Posts by Rich of Observationz
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Hard News: The other kind of phone tapping, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
The BBC was looking for antique valves, but the ones they want are a bit bigger.
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(Some) americans really don’t know what ‘wanker’ means. Phil Collins guested in an episode of Miami Vice where they decided that “bitch” was unacceptable language for prime time TV, so he called the character a wanker instead. (This may be the only creative thing he had done since leaving Genesis).
See also the Mitsubishi Pajero. In some Spanish dialects, that means “cowboy”, apparently. In others…
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I wonder how "modern" card driven payphones work. I suspect they just know how much to charge for a dialed number and take money off the card automatically, the line to the exchange being regular PSTN or possibly naked ADSL with VOIP*
In this case you could still do what Brent's mate suggested - not that I'd advocate that sort of thing...
* Telecom/Chorus have had a long-standing plan which has never quite reached fruition to change all voice circuits to ADSL with a VOIP converter for landline phones.
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We live in Coatesville ... and our cellphone coverage is abysmal
<tinfoil hat>
Two reasons for that:
- a large German bloke hogging all the bandwidth in that area for his gaming
- the spooks using the remaining bandwidth to bug said large German bloke
</tinfoil hat> -
Hard News: The other kind of phone tapping, in reply to Graham Dunster,
I have found the spec on how the old BT payphone system worked: http://www.britishtelephones.com/bcc700.htm
(This information would originally have been protected by the Official Secrets Act - maybe it still is).
I imagine the “free phone NZ” service occurred when a payphone was mistakenly provisioned on a normal exchange line rather than one with coinbox support.
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Kevin et al are correct. The NZ system of having a payphone just disconnect the dial was unusually permissive - in the UK, the exchange knew it was a payphone line and expected some sort of special pulses/tones to indicate money had been loaded before it would connect. The tap-dialing method bypassed the old dial locks, though.
Modems could usually switch between pulse and tone dial using an AT command, so you could use them on a pulse-only circuit. Most PSTN circuits supported pulse until quite recently (I'm not sure if they still do).
Relatedly, in the US the three digit city codes (212 etc) produce less pulses the more important the city, or rather, as Douglas Coupland pointed out, how important the city was in 1955 or so.
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Up Front: Mind Your Language, in reply to BenWilson,
But there’s no way any software’s going to be able to do that for a long time
It's a similar problem to machine translation, and that's been quietly moving ahead of late.
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Famous Five books
"Oh Timmy, you're so licky. Just like the first time"
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Legal Beagle: What next for Winston?, in reply to Andrew Geddis,
Because the Electoral Act provides for Peters to become an electorate MP, an MP can't effectively hold two seats (where is that stipulated, standing orders?) and so his list seat is vacant?
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We just irradiated lots of opossums
Is that the new approach to pest control - drop slugs of Cobalt-60 around the woods so the 'possums just have to crawl buy them and get nuked? I'm sure people won't object to that.