Certainly a terrible idea on every level, but I can't help but sympathize with the intent.
Too much of the public simply aren't responsible about driving and there doesn't seem to be any good way to identify and prevent or penalize them for it.
Too much of the public simply aren't responsible about driving and there doesn't seem to be any good way to identify and prevent or penalize them for it.
There are accidents where even seconds matter and the effects of the jamming can mean the difference between life and death or even simply a shift in the a victim's odds. Or consider emergency services whose radios were affected: maybe paramedics were radioing in status updates to a hospital, or perhaps police officers were in the middle of receiving an Amber alert. Or, imagine that he's injured in an accident himself. He, and anyone else potentially injured in such an accident, are potentially at risk because people can't notify 911. If he's lucky, he's able to turn it off. If he's unlucky, and is incapacitated or otherwise unable to turn it off, well, that's quite the problem now, isn't it?
I hate dreaming up hypotheticals, but this story practically demands it. His actions were no less selfish than someone else's texting while driving.
A car driving around is a secret dead zone that punishes you for being nearby, even if you're not transgressing any social norms or traffic laws. Sitting on a park bench nearby? Hell, even being a passenger in a vehicle? That's the problem - he's being an indiscriminate vigilante.
That said, I totally agree with you on your main point. This is often a counter argument when people suggest that mobile devices should be disabled when the car is in motion (which isn't necessarily the same thing as jamming). Often, when I'm driving, my wife is looking up directions or letting a family member know that we're near.
That said, making calls to emergency services, if you have to run outside to make that call, you've lost 30 seconds or a couple minutes. And you can't follow their directions in aiding the person because you're outside, and the victim(s) are inside. That's assuming it's not an attacker who would prevent you from leaving in the first place.
Is this really such a pandemic in the US these days?
[1] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/05/woman-k...
[2] http://chartsbin.com/view/32k -- I'm assuming this is accurate
As for the babysitter, deal with it. If you're not contactable for 90 minutes, you're not contactable for 90 minutes. This perma-connectivity is an entirely new phenomenon, and there's no absolute need for it. Essentially this argument is saying that the parent's inability to deal with lack of connectivity is a convenience which trumps the general theatre-going public's convenience of not having people talking on the phone, or who light up the people behind them because they're bored with the movie and are playing online.
Being uncontactable for a short period is not the horror that it's made out to be in these arguments. The good old argument that someone can't sit through a lecture without connectivity "in case Auntie Mabel dies", but of course it's just a cover for having phone access for other things. If one were to believe the excuses that get trotted out, you'd be forgiven for thinking that human mortality had skyrocketed since the public acceptance of mobile phones :)
If a movie theatre did in fact install jammers each parent concerned about their kid (yea, it's probably not a true emergency, but subjective perception matters) or each doctor (I'm thinking more about delivering babies, which can mean being on call for weeks at a time, than an ER doctor) might choose to skip the movie. The end result is that that the theatre will likely take a hit on their profits. That's not a compelling reason to invest in installing a jammer.
The whole "we survived just fine without constant connectivity" argument is flawed. Yea, we did a lot of things without modern technology. We got along fine without movies, driving to the movies, mobile phones, the Internet, or arguing on the Internet about the need for mobile phone access during a movie.
Have another read of my comment, and you'll see in the middle of it that I'm saying that it's an argument of conveniences. It's convenient for a parent to have instant connectivity in case the babysitter calls, just as it's convenient for the audience to enjoy the movie they paid for without distractions. You say the theatre would take a financial hit for installing blocking devices, yet the more common trope is that the major annoyance in a theatre is people on phones - you could just as easily argue that they'd get a financial benefit from it. Doctors specifically on-call to deliver babies aren't much of a market segment to a movie theatre.
You clearly have no perspective.
I'd prefer my next trauma surgeon can relax and take in half a movie before he is called in on his pager to try and save my life, of which I have one that will be entirely in his hands. I don't give a fuck if you miss a couple of minutes of a movie that cost you $15 or even if it meant myself never being able to go into a movie theater again.
What's so wrong with having places that can only be attended by people who are fine with nobody will be able to reach them? Businesses don't have to serve everybody; in fact, selling exactly that escapism--that only people in certain classes and professions can afford the time to experience--is exactly the business model theatres. It is also the business model of cruise-lines and travel agencies.
If a trauma surgeon wants to see a movie, they can wait for it to come out on Netflix. Just so: if a trauma surgeon wants to go to the beach and sip mai-tais, they can find a public one within an hour's drive of the hospital.
(Note that this is all assuming that being on-call is a sensible thing to have in society. We really need to get ourselves enough employed doctors that we can guarantee we'll only need some of them at any given time, so the rest can actually stay home and sleep.)
Thing is, I just can't think of a single scenario where the rights of the many to enjoy uninterrupted entertainment in every theater outweigh the rights of everyone else to be in constant communication with whomever they chose to, for whatever reason they chose to. Regardless if they are a surgeon, parent, or just a loud douchebag in a movie theater.
So until these faraday cage theaters start popping up, if you want the movie theater without the rest of civilization, you'll just have to take a generator and projector to a National Park or start it yourself.
Seriously, get some perspective here.
As for perspective, you are right that life-and-death on-call people should be using pagers rather than phones, but you completely miss the point that you can get pagers that work on a higher frequency than the phone system. Your precious trauma surgeon can still have a pager that works in a theatre while disallowing phone use, since Faraday cages can be tuned to work on different frequencies. Pagers should be used because a pager service comes with a guaranteed SLA, and SMS services do not.
And frankly, I don't give a fuck about your ignorance, just don't use it to angrily insult me when I've done nothing to you.
On a different note, me and my friend and his wife went to see Roger Waters perform The Wall a couple years back. The tickets said "No photography", but the band was very careful to say "When you take photos, please make sure the flash on your cameras is off. There are effects during our production that camera flashes will disrupt." I'm paraphrasing, but they were projecting video on the bricks that were assembled onstage as part of the performance. Sure enough, not minutes into the first set, flash flash flash flash flash.
My friends were taking photos. I made sure not to look over at them.
It would seem letting people have a signal doesn't have to be a problem.
I think your definition of "disruption" may not be entirely reasonable. It's one thing if someone is sitting there having a chat during the movie, but if a person quietly getting up and excusing themselves (in response to an unheard vibration in their pocket) is unacceptable, then we're going have to ban anyone who sits down to a three-and-a-half-hour film with a Jumbo Big Gulp from the concession counter.
Broadcasting to jam is illegal. It is not illegal to build a room in which cellphones do not work, nor should it be.
My apartment has worse reception than that (I can make calls from my sunroom, nowhere else).
Also, these access points pair with your device and don't provide bandwidth to other random devices, so at least you're not providing free backhaul for random passersby.
Every payphone I've ever seen in my lifetime has been removed.
Well, except for the people who actually, literally died because the doctor who could have saved them couldn't be reached in time.
Doctors on call had pagers before anyone else had even heard of them, much less cellphones. Are you actually taking the position that barring surgeons and other emergency personnel from, not just entering, but coming anywhere near a movie theater is a reasonable solution to the problem of the occasional jerk disrupting your entertainment?
We also miraculously managed to live without plumbing and electricity. That doesn't mean that life isn't a lot better with it.
I have family who work in health care. They spend a lot of their time at home, on call. Back in the landline days, they were tied to their phone. They literally couldn't take the dog for a walk around the block, lest they'd miss a call. Today, thanks to mobile phones, they can run errands and even go to the movies.
The problem isn't cellphones, the problem is that some people are assholes and movie theaters are too meek to enforce a no-asshole policy. If people were routinely ejected from theatres for being disruptive people would behave better.
More than a few years ago, I was a manager at a hotel. As such there were several days each month when I had the emergency pager (yep, pager). The only time I ever got a 911 on the darn thing was while I was in the middle of a movie. I've never booked out of a movie theater so fast! I called back to the hotel to find out a fire alarm in a crawl space had triggered.
In the end it was just a loose wire in the actual alarm system, but obviously we didn't know it at the time. And thankfully, the movie staff had seen me in my haste, so when I returned several hours later, they were kind enough to let me watch the next showing of the movie for free.
What I think he's saying is that he's got sympathy for what drove the guy to go to these idiotic lengths - the fact that a large number of drivers give pretty much no thought to safety by using their phones when they drive.
On my daily 5 minute walk from the bus to work, I will typically see upwards of a dozen drivers staring at their phones, presumably either reading or writing a message, whilst they are moving - ranging from people inching along in slow moving traffic in places that pedestrians could easily (and legally) be crossing, to ones doing 30mph+ in free flowing traffic or even pulling away from the lights based presumably on nothing more than seeing out of the corner of their eye that the car in front has started moving. I've fairly regularly seen cars meandering quite a long way through red lights simply because the driver was clearly paying no attention to what was happening on the road in front of them.
Like you say, it's a terrible idea for a lot of reasons, but I always admire a good hack.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_and_driving_safet...
Edit: https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/MeasuringC... Don't talk to passengers folks! (like that's going to happen)
Fiddling with a phone is probably the most dangerous of phone related activities while driving, though. Looking and reading off the screen (texts), pushing capacitive spots on the screen to interact with it (changing songs), and so on.
Police most likely want eyes on the road, as even passive attention to the road is better than eyes completely off it.
[edit: replaced "be singing" with "stop singing" since that's what I meant to say]
It also mentioned that young children can cause dangerous distractions because they lack the knowledge to know when the driving has gotten tough.
As for the phone, they're also the hands that will affect my phone if we need to change settings on GPS or music or whatever, because they understand the safety precautions.
So, what you say makes sense at least anecdotally and mentally.
[1] http://responsibility.org/sites/default/files/files/AIDF%20R...