Yes. These devices are made to withstand very high forces. You clearly have zero knowledge of anything related to aviation. There are very few aviation accidents, no matter how catastrophic, in which the FDR and CVR do not contain usable data.

That's not the case at all. FDRs commonly survive catastrophic high speed accidents. For example, USAir 427 in 1994 crashed in a near vertical nose-down attitude, and pretty much all that was left of that accident was small bits and pieces. The FDR was recovered and was usable. They rolled and went nose down from 6,000 feet, and the last data on the recorder indicated an airspeed of 261 knots (300 mph, or about 135 meters per second), at a 80 nose-down attitude, virtually straight into the ground. If an FDR can survive that, it can survive damn near anything.

Whatever happened to sending the kids outside to play soccer or some make-believe game? No wonder this nation is so overweight and no one knows how to socialize when people whine about not having enough bandwidth to consume this level of TV watching. I let my kids watch about an hour of TV a day, tops. Then the damn thing gets turned off. If they complain about being bored I tell them I'll happily put a puzzle together with them or get the chess board out or put on the baseball glove. If anyone is consuming 250GB a month on a regular basis with gaming and media, you need to seriously take a hard look at your life and get out the door every now and then. The ISPs in this country would do the healthcare system a serious favor if they would all put a 10GB/month cap on everyone's internet usage. (This is hilarious: I'm turning into my dad!)

I'm sorry, but the apostrophes in your post really got in the way of a successfully implemented attitude of intellectual superiority.

Well, that pretty much rules out anyone on Slashdot as being a true scientist, then. It also rules out the vast majority of scientists themselves. There are very few people, especially in science, who take well to disagreement and debate. In fact, the general public, being far removed from a deep, intricate understanding of science, is probably far more tolerant of scientific debate and disagreement than the scientists themselves. Science, in my experience, pays a lot of lip service to encouraging debate and disagreement; the reality is generally far removed from the theory. I see no practical difference between the modern scientist and the priest.

Which clearly didn't include any courses in statistical analysis or the basic ability to use a dictionary...

Painting results in a smooth surface, so long as it's kept clean. Thus, the fuel savings from the reduced drag offset the cost of hauling around that extra weight in paint. For airlines like American, which go with an unpainted fuselage, they have to polish that aluminum at frequent intervals to keep it smooth, which adds up to a lot of expense and wear on the skin. I've read studies in the past saying it's basically a toss-up as to which methodology costs/saves more.

Well, so what if the airlines do have to strip the paint? The point is that the paint will get stripped, so the airframe will get tested for cracks without the paint regardless of whether the airline in question decided they wanted to go with paint or without paint during commercial operations. If the airline wants to spend the money to paint, strip, paint, strip, etc., that's their business, so long as they conduct the testing without the paint.

Most airlines don't really care about this sort of thing since eddy current testing is normally performed during heavy maintenance when the airplane is pulled out of service for weeks for such minute inspections. These "heavy checks" happen after fairly lengthy intervals after which the paint on the airframe needs to be stripped and replaced anyway just because it looks awful after a while.

It's Greg Feith, actually, and he has worked as an accident investigator for the NTSB for a long time. The NTSB (which is his background) has nothing to do with the FAA and is often at loggerheads with the FAA over this or that issue. The NTSB plays an investigatory role during accidents, incidents, etc.; they have nothing to do with the ongoing regulation or inspection requirements of the airlines, which is where this paint thing would come into play. If paint seriously got in the way of performing a proper inspection, the FAA would long ago have regulated it out of existence. Since the kind of cracks we're talking about here are not going to be visible to the naked eye anyway, there's no problem with paint so long as your testing methodology is adequate to detect the metal weakness with the paint present; if it's not, the paint has to be stripped before testing.

Bottom line, paint is not an issue.

First of all, you talked about heat from the ramp. An airliner's skin will vary from about -40 C in flight to whatever the ramp temperature is. That's a pretty wide temperature variation. Adding a few more degrees from the color of the paint isn't going to do anything to the skin. Of vastly more interest to aviation professionals is the expansion and contraction of the pressure hull during thousands of pressurization cycles. This, as well as corrosion, is what causes the fatigue-related cracks that lead to hull damage such as with the recent Southwest incident.

Airline skin tests on aluminum are done via eddy current testing. It has nothing to do with a visual inspection. The point is to find the cracks long before they become visible to the naked eye.

You were slandered because you made a statement showing your ignorance of how things operating in a particular industry, when spending two minutes doing a little online searching would have educated you. Then, you stated your willingness to judge your personal safety on your misconceptions without apparently putting even a moment's effort into educating yourself on the subject so as to make an informed decision. Thus, silly.

Wow, I hope that was said TIC... If not, I think this post wins hands-down as the Most Stupid Aviation Commentary By Somone Who Knows Nothing About Aviation on this thread.

Because Boeing doesn't use carbon fiber on their airframes, right? (Hint, that Southwest Airlines 737 that just had its top peeled off didn't develop those cracks in carbon fiber.) Because Boeing doesn't use fly-by-wire systems, right? (Hint: only difference between Boeing and Airbus since the 1990s has been that Boeing kept a yoke in the cockpit and Airbus went with a sidestick, but it's all connected to wires these days, and can you provide even one example of an accident of either Boeing or Airbus that was directly tied to the fly-by-wire system failing on the airplane? Right, I thought not.) Because Boeing aircraft are never powered by Rolls Royce engines, right? (Hint: the A380 incident didn't have anything at all to do with Airbus, it was a problem with the engine that was manufactured by Rolls Royce.) There are so many fools who think they know what they're talking about. When I read this comment I pictured Cliff Claven from Cheers.

Sigh. You really ought to RTFA, otherwise you just come across as a dumbshit. This story has nothing to do with preventing you from doing what you want with your i-Device. It has everything to do with an enterprise-provided and -owned device reporting itself to the enterprise-owner that you as the non-owner-user have jailbroken your i-Device, thus causing a security hole the size of the one in your backside in the enterprise's system. And yes, Virginia, the enterprise that owns said device does have the right to know if you're being said dumbshit and jailbreaking a device that you don't even own.

That's absurd. You paid for your access to the internet, not access to that particular site's content. Do you seriously think any website out there gets any of your internet access fee money? Just as with free television content on the big network channels, someone somewhere has to pay for all that content you're watching. Your choice is simple: either pay the site directly via credit-card access to their content, or put up with the ads that are financially supporting your ability to view that site without any additional payment on your part.

Because "act" should be plural in that sentence. "Slideware perhaps helps inept speakerS get their actS together." Asshole.

Right, because that's what Mr. AC was trying to convey...

Down here on Earth, welcome to the reality of life outside the 5th grade classroom.