I would not be surprise that entertainment systems retrofitted onto older aircraft share subnets. Likely for battery BMS, fire safety, electrical shorts, etc.... Funny--it's actually the safety stuff!

Sure the designers would never (even a practical person wouldn't do it) tie avionics to entertainment networks, that's logical and likely easier to do to keep them separate when designing an aircraft.

But when you retro fit a 25-30yr old plane, it's possible nets cross lines due to time (i.e. competition w/newer aircraft), short cuts (accounting) and cost constraints (CEOs). We all want our movies & music nowadays. So the airlines are going to add it ASAP w/some subcontractor (not the aircraft manufacturers). It's a cheap retrofit in the end. That's one problem.

The 2nd problem is Chris Roberts and the media sensationalizing these cheap retrofits. No different from one putting a kids seat over a regular car seat (which had it's share of problems for years up until 2006). Heck anything that flies is sensationalized nowadays--it's sells eyeballs and ad money..

This is a funny article.

The Auto industry has been through many, and I mean many ebbs and flows in tech. The PC industry? just one. (1980's).

The big 3 auto markers are not one IBM. It was more the other way around (IBM went through what the auto industry has gone through.

Now if there's anything like the 1980's.... It's the consumer drone market.

So instead of The Internet of Things , it'll be The Internet of Apple Things.

Seems logical.
(e.g. moving from platforms to ecosystems).

I just watched some PBS show that led to some conclusion that they did identify what was causing the populations to die.

TFA says otherwise.

And I just lost a colony two months ago--it was weird and I sent some in for analysis. Just a pile of bees at the base of my fruit tree...just looked sad.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Well, let's look at today's alternatives:

Hotmail/Live/Outlook: sucks, too slow, html errors
Gmail: sucks, I want a plain list w/o spam and google+
iCloud/.me: Sucks, need an iphone to do anything productive. And productive is a challenge still...
Rackspace: Sucks, no UI, I got pay for it too!
Yahoo!: Sucks, where is my email (layout)?
Facebook: Sucks, just read the life streams, ugh.
Twitter: really?
ISP based email: sucks, but at least I can use thunderbird w/o any issues.
Your own email server: so far the most flexible, but I have to do more work now.

Conclusion: they all suck. Having this discussion is worthless aside from social stereotyping.

I still have 3 AOL email addresses. Mainly for spam magnets and to throw off business purchases so I'm not in their tracking DB. I use my other email accounts on other services for personal stuff.

And I don't pay for them. Never have since 1998 (sometime then ?). AOL again is another Internet company, they offer paid ISP services (i.e. dial up) and [free] services like any other agg, aka google, yahoo, facebook, microsoft, etc... Never had a problem and the email always worked and only recently changed UI since the time warner split (and the new layout is not that bad). FYI, "conversations" are continuous in time, not discontinuous as most competitor UIs are now laying out their emails as conversations....

Also, you need a stable email system for your adult things, like 401K, some banks, some loans, so gov't contacts. Gmail has changed 3 times already and the google latitude, google buzz, google+ integration stunts really screwed up gmail for some time. Same thing happen with Yahoo, MS (now w/the wacko outlook365, inject characters, cursor jumps, etc...), and Facebook (spam!)... over the last 5 yrs. That's 5 yrs when AOL, Compuserv (back then) were... stable. I guess folks like going to etrade, their 401k, banks, gov't prop tax, car loan acct, and etc... to change their contact email-- from jumping onto the latest email app? At this point gmail looks like it will be around for another 10yrs... but would you count on it 100%? AOL has been around for more than 10yrs (like 25?)... that does say something aside from being a dinosaur... and it still works (only had a security issue back in 2003)...

As for dial up: give some of those guys some slack--they just don't know and deserve to pay, or just have real ISP restrictions--heck why would facebook and google spend billions for dark fiber or drone based wifi service?

And the cool thing about high speed rail or auto transport as we move into this world of IoT:

You can carry loose lithium [spare] batteries, and likely fuel cells when they're out. Good luck with airplanes at this point as they'll likely ban any high energy density power source.

Issue a mandatory NOTAM. And [already they did] shutdown the local airports.

They do it all the time at Edwards AFB here on the west coast. No one flies into the space and guess what... your tech challenges become zero. None of these aircraft are going to go flying off...like a drone for instance. Only today, the big challenges are RF issues, but luckily these aircraft have no tech that deends on digital RF connections.

I'd still take a B52 and a couple of F22s and JSFs buzzing around with some afterburners running. You see that here. Impressive.

The 25% of old cars don't use catalytic converters. That's common in most 3rd world and EU countries....

Retrofit and call it a day.

Poorly designed or obsolete languages:
"do not reinvent the wheel because thou are not as wise as the wheel builder"

Rightfully designed, efficient languages:
"do not reinvent the wheel because you can be more efficient, and focus on behavior/app logic"

The perfect case of C following the latter is the Linux Kernel--they do not reinvent a lot of things.

HURD played the same role as Duke Nukem Forever back them.

Linux is successful from the volunteers that developed the driver/HAL suite around the kernel. If we were still have basic display driver issues today, no one would be on Linux... except maybe the network guys.

Cool, I guess flying will easily get me to the corner of 14th and Pennsylvania Ave. Really, the exact corner...

Really, all this shows it that the more precise location you need to be in, the more energy you'll use. Sure, flying may theoretically get you closer, but if you factor in the infrastructure required vs a dirt road, it's more expensive (today's street cost a lot for robustness.

Goes with my mantra: More precision == more effort (i.e. cost in this case). Applies to pretty much everything.

Self selection my ass.

They hire people that desire the culture of hanging out intelligently, and hire their buddies. Unfortunately that also includes staying around, which means working all day long, much like working in a college lab.

Not different from any college academic fraternity. I saw that with SPS as we had a dedicated study room, aka hang out for nerds (tv, frig, couches, tables, bookshelf library, etc...).

I want to see proof. Photos of a hovering drone says nothing nowadays. ...and especially from a penny stock company that appears to be teaming up with a university to push gov't SBAS contracts. Oh, the gov't cash cow!

Really, even Google's '8 guys surrounding a drone' video doesn't show autonomous capability--though their cars are a different story (i.e. real).

Nowadays, I see 9 or 10 companies touting fully autonomous flight, redundancy and delivery, RTF, ready to go, 1hr flight, 1min charge--I want to see a 1 min video of an actual test of a real use case: drive up, 2lbs payload, launch to delivery to land, to recharging, no setup and one-touch. It's very possible to create content of that, but I don't see any...

Then really, a drone on top of a truck--I see things (IMU) shifting off calibration, sand-papering the props, dust-n-dirt, sun damage, and them some. You put skis on top of a truck, not precision electronic devices.