please ensure your seat backs and tray tables are in the upright and locked
position and turn off any handheld electronic
devices wait a minute what I mean I
understand why I had to check my paintball gun but is my tiny little
iPhone really going to bring down a Boeing 787 does it really matter if I'm
watching the an excellent recent Techquickie episode about fax machines as
the plane rolls down the tarmac
well to answer this question we need a little bit of History the United States
Federal Communication Commission or FCC
you know the same group of folks at the center of every debate over net
neutrality banned phone calls on planes
way back in 1991 when the privileged few that had
cell phones were carrying around things that looked like
this this rule was passed over concerns
that the radio waves emitted from a cell phone could interfere with more
important radio Transmissions such as Communications between air traffic
control and Pilots so that your plane can avoid you know little obstacles like
thunderstorms mountains and other planes
later on as other types of devices like
portable audio and video players became more widespread there was further
concerned that even devices that didn't transmit data over the air could
interfere with critical airplane Electronics like Positioning Systems and
to be very clear this was more than the
type of idle paranoia that you'd find at a typical PTA meeting in fact one
passenger's handheld DVD player caused an instrument in a cockpit to indicate
the plane was pointed in the wrong direction in an incident back in
1999 with that said modern Aviation
Electronics or avionics resist interference far better
than they used to and on top of that there's never been any definitive
evidence linking portable consumer electronics to an actual crash so in
response to this reality the Federal Aviation Administration relaxed their
rules about exactly when passengers could use their Gadgets in 2013 and
since then US flights have been allowed Electronics use throughout the flight
even below 10,000 ft which was previously banned because takeoff and
Landing are the most dangerous segments of flight when lots of things need to
happen with Precision in a particular order for safe departure and arrival but
the new rule only allows the use of non-transmitting devices so while you
can use an iPad to watch a movie that you've saved to its local storage you
can forget about a voice call on a cellular network hence the famous
airplane mode that stops all transmissions to and from the
device but why I mean we're living in
the age of inflight Wi-Fi for crying out loud which you can learn more about here
and the FCC has even allocated specific
frequencies to Cellular Connections to reduce the risk of interference with
flight why are we still told not to make
a quick call while waiting on an overpriced cocktail from the flight
attendant well the answer may be as
simple as the powers that be being fine
with the rule as it is in April 2017 the
chairman of the FCC actually rejected a
proposal to allow cell phone calls on flights because he this is a quote
valued a moment of quiet at 30,000 ft
with the press release not saying a single word about actual safety and in
Europe passengers are allowed to use their cellular data it's just calls that
are banned to avoid annoying other passengers and I guess there are also
those who further speculate that this could be a case of government Regulators
cozying up to companies who want to charge people for inflight communication
Services we're not going to get too deep into how true that may or may not be but
now that I think about it with the way I get nickel and dimed by the airlines
these days it wouldn't surprise me that much if that were
true although with that said it wouldn't surprise me that much to see a credit
card reader on the lavatory door at some point so speaking of getting nickel and
dimed Synergy doesn't do that Synergy is a software download that solves the
problem of having two keyboards and two mice on your desk at the same time
forget that stuff just install Synergy on all your computers and share one
Mouse and one keyboard between two or more so you'll no longer confuse CH
which one goes with which they offer a basic and a pro option with a one-time
payment for Lifetime access features include things like clipboard sharing
between computers dragging and dropping files between computers the ability to
set up hotkeys and even the ability to share your peripherals between different
operating systems seriously you can have like a Windows a Mac and a Linux PC and
you just move your mouse across them it's like freaking magic so if you want
to try out Synergy and save some money check out the link in the video
description now so thanks for watching
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