My information comes from a pilot, but it was his personal stand on the situation. However, there are quite a few sites on Internet that state my claim as correct, but I'm pretty sure that it is a mix of both. I don't claim to be correct on everything, and I will not contradict you since I do not work in the industry, or at least not directly.

Probably because flight attendants have a hard enough time getting passengers to turn off electronics, so forbidding people to read would probably just really piss everyone off. Also, and this applies to me personally, probably not for everyone, but when I read a book I am still a litle bit attentive to what is going on around me, but put me infront of an electronic device, and I'm in my own little universe, isolated from the outside world.

One of the reasons that electronics are banned is because it distracts people, and airline companies (and federal directives) want passengers to be at peak concentration during takeoff and landing, just incase anything goes wrong and they need to evacuate the plane. I also flew Delta a while ago, and they had an onboard Wifi system that I could use to get my emails, so wireless can't be that dangerous; I'm still alive.

Don't confuse this. Electronics are banned on take off and landing for different reasons, not just for interference. Electronics are banned for radio interference, because that is the easy explanation, but one of the multiple reasons is passenger attention. Take off and landing are, statistically, the most dangerous times, where all passengers are required to be attentive to what goes on. When you take off at night and they dim the cabin lights, some people say that it is for electrical considerations, but it also gets your eyes used to the outside light in case you need to evacuate. Airplanes and procedures are carefully planned so that you can evacuate quickly in case of an emergency, and people being distracted form electronics isn't really a good idea.

I was fired from a job because of Agile... I'm a C developper, and one part of the server had Java development. Well, guess who had to take the post-it, because "that is the way things are done". So here I was doing Java, on a ticket that was supposed to take a day, I did it in 4. I had to take the ticket, because that is what Agile is about. During the scrum meetings, I said I had problems with it, but I couldn't ask for help, because I took the ticket, and "that is the way things are done". I was a 6-month trial period, so they sacked me with no warning, because I was crap at my job. Since then I've been working with multinationals, and the previous company has made one single iPhone App that has a rating of 1-star, their previous flagship application is now one-star too (and on the verge of a lawsuit because of a dodgy change of contract for the application). Since then, I've had real Agile training, and the trainer explained the way things were really done, and at least I know I wasn't in the wrong. Still, my first Agile experience cost me my job. That's what I remember.

I've seen something like that, in Asia. It was the same dimensions as an iPhone, same layout, different screen and different OS/icons/layout, but you couldn't see that inside its box. They weren't advertising it as an Apple phone, but there again, they weren't advertising it as anything else. I was an iPhone dev at the time, and you had to look closely at the box in order to figure out that it wasn't a real iPhone. However, on this particular one, if you had used an iPhone before, you would have seen the difference by just turning it on and looking at the screen; the icons were different, the layout wasn't exactly the same, and the screen quality had nothing to do with the original.

I'm in France, and I have 2 options. One is, as said above, create a temporary credit card number that is good for only one transaction for a specified amount, but the other option allows me to buy on most sites in France, and on the authorization screen, my bank sends me a text message that I have to enter in on the site. No password, no payment. These codes are one-shot codes, and I don't have to enter any personal information. I love this system, it doesn't add a lot of complication for me, except for having a cell phone next to me 24 hours a day (which I have anyway), and no personal information is sent.