100%, and it extends beyond vacations, too. Unless you have a formal on-call arrangement, then any time you spend doing work stuff outside of your work hours is time you are choosing to donate to your company. It's fine if you want to do that, but you don't have to. I work 8-4 every day. I am not contactable outside that window and definitely not contactable on my days off. I haven't worked at a ton of different places, but at the places & teams I have worked with, I've never had anyone object to this policy.
This is one of the reasons I work in an office every single day. I leave my work laptop there. I don't have any work software on any of my personal devices, including my phone. If I had the ability to check in on work things while out of the office, I probably would, so I make it impossible.
This is exactly the move. Work and life should be separate. No work stuff on your personal devices; no personal stuff on your work devices. This way, you can be your best self in both worlds.
Easy fix. It should be opt-in to accept a call that is routed through one of these. I know they allow it so some grandma in rural France that still uses a dial phone on a copper line that hasn't been touched since 1962 can call her son in New York, but for the rest of us who are not in that situation, we can just blacklist all those calls and lose nothing. This would even fix spam for the people who opt-in, because so few people have grandmas in rural France that it's not worth it for the spammers to bother anymore.
> Easy fix. It should be opt-in to accept a call that is routed through one of these.
Easier (and correct) fix: Telecoms operators should not be permitted to provide transit to a call that's routed through one of these.
> I know they allow it so some grandma in rural France that still uses a dial phone on a copper line that hasn't been touched since 1962...
This doesn't make sense. Even my inexpensive Mikrotik switches can augment packets with the ID of the port that they originated from. I do not believe for even a second that Telecoms Grade switching equipment is unable to do the same. The fact that that grandma can send and receive calls tells you that both that that equipment exists and that it knows what port her phone is connected to.
> I do not believe for even a second that Telecoms Grade switching equipment is unable to do the same.
The example should rather have been some telecom carrier in Africa or India. Telco equipment is expensive, the technology is ridiculously complex and getting companies especially in less well-off regions to replace aging stuff and updating it to modern standards is next to impossible. Think about it, the globally connected phone system includes countries where you get 10 GBit/s symmetric fiber in your home and it includes countries where people don't even have running water because they're so poor.
The fact that we in Western countries can have a realtime conversation with someone in the Saharan desert or in an Indian village that requires days worth of travel [1] is nothing short of a miracle.
Odd. I could have sworn that Caller ID, Customer-initiated Dialback, "Tell me the number of my most recent caller", and "Keep calling this number for the next half hour, and ring me if the call is answered" were features that were available on the POTS since the early 1990s. I agree that the tech's complex, but the R&D for the stuff I'm talking about has been over and done with for at least thirty five years. There are adult HN users who have never lived in a world without this stuff.
> ...getting companies especially in less well-off regions to replace aging stuff and updating it to modern standards is next to impossible.
I don't see how that's the problem of "The West"? If it's actually a problem, instruct "Western" telecoms to send a couple-hundred-million dollars in last-gen equipment, along with the techs required to install it and let them declare its original purchase price and the full cost of the manpower as a tax credit.
> ...is nothing short of a miracle.
If we ignore the existence of long-range radio, and if this were prior to 1965 or -at latest- 1970, I might agree. But, like, we've had satellite telecommunications for nearly sixty years, terrestrial microwave transceivers for a couple of decades longer, and short- and long-wave transceivers for far, far longer than either.
Additionally... I don't know if you've noticed, but it's not uncommon to have a satellite phone in your pocket these days.
> I agree that the tech's complex, but the R&D for the stuff I'm talking about has been over and done with for at least thirty five years.
Sure, but now have a look at the infrastructure that's physically deployed. Hell in Germany (!), it took until 2020 to finally disable the old and truly horribly aged ISDN infrastructure. When it takes the third-richest nation by GDP that long to replace technology, I am not going to demand better from nations that are a few dozen places below us on the economy rankings.
> I don't see how that's the problem of "The West"? If it's actually a problem, instruct "Western" telecoms to send a couple-hundred-million dollars in last-gen equipment, along with the techs required to install it and let them declare its original purchase price and the full cost of the manpower as a tax credit.
Yeah good luck with getting that past our populations that, no matter if we're talking about the US or Europe, have been riled up by the local far-right and Russia that foreign aid is a bad thing and "national wealth should stay in the nation" (with the end result of course being that Russia has swooped in to replace our foreign aid, and that's why we see so many putsches in Africa).
> But, like, we've had satellite telecommunications for nearly sixty years, terrestrial microwave transceivers for a couple of decades longer, and short- and long-wave transceivers for far, far longer than either.
Sure! But the fact remains that it took a lot of effort to get telephones and their infrastructure deployed effectively worldwide.
> Additionally... I don't know if you've noticed, but it's not uncommon to have a satellite phone in your pocket these days.
In developed economies, sure. But in countries where the iPhone models capable of that (or an outright Starlink terminal) can cost a full year's wages? In South Sudan, the yearly corrected purchase power is about 716 $ per person and year [1].
> When it takes the third-richest nation by GDP that long to replace technology, I am not going to demand better from nations that are a few dozen places below us on the economy rankings.
It's odd that you talk about "demanding" nations to foot the bill for upgrades even though I talk about paying "Western" telcos to give it to them, install it, and teach them how to use and maintain it for free. You even quote this plan in your next paragraph. Smells like you have an axe to grind or something.
> Yeah good luck with getting that past our populations that...
Oh boy. Hun, the "expense" is gonna be less than a couple billion dollars, and it's not even going to be an appropriation. Unless some politician wants to use it to score points, literally noone in the public will notice.
> But in countries where the iPhone models capable of that (or an outright Starlink terminal) can cost a full year's wages?
Mmm, tell me what the BOM is for the satellite communications package on the phones that I'm talking about. I bet that not only do you have no clue, you're also largely unaware of the state of radio telecommunications in many of the nations in Africa. As a bonus inquiry, do tell me how many of the people who can't afford to buy the cheapest-available satellite phone are running scam/spam phone call operations in those countries. I bet that number is very close to zero. ;)
Do remember that TFA that started all of this conversation discussed the FCC's plans to require government-issued ID in order to get access to the phone network. This is being presented as the "only way" to "solve" spam and scam calls, but even a moment's thought makes it plain that not only is it not the only way, [0] it will be completely unable to achieve the stated goal.
[0] ...tax credits and their equivalents move businesses to solve every problem that can be solved, after all...
Your points would come across a lot better if you turned the sarcasm & condescension in your tone down like 15 notches. You're being bizarrely rude & aggressive for a conversation about telcom tech.
The simplest phone you can attach to any POTS line in the US is the touch-tone phone. [0] It's a microphone, speaker, ringer, switch, and a DTMF tone generator. The most complicated part of this device by far is the tone generator. The line it's attached to provides the power for all of the electronics/electromechanics inside the phone... and is also responsible for activating the phone's ringer and "knowing" the status of the "on hook" switch. The most basic phone models have no memory or logic inside them of any kind.
Given these restrictions, how does one ensure that one can activate the ringer of a single phone (and connect its speaker and mic to that of the caller, and noone else) in a world where all of the human operators were replaced by electromechanical ones, which were then replaced by fully computerized ones? Once one has figured that out, how does one ensure accurate and correct determination of the calling parties, the transit networks, and the duration of the call? One needs to recover your costs, and one uses usage-based billing to do so. [1]
In order to do those things, mightn't the system that that phone is connected to have to have all of the information about the callers, the systems the call flows through, the duration of the call, etc, etc, etc?
[0] Rotary phones are even simpler than touch-tone phones because they replace the tone generator with an elecromechanical gizmo that bangs on the line when it's rotated. Because I vaguely remember hearing that some phone networks were phasing out support for rotary phones, I'm assuming that you're not guaranteed to be able to attach one and have it function.
[1] I'll only briefly mention POTS features from ~35 years ago such as "Caller ID", "Read to me out loud the phone number of my most recent caller", and "Keep calling this number for the next half hour and ring me if they pick up", which had to (and did) work with these dumb-as-bricks phones.
It is opt/in. There's three categories (according to that defcon talk): call originates from the number it says it does, call originates from our network but we're not sure about the number, and call came to us unverified (only allowed by regulation on legacy links).
Now, operators of those legacy links make A LOT of money for operating them since they carry 100% of the country's spam traffic, and they're not going to shut them down just because you think they should. The government would have to make them do it and they'll pretend upgrading is super expensive.
> call originates from our network but we're not sure about the number, and call came to us unverified
I'm saying these two categories should be denied by default by my telecom provider, and the user must opt-in to receiving them.
> Now, operators of those legacy links make A LOT of money for operating them since they carry 100% of the country's spam traffic, and they're not going to shut them down just because you think they should.
Those operators are not my concern, they can do whatever they want. I want my telecom provider to block unknown/unverified calls by default. I have no reason to ever receive a call from an unverified source. Some people might, because they have business or relatives or whatever in such a region, and they can opt-in to receiving them if so.
If your telecom provider stopped carrying unverified calls you'd cancel your service because you'd miss a lot of important calls. If the government required it for all calls though...
Like what? Who is both a legitimate caller and also trying to call me through one of these unverified legacy services? If their calls stopped going through to a huge chunk of their customers (this is one of the reasons receiving unvalidated calls should be opt in, not opt out), why wouldn't they switch to a verified service?
Your bank is calling you from a verified network, unverified number, because it's one of their employee's phones but they want the caller ID to be from the main switchboard, and they didn't bother to do the extra work with their telecom to make this verify as a correct number.
I am, more in tune with "just get it over with" than ever. Ipv6? 25 years of this crap? should have just said, Jan 1 2001, all routers must support 64 bit ipv4 addresses. Like the chrome HTTPS switch over, JUST DO IT
If you've ever been part of an organization that participated in something like Google Summer of Code, you know this isn't fiction. People really do behave like this.
> I've got research on everyone, and had emails drafted for each one based on what they said. Quotes and figures and all.
Please tell me you did the work to validate that the quotes and figures were not made up by the cheap model. These things make stuff up all the time, you absolutely cannot rely on them without validating the output yourself.
Yep, I manually listened to the meeting recordings (easy to find the spots based on the transcript timestamps) for any quotes. There are also meeting minutes and agendas with supporting docs to corroborate against (e.g. for dollar amounts). They really don’t make stuff up all the time if you root them in data.
> It's almost as if the choice between the two parties is no choice at all.
Hi, I live in Minneapolis/Saint Paul. You may have heard about what the Republicans in the federal government did here a couple of months ago! The only appropriate response to your sentiment would, rightly, get me banned from this website. Please think before you speak.
For those who just watch fox news we're up to an estimated 700 million dollars of damage, completely aside from the human suffering for no definable reasons. The murders and the justification for murders, the protecting of murderers, and the celebration of convicted murderers in the local MN GOP.
What relevance does that have to this discussion of the executive branch causing willful damage? It just sounds like you are trying to say that its either false, misleading, or just a place where that happens so why give a shit.
None of those really seem like worthwhile to bring to this discussion.
I don't know that there is. It takes ages to develop an EV-focused platform, and the lines to manufacture it. Tesla is the only American manufacturer that has already done that work, and they're circling the drain. Aside from them, there's exactly one decent US-owned EV on the market, the Chevrolet Bolt. All of the top-of-the-line EVs are Korean or Chinese, and the 2nd tiers are all European. America's EVs aren't even on the horizon, they'll be playing catchup for decades.
> there's exactly one decent US-owned EV on the market, the Chevrolet Bolt.
I drive a Chevrolet Blazer EV. Test drove a Equinox EV as well. There is the silverado EV as well. Chrysler and Ford are mostly working on plug in hybrids which is 90% of the advantages of an EV for those who charge at home (if people will is debated).
Which is to say the big-3 car makers all have EV or close enough EV cars and are making more.
A major problem is that dealers hate carrying and selling EVs. If you want to get these vehicles you either have to special order them or you have to buy used.
I think a big portion of why Tesla is so prominent is because it's relatively easy to get a Tesla almost anywhere.
*edit* I'm out of date. It looks like the dealers around me are all stocking EVs now.
I'm actually out of date. The last time I searched (Dec last year) it was the case that it was quite hard to find any EV brand that wasn't Tesla. This appears to have changed as now I can find most EV brands in local stock.
The US specific part is that a decent portion of the population makes, at least occasionally, longer trips outside of urban centers where more limited range, longer charging stops, and the need to carefully plan routes to hit chargers (that are hopefully functioning) make ICE derived power more attractive.
You are right, looks like my local chevy dealers also have EVs on their lots. In fact, now that I'm searching this time it looks like most of the other dealers have EVs.
This wasn't the case when I searched around Dec last year.
I wonder if the shift in gas prices has caused all these dealers to start stocking EVs.
This is what I use & like as well, but I definitely think there's space for a more GUI-focused option that isn't Quickbooks or Gnucash. It's not a good fit for me, though, I require my important tools to be open source. Closed source software has way too many misaligned incentives for me to use it for anything important.
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