The definition of a networked system is "one you can't use because some computer you never heard of is down".

Also, most streaming content doesn't use TCP/IP anyway.

Wait, so I can save carbon by having a private cloud in my basement? I mean sure, that saves the lag and whatnot from the always-problematic last mile, but how does the movie get to my private cloud? I'm not seeing the carbon savings!

"A distributed system is a system where I can’t get my work done because a computer has failed that I’ve never even heard of."

- Leslie Lamport, 2006 (or earlier)

I doubt that's what he thinks - he doesn't actually care about black or latino people. He just wants the publicity, and some sort of "fund for underprivileged nerds" to be set up, which he can then "administer" in a way that benefits him and his friends. Shakedown, plain and simple.

Technically the device might last 30 years, but come on - it's electronics! If electronic gadgets last a decade before they get replaced by newer versions, they're doing pretty good How many electronic gadgets do you have from 1984 that are still in use?

But they could also turn up missing in due to any number of other causes! Only a tiny fraction of missing bodies are due to mid-ocean plane crashes - I still haven't heard why finding the corpses of a couple dozen such people per year is so much more important than finding the corpses of the thousands of other people that could be found by spending that same billion dollars more intelligently.

No, I've lived in america all my life. I thought it was a common phrase, like saying you could "wake up dead" tomorrow.

Just for the record, I'm not suggesting that the 4 cent (or 9 cent) cost makes it worthwhile - I just got tired of reading wild speculation about the costs, and decided to do a little math and come up with a better answer. You're right about the 2 segments per day - short-haul flights do more, but when those crash it's over land, so they tend to be found pretty quickly. Only those flying over water would benefit from this system.

And I do think it's fair (and helpful) to bring it down to a per-passenger level. Sure, the airlines operate at a large scale, so any fleet-wide investment will cost zillions, and any fleet-wide savings will save zillions. But that's compared to overall costs in the mega-zillions, so the numbers are almost meaningless to most people. Suppose someone wanted to eliminate the padding on the seats, and just have you sit on bare metal, and quoted a large dollar figure savings - the first thing I'd do is estimate the per-passenger savings: if it's $50-$100 per pax, then it could make a big difference in ticket prices (PLEASE let's not go off on a tangent about how the greedy bastards at the airline would just keep the difference!) ... if it's $0.05 per pax, then no, even the meager comfort of the standard seat cushion is worth a nickle to me (besides, your metal seat couldn't be used as a flotation device)

Worldwide, thousands (probably millions) of people turn up missing every year - it's sad, but true. The number of people who would be found significantly sooner by this device probably averages around a couple dozen per year. What makes those people worth spending billions of dollars on?

It's more likely you could use that same money to find a lot more than a couple dozen people by spending it more intelligently. The only thing that makes these people special is that they were rich enough to afford trans-pacific plane tickets, and they're in the news. If you think that makes them more important than other people, then YOU are the one barely attached to human reality.

Wow - another poster claimed that NOT installing the boxes was proof of how capitalism sucks, and you're claiming that installing them (the exact opposite!) would prove that capitalism sucks.

I think you left-wingers have a stock answer ("capitalism sucks") and you're always on the lookout for a question to attach it to.

Why do you say that? What makes YOU the authority on the "correct" answer? Maybe people are perfectly comfortable with the status quo - after all, it's not like this box would save anyone, it would just help to find their corpses a little sooner. Considering only a few hundred people a year die in commercial plane crashes (vs around 100 million total deaths per year), and the vast majority of those are found very quickly, it's not really that big of a deal. There are probably better ways to spend $100K per plane to improve the flying experience (safer, more comfortable, less TSA, whatever), yet you've suddenly decided that the best thing to do would have been to bump this box (which you never even heard of until today) to the top of the list!

Come on, let's do some math instead of just guessing at the answer: if a plane seats 200 people, flies 4 segments/day, 300 days/year, and the device has a useful life of 10 years, that's $100K / 10 / 300 / 4 / 200 = about 4 cents per passenger segment. An order of magnitude more than "a fraction of a cent", but still pretty close to negligible.

They didn't used to

Not sure iOS is any less broken - they don't ask you about some things, they just share them anyway. As soon as I got an iPhone and installed the LinkedIn app, linked in started asking me if I wanted to connect to people/organizations that I haven't had anything to do with in years - but they happened to be in my contact list on the phone. Hmmmm.....