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US To Ban Laptops in All Cabins of Flights From Europe (thedailybeast.com)
An anonymous reader shares an article: The Department of Homeland Security will ban laptops in the cabins of all flights from Europe to the United States, European security officials told The Daily Beast. An official announcement is expected Thursday. Initially a ban on laptops and tablets was applied only to U.S.-bound flights from 10 airports in North Africa and the Middle East. The ban was based on U.S. fears that terrorists have found a way to convert laptops into bombs capable of bringing down an airplane. It is unclear if the European ban will also apply to tablets. DHS said in a statement to The Daily Beast: "No final decisions have been made on expanding the restriction on large electronic devices in aircraft cabins; however, it is under consideration. DHS continues to evaluate the threat environment and will make changes when necessary to keep air travelers safe."
The big catch here is that you aren't allowed to check li-ion batteries. So you can't bring a laptop from Europe to the USA at all.
You have nothing to offer an intelligent conversation, please lurk more.
You have obviously not paid attention to the Muslim ban controversies. Trump's policies are stuck in court because they weren't made on actionable intelligence as Obama's band was in 2011, but racist remarks that Trump made on the campaign trail. My question is relevant: does Trump have actionable intelligence or is he using Europe to whitewash his racist ban?
It doesn't need to be full, it just needs enough explosives that if pressed against the hull and detonated that it would rip a hole in the fuselage. The information I saw said that they had figured out how to cut a chunk of the battery out and fill it full of some explosive that's been shaped into a shaped charge, set one of the keys or switchs to detonate it.
The laptop would turn on a function like normal and would explode with enough force to breach the fuselage if pressed against the wall before being detonated. This arrangement was viewed to be virtually undetectable without disassembling the laptop. Experts that had reviewed the plans they recovered believed this was not only possible but that the groups in question were actively building these bombs. The crucial weakness is that the bomb wouldn't be strong enough to breach the fuselage if it wasn't pressed against the wall, so all you need to do is ban laptops from the passenger compartment to make the bomb worthless.
Transatlantic cruises have *incredibly* bad internet connectivity. As in, 19.2kbps when it works... and mostly, it doesn't.
Caribbean cruises have fast internet because the Bahamas only has a few TV stations, but the same ~900MHz of UHF spectrum as the US, and cruise ships can have good antennas & high-power radios (unlike cell phones) to communicate with a LTE or WiMax site 40-80 miles away (few caribbean cruise routes are ever more than 100 miles from an island). There's also a huge market for Caribbean-cruise internet service, so the infrastructure got built. In contrast, the North Atlantic has a lot less cruise-ship traffic to pay for it, and sticking LTE towers in a glacier field in Greenland is several orders of magnitude harder than doing it on a caribbean island.
There's satellite too, but for Caribbean cruises, the *really* fast connectivity is terrestrial.
Here's another reason: every plane will now have cargo holds full of potentially damaged lithium batteries that have been thrown around by baggage handlers. Don't count on the fire suppressant system to save you, it's completely ineffective against lithium battery thermal runaways.