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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neeka who wrote (5599)	1/3/2003 3:22:09 AM
From: Maurice Winn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 12231

Well, useless is obviously an extreme exaggeration. I have availed myself of their services and been impressed by Boeing aircraft for decades. A 747 flying over at low altitude coming in for a landing is impressive. So is it when taking off and zooming into the sky. Same for swooping at 1000 kph, 10 km high, with 400 people sitting comfy on board watching movies, eating yummy food [especially in first class] with a probability of dying due to misadventure [excluding malevolence] at near-zero risk. They are a marvel of humanities achievement. So, how come such a simple thing as enabling people to swoop through cyberspace or at least make a phone call is such a difficult and expensive thing to achieve? And how come it's considered hazardous, yet people are even allowed to retain in their possession such hazardous devices as electronics? Even more simple, how come psychotics are allowed to carry on board litres of highly flammable whisky, brandy etc. They need only get the idea of having a mid-flight Islamic Jihad conflagration by smashing bottles of booze and lighting it to cause some substantial mayhem. Again, airlines are showing how clueless they are regarding safety when they allow uncontrolled primates access to litres of volatility and an ignition source, but get wound up about people using cdma2000 cyberphones which have never had any detectable effect on any aircraft let alone be a hazard. Now that I think about it, if they are that clueless, they are obviously unfit to be in charge of an aircraft 10 km high full of people travelling at 1000 kph separated from other aircraft by only a couple of hundred metres. Thank goodness for transponder engineers [and other engineers]. Anyway, if a primary requirement of an aircraft is to retain contact with cyberspace, which any modern aircraft should be able to do, then it is effectively useless. I won't buy a house where there is no fast internet connection. Such houses are now useless to me. As soon as there are aircraft with sensibly priced cyberspace and phone access on call [their idea of sensibly priced is off the planet], aircraft without said services will be useless. Perhaps said Boeing whiners about cdma2000 cyberphones could give us a list of the hazardous experiences they have suffered, and what they have done about protecting aircraft from said electromagnetic attack from within, [other than shutting down the users of said equipment]. It's a bit like service stations banning cellphone usage. The chances of a fire due to a cellphone are near zero. There has never on earth been a fire caused by a cellphone [accidentally]. If there has, it will have been so minor that nobody cares. But if service stations want something to worry about, they could worry about people getting in and out of their cars and getting a spark from static electricity discharge. That can be quite a crack with the right clothing, temperature and humidity conditions. But there's not enough fuel around to cause any kind of fire. Somebody would have to do a bunch of really stupid things, such as squirting petrol around, or tipping over a container they were filling and not noticing it, then somebody would have to cause a spark in the flammable vapour zone. Even if they did that, the fire would be a bit of fun for a few seconds and maybe singe some eyebrows and give a big fright, but not much damage would result. The underground tanks certainly wouldn't blow up or anything fun like that. Neither would a tanker which might happen to be in the way of the flame burst. Mqurice