I'm wholeheartedly opposed to "infallible" biometric/smart ID cards, but yours is a flawed argument. The biometric information could be digitally signed using a government key at the point of issue. Of course, this doesn't eliminate the possibility of corrupt issuing staff, a compromised key, or other, similar, attacks. If that was your point, you should have made it clearer.:-)
One key used for signing 10's of millions of IDs, issued by multiple entities is virtually guarenteed to "leak". Even if multiple keys are used they would still need to be secure for the entire life of the IDs they are used to sign. There's also the problem of multiple keys acting as "meta-data". e.g. someone having an ID with a key which is inconsistent with where they have claimed to be at a specific data/time or even worst a key equating to "undercover cop". Anyway a key is only as trustworthy as the entity they apply to. Historically most governments rate "I don't trust at all" at best...
From the look of the model, tension is applied through strings or cables. As a pilot, I don't think I am ready to trust that till they start using a solid linkage. I had a rudder cable on a C172 snap once, and I really never want to try and land like that again. I can't imagine trusting my wings to that, especially my ailerons.
No ailerons, no getting home. Rudder and elevators won't steer a plane.
Depends on the aircraft. Remember a crew managed to sucessfully crash land a DC10 with no control surfaces and number 2 engine out.
Uhm, I thought planes stored fuel in the wings. So I guess you need some flexible fuel tanks now too? Tell you what, I'll just pour the kerosene into this nice rubber bag and...
Such tanks go by the name of "bladders", rather unimaginativly.
This project looks like much of the same. Modern aircraft wings are monocoque, and have very little internal structure (although the space may be filled by other things like fuel tankage). These wings would require a lot of heavy internal structure to accomplish the effect, thus losing the benefits of the more efficient airfoil. Plus, the MMHFH ratio must be pretty awful with hundreds of little actuators.
They'd also make a much poorer fuel tank...
On top of that, what are the failure modes? What happens if one of those actuators fails in the middle of a shift? Does the wing rip itself apart?
Even if the wing stays in one piece you have the problem of the two wings producing differing amounts of lift and drag. If the roll and yaw control surfaces can't cope with this then the plane is likely to fall out of the sky. (Probably in bits since the resulting areodymanic forces will tear it apart.)
If the stress put on a ferrous material is much smaller than the amount of stress that part can handle, then after a certain large number of cycles without failure you could pretty much consider the part unbreakable. For example, this is why it would be better to pick up a good set of seasoned connecting rods rather than a brand new set (assuming, of course, that someone hasn't abused the used conn rods).
At one time BMW was building F1 racing car engines using old engine blocks. Because of this rule-of-thumb. Similarly airline pilots can be more worried about a brand new engine failing in flight than an old one...
Look at the difference between the position of the wingtip durring taxi on the ground and cruise. Many larger aircraft (747, 777, etc) have a difference nearly 5 ft, and this is normal conditions.
Probably the best aircraft to see this on is the B52. This has outrigger wheels on the wings to keep the wingtips from striking the ground. These being the first wheels to leave the ground on takeoff.
Well, there was a project in colombia to issue an ID card with a 2d barcode on the back which contained your index fingers coded print minutiae. The authorities can then ask you for your id, and with a little device like the MorphoTouch, they can ask you to place your fingers in the optical reader and compare your prints with the ones coded in the card.
If you are a crook, terrorist or spy then you are likely to have a card where the encoded fingerprint matches yours. Especially in the case of the latter two where your "employer" is the government issuing the cards in the first place (or one "friendly" to them.)
If the fingers dont match, youll have to explain where you got that card, and authorities can even connect the morphotouch to a central AFIS (via modem, wifi, whatever) to check your real identity.
In that case they can check your identity against some database of unknown security and accuracy. Government database projects, certainly in the UK, are notorious for being late, over budget and of poor quality. As well as whatever holes are delibratly put in for MI5, MI6, NCIS, FBI, CIA, NSA, Mossad, etc there are likely to be plenty for even two bit terrorists and gangsters to exploit. Let alone those who are well organised and other foreign "intelligence" services.
That would be the biometric identifiers. The word is even used in the slashdot headline, it's not like you even need to read the article to find that out!
All that proves is that the card and the cardholder match. Putting fingerprints, retina scan or whatever information on the card dosn't address this issue any more than having a photograph (the most common form of current biometrics) on the card.
Firstly, the question isn't "why not", it's "why". It will cost a fortune, make a whole new layer of beaurocracy, upset a lot of people etc etc and no one has yet given a good example of what we really gain, so, why bother?
As well as the downsides of the information being used for criminal purposes.
Secondly, *everyone* has something to hide. Everyone. It may not be something criminal, it may not be something wrong, it may even be something you have no logical reason you want to keep to yourself, but you still have a whole raft of things you don't want the policeman who has just randomly stopped you to know.
Even "celebrities" who like to live their lives in the "public eye" get upset when their boundries of "public" and "private" are breached.
Even further: the Government's powers are limited. There are lots of examples of things they have failed to do in spite of the huge majority they hold.
Dosn't stop them getting upset when they discover their powers are not absolute. Just this week Blunkett (again) was making a big fuss about someone who had been held without charge for years being moved from prison to "house arrest".
The ironic thing is that Blair is the leader of the Labour party: which was historically established to protect the rights of the working class (ie Socialist, left wing). Blair however seems to see his mission to kiss the arse of Corporate Britain and fuck the workers because if they disagree they're probably don't understand what he's saying.
Blair is so called "New Labour" which has about as much in common with traditional Labour as the "neocons" have with traditional US Conservatives.
Both Bush and Blair strike me as shining examples of why Universal Suffrage doesn't work. Personally I think you should have to pass an exam before you can vote. Only simple stuff like: "Who are the leaders of the 3 main parties?", "Who is the Constituional head of state?". Let's face it, if you can't answer questions like that a) you're not well enough informed to vote and b) you don't fucking deserve to be able to vote.
What sort of exam should be required for potential candidates? You can hardly blame the voters when an election comes down to picking the "best" from a set of bad choices...
To avoid having to carry biometric ID in the UK, where he has the protection of the European convention on human rights he moves to the US, where he gets fingerprinted on entry, and looses all human rights protection. Aliens are not covered by the bill of rights you know.
That would require a "radical interpretation of the text". Given that very few parts draw any distinction between people who are US citizens and those who are not...
Ok, so add biometric identification to the ID we already have; passports, driving licence, etc.
All that does is make it easier to match the document and it's holder. It dosn't prove much otherwise. Also a driving licence was intended to indicate that the holder was competent to drive motor vehicles, subsequently abused as an identity document
but why on earth are we having this centralisation? Surely everything we've learnt about security technologies says a layered approach is needed?
Most people don't understand security, that includes politicans...
What happens when someone beats the system? Everyone will trust it completely because nutters like Blunkett say biometric id is unbeatable.
If anything people should automatically distrust anything the likes of Blunket says. New Labour is more or less the ultimate in "How do you tell when a politican is lying? Their lips are moving."
What about the human element of the system? If someone exploits this database they can write themselves a few new lives,
Or more likely for the criminal gang they are a member of or are bribed/blackmailed by.
To be honest, i'd be for ID cards in a way - we do have a bit of a problem with illegal immigrants in this country lately, who are totally abusing the system - the current trend is buying cheap cars, and then they just drive around the city in them with no tax insurance or anything.
What exactly is to stop them using someone elses ID? The basic problem is that with any such scheme the "bad guys" will simply either use bogus IDs or steal the identity of honest people. ID cards which cannot be forged and total security of the entity doing the issuing is the stuff of science fiction. As with any other form of identity document there will be convincing forgeries and those issuing the "real" thing will be capable of being blackmailed/bribed/etc. Having one approved form of ID makes identity theft considerably easier.
As far as I know, that doesn't stop a whole lot of software companies from doing just that every year, forcing their customers to either upgrade at 80% of the full price
Where the customer is also likely to wind up with a large bill for "consequential costs"
or watch support for their current version dwindle down to the eventual EOLing in a year or two, maybe three. That is two or three years/version down the road of said product.
This is a technique proprietary software vendors appear to have hit on as a method for gaining extra revenue. It's a technique which dosn't work well with OSS, since no-one, not even the copyright holder can "kill" software with an OS licence. In many real world situations it can take several years to "shake the bugs out" of software.
Also, what kind of support are we talking about here?
The term "support" is one which has been abused to the point where it can be meaningless in many contexts.
REAL support as in talking to one of the developers regarding some weird bug one has encountered?
With proprietary the developers are anonymous, you have no way of knowing if the person who wrote program foo has any contact with vendor bar any more. Whereas with OSS developers tend to have real contact details and anyone can become one or study the code in order to understand it as well as whoever wrote it.
Or support as in cheapo callcenter with underpaid operators where your worth is judged on how quickly you get your ass of the line?
Is this a "support" contract or a contract to have someone answer phone calls?
It's not about whether it works or not. It's about being able to call somebody at 2:00AM when a critical machine goes down, as opposed to waiting for your Usenet post to get propogated, then hoping that l334G33k425 responds to your message in a timely manner and gives you the correct answer. Case in point... my retail businesses have a POS system that I paid for. Granted, there aren't any truly viable OSS ones out there yet, but assume there are. It's worth the money for me to be able to get someone on the phone 30 seconds after it crashes to get my business running again.
Assuming that the person on the end of the phone does actually fix the problem. It isn't unknown for organisations with "commercial support" to make use of usenet/Google/etc in preferance to picking up the phone. Since very often the people signing the "support" contracts are not the people who use the service they may not be able to tell the difference between a contract to have a vendor make best effort to fix a problem and one which simply requires the answering of a phone call or the sending of a warm body within X hours.
You may see the big wireless companies start to offer packages with airline roaming. How hard would it be for Cingular, Verizon, Sprint, Virgin, etc to work with the airlines.
Well Virgin would be the most obvious possibility. Considering that the same company runs an airline:)
It won't cause a problem if the cell phone is working properly. The thing people are worried about (for valid or invalid reasons) are what happens if the cell phone is broken and starts transmitting (or have subcarriers or harmonics) on air traffic control or guidance frequencies. The likelihood is small, but it's likely to happen in the most critical moments of flight.
If this is a real risk then it would probably make sense to ban anything capable of transmitting RF from being taken on a plane at all. Otherwise some terrorist could use modified phones to crash planes...
Airport security is a joke anyway. You can be stopped at the security check for things like pocket knives (and even tweezers). Then they allow people to buy things like bottles of wine just before boarding the plane. You could easily smash the bottle while in-flight, and you'd have a weapon far deadlier than any pocket-knife!
With an unsmashed bottle being a rather heavy club. Which is still a nasty weapon even if it breaks... The other interesting thing is that matches and butane lighters were not placed on the prohibited list, even after the "shoe-bomber" incident.
In an airplane your signal will carry much farther so you can hit multiple towers running on the same channels. Going back to the map analogy, once you're 40,000ft above the map there are LOTS of places where you could "see" two separate red cities. When that happens there's a good chance that the slot you're using on the tower you're officially connected to is also in use on the tower you're not supposed to be connected to but you are anyway.
Given a choice between using a cellside at most a few 10's of metres away and one over 10 km away which do you think the typical handset is going to pick.
When you're on the ground and your call drops because some jackass on an airplane owns the same cell you are on then you might care.
The cellsite on the aircraft is not the same as any of the cellsites on the ground. It has it's own ID and is operating at low power inside a metal structure. Thus it's signal will only leave the plane if the door is open, even then it's only likely to go a few metres outside the door.
The exact same thing happened with my old cell phone and my old monitor, but only if the cell phone was lying on the table where it would be about 20 cm from the monitor. Obviously this means, the phone must know the call is comming,
The network is interrogating the phone to check if it is there and has sufficent signal strength to be able to accept the call.
The only thing is, you might as well use the back-of-seat AirPhones to get to that satellite trnasponder rather than your own phone and the picocell...
If you are an airline what would you rather have in your planes? Option A is a pile of handsets and card readers in the passenger cabin, together with miles of cable and a sizable PBX. All of which you have to maintain. Option B is a few boxes together with much less cabling none of which is anywhere passengers should be going.
I get the feeling that even if this allows you to use your cell phone like normal, you're going to be considered to be on a "roaming tower" as far as your cell phone company is concerned because your cell phone company won't own the picocell.
Nothing to stop a phone company "partnering" with an airline.
Therefore, forget about using your unlimited night and weekend minutes on these flights,
Working out "night" and "weekend" gets a bit complex on a plane which is flying East or West, especially on trans-Pacific flights crossing the international date line...
you'll be still paying the same through-the-nose rates for plane-to-ground communications.
With the possibility of incomming as well as outgoing calls.
The primary purpose of a corporation is to protect the shareholders and the people running from mistakes, errors in judgement and grevious wrong doing.
IIRC The original idea was to protect the investors (the shareholders) from financial liability if the undertaking went bankrupt. As well as to enable there to be many investors. But the concept of "limited liability" got added to.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm wholeheartedly opposed to "infallible" biometric/smart ID cards, but yours is a flawed argument. The biometric information could be digitally signed using a government key at the point of issue. :-)
Of course, this doesn't eliminate the possibility of corrupt issuing staff, a compromised key, or other, similar, attacks. If that was your point, you should have made it clearer.
One key used for signing 10's of millions of IDs, issued by multiple entities is virtually guarenteed to "leak". Even if multiple keys are used they would still need to be secure for the entire life of the IDs they are used to sign. There's also the problem of multiple keys acting as "meta-data". e.g. someone having an ID with a key which is inconsistent with where they have claimed to be at a specific data/time or even worst a key equating to "undercover cop".
Anyway a key is only as trustworthy as the entity they apply to. Historically most governments rate "I don't trust at all" at best...
From the look of the model, tension is applied through strings or cables. As a pilot, I don't think I am ready to trust that till they start using a solid linkage. I had a rudder cable on a C172 snap once, and I really never want to try and land like that again. I can't imagine trusting my wings to that, especially my ailerons. No ailerons, no getting home. Rudder and elevators won't steer a plane.
Depends on the aircraft. Remember a crew managed to sucessfully crash land a DC10 with no control surfaces and number 2 engine out.
Uhm, I thought planes stored fuel in the wings. So I guess you need some flexible fuel tanks now too? Tell you what, I'll just pour the kerosene into this nice rubber bag and ...
Such tanks go by the name of "bladders", rather unimaginativly.
This project looks like much of the same. Modern aircraft wings are monocoque, and have very little internal structure (although the space may be filled by other things like fuel tankage). These wings would require a lot of heavy internal structure to accomplish the effect, thus losing the benefits of the more efficient airfoil. Plus, the MMHFH ratio must be pretty awful with hundreds of little actuators.
They'd also make a much poorer fuel tank...
On top of that, what are the failure modes? What happens if one of those actuators fails in the middle of a shift? Does the wing rip itself apart?
Even if the wing stays in one piece you have the problem of the two wings producing differing amounts of lift and drag. If the roll and yaw control surfaces can't cope with this then the plane is likely to fall out of the sky. (Probably in bits since the resulting areodymanic forces will tear it apart.)
If the stress put on a ferrous material is much smaller than the amount of stress that part can handle, then after a certain large number of cycles without failure you could pretty much consider the part unbreakable. For example, this is why it would be better to pick up a good set of seasoned connecting rods rather than a brand new set (assuming, of course, that someone hasn't abused the used conn rods).
At one time BMW was building F1 racing car engines using old engine blocks. Because of this rule-of-thumb. Similarly airline pilots can be more worried about a brand new engine failing in flight than an old one...
Look at the difference between the position of the wingtip durring taxi on the ground and cruise. Many larger aircraft (747, 777, etc) have a difference nearly 5 ft, and this is normal conditions.
Probably the best aircraft to see this on is the B52. This has outrigger wheels on the wings to keep the wingtips from striking the ground. These being the first wheels to leave the ground on takeoff.
Well, there was a project in colombia to issue an ID card with a 2d barcode on the back which contained your index fingers coded print minutiae. The authorities can then ask you for your id, and with a little device like the MorphoTouch, they can ask you to place your fingers in the optical reader and compare your prints with the ones coded in the card.
If you are a crook, terrorist or spy then you are likely to have a card where the encoded fingerprint matches yours. Especially in the case of the latter two where your "employer" is the government issuing the cards in the first place (or one "friendly" to them.)
If the fingers dont match, youll have to explain where you got that card, and authorities can even connect the morphotouch to a central AFIS (via modem, wifi, whatever) to check your real identity.
In that case they can check your identity against some database of unknown security and accuracy.
Government database projects, certainly in the UK, are notorious for being late, over budget and of poor quality. As well as whatever holes are delibratly put in for MI5, MI6, NCIS, FBI, CIA, NSA, Mossad, etc there are likely to be plenty for even two bit terrorists and gangsters to exploit. Let alone those who are well organised and other foreign "intelligence" services.
That would be the biometric identifiers. The word is even used in the slashdot headline, it's not like you even need to read the article to find that out!
All that proves is that the card and the cardholder match. Putting fingerprints, retina scan or whatever information on the card dosn't address this issue any more than having a photograph (the most common form of current biometrics) on the card.
Firstly, the question isn't "why not", it's "why". It will cost a fortune, make a whole new layer of beaurocracy, upset a lot of people etc etc and no one has yet given a good example of what we really gain, so, why bother?
As well as the downsides of the information being used for criminal purposes.
Secondly, *everyone* has something to hide. Everyone. It may not be something criminal, it may not be something wrong, it may even be something you have no logical reason you want to keep to yourself, but you still have a whole raft of things you don't want the policeman who has just randomly stopped you to know.
Even "celebrities" who like to live their lives in the "public eye" get upset when their boundries of "public" and "private" are breached.
That cult leader behind the sarin gas attacks in Tokyo is blind.
As is David Blunkett, who is advocating this expensive nonsense.
Even further: the Government's powers are limited. There are lots of examples of things they have failed to do in spite of the huge majority they hold.
Dosn't stop them getting upset when they discover their powers are not absolute. Just this week Blunkett (again) was making a big fuss about someone who had been held without charge for years being moved from prison to "house arrest".
The ironic thing is that Blair is the leader of the Labour party: which was historically established to protect the rights of the working class (ie Socialist, left wing). Blair however seems to see his mission to kiss the arse of Corporate Britain and fuck the workers because if they disagree they're probably don't understand what he's saying.
Blair is so called "New Labour" which has about as much in common with traditional Labour as the "neocons" have with traditional US Conservatives.
Both Bush and Blair strike me as shining examples of why Universal Suffrage doesn't work. Personally I think you should have to pass an exam before you can vote. Only simple stuff like: "Who are the leaders of the 3 main parties?", "Who is the Constituional head of state?". Let's face it, if you can't answer questions like that a) you're not well enough informed to vote and b) you don't fucking deserve to be able to vote.
What sort of exam should be required for potential candidates? You can hardly blame the voters when an election comes down to picking the "best" from a set of bad choices...
To avoid having to carry biometric ID in the UK, where he has the protection of the European convention on human rights he moves to the US, where he gets fingerprinted on entry, and looses all human rights protection. Aliens are not covered by the bill of rights you know.
That would require a "radical interpretation of the text". Given that very few parts draw any distinction between people who are US citizens and those who are not...
Ok, so add biometric identification to the ID we already have; passports, driving licence, etc.
All that does is make it easier to match the document and it's holder. It dosn't prove much otherwise. Also a driving licence was intended to indicate that the holder was competent to drive motor vehicles, subsequently abused as an identity document
but why on earth are we having this centralisation? Surely everything we've learnt about security technologies says a layered approach is needed?
Most people don't understand security, that includes politicans...
What happens when someone beats the system? Everyone will trust it completely because nutters like Blunkett say biometric id is unbeatable.
If anything people should automatically distrust anything the likes of Blunket says. New Labour is more or less the ultimate in "How do you tell when a politican is lying? Their lips are moving."
What about the human element of the system? If someone exploits this database they can write themselves a few new lives,
Or more likely for the criminal gang they are a member of or are bribed/blackmailed by.
To be honest, i'd be for ID cards in a way - we do have a bit of a problem with illegal immigrants in this country lately, who are totally abusing the system - the current trend is buying cheap cars, and then they just drive around the city in them with no tax insurance or anything.
What exactly is to stop them using someone elses ID? The basic problem is that with any such scheme the "bad guys" will simply either use bogus IDs or steal the identity of honest people. ID cards which cannot be forged and total security of the entity doing the issuing is the stuff of science fiction. As with any other form of identity document there will be convincing forgeries and those issuing the "real" thing will be capable of being blackmailed/bribed/etc.
Having one approved form of ID makes identity theft considerably easier.
As far as I know, that doesn't stop a whole lot of software companies from doing just that every year, forcing their customers to either upgrade at 80% of the full price
Where the customer is also likely to wind up with a large bill for "consequential costs"
or watch support for their current version dwindle down to the eventual EOLing in a year or two, maybe three. That is two or three years/version down the road of said product.
This is a technique proprietary software vendors appear to have hit on as a method for gaining extra revenue. It's a technique which dosn't work well with OSS, since no-one, not even the copyright holder can "kill" software with an OS licence. In many real world situations it can take several years to "shake the bugs out" of software.
Also, what kind of support are we talking about here?
The term "support" is one which has been abused to the point where it can be meaningless in many contexts.
REAL support as in talking to one of the developers regarding some weird bug one has encountered?
With proprietary the developers are anonymous, you have no way of knowing if the person who wrote program foo has any contact with vendor bar any more. Whereas with OSS developers tend to have real contact details and anyone can become one or study the code in order to understand it as well as whoever wrote it.
Or support as in cheapo callcenter with underpaid operators where your worth is judged on how quickly you get your ass of the line?
Is this a "support" contract or a contract to have someone answer phone calls?
It's not about whether it works or not. It's about being able to call somebody at 2:00AM when a critical machine goes down, as opposed to waiting for your Usenet post to get propogated, then hoping that l334G33k425 responds to your message in a timely manner and gives you the correct answer. Case in point... my retail businesses have a POS system that I paid for. Granted, there aren't any truly viable OSS ones out there yet, but assume there are. It's worth the money for me to be able to get someone on the phone 30 seconds after it crashes to get my business running again.
Assuming that the person on the end of the phone does actually fix the problem. It isn't unknown for organisations with "commercial support" to make use of usenet/Google/etc in preferance to picking up the phone.
Since very often the people signing the "support" contracts are not the people who use the service they may not be able to tell the difference between a contract to have a vendor make best effort to fix a problem and one which simply requires the answering of a phone call or the sending of a warm body within X hours.
You may see the big wireless companies start to offer packages with airline roaming. How hard would it be for Cingular, Verizon, Sprint, Virgin, etc to work with the airlines.
:)
Well Virgin would be the most obvious possibility. Considering that the same company runs an airline
It won't cause a problem if the cell phone is working properly. The thing people are worried about (for valid or invalid reasons) are what happens if the cell phone is broken and starts transmitting (or have subcarriers or harmonics) on air traffic control or guidance frequencies. The likelihood is small, but it's likely to happen in the most critical moments of flight.
If this is a real risk then it would probably make sense to ban anything capable of transmitting RF from being taken on a plane at all. Otherwise some terrorist could use modified phones to crash planes...
Airport security is a joke anyway. You can be stopped at the security check for things like pocket knives (and even tweezers). Then they allow people to buy things like bottles of wine just before boarding the plane. You could easily smash the bottle while in-flight, and you'd have a weapon far deadlier than any pocket-knife!
With an unsmashed bottle being a rather heavy club. Which is still a nasty weapon even if it breaks... The other interesting thing is that matches and butane lighters were not placed on the prohibited list, even after the "shoe-bomber" incident.
In an airplane your signal will carry much farther so you can hit multiple towers running on the same channels. Going back to the map analogy, once you're 40,000ft above the map there are LOTS of places where you could "see" two separate red cities. When that happens there's a good chance that the slot you're using on the tower you're officially connected to is also in use on the tower you're not supposed to be connected to but you are anyway.
Given a choice between using a cellside at most a few 10's of metres away and one over 10 km away which do you think the typical handset is going to pick.
When you're on the ground and your call drops because some jackass on an airplane owns the same cell you are on then you might care.
The cellsite on the aircraft is not the same as any of the cellsites on the ground. It has it's own ID and is operating at low power inside a metal structure. Thus it's signal will only leave the plane if the door is open, even then it's only likely to go a few metres outside the door.
The exact same thing happened with my old cell phone and my old monitor, but only if the cell phone was lying on the table where it would be about 20 cm from the monitor. Obviously this means, the phone must know the call is comming,
The network is interrogating the phone to check if it is there and has sufficent signal strength to be able to accept the call.
The only thing is, you might as well use the back-of-seat AirPhones to get to that satellite trnasponder rather than your own phone and the picocell...
If you are an airline what would you rather have in your planes? Option A is a pile of handsets and card readers in the passenger cabin, together with miles of cable and a sizable PBX. All of which you have to maintain. Option B is a few boxes together with much less cabling none of which is anywhere passengers should be going.
I get the feeling that even if this allows you to use your cell phone like normal, you're going to be considered to be on a "roaming tower" as far as your cell phone company is concerned because your cell phone company won't own the picocell.
Nothing to stop a phone company "partnering" with an airline.
Therefore, forget about using your unlimited night and weekend minutes on these flights,
Working out "night" and "weekend" gets a bit complex on a plane which is flying East or West, especially on trans-Pacific flights crossing the international date line...
you'll be still paying the same through-the-nose rates for plane-to-ground communications.
With the possibility of incomming as well as outgoing calls.
The primary purpose of a corporation is to protect the shareholders and the people running from mistakes, errors in judgement and grevious wrong doing.
IIRC The original idea was to protect the investors (the shareholders) from financial liability if the undertaking went bankrupt. As well as to enable there to be many investors. But the concept of "limited liability" got added to.