"Does it have motion sensing like an iPhone? Could you reboot the thing by shaking it up and down like an etchasketch?"
Tee hee. I bought a Tablet PC back in 2004 that has an accellerometer. You could shake it and start an app, or play a sound, or whatever. I had mine make a "Waaaah!" sound like Ziggy in Quantum Leap if it shook. Nobody got the reference, though, they just thought it was annoying. *sigh*
Yeah, wide-area jammers and Faraday-cage style construction is morally ambiguous, you are potentially causing a lot of grief if a necessary message needs to be transmitted, but there are certainly cases where I feel it's warranted too. Maybe the problem is that the FCC doesn't allow for any definition of private property to determine the signals present on just that property. Frankly, if I were a business-owner I would like to be able to say I could disallow a particular spectrum's use inside my own establishment. Additionally, any broadcast that doesn't leave that property shouldn't result in a fine, should it? I see what you're saying. I don't really have the energy to reply to this topic any more, but I wanted to thank you for providing a rebuttal that I respect. (And it's not just the novelty of hearing something besides "a heart attack instantly kills!"!) Have a good week, man.
"Your experience is not everyone's experience, no matter how well-travelled you think you are. So shove the holier-than-thou crap back up your ass and try to realize there are other people in the world whose experiences matter."
Speaking of escaping irony, take your own advice, Mr. Hypocrite.
"If your dad was so close to death, what are you doing at the movies? "
This is exactly why I made the comment about hating this site sometimes. Get on the wrong side of public opinion, and IQ points drop by significant percentages. It is absolutely amazing to me that you couldn't picture somebody having a sudden heart attack. As if the imminence of all heart attacks could be determined because everybody looks sickley etc. Cripes.
"What if you're two hours away with coverage? That would be acceptable, no cell wouldn't be?"
Ah, more brain damage. Okay, I'll use a car analogy, that way you can argue with it without actually having to spend the time to process what I've said. Let's say you had an important interview one morning. But you couldn't get to it because I stole your car. Angry that you've missed something important, you tell me that I shouldn't have stolen your car. I reply with "But your car could have broken down anyway, so not having it now is acceptable, right? You can't always have a car! You could be stranded in the next city, you wouldn't have expected to have your car then! Why didnt you have the person interviewing you spend the night at your house, that way the interview would have happened on time!"
I don't mind you having a different opinion from me, but yeesh. Heh.
"If you're so bloody worried about getting that call then you don't have any business whatsoever entering an establishment which prohibits you from using your cellphone. End of discussion."
"And I'm even hypersensitive to cell phones, so I'm told. I'm someone who has complained to HR because people leave cell phones on their desks letting their annoying ringtones go on and on. Never noticed it in a movie theater."
I hear ya on that. I was yelled at by a board member once because he left his phone on his desk in a cubicle environment so he could be in some meeting. It rang for what felt like eternity. I just walked over and hit 'end' on the phone, sending the call to voice mail. He was so angry at me for touching his phone. (Sadly, none of my coworkers annoyed by the ringer backed me up on it.) I used to have my ringer on the loudest setting, that way I'd have the best chance of not missing a call. After that, I realized that I was just being annoying and if I was away from my phone, I probably wouldn't run back to get it. (That's what voice mail's for, right?) So now my ringer's set to a low volume and I have vibrate on. I also have a soft beeping ringer instead of a blaring dentist-drill like sound people like to use.
I think part of the problem is that people don't speak up when they're being annoyed. That needs to change. I went to a theater one time and during the previews, some guy was messing around with a laser pointer. Some dude stood up and shouted "If I see that red dot on the screen during the movie, I'm going to come over there and break your arm!" The audience erupted in applause. No red dots appeared during the movie. I'm willing to bet he never did that again.
How about not writing such obscenely bloated software that it needs a mainframe-on-a-chip to show an address book? You want to save energy? You want to reduce cost? You want to reduce carbon footprint? It's not by making yet another technology, it's by refining what we already have. We don't need Javascript code that takes seconds to execute a simple text display on a multi-GHz processor./quote
Great! We can roll back technology to the days where we need platform specific code, no multi-tasking, and give up all the benefits of having our portable devices do the same things our desktop devices do for the sake of running everything on triple-A's. Let's get started!
The nice thing about capacitors is that they charge orders of magnitude faster than batteries. If you could plug your phone/PDA/etc. into any wall socket and have it fully charged in a few seconds, would you really need a power source for it that would last for days? Certainly yes, for camping trips perhaps. Ultracapacitors would introduce new ways of using portable devices. Would an ultracapictor battery use less power to charge up than a slow-charging Li-ion?
"Even if this is a genuine high-priority interrupt, though, the numbers (or at least my bad guesses) are against making it a deciding factor in determining policy."
Can't say I agree with those numbers. It seems a bit academic to me, anyway. Lots of doctors, people who are on call 24-7 for an emergency, wouldn't be allowed to go to a movie. Even though many, if not most, haven't bothered anybody. People not guilty of doing any wrong are punished. Meanwhile, this solution doesn't actually solve a problem, it patches one small symptom. The people in the theater would still be required to be quiet, and this 'quick fix' doesn't do a thing for that. People can still be rude, innocent people on-call are discriminated against.
"People like yourself are "the" reason I enjoy going to countries like Japan."
I find that unlikely. My cell phone is always off in theaters. I've never bothered anybody with my phone. Part of the reason we're having a disconnect here is that you're jumping to conclusions about my goals. (That's why I made the comment about hating this site sometimes. People'd rather argue than discuss.) It's amusing, really, because the rest of your post indicates that we agree. The solution isn't to build theaters so they cannot recieve signals. The better goal would be to teach people to be polite.
Now, if we could drop the whole "we disagree because you really want to go to a movie theater and talk on your phone as loud as possible" bullshit that Slashdot apparently owns the patent on, we could discuss how to make that goal happen instead of jumping the gun and making assumptions that aren't even in the ballpark of reality.
"How many times is there going to be an honest-to-God emergency where immediate connectivity is vital, which cannot be foreseen? I'm mumblety-three years old, and I can't really think of a time in my life. It's got to happen sometime, but I would think it would be exceedingly rare."
That depends so much on the individuals that there's really no fair way to judge.
"This means that you are willing to subject people in general to serious inconvenience just so you can have access that you may, or may not need, sometime in your life."
That's not true. I'm in no way suggesting that people should let their phone ring audibly, then answer it in the theater. I'm suggesting that the solution isn't to block the signals. You see, I have thought about this issue. The problem isn't the phone, it's people being rude. You can kill the cell phones and people will still bring in crying babies, shout comments in a movie, screw around with laser pointers, play their PSPs, and whatever. People need to be taught to behave in theaters. That'll solve all the problems, not just one.
"If you need to be constantly available, you can stay out of theaters, or anywhere where they might block cell phones."
Heh. Don't ever let your doctor hear that.
"If you can't find time to be unavailable, your life is screwed up anyway, and don't ask me to support your stupid lifestyle."
Your solution isn't better. It punishes those who aren't in violation. It only 'solves' one problem to the exclusion of many others, though they're related. It unfairly discriminates against people like doctors. Don't ask me to support your stupid knee-jerk group-think extremes then accuse me of not actually thinking about the issue. If you want to live in a world where you have to physically force people to not act like an idiot, go right ahead, just keep it out of my back yard.
"IOW - one is not supposed to read what he wrote, but is supposed to assume some mystical meaning. Especially when he very plainly compared cell phones to CT scans."
He very plainly did not compare cell phones to CT scans.
"Ah, so in the second line of his post he didn't mention CT scans?"
Mention or compare? Which one is it? Each one gives you a very different result.
"But don't be spiteful just because you don't understand the problem. You obviously haven't had a lot of experience with people ruining other people's movie watching experience, we lose quite a bit of money refunding those tickets and giving them passes to another show because some jackass(es) in the theatre ruined their movie."
You're right, I haven't had a lot of experience with this. I've lived in three major cities since the obiquity of cell phones. (Los Angeles is one of them...) I've seen a NUMBER of movies, and can only think of two times where I've been annoyed by a jackass with a cell phone. That said, I've been annoyed a great deal more by many other forms of stupidity. I went to see the 2005 Amityville Horror movie, started at 10:30 at night, some dipshit brought their baby. They brought a crying baby to a movie like that at that time of night. I went to go see From Hell. Some chick brought her boyfriend, only he was drunk. Halfway through the movie he kept saying "I don't like this movie.. let's go!" He even dropped his beer bottle, which brought a rather distinct *clank* and an ugly rolling sound as it rolled down towards the screen. I've sat through laser pointers, thrown popcorn, people who show up half hour into the movie, comments blurted out, and even two dudes who got into an argument about who sits where. In my little world, if you jam cell phone signals, you'll do very little to reduce the amount of human rudeness in a theater.
Maybe I was presumptious in assuming that my experiences were like most other people's. Maybe I managed to go to a number of different theaters that didn't actually have the cell phone problem. That seems odd to me considering how much I've moved around, but okay, you win, I don't actually know what every theater in the country is like.
"Sure - if the guy being called was the surgeon who could have saved his own fathers life. Otherwise, if someone is dying of a heart attack - he isn't getting anywhere close to his father."
He could get there before his father passed away. He could say goodbye. That would matter a great deal. Your ignorance of this doesn't give your comment about me being a self centered git with no more clue than the average two week old infant much reason for me to take offense.
"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."
My non-presence meant I didn't get to say goodbye. Emotionally, that would hurt. Bad timing, dead batteries, or lots of other reasons aren't due to an intentional jamming.
"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."
Throughout history, communication is something man has strived to improved. We wouldn't have such a massive infrastructure today if it wasn't felt to be necessary. That's besides the point, though. The problem isn't cell phones and their ability to work in a theater. The problem is that there are idiots in the world. That's a social problem, not a technical one.
"If you think you can compare them you're really missing the point."
Speaking of missing the point... he wasn't comparing cell phones to CT scans.
How did you manage to listen to some great music at your home if you are not grown in a family of virtuoses before recording equipment and amplifiers? How did you manage to proscrastinate at work when there was no/. You should be the guy that re-reads that post and gets the right meaning out if it instead of being the guy that calls bullshit on a comparison that wasn't made.
"What does it matter if you get the message right away? Doesn't change your father's medical condition any."
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.
"(BTW, why is active jamming unacceptable because of 911 calls, but copper mesh in theater walls to achieve the exact same end allowed?)"
Boy do I agree with you about that. There was an article on that years ago on Slashdot. I brought up the 911 thing and was pulverized by rude comments and moderations. "They have payphones, go use those!" "Don't get bad news in a theater, I'm trying to watch!" "Why would you need to know about a loved one? You should be bringing them with you!" Yadda yadda yadda. I'd love to hear a damn good reason to justify all the bullshit I got over that.
"One guy in a room of 400 is annoying with a cell phone, let's build a theater like a nuclear bunker! Ready the tar and pitchforks for anybody who disagrees!" I fucking hate this site sometimes.
"But if you'd bought it in the first place, you wouldn't then have to spend MORE money to continue to enjoy your music."
I have to keep spending money or time in order to keep that music. I also have to spend money to attain music I may not want OR have a more conservative collection. I've listened to a lot of 'throw away' music.
"Same for movies: when I see a movie I enjoy, I always think, yep, I'll be buying that as soon as it's available."
In a way, what we're talking about isn't that different. For TV, you're possibly paying a cable/satellite bill, or at the very least, you're trading commercial time. You see it, you like it, you buy it, only you're paying again for that content. My situation's very similar. I pay a subscription to music. If I really want to buy a song, I certainly could. The only reason I'm not is that the on-demand feature decreases the value in my actually wanting to own a copy of the song. True, I pay a monthly fee, but I never pay for a song I don't want.
"Can you say for certain that Rhapsody is going to be around next year? Or the year following? Say some lawsuit shows up, blows it out of the water and it ceases entirely."
Nope. Either I'll pack up and move to another service, or I'll go find the songs I really want to have and buy them.
"What are you left with? Not a thing. All your money that you spent on music is gone, and you have nothing to show for it."
Though I get what you're saying, that isn't quite true.
- I have found a LOT of music I wouldn't have found otherwise. (I've also found a lot of music I *don't* want or only found entertaining for a bit.)
- I've had the convenience of not having to worry about gigabytes of data or synchronization across multiple machines. This is actually what drove me to subscription in the first place.
- This is similar to my first point, but my music tastes have expanded. I hadn't really given 70's music a chance until it didn't cost me anything to try. I feel silly about that now, I understand why modern is considered crap.
- I've been entertained for many, many hours. I haven't bothered to sit around and do all the math, but I know I'm going through a lot more hours of music in a given month than I am with TV, and at 1/8th the price. I mean, yeah, the service could die, but that won't go back and undo all the entertainment I've had. Movies and TV are already acceptable to me in this regard, why not music?
I've gained quite a bit, I'm just not able to keep the songs.
That's why subscription-based services like Rhapsody and satellite radio don't make much sense to me. I expect they are great for DISCOVERING new music.. but I have plenty of means to discover music already that don't involve paying money. I recently discovered a group called The 69 Eyes because a song was playing on a random MySpace page that I stumbled across. I liked the song, analog-holed it (and the other one that was there), listened to them for a day or so, decided I really liked them, downloaded their album from iTMS, converted the tracks to MP3. Boom. Now I have the music in a non-DRMed format that I am fairly confident I will be able to enjoy in perpituity, whether some company somewhere else goes out of business or not. That's cool. For me, it's a matter of convenience. I do a lot of my music 'shopping' at work while I'm waiting for stuff to load. That 20 second figure I threw out earlier was literal. I have that song on any computer I'm using Rhapsody with. I understand your concerns about the business going tits-up. Heck, it'd suck for me if Rhapsody went down, I don't know if there's a comparable service or not I can switch to. The thing is, though, I've ALWAYS had that problem with whatever music choices I've made. What drove me to Rhapsody in the first place was a hard-drive failure. I lost my collection of MP3s. My laptop had most of them, but I had gotten lazy about synching across the machines, so I had to re-acquire some stuff. The capacity for loss is, at least, more under my control. But it doesn't go away. I'd be a lightning bolt away from loss. So I'd end up spending money on new HD's or writable media, then spending time keeping it all backed up, etc. Yes, I'd survive a company going out of business, but that's not all that enticing. On the flip side, as long as the business is afloat, I could suddenly materialize on the opposite coast of the country and still get at my music.
Okay, I'm rambling a bit. I apologize for that. Music has a different value for me than it does for you. There are songs I like, but I just don't want to go through all that effort any more to try to maintain a collection. (I wouldn't be offended if you called me a 'consumer' as opposed to 'collector'.) It isn't really gaining me much. I gave up the 'keep' part of the music and gained a much bigger and much more convenient library. If the service dies, oh well. It was fun while it lasted and my music tastes are broader.
"Gee, do you really want to pay a monthly fee for limited (DRMed) access to music files, access which goes away if you terminate your service. That value proposition is exceedingly poor, unless you take measures to copy the files into non-DRM form."
That's one way to look at it. I see it a bit differently. I've subscribed to a music service for quite a while now. (Rhapsody, if anybody's curious.) There are a few benefits to it that are worth $10/mo. to me.
1.) I have access to all their music. Often I go find a bunch of new albums to listen to. That means if somebody recommends a song, for example, I'm listening to it like 20 seconds later.
2.) I don't have a big collection of music to take with my everywhere. Lots of people don't mind that, but I do. I have 3 different computers I constantly access. (Home desktop, home laptop, work desktop.) If I switch computers at work, I just reinstall Rhapsody and I'm hearing music again.
3.) Yes, if I terminate the service, I lose the music. On the flip side, there's lots of songs I used to listen to all the time that I don't anymore. This became wasteful, trying to manage all that. Here I just delete it from my list, and if I want it back like a year later, I just go hunt add it again. Before I was a packrat, keeping songs I didn't know if I really wanted to keep anymore. I can go buy them later if I really really want to make a long-term investment. I haven't done that in ages, though. My playlist today is far different than the one I had a year ago.
4.) This was sort of covered in the first point, but I'm always on the prowl to find new music. This service often gets new albums just as they're released. I pop them into my list and explore. I've found a ton of new music this way. One thing I didn't like about my music scouring before is that it was often tied to how much disposable money I had in a given month. I hated buying 3 or 4 albums and only getting a handful of interesting songs. In theory I could hear the clips and decide, but too many times I've not really liked a song until I've heard it a couple of times in its entirety. This makes me squeamish about buying a whole album.
5.) There's lots of stand-up comedy on this service. I use it to enterain myself at work from time to time during long monotonous days.
Subscription's not for everybody, but it's certainly not for nobody. Yeah, you've got a point. For me, the termination of services doesn't multiply the other values of it by 0. To me it's sorta like cable TV for music, only this is on-demand. I certainly like it better than satellite radio or other subscription services just for that reason. Considering all the new music I've found, I'd say there's plenty of value in it for some people, especially those with multiple computers or finicky music tastes.
"Yeah, but video on demand isn't going to happen for another 10 or more years. Remember, 1080p is something like 40mbps. Comcast currently tops of at around 6mbps."
I have HD on demand right now. As for the 6mbps figure, you're talking about the internet connection. The TV connection, whatever the data rate is (I thought I heard 19 megabits somewhere... but I cannot swear to it), already supports pushing HD down the pipe.
"I'm not saying it won't happen, it's just not there yet and I don't see cable companies as smart enough to figure it out."
I don't have HD, so I cannot really tell you much about that experience. However, I do have on-demand (and just to reiterate, there is HD On Demand) and it has already killed my membership to the local rental place. It's not, by any means, a perfect service. But I can imagine it taking off in a big way. But, that's supposition. Video on Demand is already here, it's just small.
Slashdot Mirror
"Does it have motion sensing like an iPhone? Could you reboot the thing by shaking it up and down like an etchasketch?"
Tee hee. I bought a Tablet PC back in 2004 that has an accellerometer. You could shake it and start an app, or play a sound, or whatever. I had mine make a "Waaaah!" sound like Ziggy in Quantum Leap if it shook. Nobody got the reference, though, they just thought it was annoying. *sigh*
"Your experience is not everyone's experience, no matter how well-travelled you think you are. So shove the holier-than-thou crap back up your ass and try to realize there are other people in the world whose experiences matter."
Speaking of escaping irony, take your own advice, Mr. Hypocrite.
"If your dad was so close to death, what are you doing at the movies? "
This is exactly why I made the comment about hating this site sometimes. Get on the wrong side of public opinion, and IQ points drop by significant percentages. It is absolutely amazing to me that you couldn't picture somebody having a sudden heart attack. As if the imminence of all heart attacks could be determined because everybody looks sickley etc. Cripes.
"What if you're two hours away with coverage? That would be acceptable, no cell wouldn't be?"
Ah, more brain damage. Okay, I'll use a car analogy, that way you can argue with it without actually having to spend the time to process what I've said. Let's say you had an important interview one morning. But you couldn't get to it because I stole your car. Angry that you've missed something important, you tell me that I shouldn't have stolen your car. I reply with "But your car could have broken down anyway, so not having it now is acceptable, right? You can't always have a car! You could be stranded in the next city, you wouldn't have expected to have your car then! Why didnt you have the person interviewing you spend the night at your house, that way the interview would have happened on time!"
I don't mind you having a different opinion from me, but yeesh. Heh.
"Australian Maths.
... FFffourteen beerrrsh..."
One sheep.. Two sheep.. Three sheep.."
No, that's New Zealand math. Aussie math is "One beer... Two beers... Three beers...
"If you're so bloody worried about getting that call then you don't have any business whatsoever entering an establishment which prohibits you from using your cellphone. End of discussion."
Go tell your doctor that.
0.20 PROGRAM-ID. JL01A.
0.30 *
0.40 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
0.50 CONFIGURATION SECTION.
0.60 SPECIAL-NAMES.
0.70 TERMINAL IS TERM.
0.80 INPUT-OUTPUT SECTION.
0.90 *
1.00 DATA DIVISION.
1.10 FILE SECTION.
1.20 *
1.30 WORKING-STORAGE SECTION.
1.40 77 WS-TEKST PIC A(13) VALUE "WELCOME BACK.".
1.50 *
1.60 PROCEDURE DIVISION.
1.70 JL01A.
1.80 *
1.90 DISPLAY "HELLO WORLD, " WS-TEKST UPON TERM.
2.00 *
2.10 FIN.
2.20 STOP RUN. Oh yeah, I've played this game. Just buy a potion from Gandolf!
"And I'm even hypersensitive to cell phones, so I'm told. I'm someone who has complained to HR because people leave cell phones on their desks letting their annoying ringtones go on and on. Never noticed it in a movie theater."
I hear ya on that. I was yelled at by a board member once because he left his phone on his desk in a cubicle environment so he could be in some meeting. It rang for what felt like eternity. I just walked over and hit 'end' on the phone, sending the call to voice mail. He was so angry at me for touching his phone. (Sadly, none of my coworkers annoyed by the ringer backed me up on it.) I used to have my ringer on the loudest setting, that way I'd have the best chance of not missing a call. After that, I realized that I was just being annoying and if I was away from my phone, I probably wouldn't run back to get it. (That's what voice mail's for, right?) So now my ringer's set to a low volume and I have vibrate on. I also have a soft beeping ringer instead of a blaring dentist-drill like sound people like to use.
I think part of the problem is that people don't speak up when they're being annoyed. That needs to change. I went to a theater one time and during the previews, some guy was messing around with a laser pointer. Some dude stood up and shouted "If I see that red dot on the screen during the movie, I'm going to come over there and break your arm!" The audience erupted in applause. No red dots appeared during the movie. I'm willing to bet he never did that again.
You want to save energy? You want to reduce cost? You want to reduce carbon footprint? It's not by making yet another technology, it's by refining what we already have. We don't need Javascript code that takes seconds to execute a simple text display on a multi-GHz processor./quote
Great! We can roll back technology to the days where we need platform specific code, no multi-tasking, and give up all the benefits of having our portable devices do the same things our desktop devices do for the sake of running everything on triple-A's. Let's get started!
"Even if this is a genuine high-priority interrupt, though, the numbers (or at least my bad guesses) are against making it a deciding factor in determining policy."
Can't say I agree with those numbers. It seems a bit academic to me, anyway. Lots of doctors, people who are on call 24-7 for an emergency, wouldn't be allowed to go to a movie. Even though many, if not most, haven't bothered anybody. People not guilty of doing any wrong are punished. Meanwhile, this solution doesn't actually solve a problem, it patches one small symptom. The people in the theater would still be required to be quiet, and this 'quick fix' doesn't do a thing for that. People can still be rude, innocent people on-call are discriminated against.
"People like yourself are "the" reason I enjoy going to countries like Japan."
I find that unlikely. My cell phone is always off in theaters. I've never bothered anybody with my phone. Part of the reason we're having a disconnect here is that you're jumping to conclusions about my goals. (That's why I made the comment about hating this site sometimes. People'd rather argue than discuss.) It's amusing, really, because the rest of your post indicates that we agree. The solution isn't to build theaters so they cannot recieve signals. The better goal would be to teach people to be polite.
Now, if we could drop the whole "we disagree because you really want to go to a movie theater and talk on your phone as loud as possible" bullshit that Slashdot apparently owns the patent on, we could discuss how to make that goal happen instead of jumping the gun and making assumptions that aren't even in the ballpark of reality.
"How many times is there going to be an honest-to-God emergency where immediate connectivity is vital, which cannot be foreseen? I'm mumblety-three years old, and I can't really think of a time in my life. It's got to happen sometime, but I would think it would be exceedingly rare."
That depends so much on the individuals that there's really no fair way to judge.
"This means that you are willing to subject people in general to serious inconvenience just so you can have access that you may, or may not need, sometime in your life."
That's not true. I'm in no way suggesting that people should let their phone ring audibly, then answer it in the theater. I'm suggesting that the solution isn't to block the signals. You see, I have thought about this issue. The problem isn't the phone, it's people being rude. You can kill the cell phones and people will still bring in crying babies, shout comments in a movie, screw around with laser pointers, play their PSPs, and whatever. People need to be taught to behave in theaters. That'll solve all the problems, not just one.
"If you need to be constantly available, you can stay out of theaters, or anywhere where they might block cell phones."
Heh. Don't ever let your doctor hear that.
"If you can't find time to be unavailable, your life is screwed up anyway, and don't ask me to support your stupid lifestyle."
Your solution isn't better. It punishes those who aren't in violation. It only 'solves' one problem to the exclusion of many others, though they're related. It unfairly discriminates against people like doctors. Don't ask me to support your stupid knee-jerk group-think extremes then accuse me of not actually thinking about the issue. If you want to live in a world where you have to physically force people to not act like an idiot, go right ahead, just keep it out of my back yard.
"IOW - one is not supposed to read what he wrote, but is supposed to assume some mystical meaning. Especially when he very plainly compared cell phones to CT scans."
He very plainly did not compare cell phones to CT scans.
"Ah, so in the second line of his post he didn't mention CT scans?"
Mention or compare? Which one is it? Each one gives you a very different result.
"But don't be spiteful just because you don't understand the problem. You obviously haven't had a lot of experience with people ruining other people's movie watching experience, we lose quite a bit of money refunding those tickets and giving them passes to another show because some jackass(es) in the theatre ruined their movie."
You're right, I haven't had a lot of experience with this. I've lived in three major cities since the obiquity of cell phones. (Los Angeles is one of them...) I've seen a NUMBER of movies, and can only think of two times where I've been annoyed by a jackass with a cell phone. That said, I've been annoyed a great deal more by many other forms of stupidity. I went to see the 2005 Amityville Horror movie, started at 10:30 at night, some dipshit brought their baby. They brought a crying baby to a movie like that at that time of night. I went to go see From Hell. Some chick brought her boyfriend, only he was drunk. Halfway through the movie he kept saying "I don't like this movie.. let's go!" He even dropped his beer bottle, which brought a rather distinct *clank* and an ugly rolling sound as it rolled down towards the screen. I've sat through laser pointers, thrown popcorn, people who show up half hour into the movie, comments blurted out, and even two dudes who got into an argument about who sits where. In my little world, if you jam cell phone signals, you'll do very little to reduce the amount of human rudeness in a theater.
Maybe I was presumptious in assuming that my experiences were like most other people's. Maybe I managed to go to a number of different theaters that didn't actually have the cell phone problem. That seems odd to me considering how much I've moved around, but okay, you win, I don't actually know what every theater in the country is like.
"Sure - if the guy being called was the surgeon who could have saved his own fathers life. Otherwise, if someone is dying of a heart attack - he isn't getting anywhere close to his father."
:)
He could get there before his father passed away. He could say goodbye. That would matter a great deal. Your ignorance of this doesn't give your comment about me being a self centered git with no more clue than the average two week old infant much reason for me to take offense.
Have a good day.
"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."
My non-presence meant I didn't get to say goodbye. Emotionally, that would hurt. Bad timing, dead batteries, or lots of other reasons aren't due to an intentional jamming.
"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."
Throughout history, communication is something man has strived to improved. We wouldn't have such a massive infrastructure today if it wasn't felt to be necessary. That's besides the point, though. The problem isn't cell phones and their ability to work in a theater. The problem is that there are idiots in the world. That's a social problem, not a technical one.
Speaking of missing the point... he wasn't comparing cell phones to CT scans. How did you manage to listen to some great music at your home if you are not grown in a family of virtuoses before recording equipment and amplifiers?
How did you manage to proscrastinate at work when there was no
"What does it matter if you get the message right away? Doesn't change your father's medical condition any."
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.
"(BTW, why is active jamming unacceptable because of 911 calls, but copper mesh in theater walls to achieve the exact same end allowed?)"
Boy do I agree with you about that. There was an article on that years ago on Slashdot. I brought up the 911 thing and was pulverized by rude comments and moderations. "They have payphones, go use those!" "Don't get bad news in a theater, I'm trying to watch!" "Why would you need to know about a loved one? You should be bringing them with you!" Yadda yadda yadda. I'd love to hear a damn good reason to justify all the bullshit I got over that.
"One guy in a room of 400 is annoying with a cell phone, let's build a theater like a nuclear bunker! Ready the tar and pitchforks for anybody who disagrees!" I fucking hate this site sometimes.
"how exactly is this news? or stuff that matters?"
No no no, it's Slashdot's uptime is our downtime.
"But if you'd bought it in the first place, you wouldn't then have to spend MORE money to continue to enjoy your music."
I have to keep spending money or time in order to keep that music. I also have to spend money to attain music I may not want OR have a more conservative collection. I've listened to a lot of 'throw away' music.
"Same for movies: when I see a movie I enjoy, I always think, yep, I'll be buying that as soon as it's available."
In a way, what we're talking about isn't that different. For TV, you're possibly paying a cable/satellite bill, or at the very least, you're trading commercial time. You see it, you like it, you buy it, only you're paying again for that content. My situation's very similar. I pay a subscription to music. If I really want to buy a song, I certainly could. The only reason I'm not is that the on-demand feature decreases the value in my actually wanting to own a copy of the song. True, I pay a monthly fee, but I never pay for a song I don't want.
Two questions:
1.) Is that a Palm Treo?
2.) How are you synching songs to it? Is this because you're purchasing them or...?
I have a 700P. If you could nudge me in the right direction to get subscription music on it, I'd really appreciate it.
Nope. Either I'll pack up and move to another service, or I'll go find the songs I really want to have and buy them.
"What are you left with? Not a thing. All your money that you spent on music is gone, and you have nothing to show for it."
Though I get what you're saying, that isn't quite true.
- I have found a LOT of music I wouldn't have found otherwise. (I've also found a lot of music I *don't* want or only found entertaining for a bit.)
- I've had the convenience of not having to worry about gigabytes of data or synchronization across multiple machines. This is actually what drove me to subscription in the first place.
- This is similar to my first point, but my music tastes have expanded. I hadn't really given 70's music a chance until it didn't cost me anything to try. I feel silly about that now, I understand why modern is considered crap.
- I've been entertained for many, many hours. I haven't bothered to sit around and do all the math, but I know I'm going through a lot more hours of music in a given month than I am with TV, and at 1/8th the price. I mean, yeah, the service could die, but that won't go back and undo all the entertainment I've had. Movies and TV are already acceptable to me in this regard, why not music?
I've gained quite a bit, I'm just not able to keep the songs. That's why subscription-based services like Rhapsody and satellite radio don't make much sense to me. I expect they are great for DISCOVERING new music
Okay, I'm rambling a bit. I apologize for that. Music has a different value for me than it does for you. There are songs I like, but I just don't want to go through all that effort any more to try to maintain a collection. (I wouldn't be offended if you called me a 'consumer' as opposed to 'collector'.) It isn't really gaining me much. I gave up the 'keep' part of the music and gained a much bigger and much more convenient library. If the service dies, oh well. It was fun while it lasted and my music tastes are broader.
"Gee, do you really want to pay a monthly fee for limited (DRMed) access to music files, access which goes away if you terminate your service. That value proposition is exceedingly poor, unless you take measures to copy the files into non-DRM form."
That's one way to look at it. I see it a bit differently. I've subscribed to a music service for quite a while now. (Rhapsody, if anybody's curious.) There are a few benefits to it that are worth $10/mo. to me.
1.) I have access to all their music. Often I go find a bunch of new albums to listen to. That means if somebody recommends a song, for example, I'm listening to it like 20 seconds later.
2.) I don't have a big collection of music to take with my everywhere. Lots of people don't mind that, but I do. I have 3 different computers I constantly access. (Home desktop, home laptop, work desktop.) If I switch computers at work, I just reinstall Rhapsody and I'm hearing music again.
3.) Yes, if I terminate the service, I lose the music. On the flip side, there's lots of songs I used to listen to all the time that I don't anymore. This became wasteful, trying to manage all that. Here I just delete it from my list, and if I want it back like a year later, I just go hunt add it again. Before I was a packrat, keeping songs I didn't know if I really wanted to keep anymore. I can go buy them later if I really really want to make a long-term investment. I haven't done that in ages, though. My playlist today is far different than the one I had a year ago.
4.) This was sort of covered in the first point, but I'm always on the prowl to find new music. This service often gets new albums just as they're released. I pop them into my list and explore. I've found a ton of new music this way. One thing I didn't like about my music scouring before is that it was often tied to how much disposable money I had in a given month. I hated buying 3 or 4 albums and only getting a handful of interesting songs. In theory I could hear the clips and decide, but too many times I've not really liked a song until I've heard it a couple of times in its entirety. This makes me squeamish about buying a whole album.
5.) There's lots of stand-up comedy on this service. I use it to enterain myself at work from time to time during long monotonous days.
Subscription's not for everybody, but it's certainly not for nobody. Yeah, you've got a point. For me, the termination of services doesn't multiply the other values of it by 0. To me it's sorta like cable TV for music, only this is on-demand. I certainly like it better than satellite radio or other subscription services just for that reason. Considering all the new music I've found, I'd say there's plenty of value in it for some people, especially those with multiple computers or finicky music tastes.
"Yeah, but video on demand isn't going to happen for another 10 or more years. Remember, 1080p is something like 40mbps. Comcast currently tops of at around 6mbps."
I have HD on demand right now. As for the 6mbps figure, you're talking about the internet connection. The TV connection, whatever the data rate is (I thought I heard 19 megabits somewhere... but I cannot swear to it), already supports pushing HD down the pipe.
"I'm not saying it won't happen, it's just not there yet and I don't see cable companies as smart enough to figure it out."
I don't have HD, so I cannot really tell you much about that experience. However, I do have on-demand (and just to reiterate, there is HD On Demand) and it has already killed my membership to the local rental place. It's not, by any means, a perfect service. But I can imagine it taking off in a big way. But, that's supposition. Video on Demand is already here, it's just small.