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Comment by stevekinney | Hacker News Reader

I think the point was that if a theatre installed jammers, then patrons could not receive calls. Yea, I get that no one wants to overhear someone having a long chat with their significant other right as the plot line thickens, but a doctor on call or a parent who's kid is just got hurt at the baby sitter might appreciate being able to receive a call or text while their phone is on silent. They can then step out of the theatre in order to take the call or call back.

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.

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A doctor on-call can go without going to the movies. I say this having been on-call (not as a doctor) myself. When you're on-call, your life is seriously curtailed. You can't drink, you have to be within range of tools to do your work, you have to be immediately accessible. Being on-call sucks, but it's no reason to argue against passive signal blocking in theatres.

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 :)

It's true that the world doesn't end if Dr. Jones isn't allowed to go the movies, or if Mr. and Mrs. Smith get to watch the end credits before finding out that their baby's in an ambulance. But the world also doesn't end if you have to suffer through a rude teenager on the phone for a minute and a half. You talk like your leisure experience is an absolute moral imperative, but everyone else's is just frivolous goofing off and easily sacrificed. Why is that?

The goal of a movie theatre is leisure experience. If you know a movie is 90+ minutes, and there's a significant likelihood of you or your devices causing a disruption to the other 100 people in the audience in 90+ minutes...

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.

I've been to the cinema several hundred times over the last decade. There was a period we used to go 1-2 every week. In that time, I've never once been distracted by anyones phone going off. Maybe half a dozen times I've been momentarily annoyed by someone checking their phone with an overly bright screen. That's it.

It would seem letting people have a signal doesn't have to be a problem.

> The goal of a movie theatre is leisure experience. If you know a movie is 90+ minutes, and there's a significant likelihood of you or your devices causing a disruption to the other 100 people in the audience in 90+ minutes...

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.

If that was the reaction to an incoming cellphone call, every time by every person, I don't think anybody would have a problem with cellphones in public spaces.

Yea, I could probably list a few hundred examples and you could probably shoot each and every one of them down on an individual level. Great. The larger point is that in the aggregate, there are enough individual situations that would be disrupted by jammers in the theatre that it would outweigh the nexus between the number of times someone is going to be inconvenienced by a conversation during a movie and the number of times someone is actually rude enough to pick up the phone during a movie. At the end of the day, it's a cost-benefit analysis.

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.

The 'we got along fine without instant connectivity' argument is a counter to the overwrought life-and-death-situation arguments in general. It's not about being a luddite, it's about keeping perspective.

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.

> It's not about being a luddite, it's about keeping perspective.

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.

Maybe you care a lot about your life, and thereby about the quality-of-life of trauma surgeons. Do you think the movie theatre does?

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.)

There's absolutely nothing wrong with that. I can't wait until movie theaters pop up that advertise walls covered with metallic paint to block cellular RF. As someone who dislikes push notifications and refuses to work in any profession with the concept of being "on call," I will go to those almost all the time. And when my surgeon isn't on call, he'll be even more relaxed!

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.

Rights? What rights? You're talking about conveniences here, supplied by a private entity, not rights. You don't have a right to watch a movie with guaranteed phone access any more than you have a right to watch a movie not being illuminated by the bright screen of the phone from some idiot in front of you. You don't even have a right to watch a movie in the first place.

Seriously, get some perspective here.

Since we're doing ridiculous hypotheticals here, I'd rather the entire movie theatre having a relaxing, fun time with no interruptions or rude phone users, meaning that they leave the movie happy rather than irritated, less likely to have an accident on the way home and hence need a trauma surgeon in the first place. Ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure and all that.

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.

Thanks, receiving calls is really the big one for me. I know a lot of people working in fields requiring them to be on call 24x7 unless they're on leave. A 2 hour delay in calling back is just barely tolerable for most of them, and unacceptable for some. It'd suck to have to stop enjoying something outside a couple vacations a year because some people are inconsiderate and other people can't tune them out.

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.

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?

Theater shootings and mass shootings, not really. But shootings do happen, sometimes over the dumbest crap, and by people you wouldn't expect ([EDIT: retired] police officer in FL in a theater, a veteran shot a woman at a gas station here in GA [1]). Shootings aren't nearly common enough, though, to justify a ban on jammers. But emergency situations do come up, especially in a country of 300 million people and some 40k theaters [2], each with several screens. It just strikes me as irresponsible and unnecessary to insist on such a hardline ban for the sake of shutting out a few rude jerks.

[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

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