Forcing Cell Phones to be Quiet
from the public-goods dept
There have been similar attempts before, but now a company is using Bluetooth to try to lower the volume on cell phones when they're in public places. It's not a bad idea. I like how they let doctors override the feature, though. I still don't understand why people don't just use a silent or vibrate mode on their phones most of the time.
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qsort (cart, horse)
"We had been wanting to do something with Bluetooth and at that moment it was, 'A ha! That's it,'" she said.
In other words: "We had this solution and we were in search of a problem...."
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Silent mode
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Silent mode
Strangely enough, even when I'm not wearing the pager, I can hear it. Several months ago, I had a part in a play, and I was onstage in a dress rehearsal. My pager was still hooked to my pants, which were in a bag in the very back of the auditorium, behind a stack of chairs. On three separate occasions (three separate dress rehearsals) I was backstage talking to friends and suddenly, without even consciously hearing a "beep", I had an overpowering feeling that my pager had just gone off. I went and checked, and sure enough, it had. This happened three different times. It's downright freaky, if you ask me.
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hardly a solution
How about a cell phone that can ring just loud enough to be heard over the ambient noise level? There's already a microphone available to sense this -- no fancy new technology required.
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