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Comment Nothing new (Score 1) 156

We are very good at spending money and producing useless scientific papers.
My experience while working at a state owned research institute:
- Phase X of project needs buying some equipment
- Only 30-60% money available
- Write useless study to justify spending the money
- Move acquisition to next phase
- Repeat until project gets buried

Comment Re:Get the latest smartphones (Score 1) 79

No, in GSM SMS messages are part of the voice network. [...]

Besides the voice network's control channel the short messages can also be transported on the data network which has a much higher capacity even for 2G.
All those phones that normally stay connected to the Internet (pretty much all smartphones and feature phones) can send and receive SMS with little latency and with less congestion.
For the operators short messages are still a cash cow and will remain so even if they reduce prices 10 times.

Comment Re:The second link is the important one (Score 5, Interesting) 73

Pretty much none of the major providers issue ancient SIMs with DES OTA signing. For the old cards never replaced they may just deactivate them in HLR and wait for subscribers to complain to support.
On the other hand cheap Chinese SIMs are still issued in some countries. The only relief is that some of them don't support OTA at all...

Comment Re:fairly sure this uses sms (Score 1) 199

The system uses Cell Broadcast, not SMS.
CB works pretty much like teletext or CC on TV so in a few seconds all phones in an area can be alerted without any extra network usage.
On the other hand SMS uses paging, channel acquisition and a temporary connection. A flood of short messages can bloxk the network just like it happens on New Year.

Comment Re:Good to see intelligence rewarded for once. (Score 1) 241

In the end the students were given detentions for taking the sodium without asking, and I don't think anything happened to the teacher (who was a great teacher in general). In today's absurd educational environment the teacher probably would have been fired and the straight A students (one of whom is now an aeronautical engineer and the other a doctor) expelled and their future academic careers ruined...

So it's better to not get caught. Worked for me. Every time. 25 years ago...
I can swear that our principal looked straight at me after filling the high school with smoke but he couldn't prove a thing. I even wiped my fingerprints off the bottles - just in case :-)

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