Tell that to the Latitude D600 sitting on my desk right now. I may not be a corporate user, but I know a better warranty and less pre-installed cruft when I see it (and a good deal in the Dell Outlet). Once their center has moved, I need to call them about an annoying stability problem. Anyone here know why a computer would run forever with a USB device of any sort plugged in, but will crash in 10 minutes without?
Just curious.
nytimes registration not bad, but..
on
Synthesized Singers
·
· Score: 3, Funny
Having been in a research enviroment where exposure/inhalation of airplane glue fumes (we were gluing up parts that were installed and flown on a real airplane (OK, it was tilt-rotor, and those are not real airplanes, but-still) so it counts as airplane glue), I can attest that attempting to sign into the NyTimes website can be greatly hampered by inhalation of airplane glue. Further, when some of those glue-tubes say 'use in a well ventilated area' they mean outdoors in a hurricane.
Now excuse me while I go try find where my brain cells went.
You don't have to launch the minerals into space, just the equipment to mine them. If your mining base can made so its a mostly closed enviroment to reduce support launches, then launch costs are mostly up front. Transporting the material in from the asteroid belt (or moon, but there isn't much worthwhile there as far as I can see), involves decreasing its total energy and letting gravity do its thing and can be done over time, perhaps with a solar-powered ion-thruster, or rockets made using materials found on site (powdered aluminum would work).
As for re-entry, with highly refractive metals, you can just drop a big lump into the atmosphere and aim for shallow water. What could be cheaper? If your material is less heat resistant, wrap it up in some of the waste material from your mining operation to form an ablative heat sheild. The only large expense here is that you would want a high impulse delta-V (think chemical rocket) to give a precise (+/- a couple miles) splashdown. Smaller delta-V would result in a less predictable re-entry and splashdown point similar to Mir's final orbits.
While laws like the DMCA can be found un-constitutional and tossed out by the Supreme Court (hey, they occasionally do the right thing), treaties, once ratified, are equivalent to constitutional amendments. And while an amendment must be approved by both houses of Congress and 34 of the 50 states, a treaty need only make it through the Senate.
Actually, the tallest man made structure of any type is this television antenna in North Dakota. The CN Tower is the tallest free-standing structure. This new building in Taipei is the tallest building with habitable floors from the ground up, if you include the spire. The Sears Tower in Chicago is the tallest in terms of elevation of the highest habitable floor, and the Hancock Building still has the highest residental/apartment level with apartments on the 92nd floor (start on the 44th floor).
As a number of commentators have noted, the Chinese Shenzhou capsules are very similar to the Russian Soyuz. Perhaps just coincidence, but China does take in a lot of foreign, hard currency that the Russians would dearly love to have.
While there is no smoking gun that they did buy the capsule design, it is positively known that China's Long March series rockets received (illegally) several key guidance technologies from US aerospace firms (I think it was Boeing and Hughes, but I may be wrong). At the time (mid-90s) there was massive demand commercial satellite launches, but all Western launch sites were booked for years and then-current Chinese failed so often as to be un-insurable. A few illegal technology transfers, and the reliability of Long March rockets soared, as did the order books of satellite builders. The offending companies still do business with the DoD, and never even had a thorough management as a result of this. Go figure.
As for exploring space, Japan, France and Brazil all have demonstrated successful space launch capabilities, they simply haven't bothered to strap a sack of flesh to the top of one of their rockets.
When you consider that we went to the moon with Sixties technology, designed by guys (girls didn't do engineering back then) with slide rules, I don't think that the technology level poses an obstacle.
Remember that only computers become more technologically advanced at the rate computers do. All mechanical systems advance on much longer time scales. There is nothing radically different between a new rocket engine fresh off the assembly line and those in museums. Most of the change is in lighter/stronger materials and 40+ years of design optimization. And the Apollo moon rockets were designed by thousands engineers representing a substantial fraction of the intellectual capital of a superpower, backed up by much of the computing power then in existance, operating with near-limitless budgets. Finally, given that even after spending billions of dollars, the Japanese rocket program has yet to achieve a success rate over 50%
The technology involved in space operations is not trivial, and the consequences of failure are invariably spectacular (they are lots of recordings of rockets blowing up, and not just because they used lots of cameras). Making remarks like 'it must be easy because they used slide rules' indicates a lack of understanding of what it took to launch the first astronauts. And if too many people competing for the X-Prize think the same as you, then the consolation prizes might just be a number of Darwin Awards.
Seriously. Several middle school classes in my district used hypercard quite a bit, to do presentations. It was easy to use for that purpose, and for sixth graders anything that involved computers was fun. And messing around with Hypercard, inserting pointless slide transistions and odd sounds was lots of fun.
Then while I was in high school we made the transistion to PCs and Powerpoint. And with Powerpoint everything became less fun and more work. It was not as easy to do things like linked slides for non-linear type presentations.
So as a result, I always thought that Hypercard was just for creating nifty presentations (which easily impressed most parents) and was the precursor to Powerpoint. And like most ideas MS lifted from Apple, they didn't do it near as well (or so it seemed to me).
Isn't this what everyone (mostly Slashdot keyboard pundits) has been saying they should do for months now? Namely making an effort to stop the flow of movies into the P2P channels. If they pull this off, there might actually be a noticeable drop in the number of high quality rips appearing before a movie is in the theaters. And the seems to be the biggest of the MPAA's pet peeves. At least with the video camera copies, one person had to actually buy a ticket.
Short version: There is absolutely nothing to worry about. Read on for the long version.
That is because throwing 48 pounds of Pu-238 (which is useless as weapons grade material, Pu-239 is much better for sustaining fission chain reactions) into Jupiter is like tossing a salt shaker into the ocean. Jupiter already has massive radition belts generated by its interactions with the solar wind. It has surely ingested more than 48 pounds of the various isotopes of Uranium from the thousands or millions of meteorite strikes Jupiter has sustained. And the total energy that could be released by complete fission of all of that plutonium into stable elements would insignificant next to the gravitational-potential energy released by the steady contraction of Jupiter's gas clouds that results from the planet's massive gravitational pull. Because of this contraction, Jupiter already releases significantly more energy back into space that it absorbs from the sun.
Finally, with a total mass that is about 0.0001 times that of the Sun, Jupiter is too small to support fusion reactions in its core by about two (2) orders of magnitude. The smallest stars are about 0.08 times the Sun's mass.
Unless you are actually worried about taking up too much space (and why should we let that get in the way?), why use one of those little mini-dishes? Go all out and find an old 8-ft diameter big dish system. Not only will get a much larger reflector area, but if the control arm and box are still in working order, you can remotely slew over an arc of about 50-60 degrees without modification. This could let you change focus to different nodes from your computer.
Plus it is far more conspicuous, and therefore infinitely more cool.
No, they are not safe from lightning at all. A couple years ago, an MD-80 series airliner was struck by lightning at cruise altitude. The cover for the radar was blown off the front, a hole was zorched in one of the wingtips and the cockpit instrumentation was reduced to 1930's levels.
An older airplane with piston engines would have simply exploded (gasoline is much more volitale than jet fuel).
There are reasons that pilots avoid thunderstorms.
However requiring a license or certification of some sort to run a server that can connect to the outside world might be worth considering.
It would be somewhat analagous to the way FM or shortwave radio works. Anybody with a net connection can 'receive' the internet (and post to message boards, send email, IM, etc). To do this they would only need to have a few well defined port numbers open on their machine and the rest could be blocked some way or another. Maybe something in the hardware of the $15 consumer NIC cards if that would work (or maybe built into home routers?). Licensed/certified users could purchase slightly more expensive cards with full transmit capability (and probably other handy server features like load balancing and CPU offloading) that would allow all ports/connection types through. Kinda like how you need an FCC license to own and operate an FM transmitter above a certain power level.
Even though I am sure he had nothing to do with it.
A friend of mine works at NASA's Glenn Research Center near Cleveland (about where this whole mess started). GRC is where NASA has a very large, supersonic wind tunnel (large as in can accommodate full size mock-ups of fighter planes). When they run it during peak hours (rarely), it costs upwards of a million dollars per hour and causes localized blackouts in Cleveland. So I will have to make some sort of comment along the lines of "You just HAD to push to big, green button, didn't you?"
I also know that it wasn't the tunnel I work with in Chicago; we can only cause localized brownouts from the transient currents when we start the motor (rated for 1.5MW, starting power-draw is several times that). On an unrelated note, the sound of the capacitors charging is very similar to the noise you would expect from an evil villain's death ray.
Actually all of the state gas taxes are be law reserved for transportation projects (10-20% mandated for mass transportation), if I recall correctly (my permanent address is in Cottage Grove). The state-level road funds are actually padded with more money out of the general fund plus special bond measures and the like. The firestation you refer to is probably a legacy of the flusher times, or was paid for with a bond measure.
The Federal gas tax, however, is over half the total gas tax paid and goes into the general revenue funds for the Federal government.
Specifically, the Oregon legislature, in its infinite lack of wisdom, proposed replacing the current gas tax with a GPS based system that would track the total number of miles you drive regardless of road type (Previous Slashdot Article). The GPS receiver/controller would be mounted on the car and would report the number of miles driven to a receiver built into the gas station so the road tax could be added to your total. They thought this would be better received than an increase in the gas tax.
And they were wrong. Even those not concerned about obvious privacy issues objected to the costs of the GPS unit, costs of upgrading gas stations, getting billed for travel on private roads and the fact that it penalizes onwers of fuel efficient vehicles by charging a flat rate. That and refitting older vehicles. And billing out-of-state drivers. The list of problems was endless, the benefits were few to none. The backlash was noteworthy and I have not see much more about it since it was first proposed; with luck the legislative will realize just how bad of an idea it was and drop it forever.
Oh, in case some think I am an anti-tax nutcase, I support reasonable increases in gas taxes and vehicle registration fees to pay for the massive road network I enjoy so much. Tollways, however, annoy me to no end.
Those bloody high-energy physics guys will not be happy until they manage to turn their big particle accelerators into giant, glowing holes in the ground. Why don't they go do something useful, like violating Newton's Laws or whatnot.
Why can't we have the ships from the Wing Commander series on there? Espcially the alien ships from Prophecy, as I recall, length of the final battleship was measured in miles. Flying around required a fair bit of time or a lot of afterburner fuel. That, and it had to whole squid looking thing going for it. And it was a very fun game, shame it doesn't get along with Win2K.
I would not be suprised if the airlines did consider banning all wireless capable electronics.
Some people here have said that airplanes must be resistant to EM because of exposure to all the radio noise from ground based sources. But keep in mind, radiation intensity decreases as a 1/R^2 function, so a 1-watt radio source 30ft away causes as much interference as a 1-Megawatt source 30,000ft away. A transmitter outputing a few milliwatts on the right frequency can potenitally drown out a GPS signal (a couple kW of power a couple thousand miles away). FCC/FAA regulations keep the really high-power stuff well away from airports, and aircraft, even military fighters, have been downed by flying too close FM radio antannee. Your typical airport radar can not actually 'see' aircraft, it interrogates that aircraft's transponder, which sends a reply containing far more information than a full 'skin paint' radar gets from the bounced signal.
Now imagine a whole slew of low-power transmitters scattered throughout the cabin. Even everything is operating with its designed limits (which is not a given with consumer electronics), the radiated EM can possibly resonate within the many, many odd shaped cavities in the structure of the aircraft, re-radiating on an entirely different frequency and at an amplified power level. And there is very little protecting the aircraft wiring and systems from noise generated inside the aircraft. This is why internal noise is so much more dangerous than external noise, which is absorbed and re-radiated outward by the skin of the airplane. Throw in the fact than airlines are very paranoid about allowing anything that might endanger the safety of an airplane because if they do, and a crash results, the lawyers will have a field day with them.
As for adding more shielding, it adds weight, in adds volume in already tight spaces, it adds initial cost, it adds mainainence time and costs and all this results in higher operating costs. It works out to roughly $300/pound in initial costs and about $500/pound/year in operating costs. Add 2000 pounds of shielding to a small airliner, the increases in costs become significant. Much more expensive than banning some devices that few travelers use and from which some will welcome the break. And 2000 pounds for one small airliner is not unreasonable given that EM hardening all of Air Force One used up a good chunk of its usable payload (on the order of tens of tons).
Now, if we could just ban cellphones from the face of this Earth...
That is, depending on the power density of the beam, it may actually be capable of cooking birds in flight. Seriously.
The radars on some US Navy ships can put out enough power along a single line of bearing to damage aircraft electrical systems at a range of a couple miles. Microwaves are a byproduct of radar research, when it was discovered that radio waves of a particular high frequency were strongly absorbed by water molecules, causing them to heat up very rapidly. So a microwave beam of sufficient power to light a small town could legitimately pose a hazard to birds and other animals.
If they don't want unsightly powerlines, why not just bury the things underground?
I mean, given that us aerospace engineering types are always arguing with the physics people over whether or not we are 'rocket scientists,' the code monkeys can stick an engineering title next the entrance to their little cubicles.
But I will still refer to programming as 'technical writing' just to start a brouhaha.
Well, actually we all need to run WEST if we want to speed the Earth up a little. And it would work, just not as well as some giant rocket engine (think cartoon villian plots sized giant rocket). You work on running, I'll build the rocket.
There is a very simple way to avoid dealing the morons who work at Fry's - buy retail pack items. Then, if something goes wrong, you deal with a company that has a reputation and would like to keep it. And price the disparity between OEM and retail is a lot less than what it once was.
Then, by all means, be unreasonable to them. If they are going to refuse to roll-out broadband on any scale until the Kansas legislature kills off SBC's competition, then I say the Kansas legislature should put its regulatory power to good use.
Deeming widespread availability of high-speed internet access to be critical to the economic growth of the state, they should require that all the companies that own the lines make any upgrades required to support DSL/high speed modems under penalty of losing the licenses and/or losing their right of ways.
While I tend to support deregulation in many areas of the economy, I think the actual infrastructure (roads, powerlines, water mains, etc) should be managed, or at least heavily monitored, by the government. And residential utilities need some form of regulatory safety net to prevent abuse. In Oregon there are still some incorporated towns that do not have landline phone service because Qwest won't run a line out there unless the Oregon legislature does for them what SBC wants from Kansas.
Some people say to fight fire with fire, I maintain that fire should be fought with a flamethrower.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell that to the Latitude D600 sitting on my desk right now. I may not be a corporate user, but I know a better warranty and less pre-installed cruft when I see it (and a good deal in the Dell Outlet). Once their center has moved, I need to call them about an annoying stability problem. Anyone here know why a computer would run forever with a USB device of any sort plugged in, but will crash in 10 minutes without?
Just curious.
Having been in a research enviroment where exposure/inhalation of airplane glue fumes (we were gluing up parts that were installed and flown on a real airplane (OK, it was tilt-rotor, and those are not real airplanes, but-still) so it counts as airplane glue), I can attest that attempting to sign into the NyTimes website can be greatly hampered by inhalation of airplane glue. Further, when some of those glue-tubes say 'use in a well ventilated area' they mean outdoors in a hurricane.
Now excuse me while I go try find where my brain cells went.
You don't have to launch the minerals into space, just the equipment to mine them. If your mining base can made so its a mostly closed enviroment to reduce support launches, then launch costs are mostly up front. Transporting the material in from the asteroid belt (or moon, but there isn't much worthwhile there as far as I can see), involves decreasing its total energy and letting gravity do its thing and can be done over time, perhaps with a solar-powered ion-thruster, or rockets made using materials found on site (powdered aluminum would work).
.sig, as this is rocket science (woohoo!).
As for re-entry, with highly refractive metals, you can just drop a big lump into the atmosphere and aim for shallow water. What could be cheaper? If your material is less heat resistant, wrap it up in some of the waste material from your mining operation to form an ablative heat sheild. The only large expense here is that you would want a high impulse delta-V (think chemical rocket) to give a precise (+/- a couple miles) splashdown. Smaller delta-V would result in a less predictable re-entry and splashdown point similar to Mir's final orbits.
Ignore
While laws like the DMCA can be found un-constitutional and tossed out by the Supreme Court (hey, they occasionally do the right thing), treaties, once ratified, are equivalent to constitutional amendments. And while an amendment must be approved by both houses of Congress and 34 of the 50 states, a treaty need only make it through the Senate.
Actually, the tallest man made structure of any type is this television antenna in North Dakota. The CN Tower is the tallest free-standing structure. This new building in Taipei is the tallest building with habitable floors from the ground up, if you include the spire. The Sears Tower in Chicago is the tallest in terms of elevation of the highest habitable floor, and the Hancock Building still has the highest residental/apartment level with apartments on the 92nd floor (start on the 44th floor).
As a number of commentators have noted, the Chinese Shenzhou capsules are very similar to the Russian Soyuz. Perhaps just coincidence, but China does take in a lot of foreign, hard currency that the Russians would dearly love to have.
While there is no smoking gun that they did buy the capsule design, it is positively known that China's Long March series rockets received (illegally) several key guidance technologies from US aerospace firms (I think it was Boeing and Hughes, but I may be wrong). At the time (mid-90s) there was massive demand commercial satellite launches, but all Western launch sites were booked for years and then-current Chinese failed so often as to be un-insurable. A few illegal technology transfers, and the reliability of Long March rockets soared, as did the order books of satellite builders. The offending companies still do business with the DoD, and never even had a thorough management as a result of this. Go figure.
As for exploring space, Japan, France and Brazil all have demonstrated successful space launch capabilities, they simply haven't bothered to strap a sack of flesh to the top of one of their rockets.
When you consider that we went to the moon with Sixties technology, designed by guys (girls didn't do engineering back then) with slide rules, I don't think that the technology level poses an obstacle.
Remember that only computers become more technologically advanced at the rate computers do. All mechanical systems advance on much longer time scales. There is nothing radically different between a new rocket engine fresh off the assembly line and those in museums. Most of the change is in lighter/stronger materials and 40+ years of design optimization. And the Apollo moon rockets were designed by thousands engineers representing a substantial fraction of the intellectual capital of a superpower, backed up by much of the computing power then in existance, operating with near-limitless budgets. Finally, given that even after spending billions of dollars, the Japanese rocket program has yet to achieve a success rate over 50%
The technology involved in space operations is not trivial, and the consequences of failure are invariably spectacular (they are lots of recordings of rockets blowing up, and not just because they used lots of cameras). Making remarks like 'it must be easy because they used slide rules' indicates a lack of understanding of what it took to launch the first astronauts. And if too many people competing for the X-Prize think the same as you, then the consolation prizes might just be a number of Darwin Awards.
Seriously. Several middle school classes in my district used hypercard quite a bit, to do presentations. It was easy to use for that purpose, and for sixth graders anything that involved computers was fun. And messing around with Hypercard, inserting pointless slide transistions and odd sounds was lots of fun.
Then while I was in high school we made the transistion to PCs and Powerpoint. And with Powerpoint everything became less fun and more work. It was not as easy to do things like linked slides for non-linear type presentations.
So as a result, I always thought that Hypercard was just for creating nifty presentations (which easily impressed most parents) and was the precursor to Powerpoint. And like most ideas MS lifted from Apple, they didn't do it near as well (or so it seemed to me).
Isn't this what everyone (mostly Slashdot keyboard pundits) has been saying they should do for months now? Namely making an effort to stop the flow of movies into the P2P channels. If they pull this off, there might actually be a noticeable drop in the number of high quality rips appearing before a movie is in the theaters. And the seems to be the biggest of the MPAA's pet peeves. At least with the video camera copies, one person had to actually buy a ticket.
And it might even work.
Short version: There is absolutely nothing to worry about. Read on for the long version.
That is because throwing 48 pounds of Pu-238 (which is useless as weapons grade material, Pu-239 is much better for sustaining fission chain reactions) into Jupiter is like tossing a salt shaker into the ocean. Jupiter already has massive radition belts generated by its interactions with the solar wind. It has surely ingested more than 48 pounds of the various isotopes of Uranium from the thousands or millions of meteorite strikes Jupiter has sustained. And the total energy that could be released by complete fission of all of that plutonium into stable elements would insignificant next to the gravitational-potential energy released by the steady contraction of Jupiter's gas clouds that results from the planet's massive gravitational pull. Because of this contraction, Jupiter already releases significantly more energy back into space that it absorbs from the sun.
Finally, with a total mass that is about 0.0001 times that of the Sun, Jupiter is too small to support fusion reactions in its core by about two (2) orders of magnitude. The smallest stars are about 0.08 times the Sun's mass.
Unless you are actually worried about taking up too much space (and why should we let that get in the way?), why use one of those little mini-dishes? Go all out and find an old 8-ft diameter big dish system. Not only will get a much larger reflector area, but if the control arm and box are still in working order, you can remotely slew over an arc of about 50-60 degrees without modification. This could let you change focus to different nodes from your computer.
Plus it is far more conspicuous, and therefore infinitely more cool.
No, they are not safe from lightning at all. A couple years ago, an MD-80 series airliner was struck by lightning at cruise altitude. The cover for the radar was blown off the front, a hole was zorched in one of the wingtips and the cockpit instrumentation was reduced to 1930's levels.
An older airplane with piston engines would have simply exploded (gasoline is much more volitale than jet fuel).
There are reasons that pilots avoid thunderstorms.
However requiring a license or certification of some sort to run a server that can connect to the outside world might be worth considering.
It would be somewhat analagous to the way FM or shortwave radio works. Anybody with a net connection can 'receive' the internet (and post to message boards, send email, IM, etc). To do this they would only need to have a few well defined port numbers open on their machine and the rest could be blocked some way or another. Maybe something in the hardware of the $15 consumer NIC cards if that would work (or maybe built into home routers?). Licensed/certified users could purchase slightly more expensive cards with full transmit capability (and probably other handy server features like load balancing and CPU offloading) that would allow all ports/connection types through. Kinda like how you need an FCC license to own and operate an FM transmitter above a certain power level.
Even though I am sure he had nothing to do with it.
A friend of mine works at NASA's Glenn Research Center near Cleveland (about where this whole mess started). GRC is where NASA has a very large, supersonic wind tunnel (large as in can accommodate full size mock-ups of fighter planes). When they run it during peak hours (rarely), it costs upwards of a million dollars per hour and causes localized blackouts in Cleveland. So I will have to make some sort of comment along the lines of "You just HAD to push to big, green button, didn't you?"
I also know that it wasn't the tunnel I work with in Chicago; we can only cause localized brownouts from the transient currents when we start the motor (rated for 1.5MW, starting power-draw is several times that). On an unrelated note, the sound of the capacitors charging is very similar to the noise you would expect from an evil villain's death ray.
Actually all of the state gas taxes are be law reserved for transportation projects (10-20% mandated for mass transportation), if I recall correctly (my permanent address is in Cottage Grove). The state-level road funds are actually padded with more money out of the general fund plus special bond measures and the like. The firestation you refer to is probably a legacy of the flusher times, or was paid for with a bond measure.
The Federal gas tax, however, is over half the total gas tax paid and goes into the general revenue funds for the Federal government.
Specifically, the Oregon legislature, in its infinite lack of wisdom, proposed replacing the current gas tax with a GPS based system that would track the total number of miles you drive regardless of road type (Previous Slashdot Article). The GPS receiver/controller would be mounted on the car and would report the number of miles driven to a receiver built into the gas station so the road tax could be added to your total. They thought this would be better received than an increase in the gas tax.
And they were wrong. Even those not concerned about obvious privacy issues objected to the costs of the GPS unit, costs of upgrading gas stations, getting billed for travel on private roads and the fact that it penalizes onwers of fuel efficient vehicles by charging a flat rate. That and refitting older vehicles. And billing out-of-state drivers. The list of problems was endless, the benefits were few to none. The backlash was noteworthy and I have not see much more about it since it was first proposed; with luck the legislative will realize just how bad of an idea it was and drop it forever.
Oh, in case some think I am an anti-tax nutcase, I support reasonable increases in gas taxes and vehicle registration fees to pay for the massive road network I enjoy so much. Tollways, however, annoy me to no end.
Those bloody high-energy physics guys will not be happy until they manage to turn their big particle accelerators into giant, glowing holes in the ground. Why don't they go do something useful, like violating Newton's Laws or whatnot.
Why can't we have the ships from the Wing Commander series on there? Espcially the alien ships from Prophecy, as I recall, length of the final battleship was measured in miles. Flying around required a fair bit of time or a lot of afterburner fuel. That, and it had to whole squid looking thing going for it. And it was a very fun game, shame it doesn't get along with Win2K.
I would not be suprised if the airlines did consider banning all wireless capable electronics.
...
Some people here have said that airplanes must be resistant to EM because of exposure to all the radio noise from ground based sources. But keep in mind, radiation intensity decreases as a 1/R^2 function, so a 1-watt radio source 30ft away causes as much interference as a 1-Megawatt source 30,000ft away. A transmitter outputing a few milliwatts on the right frequency can potenitally drown out a GPS signal (a couple kW of power a couple thousand miles away). FCC/FAA regulations keep the really high-power stuff well away from airports, and aircraft, even military fighters, have been downed by flying too close FM radio antannee. Your typical airport radar can not actually 'see' aircraft, it interrogates that aircraft's transponder, which sends a reply containing far more information than a full 'skin paint' radar gets from the bounced signal.
Now imagine a whole slew of low-power transmitters scattered throughout the cabin. Even everything is operating with its designed limits (which is not a given with consumer electronics), the radiated EM can possibly resonate within the many, many odd shaped cavities in the structure of the aircraft, re-radiating on an entirely different frequency and at an amplified power level. And there is very little protecting the aircraft wiring and systems from noise generated inside the aircraft. This is why internal noise is so much more dangerous than external noise, which is absorbed and re-radiated outward by the skin of the airplane. Throw in the fact than airlines are very paranoid about allowing anything that might endanger the safety of an airplane because if they do, and a crash results, the lawyers will have a field day with them.
As for adding more shielding, it adds weight, in adds volume in already tight spaces, it adds initial cost, it adds mainainence time and costs and all this results in higher operating costs. It works out to roughly $300/pound in initial costs and about $500/pound/year in operating costs. Add 2000 pounds of shielding to a small airliner, the increases in costs become significant. Much more expensive than banning some devices that few travelers use and from which some will welcome the break. And 2000 pounds for one small airliner is not unreasonable given that EM hardening all of Air Force One used up a good chunk of its usable payload (on the order of tens of tons).
Now, if we could just ban cellphones from the face of this Earth
That is, depending on the power density of the beam, it may actually be capable of cooking birds in flight. Seriously.
The radars on some US Navy ships can put out enough power along a single line of bearing to damage aircraft electrical systems at a range of a couple miles. Microwaves are a byproduct of radar research, when it was discovered that radio waves of a particular high frequency were strongly absorbed by water molecules, causing them to heat up very rapidly. So a microwave beam of sufficient power to light a small town could legitimately pose a hazard to birds and other animals.
If they don't want unsightly powerlines, why not just bury the things underground?
I mean, given that us aerospace engineering types are always arguing with the physics people over whether or not we are 'rocket scientists,' the code monkeys can stick an engineering title next the entrance to their little cubicles.
But I will still refer to programming as 'technical writing' just to start a brouhaha.
Well, actually we all need to run WEST if we want to speed the Earth up a little. And it would work, just not as well as some giant rocket engine (think cartoon villian plots sized giant rocket). You work on running, I'll build the rocket.
There is a very simple way to avoid dealing the morons who work at Fry's - buy retail pack items. Then, if something goes wrong, you deal with a company that has a reputation and would like to keep it. And price the disparity between OEM and retail is a lot less than what it once was.
Got turbomachinery???
Then, by all means, be unreasonable to them. If they are going to refuse to roll-out broadband on any scale until the Kansas legislature kills off SBC's competition, then I say the Kansas legislature should put its regulatory power to good use.
Deeming widespread availability of high-speed internet access to be critical to the economic growth of the state, they should require that all the companies that own the lines make any upgrades required to support DSL/high speed modems under penalty of losing the licenses and/or losing their right of ways.
While I tend to support deregulation in many areas of the economy, I think the actual infrastructure (roads, powerlines, water mains, etc) should be managed, or at least heavily monitored, by the government. And residential utilities need some form of regulatory safety net to prevent abuse. In Oregon there are still some incorporated towns that do not have landline phone service because Qwest won't run a line out there unless the Oregon legislature does for them what SBC wants from Kansas.
Some people say to fight fire with fire, I maintain that fire should be fought with a flamethrower.