A wire mesh *can* be (actively) "shut off" if you put a cell network extender at an appropriate place inside it, with a coax cable going to an antenna outside. These cost less than $1000 -- not a very significant expense when building a theater.
If the risks implicit in putting a Faraday cage inside a theater are as significant as you suggest, their insurer should insist on such a measure being in place (and automatically enabled whenever the lights are up). If their insurer chooses not to enforce such a rule, then the risks are presumably not in fact so significant.
Perhaps to you this is a trivial thing when compared with what is truly important: you being able to watch the latest movie and enjoy your popcorn in peace -- but I suspect his priorities are rather different.
Adjust for frequency and number of individuals effected. I'd call it a safe guess that there are at least 100 instances of unnecessary disruption, with an average of at least 30 people in the theater for each one, for every one instance where said disruption is called for.
Is a rule which allows 3,000 peoples' enjoyment to be disrupted (not to mention the employees who need to handle refund requests from disgruntled customers and lost revenue from tthe same) for every one individual's genuinely high-priority message delivery reasonable? I think that there's a strong argument to the contrary: Divide the importance of that high-priority interrupt by 3,000 (to spread the benefit of potentially being the individual receiving an important message across those who are beneficiaries of either the benefit or the annoyance), and it's unlikely to still hold a higher value.
If there were a way to allow cell phones to be used only for genuine emergencies, I would be in agreement with you. However, that particular uncommon situation is being used as an excuse to justify policies which result in undesirable common-case behavior.
And yes, I am a little cold -- but this is my position in Real Life, not just when debating on the Internet, and is consistent with the culture in which I was raised. My father didn't let me know the last two times he was in the emergency room until afterwards, and I only recently heard through an old friend about my mother's bout with cancer -- and why would they have any obligation for it to be otherwise? The knowledge would disrupt my life without making their own situations any less severe.
I worry about my wife because I'm responsible for her wellbeing, as she is for mine. My parents' responsibilities to me ended when I moved out at age 18. If she were to suffer a freak accident and die without me because I couldn't be reached, I would hurt. That doesn't change that making policy based on the exceptional case rather than the common one is, absent analysis of the frequency and impact of those cases, a Bad Idea -- and I turn my phone off in the theater, even when she's not with me.
Can you give an example of a crime that you can commit (not attempt) that you are guilty of only if you intended to do it?
Sure thing. Off the top of my head, slander against a public figure.
Not mention I'm sure the cell companies would be thrilled about being told that dropped calls are an intentional degredation of cell service for economic reasons[...]
I am not a lawyer (just a software geek who took a few business law classes in school and is reading his wife's law books as she studies) and can't give legal advice valid anywhere, but my understanding of the legal definition of intent is such that that argument wouldn't fly for a minute in court.
There are lots of laws which have intent as a necessary element, and they tend to be enforced effectively. Finding evidence of intent contrary to the accused's claims are what discovery (in civil cases) and good old fashioned police work (in criminal ones) are good for. The justice system has established procedures for finding evidence of intent, and they work.
Laws to make passive jamming illegal would have some very nasty repercussions in all kinds of places, including for the carriers themselves.
I could only see such laws being passed if they specified intent as a necessary element and limited themselves to areas accessible to the public (thus excluding high-security areas and the like).
Yes, I'm aware of the difference in mechanics, and that this difference is the reason for the present difference in legality.
However, this is an accidental difference which exists (effectively) because Congress hasn't sat down to explicitly consider the specific legality of jamming cell phones (and has left the FCC's existing regulations, which have the effect you describe, in place).
The question, then, is this: If you were deciding whether preventing cell phones from working within a limited area should be legal regardless of the mechanism, what would you decide? What limitations would you place (property ownership? posting that cell phone usage is disallowed? etc). Asking about passive blocking is a way to drop arguments about the specific mechanism out of the picture and focus on whether using a mechanism for preventing cell phone usage in a theater is an acceptable concept as a whole and under what circumstances it should be legal.
If you got to the hospital an hour after he died, there'd be a large amount of 'matterin' about it. The difference is you being there when that person needs you.
Would your presence have prevented his death? If not, your nonpresence is just another of life's unfortunate circumstance (same as if you'd been unavailable due to travel, a dead phone battery, or any other reason), not a tragedy in and of itself.
People a hundred years had no expectation of continual, interrupted connectivity, and even today it is enjoyed only by a limited subset of the world's population; I find it hard to treat such connectivity as a necessary element of the human condition.
There's something wrong when a programmer is trying to say he's inherently better than a meth dealer or prostitute.
I'll grant that there are parallels which can be drawn in both cases.:)
Your comment doesn't include enough information, given the lack of intonation and body language, to know where you stand. Is something wrong because it's necessary to make the point? Is something wrong with the entire idea of one person's profession being, in your words, "inherently better" than another?
Usefulness and Art are subjective measures from disputable value systems. A poor artist may have a real fulfilling job, but he could end up fucking his family over by wasting his lucrative job as a stock broker/movie star/CPA.
Ayup -- but disputable though it may be, I have my stake in the ground somewhere, and I'm reasonably happy with that place. That said, I'm not entirely unfamiliar with opposing viewpoints -- as previously mentioned, my wife has one of those. I hold with the value-to-society side of things, though, and argue that the examples you provide of hardships caused by reasonable actions taken in pursuit of that goal are failures of personal responsibility -- that poor artist's significant other shouldn't have gotten involved if unable to cope with living in relative poverty, and no individual should take part in making children they're uncertain of their ability to care for.
Heck, sometimes a job is just a job, and is just the stepping stone to a happy home life filled with whatever that person wants to fill it with. It'd be neat if everyone could have a job they loved, just like it'd be neat if everyone was rich and well-fed, but unfortunately that's not the case.
It's not the case, no, but that doesn't make it less of a valid goal. The more people who are inventing robots to wash the floors rather than washing the floors themselves (and building ultracapacitators and high-speed, automated charging stations for cars rather than pumping gas themselves), the better off everyone is. (I'm skeptical of having a happy home life coupled with uninteresting employment. Who can enjoy their lives when a third of their time is doing something unfulfilling? If the answer is "you", you're obviously not the target audience for the value system I'm selling. Anyhow, having a happy home life has a considerably more indirect benefit to society as a whole than productive employment, and isn't overall societal benefit a worthwhile goal in and of itself?)
Employment isn't a zero-sum game. If someone decides they're going to make a better $GIZMO and can sell the idea well enough to get the resources to make it happen, that's jobs which wouldn't otherwise exist for a design team, an engineering group, marketers, a salesforce, lawyers, and so forth. If that individual hadn't decided to get the education and contacts to get started, on the other hand, everyone would have lost out. I find it an easy reach, then, to argue that promoting productive or creative goals is a higher goal than making everyone feel good about themselves wherever they happen to be.
I think the confusion sets in, right here. How is a "real job" less life-wasting? Is there any employed person (whether they're a meth dealer or a doctor), who isn't "wasting their life?" You do work for someone else, and get paid. Then you come home and use the money to do something for yourself.
The question is how what you do benefits society as a whole, and/or lives up to your potential to provide such benefit.
I make things. Those things are software constructs, sure, but I'm bringing something into existence that wasn't there before! When I'm not making things, I'm wearing an IT hat and helping people do things. Using technology to make peoples' lives easier (or to allow people to do things they otherwise couldn't) -- it's meaningful to me.
These same questions apply anywhere. Where's the meaning? Where's the benefit to those outside my immediate family unit? Will I be able to look back at what I've spent my life on and be proud of something I was a part of? Does what I do make me a better person, or part of a better society? Am I wasting potential that could be put to a more useful purpose? Obviously, there's more than one way to determine self-worth, and this philosophy isn't even nearly the only one out there. Indeed, my wife sees things differently than I do -- I focus on an individual's contribution to society, whereas she focuses on an individual's contribution to their family. Still, the question hangs: What do you create? Is it useful? Is it art? And could you be doing something better?
I would guess (IANAL) that the exemption is that anything can be recorded if there's no reasonable expectation of privacy.
If the cop doesn't have a reasonable expectation, they probably can't require notice even in a two-party state. Under what circumstances one does or doesn't have a a reasonable expectation of privacy is typically a matter for the courts; there should be adequate case law in whatever jurisdiction you happen to be in.
Whether 2257 is in place or not shouldn't make any difference for sites that don't host porn, correct. Of course, in a world where user-submitted contact is every idiot's idea of how they're going to start a business that'll be The Next Big Thing On The Internet but artificial intelligence isn't good enough to conclusively determine whether a given piece appeals to prurient interests or is outside of established community standards, being a site that doesn't host porn is considerably harder than just putting a line in your TOS and filtering things out after-the-fact.
No matter what court rulings come down as to the constitutionality of the law, until the law is actually repealed or amended, adult content providers won't change a thing. They will not break the law because it's not worth the prison sentence just to save some lazy schmuck three extra clicks to enter their (fake) birth date.
Eh? My understanding is that the most objectionable parts of 2257 are related to recordkeeping requirements regarding the performers, not the users.
Indeed, compromising the performers' privacy by requiring that identifying information be distributed to any site hosting the content they star in seems to have much less to do with its stated purpose of preventing underage individuals from acting in porn and much more to do with making a hostile and dangerous business environment for those in an industry the religious right would like to shut down.
Not paying much attention to preexisting replies, eh? Go read the thread in response to the other individual who was worried about patent terms being extended, and come back if you still have something to contribute once you're done.
I trust it, because it's visible. Copyright terms get extended and while it hurts everyone, it's not obvious to Average Joe why that's true, there's relatively little human-interest angle for pickup by the nightly news, and so only a few geeks care. Patent terms get extended, and the impact is huge and visible because of the public's reliance on the availability of cheap generic medications. It's too obvious to the average American to be swept under the carpet in return for some help with the reelection fund, and too big of a talking point for anyone opposing an incumbent who voted in favor. At this point it's not about the companies that want to access the patents, but about the consumers who are already dependent on the inexpensive products those companies are making.
The biggest lobbying budget wins, until an issue is so hot that even a huge lobbying budget can't help with the fallout. Removing access to generic medications would be just such an issue; it's an example that makes the issue so accessible and relevant to the public that significantly extending patent lifetimes would be political suicide.
There's a long track record of retroactive copyright extensions -- it's not a recent trend, and there are obvious reasons why -- for one, the folks with the economic incentive to fight such trends are historically disorganized and underfunded. On the other hand, the industry making generic medications (based on products for which the patents have expired) is huge, and powerful groups like the AARP will back up their ability to continue doing so. Who wants to be the politician that stops people from being able to buy cheap generic medications?
The patent system is prone to all kinds of abuse, but I'm not concerned about retroactive term extensions -- not at all.
...and that's why stego is typically combined with crypto (to make the payload look more like random noise and prevent it from being decrypted even should it be found) and other techniques to hide the payload from statistical analysis (ie. making it look less like random noise, and more like the noise that legitimately appears in images' low-order bits).
Done right, stego can be resistant to analysis, even by someone who knows the algorithm. Of course, it's a cat-and-mouse game between those working on analysis software and those improving steganography techniques.
Slashdot Mirror
A wire mesh *can* be (actively) "shut off" if you put a cell network extender at an appropriate place inside it, with a coax cable going to an antenna outside. These cost less than $1000 -- not a very significant expense when building a theater.
If the risks implicit in putting a Faraday cage inside a theater are as significant as you suggest, their insurer should insist on such a measure being in place (and automatically enabled whenever the lights are up). If their insurer chooses not to enforce such a rule, then the risks are presumably not in fact so significant.
Is a rule which allows 3,000 peoples' enjoyment to be disrupted (not to mention the employees who need to handle refund requests from disgruntled customers and lost revenue from tthe same) for every one individual's genuinely high-priority message delivery reasonable? I think that there's a strong argument to the contrary: Divide the importance of that high-priority interrupt by 3,000 (to spread the benefit of potentially being the individual receiving an important message across those who are beneficiaries of either the benefit or the annoyance), and it's unlikely to still hold a higher value.
If there were a way to allow cell phones to be used only for genuine emergencies, I would be in agreement with you. However, that particular uncommon situation is being used as an excuse to justify policies which result in undesirable common-case behavior.
And yes, I am a little cold -- but this is my position in Real Life, not just when debating on the Internet, and is consistent with the culture in which I was raised. My father didn't let me know the last two times he was in the emergency room until afterwards, and I only recently heard through an old friend about my mother's bout with cancer -- and why would they have any obligation for it to be otherwise? The knowledge would disrupt my life without making their own situations any less severe.
I worry about my wife because I'm responsible for her wellbeing, as she is for mine. My parents' responsibilities to me ended when I moved out at age 18. If she were to suffer a freak accident and die without me because I couldn't be reached, I would hurt. That doesn't change that making policy based on the exceptional case rather than the common one is, absent analysis of the frequency and impact of those cases, a Bad Idea -- and I turn my phone off in the theater, even when she's not with me.
There are lots of laws which have intent as a necessary element, and they tend to be enforced effectively. Finding evidence of intent contrary to the accused's claims are what discovery (in civil cases) and good old fashioned police work (in criminal ones) are good for. The justice system has established procedures for finding evidence of intent, and they work.
Yes, I'm aware of the difference in mechanics, and that this difference is the reason for the present difference in legality.
However, this is an accidental difference which exists (effectively) because Congress hasn't sat down to explicitly consider the specific legality of jamming cell phones (and has left the FCC's existing regulations, which have the effect you describe, in place).
The question, then, is this: If you were deciding whether preventing cell phones from working within a limited area should be legal regardless of the mechanism, what would you decide? What limitations would you place (property ownership? posting that cell phone usage is disallowed? etc). Asking about passive blocking is a way to drop arguments about the specific mechanism out of the picture and focus on whether using a mechanism for preventing cell phone usage in a theater is an acceptable concept as a whole and under what circumstances it should be legal.
People a hundred years had no expectation of continual, interrupted connectivity, and even today it is enjoyed only by a limited subset of the world's population; I find it hard to treat such connectivity as a necessary element of the human condition.
I didn't mean to imply that every theater installs mesh intended to block cell phone reception -- but it's not unheard of for new construction.
What does it matter if you get the message right away? Doesn't change your father's medical condition any.
(BTW, why is active jamming unacceptable because of 911 calls, but copper mesh in theater walls to achieve the exact same end allowed?)
Since they're still reproducing at 3 years, it doesn't appear so.
Ten times as many mitochondria in the muscles.
Your comment doesn't include enough information, given the lack of intonation and body language, to know where you stand. Is something wrong because it's necessary to make the point? Is something wrong with the entire idea of one person's profession being, in your words, "inherently better" than another?
Employment isn't a zero-sum game. If someone decides they're going to make a better $GIZMO and can sell the idea well enough to get the resources to make it happen, that's jobs which wouldn't otherwise exist for a design team, an engineering group, marketers, a salesforce, lawyers, and so forth. If that individual hadn't decided to get the education and contacts to get started, on the other hand, everyone would have lost out. I find it an easy reach, then, to argue that promoting productive or creative goals is a higher goal than making everyone feel good about themselves wherever they happen to be.
I make things. Those things are software constructs, sure, but I'm bringing something into existence that wasn't there before! When I'm not making things, I'm wearing an IT hat and helping people do things. Using technology to make peoples' lives easier (or to allow people to do things they otherwise couldn't) -- it's meaningful to me.
These same questions apply anywhere. Where's the meaning? Where's the benefit to those outside my immediate family unit? Will I be able to look back at what I've spent my life on and be proud of something I was a part of? Does what I do make me a better person, or part of a better society? Am I wasting potential that could be put to a more useful purpose? Obviously, there's more than one way to determine self-worth, and this philosophy isn't even nearly the only one out there. Indeed, my wife sees things differently than I do -- I focus on an individual's contribution to society, whereas she focuses on an individual's contribution to their family. Still, the question hangs: What do you create? Is it useful? Is it art? And could you be doing something better?
I would guess (IANAL) that the exemption is that anything can be recorded if there's no reasonable expectation of privacy.
If the cop doesn't have a reasonable expectation, they probably can't require notice even in a two-party state. Under what circumstances one does or doesn't have a a reasonable expectation of privacy is typically a matter for the courts; there should be adequate case law in whatever jurisdiction you happen to be in.
Probably depends on whether you're in a one- or two-party state; in the latter case, everyone being recorded has to consent.
Texas (where I'm living now) is one-party, but there's a lot of variance.
Wow -- that is indeed worse than I had realized. (That said -- is anything I said actually incorrect, as opposed to incomplete?)
Whether 2257 is in place or not shouldn't make any difference for sites that don't host porn, correct. Of course, in a world where user-submitted contact is every idiot's idea of how they're going to start a business that'll be The Next Big Thing On The Internet but artificial intelligence isn't good enough to conclusively determine whether a given piece appeals to prurient interests or is outside of established community standards, being a site that doesn't host porn is considerably harder than just putting a line in your TOS and filtering things out after-the-fact.
Indeed, compromising the performers' privacy by requiring that identifying information be distributed to any site hosting the content they star in seems to have much less to do with its stated purpose of preventing underage individuals from acting in porn and much more to do with making a hostile and dangerous business environment for those in an industry the religious right would like to shut down.
Not paying much attention to preexisting replies, eh? Go read the thread in response to the other individual who was worried about patent terms being extended, and come back if you still have something to contribute once you're done.
I trust it, because it's visible. Copyright terms get extended and while it hurts everyone, it's not obvious to Average Joe why that's true, there's relatively little human-interest angle for pickup by the nightly news, and so only a few geeks care. Patent terms get extended, and the impact is huge and visible because of the public's reliance on the availability of cheap generic medications. It's too obvious to the average American to be swept under the carpet in return for some help with the reelection fund, and too big of a talking point for anyone opposing an incumbent who voted in favor. At this point it's not about the companies that want to access the patents, but about the consumers who are already dependent on the inexpensive products those companies are making.
The biggest lobbying budget wins, until an issue is so hot that even a huge lobbying budget can't help with the fallout. Removing access to generic medications would be just such an issue; it's an example that makes the issue so accessible and relevant to the public that significantly extending patent lifetimes would be political suicide.
I don't think so.
There's a long track record of retroactive copyright extensions -- it's not a recent trend, and there are obvious reasons why -- for one, the folks with the economic incentive to fight such trends are historically disorganized and underfunded. On the other hand, the industry making generic medications (based on products for which the patents have expired) is huge, and powerful groups like the AARP will back up their ability to continue doing so. Who wants to be the politician that stops people from being able to buy cheap generic medications?
The patent system is prone to all kinds of abuse, but I'm not concerned about retroactive term extensions -- not at all.
...and that's why stego is typically combined with crypto (to make the payload look more like random noise and prevent it from being decrypted even should it be found) and other techniques to hide the payload from statistical analysis (ie. making it look less like random noise, and more like the noise that legitimately appears in images' low-order bits).
Done right, stego can be resistant to analysis, even by someone who knows the algorithm. Of course, it's a cat-and-mouse game between those working on analysis software and those improving steganography techniques.