I don't want to listen to people talking next to me.

I think you should be required to text only in the departure area too.

I think it's been established that there is near-zero chance of your phone interfering with the plane itself. Of course, there's the whole "abundance of caution" and "we can't be sure" argument, but this point it's mostly to avoid fights, IMHO.

I always think about the passengers on the 9/11 flight that didn't crash into DC. They stopped it because they talked on their phones. Some of the trans Atlantic lights used to have special, expensive in-flight calls.

Obviously, the first thing terrorists do after taking over a plane is announce that you can use your cell phone and destroy, disable, or tamper with smoke detector in the lavatory.

I would be happy to surrender my phone if only the airlines would do something about the inevitable massive people who overflow their seats in front of mine and heave their masses back into my kneecaps.

I am not a crackpot.

The worst part about flying earlier this summer was how hard it was to get a cup of coffee in the airport.

If the cup had been less than three ounces you could have gotten it into the airport.
The dumbest piece of theater that most insults my scientific sensibilities is that in the US it's 3 ounces and in the rest of the world 100mL and they actually enforce the difference if you happen to have a 100mL container in the US. it's dubious enough that they think you'd be able to make a binary explosive from a 16oz bottle, especially if you're willing to drink to it to show it's not hazardous, but someone is apparently convinced that 11.3 mL is somehow a deadly marginal amount of liquid when you're in America.

My least favorite part is where sometimes they decide to cup your balls. But I guess that's not theater because it would find something hidden.

They can't be expected to believe me when I say I have too much castration anxiety to store explosives near my balls. I didn't even put a cell phone in my pocket for fear of the radiation until about five years ago.

9:. They did that to Nicky Minaj's cousin's friend, because it was suspiciously huge.

I just flew for the first time since 2019, and I forgot to put my phone into airplane mode. There wasn't a crash.

I think there's a different point than the literal safety of the device. During takeoff and landing is when things are most likely to go wrong and when the flight attendants would need to get your attention and have you do something immediately. The restriction on devices during those periods is justified not because the wifi is hazardous but as part of reducing distractions. It would be more honest to say "put everything away and take your headphones off for the next fifteen minutes" but it would be a harder sell.

Problems with flying that are much bigger deals for me than the polite-but-maybe-meaningless requests to use airplane mode: how cramped everything is (I'm an average-sized guy, I assume it is hell for anyone bigger than me) and the hidden fees for everything especially for the reasonable security line.

I'm ambivalent about the entertainment options. Once upon a time planes had 10-inch screens on the back of the seat in front of you. I don't remember how much choice there was in things to watch but I'd guess 20 or so? I think some airlines still do, but for years now the only flying I've been doing is by Alaska Airlines. You get the choice of 300 or so movies and TV episodes for free streaming through on your own device but you pay through the nose if you want to use wifi for anything else. The only problem with the free option is that my own device is a phone, with a dinky screen. I feel like I should be mad about any reduction in service but I have to admit this problem is partly on my end.

I once watched Jupiter Ascending on one of those seat-back screens. It made no sense, though I'm told it didn't make sense on a bigger screen.

I guess my biggest complaint about flying is that you still can't buy edibles in the Denver Airport.

I went on a couple of trips in August, on Delta, and watched all of Mare of Easttown, and several movies.

I never put my phone in airplane mode, but also never have signal when we're more than a few hundred feet off the ground.

I really like airplanes as a way to catch up on movies that aren't good enough for me to want to see them in the theater. Finally had my first long flight in a long time, on the way there I watched Cruella (and then slept), and on the way back Tenet, Parasite (rewatch), Game Night, and then the first two episodes of Pretty Little Liars (rewatch).

Tenet made no sense at all.

The acting was good, so I kept watching until the end.

If I could go back in time, instead of watching Tenet I would have just rewatched Inception, which is basically the same thing but better. In both cases, the main point is the great action set pieces.

Boy the Elizabeth Debecki character was a truly embarrassing amalgamation of every movie trope about women. She did well with what she had to work with, but it just made me want them to put her in a Bond film where she can have fun in an action movie instead of being miserable.

I assumed everyone next to Kenneth Branagh just got like that.

Airplane mode has nothing to do with the safety iof the aircraft ; it's an FCC requirement because otherwise your phone is zipping very fast from one cell to the next and it causes problems with the cell network on the ground.

Fuck those stationary losers.

Jammies downloaded Stand and Deliver for the flight, but had to board before it was fully downloaded and only got about 2/3 of the way through. At the end of the flight he noticed that it is actually the free American Airlines movie this month, to celebrate Hispanic heritage.

I saw that years ago. I think they did learn calculus.

What I expected after watching the Tenet trailer: "Fox Mulder, there's a conspiracy of time travelers trying to take over the world! Anybody could be one of them so trust no one!"

What I got from the Tenet movie: "James Bond, the bad guys are building a really big bomb! Let's go stop them by shooting them with our guns!"

And how to make an origami unicorn.

Since it's a spy thriller I assumed it had something to do with the CIA director of that name.

William Standanddeliver was only deputy director.

hi, Bostonians. I'm driving on your highways.

I've heard that they don't drive nice there.

Anyway, I've never been to Massachusetts.

Jammies' youngest brother is getting married on nantucket.

I've heard the limericks.

Wave as you get anywhere close! I've never actually been to Nantucket.

I've spent a lot of time there, let me know if you need tips. Taking the slow or fast ferry?

Jammies says the fast one? The one with no cars.

I watched parts of Stand and Deliver recently and wondered by the hero protagonist was so abusive to his own students.

"Sandwich Mashpee" is quite an exit name.

39: The 80s were a different time.

34. Don't miss the sleigh ride.

A Texan friend drove me round Cambridge once, keeping up a running commentary on what assholes Boston drivers were. Then he took a wrong turning and to recover did a three point turn right across a fairly large road by the side of the Charles river.

That's a Pittsburgh specialty, the stupid three-point turn. If you want bonus points, you miscalculate and do a four-pointer.

Yes, well. If they were the same time, they'd be now.

31 you can't get there from here

8 in the US it's 3 ounces and in the rest of the world 100mL

The even more annoying international discrepancy is that some countries have decided this applies to anything you take on the plane, even if you bought it in the airport. I've purchased a drink from a vending machine immediately next to a gate at an airport in China, after security, and had them search my bag and throw it away before I boarded the plane. And they explain it by saying "US law requires us to do this."

It's weird to think about flying again. I took one plane trip over the summer, and otherwise I haven't flown since the very end of 2019. I can't quite make sense of the thought that I used to take a plane trip every couple weeks or so, on average.

That's communism.

But going back to flying was weird for me. I wouldn't have done it without great need.

23: it's a mixture of a leftover concern from analogue and early digital that was high power and might conceivably interfere with navigation aids from offboard, and worries about inter-cell handoff speeds from later. The design objective in GSM was originally what would happen when two TGVs passed each other at full speed through a black spot, so all the users would not only do an inter-cell handoff but one that would need the core network's assistance. In practice it's not a problem because mobile networks are designed to cover people on the ground, where we live - you get a lot more coverage by pointing the antenna downwards from the horizon so the fresnel zone intersects the ground, and then putting small cells or distributed antennas in any skyscrapers. So you'd be lucky to actually get service in the cruise without infrastructure in the plane.

Providing good coverage for aviation is a separate challenge. In some of the enterprise 5G things I used to cover, supporting drones, users, and gadgets up on hydrocracker towers or wind turbines was a problem and a driver for doing a private mobile network in the first place, as people don't live in the sky. Nokia Networks and Deutsche Telekom put together a product called the European Aviation Network that was a mixture of 4G antennas pointing upwards and mobile-satellite service. If you recall the kerfuffle about how 5G would end weather forecasting, there's a restriction on the vertical angle of antennas in some frequencies to prevent them interfering with Earth observation satellites for that reason.

The phone calls from 9/11 planes weren't from personal cellular phones (AFAIK) but from satellite phones built into the aircraft, an extension of the airlines' own operational networks. The idea was that you could ask a FA to call ahead, or pick it up yourself, and rebook your connecting flight. The callers - some passengers and some FAs - rang into the customer service centres and got put through from there.

Nobody ever listens to me...

CDMA450's day will come, Steve!

Why doesn't my handheld GPS work on a plane? I always want to know what I'm flying over, but the garmin can't get a signal when I am flying. I used to think "oh, they have some shielding to block signals so you can't detonate a bomb in the luggage compartment from within the plane" but of course cell signals aren't blocked, they work fine from the plane when you're on the ground.

51: I think some were the Airfone, but as they got lower people used cell phones.

I made a call on one of those only once, when I was coming back from a HS trip to London. My new girlfriend had given me a stuffed animal and I brought it on the trip and realized I had left it at the hotel. I called them from over the Atlantic to see if they had found it, which they had. Phone call $10, shipping $30.
And then, reader, I married her.

54: Probably just moving too fast.

You married a stuffed animal?

57 to 58.

Some stuffed animals are very traditional.

||

This is silly, but I was trying to figure out who Jay Inslee reminded me of in this photo: https://www.mcclatchy-wires.com/incoming/dt7k1i/picture253592744/alternates/LANDSCAPE_768/Virus_Outbreak_Washington_44161.jpg

And then I figured it out (it's the glasses and hair for me): https://i.pinimg.com/originals/d8/bc/02/d8bc0249380884a6e143c74457ff9ce6.jpg

|>

The GPS in my phone works on planes with "airplane mode" on, but only if I'm pretty close to a window. I've enjoyed setting the GPS app I have into speedometer mode and watching takeoff speed.

54, 62: obviously the GPS needs to see the sky (and the aircraft's own receivers will have dedicated, external antennas). the "airplane mode" bit is probably disabling A-GPS - the data rate of the GPS signal is not high, so you can start up faster by fetching details of the satellites that are overhead at the moment over the Internet. this won't work without connectivity to the A-GPS infrastructure, hence the option.

62: if you read 63 you can probably guess I used to do that.

19: Tenet explained, with diagrams (major spoilers, natch). It's a complex puzzle box of a film, but I think it does make sense on its own terms. Rewatching with those diagrams in front of us was helpful.

Can we all agree that if a movie doesn't make sense without complex diagramming not provided, it's a bad movie?

66: For me, it's perfectly possible for a movie to not make sense at all and be good. I haven't seen Tenet though, so I'm pretty sure it sucks.

67: That's the way I see it. If it's a good movie, you don't notice things like sense.

I didn't think Tenet actually sucked. It was just O.K.

OK, yes, I'm overstating. Understanding the plot in detail isn't a necessary element of movies. In Tenet's case, though, I thought it was overtly priding itself on the cleverness of its time travel element as a key aspect, so if that falls flat, what's left?

The bungee assault on the high-rise was pretty cool and everyone likes gratuitous Michael Caine.

71: Bungee climbing was meant to be a joke!

So was Twilight, but Robert Pattison got involved with both.

I am assured that the movie Primer made perfect sense. Maybe one of these days I'll watch it again in an effort to confirm.

My wife flies for the first time in 20 months tomorrow, to head back to Columbus, OH for her delayed but not canceled convention. She's dreading it a bit, particularly the airport bits -- the convention is much smaller than normal, but will at least be fully masked, with extra security to assist in keeping mask requirements in mind.

She'd considered adding a stop off on the way to the con, where she could visit family in MO, but abandoned that option as MO's case count climbed in August and realized that she'd be visiting her too young to vaccinate niece after flying and the associated airports.