I do it this way with two cheap Linksys access points. Same SSID, same pass-phrase, different channels. MAC filtering enabled.
Having to occasionally update the MAC filter list twice isn't much of a labor. Thou depending on how many access points you have and how often you have to make changes would depend on how boring that might get.
Why use MAC filtering?
It does nothing to stop someone that's interested in joining your network - if they can hack your WPA key (or steal it from someone's desk), the MAC is not an impediment at all -- it's broadcast in plain text.
All MAC filtering does is keep honest users off your network, but if they are that honest, they probably aren't going to get on your network in the first place.
If you're looking for security, setup a RADIUS server and use 802.1x authentication instead of PSK.
Is there another way to do it? I've always set office (and my home) Wifi networks up like this -- as long as the AP's are all on the same subnet, roaming among them should be fairly transparent.
Try to use non-overlapping channels as much as possible. (i.e. channel 1 at the east end of the office, channel 6 in the middle and channel 11 at the west end). If you can't use non-overlapping channels, some tuning of power levels to prevent interference between nodes can help -- i.e. if you have a long office with 4 nodes on 3 channels: [1, 6, 11, 1] you may see better performance if you turn down the transmit levels on the two channel 1 nodes so they don't interfere with each other as much. And dual-band 802.11n can help even more both because there's more channels on 5Ghz, and because the 5Ghz signals will be attenuated more.
In my current office, I have about 120 Wifi nodes (through a Cisco WLAN controller), all are broadcasting the same SSID.
Like that's gonna work with all of the greedy content providers* licensing agreements. Just the other day I was at a woman's house and we were deciding what to watch on her Roku box. Hey, let's watch this on Netflix! Oh, we can't, that's DVD-only. Let's watch it on Amazon! Oh, premium membership (or whatever the fuck the problem was) only. It seemed that wanting to watch every movie that was a cult classic or otherwise worth watching held us hostage from some kind of restriction,
What kind of restriction are you talking about? You said the movie was available on Amazon streaming (but you'd have to pay for it), and Amazon streaming runs fine on Linux.
Is it paying for the content that you object to?
which is inexcusable beacuse outfits like Netflix have had quite awhile to get their shit together and still have no native Linux client.
Why would they? It would gain them a tiny number of users but incur large support costs - MS has 3 mainstream operating systems to support: XP, 7 and now 8. Linux has dozens of distributions they'd have to support... and that's after they've spent the money to train their support staff on Linux. If they wanted to provide a Linux client, they'd just do it - they already have one since the Roku runs Linux.
If a department wanted to violate the no printers rule they could do it with petty cash, I don't think the cost of a printer is even remotely a barrier here.
You could block their ability to add a new printer to their system, which would prevent them from printing unless they used a printer that prints from USB drive (which you could also block). You can also prevent them from plugging a printer into the network and/or using a Wifi enabled printer with appropriate network tools.
You mock those who rely on the "old" paper system and then suggest relying on an long-unsupported proprietary computer architecture from the late 1980's.
I think you're missing the point.
And you're (most likely) using a computer whose CPU's instruction set was based upon a 1970's era computer terminal. Sure, the instruction set and architecture have been extended and modified significantly since then, just as the AS/400 you buy today is much different than the one you bought in 1980.
This actually reminds me of a decade old piece of military equipment- think of a ruggedized, 2" thick tablet with a 3" screen. The 'neat' thing with the stylus for this device is that it doesn't actually have to touch the screen to work. Note: It's completely insensitive to fingers and such, you have to use the stylus, but that might be some sort of sensitivity setting.
Plenty of prior art, I think.
It reminds me of a centuries old piece of equipment called a "Pencil". They were heavily used while I was in school before being replaced by newer, sleeker technology. It was pressure sensitive, and though it would work on a multidue of surfaces, it worked best only on a specially formulated screen that we called "paper". Different styluses could be used for different effects (colors, darkness/thickness of lines, etc), but most people used the plain old #2. By inverting the stylus, it had some limited "undo" capability, but there were some ghosting artifacts left behind and excessive undo use could lead to screen damage.
Facebook does have a way of making pictures of you public without your permission by letting others tag you in photos, but I think there's a setting to prevent that.
There should, of course, be nine circles. One for your sex life, one about money, one where you put all your rants, one for all things heretical, etc. Hmm, which one is it where everyone has to be doused in faeces? Oh, and of course Mark Zuckerberg himself will be in the centre of the ninth.
That circle is the intersection of your "girl" circle and "cup" circle.
Or maybe you are too short sighted to see that this could potentially help everyone on the planet instead of a microcosm of it. It could lead to a cure for limited resources, which, if I'm not mistaken, is part of the cause of the poverty in Africa.
Well no, not yet- humanity could feed everyone on the planet today if they could find a way past artificial political barriers that are preventing it. And if there were no political and/or religious barriers against promoting education and contraception, we could continue to house everyone on this planet indefinitely.
It would be nice for humans to be able to escape the planet some day to ensure survival even if there's a catastrophic event on this planet, but saying that we need to leave the planet because of limited resources ignores the obvious (and arguably cheaper and easier, though less "sexy" solution) - use policy and technology to reduce the resource drain on this planet.
This will be necessary even if we do colonize other planets since I don't see space travel ever being practical enough to move a few billion people off the planet to make more room for the rest of us.
Once you leave the atmosphere of this blue planet, *everything* will kill you. No amount of engineering, terraforming, or any other science fiction magic will ever make any other body within human reach survivable for long, and certainly not without HEAVY and CONSTANT support from earth.
...
No other body is survivable in our solar system. And with the next-closest solar system at over 100,000 years journey away in the fastest craft we can build, don't think of escaping to another solar system either.
Isn't it more a matter of developing a reliable and high yield source of energy? Like a fusion reactor that could be powered from water? Then you could hollow out a reasonable sized asteroid to put the humans in the center where they are shielded by many meters of rock, then strap a big enough ion engine on it to provide 1G of thrust - if they can do that, then even 100,000 light year distances are possible within the lifetime of humans living within the ship. (though I'm not sure how much reaction mass you'd use up to accelerate a 10,000 ton asteroid to 1G for several decades and how much hydrogen you'd burn through in the Mr Fusion reactor).
Of course, it's only feasible from the point of view of those on the ship - while they may only age a few dozen years during the trip, due to relativistic time dilation, earth will have aged over 100,000 years.
wouldn't it be wise for practical* reasons for people to offer more power to folding@home instead of einstein@home?
* = has more chances to help humanity ( for curing diseases etc. )
Or, to put it another way - why waste resources studying astronomy when there are so many sick people in the world so it would be better for humanity to put our resources into curing disease?
That doesn't help with publically accessible material that gets indexed by Google. Secondly, Facebook does have that sort of functionality and it had it before Google. The only thing google did was simplify things to give potential users the impression they care about your privacy, which, imo, is a bit of a joke.
Well, yeah, if you make your data available to the public (if Google's search engine indexes it, it's available to the world), then your data is available to the public. No technology is going to help you with that - if you don't want it public, don't make it public. Facebook does have a way of making pictures of you public without your permission by letting others tag you in photos, but I think there's a setting to prevent that. Not sure if Google has the same functionality.
I thought the problem the GP was trying to solve was that there's no way to make data available to friends without also making it available to others they are connected to in Facebook.
Facebook is one example of a site that has a crappy policy that only allows you to have one profile. It makes sense to have two social media profiles, one for your personal life which you share with friends, post your party pictures and aren't afraid to write whatever you want, and one for your professional life, where you add coworkers and talk about work.
Maybe Facebook could let you organize your social media contacts into different "circles" and let you share content based on which "circle" a person in. They could keep the membership of those "circles" private so no one knows which circle they are in or who else in in that circle.
Someone should start a social media site like that! It's sure to be a Facebook killer.
Electric razors are allowed because they were tested-- the list of allowed items is pretty funny, but they are just things that have been tested. If a company thinks it can sell more of its products, they are free to pay to conduct the testing to get on the approved list. That private companies don't believe it is worth the expense is not the fault of the FAA. The FAA (our tax dollars) do not pay for this testing-- this is as it should be.
I didn't know electric razors were specifically tested and permitted (but surely not during takeoff/landing?). But if electric razors do need to be tested for interference, unless every single brand and model is tested, how do they know that any particular razor is not going to cause a problem? Modern razors with PWM controlled motors and an energy efficient switching power supply will have a much different interference profile than an old style electric razor that may have just an AC driven solenoid.
The consequences of having something go boom on the ground are very different from the consequences of same happening in the air.
To the janitor that's hauling out the big bin full of explosives, the consequences of having something go boom are pretty much the same to him whether he's in the air or on the ground. Entire airports have been evacuated because of an unclaimed backpack, but the TSA has a big barrel of what they suspect to be explosives, they keep it right at the security checkpoint within 10 meters of hundreds of people, and they just dump it all in the trash when the bin is full.
How is it not time taken away? It's time I *could* be using my iPad, but I'm not allowed to because of some regulation that may have no reason to exist.
Its not time taken away because you never had that time to play with your electronic devices.
Well, let me put it another way - let's say that many years ago, airplanes carried parachutes and there was a mandatory 30 minute parachute lesson before each flight - you're required to pay attention to the test and can't read a book or play with your iPad.
Nowadays, planes no longer carry parachutes, but since the regulations haven't been updated you still have to sit through the mandatory parachute training.
Wouldn't you say that is time taken away from you, even though it's always been that way and travelers have come to expect that they have to spend 30 minutes of their flight doing something just to fulfill some useless regulation?
Just because you know in advance that you're not going to be able to read your emails during takeoff doesn't mean that it's not time taken away from you.
that's $730M of productivity (or leisure time) taken away.
That is not time that was taken away, that is time you never had to play/work with you gadgets. I agree if there is no viable reason it should be allowed but this is not something we were able to do and then it was taken away. This is $730M of productivity or leisure time you did not have.
How is it not time taken away? It's time I *could* be using my iPad, but I'm not allowed to because of some regulation that may have no reason to exist. Just because we haven't been able to do so in the past doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to do so in the future. We used to get hot meals (with real metal silverware) included in the price of a plane ticket, now we're lucky to be offered a $9.99 "snack pack", so apparently the amenities of air travel do change with the times.
If just 1 % of those 36M hours of time were being used for anything other than twitter, facebook, music/movie streaming, slashdot? or angrybirds/wordswithfriends, I would be shocked. Productivity can wait for 15 minutes. And just how exactly would a passenger's _leisure_time_ be valued at $20 an hour? You lumped productivity/leisure time together for a cost analysis? If you choose to fly, there is an opportunity cost. If you don't like not being able to use your devices for brief periods - drive, take a bus or take a train.
FWIW, I think they will eventually change the regulations, and it does inconvenience me often - but it really IS an overblown issue - regardless of whatever made up cost you associate with it.
How people choose to spend their leisure time shouldn't really be your concern (or the FAA's). If people feel more relaxed and satisfied playing Angry Birds than staring at the seatback in front of them, what's the problem with that?
I know, $20 is pretty low for leisure time -- I value my leisure time at twice my regular salary.
the first plane crash after devices are allowed and people will change their tune real fast.
Yeah, I'd change my tune to "Why in the h*ll didn't the FAA require enough Avionics shielding to prevent a 300mW transmitter from taking down a plane?" It wouldn't be hard to turn a laptop into a 30 watt transmitter, equivalent to 100 phones - the electronics would fit within the hard drive and optical drive bays (with an mSATA drive to make sure the computer is bootable), a typical 85 watt-hour laptop battery could easily power the transmitter for an hour or longer.
I agree and I think that it probably causes no issues. What is funny is that people are getting that pissy over not being able to use something for 15 minutes at the start and 15 minutes at the end of a flight... really this is an overblown non-issue.
There are 730M air passengers in the USA each year.
If just 10% or 73M of them want to use their mobile device during takeoff/landing, that's 36M hours of time taken away without any apparent reason. If the average air passenger's time is valued at $20/hour, that's $730M of productivity (or leisure time) taken away.
The agency has no proof that electronic devices can harm a plane's avionics
That is not how it work is aviation. The rule is you have to prove it is not harmful. Don't like it ? change the rules, but then those rules apply to everyone and everything involved in aviation, not only consumer electronic devices.
If the FAA really thinks iPads, cellphones, and other devices are harmful or could be harmful, then they should treat them as such and require that the devices be stored in an RF shielded container, or that batteries be removed and held by the flight crew until it's safe to turn them back on.
The power button on my cell phone is easily pressed by accident when I stuff it in my carryon bag, so more times than not, it's turned itself on at some point after I put it in the bag. I'm sure there are dozens of cell phones on every flight tucked away in checked and carryon bags that are powered on. Ironically, if I was allowed to hold the phone in my hands during takeoff, it would not accidentally turn on. (yes, I know my 4 ounce phone could become a hazardous projectile in an emergency, but so could the 24 ounce hardback book my seatmate is reading)
If the FAA really thinks the devices may be harmful, they should treat them as harmful devices, instead of just looking the other way and ignoring them even though they know that the devices *are* in use during all phases of flight.
It's kind of like how the TSA makes people discard drinks and other liquids before going through security since they could be explosives or hazardous explosive components, yet the trash is not treated as the hazardous waste they suspect it is. If they really think that the liquids may be hazardous, then they should treat them as hazardous waste - why would they let the janitor haul out a bin full of suspected explosives?
riding 60s technology hastily designed, developed and built in under a decade that has, in the 40+ years since, yet to be duplicated for a return... despite all of our advances in engineering, astrophysics, technology, manufacturing, and other fields. we *should* be able to get there for a mere fraction of apollo's cost (was approx $190b in current dollars)
We've developed much less tolerance for risk since then, which drives up costs and complexity - NASA wouldn't certify an Apollo era spacecraft for human spaceflight today.
Trying to shoehorn the 'tux onto the ARM Surface is stupid. No shit Microsoft has locked the thing up, they're subsidizing the damned hardware by assuming that you'll run Windows on it and buy applications through the Windows App Store.
Are you sure they are subsidizing it? Apple supposedly makes obscene profits from the similarly priced (with similar, if not better, specs) iPads.
They are certainly throwing a lot of marketing dollars behind it - but that's more to promote Win 8, not the hardware.
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I do it this way with two cheap Linksys access points. Same SSID, same pass-phrase, different channels. MAC filtering enabled.
Having to occasionally update the MAC filter list twice isn't much of a labor. Thou depending on how many access points you have and how often you have to make changes would depend on how boring that might get.
Why use MAC filtering?
It does nothing to stop someone that's interested in joining your network - if they can hack your WPA key (or steal it from someone's desk), the MAC is not an impediment at all -- it's broadcast in plain text.
All MAC filtering does is keep honest users off your network, but if they are that honest, they probably aren't going to get on your network in the first place.
If you're looking for security, setup a RADIUS server and use 802.1x authentication instead of PSK.
Is there another way to do it? I've always set office (and my home) Wifi networks up like this -- as long as the AP's are all on the same subnet, roaming among them should be fairly transparent.
Try to use non-overlapping channels as much as possible. (i.e. channel 1 at the east end of the office, channel 6 in the middle and channel 11 at the west end). If you can't use non-overlapping channels, some tuning of power levels to prevent interference between nodes can help -- i.e. if you have a long office with 4 nodes on 3 channels: [1, 6, 11, 1] you may see better performance if you turn down the transmit levels on the two channel 1 nodes so they don't interfere with each other as much. And dual-band 802.11n can help even more both because there's more channels on 5Ghz, and because the 5Ghz signals will be attenuated more.
In my current office, I have about 120 Wifi nodes (through a Cisco WLAN controller), all are broadcasting the same SSID.
Like that's gonna work with all of the greedy content providers* licensing agreements. Just the other day I was at a woman's house and we were deciding what to watch on her Roku box. Hey, let's watch this on Netflix! Oh, we can't, that's DVD-only. Let's watch it on Amazon! Oh, premium membership (or whatever the fuck the problem was) only. It seemed that wanting to watch every movie that was a cult classic or otherwise worth watching held us hostage from some kind of restriction,
What kind of restriction are you talking about? You said the movie was available on Amazon streaming (but you'd have to pay for it), and Amazon streaming runs fine on Linux.
Is it paying for the content that you object to?
which is inexcusable beacuse outfits like Netflix have had quite awhile to get their shit together and still have no native Linux client.
Why would they? It would gain them a tiny number of users but incur large support costs - MS has 3 mainstream operating systems to support: XP, 7 and now 8. Linux has dozens of distributions they'd have to support... and that's after they've spent the money to train their support staff on Linux. If they wanted to provide a Linux client, they'd just do it - they already have one since the Roku runs Linux.
"You could block their ability to add a new printer to their system"
So you can't avoid them buying a printer but you think you can avoid them buying a notebook?
How funny.
They can buy a notebook but they can't join it to the domain, plug it into the corporate network, or connect it to the corporate Wifi network.
Where are you buying your printers?
If a department wanted to violate the no printers rule they could do it with petty cash, I don't think the cost of a printer is even remotely a barrier here.
You could block their ability to add a new printer to their system, which would prevent them from printing unless they used a printer that prints from USB drive (which you could also block). You can also prevent them from plugging a printer into the network and/or using a Wifi enabled printer with appropriate network tools.
You mock those who rely on the "old" paper system and then suggest relying on an long-unsupported proprietary computer architecture from the late 1980's.
I think you're missing the point.
And you're (most likely) using a computer whose CPU's instruction set was based upon a 1970's era computer terminal. Sure, the instruction set and architecture have been extended and modified significantly since then, just as the AS/400 you buy today is much different than the one you bought in 1980.
This actually reminds me of a decade old piece of military equipment- think of a ruggedized, 2" thick tablet with a 3" screen. The 'neat' thing with the stylus for this device is that it doesn't actually have to touch the screen to work. Note: It's completely insensitive to fingers and such, you have to use the stylus, but that might be some sort of sensitivity setting.
Plenty of prior art, I think.
It reminds me of a centuries old piece of equipment called a "Pencil". They were heavily used while I was in school before being replaced by newer, sleeker technology. It was pressure sensitive, and though it would work on a multidue of surfaces, it worked best only on a specially formulated screen that we called "paper". Different styluses could be used for different effects (colors, darkness/thickness of lines, etc), but most people used the plain old #2. By inverting the stylus, it had some limited "undo" capability, but there were some ghosting artifacts left behind and excessive undo use could lead to screen damage.
Facebook does have a way of making pictures of you public without your permission by letting others tag you in photos, but I think there's a setting to prevent that.
Please share. I'm a noob and I can't find it.
Welcome to the internet! Here's a helpful link:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+to+prevent+others+from+tagging+you+on+facebook
There should, of course, be nine circles. One for your sex life, one about money, one where you put all your rants, one for all things heretical, etc. Hmm, which one is it where everyone has to be doused in faeces? Oh, and of course Mark Zuckerberg himself will be in the centre of the ninth.
That circle is the intersection of your "girl" circle and "cup" circle.
Or maybe you are too short sighted to see that this could potentially help everyone on the planet instead of a microcosm of it.
It could lead to a cure for limited resources, which, if I'm not mistaken, is part of the cause of the poverty in Africa.
Well no, not yet- humanity could feed everyone on the planet today if they could find a way past artificial political barriers that are preventing it. And if there were no political and/or religious barriers against promoting education and contraception, we could continue to house everyone on this planet indefinitely.
It would be nice for humans to be able to escape the planet some day to ensure survival even if there's a catastrophic event on this planet, but saying that we need to leave the planet because of limited resources ignores the obvious (and arguably cheaper and easier, though less "sexy" solution) - use policy and technology to reduce the resource drain on this planet.
This will be necessary even if we do colonize other planets since I don't see space travel ever being practical enough to move a few billion people off the planet to make more room for the rest of us.
Once you leave the atmosphere of this blue planet, *everything* will kill you. No amount of engineering, terraforming, or any other science fiction magic will ever make any other body within human reach survivable for long, and certainly not without HEAVY and CONSTANT support from earth.
No other body is survivable in our solar system. And with the next-closest solar system at over 100,000 years journey away in the fastest craft we can build, don't think of escaping to another solar system either.
Isn't it more a matter of developing a reliable and high yield source of energy? Like a fusion reactor that could be powered from water? Then you could hollow out a reasonable sized asteroid to put the humans in the center where they are shielded by many meters of rock, then strap a big enough ion engine on it to provide 1G of thrust - if they can do that, then even 100,000 light year distances are possible within the lifetime of humans living within the ship. (though I'm not sure how much reaction mass you'd use up to accelerate a 10,000 ton asteroid to 1G for several decades and how much hydrogen you'd burn through in the Mr Fusion reactor).
Of course, it's only feasible from the point of view of those on the ship - while they may only age a few dozen years during the trip, due to relativistic time dilation, earth will have aged over 100,000 years.
genuine question:
wouldn't it be wise for practical* reasons for people to offer more power to folding@home instead of einstein@home?
* = has more chances to help humanity ( for curing diseases etc. )
Or, to put it another way - why waste resources studying astronomy when there are so many sick people in the world so it would be better for humanity to put our resources into curing disease?
That doesn't help with publically accessible material that gets indexed by Google. Secondly, Facebook does have that sort of functionality and it had it before Google. The only thing google did was simplify things to give potential users the impression they care about your privacy, which, imo, is a bit of a joke.
Well, yeah, if you make your data available to the public (if Google's search engine indexes it, it's available to the world), then your data is available to the public. No technology is going to help you with that - if you don't want it public, don't make it public. Facebook does have a way of making pictures of you public without your permission by letting others tag you in photos, but I think there's a setting to prevent that. Not sure if Google has the same functionality.
I thought the problem the GP was trying to solve was that there's no way to make data available to friends without also making it available to others they are connected to in Facebook.
Facebook is one example of a site that has a crappy policy that only allows you to have one profile. It makes sense to have two social media profiles, one for your personal life which you share with friends, post your party pictures and aren't afraid to write whatever you want, and one for your professional life, where you add coworkers and talk about work.
Maybe Facebook could let you organize your social media contacts into different "circles" and let you share content based on which "circle" a person in. They could keep the membership of those "circles" private so no one knows which circle they are in or who else in in that circle.
Someone should start a social media site like that! It's sure to be a Facebook killer.
A working pen so that I can annotate and highlight PDFs with something close to resembling handwriting. Instead of fingerpainting.
Doesn't every touchscreen already work with a stylus?
Electric razors are allowed because they were tested-- the list of allowed items is pretty funny, but they are just things that have been tested. If a company thinks it can sell more of its products, they are free to pay to conduct the testing to get on the approved list. That private companies don't believe it is worth the expense is not the fault of the FAA. The FAA (our tax dollars) do not pay for this testing-- this is as it should be.
I didn't know electric razors were specifically tested and permitted (but surely not during takeoff/landing?). But if electric razors do need to be tested for interference, unless every single brand and model is tested, how do they know that any particular razor is not going to cause a problem? Modern razors with PWM controlled motors and an energy efficient switching power supply will have a much different interference profile than an old style electric razor that may have just an AC driven solenoid.
The consequences of having something go boom on the ground are very different from the consequences of same happening in the air.
To the janitor that's hauling out the big bin full of explosives, the consequences of having something go boom are pretty much the same to him whether he's in the air or on the ground. Entire airports have been evacuated because of an unclaimed backpack, but the TSA has a big barrel of what they suspect to be explosives, they keep it right at the security checkpoint within 10 meters of hundreds of people, and they just dump it all in the trash when the bin is full.
How is it not time taken away? It's time I *could* be using my iPad, but I'm not allowed to because of some regulation that may have no reason to exist.
Its not time taken away because you never had that time to play with your electronic devices.
Well, let me put it another way - let's say that many years ago, airplanes carried parachutes and there was a mandatory 30 minute parachute lesson before each flight - you're required to pay attention to the test and can't read a book or play with your iPad.
Nowadays, planes no longer carry parachutes, but since the regulations haven't been updated you still have to sit through the mandatory parachute training.
Wouldn't you say that is time taken away from you, even though it's always been that way and travelers have come to expect that they have to spend 30 minutes of their flight doing something just to fulfill some useless regulation?
Just because you know in advance that you're not going to be able to read your emails during takeoff doesn't mean that it's not time taken away from you.
that's $730M of productivity (or leisure time) taken away.
That is not time that was taken away, that is time you never had to play/work with you gadgets. I agree if there is no viable reason it should be allowed but this is not something we were able to do and then it was taken away. This is $730M of productivity or leisure time you did not have.
How is it not time taken away? It's time I *could* be using my iPad, but I'm not allowed to because of some regulation that may have no reason to exist. Just because we haven't been able to do so in the past doesn't mean we shouldn't be able to do so in the future. We used to get hot meals (with real metal silverware) included in the price of a plane ticket, now we're lucky to be offered a $9.99 "snack pack", so apparently the amenities of air travel do change with the times.
If just 1 % of those 36M hours of time were being used for anything other than twitter, facebook, music/movie streaming, slashdot? or angrybirds/wordswithfriends, I would be shocked. Productivity can wait for 15 minutes. And just how exactly would a passenger's _leisure_time_ be valued at $20 an hour? You lumped productivity/leisure time together for a cost analysis? If you choose to fly, there is an opportunity cost. If you don't like not being able to use your devices for brief periods - drive, take a bus or take a train.
FWIW, I think they will eventually change the regulations, and it does inconvenience me often - but it really IS an overblown issue - regardless of whatever made up cost you associate with it.
How people choose to spend their leisure time shouldn't really be your concern (or the FAA's). If people feel more relaxed and satisfied playing Angry Birds than staring at the seatback in front of them, what's the problem with that?
I know, $20 is pretty low for leisure time -- I value my leisure time at twice my regular salary.
the first plane crash after devices are allowed and people will change their tune real fast.
Yeah, I'd change my tune to "Why in the h*ll didn't the FAA require enough Avionics shielding to prevent a 300mW transmitter from taking down a plane?" It wouldn't be hard to turn a laptop into a 30 watt transmitter, equivalent to 100 phones - the electronics would fit within the hard drive and optical drive bays (with an mSATA drive to make sure the computer is bootable), a typical 85 watt-hour laptop battery could easily power the transmitter for an hour or longer.
I agree and I think that it probably causes no issues. What is funny is that people are getting that pissy over not being able to use something for 15 minutes at the start and 15 minutes at the end of a flight... really this is an overblown non-issue.
There are 730M air passengers in the USA each year.
If just 10% or 73M of them want to use their mobile device during takeoff/landing, that's 36M hours of time taken away without any apparent reason. If the average air passenger's time is valued at $20/hour, that's $730M of productivity (or leisure time) taken away.
The agency has no proof that electronic devices can harm a plane's avionics
That is not how it work is aviation. The rule is you have to prove it is not harmful.
Don't like it ? change the rules, but then those rules apply to everyone and everything involved in aviation, not only consumer electronic devices.
If the FAA really thinks iPads, cellphones, and other devices are harmful or could be harmful, then they should treat them as such and require that the devices be stored in an RF shielded container, or that batteries be removed and held by the flight crew until it's safe to turn them back on.
The power button on my cell phone is easily pressed by accident when I stuff it in my carryon bag, so more times than not, it's turned itself on at some point after I put it in the bag. I'm sure there are dozens of cell phones on every flight tucked away in checked and carryon bags that are powered on. Ironically, if I was allowed to hold the phone in my hands during takeoff, it would not accidentally turn on. (yes, I know my 4 ounce phone could become a hazardous projectile in an emergency, but so could the 24 ounce hardback book my seatmate is reading)
If the FAA really thinks the devices may be harmful, they should treat them as harmful devices, instead of just looking the other way and ignoring them even though they know that the devices *are* in use during all phases of flight.
It's kind of like how the TSA makes people discard drinks and other liquids before going through security since they could be explosives or hazardous explosive components, yet the trash is not treated as the hazardous waste they suspect it is. If they really think that the liquids may be hazardous, then they should treat them as hazardous waste - why would they let the janitor haul out a bin full of suspected explosives?
riding 60s technology hastily designed, developed and built in under a decade that has, in the 40+ years since, yet to be duplicated for a return... despite all of our advances in engineering, astrophysics, technology, manufacturing, and other fields. we *should* be able to get there for a mere fraction of apollo's cost (was approx $190b in current dollars)
We've developed much less tolerance for risk since then, which drives up costs and complexity - NASA wouldn't certify an Apollo era spacecraft for human spaceflight today.
Trying to shoehorn the 'tux onto the ARM Surface is stupid. No shit Microsoft has locked the thing up, they're subsidizing the damned hardware by assuming that you'll run Windows on it and buy applications through the Windows App Store.
Are you sure they are subsidizing it? Apple supposedly makes obscene profits from the similarly priced (with similar, if not better, specs) iPads.
They are certainly throwing a lot of marketing dollars behind it - but that's more to promote Win 8, not the hardware.