Chilean airplane crash located via Apple's Find My iPhone - Page 3

Again, you are completely off base. Just stating it as if you know it to be fact doesn't make it a fact.

That is NOT AT ALL the reason they tell you to turn stuff off on airplanes.
(The rest of your posting becomes even less believable when you say stuff like that.)

Keeping my iPad on airplane mode and not shutting it off is not the same thing as driving down the road at 100 mph.

There's that saying which goes "If you can't do the time, then don't do the crime.", and after carefully assessing the situation, I was fully prepared to suffer the consequences of leaving my iPad on airplane mode, if I were somehow to be caught.

I was also prepared to suffer the social stigma and possible job loss that comes with being a category 3 iOS Airplane Mode Offender, it's practically on the same level as an Al-Qaeda terrorist.

Exactly! They actually want you to turn off ALL electronic devices during takeoff and landing, airplane mode or not. This has been the case for decades before even cell phones were around.

Unfortunately the poster you replied to would prefer to continue this path of self-incineration rather by making up "facts" than get the courage to admit he was wrong.

Most would be perplexed just by the the title of that movie. Have no fear, our parents thought our generation was doomed because we were playing too much of them Nintendo and watching teevee... When we should have been reading books, playing in the park and what not. Now our generation bitches about kids whose lives revolve, almost literally, around Facebook and Xbox360. I do sometimes shudder at the thought that when I was a kid a fully naked woman was only to be found in a well-branded magazine stowed away in a boarding schoolmate's cupboard. Now you have millions at the click of a mouse or touch of a finger.

You never know though... To those of us in our 30s, who would have guessed ignoring our moms yelling at us to "Get off that computer thing, those green radiation-spewing screens are going to rot your brain..." ... eventually led us to being one rung above the average office slave who now cannot even function professionally and socially without Internet access at work.

On a lighter note, apparently in Chile one might have various loved ones concerned for you... see the Chilean miner "lovers fight" case. Karma's a bitch sometimes... Or a blessing, who knows how it turned out.

But when going out with one of my ex-girlfriends, I swear if she knew more about Find My iPhone she would demand I give her access to my account. This kind of thing is not so uncommon in Asia, I've had friends have to hand over their Facebook account logins to their girlfriends to monitor their "activity". No friending of any cutie-pie sweet young things.

In any case, my condolences to all that lost friends, family and loved ones.

Mythbusters investigated this. They did find that a cell phone operating on the 800MHz band interfered with unshielded equipment in a mock-up cockpit, but that does not reflect reality. When they tested it in a real, modern plane (while taxiing, since they couldn't legally use the phone while flying), they found no effect whatsoever.

Their conclusion is that cell phones are harmless to aviation, but the FAA regulation remains in force because they don't want to have to test the billions of permutations of avionics and cell phones, to make certain there isn't a potentially dangerous combination. I agree with their conclusion.

In addition to FAA regulations, however, there is also an FCC regulation against phones (at least those that use the 800MHz band) in flight. The justification here is that it may interfere with ground-based wireless communications. The validity of this is debatable, but the FCC doesn't want to take any chances.

I've also read that the cell carriers don't want to allow phone use in flight. As I understand it, a cell phone at cruising altitude is potentially in range of hundreds of towers at once, and is moving very rapidly (hundreds of miles per hour.) This puts a lot of extra stress on a network that's designed for ground-based handsets (where you're usually in range of less than 10 towers at a time, and moving no faster than highway speeds.) Although the tech can keep up with the stress of phones in flight, today's equipment would be overwhelmed if everybody did it. In order to reliably handle that kind of load, the carriers would have to spend a lot of money in network upgrades, which they'd rather spend on other kinds of system upgrades.

Assuming there was a tower within range of that crash site, of course...

This makes a lot more sense than other justifications I've been told. Especially when you consider the fact that we all carry devices that can't be turned off (like my Palm PDA and my iPod, which can only go into standby mode, and can't be turned off.) These devices are just as much a "threat" to navigation, whether in use or not. But as a distraction from a potential emergency, the argument makes sense.

Of course, if it's a distraction we're talking about, then they should also prohibit reading books during takeoff and landing, which nobody does.

Note also that some airlines have some very wacky rules. For instance, Alitalia prohibits devices with optical drives (some computers, CD players, DVD players) at any time while in flight, while permitting similar devices (computers, iPods, etc.) without optical drives. This makes no sense at all, and I've never seen any other airline with such a rule. When you ask why, they say it's the law, but I'm 100% certain that the only law involved here is the one that says you have to do what the flight crew tells you to do.

OK, I wasn't going to chime in but after reading all your posts I have to. Your logic is flawed. A few points:
1. No one claimed your sample is skewed...it IS skewed. You work tech support. The people who can figure out tech on their own don't call you. Saying we're ignoring the fact that we're on an Apple message board is immaterial as none of us are making the exaggerated claims you are making.
2. You are making an effort to tell us how successful you are even though none of us asked. That would imlpy a feeling of inadequacy on some level. Perhaps lack of formal education or not being accepted by peers and/or family. Of course, I'm no psycologist, but I have seen a few episodes of The Mentalist (I'm making a joke here.)
3. If you imply that a huge portion of the population is inept in some manner, expect to hear something back from them.

I'm 35 but it already annoys me how people in their early 20's think the world revolves around them and they know everything. I mean, a 22 year old realizes they are much smarter than a 15 year old due to their additional 7 years of knowledge, but they can never reverse that logic and say, "Oh wow, that 40 year old probably knows a whole lot more than me!" Instead, they assume you become an completely irrelevant idiot after age 29. Unfortunately, I was somewhat similar in my thinking at that age. I suppose it will never change.

That is all. Congratulations on your success at starting your company and I hope it continues. While you may get stressed by people asking you seemingly silly questions try to be patient and remember there are many different forms of intelligence. We old folk might

.... fall asleep in the middle of typing a response?

Ouch!

You could just as easily say the opposite - no one under 40 even knows how a computer works or can appreciate the engineering that goes into them.

That's pretty funny ...but no, trying to type all that on my phone and it got cut off.

That's almost true.

I'm 41 now. I programmed small computers (TRS-80, Apple-II) in assembly language back then. I performed manual repair (with a sector editor) on floppy discs. Wrote my own printer-driver code based on the protocol specs (that came with the owner's manual!) I've assembled PCs from discrete components and swapped out individual chips to upgrade it.

When PCs came about, I learned the ins-and-outs of the CONFIG.SYS file, parameters for memory managers, low-level disk formatting, BIOS calls and DOS interrupts, register-level hacks to make video cards do things they weren't meant to do, and other such stuff. I've learned the guts of WIN.INI, and later the Registry in all its (both beautiful and ugly) glory. I've written code directly for the Windows APIs, long before the world switched to massive class libraries, Java, Flash and browser scripting. Ditto for the UNIX world - I've configured and built kernels, written apps to the lowest-level APIs, built X11 apps using only the core Xlib APIs, etc.

In other words, I know not only what the computers do, but what's going on inside, and why lots of fundamental design decisions were made.

But if you talk to the 20-somethings today, they know none of this. They know that you turn it on and it works. And if it doesn't work, you call tech support, who wipes the hard drive and reinstalls everything from scratch, and if that fails, replaces the entire computer, never having a clue about what's going on, let alone determine and fix what's really broken.