A Beginner's Guide to the Internet/INTERNET.ISO/text/telediag/tc13-117.txt

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TELECOM Digest     Sat, 20 Feb 93 20:40:30 CST    Volume 13 : Issue 117

Index To This Issue:                      Moderator: Patrick A. Townson

    Re: The War on Pagers (Kyle J. Cordes)
    Re: The War on Pagers (Matthew Crosby)
    Re: The War on Pagers (Samuelson S. Rehman)
    Re: The War on Pagers (Pat Turner)
    Re: The War on Pagers (Jonathan Bradshaw)
    Pagers, Cellphones and War on Drugs (Robert Masse)
    Re: Standard Dialing Plan (Bill Stewart)
    Re: Standard Dialing Plan (Carl Moore)
    Re: Meet Me at the Power Line (Matt Healy)
    Re: N.E.T. and the Phantom Phone Exchange (Richard Nash)
    Re: Cellular Phone Questions (Bernard Rupe)
----------------------------------------------------------------------

From: [e-mail] (Kyle J Cordes)
Subject: Re: The War on Pagers
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1993 00:48:02 GMT


Well, I can think of a legitimate reason to have a cellular phone at
high school:

  FOR FUN.

A few years ago (when I was in high school) a friend of mine had a
car-phone.  Neatest toy in the world.  Yeah, it cost him $0 a month
at the time, but it was so neat that it was easily worth it.  (In
retrospect, that is.  Of course, he had a job at the time and I
didn't ...)

(At our high school, a sizable fraction of the upperclassmen had cars,
and in the suburban area where we lived, going anywhere required
driving around.)


Kyle


[Moderator's Note: I am quite sure Kyle made a typo in his message
with the cost of the phone being 'zero' per month ... but I have no
idea what he meant to put there so I did not change it.   PAT]

------------------------------

From: [e-mail] (Matthew Crosby)
Subject: Re: The War on Pagers
Organization: University of Colorado, Boulder
Date: Sun, 21 Feb 1993 01:14:08 GMT


In article <[e-mail]> mc/G=Brad/S=Hicks/OU=0205925@
mhs.attmail.com writes:

> Look, it would take only a very, very minor change to these laws to
> make them perfectly reasonable.  Change the law so that (a) =students=
> are banned from wearing/carrying communications gear, and (b) all
> other people are banned from school grounds unless they have a
> legitimate reason to be there, as determined by the local
> principal/administrator, and even then, NO LOITERING.

> I am at a total loss to imagine what legitimate need a high school
> student or younger has for to have a pager or cellular phone with him
> or her at school.  They are there to learn, period.  Never mind the
> drug angle; if that cellular phone or pager rings during classroom
> hours, it is an impediment to learning -- and not just for the person
> who has it.

*sigh* Why oh why do people feel that hs students should be treated in
a fascist manner?  Why do people consider people unable to act
responsably just because they haven't had that magic 18th birthday
which immediately changes them from an irresponsible teenager to a
responsible adult?

For the record: I am a freshman in college, so I recently finished
high school.

Now, when I was in high school, there where several people who had
pagers, and had legitimate reasons for having them.  A couple needed
them for work.  A large number where volunteers in various
organizations, like fire departments or search/rescue and where
regularily on call.  Occasionally these would go off.  It was
certainly no more interruption then, say, a watch.  I can't speak for
cellular phones, because I didn't know any one who had them.

> If you need to get a message to a student at a school, call the
> school.  They know where the student is and can relay a message as
> quickly or as slowly as it requires.  (If they don't know where your
> child is, then you have an even bigger problem.)  If a student in
> school needs to make a telephone call, he or she can either wait until
> after school or ask the office for permission; I am hard-pressed to
> think of any legitimate use that can't wait for one or the other.

My high school had about 3500 students.  It had five buildings and
large grounds.  If a student was in class, he could have been found.
If he recieved a call during one of his off periods, his chance of
being found was virtually nill.  He may not have even been on campus,
considering most of us where allowed off campus during our off hours.
Are you seriously suggesting that the office should have really been
able to find a student at all times during the school day?

On the broader sense, why must something be banned just because a
small minority uses them for illegal dealings?  What on earth is it
the business of the school administration if we choose to have
something that generally has no bearing on the rest of the school?  If
people where shoes with shoelaces, they can strangle their classmates
to death.  In addition, many drug dealers wear shoes.  Does this mean
that shoelaces should be banned?

I'm sorry if this comes off as being too much of a flame, or too off
topic, but when I was in high school I was sick and tired of people
assuming that just because I was a student I must be a violent rowdy
drug-dealing irresponsible hooligan, and therefore it was perfectly
all right to treat me like that.  This attempt to ban pagers is, imho,
just another example of the facism of the war on drugs.


Matt   [e-mail]

------------------------------

Reply-To: [e-mail]
From: [e-mail] (Samuelson S. Rehman)
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1993 16:31:53 -0800
Subject: Re: The War on Pagers


I have been listening for sometime and I'm very confused.

Are we so ignorant that we actually think for one second that the best
way (or even the only way for some) to help a child grow is not to
inspire them, let them understand (not just "remember") what may be
right (to us) and what may be wrong (as we look at it), but to
merely wipe away everything signs that you dislike or similarities
that they have to those "bad" kids?

I can understand the fear a loving father might have in seeing his
kids growing up with the "style" of a so-called bad person.  Or how
annoying it could be when a beeper goes off in a most inspiring
lesson, both for the teacher and the students.  But do you think
taking away the pagers will settle their hearts?  Or to be more
extreme, will taking away the guns stop others from killing?  I'll say
no. "It's the thought that hurts, not the act."

      The pager is just a reception device.
      Televisions are reception devices.
      Your eyes are reception devices.  Ears are reception devices, ...

Everyone seems to symbolize problems from time to time, so as to
identify them easier.  And soon we forget the root of such problems.
So we blindly attack the "symbols", instead of the actual matter it
represents. And then we make more symbols.  And then, again, we
attack.  And this goes on endless.


Best Regards,

Samuelson S. Rehman
{Systems Programmer - RnD.NCA, Director of NIS Systems}
Newspager Corp. of America
voice: [phone] | fax: [phone] | email:[e-mail],[e-mail]

------------------------------

From: [e-mail]
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 93 15:13 EST
From: rsiatl![e-mail]
Reply-To: [e-mail]


Brad Hicks writes:

> I am at a total loss to imagine what legitimate need a high school
> student or younger has for to have a pager or cellular phone with him
> or her at school.  They are there to learn, period.  Never mind the
> drug angle; if that cellular phone or pager rings during classroom
> hours, it is an impediment to learning -- and not just for the person
> who has it.

When you consider that school property includes the parking lot, the
law is a little more unreasonable.  I have one friend that kept
several pagers and a Wilson land mobile rig in his car when in high
school.  He worked for a two-way dealer.  I don't think cell phones in
students cars are a bad idea either, some rural students drive up to
40 miles to high school.  I had a two-meter and a CB in my truck for
part of high school.


How the rules are actually enforced,of course, is up to the teachers.
I was sent to the office when I was in high school for carying drug
paraphanalia (a set of aligator clip leads I had been using while
adding an extension to the school's Merlin.), yet raised no concern
about having a Hilti gun in my locker, or running a chain saw in the
school lobby (to prune the student council Christmas tree).

When I was in high school, there was a pay phone for students to use.
One of the teachers tells me it was removed the next year when the
school received a bomb threat.  The Assistant Principal ran out of the
office to call police from another phone, only to hear the girl
calling the threat in from the pay phone in the lobby.

Ah the life of a high school technogeek.


Pat Turner KB4GRZ   [e-mail]

------------------------------

From: Jonathan Bradshaw <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: The War on Pagers
Organization: University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1993 16:17:52 GMT


In article <[e-mail]> mc/G=Brad/S=Hicks/OU=0205925@
mhs.attmail.com writes:

> Look, it would take only a very, very minor change to these laws to
> make them perfectly reasonable.  Change the law so that (a) =students=
> are banned from wearing/carrying communications gear, and (b) all
> other people are banned from school grounds unless they have a
> legitimate reason to be there, as determined by the local
> principal/administrator, and even then, NO LOITERING.

> I am at a total loss to imagine what legitimate need a high school
> student or younger has for to have a pager or cellular phone with him
> or her at school.  They are there to learn, period.  Never mind the
> drug angle; if that cellular phone or pager rings during classroom
> hours, it is an impediment to learning -- and not just for the person
> who has it.

First, that would ban HAM RADIO which as a high school student I was
very involved in. Secondly, I carried a cell phone in high school. Of
course, it was turned off during class but I had two jobs, worked 34
hours a week and went to school. I never carried a pager but
considered it.  At 17 I was a licensed disc jockey so I also carried a
SCANNER to monitor the radio station I worked for communications too.
(Check the .sig for the station).

Lets get off the idea that controlling technology will control
problems.

HOWEVER, I agree fully with the (b) section of your message. Trouble
is, in every school I have seen that IS ALREADY IN EFFECT. So, all
that happens is the kids go accross the road during lunch etc. which
isn't school grounds to do their deals. Didn't exactly make a
difference. And you can hardly ban kids from going outside the school
grounds before/after school!


Jonathan Bradshaw | [e-mail] | PGP Key Available On Request
Packet: n9oxe@n0ary.#nocal.ca.usa.na | Prodigy: XMSN02B | (Os/2)(DOS)(Linux)
WNDU-AM/FM/TV South Bend, IN | Disclaimer "My opinions are not my employers"

------------------------------

From: [e-mail] (Robert Masse)
Subject: Pagers, Cellphones and War on Drugs
Organization: Communications Accessibles Montreal, Quebec Canada
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1993 16:53:08 GMT


I attend CEGEP and it is full of kids with pagers.  To them, it is
'cool' and neat to have them (age 17-24).  Only ten or so have
cellular phones.  Out of all of them, one guy uses his cellular phone
to get messages from his father (his father was a mobster a while
ago), what he does now is unknown.

In high school (age 12-17) I was the only one to have a cellular phone
(for work) and when I first got it I received a lot of flak from
teachers who thought the drug trade was going to start in our school.
After talking to the principal, I assured them I was not dealing in
illicit drugs.

Now my old high school is full of kids with them, and I hear that the
teachers are getting fustrated of hearing beep-beep-beep or dring
dring in class.  They aren't doing anything about it either because
they are too scared now.  Mind you all of these high school kids are
using them for status symbols.

I hope it doesn't come to outlawing them like previous posters
mentioned, where in my opinion a person's right to carry one shouldn't
be denied.


Robert Masse    Computer Consultant
Voice [phone]   [e-mail]    [e-mail]
Fax   [phone]   [e-mail]

------------------------------

From: [e-mail]
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 93 02:50:47 GMT
Subject: Re: Standard Dialing Plan
Organization: Electronic Birdwatching Society


In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Mark Brader)
writes:

>> There's nothing more annoying than a telco switch that says "It is
>> not necessary to dial 1 and the area code for this number".  If telco
>> knows what number is intended, why doesn't it just go ahead and
>> complete the call?!

> It doesn't know what number is intended.  It knows what number you dialed.
> The message is a polite way of saying "You were about to reach a wrong
> number!  But luckily we noticed that the number you dialed would be a
> local (or in-area) call, while you dialed in a manner requesting a
> long-distance (or out-of-area) call.  Since everyone knows the extent
> of their local calling area (or area code), you must have been calling
> the wrong number.  Please try again and dial the right number now."

ARRGH!  There's nothing more annoying than a piece of hardware that
thinks it knows what you want better than you do!

I go to the San Francisco Bay Area occasionally on business.  I often
want to call places from pay phones when I do.  I have enough trouble
keeping track of whether the person I'm calling is in 408, 415, or
510, without also having to keep track of what the often-illegible
phone number on the stupid pay phone is, much less having any clue as
to whether this is officially a long distance call or a local call or
which side of the LATA boundary it's on.  If I dial 1-415-NXX-XXXX,
then I want to talk to 1-415-NXX-XXXX.

And if the pay phone says it's run by Joe's Garage COCOT service and
uses FooBar Long Distance, I want to dial 10ATT-0-415-NXX-XXXX and not
have some stupid friendly phone tell me I don't need to dial 1 and
"Have a Nice Day - Click!"  I want to get the AT&T Bong.


Bill Stewart 1-908-949-0705 [e-mail] AT&T Bell Labs 4M312 Holmdel NJ

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 20 Feb 93 17:27:43 EST
From: Carl Moore (VLD/VMB) <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Standard Dialing Plan


To repeat an old story from me in this Digest: I answered a call at a
Newark, Del. pay phone [phone]xxx), got an operator (British-
sounding voice) who was trying to complete a collect call, and I
learned she was trying to reach 203 instead of 302.

------------------------------

From: [e-mail] (Matt Healy)
Subject: Re: Meet Me at the Power Line
Organization: Yale University--Genetics
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1993 15:58:48 GMT


In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (John
Nagle) wrote:

> [text deleted]
> distance to the conductors is key.  When you are far away from a pair
> of wires near each other (like an ordinary power cord) the effects of
> the two conductors cancel out.  Twisted pairs cancel even better.  So
> an analysis based on a single-line model isn't valid.

> Three-phase lines require more analysis, but I think that the
> effects of all three lines cancel similarly, since there's no net
> electron flow (the current in all three lines instantaneously sums to 0).

The effects had *better* cancel; if not then you have a ground fault.

This is, in fact, how ground fault circuit interruptors work.  The
GFCI has a sensing coil looped around all power-carrying lines in the
protected circuit.  The path integral of flux around the loop should
be zero if the currents balance.  A non-zero current in the sensing
loop means juice is going someplace it should not go, so the GFCI
trips.  Close to the wires, there will be local net fluxes, but at a
great distance they cancel out.

This also is the reason for the old electrician's rule that you make
_one_ hole in a metal enclosure for all the power wires of a given

circuit.  If the wires are run through different holes, so there's a
non-zero net current, then you can get lots of eddy-current heating in
the enclosure walls.

Before I left engineering for science, I designed AC switchgear; after
a couple years I decided if you've seen one motor control center
you've seen them all.


Matt Healy    [e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1993 09:08:16 -0700
From: [e-mail] (Richard Nash)
Subject: Re: N.E.T. and the Phantom Phone Exchange


[e-mail] writes:

> YES!  This is the not the first time that a telco has hosed their
> routing tables.

> One Saturday morning I got a call from our Southern Division Energy
> Control Center in Salisbury MD that they could not get any calls from
> Southern Delaware.  I tried it myself -- Delmarva has an extensive
> private fiber net and I have a bunch of OPX lines in various counties
> terminating on the sets in the Network Operations Center here.

> Sure enough, Kent and Sussex Counties had NO long-distance access
> through MCI -- AT&T worked fine.  Talked to the folks at MCI -- they
> had several open problem reports on the same thing.  They were getting
> nowhere with Bell of Pennsylvania (MCI has two big DMS250's in
> Philadelphia that apparently handle Delaware, as well as eastern PA).

> Anyhow, I raised enough hell that I finally spoke to a switchman in
> Bell's Market St CO.  Finally found that they had installed a new
> generic the night before and had forgotten to load some of the
> translation tables!

Yup, the ONP (One Night Process) from NT strikes again!  The group
responsible for performing these software loads may be experiencing
staffing problems, either due to over-worked individuals, or else from
being less than fully trained.  NT recently implemented their software
*quality* program, (we are now beginning to see the the results from
it.:) One of the installation steps requires that the applicator
actually has to read the error report generated from the tables
transfer routine.  (Data from old side copied across to new software
side).  A lot of applicators ignore these errors, but are usually
picked up that a.m., as the troubles start rolling in! :) :) --


Richard Nash  Edmonton, Alberta Canada T6K 0E8
UUCP:      [e-mail]

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 19 Feb 93 09:03:31 CST
From: [e-mail]
From: [e-mail] (Bernard Rupe)
Subject: Re: Cellular Phone Questions
Organization: Motorola Inc., Cellular Infrastructure Group
Date: Sat, 20 Feb 1993 14:59:47 GMT


[e-mail] (Don Wegeng) writes:

> Consider the following scenario.  At home I have a contract with the A
> carrier, and have the phone programmed to only roam with A carriers.
> Now I'm travelling in another state, and come upon a serious car
> accident.  My phone says that there's no cellular service in this
> area, so I can't use it to summon help, regardless of whether this
> particular area was covered by a B carrier.

> In the above scenario, had I programmed the phone to roam on B
> channels (or roam on both, with priority to A channels) would I have
> been able to make an emergency call?  In other words, will carriers
> accept emergency calls from any telephone, or will they only accept
> emergency calls from phones that they recognize?

Probably yes.  Most systems should allow any phone to make an
emergency 911 call (ie. no subscriber validation).  Some phones are
even set up to allow calling 911 when the phone is locked.


Bernie Rupe       1501 W. Shure Drive  Room 1315
Motorola, Inc.    Arlington Heights, IL 60004
Cellular Infrastructure Group  [phone]  [e-mail]

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End of TELECOM Digest V13 #117
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