That's why the HFTs installed their own dedicated fiber-optic lines between key exchanges that were "straighter" than the public network to shave a few milliseconds off the roundtrip time at the cost of $100's of millions. Why do you think they did that? So they could improve their WoW latency?

That was only one of the techniques they used to manipulate the market. NY Times has a nice article about the book that brought this to peoples' attention.

I for one welcome our alien dick overlords.

Then pull the SIM card before you put it in the evidence bag. No SIM card means no remote wipe. And install a WiFi blocker in the police evidence room to prevent it callling home via WiFi.

I'll have to rethink the realism of Moonraker. I used to think it was the most ridiculous of all the Bond films but Musk is well on his way to being a real life Hugo Drax.

The government requires you to have car insurance and there's no outrage over that. It protects you and anyone you might get in an accident with.

How is requiring health insurance any different? It protects you and your family from unexpected medical expenses that would bankrupt anyone but the 1%ers.

I'm still waiting for my 5 year old Linksys WRT320N to be supported by OpenWRT. Still in progress.

However, it's been supported by DD-WRT for a number of years.

From where I sit the only movement from OpenWRT is of the bowel variety and apparently pretty constipated from what I can see.

Damn you Geiko Gecko! Your constantly changing accent isn't fooling anyone. I've been to tropical countries and I've seen your operatives in my hotel room watching me while I sleep.

tl;dr

If you're talking about the idiots that sue McDonalds for being burned by hot coffee they spilled on themselves then I agree with you.

If you're talking about giving grieving families some peace and possibly identifying how to prevent it in the future all for the cost of a few cents per mile travelled then I would disagree with you.

FYI, a black box is not a safety measure, its a forensic tool.

I didn't say that it would have solved this particular problem. I was responding to someone's comment about the cost/benefit of this technology with MH370 and the Air France crash in 2009 as hypothetical examples of it's potential use and that the same arguments were likely made when the original black box technology was introduced.

I agree that until we know for sure what happened we don't know how or even if we could have prevented it.

I wasn't suggesting putting one of these in a Cessna. This would only be of use in commercial airliners capable of making transoceanic flights. And I never said anything about retrofitting all current aircraft just like the original black boxes were not initially retrofitted into all existing aircraft.

A device like this should only be added to new aircraft and the aircraft I'm talking about are in the tens of millions to buy so a $100k device is not a huge additional cost.

So you can unbunch your panties.

I agree but somehow I suspect that it's not as simple as that. All the electrical systems on an aircraft have to be accessible to the crew to troubleshoot and potentially shutdown circuits in the event of a problem. Up until this point no I'm sure no one considered that a flight crew would intentionally disable the transponder (if that is what really happened) so no failsafe was put in place to prevent it. But at the same time you don't want to introduce a failsafe that could prevent them from addressing a potential problem.

My estimate of the data costs was from an interview with the man who created this proposed enhanced black box. I think he knows more than either of us what the data requirements of his device are.

I'm sure similar arguments were made when the original black boxes were made mandatory on aircraft.

A new Boeing 777-200ER is about $260M. A Canadian has developed an enhanced black box that constantly sends data back to the airline. The cost would be $100,000 which is only 0.04% of the cost of the aircraft and $85,000 more that the boxes they would replace. There would also be satellite data transfer charges which would be only a few thousand dollars for a flight like MH370 or about $20 per passenger on the flight. You could even limit the data transfer to trans oceanic flights to minimize the impact on low cost and domestic carriers.

Of course, all those costs would come down if every new aircraft was equipped like this. I'm sure the families of the MH370 would consider this minimal cost money well spent.

I don't login to Google and I block cookies by default so my results aren't personalized but you're right, most people probably do get personalized results.