regulating commerce
A bill in congress to, and I am not making this up, require a cellphone equipped with a camera to sound a tone whenever a photograph is taken with the camera’s phone. It would also prohibit such a phone from being equipped with a means of disabling or silencing the tone.
January 27th, 2009 at 9:45 am
Why not just make taking unauthorized upskirt shots illegal?
Oh… wait…
January 27th, 2009 at 11:26 am
Guess they’re following the lead of Japan in that area. They have a law mandating that exactly for the reason Robb describes.
Morality police yet again. But in Japan they have a very different notion of personal space versus those of us here in North America. Any person getting that close to a woman here will be noticed if they are paying attention. We don’t rub shoulder-to-shoulder here most of the time like they do in Japan.
Sigh. We have laws that cover this. We don’t need more nanny state invasion into engineering and technology to control potential bad uses further.
January 27th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
I could *almost* understand if it wasn’t such a simple thing to get around. Each speaker has leads. Simply cut ’em / solder them off and viola! Silence.
Impossible to tell from simply looking at a phone. It’s damned near impossible to police, but it just adds one more thing in the near infinite arsenal of the government to tag you as a ‘dangerous criminal’.
I can see it now. Entire wings of prisons, overcrowded with unrepentant phone silencers.
“What are you in for?”
“I turned down the volume on my phone.”
“Oh shit, dude! You’re HARD CORE!!!!”
January 27th, 2009 at 3:57 pm
So, what about this? That’s not a cell phone…
January 27th, 2009 at 4:04 pm
It’s not going to happen to my cell phone–I have access to the source code.
Of course in your cell phone I’ll put in image recognition software and use the sound of a really loud “wolf whistle” when appropriate. And it will email the picture to everyone on your contacts list with a Bcc: to me along with the GPS coordinates of where the picture was taken.
January 27th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
If they want to regulate cell phones, why don’t they require that every cell phone sold use the same kind of power connector? Now that would be useful. I believe China did this.
Oh hell, never mind. Just leave it to the market.
January 27th, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Huzzah! That would make my non-snitching camera-equipped cell phone more valuable.
January 27th, 2009 at 8:29 pm
Fools… it has nothing to do with your silly ‘upskirt shots’, what do they care about you peons? The REAL purpose of this is to prevent those pesky citizen exposes of police abuses, government corruption, and the like. If they can HEAR your camera operating, they can slam you to the ground and break it right there (and of course charge you with silent camera possession), before the evidence is leaked.
January 27th, 2009 at 8:55 pm
B.Smith has related my first thought on the subject,also