I second that. Actually the keyboard is my primary consideration when buying a laptop, along with the pointing device. I really don't care what CPU it has etc... What I want is a good keyboard and one or two good pointing devices built-in. There have been countless laptops that I wanted to buy and I didn't only because I disliked their keyboard. I know we can change the layout through software, but this cannot change the physical size of the keys.
If only all laptop manufacturers could license and use the classic IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad keyboard...
I have two ISDN phones, one PSTN phone, a number of cellphones, and VoIP. Naturally they are all targeted by marketers.
My problem with marketers is that they waste my time and therefore my money. To counter this, I have devised a very simple method:
The basic principle of my method is that people who work with me or have a legitimate reason to contact me usually know more than one of my phone numbers, and almost surely know my email. Actually my business card has two phone numbers on it as well as my email, so everyone who I met fits this description. My method is actually akin to graylisting for email.
So what is my greylisting method? It's very simple: No call is answered, unless the same caller-id calls at least two of my phone numbers. A whitelist and a blacklist assist me in filtering known numbers. Everyone who is not on the whitelist and fails to call at least two of my phones gets ignored no matter how many times they call.
The system is based on usual human behaviour, which is that if a person knows two or three of your phone numbers, they will call one of them and if they get no response they will usually prefer to call the other rather than call again the same number. I have noticed, however, that some people prefer to call only specific numbers (maybe because of cost issues or maybe because they have saved them on their device memory, I believe), and so I try to deal with them with the whitelist (or, in some cases, the blacklist!).
My system, however, sometimes causes legitimate calls to go unanswered if they aren't on the whitelist. This happens with people who have no caller-id, as all of them are ignored by default. This problem is very easily solved by my email: If they have a serious reason to contact me, they should send an email. If someone has no caller-id and does not send email, it means that they just want to waste my time and have nothing of interest to discuss.
This system works for me because it is usually me who initiates calls with clients or associates, and I do most of my work through email or chat anyway, so I don't really rely on the phones for important work.
I do have, however, one emergency unlisted phone number that grants immediate access to every incoming call no matter what. This number is usually given to important clients for large projects etc... but naturally marketers have found it. So, what I do when I get a stupid call from a marketer on this phone? After I answer it and I understand what they are, I just say very kindly "please wait" and I don't hang up. I then carry on with my usual business, "forgetting" the call:)
I do research on the business applications of swarm intelligence and its philosophical and managerial implications for organisational behaviour. Practically, swarm intelligence can help your business make millions, including savings. Using swarm algorithms you can actually find the best ways to route cargo, etc. But there is more in the swarm story... If in the future humans learn how to swarm effectivelly, the new business organisations that will arise then will resemble more the current free software communities than the hierarchical bureaucratic monsters we know today. It is my belief that CEOs must be informed on the latest developments in swarm intelligence and apply it in their businesses, otherwise they aren't good CEOs.
Perhaps the best way to unclutter the UI would be to make it free software (open source) and let the users-developers themselves customise it to their own liking?
Good observation... What can you use a great smartphone or PDA for if your carrier sucks? Sometimes I think that device manufacturers should sue carriers for destroying a market with huge potential. Carriers suck even here in EU, so no this is not just a US phenomenon. I think the reason carriers suck is because they don't face competition from free communities run by citizens. People use their WiFi to set up community networks, but this cannot be done with GPRS or 3G because the governments (FCC et al) have decided that only a handful of guys should have the right to transmit in the cellular telephony radio spectrum. Perhaps it's time for a law to be passed to guarantee at least one gratis cellular telephony licence for free networking communities (like the ones we have for WiFi, modelled after the old BBSes and the current free software communities).
Researchers have a job, and their job is to research things. That's how they earn their living.
Free software developers usually have jobs as well, many times as programmers. That's how they earn their living, but when they get home they start hacking free software projects and contribute to the free software communities.
I see no reason why a researcher couldn't do the same if they wanted: Keep their day jobs and when they get home start doing some research for free, network with other like-minded individuals to build amateur laboratories, etc.
When I find some free time I will start a wiki where researchers will be able to upload copylefted papers, and I hope I will have the time to write a few pages teaching how citizens can become researchers themselves and help science. If you want to help in the effort, drop me a mail.
As a good nerd, one of the books I love most in my library is David G. Aviv's Laser Space Communications (2006). It is really one of the best introductory books for any laser or communications nerd. I actually do some personal research in the area as I know very well that in the future laser space communications will become a multi-billion industry, thanks to the greater presence of humans in space. Considering the 5-GENIN (fifth-generation Internet), I can predict that more Internet entrepreneurs will move into space when it becomes more mainstream. The laser space communications is an example of a technology which if you can make a contribution now or formulate a good idea you are likely to become rich easily and quickly (unless our space development gets delayed by a major war or catastrophe).
Yes, that's true, there is no security in Mediterranean countries, but if there were how could tourists spend their monies enjoying the seaside without spending their valuable time in security stoppoints etc? No security is not necessarily a bad thing!
Hacking isn't cracking, but there is a vast gray area in between. If a student hacks their own grades without using any automated script, all by using their own ingenuity, then they should pass an ethics course and that's all. Society should focus on making smart people understand that being lawful is better. Putting smart people in prison is a loss for society.
If you want only real people to enter, use a CAPTCHA
CAPTCHAs allow only people who can recognise the letters to come in. They don't allow all real people in. Blind people can't get in, as well as those with little time in their hands who prefer to do something more meaningful than spending their time trying to decipher CAPTCHAs.
Many times I have encountered CAPTCHAs that I could not solve (at least in the few times I tried), so I just stopped visiting sites that employed so stupid CAPTCHAs. A simple CAPTCHA which can clearly be read is perhaps okay when there is a serious spam problem, but extremely complicated CAPTCHAs which combine colours with shapes, numbers, symbols, capital and lower-case letters in strange typefaces, make me abandon a site rather than try to read them.
Try deciphering a CAPTCHA in sans-serif which may contain capital I and lower-case l along with 1s and all that within a chaotically-shaped colourful jungle and then tell me if "CAPTCHAs === only real people". Perhaps the time required to decipher a CAPTCHA is justified for an important site, but when I see such stupid undecipherable CAPTCHAs in blogs I just move away and find something more meaningful to do.
DJB is a competent and smart hacker (and by this I mean programmer, the correct word for people who break stuff is cracker), but I don't use his software for two reasons:
Strange licensing terms (or lack thereof): Not that licence-free software is inherently bad (in an ideal world we wouldn't have the need for licences so everything should be licence-free... but we don't live in an ideal world, do we?).
Strange implementation of standard RFCs (which is perfectly okay and acceptable if DJB writes qmail for his personal amusement, but NOT ok if he expects people to actually use qmail).
So, for me, qmail is good for reading the source or for hacking (by this I mean playing to learn). Would I put qmail on a production server? No!
I actually use exim, mostly because it's GPL and Debian default. Postfix would be good if it was GPL too (for the uninitiated, Postfix was started by the guy who wrote the old good SATAN).
I see that DJB has unpopular ideas, but I don't think this should make some of you bashing him whenever his name is mentioned in a forum.
The need for privacy is a by-product of human aggressiveness and stupidity.
In a sane and healthy society, people would just let everyone else live as they wanted.
But modern society is not sane and not healthy... Say in your blog that you don't believe in God and you can expect to be attacked by religious fanatics, either online or even offline. Say that you don't like the PATRIOT Act and you will be labelled a 'terrist'.
So, in this crazy and dangerous society where being unpopular is a risk to your life, we have invented privacy to protect us.
But privacy is a sign that a society has a serious problem. Perhaps people should focus on solving the fundamental problems that have led us to feel the need for privacy. The real problem is not the lack of privacy. The real problem is the presence of violent people who are keen to attack other people to force them to live in a certain way.
So, by embedding it into the school uniform they make it part of the dress code... Whose idea is it that students should wear uniforms in the first place? I can't see any logic in this idea in a free society, although I can see that it is useful in a McDonaldised society for making children feel that behaving like robots is normal.
They already do a pretty good job of making it impossible to download the distro in binary form from their website for free, so I think they've done about as much as they legally can.
A point to remember when discussing about the advantages of GPL over BSD licences.
As a user, CentOS makes me more likely to buy RHEL
on
Is CentOS Hurting Red Hat?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
My servers run Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 etch amd64. If for any reason I couldn't get Debian and I wanted a RedHat-like distro, then I would examine CentOS. If it suited me, then I would examine the pure RedHat. But if I couldn't get CentOS, then there would be absolutely no chance of even thinking about RedHat.
To summarise... If I were a CentOS user I would be willing to consider RHEL, but if there were no CentOS I would *never* buy RHEL. I wouldn't get RHEL even if it, its updates, and its support were offered for free.
Let me explain my reasoning as a user: RHEL is supported by a company. CentOS is supported by a community. Companies may die or bought by a bigger company and leave their users unsupported. Communities, while having no obligation to support the users, tend to live on and almost never die. "Dead" communities are usually just replaced by a new more vibrant one. The reason is that communities are formed because of the needs of developers and users, so for as long as users have the same needs there will always be communities covering these needs. Companies, however, are usually formed for profit, so if you have obscure needs that cannot bring profits to an enterprise then you may be unable to buy a commercial solution to your needs. A company can cease its operations for various reasons. This can't happen with a community. With an active CentOS community around, this means that upgrading to the enterprise support offered by RedHat is safe: Even if RedHat can't support me, I can always just revert back to CentOS and carry on my business as before with no changes. But if CentOS didn't exist, then getting RedHat would mean that you would assume the risk of having business continuity problems if your support provider went out of business etc. With CentOS around acting as a backup, RedHat is a much more safer choice.
Let's use an actual example: I still have a Commodore 64 home micro from the 1980s with its sexy tape drive, but Commodore is no more and doesn't support this old model anymore. I have to rely to an informal community to get spare parts from auctions, classified ads, etc. The company has stopped supported the C64 users, but the C64 community is still alive and supports its members very well.
Really, the knowledge that CentOS has good compatibility with RHEL and that I will *never* face the same situation as my did with my C64 makes me a thousand times more willing to buy RHEL if I ever need their enterprise support. Buying RedHat means that if I can't continue running it then I can just revert back to CentOS with little effort.
In this sense, every commercial distributors should seek to support a compatible community-led parallel distro alongside their commercial offering. Community distros that are compatible with commercial versions achieve synergy benefits for both the community and the commercial vendor. Furthermore, companies should not be afraid of losing customers from the community version, as commercial and community distros are meant for very different kinds of users. In the CentOS/RHEL example, the difference between CentOS and RHEL is that with CentOS you are responsible for keeping your machines operational, while with RHEL you can sign a contract and give portions of your responsibility to RedHat. This usually appeals to middle level managers who get to make a choice between distros and have a higher boss to report to in case somethings gets broken. But CentOS, just like Debian, will appeal to techies and entrepreneurs who either know what they are doing or have no one above them to fear getting fired. So, really, these distros target very different markets and very different psychologies of customers.
I have to be connected on the Internet all the time and I use 3G (HSDPA) for this purpose on laptops and PDAs, even while I am walking or being at lectures. If a cellphone jamming device ruined my SSH sessions that would be VERY bad. Also, I want to be able to use my phone if there is a real need to do so. Putting aside the fact that I never go to the cinema or theatres, I would purposefully boycott any establishment that jammed phone signals. It worths pointing out as well that it would be possible for a person walking or living near a theatre to suffer from the jamming even if they never visit the theatre itself. Also, jamming kits are widely available to everyone, just like repeater kits. If a theatre can jam mobiles because it dislikes the noise, does that mean that I also have the right to carry a jammer with me and block all cell phone signals wherever I am just because I dislike the noise of nearby cellphone talkers? I don't think so. Someone could say that theatres own their building, in which case I would ask whether I would be right to install a jammer in my home or my garden, potentially disrupting the communications of neighbours and people who walk outside the garden. If theatres can lawfully block cellphone signals inside and potentially near their buildings, then I demand the same privilege for every citizen as well, we should all have the right to block whatever signal we dislike in our property. I don't think that's right, however, because cell phone signals is a communication resource and may be of extreme importance to some people, even though the majority use them simply for talking to boyfriends and girlfriends. It's not a good idea to purposefully disrupt communications.
Really, it is much more simple to simply pause the movie or the performance whenever someone is heard using a phone in a theatre. Then, everyone but teenage psychopath troublemakers would remember to use the silence mode or turn off the phone if their tiny brain learns in a Pavlovian dog way that "phone = no movie".
Last time I checked the sixth sense is not universally accepted by scientists, and if you could know when someone is lying then we would have no need for so many laws and regulations for everything.
So, no, you can't tell whether someone is lying or not. You may be able to say whether they are extremely stressed, which can be an indication of a liar who doesn't know how to lie. But whether their stress comes from lying, social anxiety, some form of allergy, madness, some past event that the client experienced before coming to your shop, or anything else you really don't know and cannot know with the available science/technology today.
Slashdot Mirror
I second that. Actually the keyboard is my primary consideration when buying a laptop, along with the pointing device. I really don't care what CPU it has etc... What I want is a good keyboard and one or two good pointing devices built-in. There have been countless laptops that I wanted to buy and I didn't only because I disliked their keyboard. I know we can change the layout through software, but this cannot change the physical size of the keys.
If only all laptop manufacturers could license and use the classic IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad keyboard...
I have two ISDN phones, one PSTN phone, a number of cellphones, and VoIP. Naturally they are all targeted by marketers.
My problem with marketers is that they waste my time and therefore my money. To counter this, I have devised a very simple method:
The basic principle of my method is that people who work with me or have a legitimate reason to contact me usually know more than one of my phone numbers, and almost surely know my email. Actually my business card has two phone numbers on it as well as my email, so everyone who I met fits this description. My method is actually akin to graylisting for email.
So what is my greylisting method? It's very simple: No call is answered, unless the same caller-id calls at least two of my phone numbers. A whitelist and a blacklist assist me in filtering known numbers. Everyone who is not on the whitelist and fails to call at least two of my phones gets ignored no matter how many times they call.
The system is based on usual human behaviour, which is that if a person knows two or three of your phone numbers, they will call one of them and if they get no response they will usually prefer to call the other rather than call again the same number. I have noticed, however, that some people prefer to call only specific numbers (maybe because of cost issues or maybe because they have saved them on their device memory, I believe), and so I try to deal with them with the whitelist (or, in some cases, the blacklist!).
My system, however, sometimes causes legitimate calls to go unanswered if they aren't on the whitelist. This happens with people who have no caller-id, as all of them are ignored by default. This problem is very easily solved by my email: If they have a serious reason to contact me, they should send an email. If someone has no caller-id and does not send email, it means that they just want to waste my time and have nothing of interest to discuss.
This system works for me because it is usually me who initiates calls with clients or associates, and I do most of my work through email or chat anyway, so I don't really rely on the phones for important work.
I do have, however, one emergency unlisted phone number that grants immediate access to every incoming call no matter what. This number is usually given to important clients for large projects etc... but naturally marketers have found it. So, what I do when I get a stupid call from a marketer on this phone? After I answer it and I understand what they are, I just say very kindly "please wait" and I don't hang up. I then carry on with my usual business, "forgetting" the call :)
I do research on the business applications of swarm intelligence and its philosophical and managerial implications for organisational behaviour. Practically, swarm intelligence can help your business make millions, including savings. Using swarm algorithms you can actually find the best ways to route cargo, etc. But there is more in the swarm story... If in the future humans learn how to swarm effectivelly, the new business organisations that will arise then will resemble more the current free software communities than the hierarchical bureaucratic monsters we know today. It is my belief that CEOs must be informed on the latest developments in swarm intelligence and apply it in their businesses, otherwise they aren't good CEOs.
How about remembering this the next time you are asked to vote?
Considering it has been a while since we got to the moon, I think we should have already visited Mars and Venus.
Considering that we haven't visited neither Mars nor Venus yet I believe that *everything* related to space is worthwile. Yes, even space tourism.
Perhaps the best way to unclutter the UI would be to make it free software (open source) and let the users-developers themselves customise it to their own liking?
Good observation... What can you use a great smartphone or PDA for if your carrier sucks? Sometimes I think that device manufacturers should sue carriers for destroying a market with huge potential. Carriers suck even here in EU, so no this is not just a US phenomenon. I think the reason carriers suck is because they don't face competition from free communities run by citizens. People use their WiFi to set up community networks, but this cannot be done with GPRS or 3G because the governments (FCC et al) have decided that only a handful of guys should have the right to transmit in the cellular telephony radio spectrum. Perhaps it's time for a law to be passed to guarantee at least one gratis cellular telephony licence for free networking communities (like the ones we have for WiFi, modelled after the old BBSes and the current free software communities).
Exactly why everything Dvorak says turns up on /.?
Researchers have a job, and their job is to research things. That's how they earn their living.
Free software developers usually have jobs as well, many times as programmers. That's how they earn their living, but when they get home they start hacking free software projects and contribute to the free software communities.
I see no reason why a researcher couldn't do the same if they wanted: Keep their day jobs and when they get home start doing some research for free, network with other like-minded individuals to build amateur laboratories, etc.
When I find some free time I will start a wiki where researchers will be able to upload copylefted papers, and I hope I will have the time to write a few pages teaching how citizens can become researchers themselves and help science. If you want to help in the effort, drop me a mail.
As a good nerd, one of the books I love most in my library is David G. Aviv's Laser Space Communications (2006). It is really one of the best introductory books for any laser or communications nerd. I actually do some personal research in the area as I know very well that in the future laser space communications will become a multi-billion industry, thanks to the greater presence of humans in space. Considering the 5-GENIN (fifth-generation Internet), I can predict that more Internet entrepreneurs will move into space when it becomes more mainstream. The laser space communications is an example of a technology which if you can make a contribution now or formulate a good idea you are likely to become rich easily and quickly (unless our space development gets delayed by a major war or catastrophe).
+1, I also do not fly primarily because of stupid security measures. Whereever there are stupid security measures, I vote with my euros
Yes, that's true, there is no security in Mediterranean countries, but if there were how could tourists spend their monies enjoying the seaside without spending their valuable time in security stoppoints etc? No security is not necessarily a bad thing!
Hacking isn't cracking, but there is a vast gray area in between. If a student hacks their own grades without using any automated script, all by using their own ingenuity, then they should pass an ethics course and that's all. Society should focus on making smart people understand that being lawful is better. Putting smart people in prison is a loss for society.
CAPTCHAs allow only people who can recognise the letters to come in. They don't allow all real people in. Blind people can't get in, as well as those with little time in their hands who prefer to do something more meaningful than spending their time trying to decipher CAPTCHAs.
Many times I have encountered CAPTCHAs that I could not solve (at least in the few times I tried), so I just stopped visiting sites that employed so stupid CAPTCHAs. A simple CAPTCHA which can clearly be read is perhaps okay when there is a serious spam problem, but extremely complicated CAPTCHAs which combine colours with shapes, numbers, symbols, capital and lower-case letters in strange typefaces, make me abandon a site rather than try to read them.
Try deciphering a CAPTCHA in sans-serif which may contain capital I and lower-case l along with 1s and all that within a chaotically-shaped colourful jungle and then tell me if "CAPTCHAs === only real people". Perhaps the time required to decipher a CAPTCHA is justified for an important site, but when I see such stupid undecipherable CAPTCHAs in blogs I just move away and find something more meaningful to do.
DJB is a competent and smart hacker (and by this I mean programmer, the correct word for people who break stuff is cracker), but I don't use his software for two reasons:
So, for me, qmail is good for reading the source or for hacking (by this I mean playing to learn). Would I put qmail on a production server? No!
I actually use exim, mostly because it's GPL and Debian default. Postfix would be good if it was GPL too (for the uninitiated, Postfix was started by the guy who wrote the old good SATAN).
I see that DJB has unpopular ideas, but I don't think this should make some of you bashing him whenever his name is mentioned in a forum.
Which really breaks an antispam trick that many servers use, putting fake MX records in your DNS after and before your real MX.
Can't see any reason to use sendmail when postfix and exim are available.
And do you think that this is a bad thing?
The need for privacy is a by-product of human aggressiveness and stupidity.
In a sane and healthy society, people would just let everyone else live as they wanted.
But modern society is not sane and not healthy... Say in your blog that you don't believe in God and you can expect to be attacked by religious fanatics, either online or even offline. Say that you don't like the PATRIOT Act and you will be labelled a 'terrist'.
So, in this crazy and dangerous society where being unpopular is a risk to your life, we have invented privacy to protect us.
But privacy is a sign that a society has a serious problem. Perhaps people should focus on solving the fundamental problems that have led us to feel the need for privacy. The real problem is not the lack of privacy. The real problem is the presence of violent people who are keen to attack other people to force them to live in a certain way.
So, by embedding it into the school uniform they make it part of the dress code... Whose idea is it that students should wear uniforms in the first place? I can't see any logic in this idea in a free society, although I can see that it is useful in a McDonaldised society for making children feel that behaving like robots is normal.
A point to remember when discussing about the advantages of GPL over BSD licences.
My servers run Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 etch amd64. If for any reason I couldn't get Debian and I wanted a RedHat-like distro, then I would examine CentOS. If it suited me, then I would examine the pure RedHat. But if I couldn't get CentOS, then there would be absolutely no chance of even thinking about RedHat.
To summarise... If I were a CentOS user I would be willing to consider RHEL, but if there were no CentOS I would *never* buy RHEL. I wouldn't get RHEL even if it, its updates, and its support were offered for free.
Let me explain my reasoning as a user: RHEL is supported by a company. CentOS is supported by a community. Companies may die or bought by a bigger company and leave their users unsupported. Communities, while having no obligation to support the users, tend to live on and almost never die. "Dead" communities are usually just replaced by a new more vibrant one. The reason is that communities are formed because of the needs of developers and users, so for as long as users have the same needs there will always be communities covering these needs. Companies, however, are usually formed for profit, so if you have obscure needs that cannot bring profits to an enterprise then you may be unable to buy a commercial solution to your needs. A company can cease its operations for various reasons. This can't happen with a community. With an active CentOS community around, this means that upgrading to the enterprise support offered by RedHat is safe: Even if RedHat can't support me, I can always just revert back to CentOS and carry on my business as before with no changes. But if CentOS didn't exist, then getting RedHat would mean that you would assume the risk of having business continuity problems if your support provider went out of business etc. With CentOS around acting as a backup, RedHat is a much more safer choice.
Let's use an actual example: I still have a Commodore 64 home micro from the 1980s with its sexy tape drive, but Commodore is no more and doesn't support this old model anymore. I have to rely to an informal community to get spare parts from auctions, classified ads, etc. The company has stopped supported the C64 users, but the C64 community is still alive and supports its members very well.
Really, the knowledge that CentOS has good compatibility with RHEL and that I will *never* face the same situation as my did with my C64 makes me a thousand times more willing to buy RHEL if I ever need their enterprise support. Buying RedHat means that if I can't continue running it then I can just revert back to CentOS with little effort.
In this sense, every commercial distributors should seek to support a compatible community-led parallel distro alongside their commercial offering. Community distros that are compatible with commercial versions achieve synergy benefits for both the community and the commercial vendor. Furthermore, companies should not be afraid of losing customers from the community version, as commercial and community distros are meant for very different kinds of users. In the CentOS/RHEL example, the difference between CentOS and RHEL is that with CentOS you are responsible for keeping your machines operational, while with RHEL you can sign a contract and give portions of your responsibility to RedHat. This usually appeals to middle level managers who get to make a choice between distros and have a higher boss to report to in case somethings gets broken. But CentOS, just like Debian, will appeal to techies and entrepreneurs who either know what they are doing or have no one above them to fear getting fired. So, really, these distros target very different markets and very different psychologies of customers.
I have to be connected on the Internet all the time and I use 3G (HSDPA) for this purpose on laptops and PDAs, even while I am walking or being at lectures. If a cellphone jamming device ruined my SSH sessions that would be VERY bad. Also, I want to be able to use my phone if there is a real need to do so. Putting aside the fact that I never go to the cinema or theatres, I would purposefully boycott any establishment that jammed phone signals. It worths pointing out as well that it would be possible for a person walking or living near a theatre to suffer from the jamming even if they never visit the theatre itself. Also, jamming kits are widely available to everyone, just like repeater kits. If a theatre can jam mobiles because it dislikes the noise, does that mean that I also have the right to carry a jammer with me and block all cell phone signals wherever I am just because I dislike the noise of nearby cellphone talkers? I don't think so. Someone could say that theatres own their building, in which case I would ask whether I would be right to install a jammer in my home or my garden, potentially disrupting the communications of neighbours and people who walk outside the garden. If theatres can lawfully block cellphone signals inside and potentially near their buildings, then I demand the same privilege for every citizen as well, we should all have the right to block whatever signal we dislike in our property. I don't think that's right, however, because cell phone signals is a communication resource and may be of extreme importance to some people, even though the majority use them simply for talking to boyfriends and girlfriends. It's not a good idea to purposefully disrupt communications.
Really, it is much more simple to simply pause the movie or the performance whenever someone is heard using a phone in a theatre. Then, everyone but teenage psychopath troublemakers would remember to use the silence mode or turn off the phone if their tiny brain learns in a Pavlovian dog way that "phone = no movie".
Last time I checked the sixth sense is not universally accepted by scientists, and if you could know when someone is lying then we would have no need for so many laws and regulations for everything.
So, no, you can't tell whether someone is lying or not. You may be able to say whether they are extremely stressed, which can be an indication of a liar who doesn't know how to lie. But whether their stress comes from lying, social anxiety, some form of allergy, madness, some past event that the client experienced before coming to your shop, or anything else you really don't know and cannot know with the available science/technology today.