Thanks for that I was really hoping that Mythbusters had tested it.
"It was found that cell phone signals, specifically those in the 800-900 MHz range, did intefere with unshielded cockpit instrumentation. Because older aircraft with unshielded wiring can be affected, and because of the possible problems that may arise by having many airborne cell phones "seeing" multiple cell phone towers, the FCC (via enforcement through the FAA) still deems it best to err on the safe side and prohibit the use of cell phones while airborne."
So that is interesting, wonder if they suggested modern shielded planes. Also lends credence to ground interferance as the real reason for the "ban"
But that's the part I don't get; there's no "ban" at all! I can bring a bunch of phones on the plane and just not tell them about it. If they search my bags, they'll remove my 200ml of water citing "it's too dangerous" but they'll leave the cellphones alone.
That's not much of a "ban". So I still disagree that phones could interfere in any meaningful way with any aircraft's systems.
Firstly, if the TSA searches your bags and actually finds a "bunch" of cell phones, I bet that they will find an excuse to hassle you about it.
Secondly, your own example shows how shoddy this reasoning is; the TSA is not rational* about what they confiscate and what they don't -- your water isn't dangerous, and they took it, so why would you trust their judgment on cell phones?
Thirdly, the cell phone industry moves much faster than the airline security industry, so it's (vaguely, remotely) possible that some new phone released yesterday is dangerous, whereas old models aren't; the airlines wouldn't know the difference. One could say the same for almost all consumer electronics. So it would be hard to ban "bad" electronic devices and allow "OK" ones, and probably not worthwhile. Banning them all is an option, but just because it's a risk doesn't mean it's enough of a risk to be worth addressing.
*At least, they aren't rationally trying to prevent planes from being hijacked or interfered with; maybe they are doing a good job at other things, like making people feel warm fuzzies about security.
They don't pick on phones over other electronics. On every flight I've been on, they ask passengers to shut off "all portable electronic devices," including things that often don't even communicate over a network, like CD players.
That iconic photo of the London library after a Blitz attack was a postcard I bought many years ago while studying abroad in the UK. I don't recall why I bought it, but I've kept it on the wall at my desk everywhere I've gone. There's something so wonderfully powerful about seeing these men calmly perusing the library stacks amidst ruins from what was then a fairly routine bombing run at a time when it was far from clear that "the good guys" would win.
It's such a splendid 'fuck you' to the Nazis (or whomever your 'enemy' may be) to carry on living your life just as you were planning -- or better yet, enjoying it even more than you'd planned because it's in spite of the circumstances.
I've never been bombed, nor will I probably ever be, so it's always pretty easy to realize what kinda of life lottery ticket I've ended up with.
It's pretty amazing, but people do rapidly adjust to bombing or other high-ambient-threat environments, possibly overly much so. Still obviously worth avoiding.
Once you get down to it, all code is written on top of a platform. Why not use the wisdom of crowds and open it up to everyone so that they can contribute their ideas?
I see the argument, and no doubt it'll be pretty successful, but a large reason why I liked uTorrent is because it was fast and lean. More layers of abstraction tends to lead to slower performance.
I wonder if they're trying to compete with Azureus / Vuze with this?
:| It's the "why no love for the hardcore gamer?" lament all over again. People who care are a minority.
Yes, I want for example that my context menu becomes a platform of sorts, where they can show me good offers on any word selected in any software I use!
We can make it optionally purple and add bananas, if desired.
Okay, after reading through this thread, there seems to be an interesting trend. Almost everyone has beefy processors and lots of memory .... but it is all hooked up to a 19" monitor. Sure, there are people with the 27" iMacs and 30" monitors, but they sure seem a lot less than I would have guessed.
For those of you still using laptop screens, 19" monitors or even 22" monitors, have you tried something bigger? The difference in my productivity between a 30" or 2x24" monitors and the screen on my laptop is palatable. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that given all the cloud computing these days, I'd take a slow system without much memory as my local box if I could get a bigger monitor for it.
Definitely one of my most productive upgrades has been more monitors, I run a 24" in portrait to my left, great for text editing and reading, centre I run a 24" in landscape, to the right I have a 20" attached to a different system and a 8 inch mimo under the center screen to throw media onto, the whole lot rigged to a powered sit/stand workstation :)
Downside is power consumption, upside is I don't have to use the light switch as it never goes dark in here...
I remember reading somewhere else that the results of m$'s study into the productivity benefits of larger or more screens did not hit an upper limit.
I also design websites now and again and it's great to just drag a page around and preview it on different screen sizes in 'reality', mapping the 'visible' window on a larger monitor is not quite the same thing.
We're building the uTorrent client, creating secure and private web services and hacking javascript. There are a lot of positions open, so take a look and see if anything's interesting (programming as well as product).
