It came with my Sharp DOCOMO SH-05G tablet-phone!

Re: The forgotten war on beepers

#380

Post by DerekL »

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…

> their wives called them too often for annoying requests, like stopping to get milk on the way home.

Wouldn't it be more annoying to get home, and then have to go out again to get the milk? What they probably meant was that they didn't ever want to go to the store themselves and wanted their spouse to do it.

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