PDFs very much can be searchable, and cut & paste-able, etc.

That was how it ended up for Firewire - its higher-bandwidth meant it was still useful for niche applications. However, Firewire was developed to do the same job as USB - general purpose, serial, packetised bus for peripherals. The reason it failed was because Apple wanted a royalty on every implementation.

That's not at all my memory. Intel were including USB on motherboards, and so the ports were very prevalent. You're right there few peripherals initially, because Windows didn't support USB until Windows 95 OSR2 (late 96), and not usefully so until OSR2.1 (late 97). Apple were pushing their Firewire instead. USB featured famously in Bill Gates' launch demo of Windows 98 in April '98, when it BSODed when a USB peripheral was live-plugged in. However, USB support in '98 was otherwise pretty good.

That Apple changed course relatively quickly, and accepted USB had achieved market acceptance in a way that Firewire would not, does not change the fact that Apple before that were pushing Firewire to fill the same needs as, and *rather than*, USB, and that Apple hardware did NOT feature USB until *LONG* (2+) years after it was implemented by default on PC boards.

No, Apple developed IEEE 1394. Apple were quite resistant to USB initially.

It is definitely not the case at DUB or GLA, both of which certainly handle international traffic. DUB also handles some international transfer traffic - it actually has US Immigration there that you go through /before/ boarding a US bound flight.

If it really is generally the case, then I suspect you're confused about what "European" generally means (possibly you actually mean "Schengen" area). I'm still sceptical though. Can you provide a citation? :)

Amen to this, security at Schiphol is getting ridiculous and annoying. They took a bottle of water off us when we transferred, even though we had bought it airside at our departing airport. The immigration control to get to the Schengen area is also annoying - long queues. The Marchaussee check-point (customs/immigration) is slow, and the dumb phony-exploding-water security check there-after is often even slower - causing further slow-down at the Marchaussee check-point. :(

“All European international airports have an area behind customs declared 'neutral',”

I don't think this is true. Some big ones (Schiphol, Charles de Gaulle) maybe, but I don't think it's generally true.

Since when does encryption prevent radio signals from being triangulated? (Hint: it doesn't).

Scotland is still suffering from the effects of its de-industrialisation. The lowlands and its central belt particularly, used to be home to much labour intensive, heavy industry - steel, shipyards, mining, heavy engineering. The industry is gone, but the people (or their descendants) largely remain. Thus there are many pockets of poverty around. Life expectancy can be extremely low there, due to substance abuse particularly. The area of Glasgow I live in, Calton, has the lowest male life expectancy in the UK - 53.9 years!

Scotland is a special case, and is dealing with some tough social problems that are a legacy of how the world around it has changed over the last 60 years. Scotland has excellent health care though, I've found. They spend quite a lot on social health-care, relative to rest of UK. That the life expectancy is still low is due to that poverty and attendant education and life-choices that seem to correlate with that.

The aural interference is almost certain. The noise is very recognisable - many of us will have heard it on the ground when leaving a digital mobile phone near a radio.

My understanding is that these liquid explosives are difficult even for trained technicians to mix under controlled laboratory conditions, never mind dumb foot soldiers trying to do this in an aircraft toilet. For the UK liquid bomb plot trial, the UK government produced demonstration videos of the power of these bombs, however I thought I read somewhere that those producing that demo actually had great difficulty making it work. Unfortunately, I can't a good ref for this now, so...

There are a number of examples of possible interference to flight systems from passenger equipment in that report, including some which are near certain to have interference from cell/mobile phones (e.g. aural interference on VHF radio comms).

without proof that such emissions will actually harm someone.

There is plenty of proof that various kinds of emissions, those from combustion particularly, cause harm. E.g. start with death rate statistics from London in the 50s when they had terrible smog during some winters, when cold air trapped emissions. Large numbers of people *died*, quite obviously directly due to the smog - animals were falling down dead. This was the impetus for regulation of emissions there. Similar stories elsewhere.

Oh, my father's take on mobile/cell phones being banned was that it was done to protect the *ground* GSM networks - not the aircraft. Having many thousands of phones in the air, in range of tens, maybe hundreds of GSM cells would have put a strain on, perhaps overloaded, the GSM networks. Also, he's heard that "tu duh duh duh tu duh" kind of interference in his headphones, from the mobile phones of passengers roaming. Which potentially could be a safety hazard - though that was in an older aircraft without any complex, modern electronic control systems or cockpit instruments.

This isn't a terribly uncommon problem, and the fault is often the sensors in the wheel wells. I can ask my (retired) airline captain father for more details if you wish. I've had mobile/cell phone conversations with him in the late 90s, where he was phoning home from the cockpit. ;)