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MacBook Air Confuses Airport Security
Ant writes "MacNN reports that the thin design of Apple's MacBook Air is causing some confusion for the technically ignorant, according to one blogger who says that the ultra-portable caused him to miss his flight. When going through the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) airport security checkpoint, blogger Michael Nygard was held up as security staff gathered around his MacBook Air, trying to make sense of the slender laptop/notebook. One of the less technically knowledgeable staff points out the lack of standard features as cause for alarm..."
Its a real bummer that these TSA guys end up being no better than night club bouncers, but heck I suppose technology is not their forte, which is kind of ironic given they need to understand recognise what's going through the machine.
Anyhow, my question is if you miss a flight because of these TSA guys, does your airline put you on the next available flight at no extra cost?
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
I too have been through countless security check points with enough electronics in my bags to make my back hurt. I have never had a problem with the people at security. However, I travel with a wife and colleagues who are not always so lucky. The difference? I am a white guy and they are not. Sad but true. Next time you are in line watch who is being searched or detained.
A former boss of mine owned a Mooney prop plane (a bit faster than the Cessna, I think about 170 knots) and I found the routine at private airports refreshingly easy - go to the plane, walk around it to make sure nothing's fallen off, run up the engine and take off. The checklist isn't that hard, and much of it can be done during the brief wait for a take off slot.
I loved the freedom associated with being able to take off and land at any time, at any airport. In this particular case, he could leave out of Van Nuys airport, about 15 minutes from his home, instead of LAX which would have taken a grinding hour and a half to get to.
I will admit that flying a private plane is disappointingly non-luxurious - his interior felt more like a Subaru than a Mercedes - but even though I was not very good at physically flying the plane I enjoyed changing the frequencies on the radios and navigation systems. (This was before GPS took off in a big way - we used the old beacon system.)
I would have surely preferred a jet but I liked flying private better than commercial. As I remember it cost him about $55 per flight hour to run, including overhauls, and he certainly believed it penciled out for him economically. He had to carry fairly heavy amounts of baggage for the trade shows we went to and that definitely helped.
D
Devil's advocate: What attributes? Being brown?
This is what vigilantism looks like.
II. Rationality They won't do it again because taking a plane out of the sky really will make airport security like a military check point, thus also limiting the mobility of the enemy for the reward of taking 1 or 2 planes out of the sky with no hard land target in mind. Not going to happen.I'm not so sure. Your argument rests on the assumption that the terrorists make well-reasoned decisions to further their cause. They do have objectives -- "get out of the Middle East, U.S!" -- but in my opinion they are horribly misguided in their decisions: If they wanted to reduce the U.S. military presence there, they sure as hell haven't succeeded.
Some people say, "the terrorists have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams." I don't think so. Rather, the current situation is a dismal failure for all involved, terrorists included. It's a failure for the U.S., which is now engaged in a bloody, costly (we have spent more than we did in Vietnam), no-way-out quagmire of a war. It's a failure for the extremists who downed those planes, who rather than convincing the U.S. to pull out of the Middle East has provoked it to deploy even more troops there. It is a failure for "Iraqi" civilians (even if no "Iraqi" ethnic identity really exists), who might have been oppressed under Saddam but who at least had electricity and drinking water. It is a failure for nearly everyone. The only reason this mess continues is that we, the extremists, and everyone else, are stuck together in yet-another (the world has so many) collective action problem.
[The list of those who have benefited from this situation is short -- mainly politicians (in the US and in the Middle East) and government contractors (Haliburton/KBR, etc) happy to multiply the terror and exploit the situation (see the BBC's The Power of Nightmares -- video here). But these people didn't engineer the attacks; they're just opportunists.]
I got a little sidetracked, but the point is this: The terrorists did not plan a well-reasoned attack to achieve their objectives; by most rational metrics I can think of, they have failed. Therefore, I wouldn't put it past them to do something stupid again -- like stage an attack which will ultimately make their task more difficult. That's the part of your post I was disagreeing with -- that these terrorists make smart decisions. I suspect they don't -- not because they're populated by stupid people (terrorists tend to be well-educated. I'm most familiar not with Middle-Eastern terrorists, but with the Japanese terror cult Aum Shinrikyo that released Sarin nerve gas on the Tokyo subway -- and that organization was full of Ph.D.s and physics students) but because their logical, analytical minds have been short-circuited by a seductive ideology.
In other words, we've got one group of people whose brains have been short-circuited by ideology and anger against another whose frontal lobes have been shut off by a hyperactive fear-and-stress center. I'm not counting on rationality from anyone.