On a related note, anyone know why cinemas don't have some form of shielding/Faraday caging to prevent people from making calls? You could shield just the movie halls themselves, so people can still make emergency calls from the lobbies.
The article seems to paint the theatre in bad light, as if they are responsible for the shooting, or at least for not preventing it - do we really want to live in reality where you have to go through metal detector to see a movie?
While I feel very sorry for the survivors, I feel like they are a bunch of exploitative arseholes for trying to sue the theater for any damages - it's beyond ridiculous.
Instead of relying on users downloading the app, and annoying their seatmates, here's another idea. Since you're relying on the cinemas' cooperation anyway, why not sell them a button to be installed under each armrest?
The way to prevent abuse would be for an attendant to quietly come in and witness the disturbance, then act upon it or simply kick out the abuser at the next false-alarm buzz.
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.
I agree, if you notice this problem and decide to solve it. I have seen queues in London theaters that had higher density in front of the theater than inside it, which kind of doesn't make sense if you want to discourage people form bombing large amounts of people.
It's been a problem since smartphones became widespread and people got addicted to them. And quite frankly the theater workers don't get paid enough to enforce the rules.
Just one of many reasons going to movies isn't really worth it anymore, unless you're really in the mindset you want to go and having lights shining / jostling around in your peripheral vision won't annoy you.
if instead of jamming they chose to build the theatre out of lead and posted a sign that said "cell phones don't work in here" then the result would be that people on call should not attend movies.
And what's your point? Did you misread something as I do not believe there is a problem? There's only a problem when you go to a theater that doesn't care about customer behavior. If you attend a theater that does, and removes people that misbehave, you do not have this experience.
chicken egg also ... theaters will be big problem , if you are watching a movie its an issue and if you mark them safe its an issue ... Too much intelligence required to solve it and its a privacy night mare !
Are movie theaters anti-human because they push the work of avoiding freeloaders (their problem) onto all human users of the theater by making them carry and show tickets?
That's not really an alcohol issue, it's an anti-social behaviour issue. And movie theatres (and their customers) have had to deal with that for a long time.
If they can find the money and staff to implement securing third party cinemas to prevent copyright infringement by members of the public, perhaps they should spend a few dollars to secure their own premises.
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.
I stopped going to the cinema some years ago when they started putting threats on screen before the movie. I realized "hey, I'm literally paying people to threaten me; is that a logical, wise or sane thing to do? No. So stop doing it."
So it seems those threats are by no means idle. Think about it if you're considering going to the cinema: it's not like our society doesn't provide a zillion other forms of entertainment where you won't be financing thugs.
I wonder what is preventing them from doing that, other than fear that it’s patrons would rather stay at home. I wouldn’t be so fast to assume that, though. Many people, including myself, love viewing films in theatres.
Seems to me that theatres (and cinemas) should be putting passive farady cages to block signals coming in, I'd pay extra for that.
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