Saying that something is "good, but not for the masses," is elitism; even if you take the rather odd tack that you consider yourself in the group of the masses when you make that pronouncement.

Well, although I don't believe in the whole "24/7 connectivity is required" mindset (somehow society survived for thousands of years before it became an option), if you insist on being connected at all times, a theatre that implements this wouldn't be an option for you. Your options would be to patronize a different theatre, or choose a different form of entertainment.

Yeah, I suppose that this is a common problem of a typical Slashdotter such as Picass0.

Now I may not be an engineer but even I know that having a reasonable DC component on the filtering capacitor helps avoiding low voltage when the current input is intermittent. And as long as the average current output is equalized by the current input, what's the problem, exactly? The only difference is that you don't hit insufficient voltage.

That would be theyWatch, wouldn't it?

Uhm, why?

That makes no sense. Patent encumbrance can't possibly matter for releasability (is that a word?) of specs; patents are public by definition. And copyright is yours if you write the spec yourself.

You without mod points is the best version of you? Don't worry, having mod points is a metastable state anyway.

Stop going to the movies. I'm being serious. You have to put up with the manners of strangers, cell phones, 6 dollar popcorn, no pause button for bathroom breaks, curiously uncomfortable seating, and the godawful commercials they force you to sit through before the movie.

Seriously. Screw that. Get a DVD/Blueray player and a big screen TV. Wait for the disc and invite some friends over. And you can have a beer while the movie is on. That's a million times better than the current "sit in a gigantic uncomfortable closet with random bits of humanity" movie model.

Of course there are exceptions. If you can find an actual real theater go to that by all means. Things to look for? Red velvet curtains beside the screen, a balcony, decor from the 50s, one screen only, and an usher. If you can find a movie joint like that, go there. But as for these 20 screen megaplexes? Avoid those like the plague. You shouldn't be surprised that they treat you like crap there. Because they are treating the movie experience in general like crap, so you shouldn't expect anything different for yourself.

The FCC gets no say in what building materials you use. They can (and do) prohibit jammers, but they don't have anything to say about building a faraday cage.

I've always liked the notion of enclosing the theatres in a faraday cage. In any new construction, it should be relatively cheap to include a mesh around the theatre itself -- and then you don't have to worry about people's manners. At least not as far as cell phones are concerned.

Well, that's about as elitist as you can get.

Really?

Sounds like a threat to me. I'm just waiting for an incident when someone passing by gets severely hurt and tries to find medical help at his house only to get shot from a distance.

That's quite neat, but if you want something simpler, wouldn't it be possible to use a single, vertically oriented digital camera with a hyperboloid mirror in front of it, and process the stuff in a computer? The optical system would be axially symmetrical, so the angle in the picture would correspond to the azimuth, and the distance from the center would be a useful function of the elevation (I believe that with the hyperboloid, it should be linear.) You wouldn't get any sort of insanely high resolution in the azimuth but it should still be usable (and much more lightweight, simpler and cheaper).