Slashdot Mirror
Nanotube Paint Blocks Cell Phones on Demand
Kozar_The_Malignant writes "Newsday is reporting on a new nanotube paint that is able to block cell phone signals on demand. The nanotubes are filled with copper, suspended in paint, and can be applied to the walls and ceiling of places such as concert halls, churches, and classrooms."
That's cool, but where do you get the tiny little paintbrushes?
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
At least in the USA, cell phone jammers are illegal. Because this paint isn't emitting signals to accomplish the same purpose, could it be legal?
I would want to see warning signs posted at key places in buildings where this paint is used though... And a phone number to which I can forward my cell phone when I'm inside this building as well.
Because..
The very first time I miss an emergency call because of this paint, I will be suing both the building and the company that made the paint. I might even sue the guy who applied the paint on the walls..
Some people RELY on their cell phones' ability to receive calls...
Karma: Bad (but who really cares anyway?)
...as long as the areas where cell phones are blocked are clearly marked as dead areas. It's something that you really need to know if you're on call.
Um, no. Since it is a passive method, this is not and will not be regulated. You can acheive a similar effect by putting a layer of copper shielding in your wall.
The novelty here is that it can be enabled and disabled at will.
[sig]you really dont want the answers, trust me[/sig]
As much as we love to hate cell phone chatters, there are two serious problems with the paint proposal, though.
1) Cost. Copper filled nanotubes? Doesn't sound cheap. I'd expect even a plain paint with a relevant amount of copper in it to be expensive, let alone copper filled nanotubes.
2) Blocking emergency calls. Doctors on call, first responders, etc.
I was watching this thing on TV about some guy named Hitler. Someone should stop him!
There may be some serious health risks associated with nanotubes and other small particles. Hopefully the companies involved do thorough health risk assessments before putting it up everywhere.
The FCC can't kill this, as it doesn't transmit anything to anywhere, it's not even a powered device (persay). For example, if a builder decides to line the walls of his building with lead to achieve the same result, tough luck cell user. If an interior designer likes chromium (and they did in the '20s) and builds a lobby that is in essence a Faraday box, tough luck BlackBerry.
Personally, I like the idea of creating a domestic space where I'm not being bombarded by microwave energy, around the clock. Just because every idiot neighbour I have feels that they need a WiFi network, cordless phone, and what-have-you, doesn't mean that I should have to sleep in their energy pollution.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
2) Blocking emergency calls. Doctors on call, first responders, etc.
In a movie theater? Seriously, society has gotten along just fine before cell phones in the past. If you have an emergency, walk out of the bloody theater and use a land-line from a receptionist or payphone.
Just because there might be a potential problem without a technology doesn't mean that very technology is implicitly granted a *right* to be used.
Life is not for the lazy.
What we really need is people with common sense/courtesy. Don't have an obnoxious ringtone. Don't talk on the phone in a movie theatre, etc.
My situation: I've got to wear a hospital pager 24/7. New movie theatre with signal-jamming capability? I can't go. Sure, I've got sense enough to keep it on vibrate, but i'm the minority. We have to resort to actually crippling the devices to keep people from being idiots.
Han shot first.
That's cool, but where do you get the tiny little paintbrushes?
:)
Here.
Just to prove that science is stranger than fiction
(Mod this interesting, if you want)
Generally, bash is superior to python in those environments where python is not installed.
If it can block cellphone calls, it will certainly block the rays from the orbiting mind-control satellites. The movie would start, this blocking system would be activated, and the whole audience would riot when the MPAA ad with the starving carpenter berating the audience for stealing movies when they just paid full admission was run.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What's the big deal here? The paint is conductive. The conductivity cannot be switched on and off, but by reading between the lines of TFA, they have an antenna inside the faraday cage which can selectively provide connectivity to the outside world. You can do the same thing with copper mesh (and I have, to make ultra-quiet recordings of microvolt biological signals) to create an entire room that is a faraday cage.
The only thing newsworthy is that this paint contains nanotechnology. Sure, that's nice. But the summary and title are misleading: The paint blocks, always. The additional antenna blocks on demand, and there's nothing special there.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
The problem here is that everyone is being punished equally by this paint. The situation that people are trying to address is people who leave their phones on ring and talk in the middle of a large room of people. The beating seems like a reasonable expression of democracy(mob rule against the person who elected himself a victim) in action. The people who may have a legitimate emergency interrupt them at any random time 24x7 often can take those calls without disrupting others. These people do not need to be punished. The paint does not differentiate between the two groups.
When my cell phone vibrates during a movie and I look at the number to determine if it should go to voicemail or if I should excuse myself, no one is inconvenienced. Of course, I'm also not leaving in the middle of a movie to talk to someone who wasn't polite enough to inform me ahead of time that they are planning an emergency, so I won't even stand up and bother anyone.
Read the best of all of Slash: seenonslash.com
Go to movie theater, find seat, get number of seat, bring cell phone to the "cell phone check", which is outside the painted area, register it with your seat number. Minimum wage popcorn jockey sits and waits for phone to ring. If it does he takes a brief message with callback number and delivers it inobtrusively to your seat.
It's how things like that have been handled for years...and the solution is needed.
I do live comedy performances, and nothing ruins the flow of the show more than a cell phone going off in the middle of a scene. The Troupe I'm with has implemented this solution, it works pretty darned well.
Could this be a way to block RFID signals? Wear clothes or a sticker made of this stuff over an embedded tag and people only see the signal when you press a button.
Why is it that when you believe something it's an opinion, but when I believe something it's a manifesto?
Sounds hazardous to me - little airborne filaments? Sounds like asbestos. Then again, I've done no digging at all to check, so I may be full of carp.
At any rate, it seems like overkill to a problem that should've been fixed by the GSM standard itself - built into the GSM standard there should've been a mechanism to receive "silcence flags" sent by local transmitters. Church/movie theathre simply needs to have a transmitter in the room. First-responders could have special cellphoness that ignore the "silence flag".
Read it sometime. If you don't like the terms, don't buy the ticket.
Exactly why I haven't seen a movie in years. I don't like facist "contracts" that I don't have an equal hand in negotiating.
How hard is it to put your phone or pager on Vibrate and put it down your pants. No way are you going to miss a call and then politely leave the theatre to find out what the problem is.
I am on call 24/7 to support my computer client. The servers for 4 factories that I contract to are my responsibility. Guess what... I get an extra $15,000 in the contract to be on call like that. I got a call in the middle of Walk the Line, Harry Potter and Underworld. Have not seen the end of any of those movies yet. I put my cell on vibrate, put it in my pocket and politely leave the theatre when I see the number on the phone is my client. If it is someone else I ignore it and enjoy the vibration between my legs.
Support Our Troops
Impeach Bush
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - BF
Yeah because seeing a bright blue neon light out of the corner of my eye while in a dimlit room is not annoying in the least bit. I honestly don't think people with cellphones understand how distracting they are to everyone around them.
How is this paint going to reduce the cost of movie theater popcorn?
Thank you. Drive through.
As a woodworker I am aware of the respiratory issues with small particles. Any time I see "X times smaller than a human hair" I think lung damage.
When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.
The theater I used to work at actually did something along those lines. When a new movie came out (something teenagers and adults would see, like White Noise), they would show the movie in two theaters at the same time.
When you came up to buy a ticket, you were sorted based on how you looked and acted (oh no, discrimination!)
In one theater went unaccompanied teenagers, adults with really small children, people who couldn't get off their cellphone to buy a ticket, etc.
In the other theater went people who looked like they could be trusted to be quiet in a movie.
We had someone at the theater doors checking ticket stubs to make sure people didn't switch theaters and the like, as well as people in the theaters themselves. In the noisy people theater, we had a police officer, and several employees, and we managed to keep it down to a decent level. People were sending text messages back and forth, and whispering, but absolute quiet simply wasn't a possibility without removing half the theater. Excessive talking, taking phone calls, etc. got a warning, followed by removal from the theater.
In the second theater, we had a single employee, and announced a zero tolerance policy beforehand. You talk, you leave. Anyone who wanted to join the noisy theater was welcome to do so. Also, anyone who complained about the noise level in the other theater got a free readmit pass, and was issued a ticket in the "quiet" theater.
All in all, it worked out well. We had only a few complaints from the noisy theater, and a whole bunch of people saying "thank you" for being able to sit back and watch the movie in peace. Some people simply won't be quiet, so it makes a certain amount of sense to shove them all in their own theater. They don't seem to bug each other, so it all works out in the end.
Sadly, we couldn't do this for every showing, or even every movie. Movies like spongebob simply aren't going to be quiet no matter how hard you try. Also, I found keeping quiet (opening night) in movies like "Diary of a Mad Black Woman" to be impossible. First, it would have been necessary to remove a good chunk of the (largely adult) audience; second, I didn't want to be the lone white employee removing the aforementioned chunk of the (largely black) audience. I don't care one way or the other about race; however, the management really hated it when anything got escalated to Corporate, and that sounded like a good way get something escalated.
Amen on that point. I've been saying for ages that all cellphone manufacturers should be forced to honor a 'privacy' spec. Namely, if a signal on a specific frequency is being broadcast, your phone (optionally) chirps once and then is FORCED to vibrate-only mode for the duration of the signal's reception. Your phone also CANNOT place outgoing calls; incoming only. NO rings, no anything, and calls are forcibly terminated after 30 seconds.
This represents a fair compromise between folks on call (by the way, for anyone who hasn't figured it out, on-call IS NOT always just for a week at a shot - I was on-call continuously for several years at MP3.com) and the rights of other moviegoers. All this moronic BS about totally blocking cellphones is just that, BS. What needs to happen is the forcible education of the inconsiderate morons who do more than whisper, "I'm in a movie, I'll call you back", then get up and WALK OUT.
For the record, I do not ever use audible rings on my cellphone - it's never off of vibrate, in or out of movie theaters.
My 229 is all the Sig I need http://thegunwiki.com/
"My name is Dr. X. I will be sitting in the very back row on the right hand side. If any emergency call comes in for me, please let me know."
I happen to own a movie theatre....
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
You're both annoying the crap out of me; please surrender yourselves at your local police stations for re-education (and a free beating).
Censorship is telling a man he can't have a steak just because a baby can't chew it. --Mark Twain
Yes, that could work, but it's still kindof heavy handed. How about some sort of interruptable voicemail feature. So, it would give a different message than usual. Instead of "I'm away from the phone, leave a message", you could have it say "I'm in a theatre or something like that, so please wait half a minute for me, but if you get bored, just press #, and leave a message." And it could play elevator music, or beep every 5 seconds, to the caller, but it'd be silent to the person in the theatre, until they press #, and then it would connect. On the cell phone screen it could show the status of the call, if they're still holding, or are leaving a message, or hung-up.
But to tie that back to your suggestion, maybe it could be part of the theatre's profile, like allowing ringing or vibrating, to conditionally allow interruptable voicemail, or handle it like the phone is off. Like if you're in a restaurant, it would allow the interruptable voicemail, but in the opera, it would just act like your phone is off.
Hell, they might even have different signals for inside the theatre watching area versus the lobby, so that you could only pickup once in the lobby.