> This leaves the question: why does work start so early? If children benefit from sleeping longer, so should adults.
If you work 7-15h (3pm american), you still have some daylight time left at home, after work so you can do other, non-work stuff that requires daylight. If you sleep until 9 and work 10-18h, you get zero off-work daylight for most of the year.
> Perhaps other than tracking concerns, I'm totally not convinced with the reasoning.
Tracking is not an issue, if you keep your phone in airplane mode (wifi and bluetooth can be enabled on most phones, but mobile network stays disabled), or if you just remove the sim card, and put it back, on those rare occasion when you need it (so you don't have to bother other people)
If you have wifi turned on then what's to stop you being tracked. I imagine Google Maps can track you using a combination of GPS and WiFi, as well as working out your likely route between locations for periods you're out of contact.
Precisely. With any outgoing connection, your phone is constantly looking, reporting, and talking. IIRC, didn't Google (or maybe even some Open Initiative) do a huge mapping of routers based just on the MAC and overlays with GoogleMaps or OpenStreet?
A connection exposes you to surveillance, and yes, it's worse with SIMs, but having WiFi on just adds a little latency to the same thing. Public Routers that you're discovering do the same thing. I had thought this was the entire point of iOS devices randomizing their MACs when scanning available networks (no idea if this ever got shipped with Android devices).
I am probably in the "nutty" quadrant when it comes to concerns about tracking, surveillance concerns, and online privacy, but I also don't really like needlessly inconveniencing myself just to undermine the entire purpose of why the inconvenience is necessary in the first place. Your phone is always talking -- SIM card or not. I'm not even sure modern non-smart phones (flip revivals and such) are wifi free.
Such protections are a good ideal, but a lot of people have an unrealistic idea of the threat actors they're trying to protect against.
5G works perfectly fine on same long distances as 2G/3G/4G did.
But it adds a dedicated frequency range for emergency services, so when shit hits the fan, and everybody is calling everybody, the emergency workers can still communicate.
Compared to TETRA, pretty much everything is an upgrade.
> But it adds a dedicated frequency range for emergency services, so when shit hits the fan, and everybody is calling everybody, the emergency workers can still communicate.
Cool. Now if only Verizon's commercials were about that, and not claiming that the short-distance part of the network is going to revolutionize emergency services on an everyday basis.
But the fast part is what they want to advertise, so who cares about accuracy.
Nah, usually it works, just the calls don't get through.
Even after the Boston bombing, the people there couldnt get/take calls, because the network was flooded with other people calling.
Mobile networks survive most of the "shits hitting the fans", but usually the sheer amount of calls to/from that area makes them useless for emergency communication (unless you get a dedicated channel... or have "QoS" set up very very well)
Tetra is the "mobile phone" that our emergency services (well, police and firefighters atleast, not sure about ambulances) use. It offers "normal" calls and messages, ut it also offers push-to-talk, and group talks (needed for teamwork).
5G is set to replace tetra, with dedicated frequencies for emergency services, and those features implemented - so this will become the "mobile phone", using dedicated frequencies on current basestations, while the data in the backend will be transfered via 5G standards (with additional moficiations for PTT and group talk).
So yes, the technology behind is different, but the usecase will be the same.
Dedicated frequencies for emergency services is not something new that 5G brings to the table. See FirstNet for an example of LTE running on dedicated public safety frequencies.
We might be laughing now, but this kind of things bring us new laws, limitations and regulations.
Drones are a great tool, even in the hands of a total amateur. Some regulation is needed (eg. not flying over crowds of people), but otherwise a top-down view shows many, many interesting things, from far crash remains (missing people, atleast finding a body) to illegal dumping operations (eg. a company pouring toxic waste into a river), etc.
They are a great tool. We know a roofer that's using them to easily inspect and do initial quotes for roof repairs & replacements now...safer, easier, faster. Great idea.
It would be really nice to get a blanket permission for all drone activities under 50 feet AGL.
As someone who loves to use them to shoot video instead of using a ladder (for shots 15-20 feet in the air), the insane panic around their use at all has been massively inconvenient: it is illegal to fly one 20 feet off the ground in a national park as a platform for video/stills. This seems crazy to me.
Nothing that low/close poses any threat to anyone.
I've seen real estate agents using them for high altitude views of homes all the time. It does make a difference in addition to other pictures of homes. It's a view you otherwise wouldn't be able to see.
Honestly, knowing how much taxes you pay is important (and as i said in a comment above, problematic, if people don't know).
But this can be solved by autofiling taxes, and then sending a yearly report: you earned X, paid Y taxes, out of those, Z goes to this, Q to that, W to that other thing, you've used these government services this year, that cost that much money, etc.
No doubt, the thing for most people, including anyone who hates paying taxes is the bottom line. I don't see any connection though between the bottom line paid and how forgiving people will be when they discover how easy it is to file. I suspect the word prominent is a misnomer at best, it just makes no sense to me.
> is that if paying taxes gets too easy the average American will be less likely to push their representatives to lower taxes or to oppose new taxes that get proposed.
This is problematic here (small EU country). People have no idea how much taxes they pay, and believe free (healthcare, schooling,...) is actually free, and that government can pay for anything. If average Joe (Janez here) would know how much taxes he pays for (eg.) health, and what kind of a shitty service he gets for that, he'd be protesting already,... but since it's 'free', it's ok, just so he doesn't have to pay for it (out of pocket directly).
If you work 7-15h (3pm american), you still have some daylight time left at home, after work so you can do other, non-work stuff that requires daylight. If you sleep until 9 and work 10-18h, you get zero off-work daylight for most of the year.