Here the offence for driving whilst influenced by alcohol has been revised to be "Prescribed Concentration of Alcohol" which in the jurisdiction is 0.05 for normal drivers, 0.0 for provisionally licenced drivers (recently licenced ones) and variously for other categories of drivers like Taxis and Trucks.

As a result the offence is not a subjective one about onces capacities to drive but rather just the amount of alcohol in your blood.

As a consequence, the application of "Random Breath Tests" or RBT is a fundamental part of driving. The police require no warrant to randomly sample the driving populace for testing their breath for the presence of alcohol. A result in excess of the PCA means a test at a more accurate machine and subsequently a blood test if a driver refuses the breath test.

As a driver, my privacy is not invaded, I am not "targeted by the state" but rather a part of the duties attached to my _licence_ to operate a motor vehicle is the requirement to drive with less than the PCA in my blood. End of story.

You USA folk need to get clear on the distinction between rights and duties, one cannot have one without the other.

rewrite fullwise upsub antefiling

It doesn't quite work this way. This is going to be a bit technical, but you asked a technical question, so bear with me. Yes, I am a ham (since you asked for one), and I've also done some commercial RF data systems.

As others have pointed out, cellular telephone systems aren't like broadcast systems. You really can "put up more towers" to increase the amount of "service" (available data transfer per unit time, number of simultaneous voice calls, etc.) in a given geographic area without using more RF bandwidth. The reason for this is that you can turn the power on the base and handset down to reduce the coverage of the cell allowing reuse of the RF bandwidth more frequently within a certain geographical space. This is already done: cells on rural highways are much larger than cells within a city. In fact, the cells on rural highways would often be capable of covering an entire city from a geographic point of view, but there wouldn't be enough capacity to handle all that traffic, so smaller (lower power, lower antenna angle, etc.) cells are placed in cities allowing reuse of that RF bandwidth. Broadcast services can be thought of as "cellular" with very large cells (depending on the service, up to and including the entire planet for HF "shortwave" radio, for example) if you want, but that's not a traditional interpretation.

As for how much bandwidth it takes to attain a certain information rate, that varies with a number of factors. Assuming a uniform RF environment (noise, propagation, etc., which of course isn't true but is handy for discussion), the key tradeoff is made by how "aggressive" your modulation scheme is. A more aggressive modulation scheme packs more data into a certain amount of RF bandwidth, but it requires a stronger signal to noise ratio at the receiver to demodulate and recover the data. The exact relationship between how much data you can chuck into a given amount of RF bandwidth and the required receiver SNR varies with your chosen modulation scheme and receiver design. The reason data rates have been increasing with time is that newer, better (easier to demodulation) modulation schemes and better (mostly less noisy, but also more cost effective for a given complexity) receivers are being developed. More cells are also being added (see above) to lessen "competition" for the channel's bandwidth, but we're also seeing a lot more users and demand, so that probably averages out. The amount of RF bandwidth allocated to the cellular telephone services has remained roughly constant since the late 90s (800MHz cellular band + 1900MHz PCS band, though other bands are also used regionally, and some of these are new).

In a two-way scenario like a cellular telephone, you also get to play with the fact that the two directions don't behave equally. The base-to-handset link (downlink) has the advantage of no access contention (there's just one base, and it knows everything it's doing), expensive equipment (there's only one, so the company can pump some money into it), and lots of power available (it's plugged into the wall). The handset-to-base link (uplink) is messier: it has access contention (multiple handsets coordinated remotely by the base), cost sensitive equipment (consumers don't like to pay thousands of dollars for their handsets), and limited power (batteries). Antennas are something of a wash since antennas are effective about equally in both directions. What all this means is that it's easier to use a more aggressive modulation scheme (and hence cram more bits per second into a given chunk of RF MHz) on the downlink than the uplink. Fortunately, this is roughly in-line with consumer demand: most consumers want to transfer large stuff to their phones, not from them. FWIW, Cable Modems have similar concerns, and a similar situation results.

You also seem to assume a TDMA based uplink channel. Modern standards are all CDMA based. While the theory of operation is totally different, the effect is the same: multiple people contend for the same resource. Various standards allow for various amounts of "resource concatenation" to allow one user to use more than one "unit" of the uplink when it's not full, but most of them do not dynamically adjust the size of the quantum. (Though, somewhat amusingly, the downlink of CDMA2000 EVDO is time-division multiplexed).

Cell providers also have to ensure that old handsets are supported. For non-compatible upgrades (e.g. GSM to UMTS - done by AT&T and T-Mobile), this means they basically have to run both standards side-by-side on different channels. This results in some interesting scenarios where congestion will force some users onto a slower, less efficient standard even if the handset and base both support something better. I've seen this happen at amusement parks a lot.

Also, some on-air standards don't support voice calls at all (e.g. EVDO or HSDPA), and the carriers always want to be able to handle voice calls, so generally at least one channel on a cell will operate in a voice capable mode, though I can imagine some might have the capability to drop every channel into a data-only mode if there really are no voice calls. A true "4G" service would eliminate this as voice calls are actually just data, as far as the infrastructure is concerned, with QoS used to ensure availability. Current data standards (including the LTE being deployed by Verizon) do not have this QoS capability, so voice calls are still routed on a separate channel (probably RTT, but I'm not familiar enough with these deployments to say this authoritatively). LTE Advanced should mash all this back together.

Of course, all this stuff has limits. It's not practical to set up a cell (with the required base station, antennas, tower, etc.) every 100 feet, and current RF technology and transmitter/receiver complexity is only so advanced, so there is a limited amount of service available to an end user. I can't say I agree with Verizon's pricing (I use Sprint, and while I don't have a 4G handset, if I did, I'd have unlimited transfer while on 4G Wi-Max and a 5GB soft cap while on 3G EVDO/RTT), it's not like they could offer unlimited everything easily. I just think the overage charges and base limits are a little off.

(I apologize if I've gotten any technical details e.g. what standard supports what wrong - I'm not a cellular engineer, so if anyone reading this is, please correct me. The basics should be reasonable, though)

A random breath test (as we call it where I'm from) is a completely acceptable price to pay when travelling on a limited public resource (the roads) with a bunch of asshats that continue to drive drunk putting me in danger.

Or more straightforward, let all the passengers vet the other passengers on their flight. Maybe a reality TV type approach where each passenger is voted on or off the plane by all the other passengers.

It's only half a joke.

The rule is not that you can't bring a weapon aboard an airplane, it's that you can't take a weapon through security and into the gate area. The reason should be obvious: if different rules applied to passengers on different types of airplanes, then a person flying on e.g. a private jet could bring a weapon through security and hand it to someone who is flying on a commercial airliner. I'm sure some airports keep general aviation isolated from the airlines, but as the article states, "The airport doesn’t have separate boarding arrangements for private-jet users". So whether or not Jobs was really involved in such an incident, all of this outrage is silly.

And it's not really an Exploit, either.

1: It's javascript that tries to guess what your modems IP address is. If it's possible for javascript to find out what your IP Address is, it becomes trivial, and it it's possible for javascript to find out what your default route is, then it's solved.

2: It then tries to get into your router. I would assume there would be another js library that it would load, that could be easily kept up to date, containing fingerprints of modems so it can figure out what it is, and try the default (root/password, admin/admin, etc)

3: It then updates the DNS servers in the modem to NOT use the ISP assigned ones, but nasty ones. As your PC queries the modem (99% of the time, unless you've manually changed your DNS servers) for DNS results, if the DNS relay in the modem is pointing to the wrong root, then you'll get crap answers.

I realise they say that using OpenDNS wouldn't avoid this, but I think that's known, technically, as bullshit.

Actually, all you need to do is look at the default route of the PC. There's your modem.

It's almost like there's some kind of Application Programming Interface layer there. Wouldn't that be new and interesting?

I've watched a good deal of the calculus videos. They are very good. He does a great job explaining things.

I even donated a few bucks. I suggest doing the same. It's well worth it.

My cynical side says that it's because neither want you to be able to "extract" content from the things you use your phone for and rather than design the feature thoroughly to encompass uncopyable elements they just went for the zero case.

To be fair, man problems in software come down to the zero, one or many case in terms of design and in the case of copy and paste, I can imagine that the full implementation of what they want copy to be is very complicated. Simpler just to make it always impossible to copy rather than to decide when it is right and wrong.

It's this kind of thing that just shits me about digital restricitons.

Have all the other passengers on the plane vet each passenger. All the passengers get into the departure lounge, each gets a handset/chair with a red/green button as each passenger is called, all other passengers are entitled to vote red or green. If you get a majority of red you ain't on the plane. Sorry.

Naah, the correct punishment is for the offender to be offered the oppurtunity to repent their acting or else the offending team is actually allowed to hurt them as much as they are acting. I reckon diving would be out of the game in a minute. Particularly if teams started picking a "specialty" player who was say 2 metres tall and 125kg with a side line in debt collecting.