This is one of the best things anyone interested in one of the most impressive engineering marvels ever can go and visit anywhere in the world. I cannot stress enough how good it is and how involved the tour gets (wearing waders to go waist deep in water to view the jet turbines used to pump water).
I strongly advise taking someone who can help translate Japanese with you as there's a huge amount of information to take in and it's a fantastic opportunity for anyone keen on photography as well.
I suppose it'd be easier for someone to buy one of each of the comics, rather than an industrial size printing press used to print comics and hold onto it for 70 years.
I dont think ink, on it's own, has a 70 year shelf life either.
And, aside from having the setup to print stuff with, you still need the source material (presumably printing plates or whatever) which is where the actual forging comes in. Assuming it was printing plates lets say, you'd need to copy them to a microscopic level along with every dot on a matching comic book.
Maybe I'm the exception here, but I slice my files and then load them to an SD card and walk them over to my printer. It's not high tech, but since you can't clear the build plate without physically being there, I don't see much of a change. If I really wanted to monitor the build I suppose I could just point a webcam at it rather than use the existing one. But since it prints flawlessly most of the time it seems unnecessary.
> you can't clear the build plate without physically being there
BambuLabs printers may not support this but some people do it. The idea is to use the print head to knock the part out of the bed and into a bin. Probably not worth the hassle for personal use and you may need to design the part a certain way to make it possible, but it is useful for mass production.
People complaining here that you are somehow owed something for contributing to the data set, or that because you use google maps or reCAPTCHA you are owed access to their training data.
I mean, I'd like that data too. But you did get something in return already. A game that you enjoy (or your wouldn't play it), free and efficient navigation (better than your TomTom ever worked), sites not overwhelmed by bots or spammers.
Yeah google gets more out of it than you probably do, but it's incorrect to say that you are getting 'nothing' in return.
The company was formed as Niantic Labs in 2010 as an internal startup within Google, founded by the then-head of Google's Geo Division (Google Maps, Google Earth, and Google Street View).
It became an independent entity in October 2015 when Google restructured under Alphabet Inc. During the spinout, Niantic announced that Google, Nintendo, and The Pokémon Company would invest up to $30 million in Series-A funding. Not sure what the current ownership is (they've raised a few more times since then), but they're seemingly still very closely tied with Google.
Okay. 3G is pretty good. No doubt about it.
But from a security perspective (which I suspect is what's driving this), I think 4/5G are better.
Like many instances in security, supporting legacy devices is not a desirable outcome for the security of the network as a whole.
That said, for telcos/the government to unilaterally decide that people's handsets are no longer working (with little to no notice and no financial compensation) is a bit on the nose.
The correct thing would be to let customers come into store with an existing plan and handset, and give them a new phone and bill that back to the government so there's no interruption to services for them.
3G wasn't designed to be forward-compatible. It expects to have a dedicated frequency band it can operate on. But spectrum is limited, and telcos really don't want to reserve something like 25% of what little spectrum they have to support a handful of legacy devices.
4G/5G support Dynamic Spectrum Sharing. This means a single frequency can be used to carry both technologies, with the ratio between them adjustable as demand varies. With DSS a 5G base station reserving a tiny fraction of transmission time for legacy 4G emergency calls would be absolutely trivial, which makes future hard shutdowns unnecessary from a technical POV.
Feel like you need to read the article. Many of the devices affected do not fit any reasonable interpretation of the term “legacy”. It turns out 3G is in many ways superior to 4G and 5G.
>Many of the devices affected do not fit any reasonable interpretation of the term “legacy”.
I'm really just going on a tangent rant, but I don't like that the word "legacy" has been associated with negative connotations in the tech world.
In the rest of the Anglosphere, a "legacy" is something to be admired and respected. Being old with stories to tell is a sign that someone or something weathered and survived the tests of time above all others.
Only in the tech world do I see legacies shunned in favour of the next new shiny at speeds that make progressives blush in embarrassment.
3G is a legacy protocol. The handsets themselves are irrelevant. They're shutting down a legacy protocol and (for somewhat misguided reasons) blocking handsets because they can't access 000 anymore.
Despite it having advantages over 4/5G, I do think it's progress (at least in terms of security).
A load of older IoT devices and POS terminals are likely not working anymore though. That's a harder problem to solve.
- Australian carriers are blocking 4G phones based on whitelists, citing government mandate/ruling/whatever. Consequently many 4G phones are getting stuck in No Service state.
- Previously, phones that weren't whitelisted could connect to 4G for Internet, and disconnect & fall back to 3G for calls.
- Voice calling on 4G is finicky, and carriers don't like supporting random customer bought contraptions trying to do it.
- (you can whine all day about how calling is the sole defining feature for an object to be a "phone", doesn't change the fact that calling on 4G is a carrier-grade ever-beta duct tape hack).
Did you read the article? No one disputes that 3G is no legacy network as of now. But it’s needed because the devices that are in widespread use are not able to do specific things on 4G/5G which includes emergency calls.
And while progress may be good, risking people’s lifes for it isn’t. You can be mad on the device vendors for not implementing the technology, the standard inventors for not defining the VoLTE standard well enough, the government for not having any foresight at all, the operators for being profit driven. But you cannot just ignore it and turn off 3G and risk people’s lifes. Apart from that it’s just pure idiotism to also ignore the half million people that are losing any mobile network.
Plan it better, or punish operators or vendors more, but not ignore their and your incompetence completely and just continue shutting down integral mobile network services.
> The correct thing would be to let customers come into store with an existing plan and handset, and give them a new phone and bill that back to the government so there's no interruption to services for them.
I’m not sure I agree. Why is that the right thing? It’s a politically popular approach but not clear there’s a right/wrong here. For example, people might buy second-hand 3G headsets to get brand new ones on the government’s dime.
The exchange could be limited to only existing, paid plans. New plans would require a device compatible with the new specification. I don't think it's too hard since American phone carriers were able to offer free LTE devices to users with activated 3g devices.
Correct. You need an existing plan, and clearly the carrier can see what handset you are/were using. It's also the right thing to do because they are imposing a financial burden on people. People with older handsets are (I assume) likely the ones that can't afford newer ones.
SS7 is used in all kinds of operator messaging, so unless a network disables all 3G and lower (including when roaming), it'll stick around.
With 4G, a lot of SS7 functionality has been moved to a different protocol that's more resilient and less (obviously) designed to be used to spy on foreign assets. There's still a level of firewalling necessary for any operator that cares about security, but it's not nearly as bad as on SS7.
I strongly advise taking someone who can help translate Japanese with you as there's a huge amount of information to take in and it's a fantastic opportunity for anyone keen on photography as well.