Other people have not mastered that skill. If people would keep their cellphones on quiet and leave the theatre to check them, there wouldn't be this problem.
Technology exists, though, to allow calls only to someone who has pre-registered and perhaps signed a declaration to accept whatever hefty consequences if their phone rings audibly or they answer there and then. Consequences could include things like loss of a substantial deposit, barring from the service in future etc. Since people would pay for pre-registration (if you're not willing to pay, you've made the judgement that the 2 hour wait isn't worth the money) this would seem to be good for everyone.
However, even with jammers, its easy to give the babysitter the number at the theatre in case there is an emergency.
At a restaurant I know this can be done. However, I've never heard of anyone successfully phoning a cinema and being able to get a message to someone watching a film. The cinema generally has no way of finding them without going to the extreme of halting the film and making an announcement- and I don't think anyone would do that. Or want that. The only case I've seen anything like that was a cinema at a holiday camp where there was a messageboard next to the screen, but that was quite distracting.
Seriously though... who REALLY needs to be contacted IMMEDIATELY 24-7?
Parents?
Yes, I hate hearing cellphones in cinemas etc. But when I'm in such a place and I have a babysitter, I always have the cellphone on, and on silent/vibrate. That way, if something needs dealing with, I can go out and call them back. Afterall, before mobiles came along there was still the ability to contact someone in an emergency- restaurants etc would be able to take calls and pass the message along.
The comment about someone dead or dying is absolutely stupid. If someone's been hit by a car and they're not dead yet, but will be soon, I'd rather like to go and say goodbye.
I'd like to see the option of remaining contactable. There's a few ways to do this given a local base under the cinema (etc)'s control- the simplest would be to be able to hire personal vibrate-only pagers that are automatically fired by the local base, and the most elegant would be to be able to register your mobile number in advance, and if you make a noise or take a call inappropriately you get blacklisted and lose the service. As well as being cut off mid-call and perhaps booted out- if very few people do it, then you can come down much harder on them.
An alternative to these Star Trek-like technologies is voice recognition. Motorola has developed something it calls the SmartButton. The user pins the device onto a lapel, then taps on it and, using voice commands, dials a number and holds a conversation.
The author has evidently little knowledge of Star Trek!
You don't need to invoke such scenarios. Plumbers (and electricians) can charge such high rates simply because demand outstrips supply, as it once did in IT.
I don't know if as many people will want to do plumbing as want to do IT; I can code from anywhere- work at home a fair amount, use the laptop in the garden etc. Compare that with plumbing, where some of the things you're called on to do are somewhat unpleasant. Google for "saniflow" for example. And water doesn't switch off as quickly when things go badly wrong as electronic stuff.
As for a previous poster's comments on hobby plumbers- on my birthday wish list is a deluxe pipe bender...
One of them is illegal for all; anyone selling to anyone is by definition breaking the law.
OTOH, one of them is (like alcohol and smoking) legal for those above a semi-arbitrary age. Selling to those perfectly allowed to posess and purchase is fine.
In the case of drugs, the crime is committed typically outside the home and away from the parents. In the case of minors playing adult computer games, the 'crime' is committed within the house, an environment which is the direct responsibility of the parent, and generally the parent has additionally had a role in "dealing" the game, if the retailer would not supply it to the child.
It's easy to do a search and replace on strings of characters, but it doesn't automatically impart meaning to the generated text.
You need a counterweight, else as mentioned the whole thing comes crashing down. Unlike a conventional elevator, though, the counterweight will have to be an extension of the elevator going out past the geostationary point. The outward "pull" of the extension trying to fly off into space (you're spinning it faster than its natural orbital speed) serves to balance gravity trying to pull down all the length that's below the geostationary point, and hence moving below its orbital speed.
The point about the nanotubes is that no material so far has the tensile strength to simply hold itself together over that kind of length; it has to support its own weight, before you can start thinking about lifting things. Nanotubes may be strong enough, if we can make them long enough. If they're not, something else will come along.
Er- not usable with a PPC Amiga. I recently obtained a refund for my $100 preorder for the PPC part of Amiga Fusion, which has not yet (not ever?) been released. The Amiga version is limited to running on the original 68K series CPU.
Fusion for the Intel cannot be described as "MacOS for Intel". It is emulating a 68K series CPU and running MacOS on that, at a significant loss of performance.
Perhaps they've been shooting by all the time but we've only just started noticing- the car that splats a bug isn't the first car to drive by.
Tunguska, 1908, is a recent possible impact site. The theory is a 60 metre asteroid blew up in the atmosphere 5 miles above Tunguska, in Siberia. It didn't even make it to the ground, yet the 15 megaton equivalent explosion flattened the forest for thousands of square miles, and the seismic shock was felt in London. Hardly a world shattering event, but it would have been pretty devastating over a builtup area.
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Technology exists, though, to allow calls only to someone who has pre-registered and perhaps signed a declaration to accept whatever hefty consequences if their phone rings audibly or they answer there and then. Consequences could include things like loss of a substantial deposit, barring from the service in future etc. Since people would pay for pre-registration (if you're not willing to pay, you've made the judgement that the 2 hour wait isn't worth the money) this would seem to be good for everyone.
At a restaurant I know this can be done. However, I've never heard of anyone successfully phoning a cinema and being able to get a message to someone watching a film. The cinema generally has no way of finding them without going to the extreme of halting the film and making an announcement- and I don't think anyone would do that. Or want that. The only case I've seen anything like that was a cinema at a holiday camp where there was a messageboard next to the screen, but that was quite distracting.
Parents?
Yes, I hate hearing cellphones in cinemas etc. But when I'm in such a place and I have a babysitter, I always have the cellphone on, and on silent/vibrate. That way, if something needs dealing with, I can go out and call them back. Afterall, before mobiles came along there was still the ability to contact someone in an emergency- restaurants etc would be able to take calls and pass the message along.
The comment about someone dead or dying is absolutely stupid. If someone's been hit by a car and they're not dead yet, but will be soon, I'd rather like to go and say goodbye.
I'd like to see the option of remaining contactable. There's a few ways to do this given a local base under the cinema (etc)'s control- the simplest would be to be able to hire personal vibrate-only pagers that are automatically fired by the local base, and the most elegant would be to be able to register your mobile number in advance, and if you make a noise or take a call inappropriately you get blacklisted and lose the service. As well as being cut off mid-call and perhaps booted out- if very few people do it, then you can come down much harder on them.
The author has evidently little knowledge of Star Trek!
You don't need to invoke such scenarios. Plumbers (and electricians) can charge such high rates simply because demand outstrips supply, as it once did in IT.
I don't know if as many people will want to do plumbing as want to do IT; I can code from anywhere- work at home a fair amount, use the laptop in the garden etc. Compare that with plumbing, where some of the things you're called on to do are somewhat unpleasant. Google for "saniflow" for example. And water doesn't switch off as quickly when things go badly wrong as electronic stuff.
As for a previous poster's comments on hobby plumbers- on my birthday wish list is a deluxe pipe bender...
One of them is illegal for all; anyone selling to anyone is by definition breaking the law.
OTOH, one of them is (like alcohol and smoking) legal for those above a semi-arbitrary age. Selling to those perfectly allowed to posess and purchase is fine.
In the case of drugs, the crime is committed typically outside the home and away from the parents. In the case of minors playing adult computer games, the 'crime' is committed within the house, an environment which is the direct responsibility of the parent, and generally the parent has additionally had a role in "dealing" the game, if the retailer would not supply it to the child.
It's easy to do a search and replace on strings of characters, but it doesn't automatically impart meaning to the generated text.
You need a counterweight, else as mentioned the whole thing comes crashing down. Unlike a conventional elevator, though, the counterweight will have to be an extension of the elevator going out past the geostationary point. The outward "pull" of the extension trying to fly off into space (you're spinning it faster than its natural orbital speed) serves to balance gravity trying to pull down all the length that's below the geostationary point, and hence moving below its orbital speed.
The point about the nanotubes is that no material so far has the tensile strength to simply hold itself together over that kind of length; it has to support its own weight, before you can start thinking about lifting things. Nanotubes may be strong enough, if we can make them long enough. If they're not, something else will come along.
Er- not usable with a PPC Amiga. I recently obtained a refund for my $100 preorder for the PPC part of Amiga Fusion, which has not yet (not ever?) been released. The Amiga version is limited to running on the original 68K series CPU. Fusion for the Intel cannot be described as "MacOS for Intel". It is emulating a 68K series CPU and running MacOS on that, at a significant loss of performance.
Perhaps they've been shooting by all the time but we've only just started noticing- the car that splats a bug isn't the first car to drive by. Tunguska, 1908, is a recent possible impact site. The theory is a 60 metre asteroid blew up in the atmosphere 5 miles above Tunguska, in Siberia. It didn't even make it to the ground, yet the 15 megaton equivalent explosion flattened the forest for thousands of square miles, and the seismic shock was felt in London. Hardly a world shattering event, but it would have been pretty devastating over a builtup area.