It is reflected in sales charts, just not Apple's. Take a look at the sales figures for battery cases.
The only way it would be reflected in Apple's sales charts would be if you could buy two different iPhone models, one with better battery life and one that's thinner. As long as Apple doesn't give consumers the option, the only other option is to reject the entire platform and switch to Android. That would take something much bigger than a few percent difference in battery life.
If some customers want more battery life, a good approach would be to remove a component wasting a lot of internal volume, which also allows you to eliminate various large-ish components from the logic board. The saved space could be used to expand the battery. Every cubic mm in the iPhone is used for something...
It doesn't allow you to eliminate anything from the logic board. Basically the entire set of audio circuitry for the phone is still required for driving the normal speaker and the speakerphone speaker. The only thing that removing the headphone jack does is cut out a jack that is already really, really small.
So now consider the amount of space used by that headphone jack. I think the headphone jack is about a quarter inch by half an inch by the thickness of the interior of the phone (smaller than the 3.5mm plug, in fact, both in length and in thickness, IIRC). The battery in an iPhone 6S is a whopping 120mm x 48mm x 3mm (approx.). Removing the headphone jack, then, would give about a 1–2% boost in battery capacity. If you instead made the iPhone just 1mm thicker, the battery would increase from 3.3mm to 4.3mm in thickness, yielding at least a 30% increase in battery life (and really, more than that, because you aren't making the battery's packaging proportionally thicker). An extra 2mm would almost double the battery life.
The best part about using the thickness approach is that you could even give users a choice (audible gasps). Make several versions of the back case that allow for different thicknesses of batteries (by having various side wall heights), but are otherwise identical in construction. The extra R&D cost is basically zero for doing that, and the tooling costs should be minimal. Then, let the market decide whether users want more battery life or thinner phones. I'd be willing to bet that most users would choose the thicker phone with the longer battery life (unless they made the cost difference so ridiculous that it artificially skewed the market, which knowing Apple, they might just do).
What's the point? If you don't recover your phone in a minute or two, you're probably not going to get it back anyway. I mean, maybe for a sports edition that people want to take swimming with them???
Yes, there are waterproof 3.5 mm jacks; but they are all necessarily much bigger (in all dimensions) than the non-waterproof kind (which are already almost too "thick" for current smartphones).
Why use a waterproof jack? Just waterproof that part of the case. Put a solid box sticking in from the back case, rubber on the front case's interior face, and pass a flat ribbon between the case and the rubber gasket. It's not like Apple is ever going to remove the top bezel anyway. As an added bonus, the extra half millimeter it would add to the thickness would give us more usable battery life (which they're going to need anyway if everybody is forced to use Bluetooth).
I guarantee that if I owned an iPhone with no headphone jack, I would not have been able to plug my iPhone in to play a song over the speakers at a jam session last week. Everybody else had Android phones. I reached over and plugged my iPhone in, and everything just worked, because my iPhone 6S is actually standards-compliant, using an industry-standard connector. When Apple requires me to carry a proprietary adapter just for their devices, suddenly access to audio output is not ubiquitous, and suddenly I have to plan a day in advance to pack that adapter in my car or whatever.
So basically unless Apple ditches their proprietary dock connector at the same time, and if they're wrong about all the Android companies following suit, they'll have a situation where iPhone users are at a decided disadvantage over Android users, which is likely to make a number of users switch to Android.
It's too bad Bluetooth provides such a bad user experience on iOS, with multi-second playback delays (at least in my personal experience, with all brand new hardware). Otherwise, that would make ditching the headphone jack would at least suck a little less.
But if it means thinner phone/more screen I'd still be OK with maybe once a month not being able to use headphones.
Why would you want a thinner phone? No, really. They're already so thin that human skin doesn't provide enough friction to keep it in your hand if your hands are sweaty. These things are a usability disaster because they're already way too thin.
If they're not capable of waterproofing a simple headphone jack, then maybe their industrial designers aren't as good as they think they are.... This isn't rocket science.
Because it has less of the stuff that helps stop your phone from getting broken (bezel) and a higher percentage of the stuff that's easy to break (the glass), of course!
Yeah, I can't imagine why Apple would even consider going back to those glass backs. I was planning to upgrade my original iPhone as soon as they got a front-facing camera, but I ended up skipping the iPhone 4 and 4s precisely because the last thing I want is a fragile decorative element that does nothing but add risk.
Ironically, when I got the iPhone 5, I found it so thin that I kept dropping it, so I immediately put it in a case. I honestly don't understand why Apple even cares about the case design of phones anymore. The darn things are so hard to hold that nobody I know actually carries one without a case that completely hides Apple's industrial design anyway.
I don't know what's more horrifying—the idea of extra glass or the idea that the author of this story thinks that removing the iPhone's only analog I/O and forcing everybody to either use horrible, high-latency bluetooth or fragile, Apple-proprietary adapter cables doesn't constitute a big change.... It will be enough to make me skip two generations again.
Calling 911 in a crowded event is the absolute worst thing you could do.
Destroying the entire universe is the absolute worst thing you could do. I think your scale needs a little recalibration....
You lower the chances of survival drastically.
So you're saying that by simultaneously contacting 911 and event security, you lower the chances of survival!?! That's such an absurd claim that it demands extraordinary proof. There's just no plausible way that requesting help from two different groups of people will have a worse outcome than asking for help from only one unless the two groups interfere with one other somehow. And unless you're in some hick town that only has one ambulance, your cell phone call isn't going to keep event security from requesting help. (If you are in some hick town with only one ambulance, the venue will be small enough that the security people will immediately see the person collapse, making the entire issue moot.)
Calling 911 instead of event security would be one of the worst ways to get help, but I never said to do that.
Even if there's no ambulance on standby, the emergency management plan of the venue is still much better than anything you think you can do to help when calling 911.
That's just not true. Getting an ambulance rolling while you're on your way to notify security means that the ambulance arrives minutes sooner. No matter how good the venue's emergency plan is, unless they immediately spot the victim and call 911 in less time than it takes you to pull out your cell phone, they've delayed getting the person to the hospital when compared with the ideal situation of having one person talking to 911 and getting advice for immediate short-term aid while another person fetches the in-house first responders, and getting an ambulance rolling immediately rather than waiting until you're able to get the in-house security to contact them. Even if that results in only a one-minute delay in care, that can make the difference between life and death. And if nobody around you knows CPR, that extra delay can be even more catastrophic.
If you answered no to any of the above questions then you're not helping by attempting to bypass the local emergency management procedures that all venues have.
Nobody's bypassing anything. I'm talking about using both approaches in parallel to minimize the delay waiting for an ambulance, then transferring control to a person who can answer "yes" to all of your questions.
If you're lucky you may end up with an ambulance with no idea which of the 20 gates to use to get into the venue.
That's just not a likely scenario unless you get cut off. The E911 dispatcher is supposed to stay on the line until emergency personnel arrive at your location. While you're talking to them, you should be finding a security person who can get the on-site first responders to the victim. Then, you should hand your phone to that security person, who in turn can either tell the 911 dispatcher which gate the ambulance should go to or tell the 911 dispatcher the number for the venue's security operations center and hand off responsibility to them. This isn't hard, or at least it shouldn't be.
But even if you're correct most of the time, everything you just said would still be largely irrelevant. In a civil suit, they would have to prove that there was no real possibility that the person would have lived without the cell phone ban. That's just not provable (even to a "preponderance of evidence" standard) unless there's already an empty ambulance waiting outside, unless the patient would have died no matter what, or unless the call to 911 began within seconds after the person collapsed. If your event security is that good, awesome. Otherwise....
And as I said elsewhere, the event need not occur in the venue for the venue to be held liable. By discouraging cell phones (both in the venue and in cars by putting "we will not be held liable for theft from your car" in the terms and conditions for your tickets), they're increasing the chances of people leaving phones at home, which could cause someone to die unnecessarily in a car wreck while driving to or from the event. Event security doesn't even play a role in that situation, but the event's policies contributed to it, which means that the event/venue could potentially be held liable for damages in a civil suit.
These policies should not be allowed, for precisely the same reason that cell phone jammers are illegal (well, one of the two reasons, anyway).
And 911 isn't going to send more resources just because you said so, they are going to let on-site make that call.
I doubt that dispatchers are authorized to make those decisions. But if they are, then you've still lost nothing by contacting them while you seek out venue security.
If there is a venue that is so pathetic that their emergency plan is 'I hope someone has a cell phone and calls 911', then they probably should let you have your phone. But that is a purely contrived scenario and does not enter into this discussion.
Uh... it happens all the time. I'd like to cite Boller v. Robert Woodruff Arts Ctr.,Inc. as an example of a lawsuit that arose precisely because a large concert venue did not do so. In that case, the venue was not held liable, because the venue did not cause or contribute to the peril. Had they banned cell phones, the results could have been very different.
And if you want to talk about statistics and saving lives, don't forget to add in the other lives that were lost because 911 was busy handling calls that should not have been made in the first place.
If your 911 center is so badly understaffed that handling a heart attack or stroke at a concert venue would cause multiple other lives to be lost, then you need to vote out all your elected officials. They're clearly not funding E911 sufficiently.
And what do you think is going to garner the fastest response?
Fast response is only one part of the problem. Fast response is critical for heart attacks because it gets you defibrillation more quickly. But after that initial response, survivability is still strongly correlated with fast arrival at a hospital. And for strokes, there's not much you can do in the field other than give oxygen, because you need to know whether it's a bleed or a clot, and if you guess wrong, you've just killed the patient.
So I maintain my original assertion, which is that the best approach is to simultaneously notify event security and 911. In theory, if you had to choose one, then yes, notify event security and skip the 911 call, but that's just not a realistic scenario unless some greedy record company locks up your cell phone....
No, you're not aware of the notion of outliers. It only takes one outlier to create a public backlash. Just look at how many people are screaming that we should allow guns in bars right now. And imagine how much worse that backlash would be if the banned item that could have saved lives were something as harmless as a cellular phone, banned solely to boost corporate profits. If a story like that ended up on CNN, it would pretty much ruin the career of the artist who demanded such extraordinary measures, and it wouldn't be good for that artist's record label, either.
For that matter, the death wouldn't necessarily even have to happen inside the venue for the venue and event planners to be held liable. Consider that bars have been held civilly liable for drunk driving deaths when people left those bars, got into their cars, and drove into bridge posts or whatever. So what happens when a person sees a no cell phone policy and leaves his/her phone at home rather than dealing with the hassle of extra security delays or risking the phone getting stolen from his/her car, then gets into a wreck on the way home and can't call 911 (or gets jumped in the park while walking home or...)? Let's look at the pertinent facts:
The event actively discouraged bringing the phone in with the whole bagging thing.
The event discouraged leaving the phone in the car with their "we will not be held liable for items stolen from personal vehicles" disclaimers.
I'm not saying that the courts would necessarily hold the event organizers liable, but it would be entirely at the discretion of the judge and/or jury, and I can't think of any obvious law that would preclude a finding of liability, particularly given the degree to which the event discouraged people from bringing their phones.
No, cell phone bans are an absolutely stupid thing to do from a legal perspective. There are technical measures that can be taken to make recording harder (strong IR lights, for example), on-site security can confiscate phones used in violation of the rules, or for that matter, you could just recognize that it is a mostly harmless infringement of IP rights that doesn't impact the commercial viability of the event or the artist's music sales in any way, and just ignore it unless someone complains about the person in front of him/her blocking his/her view, and deal with that on a case by case basis. And none of those approaches will create the same sort of financial risk that cell phone bans create. That's why these sorts of policies just don't make sense.
There are already ambulances and police on site at any event of this size.
And as I've said elsewhere, the ambulances are not always sufficient, depending on the number of people sick or injured at a given event, and at smaller venues, you won't find ambulances at all. (I know that doesn't apply for venues that Alicia Keys would play, in all likelihood, but this discussion shouldn't just be about her concerts; it's a general issue that affects all concerts in venues ranging from giant stadiums all the way down to small, private clubs.) Simultaneously reaching out to 911 while you go to find the event staff costs no additional time, and increases the odds of success, even if only marginally.
Either way, statistically, there will eventually be at least one time in which a 911 call would have saved a life for one reason or another. And it only takes one.
Concerts have ambulances and crew literally standing by, as in parked righ outside the venue. Unless you have the cell number for one of the paramedics, you are wasting your time doing anything but flagging security.
Depends on the size of the venue, the state where the concert is happening, and how many people are in need of medical care simultaneously. For example, at one show, there were a whopping 36 people transported by ambulance. I guarantee that no venue has 36 ambulances waiting around just in case 36 people collapse.
So as I said, a smart person does both. In an ideal world, you would not need to, but we do not live in an ideal world.
Don't count on it. [Link to USA Today about cell phone GPS failures]
Count on it? No. That's why you also contact event security. Besides, there's a huge difference between not getting accurate GPS and getting no GPS, and there's a huge difference between being on the side of a road somewhere in the middle of nowhere and being in a major venue with multiple Wi-Fi networks that will give you an adequate aGPS location even without being able to receive GPS data (which you almost certainly couldn't receive indoors anyway).
Also, have you ever tried to find your friends at a concert once it's already started?
That's why you also contact event security. As I said, "... event security will have to either help get the patient out (preferred) or get the medical personnel to the patient (slower)...".
Jeez, does anybody even read my posts before they assume I must be wrong?
And how the hell will the responders get in past security and find a stroke or heart attack victim that security doesn't know about?
Maybe you should actually read what you're replying to before you reply.
"...you should be making your phone call while you run for event security..."
In other words, if you aren't sure whether there's an ambulance on site (it depends on how big the venue is), get the ambulance rolling while you go to get security. Better still, send one person to find security while a second person calls 911.
You have to the most stupid person on the internet today.
...says the person who didn't bother reading the post before commenting on it, and who left out a verb.
What can 911 do faster than the medic/security crew who work for the venue?
Unless a venue security person sees what's happening, you're going to have to find one of them, and that potentially adds a critical minute to the response time. If you instead called 911 while you ran to find the local help, they could get an ambulance or police car rolling towards the venue before event security even knew there was a problem.
Do you think that making a 9-1-1 or 1-1-2 phone call is even possible over the din of the band and the crowd?
Yes. Modern cell phones are quite good at noise rejection; there are real advantages from having your mouth an inch from the main mic and multiple microphones elsewhere on the device. Besides, all that 911 needs to know is that there's a medical emergency. They can tell the location from GPS even if they can't tell it from the noise level.
Leave making emergency calls to the emergency crew which is present
In a heart attack situation, you have five minutes to restore blood flow, or the person is dead. So you have one minute to step quickly out of the row and run up the stairs to the nearest security person, plus the time for them to get somewhere quiet enough that they can call it in. That burns precious minutes, so unless they have medical staff at the event, the victim is probably screwed.
Mind you, most large events should have medical staff on the premises, and at a bare minimum, event security will have to either help get the patient out (preferred) or get the medical personnel to the patient (slower), so you should be making your phone call while you run for event security, but you're still statistically better off doing both, because you can't know with certainty that they do have a medical staff, and they probably won't have an ambulance standing ready unless you're at a football game.
At least a gun would have a fighting chance of blowing a hole in the bag. Then again, if that fan fails and the cell phone goes into thermal runaway, I'd imagine it would blow a hole in the bag, too, so... never mind.
I'm okay with banning the use of cell phones to record the show, but that should be done with bouncers, not by locking up people's cell phones so that they are unavailable if an emergency should arise. Locking up the phones in bags represents a public safety concern, and thus should not be taken lightly.
I'm just waiting for the first time that the inability to make a 911 call quickly from one of these shows (heart attack, stroke, active shooter, etc.) results in someone's unnecessary death. After one lawsuit erases the benefits of the entire tour, the insurance companies will start levying huge surcharges for any shows that ban cellphones, and all this nonsense will take care of itself.
What you are saying will only be true if states pass laws requiring insurance premiums to be directly tied to payouts. As far as I know, there currently are no such laws and there is nothing requiring insurance companies to lower their rates if there are fewer payouts.
Many car insurance companies are mutual insurance companies, which makes them nonprofits. So to that extent, yes, there are laws requiring them to either lower their rates or pay money back to their customers if there are fewer payouts. And the existence of State Farm and other mutual insurance companies ensures that any for-profit insurers won't be able to keep their rates arbitrarily high for very long.
The thing is, most folks will probably still want comprehensive car insurance for other things—damage from hail, trees falling on your car, accidents beyond even the computer's control, vandalism, theft, etc. It will just be a lot cheaper because you won't have to pay the liability portions.
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It is reflected in sales charts, just not Apple's. Take a look at the sales figures for battery cases.
The only way it would be reflected in Apple's sales charts would be if you could buy two different iPhone models, one with better battery life and one that's thinner. As long as Apple doesn't give consumers the option, the only other option is to reject the entire platform and switch to Android. That would take something much bigger than a few percent difference in battery life.
It doesn't allow you to eliminate anything from the logic board. Basically the entire set of audio circuitry for the phone is still required for driving the normal speaker and the speakerphone speaker. The only thing that removing the headphone jack does is cut out a jack that is already really, really small.
So now consider the amount of space used by that headphone jack. I think the headphone jack is about a quarter inch by half an inch by the thickness of the interior of the phone (smaller than the 3.5mm plug, in fact, both in length and in thickness, IIRC). The battery in an iPhone 6S is a whopping 120mm x 48mm x 3mm (approx.). Removing the headphone jack, then, would give about a 1–2% boost in battery capacity. If you instead made the iPhone just 1mm thicker, the battery would increase from 3.3mm to 4.3mm in thickness, yielding at least a 30% increase in battery life (and really, more than that, because you aren't making the battery's packaging proportionally thicker). An extra 2mm would almost double the battery life.
The best part about using the thickness approach is that you could even give users a choice (audible gasps). Make several versions of the back case that allow for different thicknesses of batteries (by having various side wall heights), but are otherwise identical in construction. The extra R&D cost is basically zero for doing that, and the tooling costs should be minimal. Then, let the market decide whether users want more battery life or thinner phones. I'd be willing to bet that most users would choose the thicker phone with the longer battery life (unless they made the cost difference so ridiculous that it artificially skewed the market, which knowing Apple, they might just do).
What's the point? If you don't recover your phone in a minute or two, you're probably not going to get it back anyway. I mean, maybe for a sports edition that people want to take swimming with them???
Why use a waterproof jack? Just waterproof that part of the case. Put a solid box sticking in from the back case, rubber on the front case's interior face, and pass a flat ribbon between the case and the rubber gasket. It's not like Apple is ever going to remove the top bezel anyway. As an added bonus, the extra half millimeter it would add to the thickness would give us more usable battery life (which they're going to need anyway if everybody is forced to use Bluetooth).
I guarantee that if I owned an iPhone with no headphone jack, I would not have been able to plug my iPhone in to play a song over the speakers at a jam session last week. Everybody else had Android phones. I reached over and plugged my iPhone in, and everything just worked, because my iPhone 6S is actually standards-compliant, using an industry-standard connector. When Apple requires me to carry a proprietary adapter just for their devices, suddenly access to audio output is not ubiquitous, and suddenly I have to plan a day in advance to pack that adapter in my car or whatever.
So basically unless Apple ditches their proprietary dock connector at the same time, and if they're wrong about all the Android companies following suit, they'll have a situation where iPhone users are at a decided disadvantage over Android users, which is likely to make a number of users switch to Android.
It's too bad Bluetooth provides such a bad user experience on iOS, with multi-second playback delays (at least in my personal experience, with all brand new hardware). Otherwise, that would make ditching the headphone jack would at least suck a little less.
Why would you want a thinner phone? No, really. They're already so thin that human skin doesn't provide enough friction to keep it in your hand if your hands are sweaty. These things are a usability disaster because they're already way too thin.
If they're not capable of waterproofing a simple headphone jack, then maybe their industrial designers aren't as good as they think they are.... This isn't rocket science.
Yeah, I can't imagine why Apple would even consider going back to those glass backs. I was planning to upgrade my original iPhone as soon as they got a front-facing camera, but I ended up skipping the iPhone 4 and 4s precisely because the last thing I want is a fragile decorative element that does nothing but add risk.
Ironically, when I got the iPhone 5, I found it so thin that I kept dropping it, so I immediately put it in a case. I honestly don't understand why Apple even cares about the case design of phones anymore. The darn things are so hard to hold that nobody I know actually carries one without a case that completely hides Apple's industrial design anyway.
I don't know what's more horrifying—the idea of extra glass or the idea that the author of this story thinks that removing the iPhone's only analog I/O and forcing everybody to either use horrible, high-latency bluetooth or fragile, Apple-proprietary adapter cables doesn't constitute a big change.... It will be enough to make me skip two generations again.
Destroying the entire universe is the absolute worst thing you could do. I think your scale needs a little recalibration....
So you're saying that by simultaneously contacting 911 and event security, you lower the chances of survival!?! That's such an absurd claim that it demands extraordinary proof. There's just no plausible way that requesting help from two different groups of people will have a worse outcome than asking for help from only one unless the two groups interfere with one other somehow. And unless you're in some hick town that only has one ambulance, your cell phone call isn't going to keep event security from requesting help. (If you are in some hick town with only one ambulance, the venue will be small enough that the security people will immediately see the person collapse, making the entire issue moot.)
Calling 911 instead of event security would be one of the worst ways to get help, but I never said to do that.
That's just not true. Getting an ambulance rolling while you're on your way to notify security means that the ambulance arrives minutes sooner. No matter how good the venue's emergency plan is, unless they immediately spot the victim and call 911 in less time than it takes you to pull out your cell phone, they've delayed getting the person to the hospital when compared with the ideal situation of having one person talking to 911 and getting advice for immediate short-term aid while another person fetches the in-house first responders, and getting an ambulance rolling immediately rather than waiting until you're able to get the in-house security to contact them. Even if that results in only a one-minute delay in care, that can make the difference between life and death. And if nobody around you knows CPR, that extra delay can be even more catastrophic.
Nobody's bypassing anything. I'm talking about using both approaches in parallel to minimize the delay waiting for an ambulance, then transferring control to a person who can answer "yes" to all of your questions.
That's just not a likely scenario unless you get cut off. The E911 dispatcher is supposed to stay on the line until emergency personnel arrive at your location. While you're talking to them, you should be finding a security person who can get the on-site first responders to the victim. Then, you should hand your phone to that security person, who in turn can either tell the 911 dispatcher which gate the ambulance should go to or tell the 911 dispatcher the number for the venue's security operations center and hand off responsibility to them. This isn't hard, or at least it shouldn't be.
But even if you're correct most of the time, everything you just said would still be largely irrelevant. In a civil suit, they would have to prove that there was no real possibility that the person would have lived without the cell phone ban. That's just not provable (even to a "preponderance of evidence" standard) unless there's already an empty ambulance waiting outside, unless the patient would have died no matter what, or unless the call to 911 began within seconds after the person collapsed. If your event security is that good, awesome. Otherwise....
And as I said elsewhere, the event need not occur in the venue for the venue to be held liable. By discouraging cell phones (both in the venue and in cars by putting "we will not be held liable for theft from your car" in the terms and conditions for your tickets), they're increasing the chances of people leaving phones at home, which could cause someone to die unnecessarily in a car wreck while driving to or from the event. Event security doesn't even play a role in that situation, but the event's policies contributed to it, which means that the event/venue could potentially be held liable for damages in a civil suit.
These policies should not be allowed, for precisely the same reason that cell phone jammers are illegal (well, one of the two reasons, anyway).
I doubt that dispatchers are authorized to make those decisions. But if they are, then you've still lost nothing by contacting them while you seek out venue security.
Uh... it happens all the time. I'd like to cite Boller v. Robert Woodruff Arts Ctr.,Inc. as an example of a lawsuit that arose precisely because a large concert venue did not do so. In that case, the venue was not held liable, because the venue did not cause or contribute to the peril. Had they banned cell phones, the results could have been very different.
If your 911 center is so badly understaffed that handling a heart attack or stroke at a concert venue would cause multiple other lives to be lost, then you need to vote out all your elected officials. They're clearly not funding E911 sufficiently.
Fast response is only one part of the problem. Fast response is critical for heart attacks because it gets you defibrillation more quickly. But after that initial response, survivability is still strongly correlated with fast arrival at a hospital. And for strokes, there's not much you can do in the field other than give oxygen, because you need to know whether it's a bleed or a clot, and if you guess wrong, you've just killed the patient.
So I maintain my original assertion, which is that the best approach is to simultaneously notify event security and 911. In theory, if you had to choose one, then yes, notify event security and skip the 911 call, but that's just not a realistic scenario unless some greedy record company locks up your cell phone....
No, you're not aware of the notion of outliers. It only takes one outlier to create a public backlash. Just look at how many people are screaming that we should allow guns in bars right now. And imagine how much worse that backlash would be if the banned item that could have saved lives were something as harmless as a cellular phone, banned solely to boost corporate profits. If a story like that ended up on CNN, it would pretty much ruin the career of the artist who demanded such extraordinary measures, and it wouldn't be good for that artist's record label, either.
For that matter, the death wouldn't necessarily even have to happen inside the venue for the venue and event planners to be held liable. Consider that bars have been held civilly liable for drunk driving deaths when people left those bars, got into their cars, and drove into bridge posts or whatever. So what happens when a person sees a no cell phone policy and leaves his/her phone at home rather than dealing with the hassle of extra security delays or risking the phone getting stolen from his/her car, then gets into a wreck on the way home and can't call 911 (or gets jumped in the park while walking home or...)? Let's look at the pertinent facts:
I'm not saying that the courts would necessarily hold the event organizers liable, but it would be entirely at the discretion of the judge and/or jury, and I can't think of any obvious law that would preclude a finding of liability, particularly given the degree to which the event discouraged people from bringing their phones.
No, cell phone bans are an absolutely stupid thing to do from a legal perspective. There are technical measures that can be taken to make recording harder (strong IR lights, for example), on-site security can confiscate phones used in violation of the rules, or for that matter, you could just recognize that it is a mostly harmless infringement of IP rights that doesn't impact the commercial viability of the event or the artist's music sales in any way, and just ignore it unless someone complains about the person in front of him/her blocking his/her view, and deal with that on a case by case basis. And none of those approaches will create the same sort of financial risk that cell phone bans create. That's why these sorts of policies just don't make sense.
And as I've said elsewhere, the ambulances are not always sufficient, depending on the number of people sick or injured at a given event, and at smaller venues, you won't find ambulances at all. (I know that doesn't apply for venues that Alicia Keys would play, in all likelihood, but this discussion shouldn't just be about her concerts; it's a general issue that affects all concerts in venues ranging from giant stadiums all the way down to small, private clubs.) Simultaneously reaching out to 911 while you go to find the event staff costs no additional time, and increases the odds of success, even if only marginally.
Either way, statistically, there will eventually be at least one time in which a 911 call would have saved a life for one reason or another. And it only takes one.
From the post you replied to:
At no point did I even imply, much less state, that you should not find the event staff.
Are you as horrible a person in real life as you are being on here? Grow up, kid.
Depends on the size of the venue, the state where the concert is happening, and how many people are in need of medical care simultaneously. For example, at one show, there were a whopping 36 people transported by ambulance. I guarantee that no venue has 36 ambulances waiting around just in case 36 people collapse.
So as I said, a smart person does both. In an ideal world, you would not need to, but we do not live in an ideal world.
Count on it? No. That's why you also contact event security. Besides, there's a huge difference between not getting accurate GPS and getting no GPS, and there's a huge difference between being on the side of a road somewhere in the middle of nowhere and being in a major venue with multiple Wi-Fi networks that will give you an adequate aGPS location even without being able to receive GPS data (which you almost certainly couldn't receive indoors anyway).
That's why you also contact event security. As I said, "... event security will have to either help get the patient out (preferred) or get the medical personnel to the patient (slower) ...".
Jeez, does anybody even read my posts before they assume I must be wrong?
Maybe you should actually read what you're replying to before you reply.
"...you should be making your phone call while you run for event security..."
In other words, if you aren't sure whether there's an ambulance on site (it depends on how big the venue is), get the ambulance rolling while you go to get security. Better still, send one person to find security while a second person calls 911.
...says the person who didn't bother reading the post before commenting on it, and who left out a verb.
Unless a venue security person sees what's happening, you're going to have to find one of them, and that potentially adds a critical minute to the response time. If you instead called 911 while you ran to find the local help, they could get an ambulance or police car rolling towards the venue before event security even knew there was a problem.
Yes. Modern cell phones are quite good at noise rejection; there are real advantages from having your mouth an inch from the main mic and multiple microphones elsewhere on the device. Besides, all that 911 needs to know is that there's a medical emergency. They can tell the location from GPS even if they can't tell it from the noise level.
In a heart attack situation, you have five minutes to restore blood flow, or the person is dead. So you have one minute to step quickly out of the row and run up the stairs to the nearest security person, plus the time for them to get somewhere quiet enough that they can call it in. That burns precious minutes, so unless they have medical staff at the event, the victim is probably screwed.
Mind you, most large events should have medical staff on the premises, and at a bare minimum, event security will have to either help get the patient out (preferred) or get the medical personnel to the patient (slower), so you should be making your phone call while you run for event security, but you're still statistically better off doing both, because you can't know with certainty that they do have a medical staff, and they probably won't have an ambulance standing ready unless you're at a football game.
At least a gun would have a fighting chance of blowing a hole in the bag. Then again, if that fan fails and the cell phone goes into thermal runaway, I'd imagine it would blow a hole in the bag, too, so... never mind.
Speaking of liability....
I'm okay with banning the use of cell phones to record the show, but that should be done with bouncers, not by locking up people's cell phones so that they are unavailable if an emergency should arise. Locking up the phones in bags represents a public safety concern, and thus should not be taken lightly.
I'm just waiting for the first time that the inability to make a 911 call quickly from one of these shows (heart attack, stroke, active shooter, etc.) results in someone's unnecessary death. After one lawsuit erases the benefits of the entire tour, the insurance companies will start levying huge surcharges for any shows that ban cellphones, and all this nonsense will take care of itself.
Many car insurance companies are mutual insurance companies, which makes them nonprofits. So to that extent, yes, there are laws requiring them to either lower their rates or pay money back to their customers if there are fewer payouts. And the existence of State Farm and other mutual insurance companies ensures that any for-profit insurers won't be able to keep their rates arbitrarily high for very long.
The thing is, most folks will probably still want comprehensive car insurance for other things—damage from hail, trees falling on your car, accidents beyond even the computer's control, vandalism, theft, etc. It will just be a lot cheaper because you won't have to pay the liability portions.