but my stock grants have always had a "fair market value" attached to stock grants, even pre-IPO stock.
Depends on whether you receive stock, or stock options. Pre-IPO, you couldn't have received 'stock,' you would have received stock options, that is, the option to buy a certain number of shares at a certain strike price, either set at time of award, or set at time of vesting - depending on the grant. Stock options are worthless - and thus tax-free - until and unless you exercise them, and then you only pay the capital gains tax on the difference between the stock price when you sell, and the strike price the options were granted at.
If you were given a stock grant - e.g., actual shares of publicly traded company stock as a bonus or something like that, then that would be treated as income, and you would be taxed on the monetary value of the stock grant at the stock price on the day of the grant. You may still owe capital gains on those if you sell them for a profit.
If you were awarded a mess of stock options a few weeks before an IPO at a strike price of 23 cents, and the stock was then sold at 40 dollars a share, the IRS would not have any issue with that so long as you paid your taxes. The SEC *might* take an issue with that, as there are certain rules and requirements that companies have to obey as they near the IPO issue date, but a private company can do whatever the fuck it wants to with its equity, and if it wants to hand a bunch of 18 year old kids a million dollars worth of company equity... it can do that.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, but your story really suggests that you've never earned, much less exercised, a stock grant or a stock option, since you don't seem to know what the fuck you're talking about.
If you exercise a significant value of QSO's, you need to be aware of AMT
A company is only as good as its employees, and having demotivated employees is not good for any company. If the employees are underwater on their stock for the forseeable future, it's going to be hard to keep them motivated.
LOL. Underwater? Oh no, the free stock they were given is only worth $1M instead of $2M. Oh the horror.
I don't know how long-term "founding" employees are treated (i.e. Zuckerberg), but my stock grants have always had a "fair market value" attached to stock grants, even pre-IPO stock. You'd have a hard time proving to the IRS that stock that was granted to you a day before a $40 IPO was worth $0. It's entirely possible that for some employees the tax liability on the stock is higher than the current market price.
If one barrel is 306 pounds and a ton is 2000 pounds then that's 400,000 pounds of oil consumed, or 1324 barrels. In contrast, BP trashed the Gulf with an estimated 5 million barrels.
It's interesting that bacteria are working hard to consume the spilled oil, but hardly a successful method of cleanup.
I don't know how you arrived at "400,000 lbs" from 200,000 tons, but I came up about 1.3M barrels of oil:
What happens to all of the oil they consume? When a person devours a large plate of nachos, much of that tasty food comes out as undesirable waste products that have to be carefully treated and disposed of.
Do they turn it into some other chemical? Do they just eat the oil, reproduce, and eventually die, leaving 200,000 tons of organic matter at the bottom of the gulf (is that any better than 200,000 tons of oil?). Oil from the ground has lots of contaminants like sulfur, what happens to the parts of the oil the bacteria can't digest?
Unless he sold his shares at the high mark, no. In fact after the IPO his net worth will have crashed.
Holding shares != rich.
That depends how much he could have sold his stake in the company for prior to the IPO, His net worth is around $12B today. if you think he could have sold his stake in the company for more than $12B prior to the IPO, then yeah, his net worth has dropped since then. However, I find it unlikely that any company would have paid him $12B for a controlling interest in the company prior to the IPO.
If he lives in California and the divorce proceedings are started there that prenup is worthless after 5 years.
Under California Law, she's not entitled to property he owned prior to getting married (gee, I wonder why he waited until the day *after* the IPO to get married!?). She'd be entitled to any gains the stock made after they were married, but she's probably in for a long wait before the stock rises to meet the IPO price again.
If he knew what he was doing, he wouldn't still be about a sinking ship.
Let's see.. The guy made billions on the deal, and simultaneously kept control of his company. You somehow have a superior knowledge on the subject and know better. How exactly does that work? If anyone didn't know what they were doing it would be the investors who bought the overpriced shares. Zuckerberg, on the other hand can laugh all the way to the bank - or wherever else he might want to go. Because that's the sort of thing you can do when you're a multi billionaire. Cocksucker might be a good description if you ask the other shareholders, but I don't think the incompetence you're pretending he has is really there.
A company is only as good as its employees, and having demotivated employees is not good for any company. If the employees are underwater on their stock for the forseeable future, it's going to be hard to keep them motivated. It's also going to drive up labor costs since they'll have to start paying out bonuses to keep employees happy as well as hire replacements for those that quit. Higher operating costs mean there's even more pressure to bring in more revenue.
Zuckerberg is set for life, there's no doubt. Facebook as a company is ok for now,but I'm betting it will eventually go the way of Myspace. If Google put some marketing dollars behind Google Plus they might have a chance to take some serious marketshare from FB -- and not just online marketing, they need to reach a broader audience. Many non-geeks still haven't even heard of it.
you eliminate the need for a power connector, it would be pretty simple to start producing smartphones and other devices that are waterproof themselves. That would be a nice improvement. My last smartphone met with a watery grave. I see it as just a gimmick to add this onto an existing device, but for new devices designed around this it would be useful.
If you can eliminate the need for a power connector, and make wireless power ubiquitous enough, we can also eliminate the battery.
No available wireless power transmission method is meant for long-range (beyond a few mm or centimeters) transmission of power so I don't think there's any chance of batteries going away in the near term.
I didn't know people still used data cables for syncing with modern phones - I have a Galaxy Nexus and the only thing I've used the USB port for is charging. Everything else goes over Wifi or Bluetooth so I wouldn't miss it at all if the USB port went away and was replaced by wireless charging,
For Android toys like the Nexus a Wifi/BT Connection is fast enough, but for professional use i prefer a fast reliable wired connection.
I don't think think wireless charging was meant to work for everyone's application - I charge by phone via USB, but my walkie-talkie at work is charged in a drop-in charger. What is this professional phone use that requires USB versus Wifi speeds?
20mW x (conservatively) 50,000,000 devices nationwide (what, you thought this was just about cell phones? Don't forget LameBoys, PeeS2's and the NoMindO DS) ~= 100,000W.
100KW? For the nation? That's nothing. I'll even say literally nothing - that would be in the unmeasurable noise of country-wide power generation.
If a 100 people make morning toast at the same time they'll be using more power than that.
i just plug my iphone into my laptop all day and not think about it. at home its into the wall
what does wireless charging give me?
It would give you a few seconds of your time back each day. Instead of having to plug it in to your laptop when you get to work, unplug it when you leave, plug it in when you get home, unplug it when you leave, you could just drop it on the charging mat at night when you go to bed and you're done. No cables to plug in.
Waste of power if you transmit it over any distance, and otherwise you still have to put it on a pad that's connected to a wire. So yeah, not all that useful for most applications.
But what about the stated application of charging your phone? How is it not useful for a phone? I keep my phone on the dresser at night, I'd rather drop it on a mat then have to plug it in in the dark when I go to bed. Where do you keep your phone at night if you don't put it on a table somewhere?
Likewise, I wish I could drop my phone in the center console of my car and have it charge automatically rather than plug it in to a charger every time I get into the car.
Seriously, this. I just don't get why this is such a popular idea, unless I remind myself that the average person is more or less technically uneducated, and doesn't understand that it's wildly energy inefficient. Also, echoing other comments on this topic: This is far from a new idea, and again: there are reasons we haven't gone this way before, but nobody seems to understand that.
Since you're so technically educated, please explain how it's so energy inefficient? A wireless charging device is essentially half of a transformer (your phone is the other half). Transformer efficiency can exceed 99%. But since the wireless charging mat is not a perfect transformer (an air gap is not as efficient as a metal core), efficiency will be lower, but I don't see why it can't exceed 90%. Do you have documentation for this low efficiency claim?
Indeed. There is nothing 'green' about it, though I'm sure the iPhone crowd will probably find they can't do without it.
It just bleeds energy into the atmosphere. Running your GPU at full tilt to generate BitCoins might be less dangerous.
What are you talking about? A wireless charger doesn't radiate Watts of energy into the air when there's no device on the charging mat. Standby power use should be around the same as a traditional charger - the wireless power consortium claims they have test devices that are as low as.0001W of standby power, but they don't say what currently shipping chargers are at.
Efficiency alone is such a big problem that it is hard to imagine it getting widely adopted before regulators kill it.
It is much more logical to push for common connectors.
As long as it doesn't use much standby power, efficiency during charging shouldn't be that big of a factor.
My phone battery holds around 8Watt-hours of power, so even if the charger is only 50% efficient, that means 8Wh of power wasted for each charge.
8 Wh wasted every day for a year is 3Kwh, or around 45 cents of power (depending on where you live).
In comparison, an EnergyStar rated TV is allowed to consume up to 1W of power in sleep mode, so if your TV is powered off 16 hours a day, it will waste 16Wh of power each day, or about twice as much power as you're wasting by using a wireless charger to charge your phone.
Granted, 8Wh/day across hundreds of millions of people is a lot of energy, but also, hundreds of millions of plug-in chargers and cables also ads up to a lot of wasted resources, if everyone had one powermat for their devices and didn't receive a new plug-in charger with each device, that would eliminate a lot of resource waste.
If you eliminate the need for a power connector, it would be pretty simple to start producing smartphones and other devices that are waterproof themselves. That would be a nice improvement.
Charging cables double as data cables. How would people react if you got rid of data cables entirely? Wireless syncing is nice, but I find I usually go for the cable. It's faster and has less chance of error, plus no drain on the phone's battery.
I didn't know people still used data cables for syncing with modern phones - I have a Galaxy Nexus and the only thing I've used the USB port for is charging. Everything else goes over Wifi or Bluetooth so I wouldn't miss it at all if the USB port went away and was replaced by wireless charging,
And of course, just because there's an iPad for documentation, no documentation at all can be provided in paper form...
If you'd read the linked article, American said that they plan on getting rid of all printed docs:
The company is to start using the iPads immediately in its 777 aircraft and is planning to completely do away with printed documents as early as 2013
Now it may be that when they said "all" they didn't mean "all", but that's what they said.
And BTW, I hope that any pilot allowed into the cockpit of a passenger plane is able to do an emergency landing even if no checklist is available.
I'd still feel better if they had their emergency checklist on their lap to make sure that they follow all procedures and don't get so focused on shutting down the bad engine that they forgot to set the flaps appropriately and end up in a stall upon approach.
I agree with your points and just wanted to add one more thing. There are documented cases where a passenger's consumer electronic device was verified to cause interference with one or more of the plane's systems. The crew located the passenger with the device, had them turn it off and saw that the problem went away. Then, for good measure, had them turn it back on and the problem reappeared. This is proof via the scientific method that it is possible for a device to interfere with an electronic system in a commercial aircraft, and frankly that's enough for me.
Boeing performed extensive tests as reported in Aero magazine's "Interference from Electronic Devices"[3] in response to reports by flight crews of anomalies that they believed to be caused by electronic devices. The flight crew members claimed they could turn the "suspect" devices on and off and observe effects in the airplane. Boeing, in many cases, was able to purchase the actual device from the passenger and perform extensive testing on it. Boeing was never able to reproduce any of the anomalies. The report concludes:
As a result of these and other investigations, Boeing has not been able to find a definite correlation between PEDs and the associated reported airplane anomalies.
If consumer electronics really did cause a problem with aircraft, then the FAA should require much more stringent measures to make sure they are powered off. On about half the flights when I put my phone into my carry on or checked bag, I find that it has powered itself on when I take it out of the bag because the power button is easily depressed accidentally. I bet most flights have a dozen or more phones, tablets, gameboys, etc all powered on and stowed in checked or carryon luggage.
Actually, the main reason for the whole "seat backs up, tray tables closed, put away your portable electronics" rule is that the takeoff and landing are the most dangerous parts of a flight, and if something goes wrong, people need to be able to respond, need to not be distracted, and need to not have extra impediments to moving within the cabin.
So why it it ok to read a bulky 30 ounce, $30 hardback book during takeoff/landing, but a 6 ounce $60 Kindle has to be put away?
The Kindle is an Amazon product platform, essentially an entertainment platform. Relying on an entertainment platform and random open source material for critical flying documents / information is probably not a good idea. I'm not sure the "e-ink" type display is really optimal for this application.
What is the iPad if not essentially an entertainment platform?
a system for encoding data in apparently steady light sources
You mean Intel has finally invented IrDA (but with visible light - VDA?)? I can't wait for that technology to trickle down to laptops, I bet I can use it to sync my computer with my Palm Pilot.
The checklists shouldn't be going anywhere. Disclaimer: I dont fly for AA, but I did fly for another airline. The pilots carry docs and the plane carries docs. The plane should have at least 2 checklists and a quick reference handbook, in printed form, in the cockpit. The checklists cover all normal procedures for all phases of flight. The QRH has all of the abnormal checklists. The absolutely vital emergency procedures are printed also in the QRH but the primary source is the pilots memory (things that need to be accomplished ASAP before there is time to consult the book).
Now that makes infinitely more sense, the article made it sound like they were getting rid of all printed docs. If they are putting normal procedures and maps on the iPad, that sounds quite reasonable, but I wouldn't want my pilot relying on an iPad in an emergency.
If the iPad is not charged then obviously they... plug it into the outlet i the cockpit and charge it. And how exactly is their offline documentation going to get 'hacked'? And how would it be any more of a problem then someone maliciousy changing their printed documents?
I guess that depends on how they get the docs onto the iPad, but if they use iTunes on an internet connected computer, to load the docs (or they use an app that downloads doc updates over the public internet) I think you've found your attack vector.
Slashdot Mirror
..I don't see why it can't exceed 90%
<citation needed>
http://www.wirelesspowerconsortium.com/technology/transfer-efficiency.html
A high efficiency (>90%) can be achieved at close distance (z/D < 0.1) and for coils of similar size (D2/D = 0.5..1)
Depends on whether you receive stock, or stock options. Pre-IPO, you couldn't have received 'stock,' you would have received stock options, that is, the option to buy a certain number of shares at a certain strike price, either set at time of award, or set at time of vesting - depending on the grant. Stock options are worthless - and thus tax-free - until and unless you exercise them, and then you only pay the capital gains tax on the difference between the stock price when you sell, and the strike price the options were granted at.
If you were given a stock grant - e.g., actual shares of publicly traded company stock as a bonus or something like that, then that would be treated as income, and you would be taxed on the monetary value of the stock grant at the stock price on the day of the grant. You may still owe capital gains on those if you sell them for a profit.
If you were awarded a mess of stock options a few weeks before an IPO at a strike price of 23 cents, and the stock was then sold at 40 dollars a share, the IRS would not have any issue with that so long as you paid your taxes. The SEC *might* take an issue with that, as there are certain rules and requirements that companies have to obey as they near the IPO issue date, but a private company can do whatever the fuck it wants to with its equity, and if it wants to hand a bunch of 18 year old kids a million dollars worth of company equity... it can do that.
I'm not sure what you're talking about, but your story really suggests that you've never earned, much less exercised, a stock grant or a stock option, since you don't seem to know what the fuck you're talking about.
If you exercise a significant value of QSO's, you need to be aware of AMT
A company is only as good as its employees, and having demotivated employees is not good for any company. If the employees are underwater on their stock for the forseeable future, it's going to be hard to keep them motivated.
LOL. Underwater? Oh no, the free stock they were given is only worth $1M instead of $2M. Oh the horror.
I don't know how long-term "founding" employees are treated (i.e. Zuckerberg), but my stock grants have always had a "fair market value" attached to stock grants, even pre-IPO stock. You'd have a hard time proving to the IRS that stock that was granted to you a day before a $40 IPO was worth $0. It's entirely possible that for some employees the tax liability on the stock is higher than the current market price.
If one barrel is 306 pounds and a ton is 2000 pounds then that's 400,000 pounds of oil consumed, or 1324 barrels. In contrast, BP trashed the Gulf with an estimated 5 million barrels.
It's interesting that bacteria are working hard to consume the spilled oil, but hardly a successful method of cleanup.
I don't know how you arrived at "400,000 lbs" from 200,000 tons, but I came up about 1.3M barrels of oil:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=200000+tons++%2F+307+lbs%2Fbarrel
Which is still only about 25% of the spill, yet the article said that it accounts for 40% of the oil, what happened to the rest?
What happens to all of the oil they consume? When a person devours a large plate of nachos, much of that tasty food comes out as undesirable waste products that have to be carefully treated and disposed of.
Do they turn it into some other chemical? Do they just eat the oil, reproduce, and eventually die, leaving 200,000 tons of organic matter at the bottom of the gulf (is that any better than 200,000 tons of oil?). Oil from the ground has lots of contaminants like sulfur, what happens to the parts of the oil the bacteria can't digest?
Didn't it make him, you know, rather rich?
Unless he sold his shares at the high mark, no. In fact after the IPO his net worth will have crashed.
Holding shares != rich.
That depends how much he could have sold his stake in the company for prior to the IPO, His net worth is around $12B today. if you think he could have sold his stake in the company for more than $12B prior to the IPO, then yeah, his net worth has dropped since then. However, I find it unlikely that any company would have paid him $12B for a controlling interest in the company prior to the IPO.
If he lives in California and the divorce proceedings are started there that prenup is worthless after 5 years.
Under California Law, she's not entitled to property he owned prior to getting married (gee, I wonder why he waited until the day *after* the IPO to get married!?). She'd be entitled to any gains the stock made after they were married, but she's probably in for a long wait before the stock rises to meet the IPO price again.
"The guy knows what he's doing".
LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!
If he knew what he was doing, he wouldn't still be about a sinking ship.
Let's see.. The guy made billions on the deal, and simultaneously kept control of his company. You somehow have a superior knowledge on the subject and know better. How exactly does that work? If anyone didn't know what they were doing it would be the investors who bought the overpriced shares. Zuckerberg, on the other hand can laugh all the way to the bank - or wherever else he might want to go. Because that's the sort of thing you can do when you're a multi billionaire. Cocksucker might be a good description if you ask the other shareholders, but I don't think the incompetence you're pretending he has is really there.
A company is only as good as its employees, and having demotivated employees is not good for any company. If the employees are underwater on their stock for the forseeable future, it's going to be hard to keep them motivated. It's also going to drive up labor costs since they'll have to start paying out bonuses to keep employees happy as well as hire replacements for those that quit. Higher operating costs mean there's even more pressure to bring in more revenue.
Zuckerberg is set for life, there's no doubt. Facebook as a company is ok for now,but I'm betting it will eventually go the way of Myspace. If Google put some marketing dollars behind Google Plus they might have a chance to take some serious marketshare from FB -- and not just online marketing, they need to reach a broader audience. Many non-geeks still haven't even heard of it.
you eliminate the need for a power connector, it would be pretty simple to start producing smartphones and other devices that are waterproof themselves. That would be a nice improvement. My last smartphone met with a watery grave. I see it as just a gimmick to add this onto an existing device, but for new devices designed around this it would be useful.
If you can eliminate the need for a power connector, and make wireless power ubiquitous enough, we can also eliminate the battery.
No available wireless power transmission method is meant for long-range (beyond a few mm or centimeters) transmission of power so I don't think there's any chance of batteries going away in the near term.
I didn't know people still used data cables for syncing with modern phones - I have a Galaxy Nexus and the only thing I've used the USB port for is charging. Everything else goes over Wifi or Bluetooth so I wouldn't miss it at all if the USB port went away and was replaced by wireless charging,
For Android toys like the Nexus a Wifi/BT Connection is fast enough, but for professional use i prefer a fast reliable wired connection.
I don't think think wireless charging was meant to work for everyone's application - I charge by phone via USB, but my walkie-talkie at work is charged in a drop-in charger. What is this professional phone use that requires USB versus Wifi speeds?
20mW x (conservatively) 50,000,000 devices nationwide (what, you thought this was just about cell phones? Don't forget LameBoys, PeeS2's and the NoMindO DS) ~= 100,000W.
100KW? For the nation? That's nothing. I'll even say literally nothing - that would be in the unmeasurable noise of country-wide power generation.
If a 100 people make morning toast at the same time they'll be using more power than that.
i just plug my iphone into my laptop all day and not think about it. at home its into the wall
what does wireless charging give me?
It would give you a few seconds of your time back each day. Instead of having to plug it in to your laptop when you get to work, unplug it when you leave, plug it in when you get home, unplug it when you leave, you could just drop it on the charging mat at night when you go to bed and you're done. No cables to plug in.
Waste of power if you transmit it over any distance, and otherwise you still have to put it on a pad that's connected to a wire.
So yeah, not all that useful for most applications.
But what about the stated application of charging your phone? How is it not useful for a phone? I keep my phone on the dresser at night, I'd rather drop it on a mat then have to plug it in in the dark when I go to bed. Where do you keep your phone at night if you don't put it on a table somewhere?
Likewise, I wish I could drop my phone in the center console of my car and have it charge automatically rather than plug it in to a charger every time I get into the car.
Seriously, this.
I just don't get why this is such a popular idea, unless I remind myself that the average person is more or less technically uneducated, and doesn't understand that it's wildly energy inefficient. Also, echoing other comments on this topic: This is far from a new idea, and again: there are reasons we haven't gone this way before, but nobody seems to understand that.
Since you're so technically educated, please explain how it's so energy inefficient? A wireless charging device is essentially half of a transformer (your phone is the other half). Transformer efficiency can exceed 99%. But since the wireless charging mat is not a perfect transformer (an air gap is not as efficient as a metal core), efficiency will be lower, but I don't see why it can't exceed 90%. Do you have documentation for this low efficiency claim?
Indeed. There is nothing 'green' about it, though I'm sure the iPhone crowd will probably find they can't do without it.
It just bleeds energy into the atmosphere. Running your GPU at full tilt to generate BitCoins might be less dangerous.
What are you talking about? A wireless charger doesn't radiate Watts of energy into the air when there's no device on the charging mat. Standby power use should be around the same as a traditional charger - the wireless power consortium claims they have test devices that are as low as .0001W of standby power, but they don't say what currently shipping chargers are at.
Efficiency alone is such a big problem that it is hard to imagine it getting widely adopted before regulators kill it.
It is much more logical to push for common connectors.
As long as it doesn't use much standby power, efficiency during charging shouldn't be that big of a factor.
My phone battery holds around 8Watt-hours of power, so even if the charger is only 50% efficient, that means 8Wh of power wasted for each charge.
8 Wh wasted every day for a year is 3Kwh, or around 45 cents of power (depending on where you live).
In comparison, an EnergyStar rated TV is allowed to consume up to 1W of power in sleep mode, so if your TV is powered off 16 hours a day, it will waste 16Wh of power each day, or about twice as much power as you're wasting by using a wireless charger to charge your phone.
Granted, 8Wh/day across hundreds of millions of people is a lot of energy, but also, hundreds of millions of plug-in chargers and cables also ads up to a lot of wasted resources, if everyone had one powermat for their devices and didn't receive a new plug-in charger with each device, that would eliminate a lot of resource waste.
If you eliminate the need for a power connector, it would be pretty simple to start producing smartphones and other devices that are waterproof themselves. That would be a nice improvement.
Charging cables double as data cables. How would people react if you got rid of data cables entirely? Wireless syncing is nice, but I find I usually go for the cable. It's faster and has less chance of error, plus no drain on the phone's battery.
I didn't know people still used data cables for syncing with modern phones - I have a Galaxy Nexus and the only thing I've used the USB port for is charging. Everything else goes over Wifi or Bluetooth so I wouldn't miss it at all if the USB port went away and was replaced by wireless charging,
And of course, just because there's an iPad for documentation, no documentation at all can be provided in paper form ...
If you'd read the linked article, American said that they plan on getting rid of all printed docs:
The company is to start using the iPads immediately in its 777 aircraft and is planning to completely do away with printed documents as early as 2013
Now it may be that when they said "all" they didn't mean "all", but that's what they said.
And BTW, I hope that any pilot allowed into the cockpit of a passenger plane is able to do an emergency landing even if no checklist is available.
I'd still feel better if they had their emergency checklist on their lap to make sure that they follow all procedures and don't get so focused on shutting down the bad engine that they forgot to set the flaps appropriately and end up in a stall upon approach.
They do become unusable when you drop the stack of papers and they scatter... or if you set them on fire. Or if you spill your coffee on them.
If you've got a fire in the cockpit, there's probably bigger things to worry about in the short term than the loss of some documentation.
It's a good thing that iPads can't catch fire or explode.
I agree with your points and just wanted to add one more thing. There are documented cases where a passenger's consumer electronic device was verified to cause interference with one or more of the plane's systems. The crew located the passenger with the device, had them turn it off and saw that the problem went away. Then, for good measure, had them turn it back on and the problem reappeared. This is proof via the scientific method that it is possible for a device to interfere with an electronic system in a commercial aircraft, and frankly that's enough for me.
Links?
Boeing disputes your claim:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phones_on_aircraft#Electromagnetic_interference
Boeing performed extensive tests as reported in Aero magazine's "Interference from Electronic Devices"[3] in response to reports by flight crews of anomalies that they believed to be caused by electronic devices. The flight crew members claimed they could turn the "suspect" devices on and off and observe effects in the airplane. Boeing, in many cases, was able to purchase the actual device from the passenger and perform extensive testing on it. Boeing was never able to reproduce any of the anomalies. The report concludes:
http://www.boeing.com/commercial/aeromagazine/aero_10/interfere_textonly.html
As a result of these and other investigations, Boeing has not been able to find a definite correlation between PEDs and the associated reported airplane anomalies.
If consumer electronics really did cause a problem with aircraft, then the FAA should require much more stringent measures to make sure they are powered off. On about half the flights when I put my phone into my carry on or checked bag, I find that it has powered itself on when I take it out of the bag because the power button is easily depressed accidentally. I bet most flights have a dozen or more phones, tablets, gameboys, etc all powered on and stowed in checked or carryon luggage.
Actually, the main reason for the whole "seat backs up, tray tables closed, put away your portable electronics" rule is that the takeoff and landing are the most dangerous parts of a flight, and if something goes wrong, people need to be able to respond, need to not be distracted, and need to not have extra impediments to moving within the cabin.
So why it it ok to read a bulky 30 ounce, $30 hardback book during takeoff/landing, but a 6 ounce $60 Kindle has to be put away?
The Kindle is an Amazon product platform, essentially an entertainment platform. Relying on an entertainment platform and random open source material for critical flying documents / information is probably not a good idea. I'm not sure the "e-ink" type display is really optimal for this application.
What is the iPad if not essentially an entertainment platform?
a system for encoding data in apparently steady light sources
You mean Intel has finally invented IrDA (but with visible light - VDA?)? I can't wait for that technology to trickle down to laptops, I bet I can use it to sync my computer with my Palm Pilot.
The checklists shouldn't be going anywhere. Disclaimer: I dont fly for AA, but I did fly for another airline. The pilots carry docs and the plane carries docs. The plane should have at least 2 checklists and a quick reference handbook, in printed form, in the cockpit. The checklists cover all normal procedures for all phases of flight. The QRH has all of the abnormal checklists. The absolutely vital emergency procedures are printed also in the QRH but the primary source is the pilots memory (things that need to be accomplished ASAP before there is time to consult the book).
Now that makes infinitely more sense, the article made it sound like they were getting rid of all printed docs. If they are putting normal procedures and maps on the iPad, that sounds quite reasonable, but I wouldn't want my pilot relying on an iPad in an emergency.
If the iPad is not charged then obviously they... plug it into the outlet i the cockpit and charge it. And how exactly is their offline documentation going to get 'hacked'? And how would it be any more of a problem then someone maliciousy changing their printed documents?
I guess that depends on how they get the docs onto the iPad, but if they use iTunes on an internet connected computer, to load the docs (or they use an app that downloads doc updates over the public internet) I think you've found your attack vector.